by Sue Rabbitt Roff

The fall-out from nuclear bomb tests in Australia in the fifties continues as more documents reveal decades of denials and cover-ups, hindering proper compensation for victims. Sue Rabbitt Roff investigates.

The UK detonated at least 12 atomic and hybrid fission-fusion weapons in Australia in the 1950s. Eight were detonated on 31-metre towers, barely 5% of the heights at which the bombs were detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Nobody claimed then that they didn’t devastate the cities beneath them, killing between 150,000 and 250,000 civilians.

There was at least one ground burst – known to be the dirtiest in terms of fallout because the radioactive debris fell close to ground zero rather than being blown across Australia and out to territories in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

The Brits detonated more than 200 kilotons of radioactive explosives at 100 feet or less, including one that had a yield of 98 kt in 1956.

Australia foolishly accepted a clean-up and compensation payment of £20,000,000 in 1993. Interestingly, this ‘indemnity’ did not cover deaths or injuries that ‘result from nuclear tests or experimental programmes at the Monte Bello Islands in respect of which the cause of action occurred before 27 June 1956.’

The Australian National Archives hold 3.6 metres of ‘Identification cards of persons employed at Maralinga’ through to 1967 – mostly civilians. The Department of Veterans Affairs published a study in 2006 of 10 983 male subjects, of whom 7116 were military participants and 3867 were civilians.

More than 22,000 British scientists, civilians and military personnel participated in the tests.

Members of the armed forces were prevented from suing the Ministry of Defence by the (UK) 1947 Crown Proceedings Act’s Section 10, which granted immunity against tort litigation. Section 10 was repealed in 1987 – but not retrospectively, thereby continuing to disenfranchise the men (virtually no women were sent to the tests) who increasingly realised that their poor health may well have been radiogenic. As did their families.

But the tide may be turning. In July 2024, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) paid a reported £72,000,000 in compensation for hearing loss to 9000 members and veterans of the armed forces in the eight years from 2012 to 2020, with a further 10,000 claimants anticipated. Other armed services personnel in service after 1987 have begun to put their claims for duty of care in court in recent months.  Hundreds of Royal Marines have issued proceedings claiming they were knowingly exposed to asbestos.  UK  military pilots allege that toxic fumes from military helicopters are causing a range of deadly cancers – which the MOD has known for decades.

It’s in this context that UK nuclear veterans have begun to prepare a case suing for the failure of duty of care to themselves and their families before, during and after the nuclear tests in Australia and off Christmas Island.

The re-reading of the archival material could be of considerable significance to Australian nuclear test veterans given that Governor-General William McKell decreed in Air Ministry Order A.652 dated December 1952 that the air forces “raised in the United Kingdom do serve together and act in combination wheresoever,

serving with the naval, military and air forces of His Majesty raised in the Commonwealth of Australia and in the Dominion of New Zealand.

Curiously, it has been overlooked for nearly forty years that in 1988, the House of Lords upheld the right of a nuclear veteran to sue the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) for its failure of duty of care during the conduct of the tests.

There has been a steady flow of Freedom of Information enquiries in the past two years. Whereas in November 2022, the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE)  said it had been able to locate only ‘1 blood test for 1 member of the service personnel’ at the 21 tests the UK led or participated in.

However, after a dozen applications for information, the response in April 2024 acknowledged that there is ‘prominent public interest in permitting public authorities to maintain their accountability to publish information in a manner and via a suitable platform ensuring accessibility to the public; … we propose to offer to write to you advising you of how and where the information can be accessed in due course if you should wish us to do so.’

Nobody is holding their breath on this. But there are already pivotal archival documents online that include:

• An October 1955 memo stating:  ‘It is quite clear that the responsibility for radiological safety is at all times [emphasis in original] vested in Director, A.W.R.E, acting on behalf of the Ministry of Supply;
• In the same month, the MINISTRY OF SUPPLY London stated that ‘‘The United Kingdom is responsible for radiation safety on the range. During trials this responsibility is exercised by the Director, A.W.R.E., on behalf of the Minister of Supply, and in inter-trial periods by the Commandant, Maralinga.
• On 9th December 1955, an Outward Telegram from the Commonwealth Relations Office informed the  U.K. High Commissioner in Australia:

‘2.In our view United Kingdom (Ministry of Supply and A.W.E.R.E.) U.K.M.O.S.S. [UK Ministry of Supply Staff/ Melbourne] and Range Commandant are one organisation with a task to be done. We consider that [redacted] must receive instructions direct from the United Kingdom and be responsible directly to United Kingdom for all operational requirements, such as technical work at Maralinga and running range to meet United Kingdom requirements, while Australians, through any channels they may arrange, would be responsible for general administration of force in matters of discipline, postings, welfare, leave etc…’

‘4. … we consider that Maralinga is not a joint project in sense that Woomera is but British project carried out on Australian soil with help from Australia in those matters in which Australia is best equipped to help….’

• A memo annotated /56 AIR PLAN OPERATION “BUFFALO” states:

‘2. A permanent atomic weapons proving ground is being created at Maralinga under the auspices of the Ministry of Supply and the Department of Supply, AUSTRALIA’.
Executive Responsibility
8. (a) The Royal Air Force will assume overall executive and administrative responsibility for the Combined Task Force. A senior R.A.F. Officer has been nominated as the Task Force Commander. The Air Task Group which forms part of the Task Force will also be C(sic)ommanded by a Senior R.A. F. Officer.
(b) The scientific aspects of the trials, including Target Response, will be controlled by the Director of Atomic Weapons Research Establishment [AWERE] or his nominee.’

There are many documents that show that radioactive contamination of participants was clearly anticipated by the scientists of AWERE.

For instance, the HMS DIANA was instructed to sail directly in the expected path of the fallout from the Buffalo detonation precisely to record contamination expected to fall on it and its crew. Pilots of the MOSAIC ‘sniffer’ aircraft were not allowed to see the intensity of the cockpit exposure reading so that ‘ the pilot and crew are not confronted with a psychologically embarrassing reading of several thousand ‘r’ per hour when they know that the maximum [permissible] dose is only 25 r.’ The 250 ‘indoctrinees’ were sent into known radioactive areas at Buffalo.

One AWERE memo noted that:

‘They [Australians] would not know that fall-out contamination from close-in area is very different from samples obtained from the cloud, and that only the latter is sufficiently representative to enable quantitative estimates to be made…

’It was proposed to give Australians ‘a little piece of the filters, but that we wait a few days so that some of the short-lived isotopes have decayed a good deal.’

These documents are the tip of the iceberg of evidence that the Australian government of the day was deliberately misled into allowing the British nuclear tests.  But perhaps, seventy or so years later, they are also the tipping point.

Neither the British tests  Scientific Director William Penney, who planned and observed the bombing of Nagasaki, nor the Australian Weapons Tests Safety Committee member Professor Ernest Titterton, who detonated the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo in July 1945, were blind.

But both felt able to turn blind eyes to their duty of care when building and testing Britain’s atomic and hydrogen bombs in the Dominion and  Protectorate territories of the United Kingdom.

It’s time we took the awe out of the AWE.

https://michaelwest.com.au/documents-reveal-failing-australian-nuclear-test-participants/

READ FROM TOP

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

Security and State Power / The Prospects for Survival

Noam Chomsky

Truthout, Part I, Part II, March 3, 2014
(adapted from a lecture by Noam Chomsky on February 28, 2014
in Santa Barbara, CA, sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation)

A leading principle of international relations theory is that the state’s highest priority is to ensure security. As Cold War strategist George F. Kennan formulated the standard view, government is created “to assure order and justice internally and to provide for the common defense.”

The proposition seems plausible, almost self-evident, until we look more closely and ask: Security for whom? For the general population? For state power itself? For dominant domestic constituencies?

Depending on what we mean, the credibility of the proposition ranges from negligible to very high.

Security for state power is at the high extreme, as illustrated by the efforts that states exert to protect themselves from the scrutiny of their own populations.

In an interview on German TV, Edward J. Snowden said that his “breaking point” was “seeing Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress” by denying the existence of a domestic spying program conducted by the National Security Agency.

Snowden elaborated that “The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public.”

The same could be justly said by Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and other courageous figures who acted on the same democratic principle.

The government stance is quite different: The public doesn’t have the right to know because security thus is undermined — severely so, as officials assert.

There are several good reasons to be skeptical about such a response. The first is that it’s almost completely predictable: When a government’s act is exposed, the government reflexively pleads security. The predictable response therefore carries little information.

A second reason for skepticism is the nature of the evidence presented. International relations scholar John Mearsheimer writes that “The Obama administration, not surprisingly, initially claimed that the NSA’s spying played a key role in thwarting 54 terrorist plots against the United States, implying it violated the Fourth Amendment for good reason.

“This was a lie, however. Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, eventually admitted to Congress that he could claim only one success, and that involved catching a Somali immigrant and three cohorts living in San Diego who had sent $8,500 to a terrorist group in Somalia.”

A similar conclusion was reached by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, established by the government to investigate the NSA programs and therefore granted extensive access to classified materials and to security officials.

There is, of course, a sense in which security is threatened by public awareness — namely, security of state power from exposure.

The basic insight was expressed well by the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington: “The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”

In the United States as elsewhere, the architects of power understand that very well. Those who have worked through the huge mass of declassified documents in, for example, the official State Department history “Foreign Relations of the United States,” can hardly fail to notice how frequently it is security of state power from the domestic public that is a prime concern, not national security in any meaningful sense.

Often the attempt to maintain secrecy is motivated by the need to guarantee the security of powerful domestic sectors. One persistent example is the mislabeled “free trade agreements” — mislabeled because they radically violate free trade principles and are substantially not about trade at all, but rather about investor rights.

These instruments are regularly negotiated in secret, like the current Trans-Pacific Partnership — not entirely in secret, of course. They aren’t secret from the hundreds of corporate lobbyists and lawyers who are writing the detailed provisions, with an impact revealed by the few parts that have reached the public through WikiLeaks.

As the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz reasonably concludes, with the U.S. Trade Representative’s office “representing corporate interests,” not those of the public, “The likelihood that what emerges from the coming talks will serve ordinary Americans’ interests is low; the outlook for ordinary citizens in other countries is even bleaker.”

Corporate-sector security is a regular concern of government policies — which is hardly surprising, given their role in formulating the policies in the first place.

In contrast, there is substantial evidence that the security of the domestic population — “national security” as the term is supposed to be understood — is not a high priority for state policy.

For example, President Obama’s drone-driven global assassination program, by far the world’s greatest terrorist campaign, is also a terror-generating campaign. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan until he was relieved of duty, spoke of “insurgent math”: For every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.

This concept of “innocent person” tells us how far we’ve progressed in the last 800 years, since the Magna Carta, which established the principle of presumption of innocence that was once thought to be the foundation of Anglo-American law.

Today, the word “guilty” means “targeted for assassination by Obama,” and “innocent” means “not yet accorded that status.”

The Brookings Institution just published “The Thistle and the Drone,” a highly praised anthropological study of tribal societies by Akbar Ahmed, subtitled “How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam.”

This global war pressures repressive central governments to undertake assaults against Washington’s tribal enemies. The war, Ahmed warns, may drive some tribes “to extinction” — with severe costs to the societies themselves, as seen now in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. And ultimately to Americans.

Tribal cultures, Ahmed points out, are based on honor and revenge: “Every act of violence in these tribal societies provokes a counterattack: the harder the attacks on the tribesmen, the more vicious and bloody the counterattacks.”

The terror targeting may hit home. In the British journal International Affairs, David Hastings Dunn outlines how increasingly sophisticated drones are a perfect weapon for terrorist groups. Drones are cheap, easily acquired and “possess many qualities which, when combined, make them potentially the ideal means for terrorist attack in the 21st century,” Dunn explains.

Sen. Adlai Stevenson III, referring to his many years of service on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, writes that “Cyber surveillance and meta data collection are part of the continuing reaction to 9/11, with few if any terrorists to show for it and near universal condemnation. The U.S. is widely perceived as waging war against Islam, against Shiites as well as Sunnis, on the ground, with drones, and by proxy in Palestine, from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia. Germany and Brazil resent our intrusions, and what have they wrought?”

The answer is that they have wrought a growing terror threat as well as international isolation.

The drone assassination campaigns are one device by which state policy knowingly endangers security. The same is true of murderous special-forces operations. And of the invasion of Iraq, which sharply increased terror in the West, confirming the predictions of British and American intelligence.

These acts of aggression were, again, a matter of little concern to planners, who are guided by altogether different concepts of security. Even instant destruction by nuclear weapons has never ranked high for state authorities — a topic for discussion in the next column.

*

The previous article explored how security is a high priority for government planners: security, that is, for state power and its primary constituency, concentrated private power — all of which entails that official policy must be protected from public scrutiny.

In these terms, government actions fall in place as quite rational, including the rationality of collective suicide. Even instant destruction by nuclear weapons has never ranked high among the concerns of state authorities.

To cite an example from the late Cold War: In November 1983 the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched a military exercise designed to probe Russian air defenses, simulating air and naval attacks and even a nuclear alert.

These actions were undertaken at a very tense moment. Pershing II strategic missiles were being deployed in Europe. President Reagan, fresh from the “Evil Empire” speech, had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed “Star Wars,” which the Russians understood to be effectively a first-strike weapon — a standard interpretation of missile defense on all sides.

Naturally these actions caused great alarm in Russia, which, unlike the U.S., was quite vulnerable and had repeatedly been invaded.

Newly released archives reveal that the danger was even more severe than historians had previously assumed. The NATO exercise “almost became a prelude to a preventative (Russian) nuclear strike,” according to an account last year by Dmitry Adamsky in the Journal of Strategic Studies .

Nor was this the only close call. In September 1983, Russia’s early-warning systems registered an incoming missile strike from the United States and sent the highest-level alert. The Soviet military protocol was to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own.

The Soviet officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, intuiting a false alarm, decided not to report the warnings to his superiors. Thanks to his dereliction of duty, we’re alive to talk about the incident.

Security of the population was no more a high priority for Reagan planners than for their predecessors. Such heedlessness continues to the present, even putting aside the numerous near-catastrophic accidents, reviewed in a chilling new book, “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety,” by Eric Schlosser.

It’s hard to contest the conclusion of the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen . Lee Butler, that humanity has so far survived the nuclear age “by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”

The government’s regular, easy acceptance of threats to survival is almost too extraordinary to capture in words.

In 1995, well after the Soviet Union had collapsed, the U.S. Strategic Command, or Stratcom, which is in charge of nuclear weapons, published a study, “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence.”

A central conclusion is that the U.S. must maintain the right of a nuclear first strike, even against non-nuclear states. Furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be available, because they “cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict.”

Thus nuclear weapons are always used, just as you use a gun if you aim it but don’t fire when robbing a store — a point that Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, has repeatedly stressed.

Stratcom goes on to advise that “planners should not be too rational about determining … what an adversary values,” all of which must be targeted. “[I]t hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. . That the U.S. may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries.”

It is “beneficial [for …our strategic posture] that some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control'” — and thus posing a constant threat of nuclear attack.

Not much in this document pertains to the obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to make “good faith” efforts to eliminate the nuclear-weapon scourge from the earth. What resounds, rather, is an adaptation of Hilaire Belloc’s famous 1898 couplet about the Maxim gun:

Whatever happens we have got,
The Atom Bomb and they have not.

Plans for the future are hardly promising. In December the Congressional Budget Office reported that the U.S. nuclear arsenal will cost $355 billion over the next decade. In January the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies estimated that the U.S. would spend $1 trillion on the nuclear arsenal in the next 30 years.

And of course the United States is not alone in the arms race. As Butler observed, it is a near miracle that we have escaped destruction so far. The longer we tempt fate, the less likely it is that we can hope for divine intervention to perpetuate the miracle.

In the case of nuclear weapons, at least we know in principle how to overcome the threat of apocalypse: Eliminate them.

But another dire peril casts its shadow over any contemplation of the future — environmental disaster. It’s not clear that there even is an escape, though the longer we delay, the more severe the threat becomes — and not in the distant future. The commitment of governments to the security of their populations is therefore clearly exhibited by how they address this issue.

Today the United States is crowing about “100 years of energy independence” as the country becomes “the Saudi Arabia of the next century” — very likely the final century of human civilization if current policies persist.

One might even take a speech of President Obama’s two years ago in the oil town of Cushing, Okla., to be an eloquent death-knell for the species.

He proclaimed with pride, to ample applause, that “Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That’s important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.”

The applause also reveals something about government commitment to security. Industry profits are sure to be secured as “producing more oil and gas here at home” will continue to be “a critical part” of energy strategy, as the president promised.

The corporate sector is carrying out major propaganda campaigns to convince the public that climate change, if happening at all, does not result from human activity. These efforts are aimed at overcoming the excessive rationality of the public, which continues to be concerned about the threats that scientists overwhelmingly regard as near-certain and ominous.

To put it bluntly, in the moral calculus of today’s capitalism, a bigger bonus tomorrow outweighs the fate of one’s grandchildren.

What are the prospects for survival then? They are not bright. But the achievements of those who have struggled for centuries for greater freedom and justice leave a legacy that can be taken up and carried forward — and must be, and soon, if hopes for decent survival are to be sustained. And nothing can tell us more eloquently what kind of creatures we are.

https://chomsky.info/20140303/

READ FROM TOP

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

"Cognitive Warfare" has become a new form of confrontation between states, and a new security threat. With new technological means, it sets agendas and spreads disinformation, to change people's perceptions and thus alter their self-identity.

Launching cognitive warfare against China is an important means for Western anti-China forces to attack and discredit the country.

Some politicians and media outlets have publicly smeared China's image by propagating false narratives in an attempt to incite and provoke dissatisfaction with China among people in certain countries. These means all serve the US strategy to contain China's rise and maintain its hegemony. The Global Times is publishing a series of articles to reveal the intrigues of the US and its allies' China-targeted cognitive warfare and expose its lies and vicious intentions.

In the 17th installment of the series, the Global Times revealed how the US military-industrial complex orchestrates cognitive warfare campaigns against China to incite the Philippines to confront China, how the US government has transitioned from the forefront to the background to exert influence on the Philippines, and what tactics have been used in these cognitive wars.

From manipulating public opinion through hyping the South China Sea issue to launching smear campaign against Chinese vaccines in the Philippines, the US military-industrial complex has been exposed for persistently instigating the Philippines behind the scenes to fabricate biased or false narratives and foment public misunderstanding regarding China.

Experts warned that this strategy risks pushing the Philippines toward greater conflict and jeopardizes its own interests.

What lobbying groups are behind these cognitive warfare efforts against China? What ties do they have to the US Department of Defense, the US government, and the Philippine military? And ultimately, what tactics do they employ in their coordinated cognitive warfare assault? This investigative report aims to unravel these dirty tricks.

Military Forces Disguised as Think Tanks

In the process of supporting the Philippines in provoking disputes with China over the South China Sea, there is a non-negligible American think tank behind the scenes, known as Project Myoushu at Stanford University, which focuses on South China Sea security issues.

The project became well-known to the public due to a notorious smear campaign against the China Coast Guard (CCG) in February 2023. Project Myoushu claimed that China had harassed the Philippines Coast Guard (PCG) vessel by citing a so-called source. Subsequently, the PCG asserted that a Chinese ship had directed a laser at the PCG, while then US State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, further fanned the flames by stating that the US stands with its ally in the face of alleged laser incidents. The Chinese Foreign Ministry later clarified the facts, saying that the CCG's on-site operations are professional and res trained, and the claim made by the Philippines has no basis in fact.

Taking its name from an "inspired move" in the ancient Chinese game Go, Project Myoushu was established in 2022. Ray Powell, who served in the US Air Force and currently leads Project Myoushu at Stanford University's Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, is an active figure in the narrative campaign against China on the South China Sea issue.

Reports show that Powell had served 35 years in the US Air Force, including a posting in the Philippines. After retiring in November 2021, Powell joined Stanford University as a research fellow.

In July 2023, Ray Powell visited with then Vice Admiral Alberto Carlos of Western Command to discuss "how to leverage emerging technologies to help improve maritime domain awareness and illuminate gray-zone activities in the West Philippine Sea," according to SeaLight's website, an organization at Stanford University that Powell led.

The term "gray zone activity" has been used by some officials and scholars in the US to discredit China's policies and legal actions in the South China Sea. They use this term to accuse China of employing non-military means to "change the status quo" or "create tension."

"This is a blatant inversion of reality. In fact, labeling China with various cognitive tags regarding the South China Sea issue is itself a manifestation of the US' use of the 'gray zone' strategy," said Ding Duo, deputy director of the Institute of Maritime Law and Policy at the National Institute for South China Sea Studies.

Powell has also given interviews to US-funded media sources to support the Philippines or levy groundless accusations against China over the South China Sea issue.

In addition to Powell and Project Myoushu, another think tank with military ties has been found to openly intervene in the South China Sea issue.

According to an article in the US Naval Institute's magazine Proceedings, the US Naval Institute initiated the Maritime Counterinsurgency (COIN) Project in July 2022, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The project is specifically aimed at China's activities in the South China Sea, as it has claimed that "China is working below the threshold of armed conflict to subjugate the large civilian maritime population of Southeast Asia [...] who depend on access to the South China Sea for their daily livelihoods."

The initial concept of Maritime COIN has sparked intense discussion in the US and its partners since 2019. Several high-ranking US military officers, including Admiral John Aquilino, Vice Admiral William Merz, and Rear Admiral Fred Kacher, have been influenced by this concept.

According to the US Naval Institute, the Maritime COIN has published 19 articles from July 2022 to April 2024, and many of the authors have US military backgrounds. A retired Philippine rear admiral is also among them.

US arms firms also have stakes in the South China Sea issue. According to the arms transfers database of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the US has transferred many pieces of military equipment including aircrafts, ships, missiles, armored vehicles, and engines to the Philippines over the last 10 years.

Manila is also planning to procure a US-made Typhon mid-range capability missile system, according to Armed Forces of the Philippines chief General Romeo Brawner Jr, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported on August 29.

Observers said that US weapon makers are eager to see tensions in the South China Sea rise, so that they can sell more of their products to make profits.

Sophisticated Network Built on Cognitive Warfare Players

The influence of the US military-industrial complex extends beyond the South China Sea issue, bleeding into other areas as well.

In June, Reuters published an investigative report revealing that during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US military secretly launched a campaign to counter what it saw as China's growing influence in the Philippines. At the time, the Philippines had one of the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia.

Citing three former US military officials, a Reuters report referenced the operation as having been pushed by then US Special Operations Command Pacific General Jonathan Braga, who was reportedly a longtime advocate of increasing the use of propaganda operations as a tool in the global geopolitical competition.

The Pentagon's audit concluded that the military's primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, a US-based global aerospace and defense company, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, according to a person with direct knowledge of the review, Reuters reported.

Why did the US launch such a cognitive war against Chinese vaccines? Reuters provides an answer: To counter what it perceived as China's growing influence in the Philippines. At the time, the Philippines had received vaccine aid from China, while US-produced vaccines had not yet been introduced in the Philippines.

These highly similar tactics lead to a suspicion of a connection between the narrative campaigns over the South China Sea and Chinese vaccines. Following the clues, the Global Times discovered that the key figures behind both operations are intricately linked.

The Global Times found that Braga, one of the initiators of the vaccine campaign, once visited the Hoover Institution in February 2020, engaging fellows in a roundtable discussion about the threats his command faced in the region. One of the fellows he met with is research fellow Joseph Felter.

The ties between the two individuals go far beyond this. Felter once served in the US Army Special Forces, while Braga was quickly reassigned to command the US Army Special Operations Command in mid-2021 after the launch of the vaccine campaign against China.

Joe Felter, as the former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia, is familiar with the situation in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines. He served as the principal advisor to senior US Department of Defense leadership for all policy matters pertaining to the development and implementation of defense strategies and plans for the region. Felter's resume shows that he has also been a military attaché in the Philippines.

Moreover, he also co-founded the defense company BMNT, which has close ties to the Pentagon and US military giants like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, according to the company's official website. Felter's role as a bridge between the US military and the Philippines has since become clear.

Felter is the director of Stanford University's Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. This indicates that Powell, while working on Project Myoushu, is required to report to Felter as the head of the center.

The intricate connections between Powell, Braga, and Felter, along with their profound military backgrounds, make the player network picture behind two typical cognitive wars against China much clearer.

A Significant Shift in Strategy

The connections also highlighted a significant shift in the US' strategy: The military-industrial complex has begun to play an active role in the cognitive war against China.

"The US military-industrial complex is often involved in many global conflicts. Driven by its own interests, it benefits from escalating regional tensions," Chen Xiangmiao, director of the World Navy Research Center at the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, told the Global Times.

By creating instability in the region, the complex aims to stimulate demand from countries around the South China Sea, thereby fulfilling its economic interests, he noted.

The military-industrial complex seeks to leverage these initiatives to encourage the US Congress to approve larger budgets and to push the US Department of Defense to procure more weapons, Chen said.

China urges win-win cooperation as US sees zero-sum game

The People’s Republic of China continues to seek mutually beneficial partnerships with the United States and the rest of the world but US leaders are committed to seeing the Asian country’s rise as a challenge to its… pic.twitter.com/SGnDFBvEQ7

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) September 24, 2024

The interests of the military-industrial complex are clearly driving the US strategy of cognitive warfare against China, Chen noted.

The expert further stated it is clear to see that the US government has shifted from a front-stage role to a behind-the-scenes one. This can help avoid direct involvement in controversies that may provoke public resentment or skepticism, as well as prevent "factual conflicts" with China.

Meanwhile, by packaging think tanks as neutral and objective "academic authorities," the US can better exert global public opinion pressure, according to Chen. 

"This strategy may push the Philippines to escalate tensions in the region, ultimately jeopardizing its own interests. The Philippines is by no means the winner of the cognitive war," he stressed.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202409/1320215.shtml

READ FROM TOP

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

There’s a live debate running on building nuclear power stations. But when it comes to the danger of nuclear war, there’s deadly silence. Rex Patrick and Philip Dorling report on a disturbing FOI that confirms that silence.

Australia’s geo-strategic situation is changing rapidly.  The Government’s 2023 Defence Strategic Review wasn’t shy in laying out the big concern, highlighting that “China’s military build-up in is now the second largest and most ambitious of any country since the end of the Second World War”. 

The Strategic Review went on to say “This build-up is occurring without transparency or reassurance to the Indo-Pacific region of China’s strategic intent. China’s assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea threatens the global rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific in a way that adversely impacts Australia’s national interests.”

The Strategic Review did not draw attention to a potential China-Taiwan conflict, but that’s unquestionably the big risk driving the current and planned US military build-up in Australia.

Now hold that thought.

As China builds its conventional forces, it’s also doing the same for its nuclear arsenal. For a long time China maintained a small strategic nuclear force – essentially a minimum deterrent. But that’s now changing. The most recent US Department of Defense report to Congress on the state of China’s military capabilities spells out the situation.

China is expanding the number of its land, sea, and air-based nuclear delivery platforms while investing in and constructing infrastructure necessary to support further expansion of its nuclear forces.

It’s estimated that China possesses more than 500 operational nuclear warheads. It completed at least 300 new Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silos, and has loaded at least some ICBMs into these silos. It also has fielded longer-range JL-3 Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles on its JIN class ballistic missile submarines, which are capable of hitting the continental United States from their waters.

China will probably have over 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030.

All of this involves risk for Australia.

As a starting point it’s worth saying; there are no winners in a nuclear war. That does not mean that nuclear war is not a possibility.

There’s some chance that China will, as Russia has done in with Ukraine, embark on a military operation against Taiwan. Such a conflict might be localised. Beijing would prefer that, but the risk of escalation and expansion would be high. It’s not inconceivable China could threaten use of nuclear weapons in the context of a China – Taiwan – US conflict.  

In a worst case scenario, the question the leadership in Beijing could send through the hotline to Washington might be, “Madam President, what’s more important to you, Honolulu, Seattle or Taipei?”

High priority targets for China would almost certainly include Pine Gap […and] North West Cape.

If nuclear weapons are exchanged, Australia would not be immune in terms of Chinese targeting, especially as the number of weapons available for targeting grows. Indeed, it may even be the case that the question to the US President might be “Look what we have shown we’re prepared to do, look to the weapons we have detonated in Australia.”

High priority targets for China would almost certainly include the Joint Defence Intelligence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs and the very low-frequency US submarine communication facility at North West Cape. That’s not new, these were undoubtedly Russian targets in the Cold War and are probably still on Moscow’s list.  

However, the Chinese are likely to also look at an expanded target set covering US and Australian war-fighting capabilities that could project power into the South China Sea, around Taiwan or elsewhere in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.  

This will likely include HMAS Stirling (US and UK nuclear submarines) near Perth, Darwin (RAAF Darwin, fuel storage facilities and the US Marine detachment), RAAF Tindal (US B-52 Bombers) and new US logistic storage facilities in Victoria and Queensland.

The Australian Defence Force headquarters at Bungendore near Canberra is another possibility.

As the Chinese strategic arsenal expands further, other major transportation and communications facilities as well as Australian cities could also come into the picture.  

Today’s nuclear weapons are vastly more powerful than those that destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly 80 years ago.

If a Chinese DF-31 ICBM delivers a 1MT nuclear payload on HMAS Stirling, life for many Western Australians will end or else be changed forever.

The immediate flash of light and heat would be so tremendous it is impossible for anyone to imagine. The temperature at ground zero will be 180 million degrees, 5 times hotter than the centre of the sun. Anyone in Fremantle unlucky enough to be looking south west would be instantly blinded.

Within the first couple of seconds a fireball of 1.4 km in diameter will have obliterated the entire naval base. Metal objects will have melted and concrete would have exploded. Every man and woman on the naval base will have converted into carbon. The injured will envy them.

Everything outside the fireball range will burst into flames; clothes, books, wooden fences and trees. Almost all humans will suffer third degree burns, with specialist burns beds in Fremantle and Perth being almost instantly overwhelmed with any immediate casualties that can get to them. 

Rockingham and the coastal areas north to Fremantle will suffer a high-pressure wave that will mow people down, burst ear drums and collapse buildings. The industrial plants at Kwinana will be devastated with collapsing structures, rupturing of pipes, and fire. Those surprised by the pressure wave will be equally surprised by the reverse suction effect.

In total, 1,210 souls will die and 20,220 will be injured.

After about 35 seconds the mushroom cloud will have formed and after 60 seconds will be well on its journey towards the troposphere.  On the ground a firestorm will rage across the suburban landscape. Over the next hour or two the cloud will drift with the assistance of the ‘Fremantle doctor’ over Perth in the coming hours, raining radioactive debris and dust.

Most people in the initial thermal radiation area will die over the first few days. Those that manage to stay alive will be alone and trapped in self-survival mode. There will be no mobile phone coverage and no internet and little food or water. There will be no first responders.

If the United States is subject to nuclear attack, there is a ‘continuity of government’ plan and a separate ‘continuity of operations’ plan. 

The first is a protocol of how command and control is maintained for the US armed forces and government agencies; with much effort put into ensuring effective succession from the President to the Vice President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives etc if required.

The second is how to keep the key elements of the country working.

The United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) exists to deal with ‘continuity of operations’ in the event of hurricanes, fires, floods and nuclear attack.

Australia does have a continuity of Government plan? 

Historically previous Governments have discussed the plan publicly. Prime Minister John Howard was quite open about the necessity for such planning and preparations which in their post-Cold War iteration date back to 2004. Howard answered parliamentary questions on the subject.  

However, it’s a rather different story with the current Government. In a response to a recent FOI request for information relating to continuity of government planning, the Government answered saying they would “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of any such plan.

The plan does exist. The Government is being unnecessarily secretive about that fact if not the details of the plan. This secrecy is now subject to challenge.  

Of course, it might also be the case that the plan is out of date. It might be the case that the Government hasn’t been attentive to Australia’s strategic environment

One thing’s clear, there’s no work underway on how Australia, as a nation, might deal with a nuclear attack, even a single strike on one target.  

In a separate FOI to our National Emergency Management Agency (Australia’s equivalent of FEMA) to see what studies or planning they might be doing in the way of preparation for the low probability but extremely high consequence scenario of a nuclear strike. The answer was pretty disturbing. They have done no work in this space.

Whether you support AUKUS, or don’t – whether you support the increasing presence of the US military in Australia, or don’t – we should have a fully informed debate. We should be fully aware of the possible consequences of the choices that have been made and be prepared for it.  

We haven’t had that properly informed debate, and the Government hasn’t even started to consider preparations for contingencies.  

That’s a profound failure that ought to cause people to stop and think.

https://michaelwest.com.au/us-australia-consequences-of-nuclear-war-with-china/

READ FROM TOP

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

The Labor Party is a long way from done but at the moment it is mired in mediocrity. We need a Labor Party agenda in which the big issues are confronted, writes Bill Keelty.

It is a sad day for me in some ways. I remember coming back from Canberra and I told Lindsay Fox that Australia did not have much to worry about. I had seen both Bill Shorten and Josh Frydenberg. Two young men on opposite political sides, but with very similar values when it came to public service. I like them both and said to Lindsay that one day they will each have the opportunity to lead Australia. Bill almost got there. It would be foolish to write off Josh just yet.

They already have a legacy of which both can be proud. I happened to be in Bill’s office in Moonee Pond just a week or so after he became Parliamentary Secretary for persons with disability. Scores of good people from all sides had striven to do something of lasting substance for this group of Australians. The reality was that goodwill had been trounced by pragmatism. This was still a very marginal issue as was evidenced by the status the government had given it.

It was the first time I heard anybody talk about a national insurance scheme. This was a great and imaginative idea that only a Labor Government could deliver. It is true that others like Bruce Bonyhady and Jenny Macklin should share some credit but as I saw it, Bill Shorten was the father of the NDIS. If he did nothing more in public life, it is a remarkable achievement. The most significant social reform of this century. The only government in the world which was prepared to be so brave.

As for Josh, it is always worthwhile to recall the great uncertainty and fear that beset the nation in the face of COVID. Josh stepped up with a spirit of generosity that stopped Australia falling into the abyss. For that we should always be grateful.

My politics has never been taken as a whole, of the left or the right.

I have always been willing to be seen as a socialist, if that term is defined as never leaving people behind and providing greater opportunities for more people. I have always been in love with the idea of national healthcare, universal superannuation, education for everyone and a minimum wage that is the highest the nation can afford.

But on the other hand, I believe in the power of markets, the benefits of competition, entrepreneurship, corporate relevance, small business dynamism, rural industry resilience and political pluralism. I saw nothing inconsistent with privatisation and socialism if it meant that the beneficiaries were lower paid people. I said that when it came to deregulating the airlines and selling the Commonwealth Bank.

In my life, it has not been a theory. For thirty years, nearly every day of those thirty years I worked for trade unions. For the past 25 years, I have worked with Lindsay Fox.

It is true that I found Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, more personally relevant than the birthday present my mother gave me when I was 14 – three volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

The truth I thought was simple enough. It was not a matter of choice between left and right.

As evidence, I thought all you needed to do was point to the great political compromise, indeed almost the national covenant that is Australia. Giant safety nets on health, education, superannuation, the highest minimum rates in the world, and now the NDIS. But almost in every case there is a private dimension.

Private healthcare, private education, individual wage contracts and personal superannuation. The ALP has been the great promoter of the safety nets. The Liberal Party, the great advocates for personal insurance and private contributions subsidized by the State.

The national convention is this. When the Liberal Party attack the safety nets, they lose. When the Labor Party seeks to destroy the individual contribution, they do not win.

Of course, there is a great contest over the balance and for middle ground aspirations. Sometimes a Keating comes along and creates imputation credits, and reduces the top marginal tax rates from 60% to 46%. Then John Howard’s gun laws would be seen as a form of communism in the United States.

But let me turn to the current political position.

The Labor Party seems to have lost its way to safely secure three terms of Government. The polls show a primary vote of between 28% to 32%, the Northern Territory elections were devastating and threaten two seats, there is a strong chance for a Liberal Party rebound in Western Australia, there are great forebodings in the debt-ridden Victoria and great uncertainty in Queensland. There is a real chance that Federal Labor will go into minority Government. There is a reasonable chance that the Liberal and National Party could even win.

The Federal Labor Government under Albanese has done some very good things and the economy has seen increasing employment and falling inflation. So, what accounts for the malaise?

The most obvious is that the majority of working people have had a savage reduction in their living standards. Since the GFC the reduction in real average earnings is between 5% to 9% depending upon consumption patterns. Since COVID the reduction in living standards has been even greater for a vast bulk of working people. Real wages have fallen and real taxes have increased.

At the same time and over the same period there has been a massive increase in wealth for home owners and superannuants, including environment protection, improving the industrial relations framework, repairing the NDIS and creating a building fund. These trends demonstrate the fundamental reason why renters and the non-inheritors are turning away from the Labor Party and for that matter the Liberal Party.

For a great number of people, they face a world of renting, not home ownership, total marginal tax rates of over 50% and jobs in which the real value of their wages have declined.

We are not alone in the world. The USA, Canada and the UK all face the same problems and the same discontent, cost of living, mortgage rates, rents and housing shortage.

In the United States the real value of work for a majority of working people in a majority of States has hardly moved in two generations.

Australia has done much better, but the 15-year period to 2026 shows that we are on the same track. This is a very long period of real wage stagnancy.

So, what explains this situation? The decline in productivity increases have not helped. The two great shocks of COVID and the GFC knocked the world around them. The decline in enterprise bargaining and the decline in real wages is highly correlated. Since the Gillard and Rudd Governments made it even harder to bargain, the number of enterprise bargains has collapsed. It was an unintended consequence of industrial incompetence. The Albanese Government and the ACTU deserve credit for their industrial changes. They will help reverse the trend but they may well prove to be insufficient. We simply need to be more supportive of the new model EBA’s that increase training, adaption and productivity. We need a fresh approach to a more dynamic world which addresses these issues.

What we do not need is a self-congratulatory Government telling people they have really cared and looked after them. People are not impressed by politicians telling them – or at least implying that a tax cut has fixed their problem paying bills, especially a tax cut that leaves them paying more tax than they were two years ago. The cost-of-living tax cut was welcome but it was a year too late and a thousand dollars too little.

We do not need the Government telling us that real reform is tinkering with Reserve Bank structures. It is a change that delights only about two dozen connoisseurs of minutiae. The real power is fixing the base interest. That is the A Grade Board. The Corporate Governance Board is the Z Grade board for petty power. The real issue is interest rates.

The former Governor of the Reserve Bank will go down in history as having made one of the most ill-advised statements in the history of the Bank. It was a mistake that helped contribute to the inflation created by a world that forced up oil prices and deficit funded on over- compensation of COVID relief. But we all make mistakes and at least it was motivated by good intent. The Reserve Bank has done the right thing to increase rates. It was tough and necessary. There is a case to say they are marginally too high. There is no case to say they should be increased. It is nonsense to suggest that there is a wage price spiral insight. We broadly know the wage outcomes for the next few years. They are manageable and not inflationary.

To reduce interest rates to record lows and then tell everybody they were here to stay for a long time was a mistake. To increase interest rates now would be to book-end stupidities. Rates too low for too long without reason. Interest rates too high for too long out of unjustified fear.

There should be interest rate cuts and if we are clever, they will be relatively small so that they can return to a long-term neutral position. They will only be substantial if we have fallen into recession.

Monetary policy counts not some indulgent elective surgery to the bank. It was Bernie Fraser, the best Reserve Bank Governor in our history, who convinced us that inflation targeting was a good idea. Inflation, camouflages reality, more often rewards mediocrity, caters for the strongest and luckiest, and can crush the least powerful. But the 2% to 3% was over the normal cycle and did not assume massive exogenous shocks.

The question is now, will inflation over the next 2 to 3 years return to a band between 2% to 3%. We broadly know the wage outcomes of between 3.5% to 3.8% per annum. So, allowing for only .7% productivity, the unit costs will rose 2.8% to 3.1%. Oil prices are uncertain, but the odds must be against these prices forever and oil prices may well fall. Accelerated depreciation offsets come to an end and the extra demand it created that forced up the prices of cars, trucks and other goods will come to an end. So too will the tax break and additional taxes will have to be paid. We are already seeing the rest of the world signalling a reduction in rates. Our economy is close to stagnant.

The issue about government expenditure is not its inflationary consequences but its waste.

Tunnel drilling machines are stuck, Commonwealth Games abandoned without having any events, roads being paid for that are not built, quarantine centres constructed that will unlikely be taken up, railways built without business cases. At the same time, I get calls every day telling me that the government is subsidising solar power, giving away door seals, LED lights and a myriad of other silly things. It makes me wonder when we don’t have enough money to pay our teacher properly.

There is simply just a very good case to reduce interest rates before the end of the year. When comes to the security of the banking system there is a strange coalition of concerned institutions. The Labor Governments, Treasury and Reserve Bank have all placed security well in advance of competition and fair access. It was for that reason the previous Labor Government substantially weakened competition by charging the regional banks a premium on risk. The share prices show the long-term impact of this anti-competitive stance. It was understandable but unfair. But it has been compounded by a Royal Commission which forced the major banks out of the market for lower paid and more vulnerable Australians. If Lindsay Fox was starting his business today, he would never have been able to buy his second truck. If my single sister had sought a bank loan today to buy her house she would have been rejected.

That is not to say we can make excuses for the bad behaviour of many of the leading banks that the Royal Commission found, but thousands of its customers knew about and experienced. A lack of competition always breeds arrogance, but bad behaviour of the banks should not be compounded by bad policy.

It is easy to suggest they are unintended consequences, but they are not. They are sad policies which see up to a quarter of the working population having no access to capital or relying on a secondary market of much higher interest rates. In this world of double and sometimes treble the interest rates, life is an exercise in tight rope walking at heights. It is economic cruelty and philosophical sophistry that prevents those with less risk subsidising those with more.

Yet, when it comes to the young, that is precisely what is being imposed to maintain private health insurance, HELP that their parents did not pay, and a GST that subsidises capital deficient taxes, you can understand they may be just a little cynical. Many young people are paying effective total marginal tax rates of over 50% when millions of wealthy Australians have effective total marginal tax rates not much higher than 25%.

Higher income Australians cannot complain about the Australian tax system not while they can negatively gear properties, have FBT expenses paid by the company, superannuation concessions, trust arrangements and have their capital income taxed at 50% of their marginal tax rate. They pay a lot less of their income on GST in relative terms. This is the tax system. It is not fine for most people who pay the 50% plus marginal tax rates without deductions or other arrangements. In particular, it is not fine for young people who are renters and non-inheritors. It is brutish.

It is not fine for those not able to access the tax breaks. We need a tax system which does not make industries out of tax breaks.

We need to say to Australians, we have a tax system for you and your future that does not require creative accounting or special privilege. We do know this – that taxing is a real political problem. People don’t like paying extra taxes despite what they may say in polling. But that does not mean we cannot have tax reform. The majority can continue to live in this tax world and they will not be worse off, but for many there should be a new tax system which is simpler and fairer – especially for younger people.

The Treasurer is trying to reform the tax system on superannuation. The truth is the Howard/Costello changes went too far for the privileged. But it is equally clear that the Government changes go too far. The failure to index the rates will over time reduce superannuation to a cap of $1-9m. A policy of taxing unrealised capital gains may cause panic.

There is nothing wrong in increasing the tax rates and even having a cap of $3m indexed. What is wrong is that it is an attack on the great national compromise that underpin this nation’s economic and social policies. There is a case for change, but non-indexation and taxing unrealised gains are both political poison.

The Australian Labor Party needs to address much more important reform. It needs to be able to plainly speak to a younger generation concerned about inequality, the environment, and security.

It can start with a job contract that provides training and jobs in every industry in which there is a shortage. A new contract that provides teachers with paid training and a job for four or five years. A new contract that provides tradespeople with the same paid training and a job for a few years. A new contract which provides health care, and aged care workers with a new training wage and a job for years. This is both doable and necessary. It will require employer support and encouragement.

With these new job and training contracts the role of HELP should be reviewed. It should at least be reconfigured so that the burden of debt repayment is no greater than it was when it was introduced. No HELP should be payable until incomes are over $60,000.

But for many young people it is the likelihood that they will be forever renters in a market of forever shortages that destroys ambition.

Abandon any idea of subsidies; they don’t work except to increase prices. What we need is a modified Singapore model in which government, banks and superannuation provide the capital to build generational houses for public and social needs. A modern national Housing Commission, with accredited builders underpinned by a modern national EBA which provides fair incomes and high-quality work. The nation has to stop the baloney and replace false promises with real buildings.

The superannuation funds have an important part to play. People forget that giving access to superannuation for home investors was the policy of the Labor Government and the ACTU in the 1993 election. We abandoned that policy after the election because we decided to address the structural issue of rapacious banking margins before we added to the demand. It was a good decision: banking margins fell, home ownership increased and superannuation returned close to 9% p.a. It was the source of the great wave of wealth that Australians who have both homes and superannuation have experienced.

We did not get to the great housing shortage by chance. The GST on new homes increased the price on all homes, the great migration probably added to demand greater than supply, the shortage of labour forced up wage costs, regulations were increased, and big infrastructure builds forced up the price of materials.

We should note that for all our great safety nets, per capita homelessness in Australia is much worse than the USA. The national disgrace is owned by nearly every government at every level.

We need to do what FDR did when faced with building up that nation’s defence. He enlisted Raymond F Knudsen, the CEO of GMH, and gave him both legal and moral responsibility to do the job. On a smaller scale, this is what Paul Keating did when he made Lindsay Fox the Chairperson of Nettforce to fix up traineeships.

Childcare is a vital reform; the most important of the Government’s plans for the future. But it cannot be left to the younger and single generation. It must come from the dividends of increased economic growth. Reform would probably be more effective if a price had to be paid and it was not a subsidy for private child care operators.

The commitment to young people must go beyond economic calculus. The environment, climate change and indigenous rights are big issues for the future. The overwhelming majority of world scientific opinion has endorsed a view of climate change that is both frightening and threatening. In a sense it is more important than party politics and Parliament should elevate it to that level. For my part I am always a little confused when there is a specific target for a specific year. I would prefer to adopt an energy policy based on both continuity of supply and a renewal strategy.

I know that good people like Jennie George have strong ideas about nuclear. Bob Hawke was always open to the idea. My concern is not just about the waste and insecurity. Rather, it is about distraction and cost. We run the great danger of pushing trillions down two related dreams. The first is AUKUS and the second is nuclear energy. A nation pays a high price for extravagant expenditure fantasies. While we do this, we can easily lose focus on implementing an energy policy which has the support of the majority of Australians. In any event an open debate and process within Parliament would be a good place to debate all the main issues aided by the best scientific minds.

There might never be general agreement, but we need to remove climate change policy as far as we can from politics. Let’s have a participatory inquiry – quickly – and on the basis of evidence decide on the way forward. If there’s a sound case for putting nuclear in the mix, put it in the mix. If there’s not, drop it.

The Voice was a noble idea but fundamentally a naïve one which placed bureaucracy in front of principle. I found myself broadly in agreement with two of the great antagonists; Lidia Thorpe in advocating for a Treaty and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price seeking greater tribal and local relevance. One of the very last things Bob Hawke told me was that to never give up on the idea of a Treaty. Australia should never give up on the need for a Treaty – a formal undertaking that the peoples who were here for 65,000 years deserve recognition, recompense and representation.

There is just one final point, and that is national security. I was at the St Kilda Town Hall when Gough Whitlam announced the withdrawal of troops from the war in Vietnam. It received the loudest ovation that I can ever recall at a political meeting.

But Whitlam went on to delineate the ALP policy on defence. Recognition of China, greater understanding with Indonesia and the Pacific, greater reliance on Australia’s own defensive capacity whilst maintaining its relationship with the USA. It did not seem extremist then and resounded well with an audience, many of which could still recall Curtin and Evatt. The ALP approach to the world was tested over the war in Vietnam. When Hawke developed APEC and Keating gave it an unparalleled political strength, it seemed in keeping with the strategy. When Beazley wanted to build up Australia’s own capacity and Gareth Evans embraced every Asian nation as independently worthy and to be respected, we had finally escaped the White Australia policy, which offended our neighbours and inhibited our thinking. When Keating embraced the Pacific and entered into a pact with Indonesia, we knew what we were defending.

I must confess that I always found the Chinese Communist Party a very unattractive political organisation. I always thought Maoists were on the edge of political lunacy.

China has been the threat and the promise for a very long time. White Australia was in part a rejection of Chinese immigration. The Korean War in, part a war against China and the Vietnam war was always explained as a war against Chinese aggression.

Over the past generations no group of people in the history of the world have taken so many people out of poverty as have the Chinese. China has been one of the great catalysts in increasing our living standards.

Buying our resources, providing cheaper goods to Australia, attending our universities, buying houses and homes and living in Australia. Yet, China remains the greatest threat and by our pact with the USA brings us closer to war with them over Taiwan than at any time since the war in Vietnam. The truth was that Vietnam was never the enemy of Australia and China was never the friend of Vietnam. Taiwan is not Vietnam. The world has lived with the reality of Taiwan for a long time. Australia has just one role to play and that is to become a peacemaker. After all, it was of all people Richard Nixon whose tombstone reads “The greatest honour history can bestow is the title of peacemaker”.

The easiest criticism of Paul Keating is that he a person of the past, the times have overtaken him, and it is, therefore, pointless to engage him in debate. On AUKUS for instance. But this government has not engaged any of the AUKUS critics and sceptics: not Keating, not Hugh White, not Malcolm Turnbull, not Sam Roggeveen, James Curran, or any of their once trusted former advisors who opposed it. They have listened to no one, old or young. But even restricting it to the old, I know which side I would back in a debate – Albanese, Marles, Morrison and Hartcher (the new) against Keating, Evans, White, Turnbull, etc (the old).

The debate will never happen. No serious inquiry will ever be conducted. Only history will judge. My guess is that there will never be any submarines. But then the AUKUS advocates say it’s about more than submarines – as if this special knowledge makes all resistance futile. Well, of course, it’s about more than submarines. It’s about our unceasing fealty to the United States, whatever their follies abroad, and at home; our posture in Asia and the Pacific; our ability to think for ourselves and conduct mature debate. And it’s about – conservatively – a trillion dollars, and where that might be better spent, not only on the nation’s defences, but its infrastructure and schools.

It is most likely that China and Taiwan will find their own resolution. If there is a war then there will be no victors.

There is just one other issue that I want to comment on and that is the war on Gaza. All my life I have been a friend of Israel. All my life I have been a supporter of the speech of Dr. Evatt that helped establish Israel. A speech that declared for an independent Israel and an independent Palestine. The truth is that in the two-state solution, my greatest passion has been for the state of Israel. It is also true that the Labor controlled state under Ben Gurion was for me a mixture of compassion and toughness that we admired, loved even. It was not a religious state – Ben Gurion was an atheist. However, there is another side which also believes in a two-state solution but in this case the passion is for Palestine. It is understandable and is a basis for peace. Nobody can or should excuse the atrocities of Hamas. But nobody can really believe that killing of thousands of innocent people is a long-term solution to terrorism. It will create its own terrorists. It is true that Hamas is the enemy of the two-state solution, and their terrorism should be forever abhorred.

The Labor Party is a long way from done but at the moment it is mired in mediocrity that is not much different from the past generation.

We need a Labor Party agenda in which the big issues are confronted. An energy policy that is practicable and principled. A bargaining framework that is about training, productivity and fairness. A tax policy for the future that is fair and effective. A manifesto for the young that offers hope. A fair finance policy that is accessible for those in need. A monetary policy that is not distracted by silliness. An interest rate cut now by .25% and a further cut in early New Year by at least .25%. But the message should be clear; the days of almost free money are over. A return to the Labor defence policy of Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and Evans.

A new National Housing Commission that in conjunction with the States actually builds houses.

Paul Keating is right. The Labor Party needs a dose of imagination mixed with compassion.

Let me say this in conclusion.

When I look at the world today, I do ask myself, “Would the world be different if the USA had the economic framework of higher minimum wages, national health care and national superannuation?”

If the USA had three times their GDP in superannuation compared to the .7% they currently have, they would dwarf China as an economic power. If the proportion of GDP spent on health care was the same as Australia and their defence expenditure was even double the 2% target of most European countries, they would have the capacity to have living standards, including minimum wages, that far exceed that of any nation on earth.

They would then have an economy that matched their imagination. I think the world would be a far better and safer place. I know it is a fantasy and not as simple as all that for them.

But it is not for us. We have always had the opportunity to have policies that reflect our imagination.

What we need now is for the Prime Minister and the Labor team to take a break and give their creative capacities a reasonable chance. The PM can do that now that he has put off his impending marriage until after the election.

William John Kelty, AC is an Australian trade unionist and a well-known figure in the Australian labour movement, who served as Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions from 1983 to 2000. Born in Brunswick, Melbourne, Kelty was educated at La Trobe University where he studied economics.

Transcript of a speech delivered at Newmark Stakeholder Luncheon, 5 September, 2024.

https://johnmenadue.com/the-labor-party-has-lost-its-way/

READ FROM TOP

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

It may be that in his post-Public Service life Mr Mike Pezzullo has been watching lots of classic films.

When asked about the recent stripping of his Order of Australia, the former Home Affairs supremo said that the matter wasn’t “worth a hill of beans in this crazy world.” They’re precisely the sentiments Humphrey Bogart expresses to Ingrid Bergman in the 1942 romantic drama film “Casablanca”. Pezzullo has Bogart’s words word perfect.

Mind you, issuing from the lips of either gentleman, the sentiment is a trifle ambiguous as hills of coffee and vanilla beans, depending on their bigness, could be worth fortunes in our days of cost of living “crises”. Hills of mung or baked beans perhaps not so much unless they were of Everest proportions.

But if Mr Pezzullo thought his Order of Australia was, to grasp another metaphor, small beer, why did he accept it in the first place? Many don’t.

Yet whatever the bean-counting, in a manner of speaking, Mr Pezzullo is sort of right.

The Order of Australia is a rickety edifice based on the social hierarchies of British Imperial honours but with different titles.

Admission to the Order is based on criteria of spectacular opacity which nevertheless put awardees in their social places – judges and politicians at the top, nurses and carers of the aged and infirm on the bottom.

Apart from the social categorisation, entry to the Order’s society is relatively easy and for some professions – like professors who dominate its upper echelons – the process appears to be semi-automated. Still tens of thousands from many trades have been chosen and the nature of the criteria ensures a fair allotment to personages whose virtues are not always widely appreciated.

Nevertheless once in, 99.9999% stay put. It’s almost as hard to get out of the Order as it used to be to get out of the Australian cricket team.

Some have resigned their places on matters of principle. Dr H C Coombs did so apparently in objection to the admission of Knights and Dames in 1976. Patrick White may have handed in his badge for like reasons although it’s a little obscure in his case – rather like some of his Nobel prize winning novels.

Others have self-ejected because of what might be called “personal difficulties” – the legal eagle Dyson Heydon and businessman Richard Pratt, for example. They seem to have seen the writing on the wall.

A few have had their medallions torn from them – Alan Bond, Rodney Adler and Steve Vizard, among others.

Now Mr Pezzullo has joined the ranks of former members of the Order of Australia, a tiny and mixed contingent if ever there was one except for those who have died. Apparently awardees can’t take their gongs with them although that might not be much to regret as they would be unlikely to count for much in whatever ultimate destination persons are sent.

Pezzullo had the misfortune to be dismissed from the Public Service for reasons that were, at best, only partially explained by the Public Service Commissioner and other authorities.

Now he has had his AO removed in an exercise of Vice Regal power for which there has been no explanation what so ever. It’s often the way with Vice Regals. Hence the saying “We are not amused.”

https://johnmenadue.com/the-bell-has-tolled-for-pezzullos-gong/

READ FROM TOP

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.