Australian service personnel are embedded with a rogue military force committing war crimes. It is testimony to the Australian Government’s lack of integrity that they are not being recalled.
Australian service personnel are embedded with a rogue military force committing war crimes. It is testimony to the Australian Government’s lack of integrity that they are not being recalled.
As an American Admiral, Frank “Mitch” Bradley is at least likely to know of the episode that made Eck and co infamous – murdering the survivors of a Greek freighter their U-boat had sunk. Their victims were in lifeboats and clinging to wreckage in the South Atlantic night as they were machinegunned and attacked with hand grenades and small arms. Two of them had been taken aboard the U-boat for interrogation before being returned to the water and their death.
Eck, Weispfennig and Hoffmann were convicted at Nuremberg and executed by firing squad in October 1946.
Bradley, following Hegseth’s orders, didn’t use anything as primitive as small arms to kill the two survivors of a Venezuelan speedboat that had been hit by an American missile in international waters. From the comfort and safety of Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he sent another missile to blow them apart.
Since the Washington Post reported the crime on Friday night, the Trump administration has flipped and flopped between straight denial, outrage and careful wording as even some Republican politicians sensed a bridge too far.
Any denials by Trump, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Hegseth, of course, have all the credibility of Trump, Leavitt and Hegseth. The MAGA mob can be guaranteed to roll on to its next scandal, increasingly misusing the most powerful military machine the world has ever seen as its supra-legal hit squad, broadcasting snuff movies to prove it.
Fog of war?
Overnight, as the denials and obfuscations could not be sustained, Trump and Hegseth confirmed and defended murdering the survivors of the original strike.
With enormous gall, Hegseth is citing “fog of war” and criticising journalists sitting in air-conditioned offices planting “fake stories”. Bradley and the cowards who carried out his orders were in air-conditioned comfort themselves, nowhere near any frontline or danger.
Hegseth is working his way through the usual pattern of a worm caught in scandal: first denial, then distancing as denial falters, penultimately defending, relying on Trumpistas being above the law. Beware the usual fourth step, distraction.
It’s taken the major Australian media outlets a little while to begin to cotton on to the depravity of murdering helpless survivors. As Todd Huntley, the director of the National Security Law program at Georgetown University Law Center and previously a judge advocate in the US Navy for more than two decades, toldThe New Yorker:
“Basically, this is the one strike that we know about where even if you accept the Administration’s position that the United States is in an armed conflict with these drug cartels, this would still be unlawful under the laws of armed conflict, because the individuals were out of the fight and shipwrecked, and thus owed protection.”
The ”even if” in that sentence is one that nobody outside the MAGA diehards and their apologists accepts. The overwhelming legal opinion is that blowing up civilian boats – the summary executions – are criminal actions. There’s been plenty written on what the theatre off the Venezuelan coast is really about; the one sure thing is
it has nothing to do with stopping fentanyl reaching the US.
Australians embedded
It’s become trite to quote Lieutenant-General David Morrison, saying as chief of the Australian Army that “the standard you walk by is the standard you accept”.
Besides, the Australian Government of Albanese, Marles and Wong doesn’t walk past the Trump slime, it embraces it, welcomes it, pledges allegiance to it, pays it protection money,
pimps out our nation for it and sends Australian men and women to serve it.
The last is ethically unsustainable. We have moved well beyond the merely cringing embarrassment of smiling Marles and Hegseth photo ops to questions of complicity as we facilitate America’s armed forces’ criminal acts Distinguished former US officers have publicly warned troops not to follow illegal orders from the Trump gang and have been threatened by Trump for doing so. What has Australia’s Chief of Defence Force, Admiral David Johnston, told his people before handing them over to the likes of Admiral Bradley?
It is time to show just a little spine by bringing our troops home. That we are incapable of prosecuting our own war criminals is not an excuse for potentially creating more.
Marles mute on troops embedded
How many people are we putting in harm’s way? I don’t know. An email request to Marles’ defence media office has gone unanswered for more than 24 hours as I write. I wanted to know how many Australians are embedded or on exchange with the US military and in what areas.
In response to a question by Senator Jacqui Lambie in July, Defence answered that there were 193 ADF and APS personnel embedded in the US just for the first phase of AUKUS.
Instead of pursuing inane beatups about where Chinese ships in the Philippine Sea might be sailing for Christmas, maybe a press gallery with a clue could ask Marles at his next media performance if any Australian personnel are embedded with US Navy SEAL teams, the units carrying out Hegseth and Bradley’s illegal orders to murder.
Questions for the Government
For that matter, any Australian Government politician at any occasion should be asked if we share America’s values on war crimes, to what extent our nominally Australian Pine Gap and Exmouth facilities are being used for illegal military action against civilians off Venezuela, if we would support US military action against Venezuela, if they think Hegseth is even fit to return to his gig as a Fox News weekend clown, let alone remain as the US “Secretary for War”.
There are so many good questions to ask, but hey, watch the gallery stick to safe Sinophobia baiting and the usual horse race politics.
I can already hear the argument that the US has always been like this, fond of extra-judicial killings. True, there’s more than a century of invasions and covert and overt action overthrowing governments, good and bad, usually replacing them with something worse.
There are legal niceties, though, in the rules of war. Those rules have been bent and twisted to suit, most recently in the “War on Terror”, but this is something different, a different level of state evil.
Context was provided in The New Yorker’s interview with Todd Huntley:
“I think it’s the intentional nature of it. In most of those other situations where U.S. attacks have killed civilians, the deaths were due to either faulty intelligence, a faulty assessment of the facts, or an accident. This one seems to have been very clearly intentional. I think that is one thing that makes it much different, and on some level worse, because if you’re looking at the use of force in an armed conflict and you have violations, not everything rises to the level of a war crime.
This is a war crime.
And by keeping silent, by pursuing our policy of enmeshing our military with the US military, we are making Australia complicit.
Michael Pascoe is an independent journalist and commentator with five decades of experience here and abroad in print, broadcast and online journalism. His book, The Summertime of Our Dreams, is published by Ultimo Press.
South Australia – the country’s most advanced renewables grid – has average more than 100 per cent net renewables (compared to state demand) over the past week, and more than 90 per cent renewables over the last 28 days. It is not the first time that South Australia has reached 100 per cent renewables – it has done so previously over the Christmas/New Year period – but it marks a significant milestone, given that its mix of renewables is made up entirely of variable wind and solar, and with no hydro or even biomass to speak of.
The strategic placement of key US and joint military facilities across Australia reveals a pattern not of national defence, but of integration into a global, offensively-oriented network for force projection and intelligence gathering. An analysis of their locations and functions demonstrates that these bases are designed to serve the strategic interests of a superpower, often at the expense of Australian sovereignty and security.
The Official Rationale: A Volatile Region and the Strategy of Denial
According to official Australian government assessments, the strategic environment is increasingly volatile, characterised by falling international cooperation, rising competition, and uncertainty about US reliability. In response, Australia’s National Defence Strategy: 2024 has adopted a “strategy of denial,” emphasising deterrence as its primary objective. This policy shift is used to justify initiatives such as:
Acquiring nuclear-powered submarines through AUKUS.
Upgrading and expanding northern military bases.
Acquiring new long-range strike capabilities.
The public-facing logic is that longer-range weapons have overturned Australia’s geographic advantage, making the “sea-air gap” to the north a vulnerability. However, a closer examination of the specific facilities tells a different story.
Pine Gap: The Beating Heart of Global Surveillance
The Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, is the most prominent example. Ostensibly a joint facility, it is a critical node in US global intelligence. Its functions extend far beyond any defensive mandate for Australia.
Global Signals Intelligence: Pine Gap acts as a ground control and processing station for US geosynchronous signals intelligence (SIGINT) satellites. These satellites monitor a vast swath of the Eastern Hemisphere, collecting data including missile telemetry, anti-aircraft radar signals, and communications from mobile phones and microwave transmissions.
Warfighting and Targeted Killing: Information from Pine Gap is not merely for analysis. It is used to geolocate targets for military action. The base has played a direct role in US drone strikes and has provided intelligence in conflicts from Vietnam and the Gulf War to the ongoing wars in Gaza. Experts testify that data downlinked at Pine Gap is passed to the US National Security Agency and then to allies like the Israel Defense Forces, potentially implicating Australia in international conflicts without public knowledge or parliamentary oversight.
A History of Secrecy and Sovereignty Betrayed: The base’s history is marked by breaches of Australian sovereignty. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the US government placed Pine Gap on nuclear alert (DEFCON 3) without informing Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Whitlam’s subsequent consideration of closing the base was followed by his dramatic dismissal in 1975, an event that former CIA officers have linked to US fears over losing access to the facility.
Northern Bases: Launchpads for Power Projection
The network of bases across Australia’s north forms an arc designed for forward operations, not homeland defence.
RAAF Base Tindal: This base in the Northern Territory is undergoing upgrades to host US B-52 strategic bombers. This transformation turns Australian territory into a forward operating location for long-range strike missions deep into Asia, fundamentally changing the nation’s role from a sovereign state to a launching pad for another power’s offensive operations.
Marine Rotational Force – Darwin: The stationing of up to 2,500 US Marines in Darwin functions as a persistent force projection and logistics hub, enhancing the US ability to rapidly deploy forces into the Southeast Asian region.
NW Cape (Harold E. Holt): The facility in Exmouth, Western Australia, hosts advanced space radar and telescopes for “space situational awareness.” This contributes to US space warfare and communications capabilities, a global mission with little direct relation to the defence of Australia’s population centres.
The True Cost: Compromised Sovereignty and Incurred Risk
This integration into a superpower’s military apparatus comes with severe, often unacknowledged, costs.
The Loss of Sovereign Control: The operational control of these critical facilities is often ceded to the United States. At Pine Gap, the chief of the facility is a senior CIA officer, and certain sections, such as the NSA’s cryptology room, are off-limits to Australian personnel. This creates a situation where activities conducted on Australian soil are not fully known or controlled by the Australian government.
Becoming a Nuclear Target: The critical importance of bases like Pine Gap to US global military dominance makes them high-priority targets in the event of a major conflict. By hosting these facilities, Australia voluntarily assumes the risk of being drawn into a nuclear exchange, a strategic decision made without public debate.
Complicity in International Conflicts: As the protests and legal actions surrounding Pine Gap’s role in Gaza highlight, Australia faces legal and moral accusations of complicity in actions that may constitute war crimes or genocide. This places the nation in direct opposition to international law and global public opinion, all for the sake of an alliance that often prioritises US interests.
Conclusion: From Independent Ally to Integrated Base
The evidence is clear: the strategic network of US-linked bases in Australia is not primarily for the nation’s defence. It is the architecture of a vassal state, designed to service the global force projection and intelligence-gathering needs of a superpower. From the satellite surveillance of Pine Gap to the bomber forward deployment at Tindal, these facilities entangle Australia in conflicts far beyond its shores, compromise its sovereignty, and incur immense strategic risks. Until this fundamental reality is confronted, Australian defence policy will continue to serve an empire’s interests, not its own.
Cooperation between Australia and China could send a useful message to the Trump regime and other countries around the world about both the possibility of developing alternatives to failing American leadership and the institutional order it did so much to create.
If we are to survive, unprecedented levels of cooperation are needed, no matter how unlikely. Mark Beeson writes.
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE is failing. Nothing highlights this reality more dramatically than our collective inability to address the degradation of the natural environment adequately. Addressing an unprecedented problem of this magnitude and complexity would be difficult at the best of times. Plainly, these are not the best of times.
Even if climate change could be dealt with in isolation, it would still present a formidable challenge. But when it is part of a polycrisis of intersecting issues with the capacity to reinforce other more immediate, politically sensitive economic, social and strategic problems, then the prospects for effective cooperative action become more remote.
Indeed, the polycrisis makes it increasingly difficult to know quite which of the many threats to international order and individual well-being we ought to focus on. The “we” in this case is usually taken to be the “international community”, which has always been difficult to define, generally more of an aspiration than a reality, frequently more noteworthy for its absence than its effectiveness.
Nation-states, by contrast, can still act, even if we don’t always like what they do. The quintessential case in point now, of course, is the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. Because it is by any measure still the most powerful country in the world, what America does necessarily affects everyone. This is why its actions on climate change – withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, gutting the Environmental Protection Authority, encouraging fossil fuel companies – matter so much.
But nation-states can also be forces for good and not just for those people who live within the borders of countries in the affluent global North. On the contrary, states that oversee a reduction in CO2 emissions are not only helping themselves, but they are also helping their neighbours and setting a useful example of “good international citizenship”.
When global governance is failing and being actively undermined by the Trump regime, it is even more important that other countries try to fill the void, even if this means cooperating with the unlikeliest of partners. Australia and China really could offer a different approach to climate change mitigation while simultaneously defusing tensions in the Indo-Pacific and demonstrating that resistance to the Trump agenda really is possible.
Friends with benefits
In the long term, if there still is one, environmental breakdown remains the most unambiguous threat to our collective future, especially in Australia, the world’s driest continent. And yet Australia’s strategic and political elites remain consumed by the military threat China supposedly poses, rather than the immediate, life-threatening impact of simultaneous droughts, fires and floods.
One of the only positives of the climate crisis is that it presents a common threat that really ought to generate a common cause. Some countries are no doubt more responsible for the problem and more capable of responding effectively, so they really ought to overcome the logic of first-mover disadvantage. No doubt, some other country will take over Australian coal markets, but someone has to demonstrate that change is possible.
China is possibly at even greater risk from the impact of climate catastrophes because of water shortages and, paradoxically enough, rising sea levels that will eventually threaten massive urban centres like Guangzhou and Shanghai. While there is much to admire about the decrease in poverty in the People’s Republic, it has come at an appalling cost to the natural environment. China also has powerful reasons to change its ways.
Unfortunately, Chinese policymakers, like Australia’s and their counterparts everywhere else, are consumed with more traditional threats to national strategic and economic security. This may be understandable enough in a world turned upside down by an unpredictable administration bent on creating a new international order that puts America first and trashes the environment in the process.
But in the absence of accustomed forms of leadership from the U.S. and the international community, for that matter, states must look to do what they can where they can, even if this means thinking the unthinkable and working with notional foes. China and Australia really do have a common cause when it comes to the environment and they could and should act on it.
Yes, this does all sound a bit unlikely. But if we are to survive in anything like a civilised state, unprecedented levels of cooperation would seem to be an inescapable part of limiting the damage our current policies have inflicted on the environment. In this context, Australia and China really could lead the way by simply agreeing to implement coordinated domestic actions designed to set a good example and address a critical global problem.
Leading by example
As two of the biggest consumers and producers of coal, Australia and China could make an outsize contribution to a global problem that would almost certainly win near universal praise, not to say disbelief. In short, China could agree not to build any more coal-fired power stations and Australia could commit to not opening any more new mines and rapidly moving to close down existing ones.
This would be a challenge for both countries, no doubt, but if we are ever going to address the climate challenge seriously, this is the sort of action that will be needed. There are no easy or painless solutions. But voluntarily abandoning the use of one of the most polluting fossil fuels is a potentially feasible and effective gesture that would make a difference. After all, China is a world leader in the development and use of green energy already, so the transition would be difficult but doable.
Australia has a shameful record of exporting carbon emissions and could live without the coal industry, which produces most of them, altogether. Coal extraction doesn’t employ many people and Australia is a rich enough country to compensate those affected by the loss of what are awful jobs in a dirty industry. If Australia can find $368 billion for submarines that will likely never arrive, to counter an entirely notional threat from China, it ought to be able to find a couple of billion to deal with a real one.
No doubt there would be significant pushback from coal industry lobbyists and politicians who think their future depends on being “realistic”, even if it means wrecking the planet. And yet it is possible, even likely, that such actions on the part of Australia and China would be very well received by regional neighbours, who would directly benefit from their actions and who might also be encouraged to consider meaningful cooperative actions themselves.
Given the failure of regional organisations like ASEAN to tackle these issues, normative pressure could be useful.
China might even get a significant boost to its soft power and regional reputation. President Xi Jinping frequently talks about the need to develop an “ecological civilisation”. Moving away from coal and collaborating with an unlikely partner for the collective good would be an opportunity to demonstrate China’s commitment to this idea, and to offer some badly needed environmental leadership.
If that’s not an example of what Xi calls win-win diplomacy, it’s hard to know what is.
A sustainable world order?
In the absence of what U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders calls a “revolution” in American foreign policy, multilateralism may well be in terminal decline. Indeed, it is an open question whether interstate cooperation will survive another four years of Trumpism, especially when the United Nations faces a funding crisis and politics in the European Union is moving in a similarly populist and authoritarian direction.
Cooperation between Australia and China could send a useful message to the Trump regime and other countries around the world about both the possibility of developing alternatives to failing American leadership and the institutional order it did so much to create. American hegemony was frequently self-serving, violent and seemingly indifferent to its impact on the global South, but we may miss it when it’s gone.
If multilateralism is likely to be less effective for the foreseeable future, perhaps minilateralism or even bilateralism can provide an alternative pathway to cooperation. Narrowly conceived notional strategic threats could be usefully “decoupled” from the economic and environmental varieties. In such circumstances, geography may be a better guide to prospective partners than sacrosanct notions about supposed friends and enemies.
Someone somewhere has to show leadership on climate change and restore hope that at least one problem, arguably the biggest one we collectively face, is being taken seriously. There really isn’t any choice other than to contemplate unprecedented actions for an unprecedented problem. Australia and China may not save the world, but they could make things a bit less awful and inject some much-needed creativity and hope into international politics.
Mark Beeson is an adjunct professor at the University of Technology Sydney and Griffith University. He was previously Professor of International Politics at the University of Western Australia.
Google has become something of a fixture in digital infrastructure in the Pacific. In late 2023, Canberra announced a joint project with the US, Google and Vocus, an Australian digital infrastructure firm, to deliver the A$80 million South Pacific Connect initiative. The object: to link Fiji and French Polynesia to Australia and North America, with the hopeful placement of landing stations in other South Pacific countries.
Interest in Google’s relationship with the Australian government was also piqued this month by promised activity on Christmas Island, located 350 kilometres (220 miles) south of Indonesia. The Indian Ocean outpost of exquisite environmental beauty has often been sinister in its secrecy. Unwanted refugees and asylum seekers have periodically found themselves as detainees on the island, victims of Australia’s sadistic approach to undocumented naval arrivals. In August 2016, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre claimed that the Christmas Island Detention Centre had all the brutal features of “a high security military camp where control is based on fear and punishment and the extensive internal use of extrajudicial punishment by force and isolation is evident.”
The goal of the Silicon Valley behemoth lies elsewhere. Occasioned by the signing of a cloud deal with Australia’s Department of Defence earlier in July, the company promises to build what Reuters describes as “a large artificial intelligence data centre” on the island. Advanced talks are being held on leasing land near the island’s airport that will be used for the site. This will include an arrangement with a local mining company to deal with any necessary energy needs for the 7-megawatt facility, which will be powered on diesel and renewable energy.
The scale of the project, let alone its broader significance, is not something the company or government wonks wish others to know about. “We are not constructing ‘a large artificial intelligence data centre’ on Christmas Island,” came the sharp response from a Google spokesperson to Data Center Dynamics. “This is a continuation of our Australia Connect work to deliver subsea cable infrastructure, and we look forward to sharing more soon.” Planning documents further show the company’s vision for an “additional future cable system” that will connect Christmas Island to Asia.
The Australian Department of Infrastructure has confirmed the Google project, which includes plans to link the island to Darwin using the services of US-based contractor SubCom. The bureaucrats were also quick to gloss over what disruptions might arise to the 1,600 residents heavily reliant on diesel to patch up inadequate renewable sources. “The department is in discussions with Google to ensure energy requirements for the proposed project are met without impacting supply to local residents and businesses.” A spokesperson also stated that, “All environmental and other planning requirements will need to be met for the project to succeed.”
The same cautionary note has not been struck by enthusiasts who see the military potential of the island outpost. Former US Navy strategist Bryan Clark, fresh from being involved in a tabletop war game involving personnel from the US, Japanese and Australian militaries, was keen to inflate the importance of the data centre. That importance, he stresses, lies in the field of conflict. “The data centre is partly to allow you to do the kinds of AI-enabled command and control that you need to do in the future, especially if you rely on uncrewed systems for surveillance missions and targeting missions and even engagements.”
He considers the use of subsea cables more reliable in frustrating any mischief that might arise from China (who else?), notably in attempts to jam Starlink or any satellite communications. Such cables also provided more bandwidth for communication. “If you’ve got a data centre on Christmas, you can do a lot of that through cloud infrastructure.” Again, American power uses Australian territory as a conduit to maintain the imperium.
Google’s ties with the military tendrils of several nations continues the ongoing penetration of Big Tech companies into the industrial complex. The circle between military Research and Development pioneered by government agencies and their partnering with private contractors is complete. Indeed, digital-military-industrial complexes are now battling in steady rivalry (the two most prominent being China and the United States). “This is contributing to the blurring of state-corporation boundaries even more than what was observed during the second half of the twentieth century with the rise of transnational corporations,” write Andrea Coveri, Claudia Cozza and Dario Guarsacio in Intereconomics.
This blurring has served to diminish company accountability and government independence, however well-dressed the issue of planning approvals is. Christmas Island residents will be left to the mercies of unimaginative officials easily seduced by the promise of investment and returns. “There is support for it,” says a convinced Steve Pereira, Christmas Island Shire President, “providing this data centre actually does put back into the community with infrastructure, employment and adding economic value to the island.” As for the military dimension? “We are a strategic asset for defence.” What a comfort for the local citizenry.
As one of the most advanced solar nations in the world, Australia is well placed to experiment with giving people free power – and if it succeeds, other countries may look to copy its approach
Australians received a welcome surprise this week with the news that every household will soon receive 3 hours of free electricity every day, as part of a world-first initiative to share the benefits of solar power. If successful, it could be a model for other to follow in a future that will increasingly be powered by sunshine.
The Australian electricity grid is zinging with excess capacity during the day thanks to solar power, but it is strained at night when people return from work and use most of their appliances. To address this, the Australian government says its “Solar Sharer” scheme will be rolled out from July 2026 in three states – New South Wales, South Australia and the south-east corner of Queensland – with the rest of the country joining in 2027…………………..(Subscribers only)..…………………. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2503532-australia-is-getting-free-electricity-will-other-countries-follow/
Western Australia’s South West Interconnected System – the world’s biggest isolated grid – has reached a remarkable new record high of 89 per cent renewables, led by rooftop solar.
The new peak – 88.97 per cent to be precise – was reached at 11am on Monday, beating the previous record of 87.29 per cent set just a day earlier, and the previous peak of 85.36 per cent set on October 23. “Another milestone for WA’s clean energy future,” Sanderson wrote. “It’s another strong sign of the transformation underway in our energy system as we become a renewable energy powerhouse.”
The Australian Energy Market Operator says the record share was led by rooftop solar, which accounted for 64 per cent of generation at the time. Large scale wind accounted for just over 16 per cent, with the rest from large scale solar, solar battery hybrids, biomass and battery storage.
Cheaper, greener power is on the way. As long as anti-net zero populists don’t throttle it in the cradle. Not that long ago, Mark Purcell, a retired rear admiral in the Australian navy, was paying about A$250 a month for electricity in his roomy family home on the Queensland coast.
Today, he says he makes as much as A$300 a month, or nearly $200, from the electricity he makes, stores and sells with his solar panels and batteries. “This is the future,” he told me. “This is what the energy transition could look like for a lot of folks.” Purcell is one of the 58,000-plus customers of Amber Electric, an eight-year-old Melbourne business that gives householders access to real-time wholesale power prices so they can use power when it’s cheap and sell what is stored in their batteries when it’s expensive.
The company is adding 5,000 customers a month, putting it among a new generation of fast-growing energy tech start-ups aiming to make electricity cheaper and greener, and not just in Australia. Amber’s dynamic pricing technology is due to launch soon in the UK, where the company has done licensing deals with the energy suppliers Ecotricity and E.On.
Norway’s Tibber offers similar services to the 1mn customers it has gained since launching in 2016 and expanding to Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. In Germany, the market share of companies including Tibber, Octopus Energy and Rabot Charge has grown from 0.1 per cent in 2023 to 2.4 per cent in 2025, says the Kreutzer Consulting group. Between them they have more than 1mn customers, 77 per cent of whom are particularly or very happy with their provider, far more than the industry-wide figure of 57 per cent.
Remember those figures the next time you hear a rightwing populist condemn allegedly unaffordable net zero policies. In fact, this new class of energy tech entrepreneurs is showing how electricity can become more affordable precisely because of the renewables, batteries and electric cars that net zero efforts drive.
It is no accident Amber Electric began in Australia, long a world leader in rooftop solar systems that sit atop more than 4mn of its homes and small businesses. Its population of 28mn is now undergoing a home battery boom, following the July launch of a A$2.3bn government subsidy scheme. Industry estimates show rooftop solar can save households up to A$1,500 a year on energy bills, a figure that nearly doubles if you add a battery, and rises further with dynamic pricing. Is there a catch?
Right now, the upfront costs of green tech can be considerable. Queensland’s Purcell is a superuser who has spent tens of thousands of dollars on solar panels, batteries and a home energy management system that makes everything from his pool heater to his air conditioners price-responsive. His family also has two Teslas with even bigger batteries.
This is clearly unaffordable for many, but maybe not for long. Big home hardware retailers have begun to launch financing plans that let people pay monthly fees of less than A$150 for solar and battery packages rather than a big initial outlay.
The National Press Club of Australia lists 81 corporate sponsors on its website.
Twenty-one of them (listed below) are either part of the global arms industry or actively working on its behalf.
Ten are multinational weapons manufacturers or military services corporations. They include the world’s two biggest weapons makers, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon (RTX); British giant BAE Systems; France’s largest weapons-maker, Thales; and US weapons corporation Leidos – all five are in the global top 20. BAE Systems, which is the largest contractor to the Department of Defence, received $2 billion from Australian taxpayers last year.
In 2023, these five corporations alone were responsible for almost a quarter – 23.8 per cent (US$150.4 billion (A$231.5 billion)) – of total weapons sales (US$632 billion (A$973 billion)) made by the world’s top 100 weapons companies that year.
Last year, UN experts named Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, RTX (Raytheon) and eight other multinationals in a statement, warning them that they risked being found in violation of international law for their continued supply of weapons, parts, components and ammunition to Israeli forces. The experts called on the corporations to immediately end weapons transfers to Israel. None has done so.
Another of the Club’s sponsors – Thales – is being investigated by four countries for widespread criminal activity in three separate corruption probes. In a fourth, long-running corruption case in South Africa, the country’s former president, Jacob Zuma, is now in court, alongside Thales, being tried on 16 charges of racketeering, fraud, corruption and money laundering in connection with arms deals his government did with Thales.
Global expert Andrew Feinstein has documented his extensive research into the arms industry. He told Undue Influence that wherever the arms trade operates, it “increases corruption and undermines democracy, good governance, transparency, and the rule of law, while, ironically, making us less safe”.
Undue Influence asked the Press Club’s CEO, Maurice Reilly, what written policies or guidelines were in place that addressed the suitability and selection of corporations proposing to become Press Club sponsors.
Mr Reilly responded: “The board are informed monthly about…proposals and have the right to refuse any application.”
Wherever the arms trade operates it “increases corruption and undermines democracy, good governance, transparency, and the rule of law, while, ironically, making us less safe”. – Andrew Feinstein, author of Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade
National Press Club board
The National Press Club, established by journalists in 1963, is an iconic Australian institution. It is best known for its weekly luncheon addresses, televised on the ABC, covering issues of national importance, after which the speaker is questioned by journalists.
The Club’s board has 10 directors led by Tom Connell, political host and reporter at Sky News, who was elected president in February following the resignation of the ABC’s Laura Tingle.
The other board members are: vice president Misha Schubert (CEO, Super Members Council of Australia; formerly with The Age and The Australian); treasurer Greg Jennett (ABC); Steve Lewis (senior adviser, SEC Newgate; formerly with NewsCorp and the Financial Review); Jane Norman (ABC); Anna Henderson (SBS); Julie Hare (Financial Review); Andrew Probyn (Nine Network); Gemma Daley (Media & Government Affairs, Ai Group); and Corrie McLeod, the sole representative from an independent media outlet – InnovationAus.
At least two board members have jobs that involve lobbying.
Long-term board member Steve Lewis works as a senior adviser for lobbying firm SEC Newgate, which itself is a Press Club sponsor and also has as clients the Press Club’s two largest sponsors: Westpac and Telstra. SEC Newgate has previously acted for several Press Club sponsors, including Serco (one of the arms industry multinationals listed below), BHP, Macquarie Bank, Tattarang, and Spirits & Cocktails Australia Inc.
Gemma Daley joined the board a year ago, having started with Ai Group as its head of media and government affairs four months earlier. Ms Daley had worked for Nationals’ leader David Littleproud, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former treasurer Joe Hockey and, before that, for media outlets the Financial Review and Bloomberg. Ai Group has a significant defence focus and promotes itself as “the peak national representative body for the Australian defence industry”. The group has established a Defence Council and in 2017 appointed a former assistant secretary of the Defence Department, Kate Louis, to lead it. The co-chairs of its Defence Council are senior arms industry executives. One of them, Paul Chase, is CEO of Leidos Australia, a Press Club sponsor.
Undue Influence asked Ms Daley for comment on several aspects related to her position on the board, including whether she has had to declare any conflicts of interest to date. She responded: “Thanks for the inquiry. I have forwarded this through to Maurice Reilly. Have a good day.”
Given the potential for conflicts of interest to arise, as happens on any board, Undue Influence had already asked the Press Club CEO what written policies or guidelines existed to ensure the appropriate management of conflicts of interest by board members and staff.
Mr Reilly responded:
The Club has a directors’ conflict register which is updated when required. Each meeting, board members and management are asked if they have conflicts of interest with the meeting agenda. We have a standard corporate practice that where a director has a conflict on an agenda item they excuse themselves from the meeting and take no [part] in any discussion or any decision.
Undue Influence is neither alleging nor implying inappropriate or illegal behaviour by anyone named in this article. Our objective, as always, is to shine a light on, and scrutinise, the weapons industry’s opaque engagement in public life in Australia.
While Mr Reilly declined to disclose the Club’s sponsorship arrangements with Westpac and Telstra, citing “commercial in confidence” reasons, The Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier this year that Westpac paid $3 million in 2015 to replace NAB as the Press Club’s principal sponsor.
The SMH article, “Westpac centre stage at post-budget bash”, on Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ National Press Club address in the Great Hall of Parliament House in late March, added:
[Westpac] … gets more than its money’s worth in terms of access. New-ish chief executive Anthony Miller got the most coveted seat in the house, between Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese… Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles were also on the front tables.
Westpac occupied prime real estate in the Great Hall, with guests on its tables including Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet boss Glyn Davis, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, Housing Minister Clare O’Neil and Labor national secretary and campaign mastermind Paul Erickson…
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland was on the Telstra table.
Mr Reilly told Undue Influence that all the other corporate sponsors pay $25,000 per year, with a few paying extra as partners in the Club’s journalism awards.
The 21 arms industry and related sponsors therefore contribute an annual $525,000 to the Press Club’s coffers. This is 23% of the $2.26 million revenue it earns from “membership, sponsorship and broadcasting”, the Club’s largest revenue line, as shown in its 2024 financial statement.
“The National Press Club of Australia proudly partners with organisations that share our commitment to quality, independent journalism,” says the Club’s website.
“Aligning your brand with the National Press Club is an opportunity for unparalleled engagement in the Australian political debate and announces that your organisation is part of the business culture in Canberra.”
In response to Undue Influence’s questions about the Club’s cancellation of a planned address by the internationally acclaimed journalist Chris Hedges (covered below), Mr Reilly stated that: “For the avoidance of doubt [sponsors] do not receive any rights to speak at the club [nor are they] able to influence decisions on speakers.”
Sponsors may not be granted a right to speak, but they are sometimes invited to speak, with their status as sponsors not always disclosed to audiences.
When the Club’s second largest sponsor, Telstra, spoke on 10 September, both Club president Tom Connell and Telstra CEO Vicki Brady noted the corporation’s longstanding sponsorship.
Sponsors may not be granted a right to speak, but they are sometimes invited to speak, with their status as sponsors not always disclosed to audiences.
When the Club’s second largest sponsor, Telstra, spoke on 10 September, both Club president Tom Connell and Telstra CEO Vicki Brady noted the corporation’s longstanding sponsorship.
Compare this with two addresses given by $25,000 corporate sponsors – Kurt Campbell (former US deputy secretary of state, now co-founder and chair of The Asia Group) who gave an address on 7 September; and Mike Johnson, CEO of Australian Industry and Defence Network (AIDN), who gave an address on 15 October. Neither the Press Club nor the speakers disclosed the companies’ sponsorship of the Press Club.
While both speakers are considered experts in their field, the sponsorships should have been disclosed as a matter of public accountability.
“Priority seating and brand positioning”
On its website, the Club also promotes additional benefits of corporate sponsorship, including, “Brand association with inclusion on our prestigious ‘Corporate Partners’ board and recognition on the National Press Club of Australia website”.
The Club also promises corporate sponsors that they will receive “priority seating and brand positioning” at its weekly luncheon addresses, as the following examples show. (As principal sponsor, the logo of Westpac appears on every table and on the podium.)
The local subsidiary of British giant BAE Systems has benefited handsomely from its modest $25,000 annual sponsorship. It had the best table – behind the microphone from which journalists asked questions – at then defence minister Peter Dutton’s address in November 2021. The BAE logo appeared on the national public broadcaster – which has strict rules against advertising – eight times during the half-hour question period following Mr Dutton’s address, giving BAE Systems extended ‘brand positioning’ with its target market: senior politicians, defence public servants and military officers.
On 28 November 2023, Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy spoke about AUKUS. The logos of Press Club sponsors DXC Technology and Deloitte were also well-situated for the camera during question time. Both companies are significant contractors to the Defence Department. Deloitte also works for the weapons industry, including BAE Systems.
Cancelling Chris Hedges
The Press Club recently drew significant attention to itself after it cancelled a planned address by the Pulitzer-prize-winning American journalist, and former long-term war correspondent, Chris Hedges. Mr Hedges reported for The New York Times for 15 years, from 1990-2005, including long stints as its bureau chief in the Middle East and in the Balkans. He was to have appeared at the Press Club on 20 October.
However, in late September, Press Club CEO Maurice Reilly cancelled Mr Hedges’ appearance. This occurred two weeks after the Club was sent details of what Mr Hedges proposed to cover, including a link to an article he had entitled The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists. In that article, Mr Hedges wrote:
Israel has murdered 245 journalists in Gaza by one count and more than 273 by another… No war I covered comes close to these numbers of dead. Since Oct 7 [2023], Israel has killed more journalists “than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined”.
Mr Hedges also intended to cover what he has described as the “barrage of Israeli lies amplified and given credibility by the Western press”, examples of which he provides in the above article.
Following a scathing post from Mr Hedges about the Press Club’s cancellation of his address, and significant public disquiet, the Press Club issued a statement denying it had come under external pressure to cancel his address. Inexplicably, the Press Club also denied it had confirmed the Hedges address. This claim was easily checked and soon reported to be false. Undue Influence has seen the emails showing that the Press Club had confirmed the address.
National Press Club funded by companies profiting from genocide
In July, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, issued a report explaining how the corporate sector had become complicit with the State of Israel in conducting the genocide.
Her report also noted that arms-making multinationals depend on legal, auditing and consulting firms to facilitate export and import transactions to supply Israel with weapons.
Numerous members of the public posted their concerns on the Press Club’s Facebook page. Here are three examples: [on original]
Four of the world’s largest accounting, audit and consulting firms – all of which have arms industry corporations as clients – are sponsors of the Press Club: KPMG, Accenture, Deloitte and EY. Until recently, PwC counted among them.
EY (Ernst & Young) has been Lockheed Martin’s auditor since 1994. EY is also one of two auditors used by Thales, and has been for 22 years. Deloitte has been BAE Systems’ auditor since 2018. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) – a Press Club sponsor until 2024 – has been Raytheon’s auditor since 1947.
Lockheed Martin’s supply to Israel of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets and C-130 Hercules transport planes, and their parts and components, along with Hellfire missiles and other munitions, has directly facilitated Israel’s genocide.
Raytheon’s (RTX) supply of guided missiles, bombs, and other advanced weaponry and defence systems, like the Iron Dome interceptors, also directly supports Israel military capability.
In England, BAE Systems builds the rear fuselage of every F-35, with the horizontal and vertical tails and other crucial components manufactured in its UK and Australian facilities. It also supplies the Israeli military with munitions, missile launching kits and armoured vehicles, while BAE technologies are integrated into Israel’s drones and warships.
Thales supplies Israel’s military with vital components, including drone transponders. Australian Zomi Frankcom and her World Central Kitchen colleagues were murdered by an Israeli Hermes drone, which contain Thales’ transponders. Yet, echoing Australia, France claims its military exports to Israel are non-lethal.
National Press Club sponsors from military-industrial complex
# Rankings compiled by SIPRI at December 2023 (published December 2024)
^ NOTE ON US COMPANIES: The Defence Department procures weapons/military goods directly from Lockheed Martin, RTX (Raytheon) and other US corporations via the US Government’s Foreign Military Sales program. The value of FMS contracts is not included in the table.
Note on the use of the word ‘genocide’
Three independent experts appointed by the UN’s Human Rights Commission – the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel – issued a report in September that concluded Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. One of the Commissioners – Chris Sidoti – speaking at the Press Club recently, said the Commission’s report will remain the most authoritative statement on this issue until the world’s highest authority, the International Court of Justice, makes its ruling.
the greatest threat to Australia’s security is subservience to U.S. militarism.
Politics for the people, 30 Oct 25
Introduction: A Nation Out of Balance
The latest Ipsos Issues Monitor shows that cost of living, housing, crime, and healthcare matter most to Australians. Yet fewer than 8 per cent name defence as a concern. Despite this, defence spending in Australia now stands at about A$59 billion for 2025-26, a record amount.
While households struggle with rent hikes, soaring groceries, and lengthy hospital waits, government priorities tell a different story. If our leaders can mobilise billions for submarines and foreign military bases, why not for homes, hospitals, and community safety?
The government’s growing defence spending shows how far priorities have shifted from citizens’ needs.
The Problem: Spending That Ignores Public Needs
1. Australians Struggle While Defence Budgets Soar
According to SBS’s “If the Budget Were $100”, defence receives $6.60, health $15.90, and welfare $37.00. The government insists on “fiscal responsibility” when it comes to families, but not when signing billion-dollar arms contracts.
This surge in defence spending contrasts sharply with the lack of targeted cost-of-living support.
The mismatch is stark: Australians cite the cost of living in Australia as their top issue, yet policies focus on militarisation. A nation cannot claim security when its citizens cannot afford food, rent, or electricity.
The 2025-26 Budget allocates A$9.3 billion to social housing and homelessness, barely a sixth of defence spending. Hospitals receive about A$33.9 billion in Commonwealth funding, far short of what’s needed to end long emergency queues and staff shortages.
Using public money productively, Australia could expand housing supply and modernise hospitals without “finding” tax revenue. As a sovereign currency issuer, the Commonwealth can fund whatever domestic resources are available.
Workers juggle multiple jobs. Families spend over 30 per cent of their income on rent. Hospitals cancel surgeries due to staff burnout. Meanwhile, record military budgets create jobs, but not the kind that house or heal people.
This deepens inequality and fuels public frustration. Cost of living in Australia headlines dominate the news, yet solutions are still tokenistic while weapons programs thrive.
4. Who Benefits from the Defence Boom – and Who Are We Really Defending Against?
Arms corporations and political donors benefit most. AUKUS contracts flow to foreign firms. U.S. forces rotate through Darwin, and Pine Gap stays a key U.S. intelligence hub.
So, who is Australia defending against? Officially, the government cites a “deteriorating Indo-Pacific environment.” Australia faces no imminent invasion. The real risk lies in our alliance obligations. Much of this defence spending directly supports U.S. strategic goals, not Australian security.
When Washington pursues containment of China, Australia follows, even if it damages trade and peace. This dependence undermines sovereignty and raises the uncomfortable truth: the greatest threat to Australia’s security is subservience to U.S. militarism.
Economic insecurity, environmental decline, and eroded independence are the dangers we should fear. As a nation with dollar sovereignty, Australia can defend its people through prosperity, not through weapons for U.S. wars.
The Solution: What Must Be Done
5. Use Dollar Sovereignty for People, Not War
Australia issues its own currency. It cannot “run out” of money but can run out of political will. By embracing Modern Monetary Theory principles, the government could fund full employment, universal healthcare, and green infrastructure before military expansion.
6. Re-prioritise the Budget for National Wellbeing
Australia can realign its priorities by:
Expanding public housing nationwide.
Investing heavily in healthcare staffing and preventive care.
Addressing crime through community programs, not incarceration.
Keeping defence strictly for territorial protection, not for U.S. wars.
Redirecting even 10 per cent of Australia’s defence spending toward housing and health would transform lives and strengthen genuine security.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does Australia spend so much on defence? Defence growth is politically tied to the U.S. alliance and AUKUS, not citizen demand.
Who are we really defending against? Australia’s rising defence spending is driven more by alliance politics than genuine threats. No nation threatens Australia. The real danger is being drawn into conflicts created by foreign powers.
Can public money fund housing and health without cuts elsewhere? Yes, as the currency issuer, Australia can fund both. The constraint is resources, not revenue.
What would happen if 10 per cent of defence spending were redirected? Billions would build thousands of homes, hire nurses and teachers, and ease cost-of-living pressure.
In an attempt to seize a share of a market currently dominated by China, Albanese has willingly placed Australia’s rare earths and critical minerals at the disposal of US strategic interests. The framework document focusing on mining and processing of such minerals is drafted with the hollow language of counterfeit equality.
the next annexation of Australian control over its own affairs by the US
The October 20 performance saw few transgressions and many feats of compliance. As a guest in the White House, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was in no mood to be combative, and US President Donald Trump was accommodating. There was, however, an odd nervous glanceshot at the host at various points.
The latest turn of events from the perspective of those believing in Australian sovereignty, pitifully withered as it is, remains dark. In an attempt to seize a share of a market currently dominated by China, Albanese has willingly placed Australia’s rare earths and critical minerals at the disposal of US strategic interests. The framework document focusing on mining and processing of such minerals is drafted with the hollow language of counterfeit equality. The objective “is to assist both countries in achieving resilience and security of minerals and rare earths supply chains, including mining, separation and processing.” The necessity of securing such supply is explicitly noted for reasons of war or, as the document notes, “necessary to support manufacturing of defense and advanced technologies” for both countries.
The US and Australia will draw on the money bags of the private sector to supplement government initiatives (guarantees, loans, equity and so forth), an incentive that will cause much salivating joy in the mining industry. Within 6 months “measures to provide at least $1 billion in financing to projects located in each of the United States and Australia expected to generate end product for delivery to buyers in the United States and Australia.”
The inequality of the agreement does not bother such analysts as Bryce Wakefield, Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He mysteriously thinks that Albanese did not “succumb to the routine sycophancy we’ve come to expect from other leaders”, something of a “win”. With the skill of a cabalist, he identified the benefits in the critical minerals framework which he thinks will be “the backbone for joint investment in at least six Australian projects.” The agreement would “counter China’s dominance over rare earths and supply chains.”
Much of what was agreed between Trump and Albanese was barely covered by the sleepwalking press corps, despite the details of a White House factsheet. There were more extorting deals extracted from Canberra, with agreements to purchase US$1.2 billion in Anduril unmanned underwater vehicles and US$2.6 billion worth of Apache helicopters. Of particular significance was the agreement to push Australia’s superannuation funds to increase investments in the US to US$1.44 trillion by 2035, which would increase the pool by US$1 trillion. “This unprecedented investment will create tens of thousands of new, high paying jobs for America.
Back in Australia, attention was focused on other things. The mock affair known as the opposition party tried to make something of the personal ribbing given by Trump to Australia’s ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd. Small minds are distracted by small matters, and instead of taking issue with the appalling cost of AUKUS with its chimerical submarines, or the voluntary relinquishment of various sectors of the Australian economy to US control, Sussan Ley of the Liberal Party was adamant that Rudd be sacked. This was occasioned by an encounter where Trump had turned to the Australian PM to ask if “an ambassador” had said anything “bad about me”. Trump’s follow up remarks: “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.” The finger was duly pointed at Rudd by Albanese. “You said bad?” inquired Trump. Rudd, never one to manage the brief response, spoke of being critical of the president in his pre-ambassadorial phase but that was all in the past. “I don’t like you either,” shot Trump in reply. “And I probably never will.”
This was enough to exercise Ley, who claimed to be “surprised that the president didn’t know who the Australian ambassador was.” This showed her thin sheet grasp of White House realities. Freedom Land’s previous presidents have struggled with names, geography and memory, the list starting with such luminaries as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Not knowing the name of an ambassador from an imperial outpost is hardly a shock.
The Australian papers and broadcasters, however, drooled and saw seismic history in the presence of casual utterance. Sky News host Sharri Markson was reliably idiotic: “The big news of course is President Trump’s meeting with Albanese today and the major news story to come out of it is Trump putting Rudd firmly in his place.” Often sensible in her assessments, the political columnist Annabel Crabb showed she had lost her mind, imbibing the Trump jungle juice and relaying it to her unfortunate readers. “From his humble early days as a child reading Hansard in the regional Sunshine State pocket of Eumundi, Kevin Rudd has been preparing for this martyrdom.”
Having been politically martyred by the Labor Party at the hands of his own deputy Julia Gillard in June 2010, who challenged him for being a mentally unstable, micromanaging misfit driving down poll ratings, this was amateurish. But a wretchedly bad story should not be meddled with. At the very least, Crabb blandly offered a smidgen of humour, suggesting that Albanese, having gone into the meeting “with the perennially open chequebook for American submarines, plus an option over our continent’s considerable rare-earths reserves” was bound to come with some human sacrifice hovering “in the ether.”
In this grand abdication of responsibility by the press and bought think tankers, little in terms of detail was discussed about the next annexation of Australian control over its own affairs by the US. It was all babble about the views of Trump and whether, in the words of Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Rudd “did an extremely good job, not only in getting the meeting, but doing the work on the critical minerals deal and AUKUS.” For the experts moored in antipodean isolation, Rudd had either been bad by being disliked for past remarks on the US chief magistrate, or good in being a representative of servile facilitation. To give him his due, Wakefield was correct to note how commentators in Australia “continue to personalise the alliance” equating it to “an episode of The Apprentice.”
Joy and delight! Australia is to have a booming rare earths industry, mining and PROCESSING – jobs jobs jobs! Money money money!. And we can stick it up to China, confronting its near monopoly on the industry!
The reality is something very different.
Apart from the enormous and time-consuming problems involved in establishing this industry, and in competing economically with China, there’s that other unmentionable problem – RADIOACTIVE WASTES.
Western Australia’s Lynas Rare Earths company knows all about this. They’ve had no end of trouble with their rare earths processing and its radioactive wastes. They were smart enough, had the foresight, to set up processing in another country. Lynas moved its rare earths processing to Malaysia because of Malaysia’s less stringent laws. But what they didn’t reckon with, was Malaysia’ ‘s history, and awareness of radioactive waste danger. As Lynas’ plant started operations in 2012 – in Kuala Lumpur: 10,000 marched for 13 days, rally against Lynas rare earths processing plant. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad imposed stringent conditions on Lynas’ operations.
Malaysians remember the environmental and health disaster of Bukit Merah; where, early this century, rare earth processing left a toxic wasteland.
A longer explanation is provided in this documentary –
It is very hard to get information on Lynas’ processing operations in Malaysia. I remember that a few years ago, there was a controversy, and an Australian protest movement against Lynas’ plan to dump these wastes into an old growth forest in Malaysia. I can now find no record of this. And indeed, many news items of the controversies of Lynas’ Malaysia operations have now vanished from the internet.
If Malaysia’s history of radioactive pollution from processing of rare earths is scandalous, – what about China’s history?
I know that in recent years, China has cleaned up its act on industrial pollution. But its history is shocking – with a legacy of “cancer villages” –
Whole villages between the city of Baotou and the Yellow River in Inner Mongolia have been evacuated and resettled to apartment towers elsewhere after reports of high cancer rates and other health problems associated with the numerous rare earth refineries there. – China’s legacy of radioactive pollution from rare earths processing.
Well, is everybody now pretending that that to introduce rare earths processing in Australia is a good thing, no problem, it’s progress – blah blah?
This new development comes just as Australia’s government introduces its new reforms to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act – including the aim to simplify and speed up approvals for development. We wait to see what that entails – could it be the weakening of environmental standards?
Coincidentally, Mr Trump’s USA is changing the standards on radiation safety. An Executive Order from the White House states:
“In particular, the NRC shall reconsider reliance on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure and the “as low as reasonably achievable” standard, which is predicated on LNT. Those models are flawed”, – ORDERING THE REFORM OF THE NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION.
This will likely result in a significant weakening of the current standards at a time when the evidence strongly suggests that they are in need of further tightening.
The environmental movement fights on – but with a wave of enthusiasm for renewable energy development. A recent article discussed recycling of rare earths from our many digital devices. That’s an idea that seems to be ahead of its time, especially given the extreme difficulty of retrieving those elements from mobile phones, laptops etc.fficulty of retrieving those elements from mobile phones, laptops etc.
Well, it’s the (?) futuristic idea of the circular economy. It fits in with those unfashionable concepts of energy efficiency, energy conservation. We used to hear about them, in the early days of action on climate change.
These concepts are anathema to our billionaire leaders, as we are all drawn into the mindless rollercoaster of ever more artificial intelligence, with its ever more energy use.
Australia, federally and in each State has strong restrictions on radioactive processes. The nuclear lobby has tried for decades to weaken or overthrow those restrictions, and to introduce radioactive waste dumping in a big way.
We’ll be pitched the story that the radioactive wastes from rare earths processing are “minor” “low key” – acceptable. Let’s not worry – after all, the whole rare earths thing is so complex, and so far into the future.
But Albanese so readily agreed with Trump, that Australia can have both the mining and the processing of rare earths – it opens the door up to radioactive waste dumping,
Meanwhile, the issue is also relevant to Australia’s agricultural industry, particularly in Victoria. Victoria being blessed with rich agricultural land, regions like the Wimmera and Gippsland could be threatened by these new industries. The nuclear lobby, too, has long salivated on the possibility of a thorium industry there, too
It’s a sad thing – that history is forgotten, in these days of super-fast “progress’ into the Age of AI. We are being led by the nose by those technobillionaires surrounding Donald Trump – to believe that we don’t need to do much working, or thinking – as we race into this golden age, and embrace this new radioactively-polluting industry.
Albanese may come to regret his meeting with Trump, the deal and the endorsement by Trump. He may have underestimated the risk in kissing the ring of the Confidence Man.
but now he was a man of compromise, the politician who has exchanged principles for politics.
Australia should have put AUKUS on hold to let the people decide whether it should proceed. After all, we will pay for AUKUS, and we pay the salaries of the representatives of the people
Australia is paying for America’s submarines, striking a deal with a President we still have to fact-check. Dr Kim Sawyerreports.
HE IS THE MASTER showman. He knows where to position the actors, where to position the cameras, where to position the lights. He knows how to spray on his make-up and the make-up of others. Every press conference, every Cabinet meeting is the reality show of the showman.
“Young Donald Trump had been an athlete as a teenager, and he aspired to a career in Hollywood. He ultimately fulfilled his father’s desire for a successor in the family business in real estate. But what the son really always wanted was to be a star.”
The reality show The Apprentice made him a star. The Apprentice was his apprenticeship. Trump knows who is willing to be conned; he knows their price or how to determine their price. He thinks he knows the price of everything and everyone, but really knows the value of nothing. He is the confidence man.
Trump is the confidence man of fiction best understood by reading Ibsen’s Master Builder or by viewing the 1958 episode‘The End of the World’ of the CBS series Trackdown that featured a character who wanted to build a wall, and who had all the confidence of the confidence man. Sound familiar? The fictitious character was called Trump. He was finally exposed as a fraud. The fictitious Trump was finally arrested.
The meeting of Trump and Albanese was his latest reality show, the Master and the Apprentice. The Master got what we wanted. He got the deference he craved. He got the deal he wanted. The Apprentice got what he wanted. He got the endorsement of power of the Confidence Man.
The art of the deal.
Perforce, the deal is a con. Turnbull and Keating understand. Morrison and Albanese do not. We should never have agreed to AUKUS. It’s not just the cost of $368 billion over 30 years that includes $123bn as a contingency for the risk of a cost blowout. The risks are everywhere.
We have already paid more than $3 billion, the premium for a very uncertain insurance policy. As Turnbull has noted, the submarines are currently being produced at a rate of 1.1 per year.
“They need to get to two by 2028 to be able to meet their own requirements, and to 2.33 to meet their own, plus Australia’s. And they have not been able to lift production rates despite expenditure of over $10 billion over the last six or seven years. So, they’ve got a real problem.”
We’ve got a bigger problem.
Governments are like portfolio managers. The government needs to understand diversification, that you do not put all your eggs in a basket of submarines. The defence budget is so tied up in submarines, we don’t have room to invest in emerging defence technologies, in patrol boats, frigates or the amphibious landing craft we need for immediate problems like evacuations. The budget is being skewed towards submarines that will not be supplied until the early 2030s, away from writing off the $70 billion of student debt that three million young Australians face. The cost of the deal.
We have become so inured to the lies of the conman, we have to fact-check everything he says. When Trump said he had been to Australia, I thought it was another porky, but no, he had visited Australia, not as the President but as a spruiker to the National Achievement Congress in 2011. The conman spruiked the message of the grifter as to how to get everyone else to pay his debts. It wasn’t Trump’s first visit to the antipodes. In August 1993, Trump visited Auckland as part of a consortium bidding for a casino operator’s licence. At the time, Trump was mired in debt. The bid was unsuccessful.
Truth and falsity are transactional for Trump. He has always used the mantra. “If you say something often enough, it becomes true.” Interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2011, Trump criticised Obama’s job plan as doomed and unlikely to have any impact. At the time, the unemployment rate was nine per cent, at the end of Obama’s term, unemployment was 4.9 per cent. Trump was always anti-Obama. Trump was always false.
The other leading actor in the show that we watched last Monday was our own Prime Minister. Albanese had a lot to thank Trump for; perhaps that’s why he had wanted so much to meet him. The polls in February 2025 had the coalition leading 51–49, and then the Trump-Dutton factor came into play. Dutton was Albo’s trump card. No wonder he wanted the selfie with Trump. He invited Trump to visit, perhaps to spruik why Australia is paying for America’s submarines.
Albanese wore a lot of make-up to the meeting. The real Albo shared his confidences in private, perhaps with the other actor who sat opposite Trump, the Ambassador who Trump did not like. Albanese may come to regret his meeting with Trump, the deal and the endorsement by Trump. He may have underestimated the risk in kissing the ring of the Confidence Man.
The risk was everywhere to be seen. Two days before, 7 million joined the No Kings’ protests. Thirty years ago, when Albo was a man of principle, he may have joined those same protests, but now he was a man of compromise, the politician who has exchanged principles for politics.
On the day that Albo met Trump in the Whitehouse, the East Room was being demolished. In 1984, on a tour of the Whitehouse, we were asked to stand still, as the President appeared. Reagan had just left the East Room, where he had given a speech, where Carter, Obama, and FDR gave speeches. The East Room was built by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902.
Apparently, there was no heritage overlay, at least for Trump. Betty Ford reflected on its significance. “If the West Wing is the mind of the nation, then the East Wing is the heart.” Confirmation that Trump is heartless.
Australia should have put AUKUS on hold to let the people decide whether it should proceed. After all, we will pay for AUKUS, and we pay the salaries of the representatives of the people. However, most will never get to see the submarines, not like the HECS debt on their tax bill. Australia has been too subservient, too sycophantic, too risk-averse in our dealings with Trump. There is a cost to being risk-averse just as there is a cost to being a risk-taker.
The Democrats paid the price for not dealing with Trump as they should have dealt with him. Dealing with Trump is like dealing with the devil; you must deal on your terms, not his terms. He is a convicted felon, a fraudster, a showman, the confidence man who became President.
The No Kings protests showed the divergence between the people and the institutions, between those who will not defer to Trump and those who will defer to him; between right and wrong. History may rewrite some of the story, but not the story of the Master and the Apprentice.
“Submarines in our time!” He didn’t say it, but Anthony Albanese might as well have, as he returned triumphantly from his meeting with Donald Trump this week.
AUKUS is indeed a fantastic deal. For the Americans, at least.
“Trump is not going to cancel AUKUS”, a well-connected industry source told MWM two weeks ago.
“AUKUS is so good for US industry – Australia is spending billions on their shipyards, and then there’s the purchase of the submarines themselves. General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries will see tens of billions of Australian dollars flow their way, as will Lockheed Martin and Raytheon”, said the source.
“And assuming things go well, the shipyard mess in the UK will see us going from three US Virginia-class subs to five, and then likely eight. Australia will abandon the UK AUKUS-designed subs, and even more Australian money will flow into the bank accounts of US companies.”
‘They’ll be lobbying the White House to ensure this cash keeps on flowing.’
And clearly, the lobbying has worked so far. Trump has endorsed AUKUS. It’s the sort of deal he likes.
As former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull stated in the lead-up to the meeting, it wasn’t going to be in Trump’s interest to withdraw, “The AUKUS deal is a fantastic deal for the Americans, a terrible deal for Australia, so there is no way Donald Trump will walk away from it because what does he get?” he said.
Turnbull was right. He was also right in his analysis after the meeting, “warm words don’t build submarines”.
Submarine woes
The United States is not building enough Virginia-class subs. They’re not building enough for their own Navy, let alone ours. That is the determining fact sitting in the middle of the AUKUS slipway.
For more than a decade, the US Government has been trying to build two Virginia subs per year. But they haven’t been able to move the shipbuilding dial. They’re currently struggling along at 1.1 submarines per annum, not enough to meet their own demand, let alone the 2.3 boats per annum they need to hit to be able to spare a submarine or three for Australia.
The spin from US and Australian politicians is turning in the opposite direction to the analysis of the United States Congressional Research Service, the US Government Audit Office and the US Chief of Naval Operations. No matter the spin from politicians, they can’t cause a change in the engineering and construction taking place at Groton, Connecticut and Newport News, Virginia.
Trump needn’t be worried though; he won’t be the President in the early 2030s when the first Virginia Class sub can’t be delivered because doing so,
will have a detrimental effect on the US Navy’s undersea warfare capability.
The US Congress has enshrined that “America First” requirement in their AUKUS legislation, and the crunch point is already less than a decade away – too little time for the US submarine industrial base to make the enormous strides that are so easily spruiked but so difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
Eroding our sovereignty
Meanwhile, MWM’s industry source has foreshadowed the closing down of some Australian Defence companies struggling to make ends meet after Defence has cancelled a range of local programs, and is not initiating replacement work, so that they can meet the almost $10B in payments to both the US and UK governments to invest in their industry.
‘AUKUS is sending Australia into a sovereignty-eroding spiral.’
We are already tightly integrated into the US military with common hardware, common ordinance and common tactics. As the US turns its eye towards its superpower competitor, China (incidentally, our biggest trading partner), we are also seeing an expanding US military footprint on Australian soil, including:
and logistics storage in both Victoria and Queensland.
the long-standing Pine Gap joint communications and intelligence facility at Alice Springs,
the critical submarine very low frequency communications station at WA’s North West Cape,
a new mission briefing/intelligence centre and aircraft parking aprons at RAAF Darwin,
fuel storage at Darwin Port, infrastructure at RAAF Tindal near Katherine,
And there’ll be a forward staging base for US Navy Virginia-class subs out of HMAS Stirling near Perth from 2027.
US nuclear-powered, and by the early 2030s likely nuclear-armed, submarines will be using Western Australia as a strategic base for operations extending from the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, to the South China Sea and the East China Sea and beyond.
‘All th’is is about strategic competition with China.‘
The Australian Defence Force, as it diverts money to AUKUS, will suffer in terms of independent capability. Industry will suffer. The taxpayer will suffer.
Best deal in history
Trump must be rubbing his hands together. This will play out well for the US.
Billions of Australian dollars will flow into the continental US to contribute to its submarine industry – this is a certainty. In contrast, the US will almost certainly not deliver. There is no clawback of expended money for non-delivery.
Australia’s Collins Class submarine capability will atrophy further, as will the general capabilities of the Australian Defence Force, starved of funds. More reliance on the US will see the US Navy station more subs in WA, the US Air Force stationing and staging additional air capabilities in our north, and an increase in the number of US Marines rotating through Darwin.
More than ever, Australia will be reduced to being “a suitable piece of real estate” in US war planning (to adopt the words of one of Australia’s most insightful strategic critics, the late Professor Des Ball).
Australia will have little choice but to let the US do this … and we might be pressured into much more.
‘There will be no choice but to follow the US into conflict with China.‘
We will have limited capabilities and will be left totally reliant on red, white and blue military capabilities. When Richard Marles talks of sovereign capabilities and decision-making, it’s just a political con job.
Trump will, in retirement, post on Truth Social his genius and how he suckered retired Prime Minister Albanese into what Paul Keating would call, in the view from the White House and Pentagon, the best deal in all of history.
Rex Patrick is a former Senator for South Australia and, earlier, a submariner in the armed forces. Best known as an anti-corruption and transparency crusader, Rex is also known as the “Transparency Warrior.”
Australian media coverage of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s meeting with US President Donald Trump was teetering on the brink of euphoria.
Emerging from the cabinet room where the meeting took place, the ABC’s reporter Jane Norman appeared breathless in her account of the big moment. Even Sally Sara, host of Radio National’s Breakfast, who is usually calm and is known to ask probing questions, seemed to have abandoned her cool. She pronounced: “Well, the bonds between the United States and Australia appear tighter than ever today.’
But our prime minister didn’t rest on his laurels, even after securing various assurances from Trump. Albanese seemed to feel he needed to further convince the Americans of our nation’s commitment to their nation. As he told a roomful of US Congress members: “We’ve already contributed a billion dollars to your industrial base; there’ll be a billion dollars on its way before Christmas.”
He went on to say there would be “a further billion dollars next year because … we want to uplift your industrial capacity. … We’ll be providing a capacity for maintenance of your subs from 2027 on top of the facilities that we have already in the West.” And just to ensure his audience understood his message, he added, “It will increase your capacity to forward project.”
In other words, he wanted to drive home that AU
When asked by Sara what securing a commitment from Trump meant, the ABC’s John Lyons said: “From America’s point of view, why wouldn’t you? When a country comes along and says we will pay you $380 billion to boost your manufacturing industry in America for submarines you may one day see, of course! America loves the deal.”
But Lyons didn’t mention that while the AUKUS contract commits the US to deliver eight nuclear-powered submarines to Australia by 2032, there’s a condition: under the US legislation, the president of the day can stop the transfer if the American government believes the sale could affect its undersea capabilities, thereby undermining the national interest. To put it plainly: Australia has no way of recovering its money, even if we end up with no submarines.
If AUKUS is such a good deal for the Americans, why does our prime minister feel the need to keep talking up AUKUS to them? KUS is really in America’s national interest.
Could the Albanese government be so desperate to secure a continuous commitment because it needs to convince Australian voters it is doing its utmost to persuade America to stay the course, so that their taxpayer money won’t go down the drain? Perhaps the government believes it can’t afford to let up on the PR surrounding AUKUS in both the US and Australia, even though it isn’t certain the submarines will eventually turn up, nor that they will deter Australia’s enemies?
Australia’s news media are prone to switch from pursuing a “public interest” mandate to a “national interest” mandate when covering foreign policy. For this reason, despite Trump’s assurances this week, they will doubtlessly continue to focus on the trope of “Is AUKUS on track or is it in trouble?” They are likely to keep ignoring or downplaying critical questions such as “What does Australia get out of the AUKUS deal?” and “Will the US submarines keep us safe?”
Although middle powers have less global influence, they nevertheless exercise agency strategically in the emerging multipolar world as great powers contest the rules of order. They gain influence by mediating between great powers through what international relations theorists call “hedging”.
Such scholars believe that hedging enables middle powers to engage with competing great powers, while avoiding alignment that limits their autonomy. Through hedging, less powerful states preserve sovereignty in a context of uncertainty by balancing engagement and resistance. Our Asian neighbours, such as India, Indonesia and Singapore, do precisely that.
Despite our leaders’ rhetoric, signing up to AUKUS seems to signal that Australia has somewhat voluntarily relinquished its capacity as a middle power to practise effective hedging.
For instance, Sydney University’s James Curran believes AUKUS could mean the US would expect Australia to join them in a potential war with China over Taiwan:
Similarly, the Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen argues that Australia’s deeper alignment with the US and the hosting of US bomber capabilities at Tindal and future nuclear-submarine infrastructure raises the likelihood of Australia becoming “an important target” in a conflict with China.
Neither of the major parties has ruled in or out the possibility that Australia would join the US in a potential war. But despite Defence Minister Richard Marles’ rebuttal of criticism from AUKUS critics over the issue of sovereignty, one thing is clear: unlike many Western European and Scandinavian middle powers, Australia’s constitution implies that decisions to engage in armed conflict are made by the executive government under prerogative powers, not by parliament as a whole.
In other words, the Parliament of Australia apparently has no power to stop Australia from going to war, even though it could be consulted.
It is for these reasons that Clinton Fernandes, in the Future Operations Research Group at UNSW Canberra, believes that “rules-based international order” is a “euphemism” for the US-led imperial order, and that Australia is really a “subimperial power upholding a US-led imperial order”.
Without giving a full account of the myriad concerns raised by critics of AUKUS, let’s just say here that with AUKUS, Australia’s capacity to function as a true middle power — one that is confident of its sovereignty, autonomy and capacity to exercise agency to influence superpowers — seems gravely in doubt. And signing up to AUKUS may be another case study that supports Fendandes’s argument.
Wanning Sun is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She also serves as the deputy director of the UTS Australia-China Relations Institute. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts (2020-23). She is best known in the field of China studies for her ethnography of rural-to-urban migration and social inequality in contemporary China. She writes about Chinese diaspora, diasporic Chinese media, and Australia-China relations.
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