Writer
Binoy Kampmark
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
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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 »
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Terms of condescension: The language of Australia’s “Pacific Family”
When will this nonsense on familial connection between Australia and the Pacific end? In 2018, Australia’s then Pentecostal Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, drew upon a term that his predecessors had not. On November 8 that year, he announced that Australia’s engagement with the region would be taken to another level, launching a “new chapter in Continue reading »
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The brutality of “Bulldozer Justice” in India
It looks all too eerily similar as a method: the expulsion of individuals from their home, the demolition of said home and the punishing of entire families. All excused by a harsh reading of local regulations. But this method, used by Israeli authorities for years against vulnerable Palestinians, has become a weapon of choice for Continue reading »
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Convenient omissions: The Ukraine-EU candidacy show
Instances of sympathy are rarely excuses to throw out the rule book. In the case of the European Union, throwing out the rule book about admission has tended to be a feature of enlargement. Credentials of candidate states have been, when needed, boosted or cooked for the occasion. Others, whatever the progress, have been ignored. Continue reading »
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Deadly games: The labour casualties of Qatar’s World Cup
A sordid enterprise, nasty, crude and needless. But the World Cup 2022 will be, should anyone bother watching it, stained by one of the highest casualty rates amongst workers in its history, marked by corruption and stained by a pharisee quality. The sportswashers, cleaning agent at the ready, will be out in force, and the Continue reading »
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Binoy Kampmark: Julian Assange in Ithaka
“Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is where you’re destined for”. P. Cavafy, trans. Edmund Keeley Continue reading »
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A Spanish court calls: Mike Pompeo, we want you
On June 3, Judge Santiago Pedraz of Spain’s national court, the Audienca Nacional, issued a summons for former CIA director and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to testify in an ongoing investigation into the conduct of private security firm UC Global and its founder, David Morales. Continue reading »
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Fighting the first UK-Rwandan refugee flight
June 10 bore witness to a valiant effort on the part of refugee groups and a trade union to stop what promises to be the first journey of many as part of the UK-Rwanda plan. Their attempt to seek an injunction failed to convince the High Court. Next Tuesday, the first flight from the UK Continue reading »
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Dear times and costly cricket: Australia’s Sri Lankan Tour
For a country experiencing its worst economic crisis since gaining independence in 1948, the picture of a touring team pampered and fussed over might cause consternation. But the Australian cricket tour to Sri Lanka has only been met by praise from the country’s cricket officials, where logic is inverted, and the gaze of responsibility averted. Continue reading »
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New Brooms, old stories: The Australian Labor Party and Julian Assange
After having a few lunches with Australia’s then opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, John Shipton felt reason to be confident. Albanese had promised Assange’s father that he would do whatever he could, should he win office, to bring the matter to a close. Continue reading »
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Platinum jubilees and republican questions
The platinum jubilee will bore and cause some to yawn. It might certainly agitate the republican spleen in the fourteen countries where Queen Elizabeth II remains a constitutional head of state. But the question remains: How does the institution this figure represents endure, if it should at all? Continue reading »
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Biden in Tokyo: Killing strategic ambiguity
Could it have been just another case of bumbling poor judgment, the mind softened as the mouth opened? A question was put to US President Joe Biden, visiting Tokyo and standing beside Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida: “You didn’t want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons. Are you willing to Continue reading »
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Political appointments and downgrading the Australian Human Rights Commission
The international standards body on human rights has found that the Australian Human Rights Commission should be downgraded in its standing. Continue reading »
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The extradition of Julian Assange ‘to a country that conspired to murder him’
It was a dastardly formality. On April 20, at a hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, Julian Assange, beamed in via video link from Belmarsh Prison, his carceral home for three years, is to be extradited to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 based on the US Espionage Act of 1917. Continue reading »
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Stumbles and fictions: The Australian election campaign begins
That a figure like Scott Morrison comes across as competent, able and free of imbecility after a day of electioneering in Australia suggests a broader sickness in politics. Continue reading »
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AUKUS in the hypersonic missile wonderland
As this idiotic, servile venture proceeds, Australian territory, sites and facilities will become every more attractive for assault in the fulness of time. Continue reading »
