Wild Magpies Singing & Rocking Out

Wild magpies were regular visitors to my garage recording studio at Wakki Beach, NSW. They'd invite themselves in and sing along to crazy stuff I was playing on synthesizers

Climate Change Exhibition At Sydney Museum, 2009

A selection of images from a Climate Change Exhibition at Sydney Museum in 2009. 

About 70% of Australians supported actions to lessen climate pollution and to degrade the intensity of what most scientists, news media and people generally thought was coming.

That was 2009, the year of this exhibition. Then the fossil fuel lobby and the billionaires business lobby and the Liberal Party and National Party, and Labor, and their partners in Australian news media all decided that Nope, We Won't Do Fk All, And We'll Keep Opening Mines And Polluting.

With the decade, the public support for 'Taking Action To Halt Or Degrade Extreme Climate Change' was fractured and soaked in conspiracy theories. 

Now? Climate Change doesn't get mentioned during elections.

The polluters and all their lackeys won.

Australian UFO History: February, 1947: 'White Egg-Shaped Objects Moving At Incredible Speed'

'WHITE EGG FLYING OBJECTS' REPORTED IN AUSTRALIA IN EARLY 1947

What a surprise. There is no mention of UFOs, spacecraft, aliens or flying saucers in this Australian newspaper story from February, 1947 about mysterious 'egg-shaped' objects spotted in the skies.. The term "Flying Saucers" hadn't been invented by newspapers yet. 

People saw something strange in the sky at night, in Port Augusta, Australia, shortly after the end of World War II, they reported it, newspapers wrote it up. There was no speculation that "aliens" were involved, or that the objects were from another planet, because people had not yet been trained by news media to think of unusual objects in the sky that way.

The below story is from early February, 1947. The Kenneth Arnold sightings that saw American newspapers popularise the term 'Flying Saucers' didn't happen until June 1947.

Text: 

"PORT AUGUSTA, Feb. 6, 1947.

While working in the yard at the Commonwealth Railways work-
shops yesterday morning Mr. Ron Ellis and two workmates claim to
have seen five strange objects in formation pass across the sky from
north to south.

The objects were white or light pink, and were shaped like an egg.

Mr. Ellis said that he could not give an accurate estimate of the
size of the objects, but they were casting shadows, and judging by
his experience with aircraft in the RAAF during the war he considered they were about the size of a locomotive.

Although the objects kept on a direct course at a height of about
6,000 feet they appeared to be quivering, he said. Owing to their great
speed they were out of sight within a few seconds.

Any question of the phenomenon being an optical illusion was dis-
pelled by the fact that a few minutes later both Mr. Ellis and his companion gave an identical description of what they had seen.

Their description was verified by another member of the workshops
staff who said that he had also seen the objects."

------------

Fascinating, isn't it? How such stories were once reported?

Supposedly reliable witnesses with flying experience, who saw something they didn't recognise in the sky. They rejected suggestions they had seen an optical illusion, but they were not accused of being "crazy" and nobody suggests they might be from another world. They didn't know what it was, and neither did the newspaper. 

That was it. 

Big difference to just a few years later, when anything that could be whipped up into 'Are Aliens Watching Us?!' and 'Flying Saucers Attack!' headlines became the Fear standard.

The objects that couldn't be explained should not induce wonder or mystery, but Fear that Earth is being threatened.

Note: I predict a 'UFO Researcher' will take my research and the news clipping I found and reproduce it on a popular YouTube or podcast episode without credit by late October, 2024.

The Whitlam Coup And The CIA In Australia

A republished story on an incredibly important era of Australian history. The links to this old piece are dead now. 

Rob Cobb's 1972 cartoon on Australia as 'Imperialism's Best Friend.'

Gough Whitlam & The CIA In Australia:

"The CIA's aim in Australia was to get rid of a government they did not like and that was not co-operative… it's a Chile, but in a much more sophisticated and subtle form."

- VICTOR MARCHETTI, ex-CIA officer, 1980

"There is profoundly increasing evidence that foreign espionage and intelligence activities are being practised in Australia on a wide scale… I believe the evidence is so grave and so alarming in its implications that it demands the fullest explanation. The deception over the CIA and the activities of foreign installations on our soil… are an onslaught on Australia's sovereignty."

-- GOUGH WHITLAM to the Australian Parliament, 1977

On December 2nd 1972, Australia's first Labor Government for twenty-three years was elected. The new Prime Minister, Edward Gough Whitlam, quickly set about a series of historic legislations: wages, pensions and unemployment benefits were increased; equal pay for women was introduced; a free national health service was established; spending on education was doubled; university and college fees were abolished; and legal aid became a universal right.

 
The Federal Government assumed responsibility for Aboriginal health, education and welfare, and the first land rights legislation for Aborigines was drafted. Cultural initiatives for women, Aborigines and immigrants were set up. Imperial honours such as knighthoods and MBEs were scrapped. The "Commonwealth Government" was renamed the Australian Government and an Australian anthem replaced "God Save the Queen."

Conscription was ended. Australian troops were withdrawn from the Vietnam War and men imprisoned for draft evasion were released. Australian ministers publicly condemned the American conduct of the Vietnam War. The U.S. bombing of Hanoi during Christmas 1972 was denounced as the work of "maniacs" and "mass murderers". Deputy Prime Minister, Dr Jim Cairns, called for public rallies to condemn the bombing and for boycotts on American goods. In response, Australian dockers refused to unload American ships. Whitlam himself warned the Nixon administration that he might draw Indonesia and Japan into protests against the bombing.

 
The Australian Government also pressed for support for the Indian Ocean Zone of Peace, which was opposed by the US, and spoke up in the United Nations for Palestinian rights. The French were condemned for testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, and refugees fleeing the CIA-backed coup in Chile were welcomed into Australia (an irony in the light of Washington's retaliation against Whitlam).

Ron Cobb's cartoon on rumours the U.S. was using Australia as a nuclear missile base in the 1970s

"We were told that the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators."

-- FRANK SNEPP, CIA officer stationed in Saigon at the time of the Agency's covert activities against the Whitlam government.

The CIA's alarm over the Australian Government rose to a fury when, in the early hours of March 16th 1973, the Attorney General, Lionel Murphy, led a raid on the Melbourne offices of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Murphy and Whitlam were concerned about ASIO's involvement with local fascist Croatian groups that had carried out terrorist acts in Australia and against Yugoslav diplomats abroad.

Set up under the auspices of the UKUSA Treaty in 1949, ASIO had distinguished itself by not uncovering a single spy or traitor (this is still the case), yet it had become almost as powerful in Australia as the CIA itself. ASIO had a secret pact of loyalty to the CIA and helped to set up and maintain secret police organisations that kept files on all Australian Labor Party members, prominent politicians, government officials, union leaders, members of the Council of Civil Liberties and anyone considered the slightest left-of centre. Even prayer meetings for peace were watched and recorded.

According to a top-secret report to a Royal Commission into Australia's secret services led by Mr Justice Hope, for decades members of ASIO handed over to the CIA slanderous information against Australian politicians and senior officials who they regarded unfavourably. This material ranged from accusations of subversive tendencies to concern about their personal lives, and allowed the CIA to work against these people in ways that ranged from blackmail to efforts to block their careers.

ASIO is run as an internal organisation in Australia. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service, ASIS, operates abroad and is less well known. Code-named MO9, its existence was only acknowledged after the Labor Government came to power in 1972. 

ASIS played an important role in the CIA's covert activities against foreign governments in Southeast Asia. 

For example, after Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk broke off diplomatic relations with the United States in 1965, the CIA used ASIS to secretly carry out its work in the country for the next four years, despite official Australian policy being one of strict neutrality. After Sihanouk was overthrown in a CIA-inspired coup, American forces invaded Cambodia and the US carpet-bombing of the country - a bombing so intense that during one six-month period in 1973, American B52s dropped the equivalent (in tons of bombs) of five Hiroshimas on the civilian population - served as a catalyst for the rise to power of Pol Pot and the genocidal Khmer Rouge).

Whitlam also discovered that ASIS agents were working for the CIA in Chile, de-stabilising the government of Salvador Allende, who was supported by the Australian Labor Government. Whitlam promptly ordered the ASIS officers home. However, some remained in Chile under Australian Embassy cover and without Whitlam's knowledge; Allende was subsequently murdered during the CIA-orchestrated military coup led by the dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

The CIA's concern over the activities of the Whitlam government was due to the fact that Australia played a pivotal role in the United States' desire for covert influence over Indo-China. 

Some of the most strategically important and top-secret American bases outside the United States are located in Australia. 

These include the U.S. Naval Communication Station, North West Cape, on the northern coast of Western Australia, which transmits battle orders for the nuclear missile-carrying Polaris submarines. The most secretive Australian intelligence organisation is the Melbourne-based Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) which is modelled on the American National Security Agency, NSA. The DSD spies for the U.S. in the Indian Ocean, the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. There is also the Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO), established in 1970 under the supervision of the CIA's analyst division, and the Office of National Assessments (ONA), whose job is to co-ordinate and analyse Australia's extensive spying networks in the region.

 
Most important of all is Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, officially described as an American- Australian "Joint Defence Space Research Facility", but in actuality it is an entirely American spy-satellite base, run by the CIA and the NSA. 

Pine Gap can pick up communications from almost anywhere in the world; its primary function is the collection of data from CIA sources and transmitters, and the preparation for nuclear warfare. So secretive were Pine Gap and the other major U.S. base at Nurrungar in South Australia that no details of their plans were revealed to successive Australian Prime Ministers and their cabinets.

Leaked Australian Defence Department documents disclosed that in 1972, high-frequency transmitters at North West Cape had helped the United States to mine Haiphong and other North Vietnamese harbours; and that satellites controlled from Pine Gap and Nurrungar were being used to pinpoint targets for the American bombing of Cambodia. These actions were taken entirely without the consent or knowledge of the Australian government.

William Corson, a former senior U.S. intelligence officer, also revealed that the CIA ran between ten and fifteen "black airfields" at their secret Australian bases during the Vietnam War, flying "hot" CIA agents from Vietnam for debriefing. In 1975, as the North Vietnamese captured control of South Vietnam, massive supplies of drugs that had been stashed by the CIA in Vietnam were flown into the secret U.S. airfields in Australia. The drugs were redistributed to "regional drug banks", thus providing a "reserve currency" for the Agency's global criminal activities.

In October 1973, during the Middle East War, President Nixon put U.S. forces on nuclear "Level Three" alert, through the base at North West Cape. Australia had become involved, without the knowledge of its government, in a war on the other side of the world. When Whitlam found out about this, he was furious and told Parliament that although the Australian government would honour agreements with America covering existing spy stations, "there will not be extensions or proliferations."

Whitlam's words were to have serious consequences for the fate of his government. A new American Ambassador was appointed to Australia - Marshall Green, widely known as "the coup-master". Green was a senior U.S. policy planner for Southeast Asia and had the distinction of being involved in several countries where the CIA had masterminded coups, such as Indonesia and Chile.

 
Green visited the office of Clyde Cameron, a senior minister in the Whitlam government, and made the threat that if the Labor Government honoured one of its key election pledges to reclaim national ownership of oil refineries and other industries which had been mostly sold to American transnational interests, "we would move in." 

In early 1974, Green addressed the Australian Institute of Directors with a speech that amounted almost to an incitement to rise against the Australian Government. Green went on to say that Australian business leaders "could expect help from the United States, which would be similar to the help given to South America." (The CIA-sponsored coup in Chile had happened only a few months earlier).

 
The CIA set about a programme of discrediting Jim Cairns, leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement. ASIO timed the leak of a defamatory "Cairns file" to the Bulletin magazine to coincide with Cairns' election to Deputy Prime Minister in 1974. 

This file claimed that Cairns "echoed Communist views... and his activities could lead to the fascist cult of the personality... and to the destruction of the democratic system of government." 

A few weeks later, ASIO leaked a second file to journalist Peter Samuels, a regular publisher of CIA propaganda. Under the headline The Pathway to Terrorism, Samuels wrote that ASIO's prime concern about Cairns was the "terrorist" potential of his part in the anti-war movement.

By the end of 1974, inflation and the money supply were rising at an alarming rate due to the dramatic rise in the cost of oil. 

Despite this, the Whitlam Government was determined to honour its election promise to hand control of U.S. multinational subsidiaries to the Australian people. In order to achieve this, Whitlam sent two of his ministers to scour the Middle East for a loan of $A4 billion.

In November 1974 Rex Connor, the Minister for Minerals and Energy, met with Tirath Khemlani, a Pakistani "commodities merchant" who was working for the London brokers Dalamal & Sons. 

Unknown to Connor, Khemlani was a con-man who had been sent to sabotage the Australian Government by a Hong Kong arms firm closely associated with Commerce International, a Brussels-based armaments company with widespread links to the CIA. (Commerce International was set up as a front for Task Force 157, the highly secretive CIA "dirty tricks" organisation).

In March 1975 Jim Cairns was introduced to Melbourne businessman George Harris, who told Cairns that a $A4 billion loan was available from Commerce International with a once-only brokerage fee of 2.5%. Cairns considered the offer a fairy tale and rejected the deal. Harris then contacted Phillip Lynch, Deputy Leader of the opposition Liberal Party. When Lynch raised the question of the brokerage fee in Parliament, Cairns denied that any such agreement existed. Within days, a letter with Cairns' signature was published on the front pages of the national newspapers and Cairns was forced to resign for "misleading Parliament." 

Cairns steadfastly maintained that he never agreed to or put his name to such an outrageous and incriminating letter. 

A top-secret CIA briefing document for the U.S. President dated July 3rd 1975 later revealed that Cairns had been sacked "even though the evidence had been fabricated."

The CIA was involved in further activities designed to undermine the Whitlam Government. 

In July 1975 the Australian media reported that the Mercantile Bank and Trust Company, based in the Bahamas, had issued a letter seeking $4,267,365,000 "for and on behalf of the Government of Australia." 

The bank did not claim to be acting with the approval of the Australian Government and cabinet ministers had never heard of it. But the implication was enough to fill the newspapers with another "scandal". 

Much later, an ASIO officer was to publicly state: "some of the documents which helped discredit the Labor Government in its last year in office were forgeries planted by the CIA."

Mercantile Bank and Trust was set up and owned by the CIA's Colonel Paul Helliwell, who built up a network of banks, including the infamous Castle Bank, which collapsed after U.S. tax investigators found it was laundering drugs money for the CIA and the Mafia.

As the loans affair reached its climax in the spring of 1975, a welter of supposedly incriminating documents forged by the CIA were given widespread coverage in the Australian media. Tirath Khemlani himself arrived in Australia with two bags bulging with more "incriminating" documents. Bodyguards provided by the opposition parties accompanied Khemlani and the CIA paid his expenses. Khemlani made outrageous claims in the media that Labor ministers had received commissions and "kickbacks" from the loans, that documents proving corruption were soon to be made public, and so on.

In fact not one of these "documents" proved a thing; not one penny was paid by anyone to the government, nor did any minister profit from the affair. 

In 1981 a CIA contract employee, Joseph Flynn, revealed that he had forged some of the loans affair documents and had bugged a hotel room where Gough Whitlam was staying. He had been paid by Michael Hand, co-founder of the CIA's Nugan Hand Bank.

Former Nugan Hand principal Karl Schuller provided evidence to Australian Corporate Affairs investigating officers that the CIA transferred a "slush fund" of $A2,400,000 to the main opposition parties in March 1973, four months after Whitlam's election. 

An investigation by a special New South Wales police task force concluded that "many links were found between individuals connected with Nugan Hand and individuals connected in very significant ways with U.S. intelligence organisations, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of Naval Intelligence [Task Force 157]... at times those links have the appearance of the direct involvement of the U.S. intelligence community itself." 

The Commission called for criminal charges for "drug, conspiracy, perjury and passport offences." (A year after Frank Nugan's death, the Deputy Director of the CIA, Admiral Bobby Inman, expressed deep concern that the investigations into Nugan Hand Bank would lead to disclosure of a range of CIA dirty tricks calculated to undermine the Whitlam Government).

It was revealed in the press that the CIA had offered the Australian opposition Liberal Party (the Liberals were actually conservative) "unlimited funds" in their unsuccessful attempt to defeat the Labor party in the May 1974 parliamentary elections. 

Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti confirmed that the CIA had funded both of the major opposition parties and that the Liberals had been receiving CIA funds since the late 1960s.

According to the former Deputy Director of Intelligence for the CIA, Dr Ray Cline, the CIA passed information to opposition politicians not only to discredit the Whitlam Government but also to put pressure on Australian civil servants who in turn would pressure the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr.

When the Pine Gap Treaty, which would determine the future of the CIA's most valuable overseas base, was due for renewal on December 9th 1975, Whitlam's comments that he might not renew the treaty raised major alarms in the Agency. CIA Director William Colby later wrote that the "threat" posed by the Whitlam Government was one of the three "world crises" of his career, comparable with the Middle East war two years previously, when the United States considered using nuclear weapons.

The CIA Station Chief in London, Dr John Proctor, contacted MI6 and asked for British help with "the Whitlam problem." William Colby directly approached his opposite number, head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, to emphasise to British intelligence that Australia was "traditionally Britain's domain" and that if Pine Gap was closed down, "the Alliance would be blinded strategically." 

The CIA also sought assistance from MI6 and MI5 liaison officers based in Washington.

British intelligence has long had a vested interest in Australian politics. 

MI6 operates its own base at Kowandi, south of Darwin, where its highly secret activities are concealed from the Australian government and people. They include widespread interception of communications and covert operations in Asia. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service, ASIS, also operates from this base and is highly integrated with British intelligence.

 
At the same time as U.S. intelligence was targeting the Australian Labor Government, Peter Wright (of Spycatcher infamy) and his colleagues in British intelligence were busy destabilising the British Labour Government of Harold Wilson. Wright conspired with his close friend, James Jesus Angleton, the extreme right-wing head of CIA counter-intelligence, to "target" the three Western leaders they regarded as "Communist agents": Harold Wilson, Willy Brandt in Germany and Gough Whitlam.

After discovering that the British and American intelligence services based in Australia were secretly involved in Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, Whitlam ordered the dismissal of the heads of ASIO and ASIS in the autumn of 1975, and then began to make moves against the CIA. 

Then, at the beginning of November, it was revealed in the press that a former CIA officer, Richard Stallings, had been channelling funds to J. Douglas Anthony, leader of the opposition National Country Party, and was a close friend and former tenant of Anthony's Canberra home. 

Whitlam accused the opposition of being "subsidised by the CIA."

In Parliament, Doug Anthony admitted that Stallings was a friend but challenged Whitlam to provide evidence that Stallings worked for the CIA. (Stallings' name was not on the official list of "declared" CIA officers working in Australia, but on a "confidential" list held by the Permanent Head of the Australian Defence Department, Sir Arthur Tange). 

Whitlam prepared a reply, which he intended to give when Parliament resumed the following week, on Tuesday November 11th.

The CIA was frantic. The Australian Prime Minister was about to blow the cover of the agent who had set up Pine Gap and to reveal that the supposedly "joint" facility was a CIA charade. 

Furthermore, the future of the base itself was to be subject to parliamentary debate. 

The day before his speech was due, Whitlam was informed of a telex from the ASIO station in Washington, which stated that the Prime Minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country. The message had been virtually dictated by Theodore Shackley, head of the CIA's East Asia Division (and whose plethora of illegal covert activities have been outlined in other articles on this site).

On Sunday November 9th, the Australian Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, was briefed on the "security crisis", while the head of the Defence Department declared publicly: "This is the greatest risk to the nation's security there has ever been." 

The CIA was certain that Whitlam would announce the cancellation of the Pine Gap agreement on December 9th, and set into motion a plan to install in power a political party to "protect the sanctity of U.S. bases."

Six weeks earlier, during a visit to Indonesia, opposition politician Andrew Peacock had briefed government officials there on the current state of the Australian political crisis. He described in detail a sequence of events that were about to take Australia by surprise. A record of his briefing was later read into Australian Hansard:

"Whitlam will not agree to hold an election.... The Governor-General would be forced to ask Malcolm Fraser to form a Cabinet. But this 

Cabinet would not be able to get a mandate to govern, because Parliament is controlled by the Labor Party.... Fraser is appointed PM, a minute later he asks the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament, following which a general election is to be held."

And that was exactly what happened. On November 11th, the day Whitlam was to inform Parliament fully about the CIA and American bases in Australia, he was summoned by Kerr from Parliament House. 

Without warning, Kerr dismissed Whitlam as Prime Minister, dissolved both houses of Parliament and appointed Malcolm Fraser, leader of the Liberal Party, to head an interim government until new elections could be held in December. 

An unelected official (whose position was traditionally only that of a figurehead representative of the Queen of England) had, in one arbitrary and unconstitutional act, overthrown a legitimate and democratically elected government.

Back in the House of Representatives, Whitlam called for a vote of confidence in himself and his government. An overwhelming majority supported Whitlam. Indeed, six motions proposed that day, including a motion of no-confidence in Malcolm Fraser, were passed by absolute majorities. 

The Speaker of the House delivered Parliament's clear message of confidence in the Whitlam government personally to the Governor-General. Kerr refused to accept it. 

The no-confidence motion against Fraser legally obliged the Governor-General to dismiss Fraser, but Kerr chose to ignore this.

Former CIA officers who were among the Agency's "top seven" in 1975, revealed ten years later that "Whitlam was set up. The action that Kerr took was so extreme that it would take far more than a constitutional crisis to cause him to do what he did...." 

A Deputy Director of the CIA said, "Kerr did what he was told to do."

During the first week of the coup, the Australian army was recalled to barracks and there were reports that units were issued with live ammunition. There were demonstrations against the sacking of the Labor Government throughout Australia; the unions began to mobilise and prepare for a general strike. 

However, Bob Hawke, the President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), summoned the press and delivered a stirring speech in which he said that "working people must not be provoked... we have to show we are not going to allow this to snowball." 

Hawke's intervention was critical: Australia's organised labour was strangely quiet in response to the affair. 

In fact Marshall Green later said that he found Bob Hawke so amenable to the CIA's cause that "Bob gave me his private telephone number and said if anything ever comes up that desperately needs some action, this is the number to ring."

An election was called for December 13th 1975. 

During the campaign, three letter bombs were posted to Kerr, Fraser and the ultra-right-wing Queensland Premier, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen. 

Most of the press, led by Rupert Murdoch's papers, concluded that the bombs were sent by left-wing extremists within the Labor Party. 

There was not a shred of evidence to support this and no culprits were ever found, but the charge of "terrorism" was used to great effect against Labor.

Four days before the election, Bjelke-Petersen called a special session of the Queensland Parliament to hear "dramatic revelations". 

He claimed to be "in possession of material which made clear that two Ministers of the Whitlam Government were due to receive staggering sums of money as a consequence of secret commissions and kickbacks." 

Bjelke-Petersen then moved quickly to gag any debate and to prevent the Labor leader from arranging for parliamentary investigation of the "revelations". 

The undisclosed "revelations" made large headlines in the press. No material or evidence of any kind was ever produced, but the publicity achieved its goal. Whitlam lost the election.

The new Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser renewed the Pine Gap treaty for another decade. He also offered Washington a naval base at Cockburn Sound, even though the Americans had not requested it. 

In his first budget, Fraser increased the size of ASIO and gave it more money, proportionately, than any other government body. 

Kerr was given an unequalled pay rise of 170% and was promoted to "Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George."

Despite denying that he ever had any connections with the CIA or any other intelligence organisations, Kerr in fact had a long association with covert intelligence operations, firstly as a member of the top-secret Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs during the Second World War. 

He was then seconded to the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, the fore-runner of the CIA. 

Although he joined the Australian Labor Party early in his career, Kerr was always well to the right politically. He was chief legal adviser to the Industrial Groups, a body which sought to dominate trade unionism and was linked to the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), an extreme "anti-Communist" organisation whose split from the Labor Party and subsequent spoiler tactics kept Labor in opposition until the election of Gough Whitlam in 1977. 

Kerr was an active member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, which was exposed in Congress in 1967 as being "founded, funded and generally run by the CIA." 

In the 1960s Kerr travelled to the United States to arrange funding from the Asia Foundation; that too, was exposed in Congress as a CIA conduit for money and influence.

The trade union movement of Australia had long been infiltrated by U.S. intelligence. As John Grenville, assistant secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall, revealed, "it was generally accepted that the U.S. labour attaché was the station agent for the CIA." 

Robert Walkinshaw was the labour attaché from 1962 to 1964. During his time in Melbourne, a trade-union publication, Spotlight, was set up, funded and run by the CIA. Walkinshaw's subsequent CIA posting was Indonesia, during the military coup in which over half a million alleged Communists were murdered. 

Walkinshaw was later posted as CIA adviser in Phuoc Tuy, Vietnam, where the Australian army and Australian CIA advisers were based.

The CIA later admitted giving money to the General Secretary of the powerful Australian Worker's Union, Tom Dougherty, to "fight Communism in the AWU." 

Four years later the National Secretary of the Federation Ironworkers' Association, Laurie Short, began many visits to the United States, which were sponsored by the CIA. Short returned to Australia "determined to get rid of the Commies and their friends" from the Labor Party and the unions. 

He also delivered the clear message that "in America, the trade-union movement looked to Australian unionists to help counteract the spread of Communism in the Far East."

 
The three Americans involved in supporting Bob Hawke's campaign for the Presidency of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) - Emil Lindahl, Gerry O'Keefe and Ed McHale - all worked for the CIA. Gerry O'Keefe was exposed as a major CIA operator in right-wing Chilean unions that helped to overthrow the Allende Government. 

Ed McHale was U.S. labour attaché in the early 1970s and maintained a "close personal relationship" with Hawke when the ACTU President was one of the most powerful union bosses Australia had ever known. McHale was internationally known as a senior CIA officer, having long been Assistant Director of Radio Free Europe, which had been set up, financed and run by the CIA.

 
In 1977 the American Christopher Boyce disclosed details of CIA activities in Australia, specifically the manipulation of unions. 

Boyce was employed by a Californian aerospace company, TRW Systems Inc., in a cryptographic communications centre which linked CIA headquarters in Virginia with the Agency's satellite surveillance system in Australia. 

Boyce revealed that the CIA had infiltrated Australian labour unions, had manipulated their leadership and suppressed strikes, particularly those involving railroads and airports. 

Boyce described one instance when TRW had material and personnel to ship out to the CIA spy base at Pine Gap. The Agency was concerned that strikes at Australian airports could wreck their schedule. However, a telex from CIA headquarters said, "CIA will continue to suppress the strikes. Continue shipment on schedule." In other words, the CIA had infiltrated the hierarchy of Australian trade unions.

 
Boyce and his associate Andrew Daulton Lee were put on trial in 1977 for selling U.S. secrets to the Russians. Lee had flown to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico and sold details of the CIA's covert activities in Australia to the Soviets. 

Boyce maintained that he had never intended the information to go the Russians, that Lee had agreed to make it public through one of his father's influential friends, but that he had been blackmailed by Lee, a heroin addict and pusher.

 
Evidence emerged during the trial that most of TRW's communications came from Pine Gap and that although the United States had signed an Executive Agreement with Australia to share information from Pine Gap, the agreement was not being honoured and "certain information" was regularly concealed from the Australian government. 

Boyce described the CIA's campaigns to subvert Australian trade unions "particularly in the transport industry", and revealed that the Agency was using Pine Gap to eavesdrop on telephone and telex messages to and from Australia of a political character, and that the CIA had funded the Australian opposition political parties. 

Boyce also revealed that the Australian Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, was referred to by Joe Harrison, the CIA chief at TWR, as "our man Kerr."

Boyce's disclosures caused a sensation in the United States. 

The prosecuting lawyers made no attempt to refute his allegations but successfully objected to any further evidence about the CIA's activities in Australia. 

The judge complied with a direct CIA request and agreed that Boyce would not mention the "Australia information" at his trial if, in return, the government did not use it against him - such was the sensitivity of the matter. Boyce and Lee were both found guilty; Lee was given a life sentence, while Boyce was sent for "psychiatric observation" - an indication that he might be treated leniently in return for his silence. 

However, Boyce made it consistently clear that he was so outraged at the betrayal of an ally - Australia - that he intended to talk. He was subsequently given forty years in Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois, where he is kept in solitary confinement. 

Whenever he leaves his cell, he is manacled, handcuffed and accompanied by two guards. It is said that his only hope of release rests on his continued silence about what happened in Australia.

The American Christopher Boyce described CIA covert operations in Australia aimed at bringing down the Labor Government of Gough Whitlam. 

Boyce was sentenced to 40 years solitary confinement for his refusal to stay silent on the matter.

Five years after the overthrow of Whitlam, in April 1981, senior executives of nineteen Australian corporations met at Melbourne's Noah's Hotel for a "forecasting round table" organised by Business International. Business International is a worldwide American organisation of "consultants" which represents the top multi-national companies in Australia. In December 1977, the New York Times exposed Business International's clandestine links with the CIA.

The nineteen had come to hear Business International's Alan Carroll express his concern about the resurgence of the Labor Party under Bill Hayden, who had held senior posts in the Whitlam Government and described himself as a republican and a democratic socialist. 

At that time, Bob Hawke had completed his term as ACTU President and was a newly elected Labor Party Member of Parliament. Carroll told the meeting that he knew Hawke "pretty well" and "basically, Hawke will be Labor Party leader by the middle of next year; and that's my business, and we won't go into that in any great depth. But he will be there. It's all under way. The game plan is totally under way and I forecast 3 to 5 on a Hawke Government in '83! We had a meeting with him about one month ago and we're meeting with him every six months from now. It's terribly important." 

A top-secret CIA briefing document for the U.S. President described Hawke as "the best qualified" to succeed Whitlam as Labor leader.

The forecasts of the Agency and Alan Carroll came true in almost every detail. 

In February 1983, three weeks before an election was due, Hawke and others on the party's right wing mounted a successful putsch against Bill Hayden. 

With the slogan, "Bob Hawke, Bringing Australia Together", the CIA's chosen candidate became Australian Prime Minister. Hawke went on to cultivate many ties with anti-Communist groups and developed what U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz described as "a fine relationship" with Presidents Nixon and Reagan.

 
Hawke's Government repeatedly refused to release some 1,200 documents on the Nugan Hand Bank, the front for international crime and illegal CIA operations in Australia. 

Hawke also refused to find out why the CIA barred the release, under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, of fourteen intelligence reports on Commerce International, the CIA-front company that played a central role in the destruction of the Whitlam Government.

In 1989 a committee headed by a former Chief Justice of the High Court recommended rigorous Government secrecy in order to prevent disclosures about the activities of the CIA, MI5 and MI6 in the internal affairs of Australia. 

The CIA's illicit actions against the Australian Labor Party clearly indicate that the Agency will not hesitate to move against even supposed allies if it considers that they threaten U.S. interests; the full range of CIA dirty tricks can be expected to be applied against any Western nation with the same lack of impunity and regard for the law that the Agency has shown in its wars with its enemies in the East.

End of excerpt.


The Full Story Is Here

Rupert Murdoch Was Sent To Oxford University In 1950 To Dodge Australian Military Service

 Rupert Murdoch Was Sent To Oxford University In 1950 To Dodge Australian Military Service

Sydney Tribune, June, 1950: 

"Wealthy press monopolist Sir Keith Murdoch,who urges through his chain of newspapers the sending of her people's sons to die in Malaya for monopoly profits and the crushing of national independence, is taking his own son Rupert to England to be enrolled at Oxford University. Apparently Sir Keith, like US politician Clarence Cannon, believes in sending other boys "into the holocaust so we won't have to send our own boys."

Full Story Is Here

Magpie In Wakki Records Studio

Photo By Darryl Mason

 Magpies hung around Wakki Studios at Wakki Beach, New South Wales, so often they ended up singing on songs. 

Like this one at YouTube

Love magpies

Green Turtle Tracks At Dawn

Photo By Darryl Mason

 Green turtle tracks at dawn. Photo by Darryl Mason

Never Get Out Of The Boat

Northern Territory, 2008. Still have nightmares about my boot sinking into that mud and the mud not letting go, felt like it was pulling me in, holding me in place for Mr Chompy there.

Angus In The Outback - A.I. Art by Darryl Mason

By Darryl Mason

'Angus In The Outback' began as a fun prompt on the first A.I. Art software I got to trial in 2020. I liked the idea of a painter like Sidney Nolan or Brett Whiteley being inspired to capture such an Australian icon in the stunning landscapes of this country. 

Every new A.I. Art software I got to test or trial, I used the same prompt to see what this algorithmic compiler of new images could come up with. Sometimes they were fairly normal looking attempts at portraiture, which wasn't what I was looking for.  I wanted the stuff humans wouldn't think to paint or draw, as solutions to restrictions placed upon algorithmic image makers. Like this one below: they can't show people smoking, but Angus smokes in many of the source images the algo uses. So the mouth and cigarette become a part of the wall, or background. 

There's nothing particular special or unusual about this one, but I just liked it, so I kept it. I tried some changes, but any attempt to 'fix' the face in Photoshop made it look less Angus, so I left it.

It's new tech, this is still the early days. If I'm able to still do this with a famous person like Angus Young in a year or two, the results will be stunningly life-like. So in these early days, not every attempt at Angus's face worked, or even came close. But even from unusable images, I still pulled interesting details like the one below.

The 'Angus In The Outback' series totals about 400 images now, and that's after deleting the ones that definitely didn't work, or were just weird or warped to share. This one falls into the Interesting file for me; you can barely see Angus in all the 'paint' but his face and larger school hat are still there. 

I didn't paint these. I prompted them into existence and then cleaned them up, or fine-tuned them, to varying degrees. Some were only 10 or 15 minutes work, others took hours. I have trouble remembering now which ones were almost complete in creation, and the ones that I kept playing with for 3 or 4 hours, or over a couple of days. 

AI Art app Wombo Dream had trouble keeping Angus and the Ned Kelly of famous Sidney Nolan paintings separate, and merged them, so I got 'Angus Young As Ned Kelly In The Outback.' 

And occasionally, AI Art decided to just do a landscape based around the rocking elements of Angus Young and created amazing images like this. What's going on here? I don't really know, but I like it.

I'll add more to this collection soon. 

I should note many of these were made a year ago, or more, and that's already an eternity in AI development. If I go back today to the same AI Art apps, I won't get images like these from the 'Angus In The Outback' prompts I originally used. Again, I don't think these are masterpieces, but I do like them, and I've got some printed out and hanging up. I'm not bored with them yet. 

MARCH 1789 BREAKING NEWS ABOUT 1788: 40 DEAD IN EXPEDITION TO BOTANY BAY

By Darryl Mason

In images below, you will find the first lengthy newspaper report published in London, in March 1789, of the First Fleet arriving in Botany Bay in January, 1788. Scattered across other early 1789 issues of the Times of London are letters, editorials, blasting the sending of "slaves to New Holland." Debate raged on whether it was right or wrong to participate in the "white slave trade" when other countries were beginning to abolish such servitude. The morality of human cargo was quite the dinner table conversation amongst the London establishment.

The account below, and rewrites of it in other London newspapers of the era, was published to spread the 'good news' about what England was doing in a yet another 'new land', on the other side of the world, already inhabited and in use by First Nations people for 'untold centuries'.

This can be a little difficult to read, remembering that some of the letters that look like 'f' are actually 's'. It's worth reading it a few times, your brain will adjust.

While the "natives" are barely mentioned, do note in the above passage the use of convicts as human shields for the officer class in first attempts at communicating with people who clearly wanted to be left alone, and how the deaths of two convicts, and near starvation of the third, were used as Examples to other convicts on what would most definitely happen to all of them if they tried to run away before building the new town.

Some animals on board were smarter. After seeing their fellow cows die "during their passage," the cows that landed in the new land were out of there straight away. They bailed. They didn't know what their futures held out there, but they wanted to be as far away from First Fleeters as possible:

"...after their land, strayed so far in the woods as to be irrecoverably lost."






That was the first major, detailed, newspaper story, such as it is, of how the First Fleet landing and the beginning of the English and European occupation had unfolded. This Times of London story would have been read and absorbed, at the same time, for the first time, by royal family members, bankers, politicians, lawyers, traders, doctors, the sprawl of English establishment, along with 1000s of the literate poor.

The above story was the first and lasting impression of what this newly invaded land had to offer. The Narrative was set, in print, and in patriotic legend.

Source: London Times, March 27, 1789

A Guide To The Australian Pandemic - The Last One And This One

What To Expect In An Australian Pandemic: Villages, Towns, Cities Quarantined...Churches, Schools, Workplaces Shut Down...Social Chaos...Food And Medical Shortages...Normal Life Ceases...100,000+ Australians Dead...Mobile Healthcheck Teams...Die In Your Homes

By Darryl Mason

Tony Abbott was Australia's Health Minister when Avian Flu threatened to become a global pandemic, in late 2005. The Howard Govt took the threat, and the advice of the World Health Organisation, seriously enough. They prepared. They had plans, and made them public. There was a Influenza Pandemic Worst Case Scenario and Tony Abbott was one of the ministers dispatched to the media to Get The Message Out.

Which he did. In some nighmarish late night TV interviews about "The Biological Tsunami", Tony Abbott stepped his way through the "inevitable" and very deadly influenza pandemic Australians would have to eventually face, and deal with.

If you thought he was rough as guts as Prime Minister, in 2005 Health Minister Tony Abbott was even more raw. He spilled on his knowledge from briefings on what The Worse Case Pandemic Scenario would look like in a kind of shocked awe. The scope of how daily life would be transformed in Australia during the "inevitable" influenza pandemic in the 21st century seemed to overload his mind.

"We don't know when a pandemic might happen, but if one does happen it will be a public health disaster, the magnitude of which this country has not seen at least since 1919 when we had the last flu pandemic."

Abbott expected a new, more virulent influenza pandemic in Australia to become a "Public Health Disaster" when he was Health Minister. He admitted to this, on TV. How prepared is the Morrison Govt today, in 2020, for a COVID-19 pandemic? 

On 'Australia During A Pandemic', Tony Abbott in 2005 blurted a The Scenario the Americans had put together (presumably via the Centre for Disease Control) and on which he said he'd been thoroughly briefed:

"(in the scenario) medical facilities couldn't cope and there was widespread social breakdown, as people abandoned their posts concerned about their health. 

"Now this is a pretty scary scenario, and just so people don't think it is entirely in the realm of science fiction - back in 1919, Australia had a Spanish flu pandemic outbreak and that killed some 13,000 Australians, in a then population of about 4 million and at different times in the first half of 1919, schools were closed, churches were closed, places of public gathering were off limits. Normal life had pretty much ceased in large parts of Australia. We have little folk memory of this though..."

The actual Australian death toll may have been closer to 25,000, by the time the virus seemed to have faded away in the early 1920s, as human immune systems adapted.

In 1919, when at least 15,000 Australians died from the virus, the annual death rate of the nation jumped by 25%.

But Abbott was right about the rest. Most Australian families have no, or little generational memory, of 'The Great Influenza/Spanish Flu' Australian Pandemic 100 years ago. It was never up for much discussion around the dinner tables.

When 'The Great Influenza' reached Australia in 1919, schools, churches, concert halls, theatres, train stations, public squares, pubs, were all locked down. Farms, factories and city business districts ground to a halt as people fled to the country to escape the pandemic. They only succeeded in transporting the virus to rural Australia, where it killed as effortlessly as it had in heavily populated city centres.

What did "abandoning their posts" actually mean in 1919? It meant police, soldiers, firefighters, ambulance drivers, nurses, medical professionals eventually having to choose between caring for sick family members at home, or those in public care. Or leaving when they themselves became sick.

Abbott raised this the 'abandonment of posts' in 2005 because the American Worst Case Scenario proposed the same would happen in the 21st Century, in the United States and Australia.

'The Great Influenza' or falsely named 'Spanish Flu', swept the globe from 1918 to early 1920. Quarantine systems in Australia did delay the arrival of a vast spread of the new virus for a few months.

More than 300 Australian soldiers who had somehow survived the European slaughter fields of World War I died from the influenza pandemic within weeks or months of finally making it home.

The extraordinary global death toll as more than one-third of the world's population became infected, killing some 80 million or more people, saw the loss of so many essential workers, doctors, hospital workers, nurses, police, public servants, teachers, production line workers, welders, craftspeople and children, the impacts rapidly transformed 20th century society in the West, and saw the surviving workers in the industrialised world become, suddenly, very valuable and not so disposable anymore. The politics of all Western countries were impacted by The Great Influenza, not only because of the death tolls, economic impacts, but because politicians, their advisers, their donors, died along with the rest of the people.

There was little warning before The Great Influenza exploded into reality. Unlike most flu epidemics in the 1800s, this one killed without discrimination. It laid waste to infants, old people, healthy young men.

Here's how The Times of London dealt with the rising panic about the spread of The Great Influenza in early 1919, shortly before the virus rapidly killed 200,000+ across the United Kingdom:

If you caught The Great Influenza H1N1 virus, death could come within a matter of days. Your lungs filled with fluid, as your immune system battled the invader and overdid the defences. Survivors described H1N1-affected lungs as 'like trying to breathe through wet sand.' There was no cure.

Back then, for the first year, they didn't even know what exactly was killing millions of people. Was it a virus? Many experts thought it was a bacterium. A conspiracy theory raged in the the Allied nations of World War I that the Germans had invented a biological bomb in revenge for losing 'The Great War'.

In 1919-1920, doctors, hospitals, morgues and graveyards were overwhelmed by the endless casualties. In the US city of Philadelphia, 5000 people died in one week. Mass rioting broke out, whole streets full of cramped dwellings were torched and corpses were piled in mounds a dozen bodies high. They were tossed into carts and transported to mass burial sites. This was the United States in the age of cinema and radio.

In some European cities, entire towns were burned to the ground, with the dying still in their homes, to try and contain the spread of the virulent flu. Ships at sea were blocked from entering ports and became "floating caskets." Other ships were torched in harbours before passengers could get to land.

'The Great Influenza' is believed now to have originated in animals (chickens and/or pigs) but mutated quickly and crossed over into humans. A Kansas farm next to a military base is now often cited as The Great Influenza's Ground Zero.

The influenza virus mutating, plus a lack of capable medical facilities, unsanitary hospitals, towns and cities, a shortage of doctors and nurses, also helped the 1918-19 death toll to move into the tens of millions, globally.

And yet, there are few countries in the world today that can honestly claim to have a universal public health system that could cope with a full-blown influenza pandemic, like COVID-19. There aren't enough hospital beds, or isolation wards.

In Australia in 1918-1920, after hospitals were overwhelmed, as was common around the world, the infected were quarantined in their homes and left to live or die. You were either going to make it, or not.

The way govts of 2020 will cope with a COVID-19 Pandemic are not so distant from 100 years ago. As we've already seen in China, Japan, Korea and Iran, the United States and Italy, and other countries, by mid-February, 2020. Home quarantines and 1000s isolated in 'Medical Care Camps' outside of major cities has quickly became normal, as they did in 1919. And now, as back then, deaths outside of hospitals or medical facilities are forgotten, missed or ignored, left off the official numbers.

In one late night, chilling interview, in 2005, Health Minister Tony Abbott revealed the federal govt expected and feared a 'beyond normal' flu pandemic could kill more than 100,000 Australians: 

"A pandemic if it hits Australia and it is of the severity of the 1918 outbreak, will potentially kill many thousands of people and it's hard to imagine any terrorist attack - short of a nuclear bomb in a major city - that would have a comparable impact. 

"Back in the time of the Spanish flu there was much less international travel, people coming to Australia had to arrive by ship. Thanks to the then Commonwealth quarantine authorities we were quite effectively protected for many months. Certainly New Zealand, which put a much less stringent system of quarantine in place, was impacted very early and had about double the death rate of the flu outbreak in Australia, which is why in New Zealand they have a stronger folk memory of this than we do. 

"We have plans for an escalating health response, including mobile teams, home quarantine, home treatment, so that only the very serious cases have to go to public hospitals. We would certainly be alerting people to the potential dangers of doing certain sorts of things. Whether we needed to close down public institutions would depend upon the virulence of the virus and who was most susceptible to it."

In 2020, it's become a bit more obvious the limits to which the spread of a highly contagious new influenza virus can be contained, by any method, particularly when it can hide away inside a new human host for up to a month, rendering the host infectious before symptoms begin to show, like the COVID-19 strain is now believed to do. And this is all before the new virus has undergone any dramatic mutation. 'The Great Influenza' began its killing spree in 1918. The vast majority of deaths came in 1919, after the H1N1 virus had mutated.

If it feels like some govts are already in a 'Hey Man, Flu's Gonna Do What The Flu's Gotta Do' headspace, that may not be far wrong. 

Maybe the biggest cities in the US, Europe, Australia, the UK are planning to shut down for a month or two or more, and are prepared to take a massive economic hit, like China has. Maybe the 2020 Olympics will be cancelled. 

Or maybe these govts won't do that. Maybe they won't inflict extended mass disruption on their people and their economies.

Maybe our Western govts already at 'Flu's Gonna Do What Flu's Gotta Do.' because some of their experts and advisers are telling them that even shutting down cities is an an action that will, ultimately, have only a limited effect on stopping the new influenza strain eventually reaching most people on the planet.

As the COVID-19 influenza virus clearly intends to do. 

---------

Tony Abbott interview quotes, September, 2005:

Source: https://www.abc.net.au/lateline/tony-abbott-speaks-on-the-threat-of-avian-flu/2103424

Twitter Flashback: 2010 - The Age Newspaper Sacks "Outrageous" Columnist Over Logies Tweets

Twitter Flashback.

THE AGE NEWSPAPER FIRES MOST POPULAR COLUMNIST BECAUSE SHE UPSET RUPERT MURDOCH'S THUGS AND GOONS

May, 2010: The Melbourne Age newspaper has fired one of Australia's most successful comediasn for using her Twitter feed to snark hard on the Logie Awards, and its participants.

Dullards and wankstains from 2GB, 3AW and crimelord Rupert Murdoch's Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, Courier Mail, The Australian (media that employs people to scan celebrities Twitter feeds as a full-time job) went in hard and chanted in unison Fairfax had to fire Deveny, while News Corp created, launched and ran a Boycott The Age Advertisers/Cancel Your Subscription campaign, across Murdoch newspapers, nationwide.

Of course The Age caved in. They fired Deveny.

Deveny responded she was using satire "to expose celebrity raunch culture and the sexual objectification of women, which is rife on the red carpet".

"It was just passing notes in class, but suddenly these notes are being projected into the sky and taken out of context," she said.

This wasn't Deveny's first Twitter crime against all that was still good and sacred in Australian media, and all that they held sacred.A week earlier, Australia's conservative media got all frothy and furious because Deveny tweeted:

"Anzac Day shits me."

Deveny: "People who are offended by tweets are probably the same people who find Hey Hey funny, a show that I find deeply offensive."

Deveny said, in 2010, most of the public, and older journalists, did not understand Twitter.

"Twitter is not a news source, but it is starting to be used as one".

"Six months ago Twitter was just people saying 'Oh my God, I'm so hung-over,'" she said.

"Now really serious people are using Twitter to communicate, people like Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, the New Scientist.

"It's about everyone assessing the information for themselves. This is a great challenge for us, to have a sophisticated response to the evolution of communication."

Murdoch media goons came over all politically correct in demanding censorship of Deveny, and Rupert Murdoch allowed his newspapers to call for Advertiser Boycotts of Fairfax newspapers if they kept publishing Deveny's work.

Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Piers Akerman, and nearly every big city Murdoch editor, chanted together subscribers to The Age and Sydney Morning Herald should cancel their subscriptions to 'show Fairfax this can't be tolerated.'

This was Paul Ramadge, editor of The Age in 2010, explaining why he caved into a Boycott Campaign run by Murdochs News Corp and fired one of Fairfax's most popular columnists.

"We are appreciative of the columns Catherine has written for The Age over several years but the views she has expressed recently on Twitter are not in keeping with the standards we set at The Age."

@Catherine Deveny 's Twitter account surged in followers after Fairfax followed the orders of Murdoch thugs and goons, adding more than 1200 more new followers in three hours. In 2010, that was a remarkable surge in Australian Twitter followers.

By midnight on the day of Deveny's May, 2010, dismissal, she had received more than seven hundred responses on Twitter supporting her, railing against The Age and asking what happened to the once legendary Australian sense of humour and love of a piss-take.

Well, the politically correct Murdoch media of the 2010s beat it out of us, didn't they?

Old Media Rages Against Twitter Raging Against The Election

'Why Are You Yelling At Me On Social Media When I'm Only Trying To Wind You Up And Make You React Angrily So I Can Report How Abusive You Are?'

By Darryl Mason

It was inevitable Australia's Old Media and social media, primarily Twitter, would reach end-game territory around a federal election.

That election appears to this one, Federal Election 2019.

It's been a bit grim seeing Old Media's entrenched political journalists lashing out at those they deem "trolls" and "abusers", along with huge sections of their own audiences, including paying customers/subscribers.

Not many from Old Media Press Gallery are coping well as mere people off the street with phones analyse, quote and post political news videos and commentary to bigger audiences on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram than Old Media can often muster, and faster.

But it's been satisfying to see at least a few of the standard cliches of Old Media political news coverage during a federal election have been deflated by social media, like over-reliance on polls and opinion, and so then quietly retreated by Old Media.

If Australians interested in political news have more social media options than ever to get the news that matters, including following and engaging with the politicians themselves, and the feast of fact-checking in comments that usually follows any politician's policy tweets, and there is no shortage of free opinion (all the best writers are on Twitter), then what exactly is left for the 270 member Australian Press Gallery to do to try and lure the political news away from their Twitter timelines? To find that new generation of paying customers?

What can the Old Media-controlled Press Gallery provide that former journalists and public servants and former politicians and senior ministers and all the others with long political experience on social media cannot supply, for free?

Exclusive access to politicians?

Big deal. Has that exclusive access delivered better policies and information to the Australian people? Or do politicians feel free to lie and deceive even more relentlessly now, during Exclusive Interviews, because they know The Interview Routine better than many journalists do?

Has the political industry itself gamed out most of the old political media's best efforts before they even get started?

How many politicians have been caught out in outrageous lies and had to Resign In Disgrace after interviews with Australia's Best Political Journalists, in the past 5 years? Or past decade? Any at all?

What is The Product we're being told is worth buying?

Press Gallery journalists have more duties and live crosses now than in any previous decade. The depth of their daily research is always limited. So they have less time than jobless ex-public servants on Twitter have to actually read through 400 page reports and supply timely analysis.

On social media, just in Australia, there are hundreds of now jobless former public servants who do this analysis work, daily, for free. They should be earning something, particularly when so much of their work acts as research for paid journalists, but they don't stop doing it because they're not paid.

21st century journalists have already realised social media is the greatest research tool journalism has ever had access to. You can ask for help and get it, on almost any subject, if the Google isn't helping. If you say on Twitter you are unsure about info, good people, people who know, will often try and help you. This is not something to be afraid of.

On social media, a journalist can search for people who specialise in a subject that they're writing about, contact them and get help, quicker than a phone call. That kind of fast access to people and good information and research is like a 1970s journalist's ultimate work-related fantasy.

Social media is information, a living breathing world library of info, facts and people who know things.

This New Reality will maybe, finally, sink through to those still bogged down in Old Media bubbles, but for now there's a lot of anger, vitriol and bitterness coming from many in Australian news media, mostly towards their news audiences, probably because it's elections time. But there's not a lot of attempts to understand the news audience the Press Gallery needs to exist is right there in front of them, interacting with them, trying to talk to them, to share information, leads, tips. So what if some are rude? That's what happened when journalists had to go knocking on doors. Some told you to Fack Off, other people gave you a cup of tea and talked for hours. That's What People Are Like.

And anyway, why would anyone working across the top of Australia's news media industry expect all who still bother to engage with them on news to be polite, concise and respectful? That's not exactly the history of the Australian news media industry itself, is it? Or the history of our news media towards the public. This relationship has been long hostile.

The ABC's Michael Rowland:

Twitter is a double-edged sword for political journalists.
It's an invaluable source of breaking news and allows us to keep track of campaign developments in real time.For good and bad, it's a forum for politicians to make unfiltered announcements or respond to criticism from the other side, all of which provides fodder for news stories and commentary. 

"Twitter is a peanut gallery of hyper-partisan tools," Chris Uhlmann laments.

Can't live with it, can't live without it, eh Chris? 

Social media doesn't demand quick action-packed interviews and breezy sound bites on policies. The news audience on social media demands all the data and background info relevant to the subject so proper fact-checking can be carried out. So the news that results, that people on Twitter are willing to put their names to in sharing, is more credible, closer to the truth, and richer with information. People who like sharing quality news aren't big fans of seeing what they shared easily debunked in comments below. Many on Twitter really do care about the quality of information that comes out of the Newsdesk bearing their name.

Now that may not be everyone on Twitter, but there's 1000s more Australians on Twitter  analysing politics and policies and checking for corruption than the entire Australian News Industry has engaged in such tasks.

Some of the political journalists entrenched in Old Media still pretend not much has changed, and that The People Who Really Matter are still spending 3 hours every morning reading through Opinion pages in The Australian and The Financial Review (when virtually no-one outside the media industry is doing anything like that now). They seem to dreamily hope people will soon get sick of this whole internet thing and return to Quality Print Media or something. A belief that remains even while that very print media industry has sacked most of their specialised journalists.

Here's former ABC now Nine-Fairfax political um correspondent Chris Uhlmann on how he deals with those smartypants people on Twitter who, perhaps, might know from their work history or life experiences more about a certain subject than he might:

'I'll post a tweet on federal politics, wait for the notifications of replies to build up on my phone home screen then bulk delete all of them without reading a single word. 

"If I spend even a minute bothered...they win. If I don't engage and they all day getting worked up about it, then I win."

This is an experienced journalist employed by a for-profit news media company explaining how he both ignores and baits his news audience, for his own amusement. He's bullshitting. He reads his own comments, every journalist checks. But Uhlmann clearly hates the debunking and fact-checks he finds.

Fark The Customers, apparently. It's a bizarre attitude, generally, for any employee of an industry losing both profits and audience in double digit percentage points almost every quarter to still hold.

Bizarre an attitude as this is that Chris Uhlmann can still harbour - blaming the news audience for caring about facts and paying attention - this clearly isn't going far enough for Murdoch Crime Family's star goon, Andrew Bolt. He can top it. But how? By hating democracy and the voters responsible for voting:

An American media company campaigning against democracy in Australia. Is that a new level?

'Don't Vote! It's Socialist!'

'Refuse Your Right To Vote!'

'Don't Be A Sheeple! Stop Voting!'

What a curious thing to see the Delaware-based News Corp company trying to guilt-trip Australians against voting in a federal election. A foreign govt, company or person interfering in politics and elections in Australia is supposed to be illegal.

Here's Michael Rowland again, reminding us how terrible it is people interested in News on social media try to engage with journalists who allegedly report News:

According to many veteran political journalists, this Twitter "feedback" is getting much more vicious.
The Courier-Mail's national affairs editor Dennis Atkins said Twitter users had certainly "amped up" over the last few weeks. 

"They are shoutier, they are more tribal. They have never been great ones for considering other points of view, but now they have lost any inclination to do that," he said.
"They are quick to attack the person rather than engage in the merits of an argument."

Dennis Atkins is a veteran Murdoch tabloids journalist listing the bad habits we likely picked up from reading or being exposed to tabloid Australian TV journalism and the Murdoch newspapers most of their lives. Atkins didn't seem aware he was describing the editorial room policies of the tabloids that employed him.

Guardian Australia's political editor Katharine Murphy notes there's often an increase in anxiety and frustration on social media in election campaigns.

She says that's consistent with the polls that tell us voters are deeply disaffected with politics and distrustful of institutions, including media organisations.

"So most of it is that, but I also think elections bring an increase in what I suspect is organised or loosely organised trolling directed against politicians and individual journalists," she said. 

"Some actors are intent on being disruptive on social platforms and picking fights as a means to that end."

Some political journalists are intent on being disruptive and picking fights. They get paid to do it. To inflame the public. Provocation-Reaction. When such journalists thoroughly stir up the public, and people snap, they are deemed "controversial" and "successful" like it's a war on the people they're winning.

Perhaps the news industry could set a better example than the audience they are reporting for? Australians have had 100 years now of vicious, abusive, cruel news media content, feasting off the miseries and tragedies of Australians lives. Isn't a century of anything long enough?

Michael Rowland:

While the hyper-partisans are alert to any perceived "bias", Uhlmann believes one side is way more offensive than the other. 

"While one of the memes of the early 21st century is the rise of the aggressive right, the emergence of what I would call the "post-Christian left" is much more of a worry," he said.

Uh huh. Uhlmann, paid to provide information to people for a living, makes up stupid new terminologies to further categorise and try and belittle his news audience, then announces his New Controversial View on TV and on social media, then wonders why people respond with "hostility" and call him a cliched boring old media hack.

But Uhlmann doesn't actually wonder anything like that. It's not a mystery to him. He knows why people respond that way. He's been trained to provoke his audience, and he clearly enjoys doing it. That's the way the Legends Of Australian Journalism did their work. The more furious the reaction from the News Target, the better the front page and headlines. When Uhlmann was a cub reporter, Serious Journalists, drunk by midday, were still picking fights with mourners at funerals for a "great photo."

Eventually, most of the remaining news audience won't bother responding to Provocation-Reaction journalists, like Uhlmann, at all. They'll tune out, and after a few weeks or months, these news customers will realise that such stock standard Old Media routines are intensely boring, and not missed at all. Not when there's so much excellent news media elsewhere in the world, and on social media, to inform and feed your head.

Maybe the better Old Media journalists will realise in time.