Marcus Reubenstein
Marcus Reubenstein is an independent journalist with more than twenty-five years of media experience, having previously been a staffer with a federal Liberal Party senator from 1992 to 1994. He spent five years at Seven News in Sydney and seven years at SBS World News where he was a senior correspondent. As a print journalist he has contributed to most of Australia’s major news outlets. Internationally he has worked on assignments for CNN, Eurosport and the Olympic Games Broadcasting Service. He is the founder and editor of Asian business new website, APAC Business Review.
Marcus's recent articles
25 April 2025
Election looms, time to ramp up the China scare campaign: Anti-China Media Watch
Hampered by an underwhelming election campaign — where the Labor/LNP “uniparty” faces the harsh reality that the punters don’t think China is about to invade Australia — Murdoch media is going all out to put those commie bastards front and centre. There’s the inconvenient truth that the Australian military is gearing up to hit China with a barrage of US-made missiles; the Chinese Communist Party is meddling in the affairs of the Catholic Church; and a 60 Minutes report tells us Barbie has fallen victim to the Chinese.
11 April 2025
ABC has Four Corners with just one angle: Anti-China Media Watch
In the midst of a federal election campaign, China is front and centre, with the major parties falling over themselves to look tough on national security. The mainstream media is once again aiding and abetting the political narrative without any serious analysis; Albo and Dutton are going to swipe back the Port of Darwin from its CCP-linked owners, but the mainstream media is clueless as to how that will happen; Tony Abbott tells his former chief of staff we’re being bullied by China; and a heavily-promoted Four Corners program fails to scale the great wall of objectivity.
4 April 2025
China’s spies are here to help Albo: Anti-China Media Watch
The Australian reliably informs as that in Beijing it’s “all the way with Albo for PM”; the latest Chinese ship in the proximity of Australia’s waters is both an act of aggression and proof positive that New Zealand’s scientists are among the most “clueless” creatures on earth; and Confucius Institutes have to go from Australian university campuses.
29 March 2025
China’s war is almost here: Anti-China Media Watch
Mainstream media tells us exactly when China will invade Taiwan; it continues to run the false narrative that the Chinese naval ships fired missiles into the path of commercial airliners; and China, with a solitary overseas military base versus 800 US bases, poses a massive risk to our masters in Washington.
21 March 2025
Misinformation in politics: Anti-China Media Watch
The ABC reveals Chinese social media is again facilitating foreign interference in our elections, Dutton is the true champion of China relations, while Chinese hospitals are overcharging Aussies for lifesaving surgery.
14 March 2025
Any old Chinese port in a storm: Anti-China Media Watch
Reports on the financial distress of Landbridge, the Chinese-owned company with a 99-year lease for the Port of Darwin, lack perspective and analysis. Penny Wong goes soft on China and ASPI goes unchecked.
7 March 2025
The Australian jellyfish: Anti-China Media Watch
The Australian labels Albanese a “jellyfish” in the face of Chinese naval vessels, ironically the barbs came from a faceless columnist. Kudos to The Australian for keeping tabs on a US nuclear submarine in our waters, but the headline act for the Murdoch masthead was hosting its own event for weapons makers and China hawks.
28 February 2025
The Chinese invasion begins: Anti-China Media Watch
Is a flotilla of Chinese ships on a reconnaissance mission for a future invasion of Australia or, as the Australian Defence Force admits, is China doing to us what we’ve been doing to them for decades?
21 February 2025
Locked up in Beijing: Anti-China Media Watch
An Australian national is locked up in a Beijing jail for five years. Led by Sky News, the media maintains his innocence, based on nothing more than his word… and the “fact” that innocents are locked up because the Chinese police are jealous.
14 February 2025
Australia’s 'suspicious' links to DeepSeek: Anti-China Media Watch
The ABC’s Andrew Greene has found an Australian link to Chinese AI platform DeepSeek, a Chinese national who holds post-graduate degrees from Monash University and the University of Adelaide. No surprise, ASPI is lurking in the background of the sinister allegations against an Australian educated PhD, while that researcher, Dr. Zizheng Pan, is hiding in plain sight.
7 February 2025
Silence on 'evil' China: Anti-China Media Watch
While the big China threat remains AI platform DeepSeek, The Australian reminds us that the true evil is Canberra not doing anything about China’s threat to national security, and Nine Newspapers remind us that LNP politicians taking money from rich Chinese-Australians are good, while their benefactors are likely up to no good.
31 January 2025
Is an ‘antisemitic’ CCP DeepSeeking Aussie data? - Anti-China Media Watch
This week’s big China threat story is DeepSeek, an Open-Source AI (artificial intelligence) platform that the alarmists are signalling is further proof China is stealing our personal data. Those shouting loudest are the right-wing free marketeers but what are we to make of Wall Street greeting the rise of DeepSeek by wiping $1 trillion off the value of, chip maker, Nvidia in just one day?
24 January 2025
China Media Watch
Reports of Uyghur forced labour imports to Australia: The mainstream media continues to produce China reports that are agenda driven, biased and based on poor or no research. There is no balance and rather than be constructive, there’s an all-out determination to be destructive.
10 December 2024
Chinese dance spectacular, Shen Yun faces allegations of child trafficking and abuse
As Shen Yun gears up for its annual multi-million-dollar tour of Australia, the U.S.-based Chinese dance group is facing a class action lawsuit for multiple counts of child trafficking, abusive practices and breaching a slew of U.S. labour laws.
6 December 2024
The Electoral Reform Bill is stalled but the party is far from over
The Australian Uniparty— also known as the cosy ALP/LNP coalition of self-interest—is jockeying for electoral reform. Talks between Labor and the LNP have broken down so those reforms are not coming in any time soon but, as former New South Wales Labor premier Jack Lang was fond of saying, “Always back the horse named ‘self-interest’, it’s the only one that will be trying.”
18 May 2023
Passing of Tony Pun a great loss for all Australians
Prominent Chinese community leader, Dr Anthony Tony Pun died last night in Sydney, aged 77. In 1989 he came to public prominence when he lobbied then prime minister Bob Hawke to allow Chinese students to remain in Australia, in the wake of the crackdown on Chinese student protests that led to the Tiananmen Square incident.
2 December 2021
The National Press Club exemplifies the erosion of journalism
The National Press Club sells access to influential journalists to organisations with vested interests in shaping government policy and self-promotion.
27 October 2021
The 'independent' think tank that writes its own history!
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute's claims of fearless independence ring hollow as foreign governments and corporate entities shower it with money.
22 September 2021
Star spangled propaganda: ASPI to open office in the US so as to be close to the military and business complex.
O say can you see, by the dawns early light? It's a new dawn for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) as it succumbs to the irrefutable truth it is nothing more than a vassal for American interests, opening a US office.
7 September 2021
Dungeons and dragons: The China threat fiction
China is an increasingly authoritarian state, actively asserting its will regionally and within its own borders giving rise to a dangerous fiction.
4 April 2021
ASPI sponsors collect billions from Defence
Scott Morrison's latest billion-dollar missile spend was leaked to the media and then talked up by ASPI whose sponsors have raked in $51 billion in Defence Department contracts whilst doling cash to the highly-conflicted think-tank
3 March 2021
Being Chinese in Australia: the good, the bad and the ugly
A snapshot of the life for Chinese-Australians shows three quarters say they are happy living in Australia, yet in the past 12 months one in five has reported being physically threatened or attacked.
23 January 2021
US presidents love to play a round
The US presidency is said to be the office of the leader of the free world yet, as highlighted by the dying days of Donald Trumps presidency, one of the most challenging handicaps for US presidents seems to have been on the golf course.
14 December 2020
Undue influence? University grants questioned after ASPI US-funded research
The Australian Research Council launched an investigation into Australian academics solely on the basis of US government-funded research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
24 November 2020
Agents of foreign influence. What about the Australian Strategic Policy Institute?
The Australia-China relationship has hit new lows, with Chinas ban on a range of imports threatening $20 billion of Australian exports. However, just in the past few days Scott Morrison has said Australia's position has been wrongly interpreted as siding with the United States over China, and that his government would not make a binary choice between the superpowers.
3 November 2020
Abetz committee shuts down critics
A top Chinese community leader Dr Tony Pun, who was highly critical of Eric Abetz was silenced by the Senate committee looking into diaspora communities, while a pro-Trump Chinese media outlet was welcomed to make public comment. Editor's note: After publication of this article on the APAC.News websiteyesterday, the Senate released a transcript of evidence provided by Dr Pun. Following his testimony on 2 November 2020, the Committee Secretariat indicated evidence was taken in camera and there was no decision as to whether it would be released. Senator Abetz excused himself from the meeting and did not participate...
29 October 2020
ASPI's Broadcasting Corporation?
Is ABC management complicit in letting senior on-air talent promote the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and its sponsors, without declaring conflicts of interest?
11 October 2020
US prison labour, foreign weapons-makers finance Australian government think tank ASPI
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a think tank owned by the Commonwealth and funded by the Defence Department, also receives millions from foreign governments, weapons manufacturers, and US corporations that have used or are using prison workers paid as little as 23 cents an hour.
24 September 2020
Chinese interference overblown
Floating the idea of a Foreign Interference Commissioner in the face of a diplomatic storm front is not going to steer us into calmer waters
13 September 2020
Sino-Australian media cold war on ice
The shock and indignation of the Australian media over the forced departure of two China correspondents has quickly dissipated following revelations that ASIO raided the homes of four Chinese journalists two months earlier
13 August 2020
US sanctions policy on steroids: a legitimate tool or is Donald Trump using it for retribution? (Michael West August 10, 2020)
The Trump Administration is adding foreign individuals and entities to US sanctions lists at a rate never before seen and its increasingly been done without Congressional oversight, judicial review or any requirement to produce evidence, writesMarcus Reubenstein.
3 August 2020
Uncle Sam grabs CCP playbook (APAC News, 3 August 2020)
The US State Department is quietly funding a Chinese-language news service in Australia, a move more typically associated with Chinas state media propagandists.
4 July 2020
Independent think-tank ASPI behind push for more defence spending rakes in advisory fees
Funded by the Department of Defence, the Australia Strategic Policy Institute collects millions more as it drives the China threat narrative. AsMarcus Reubensteinreports, while ASPI is the medias go-to experts for public comment, ASPI is remarkably coy about revealing all its funding sources.