brave...

A senior defence official under former United States president Barack Obama says the Five Eyes spy network should be used as a diplomatic grouping to pressure China, in a direct contrast to New Zealand’s attempt to narrow its remit.

pink moon

self-appointed

FOI

Australia’s government has major issues with transparency and is actively trying to keep citizens uninformed and unaware, a senator leading the charge against the culture of secrecy has said.

On Saturday, independent senator Rex Patrick slammed Australia’s Freedom of Information (FOI) process, and threatened to take the freedom of information commissioner to court over “unreasonable” delays in the review process.

Senator Patrick, a strong advocate for open government, has written to Australian information commissioner Angelene Falk, demanding she makes decisions on his FOI requests – some of which have been with her office for two years.

variants

THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY is pouring resources into the growing political fight over generic coronavirus vaccines.

Newly filed disclosure forms from the first quarter of 2021 show that over 100 lobbyists have been mobilized to contact lawmakers and members of the Biden administration, urging them to oppose a proposed temporary waiver on intellectual property rights by the World Trade Organization that would allow generic vaccines to be produced globally.

slogan

Australia’s billions in fossil fuel subsidies are under the spotlight in a new report as the US puts pressure on other countries to stop handing money to the sector.

Left-leaning think tank the Australia Institute has combed through recent federal and state budgets, finding there has been $10.3 billion in fossil fuel subsidies this financial year.

Most of it – $7.84 billion – is from a federal government fuel tax credit scheme, which provides a refund to industry for diesel.

truthee

The one thing that the Covid-19 pandemic, now in its second year, has encouraged very few people to do, when most are despairing, has been to try to re-invent the wheel in the epoch of digitisation. 

assange2

It turns out it’s surprisingly easy to tolerate the torture of your citizens if you’re a country with a long record of it. Dr Lissa Johnson weighs in on the Australian Government’s silence on Julian Assange.

BY Dr Lissa Johnson

As an Australian citizen, Julian Assange has set a number of firsts for Australia.

He was the first person to establish an encrypted dropbox media platform through which whistleblowers could anonymously share troves of information in the public interest, a practice which has now been adopted by news outlets worldwide.

kvd

 On Wednesday, April 21, Australia terminated several agreements that had been concluded with China as part of the Belt and Road Initiative.

war drunks...

22 years since the launch of the NATO aggression on Serbia...

miracles

Joe Biden has called upon the world to confront the climate crisis and “overcome the existential crisis of our time”, as he unveiled an ambitious new pledge to slash US planet-heating emissions in half by the end of the decade.

battle ready

The Ukrainian population is divided between a part of European culture and another of Russian culture. This singularity offers Washington a playground against Moscow. For several weeks now, the drums have been beating, sounding war. But none of the allies want to die for Kiev or sacrifice themselves to Russia.

deadfast

For more than 15 years, this little website has tackled some of the biggest issues faced by humanity and its fellow travellers, plants and animals, on this little planet.

 worst

In the past 50 years, Australia has had 23 health ministers. But who is the worst?

Two of them, Lance Barnard and Arthur Sinodinos get passes, because Barnard and Whitlam were Ministers for everything in 1972 and Sinodinos merely filled in temporarily.

Neal Blewett, Brian Howe and Nicola Roxon would be among the best mainly because they focused on major policy reform; expanded preventative medical programs; and tried to integrate health policy into broader policy perspectives.

buffett

IT’S ONLY WHEN the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked,” the billionaire investor Warren Buffett has famously said.

During the crash of 2008, the whole world learned just how dangerously nude Wall Street was. Now evidence is accumulating that suggests that many financial institutions are skinny-dipping once more — via similar types of lending that could lead to similar disasters as the water recedes again due to the Covid-19 pandemic.