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.

Big Four consulting firm Deloitte has been handed a $2.1m contract to provide “management advisory services” to the Illicit Tobacco and E-Cigarette (ITEC) Commissioner despite a decades-long relationship with the tobacco industry and its contribution to campaigns against plain-packaging laws.

Few details are known about the arrangement which was procured by the Department of Home Affairs and entered into force on 1 July 2026.

The description on the AusTender website is given as “Specialist Service procurement” with no further detail and no mention of ITEC. The contract is expected to run until 30 June 2027, with the possibility it may extend to June 2028.

Deepcut contacted Deloitte to confirm whether the publicly-listed contract was for services to be provided to the ITEC Commissioner but was told by a spokesperson the firm was “unable to assist with this enquiry”. A spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs confirmed the contract was initiated by the ITEC Commissioner’s office for “specialist services from a consultancy firm”.

Greens finance and public service spokesperson Barbara Pocock said that given Deloitte’s history with the tobacco industry and the lack of information, there were questions to answer over whether the arrangement represents a conflict of interest.

“If the government is knowingly hiring the tobacco industry’s friends to advise on the tobacco industry’s interests, this isn’t clean advice,” Senator Pocock told Deepcut.

“The Commissioner is supposed to crack down on unethical tobacco behaviour. Australian taxpayers deserve to know what the government is paying Deloitte big bucks for. Is it to play both sides?” she added.

Deloitte’s long relationship with tobacco

The ITEC Commission was set up by the Albanese government in July 2024 to address the massive tobacco black market.

It is unclear whether the government considered Deloitte’s storied relationship with the tobacco industry before handing the firm taxpayer money to advise ITEC.

A search of the tobacco industry archives maintained by the University of California San Francisco – a collection of millions of internal industry documents spanning over half a century – returns over 15,000 references to Deloitte.

Many of these refer to multiple hits within the same email chains, but they demonstrate how Deloitte’s relationship with the global tobacco industry extends back to at least the 1980s, if not further.

Neither is this relationship purely historical. More recent emails from 2019 show Deloitte provided tax and marketing advice to e-cigarette company Juul.

In Australia, the consulting firm has helped the tobacco industry design materials used in industry campaigns to lobby against the introduction of plain-packaging laws, including a report for British American Tobacco in 2011. Its work was criticised at the time by academics and Customs and Border Protection which described its methods as “misleading”.

Deloitte today consults for companies working within the Chinese tobacco monopoly system – the origin for most of the illegal tobacco brought into Australia.

Deloitte did not respond to questions from Deepcut regarding its work for the tobacco industry that includes relationships with Philip Morris International and RJ Reynolds.

The government’s shadowy selection process

The tobacco industry denied the science linking smoking to cancer for decades, running an organised campaign of deceit intended to distort research and attack scientists.

Some of these campaigns were given codenames, such as Operation Berkshire which sought to emphasise “controversy” over findings linking smoking with cancer. This activity has been cited as evidence of a pattern of behaviour that continued for decades, including in 1994 when several tobacco executives coordinated to give false evidence before the US Congress denying nicotine was addictive.

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Australia is a party to the World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which requires signatories to protect public health policies “from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry in accordance with national law”.

The Australian government issues advice to officials regarding these obligations that stresses limited engagement with the tobacco industry, management of conflicts of interest and transparency in decision-making.

In a follow up request, Deepcut sought to clarify the nature of ITEC’s contract with Deloitte but received no detail about how the firm was assessed, how any conflict of interest would be managed or confirmation that it was made to disclose its past work with the tobacco industry before it was awarded the contract, including with Chinese companies.

The home affairs spokesperson told Deepcut that Deloitte personnel engaged by ITEC did not contravene the WHO framework.

“This includes specialist input on data analytics, business processes, communications products, and project delivery as required,” they said.

“Personnel do not provide policy advice to the ITEC Commissioner or Australian Government. Responsibility for policy development, advice to government and decision-making remains with public officials.”

Senator Pocock said the arrangement may represent a conflict of interest, adding she would pursue the matter at Senate estimates.

“Big Tobacco has always put profit and addiction ahead of public health. That’s why we need to know whether it is advising on the rules that govern it,” Pocock said.

Judges often ask questions of witnesses to clarify evidence or tie up inconsequential loose ends.

But as a lawyer one learns that sometimes a key looming conclusion is smuggled into the premise of a carefully constructed judicial question.

Recently in the ‘Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion’, witness Rita Jabri Markwell was asked by Commissioner Virginia Bell:

“Ms. Markwell, a little while ago in describing your understanding of Zionism you spoke of it being an ideology, that went back I think you said a couple of hundred years, we won’t debate that, but you also referenced ideas of a greater Israel. If you can put all of that out of your mind for a moment, and accept that following the United Nations resolution for the partition of Israel and Palestine in 1948, the state of Israel was declared by Prime Minister Ben Gurion, and following that declaration the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution recognising the State of Israel, putting Zionism to one side, Ms. Markwell, well do you accept that there is a legitimacy to the existence of the State of Israel, I’m not talking of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, just the State of Israel?”

One can only infer that Commissioner Bell was seeking a concession that Israel is a legitimate state.

Markwell – a solicitor with Birchgrove Legal – was well equipped to respond to a question that was both leading and complex:

“As a human rights lawyer, I don’t think that any state that relies upon unlawful occupation, apartheid and genocide could be said to be a legitimate state.”

The Commissioner’s question likely arose from an ongoing focus in the Royal Commission on the much-discussed distinction between so-called ‘legitimate criticism’ of Israel and antisemitism.

The contentious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism (remarkably imposed on the Commission by the government despite its controversy) states that manifestations of antisemitism:

“... might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

It also offers certain examples of antisemitism:

“Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.”

“Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

The Commission’s ‘profound ignorance’ on Israel

Of course, whether criticism of a state imposes an unfair ‘double standard’, or whether a country is a racist endeavour, surely depends on a comparative analysis of its characteristics and conduct.

It is notable that the question asked the witness to accept the legitimacy of Israel, “putting aside Zionism”.

This took hypothetical questioning to the point of absurdity but also revealed a profound ignorance of the foundational attributes of Israel.

That may sound harsh on the learned Commissioner, but she didn’t create the Overton window that manufactures systemic indifference to the truth on Palestine.

The truth being that there would be no Israel without Zionism and an Israel without Zionism would be no Israel at all.

Historians have thoroughly documented Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, neatly achieving the long-standing Zionist vision that an 80% Jewish majority was necessary to make Israel viable.

Any false contention that this ‘population transfer’ was not deliberate is rendered irrelevant by Israel’s denial of a right of return for Palestinian refugees – despite a UN resolution requiring them to do so.

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Since its creation, Israel has also encouraged Jewish people worldwide to move there, part of the ‘self-determination’ of Jewish people alone established by law.

The reason Israel clamours to be accorded a ‘right to exist’, something no other state demands, is because that demand is for it to exist as a Jewish state, i.e. a state that will be allowed to maintain discriminatory migration law and exclude, in perpetuity, the expelled Palestinians.

In simpler terms, a non-racist migration law that respected the rights of refugees would be the end of Israel as a Jewish state, but the possible beginning of it being a truly democratic state that affords equal rights to all.

Commission risks ‘cardinal error’ on antisemitism

These facts actually do render Israel a unique ethnocracy. To suggest, as IHRA does, that it is an antisemitic double standard to label Israel as a ‘racist endeavour’ is ridiculous, called in aid of the state interests of Israel, but rejected by most of the world.

If the Commissioner is heading towards some categorisation as presumptively antisemitic speech that delegitimises Israel, she will be making the same cardinal error that so many have made for decades: accepting a standard as applicable to the Palestinians that one would never accept for one’s own people.

The Commissioner’s question also portends a fundamental risk that the Commission will miss what is obvious to most Australians – rising antisemitism in Australia is largely driven by revulsion at the actions of Israel and a pernicious perception that the Jewish community is somehow responsible for the actions of Israel.

It is this reality that poses the most difficult question of Virginia Bell; how do we deal with the fact that most Australians are now perhaps revolted by Israel’s racist and supremacist conduct (some tragically and outrageously to the point of engaging in violent extremism), but most Australian Jews are (so we are told) enthusiastic supporters of Israel and Zionism?

Resolution in social policy terms of this wicked conundrum will not be found in specious notions that the legitimacy of Israel, “putting aside Zionism”, can be found in a General Assembly resolution.

Nor will it be found in censorious rules that allow criticism of the conduct of particular governments of Israel, but no critique of the fundamental nature of the State of Israel, from 1948 until the present day.

Indeed, such measures will almost certainly worsen antisemitism, resting as it does on a pernicious conspiracy theory of Jewish power.

I hope my lawyer’s instinct is wrong about the Commissioner’s impossible question of Rita Jabri Markwell and all it might portend.

A candidate in a Victorian council by-election used AI portraits in their promotional material, a Deepcut investigation has found, raising concerns of AI manipulation in election campaigns.

Louise Black, a former member of the Victorian Liberal Party, contested in the City of Kingston, which covers the suburbs of Mordialloc and Parkdale in Melbourne’s south-east.

An analysis of Black’s Facebook campaign page revealed a set of images that do not visually align with past photos.

A test by Deepcut using AI detection software found the images were likely generative AI or edited using AI, with a confidence level between 96 and 99 per cent. By contrast, a 2024 photo of Black taken from Instagram was judged to be only 1 per cent likely to have been altered or generated by AI.

“Physical attractiveness has been shown by extensive research to have a clear positive impact on electoral success,” Rodrigo Praino, professor of politics and public policy at Flinders University, told Deepcut.

“This is particularly true in the case of low information electoral contests, that is, when voters typically do not have very large amounts of information on the candidates, their policies and their records.”

With a turnout of just over 79 per cent, Black finished in third place on first preferences with 14.75 per cent of the vote.

Following the declaration of results on August 14, Black – alongside fellow candidate Glenn Dumbrell – called for a “full recount of all ballot papers”, claiming “serious procedural irregularities” in the count. The VEC said it suspected vote tampering and referred the matter to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

Neo-Nazi Telegram chats

This is the second time Black has contested Kingston’s Melaleuca ward. After losing the previous election in November 2024, anti-fascist researchers alleged that Black had posted over 25,000 messages under various usernames in neo-Nazi Telegram chats.

In one chat, Black allegedly asks a National Socialist Network (NSN) member for “poster ideas” for “my candidates (SIC) election campaign”.

The candidate in question was Liberal candidate Robbie Beaton, who was contesting the federal Victorian seat of Isaacs in 2022 against then attorney-general, Labor’s Mark Dreyfus. In asking for poster ideas, Black tells the chat, “Try not to be insanely antisemitic”. One user responds, “Bare minimum anti-Semitism”. Dreyfus is Jewish.

Beaton was eventually found to have provided false information about his address to the Australian Electoral Commission – claiming to have resided in the seat of Isaacs when his actual address was elsewhere in Camberwell – and was slapped with a $1,000 bond for two years. Beaton was not revealed to be in the same Telegram chat.

AI images permitted

Electoral rules have yet to catch up with AI use – a potential worry ahead of Victoria’s state elections in November. When asked whether AI-generated candidate imagery was permitted in campaign material, a VEC spokesperson responded:

“The Local Government Act 2020 does not specify how a candidate must present themselves in their identifying imagery and does not prohibit the use of generative AI to create images. For this reason, how a candidate wishes to use imagery to portray themselves is not regulated by the VEC.”

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The lack of AI regulation comes amid growing voter concern over AI misinformation. An ANU study on AI and electoral integrity noted that “those who were more familiar with AI were also more likely to be concerned about its potential to spread misinformation”.

“Nearly half of Australians reported that false information about candidates and parties was distributed online, and more than four in ten believed that AI would make elections less fair,” it read.

Impact on voter trust unclear

According to Prof Nicholas Biddle, the study’s lead author, most people already assume “there is a substantial amount of use of AI”.

“The most important thing is disclosure and making clear when AI is being used and when it’s not being used and under what scenario,” Biddle – who heads the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University – told Deepcut.

But Praino says it remains to be seen whether voters will immediately turn off candidates using AI.

“In the short term I think we are seeing a lack of trust in the public, but long term it is harder to tell,” he told Deepcut.

“There is a lot of awareness about AI in the community. Voters are very aware now that just because a photo is out there, it doesn’t mean it is true. In that sense, an increased awareness could see a positive effect over the longer term. We will have to wait and see.”

Nevertheless, public expectations for governments to regulate AI are high, according to Biddle.

“There’s very strong evidence that the general public has a desire for government to play both a leadership role and a legislative role in managing the use of AI in general, but also in regards to elections,” he said.

Louise Black was contacted for comment.

Ninety nine per cent of us share a fundamental common interest. The other 1 per cent know this – they fear we will discover it and mobilise around it. So they’re shamelessly and effectively wielding their wealth to make us fight each other instead of them.

The 1 per cent own a quarter of the entire wealth in Australia. In hard numbers, 20 people hold the same amount of wealth as 3 million other Australians combined. This handful of ultra-wealthy individuals has accumulated such concentrated power they are distorting our politics and economy to their own ends.

They hand private planes to politicians like beers at a barbecue. They meet the prime minister at exclusive, lavish fundraisers, hand over a million dollar donation and then make it back in the next day’s trading.

This is the political struggle of the moment: galvanising the 99 per cent into a people-powered political movement to resist and take back power from the 1 per cent.

Insatiable greed

Obscene wealth, greed and power are driving the world into war, climate collapse and economic chaos. The wars we see live-streamed on our phones and the extreme heat, floods and fires are neither accidental nor isolated. They are symptoms of a system designed by the ultra-wealthy to enrich themselves at our collective expense.

The key problem with greed is that it is insatiable. The ultra-wealthy will not stop – they will keep stoking wars, keep destroying the planet, keep driving people into poverty, if it means they will get just a little bit more. And that leaves us no choice but to respond, for our collective survival.

War is the extreme end goal of this system. Far more than any other activity, war concentrates wealth and sees public funds poured into private arms companies to provide ‘growth opportunity’ for those ready to profit.

Woodside Energy saw a very healthy 30 per cent increase in revenue in the three months after the Iran war began. While most people struggle to pay for fuel, children are killed and cities devastated, Lockheed Martin – the world’s largest arms manufacturer – has a record US$230 billion in outstanding orders for its missiles, bombs and warplanes.

Woodside’s windfall profit, Lockheed Martin’s cash grab, the political pressure from Donald Trump and ruthless self-interest explains why the Australian government stupefyingly backed the illegal US and Israel war on Iran. It also explains AUKUS, explains complicity in Gaza and explains the multi-billion dollar NDIS cuts.

The ultra-wealthy are escalating

The cost of living crisis is biting hard because wages have flatlined while wealth for the 1 per cent keeps compounding. Existing wealth makes money faster than work ever can. Meanwhile, people are choosing between groceries and going to the doctor. Rents are up 80 per cent, which is forcing more and more Australians to sleep rough on our streets.

How did we get here? Decades of privatising public assets, energy, banks, telecoms, insurance, transport, public housing, universities have pushed costs that were once shared onto individual households. Private debt and privatised profits filled the gap the public sector left behind.

The ultra-wealthy know this is unsustainable. But they’re not ceding ground – they’re escalating.

Watching millions of Australians protest the ongoing war in Palestine scared the 1 per cent and their political mates in Labor, the Coalition (and now One Nation). They know a people-powered movement is possible and the ultra-wealthy can be defanged.

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That’s why there’s now a major push into the expansion of policing and surveillance powers. Big Tech, with the support of our governments, is building the infrastructure that will enable authoritarian politics.

Platforms optimised for outrage, increasingly aligned with strongman politics, serve power by keeping people isolated, distracted and afraid rather than organised.

AI and datacentres, facial recognition, data retention, coercive questioning powers, private data brokers feeding government agencies are all designed for one purpose: population control.

Corporate profits and state control are both pushing in the same direction to deliver an unprecedented public-private surveillance state. It’s about protecting capital from the increasingly disgruntled 99 per cent.

This is what’s behind the anti-immigration politics of Trump, Farage, Hanson and their wannabe followers in the Coalition and Labor. Your workmate from India wasn’t sitting at the Cabinet table when someone decided to privatise the Commonwealth Bank. Your nurse from the Philippines didn’t vote for public money to be diverted from public schools to weapons. Your neighbours from Nigeria aren’t responsible for gas companies exporting our resources without paying tax, while you’re hounded if you dare slip up on your tax return. The 1 per cent did this, and they want to blame the economic pain we all feel on someone, anyone, but them.

Hope in resistance

But what the ruling class have yet to grasp is that for every encroachment on our rights, for every attempt to suffocate us, creative pathways to resist are found. You cannot muzzle the 99 per cent.

The Free Palestine movement has built a community that crosses class, age, race and religion and is an extraordinary scaffold for social change. That is feeding off other grassroots movements that are increasingly coalescing – from the peace and anti-nuclear movements, to First Nations and climate, and disgruntled workers fighting for better conditions.

Uniting these movements is how we build the critical political mass to challenge and defeat the 1 per cent. Together, they are an incredibly powerful entry point into communities.

Making it clear to communities that our struggles are one and the same, weaving the threads together, is how we build momentum. Inequality is the enemy of peace, inequality feeds off militarisation, and inequality delivers fear and division. Ending this means taking on the 1 per cent and inspiring a mass movement into believing this is possible.

There is real anger with governments and politics right now, and that anger is mixed with a sense of powerlessness and pain. The anger is right, the pain is real, but the powerlessness is wrong.

The 1 per cent want us to lose hope, ignore what binds us together and fight amongst ourselves for the scraps they are willing to let fall from bulging pockets. To help make this happen they are feeding One Nation, like they fed Trump in the US and Farage in the UK, with their anti-immigration, pro-corporate and ‘anti-woke’ policies.

The people’s anger is legitimate and real. People can see a bunch of self-interested politicians washing between parliament and industry, milking the knowledge they got in government for private profit. They can see the mega-rich getting richer while they struggle with rent, insurance and debt.

The 1 per cent also see this anger, so they are funding and pumping the Trojan Horse that is One Nation. They want to point the finger of blame away from themselves and towards migrants. It isn’t even hidden – the money, the access and the coverage is right there in plain sight.

The Left must meet this moment. It must capture and direct the anger, and deliver a clear anti-establishment message of hope, action and change. We need to shout from rooftops that we will tax the super rich, we will throw open the doors of parliament to community and slam the doors shut on grifters. This is the lesson we must learn from the Left’s rise in the US with the Democratic Socialists and in the UK with the Greens. We can beat greed with collective compassion and we can smash hate with hope. And we better get started.

The easiest way to get people to vote against their own interests in modern times is to simply tell people you stand for ‘common sense’.

The term dates back to Aristotle, who was attempting to explain perception. Common sense was the uniting of our five senses into recognising a single object. Take tea – you can smell, see and taste it, you recognise the feel and you can hear it being made. We don’t know how others taste, smell or see it – we have no comparison to our own, but our ‘common’ shared knowledge of these senses tell us all it’s tea.

Very quickly, savvy communicators saw a way to apply it to politics.

In 1776, Thomas Paine sparked the beginnings of the American revolution with his pamphlet ‘Common Sense’: “Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.”

As Paine wrote, “time makes more converts than reason”, and so, common sense, which he argued sat with the people, against kings, now tends to sit with would-be kings cosplaying as workers, convincing them the needs of the wealthy are the needs of all.

“It’s a common sense revolution,” claimed Donald Trump in his second inaugural address. Shortly after, Trump’s “common sense” told him diversity was to blame for the fatal collision between a plane and a helicopter at Washington airport. (It wasn’t diversity – it was systemic failures, including cost cutting, which were to blame).

Trump’s common sense revolution, as Prof Barbara Leckie and others have identified, is an updated take of conservative Ontario leader Mike Harris’s ‘common sense revolution’ which cut social services and welfare in the 1990s.

In Australia, the purveyors of ‘common sense’ are Pauline Hanson and her conspiracy of senators who argue the populist far right take of the day as ‘common sense’. David Hughes, who only found a political voice when he felt something was personally being taken from his future wealth, claims it’s not ideology, but ‘common sense’ which is guiding him.

Which is amusing – Hughes’ wealth is neither common, nor his complaints based in sense. But he has managed to tap into the seemingly ever flowing political grift of grievance, in which by expressing his individual displeasure at not being able to grow his wealth in quite the same manner, he’s convinced some people his loss is theirs.

Hughes’ property wealth is passive income and not productive. It’s wealth built from other people’s incomes. But because he, like Pauline Hanson – a multi-millionaire in her own right – once struggled financially, they pretend their wealth is immaterial to their current grievances, instead of being their primary concern. It is only a short skip and a jump from the ‘common sense’ politics of ‘they’re taking something from me’ to support for ‘I want to take liberties from them’.

Hughes is now advocating for Australia’s spy agency to focus on those who disagree and correct him on social media. Hughes has the space to say and support whatever he wishes, but, like others who take correction and accountability as a personal attack, now wants the power of the state security apparatus to control who can have a voice.

That’s not common sense – it’s fascism, and where this strain of ‘common sense’ leads.

Since 2001, ‘common sense’ has seen Australia pass more than 100 pieces of national security legislation.

These laws limit our speech, our liberties, our rights and our movements – in ways most people don’t understand until they are applied to you.

The most recent laws which passed through the parliament give ASIO as broad a brush as they wish in who they question and detain. It was an extension of powers ASIO already held, but now can be aimed at anti-genocide protesters based on vibes and political will.

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The Counter-Terrorism Amendment Bill, introduced on August 12, can control who “certain individuals” interact with and what areas they move through. The ‘common sense’ approach, which is pushed by authoritarians and would-be fascist ideologues is that ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about’, but in Australia – which appears to be following the US in a democratic backslide – the laws are applied based on political agendas, not safety.

Instinctively, we know this, which is why Hughes – as he continues his right-wing slide – immediately reaches for control in the face of correction.

When you look at what Australians actually want, you can’t help but see a silenced majority. Not silent – silenced. People who want something different but feel bullied into submission and silence by the loudest, and often wealthy and least common, voices.

Four in five Australians want a total ban on gambling advertisements; 72% of Australians support a flat tax on gas exports; and up to seven in ten Australians want laws that make it harder to access a gun.

But we don’t hear about that (unless you read Deepcut News or other independent outlets). We don’t hear from the Australians who just want Israel’s genocide of Palestinians to stop. We don’t hear about the dissent regarding the adoption of artificial intelligence. We don’t hear about the concerns Australians have with lobbying and the influence of vested interest groups in our politics. We don’t hear about the concerns of the silenced majority – we hear from the rich who are only concerned with their wealth, and we’re told it’s ‘common sense’ to ignore ‘noisy activists’ who push back.

The warped politicisation of ‘common sense’ is drowning democracy. And it’s about time we pushed back.

More than 450 University of Sydney (USyd) alumni and current staff have signed a letter calling for a mass meeting to discuss the university’s ties to Israel amid concerns of a crackdown on free speech.

The letter, submitted to Chancellor David Thodey on Tuesday, accused the university of “failing to respond meaningfully to the ongoing genocide in Gaza” which it said “represents a profound moral failure”.

The signatories – among them recipients of Australian AM and OAM honours, a former deputy vice-chancellor and two politicians – are calling for a meeting of Convocation, a body comprising alumni, staff and members of the university’s governing Senate.

As well as the university’s institutional ties to Israel, the letter noted “an accelerating erosion of freedom of expression” as a crisis warranting a Convocation meeting.

“We want to give voice to the disquiet among staff and alumni and force the university to take this issue seriously. They can’t keep sweeping an ongoing genocide under the rug,” Dr David Brophy, senior lecturer in history, told Deepcut.

Two weeks to reply

Convocation meetings are common in universities as a means for alumni and staff to provide input into the institution’s governance. The University of Western Australia and University of New England are among those that hold regular Convocation meetings.

The University of Sydney (Amendment Act) Rule 1999 requires Convocation to “hold at least 1 meeting in each year”. The last meeting it held, however, was over three decades ago.

“Convocation is not a relic of a bygone age: meetings were held as recently as the 1990s,” the letter read.

According to the university’s governing document, the Chancellor has 14 days from the request to give notice of a meeting – or until September 8. If granted, the meeting is to be held within 28 days of the request – or by September 22.

“Our Chancellor is considering the request to summon a meeting of Convocation sent on Tuesday as required under relevant university rules,” a USyd spokesperson told Deepcut.

‘Suppression of dissent’

Campus atmosphere has remained tense since an anti-genocide student encampment was removed in 2024.

That same year, USyd management upgraded its CCTV system, installed additional cameras and introduced restrictions on students setting up stalls.

University staff also report being “unfairly accused of antisemitism for protesting Israel’s actions in Palestine”, according to a statement from the letter’s organisers.

The statement claims there has been a “suppression of dissent in the wake of the 2024 pro-Palestine encampment”.

When asked about the allegations, the USyd spokesperson said, “We remain strongly committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech balanced alongside our obligations to ensure the safety and well-being of our whole community.”

Many seem unconvinced. Jenny Leong, the state Greens MP for Newtown and a signatory to the letter as a former USyd Senate Fellow, warned the university’s reputation was at risk.

“The student experience, beyond the classroom, was something that used to be valued by the university, so now to see policies and practices that crack down on the rights of freedom of speech, association and assembly, as well as attempting to silence pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide actions, is cause for serious concern,” she told Deepcut.

Refusal to cut Israeli ties

A key demand of the student encampment was for USyd to cut institutional ties to Israel, in line with several European universities that have taken such a step.

In February 2025, USyd ended an exchange program with the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Israel but insisted that “recent advocacy against this student exchange had nothing to do with the University’s decision”.

“Our ties with Israeli and other institutions remain in place because we are committed to academic freedom, freedom of speech, and human rights as the University’s central pillars,” a USyd statement read at the time.

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USyd’s approach to Israel contrasts with its decision in June this year to boycott “any research collaboration” with Russia in response to its war in Ukraine.

“The fact that the University recently decided to impose a ban on collaboration with Russia shows that the University is capable of firm measures in response to war crimes,” Brophy said.

Antisemitism definition condemned

The letter’s organisers drew attention to a significant NSW Supreme Court ruling this month that found criticism of Israel or Zionism did not constitute antisemitism.

Justice Desmond Fagan was particularly scathing of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which includes criticism of Israel and Zionism and is favoured by the pro-Israel lobby.

Universities Australia’s 39 members, including USyd, adopted a definition of antisemitism that drew on IHRA but was more explicit.

“… criticism of Israel can be antisemitic when it is grounded in harmful tropes, stereotypes or assumptions and when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel … Substituting the word ‘Zionist’ for ‘Jew’ does not eliminate the possibility of speech being antisemitic,” it reads.

The definition was roundly condemned for its implications for free speech, with the Jewish Council of Australia calling it “a dangerous and politicised definition of antisemitism which threatens academic freedom”.

USyd, however, told a NSW parliamentary committee in July 2025 that it had included the controversial definition “as part of the Supplementary Resources to its Anti-Racism Statement” and “does not currently propose to amend the definition”.

That decision, however, is feeding the current backlash.

“There is no place for the IHRA definition of antisemitism on campuses or in any of our public institutions,” Leong said.

“Criticism of the criminal actions of the Israeli government and the IDF, amounting to apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people, should never be conflated with antisemitism,” she added.

“This conflation is wrong not only because it protects Israel from legitimate criticism, but also because it falsely identifies Jewish identity with the state of Israel – which is in itself an antisemitic trope.”

When I set out gathering articles for my new book Heresies I was struck by how certain themes kept recurring. One of the most important was the centrality of freedom of speech and expression. I grew up in Tasmania amidst a great silence about the island’s twin traumas of its origins, a convict slave system and the closest thing to a successful genocide in world history. A shrill, deafening silence. It shaped everything. In a sense it has not simply informed all I have ever written. It is why I write. To name, to point, to bear witness.

I recently came across a story in Haaretz, the last significant opposition newspaper in Israel, which told of a remarkable Israeli called Lee Mordechai^[1]. A mediaeval scholar, Mordechai has over the three years of the Gaza war compiled an online report called “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War“. Referencing thousands of sources, including eyewitness reports, video footage, investigatory materials, articles and photographs, Haaretz described it “as the most methodical and detailed documentation yet of the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza”.

“My role as a historian,” Mordechai is quoted as saying, “is to give voice to those who cannot sound their own voices, whether they were eunuchs in the 11th century or children in Gaza.“

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The report goes on to describe the unspeakable horrors Mordechai has documented.

Here’s an example: the numerous reports that have come out of Gaza of crying drones: at night IDF drones play the sound of crying babies and screaming women to lure people out of their shelters to help—only to then shoot them.

Here’s another example: the testimony of a distinguished British surgeon who worked in Gaza in 2024 to a British parliamentary committee. Professor Nizam Mamode—and I quote from the BBC report—”broke down as he described children’s accounts of being shot by quadcopters.

“The 62-year-old surgeon told MPs: ‘What I found particularly disturbing was that a bomb would drop, maybe on a crowded, tented area and then the drones would come down.’

“His face shook with emotion as he paused for several seconds to compose himself.” He continued: “The drones would come down and pick off civilians - children. We [were] operating on children who would say: ‘I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.’“^[2]

According to UNICEF, 21,289 children have been killed in Gaza.^[3] The World Health Organisation calculated that in 2023 one child was being killed every ten minutes.^[4]

Asked which of the thousands of images of horror had had the greatest impact on him, Mordechai spoke of a photo of the body of a 62-year-old man run over by a tank, his body mangled beyond recognition. His hands were ziptied, indicating he was detained when killed.

“I have never in my life seen anything like that,” Lee Mordechai told Haaretz. “But worse than that was the fact that the image was shared by soldiers in an Israeli Telegram group and got very favourable reactions.” The image was captioned: “You’re going to love this!”

Two years ago, I was to travel to Gaza with my friend, the artist Ben Quilty, under the auspices of UNHCR. Our goal was simple—to describe what we saw, heard, smelt and touched with Ben’s drawings and my words. Like Lee Mordechai we saw our work not as taking sides but as bearing witness. The trip fell apart when the sister organisation organising logistics in Gaza, the UNWRA, was banned from Gaza by the Israeli government. Before the ban happened and we were still going, Ben was told a very specific detail by the organisers that we needed to understand: that we would be seen as a legitimate target for killing by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).

I confess I took that a little personally. But I shouldn’t have. To want to drop a missile on our car, to want to put a bullet through my brain for wanting to do my job or to blow me up or bury me alive or incinerate me, as it has serially murdered so many other journalists in Gaza and now in Lebanon, is nothing other than business as usual for the IDF—acts for which, as Australia learnt last week in the case of aid worker, Zomi Frankcom, Israel absolves its army of any criminal wrongdoing.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Israel was responsible for two-thirds of all press killings in the world in both 2024 and 2025. More journalists have been killed in Gaza by the IDF than in all of World War II.^[5]

Why would the Israeli state—which claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East—be party to such serial murder of the innocent?

And the answer is very simple: it has to kill every journalist, it has to silence every voice that seeks to bear witness to truth, so that it can keep its own citizens and the world ignorant of the orgy of evil it has visited on the Palestinian people over the last three years in Gaza, and now in the West Bank and in Lebanon. In those countries where a bullet can’t be used, the deadliest slur to throw is that of antisemitism. And Israel is now seeking to silence us here in Australia with just that slur.

This matters—and it matters enormously—for the guarantee of Australian democracy is not to be found in parliament nor with our elected representatives but in freedom of speech and expression and the right to protest.

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And these freedoms are now endangered in Australia by the politicisation and weaponisation of the Bondi massacre by what no less a figure than Australia’s former foreign minister, Bob Carr, has described as a foreign influence operation—an operation led by those Carr and many others call the Israel lobby.

The Israel lobby is not the same thing as the Australian Jewish people nor is it composed solely of Jews—ask Chris Minns— while some of Australia’s leading Jewish figures—the likes of Louise Adler, Sarah Schwarz, Antony Lowenstein and David Leser—have spoken out against the Israel lobby and tried to warn their fellow Australians just what is at stake.

There is nothing unusual or necessarily wrong about a lobby group—no doubt the porn industry has one, and Russia has one and so too the United Arab Emirates. But the porn industry is not seeking to limit our right to protest. And neither Russia nor the UAE are seeking to stifle our freedom of speech and threatening to pervert our democracy. Neither Russia nor the UAE is seeking to install oversight committees in every significant arena of Australian public life to ensure that Russia’s criminal acts in the Ukraine war or the UAE’s criminal acts in sponsoring genocidal proxies in the Sudan civil war are never questioned, criticised or truthfully reported.

But these things are just what are being proposed for Australia by the Special Envoy for Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, and her supporters in the staunchly pro-Israel organisations, the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council; the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. And these things are happening with the support of a cowed Albanese government, a government with all the spine of a liquorice stick.

The Special Envoy’s initial report last year proved to be too great an overreach, even for the ever-biddable Albanese government, and it was quietly shelved. But then came the horror of the Bondi massacre and with it a renewed attempt by the Israel lobby to use the tragedy to silence discussion around Israel and Gaza.

The history of the last few years was rewritten as the story of a growing antisemitic wave in Australia that culminated in the Bondi massacre. This massacre, it was argued, was the consequence of a government that had done nothing and ignored all warnings about antisemitism. Superficially this seems to accord with what was known. There had clearly been an appalling increase in attacks on synagogues, businesses, in abuse and harassment, some of it deeply shocking. But when we ask questions of this revised history much of it collapses into a more qualified, complex pattern of events.

First, as many of the witnesses to the Royal Commission have made clear, they had experienced little antisemitism in their lives in Australia prior to the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas. So, what does this tell us? That Australia has a systemic, longstanding problem with antisemitism demanding draconian action? Or were there other things happening?

A question needs to be asked: to what extent has the Israel lobby itself contributed to antisemitism in Australia by consistently advocating for Israel’s war in Gaza in a highly aggressive fashion, always seeking to identify all Australian Jewish people with Israel’s actions and with the lobby’s own heavy-handed attempts to silence Australians? As anger around the genocide grew could it have been the lobby’s own acts fuelling antisemitism?

For the Israel lobby has to answer to all Jews for such acts of grotesque injustice as the unlawful sacking of ABC presenter Antoinette Lattouf, a decision Justice Darryl Rangiah found was “made to appease pro-Israel lobbyists behind a campaign of complaints”^[6] after Lattouf shared a Human Rights Watch post about starvation being used as a tool of war in Gaza.

“The ABC let down the Australian public badly,” Justice Rangiah concluded, “when it abjectly surrendered the rights of its employee Ms Lattouf to appease a lobby group”.

And yet it is exactly that same lobby group still working hard to ensure the Australian public is let down badly over and over and over again in order to protect the indefensible actions of a foreign state from international condemnation.

The gutting of University of Queensland Press is another example of the way the IHRA definition of antisemitism can cause great damage. Because University of Queensland had signed up to the IHRA definition, its subsidiary UQP, one of Australia’s most storied and celebrated literary publishers, was made to pulp a children’s book that had been illustrated by a man who had written an online essay about Israel. The essay was stupid and offensive. But, on the other hand, it had nothing to do with his children’s book illustrations. In consequence of the book’s pulping, many of UQP’s celebrated list of writers left, including its most distinguished Indigenous writers. In this way a once proud publishing house, an important contributor to Australian culture, was laid waste.

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Australians were, last time I looked, still allowed to say stupid and offensive things if they are within the law. We wouldn’t have the Murdoch press if it were otherwise. Tony Abbott, for example, has said more than his fair share of stupid and offensive things from far loftier platforms than an obscure website, including when as prime minister he said of the Sri Lankan government’s murderous behaviour at the time of the Sri Lankan civil war, ‘‘We accept that sometimes in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen.”^[7] Difficult things like rape, torture and massacring tens of thousands of civilians. Yet last year our ex-prime minister published a history of Australia with Harper Collins. I hear no calls for Tony Abbott’s book to be pulped, and nor would I call for such a thing, nor the gutting of a major publisher.

Second, the story of government inaction doesn’t accord with the facts. By December 2024, the Albanese government had spent $57 million in supporting security measures at Jewish community centres, including schools and synagogues—hardly evidence of an uncaring, unresponsive government.^[8]

Third, we know that many events presented and tallied as evidence of antisemitism after October 7 were rather acts of legitimate protest by Australians about the horror of the emerging genocide in Gaza, culminating in the march for Palestine across the Sydney Harbour Bridge which was dismissed as antisemitic, the 300,000 who took part compared to Nazi-era Germans by Australian Israel advocate Shane Shmuel in The Times of Israel^[9] and condemned by leading Israel lobby advocates like Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.^[10]

“The Royal Commission,” Louise Adler has written, “afforded individuals the opportunity to express their feelings. Some are tragic, most have no context, while others border on paranoia such as the witness who would have been treated terribly at hospital for being a Jew but wasn’t. None are challenged, scrutinized or tested. Unfortunately, the Royal Commission has not undertaken its own independent analysis of the number and nature of reported antisemitic attacks. Instead, it has relied on statistics provided by interested pro-Israel parties.”

Fourth, we know that some of the worst antisemitic acts—the firebombing of a Melbourne synagogue and the arson attack on a Sydney restaurant—were financed and organised by Iran, not by antisemitic Australians.

Finally, we have the massacre itself. We were told this was an inevitable consequence of the building wave of Australian antisemitism. But was it? The evidence publicly available to date suggests that the two shooters were radicalised by online international terrorist groups, and their mass murder was made possible by a combination of lax gun laws, poor surveillance and inadequate policing on the day.

This leads me to the destructive myth that has been built around the Bondi massacre, the way it is ever more represented as an Australian Kristallnacht, the infamous evening in 1938 Nazi Germany when ordinary Germans turned on their Jewish neighbours or, at best, ignored their sufferings and turned away.

Yet what happened at Bondi was the exact opposite: the story of Bondi is of Australians of every creed, colour and background rushing to the massacre, sometimes at great personal risk, to help the dying and the survivors. We should never forget this. Far from the being the culmination of a wave of national antisemitism it was a refutation of antisemitism: in that moment Australians saw other Australians and rushed to help.

That is the story that needs to be remembered. Amidst that horror it is a good story about who we are and who we are not. And yet it was almost immediately drowned out by the myth of the massacre being the end result of a tsunami of Australian antisemitism.

We become the words we speak. And if we keep telling ourselves we are not that caring, good people who revealed themselves that day of horror, we begin the slow journey to become what we are being defined as: murderous antisemites. But other than the murderous evil of the two gunmen, where was the antisemitism to be found at Bondi on that terrible day?

Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere.

The immediate politicisation of the massacre by the Israel lobby meant that the Albanese government’s correct and best response—to tighten up gun laws—was effectively killed off in days in every state other than NSW. Ex-prime minister John Howard—who got his 1996 gun laws up with bipartisan support—came out to destroy that very possibility, saying he did not want ”the focus on guns be used as a pretext to avoid the broader debate about the spread of hatred of Jewish people and antisemitism.” ^[11]

Albanese—after being savaged by Netanyahu, after being falsely accused by the Israel lobby for ignoring the plight of Australian Jews, after the Bondi memorial service where Alex Ryvchin in a most appalling and disrespectful way did nothing to stop Albanese, who had come as prime minister to grieve with Australian Jews, being booed—after all that, Albanese caved to the lobby’s demands.

And so instead of fully backing a gun buyback that would have been a practical good for all, not least terrified Australian Jews, he adopted in full the Segal report, the same report he had previously quietly shelved. He ordered a royal commission that immediately and perhaps terminally compromised any findings it might make by adopting the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Meant to be an enquiry into antisemitism it never even enquired into what antisemitism is and what is its history. As antisemitism’s eminent historian, Mark Mazower, has noted, what began “as a way to describe the hostility faced by Jews as a minority struggling for their legal rights is now used to defend a Jewish majority state depriving the minority within it of theirs. Fighting antisemitism once meant battling ethno-nationalism; now it often justifies ethno-nationalist excesses.”^[12]

Yet in the name of that antisemitism the Special Envoy in her report, her handbook and her public utterances has made very clear that every aspect of Australian life over which the government has leverage the Special Envoy now also wishes to have leverage—and solely on her terms, which, given her record, are likely to be terms that please Israel, a foreign nation. From public broadcasting to libraries to schools to universities to sports to medicine, grotesque demands to control every aspect of Australian public life such that most Australians will find themselves unable to question or oppose the acts of the Israeli government.

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The mechanism for this silencing of discussion about Israel is the discredited IHRA definition, disowned even by its lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, himself a Zionist, who has warned of it being weaponised, describing it being used as a new punitive state policy as “a horrible idea’ that would lead to McCarthyism. It would mean, he said, that you would ‘have to agree with the state to get official funding”. Worse, in this case, that won’t be the Australian state, but the Israeli state—the same Israeli state that in its official documents lists a number of Australian politicians as antisemites. And why? Because they have been critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Bad as the IHRA definition is, it is made infinitely worse by its interpretations—and therefore the McCarthysim that will follow—being ruled on by none other than JillIan Segal, a long time leading advocate for Israel, an ex-chair of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce and a past president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. In 2023, Segal co-signed a statement savaging foreign minister Penny Wong and the Labor government for calling on Israel to stop bombing hospitals while condemning Labor’s support for a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.^[10] Mysteriously, Segal was appointed Australia’s Special Envoy for Antisemitism in 2024 after, according to the pro-Israel Jerusalem News Service, sustained pressure on the Albanese government by the Biden administration that saw the Albanese government as having drifted to far from Australia’s traditional support of Israel.^[13]

The IHRA definition conflates criticism of Israel and criticism of Zionism with antisemitism. While it admits to the reality that not all criticism of either is antisemitic, the various utterances and publications of the Special Envoy make clear that almost any will be seen as such by her, and it is she who will act as the final arbiter of what will and won’t be defined as antisemitism. Earlier this year, her office released their Handbook of Antisemitism—an official guide for schools, universities, workplaces, government agencies and community organisations. In places, the handbook reads not so much a guide to antisemitism as a manual of contemporary Zionist belief. One has to wonder why the Australian government would agree to the imposition of a foreign state’s political ideology on every aspect of Australian life. On page 76 we find a typically evidence-free assertion: “Antisemitism and antizionism are both expressions of hatred towards Jews.”

Which is not so much a curious idea as simply a historically false one. Zionism is neither the Torah nor matzo ball soup. Zionism arose out of the same fetid ethno-nationalist ferment of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century Europe that also gave the world Nazism, fascism, and extreme nationalism and authoritarianism. Its model of society building was that of nineteenth century imperialism: conquest and violence to create ethnically pure countries. Israel’s supporters bristle at the idea of Israel being a colonial project but the early Zionists had no such qualms. The word colony appear often in its early writings, with an honesty about what a colony meant for a land’s original inhabitants. None of this is remarkable, for as Zionism’s founder Theodore Herzl presciently wrote in 1896 in his foundational text, The Jewish State, “Universal brotherhood is not even a dream. Antagonism is essential to man’s greatest efforts.”

Unsurprisingly, many of the twentieth century’s most celebrated Jews had serious reservations and reasons for not supporting Zionism, from Stefan Zweig to Einstein.^[14] Many saw Zionism as a Jewish variation of the fascism that was engulfing Europe, while others saw it as antithetical to Jewish religion, or culture, or history, or spirit, or all of these things. The celebrated Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer was far from alone when he noted in his secret diary while living under Nazi rule that that the Zionists “are just as offensive as the Nazis”. The great Jewish novelist Joseph Roth went further, calling them the “Hitler-Zionists”.^[15] Many Jews loathed Zionism and for the first half century of Zionism’s existence it never had anything approaching the majority support of Jewish people. The leading Jewish organisation in the inter-war was the Bund, which was internationalist in aspiration. The Bundists detested the Zionists.

Today, while support for Zionism is strong in Israel, support for Zionism amongst non-Israeli Jews is cratering. In America, with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, polling by the Jewish Federations of North America found only 37% of America’s Jews identify as Zionist. In Boston, 38% of Jews aged between 18 and 29 considered themselves anti-Zionist, compared to 32% who identified as Zionist.^[16]

Making Zionism synonymous with Jewishness, as Segal does, is not unlike making Hansonism synonymous with Australian identity. The chutzpah of such a statement is only surpassed by its idiocy. Is anti-Hansonism an expression of hatred towards Australians? Gina Rinehart might say so. Luckily, she as yet has no oversight committee.

The conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism makes even less sense, when 30% of America’s Jews now say Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, according to a July AP-NORC poll.^[17]

This argument was put to the sword last week by no less a figure than NSW Supreme Court justice Desmond Fagan, when he ruled that there had been a “serious miscarriage of justice” with the two year imprisonment of Mohommed Farhat for property damage, including spraying the words ‘Fuk Israel’ on a car.^[18]

Fagan ruled that police, lower courts and various state agencies all incorrectly labelled Farhat’s actions antisemitic, meaning he was treated more harshly, writing in his judgement, that ‘Fuk Israel’ was “a curse against a foreign state”.

Finding that the crown solicitor had continued to wrongly conflate “political comment” with antisemitism, Fagan asked, “How can it be antisemitic—in the established sense of the word—to disparage Israel when doing so accords with the words and beliefs of many Jews?”

Fagan was particularly scathing of the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism. “The IHRA proposal is detached from the reality of the common usage and understanding of antisemitism in this country,” Fagan wrote, noting he was “not the first to have criticised the inept drafting of the IHRA formulation”.

Fagan referred to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, which found 79% of Australian respondents viewed Israel unfavourably.

“It would be preposterous to suggest that 79% of Australians are antisemitic because they disapprove of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians,” Fagan said.

“Australians who strongly disapprove of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians have freedom to express their views.”

And there we have it. We are free and we must not surrender that freedom. Yet, it is under attack and we must now fight for it.

The ways in which the Segal report can deeply damage our democracy are frightening to ponder.

Backed only by her unverified, contested claims, Segal recommends that the Australian government defund any university, public broadcaster or cultural institution (such as libraries, galleries and writers festivals) found to have presented views newly defined as ‘antisemitic’. Galleries would risk losing public funding if they exhibited an artist who had simply posted something about Gaza. Hospitals similarly could be compelled to sack doctors for social media posts. Sports people ditto. Charities could lose their tax-deductible status if they featured a writer or artist who had, in whatever form, expressed an opinion deemed antisemitic. I would not be able to speak here today. All Australians would quickly understand that there is now a sphere of human life about which they must be silent—or tempt being blacklisted. That’s the new McCarthyism.

The absurdity is overwhelming and frightening: the distinguished Jewish critic of contemporary tyranny, the journalist M. Gessen, would be hard-pressed to find an Australian public institution prepared to allow them to speak, given they would be defined as antisemitic for writing of Gaza in the New Yorker: “The ghetto is being liquidated.”

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Make no mistake: the Segal report will allow government the power to do what the Trump administration has done in the US: defund universities, cower civil society and curb free speech. And you think that won’t happen here? Nationals Senate leader Bridget McKenzie in a recent speech spoke of her ambition to “break” universities, accusing them of allowing unchecked antisemitism and inculcating “white guilt” and “climate catastrophe” among students.

I want to be very clear about what I am saying and what I am not saying. Jewish Australians have suffered terrible acts of hatred and violence over the last three years. Within our laws, these should not be tolerated.

But if you wish to create a machine to destroy social cohesion in this country, a machine to create hatred of Jews such as this country has never known, then endorse the ambitions of the Special Envoy for Antisemitism. Because although this will be the work of the Israel lobby on behalf of Israel, it will be Australian Jews who will be blamed for it.

As more and more ordinary Australians find themselves silenced, their careers destroyed as Antoinette Lattouf’s was, falsely imprisoned as Mohommed Farhat was, their liberties infringed as they were with Chris Minns’s unconstitutional and draconian anti-protest laws, their institutions silenced or gutted as UQP was, anger and resentment towards all Jewish people will only grow.

And perhaps, perversely, that suits the Israel lobby, because it would merely be in accord with their existential message, that only in Israel are Jews safe, and have the effect of binding the Australian Jewish community ever more tightly to the nation of Israel, right or wrong.

And worse: because once the Segal recommendations become reality, a template will exist for other powerful lobbies who wish to see Australians silenced, fearful and divided. There is a disturbing trend throughout the western world to recategorise protest and dissent as terrorism and legislate accordingly. Bob Brown recently said the swathe of new laws and restrictions on protest mean that the Franklin campaign would never succeed today. Get ready for new laws to please the fossil fuel lobby as climate anger grows. Ditto the data centre and AI lobby. And so on and so on.

To end where I began: the Haaretz interview with the mediaeval scholar, Lee Mordechai. After their interview, Mordechai sent the journalist a last link. It was not about Gaza, but a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, called ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’

I found the story and read it.

Omelas is a beautiful city full of beautiful, happy people. Omelas’s society is one of harmony and beauty and joy.

“All is perfect,” writes Le Guin, “except for one detail: in a tiny, windowless cellar room there is locked up a naked, starving child, that sits in its own excrement in the darkness. It is feebleminded, perhaps from starvation, perhaps for other reasons, fear, neglect, God knows. All the people of Omelas know the child exists …

“They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place … in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms … The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

… The[y] [people of Omelas] know that they, like the child, are not free … It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science.

And so no one does anything to end the child’s suffering.

Le Guin ends her haunting story this way: “very occasionally a young person or occasionally an old person fall silent for days. Then they go out on the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and they walk straight out of the city of Omelas … they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they are going towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness … But they seem to know where they’re going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

It’s time each of us began to walk towards our most fundamental freedom—to name, to point, to bear witness to the truth. It’s time all of us began to walk away from Omelas.

Thank you for listening.

^[1]https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-12-05/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/massive-database-of-evidence-compiled-by-a-historian-details-israels-war-crimes-in-gaza/00000193-979b-d408-a7d3-bfdbf1410000 5 December 2024

^[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7893vpy2gqo

^[3] https://www.unicef.org/sop/reports/unicef-state-palestine-humanitarian-situation-update

^[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/child-killed-average-every-10-minutes-gaza-says-who-chief-2023-11-10/

^[5] https://cpj.org/special-reports/record-129-press-members-killed-in-2025-israel-responsible-for-2-of-3-of-deaths/

^[6] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-24/antoinette-lattouf-costs-decision-in-abc-unlawful-termination/105810052

^[7]https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=chamber/hansardr/585f8e84-c281-4991-9ab8-437f9b9ff0f8/&sid=0074

^[8] https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-46418

^[9] https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/sydney-harbour-bridge-australias-moral-decline/

^[10] https://www.jwire.com.au/harbour-bridge-protest-to-proceed-after-court-ruling-as-jewish-leaders-warn-of-rising-tensions/

^[11] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/australia-had-a-chance-to-do-something-big-then-came-weak-leadership-and-fatal-errors-20260624-p609jo.html

^[12] Mark Mazower, On Antisemitism. A Word In History (London, 2025) p273

^[13] https://www.jns.org/feature/australias-silence-on-jew-hatred-shouldve-drawn-more-attention-right-after-oct-7-former-official-says

^[14] https://1drv.ms/w/c/5362b088e24ef006/IQBhBq81cgV9SJyGFHyVZ4HKAclP90RFV36j2Q0nVQ_4-HE

^[15] Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig, 14 August 1935, Joseph Roth. A Life in Letters, (ed. Michael Hoffman) (London 2012) p415

^[16] Haaretz Today - 12 August 2026

^[17] Haaretz Today email Newsletter 17 August 2026

^[18] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/19/justice-desmond-fagan-sydney-anti-israel-graffiti-incorrectly-labelled-antisemitic-supreme-court-ntwnfb

Australia’s political class risks living in an echo chamber of power, where individuals shuffle between public office and major corporations, ensuring special interests are always top of mind in government decision-making.

This is part of the findings of a new damning report by the Australian Democracy Network (AND), which revealed that almost two-thirds (64%) of the 714 registered lobbyists previously worked in government.

“There is clearly a well-oiled revolving door between political office and private sector lobbying roles,” Christian Slattery, senior campaigner for ADN, said.

“That revolving door is principally benefitting vested interests that can afford to hire that expertise, and is one of the reasons two in three Australians agree the political system is not working for ordinary people.”

From ministers to lobbyists

Of the ex-government cohort who jumped across to lobby for the private sector, 295 were former advisors – the largest segment. There are also 22 former federal ministers or assistant ministers from Labor and the Coalition now working in registered lobbying roles.

“This includes Christopher Pyne, Julie Bishop, Michael Keenan, Robert Hill and Zed Seselja (Coalition), and Gary Gray, Joel Fitzgibbon, Lindsay Tanner and Stephen Conroy (Labor). These persons all disclosed their former roles as required under the Lobbying Code,” the report read.

Another 21 former politicians were not required to disclose their lobbying activities according to existing rules, but were identified in the report, including Labor MPs Belinda Neal, Graham Perrett and Bernard Ripoll, as well as three former premiers Paul Lennon (Labor, Tasmania), Morris Iemma (Labor, NSW) and Robert Borbidge (Coalition, Queensland).

The report also identified high-profile party officials who went on to become lobbyists, including former Liberal Party Vice President Tom Harley, former Liberal Party Federal Director Sir Lynton Crosby AO and former Queensland Labor State Secretary Evan Moorhead.

Careerism in politics

The findings suggest a political culture where many politicians and staffers value their personal career pathways often at the expense of the public interest.

“It is no secret that lobbying can provide a lucrative career path for political insiders,” Slattery said.

“Fair or not, that feeds suspicion of perceived conflicts of interest, which in turn undermines confidence that decisions are being made solely in the public interest,” he said.

The added risk, the report noted, was that those politicians and staffers “may use the information and contacts collected during their time in parliament to advantage private-sector clients at the expense of public interest outcomes”.

This ultimately threatens the “actual and perceived integrity of government decisions by allowing individuals to leverage experience, knowledge, skills or contacts gained while serving the public interest to deliver private commercial gain”, the report read.

The findings reinforce a Deepcut analysis showing the Albanese government consistently backed lobbyists and corporate interests over public opinion on several key issues – from gambling to supermarkets, gas to Israel.

Potential echo chamber of power

A consequence of this constant revolving door is what Slattery describes as a “serious echo-chamber risk” of familiar faces prioritising corporate interests at the highest levels of government.

“In a healthy democracy, government should hear from a broad range of voices,” he told Deepcut.

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“When paid influence is dominated by people drawn from the same political networks, those insiders can enjoy access and familiarity that most Australians – and many less powerful organisations – cannot match.”

Corporations and lobbying firms naturally seek to employ those with the strongest political networks, the report read, which makes former politicians and their staff obvious targets.

“This creates a very uneven playing field where wealthy corporations and individuals enjoy substantially more political representation than other interests,” Slattery said.

Current lobbying rules restrict ministers from taking on lobbying roles for 18 months after leaving office, and 12 months for advisors – a small window the report labelled “insufficient”.

The ADN are instead calling for a five-year cooling-off period to prevent former ministers from becoming lobbyists after leaving parliament, backed by an independently enforced National Lobbying Act.

“The purpose is not to prevent people from working; it is to protect public-interest decision-making from undue influence and perceived conflicts of interest,” Slattery said.

A week before Anthony Albanese enthusiastically endorsed AI in a major speech in July, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner travelled to the United States to meet with tech companies and security agencies.

On the agenda was “joint operations” and driving “capability development initiatives” – code for enhanced intelligence sharing and greater surveillance with the support of Big Tech.

Speaking at the UN Chiefs of Police Summit (UNCOPS) on July 8 in New York, AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett framed the outreach to tech companies as “urgent because the scale and pace of crime will only become more acute because of artificial intelligence”.

Tech companies, Barrett said, “can be the digital penicillin of our time”.

Of key interest to the AFP is AI – not for its potential in promoting crime (a big uptick in crime in the past decade has been a 55% jump in sexual assault, and thus not related to AI). But for its potential use, in particular, dramatically enhancing the ability of security agencies to surveil Australians.

Help with the ‘deluge of data’

From supermarkets to public parks to Bunnings, the proliferation of cameras in common spaces in Australian cities and towns is unavoidable. No matter where one steps, it seems, there’s a camera watching.

In 2019, Sydney was already ranked the 15th-most surveilled city in the world, with 12.35 cameras per 1,000 people. Assuming that per capita rate has since increased, the physical architecture for mass state surveillance has effectively been put in place.

The challenge, as Barrett highlighted, was the “deluge of data”. The laborious task of security officers trawling through hours of footage.

“If there are 12 cameras recording 24 hours a day, that equates to 288 hours of video every day,” she told the Australian Information Industry Association in April. “Thirty days is the equivalent of 8,640 hours. Even with four police officers reviewing this footage at double speed, for eight hours a day, five days a week, it would take six months to review.”

Enter AI.

“We need to use a combination of human intelligence and artificial intelligence to disrupt and detect the extremist recruiters and inciters, while protecting and diverting those at risk,” she said in May, after the Albanese government announced $74m in funding for a Counter-Terrorism Online Centre.

A key part of the funding will go towards building “a specific artificial intelligence capacity”.

Surveillance targeting ‘hate’ groups

In tandem with growing surveillance capabilities are the legal weapons passed by Labor and the Coalition to effectively target dissent.

Deepcut has extensively covered the laws passed at federal and state levels over the past two decades that have cumulatively eroded political expression – often with the support of the pro-Israel lobby. Constant tweaking to counter-terrorism and hate speech laws have increasingly encroached on free speech, which has escalated in recent years amid mounting criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The most recent – and arguably most controversial – was the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Act 2026 passed in January this year, which gives the home affairs minister extraordinary power to proscribe local organisations as ‘hate groups’ without procedural fairness – meaning groups cannot appeal or provide evidence against the proscription.

The definition of ‘promoting hatred’ was also left vague, raising concerns the minister has broad scope to designate legitimate dissent as ‘hate’. The powers were condemned at the time as akin to a dictatorship.

ASIO head Mike Burgess hinted as to where their eyes are shifting, when in June he pointed to “far-left activists” as the culprits behind vandalism of Australian weapons companies supplying parts to Israel. In those remarks, Burgess conflated the anti-war protests with “violent antisemitism”.

The Counter-Terrorism Online Centre – a joint ASIO-AFP operation powered with AI capabilities – appears to be, in part, executing into practice the hate speech laws passed in January.

As Barrett described, AI will help “provide an early warning system for the nation’s Joint Counter Terrorism Teams about emerging hate groups and individuals who use social media, gaming platforms, online forums and our dark web to incite or commit violence”.

Dystopian future tested in WA

Western Australian police offered a taste of what AI mass surveillance could look like in Australia. In June, it trialled live AI facial recognition technology that scanned more than 130,000 people in Perth and Fremantle in its first week, comparing the faces to a police watchlist of 4,000 people.

The mass scan resulted in 18 arrests but was widely condemned by privacy and civil liberties groups, with concerns that First Nations will be disproportionately targeted.

It solved Barrett’s challenge – processing footage and data in seconds rather than “six months”.

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In New South Wales, the hardline Minns government is proposing laws that will allow NSW Police to access photos of drivers and passengers – including children – taken by cameras at toll points.

Although AI was not explicitly mentioned in the Bill, NSW Police is adopting AI to help “existing police procedures and systems”.

In February, it was revealed that NSW Police was in the early stages of establishing an AI centre in Parramatta.

Among its tasks is exploring “ways of integrating generative artificial intelligence technologies into policing”.

Toll road cameras might be the start.