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Category: Accountability

25/06/2026

Farrer By-Election, the Libs and the Right

10 May 2026

The big victory by David Farley of One Nation in the Farrer by-election of Saturday 9 May was hardly a surprise.

The polls had predicted this, and the fact that both the Liberal and the National put One Nation ahead of the Independent, Michelle Milthorpe, virtually guaranteed the result. I will have to analyse the results to see if the preferences were decisive. It may be that they were not.

But either way the LIberals preferenced One Nation ahead of the Independent because Independents tend to become entrenched, whereas One Nation candidates and MPs tend to leave the party in a blaze of bad publicity, and the Liberals think that they will have a better chance of retaking the seat at the next general election. One Nation seems never to be held to account. Pauline Hanson accepted a fortune and then a private plane from mining billionaire Gina Rinehardt. David Farley, the candidate, was shown to have sought Labor party preselection. One Nation has no real policies. Yet it does not seem to matter. A poll showed that 70% of One Nation voters were angry and wanted to send a message to the two major parties. So it is a protest vote, just as it was for Trump, who similarly was not held to account.

Meanwhile in the UK, Reform this week swept the local Council elections to become the largest party. Its leader, Nigel Farage led the Brexit campaign that has been a major cause of Britain’s economic woes. It seems that politics is no longer about considered policies; it is about emotional reactions and people are voted out, not voted in.

The Liberals have not had a serious policy idea for years, and answer most questions by criticising Labor, as Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson did today on ÁBC Ínsiders. He would not rule out having One Nation in as Coalition government, and would not be drawn on what he thought about the Budget, which is due on Tuesday, deflecting the questions about his attitude of negative gearing of property or changes to capital gains tax. He merely said that he would see what the government did and respond, chucking in a few barbs as usual. The LIberals did put out a policy last week on Immigration, which said that it depended what country migrants came from, so was roundly criticised for not allowing dissidents to flee from very bad countries. The point is that the Immigration policy was similar to One Nation’s, so the Liberals ares merely ‘One Nation Lite’ with no real direction.

The problem is that neo-liberalism and capitalism are going to their logical conclusion. The world has been turned into a market with everything for sale and all the stress on individual ownership. Taxes have been minimised and the idea that the government is responsible for the welfare of all citizens gets lip service but no dollars. Where once we had a Housing Dept that built suburbs of houses for the post-war migrants, we now have negative gearing and capital gains concessions on the assumption that the private market would build the houses. Wrong. We have a 2 tier education system with subsidies to the top tier, and the same happens in health. We used to have free universities, but now students leave with huge HECS debts. The welfare system is such that pensioners and unemployed can barely live, as they cannot pay rents set by the private market, which follows house prices, with housing now an idiot-proof commodity investment, rather than a human right.

Labor talks about fixing all this, but are scared to raise taxes, as the Liberals would criticise them, so it is impossible to fix the above problems. They have become ‘Liberal-Lite’ as they fail to even acknowledge the fundamental problems, much less address them.

We used to congratulate ourselves that we would not elect Trump, and that the foolish Brexit vote would not happen here, but One Nation have now won Farrer and did very well in the recent South Australian election where they were largely kept out by the compulsory preferential system. They are polling well in NSW and it will be interesting to see what difference the Optional Preferential voting system makes in NSW. (You may recall that I did an analysis of the difference it made in the last NSW election, which can still be found on my website, chesterfieldevans.com).

It seems to me that the western democracies are in relative decline, but the major change is increasing inequality across the world due to unregulated capitalism, sending jobs overseas and technology replacing labour. There are not enough jobs, and governments seem unable to acknowledge the problems or take responsibility for their consequences. The security industry is booming at a national, international and defence level.

The Trump, Farage and One Nation voters are right to be angry, but their champions have no solutions. The sad part is that the conventional major players do not seem to either.

25/06/2026

Volunteers and Professionals

30 May 2026

I don’t believe that you get what you pay for and have huge doubt that hard work necessarily brings rewards. Price used to be different from value, but now they are synonymous. Price has become whatever the seller can persuade people to pay, and now the concept of value is devalued to the same concept. I knew a chemical engineer who supervised face cream manufacture (before the company offshored to save money). He said that all the face creams were basically the same- sorbolene with a few colours and scents added, and they all came from the same production line, whether they retailed for $2 or $56 for a small bottle.

Volunteers work for nothing because they believe in a cause. I spent 20 years fighting tobacco and it was the most useful thing I have done or will ever do. I had the advantage that I could say the situation as it was- the tobacco industry was killing people and the government was not doing anything about it because the industry gave money to the big political parties. No one in the Health Dept could say that, and none of the big Health NGOs would either for fear of upsetting the big end of town that were significant donors.

The media came to me because I could say it as it was. I had a freedom that no one else had. I wasn’t paid a cent. Minor clerks from the health NGOs would go to conference hotels paid by well intentioned donors. I stayed in the cheapest hotels I could find as I was paying for myself. Tobacco work was free. I was lucky that I was single with a public service job which subsidised my passion, and a house that made more money than I did, merely by being there. (Hard work, no money; no work, lots of money- get it?)

Volunteer lifesavers, disaster relief workers, firefighters, food vans, homeless shelters, bush regenerators etc run with volunteer help. Usually these organisations start as all volunteers, then get a grant to help pay for a CEO and an office. They then expand in numbers and recruit more paid staff. The office gets bigger. The CEO changes from the most dedicated volunteer to a manager. The manager thinks it is a job rather than a cause. He or she looks for a better salary, a better office and more staff. A lot of energy starts to go into fundraising, and government grant applications. The paid staff have status above the volunteers, who ask themselves, ‘Why should I do this for free, when they are getting paid for it?’ The CEO will not say anything that might jeopardise grants or donations, so if major policy decisions are made that adversely affect the organisation’s aims, no one speaks up. Hey, without that government grant we would have to sack X% of the paid staff!

I am told that social research in Germany has looked at this as a life cycle in the rise and fall of NGOs, but I am unaware of literature here, though I can’t say I have looked for it.

I have observed myself highly respect charities moving into very expensive offices and CEOs salaries rising to close to industrial salaries with the same budgets. I have noticed difficulties between volunteers and professionals in health areas, disability, blindness, lifesaving, bushcare and fires.

The difficulty seems to stem from the idea that everything has to be monetised and all benefit has to be at an individual level. I credit John Howard with the concept that if you work for free, you are a mug, and for the idea that volunteers were good, as they saved wages cost. His only question was how long the volunteers would work for free, and how well could managers control what they did. The idea that we work to contribute to society without an immediate personal benefit has been a casualty of the neo-liberal society where the value of anything is judged by what it costs or what return it might make.

My simplistic explanation for all this is that at the end of WW2, the meeting at Bretton Woods concluded that the world wars were about access to markets and if the whole world had no trade barriers countries could rise or fall depending on how productive they were. Wars would be unnecessary.

In the 1980s the Union-funded Trans-National Cooperative predicted the rise of world oligopolies, and this had happened in many areas such as oil, fertilisers, chemicals, grains, pharmaceuticals, and most recently AI and information management. Multinationals have taken their industries to wherever labour is cheapest, but have managed to keep most of the profits, which has left poorer workers in first world countries approaching the incomes of those in developing countries as the world globalises. The emphasis on individual rights, which then become individual consumption, have led to an unwillingness and now almost inability for governments to share resources. Common property and ownership are given away which exacerbates the problem as the neoliberal mantra has been that governments are inefficient and the government must never raise taxes for universal services or welfare incomes.

The problem of volunteer organisations will not go away. They are always needed in crises when the workforce has to expand very quickly, such as in disaster relief, and they can help increase many social services and make them more flexible and responsive. But they cannot fix the underlying economic problems of Western society. In the meantime more attention to the relationships between volunteers and their management would let them function better for what they still do.

Here is an example of what can happen from today’s SMH.

Disaster relief agency shuts down after revolt

30 May 2026 Eryc Bagshaw

Australia”s top disaster relief agency has been shut down after an internal revolt and allegations of fraud led to the withdrawal of all taxpayer funding.

Disaster Relief Australia”s creditors yesterday voted to wind up the emergency agency after the federal government refused to extend its $38 million grant, leaving the volunteer organisation without two-thirds of its budget.

Disaster Relief Australia was praised by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and led by two of Australia”s most decorated military commanders, Major General Andrew Freeman and Brigadier David Smith, as it responded to national emergencies including the Lismore floods, Cyclone Jasper and the Black Summer bushfires.

But it has spent the past year mired in internal conflict, driven by disputes between its volunteer veteran and professional workforce.

In December, this masthead revealed claims that Disaster Relief Australia used opaque recruitment practices, prioritised marketing over missions, and pushed out whistleblowers who raised concerns. Eight whistleblowers said DRA was inflating membership numbers and fostering a culture of censorship and retribution. DRA denied the allegations.

DRA at the time said it had 6700 volunteers registered to assist in emergencies. Internal documents revealed that only 2503 were ready to deploy. The organisation is also embroiled in a dispute with the AFL over a $300,000 donation, which the league demanded be returned in the wake of the allegations.

“The Australian Football League”s law firm demanded that DRA return a donation of $300,000,” Fort Restructuring said in a report to creditors last week. “The administrators are seeking legal advice in this regard. The return of the AFL donation will reduce the funds available to creditors.”

Fort Restructuring estimated the organisation owed $442,000 to staff and $647,000 to creditors. Liquidator Mark Robinson advised creditors that this would be repaid if DRA went into liquidation. In a note to be sent to volunteers and veterans, Robinson said the liquidation was regrettable.

While the agency marketed itself as a volunteer workforce, the liquidators” report shows employee costs almost quadrupling from $2.6 million to $8.3 million per year between 2023 and 2025. As a proportion of its expenses on disaster relief efforts, employee costs surged from 27 per cent to 50 per cent over the same period.

The organisation also increasingly relied on government funding, growing from $3 million in 2023 to almost $11 million in 2025, while donations fell from $3.2 million to $3 million, leaving DRA vulnerable to collapse once taxpayer funding was pulled earlier this year.

In March, the National Emergency Management Agency said it would withhold government funding over the serious allegations against DRA of misconduct, mismanagement and misuse of grant funding, and formal complaints against DRA relating to staff and volunteer wellbeing.

A WorkLogic report commissioned by DRA concluded that no allegations of organisational or management-level fraud or misuse of funds could be substantiated. The federal government “expressed reservations” about the report.

25/06/2026

‘Catabolic’ Capitalism- a paper by Dr Craig Collins

25 June 2026

For some time I have noticed the difference between GDP growth and progress. When I was in the campaign against tobacco, they told me it good for the economy; farming, manufacturing, transporting, retailing, treating and burying. (Shame about the people dying).
Now we increasingly see the stockmarket rise as unemployment rises or the conditions for poorer folk get worse.
Some of this is because the money is flowing from the lower and middle parts of society to those at the top, and from government, which everyone owns to private corporations, the ‘tragedy of the commons’. It is not a rising tide lifting all boats, it is one part of society devouring the rest, a catabolic situation.

Here is a very long post by Dr Craig Collins that looks at the idea that late stage capitalism has the very rich eating the rest of society.

It is worth the read;

For most of the modern era, capitalism justified itself through growth. Industrial societies converted vast amounts of fossil energy into production, wealth, and rising living standards. Roads, bridges, power grids, schools, and public institutions expanded alongside the economy. Inequality and exploitation remained deeply embedded in the system, but they were partly obscured by a broader story of material progress.

That story is beginning to unravel.

Across much of the developed world, economic life increasingly feels less like construction than demolition. Infrastructure deteriorates. Public institutions struggle to perform basic functions. Ecosystems degrade. Democratic norms weaken. Yet wealth continues to concentrate at remarkable speed. Political systems seem unable to solve mounting crises while proving highly adept at monetizing them. Climate disasters create investment opportunities. Housing shortages become profitable asset classes. Social isolation fuels lucrative digital platforms. War drives markets. Collapse itself becomes a business model. If growth fails, capitalism will extort wealth for as long as possible by devising new ways to profit from disaster, conflict, chaos, scarcity, and collapse.

A useful way to understand this shift is through the concept of catabolic capitalism. In biology, catabolism refers to the process by which an organism breaks down its own tissues to survive when external resources become scarce.[1] Applied to political economy, the concept describes a late stage of industrial capitalism in which profits increasingly come not from expanding production, but from consuming the social, institutional, ecological, and infrastructural foundations built during an earlier era of abundance.

The idea draws on historian John Michael Greer’s concept of catabolic collapse. Greer argued that when past civilizations faced declining energy reserves and resource constraints, they often maintained short-term stability by consuming assets accumulated during more prosperous periods. Industrial capitalism intensifies this dynamic because it is driven by a relentless demand for profit. During the long age of cheap energy and expanding resources, that imperative encouraged innovation, investment, and growth. As growth slows and constraints multiply, however, profits are increasingly extracted from deterioration rather than creation.

For much of the past two centuries, profits flowed from building things: factories, transportation networks, electric grids, cities, suburbs, and global communications infrastructure. Capital transformed abundant fossil energy into ever-greater economic velocity and complexity. Today, that process is becoming difficult to sustain. The easiest resources have already been exploited. Infrastructure is aging. Ecological damage is accumulating. Debt is growing faster than productive capacity. Political legitimacy is eroding. Competition over energy, resources, and strategic supply chains is intensifying.

Yet capitalism’s prime directive has not changed. The pursuit of profit adapts to new conditions. Faced with stagnation and decline, it increasingly finds ways to profit from deterioration itself.

From Production to Predation

One of the clearest signs of this catabolic transition is the growing dominance of financial extraction over productive investment.

Rather than building new productive capacity, large pools of capital increasingly generate returns by stripping value from existing institutions. Private equity firms, for example, often acquire functioning companies, load them with debt, extract fees and assets, cut labor costs, and leave weakened organizations behind. Hospitals, nursing homes, local newspapers, retail chains, and housing markets have all been subjected to this logic.

Infrastructure tells a similar story. Preventive maintenance rarely attracts political attention, especially in an era of fiscal strain and anti-tax politics. As a result, systems are allowed to deteriorate until failure becomes unavoidable. Emergency repairs and reconstruction then generate large profits for contractors, insurers, and investors. In many cases, responding to disasters becomes more lucrative than preventing them.

The same pattern appears in everyday life. For decades, stagnant wages have been offset by rising levels of debt. Student loans, medical debt, credit cards, payday lending, and subscription-based financing allow consumption to continue by borrowing against the future.[2] Instead of distributing the gains of rising prosperity, the system increasingly extracts value from chronic insolvency.[3]

Housing offers one of the clearest examples. During the postwar boom, housing policy — though blatantly discriminatory — was largely oriented toward expanding homeownership and promoting social stability. Today, housing increasingly functions as a financial asset. Investment firms purchase homes at scale, rents rise faster than incomes, and homelessness grows alongside soaring property values. Shelter becomes less a social necessity than a vehicle for extracting income from a shrinking middle class.

These developments are often dismissed as corruption, greed, or policy failure. Those factors matter, but they do not fully explain what is happening. The problem is deeper — systemic. As opportunities for broad-based material expansion diminish, profit increasingly depends on extracting value from structures that already exist.

The Politics of Breakdown

Political systems respond to catabolic conditions as well.

When governments can no longer reliably deliver rising living standards and expanding public services, they shift from promoting development to managing crisis. Public institutions weaken while security institutions grow. Temporary emergencies become permanent features of political life.

The expansion of the national security apparatus after 9/11 offered an early glimpse of this trend. Surveillance systems, predictive policing technologies, private intelligence contractors, militarized borders, and sprawling security bureaucracies flourished in an atmosphere of perpetual threat. Instability and fear became increasingly profitable.

The rise of authoritarian and illiberal movements across much of the world reflects similar pressures. As inequality widens, ecological stresses deepen, and economic insecurity spreads, political leaders gradually abandon promises of collective improvement. Instead, they offer narratives centered on repression, exclusion, punishment, and restoration through force.

The “wrecking ball” politics associated with the second Trump administration and the broader Project 2025 agenda fit comfortably within this pattern.

The MAGA agenda accelerates capitalism’s catabolic dynamic. Notorious MAGA ideologue Steve Bannon openly calls for the deconstruction of the administrative state and the delegitimization of institutions and experts. In 2016, Bannon declared that his goal was to “destroy the state and bring everything crashing down.”[4] To achieve this, he pursues a strategy of “flooding the zone” with conflicting information and inflammatory narratives. His goal is political catabolism: overwhelm the public information ecosystem, deepen societal conflict and fragmentation, and undermine the political status quo. Under Trump, regulatory agencies are gutted or politicized. Public institutions are eviscerated. Environmental protections are dismantled. Civil service systems are attacked. Scientific and administrative expertise is subordinated to personal loyalty and ideological alignment.

This is not simply a matter of shrinking government. Catabolic politics does not necessarily reduce state power. Instead, it redirects state capacity away from broadly shared public functions and toward policing, border enforcement, patronage networks, resource extraction, and the protection of concentrated wealth.

Under catabolic conditions, governance itself becomes increasingly extractive. Public institutions cease to function primarily as tools for building collective capacity and instead become mechanisms for managing instability while preserving existing hierarchies amid decline. This helps explain one of the defining paradoxes of contemporary politics: many governments appear simultaneously weak and authoritarian — incapable of addressing major structural problems, yet increasingly aggressive in surveillance, policing, and symbolic displays of force.

AI — Automating Decline

Artificial intelligence is often presented as the next great engine of prosperity. Yet under catabolic conditions, AI may function more as a system for managing and profiting from contraction than as a tool for social advancement.

In an expanding capitalist economy, automation displaces labor and lowers wages, but it can also satisfy rising demand and create new sectors of employment. In a stagnant or declining economy, however, intelligent machines concentrate wealth and displace labor far faster than new viable opportunities emerge.

AI serves four core catabolic functions.

First, it intensifies extraction. AI’s hunger for energy and water is enormous. A standard AI search query or text generation task can require far more electricity than a traditional Google search, forcing utility companies to scramble to revive retired fossil fuel plants and nuclear reactors to meet rising demand. Large data centers can consume as much water and electricity in a day as a medium-sized city.[5]

In addition, human knowledge, creativity, and attention have become mined resources. The foundation of AI is collective human intelligence: books, songs, artwork, journalism, scientific research, films, and ideas — the vast accumulated knowledge of human cultures. As Sam Altman admits, AI models are trained on the “collective experience, knowledge and learnings of humanity.”[6]

Who should this resource belong to? Big tech oligarchs, venture capitalists, and Wall Street financiers extract it without permission, acknowledgment, or compensation. Will they use it primarily for the benefit of humanity or to fabricate the next great wealth extraction machine? Most AI algorithms are designed to optimize advertising, logistics, pricing, surveillance, and labor discipline. Social media platforms profit by amplifying outrage, fear, and polarization because emotional destabilization increases engagement. This is cultural catabolism.

Second, AI reduces the cost of enforcing inequality. Automated welfare systems, predictive policing, algorithmic hiring filters, digital reputation scoring, and workplace surveillance allow institutions to manage increasingly precarious populations with fewer human administrators and less democratic accountability.[7]

Third, AI supports the expansion of the security state. Facial recognition, mass data analysis, autonomous drones, biometric tracking, and predictive analytics create unprecedented capacities for monitoring and controlling populations during periods of instability.[8]

Finally, when material prosperity stagnates, AI promotes artificial forms of virtual consumption. Endless digital entertainment, AI-generated content, surrogate companionship, and immersive online environments increasingly substitute for declining access to nature, human relationships, stable housing, community, healthcare, or economic security.

Instead of heralding a new golden age for industrial civilization, AI may represent a technologically sophisticated method for overseeing and profiting from the conflicts, crises, and calamities of decline.

Climate Change and the Disaster Business

Nowhere are the dynamics of catabolic capitalism more visible than in the ecological crisis.

Industrial civilization was built on an extraordinary inheritance of cheap, abundant fossil fuels. That energy surplus made it possible to construct vast networks of infrastructure, transportation, manufacturing, and global trade. But maintaining that complexity becomes increasingly expensive as high-quality resources are depleted, extraction costs rise, and environmental damage accumulates.

Rather than fundamentally changing course, the system is increasingly finding ways to profit from breakdown itself.

Climate disasters create booming markets for reconstruction. Insurance speculation expands. Private firefighting services emerge to protect affluent communities. Water scarcity becomes a tradable asset. Entire industries develop around adapting to environmental calamity rather than preventing it.

At the same time, increasingly destructive forms of resource exploitation — fracking, tar sands extraction, deep-water drilling, seabed mining, and mountaintop removal — are deployed to maintain industrial output despite declining energy returns and escalating ecological damage.

The result is a self-reinforcing cycle. Ecological crises create profitable opportunities. Those opportunities encourage further extraction. Further extraction deepens the underlying crises. Under catabolic capitalism, environmental destruction is no longer merely a byproduct of economic growth. It becomes woven directly into the logic of profit itself.

Militarization and Global Resource Conflict

As ecological pressures mount and resource constraints tighten, geopolitical competition increasingly centers on access to strategic assets: energy supplies, water systems, critical minerals, migration routes, supply chains, semiconductor production, and key transportation corridors.

The outlines of this struggle are already visible in growing tensions over food security, freshwater access, climate-driven migration, Arctic shipping routes and energy reserves, lithium and cobalt deposits, and the semiconductor chokepoints that underpin the global economy.[9]

Military strategy is evolving accordingly. Advanced states increasingly rely on drones, cyberwarfare, autonomous systems, satellite surveillance, and AI-assisted targeting rather than large-scale troop mobilizations. These technologies allow governments to project power with fewer political costs and less dependence on broad public support.

At the same time, the line between military and domestic security functions is increasingly blurred. Urban surveillance networks, predictive policing systems, biometric tracking, militarized borders, and sophisticated crowd-control technologies bring techniques once associated with warfare into everyday governance.

Under catabolic conditions, security increasingly means protecting unequal access to scarce resources. The result can resemble a form of technological neo-feudalism: heavily fortified zones of wealth and infrastructure surrounded by expanding regions of precarity, instability, and environmental decline.

The Central Contradiction

One of the defining features of catabolic capitalism is the widening gap between financial indicators and material reality.

Stock markets can climb while production flatlines and infrastructure decays. Corporate profits can soar while life expectancy stalls. Artificial intelligence can advance at breathtaking speed while loneliness, anxiety, and social fragmentation deepen. Technological sophistication can coexist with declining public trust, ecological instability, and growing authoritarianism.

This disconnect challenges one of the core assumptions of the modern era: that technological development naturally generates social progress. For much of industrial history, the two often moved together. Under catabolic conditions, however, technological innovation increasingly serves extraction, surveillance, and control rather than shared prosperity.

The result is a society that can appear both hypermodern and surprisingly fragile.

Supercomputers coexist with crumbling bridges. Advanced medicine coexists with declining public health. Constant digital connectivity coexists with loneliness and social isolation. Billionaires pursue private space programs while aging electrical grids fail and housing becomes unaffordable for millions.

The system continues to generate immense wealth. Increasingly, however, it does so by consuming the social and material foundations that made that wealth possible in the first place.

Beyond the Illusion of Endless Growth

Viewed through this lens, rising authoritarianism, political dysfunction, corruption, and extreme polarization are not isolated problems. They are symptoms of a deeper impasse. Industrial civilization is colliding with the limits of a profit-driven economy designed for perpetual growth and sustained for generations by abundant, inexpensive fossil energy.

Humanity now faces a convergence of crises: climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, resource depletion, extreme inequality, food and water insecurity, mass displacement, and the growing risk of global pandemics. Each problem amplifies the others. Together, they place increasing strain on the systems that support modern life. The danger is that a system increasingly committed to profiting from extraction, conflict, chaos, and crisis management begins promoting instability itself.

Unfortunately, our collective capacity to confront these mounting crises is crippled by a fragmented political system of antagonistic nations ruled by corrupt elites who care more about power and wealth than people and the planet. As pressures intensify, the temptation to channel public frustration into nationalism, scapegoating, and geopolitical conflict intensifies.

How people respond to these pressures will shape humanity’s future. The challenges are monumental. They require us to question our identities, our values, and our loyalties like no other experience in our history. Who are we? Are we, first and foremost, human beings struggling to raise our families, strengthen our communities, and coexist with the other inhabitants of Earth? Or do our primary loyalties belong to our nation, our culture, our race, our ideology, or our religion? Can we put the survival of our species and our planet first, or will we allow ourselves to become hopelessly divided along national, cultural, racial, religious, or party lines?

The eventual outcome of this great implosion is still up for grabs. The future could be defined by deeper fragmentation, rising authoritarianism, and escalating conflict. But other possibilities remain open if we can overcome denial and despair; break our addiction to hydrocarbons; and pull together to loosen the grip of corporate power over our lives. Will we foster genuine democracy, harness renewable energy, reweave our communities, relearn forgotten skills, and heal the wounds we’ve inflicted on the Earth? Or will fear and prejudice drive us into hostile camps, fighting over the dwindling resources of a degraded planet? The stakes could not be higher.

Footnotes

1) Anabolism vs. Catabolism: In biology, anabolism refers to building tissues, while catabolism is the breaking down of tissues to release energy.

2) Subscription-based consumption shifts society from ownership toward ongoing rent-like dependency. Instead of paying once for durable goods, consumers maintain access through continuous payments across transportation, entertainment, software, housing services, food delivery, and physical products. Access replaces ownership, making consumers less able to accumulate assets while tying everyday life to recurring financial obligations. These models can sustain consumption despite stagnant wages, inequality, and high asset prices, but they also increase household fragility by raising fixed monthly costs, reducing savings, and deepening vulnerability to layoffs or interest-rate shocks.

3) In 2023, world debt (all outstanding loans waiting to be repaid plus interest) was a record $300 trillion. This is an astounding 349 percent over world GDP, and rising rapidly. This translates to $37,500 of average debt for each person in the world versus per capita GDP of just $12,000. Chan, Terry & Alexandra Dimitrijevic. “Global Debt Leverage: Is A Great Reset Coming?” S&P Global (Jan. 13, 2023.

4) Ronald Radosh, “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, Told Me He Was ‘a Leninist’,” The Daily Beast, Aug. 22, 2016, available at

5) “AI Data Centers — Statistics & Facts,

6) Interview with Tucker Carlson: “Sam Altman on God, Elon Musk and the Mysterious Death of His Former Employee,”

7) A digital reputation score is a numerical metric that quantifies the public perception, credibility, and trustworthiness of an individual, brand, or organization online.

8) Predictive analytics transforms population monitoring and control by shifting governance from a reactive system to an anticipatory one. By combining massive, real-time datasets with machine learning, authorities can forecast human behavior, preempt crises, and influence societal outcomes before they occur. These capacities raise major societal and ethical concerns, particularly regarding algorithmic bias, the erosion of privacy, and the potential for digital determinism, where historical data unfairly dictates an individual’s future opportunities and freedoms.

9) A semiconductor chokepoint is a highly concentrated node in the global chip supply chain where a single company, country (like Taiwan), or specific technology monopolizes a critical step of production. Because microchip manufacturing is one of the most complex engineering feats in human history, certain steps cannot be bypassed or replicated easily. This gives the entities controlling them outsized geopolitical and economic leverage.

Craig Collins Ph.D. is the author of “Toxic Loopholes” (Cambridge University Press), which examines America’s dysfunctional system of environmental protection. He teaches political science and environmental law at California State University East Bay and was a founding member of the Green Party of California.

06/04/2026

Trump and One Nation

4 April 2026

There has been a lot of interest in One Nation after they got 23% of the primary vote and 4 lower house seats in the South Australian elections of 21 March. It was commented that they had no MPs and no real policies. This is true, and it indicates how unhappy people are with the status quo and the two major parties in particular. They are seen as not being able to solve our problems. So people voted for One Nation because it was a change and because it criticised the status quo. They may have got more seats if there had not been compulsory preferential voting in South Australia- I have not done the analysis.

A vote for One Nation is still largely a protest vote in that the specifics for their policies are vague. It is clear what they are against, but not clear what they would do in most portfolio areas.

Trump was elected with 50% of the 65% of the eligible voters who bothered to vote. That is a bit under 33% of the total voters. The polls and figures in NSW have One Nation with a real chance in the (Federal) Farrer by-election (especially with a lot of money from Gina Rinehart). They also have quite a good chance in some NSW country seats, especially National Party ones, where the Nationals have abandoned farmers for the miners. The ‘optional preferential’ voting system in NSW may also favour them, as it favours parties with big primary votes. 23% would give them 4 of the 21 seats in the NSW Upper House election, as a quota is 4.5%. I did an analysis of the 2023 NSW election and found that if we had had compulsory preferential voting rather than optional preferential Labor would have had an extra 6 seats and there would have been an extra 3 Independents in the lower house. (Amazingly, Labor has not tried to change the system to compulsory preferential).

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Yri-zkB3w8ZVH44ZLPYAsQ-2ghyXU0j1E55lwuJsBEU/edit?tab=t.0

Compulsory preferential voting tends to disfavour radical parties because it takes account of what people prefer as well as what they want as a primary vote, so it tends to move towards the political centre. Australia is not as different from the USA as we might think. The radical Right protest solution has Trump at 33% and One Nation at 23%. The Australian Electoral Commission, which stops gerrymandering, compulsory voting, and the compulsory preferential system give us some margin of security against the outcome of a protest vote electing a government, but we need to acknowledge our problems and fix them more effectively that we have been doing if we are to stop the progress of protest without solutions.

06/04/2026

Prisons are for Punishment- does this work?

5 April 2026

Prisons are for punishment, so the people most disadvantaged have further pain inflicted on them.

The criminal justice system seems to have only one solution- prison. The only question for the judges is ‘How Long?’ This seems like having a carpenter whose only tool is a hammer, or a doctor who only has one drug. Yet no one even comments on its absurdity.

This is particularly foolish for kids, as they are going to live for many years and eventually they will come out, and if they remain unable to integrate with normal society they will almost certainly re-offend. At Point Puer, which was the children’s section of Port Arthur Prison Colony in Tasmania in 1857, the object was to get the kids back as normal members of society. We seem to have gone backwards in the last 168 years.
Children don’t have computer tablets in their cells, which would allow them access to families or education, which surely would improve their chances of rehabilitation. It costs $1.17million per child per year. You must wonder where the money goes.

Here is a video compiled after the recent NSW Parliamentary Budget Estimates Hearing, as the Minister gives his lame reasons for continuing lack of progress:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_RAhAQIa0wztBnfrrdI09huGe2JQLZQJ/view

10/03/2026

Iran Attack is another step on a bad road.

10 March 2026

(Warning- long and discursive post).

It is always important to see events in as broad a context as possible.
Prior to the First World War, Germany was rising due the industrialisation of Bismarck, and the US was rising because of its natural advantages. Britain was declining. Britain and France may have been able to defeat Germany, but the US came in at the last minute and affirmed its place as the world’s leading power.
Germany was humiliated, and continued to be shut out of markets, as was the rising Japan. Both became strong and their expansion led to WW2. The US, again remained aloof until the bombing of Pearl Harbour. The US still let the Russians do most of the fighting against Germany (look at the casualty figures if you doubt this), and came in at the end. D-Day was 6 June 1944, but Stalingrad had fallen on 2 February 1943 and the Russians had been advancing ever since.
Between the wars, the League of Nations had been created, which failed to stop German rearming and aggression. After WW2, a meeting a Bretton Woods intended to turn the whole world into one market, so that countries that did well would rise, and those who did not do so well would fall, all without wars. The US, with almost half world GDP would be in a good position, and set up the UN with a veto for the major powers.
The new world order, helped by technological advances in communications and logistics, and some US pressure for free trade treaties have largely turned the world into a market, where the wealthy nations or corporations could buy whatever they wanted. But the legacies of colonialism remained. Many developing g countries had had their resources taken over by colonial countries that were not about to give up those lucrative assets. Diamonds, gold and oil were three commodities where the major Western powers did not want to give up control. A developing country with a government acting for its people would obviously demand that the benefit of its resources would go to its people. The Colonial model was that the foreign power leaned on the government, but left it in place as long as it let the foreign power have the resources. So there was always a tension in the great powers between the rhetoric of freedom and democracy and the reality of making sure that whatever government exists lets the foreign power have the goodies.
How this conflict has played out in the US is documented in the book, ‘The Devil’s Chessboard- Allen Dulles, the CIA and the rise of America’s Secret Government’ by David Talbot. The CIA seems to have continued to get the US to ruthlessly pursue its interests with little care for the consequences for weaker nations. The book chronicles many democratic movements that tried to get a better deal for their people and were ruthless supressed by CIA-backed authoritarian regimes, often with dire consequences for the democratic figures. One of the only examples of the US actually working for democracy seems to have been John F Kennedy, who declined to give US support to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba after the revolution in 1961, saying that the US supported progressive regimes in the belief that it would deal with them in affair and honest trading way. Kennedy sacked the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles after the invasion, and was assassinated shortly thereafter. Talbot does not think that this was a coincidence.
It seems that the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in his farewell speech of 17 January 1961 has come to pass. Because the armaments industry is private in the US, wars are good for considerable sections of the US economy, and whether the US wins or loses does not matter much as long as the US itself is not significantly inconvenienced. It would seem that the CIA world view is dominant in Washington, and that includes supporting US corporate interests overseas as well as defence. The CIA-dominated policy has continued since Dulles. President Obama may have wished to change this; his slogan was ‘Change is possible’. He initially tried a bipartisan approach and then did not have the numbers in Congress. His epitaph might read, ‘Change was not possible’.
The election of Trump might be seen as a protest vote, even a revolution, against a system that seemed to grind on, as the US declined due to its wage structure making it uncompetitive as a manufacturing base, with corporations keen to manufacture offshore. A lack of money for education, an appalling gerrymander and slanted voting eligibility rules contributed to Trump’s victory, as did skilful use of databases and narrowcasting in social media and the paucity of options in a binary system.
Be all that as it may, the election of a basically ignorant and prejudiced man has resulted in an erratic US foreign policy. Simplistic arrogance and hubris have led to a cavalier disregard for the rules-based order that initially allowed the US to prosper, but the concentration of wealth has moved from national borders to corporations and now individuals. The nation states are still the basis of world order, though increasingly Capital in the form of multinational corporations or even individuals tell them what to do. But the nation states still exist and the US is the largest militarily, though it is declining economically. Climate change will soon mean that Russia and China will be able to trade via the North Pole, so the US wants Greenland, and Trump, with the tact he learned as a shock jock does not mind saying so. (The movie, ‘The Apprentice’ about the rise of Trump has a telling ending about the origin and success of his moral values). It may also be that Con men, lacking any real truths or values are more easily conned themselves.
The simplest reason for the attack on Iran would seem to be that Israel conned him into it. Israel has either subdued countries around it, like Jordan and Egypt or attacked and supressed them, helped by their economic troubles. Israel made deals with the major Middle Eastern economic powers, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, which is why Hamas, seeing the problem of Palestine being ignored, arranged the 7 October 2023 attack. The US and circumstance have neutralised Syria and Iraq, so the only real threat to Israel has been Iran.
Iran is a tragic illustration of CIA-controlled US foreign policy leading to bad outcomes. In 1908 oil was discovered leading to the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. In 1925 Reza Khan deposed the nominal monarch and became Shah Pahlavi in 1925. He was nationalist, anti-communist, authoritarian and secularist to the point of being anti-Islam, trying to ban the burqa, which upset the Muslim elements in the country.
In 1941 during the WW2 occupation of Iran by the British and Russians, the Shah’s son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi took over from his father. In 1951 there was a Democratic revolution and the government of Mohammad Mossadeq nationalised the oil industry. But Mossadeq had his problems with opposition from the Clerics, Communists, as well as the Shah and his army supporters. A CIA assisted coup overthrew the democratic government and re-installed the Shah, the deal being that 50% of the National Iranian Oil Company was controlled by foreign companies, BP, Shell, Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, Standard Oil of California and Companie francais des petroles. The CIA supported the Shah and trained his ruthless secret police. As the Shah’s support waned, we wanted to negotiate a better deal for Iran, so he lost US support and was toppled in 1979. But because all democratic movements had been ruthlessly suppressed, the only organised political force were the most fanatical mosques, which the secret police had not been able to penetrate, and the Ayatollah who had been a figurehead, safely in Paris. In 1980 the US persuaded Saddam Hussein to launch the Iran-Iraq war, on the basis that the Clerics’ purge of the army would leave Iran unable to respond. The war went on for 8 years and killed huge numbers, but resulted in a stalemate. The religious regime has survived ever since, trying to get nuclear weapons which would make it ‘safer’, at least from US or Israeli attack.
The US policy has been to support regimes or movements that support it. They supported and trained the Taliban in Pakistan to get rid of the Russians in Afghanistan, then found that the Taliban did not want them either. They allegedly conned Saddam Hussein into thinking that he could have Kuwait as a reward for the Iran-Iraq war, then invaded Iraq in 1991. Hussain was ruthless to those who were politically active, but he was Sunni on a country which was only about 25% Sunni and many of these were Kurds. He was toppled in the second (2003) invasion because of alleged ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ that the UN Weapons Inspector, Hans Bix said were not there. Free elections would have had a Shia majority, who looked to Shia Iran, and the US had no strategy to create stability. They have supported the gaggle of hereditary autocratic regimes in the Gulf States, which are non-democratic, fundamentalism, repressive of women and supported by secret police, but economically supportive of the US. Fundamentalist religious sects like Wahhabism, almost a throwback to medieval times, are tolerated for the same reason. (Sunni and Shia strands of Islam have had antipathy for years because of a fight over who should succeed Muhammad in 634AD, each side believing that the other is illegitimate).
To return to the current war situation, it seems that Israel has been trying to get US backing for an attack on Iran for years, Iran has also anticipated this and has many drones, that are much cheaper and more numerous than the clever weapons that shoot them down. They have targeted US bases, so while they are accused of attacking many countries, they are mainly attacking the US bases, with some key oil facilities thrown in. They have been very successful in targeting US radar facilities, so the US is no longer sure of what they are doing. The Israelis have no qualms, now carpet bombing.
Australia is now a bit-player, with Foreign Minister Penny Wong taking a call from the recently visiting Israeli President Herzog, and now rushing our airborne early warning aircraft to UAE, needed of course because Iran has successfully bombed all the radar bases.
Trump, who started all this is claiming victory, but if oil stays bottled up, petrol prices will rise, and inflation will increase. His Board of Peace looks like a very bad joke.
Prof Clinton Fernandez thinks that shutting off China’s oil is part of a grand strategy, but this is doubtful. It is true however, that China gets most of its oil from Venezuela and Iran so will be most unhappy. Should they choose to take Taiwan, the US would be preoccupied in the Middle East and has also set the precedent that Great Powers can do what they like.
The British commentator, George Galloway says on Instagram that the US is about to drop a nuclear bomb on the Fordow mountain in Iran because there is a nuclear facility under it. He then predicts that Russia will intervene.
The Australian Peace Movement is strangely silent. How bad does it have to get?
Pine Gap and the new US nuclear submarine base in Western Australia are safe for the moment, but Iran may do terror attacks here.
Here is the Oil explanation from Clinton Fernandez in the SMH of 3/3/26.

Trump’s attacks are not about Iran. He’s after a much bigger fish

Prof Clinton Fernandes, Academic and former intelligence officer
3 March 2026 SMH

Behind the turbulence that characterises US President Donald Trump’s actions in Iran lies a shrewd geopolitical strategy. In the short term, he wants to demonstrate leverage over China when he meets President Xi Jinping at a pivotal summit next month. In the long term, he wants a politically submissive Middle East.
China, the world’s largest refiner of oil, purchases about 14 per cent of its seaborne crude from Iran. The true figure is probably higher, disguised as shipments from Oman, the UAE and Malaysia to get around US sanctions. Independent low-margin Chinese refiners in Shandong province, known as teapots, also import high-sulphur fuel oil from Iran. Taken as a whole, China’s enormous plastics sector relies on Iran for almost a quarter of its liquefied petroleum gas. Control over what Iran can export and to whom allows the US to retaliate if China restricts rare earth mineral supplies to the United States.

Trump’s abduction of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in January was driven in part by a similar logic; Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, and its Merey grade is also high in sulphur, well suited for China’s teapot refineries. Trump wants indirect but politically critical leverage over China through control over Iran and Venezuela.
The key word here is “control”. Control of oil rather than access to oil is the foundation of the United States’ Middle East policy. “Access to oil” implies that the United States simply wishes to buy oil like any other country; that it wants oil at a reasonable price. But the US already has access to oil. Its East Coast oil refiners (PBF Energy, Phillips 66 and Monroe Energy) have no trouble buying oil from West African suppliers. Thanks to its domestic shale revolution, the US is already self-sufficient. It is a major contributor to the global oil supply network.
Control is a very different beast. Control of oil means, among other things, controlling the terms on which its industrial rivals in Europe and Asia can access their oil. After World War II, the reconstruction of Japan required abundant supplies of energy. The United States obtained what it called “veto power” over Japan by controlling its access to these supplies. A price increase can harm the dollar reserves of heavily oil-dependent economies, ensuring they act in accordance with US objectives. Sometimes, a US-induced price rise can help its diplomacy. In 1986, the US requested Saudi Arabia to cut production to drive crude oil prices higher – to improve US relations with none other than Iran, which needed higher prices.
Control also means ensuring that oil-rich Gulf states pour some of their revenues into US Treasury securities, banks and corporations. Saudi Arabia, for instance, has bought $US150 billion ($211 billion) in US Treasury holdings. Kuwait, another family dictatorship, has bought $US66 billion.
These oil-rich states buy US Treasury bonds, make deposits in US banks and otherwise ensure that some of the dollars they earn from oil sales will flow back to US corporations. They also buy advanced US weapons systems. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are among the largest buyers of advanced US weapons systems.
Qatar, a monarchy with the third-largest proven reserves of natural gas in the world, hosts the forward headquarters of US Central Command at Al-Udeid Air Base, which it built at a cost of over $US1 billion. It will spend many more billions to expand it from an expeditionary to a permanent base for more than 15,000 personnel and their aircraft. Its sovereign wealth fund has committed over $US45 billion in investments in US corporations. Qatar Airways is a major buyer of US commercial aircraft.
An Iran with a government more amenable to US influence can be expected to do something similar. This is why Trump says that the war against Iran could take weeks. He isn’t merely interested in ending its uranium enrichment. After all, Iran obtained its original nuclear reactor as well the highly enriched uranium fuel to run it from the US, under former president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program in 1957, when the two countries were friendly.
In the long term, a politically submissive Middle East would likely see a network of states with authoritarian regimes that comply with US objectives. These include rolling back Iran’s membership of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, undermining China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and weakening the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. If the US can’t change the Islamic Republic itself, then keeping it weak, divided and preoccupied with its internal affairs is good enough.
Control, not access, is what Trump is after. It is the same strategy Britain had 100 years ago, when Walter Hume Long, the first lord of the admiralty, said that “if we secure the supplies of oil now available in the world, we can do what we like”.

Professor Clinton Fernandes is in the Future Operations Research Group at UNSW. His latest book is Turbulence: Australian Foreign Policy in the Trump Era.

05/03/2026

Coles and ‘The Market’

5 March 2026

Currently the ACCC is suing Coles over misleading advertising as their promotion logo ‘Down, Down’ was to show customers cheap goods, but some of these had previously had big rises, so that overall they had not fallen, or not fallen much.

When I did Economics 101 a long time ago, the first chapter of the book was about the perfect market, modelled on a European medieval village where each Saturday all the farmers came to the square and sold their produce to the villagers. The farmers all competed with each other, and could not really take their produce home. The villagers had just enough money, so chose wisely which products to buy. The farmers could not raise their prices more than the other farmers and knew roughly how much to bring, and the villagers had complete knowledge of the products that they were buying.

All the other chapters in the book were about how the market was distorted by cartels, oligopolies, innovation, scarcity, lack of knowledge, regulation and doubtless a few other factors that I have forgotten.

In the simple medieval world, people spent all their money on necessities and made rational decisions. Now, a huge percentage of our expenditure is discretionary. Some people are battling to afford food, clothes, services and rent, particularly the last two, which have been badly affected by poor government policies over many years.

But the main area of interest to marketers is the people with discretionary income. Will they buy a branded product, believing it is better or more prestigious? The ‘science’ of marketing at an individual level is a branch of psychology- working out motivations. A marketer told me that people make decisions with their emotions, then justify them intellectually afterwards. This is true and it follows that the model of the rational villager is simply not what happens.

Big decisions, like moving to a more expensive suburb, buying a prestigious brand car taking an expensive holiday, or upgrading to a more expensive seat class, are a combination of emotional and rational; you want this and you can afford that.

Airlines and some accommodations are interesting. If you try to buy an airline ticket online and fall off, when you go back a few minutes later, the fare you had is no longer there. Did it really get sold in that moment, or did the airline find out who you were and up the fare? Fares can vary wildly. I tried to catch a train from Stockholm to a northern Swedish city and the price varied almost tenfold depending on what time I wanted to travel. Were they just trying to even the load, or was there some gross profiteering there?

Some supermarkets charge more in richer suburbs than poorer ones. The products are the same. Presumably the rents in the expensive suburbs are more, but how much is that per item? When Aldi came, I was amazed that the total cost of groceries was about 30% lower than the Coles/Woolworths duopoly. The range of products is less, but it is a big gap. The duopoly lowered their prices on things that are easy to remember like milk and bread and made a great play of the fact that these were price-competitive, but frankly, most of the rest of the wasn’t and isn’t.

At least some good folk have kept a record of what was actually charged and when and it seems in Coles ‘Down, Down’ sometimes means ‘Up, Up’.

Years ago in the BUGA UP days (early 1980s) when they had an ‘Advertising Standards Council’ and you complained to it, absurd claims were dismissed as ‘puffery’ that no one believed, so of course it was OK to make them. When the heat from BUGA UP and the consumers went off, the Advertising Standards Council simply disappeared and the nonsense continues unabated, (not that it ever was abated). The ACCC (Aust. Consumers and Competition Commission) seems either to have collected the data or has had it collected for them, so is able to take action at last.

It might be noted that government-owned Sydney Markets at Flemington had cheap stalls and most retailers and the public went there to buy their groceries. Liberal Premier Nick Greiner privatised the markets, putting the stalls up for sale based on their turnover. This created a huge overhead for the stallholders, who naturally had to buy their spaces for large sums. All the market prices naturally had to rise, and the big supermarkets by-passed the markets, buying direct from the farmers and squeezing their prices down. This was a significant move from the previous free market, done so that the NSW government could flog off as asset. The duopoply and buying power of the supermarkets further distort the price structures.

Allan Fels was a former head of the ACCC and has written the piece below in the SMH of 4/3/26. Late in the article he mentions one of the technologies that already exists, which is people simply visiting supermarkets, picking what they want and leaving, having been identified by face recognition and charged as per their card on a database. An idea that he foreshadows is digital pricing, where the goods do not have a price, but the price can be set for each individual customer, presumably based on their profile. Currently, there are loyalty schemes that collect our appearances, personal details, locations, shopping habits, and credit details. Free apps want access to our contacts lists and photos, so our friends are all linked together, and now technology companies listen to our conversations and can scan our emails. All this data is saleable for marketing, security or anything else. Presumably, as we come out of our future supermarkets with no prices on the goods, no checkout and no dockets but the bill visible on our phones, we can compare what we paid with strangers in the street, and see what their prices were compared to our own. Then a bevy of lawyers can make a fortune arguing with the supermarkets who will allege that were not ripping some customers off, they were subsidising the poor ones.

It’s a Brave New World.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/our-supermarket-duopoly-needs-to-tell-not-just-the-truth-but-the-whole-truth-20260303-p5o6yk.html

04/03/2026

Politicians Property Ownership- a Big Obstruction to Tax Reform

23 February 20265

It is important not to see this as just a Liberal v Labor issue. Tax deductible property has been a no- brainer way to make money in Australia for 50 years and has distorted the national investments and directed most of our capital into non-productive static assets. We need major tax reform, and what this shows is how difficult it will be to get the politicians to vote against their personal financial interests.

Histogram coming!!!

04/03/2026

Tax Reform at Last?

23 February 2026

At last, a significant financial commentator has stated the need for major tax reform to improve inter-generational equity.

Death duties are a major way to achieve this. Stopping negative gearing, abolishing the Howard discount of capital gains tax, and taxing static wealth, so that the family home cannot be a tax haven, no matter how huge it is.

Whether Prime Minister Albanese has the balls to do any of it is the question, and whether Tim Wilson, Liberal Opposition Treasurer who says he is for inter-generational equity will support a bipartisan approach rather than opposing all tax cuts is even more uncertain.

Two big tax holes are perpetuating Australia's wealth inequality

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-23/reducing-inequality-means-taxing-capital-more/106369480

04/03/2026

Protest Against Visit of Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, in Sydney 9 February 2026

9 Feb 2026.

I was at the protest against the visit of Israeli President, Isaac Hertzog, at Sydney Town Hall and would like belatedly to share some thoughts.

The Jewish lobby has always been very strong in Anglo politics and it is a brave politician that opposes them, given their economic clout.

The Sydney Peace Foundation had supported the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) campaign against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and in 2003 awarded the Sydney Peace Prize to Hanan Ashrawi. She was a Palestinian Christian, academic, poet and member of Parliament who had worked in Education for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, but later left it due to objecting to its corruption. The then CEO, Prof Stuart Rees had checked with the Foundation’s sponsors that they would continue to back the Foundation if a Palestinian were given the Prize. They assured him, Yes, but the Jewish lobby protested loudly and demanded that he withdraw the Prize. He declined to do so, saying that the Sydney Peace Foundation would have no credibility if it withdrew an announced prize. But almost all the corporate sponsors who had promised to continue their sponsorship withdrew. That is power.

Jewish schools get the tax deductibility of all religious schools and raise the Israeli flag. The official organs have been very silent throughout the Gaza genocide, and are keen to talk about centuries old antisemitism, while ignoring the genocide and the opprobrium associated with it. It remains the ‘elephant in the room’.

Meanwhile the number of Middle Eastern Muslims has been rising, and some significant politicians in Western Sydney are depended on the Muslim vote for their seats. Australian Muslim leaders are contributors to our multicultural society, but we might wonder what they think of the Israeli flag being raised. One might also wonder what would happen if an Islamic private school raised the Palestinian flag and sang their anthem. Since the time of ISIS recruitment some radical preachers have been quietly doing harm. (I saw a film made about this, but I have not been able to find it anywhere online now. It alluded to a certain preacher, but did not name him. It was briefly in Australian cinemas).

The Bondi Terror attack was a tragic demonstration of the extent to which radical forces build up, unnoticed by existing law enforcement organs. It was a failure of both Australia’s gun laws and its intelligence services, so Anthony Albanese wanted to have an Inquiry into these failures, done by a retired security chief.

The Jewish lobby was outraged and demanded a Royal Commission, blaming Albanese for the terror attack. They had been smarting from Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian State and pressured him to hold a Royal Commission on anti-Semitism, rather than the shorter and more practical security inquiry. They then invited the Israeli President to Australia. This invitation was then taken up by Albanese. Apparently it is common practice for groups to invite prestigious people, and then the Government takes over the invitation. Labor for Palestine, a group within the Labor party claimed that there was a picture of Hertzog signing a bomb to be dropped on Gaza in December 2023. Herzog had been elected President in 2021. His father had also been President and he had been head of the Labor Party in the Knesset. The Israeli President is separated from the government and is in a similar role to Australia’s Governor-General. Hertzog had been in Opposition to Netanyahu in party politics, but as President naturally supported him as the Prime Minister of Israel . When the International Criminal Court (ICC) cited Netanyahu and his Defence Minister for genocide, Herzog criticised the ICC. Herzog spent a lot of time maintaining ties with the Jewish diaspora world-wide, frowned on marriages with non-Jews, and worked to improve relations between Israel and other countries, notably Turkey, the US and the UAE (United Arab Emirates).

After the Bondi terrorist attack NSW Premier Chris Minns was quick to announce a State Inquiry and to pass the ‘Terrorism (Police Powers) Act 2026 that empowered Police to act with impunity at demonstrations.

Herzog was to address Australian Jewry at the International Convention Centre (ironically also I.C.C.), at Darling Harbour on 9 February.

Last July, the Palestinian Action Network had been banned by the Police from holding a March across the Harbour Bridge, but appealed the Police decision in the Supreme Court, had a significant victory in August 2025, and held a major ‘March for Humanity’ on a very wet and windy day, 3/8/25 which was attended in huge numbers.

They similarly applied for permission to hold a rally outside the Sydney Town Hall at 5.30pm on 9 February and to march to NSW Parliament. The Police banned the March, and the PAN again appealed to the Supreme Court. This time they lost, but the decision was not handed down until 5pm, just before the rally was about to start.

I went to the rally, entering from Bathurst St behind the cathedral. The Police were very aggressive, forming a cordon and certainly giving the impression that they were sparring for a fight. Town Hall Square was very full and the sound system was not good, so it was hard to hear some of the speeches. Grace Tame spoke extremely well and very clearly. Perhaps she used the microphone more skilfully. People around me also could not hear, judging by the way they joined in on the chants, but were otherwise silent. Chants were ‘Free, Free Palestine, ‘Arrest Herzog’ and ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall be Free’. (It was interesting that this last chant is to be considered to be a terrorist slogan with an appropriate penalty while the Israeli government merely implements it for their settlers with no slogan at all). The Cathedral rang its bells so frequently without apparent reason throughout the rally, which made it seem a deliberate strategy. There was a mood that we were going to march, as we had not come merely to hear speeches. The speeches went on too long and seemed repetitive , though not hearing well it was hard to be sure about this last. At about 7pm, after an hour and a half Josh Lees, the chief rally organiser said that there were ‘conversations’ ongoing about whether we were marching. I presumed that he meant conversations with the demonstrators, but this was not so. He was apparently referring to conversations with the Police. Presumably the speeches were continuing to allow the negotiations.

I concluded that the Police had won, that there would not be a march and left at about 7.10pm, so I missed the confrontation, which happened at about 7.25pm

It seems that the Police strategy was to keep the rally within the precinct of the Town Hall until the Jewish rally was over so that there was no possibility of the rally participants meeting the Jewish rally.

The Jewish meeting was told by a uniformed policeman to sit down for half an hour so that the protest rally could be cleared, so it seems clear whose side they were on. The Police had tried to stop the late arrivals even entering the protest rally, which had led to chants of ‘Let them in.’

The Police then said that here would not be a march, and everyone had to leave from behind the Cathedral via Bathurst St and were not allowed to go via George St. This seems to have been the catalyst for resistance as the Police tried to clear the Square.

The Police had been sparring for a fight, arrested 17 people and pushed other to the ground and on the ground. They used pepper spray and horses. I was shocked when a patient, a 70 year old woman came to me as a patient the next day and said that she had stood up on a plantar box to see what was going on and was thrown to the ground. She had grazes on her hand and arm and bruising of her chest wall. Below is some footage of the confrontation. A 2 hour comprehensive film of the rally is available at ConsortiumNews.

There has been a lot of discussion about Police powers since the rally, but it’s certainly frightening to know that there are considerable elements of the NSW Police that are willing to attack citizens with immunity from prosecution, very similar to ICE in the USA. It seems that the ‘Riot Squad’ see themselves as an elite in this role.

Time to renew subscriptions to the Council for Civil Liberties!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH1BZa27XAw