Category: World
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – After Abbott’s demise, the heat is now on Bill Shorten
This week began with a mutinous insurrection by Liberal Party MPs against their own leader, Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Ghostly memories of the overthrow of Bob Hawke (1991), John Gorton (1971) and Margaret Thatcher (1990) floated by. By the end of the week Malcolm Turnbull was the new PM, Abbott was cactus after one year…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – It’s bombs away for Abbott’s by-election
Bolshevik leader V I Lenin once said that during political discussions and world diplomacy “there is a time for the brush and a time for the razor”. Prime Minister Tony Abbott, aka “The Mad Monk”, has decided to use both the brush and the razor simultaneously. His token humanity – offering residence to 12,000 Syrian…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – Joe Hockey will be thrown overboard from sinking Oz ship
Wednesday, 2 September 2015, deserves a special status in Australia’s calendar as the day when things started to unravel: growth in the second quarter fell to 0.2 per cent, the Aussie $ dropped under 70 cents to a six-year low and is heading towards 50 cents, the share market crashed to a new post-GFC low…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – Abbott’s plunge into the Syrian cauldron
To save his own political skin and to win next month’s khaki by-election in Canning, WA, Prime Minister Tony Abbott is on the brink of ordering the RAAF to bomb Syria. Any bombing raids would be illegal and they are not sanctioned by a UN resolution. The rationale will be that it is a humanitarian…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – Lycra-clad Abbott has run out of time and puff
The disintegration of the Abbott government is now being serialised on the nightly news. Every day brings a new instalment of Cabinet disunity, policy stuff-ups, backstabbing and hilarious attempts by Cabinet ministers to talk about how well they’re doing. Question time has stripped Abbott of his braggadocio and any pretence that he is a national…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – Why the Mad Monk is building a climate of fear
According to the Mad Monk, aka Prime Minister Tony Abbott, every single Australian is now a potential target of the “death cult”, i.e. ISIS, ISIL, IS or Daesh. There could be a bomb attack on any crowded venue in our capital cities at any time, he says. Australians should place themselves on a war footing…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook Bye bye Bronny – behind the sacking of the Speaker
The sacking of Speaker Bronwyn Bishop is a significant blow to the hard right coterie supporting the “Mad Monk”, aka Prime Minister Tony Abbott. She is a factional warrior and a bag lady for the Liberal Party’s NSW division. She joined the Liberals at the age of 17 and camped in the Senate from 1987…
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Alex Mitchell’s WEEKLY NOTEBOOK – Peter Smark praised by Vietnamese war hero
The late Australian journalist Peter Smark is recalled with affection and respect by Vietnam’s most honoured spy, Pham Xuan An, whose double life made a major contribution to the NLF’s 1975 victory. Smark was a war correspondent in Saigon in the early 1960s when An worked for Reuters (later he became a senior reporter with…
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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…