Writer
Brian Toohey
Brian Toohey is author of Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State.
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Private Korolev and Australia’s national security state
The security vetting process has gone off the rails in Australia. Continue reading »
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American folly-starting and fighting endless wars
Politics have come to this in America. Several former US presidents committed extremely serious war crimes that killed, maimed and displaced huge numbers of people without any suggestion that they be charged with these crimes. However, a former president Donald Trump has been found guilty of the crime of trying to cover up a brief Continue reading »
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Ghost shark
The Ghost Shark, a new underwater drone being developed for the Australian Navy, could kill off the deeply flawed plan to acquire eight nuclear submarines for a projected cost as much as $360 billion. Continue reading »
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Albo muddies the waters
Labor’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has a strange attraction to muddying the political waters in areas that are going well, such as its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Serious gains are already occurring in the efficiency of battery storage of electricity from solar, wind and pumped hydro sources. Bigger gains seem likely as breakthroughs Continue reading »
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Albo’s continual failures
Thanks to Anthony Albanese’s prolonged refusal to change the Morrison government’s damaging policies that he has endorsed, Labor is struggling to stay around 30% in the opinion polls for the next election. One upshot is the latest OECD figures show low and middle income workers in Australia had the highest increase in personal income taxes Continue reading »
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Pine Gap supports nuclear war fighting, not monitoring arms control agreements
Richard Tanter stated in Pearls and Irritations on March 21 in regard to my piece on a former Defence Deputy Secretary, Paul Dibb on 14 February, that “Media self-censorship, and acceptance – if not cultivation – of a mystique of impenetrable opacity about Pine Gap has facilitated public acceptance of government silence, misdirection and mendacity Continue reading »
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Government thrashes our democracy, removes RBA safeguards
The Albanese government is about to free the Reserve Bank of Australia from a rarely used constraint allowing a Treasurer to override a decision of the central bank, such as a policy to push interest-rates so high they cause a severe recession. Continue reading »
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Untruths, the CIA, and Whitlam’s dismissal
A highly regarded commentator on national security, Paul Dibb, has written an astonishing article in the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s The Strategist on January 15 – astonishing because it is riddled with major errors. Continue reading »
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Who is the war criminal?
John Howard took Australia into the devastating war of aggression in Iraq in March 2003 but has still not been held accountable. Continue reading »
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The greedy jaws of national security
With some honourable exceptions, most of the media and the parliament enthusiastically support almost everything the Director General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Mike Burgess has to say. Although Burgess is not an extreme hardliner in the Australian intelligence world, many of his statements should not go unchallenged. Continue reading »
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Why ASIS should be abolished
The Australian Secret Intelligence Service was established in 1950 to conduct spying overseas and morally repulsive covert operations. It had a slow start, but in the 1970s it sent three staff to Chile to help the CIA overthrow the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende. Continue reading »
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ASIO and the KGB: New information on Hawke v. Combe
Although ASIO dropped the intercept on Labor’s former national secretary David Combe’s phone after alleged KGB officer Valeriy Ivanov left Australia, Prime Minister Bob “Hawke’s interest in what had already transpired, increased dramatically”. Hawke suddenly asked to listen to the Combe-Ivanov tapes. After Hawke had listened for an hour and a half, “The Prime Minister Continue reading »
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Time for Labor to focus on those who are hurting
It was only in March this year that The Sydney Morning Herald claimed in a series called Red Alert that Australia “faces the real prospect of war with China within three years that could involve a direct attack on our mainland”. There were no grounds to believe this then and even fewer after Anthony Albanese’s Continue reading »
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Threat to democracy: The case for sacking Tange and Pezzullo
A good case exists for sacking the head of the Home Affairs department Michael Pezzullo for taking sides in internal political party matters among other activities, as recently reported by the Nine media group. There is an even stronger case that Sir Arthur Tange, the head of the Defence department should have been sacked in Continue reading »
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Why are government officials manufacturing false espionage threats?
Government ministers and senior officials are conditioning Australians to become frightened, very frightened. Continue reading »
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A tremendous addition to the Australian publishing machine
Pearls and Irritations (P&I) is a tremendous addition to an Australian publishing scene in which propaganda is increasingly replacing accurate news and analysis. Continue reading »
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Australian media’s alarm over Chinese spy ship highlights stark double-standard
The mainstream media has once more tried to generate alarm about the presence of two relatively innocuous Chinese electronic spy ships in international waters during the latest biennial Talisman Sabre military exercise spread across the Australian mainland and offshore oceans. It involves 30,000 troops from 13 countries. Although the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had Continue reading »
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Good news on nukes: US can’t sell Australia nuclear subs
The good news is the US can’t sell Australia the three to five used Virginia class nuclear subs that the Albanese government has announced it will buy. Nor will it sell us any new ones. Continue reading »
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Dambusters
The famous World War II “Dambusters” raid in 1943 killed many more Ukrainians and other civilians than the collapse of the large Kakhovka dam in Ukraine in June. Continue reading »
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Treasurer must wield power, rein in the RBA
The parliament wisely gave a treasurer the power to reign in the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) when it was not acting in the best interests of the Australians. Jim Chalmers should use it. Continue reading »
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Very bad advice: $368b nuclear submarines and the Federal budget
At a time when the Reserve Bank’s interest rate rise is adding to cost of living pressures and increasing the chances of a recession, Albanese is finding it hard to justify the staggering $368 billion cost of AUKUS nuclear submarines. Continue reading »
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The DSR’s desultory treatment of nuclear submarines
The Albanese government’s Defence Strategic Review is marred from the outset by its bald assertion that China’s military build-up is the largest and most ambitious of any country since the end of the Second World War. Continue reading »
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Destroying deterrence
The Albanese government wouldn’t be able buy nuclear attack submarines from the US without agreeing to let them keep performing all their core roles in our region. Continue reading »
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President Biden resorts to extortion
President Biden has resorted to extortion to destroy one of China’s leading digital companies ByteDance, the owner of the highly successful social media group, TikTok. Continue reading »
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Labor prepares return to disastrous Forward Defence doctrine
Nearly everything the Labor government says about nuclear subs is ludicrous and highly damaging. Continue reading »
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Nuclear safety agency silent on disposal of AUKUS radioactive waste
At this stage there is little interest in how to dispose of the high level uranium waste from AUKUS SSNs, let alone put First Nations voices to the fore. This is unlikely to change while the nation’s most prominent journalists see it as their job to promote the dominant military doctrine and boost the demonisation Continue reading »
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Scorpion thresher: Albanese trashes the moral core of his party
A White House fact sheet released as part of publicity for Australia’s decision to spend almost $400 billion on nuclear submarines is false. It claims, “For over 60 years, the UK and the US have operated more than 500 naval nuclear reactors . . . without incident or adverse effect on human health or the Continue reading »
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The cost and unnecessary suffering of military spending
The authoritative Peterson Foundation calculates that last year the US spent more on its military than the next nine countries together. This means more than China, India, Russia, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan and South Korea combined. In 2023, the US allocated $US 858 billion to military spending compared to China’s $US224 billion. Continue reading »
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Modern Olympics: Russian athlete bans violate the charter
Will Australian athletes face a similar ban on participation in the Olympics for their government’s wars of aggression? Continue reading »
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Arms control: the only road to peace
The world was a very dangerous place in the late 1960s. It is again. This time the danger is in Asia as well as Europe, as highlighted by John Lyons’s recent two-part series on the ABC. Continue reading »
