Police social cohesion squad prosecutes man over Gaza emails to his MP

by Michael West

'A Palestine activist has been charged with a criminal offence, faces 5 years in jail and has driving restrictions on his Uber for pestering his local MP over Gaza with email. 

Austin Mackell spent four months emailing and phoning his Blue Mountains federal MP, Susan Templeman, pressing her to speak publicly against the war in Gaza, beginning with the killing of fifteen Red Crescent and Civil Defence paramedics. 

Police assessed the conduct three times while it was happening, explicitly describing it as non criminal. 

The last of these assessments, where an AFP officer told Mr Mackell “I genuinely don’t see you as a criminal, I see you as someone who is passionate about the cause” and asked him to “continue to be mindful,” was via phone on July 24. Austin recorded the call and posted it to instagram immediately. 

On 25 July 2025, Templeman published a statement calling what is happening to Gaza’s children “indefensible”. 

Mackell left a thank-you voicemail that morning and stopped. The last item in the prosecution’s own brief, as evidence of a crime, is that message, which is Austin thanking her and her staff and wishing them well.

On 6 February 2026, however, six months after the final voicemail, but only three days before the visit of Israeli president Herzog to Australia (the occasion of a massive crackdown on Palestine activism) he was served with a notice to attend court, charged with using a carriage service to menace harass or offend.

In June 2025, an AFP officer stood at Austin Mackell’s Katoomba door and told him, on video, “we understand there’s no offences here”. Eight months later, the AFP charged him. More here.

https://michaelwest.com.au/police-prosecutes-man-over-gaza-emails-to-mp/

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Tom Roth

A decade after the UN demanded protection for medical care in war, attacks on hospitals, health workers, patients and humanitarian aid continue with devastating impunity.

On 3 October 2015, a US gunship repeatedly fired upon the Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) trauma centre in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The attack – which occurred during a Taliban attack on other parts of the city – killed 42 people, including patients, medical staff and caretakers, and destroyed the only major trauma hospital serving north-eastern Afghanistan.

This infamous attack demonstrated a dangerous erosion of respect for the protected status of hospitals under international humanitarian law (IHL) and, together with widespread attacks on health facilities in Syria and Yemen, it became a major catalyst for United Nations Security Council action. The Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2286 on 3 May 2016 – a strong political reaffirmation that medical care must be protected in war.

A decade after this resolution was adopted, attacks on healthcare have not decreased. Instead, every year there have been thousands of attacks on hospitals, clinics, ambulances, patients and health workers. Thousands of healthcare workers have been killed, injured, detained or abducted during this ten-year period. Violence reached record levels in 2023 with 2,562 documented incidents across 30 conflict-affected countries and territories. More humanitarian workers were killed in 2024 than in any previous year, with 383 killed in total.

During conflicts, attacks on healthcare are no longer exceptional events. Hospitals are bombed, ambulances are purposefully delayed or attacked, health workers are treated with suspicion, and patients are denied the care they need. The issue is that the immediate horror of each attack is further compounded by the long-term collapse of access to lifesaving care.

MSF has seen this pattern in many places where we work, including Gaza, Sudan, South Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar and Lebanon. In the last decade, 21 MSF staff have been killed while carrying out their duties, 15 of whom died during the current genocide in Gaza, serving as a reminder of the specific targeting of aid workers during crimes against humanity.

In 2025 alone, the World Health Organization (WHO) recorded 1,348 attacks on healthcare, resulting in 1,981 deaths of healthcare workers and patients.

This is not a failure of awareness. Governments and modern militaries know the rules. They know the protections that international humanitarian law affords to medical personnel, patients, facilities, transport and equipment. They know this is a war crime.

The evidence suggests that parties to conflict are increasingly brazen in their attacks on healthcare facilities and personnel for two reasons. First, as a military strategy, to forcibly displace populations to punish, demoralise and subjugate, as an end in itself. Second, the absence of independent investigations and meaningful accountability mechanisms means that parties to a conflict can attack healthcare facilities and personnel with relative impunity. It is no coincidence that attacks against journalists follow a starkly similar pattern to attacks against healthcare workers.

The same erosion in respect for IHL is visible in the way humanitarian assistance itself is being treated in war zones by warring parties. It is contempt for IHL and a rejection of humanitarian principles. It is the increasingly common restrictions on access for UN agencies and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) like MSF. It is a rejection of the role these organisations play in witnessing and speaking out on violations of IHL.

The most visible example of this erosion was in Gaza and the West Bank, where Israel’s ongoing threat to withhold registration from 37 INGOs, including MSF, was presented as an administrative measure. However, its practical impact would be to strip people of healthcare in one of the most medically devastated places on earth. In 2025, MSF teams in Gaza provided hundreds of thousands of consultations, treated mass trauma injuries, supported hospitals and delivered water at scale. While our work and independent witnessing continues through the dedication of our locally hired Palestinian staff, we are working in an increasingly constrained environment. This is a prime example of how the support international aid organisations bring can be dismantled through politically motivated barriers to registration, unnecessary bureaucracy, exclusion and the quiet removal of those still able to treat and testify.

So, in the decade ahead, how do we stop the trend and make real progress on preventing attacks on healthcare? And what role can an influential ‘middle power’ country like Australia play?

First, Australia has consistently presented itself as a supporter of international law and the protection of civilians. That position carries responsibilities. It is not enough to express concern after each attack on a hospital, aid convoy or distribution point. Australia should be more willing to use its diplomatic relationships, public voice and policy tools to defend the rules it says matter.

Australia can ensure that its engagement with parties to conflict explicitly opposes restrictions on medical and humanitarian organisations and seeks concrete guarantees for the movement and safety of ambulances, patients, health workers and humanitarian staff.

Australia can support independent investigations and accountability for attacks on healthcare and for aid models that have caused foreseeable civilian harm.

Australia can use its diplomatic voice to defend the independence of humanitarian assistance and reject militarised distribution systems that expose civilians to harm.

Second, Australia is committed to the global Declaration for the Protection of Humanitarian Personnel. While that initiative is welcome, we must ensure it does not become another statement of principle without consequence like UN Security Council Resolution 2286. The test is whether it leads to practical protection, timely accountability and political pressure when humanitarian workers, health workers and civilians are attacked.

Australia’s welcomed leadership on the Declaration must include practical follow-through: clearer reporting, stronger diplomatic consequences and specific attention to local staff, who carry the greatest share of risk.

Third, Australia is a humanitarian donor. Donor governments have a direct interest in ensuring that their humanitarian assistance can be delivered safely, independently and according to need. If aid is blocked, manipulated or militarised, donor policy is not simply being undermined, civilian lives are being placed at further risk.

Finally, Australia must be a convenor for other like-minded middle power countries to act, in our region and globally.

The defence of international humanitarian law cannot be left only to legal statements after the fact. It needs coordinated political action while violations are happening.

When hospitals are attacked, when ambulances cannot move, when patients are denied care, and when people are shot at while trying to access food or healthcare, the issue is not only a failure of assistance. It is a failure of law, policy and political will.

Medical staff, patients and humanitarian aid workers deserve more than words. Denying or restricting humanitarian assistance must not be turned into another weapon of war. Australia should help ensure that the commitments made ten years ago are finally treated as obligations, not aspirations.

This is ultimately a test of whether Australia is willing to resist the normalisation of brutality and treat the protection of medical care as an obligation rather than an aspiration.

Disclosure This article is published as part of a partnership between the Development Policy Centre and Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) Australia. MSF provides medical assistance to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters or exclusion from healthcare. Their actions are guided by medical ethics and the principles of impartiality, independence and neutrality. MSF Australia does not receive public institutional funding.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/08/medical-care-is-being-made-a-target-of-war/

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The Segal State, Part 2: the mask, the children, the money and the answer

by Andrew Brown

Part 1 traced how Anthony Albanese built an unelected censorship apparatus for Jillian Segal without a vote, a bill or a debate, while the Coalition demanded more. It ended with a question polite Australia refuses to ask. Today, the answer. Andrew Brown reports.

The architecture would be scandal enough on paper. It did not stay there. Segal took an oath at a Royal Commission.

Segal conceded regulators had found little inaccuracy in ABC and SBS reporting on Israel and Gaza. The journalism was true. Her objection was that the truth made Israel look bad. Her remedy was another oversight body and more positive stories about the amazing startup nation.

A taxpayer funded official told a Royal Commission, under oath, that accurate reporting is a problem the state should fix with pressure for flattering coverage.

Show the starving children of Gaza if you insist, then cut to a cheerful Israeli tech segment for balance. There are countries where officials talk like that. None of them are democracies. And the Prime Minister kept her in office anyway.

Then she reached for the children

University students, Segal observed, are relatively fixed in their ideas. Younger children are more open. Education, she said, is a tool for building ideas, cohesion and culture.

An advocate surveyed the population, identified the audience least capable of arguing back, and proposed to begin there.

She unveiled a National Centre for Education Against Antisemitism to train government, business and police at scale and capture the hearts and minds of Australians. Her phrase. The Gonski taskforce runs from early childhood to university. Something in the curriculum, Segal mused, might have to come out.

Jewish history and the Holocaust belong in every classroom. So do Islamophobia, anti Palestinian racism, the frontier massacres and the stolen generations.

A curriculum organised around one contested political definition does not teach children to think. It teaches them which conclusions are safe. Australians have a name for a state program built to capture the hearts and minds of other people’s children. It is not education.

Twelve days before Segal’s appointment, Henroth Investments, directed by her husband, gave $50,000 to Advance Australia. The same Advance that torched the Indigenous Voice for being too much power for one group of Australians.

Segal denies involvement. The Klaxon documented the couple’s record of joint donations, down to a photograph beside a plaque naming both as donors.

Perhaps she knew nothing of a $50,000 gift from her own household’s company on the eve of her elevation. Any other appointment, this donation triggers an inquiry by Friday. This one drew a shrug. Albanese is not neutral. He benefits from the question never being asked.

Now the question you carried overnight. Why one form of racism and not the others?

In 1991, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody delivered 339 recommendations. Both parties let them rot for three decades while the death toll passed 590 First Nations people. No envoy. No machinery.

In 2025, Segal delivered 49 actions. The Commonwealth adopted every one within months, put her in charge, and stood a $130 million Royal Commission behind her. Muslim Australians, mosques attacked, got an envoy for show.

Palestinian Australians burying entire families got lectures about tone.

So ask the questions underneath. Which cause has a professional, funded, decades old lobby behind it, and which buried its peak body by act of Parliament? Which flatters the US alliance, and which indicts the Crown? Which form of justice costs the Treasury nothing, and which costs it the continent?

And that lobby did not merely ask. After October 2023, it campaigned, through ECAJ, AIJAC and the Murdoch press behind them, and Anthony Albanese capitulated.

Then he kept capitulating.

He adopted the plan entire. He kept Segal in office after her testimony. He will not touch the donation. For this Prime Minister, capitulation is not a moment. It is a method.

Follow those questions to the end and you reach the ugliest truth in Australian public life. This state does not fight racism. It prices it. The cheap kind gets a ministry. The expensive kind gets an anniversary. That hierarchy of harm is now official Commonwealth policy. Nobody voted for it. Nobody was asked. It was imposed. And Segal is that policy made flesh.

The lobby’s president turned the nation’s umpire.

The state tier belongs to Chris Minns. His government rammed hate speech and protest laws through Parliament, with Coalition votes, while the Dural caravan was waved at a frightened public. Police then established the plot was a fabricated criminal con. A premier who legislates on a hoax and keeps the laws when it collapses has told you what they were for.

Segal’s definition, Minns’s truncheon, opposition applause. A pincer on political expression, built in eighteen months, and not one voter asked.

This is Australia in 2026. Speech graded in Canberra. Protest policed in Sydney. Children next. An open society has one rule that cannot bend. No unelected hand on the levers of speech. Segal’s office breaks it by existing.

Albanese built this office, hid its costs, ignored the donation on its doorstep and shielded its occupant. Every excess is his. So is the precedent. The apparatus does not dissolve when Segal departs. It sits waiting for the next government, and the Coalition is not planning to dismantle it. It is waiting for the keys.

End Segal’s appointment. Abolish the office.

Repeal the NSW laws passed on a hoax. Open a parliamentary inquiry into its creation, its costs and its occupant’s household donations. Replace the wreckage with one national rights framework protecting every Australian from every form of racial and religious hatred, equally.

No envoys. No favourites. No exceptions.

So make it the question of the next election. Put it to every candidate, of every party, at every doorstop, until they answer. Will you vote to abolish the Segal State? Watch who squirms. Vote accordingly.

Australia needs protection from racism.

All of it, for all of us, or it is not protection. It is patronage. And Australia does not need the Segal State.

https://michaelwest.com.au/the-segal-state-part-2-the-mask-the-children-the-money-and-the-answer/

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