Oil companies are raking in billions in windfall profits from the Iran war as Australians suffer soaring petrol prices and the Labor government refuses to adequately tax the sector.

Multinational heavyweights ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP have all recorded sharp profit spikes by a combined $29.5bn (US$20.5bn) since the US and Israel illegally attacked Iran on 28 February, triggering a global energy crisis. Chevron, which reported a profit of US$14.5bn in the 15 months prior to the Iran war, hauled in US$12.1bn in the first quarter alone.

Iran cut off the Strait of Hormuz in response to the attack, through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply transits. Recent fighting between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, as well as the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war are also adding to the global energy strain.

But there are no complaints from oil and gas giants, who are banking the billions of extra fuel costs suffered by consumers at the petrol pump. That includes Australia’s largest fuel retailer Ampol, which posted a 376% increase in profit from the company’s 2025 first-half year profit.

For the vast majority who are not oil and gas executives, the 50% surge in petrol prices – from around $1.71 a litre before the war to nearly $2.60 by the end of March – has been a source of tremendous financial pain. This has been compounded by rising interest rates, which means the war’s costs have effectively been passed onto global households while the select few profit. In Australia, this has come with government support.

Anthony Albanese was the first leader to back the US-Israeli war on Iran, despite the hardship it has brought to Australian households struggling to make ends meet. In April, amid popular demand for a tax on gas companies, the prime minister backed the fossil fuel giants and said it was “the worst possible time to jeopardise these partnerships, or the investment that underpins them”.

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The remarks echoed those aired by the chief executive of the oil and gas lobby, the Australian Energy Producers, who, three days prior to Albanese’s comments, said: “It shouldn’t need to be said that this would be the worst possible time to impose an investment-destroying tax.”

Aftab Malik’s bookshelf takes up most of the wall behind him, and he is happy to give a tour, via Zoom.

There is a section on Islamophobia and one on Islamic civilisation. Out of view are shelves on Zionism and Islamism. He says he owns more than 800 books on Jewish history, antisemitism and Zionism. He pulls down a 1,200-page volume by a rabbi who argues that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism, then a university press study of how debate about Israel has been narrowed.

“I read a lot of literature that I don’t necessarily agree with,” says the British-born scholar, “to understand the mind that I’m talking with.”

It is a habit that runs through his work as Australia’s inaugural Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia. As his three-year term enters its final year, Malik has made a practice of sitting down with the people who most distrust Muslims, and with the Muslims who most distrust him. While the role has given him access to the highest levels of power, from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to policymakers and institutions he says he never knew existed, it has also earned him bruising criticism closer to home.

Muslim distrust of envoy role

Malik built his early career writing about Islam and terrorism. In the mid-2000s the United Nations designated him a global expert on Muslim affairs, and he wrote, by hand, a three-volume study of antisemitism in modern Muslim thought that remains unpublished.

He was about to start a PhD at Oxford in 2013 when the Lebanese Muslim Association in Sydney asked him to become its scholar in residence later that year. He saw a chance to reach young Muslims grappling with religion, identity and belonging, and took it, “much to the dismay of my [Oxford] professor”. He still jokes that he chose “Lakemba over Oxford”.

Then came the call to the federal role, as reports of Islamophobia surged in the wake of October 7, 2023. The Islamophobia Register Australia says reported attacks have since jumped 612 per cent in the past three years.

However, in the lead-up to his appointment, a vocal number of Muslims and commentators called it “farcical” to think he could combat Islamophobia.

“I actually thought Muslims would see this [the envoy role] as a good thing,” he says. “I was genuinely shocked how many people thought it was a bad thing.”

Some of the distrust was about who had appointed him. Many Muslims were angry at the Albanese government’s response to the genocide in Gaza, and saw its envoy as an extension of it. “People thought that I was part of the Labor government,” Malik says. “I’ve got no coercive power over the government. All I can do is articulate as powerfully as I can the Muslim concern.”

Other concerns also stemmed from his background in countering violent extremism, or CVE, work that many Muslims associate with surveillance and suspicion. “CVE work is a red flag for many of us,” says Dr Yassir Morsi, a La Trobe University lecturer who has written books on Islamophobia and in his scholarly capacity, contributed to a paper on the 2005 anti-Arab/Islamophobic Cronulla hate riots for the envoy’s office.

Morsi argues that CVE treats terrorism as a religious problem rather than a political one, born of decades of war and western intervention in West Asia, particularly the Iraq war. He sees Malik as fluent in the government language of social cohesion but silent on the role of the state, and he considers the envoy’s office “toothless”.

Disagreements on approach

In late 2024, Malik spent six weeks touring the country to meet more than 200 Muslims from all walks of life. Some asked why he had taken the job. Others told him they had thought he was intelligent until then. Most said it to his face, which he respected, but some were courteous in the room and scathing on social media afterwards.

His first eight months, he jokes, felt like being “punished for my sins”. “I got the scars on my back to prove it.”

Few moves drew more criticism than his response to Pauline Hanson. After the One Nation leader declared on national television that there were no “good Muslims”, Malik publicly invited her to an iftar. Condemnation from some in the Muslim community was swift. Her office has never responded to the invitation.

Yet, Malik makes no apology for the approach. “Being nice doesn’t mean you cannot be firm,” he says. He models himself on the Prophet Muhammad, whom he describes as gentle but unyielding when it mattered. He also has a strategic reason for staying calm. “In the Islamophobia space, being angry is one of the stereotypes,” he says. “I don’t want to capitulate to the angry Muslim.”

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His approach to his opponents is where opinions of him divide and even he admits he says things that make Muslim audiences uncomfortable. Muslims have done “horrific things” in the name of their religion, he says, and the community has to recognise it. He also understands, without excusing it, why some Australians believe their fear of Islam is rational: they have little contact with Muslims and are fed a steady diet of terrorism headlines.

“When Muslims talk about Islamophobia, they talk about what western nations are doing,” he says. “When non-Muslims talk, they’re talking about what Muslims are doing in the name of Islam.” He sees his job as bringing those two conversations together.

That is not appeasement, he insists. “I can say that this speech is reckless,” he says, “and at the same time say, if you want to talk to me about why, come and speak to me.”

Morsi sees it differently. Engaging figures like Hanson, he says, only gives them media minutes and “makes her look better”. He would rather Muslims stop performing for their detractors and invest in their own lawyers, filmmakers and journalists. “Racism is always going to exist,” he says. “It’s kind of like the weather.”

Government ignores key recommendations

Much of Malik’s work has gone into his report to the government, which he wrote alone before his staff arrived in January this year. He asked every community the same key questions, promised to focus on whatever came up most, and sent drafts to 30 experts in Australia and abroad for feedback. Wherever he went, the same three concerns kept coming back: political rhetoric, media coverage and education.

Among his 54 recommendations to the Albanese government are a code of conduct for politicians, a youth hub where newsrooms can hear directly from young Muslims, and recognition in the national curriculum of Islam’s contribution to civilisation. His central argument, though, is that grants and dialogue are welcome but not enough. “You can’t deal with the after-effects of Islamophobia,” he says. “You need to address it on a structural basis.” For him that also means law reform, policing and the counterterrorism framework.

That argument was tested twice. When the federal budget set aside nothing for Islamophobia, he says he spent two weeks telling ministers that Muslims read it as proof they weren’t being taken seriously. Then in July, 10 months after he handed over his report, the government accepted 35 of the 54 recommendations and committed almost $42 million to mosque security, community grants, an education taskforce, leadership programs and research.

It did not accept the structural reforms he had pushed hardest for. Those included an inquiry into anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian discrimination, stronger legal protections for Muslims against religious discrimination, and a review of whether counterterrorism laws had unfairly targeted Muslim communities.

The limits of a government role

Those who have worked with him see the pros of an envoy and the wider limitations. Mohammed Bouras, a physics PhD candidate and vice-president of the Swinburne University Islamic Society, has been fighting the university over new rules for its Muslim prayer space.

Malik advocated for the students, and Bouras credits his intervention with getting the university to the table. Even so, he thinks the envoy role was created to “pander to Muslim voters” and given little power, especially compared with the antisemitism envoy, Jillian Segal.

The government formally adopted Segal’s controversial plan and announced a package of legislative reforms that critics warn impinge on free political expression. Malik got 35 of his 54. But Bouras separates the role from the man. “It’s not about Aftab,” he says. “He might be the best one for the role but he is already limited.”

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Mohamed Mohideen, president of the Islamic Council of Victoria, says those limits come with any government job. As a former Victorian Multicultural Commissioner, he says he had to temper what he said even under a supportive government, and he will never take such a role again. “You can get a good salary,” he says, “but you have to keep your mouth shut.”

What Malik says he has gained, despite those limits, is trust. He draws a sharp line between his first eight months and the period since his report was published. The second edition, he says, carries twice as many endorsements as the first. He counts winning over some of his harshest critics in the community among his proudest achievements, and credits patience and never overpromising. “People in the community often tell me ‘you don’t come across as a salesperson’,” he says. “You’re always clear about what you can do and what you can’t do.”

Understanding history is key

In Canada, Amira Elghawaby, the country’s first Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia, learned how much rides on that trust, and how little it can guarantee. She held a similar role until her office was abruptly shut down in February, with a year of her mandate left.

It had been created at the community’s request after two massacres in which Muslims were targeted and killed, and she took it on with strong community backing. She has swapped notes with Malik and calls his report “important”. “The moment you lose the trust of communities,” she says, “the government won’t engage on the difficult issues.”

Unlike Malik, who looks forward to having a break after his tenure ends in late 2027, Elghawaby says she would take the job back “in a heartbeat”.

The job has cost Malik and his family more than he expected. Ask him when it ends and the answer comes instantly: October 2027. Then a smile. “Not that I’m counting.”

Asked whether Australian Muslims should despair at the rise in Islamophobia, he reaches for history. When the Mongols sacked the heartland of Islam in the thirteenth century, he says, many Muslims believed it was the end of the world. Yet new Muslim empires followed in Spain, India and Anatolia. “You’ve got to understand the past to understand the present,” he says.

He doesn’t want Muslims to treat Islamophobia as simply a test to be endured. He wants them to report it and to use the rights their citizenship gives them. Getting jaded is human, he says. “But don’t fall into hopelessness.”

His critics argue that no envoy can fix Islamophobia, nor the problems in community leadership that Morsi says have left Muslims “talking about the same thing” for two decades. Malik doesn’t disagree. On that first bruising tour, he says, even the people tearing into him told him the same thing: nobody expected him to solve Islamophobia in three years.

One thing you grasp very quickly when writing on economics is that the economy and the entire system surrounding it is not made for people. At least not people who work most of the jobs, or are unemployed, or struggling due to health or disabilities, or elderly, or trying to buy a home, or rent, or in essence make up almost all of our society. It’s made for corporations and those who own and run those corporations, and much of the reporting is done by the same and for the same.

For example, the day after this year’s budget in May, The Australian ran with the headline on its front page, “77BN TAX GRAB”. The figure was derived by adding the collective impact of the changes to tax on capital gains and trusts out to 2036-37, which would be funny were it not so absurd.

It wasn’t a shock, because News Corp loves to decry any increases in tax.

On a completely different note, last week the ATO released the Corporate Tax transparency report for 2024-25.

It’s a fun little report that lists the amount of tax paid by every company with an income over $100m.

Here’s the table of how much tax has been paid each year by News Australia Holdings Pty Ltd:

Yep. Zero. Ok, so they have brought in nearly $24bn income, but as News Corp journalists are always at pains to tell anyone, company tax is levied on profits. Harder to explain is the nearly $1.3bn in taxable income that also led to $0 tax.

Others will say that it’s a holding company and those often pay no tax. Yes, but Nine Entertainment Co. Holdings Ltd paid $76.7m in tax in 2024-25. And sure, it was off the back of $2.27bn income and just $290.5m in taxable income, but at least it was something.

News Corp is just really clever, I guess.

Like with most things in our economy, this result is not due to fraud or malfeasance – it’s the system. A system where the Santos CEO gets to speak at the National Press Club, boast about how the gas industry is so great for communities, suggest we need more gas and demand “a stable taxation and regulatory regime”. The same CEO who at last year’s annual gas industry conference compared Victoria to North Korea and said he’d prefer to invest in PNG than Australia.

And all the while Santos Pty Ltd has gone 11 years without paying a dollar in company tax:

Zero dollars every year? That sure is stable! And not bad work by the accountants given the Santos 2024-25 annual report notes “$1.2b net profit after tax”.

Even at a smaller level we see the same skewed system at work.

Ruslan Kogan, founder and CEO of Kogan Ltd, decided after budget the nation needed to hear his views on things and so posted a ranting video online.

He told us that he has no problem paying tax, saying “when it comes to taxes, I don’t care if it’s a 90 per cent tax, as long as it’s actually making the country better for our children and giving us a better place to live in the future”.

Good point, well made!

Except in 2024-25, Kogan Australia Pty Ltd paid $0.00 in company tax – the same amount it paid in 2023-24 and 2022-23 and 2021-22:

So no, not quite 90% tax.

In 2024-25 the company made a gross profit of $168.4m.

Kogan suggested, “The Aussie culture has been all about working hard, taking risks, having a crack, and you’re going to be incentivising the wrong sort of people to come here.” What type of people? Those, who, in Kogan’s mind think, “You know what? There’s some great opportunity for some really sick NDIS scams; there’s a really great welfare system; that’s the sort of country that I want to come to.”

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This said after a budget that cut the NDIS by around 12 per cent in real terms, and in a nation where people on Jobseeker die up to 10 more than those not on welfare:

Kogan was reported glowingly on News Corp’s news.com.au as having an “epic rant” and on the old Sky News as being a “dire warning”.

Perhaps it is worth reminding people that in 2020, Kogan Australia was fined $350,000 for making false or misleading representations about (and yes, this is bitterly ironic) a “tax time sales promotion”, in which, the ACCC found “consumers were not receiving a genuine 10 per cent discount as promised”.

Ah well. That’s the system, I guess. Sometimes you get caught, and … well life carries on. Your voice remains worthy of hearing because wealth and company ownership sways all.

And then last week we had interest rates rise for the fourth time this year. The conservative media and opposition parties blamed government spending. The Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson told us what he would cut: NDIS, aged care, childcare.

No talk of getting companies to pay some tax or even acknowledging that in a budget there is both a spending and revenue column.

Nah. That’s the system, you see.

A woman protected by a family violence intervention order was allegedly contacted by the man subject of that decree, after her basketball game was livestreamed by Israeli AI cameras endorsed by Basketball Australia.

A second woman, who also raised concerns about the Ballarat game being streamed, was contacted by an estranged family member she had been avoiding.

In both instances, concerns were raised about streaming the game, with the association allegedly warned a week before the match that doing so could put the women in danger. This is according to the players’ coach, who Deepcut has chosen not to name to protect the safety of the women.

When the team reported the incidents, Ballarat Basketball’s general manager, Chris Thornton, told the women in an email sent on 16 September and seen by Deepcut that “Ballarat Basketball does not have the level of administrative access within the platform to independently hide or block games”.

That level of access is retained by the Israeli firm. “At present, our avenue to action a specific request of this nature is to communicate it directly to Pixellot,” the email read.

On privacy concerns, Thornton said the association “was not responsible for establishing [the] national frameworks and processes” and directed questions to Basketball Australia and Pixellot.

‘Children should feel safe’

The coach said they were concerned about the implied consent attached to filming, adding that many participants were not aware the games were being recorded.

“I want my players to be able to play without fear of who is watching and how it connects them to those who they don’t want nor need to be connected to,” the coach said.

“As a parent, I want my child to just be able to play and simply be a kid. A basketball court should without second thought be a safe place, free from exploitation of who knows what is happening from people accessing his image,” they said.

The coach said that players were also being asked to pay a new mandatory fee within their registration to cover the cost of the Israeli AI system.

“People deserve the right to choose, and the way that it was presented by Basketball Ballarat – apparently following Basketball Australia policies and implementation guidelines – took that choice away,” they said.

The alleged incidents follow a Deepcut investigation revealing Basketball Australia’s plans for a national rollout of the Israeli AI camera system. The technology automatically records games, regardless of age or playing level, under the premise of automating performance analytics.

The technology’s links to a former Israeli Defence Force intelligence officer have also attracted scrutiny given the Israeli genocide in Gaza, in which its forces have slaughtered at least 21,000 children, often with the assistance of AI technology. There is no evidence, however, the Pixellot system has been used for Israeli military purposes.

Underage teams watched

Questions abound as to who can access the Pixellot platform, after Deepcut was able to create an account without consenting to any privacy or safety conditions, and without being asked for credentials that tied the user to an association.

Deepcut was then able to follow numerous underage teams belonging to Ballarat Basketball, which appear to be populated ahead of a new season starting this month. Previously recorded domestic games at Ballarat and Knox Basketball were freely available to watch.

This is despite Basketball Australia previously telling this masthead that access would be limited to players, coaches, parents and guardians, authorised association administrators and service personnel.

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Respect Victoria’s CEO Helen Bolton said normalising filming and sharing images – particularly of children – without consent enabled the culture that underpins gendered violence.

“Technology-facilitated abuse is rapidly changing and includes abuse like using technology to track or record someone without their consent, or the use of AI to create sexual exploitation images, including of children,” Bolton said.

“New technologies should be carefully considered by any organisation with a duty of care, including children’s sport. This means not procuring any service or software where policies and practices around how data is used, shared and governed is not clearly understood and able to be shared easily with parents, families and children who it affects.”

Family violence extends to technology

Bolton said it was concerning that external technology providers controlled whether footage was recorded or published, particularly when the data was housed in countries with different and less stringent data security regulations than Australia.

“This means that it is impossible for anyone to give informed consent for their images being captured as they don’t know where they will end up,” she said.

“The recording of children and young people via automated livestreaming therefore does pose risks. Not only for people who are currently experiencing violence, but also for how we raise the next generation and their understanding of consent and safe and healthy relationships.”

In a 2025 national survey on technology abuse and domestic violence carried out by Wesnet, Australia’s peak body for domestic violence, 99.7 per cent of family violence practitioners reported clients who had been abused, stalked or threatened via technology.

“When a participant raises a safety concern, the sporting organisation should listen, act immediately and ask what they need to participate safely,” Westnet CEO Karen Bentley told Deepcut.

“No one should have to choose between their safety and participating in sport.”

Basketball Australia, Basketball Victoria, Ballarat Basketball, Knox Basketball and Pixellot did not respond to detailed questions from Deepcut.

At the age of 13, I was taken to an election rally at the Hobart City Hall where Gough Whitlam was to speak. It was 1974, the hall was packed and when Gough came on the emotion grew electric.

Australia in 1974 still felt like a country shaking off being a colony. We had just stopped standing up in the cinema when God Save the Queen played, portraits of the English monarch had just been taken down from government offices, and Australia had finally begun exploring a foreign policy separate of the US, having withdrawn Australian troops from the bloody and pointless quagmire of Vietnam.

To wave after wave of applause, Whitlam talked of buying back the farm. It was an idea of Australia as nation independent and sovereign, proudly charting its own course. Its bedrock was the beginning of a cultural renaissance that would see a flowering of Australian film, music and literature.

Jump-cut half a century and we have as our prime minister a Benny Hill impersonator who rarely met a corporation for which he wouldn’t roll over – more Toto than Toto. In the noble tradition of online scammers, US artificial intelligence corporations have persuaded the Albanese government that their offer of investment in Australia, replete with highly dubious conditions, is only for a short time, after which it will be withdrawn.

The Albanese government – with falling poll numbers, collapsing living standards, a renascent One Nation, reduced immigration and the consequent hit on GDP numbers – seems to see in AI, or at least data centre construction and “training” centres, a sugar hit for the economy that might perk up the national accounts enough to save its political skin at the next federal election.

For, after it promised to steer a careful path and protect creators’ rights with AI, we discover that the Albanese government is now pondering a terrible betrayal: selling out Australian artists and, more than that, the Australian people.

Days after AI companies told us their product might destroy all humanity, we discover that – in the manner of standover goons doing a shakedown – they have now threatened our government that unless it sacrifices our nation’s culture for what they call “training” (translation: theft), they will not invest here. The government’s leaked proposals add up to this: making Australia to AI regulation what the Cayman Islands is to tax evasion.

No artist I know is happy to see destroyed a system that has developed over centuries to enable them to work. Copyright law is not a block or a problem – it is the foundation of all the creative industries. It’s what makes AC/DC and Anna Funder, Tim Winton and Cate Blanchett possible. Protecting creators’ rights means protecting copyright, the foundation of Australian literature, music, art and film.

The proposed idea of an artist choosing to “opt out” – choosing not to have their work used for AI “training” (translation: theft) – is as hopeless as waving to a swimmer being attacked by a white pointer after you made it to shore. Would we accept the idea that because the Gypsy Jokers insisted on making home invasions legal a few of us may be allowed to “opt out” of home invasions?

Not one other country in the world has signed up to such brazen theft being made law. It’s hard to imagine that any will. Other countries are closed or are closing to the idea of strip-mining the soul of their cultures for AI. Which makes the bluff and bluster of the AI lobby’s threats – that they will move on if Australia doesn’t agree post-haste – only ring more hollow.

It is intimidation founded in nonsense to say Australia will miss out on AI unless it sacrifices its culture to Anthropic and Grok. Are they seriously saying they won’t build their data centres everywhere they can? Are they saying we will be denied access to their products? Given their insatiable greed, it’s very unlikely, but if they’d use such a threat now, imagine what they will demand once embedded into our society.

Worse, our own government, too easily dazzled by power, seems to believe the best way of protecting ourselves from attacks from foreign powers’ AI is to embed into the very heart of our own nation the same AI controlled by the biggest and most erratic foreign power of them all – the US, an increasingly anti-democratic, dangerous and disloyal regime.

The government’s secret proposals on AI copyright effectively amount to handing over our culture to a handful of anti-democratic oligarchs and raising the spectre of Australia becoming a vassal state. If these words sound overstated, they merely repeat much of what Arthur Mensch, CEO of Paris-based AI company Mistral, told the French National Assembly in May. But what is driving the Europeans to protect their sovereignty by building their own AI that respects their culture, copyright and their citizens’ privacy isn’t even on the table in Australia.

Instead, we are being bullied into becoming fully integrated into the American system but without the critical American legal protection of statutory damages that is leading to a proliferation of litigation against AI companies in the US.

This is an Australian government which beneath its babble about respecting artists has done next to nothing for them over its four years in office. It is a government so feckless with our national sovereignty that we must regularly witness the wretched spectacle of the sebaceous Richard Marles haunting Pentagon corridors with yet another several-hundred-million-dollar cheque for AUKUS, the only concrete achievement of which has been to make Perth, with its prospective US base at Fremantle, a nuclear target.

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And despite Albanese’s blandishments on the environment, will his promise of renewables to power data centres prove any more a durable guard rail than the protection he offered artists? If you think those promises won’t be broken also, ask Toto not to wag his tail and see what happens.

At a moment when there is such widespread rage at AI in the US that both Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon can appear at the same event denouncing it, when community after community is saying no to data centres, when AI executives fear assassination, the AI oligarchs – close to being run out of their own country – are looking for another nation to pillage for their water, their power, and their “training” (translation: theft). With the Albanese government they may have found the ideal country ripe to be colonised by their rapacious greed, as Mughal India was colonised by the East India Company.

It may be that most Australians don’t care one jot that our writers, artists and musicians may now have to submit to the yoke of the very thieves whose wealth was made from the greatest copyright robbery in history. But every Australian should care because now the same AI corporations really are coming for you – for your water, your power, your nation’s sovereignty, and your very lives to harvest – your Insta photos, your TikTok videos and Facebook community pages, your dating site information and your search records.

And to what end? To make Elon Musk and Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg even richer? More powerful? To be able to exert more control over us and our lives? Were Prime Minister Albanese to front an election rally today and explain why, 52 years after Whitlam, he is planning to sell off the farm, would anyone other than his $10,000 donor dinner partners cheer?

But what can we expect? A government that doesn’t understand its nation’s culture is a government incapable of leading the nation.

Anthony Albanese has returned from New York and the latest UN General Assembly, which, like all UNGAs, saw the nations most at risk from global warming and genocide ignored while those creating the conditions for destruction wrung their hands and preached unity.

Unity, in this sense, means deal with it. The Nepalese prime minister, Balendra Shah, made the point that western nations ensure “intercontinental missiles arrive on time. Rifles and ammunition cross borders, clear every bottleneck, meet each deadline”.

Meanwhile, farmers in his nation can’t procure fertiliser or fuel at affordable prices to feed their people. Shah outlined western hypocrisy just one week after Labor and the Liberal Party worked to shut down any talk of the Red Lines Package, which would hold Australia to the standard Albanese claimed we held in his latest ‘we are the world’ speech at the UN.

But at the core of all those empty promises is the simple truth that the Australian government does not want anything to change. On every issue, Labor has done the least it can do. The barest of minimums designed to give some kernels of truth to its claims of being a responsible global citizen, while not having to do anything which would create any sense of discomfort.

That’s not new – that’s essentially how western governments have operated since post-war reconstruction and especially since the 1970s, when neoliberalism took charge. The difference now, as Sheeran recently discovered when he attempted to be apolitical about a genocide, is that it all belongs to a different era. Albanese is trying to govern as if it is still the 1990s and 2000s, when a West Wing-style speech made (small l) liberals feel like they could run through walls as they patronised and faux-intellectualised anyone who believed there were dangers in only ever recognising the centre.

Albanese’s Labor is reactionary to the bully class – be it media, billionaire or nation. Watch as Australia becomes even more mealy mouthed about criticising the United States, or sanctioning Israel, in a bid to win a spot on the UN Security Council.

Labor pretends they need to play nice so they avoid a veto, and then can make ‘real change’ once on the council, but forget that the price of being on the council is to never upset the western nations causing the harm.

What point is a Security Council that can’t recognise a genocide because the nation responsible for it – who just so happens to be our ‘main ally’ – has a veto? What, pray tell, does Australia think it will do differently when it is at the table, to what it is doing now? Because power, when granted, only ever comes from above. And to hold on to that sort of anointed power means never upsetting those who have lent it to you. It’s granted knowing it can be taken away. That’s how Albanese runs his government, and how imperial nations run the world.

The ‘tolerant’ attitude Sheeran tried to preach in excuse for kowtowing to Zionist power – under the guise of being ‘apolitical’ and centrist, but which in reality just keeps the bully class comfortable and in control – is also how Labor, UK Labour and establishment Democrats handle power.

The moral and ethical bankruptcy at the heart of that sort of power has been made exceedingly clear. And yet Albanese, like Sheeran, like his contemporaries in the so called ‘centre-left’ parties around the world, cling to it like a life raft.

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It is this thinking that leads to Labor strategists excusing the latest selfie with Donald Trump as a “distasteful necessity” in order to keep Trump happy, even as it completely rubs Albanese of the authority which helped him to victory over Peter Dutton’s embrace of Trump in 2025.

Labor talks of ‘universality’ for services, but has no long-term view of socialism – by design. That would require actively shifting power, and Labor has no interest in that. The strongest stance Albanese and Labor have mustered is against Big Tech, but even that leans towards ‘working together’ which means, in bully power speak, allowing the tech companies to create the boundaries of what they are willing to accept.

You’ll hear more about ‘frontier models’ trained ‘locally’ and then you’ll see more approvals for fossil fuels in anticipation of underwriting the data centres we’ll need for all those ‘local frontier’ AI models – which will, of course, highlight their renewable power, but not the gas accompanying it.

But none of this should make people feel powerless. Far from it. There is more opportunity for pushback than almost any other point in the last 50 years, against this toxic centrism. As Sheeran discovered, fuck around and find out. Not taking a side is siding with the bullies. There is another way. Labor can be forced to pay attention – all it takes is enough people to make them.

When the federal government says it’s spending more on defence, there is a trade-off: your quality of life.

The more government spends on the military – or, more specifically, arms procurements and manufacturing – the less it’s spending on you.

In 2025-26, the Commonwealth spent $59bn on defence, an increase of $16.3bn (38%) over the previous five years – way above inflation over the same timeframe at 24%.

Defence also has an eye-watering $425bn decade-long capital investment commitment.

That’s enough to pay for free GPs ($54bn), adding dental into Medicare ($77.6bn), free university ($46.5bn), free childcare ($126bn), 1 million homes ($22.9bn) and lifting JobSeekers out of poverty ($95.7bn) with some chump change remaining.

Two caveats. First, the free childcare figure is the net cost from the PBO’s costing – it assumes the Child Care Subsidy is abolished and replaced with direct funding. Second, the timeframes are mixed: some figures are forward estimates, some are decade figures. It’s a rough comparison, not an accounting exercise. But the order of magnitude is the point. The $425bn defence commitment could fund every one of these policies and still leave money on the table.

The ‘can’t afford’ list

There’s one phrase the PM and his ministers have repeated ad nauseam since they came into office in 2022: “fiscally responsible” – or political speak for “we can’t afford it”. That catchphrase – or variations of it – has been used as justifications for constrained social spending, as outlined below.

JobSeeker – Anthony Albanese, 13 April 2022:

“We don’t have a plan to increase the JobSeeker allowance in our first budget. The truth is if we are fortunate enough to form government we will form [it] at a time when debt is heading towards a trillion dollars. Whereby you can’t repair all of the damage or do everything that you want to do immediately – you’ll be fiscally responsible.”

Dental into Medicare – Anthony Albanese, 4 April 2025:

“It’s a matter of making sure that the budget is responsible. We can’t do everything we’d like to do immediately.”

Dental into Medicare – Health Minister Mark Butler, 4 April 2025:

“[It] would be very expensive, a very big job to do”.

Universal childcare – Treasurer Jim Chalmers, 4 May 2026:

“We have to calibrate our ambitions to the budget realities that we confront.”

NDIS – Mark Butler, 22 April 2026:

“We can’t afford for the NDIS to continue growing at its present rate.”

The human costs to these policies are real. The NDIS cuts announced in this year’s budget will result in more than 240,000 people being kicked off disability support. And people on unemployment payments are four times more likely to die than the general population, with suicide the leading cause of death.

The defence splurge – compare the quotes

The words “fiscally responsible” vanish when government ministers speak of military spending – replaced instead with ‘record funding’. See below.

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Anthony Albanese, 14 September 2025, announcing the $12bn Henderson Defence Precinct in WA.

“Today’s investment is another way we are delivering record defence funding to bolster Australia’s capabilities.”

Anthony Albanese, 6 March 2025, after the Trump administration called on Australia to lift its defence spending.

“My government is allocating significant additional resources for defence.”

Richard Marles, 17 April 2026:

“This is the biggest peacetime increase in Australia’s defence spending in our nation’s history.”

The government cries poor when pressed on social spending, but on the military? A bottomless pit. That’s not “fiscally responsible”. That’s priorities – and we, the people, are low on the list.

An Australian court has heard, for the first time, expert evidence linking the secretive outback spy base of Pine Gap to Israel’s genocide in Gaza in a case involving two protestors.

Yul Scarf and Jorgen Doyle pleaded guilty on 14 September for blocking the main access road to the spy base under the charge of failing to cease to loiter. The protest took place on 9 October 2025, with the pair handed a six-month good behaviour bond and a court levy of $223 each.

But as part of the proceedings, the Alice Springs Local Court received details of Pine Gap’s alleged involvement in Israel’s wars in West Asia.

“As far as I’m aware, this is the first known instance of an Australian court receiving expert evidence demonstrating that Pine Gap is being used for that purpose,” Nick Hanna, the defendants’ legal representative, said outside the court.

“We argued that this evidence provides support to Jorgen and Yul’s contention that they committed this offence on conscientious grounds.”

Pine Gap ‘likely’ aiding Israel’s wars

Hanna said the defence relied on evidence from Prof Richard Tanter – Australia’s leading Pine Gap expert – and Chris Sidoti – UN Commissioner for the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel.

Tanter’s 34-page tendered report demonstrated why it was “likely” that the joint US-Australian base was assisting the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) as of the date of offending last year.

This includes:

• Pine Gap satellite coverage of Gaza and the broader region

• the historical provision of Pine Gap-derived intelligence to Israel

• documented US-Israeli intelligence-sharing agreements permitting the transfer of NSA intelligence, including raw intelligence material, which covers material sourced from Pine Gap

• statements made by former NSA senior intelligence analyst at Pine Gap, David Rosenberg, including that the “Pine Gap facility is monitoring the Gaza Strip and surrounding areas with all its resources, and gathering intelligence assessed to be useful to Israel”.

“This assessment also applies to IDF operations in Lebanon and Yemen in 2024-2025,” Tanter’s evidence reads.

The report states that in both cases assistance from the Australian government was not “direct” but in compliance with “existing arrangements” and “established policy” with the United States.

“By which the dominant partner … the United States National Security Agency passed intelligence potentially derived from Pine Gap to its Israeli Defence Force partner,” it reads.

Protest activity escalating at base

The October 2025 blockade at the remote spy base is one of several recent protests against what is considered one of the most significant offshore US intelligence facilities.

In July, hundreds from across the country converged on the road to Pine Gap demanding its closure.

Arrernte elder Felicity Hayes and three generations of her family were on the frontlines and delivered a letter to the gates of the highly secure facility.

The letter, set to be tabled in parliament in coming months, included calls for the return of sacred land occupied by the base to traditional custodians and compensation for families in Gaza impacted by the ongoing genocide.

Pine Gap’s role has faced greater public scrutiny in the last three years amid ongoing US support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as the recent US-Israeli war on Iran.

Despite the public pressure, the Albanese government maintains it will not comment on the operations of joint intelligence facilities like Pine Gap.

Australian governments have typically avoided discussing arrangements at Pine Gap for fear of US retribution. The Whitlam Labor government in 1974 famously threatened to close Pine Gap, only to be toppled a year later by what many suspect was a CIA-orchestrated coup – the only coup in Australian history. No Australian government has dared challenge US activities at the base since.

Emphasising Israel’s atrocities

While Tanter submitted evidence of Pine Gap’s intelligence operations, Sidoti highlighted the devastating end-result – the mass slaughter of innocents.

Sidoti provided details from two UN Commission of Inquiry reports that showed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and, more disturbingly, deliberately targeting children.

Listen to the Deepthink interview with Chris Sidoti

“[Israel targets Palestinian children] directly by shooting at their vital organs using precision weapons such as quadcopters and snipers,” the document tendered to court reads.

“And through use of high-impact weapons causing widespread and systematic attacks on residential buildings, schools and displacement camps.”

The report noted that the killings have continued since the so-called ceasefire went into effect last October.

“Children continued to be killed and injured in various circumstances … indicating Israel’s flagrant disregard of the terms of ceasefire,” the report reads.

The details were relevant to the case as it includes a recommendation for Australia to “prevent the commission of genocide in the Gaza Strip”, which puts Pine Gap’s activities into focus.

Hanna also submitted an affidavit as part of the bundle of evidence.

“I set out the conclusions of just about every major human rights organisation in the world that has independently found that Israel’s conduct in Gaza constitutes the crime of genocide,” he told Deepcut.

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An Australian-made component can be fitted to an F-35 fighter, flown by another country and used in a conflict thousands of kilometres away. So where does Australia’s responsibility end?

That question sits at the centre of a package of bills being put to federal parliament by crossbench MPs and senators, who want Australian law to prevent defence equipment, technology, investment and services from contributing to genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity or unlawful occupation.

The Red Lines Package – introduced on 15 September by independents David Pocock and Sophie Scamps, and co-sponsored by Andrew Wilkie, the Greens and senators Lidia Thorpe and Fatima Payman – is a suite of four bills that would impose new obligations across defence exports, investment, trade and genocide-risk reporting.

Gaza the catalyst

The F-35 program is the most politically charged example. Australia is a partner in the multinational program and Australian companies manufacture components for the aircraft. Those parts enter a global supply chain before the finished aircraft are operated by different countries. F-35 aircraft have been used by Israel during its military operations in Gaza.

The crossbench argues Australia should not avoid responsibility simply because an Australian-made component is supplied indirectly, or because it is not itself a weapon.

Defence Minister Richard Marles has defended the existing system, saying Australia has a “very strict defence export control legislation and regime”.

Scamps argues the problem is that Australia’s international commitments are not sufficiently reflected in domestic law.

“It cannot be left to the discretion of the minister or government of the day to decide which genocides or illegal occupations we act on,” she told Deepcut.

She said the proposed laws were not designed around one country or conflict.

“There are grievous human rights abuses going on all around the world,” Scamps said.

“It is not nearly good enough for our government to say they are not sure if components we manufacture here in Australia are being used in F-35s that have killed tens of thousands of people and children in Gaza.”

What would change?

Australia already regulates defence exports, including military and dual-use goods and technology.

The proposed defence bill would add a test: whether there is a real risk Australian defence goods, technology or services could facilitate genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity.

That would require officials to look further along the supply chain.

Australia does not necessarily export complete weapons systems. Its defence industry makes components, develops software and provides specialist technology that can ultimately become part of larger military platforms. The sponsors argue the question therefore cannot simply be whether the immediate Australian export is lethal.

The proposed changes would also introduce greater oversight, end-user monitoring and transparency around defence exports.

The legal gap

The wider package rests partly on an absence in Australia’s legal framework.

Australia does not have a federal Human Rights Act or charter of rights. Unlike Victoria, Queensland and the ACT, there is no comprehensive federal law requiring Commonwealth decision-makers to consider a broad range of human rights.

That does not mean Australians have no human rights protections. The Constitution protects some rights, federal laws prohibit discrimination and the common law provides other safeguards. Australia has also ratified major international human rights treaties.

But international treaty obligations do not generally become directly enforceable domestic rights simply because Australia has signed them. They usually need to be incorporated into legislation.

The Red Lines Package does not seek to create a federal charter of rights. Instead, it proposes specific rules for areas where Australian governments, businesses and institutions can contribute to conduct overseas.

Following the money

The second bill would restrict investments by bodies such as the Future Fund, superannuation funds and charities where investments are connected to prohibited activities such as illegal settlements or conduct contributing to genocide.

Where an investment fell within the proposed regime, the institution would have to divest. That raises a difficult question for Australian investors: how far down a corporate chain should responsibility extend?

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A superannuation fund might own shares in a multinational company whose subsidiaries, contractors or suppliers operate in activities covered by the legislation. Deepcut has previously reported on the Future Fund expanding its investments in Israeli arms firm Elbit Systems while Israel was slaughtering people en masse in Gaza.

The proposal would require institutions to look beyond the company name and investigate what their capital ultimately supports.

Reporting genocide risks

The package would also establish a genocide-risk reporting regime.

Large businesses, defence companies, universities, Commonwealth entities and the Future Fund would have to identify genocide risks within their operations and supply chains and report on the steps taken to address them. An independent Anti-Genocide Commissioner would also be established.

Dr Sophie Rigney, an RMIT University international law and human rights academic who helped draft the legislation, told Deepcut the reforms were intended to bring Australian law into closer alignment with its international obligations.

“There is a lag,” she said, arguing Australia had historically helped develop international law but had sometimes been slower to implement those obligations domestically.

“What (the bills) do is actually address Australia’s obligations, and not in reference to one particular thing happening in any other part of the world. We need to be really proactive about protecting Australian interests in this really complex global environment,” Rigney said.

Trade would also change

The fourth bill would prohibit the import and sale of certain goods produced in occupied territories and restrict the acquisition or provision of services supporting illegal settlements, while also targeting the extraction of natural resources from occupied territories.

The effect would be to move questions of international law into ordinary commercial decisions.

A company importing a product, providing a service or entering a contract could be required to establish whether the transaction was connected to activity prohibited under Australian law.

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What happens next?

In an unusual move, Labor joined the Coalition on Thursday to vote to block a Senate inquiry into the Red Lines Package. An inquiry would allow open interrogation of the package without the government having to commit support. But the vote prevents the bills from even reaching the committee process, effectively denying parliamentary – and public – scrutiny.

The government’s position is that Australia already has a strict export-control regime that takes humanitarian and human rights considerations into account. More importantly, the Albanese government is enthusiastic about expanding Australia’s military industry and is unlikely to impose perceived impediments to its growth, no matter the human cost.

“Defence exports are really important in terms of building an Australian defence industry,” Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said last week.

The crossbench argues existing laws leave gaps and rely too heavily on ministerial decisions and case-by-case measures.

At the heart of the debate is a broader question: if Australia says genocide, war crimes and unlawful occupation are unacceptable, what should that commitment prevent Australian governments, businesses and institutions from doing?

The Red Lines Package puts that question into practical terms - at the weapons factory, in the superannuation portfolio, across corporate supply chains and potentially in the goods Australians buy.

There has been almost total silence, if not complicity, in the mainstream media not challenging, or even simply questioning, the usual pro-Israel suspects – be they the likes of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), AIJAC, the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA), the Australian Jewish Association (AJA) or the Lions of Zion.

Yet these very organisations and their ever-incessant public spokespeople are forever defending Israel’s actions, however egregious, or labelling anyone who criticises or challenges Israel’s actions as antisemitic.

The Labor-appointed antisemitism envoy, Jillian Segal, asserts quite falsely that antisemitism in Australia is “almost fashionable”.

One can argue that the mainstream media has been cowed into not challenging the various Zionist Jewish bodies on their often-outlandish assertions and claims, or defences of Israel, and simply steer clear as they know the fallout – including being accused of antisemitism – is just not worth it.

The bully-boy tactics of these organisations will always be seen to come to the fore. Witness the unconscionable pile-on at the ABC in relation to Antoinette Lattouf – resulting in her Federal Court case – and the unmeritorious litigation launched against Mary Kostakidis. In the former ‘case’, the ABC was found to have wrongly sacked Lattouf, and in the latter the applicant – ZFA CEO Alon Cassuto – this month discontinued (that is, effectively abandoned) his claim in the Federal Court.

ECAJ and the like are patently more interested in playing up how antisemitism is plaguing Australia so the subject dominates the headlines instead of, for example, what Israel has done, and continues to do in Gaza. Famine in Gaza? The outrageous violence of so-called settlers in the occupied West Bank? Nothing to see here.

One then adds into the mix people like Sharri Markson and her co-author (and co-head of ECAJ) Alex Ryvchin, who this month launched a book relating to the Bondi massacre. One has to wonder for what purpose? It is fairly clear from Markson’s previous statements – including denying that Israel commits war crimes or that it’s “libel” to accuse Israel of genocide – that she is not across Israel’s actions in relation to Gaza and the West Bank, let alone the backstory relating to those two areas. We all know where Ryvchin stands.

NSW Premier Chris Minns, together with the usual suspects, plus the likes of Lachlan Murdoch, attended the launch and made all manner of pronouncements, many inappropriate, if not improper, whilst we all await the handing down of the Royal Commissioner’s report and any recommendations. The premier said, “It’s the first job of government to protect its citizens, and we failed our Jewish brothers and sisters on December 14. We made some big mistakes …”

If one is to believe the little which has been reported about the launch other than in the Murdoch press, Lachlan Murdoch said that “at News Corp, we stand with the Jewish community. We will be there for you. We will not walk away from this, and we will not let you down.” What does this mean exactly? And to what effect? And why is it that the premier is so much out there seeking to appease the Jewish community? There is a seeming indifference – and rare public pronouncements – about what the Muslim and Arab communities are experiencing by way of hate, personal attacks, denigration and the need to protect Muslims personally and their mosques.

Which brings us the questions the mainstream press are not directing (or deliberately avoiding) at the ECAJ, AIJAC, the ZFA, the AJA or the Lions of Zion. So, I will throw out a public challenge to these organisations to answer the following important questions:

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1. Do you regard it as acceptable that Israel starved – or even if that is not accepted as what Israel did – at least severely limited and restricted food, including infant formulas, entering Gaza?

2. Do you support Israel’s prohibition / barring of medical supplies / equipment or vital medication (for example to treat cancer) entering Gaza?

3. Even if you baulk at and are outraged at when Israel is accused of engaging in genocide, do you not see Israel’s actions as at least constituting crimes against humanity?

4. Do you find the pronouncements of various Israeli ministers to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza as acceptable?

5. Do you condemn the sort of antics of some Israeli ministers, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, leading Jews provocatively into the sacred Muslim Al-Aqsa Mosque site?

6. Why have you not spoken out about the various actions of Israel, in particular, the disproportionate killing of medicos and journalists in Gaza and Zomi Frankcom?

7. Why should Jews in Australia, their usual place of residence, regard Israel as their homeland and the Israeli president as their leader?

8. Do you accept that so-called settlers in the occupied West Bank are killing and terrorising Palestinians, and plundering and destroying Palestinian villages and the property?

9. Why is that none of your organisations – who have the ear of and ready access to the mainstream media – do not issue regular statements condemning or criticising Israel?

Finally, to Segal. There are many criticisms which can be levelled against her in relation to many of her pronouncements and some of her activities (all ideological from her perspective). But paramount in all of that are her calls for what can only be described as seeking to curb free speech in as much as it relates to Israel and Jews – coupled with her proposed regime for monitoring it all.

It is stating the obvious that this is singularly dangerous in a country which stands by and values its democratic principles. All Australians should be alarmed by what Segal proposes, in particular all the media. The mainstream media stands particularly condemned for not taking it up to Segal. One has to ask: why not?

This week Deepcut revealed the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency had been internally divided and well aware of free speech concerns prior to its controversial decision to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The chief of AHPRA even told his board in February of “heightened external pressure on a range of public sector bodies” to take this step.

This reporting was based on a trove of internal documents we obtained under Freedom of Information laws. After health practitioners and civil libertarians raised concerns about AHPRA’s decision, we felt it was in the public interest to dig into how the policy shift came about.

We applied to AHPRA on July 8 seeking a range of documents, including board minutes and reports referring to racism and discrimination including antisemitism between November 2025 and June 2026. We also sought correspondence relating to the joint announcement with the office of the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, and any AHPRA assessment of the risks and impacts of adopting this definition.

Earlier this week, we received 24 documents relevant to this request and then reported on what we saw as the most significant details from them. In the interests of transparency, we are now publishing the full bundle of documents for those who are interested in seeing the finer details for themselves.

Access the full set of documents we obtained by downloading the zip file here.

If you think our work is worth supporting, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or donating. We can’t do this without our community’s support.

The Australian health regulator bowed to pressure to adopt a contentious definition of antisemitism despite internal concerns it “may create further ambiguity” and “the perception of alignment with particular political positions”, a new trove of documents reveals.

Internal files obtained by Deepcut under freedom of information laws show the chief of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) told his colleagues there was “heightened external pressure on a range of public sector bodies” to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition.

They reveal that “some members” of the AHPRA board raised concerns in February “that the IHRA definition is not fit for regulatory purposes due to its lack of clarity and the political elements embedded within it”.

The AHPRA board resolved in March not to adopt the definition “at this time”, without closing the door entirely. Two months later, though, the same regulator decided to adopt it, eventually announcing the policy shift in a joint statement with the Albanese government-appointed Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal.

This prompted a swift backlash from health workers who felt the move would curb their ability to speak out against Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Indeed, the February board minutes included: “The AHPRA board were asked to consider the risk that certain forms of political commentary by practitioners, for example, those working in conflict zones or publicly discussing humanitarian impacts, could be interpreted through the lens of the definition in ways that would not align with regulatory intent.”

Mounting concerns

NSW Supreme Court judge Desmond Fagan last month labelled the IHRA definition as “verbose and imprecise” and encompassing “criticisms of Israel that could not be regarded as hostile to Jews as Jews”.

IHRA says antisemitism “might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”.

Its examples of contemporary antisemitism include “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” or “requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” – wording that critics say is open to wide interpretation and can be used to restrict legitimate political views about Israel’s conduct.

Michael West Media has previously reported on some of the pressure AHPRA had faced to shift its policy.

The new documents shed light on AHPRA’s decision-making at a time it was bracing for scrutiny from the antisemitism royal commission. These deliberations are of public interest because AHPRA and its 15 related national boards have oversight of nearly 1 million Australian health practitioners including doctors, nurses and psychologists.

AHPRA’s chief executive officer, Justin Untersteiner, advised his board in November 2025: “Notifications in relation to public commentary by practitioners on the conflict in Gaza continue to attract media attention.”

‘Our commitment may be questioned’

Internal discussions about the IHRA definition appear to have intensified after the deadly Bondi attack on December 14, with Untersteiner meeting on January 9 with a representative from Segal’s office.

They talked about “a number of actions we have underway, many of which align to the Special Envoy’s Plan”, he said in an update to the AHPRA board.

Untersteiner also told the board he had met with someone – whose name was redacted – “who took me through a presentation of the health and medical crisis facing Gaza” and who regarded the IHRA definition as “penalising doctors for raising awareness of human rights abuses”.

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In February the AHPRA board weighed up options including “Don’t adopt the IHRA definition at all” or make “A general statement adopting or referencing the IHRA definition”, which is what it eventually decided to do months later.

The agenda paper raised fears that if AHPRA did not act “our commitment to addressing antisemitism may be questioned and it could even create doubt about the safety of raising concerns about antisemitism with us”.

“The CEO outlined the heightened external pressure on a range of public sector bodies, including regulators, to adopt the IHRA definition,” said the minutes of the February 10 board meeting.

The “highest risk” option would be a much more expansive move to fully embed the IHRA definition in the various health sector codes of conduct. AHPRA has not done this, insisting the wording will be used only as a “reference tool” and is not legally binding.

The previously confidential agenda papers explained that a “general statement adopting the IHRA definition, similar to the Australian Government, is fundamentally different to including the definition in regulatory documents”.

“Despite the Australian Government’s adoption of the IHRA definition, the definition continues to be contentious and has not yet been adopted by all states and territories,” the papers said.

The board agreed in February to “maintain a consistent and principled position” that “existing regulatory tools are sufficient” but “further work will continue”.

The board discussed the issue again the next month and it “was acknowledged that the definition may create further ambiguity”. Minutes show the board agreed on March 17 “it would not adopt the IHRA definition at this time” but decided to “continue monitoring the environment” and await further work to “better understand the implications for practitioners”.

Policy shift with ‘reservations’

Nine days later, Untersteiner met with Segal and they discussed the antisemitism royal commission’s work, including potential scrutiny of health complaints.

“The envoy was supportive of AHPRA’s work and encouraged greater public visibility of actions underway; a joint statement outlining progress to date will be released,” Untersteiner wrote to his board.

On May 12, the board finally shifted. It agreed to use the IHRA definition “as a reference tool” but without actually incorporating it in health worker codes of conduct.

“In reaching this position, the Board acknowledged that the IHRA definition has been the subject of some public debate, with some members expressing reservations about the potential for its examples to conflate legitimate political criticism of the State of Israel with antisemitism,” the minutes said.

“Notwithstanding those reservations, the Board agreed to treat the definition as a reference tool, noting its value as a source of information to guide its understanding of antisemitism in its contemporary forms.”

‘This looks great’

The documents include emails between AHPRA and Segal’s team prior to publication of the joint statement announcing the decision on June 17. “This looks great, the team is very happy with it,” wrote a member of the special envoy’s team to AHPRA on June 15, with Segal herself giving her approval the following day.

During a royal commission hearing in July, Untersteiner said AHPRA had previously “resisted” adopting the definition due to “some concerns about the risk of the IHRA definition stifling free speech”.

But he said Segal’s explanatory handbook, released in April, was “exceptionally helpful” in allaying those concerns and was “an important factor” in the change of stance.

Page 76 of that handbook includes the blanket statement: “Antisemitism and antizionism are both expressions of hatred towards Jews.” The same page describes a social media post “as antisemitic because it included statements that accused Israel of apartheid, oppression, racism and genocide”.

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Under questioning by Kirsten Edwards SC, appearing for the Jewish Council of Australia, Untersteiner declined to give an iron-clad commitment that agreeing with international court rulings or UN committee findings would escape scrutiny, saying it would depend on the context.

“If there is a ruling in an international court and someone was to repeat that ruling, again, on the surface, I couldn’t see an issue with that,” he told the royal commission. “But ... we would need to be looking at the specific case and the evidence surrounding it.”

AHPRA was offered the opportunity to comment on the newly released internal documents. Its spokesperson told Deepcut earlier this month that AHPRA was “committed to free speech” and might undertake regulatory action only if “commentary becomes demeaning or denigrating and directed toward specific members of the community”.

GAZA CITY – Inside a torn tent in Sheikh Radwan, northern Gaza City, Majdi Shareef tends to his five children. The eldest is 10-year-old Gazal, and the youngest, Jehad, was born during the war in 2024.

The children frolick about, moving in and out of the tent, trying to keep their minds occupied. But to Majdi’s eyes, they exhibit clear signs of disturbance.

“They were once fearless children,” Majdi, 30, says. “Now everything has changed. Fear has grown greatly in their minds. They’re afraid of any sound that reminds them of Israeli bombings.”

Before the war, Majdi would take his children to the beach, to parks and other places across Gaza. Their childhoods were typical – hours spent playing with toys and running around with other children.

Now, he says, they rarely leave the tent.

“They are afraid to go outside because they think the bombing could start again,” he tells Deepcut.

“With every Israeli airstrike nearby, my children wake up terrified. After a while, they get used to the sound of bombing. But even now, when there is no bombing, a loud sound is enough to make them think an airstrike is coming.”

Psychologically damaged children

Majdi’s experience reflects a much wider crisis among children in Gaza. A UNICEF assessment conducted between December 2025 and January 2026 surveyed 2,071 households with children across all of Gaza’s governorates. Caregivers reported sleep problems in 40 per cent of children, bedwetting in 32 per cent, aggression in 19 per cent and withdrawal in 15 per cent. In 92 per cent of cases, caregivers said these symptoms had begun after October 2023.

A separate peer-reviewed study published in January examined 933 displaced children aged three to 12 living in shelters and tented communities in Gaza.

The children had experienced an average of seven forced displacements, while 98 per cent had experienced hunger and 95 per cent the destruction of their homes. The study found that 58 per cent met the researchers’ criteria for probable post-traumatic stress disorder, while more than 46 per cent showed significant psychosocial difficulties.

The researchers described the findings as evidence of an acute and potentially generational mental-health burden among Gaza’s children.

A family made homeless

Repeated displacement has added to the distress of Majdi’s children.

Before the war, Majdi worked as a barber in Sheikh Radwan. An Israeli airstrike destroyed his workplace in November 2024.

The intense attacks and repeated ‘evacuation orders’ forced the Shareefs to move several times, often on foot, for hours, to wherever safety could be found. Their journey took them as far south as Khan Younis – roughly 28 km from Sheikh Radwan.

“The journey south was exhausting. I was carrying my son and had to stop every now and then to rest,” Majdi says.

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The family arrived at Khan Younis with no belongings and no money. They managed to find a spot in the overcrowded al-Mawasi camp, relying on humanitarian aid to survive.

“During the first week, we barely had anything to eat. After some time, things started to improve as a charitable food distribution point for displaced people was established in the camp,” he recounts.

The family returned to Sheikh Radwan following the announcement of the so-called ceasefire in October 2025. But they returned to a pile of rubble – a month earlier, in September, Israeli forces destroyed the Shareefs’ home.

That hasn’t stopped Majdi from doing whatever he can to provide for his family. He’s since returned to barbering, but without a shop. He travels to customers and cuts their hair wherever they can find space – inside tents or amid the rubble and ravaged roads.

But his work barely keeps up with the high costs of basic goods, as Israel continues to block essential supplies despite repeated UN calls for unrestricted humanitarian aid.

“I need about 80 to 100 Israeli shekels (A$37-45) per day to meet the family’s basic needs. I’m earning less than half of that,” he says.

A mother’s burden

Much of the family strain, Majdi says, is falling on his wife, Amal.

“She is carrying more than she can handle,” he says.

A lack of supplies and a home means Amal often has to source firewood to cook meals, and when her husband is absent at work, she cuts it herself.

“Cooking over a fire has also taken a toll on her health. The constant exposure to smoke makes it difficult for her to breathe,” Majdi says.

Amal, like so many mothers in Gaza, is exhausted, he says.

“But despite all of this, she continues to care for her children and keep the family going.”

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As for the children, Majdi says he no longer recognises their behaviour.

“My children have become more aggressive, especially after experiencing hunger during the war. Their lives have changed. Their personalities have changed,” he says.

The lack of education – Israel has destroyed or damaged 97 per cent of Gaza’s schools – is only exacerbating the enormous strain on parents.

“School was not only important for their future, it was also a place where they met their friends, played and enjoyed their childhood. They have lost all of that now,” Majdi says.

Although the intensity of Israel’s onslaught has decreased, a constant fear among children remains – and for parents like Majdi and Amal, a sense of hopeless despair.

“I would prefer death to watching my children cry from hunger,” he says. “We cannot help them become the children they were before the war.”

Over the past 18 months, the Crisafulli government has quietly removed union representatives from multiple Queensland boards – and replaced them with conservative political appointees.

The moves have drawn accusations the Liberal National Party (LNP) is stacking state boards with conservative figures and undermining the independence of state institutions.

Advance Australia founder appointed to key education post

The pattern first emerged in November 2025 when the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (QCAA) underwent a significant board reshuffle.

The QCAA is an influential body in developing the state’s curriculum and senior assessment, and for decades, Queensland’s two largest teacher unions held positions on the QCAA board.

Without any direct communications from the government, Queensland Teachers’ Union President Cresta Richardson and Independent Education Union of Australia branch secretary Terry Burke were removed from the QCAA board.

The Crisafulli government replaced those positions with James Power, the founding chair of far-right campaign group Advance Australia, and Leesa Jeffcoat, former Diocesan Director of Catholic Education.

Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek defended the appointments, arguing the board required a broad mix of skills and experience rather than representation from workers.

Richardson quickly rebuffed this, saying, “Queenslanders expect board appointees in key positions to have experience, understanding and strong relationships in the education sector. I’ll let the community judge this decision, the qualifications of the new appointees, and the manner in which the process has been handled.”

Running concurrent to these appointments have been protracted enterprise bargaining negotiations between the LNP government and teachers over wages, workload and classroom conditions. While the appointments were made under the minister’s statutory powers, both the Guardian and the Australian were quick to highlight the changes occurred during a breakdown in the talks.

Burke said that neither he nor Richardson were extended the courtesy of a conversation with the minister, instead learning of the changes via the media.

Targeting workers’ protections

The changes were largely treated at the time as a standalone decision. But months later, another followed.

In June 2026, late on a Friday afternoon, Deputy Premier and Industrial Relations Minister Jarrod Bleijie announced sweeping changes to both the WorkCover Queensland Board and the Work Health and Safety Board. Among those removed was Richardson once again, but the sweeping changes extended to five other union representatives collectively removed from the boards.

The removal of union officials ends a longstanding model that had existed under multiple governments – where boards were balanced between organised labour, employer representatives and independent experts at the table.

In his media statement, Bleijie said that reforms were needed to ensure the boards “have the experience, commercial expertise and strategic leadership needed”, adding that workers would continue to be represented elsewhere.

But the board changes appear part of a broader, more ideological targeting of workers’ protections.

On March 24, the deputy premier announced the commission of an independent review into the Workers’ Compensation and Rehabilitation Act 2003 and the Industrial Relations Act 2016.

The terms of reference seek to identify – what the LNP government claims – areas of fraud, understand the increase in psychosocial hazard claims and whether the WorkCover scheme is fit for purpose. The investigation is still in progress and not expected to deliver findings until later this year.

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Jacqueline King, secretary of the Queensland Council of Unions, quickly challenged the board changes, stating, “Queensland workers should have zero confidence that these reviews will be conducted fairly or independently …”

“… the deputy premier has deliberately removed every representative of Queensland’s registered trade unions from the very bodies established to advise government on workplace safety and workers’ compensation.”

Independent bodies losing their independence

Statutory boards occupy an unusual position within government. Although unelected, they are not intended to function as political extensions of the executive. There is an implicit understanding to their existence – that political parties recognise their limitations on the expertise required to govern.

Political scientists B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre describe the tension between political control and institutional independence as “politicisation”. Writing in the International Review of Administrative Sciences, they note politicians have always sought to control public institutions but have historically been constrained by “the normative and institutional restraints” of a merit-based, permanent and impartial public service.

That appears to be changing, however, not least in the US with the Trump administration appointing loyalists to key institutional posts. The Queensland LNP appears to be following a similar trend of independent officials being replaced by political appointees in order to exert control over public institutions.

It’s a form of democratic backsliding that often flies under the radar. As the scholars put it, “the emergence of authoritarianism urges us to reevaluate many of the aspects of governance that we have taken for granted over the past several decades.”

Have you noticed more empty shopfronts in your suburb? And big chains popping up everywhere, especially in new estates?

Well, you’re onto something.

Small businesses once dominated the Australian landscape but are in decline as the corporate plague continues its spread and absorbs greater chunks of the labour force.

In 2008-09, nearly half (46%) of all Australian private-sector workers were employed by a small business – i.e. organisations with fewer than 20 employees. By 2025, this figure had dropped to 39%.

On the flip side, the percentage of workers in large businesses – organisations with over 200 workers – increased from 29% to 36% of private-sector employment over the same timeframe. People employed by a small business hasn’t fallen in absolute terms; it’s grown from 4.6 to 5.2 million, and of that 1.5 million are sole traders. The decline is in share, as large businesses grow faster.

On current trends, large business is on track to overtake small business as Australia’s predominant private-sector employer segment. As its share of employment grows, so does the influence of the handful of CEOs who run these major corporations.

Corporate concentration

Politicians love talking up ‘growth in small business’. An election campaign photo with a pint at the pub or a local café is worth its weight in gold. But, as usual, this impression skews the facts. Consider this disturbing stat: just 0.2% of businesses generate 44% of total private sector revenue!

By many measures of market competitiveness, Australia skews heavily toward big business. The four-firm concentration ratio (CR4), which measures the share of industry sales captured by a sector’s four largest firms, has risen across much of the Australian economy. Over 30% of industries recorded an increase of more than 5 percentage points between 2007 and 2020. This means more corporate concentration, less competition and fewer choices for workers.

Governments make life hard for small businesses

Voters were long led to believe that the Liberal Party was the best friend of small business and Labor the advocate for workers. Neither are true.

Governments of both colours have overseen the expansion of corporate power at the expense of small business, often through tax settings.

For example, payroll tax. Every state charges a payroll tax once a business’s total wage bill crosses a threshold. Major corporations like Coles and Woolies can absorb the tax, but for small businesses operating on a much smaller scale, the tax can impose a limit to growth.

When South Australia lifted its payroll tax threshold in 2019, businesses visibly rearranged themselves – i.e. “decreased their use of labour” – to fall below the threshold and avoid the tax rate. Economic researchers at the e61 Institute criticised the policy as “a material barrier to firm growth”. Small businesses think twice about the extra hire that might incur a tax they can’t afford.

Multinationals also have the luxury of borrowing money from their offshore entities, charging themselves interest and then writing off that interest on tax. This is why so many multinationals barely pay tax in Australia – a total rort enabled by Labor and the Coalition.

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On the ATO’s own transparency data, Santos went 10 years straight without paying a cent of company tax, on almost $47 billion in sales. The oil giant has “hundreds of subsidiaries” with more than a dozen in “known [overseas] tax havens”. And it uses this complicated web to borrow money from itself “for profitshifting and tax minimisation”.

Small businesses don’t have overseas subsidiaries to borrow from. They pay the full tax rate while competing against huge multinationals who do not.

Corporate power is a net negative for democracy

The concentration of corporate power coupled with a cost-of-living crisis has tilted the power balance in favour of employers. When your job is the only thing keeping a roof over your head, you don’t argue with your boss. And when you’re working for one of four companies in your industry, you don’t just lose a job – you lose a sector.

We’re seeing how diminishing worker power is playing out. Bosses are increasingly determining what you can and can’t say openly, and exerting control over aspects of your life beyond the time you spend at work.

We have seen instances of this with regards to the genocide in Palestine, where ‘social media guidelines’ and ‘bringing the company into disrepute’ have become instruments for restricting the free speech of workers (even on their own time).

The situation is made worse by the lack of muscle workers have to push back. Union membership has fallen from 58% of employees in 1975 to 13% today. Among workers aged 20 to 24, it’s just 7%. A whole generation is about to enter a labour market controlled by a few CEOs with no collective strength.

Small businesses don’t fix this because small bosses are necessarily kinder. Plenty aren’t. It fixes it through cold, hard numbers. The more businesses employing people, the less power in the hands of a few CEOs and billionaires. More choice for hardworking Australians means fewer constraints on their free speech. That’s how democracy is supposed to work, right?

Basketball Australia is preparing to put thousands of children in front of AI-powered cameras, with a proposed national system set to automatically record junior games and turn footage into searchable highlights and performance data.

The decision has alarmed child-safety experts, who warn that basketball video can reveal far more than what happens on the court – such as a child’s face, team, venue and regular playing schedule.

Susan McLean, a cyber-safety and child-protection expert, labelled the technology an “absolute disgrace” and said informed consent should be the basis for filming children in sport.

“I have been inundated with irate and very concerned parents who wanted nothing to do with this and did not understand how (Basketball Australia) could be so blind to basic child safety,” McLean, who is also a former police officer, told Deepcut.

“The images can be used and abused – we know paedophiles love collecting images of kids. They can also be manipulated using AI.”

The Israeli link

The technology, supplied by Israeli-founded company Pixellot, is already being introduced at basketball venues around Australia. Basketball Australia has selected Pixellot as its preferred provider for a national rollout, although a final agreement has not yet been signed.

Pixellot’s connection to Israeli military intelligence adds another layer of scrutiny. Its co-founder and chief technology officer Gal Oz spent nine years in an elite research and development unit of the Israeli Defence Forces Intelligence Corps, according to the company’s biography.

Pixellot says Oz managed IDF developers working on computer vision and geographic information systems and worked with visual platforms capturing information from unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites.

There is no evidence Pixellot’s basketball cameras are being used by the Israeli military in Gaza – where Israeli forces have killed at least 21,000 children with the support of AI technology – or that its sporting system is a military surveillance tool.

But the company’s intelligence background comes amid international scrutiny of the use of AI, computer vision and surveillance technologies by Israeli authorities and its military.

It is understood Pixellot representatives flew to Melbourne last week to meet with Basketball Australia executives in a bid to get the contract signed off but returned to Israel without completion.

A digital trail to a child’s location

Dr Faith Gordon, an Associate Professor in Law at the Australian National University, said the potential privacy risk extended well beyond the image of a child.

“An AI camera may see a child playing basketball. But it may also be capturing a face, a uniform, a venue, a time, a routine and a pattern of movements,” Gordon said.

“For a family escaping domestic violence, those pieces of information can potentially become a roadmap.”

Gordon described the risk as “jigsaw identification”, where apparently ordinary details can be combined to establish a pattern of movements.

“One photograph might tell you very little,” she said. “But if someone can establish that a child plays for a particular club, plays on Tuesday evenings, wears a particular uniform and regularly appears at a particular venue, those pieces of information can potentially be combined to establish a pattern of movements.”

Dr Felicity Bell, a family law expert and senior lecturer at UNSW Law and Justice, agreed that sporting information could create risks where protective orders or other safety arrangements were in place.

Bell said there was also an important distinction between recording a game for coaching purposes and publishing footage online.

Who can see the footage?

Basketball Australia’s general manager of content and media Sean Cadd told Deepcut that participant privacy and child safeguarding were fundamental considerations.

Cadd said mobile phones, venue cameras and locally managed systems were already capturing up to 25 per cent of games nationally.

Under the proposed model, community game footage would not be publicly accessible, but log-in details would be available to players, coaches, parents and guardians, authorised association administrators and service personnel.

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The platform would not use facial recognition, but rather, players would be recognised through jersey-number matching. Cadd said players could opt-out of being filmed altogether without providing a reason, and games involving participants who opted-out would not be recorded.

Privacy laws under review

The proposal comes as Australia considers privacy and online-safety reforms.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is developing a Children’s Online Privacy Code aimed at strengthening protections for children’s personal information, while the federal government is also developing a digital duty of care requiring online services to identify and mitigate foreseeable harms.

Basketball Australia said further privacy functionality, including participant blurring, was planned for a future phase.

But Gordon said safety and privacy needed to be built into systems before they were deployed.

“We are no longer talking only about somebody taking a photograph,” she said.

“We are talking about systems that can automatically capture, store, analyse, organise and distribute enormous quantities of footage.”

An eSafety Commissioner spokesperson urged sporting clubs, coaches, volunteers and families to carefully consider privacy and safety when sharing photos or videos of children, including ensuring appropriate consent.

The spokesperson also warned that increasingly sophisticated AI-generated deepfakes could create risks for organisations, including junior sporting clubs, posting children’s images online.

Pixellot was sent detailed questions about its Australian rollout, including child safety, privacy, data access and retention, its military-intelligence links and proposed opt-out arrangements. The company did not respond.

Basketball Australia was also asked about Pixellot’s links to the IDF Intelligence Corps and broader questions about the company’s technology. It did not respond to these questions.

It’s weird to be perhaps the most ardent critic of a nation’s central bank, and yet, I guess that’s where I find myself as I look at what the Reserve Bank is doing and how few others seem willing to do anything other than cheer for more rate rises.

Last Friday, the Bureau of Statistics revealed that, for the first time, 1 million Australians were working multiple jobs. Close to 7% of everyone with a job is now working more than one job:

People don’t work more than one job because they’re bored. They do it because their primary job doesn’t earn enough money to pay the bills – and the RBA’s three rate rises this year played a big part.

That’s the reality of where we’re at.

But right now, the main concern of the economy is not reality, but expectations.

Two weeks ago, investors (or speculators if you are less kind) on the futures market were pricing in the odds of the RBA raising interest rates once over the next 18 months at around 50:50.

This was fair enough. The most recent data showed annual private sector wage growth falling to 3.1%, and in July unemployment rose to 4.5%.

Why would you look at that reality and think the economy needs slowing?

And yet by Wednesday last week, a rate rise by November was fully priced in and the odds of two rates rises by this time next year were more likely than not.

What had happened in between those 10 days?

Expectations.

First, the inflation figures for July were released showing official inflation fell from 3.8% to 3.5%. This fall was not as much as ‘expected’ and so up went the odds of another rates rise.

Was this a sign the economy was doing well? Nope.

Even when you dug into the figures, the increase of market sector services prices fell from 3.7% to 3.3%. This is important because, as a rule, when services prices start rising that means wages are going to follow – services require people to do those jobs.

But pfft, up went the expectations of a rate rise.

Then last Wednesday the June quarter GDP figures were released.

These came in at a lousy 0.4%. Over the past 30 years, the median quarterly growth has been 0.7%. So we’re way down on that – in the bottom third of performance.

But because economists had expected growth to be 0.3%, once again expectations came out to play. Yes, economic growth was crap, but it was less crap than we thought so up went the odds of a rate rise – heck up went the odds of two rate rises!

The reality is that our economy is growing at basically half speed, inflation is falling, wage growth is falling, and unemployment is rising. But the expectations are still that the RBA will raise rates because they think this really is not as bad as was expected.

And to be fair, were I a future trader I’d be betting that as well.

The RBA has made no secret of looking for any excuse to raise rates to show their toughness in the fight on inflation.

This was how they were back in 2022 and 2023, when they raised rates 10 times in a row, took a month break and then raised them two more times.

My colleagues at the Australia Institute and I pointed out at the time in a number of research papers that the national accounts showed the main cause of inflation in 2022 was rising profits. Despite this happening in the US, UK and Europe, for some reason the RBA decided that Australian companies were very stupid and unique among the western world by not inflating their profits.

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The RBA didn’t just disagree, it saw it as a fight it needed to win. It sent out the assistant governor to brief the ABC and Guardian about why we were wrong on background, and included a section in its May 2023 Statement on Monetary Policy about why we were wrong officially.

We weren’t.

The RBA last month produced research that looked into the issue and found that “Business owner returns (a polite way of saying profits) also accounted for a significant part of the growth in the household consumption deflator over 2022 … By contrast, labour costs … accounted for a relatively small part of the growth.”

Ahh well not wrong for long, I guess.

Except the issue is this is not just a historical curio.

We can analyse the latest GDP figures to see what is driving inflation just like we did in 2022. And the increase has again been driven by profits – not as much as in 2022, but it is there all the same:

And yet, the RBA remains willing to raise interest rates, knowing the biggest impact will be on wages and employment. At best it will drive more people to work more than one job – at worst it will see more people with no jobs.

Sidoti served on the UN Commission of Inquiry that published a report in June detailing Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

We share some devastating case studies from that report, and go beyond to examine our state of the world and whether international law still has a role to play despite governments, including our own, disregarding it.

The conversation turns philosophical towards the end, where I ask Chris whether human civilisation has truly progressed, in light of our global descent into the abyss.

Listen or watch the interview, and wherever you do, please give us a hand with a like, a follow and a five-star rating.

Where to watch/listen

• Spotify

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• Deezer

• Or your preferred platform with this RSS feed

Upcoming Brisbane event

Avid Reader, in collaboration with Justice for Palestine, will be hosting the Brisbane launch of Antoun’s book, Rebirth: A Love Story from the Depths of War, on Friday, September 18, 6pm for a 6.30pm start. Register here and let’s connect away from the screens!

More than 500 Australian doctors and medical students, including a Nobel laureate, have signed an open letter calling on the federal government to “move from statements of concern to action” regarding Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The signatories – 86 per cent of whom are verified doctors spanning physicians, surgeons and psychiatrists – say they are “legally and morally compelled to protect any child suspected to be at risk of harm or neglect”.

“We cannot remain silent while Palestinian children are being starved, maimed and killed by the actions of Israeli authorities and military forces,” the letter reads (the full letter is published beneath the article).

The open letter is an act of defiance against AHPRA’s – the health sector regulator’s – decision to adopt the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism in June.

The definition has been roundly condemned as overreach into the realm of free political speech as it includes criticism of Israel and Zionism – a supremacist political ideology. The NSW Supreme Court last month rubbished the IHRA definition as “detached from reality”.

Instead of acquiescing to AHPRA’s attempt to chill expressions of solidarity with the Palestinians, the signatories called on “peak bodies to speak without equivocation in defence of Palestinian children, patients and healthcare workers”.

Health advocacy is ‘core business’

Dr Ruth Mitchell is a neurosurgeon in Sydney and Australia’s first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for her campaign work to abolish nuclear weapons.

Mitchell volunteered in Gaza in April this year, where she says she saw the “disproportionate impact of the genocide on children and young people … the way in which it’s destroyed the health of children, left them without limbs, left most of them living in tents”.

Although the development of the open letter was underway before AHPRA shocked the industry with its IHRA adoption, Mitchell says the letter will “reclaim the ground” for health professionals.

“Health advocacy is not an added bonus. It’s not discretionary. It’s actually core business,” she told Deepcut, adding that health advocacy is a core competency taught to trainees.

Dr Nadia Hasan, a paediatrician and co-author of the open letter, agrees.

“I hope this letter reminds medical professional bodies and healthcare institutions that this is not an issue that can or should be ignored, that we have an obligation as doctors to advocate,” she says.

AHPRA decision ‘highly irregular’

AHPRA did not consult its more than 960,000 health practitioners when its chief executive, Justin Untersteiner, publicly announced the IHRA adoption, which Mitchell says was “deeply unusual”.

“When this came out, I became aware of it through posts on social media, not from any correspondence from my medical board or from the health regulator,” the Nobel laureate says.

AHPRA normally consults practitioners on significant regulatory decisions, Mitchell says.

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“Not seeing any whiff or whisper of consultation on something of this gravity and magnitude, it’s a real outlier. It’s highly irregular. And it’s not the way that AHPRA has done business in the past,” she says.

Mitchell adds that AHPRA’s decision “doesn’t have the feeling of legitimacy because of the way that it was brought about without consultation”.

“And I think we’re aware that there are various ways in which this is likely to be interrogated in the courts and elsewhere as it should be,” she says.

AHPRA’s free speech crackdown

When asked whether AHPRA would reconsider its adoption of the IHRA definition in light of the NSW Supreme Court ruling, why it didn’t consult its profession before making the decision, and whether it would take disciplinary action against practitioners critical of Israel, a spokesperson said:

“AHPRA is committed to free speech and the right of registered health practitioners to enter into professional and public debates. AHPRA is equally committed to the prevention of the harm caused by racism and discrimination.”

The spokesperson directed Deepcut to a page that lists examples where AHPRA might take action against practitioners, raising doubts over its professed commitment to free speech.

The AHPRA examples include potentially targeting practitioners who “call to action, such as signing a petition or attending a protest march, specifically aimed at denigrating or discriminating against a population or group”. It also warns against sharing “intentionally misleading content about citizens of a country, or a cultural or religious identity that is biased”, without defining what would classify as misleading or biased.

Given AHPRA’s adoption of the IHRA definition – which includes criticism of Israel and Zionism – AHPRA’s examples suggest the regulator could target practitioners who condemn Israel’s atrocities.

Deepcut asked whether labelling Israel’s actions in Gaza as a “genocide” would invite disciplinary action, to which the spokesperson replied:

“If commentary becomes demeaning or denigrating and directed toward specific members of the community, this is where AHPRA and the National Boards might undertake regulatory action.”

Gaza remains the focus

Health professionals have a unique role in public advocacy because they “are seen as trustworthy by society”, Hasan says.

“We don’t usually have financial or political interests at heart – we genuinely care about humanity.”

Beyond the moral compulsion, healthcare workers understand better than most the long-term health implications and acute medical needs required to support populations devastated by war.

“Hospitals, homes, educational institutions, and essential infrastructure have been destroyed [in Gaza]. Malnutrition, homelessness, mental and physical trauma, lack of access to clean water, lack of education, lack of access to healthcare all have long-term consequences,” Hasan says, pointing to a line in the open letter.

“When children are being killed, starved and maimed, silence from our profession is not neutrality. It is a failure of our ethical obligations,” the line reads.

The open letter published in full.

Children Are Being Killed, Starved And Maimed In Gaza. As Doctors, We Will Not Be Silent.

We are Australian physicians, surgeons and psychiatrists. We are dedicated to the service of humanity and have pledged to care for our patients with justice, dignity, and without discrimination. We recognise the special vulnerability and innocence of children, and the unwavering obligation of all in positions of power to care for them.

We are legally and morally compelled to protect any child suspected to be at risk of harm or neglect, and to report concerns immediately. That duty does not end at our borders. We cannot remain silent while Palestinian children are being starved, maimed and killed by the actions of Israeli authorities and military forces.

What has been happening to the children of Gaza is indefensible. It demands that we speak and compels us to act.

The Scale of Killing

In June 2026, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry released its report, “The essence of childhood has been destroyed: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023.” The Commission found that Israeli authorities and security forces continue to commit genocide and war crimes by deliberately inflicting death and severe physical and mental harm on Palestinian children. It concluded that these acts form part of a deliberate strategy to destroy the future of Palestinians by targeting their children.

Chris Sidoti, an Australian expert in international human rights law and Commissioner on the inquiry stated that “every international legal norm has been violated by the actions of the Israeli authorities towards Palestinian children, and they need to be held accountable.”

Since 7 October 2023, the Commission reported that more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed and 44,000 injured. It described mass trauma, orphanhood, disability, repeated displacement, starvation, and the collapse of education and healthcare. It also detailed the destruction of health infrastructure on which children, newborns and pregnant women depend, finding that children have been killed both directly by military attacks and indirectly through the destruction of schools, hospitals and essential services. As UNICEF’s James Elder said, “These children were not killed in a war zone. They were killed in their homes. In their schools. While playing football. While fishing. They were shot, bombed and targeted by drones.”

These findings are consistent with converging public health evidence. A peer reviewed population survey published in The Lancet Global Health estimated 75,200 violent deaths in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 5 January 2025. Women, children and older people comprised 56.2 per cent of those killed violently. Separate research published in The Lancet calculated more than 3 million life years lost, including more than 1 million life years among children under 15.

The Largest Cohort of Child Amputees in Modern History

As medical professionals, it sickens us to see our disciplines converge in ways they never should. The WHO estimates that around 43,000 people in Gaza have sustained life-changing injuries since October 2023, up to a quarter of them children. These are not statistics to us: they are major limb injuries, traumatic amputations, spinal cord injuries, burns and shattered skulls. Save the Children reported that, in the first three months of the war, more than ten children a day on average lost one or both legs, and UNICEF has documented over 1,000 children enduring amputations. Gaza now holds the highest rate of child amputees per capita anywhere on earth.

For these children, the injury is only the beginning. Several of our authors have worked in Gaza and witnessed this firsthand: wasted bodies cannot mount the metabolic response that healing demands. Wounds fail to close, surgical sites break down, and infection takes hold in patients with no physiological reserve to resist it. Malnutrition turns survivable injuries into fatal ones.

The WHO estimates that more than 50,000 conflict-related injuries in Gaza require long-term rehabilitation, yet rehabilitation services have been all but destroyed. Of 2,300 people with amputated limbs assessed between September 2024 and May 2026, fewer than a quarter had received permanent prosthetics. Between May 2024 and mid-April 2026, no rehabilitation equipment entered Gaza at all. Here too the world has failed them, unable to deliver even the most basic prostheses, orthoses or rehabilitative care.

Starvation as a Weapon

In August 2025, famine was officially confirmed in Gaza City. That month, UNICEF reported that 12,800 children across the Gaza Strip were identified as acutely malnourished, with one in five children screened in Gaza City diagnosed with acute malnutrition.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, known as the IPC, later reported some improvement after the October 2025 ceasefire but warned that conditions remained severe. Save the Children’s analysis of IPC data found that four out of five children in Gaza would enter 2026 still facing crisis levels of hunger. Through mid-October 2026, the IPC projects that nearly 101,000 children aged 6 to 59 months across Gaza will suffer acute malnutrition and require treatment, including more than 31,000 severe cases. A further 37,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women are also expected to require treatment for acute malnutrition. UNICEF has reported that one in five babies in Gaza is being born prematurely or underweight.

For many children, even the search for food has become deadly. During humanitarian missions to Gaza in 2025, two of our authors treated multiple children who had been shot at aid distribution sites, many of whom succumbed to their injuries. One was nine-year-old Majed. A bullet fired by Israeli forces tore through his left arm, left lung and spleen. Despite the efforts of the surgical team, he bled to death on the operating table.

Starvation, when deliberately caused or sustained through the obstruction of humanitarian aid by state or military policy, is not a side effect of war. It is a weapon, and its primary victims are children.

The Trauma That Will Outlast the Bombs

The harm being inflicted on Gaza’s children by Israeli authorities is not only written on their bodies. Armed conflict, forced displacement, bereavement, starvation and traumatic injury leave scars just as deep and far harder to see. Even before October 2023, Palestinian children exposed to political violence suffered high rates of post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety. What they are enduring now is of another order entirely.

Displaced children in Gaza are reported to have extraordinary levels of trauma exposure, PTSD symptoms and psychosocial distress, compounded by hunger, repeated displacement, the loss of home and schooling, and the injury or death of those they love. They are presenting with nightmares, insomnia, emotional dysregulation, social withdrawal, behavioural disturbance and a despair no child should ever know. UNICEF estimates that almost all of Gaza’s 1.2 million children now require mental health and psychosocial support.

This is not distress that will simply resolve when the bombing ends. It is a mental health catastrophe unfolding alongside the physical destruction, and its consequences will include lifelong psychiatric morbidity, developmental disruption, complicated grief and intergenerational trauma.

We Would Never Accept This Here

We would not tolerate Australian newborns denied formula in their hospitals, our schools reduced to rubble, or our children left to die beneath it. We would not accept a single Australian child shot by soldiers, starved by blockade, orphaned by military assault, or torn apart by explosive weapons.

Yet this is what Palestinian children in Gaza are being forced to endure. The Commission reported that, even after the October 2025 ceasefire, Palestinian children have continued to be killed and seriously wounded by Israeli military forces. Since then, at least 265 children have been killed, an average of one child every day.

If these were Australian children, our nation would be united in grief and outrage, and we would demand protection, accountability and justice. We cannot value Palestinian children any less. Their lives are worth no less, their pain is no less real, and their right to safety, care, food, shelter and a future is no less absolute.

This is not only a matter of conscience; it is a matter of law. The Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees every child’s right to life (Article 6), to health and healthcare (Article 24), and to protection in armed conflict (Article 38). These obligations are not optional. They apply to every child, in every war, without exception.

What Must Happen

We call on the Australian Government and Parliament to:

• move from statements of concern to action, using every diplomatic and legal mechanism to compel an immediate and permanent end to the killing and to protect children, civilians and healthcare workers;

• undertake a full review of Australia’s diplomatic, trade and defence relations with Israel, and immediately impose a comprehensive arms embargo, ending all defence-related trade including dual-use products, components and technology, so that no Australian support can enable violations of international humanitarian law;

• demand that Israeli authorities lift the blockade and allow the unobstructed entry of food, medicine and humanitarian and medical supplies;

• pursue accountability through the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and targeted sanctions, and press for the immediate release of detained Palestinian healthcare workers, including paediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, held without charge;

• fund paediatric medical evacuations, surgical and rehabilitative care, prosthetics, and long-term mental health support for Palestinian children and families;

• support international efforts to rebuild the homes, hospitals, schools and essential infrastructure children depend on, and to restore the land, water and environment devastated by the conflict.

We call on the Australian Medical Association, medical colleges, specialist societies, doctors’ unions and health sector peak bodies to speak without equivocation in defence of Palestinian children, patients and healthcare workers. When children are being killed, starved and maimed, silence from our profession is not neutrality. It is a failure of our ethical obligations.

We do not need future memorials to tell us what we know today. We need action now, to stop the killing, protect children and save lives while lives remain to be saved. History will remember where we stood. As doctors, and as human beings, we choose to stand with children, civilians and healthcare workers facing catastrophic harm. We call on every Australian, and every person of conscience, to do the same.

Authored by:

A/Professor Vikram Palit, FRACP (Paediatric Respiratory Physician)

Dr Stephen Parnis FACEM FAMA (Emergency Physician)

Professor Jon Jureidini, FRANZCP (Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist)

Dr Nadia Hasan, FRACP (General Paediatrician)

Dr Bushra Othman, FRACS (General Surgeon)

Dr Rasha Rahman, FRANZCP (Psychiatrist)

Dr Safiyyah Abbas, FRACP, FAFRM (Paediatric Rehabilitation Physician)

A/Professor Tarik Sammour, CSSANZ (Colorectal Surgeon)

Dr Ruth Mitchell FRACS FFSTEd FNNSA (Paediatric and Adult Neurosurgeon)

Dr Hemal Kodikara, FRACS (Paediatric General Surgeon)

A/Professor Alasdair Vance, FRANZCP (Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist)

Dr Geraldine M Dyer FRANZCP (Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist)

Cartoon by Fiona Katauskas

Some context:

On August 24, wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Israel Katz, warned Palestinian children against flying kites and balloons in the Gaza Strip.

The warning came after Israeli forces killed four-year-old Mohammed Abdel Salam Taha in an attack on a warehouse.

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Israel – a nuclear power – has slaughtered at least 21,000 children in its ongoing genocide in Gaza, and at least 1,334 Palestinians since a so-called ceasefire was announced last October.

The threat on kites lacks any operational basis, with the Israeli military confirming there were no explosives in the 10 kites it found and that they were flown by children, according to Al Jazeera.