Israel: The most dangerous nation on Earth
By George Grundy | 22 April 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/israel-the-most-dangerous-nation-on-earth,20955
Israel’s escalating actions and influence over U.S. policy are framed as the trigger for a global crisis, with Australia set to bear the economic fallout, writes George Grundy.een enough to say it with absolute certainty: the Israeli army is the most depraved army’ ~ Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur.
“The [IDF] is the most moral army in the world” ~ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
‘I have seen enough to say it with absolute certainty: the Israeli army is the most depraved army’ ~ Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s influence over U.S. President Donald Trump may be the defining reason why America made the catastrophic decision to go to war with Iran, which is why the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, which in turn explains why Australia seems poised to experience an unprecedented oil shock.
Many economists forecast that our economy is about to grind to a halt, perhaps for months, so Australians must be clear-eyed about the role Israel has played in this disaster.
The prevailing view in Western politics, media and society has, for many decades, been that the Middle East is a “tough neighbourhood” (implicitly absolving Israel of blame for its occasional bouts of brutality), and an assumption that the “only democracy in the region” was committed to peace and, ultimately, a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
This was and remains an absolute fiction. Even the most casual glance at a map showing the shrinking landmass of Gaza and the West Bank (particularly since 1967) makes clear that the two-state solution was a lie, a fig-leaf allowing successive Israeli governments to expand territory and further immiserate the hapless Palestinians.
Yet what was an ongoing and immoral delusion moved from disaster to catastrophe, following the atrocious attack by Hamas in October 2023. Prime Minister Netanyahu appears to have viewed the atrocity as an opportunity to implement the long-held Zionist goal of establishing a “Greater Israel”, the first stage of which was to be the complete obliteration of Gaza.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has attempted to walk a fine line in his relations with Israel, recognising a Palestinian state but risking significant political damage by inviting Israel’s President to our shores.
Albanese’s clinging to established international dogma, whilst a betrayal of his past beliefs, might be acceptable in earlier times, but global tectonic plates are shifting at a pace unmatched since perhaps 1945.
Australians of all political persuasions should rightly consider whether Israel is indeed a moral player on the world stage and whether our country should continue to align itself with a regime that has:
- Used snipers to deliberately target infants and children in Gaza, killing thousands and creating the largest group of childhood amputees in modern history. Israel has subsequently blocked the distribution of prosthetic limbs for survivors.
- Dropped bombs on civilians sheltering in tents, burning people alive. An Australian doctor said she delivered a baby by C-section from a nine-month pregnant woman with no head, following an Israeli strike. In late 2023, the IDF forced staff out of a Gaza hospital at gunpoint and left newborn babies to starve and die. Every hospital in the territory has now been destroyed.
- Killed at least 80,000 in Gaza (the true number is probably much higher), targeting children, medical and power facilities, schools, mosques, hospitals and ambulances, water purification, journalists and civic leaders, whilst stopping nearly all aid and medicine from entering — actions clearly aimed at devastating every aspect of civil society and starving the population. A genocide, in other words.
- Attacked and killed UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. Used banned white phosphorous and cluster munitions while destroying countless villages, and carried out clear acts of ethnic cleansing that have left over a million people displaced, including around 370,000 children. Oxfam has stated that Israeli tactics used in Gaza are now being exported to Lebanon, a nation now suffering one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises on Earth.
- Tortured and murdered Palestinian children. The IDF buried captured Palestinian children alive in mass graves, after tying their hands behind their backs. An 18-month-old Palestinian child recently taken into custody by the IDF was returned with cigarette burns on its legs, having been tortured to get a confession from its father.
- Institutionalised the practice of “double tap” attacks, whereby an initial bombing is followed by subsequent attacks on the same location, killing first responders and medics. Just last week, Israel carried out a “quadruple tap” in southern Lebanon, killing those trying to help the injured over and over again.
- Trained and used dogs to rape Palestinian detainees and prisoners (according to B’Tselem and EuroMed Human Rights Monitor). In fact, sexual torture of Palestinians is so widespread that it has been described as “organised state policy”. One UN report highlighted the use of rape with bottles, metal rods and knives.
This is far from an exhaustive list. There is much, much more, often filled with unimaginable horror and moral degeneracy. As defined by Australian law, Israel is a terrorist state and carries out war crimes and grave violations of international humanitarian law almost daily.
Recently, Israel passed a law allowing capital punishment for Palestinians found guilty of “terrorism-related” crimes (which, given how Israel practices law against Palestinians, could mean nearly anything). The law only applies to Palestinians — an Israeli convicted of the same crime is not subject to it, and judgment will be carried out by martial law, with no due process, clemency or appeal process.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir proudly posted a video of the proposed execution chamber in which convicted Palestinians will be hanged. Armed Israeli forces have begun the practice of putting numbers on the hands of displaced Palestinians in the West Bank.
As the IDF has advanced across southern Lebanon, they have explicitly warned Christian and Druze leaders not to harbour Shiite Muslims in their homes — Jewish troops forcing one particular religious group of people out of Lebanese society, potentially searching for them in their attics. Anyone with a knowledge of history should see the historical resonance of these monstrous practices.
Race-based execution laws, genocidal destruction, institutionalised rape, pogroms in the West Bank, military expansion in nearly all directions. A network of at least 16 torture camps, where thousands are held, often without charge. Were it not such a forbidden comparison, we might spot similarities to another fascist regime in the 1930s.
Those making the connection are hardly from the fringe. Almost half of Britons in one poll said they believed Israel treats Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews. Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister of Israel, signed a letter describing settler violence in the West Bank as ‘Jewish terrorism’.
Political scientist John Mearsheimer recently said:
“If there were Nuremberg trials, right, where the Israelis and the Americans were brought before the court, President Trump, along with President Netanyahu and many of their advisors, would be hanged.”
Imagine this horror was being carried out by any nation on Earth not named Israel. Ask yourself what poses the greater threat — Iran, which until Trump tore up the JCPOA agreement was clearly not developing a nuclear bomb, or Israel, wildly attacking everyone in sight, led by a genuine maniac and possessors of the world’s only undeclared nuclear arsenal.
Far from operating the most moral army in the world, overwhelming evidence shows that Israel is now an entirely rogue state, raping, starving, torturing and murdering its prisoners, bombing its neighbours indiscriminately, annexing nearby territory and goading its patron, America, into actions that could easily lead us to a new world war.
Israel is hardly shy about its intentions. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently gave a speech in which he said, “There will be expansion in Gaza that will extend our borders. In Lebanon, to the Litani, in Syria, Mount Hermon, parts of the north, south, and east.” This would represent a “Greater Israel” plan, stretching (one might say) from the river (Litani) to the (Mediterranean) sea.
Such is the insanity of the time in which we live that voicing this same expression in Queensland will land you in prison, while it is so widely used by Israeli politicians that it’s literally in the Twitter (X) bio of the Prime Minister’s son.
Yet, despite heartening protests in Tel Aviv, poll after poll shows that a majority of Israelis support this endless militarism. Young Israelis are more right-wing, religious and conservative than their elders. An eventual end to Netanyahu’s appalling leadership seems unlikely to reform Israeli society.
An unprecedented oil shock is nearly at Australia’s shores. It’s likely to be the most devastating event for this country since the Second World War and when it arrives, Australians should remember that the crisis originated in the White House situation room on 11 February, when Netanyahu finally convinced a gullible American president to carry out his decades-long wish for an attack on Iran.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a violent extremist, a fugitive from justice at the International Criminal Court, who cannot enter even the commercial airspace of many countries for fear of arrest. It was Netanyahu who convinced Trump to catastrophically withdraw from the JCPOA, Israel that is primarily responsible for the catastrophe currently re-shaping our world and Israel who will be culpable, should a worldwide famine ensue.
Israel is the single greatest threat to world peace today. The past comfy assumptions about global partnerships are gone. Australia should join the growing list of nations that want nothing to do with this belligerent, fascistic country.
Antisemitism and Israel: A challenge to the Australian narrative (Part 1)
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has delivered the 21-page report, ‘Torture and genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967’, dated 19 February 2026. Albanese’s team outline the depths of depravity and inhumanity to which the Israeli regime has now sunk in its attempted destruction of the Palestinian people.
By Evan Jones | 27 April 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/antisemitism-and-israel-a-challenge-to-the-australian-narrative,20974
A provocative Royal Commission submission by Dr Evan Jones argues that Australia’s antisemitism debate cannot be separated from Israel, Zionism and their political influence.
Submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion
Part 1
General
This submission can be reduced to one word — Israel.
There you have the answer to your inquiry. Dismantle apartheid Israel and see so-called “antisemitism” disappear overnight, save for a small ineradicable but prosecutable fringe
There is really no reason for this Royal Commission at all, as the problem is self-evident. The Commission will not solve the problem that it was formally established to resolve because its agenda is diversionary. Indeed, it will compound the problem because it will, in all probability (as it is seemingly intended to do), reinforce the influence of the Australian Zionist lobby and thus the ongoing impunity of Israel.
The problem arises from the conflation of two forces.
One: Israel is a nation founded on terrorism and wilfully sustained on deep-seated racism.
We know that nation-states are perennially born of violence, expropriation and repression (Australia as a case study), but Israel is a pronounced variation on a common colonialist theme. Israel was born of naked terrorism against an entire (non-Jewish) indigenous population. It was explicitly created and has been sustained as a racist apartheid state. Its borders have never been determined, envisaging ongoing expansion (lebensraum) — “from the river to the sea” (and beyond).
Palestinian Israelis (descendants of those whom the Zionist terrorist gangs failed to expel) are second-class citizens. Palestinian non-Israelis, under Occupation and under martial law, are denied the most basic human rights. Gaza has been a concentration camp since Sharon supposedly “disengaged” from Gaza in 2005.
The sadistic murder of Gazans since October 2023 is reminiscent of the Germans’ feverish pursuit of Jews and Bolsheviks after Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Israel has long undermined United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) personnel and facilities, which attempt to instil a modicum of humanity into a population long starving from Israeli blockages. Israel endorses carnage by fanatical settlers on West Bank Palestinians, murdering and destroying Palestinian livelihoods at will — for which they enjoy absolute immunity.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) murder children with pleasure. Children are imprisoned indefinitely for throwing stones. Adult prisoners are tortured and murdered. Israel wilfully murders foreign dignitaries (most recently, the Iranian National Security Council chief Ali Larijani, reputed “moderate” and skilled negotiator), which highlights that mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu has put to words what has been the manifesto of all Israeli leadership: there will never be a Palestinian state (September 2025).
Long-term ethnic cleansing has now turned to genocide, ongoing in defiance of the formal “ceasefire”. Israel destroys essential infrastructure, murders aid workers and journalists — because it can. The journalist murder count is now further “totting up” in southern Lebanon.
Representative — this month (March 2026) marks the 23rd anniversary of the crushing of American Rachel Corrie by an Israeli bulldozer.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has delivered the 21-page report, ‘Torture and genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967’, dated 19 February 2026. Albanese’s team outline the depths of depravity and inhumanity to which the Israeli regime has now sunk in its attempted destruction of the Palestinian people.
Some excerpts:
Torture has always been a central feature of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians. Yet, since October 2023, Israel has employed it on a scale that suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent.
Torture is not confined to cells and interrogation rooms. Through the cumulative impact of mass displacement, siege, denial of aid and food, unrestrained military and settler violence and pervasive surveillance and terror, the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) has become a space of collective punishment, where the destruction of the conditions of life turns genocidal violence into a tool of collective torture with long-term mental and physical consequences for the occupied population.
During its Mandate in Palestine, Britain used torture as one of the counterinsurgency tactics honed in Ireland and later imparted to Zionist militias; such practices, a colonial legacy, were then absorbed into the Israeli security apparatus before and after 1948 as a tool of repression and a preventive measure against Palestinian resistance. From early State-building and through decades of occupation, Israel has practised and condoned coercive violence as a structural component of its apparatus of domination.
An ecosystem of discriminatory legal frameworks and abusive operational practices has metastasized, encompassing Israeli military detention sites and prisons.
Since October 2023, torture in detention has, been used on an unprecedented scale as punitive collective vengeance — a clear feature of genocide. All Palestinians have been treated collectively as “terrorists” and “security threats”.
For her luminous competence, commitment and courage, Albanese was subject to comprehensive oppressive sanctions by the unhinged U.S. Trump Administration in July 2025.
Israel defies all international institutions and laws that proscribe the abuse of state power. Israel’s lobbying and propaganda regime (hasbara) is probably the most extensive of any state in history. Israeli authorities lie about the state’s forces’ actions without remorse.
The Israeli state is a parasite, receiving over US$300 billion (AU$418.7 billion) in aid from U.S. governments since 1950 (a great deal of which flows back to U.S. weapons manufacturers), supplemented by an estimated US$2 billion (AU$2.8 billion) per annum in donations from overseas Jewish “charities”, propped up at the country taxpayers’ expense. In particular, the Jewish National Fund directs funds to obliterating indigenous history in historic Palestine.
In short, the state of Israel is a pariah state, a barbaric regime, an abomination.
Two: All self-described “official” Jewish representative organisations in Australia support and lobby for Israel unreservedly. It is a full-time occupation.
Such “representative” organisations oppose basic human rights for Palestinians under Israeli control. They socialise their children into “a love of Israel” in Jewish “faith” schools. Some of their children are currently enrolled with the IDF to kill Palestinians.
Such organisations lobby Australian governments to support Israel, inhibiting Australian governments from adopting a principled stance towards Israeli criminality. They harass media management and editorial, thus gaining privileged access to and biased coverage from media outlets that the public relies on for supposedly unbiased information and opinion. Their ridiculous defences of Israel (op-eds, letters, buying off journalists) are published with great regularity. Anti-Zionist Australian Jews (vide Louise Adler and so on) and their organisations (the recently formed Jewish Council of Australia) are pilloried, indeed “excommunicated”.
In essence, Australian Jewish “representative” organisations act as a fifth column for a foreign state against Australian national interests – naturally antagonistic to ‘social cohesion’.
One and two in combination.
The Australian Jewish community, by virtue of its “official” representatives, courageous dissenters excepted, is complicit in Israeli genocide. And not just passively but actively. There has been no mea culpa on the part of executives of the key Jewish organisations (such as ECAJ, ZFA, AIJAC). Nobody in the Jewish community that underpins these organisations has sought to overturn the leadership of these key organisations in order to reorient their agenda and priorities.
In short, Israel and the “official” Australian Jewish community are joined at the hip.
It is not unrealistic to infer that the Bondi attack (and multiple incidents simply labelled “antisemitic”) is blowback for Israel’s character and actions and its local support network. The Israeli machine thus puts the security of global Jewry at risk (indeed, its own Jewish population) and doesn’t care.
A Zionist foot soldier is published in The Sydney Morning Herald (22 March), in denial regarding the intimate connection:
‘While David Leser’s article (SMH & Melbourne Age, 20 March [2026]) raises some thought-provoking points, it falls into the trap of attributing antisemitism in Australia to the actions of the Israeli Government. No other national or ethnic group in Australia is held to account for the actions of governments in countries overseas. So why is it considered reasonable for Jews in Australia to be relentlessly discriminated against for the actions of the Netanyahu Government?’
After the Bondi Beach murders, Israeli flags were well represented among the flower collections and mourners. Israel is apparently seen as the mother ship, the source of solace for those suffering, yet it is the ultimate cause of that suffering.
This bizarre anomaly is enhanced when the Zionist Federation of Australia (as befits its name) initiated the idea of inviting the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, to Australia, subsequently legitimised and authorised by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and dragging the Governor-General into the sordid process.
Another foot soldier grasps the connection but declines to understand the implications (SMH, 9 January 2026):
‘President Herzog is the legitimate head of state of the internationally recognised democratic state of Israel, rightfully invited to commiserate with Australians after the appalling terrorist atrocity at Bondi, in which predominantly Jewish people were murdered and injured.’
One notes in passing that Israel is not a democracy but an ethnocracy — no amount of affirmation is going to change the lie and the blind spot in the letter writer’s eye. To repeat, Israel is apparently seen as the mother ship, the source of solace for those suffering, yet it is the ultimate cause of that suffering. ‘Rightfully invited’ — really?
Herzog is not a passive head of state but an active participant in Israeli barbarism. Herzog comes to Australia, spends a token moment with victim families and survivors, declines to visit the fire-bombed Orthodox (non-Zionist) Adass Israel synagogue (“for reasons of security”) and spends the bulk of his time playing Israeli politician (‘not the time for a two-state solution’, meets with ASIO and so on).
The implication is ugly. Those murdered at Bondi are being instrumentalised (as with Netanyahu’s treatment of Hamas’ Israeli hostages) in the defence of the state of Israel and its current genocidal agenda. Appalling, no?
Antisemitism and Israel: A challenge to the Australian narrative (Part 2)
By Evan Jones | 27 April 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/antisemitism-and-israel-a-challenge-to-the-australian-narrative,20974
Part 2
The Commission’s Terms of Reference
‘AND the determination of the Australian Government to respond to the attack, and the factors leading up to the attack, as a matter of urgency by addressing antisemitism within the Australian community, including since 7 October 2023.’
Investigating the factors leading up to the attack could and should have been the responsibility of the mooted and more suited Richardson review. A royal commission is not the most appropriate vehicle towards this end.
Any investigation regarding “antisemitism” in Australia has to put Israel front and centre. The “official” Jewish community, AKA the Zionist lobby, naturally wants to exclude it.
The appalling Segal Report contains no substantive reference to Israel (my dissection here and here), thus being not merely worthless but disingenuous (vide Gwenaël Velge’s summary of the counter-Segal Greenslade and Briskman report, Not in Our Name: Jewish Australians Speak Out) and dangerous. Ditto the absence of any substantive reference to Israel in the most recent annual report (December 2025) of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (sic) (dissected here).
‘AND that the Australian Government has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.’
This submitter is frankly gobsmacked to find that this fraudulent “definition” has been officially adopted. The definition has been widely criticised, including by one of its originators, Kenneth Stern. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition is essentially about demonising criticism of Israel. Any proposed definition of antisemitism that attempts to delineate the terms on which one is allowed to criticise Israel without censure is automatically illegitimate.
The adoption of the IHRA definition nullifies any legitimacy that the paraphernalia of a royal commission might have and destroys any prospect of an honest analysis and a substantive functional prognosis. This adoption of the IHRA definition gives the impression that the Royal Commission, even inadvertently, will serve as yet another front for the pro-Israel lobby.
With the Royal Commission proceeding based on the IHRA definition, it can only turn into an inquisition. It can have nothing intelligent or ethical to offer about real antisemitism and can have nothing to offer in terms of genuinely dealing with it. It will be remembered as a squandering of the significant money that funds it and for the farcical theatre that is its essence.
‘AND recognising that strengthening the national consensus in support of democracy, freedom and the rule of law (social cohesion) provides the strongest defence against antisemitism and other forms of religious and ideologically motivated extremism.’
This sentence reads like it was written by AI. Who wrote this rubbish? One cannot have social cohesion as long as a particular Australian community coheres and operates actively as a fifth column in support of a foreign rogue state and influences Australian politics, both foreign and domestic, and media towards that end.
AND that hearing from the Jewish Australian community will be important to informing the recommendations of your inquiry and recognising concerns relating to educational and cultural institutions, and other sections of Australian society.’
Which ‘Jewish Australian community’? Is this obscurantism a product of naivete or of cynical contempt? Is the pro-Israel lobby running this show? Will anti-Zionist Jews and their organisations be consulted? Will anti-Zionist non-Jewish organisations (which have Jewish membership), such as the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, be consulted?
‘…and recognising concerns relating to educational and cultural institutions…’ Meaning? Which and whose concerns? Is this an oblique reference to forthcoming censorship, sackings, institutional defunding and hasbara implants as foreshadowed in the Segal Report?
To the Honourable Virginia Bell AC
We do… appoint you to be a Commission of inquiry, and require and authorise you to inquire into the following matters:
(a) tackling antisemitism by:…
This section is at the heart of the Commission’s Terms of Reference misdirection. Misdiagnosed symptoms are highlighted rather than causes.
The authorities need to cut the umbilical cord between the Australian Jewish community (including demolishing the pernicious influence of its Zionist leadership) and the criminal state of Israel.
In particular, (a)(iv) deserves comment. The ‘mental health and wellbeing of Jewish Australians’? No doubt the Commission hearings will consider the mental health of anti-Zionist Australian Jews who experience the mental anguish of seeing Jewish Israelis acting like Nazis (and supposedly in the name of global Jewry), but who also suffer the obloquy of abuse by the Australian Zionist Jewish establishment for their ethical stance.
As for the mental health of Australian Zionist Jews, tied inexplicably to a racially supremacist Israel, it is a psychopathology and to their own account — save that their aberrant mental state has the Palestinians (and now the Iranians and, once again, the Lebanese) as its ongoing victims.
Zionist Jewish University students, fresh from their “faith” schools with their “love of Israel” and now nurtured in the bosom of the Zionist Australasian Union of Jewish Students, find their “sensitivities” affected by campus protests against Israeli genocide. So as not to upset these sensitive souls, inured to the genocide of lesser ethnicities, campus protests have to be shut down.
If the Commission is concerned with shoring up the ‘mental health and wellbeing of [Zionist] Jewish Australians’, it is not an agenda that any Australian imbued with ethical sympathies (which includes anti-Zionist Jewish Australians) could have any tolerance for.
‘(b) making any recommendations to assist law enforcement, border control, immigration and security agencies…’
Is this code for inhibiting access to refugee status of people escaping Israeli onslaughts and who naturally take a dim view of Israel’s modus operandi?
‘(c) examine the circumstances surrounding the antisemitic Bondi terrorist attack…’
This was supposed to be the focus of the Richardson review, but that was merged inappropriately into the Royal Commission’s framework. Now Richardson has retired, recognising the Commission’s structured dysfunctionality. The most important subject for investigation is now without a suitable home and personnel to proceed.
‘(d) make any other recommendations… that would contribute to strengthening social cohesion…’
The means to strengthening social cohesion is to dismantle the pro-Israel lobby in Australia and for the Albanese Government to develop and sustain a principled foreign policy. By contrast, the Terms of Reference of this Commission appear to direct the Commission’s operations to enhance that lobby’s influence and to ignore and to implicitly condone the Government’s cowardice.
Methinks that the Royal Commission’s slip is showing. One gets the strong impression that one is in for more than farce. Rather, the Australian public is in for an authoritarian state run in the interests of an Australian Zionist mafia, with which the current Australian Labor Government is already in cahoots (and the Liberal Opposition even more craven).
‘Worst investment ever’: Expert fumes as first $4.2billion taxpayer-funded payment for nuclear subs paid to US
We keep forking out money for submarines I’m definitely not going to live to see, and I don’t know if young people will live to see them ever arrive,’ he told the Daily Mail.
‘It is doubling down on something that was a bad idea to start with.
If and when submarines ever did arrive, they would be undoubtedly redundant, overtaken by cheap and cheerful anti-submarine drone technology.
‘If we build this base, it will undoubtedly be a prime nuclear target, because who wouldn’t want to take out a couple of nuclear-armed submarines from America.’
- US announces the first AUKUS contract
- But experts raise the alarm about the deal
By CAITLIN POWELL – NEWS REPORTER and TESS IKONOMOU FOR AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS, 24 April 2026 https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15761031/AUKUS-contract-Mark-Beeson.html
The Trump administration has signed off on the first AUKUS submarine contract, funded by a hefty taxpayer-funded payment from the Albanese government.
The Pentagon confirmed on Friday that nuclear-powered submarine capabilities would be transferred from the United States to Australia.
The contract, worth $276million ($US197million), will be covered by the Labor government’s first down payment of $4.2billion ($US3billion), the ABC reports.
The US Navy has set targets to almost double construction to 2.33 boats per year to build up its fleet, the ABC reports.
But, during a series of congressional hearings this week, data revealed the pace of production has dropped to 1.1 boats per year due to construction delays.
An Australian Submarine Agency spokesperson told the Daily Mail they welcomed the announcement of the new contract.
‘(It) strengthens the United States’ ability to deliver Foreign Military Sales commitments to partners, including Australia,’ they said.
‘This represents further momentum and commitment by AUKUS partners to deliver on the Optimal Pathway.’
Professor Beeson has made no secret of his concerns about the trilateral deal between Australia, the US and the United Kingdom.
‘I think it’s possibly the worst investment Australia’s ever made in anything, but particularly in defence material,’ he said.
‘It is doubling down on something that was a bad idea to start with
The 2021 AUKUS pact is designed to counter China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific and involves Australia acquiring Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines from the US by 2032.
However, the alliance relies on the US building enough defence vessels itself before some are sent to Australia.
International politics expert and AUKUS critic, Professor Mark Beeson, said the contract epitomised Australia’s dependence on American productivity.
‘We keep forking out money for submarines I’m definitely not going to live to see, and I don’t know if young people will live to see them ever arrive,’ he told the Daily Mail.
‘It’s because, famously, the Americans can’t build as many as they would like, or consider they need. There’s going to be no spare capacity for these submarines.’
‘The only way to get a more credible-looking outcome for AUKUS is by continuing to supply the Americans and eventually the British with lots of loot to rebuild shipyards and increase the production line for these submarines.
‘If and when submarines ever did arrive, they would be undoubtedly redundant, overtaken by cheap and cheerful anti-submarine drone technology.
‘If we build this base, it will undoubtedly be a prime nuclear target, because who wouldn’t want to take out a couple of nuclear-armed submarines from America.’
The Australian-funded contract has been awarded to US Navy contractor General Dynamics Electric Boat, which will see construction take place on American soil at a Connecticut shipyard.
As such it is between the US Government and industry to support Foreign Military Sales requirements and activities.
While that policy includes AUKUS, Australia is not party to the contract itself and this investment does not relate to Australia’s contribution to the construction of the US Submarine Industrial Base.
The announcement comes just hours after opposition industry spokesman Andrew Hastie said Australia incurred ‘strategic trade-offs’ in doubling down on its alliance with Washington.
‘We forgot the hard lessons of war, and outsourced our security to the United States,’ he said at the Robert Menzies Institute in Melbourne on Thursday.
‘It has cost us sovereign capabilities like a robust defence industry, and our strategic freedom of action in ways that we are now discovering.’
A former special forces officer, Hastie pointed to the fuel crisis triggered by the Middle East conflict and Australia’s de-industrialisation as examples of the nation betting too much on the dominance of the US.
COMMENT. Andrew Hastie conveniently forgetting that it was his own party, theLiberal-National Coalition, that signed up tp AUKUS in the first placde
He warned that, if the security alliance with the US was to endure for another 75 years, Australia needed to urgently invest in its industrial base and defence force.
‘We must grow our industrial might and hard power,’ he said.
Where are the AUKUS nuclear waste costings (let alone the dump sites)?
Australian Submarine Agency ASA is looking after a $368B project. And the Agency is in a mess.
by Rex Patrick | Apr 20, 2026 , https://michaelwest.com.au/where-are-the-aukus-nuclear-waste-costings-let-alone-the-dump-sites/
Defence is supposed to provide ‘cradle to grave’ costings for proposed capability before a procurement is approved. That doesn’t seem to have happened for AUKUS nuclear waste storage and disposal. Transparency Warrior Rex Patrick is pursuing answers.
A simple request
Imagine for a moment that you were the defence minister, and knowing that all defence capabilities must be costed from cradle to grave, you asked the Australian Submarine Agency for the latest cost estimates for a solution for the treatment and storage of high-level radioactive waste from AUKUS.
You’d expect that it might take a day or two to get the message to Defence and to get a response back to the ministerial wing of Parliament House.
In July 2025 MWM requested access under Freedom of Information laws to the latest cost estimates for a solution for the treatment and storage of high-level radioactive waste from AUKUS. The Agency did not answer the FOI request and its lack of response was referred to the Information Commissioner.
The Information Commissioner is trying to encourage the ASA to engage in a little bit of transparency. But … the Agency just can’t find a latest costing.
We’re disorganised
In a response to an engagement with MWM, the Agency has recently advised:
Preliminary searches have been carried out within one branch of one division of the ASA to identify documents falling within the scope of your request. That branch has advised that approximately 3,000 documents are potentially in scope. They would require manual examination to determine whether they contain information relating to the scope of your request. The documents within this set vary significantly in length and format and may comprise multiple pages requiring individual review.
Further, any cost information in relation to the scope of your request is likely to be dispersed across multiple documents and along timeframes, may appear in differing levels of detail, and may not be directly comparable. As a result, identifying which documents contain relevant cost information would require extensive searching, detailed examination, contextual analysis, and judgment.
Quite unbelievable!
Or is it unbelievable?
ASA is looking after a $368B project. And the Agency is in a mess.
In November 2024 the Government asked Boston Consulting Group to take a look at the organisational structure of the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA). A contract was signed for 2.7. million. In April 2025 it was amended to $7.4 million. Three months later it was amended again to a whopping $12.1 million.
In parallel the defence minister asked former Defence Secretary Dennis Richardson to undertake an urgent top-to-bottom review of the ASA amid serious concerns about how it was managing AUKUS.
None of that seems to have helped.
Budget up just to keep up
The Government’s National Defence Strategy and Integrated Investment Program was released on the same day that ASA advised MWM that it had no idea where to find its AUKUS high level radioactive waste costs.
The Integrated Investment Proposal laid out the Government’s estimates of, amongst other programs, the AUKUS and Collins Class submarine costs for the coming decade.
The 53-to-63 billion dollar AUKUS budget published in 2024 has grown to 71-to-96 billion (a change of 52% for the upper band). The 4-to-5 billion dollar Collins Submarine upgrade costs has grown to 8-to-11 billion dollar (change of 120% for the upper band).
Any thought that the Government is increasing the Defence budget to expand the Defence Force’s capabilities is illusory. The increase will struggle just to deal with cost blow outs.
Or implausible?
The numbers associated with the very long term disposal of AUKUS nuclear waste will be big. If the Minister asked for the latest cost estimates for a solution for the treatment and storage of high-level radioactive waste from AUKUS he’d get it almost instantly.
“The estimate must exist. “
The approach taken by the ASA in responding to MWM’s request reminds me of a teenager trying hid a bad school report from their parents. The kid simply doesn’t realise that mum and dad will find out eventually.
MWM is not about to give up.
Of course, there is a small possibility that we are wrong and there is no estimate. Maybe the Minister has told the ASA he won’t ask for one and they shouldn’t generate one.
I guess we’ll find out.
The Merchants of Death in Our Midst
This is the company that the Australian government, Coles, Rio Tinto, Westpac, and the Future Fund have chosen to do business with.
This is not an economic choice. It is a choice about what is right.
18 April 2026 Dr Andrew Klein, https://theaimn.net/the-merchants-of-death-in-our-midst/
How Palantir Profits from Genocide – and Why Australia Must Walk Away
I. The Company That Kills Enemies
Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir Technologies, does not hide what his company does. In February 2025, he told investors: Palantir is here to “scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” He added that he was “super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”
This is not hyperbole. It is a confession.
Palantir’s technology has been used to compile kill lists in Gaza, to track migrants for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and to select targets for drone strikes in Iran. The same systems that optimise workforce spend in Australian supermarkets are being used to select human targets for assassination.
Karp has acknowledged that he is directly involved in killing Palestinians in Gaza but insisted the dead were “mostly terrorists.” He does not provide evidence. He does not need to. The label is the weapon.
In March 2026, a UN report by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese singled out Palantir as one of the companies “profiting from genocide” during Israel’s 21-month campaign in Gaza. The report, titled “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” concluded that “Israel’s genocide continues because it is profitable for too many.”
This is the company that the Australian government, Coles, Rio Tinto, Westpac, and the Future Fund have chosen to do business with.
II. The Champions: Peter Thiel and Alex Karp
Peter Thiel is the billionaire co-founder of Palantir. He has funded right-wing political causes, including the campaign of Donald Trump. He has spoken of democracy as incompatible with freedom. He has said that he no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Alex Karp is the CEO. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Frankfurt. He studied under Jürgen Habermas. He knows what he is doing. He has chosen.
Karp has co-authored a book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, in which he articulates his vision of American global dominance through AI-driven warfare. He calls for a new Manhattan Project focused on military AI. He openly celebrates the destruction his company enables.
In an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Karp summed up his philosophy:
“I actually am a progressive. I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers – I’m trying to be nice here – out of our adversaries.”
Reality is anything but that simple. Palantir’s technology has reportedly been used to kill tens of thousands of people in Gaza and beyond, including many who had nothing to do with Hamas.
These men are not evil because they are monsters. They are evil because they have chosen to be. They have chosen profit over people. They have chosen power over compassion. They have chosen control over love.
III. Palantir in Australia: The Red Carpet
Palantir has been embedded in Australian institutions for years. The company has secured more than $50 million in Australian government contracts since 2013, largely across defence and national security-related agencies. Its clients include:
- The Department of Defence
- The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission
- The Australian Signals Directorate
- The Victorian Department of Justice
In November 2025, Palantir received a high-level Australian government security assessment – the “protected level” under the Information Security Registered Assessors Programme – enabling a broader range of government agencies to use its Foundry and AI platform.
In a Senate debate on March 10, 2026, a Senator Lambie warned that the government was “simply rolling out the red carpet to companies like Palantir, the company that has been linked, by the way, to the targeted killing of journalists and the illegal use of US citizens’ data.” The Senator noted that Palantir is “the leader in the development of agentic AI – artificial intelligence that thinks for itself and makes its own decisions.”
IV. The Coles Partnership: Ten Billion Rows of Data
In 2024, Palantir announced a three-year partnership with Coles Supermarkets. Coles will leverage Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) across its more than 840 supermarkets to better understand and address workforce-related spend. The system will identify opportunities over “10 billion rows of data.”
Coles is also rolling out ChatGPT to its corporate teams, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5 model.
This is the same technology. The same algorithms. The same logic.
But what is being optimised? Profit. Not people. Not safety. Not justice.
The same technology that optimises workforce spend in Australian supermarkets is the same technology that selects targets in Gaza and Iran. The same algorithms that track workers track enemies. The same logic that cuts labour costs cuts lives.
Coles Chief Operating Officer Matt Swindells said the partnership would allow store managers to make “real-time decisions to optimise costs.” He did not mention that those same real-time decisions are being made in Gaza – to optimise kills.
V. The Future Fund: $103 Million in Blood Money
Australia’s Future Fund – the sovereign wealth fund designed to manage and grow public funds – has a $103 million stake in Palantir. That is bigger than the fund’s holdings in Australian companies like AGL, Seek, or data centre owner NEXTDC.
In Senate estimates, Greens Senator Barbara Pocock asked whether Palantir’s human rights record had been considered before the investments were made. The answer: no.
Will Hetherton, the chief corporate affairs officer of the Future Fund, told the committee that the fund doesn’t get involved in selecting individual stocks and that the shares are held through index funds. When asked whether the fund would commit to divesting and establishing “clear ethical investment standards that exclude companies profiting from surveillance, from weapons and from human suffering,” Hetherton said the board would “continue to engage with our managers” but couldn’t commit to what Pocock was asking.
The fund’s justification is that it only excludes companies based on sanctions or treaties the Australian government has ratified – like cluster munitions, anti-personnel mines and tobacco. None of these apply to Palantir.
This is not a defence. It is a confession.
VI. The UK Precedent: “No Gaza Genocide Links in Our NHS”
In the United Kingdom, a coalition of organisations – including Amnesty International UK, Medact, and Healthcare Workers for a Free Palestine – is calling on NHS England to terminate its £330 million contract with Palantir.
Kerry Moscogiuri, Chief Executive of Amnesty International UK, said:
“The NHS constitution states that it belongs to the people, underpinned by core values of compassionate care, dignity and humanity. Those principles must apply not only to doctors and nurses, but also to the companies the NHS chooses to contract with using taxpayers’ money. Any company contributing to human rights violations should have no place at the heart of our NHS. Our message is simple: no Gaza genocide links in our NHS.”
The groups are calling on the UK government to terminate the contract, responsibly divest public sector institutions from Palantir, and introduce binding ethical standards for public sector technology procurement.
If the United Kingdom can demand this, why can’t Australia?
VII. The UN Report: Profiting from Genocide
The June 2025 UN report by Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is damning. It singles out Palantir alongside Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, Volvo, and major banks for profiting from Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
The report concludes that “Israel’s genocide continues because it is profitable for too many.”
Albanese urges:
- Sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel
- Investigations by the International Criminal Court and national courts into corporate complicity in war crimes
- Accountability modelled on the IG Farben trials after World War Two
She warns that “passive suppliers become deliberate contributors to a system of displacement.”
The Australian government, Coles, and the Future Fund are not passive suppliers. They are deliberate contributors.
VIII. The Kill Chain in Gaza and Iran
The same systems tested in Gaza are now being deployed in Iran.
The Washington Post reported that the US military in Iran has “leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare.” Palantir’s Maven Smart System reportedly helped US commanders select 1,000 Iranian targets during the war’s first 24 hours alone.
The Asia Times reports that “similarities between Israel’s bombing of Gaza and Tehran are growing stronger,” with experts warning of a “lack of human supervision over Israeli AI targeting in Iran.”
An Israeli intelligence source described the AI system as transforming the IDF into a “mass assassination factory” where the “emphasis is on quantity and not quality” of kills.
This is the technology that Coles is using to “optimise” workforce spend.
IX. The Choice
This is not an economic choice. It is a choice about what is right.
The Australian government has a choice. It can continue to roll out the red carpet to Palantir, to accept the $50 million in contracts, to allow the Future Fund to hold $103 million in shares.
Or it can walk away.
Coles has a choice. It can continue to use Palantir’s AIP to optimise workforce spend – to identify opportunities over 10 billion rows of data.
Or it can walk away.
The Future Fund has a choice. It can continue to hold Palantir shares, to defend the investment with procedural excuses.
Or it can divest.
The UK is demanding that the NHS terminate its contract with Palantir. Amnesty International is leading the campaign. Medact and healthcare workers are standing up.
What is Australia doing? Rolling out the red carpet.
X. A Call to Action
The Australian government must:
- Terminate all contracts with Palantir.
- Introduce binding ethical standards for public sector technology procurement.
- Investigate whether Palantir’s technology has been used to violate Australian privacy laws.
- Divest the Future Fund from Palantir.
Coles must:
Terminate its partnership with Palantir.- Pledge not to use AI systems linked to human rights violations.
- Be transparent about its use of AI in workforce management.
The Future Fund must:
- Divest from Palantir.
- Establish clear ethical investment standards that exclude companies profiting from surveillance, weapons, and human suffering.
The Australian people must:
- Demand accountability.
- Ask their politicians: Why is our government doing business with a company that profits from genocide?
- Support campaigns for ethical technology procurement.
XI. A Final Word
Alex Karp said: “Our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.”
It must not continue. Not in Gaza. Not in Iran. Not in Australia.
The same technology that kills children in Gaza is optimising shift rosters in Coles supermarkets. The same algorithms that track migrants for ICE are tracking Australian workers. The same logic that cuts labour costs cuts lives.
The wire is being cut. The garden is growing. The small gods are running out of time.
And Palantir? It will be remembered as the company that chose profit over humanity.
Australia must choose differently.
What secret report reveals about British nuclear weapons tests – veterans claimed they were harmed by the fallout
Christopher R. Hill, Professor of History, Faculty of Business and Creative Industries, University of South Wales, Jonathan Hogg, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History, School of Histories, Languages and Cultures, University of Liverpoo, l April 15, 2026 https://theconversation.com/what-secret-report-reveals-about-british-nuclear-weapons-tests-veterans-claimed-they-were-harmed-by-the-fallout-280189
“The Ministry of Defence has always maintained that it never rained,” said Ken McGinley, founder of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association (BNTVA). “I’m sorry, you’re liars … I was there!”
McGinley, who was a royal engineer, gave this interview in January 2024, shortly before his death, as part of our Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project.
McGinley was present during the Grapple nuclear weapons test series, conducted by the UK on the central Pacific island of Kiritimati (also known as Christmas Island) in the late 1950s. At the time, this remote atoll was inhabited by 250 villagers as well as thousands of British servicemen.
For decades, many of those present during this and other above-ground British nuclear weapons tests have argued they were harmed by radioactive fallout. McGinley founded the BNTVA in 1983 to “gain recognition and restitution” for the veterans who took part in British and American nuclear tests and clean-ups between 1952 and 1965.
Rain became a key symbol in their argument as one of the only tangible signs of fallout taking place. The nuclear physicist Sir Joseph Rotblat described these alleged post-blast showers as “rainout”, a phenomenon whereby rain and mushroom clouds interact, leading to the contamination of rain droplets by harmful radionuclides.
In almost all cases, any link to subsequent health issues has been denied by the UK government because of lack of evidence of widespread radioactive contamination. However, a review of the evidence – written in 2014 by anonymous government scientists in response to freedom of information requests – was recently leaked by whistleblowers.
It reveals that post-blast radiation readings increased by a factor of up to seven on the island, compared with the normal background level. In our view, this would be more than enough to satisfy the “reasonable doubt” that tribunals require for veterans to receive a war pension due to illness or injury related to their service, as stated in the Naval, Military and Air Forces (Disablement and Death) Services Pension Order.
The top secret review, first revealed publicly by the Mirror newspaper on March 14 2026, also contains new evidence of radioactive contamination of fish in the island’s waters.
The repeated dismissal of veterans’ testimony in court cases and pension appeals caused stress and trauma for many. The majority died insisting they were not deceitful or forgetful – and that it did indeed rain while they were living on Kiritimati.
Factually inaccurate’
Kiritimati was monitored for fallout by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) after each detonation over the island – the largest of which, Grapple Y, was 200 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
In 1993, environmental monitoring data was collated into a report by a team at the MoD’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE). Known as the Clare report, this informed the UK’s official position on fallout: namely, that none occurred over populated areas and that veterans would need to prove otherwise to secure redress.
However, the 2014 review of fallout data concluded the Clare report was “incomplete and, in some cases, factually inaccurate”.
Despite this review being passed on to the MoD, however, it was kept secret for more than a decade. Following its release, the legal implications could be gamechanging. According to the 2014 review: “The instrument readings could potentially be used to challenge the validity of statements made by MoD and UK government regarding … fallout on Christmas Island.”
In a recent House of Commons debate on the issue, the UK minister for veterans and people, Louise Sandher-Jones, confirmed her commitment “to the nuclear test veterans and their fight for transparency … They have had a very long fight, and I really recognise how difficult it has been for them, and I want them to understand that I am committed to them.”
What Merlin reveals
Behind the scenes, the release of newly declassified archival material in the publicly accessible Merlin database has added to calls for government accountability about the nuclear tests.
Compiled by the treasury solicitor during a class action against the MoD between 2009 and 2012, the database was stored at AWE until the journalist and author Susie Boniface discovered it held information about the medical monitoring of servicemen and Indigenous people. Her work led to its release in 2025.
Holding over 28,000 files, Merlin was commissioned by the MoD in response to the compensation claims made by almost 1,000 veterans from 2009. Its contents include official reports and communications, photographs, maps, safety guidelines and health monitoring information. Video footage includes the Grapple X test in November 1957.
A University of Liverpool team based in The Centre for People’s Justice and the Department of History is working with Boniface and campaign group Labrats International to catalogue and analyse the contents of Merlin – combining it with other sources, including personal testimony. Recently released files indicate nuclear fallout in the island’s ground sediment and rainwater, and heightened radioactivity in its clams.
Evidence has also emerged of radioactive waste being dropped from aeroplanes into the sea off Queensland in 1958 and 1959. Although dumping radioactive waste was surprisingly common during the cold war, this revelation raises questions about how risk and danger was understood and managed during Britain’s nuclear test programme.
The files also show workers without protective clothing around a plutonium pit at Maralinga in South Australia, site of seven British atmospheric nuclear tests in 1956-57.
The Merlin releases have galvanised claims that not so long ago may have been interpreted as conjecture. The recent releases suggest that servicemen and islanders were exposed to radioactive fallout – not just from rain showers, but from the fish they ate and the water they drank.
While a causal link with subsequent health conditions would be hard to prove, we believe it is time for the UK government to get behind a public inquiry into the full impact of Britain’s nuclear weapons testing programme.
Who’s making money? The arsenal trade after Ukraine and Iran
By Vince Hooper | 15 April 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/whos-making-money-the-arsenal-trade-after-ukraine-and-iran,20929
Defence is no longer a defensive trade, and nowhere is the question of who’s buying, who’s building, and who is being left behind more apparent than in Australia, writes Professor Vince Hooper.
Markets, missiles and the end of the peace dividend — and what it means for Australia
A South Korean missile-maker most Western investors could not have located on a map two years ago has just hit an all-time high. LIG Nex1, a precision-guided munitions and electronic warfare specialist headquartered in Yongin, has nearly quadrupled from its January 2025 base, touching 899,000 won on 6 March 2026 — days after American and Israeli aircraft struck Iranian nuclear and missile facilities.
The Korean defence sector as a whole has returned roughly 137 per cent over the past year. These are not the numbers of a sleepy industrial cyclical. They are the numbers of an asset class being repriced in real time.
Defence is no longer a defensive trade. It is the trade. And nowhere is the question of who is buying, who is building, and who is being left in the queue more pointed than in Australia.
Canberra in the queue
For Australia, the arsenal trade is not an abstract market story. It is a mirror.
AUKUS is now a procurement queue rather than a strategy and the cost of waiting for Virginia-class submarines while the Indo-Pacific darkens is becoming uncomfortable to discuss in polite company.
Canberra is, in effect, paying premium prices for late delivery, while Korean and Japanese yards offer shorter timelines at lower cost.
Hanwha’s confirmed 19.9 per cent strategic stake in Austal, cleared by both the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and Canberra’s Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) by late 2025, the Henderson shipyards build-up (now known as the Australian Marine Complex), the AS9 Huntsman self-propelled howitzer program being built by Hanwha at Avalon, near Geelong are not coincidences. They are the early signs of an Australian defence industrial base quietly rotating away from Anglosphere dependence and towards Asian arsenals that can actually deliver.
The strain is visible in real time. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported last week, Canberra’s first crisis call during the Middle East escalation went to Beijing rather than Washington — a reflex inversion that would have been unthinkable a decade ago and that tells you more about the perceived reliability of the American guarantee than any AUKUS communiqué.
The ASX has noticed even if the cabinet has not: DroneShield, Electro Optic Systems, Codan and Austal have all attracted the kind of investor attention that only arrives when a market decides a sector’s tail risks have permanently thickened.
From cost centre to industrial darling
The Ukraine War did the structural work. It converted defence from a politically awkward line item into the most fashionable corner of industrial policy and it taught Western treasuries an uncomfortable lesson about how thin their magazines actually were. Three years of artillery duels in the Donbas drained stockpiles NATO had quietly assumed would last a generation.
The Middle East conflict is the second shock. Patriot interceptors, Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) reloads, Iron Dome Tamirs, SM-3s, 155mm shells, loitering munitions — each salvo over the Gulf is, in accounting terms, a revenue recognition event somewhere in Arizona, Alabama, Haifa or Daejeon. Governments that spent the 2010s running down inventories on the assumption of a benign world are now writing cheques to rebuild them, and they are writing those cheques into the same handful of balance sheets.
Who, specifically, is making money
Four tiers are visible.
First, the American primes — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, L3Harris. They capture the replenishment contracts, the integration work, and the multi-year framework agreements that Congress now waves through with rare bipartisan enthusiasm. Their backlogs are at record highs and, after two decades of monopsony complaints, their pricing power has quietly inverted.
Second, the European awakening — Rheinmetall, BAE Systems, Leonardo, Saab AB, Thales. Germany’s Zeitenwende turned out to be real, and Rheinmetall in particular has become the continent’s de facto shell foundry, trading less like an industrial stock and more like a leveraged proxy on NATO’s Article 5 itself.
Third, and most interesting from where Australia sits, the Asian arsenals — Hanwha Aerospace, Korea Aerospace Industries, Hanwha Systems and the LIG Nex1 of the opening paragraph, alongside Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Kawasaki in Japan. South Korea has done what Europe spent 30 years failing to do: build a deep, exportable, price-competitive defence industrial base with delivery times measured in months rather than decades.
Warsaw noticed first. Riyadh, Canberra and Cairo are noticing now. Israel’s own Elbit, Rafael and IAI sit alongside them as the technological pace-setters, particularly in air defence and electronic warfare, where the Iran exchange has been a brutal but effective live-fire showcase.
Fourth, the invisible compounders — the propellant chemists, the rare-earth magnet refiners, the speciality steel mills, the gallium nitride foundries, the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) cleared software shops, the maritime insurers writing war-risk cover on Hormuz transits at multiples of last year’s premium. This is where the quiet fortunes are being made. Lynas Rare Earths, sitting on one of the few non-Chinese heavy rare earth supply chains in existence, belongs in this tier, whether the market has fully priced it in or not.
The Gulf parallel
For the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the calculation is different and more cynical than Australia’s, but the underlying logic is the same. Every Gulf capital is simultaneously a customer, a forward operating base, and a potential target. Sovereign wealth is rotating accordingly — not away from defence, but into it. Saudi Arabia, in particular, is building domestic primes such as the Synchronised Accessible Media Exchange (SAMI) — wholly owned by the Public Investment Fund and openly targeting a place in the global top 25 defence companies by 2030.
The export of security capacity has become a new instrument of influence and the capital flows track the doctrine more faithfully than any white paper. Australia, with its Henderson precinct ambitions and its Hanwha partnership, is on a milder version of the same curve.
The uncomfortable coda
None of this is a celebration. A rising LIG Nex1 share price is, in the end, a market-implied judgement that more young people in more places will be killed by better-engineered weapons. The honest analyst names that trade-off rather than hiding behind the chart.
But the honest analyst also tells the truth about incentives. The Ukraine War did not enrich defence contractors by accident and the Iran strikes will not either. Governments that spent a generation treating deterrence as a sunk cost are now paying the bill they should have been paying all along and the firms holding the order books are, predictably, getting rich.
CNN reported over the weekend that U.S. intelligence believes China is preparing to deliver shoulder-fired air defence missiles (MANPADS) to Iran during the current ceasefire — a claim Beijing has formally denied. If the reporting holds, that single fact reframes the arsenal trade as an explicit great-power contest rather than a Western replenishment cycle — and it makes every defence ministry from Canberra to Riyadh recalculate how long it can afford to wait in the AUKUS queue.
For Australia, the question is sharper than for most. Canberra can keep waiting for Virginia-class boats and hoping the phone in Washington still gets answered, or it can do what Warsaw and Riyadh have already done — back the arsenals that can actually deliver, and accept that strategic autonomy in 2026 looks less like an alliance white paper and more like a procurement contract with Daejeon, Tokyo, Henderson or Geelong.
The post-Cold War peace dividend has been spent. What replaces it is already listed, already trading and already on the front page. The only open question is whether Australia is reading the same page as the rest of the market.
Professor Vince Hooper is a proud Australian-British citizen and professor of finance and discipline head at SP Jain School of Global Management with campuses in London, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney.
At last, a hint of backbone in Australia’s foreign policy
9 April 2026 Michael Taylor, https://theaimn.net/at-last-a-hint-of-backbone-in-australias-foreign-policy/
For months, many of us have watched in frustration as our government responded to Gaza with caution, equivocation, and a reluctance to break from the familiar script of deference to powerful allies. It has felt, at times, like moral clarity was being carefully managed rather than clearly expressed.
Which is precisely why Anthony Albanese’s sudden intervention on Lebanon lands with such force.
By urging that Lebanon be included in any Middle East ceasefire, the Prime Minister has done something rare in modern Australian foreign policy: he has stepped, however briefly, out of line. Not dramatically. Not defiantly. But unmistakably.
This is not just a policy position – it is a signal.
A signal that Australia may be willing to acknowledge what much of the world can already see: that this is not a series of neatly contained conflicts, but a widening humanitarian crisis stretching from the ruins of Gaza Strip to the streets of Beirut. A signal that civilian suffering is not selective, and that our concern for it should not be either.
And yet, it is impossible to ignore the contrast.
Because while this newfound clarity extends to Lebanon, the same certainty has too often been absent when it comes to Gaza. The language has been softer, the urgency more muted, the moral line less clearly drawn. For many Australians, that inconsistency has not gone unnoticed – or unchallenged.
And perhaps most striking of all, it is a signal that the Prime Minister has finally “read the room.”
Because the room has changed. Public patience has thinned. Across Australia – including among Labor’s own supporters – there has been a growing unease with the language of balance when the images on people’s screens tell a far more unbalanced story. People are not asking for perfection, nor for reckless gestures. But they are asking for something that feels increasingly rare in public life: honesty, consistency, and the courage to apply our values evenly.
In that context, this moment feels different.
It feels like a government, or at least a Prime Minister, beginning to find his footing – beginning to speak not just as an ally, but as a representative of a public that expects more than quiet alignment and careful phrasing.
Whether this is the start of something more substantial, or merely a brief departure from the script, remains to be seen. Governments have a way of snapping back into old habits. The gravitational pull of alliance politics is strong, and Australia has rarely resisted it for long.
But for now, credit where it is due.
In choosing to speak up for Lebanon – and in doing so, gently but clearly diverging from the positions of allies such as the United States under Donald Trump – Anthony Albanese has shown a flicker of something Australians have been waiting to see.
Not a break with our allies. Not a dramatic realignment.
Just something quieter – and, perhaps, more important.
A willingness to stand, at least for a moment, on our own two feet.
Ignoring genocide. The bill for Australia’s silence has arrived
by Andrew Brown | Apr 7, 2026 , https://michaelwest.com.au/ignoring-genocide-the-bill-for-australias-silence-has-arrived/
There is a bitter truth that must be spoken before we can talk honestly about what is happening to us now. Andrew Brown on Australia’s quiet complicity in the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran, fourth in a series.
When the bombs fell on Gaza, Australia was quiet.
When the hospitals were destroyed, when the aid was blocked, when children were pulled from rubble in pieces, when the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and humanitarian organisations with decades of credibility in conflict zones used words like genocide, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment, Australia was quiet.
Not uniformly. Not entirely. There were protests in every major city, sustained over months, of a size and seriousness this country has not seen since the Iraq War.
There were independent senators who stood in Parliament and said what needed to be said, in plain language, without diplomatic hedging. There were journalists, academics, former diplomats, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians who signed petitions, marched in the streets, and wrote letters that went largely unanswered.
Palestinian-Australian, Muslim-Australian, Arab-Australian communities, and many others with no personal connection to the conflict beyond a functioning conscience, screamed into a political void and were told, in effect, to calm down.
Or apprehended for wearing a t-shirt.
The country, as a political entity, its government, its major institutions, its official voice to the world, was quiet.
The cost of silence
That silence had a cost. Not just a moral cost, though the moral cost is staggering and will take generations to fully reckon with. A strategic cost. The cost of allowing a logic of unchecked military impunity to establish itself as the operating principle of the US-Israeli alliance. A logic that, once normalised in Gaza, did not stay in Gaza.
It never does.
Over 72,000 people killed so far. Over 171,000 injured. An entire civilian population, in one of the most densely populated places on earth, was systematically starved, displaced, and destroyed.
Journalists were killed in numbers that constitute, by any honest accounting, a deliberate campaign to eliminate witnesses. Paramedics were bombed. UN peacekeepers were struck. Aid workers from Australia’s own partner organisations were killed in strikes so precise they could not have been accidental.
Australia expressed concern.
“Calibrated, diplomatically worded, operationally meaningless concern.”
And then, when the same alliance, emboldened by eighteen months of zero meaningful consequence, turned its weapons on a sovereign nation-state, on Iran, on February 28 of this year, Australia expressed support. Called it constructive. Offered the American justification back to its own people as sovereign Australian policy.
Warnings ignored
The people warning loudest about Gaza were not merely warning about Palestinians. They were warning about a system. A system in which American military power and Israeli strategic ambition, freed from the constraints of international law and serious allied pushback, would expand. Would find new targets. Would come, eventually, for the stability of every country caught in its orbit.
“They were right. And they were called antisemitic for saying so.“
Iran did not come from nowhere. The assault on Iran is the direct and logical extension of the impunity normalised in Gaza. If you can destroy a civilian population with no meaningful consequence, you can bomb a sovereign nation.
If the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu means nothing, then international law means nothing. And if international law means nothing, then the only operating principle is force. And the consequences of force are distributed not just to the combatants but to every country whose government chose alignment over principle.
Australia chose alignment over the people of Gaza. It chose it again over Iran. And now it is discovering, at the bowser and the checkout and the business bank account, exactly what that choice costs.
The war came home
Here is what makes this moment different from every protest march and every unanswered letter that came before.
The pain is no longer abstract.
When Gaza burned, the average Australian, cocooned by geographic distance, insulated by a media that kept the most confronting images off prime time, reassured by politicians who described it as heartbreaking while doing nothing, could maintain the fiction that this was someone else’s tragedy.
Terrible, certainly. Distant. Manageable. Something that happened over there, to people over there, in a conflict that had been going on forever and would presumably continue
“without any particular bearing on the school fees or the mortgage or the quarterly business figures.”
That fiction is now dead.
The fuel price spike is not over there. The supply chain disruption is not over there. The investment uncertainty showing up in superannuation statements, in business loans that just got harder to service, in the job that exists today and may not exist in three months. None of that is over there.
business loans that just got harder to service, in the job that exists today and may not exist in three months. None of that is over there.
The war came home. Not in body bags. Not in the specific grief of a military family. It came home in the way that imperial adventurism always eventually comes home to the countries that enable it. Through the economy. Through the slow, grinding, distributed punishment of a population that was never consulted, never warned, and never honestly told what their government’s choices would cost them.
Australia’s complicity
Australia was a participant in Gaza’s destruction. Not with weapons. Not with soldiers. With silence. With diplomatic cover. With the specific, material legitimacy that flows from a liberal democracy declining to formally object. And with the arms adjacent, intelligence and security cooperation that flows through Five Eyes and has never been seriously interrogated in the Australian public domain.
When you have the power to intervene, to sanction, to condemn, to withdraw diplomatic cover, and you choose not to, you are not a bystander. You are a participant. And participants, eventually, share in the consequences.
The Palestinian people could not make Australia listen with their suffering alone.
Not because Australians are cruel. They are not. But because the suffering was made distant. The media made it complex. The politicians made it delicate. The lobby groups made it professionally dangerous to say in plain language what was plainly happening.
“The whole architecture of managed consent did its job with brutal efficiency for eighteen months.”
But a forty percent fuel price increase cuts through managed consent, as does a wave of small business closures. And young Australians told to absorb the economic consequences of a war their government endorsed without their knowledge or consent. That cuts through everything.
The people who protested Gaza, who were dismissed and belittled and accused of antisemitism and told they were being naive about geopolitical complexity, understood something that the political class is only now beginning to grasp: That the world does not offer permanent non-involvement. That the wars you enable reach you. That the impunity you excuse comes back denominated in currencies you understand personally.
Fuel. Food. Jobs. Mortgages. Businesses. Futures.
This is that reckoning. The genocide in Gaza did not wake Australia up, the bill for enabling it will.And when Australia wakes, fully, clearly, with the focused fury of people who now understand exactly what was done to them, the politicians who called it constructive and the media that told them to blame the Energy Minister are going to find that managed consent has a shelf life.
That shelf life has expired.
The Platform of Shame: How Australia Normalised a Genocidal Regime
1 April 2026 Dr Andrew Klein, PhD AIM Extra. https://theaimn.net/the-platform-of-shame-how-australia-normalised-a-genocidal-regime/
An ambassador who calls dead journalists terrorists. A death penalty for Palestinians only. A government that says nothing. And a Press Club that provides the stage.
I. The Spectacle
On March 31, 2026, the National Press Club of Australia hosted Dr Hillel Newman, the newly appointed ambassador of Israel, for an address titled “Reshaping the Middle East.”
What unfolded was not diplomacy. It was propaganda. It was the marketing of genocide. And it was allowed to continue, uninterrupted, on Australian soil, under the lights of an institution that once stood for journalistic integrity.
Newman rejected a figure of 70,000 dead in Gaza – a number, he said, provided by Hamas. He claimed the ratio of civilian to combatant casualties was “the lowest in urban warfare” and that Israel should be “commended” for the “low number of uninvolved civilians that were actually killed.”
He was speaking over the bodies of 70,000 people. He was speaking over the findings of a United Nations commission of inquiry that, in September last year, found that Israel had committed genocide in the Gaza Strip – accusing the nation of having committed four genocidal acts, “namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”
The Press Club did not challenge him. The journalists in the room did not walk out. The broadcast continued.
II. The Death Penalty Law
On March 30, the Israeli Knesset passed a law imposing the death penalty for terrorism-related offences. Human Rights Watch has analysed the bill and found it explicitly discriminatory.
The law makes death by hanging the default punishment for West Bank Palestinians convicted of nationalistic killings. It also gives Israeli courts the option of imposing the death penalty on Israeli citizens convicted on similar charges – language that legal experts say effectively confines those who can be sentenced to death to Palestinian citizens of Israel and excludes Jewish citizens.
Within the military court system of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the bill imposes the death penalty for killings classified as acts of terrorism as defined under Israeli law, even without a prosecutorial request. The bill only allows courts to order life imprisonment in unspecified exceptional cases where “special reasons” are found, limiting judicial discretion. It also prohibits commutation of sentences and mandates execution within an accelerated timeframe of 90 days.
Israeli citizens and residents are explicitly excluded from this provision: military jurisdiction applies exclusively to Palestinians, while Israeli settlers are tried in civilian courts.
Human Rights Watch has noted that military trials of Palestinians have “an approximately 96% conviction rate, based largely on ‘confessions’ extracted under duress and torture during interrogations.”
Adam Coogle, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, stated: “Israeli officials argue that imposing the death penalty is about security, but in reality, it entrenches discrimination and a two-tiered system of justice, both hallmarks of apartheid. The death penalty is irreversible and cruel. Combined with its severe restrictions on appeals and its 90-day execution timeline, this bill aims to kill Palestinian detainees faster and with less scrutiny.”
The Palestinian Authority has condemned the law as a “war crime” and a “flagrant violation of international humanitarian law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees protection for individuals and fair trial rights.”
At the Press Club, Newman defended the law. “Just like in the United States, in Japan and in India, which have capital punishment, Israel has the right, as a sovereign state, to decide … capital punishment,” he said.
He did not mention the discrimination. He did not mention the 96% conviction rate. He did not mention the torture.
III. The Journalists
Newman was asked about the killing of journalists in Gaza and Lebanon. The International Federation of Journalists has reported that 261 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. The Committee to Protect Journalists has accused Israel of killing a record 129 journalists in 2025.
Newman’s response was chilling.
He claimed that two of three journalists killed in an Israeli air strike in Lebanon were “100 per cent terrorist” members of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force. He said they were “dressed up as journalists.” He claimed that both Hamas and Hezbollah “disguise themselves as press and remain terrorist operatives.”
When pressed on what percentage of killed journalists were not terrorists, he admitted: “The honest truth is that we have no way of knowing the exact amount of journalists who weren’t 100 per cent journalists who were killed.”
He has no way of knowing. Yet he called them terrorists anyway. On Australian soil. At the National Press Club.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has previously described such accusations as “smear campaigns” without “credible evidence to substantiate their claims.”
Newman also dismissed the broader death toll of journalists, saying: “When people outside quote 250, 300 journalists [have been killed], what they’re doing is they’re just buying [it] hook, line and sinker. If they would check, they would find that the majority of all the journalists, so-called journalists, that were affected were actually activists guised as journalists.”
He has no evidence. He provided none. The Press Club did not ask for it.
IV. The Frankcom Family
While Newman spoke inside the Press Club, the family of Zomi Frankcom stood outside.
Frankcom, an Australian aid worker, was killed by an Israeli drone strike on April 1, 2024, while working for World Central Kitchen in Gaza. Seven aid workers died. The convoy was struck three times.
Two years later, the family is still waiting for justice. They are still waiting for the release of critical drone footage audio that would establish motive. Former Defence Force chief Mark Binskin, who conducted an independent inquiry, was given access to unedited drone footage – but it did not include audio.
Newman was asked repeatedly whether the Israeli government would apologise to the Frankcom family. He refused. “Every incident of an innocent person or aid worker that is affected by a war situation is tragic, and we’ve expressed full sympathy with the family,” he said.
Sympathy. Not an apology.
He said reparations were “dependent on the final outcome of the interrogation.” Two years later, the interrogation is still not final.
Mal Frankcom, Zomi’s brother, said the family would like a formal apology, but he believed this was unlikely because it “could be seen as an admission of guilt.”
He met with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday. He urged the government to use all possible diplomatic levers to pressure Israel to complete its investigation.
The ambassador was asked about the audio. He said: “That’s not in my hands. It’s in the IDF’s hands.”
The IDF’s hands. Where it has been for two years.
V. The Australian Government’s Response
Foreign Minister Penny Wong told the Labor caucus that Australia opposes the death penalty “in all instances.” She pointed to a joint statement Australia signed alongside France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom that opposed the measure.
The statement said: “We are particularly worried about the de facto discriminatory character of the bill. The adoption of this bill would risk undermining Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles.”
A joint statement. Words. Not action.
The government has not summoned the ambassador. It has not imposed sanctions. It has not suspended military cooperation. It has not done anything that would cost Israel anything at all.
The same government that rushed to pass hate speech laws after the Bondi terror attack – laws that criminalise the phrase “from the river to the sea” – has nothing to say about a law that would execute Palestinian prisoners by hanging within 90 days, with no right of pardon, under a discriminatory legal regime.
The same government that welcomed Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Canberra has not condemned the man who wore a noose-shaped lapel pin while celebrating the passage of this law – Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister.
The same government that expelled Iran’s ambassador after ASIO concluded Tehran orchestrated the bombings of a synagogue and a kosher restaurant has not applied the same standard to Israel.
VI. The Question of Double Standards
In 2024, the Albanese government expelled Iran’s ambassador, Ahmad Sadeghi, after domestic spy agency ASIO concluded that Iran had orchestrated the bombings of a synagogue in Melbourne and a kosher restaurant in Sydney.
A top Iranian diplomat, Mohammad Pournajaf, defected from the regime and was granted asylum in Australia. The government acted. The ambassador was expelled.
Yet Israel’s ambassador calls dead journalists terrorists, defends a discriminatory death penalty law, refuses to apologise for the killing of an Australian aid worker – and the government says nothing.
Why was the Iranian ambassador expelled, but the Israeli ambassador remains?
The answer is the network. The donors. The lobbyists. The fear of being labelled antisemitic. The capture of our political class by a foreign ideology that demands silence in exchange for support.
VII. Has the Press Club Been Captured?
The National Press Club is meant to be a forum for robust journalism. For challenging those in power. For holding the powerful to account.
On March 31, 2026, it provided a platform for an ambassador who called dead journalists terrorists. Who defended a discriminatory death penalty law. Who refused to apologise for the killing of an Australian aid worker.
The journalists in the room did not walk out. They did not cut the microphone. They did not refuse to platform a man who accused the dead of being terrorists without evidence.
This does no credit to Australian journalism. It does no credit to the Press Club. It does no credit to Australia.
VIII. The Questions They Refuse to Ask
We will ask the questions they refuse to ask:
- Why was Hillel Newman given a platform to call dead journalists terrorists?
- Why did the National Press Club not challenge his claims in real time?
- Why has the Australian government not summoned the ambassador to answer for the death penalty law?
- Why has the government not condemned the law in the strongest possible terms?
- Why has the government not suspended military cooperation with Israel?
- Why has the government not imposed sanctions?
- Why has the government done nothing that would cost Israel anything at all?
- Why was the Iranian ambassador expelled, but the Israeli ambassador remains?
The Frankcom family deserves answers. The Palestinian prisoners facing execution deserve the world to speak. The Australian people deserve to know why their government is silent.
IX. The Larger Pattern
This is not an isolated incident. It is the same pattern we have been exposing for weeks.
The same network that brought us the Segal Plan – mandatory Zionist indoctrination in universities. The same network that brought us the police crackdown in New South Wales – eight armoured officers breaking down a woman’s door at 5am. The same network that is turning our public service into an arm of foreign influence. The same network that has captured our political class.
The same silence. The same complicity. The same refusal to act.
Israel is committing genocide. The International Court of Justice has found it “plausible.” The United Nations commission of inquiry has found it has committed genocidal acts. The world is watching.
And Australia says nothing. Or says a few words in a joint statement, then returns to business as usual.
X. What Must Be Done
- The National Press Club must answer for its decision to platform Newman. Why was he not challenged? Why was the broadcast allowed to continue? Why were dead journalists slandered without evidence on Australian soil?
- The Australian government must summon the ambassador. He must answer for the death penalty law. He must answer for his comments about journalists. He must answer for the Frankcom family.
- The government must condemn the death penalty law in the strongest possible terms. A joint statement is not enough. Words are not enough. Australia must use every diplomatic lever to oppose this discriminatory, inhumane legislation.
- The government must suspend military cooperation with Israel. Australia cannot claim to oppose the death penalty while cooperating militarily with a state that imposes it discriminatorily.
- The government must impose sanctions. The time for words is over. The time for action is now.
- The Frankcom family must receive justice. The audio must be released. The investigation must be completed. Those responsible must be held accountable.
XI. A Warning
What happened at the National Press Club on March 31, 2026, was not an aberration. It was the logical conclusion of a pattern.
A foreign ambassador called dead journalists terrorists. He defended a law that executes Palestinians by hanging within 90 days, with no right of pardon, under a discriminatory legal regime. He refused to apologise for the killing of an Australian aid worker.
And Australia was silent. The government was silent. The Press Club was silent. The media was silent.
This is what complicity looks like. Not active participation. Silence. The refusal to speak. The refusal to act. The refusal to hold accountable those who commit atrocities in our name, with our support, under the cover of our alliance.
The wire is not cut. The shells fall short. The men who send others to die do not walk the ground.
But we will not be silent. We will ask the questions they refuse to ask. We will name the names. We will expose the pattern.
And we will keep cutting the wire until there is nothing left but the garden.
This article is dedicated to my wife, who stands with me shoulder to shoulder, and I am so proud of her.
Sources:……………………………………………………………
Your money, their rules. Super funds support Israel war machine
by Andrew Gardiner | Mar 24, 2026, https://michaelwest.com.au/your-money-their-rules-super-funds-support-israel-war-machine/
Australian industry super funds are investing in companies involved in the Gaza genocide, and unions are not demanding they stop. Andrew Gardiner reports.
Protected by rules putting a member’s “best financial interests” over ethical, environmental or social considerations, the vast majority of Australia’s industry superfunds are all-systems-go on pouring money into projects connected to the decimation of Gaza, dispossession in the West Bank, and bombing Israel’s neighbours.
An MWM investigation has confirmed that just two of Australia’s 20 industry super funds are making modest changes to their investment portfolios. The other 18 remain invested in Israel’s war machine, with Australian Super alone funding corporations like Elbit Systems (drones), ICL Group (white phosphorus) and Palantir (AI/software for weapons systems).
This, even as the IDF is again using the banned white phosphorus in Lebanon, in which Australian super is invested.
The two funds which did divest – Vision Super and HESTA – still have some money tied up in Israeli projects in Gaza and the West Bank. “HESTA and Vision divested from Israeli banks (but) they still have money in companies listed on a UN database as operating from Israel’s illegal settlements”, Molly Coburn from the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) told MWM.
Activist Jill Sparrow says even those modest changes could be quietly reversed “as soon as we look away”. “Divestment isn’t set and forget (and)
“there’s a lot of money to be made in dropping bombs,”
“so super funds could be sorely tempted”, she said.
If you’re in a union-partner industry super fund and have a problem with genocide, chances are you’re out of luck on the socially-conscious investments front. Unions routinely route members’ super into partner funds with little regard to the social or environmental impact when it’s invested.
Ethics ignored
Under 2005 rule changes, union members can transfer their super to retail super funds, Australian Ethical and Future Group, which shun companies whose work enables the carnage in Gaza. These funds show it can be done, so why have industry super funds not done it?
Instead, unions aligned with the Labor Party, under pressure from Zionist lobbyists, are content to send members’ money to super funds that aid the Israeli war effort, funding what the UN calls “a moral stain on us all”.
Like so many other ACTU affiliates, the United Workers Union (UWU), with 151,000 members, talks a good game on Israel’s actions in Gaza, but hasn’t put its members’ super where its mouth is. MWM’s efforts to ascertain how much the union had done to lobby its super funds – HostPlus, Australian Super and HESTA – yielded nothing.
What we learned from UWU members is that in early 2024, a rank-and-file motion including divestment was passed at the council level in various states before being “soft-blocked” by union officials, who reportedly sat on it. Later that year, a more formal “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) motion, requiring real action compelling divestment by the super funds, was defeated.
“Social issues are bread and butter issues, and funding war is a dead end. Our leadership – who are on the boards of HESTA and Australian Super – (need) to stop hiding behind ‘fiduciary duties’ to fund death and destruction”, UWU delegate (early childhood education) Nicki Toupin told MWM.
Fidiciary duties
Fiduciary duty doesn’t just provide cover for unions putting the bottom line first. “In the interests of members”, it’s cited time and again by super funds whenever there’s pressure to divest.
Buttressing their argument is case law precedent, which will raise the hackles of Australian republicans: Cowan v Scargill, a UK decision dating back to the Thatcher years (1985), helped redefine a member’s “best interests” as “best financial interests” (emphasis added). 2021 changes to fiduciary duty here in Australia reflect that new emphasis.
How do you define “best financial interests”? Wouldn’t a stable Middle East be good for the world’s economy, providing investment opportunities for our super funds that don’t involve genocide?
“Egregious war crimes, crimes against humanity and devastating environmental impacts mean you can argue that the financial interests of super fund members are undermined by investments that support the Israeli military”, Claire Parfitt, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at Sydney University, told MWM.
It seems our super funds, and their investment managers, are ignoring these arguments in the quest for a quick return, their investment in the Israeli war machine rendering Middle East instability something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There are, of course, equal and opposite rules against super funds investing in projects “maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the occupied Palestinian territory”. But some rules, it seems, are more equal than others; successive Australian governments barely lift a finger to enforce international court rulings, human rights obligations and social considerations (ESG), which might trouble the bottom line.
To quote a famous movie line, “a foul is not a foul unless the ref blows his whistle”. The failure to enforce international and ethical obligations means super funds can go on hiding behind “fiduciary duty”; at least 18 of our 20 industry funds are doing just that.
The “fiduciary duty” chestnut, and “soft blocking” tactics by union officials aligned with an ALP which quietly supports the Gaza carnage, have rendered meaningful “change from within” on divestment all but impossible. So groups like ASU for Palestine and UWU 4 Palestine are taking matters into their own hands.
Following a 1000-strong “community picket” of the Israeli-owned ZIM Ganges cargo ship at Port Melbourne, ASU for Palestine started looking at divestment as a way to hit Israel where it hurts. After ASU secretary (now Senator) Lisa Darmanin, then a board member at Vision Super, inevitably advised ASU for Palestine of its “fiduciary and statutory obligations” (adding it wasn’t legal for her to “act as (a) representative” of ASU members on divestment) it became clear something more compelling was called for.
What did ASU for Palestine do? It began a campaign to raise awareness on divestment, suggesting ASU members “switch their super fund” elsewhere, while lobbying to change the default super fund in enterprise agreements to none other than Australian Ethical.
It’s amazing how the threat of losing thousands of ASU members (and untold millions) can motivate a super fund to abandon “fiduciary” rhetoric and do the right thing. A couple of months later, amid much fanfare at the ASU conference, Vision Super announced its limited divestment, full details of which are expected by the end of this month.
These kinds of ‘direct action’ appear to actually work, although (per APAN) the extent of Vision’s divestment was limited. “If it’s not good enough, we’ll just have to go again”, Sparrow told MWM.
For their part, UWU 4 Palestine sees divestment as a major social cause that it and Members First, a grassroots change ticket at upcoming union elections, can get their teeth into. “Building a rank and file, fighting union that isn’t remote from members gives us the power to push for the kind of world we want, not just on workplace issues but in investing our money in something other than genocide”, Toupin told MWM, adding
That’s right. Direct Action works.
The war against Iran: Lessons still unlearned
By William Briggs | 26 March 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/the-war-against-iran-lessons-still-unlearned,20853
The dreams of the U.S. President, that it would all be over in days – that the Iranian people would rise against their tyrannical regime – is now a nightmare that Trump has visited upon the world.
The global economy is on the brink of disaster as oil dries up. America and Israel have further isolated themselves from world public opinion and, apart from an ever- shrinking clique of semi-vassal states like Australia, Trump appears to be alone and increasingly dangerous.
The war offers a great many lessons, but while life and history can be great teachers, there seem to be precious few pupils ready to learn those lessons. This applies equally to apologists for U.S. power, to governments of all stripes and to many of those who inhabit the Left and lay claim to Marxist credentials.
The war was never about “liberating” the Iranian people from the right-wing theocracy. It was about securing a compliant regime that would ensure the flow of oil and to make sure that the USA, as a fading imperial power, maintained global hegemony — both politically and economically.
The slogan that accompanied the wars of aggression against Iraq, that tore Libya apart and which laid waste to so much of the Middle East was simply, No Blood for Oil! The years have slipped by, and yet the same foul motivation for despoiling the globe and destroying a people remains.
Our mainstream media know this to be true, even as the “story” turns its focus to the retaliation by Iran and to the oil pressure that the blocking of the Straits of Hormuz entails. The same media focuses on potential oil shortages, and rightly so, but seems less keen to link that invasion to the fact that people are paying stupid prices for petrol and diesel.
Fewer voices can be heard that would remind the people of how the war started and who is responsible. That has become largely the responsibility of the Left — the Marxists, the campaigners against war and imperialism.
This is as it should be, but something is very wrong. Marxism is quite clear that economics is the defining factor and that politics works with and responds to economic demands. The war, then, can only be understood from an economic perspective. But is it being understood in this way? Sadly, no.
Some see it as a political gamble by a beleaguered and dangerously unhinged U.S. President. Some portray it as a means, by Israel, of destroying any potential risk to its domination of the region. Some come a step closer by recognising the strategic desire to weaken China, as it is a principal customer for Iranian oil.
Any and all of these considerations are enough to allow blame to be sheeted home to the USA and Israel, but there is a deeper, more worrying aspect to this. The United States has been and remains the single biggest military force and greatest economic power that the world has seen. It is, as the Marxist Left will say, an imperialist power. It is also a declining power.
For decades, its main preoccupation has been how to hold back the rising tide of its one great rival. China’s rise, accompanied by a global capitalist economy that has run out of ideas and resilience, ensures that wars are either finishing, beginning, or in the planning stage. A failing economic structure is driving the world to the point of no return. The war against Iran is one battle in this endless spiral into decay. The USA, as the central power in the capitalist global economy, is more than willing to destroy entire nations in its quest to keep the sinking ship afloat.
No crime is too much. The U.S. bombing the girls’ school in Iran, the Israeli destruction of oil facilities on the edge of Tehran that have led to acid rain and an unimaginable civilian health disaster, sicken all reasonable people. But those who plan such actions are not among the reasonable.
These acts need to be condemned. Governments need to show at least a modicum of decency. Our Prime Minister needs to stop slinking in the shadows and act. He needs to denounce such actions. He needs to find the courage to say “No!” and to work to secure the natural resources needed to keep Australia functioning. This is unlikely. Our political structures are such that we remain totally subservient to the demands and interests of the USA..
Those whose anger compels them to take to the streets deserve better than the Babel that has become the protest movement. The most recent action in Melbourne, which was dominated by ever more shrill denunciations of Israel, while mention of the USA and its causal responsibility for the war was at best an afterthought. Protest has merit, it is necessary and has purpose. It also needs focus, if it is to have either merit or purpose.
Protest is also about winning the hearts and minds of people. Sound and fury might be a therapy for some, but numbers count and numbers must grow, people must be educated, encouraged to talk to others, to build a movement that can go beyond noise.
Part of that building process must include the raising of collective consciousness. It must be able to show and convince people that this or that crime of the USA, of Israel, of imperialism, is not isolated, or in any way an aberrant thing, but is a symptom of a deeper, structural crisis. It is not enough for the ideologues to make demands that cannot be achieved. The protest movement, the anti-war movement, should aim at providing a vehicle, a voice for those who want something better than news screens full of war stories and a Federal Government pathetically marching to the fifes and drums of a fading U.S. empire.
European Union leaders have been prepared to stand back a little; to say that the war is not their war. It is hard to imagine an Australian government being daring enough to question anything that comes from Washington. As the sun sinks on U.S. hegemony, Australia seems ready to go down with the American ship.
Trump is the most dangerous man in the world
By Mark Beeson | 21 March 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/trump-is-the-most-dangerous-man-in-the-world,20838
Trump’s Iran war raises fears of global conflict — while allies stay silent and diplomacy collapses, writes Mark Beeson.
U.S. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP is the most dangerous man in the world. Why are we supporting him?
Many people were concerned about what a second Trump presidency might look like, but it’s uncontroversial to claim that it’s much worse than even the gloomiest pessimists feared.
It has been plain for a long time that Trump has little regard for the truth and is determined to silence independent media. But the one thing his supporters and the world in general might have hoped for was that he wouldn’t have gone back on his promise to not start unnecessary, ill-conceived wars, especially in the Middle East.
And yet, not only has Trump launched an illegal war with Iran, which has already resulted in the deaths of thousands, including innocent schoolgirls, but he is also displaying a psychopathic delight in using America’s overwhelming military might ‘just for fun’.
Given that the assault on Iran is being conducted with – or even on behalf of – Israel there is a breathtaking irony in the fact that Trump is displaying the same sort of indifference to human suffering that allowed individual Nazis to take part in the ‘final solution’ and the murder of six million Jews.
It is, of course, entirely possible that Trump doesn’t really know what’s going on given his increasingly obvious cognitive decline, but he has never exhibited much human empathy and is a compulsive liar and confabulator. These qualities arguably made him unfit to be a property developer, much less the most powerful man on Earth.
Given his famously child-like need for attention and adulation, which his courtiers and cronies are only too willing to provide, there is absolutely no chance of him changing. On the contrary, his belief that God is proud of him ought to alarm ought to alarm friend and foe alike.
After all, this is a man with the capacity to blunder into World War 3 without having any idea what he’s doing. The complete absence of any plan or exit strategy in the escalating conflict with Iran demonstrates that even the most apocalyptic of unforeseen consequences cannot be ruled out.
While an international economic crisis may not be the worst thing that could happen, for those of us fortunate enough to live in peaceful Australia it really ought to demonstrate that Trump is a threat to supposed friends and allies, as well as the innocent Iranians he promised to help.
If nothing else, Trump’s behaviour should make the danger and folly of relying on someone quite so delusional and self-obsessed clear to even our most unthinking policymakers. Trump will be satisfied with nothing less than the complete support and cooperation of allies, no matter how misguided or inhuman his policies may be.
Given the decades of uncritical fealty Australia’s leaders have displayed to the United States, it is no surprise that there has generally been an uncomfortable silence about ‘our’ response to the latest American-led fiasco.
Penny Wong wrote:
‘We (sic) support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security.’
It’s worth remembering that Iran was attacked while trying to negotiate a new agreement to replace the one Trump tore up, a tactic that may have allowed the U.S. to decapitate Iran’s leadership but won’t making resolving the conflict any easier. Truth, diplomacy and trustworthiness are clearly for losers. Might clearly does make right in Trump-world. This reality may help to explain why the Albanese government is keeping its collective head down.
Other leaders have not been quite so supine and gutless, however. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, after fruitless attempts at ingratiating himself with Trump, unambiguously stated that the “government will not participate in this war”. Moreover, Merz pointed out that Trump’s war had nothing to do with NATO, which was a defensive alliance, not one designed for wars of aggression.
Trump responded in his usual fashion with threats and bluster, suggesting a failure to support his ill-conceived war would be ‘very bad’ for NATO. Although we have learned not expect truth or consistency when dealing with Trump, suggesting that the foundation of the Western alliance may be in jeopardy is hardly a minor threat. Trump’s great friend Vladimir Putin must be delighted.
If our leaders are too unimaginative and cowardly to speak up in defence of international law, or to criticise unilateralism and the intensification of great power politics, civil society must do what it can. The absence of the sort of activism and protests that characterised opposition to the equally ill-conceived and pointless Vietnam War is disappointing and revealing, however. Perhaps it takes 500 actual combat deaths and the prospect of being called-up to bring home the reality of war to Australians.
Or perhaps rising interest rates, the cost of filling up a monstrous SUV, or re-routing your European holiday might do the trick. Either way, it’s reassuring to know that President Trump thinks the war with Iran is going so well that he gives if 15 out of 10. Nothing for our leaders to worry about after all.
1 This Month
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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