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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2024

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  • This is straight from a think tank commentary site (their words).

    ASPI was established by the Australian Government in 2001 and is partially funded by the Department of Defence

    The following copypasted from Wikipedia:

    In 2020, Myriam Robin in the Australian Financial Review identified three sources of funding, in addition to the Department of Defence. ASPI receives funding from defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Thales Group and Raytheon Technologies. It also receives funding from technology companies such as Microsoft, Oracle Australia, Telstra, and Google. Finally, it receives funding from foreign governments including Japan, Taiwan and the Netherlands.

    For the 2019-2020 financial year, ASPI listed a revenue of $11,412,096.71. The ASPI received from the Australian Department of Defence 35% of its revenue, 32% from federal government agencies, 17% from overseas government agencies, 11% from the private sector, and 3% from the defense industries. Finally, it receives funding from foreign governments including Japan, Israel, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

    So it’s important to understand the article with that bias in mind - this is sponsored content.



  • Honestly, with news like that the title doesn’t do it justice (as appropriate as it is). I’d pick something more like “Labor Party members revealed as corrupt union gang”, or “ALP loots hundreds of thousands from CFMEU”.

    Labor has justified suspending industrial law and union democracy, claiming that the appointed CFMEU administrators are independent and acting in the best interests of union members. However, documents leaked to Jacobin by the “Defend the Unions, Defend the CFMEU” rank and file group directly contradict these claims. According to payroll documents covering the period between August 1 and September 30 this year, the bulk of CFMEU administrators are career Labor Party operatives. Administration started in mid-August, and for roughly one month, they paid themselves over $170,000, taken directly from union coffers.


  • This has been happening for over a year, it’s not sudden just now that there’s an election.

    Its not like trump is any different.

    That’s irrelevant. Just like Liberal and Labor here are both systematically supportive of the Zionist regime, just because one might prefer a party over the other doesn’t make them less worthy of criticism. No-one’s going to say ‘omg biden is complicit in genocide, im going to vote for trump instead!’, or ‘labor leadership have blood on their hands, hopefully the coalition will fix it!’ so I’m not sure what Trump has to do with this at all.





  • Oh, I didnt know about Tuntable Falls. Thanks.

    If we include smaller communes, then Wikipedia has a sizable list of intentional communities which is fun to explore. I found Cheran interesting, they had problems with organised crime coming into town and logging, disappearing people who tried to stop them, and the police and politicians were complicit, so the town kicked them all out. Now if you try to drive in with a political sticker on your car, it will get torn off at the checkpoint. A short Vice video on the place had some interesting interviews, including a local patroller who said crime plummeted and is now basically as simple as pub fights that locals can split up, and an interview with a political representative who was voted in, despite them not really wanting the job as they would get paid more in their previous job at the university. Reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote:

    […] To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. […]







  • The problem isn’t that people are offending people, it’s that neo-Nazis are propagandising proudly in public.

    Banning specific symbols is a non-solution. The symbols aren’t the problem. I tore down some of this group’s stickers this week and none of them had swastikas or salutes on them (they had things like the sonnenrad/“Black Sun” symbol and the NSN’s four-arrow logo blurred out in that article). And if you ban those, they’ll find other wolfwhistles. It’s really not hard to allude, adopt and evade. There are historically successful strategies for dealing with these kind of groups, and they rarely end with the law or police. For example, the BUF in Britain started dissolving after the Brighton police intentionally only sent one officer to their rally so the fascists could have bricks thrown at them by the '43 Group. That’s when Mosley stopped going out in public.

    The fact that they’re doing these petty little masked-up rallies for photo-ops in relatively small rural towns really sings out to the fact that they’re scared of doing this in cities with established anti-fascist presence. They have to travel out to towns (and make no mistake, most of them aren’t even local to the region, they gather from various states just to make up numbers for a small rally) and make unannounced rallies with no-one around just to be safe in public without police protection. Those masks aren’t hiding from police (like some protestors do), they’re hiding from the community.