Category: Federal
-
There is nothing like a dame
Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the London-born monarchist and British Empire loyalist, has brought back knights and dames, another dumbfounding initiative never mentioned in the Coalition’s election manifesto. This was a step that even uber-royalist John Howard, now the Queen’s Warden of the Cinque Ports, didn’t dare inflict on the Commonwealth, but the “mad monk” has.…
-
Churchill and the Spirit of ’45
1945 was a watershed year in post-war British history. Not only did it mark the end of World War Two but it also saw the humiliating defeat of wartime leader Winston Churchill in the landslide victory of a Labour Government. Nobody predicted a Tory defeat. Indeed, the mainstream media and the entire British Establishment were…
-
Windows on the world
Translation, writes one of its outstanding practitioners, “helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight.” The words are Edith Grossman’s, from her 2010 book Why…
-
Rinehart scores jackpot with US state bank loan
Happy New Year and welcome to the wonderful world of Tony Abbott and his richest supporter, mega-billionaire Gina Rinehart. In case you missed it in the Christmas rush, the world’s richest woman has pulled another jackpot to the tune of $784 million. That’s the amount she has been given by a US Government agency, the…
-
Japan: Land of the Rising Gun
Prime Minister Shinto Abe’s right-wing government in Tokyo has announced military spending of $270 billion on drones, submarines, fighter jets and armed patrol boats. It is a military provocation against China at the instigation of militarists in the US State Department and the Pentagon. It forms part of their policy of “encirclement” and “containment” of…
-
Car making – it’s time to get real
The Australian car making industry was a complete misnomer. There was no such thing. It was always a foreign-owned car industry. Australia was merely a postal address for the auto behemoths when they were globalising their market share and their profits. Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Mitsubishi milked the generous subsidies and tax breaks offered by…
-
Tanya Plibersek vanishes amid Abbott foreign policy disasters
Has anyone seen Tanya Plibersek, shadow foreign minister? If so, please report the sighting to Missing Persons and then contact the Federal ALP so they can pick her up and get her talking. The Abbott Government has committed a series of disastrous foreign relations blunders but hardly a word from Ms Plibersek. She appears to…
-
Class and culture
The black arts of marketing, Murdochism and right-wing academia have made the term “working class” almost as much of a taboo as the word “socialism” in mainstream public discourse. As Noam Chomsky says about the US, “you’re supposed to say ‘middle class’ because it diminishes the understanding that there’s a class war going on”. (Occupy:…
-
Abbott and Spectator at war over the ABC
A gaping wound has emerged in the Liberal Party over the ABC’s reporting of the bugging of the Indonesian president, his wife and various ministers. The Abbott-Howard clique, which represents the right wing of the Liberals, is furious that Australia’s spy agencies have been caught out – redhanded. But more importantly they are incandescent that…
-
Phoney war against organised crime
Australia’s spooks and cops can bug the Indonesian president, his wife and Cabinet ministers but not the phones of criminal gangs in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Why? Liberal and Labor Governments will bend over backwards to supply Washington with intelligence. But protecting metropolitan neighbourhoods from drug trafficking, street shoot-outs, money-laundering and major tax evasion –…