Things are not getting better for Optus, a subsidiary of the Singapore-owned Singtel and Australia’s second largest telecommunications company. Responsible for one of Australia’s largest data breaches, the beleaguered company is facing burning accusations and questions on various fronts. It is also proving to be rather less than forthcoming about details as to what has been compromised in the leak. First, for the claimed story, which has been, at points, vague. On September 22, the telecommunications company revealed that details of up to 9.8 million customers had been stolen from their database. Dating back to 2017, these include names, birthdates,…
Author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark
If ever there was a blatant statement of realpolitik masquerading as friendliness, the latest US-Pacific Island declaration must count as one of them. The Biden administration has been busy of late, wooing Pacific Island states in an effort to discourage increasingly sharp tilt towards China. It has been spurred on, in no small way, by Beijing’s failure in May to forge a trade and security pact with Pacific Island countries. In July, Vice President Kamala Harris was given the task of spreading the good word to those attending the Pacific Islands Forum that the US “is a proud Pacific nation…
Imagine the tobacco producer who invests in smoke limitation programs, or the arms manufacturer who attends a conference proposing to ban weapons and seek a better future. Gautam Adani, one of India’s most ruthlessly adept billionaires, has added his name to the growing list of corporate transvestism, using ecological credentials as his camouflage for fossil fuel predation. The central feature of Adani is having a nose for getting on the bandwagon and pushing to its front. Everyone is doing it, at least when it comes to renewable energy sources. Recently, the Adani Group, an entity specialising in power generation, real…
Be careful who you praise and the degree of zeal you do it with. The slain Shinzo Abe, shot dead in Nara on July 8, towered over Japanese politics. In doing so, he cast a lengthy shadow. In death, this shadow continues to grow ever more darkly. The reaction from certain figures outside Japan left an impression of distorted admiration. There was Hillary Clinton’s cloying tribute about Abe being “a champion of democracy and a firm believer that no economy, society, or country can achieve its full potential if women are left behind.” The tribute was a classic reminder of…
Australia has a mixed relationship with the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Irritation, dismissal and even the occasional openly hostile comment, have registered. But in 1994, the Toonen decision filtered through the Australian legal process, leading the federal government to remove archaically noxious provisions in the Tasmanian criminal code criminalising sodomy. The UNHRC has since found Australia’s compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to be patchy. In November 2017, the body released its observations in a five-year review of the Commonwealth’s record noting glaring problems of protection in such areas as refugees and asylum seekers, Aboriginal…
It’s impossible to know whether the new British Prime Minister is genuinely serious about constructive policy or not. She is certainly interested in greasing palms and calming the storms, if only to delay the inevitable. Having proven herself the shallowest of candidates to succeed her disgraced, not wholly banished predecessor, Liz Truss has leapt into economic policy as her starting point. Kwasi Kwarteng, the newly minted Chancellor of the Exchequer, has given us a sense of what Trussonomics looks like in his “mini budget” announced on September 23. In line with this new policy, undertaken at a time of stroppily…
Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg has been in the environmental news again, this time throwing a large judicial spanner in the works of Santos and its drilling efforts in the Timor Sea. On this occasion, the Federal Court found that the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority should never have approved the Barossa Gas Project off the Tiwi Islands, which would entail drilling at a site 140 kilometres from the Tiwi Islands. NOPSEMA’s primary role is to regulate offshore petroleum activities in Australian waters and is tasked with examining environmental plans under the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas…
The right to protest, fragile and meekly protected by the judiciary in Britain’s common law tradition, did not really hold much force till European law confirmed it. In the UK, condemning other countries for suppressing rights to protest is standard fare. So it was with some discomforting surprise – at least to a number of talking heads – that people were arrested for protesting against the monarchy after the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. Such surprise is misplaced. In the UK, protestors can be marched away before the operation of vast, and vague discretionary powers wielded by the police. An…
When it was revealed that former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had not only shown contempt for his own government in secretly appointing himself, via the Governor-General’s approval, to five portfolios, the depths of deception seemed to be boundless. His tenure had already been marked by a spectacular, habitual tendency to conceal matters. What else would come out? The latest revelation in the Morrison Mendacity Roadshow came in a leaked document authored by a former Department of Defence deputy secretary, Kim Gillis, a key figure in submarine contract negotiations with the French Naval Group. The contract to build twelve French-made…
In Vienna, China’s permanent mission to the United Nations has been rather exercised of late. Members of the mission have been particularly irate with the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Director General, Rafael Grossi, who addressed the IAEA’s Board of Governors on September 12. Grossi was building on a confidential report by the IAEA which had been circulated the previous week concerning the role of nuclear propulsion technology for submarines to be supplied to Australia under the AUKUS security pact. When the AUKUS announcement was made in September last year, its significance shook security establishments in the Indo-Pacific. It…
Once the fixated adoration with the late Queen Elizabeth II starts cooling, the accountants of public welfare and decency will be stunned to realise the costs and wealth associated with the royal institution. Her successor, Charles III, is continuing in that vein, a jarring note of wealth and pomp even as prices rise and the hefty bills for citizens (should we say subjects?), bite. The argument that the monarchy makes money for the British state and others in the Commonwealth starts to seem shallow the more one looks at the accounts and the standing of the institution. But nonetheless, individuals…
Here we go again, playing God and toying with Promethean fire. Having done a comprehensively brutal job of killing off the thylacine, known in popular parlance as the Tasmanian Tiger, along with a growing number of other species, there is interest in reviving and ultimately returning them to the wild. And, as with any deity, the choice resides in the god figure, all deciding and omniscient. The killer becomes the chooser, the executioner, the salvager. Interest in this venture was piqued and spurred by a A$5 million donation from a philanthropist to a research team engaged in a partnership with…
Turn on the television. Move to the screen. Switch on the device – if you ever left it off. Queen Elizabeth II may have passed, but she is everywhere in very lively fashion, a spectral manifestation that has utterly controlled large chunks of a transfixed global media system. It helps that she has captured the media mecca that is the United States, where anything outside its coverage is either, in self-described terms, irrelevant or non-existent. In the centre of the imperium, without a shade of irony, she and the British royal family have exercised a spiritual and celluloid existence almost…
Global, personal, individual. The reactions to the death of Queen Elizabeth II seemed to catch even unsuspecting republicans off guard. In Australia, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who had led the Australian Republic Movement, was a mess of reflection on the passing. The old enemy France glowed with a distant familial warmth. In the United States, monarchical fetishism reasserted itself. Not all the reflections were rosy. In South Africa, the Economic Freedom Fighters party admitted no mourning for the passing of the monarch of seven decades, “because to us her death is a reminder of a very tragic period in…
When will these unforgivable cretins of modern cultural exhaustion leave decent self-harming people alone? It’s that time of the year again, when sponsored pretend moralists molest, disturb and upset people who have reached that state of despair largely for the reasons these bargain basement priests are pestering them for. There is nothing grand about topping yourself, though there is an astonishing, proud literature for those who wish to leave the world of the living. This is not understood by the R U OK brigadistas who seem, on closer inspection, to look like demented barnacles in search of a solid pier.…
What is it about Australian diplomacy that makes it so clumsy and dunderheaded? Is it the harsh delivery, the tactless expression, or the inability to do things with subtle reflection? On September 6, Australian diplomacy gave another display of such form with Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s remarks about the Solomon Islands elections. Things have been testy for the government of Manasseh Sogavare, who has rolled out the red carpet to pestiferous officials of virtually all ranks from Beijing to Washington. Most, if not all this interest, has been triggered by Sogavare’s signing of a security pact with the People’s Republic…
It has been a hobbyhorse of Greg Norman for years: a threatening, alternative golf tournament to draw the stars and undermine the musty establishment. Realising a most dubious project, the LIV Tournament has become blood money’s greatest symbol. Funded by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it is a most noisy statement of sportswashing. Some aspects of this are also a touch sinister. Last month, the Wall Street Journal revealed the details of a draft LIV contract that has been offered to players. Provisions of the contract include requirements for the players to don LIV apparel when playing both LIV and…
The list of sins is lengthy and growing with diseased relish. Australia’s first and for decades only international airline, Qantas, is looking rather tattered of late. Its reliability is becoming something of the past, its standing diminished in an age of diminished international carriers. There was a time when taking a Qantas flight involved experiencing clean, solid goodness, with the softening effects of regular and, for the most part, reliable service. Nothing ever too flash, but reliable before finding your feet on chaotic ground. Its minted reputation was enough to earn it a mention in Barry Levinson’s Rain Man, a…
August 27, Sydney. The scale was jaw dropping and amusing. There he was, the still fresh Labor Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, rendered pygmy-like by the enormity of one Shaquille O’Neal, popularly known as Shaq. No degree of expert photography at this press conference could conceal the disparity in size between the two. Albanese has made it his crowning ambition to campaign for the Voice. By that, he means to put to Australian voters a question on constitutionally recognising Australia’s First Nations peoples (admirable and irrefutable) and enshrining a vague, as yet undetermined political forum that will represent them (problematic). He…
Julian Assange’s legal team has taken its next step along their Via Dolorosa, filing an appeal against the decision to extradite their client to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 based on the odious US Espionage Act of 1917. Since his violent eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy in April 2019, much to the delight of the national security establishment and its media cheerleaders, Assange has been held captive at Her Majesty’s Belmarsh Prison awaiting his fate. In a facility reserved for the country’s most hardened criminals, Assange has had to face the COVID-19 pandemic, isolation, limitations on visits,…
It must have been music to Elon Musk’s ears. Twitter, a platform he has had a patchy relationship with, has been the recipient of various blows inflicted by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the company’s former head of security. This was no mean feat, given the company’s reputation as being essentially indestructible. But Mudge was left with every reason to seethe; his tenure abruptly ceased at the company in January this year, allegedly for reasons of “ineffective leadership and poor performance”. The poor performance tag would have raised a few eyebrows. Zatko has earned a formidable reputation in the field of cybersecurity,…
There is an overwhelming boisterous ignorance that characterises Australia’s foreign policy approach to China. When Beijing was boxed and derided as emerging, weak and well-behaved, everyone supposedly got on. Washington remained the region’s patriarch and Australia its policing deputy. Everyone could get on plundering resources and making some ruddy cash along the way. Then, assumptions started being challenged: the cheeky Yellow Devil refused to stay quiet. The Anglophone states started to worry. Striking about such commentary on China as the illegitimate aggressor, the law breaker, the breacher of convention, is its distinct cultural imperviousness. As with much in this field,…
Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead – or so we are told. Al-Qaida’s chief and successor to the slain Osama bin Laden, he was deemed the chief ideologue and mastermind behind the audacious September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. On July 31, he was supposedly killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, while standing on his balcony. Terrorism and security pundits, whose views are best considered from afar with stern scrutiny, are predictably speculating that the killing will have some effect on al-Qaida but are incapable of showing how. Vanda Felbab-Brown at Brookings is convinced that “his death…
With China constantly being accused of insufferable secrecy and a lack of openness about security and defence arrangements among partners in the Pacific, the shoe, when on the other foot, sits just as well. In the case of Australia, it is particularly snug. We are not exactly clear about the fine print of the AUKUS security arrangement between Canberra, Washington and London, though we all know it involves nuclear propulsion technology for submarines. We also know little, officially speaking, about the US Pine Gap intelligence facility in central Australia, though enough work has been done for us to realise how…
The fact that Daddy Dick was there, the dark eminence who soiled the Republic and inflated executive power with drugged glee, said it all. This was the occasion of his daughter’s electoral defeat at the hands of another Republican, Harriet Hageman. Neoconservative bumbler and part of an enterprise that loves war and cherishes the buccaneering free market, Liz Cheney was facing final judgment at the hands of voters in Wyoming for her belligerent position against Donald Trump. Cheney had hoped to purge the GOP of Trumpist influence by simply reiterating her own toxic alternative, the very sort that did much…
He has survived death threats and attempts on his life since February 1989. But Salman Rushdie’s luck just about ran out at the Chautauqua Institution, southwest of Buffalo in New York State. On August 12, at a venue historically celebrated for bringing education to all, the writer was stabbed incessantly by a fanatic who felt little sense of guilt or remorse. Hadi Matar only had eyes for Rushdie’s neck and abdomen. As a result of the attack, the author is likely to lose sight of one eye and possibly the use of an arm. It was a chilling reminder that…
Why the sharp intake of breath, the tingling shock? In one of the world’s most secretive liberal democracies, the revelation that the previous Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison ran a shadow government overseen by personal quasi-despotic whim spanning several ministerial positions has caused chill and consternation. That’s not the way we do things – except when we do. Such consternation, in a country that tolerates secret trials only revealed by accident, raids upon journalists and the headquarters of the national broadcaster, full-throated prosecutions of whistleblowers, the torture-tinged indefinite detention of refugees, and brazen immunities for intelligence officers engaged in alleged…
It took a few years of tolerable incompetence, caused fears about security, and was meant to be the great surveillance salvation to reassure us all. Instead, Australia’s COVIDSafe App only identified two positive cases of infection during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and failed, in every sense of the term, to work. Launched in April 2020, this AU$21 million platform was heralded as a great tool for pandemic surveillance. It was one of many such digital responses used by countries to combat viral transmission. China adopted the Alipay Health Code app, which shares location data with police authorities. Users receive various codes…
Scenes and pictures have been circulating of broken earth, lacking moisture, cracked and yearning. But these are not from traditional drought-stricken parts of the planet, where the animal carcass assumes near totemic power amidst dry riverbeds or desert expanses. Neither Australia nor Africa feature on these occasions – at least in a prominent way. Europe, continent of historical arable sustainability, is drying up. This is not to say that the continent is immune to drought. The International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River notes the impacts of a number of dry and severe summers from the 1990s till…
Cambodia has often featured in the Western imagination as a place of plunder and pilfering. Temples and artefacts of exquisite beauty have exercised the interest of adventurers and buccaneers who looted with almost kleptocratic tendency. In 1924, the French novelist and future statesman André Malraux, proved himself one of Europe’s greatest adventurers in making off with a ton of sacred stones from Angkor Wat. It is estimated that 20 statutes were taken. Malraux, along with his wife Clara and collaborator Louis Chevasson, were subsequently apprehended for their pinching efforts on the order of George Groslier, founding director of the National…
