Category: Federal
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Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Alan Jones and Rene Rivkin’s Oxford scholarship: for whom?
In May 2002, convicted Sydney stockbroker Rene Rivkin was desperate to obtain bail and avoid serving a weekend detention sentence. His friends rallied and wrote in glowing terms to the judge hoping to persuade him that Rivkin should be spared the shame and humiliation of a weekend at Silverwater Jail. One of those to write…
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Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – IMF “trained” journalists on Greek crisis coverage
Journalists covering the Greek crisis were briefed at IMF seminars to give the bankers’ view in their reports from Athens. Panayiotis Roumeliotis, the former Greek delegate to the IMF, made the accusations in evidence to MPs sparking a media scandal of far-reaching proportions. ESIEA, the Athens journalists’ association, has launched an investigation into the corruption…
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Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Fairfax war party takes aim at Bill Short’n sweet
Only a few months ago, Fairfax Media newspapers were stridently calling for the removal Prime Minister Tony Abbott. This week they shifted their attack to Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. Thursday’s edition of The Sydney Morning Herald was a collector’s item. The front page blared: “Shorten and the AWU deal”. In addition, it promised a four-part…
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Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Oz mercenaries in the Boer War
Between 1899 and 1902 some 16,000 Australian volunteers travelled to South Africa to take up arms against the Dutch white settlers. Australia’s irregular militiamen, i.e. mercenaries, served under the Union Jack using arms and ammunition supplied by the British army. Some “bushmen” travelled at their own expense but most were paid with private donations from…
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Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Please, don’t erect a shrine in Martin Place
I walked through Sydney’s Martin Place on Wednesday, June 3, the day after vandals smashed windows of the Lindt Café, the scene of the fatal siege last December. The footpath was crowded with television cameras, photographers, tourists and rubber-neckers. People were taking “selfies” with the café as a backdrop. In their own way, so was…
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Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Stench of cover-up from Lindt inquest
Stage management of the coronial inquest into the Lindt café siege broke down in spectacular fashion this week with the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions scrambling to ban publication of embarrassing evidence. The DPP wants to suppress evidence of why the siege gunman Man Haron Monis was on bail on serious criminal charges when he…
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Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Abbott starts having delusions of grandeur
The age of entitlement is over, according to Tony Abbott, but not for his own family. While he orders Australians to tighten their belts to rein in the ballooning deficit, Abbott is loosening his own, and we are footing the bill. The family’s latest taxpayer-funded scam is to turn the historic Kirribilli House into their…
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Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Abbott’s Budget heralds an early federal election
This week’s Federal Budget was not about Australia’s economic future. And it wasn’t about the future of the country either. Its overriding purpose was to rescue Prime Minister Tony Abbott. It was the “Save Abbott” budget. It sets the stage for a snap federal election between now and the end of the year. He has…
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Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Oz Greens step into the mainstream
“The fix was in” when Dr Richard Di Natale was elected unanimously as the new Greens leader. The resignation of Christine Milne was sprung on the party’s Canberra representatives this week. It succeeded in sidelining deputy leader Adam Bandt, the Melbourne MHR who had been expected to succeed Milne. But to the Tasmanian Greens, i.e.…
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Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Only a Royal Commission will tell who’s got Bali blood on their hands
A royal commission remains the only way to establish the facts about the complicity of John Howard’s security committee, the Australian Federal Police, ASIO and ASIS in the arrest the Bali Nine drug smugglers and this week’s execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. Senator Nick Xenophon’s well-meaning parliamentary committee inquiry should not become an…