This episode of New Politics was released on the sixth of September twenty twenty five and produced on the lands of the Wongle and Gatigal people.

Hello to our audience and a big hello to you, David.

There's lots of good people on all sides, and I'm sure that there's lots of good people listening in today.

We only ever had the best people listening in.

Even those are call us all types of names in the comments, So welcome to everybody.

Hello Eddie, Hello to you David.

And today we've got a big episode coming up.

David.

We have a look at what happened in the March for Australia on the weekend the anti Semitic conference on the Gold Coast.

I really don't think we need local counselors going along to this junket.

Talk about that too.

And the federal government wants to reduce freedom of information access to the public and to me it's starting to behave a little bit like the Morrison government.

We look at that and all of this is coming up on this great episode of New Politics.

But first of all, David, I think we need to give a big shout out to all the other independent media out there, and the big shout out to Joel Jenkins at Bogan Intelligentsia thanks for having us on last week, and David.

There's just so much more happening in the world of independent media.

Independent media is definitely smaller than the mainstream media, but it's not about quantity, it's about quality and it's just getting better news, commentary and analysis through independent media.

And that's why people are leaving the mainstream.

They've just had enough of the compromise news.

We might not be as polish as the mainstream media, but for a lot of people that just does not matter anymore.

They've had enough and they just want to listen to different perspectives.

I think that's absolutely right that we give a slightly different perspective.

I think most independent media that's not an obvious conjob is based around fact, is based around considered opinion, is based around trying to get the truth out there and trying to get a different perspective out there.

And I think that's why people are falking to it.

But partly two, there's competition and better competition.

Thousands of people turned out for the March for Australia protests on the weekend and On the surface, it looks like a protest about housing shortages, a lack of infrastructure, and the so called mass migration.

But once you strip back the slogans, there's a more sinister message that's going on behind the scenes, and these protests weren't really about patriotism or community concerns.

It just seemed to be about a culture of complaint and a platform for white nationalist ideology and racism dressed up as some kind of misguided idea about civic pride.

And there was also quite a lot of openly racist material out there, David.

The Indian community was singled out for much of this material.

For some reason.

The conspiracy theory of white replacement was the big topic of discussion, and there was a bit of neo Nazism going on at the sidelines, and we also had quite a few federal MPs trying to give this some kind of legitimacy as well.

There was Pauline Hanson railing against migrants.

Bob Catter was having a go at it as well.

He's the deputy leader of Kata's Australian Party.

Nick Demesto not being too fuss about having neo Nazis at the rally.

Get rid of one two.

With this one who.

I don't know.

They behave themselves to day and don't do anything best there anyone up the dramas and I'm standing in there on their own thing over there.

And while a lot of people were focused on this idea of mass migration, extremists and neo Nazis joined up with the rallies in Melbourne, Neo Nazis stormed and Indigenous protests site, tearing down Aboriginal flags and assaulting Indigenous activists, and the mainstream media came along for the ride and tried to frame all of this as legitimate concerns, but in reality, this wasn't really a process about legitimate concerns.

It seemed to be more about trying to bring back the white Australia policy allowed a more angry and more dangerous version of it.

But it's a version of Australia that has really never existed in the past and will probably never exist in the future.

When that interlooper tried to hijack Jessiner Allen's press conference, what I thought was notable was that as soon as he turned up, the cameras turned to him and gave him the platform that a sensible media organization would have ignored.

They'd have tried to have got him away from microphone range.

They have let just Center Allen finish her press conference unimpeded.

Of course, we're used to a policy being announced and the ABC in particular going straight to the Shadow Minister for comment before anyone's had a chance to look at it to see if the comment is valid or not.

We have a press that broadly follows or supports in some way this near Nazi ideology.

A real press wouldn't give them the type of time they've given them.

They were forced into giving a fairly fair rundown of the harbor Bridge protest, which got more people by about tenfold, of the national protest that these white ones did, and it's couched in we're not Nazis.

A lot of people said, oh, we're not Nazis, and maybe you're not.

But while you're standing there and accepting that voice, you're giving it a legitimacy that it hasn't deserved since really nineteen twenty nine, but definitely since nineteen forty five.

We fought a war over it, they lost, and here they are back.

It is a zero sum game.

People, upset that other people might be getting something that they're not, despite their privilege, despite their own advantages.

Now, of course not everyone there is wealthy, but we still live in a country.

If you're going to protest, it means that you can afford to get there.

It means that you feel confident enough that you can march.

It means that there is privilege there.

I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to protest.

Freedom of speech allows for all types of idiocies.

You're absolutely right, David.

This isn't an issue about freedom of speech.

Everyone's got a right to process.

Everyone's got a right to voice their opinions, but we've got a right to critique what those opinions are.

And that's what's happening here.

And I think that for a long long time, these far right activists have pretty much hidden their racism behind coded words.

There's all this coded language that's used, words such as heritage or culture that all sounds harmless in itself, but what there really after is some form of racial purity, or it might be an extreme version of racial purity.

And also that idea of anti mass migration or remigration, which is pretty much a Nazi term anyway, and dressing up all of this is a deep issue or a deep concern for society, but it's just another form of racial exclusion pretty much.

And generally a lot of these issues, as you refer to David, they're all based on grievance and that's what one nation and players like Pauline Hanson are all about.

Life scene is a little bit unfair.

Someone's got to be blamed for this.

Too many people at the train station, Well it must be because we've got too many migrants, and it's easier to blame migrants than blaming the incompetent governments that didn't build a better transport system in the first place.

And this whole victim mentality, it's sort of amplified by the conservative media.

And the latest one came from ben Fordham on two GB who recently said this, and now ben Fordham commas.

Well, get a load of this.

Every single day, Australia is now taking in one thousand, five hundred and forty four new people one thousand, five hundred and forty four per day.

These are the latest numbers.

Now that's the equivalent of five fully loaded Boeing seven eight seven dreamliners day after day, week after week.

In the first six months of this year, we've had two hundred and seventy nine thousand arrivals.

That's more people than the population of Hobart.

So as pushing this vivid image of an invasion, except it's all propaganda and designed to inflame tensions.

It's a complete lie.

These numbers are not permanent arrivals, and it was quickly debunked by the Bureau of Statistics, but that didn't seem to matter because it's just a lot easier to believe the convenient lie.

And this is exactly how manufacturer crisis, and it's exactly what happened with the Cronola race rights that we're insider by Alan Jones.

You inflate the numbers, put out this message that we're all being overrun by migrants, and it means that the next time there's a queue at your coffee shop or at the bus stop, you can blame migrants rather than looking at the real problems that are being neglected by governments, and that's housing, wages, infrastructure, and all of these issues just get ignored because we're focusing on the wrong issue.

It's easy to blame migrants, and I hear it here a bit no ways, try and correct it.

That are all these foreigners coming in and buying up huge blocks of land and forcing up house prices when you say foreign ownership of land is actually quite low here.

Plus they tend to buy in the one area, which may or may not have an effect in that area.

You're not getting this spread across Sydney and Melbourne.

You're getting in particular pockets, which makes sense.

When you move to another country, you want to grasp on to as much familiar as you can.

So the Chinese community he would be in particular population clusters, that the Lebanese community, that the Sikh community, that the Nepalese community would be in particular clusters.

Makes a lot of sense, both economically but also socially.

It's funny too, how the figures of opobrium change six months ago it would have been on Middle Eastern and Muslim and I always enjoyed pointing out that the first mosque in Australia was built in Burke in the eighteen eighties.

Still there they had to move it into the cemetery to stop it being vandalized.

But Burke, in the far western New South Wales because of the Afghan Kamalis.

Now most of them were Lebanese, but that the semantic question for another day.

But they wanted a place to pray and at the time the people in Burke said, great, have this spot, you can go and pray.

Go for it.

I'm sure that it wasn't a racially ideal place to live in Australia in the eighteen nineties if you wanted of Anglo background.

But the other thing too is that there were fifteen nationalities on the first fleet coming out here in seventeen eighty eight, and that included there was an Indian, there were French, German, there were ash Indian, West Indian.

Yeah, they were African.

So again this notion that Australia has always been an Anglo white country and white purity is a bit of a distortion.

Yes, the majority of people for a long time were of Anglo descent and Anglo celt descent, Irish and Scots and Welsh too, bart there was a has always been a significant minority of non Anglo And for further proof travel around South Australia.

The number of German town names travel around Western Australia.

For Dutch names.

New South Wales has all kinds of things going on, said as Queensland and Victoria.

So to claim that Australia is a white nation really stretches the definition of white, I think.

And then to be angry that somebody's got something that you don't and you don't need it and it doesn't improve your life, which is a lot of the case too.

Either it doesn't exist.

All these migrants get money from the government.

What money do they get that you're not entitled to?

And if you're not entitled to it, why aren't you entitled to it?

Is it because you have sufficient income?

Is it because you get it the same amount of money but in a different way.

It's a lack of compassion, a wilful lack of empathy, a wilful lack of observation.

People see what they want to see.

And again they call themselves a silent majority, but I think they're the loud minority, boosted by a corrupted media that agrees with them.

I think the other point is that there's been quite a bit of political equivocation about all of this.

The Prime ministers said this too.

Describe the people at the March for Australia of.

Course there's always good people will turn up to demonstrate their views about particular issues.

But what we have here is neo Nazi's been given a platform.

That's what we saw.

And it's a little bit like when Donald Trump said this, but you.

Also had people that were.

Very fine people on both sides.

And David this is the sort of stuff that avoids offending anybody, and it's a false equivalence that not only misses the mark, but it sort of normalizes extremism.

And these protesses were a crock of right wing crap.

And you'd expect a Prime minister who's positioning himself as a centrist sort of leader and he actually comes from the left faction of the Labor Party.

You'd expect someone like that to call this out completely, not pick and choose and have a look through the crowd and see if there's good people and then say, oh, there's a good people, not the bad people, and that sort of stuff.

And when we look at actions that have happened from the other side of policies, when we look at something like the Black Lives Matter protest from twenty twenty, the Prime Minister at the time, Scott Morrison, well, they didn't mince his words or talk about good people or bad people.

He just condemned the protests outright and said that any protests in future will be arrested by the police and jail if it comes to that.

But when it comes to protests on the right, Albanese just tiptoes around them and suggests that there's good people in there as well.

And as far as I'm concerned, you refer to this before, David.

If you turn up to one of these protests and realize that there are neo Nazis there and you still hang around, well you're not a good person.

You're just in neo Nazi.

It seems that politics just generally has an easier time condemning any political action from the progressive left, and we saw that from New South Wales Premier Chris Mins in New South Wales condemning all of those pro Palestine marches, just like Scott Morrison condemned the Black Lives Matter protests all those years ago.

But when it comes to right wing process, even when they come along equipped with their violence, well everyone just seems to tiptoe around it.

I don't know why people are scared of saying Natism is wrong.

We spent six years and half a generation in terms of lives shattered and lost fighting the notion of Nazism.

I've been hearing things like, oh, Hitler wasn't all wrong, Yes he was, okay, he designed the VW.

But the Holocaust, the invasion of sovereign nations, the war crimes, the anti everything rhetoric cancels out the VW.

Yep, drive your VW.

It's a great car.

You know where your Hugo boss suits.

But these things are separate to the evil that Nazism is, and there's no winding it back.

The rhetoric is we are superior, and we will stop anyone from trying to claim that they are equal to us.

It is such a sad and pathetic ideology.

The comic's got super villains much better, like Lethor and the Joker, and we get stuck with people like Thomas Saule, whose attitudes are sad and pathetic and are really a projection of his own in because he's all it takes is a bit of compassion.

Well, it takes compassion, but it also takes a bit of leadership as well.

And I just see this sort of tiptoeing around all of this neo Nazi stuff.

I just think that it's a failure of leadership and Bob Hawk would have condemned this sort of stuff.

And I know that there's been a little bit of stuff that Anthony Albernezi has been saying, but everything about this has to be condemned out right.

Bob Hawk would have condemned this stuff if he was the Prime minister.

So would Paul Keating, and it's going back some time.

I'd say that even Malcolm Fraser would have condemned this sort of right wing process.

And it's not just these prime ministers.

There's also silence from other people as well.

So Gillian Siegel, the Special Envoy on Anti Semitism, she didn't say one word about this neo Nazi protests or anything at all about the March for Australia protests or the neo Nazi activity.

Not one word.

She's always been very quick to condemn the pro Palestine marches all around Australia, but when the Nazis actually arrive and then the ones who were engaging in real anti Semitism, not one word.

And I guess she's hardly going to say anything at all when her husband donated fifty thousand dollars to Advance Australia, and that's another hate field right wing agitator.

Generally, I think that this silence is the bigger problem, or just pandering to either neo Nazis or this right wing extremism.

And then we're probably around fifty thousand people across Australia and this overall is not a big march.

Fifty thousand seems like a big number, but there's twenty eight million people in Australia, so fifty thousand people is not a very big march.

And because it wasn't strongly condemned, well, I think the next one, the next march, whenever that is, whenever it's organized, well, that will be bigger, and then the next one after that will be bigger as well.

And it wasn't about housing or roads or infrastructure as we explained before.

It was all about white nationalism dressed up as patriotism.

And who knows, David, this might just fizzle out.

It's an event that's happened now, it might be gone by next year, who knows.

But I just think that it wasn't big enough to cause any long term political issues for the government.

But Albanesey should have just been a lot stronger than he was.

It was a missed opportunity to show some strength on social cohesion and I just think the Prime Minister have failed on this.

You're right, Bob Hawk wouldn't have stood for it.

Now, Bob Hawk would have been problematic in terms of the genocide in Gaza.

He was very much pro Israel.

Paul Keating wouldn't have stood for it.

Paul Keating would have withered them away with his words.

Malcolm Fraser wanted to exploit everybody equally and in fact took in Vietnamese migrants when his party was saying don't take them in and when there was a lot of pushback against it, but knew that the right thing to do.

He took in Vietnamese refugees when his party said don't, but he knew that morally it was the right thing to do.

And we can argue over the motivation over that, whether it to do with his guilt over the dismissal, or was it because he was at heart totally non racist, And it's probably mixture of both.

But Whitlam would have condemned Nazism.

And of course I think one of the things too, is that Whitlam and Fraser and to a lesser extent, Hawk were old enough to remember World War Two.

In fact, Whitlam had served in the Air Force in the Northern Territory in World War Two.

Fraser I think was too young.

Hawk was too young, but they were alive and aware at that point.

That would have been fifteen sixteen year olds during the Second World.

War, and yet getting as a creep towards eighteen, the question of do I go would have come in, and then it finishes in nineteen forty five that historical context of World War Two, which is nearly what eighty years ago.

Now, I saw an interview with a prominent British politician, Roy Jenkins, and he said that a lot of the anti europe crowd in Britain had no experience of the war.

The pro Europeans, this is back in the seventies, had served in World War Two and so understood the importance of peace a lot better than the people who had lived through peace.

Now, I'm not advocating that we should go to war and teach everybody a lesson here, but I am advocating that we try and look at these things with a bit more of an historical eye and try and get into the mindset of someone who served in whatever capacity, or who didn't serve, but saw people go and some of those people didn't come back.

And what was it that they were fighting for.

Now there's a lot of arguments.

Or they were fighting for the Queen and country.

They were fighting for a republic in Australia.

They were fighting for the worry that Japan would come down and invade.

It was an end to the unemployment of the Great Depression.

There were a whole range of reasons.

Ultimately, whether they were on the right of the spectrum of the left of the spectrum, they came out not being fans of Nazism and here are their grandkids saying that this is actually a good thing and perhaps we fought on the wrong side in the war, which is extraordinary to me.

This is New Politics with Eddie Jokovic and David lewis the best podcast on Australian politics and news commentary.

You can support us through Patreon and substack, and also find us at Newpolitics dot com dot au.

During the week there was the Australian Mayors Summit against Anti Semitism, where local mayors and counselors from all around Australia were offered all expenses paid trips to the Gold Coast and it might seem like it was a community safety initiative, but essentially it's an event that's part of that process of removing criticism of Israel and its current campaign of genocide in Gaza.

The event was organized by the US based Combat Anti Semitism Movement, and that's a group funded by Republican Party Megadonas.

It's notorious for smearing pro Palaestinian academics, it's supportive of Donald Trump's attacks on the United Nations, and it attacks anyone or any organization that accuses Israel of anything that might be construed to be negative.

And of course, the Special Envoy for Anti Semitism, Jillian Siegel, getting quite a bit of a workout today.

But Jillian Siegel is one of the speakers, and she's the one who's pushing the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Association's definition of anti Semitism and would include silencing any legitimate criticism of the State of Israel and Zionism.

And there's also a former neo Nazi leader on the program.

Jeff Scoop and one of the co chairs of this conference is Stan Roth, who also donated fifty thousand dollars to the far right Advance Australia lobby groups.

So these are probably not the people that local mayors and counselors should be going off to listen to.

And David, as you know, in the world of politics, nothing is free.

You just don't get anything for free, and there'd be an expectation that all of these local counselors attending this conference will go back to their councils and their communities and implement the agenda of this right wing American based organization and silence the criticism of Israel at the local level.

And the other issue is that these sorts of junkens are becoming so brazen and so obvious.

It just shouldn't be happening in Australia and all the counselors who have gone to this summit should be called out for it.

It was very bizarre thing, and of course anti Semitism is wrong.

Calling somebody out because of their background, because of their belief is wrong and should be condemned.

To get back to World War II, we see the end fruits of anti Semitism, of homophobia, of anti Jehovah's witnesses, of anti Romany people, anti Eastern Slavic or anti Slavic people rounded up and killed in big numbers.

And this should never be repeated, absolutely not calling out an idea.

And Zionism is an idea, and it's not a Jewish idea, not exclusively.

It comes out of English Evangelical Christianity, a particular type of Judaism, and a particular type of atheism, plus a good dose of anti Semitism.

Let's get them out of the country and somewhere else, we don't really care.

There were all kinds of places suggested, Africa, Alaska, Australia, Australia as well.

In the end, it was the more pragmatic British who won, some of whom wanted to push through the end prophecies in the Book of Daniel and of revelation of the returning of Jesus to the world, and if they could get the state of Israel up, perhaps Jesus would come back a bit more willingly.

Partly it was atheists who had a look at the huge oil reserves in Middle East, and one of the underlying themes of World War two is the supply of oil.

Ultimately America, England and Europe and the rest of Europe apart from Germany, is able to keep that oil accessed British Petroleum, which was essentially a company set up by the British government to get into and so as a result, when it comes to anti Semitism, I don't know that our councilors needed to do that, and it'd be interesting to see what they were learning.

And I suspect a lot of what would have been about what a wonderful place Tel Aviv is, what a wonderful place Jerusalem is.

Look at all this business going here.

These are Jewish people and you shouldn't be nasty to them, because don't be nasty.

Don't worry about what's going on in Gaza, it's something else.

Yeah, probably also trying to extend their own political careers as well.

So generally there has been a wide range of community groups and unions and even other Jewish organizations that did push back against this summit.

The Jewish Council of Australia they were one of them, and they were the ones who were actually leading the calls for Counselors to boycott this summit, and their message was actually quite blunt, David.

They said that this summit isn't about fighting anti Semitism, it's about pushing the pro Israel propaganda and right wing ideology of Zionism.

There's also a lot of other issues aside from all of that, about integrity and trust.

Transparency International said that even if these sorts of summits are legal in Australia, well, accepting paid trips and hospitality from these types of right wing organizations or any sort of organization, well that just undermines public confidence in government decision making, especially when they're taking perse from these international groups with the clear political agender.

And the opposition to this event isn't just the fringe activists.

It's a broader coalition of people.

It's the Australian Services Union, Democracy and Color, that's another group in the Inn and West Jewish voices of the Sydney Green's Council.

It's a diverse group of people that just want accountability at the council level.

And what this summit wants essentially is it wants to conflate anti Semitism with that criticism of Israel.

It's about staffling free speech and punishing pro Palasinian advocacy and it's completely unacceptable.

Yeah, no it's not.

And again we must call out anti Semitism when we find it, but we must also combat bad ideas and Zionism, which is not Judaism, which has got nothing to do with the individual as a Jewish person, is a bad idea and it's got to be called out, maybe reshaped, maybe disposed of all together.

But that's the problem.

And to conflate anti Zionism with anti Judaism, especially when there are a lot of Jewish people who are anti Zionists, including some of the more conservative groups, and certain figures have suggested that if you're anti Zionist, not a proper due, which I don't think is anywhere near correct.

And also despite the criticism, there were counsels that still chose to send delegates to this mayor's summit.

There were several from Melbourne, I think, some from South Australia and West Australian.

Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, Darcy Burn from the Inner West Council.

Now not many people will know about this person, but Darcy Burn from the Inner West Council, he's the mayor, even though most of his counselors didn't want him to go, nor did probably most of the people who live in the Inner West Council wanted him to go.

And this is the council that was on the verge of approving a boycott, divestment and sanction action against the state of Israel last year, and that was stopped after intervention by Darcy Burn.

And I guess a few more handshakes and attending a tacky summit on the Gold Coaster far more important than speaking out against the genocide in Newtown or other parts of the Inner West Council.

The other point is that the sponsors of these events are the biggest supporters of Zionism.

They've absolutely lighted with money.

There's Maritron, Southern Steel and the Executive Council of Australian During and I think this is where the problem lies.

It doesn't matter what the organization is or what the cause is when lobby groups are footing the bill for these elected representatives to come and listen to what their perspectives are, well, I just think it raises these serious questions about influence.

And it's bad enough seeing it at the federal and state level, and we've been calling this out for many, many years, but we just shouldn't be seeing at the local government level either, when in fact we shouldn't be seeing it anywhere at all.

It's pointless.

It won't actually help with genuine anti Semitism.

Those Nazis who marched on the weekend, you know who's still at the top of their hate list.

And in fact, zonism serves their purposes.

It gets Jewish people out of this country and into another one where they don't have to worry about them.

It's so ridiculously wrong, the whole thing, and ultimately, I think counterproductive to the aim.

And I think that's where we're going to see a rise in anti Semitism, because people will be emboldened because look at this, Look at what these people are doing, look at what the other is doing.

And they're funded and guess where that funding comes from.

Everyone's walked into a con that's really predicting the corrupt government of Israel.

And not all Israeli governments have been corrupt, don't get me wrong, but the current one is corrupt and is clearly corrupt, and this.

Is all they're doing.

And when it all comes crashing down, it'll be interesting to see how they're going to react.

This is New Politics, available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Audible and YouTube, and also available to support it Patreon, Substack and at our website New politics dot com dot Are you.

Them?

Must be some come We're out of here, said the joker.

There's too much confusion.

I can't can.

There's a growing concern about what kind of government Australia really has right now because some of the actions of the Albanese government are starting to mimic some of the worst tendencies of the Morrison era.

And I know a lot of audience probably don't want to hear that.

But the first issue relates to secrecy issues for the government and freedom of information.

The Attorney General, Michelle Roland, has unveiled the biggest shakeup in over a decade for freedom of information rules and access and it's raising quite a few red flags for me, it's raising quite a few flags for quite a few people and journalists, other politicians and researchers may soon have to pay new fees to access government documents that should be available for public scrutiny and they should be available for free, and the freedom of information system was created in nineteen eighty two by the Fraser government with the idea that this system encourages public participation and scrutiny of government activities, even if people are rarely going to use the system.

I've used it a few times, David.

I'm sure that you haven't.

Quite a few people that you know have used it as well.

But even if people are rarely going to use this system, at least they know it's a system that is in place for the governments.

They also know that the system is in place and it should act the check on their own actions and behaviors.

And the government is arguing that all of this is about cutting down on vexatious or frivolous requests and modernizing these rules that were written in the nineteen eighties, and that was of course before the onset of emails and the smartphones.

And the argument is that technology is making these requests easier to make.

But that's the whole pride, David.

It should be as easy as possible to make a freedom of information requests.

We should be making the system more open and more accessible, and this is really about restricting transparency and keeping scrutiny away from the government.

Here's what the Independent MP Andrew wilk had to say about it during the week.

I think this isn't the time for a partisan response or left right or right wrong response.

It's the time to have an intelligent discussion of this issue and work out how we modernize FOI arrangements so that we can all exercise our fundamental right to access government information affordably, but at the same time to deal with the well the whole range of things, including anonymity.

I mean, we have a problem in this country where money buys power, money buys access.

You know, we read about people paying to have a dinner with a minister.

I mean this is absurd.

So I as a matter of principle and not comfortable at all with the fact that a charge would be applied.

And David, if there are vexatious requests, well, we need a mechanism to deal with that issue.

I'm not exactly sure how you do that, but we need a mechanism to deal with that if that indeed is the problem.

But the point is that transparency of government action, it does cost money, but making people pay for it individually, well that reduces that transparency.

And if democracy is going to be worth anything.

Well, I think this is a price worth paying.

The vexatious thing, there's a level of subjectivity to it when you think about it.

I might want to find out who was on, say, a committee that made a decision that impacted my life, and the person in charge of it myself.

It's a pretty vexatious claim.

You don't need to know that the committee made its decision.

Surely you'd be more interested.

Now.

There's maybe a lot of reasons why I need to know that.

One.

Was there a conflict of interest?

Was it a political thing where the people probably qualified to make the decision that impacted me.

Well, there's nothing wrong with her sixty story apartment block just next door to.

You, not at all.

I don't know why they knocked it back.

Mostly I've used it for stuff that should have been cleared, because it was more than thirty or forty years old and it hadn't been cleared, and so it was just that last bit of bureaucratic red tape just to cut so that the documents that have gone out.

That's I don't think I've used it for anything current, mainly because it's costly and expensive, and that's a way of keeping vexatious claims down.

And of course the other way is to release everything except what really must be kept from public view.

That includes military logistics, because that can affect lives, personal circumstances like health records and things.

I don't think many people have a problem with maybe patents and stuff that the government have that they don't want out in the open, but the patent office is open anyway.

But there probably are things that don't need to be in the public domain.

But I think generally it's about this decision making who was behind a particular decision, rather than releasing the actual secret or patient or whatever that might be.

It's usually based around well, why was this decision made, Not so much to the contents of the decision.

Why was this decision made and who made it?

Yeah, exactly.

I remember once years ago they put a no right turn at the end of the street I was living, which mand it you couldn't get home, And I rang the counsel and said, who did this?

Oh?

I was and I said do you live in the street?

And he was very quiet for a long time, and it was obviously an attempt to try and cut traffic down these relatively quiet streets.

Which was which no right turn, didn't do anything, just made it for those of us, the rest of us who lived in the street a little bit harder to get home.

Now.

Of course, public servants should be frank, fearless and free in their advice, and to have them as anonymous too, because some of these decisions could attract the attention of people who you don't want in your life and who might suggest themselves into your personal life by turning up to your house and things like that.

So that's fine too, de anonymized.

It was a committee made up of these people and these are their qualifications and positions that make them so.

Again, there's not a lot that should be kept from the public, and that's why they should have tightened it up right.

These are the things that we don't want to know.

Everything else should be out there more or less.

And of course the government at the three levels does so much stuff.

A lot of it just gets hidden because it gets buried under the wash of everything else.

I don't know what they're worried about.

And the other issue that's come up during the week is the LIB.

The government's see create a silence seeker de with the Republic of Niru it's not anything new, but it's exactly what we'd expect if the Coalition was in government.

And it's a four hundred million dollar agreement to detain around three hundred and fifty a silent seekers on the island of Naru.

It's an extraordinary cost per person and over thirty years it could end up costing around two point five billion dollars in today's term, and that's what will be paid to the government of Naharu and David.

It's not so much an issue about money.

Human rights groups once described Naharu and Man asylums, the detention centers that they had there.

They described those as hellholes, and Labour promised to do things differently once they got into government.

Yet here we are almost with the same Pacific solution that John Howard began back in twenty oh one and Scott Morrison perfected during his time as the Immigration Minister.

And it's hard to know what's really going on behind the scenes here.

Is this about deterrence or is it just about political op Dixon remembering that anything to do with border security or asylum seekers is like political kryptonite to the Labor Party.

But the other point is that there was total secrecy about this.

There was no parliamentary scrutiny or public debate.

And this is the type of secrecy that we used to get from the Morrison government.

We used to call the Morrison government pretty much every week when they were in office about all of these secrecy issues.

And to me, it just seems like a continuation from the coalition or from the Morrison Government of Australia exporting its cruelty to a small Pacific nation to resolve or solve a domestic political problem.

And I guess the only thing that we can now say is that this is now a bipartisan failure.

And it also shows that the Labor government, despite the massive majority that they've got, it still governs like it's cornered by this big and lethal Liberal Party, which is more like a paper tiger right now, and it's still behaving like it's scared own shadows.

It is bizarre that the government would do that.

Now.

If they said we're giving four hundred million dollars to NAARU to help with its infrastructure, development, education or for aid, we probably wouldn't even address it here except to say, oh, good job, or maybe that's a bit much, but it's good to help our neighbors this way, but to use it in such a nasty and awful way is And again, it's good that the people of Naru are getting this type of money, but a lot of it will be sucked up in this pointless detention center that really just means that they can treat refugees a bit worse because they're not under the jurisdiction of Australian law anymore.

I find it upsetting and I'm very disappointed in Tony Burke, who negotiated it, in the Federal Labor Government, who clearly aren't interested in changing the policy towards refugees.

Again, Malcolm Fraser, there are people who are in dire trouble coming from Vietnam.

Let them in and have a look at the Vietnamese community today.

It's one of the great success stories in Australia, especially given they came over on rusty, leaky boats and built from literally nothing to have nice houses, good jobs, nice cars, that kids went to school, got a good education and still interested and involved in Vietnam, which is only natural and right.

And of course it's not just Vietnamese people.

It is a community that's worth looking at and instead of saying, maybe if we let these refugees in and look after them, and we can send them back when things have settled down, because their country is going to need rebuilding, but we can keep some too and build our own country and show that the Australian dream of anyone can make it is alive.

And I know that we can point to the argument against that in Scott Morrison becoming Prime Minister, and that anyone can make it.

But I suppose every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and.

This final issue does relate to government action or inaction.

But at Lease there was some good news for Richard Boyle.

And he's the whistleblower who called out the abuse of power and corruption that was going on within the Australian Taxation Office, and he has avoided conviction and jail.

He's been given a twelve month good behavior bond, with the judge acknowledging extenuating circumstances in this particular case.

And of course this is a huge relief for Richard Boyle.

It's a huge relief for his family and for his supporters, but it also begs the question about why on earth did the government let this go on for so long now.

Richard boll did expose aggressive and possibly illegal debt collection practices within the ATO.

He acted in the public interest, yet he spent six to seven years being dragged through the courts, paying a huge emotional, financial and professional costs.

And the broader problem is Australia's week whistleblower protections, which the Labor government did promise to reform once again got into offers, but has done nothing about this.

And what is actually needed is a totally independent body that's separate from the government and has the ability to properly handle these cases.

And the government did create the National Anti Corruption Commission, which was meant to include some protections for whistleblowers, but that entire institution just ended up being a waste of time.

They didn't introduce any whistle blower legislation or protection at all.

And ultimately, this situation isn't just about Richard Boyle, or it's not just about one person.

It's about whether we want a democracy that protects institutions at all costs or one that protects truth tellers in the public interests.

And to not do anything about this, this is what we've come to expect from the Liberal Party they wouldn't want to offer any protections for anyone that blows the whistle on incompetent government behavior.

But we expect different things from a labor government, especially one that promised to do something about whistleblower protection.

But so fa they've just done nothing at all.

It was so wrong.

Assange was wrong, Richard Boyle was wrong.

McBride was wrong.

These people showed us where the system had failed, but those who benefited from the system wanted them gone.

Now it's great that Boyle has got off, not so good that there's a good behavior bond.

He should have been declared not guilty of any wrongdoing, thanked, given an oim to try and balance the people who don't deserve it getting them, and reinstated in his job.

Now.

Of course he probably doesn't want to work at such a high level after all the stress, but he should have been given some kind of job that looks after him for the rest of his working career, so he can pull back into his superannuation and retire relatively happily after a long career which had an unjust blip in it.

I don't know what the conditions of his bond is.

I presume he's got to turn up to parole office every couple weeks and assure them that he hasn't been playing up and if he's listening, we're very happy for you.

Richard gone on for so long, like a six to seventy years, it should have been I can understand the Liberal Party when they're in government, they want to clamp down on these sort of activities.

They don't want anyone coming out with the whistleblower to call out their corruption.

Labor promised to do things differently.

They've been in government for three years.

It should have been canceled as soon as they got into office.

This whole case should have been thrown out.

Grayfus should have just said, yeah, all of you who are under this finished and then reformed the law.

He didn't do that.

He lost the job of Attorney General for reasons that are unclear, but there are a lot of speculations for a star.

He was in a long faction.

That's probably the major.

Michelle Rowlands should have acted then and said, yeah, this is unfinished business by Mark, let's clear it.

But instead there's this expensive, pointless damaging case that in which no side came out unscathedd Boil will probably not sleep for another two years or something or more as he goes through the trauma of being arrested, of being accused of all types of things.

Whereas he had the labor government done what we were all expecting a labor government would do, which was to change the laws for the better and protect those who would unmask wrongdoers, protect whistleblowers who ultimately protect all of us, get rid of the laws, drop all the cases, and let everybody out free.

Instead, they're trying to not really fix the laws, just make them a little bit less flexible.

And we expect better from a labor government.

We don't expect better from a Morrison liberal government, but we do expect better from a labor government.

That's it for this episode of New Policy.

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Geting bands back to where he was, well on.

To where you was

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