Writer
Binoy Kampmark
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
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The lunatic’s course: the Northern Territory’s increased militarisation
Another call to arms has been issued by Washington. The venue that features the recipient of such lethal generosity is not new. Continue reading »
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Australia’s problem with torture
Casting a keen eye over the human rights obligations of a state is tantamount to rummaging through untended, mouldering laundry. Often, the promise to wash such neglected items has been delayed or postponed. The reasons are often many, and not always insensible. And whose right is it to go through such things anyway? Continue reading »
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Qatar FIFA World Cup: West silent on human rights
Competitors at the FIFA World Cup will grace stadia built in near-slave labour conditions and enjoy the receptions and hospitality of a state with a brutal penal system. Continue reading »
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Exit Liz Truss; enter lettuce
“When are you going to govern? The only thing you have governed for the past year is your own survival.” Jess Phillips, Labour MP, October 20, 2022 Continue reading »
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Dated and fractured: Optus and data protections Down Under
Things are not getting better for Optus, a subsidiary of the Singapore-owned Singtel and Australia’s second largest telecommunications company. Responsible for one of Australia’s largest data breaches, the beleaguered company is facing burning accusations and questions on various fronts. It is also proving to be rather less than forthcoming about details as to what has Continue reading »
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Australian media think that only China has a human rights problem
Australia has a mixed relationship with the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Irritation, dismissal and even the occasional openly hostile comment, have registered. But in 1994, the Toonen decision filtered through the Australian legal process, leading the federal government to remove archaically noxious provisions in the Tasmanian criminal code criminalising sodomy. Continue reading »
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Opportunistic interests: The US-Pacific Island declaration
If ever there was a blatant statement of realpolitik masquerading as friendliness, the latest US-Pacific Island declaration must count as one of them. The Biden administration has been busy of late, wooing Pacific Island states in an effort to discourage increasingly sharp tilt towards China. It has been spurred on, in no small way, by Continue reading »
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The rise of Trussonomics
It’s impossible to know whether the new British Prime Minister is genuinely serious about constructive policy or not. She is certainly interested in greasing palms and calming the storms, if only to delay the inevitable. Having proven herself the shallowest of candidates to succeed her disgraced, not wholly banished predecessor, Liz Truss has leapt into Continue reading »
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A “backstab”: Santos, drilling and First Nations Peoples
Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg has been in the environmental news again, this time throwing a large judicial spanner in the works of Santos and its drilling efforts in the Timor Sea. Continue reading »
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Whitewashing at Shinzo Abe’s state funeral
Be careful who you praise and the degree of zeal you do it with. The slain Shinzo Abe, shot dead in Nara on July 8, towered over Japanese politics. In doing so, he cast a lengthy shadow. In death, this shadow continues to grow ever more darkly. Continue reading »
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“I do not think, I know”: Scott Morrison’s submarine deception
When it was revealed that former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had not only shown contempt for his own government in secretly appointing himself, via the Governor-General’s approval, to five portfolios, the depths of deception seemed to be boundless. His tenure had already been marked by a spectacular, habitual tendency to conceal matters. What else Continue reading »
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Charles III, the billionaire and owner of the Oval cricket ground
Once the fixated adoration with the late Queen Elizabeth II starts cooling, the accountants of public welfare and decency will be stunned to realise the costs and wealth associated with the royal institution. Her successor, Charles III, is continuing in that vein, a jarring note of wealth and pomp even as prices rise and the Continue reading »
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Queenly saturation
Turn on the television. Move to the screen. Switch on the device – if you ever left it off. Queen Elizabeth II may have passed, but she is everywhere in very lively fashion, a spectral manifestation that has utterly controlled large chunks of a transfixed global media system. Continue reading »
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The other side of Elizabeth II’s reign: How to profit from plunder while disclaiming responsibility
Reactions to the death of Queen Elizabeth II from victims of atrocities during her reign were less than warm. Did the British Crown derive profits of plunder yet disclaim responsibility for colonisation, they asked? The Westminster shroud, in this regard, is thick indeed, a layer of forced exculpation. Continue reading »
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Dunderheaded diplomacy: Australia’s funding offer to the Solomon Islands
What is it about Australian diplomacy that makes it so clumsy and dunderheaded? Is it the harsh delivery, the tactless expression, or the inability to do things with subtle reflection? On September 6, Australian diplomacy gave another display of such form with Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s remarks about the Solomon Islands elections. Continue reading »
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Beggars in surplus: Australia’s university gangsters
With the election of a new government in Australia in May, the begging bowls were being readied by administrators in the university sector. Bloated, ungainly, ruthless and uneven in quality, the country’s universities, for the most part, had inadvertently made their case for more public funding harder. Continue reading »
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It’s all political: Julian Assange appeals his extradition
Julian Assange’s legal team has taken its next step along their Via Dolorosa, filing an appeal against the decision to extradite their client to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 based on the odious US Espionage Act of 1917. Continue reading »
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Canberra is a fashioned spear for the US against China.
There is an overwhelming boisterous ignorance that characterises Australia’s foreign policy approach to China. Continue reading »
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The many lives of Ayman al-Zawahiri
Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead – or so we are told. Al-Qaida’s chief and successor to the slain Osama bin Laden, he was deemed the chief ideologue and mastermind behind the audacious September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. On July 31, he was supposedly killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, while Continue reading »
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Opaque matters in the Pacific: Fiji’s maritime essential services centre
With China constantly being accused of insufferable secrecy and a lack of openness about security and defence arrangements among partners in the Pacific, the shoe, when on the other foot, sits just as well. In the case of Australia, it is particularly snug. Continue reading »
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Stumbling Surveillance: The end of the COVIDSafe App
It took a few years of tolerable incompetence, caused fears about security, and was meant to be the great surveillance salvation to reassure us all. Instead, Australia’s COVIDSafe App only identified two positive cases of infection during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and failed, in every sense of the term, to work. Continue reading »
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The failings of Westminster: Scott Morrison’s Shadow Government
Why the sharp intake of breath, the tingling shock? Continue reading »
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Chegg, cheating and Australian Universities
The note on Radio National’s Background Briefing on the morning of July 31 was sombre. A student, who did not divulge his real name (he is professionally pseudonymised as Ramesh), talks about services that aid him in his study. Aid is less accurate than do – given that he is working gruelling night shifts in Continue reading »
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Facial recognition technology down under
The language is far from reassuring. Despite being caught red handed using facial recognition technology unbeknownst to customers, a number of Australia’s large retail companies have given a meek assurance that they will “pause” their use. The naughty will only show contrition in the most qualified of ways. Continue reading »
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Gilding the cage of suburbia: farewelling Neighbours
The statistics of Australia’s longest running drama series about sickeningly idyllic suburbia will interest soap show boffins. It lasted 5,955 episodes over 37 seasons, starting in 1985. Continue reading »
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Penal assassination: The gradual effort to kill Assange
They really do want to kill him. Perhaps it is high time that his detractors and sceptics, proven wrong essentially from the outset, admit that the US imperium, along with its client states, is willing to see Julian Assange perish in prison. Continue reading »
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Scott Morrison awaits the apocalypse
The minds of defeated prime ministers are rarely pretty. In some cases, they are damnably awful places, where ruins accumulate and dust gathers in wretchedness. Continue reading »
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International accountability: Myanmar, the ICJ and the genocide question
The indomitable spirit of Raphael Lemkin, bibliophile, assiduous documenter of humanity’s dark deeds and inexecrable conduct, is bound to be an unsettled one. Continue reading »
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Customary barbarity: Britain’s SAS in Afghanistan
The insistence that there is a noble way of fighting war, one less bloody and brutal, has always been the hallmark of forces self-described as civilised. Restraint characterises their behaviour; codes of laws follow in their wake, rather than genocidal impulses. Killing, in short, is a highly regulated, disciplined affair. Continue reading »
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Fighting to the last Ukrainian
Ukraine is a pawn in the US struggle against Russia Continue reading »
