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How much longer are those who run the AFL going to get away with the unpleasant circumstances surrounding the Adam Goodes affair which ruined his playing career and set a precedent for other players of colour to feel that they are not welcome in the AFL?
How many gay players have been prevented from being themselves because of the ever present homophobia in AFL administration?
If it hadn't been for the release of the film about the Adam Goodes story, nothing would ever have been done to address the issue of racism in the organisation.
The period we are living in is the 21st century, yet in some ways we are no better off than we were in the last century and the preceding ones.
I am not a sport lover, but I am very much against racism, homophobia and extreme hate in all its many forms.
Of course we know that the government aids and abets all of these issues because our governments still operate on the divide and rule principle.
When I left South Africa in 1978 to escape the police state and hope for a new life in Australia, I did know that Australian governments had tendencies similar to police states, in its treatment of its indigenous population, tendencies which have magnified over the years.
Censorship in South Africa was extreme, particularly in relationship to the English-speaking media, because of their anti-apartheid views and the journalists who expressed these views.
Raids on all sorts of organisations - political, media, social - went to extremes and death resulted more often than not and also incarceration for non-crimes but deemed crimes by the police state and its laws and regulations - themselves criminal activities.
Australia has a government which is pressing the security button on every occasion, but one needs to consider what the threats to Australia are and where they are or are not - coming from.
Australia involves itself with wars which threaten Australia's security, but which Australia has no right to be involved with. It has locked up - illegally of course - people fleeing from the terrors of many of the regimes around the world, often supported by the USA and its allies of which Australia plays its part one way or another. These people are locked up in concentration camps in Manus - Papua New Guinea, and Nauru, which is a country with laws similar to dictatorship and from whom all the poor asylum seekers need to be removed immediately.
Attacks by the government on journalists as has happened in the last few days is something which Morrison and Dutton are responsible for, no matter how much they deny it. The next step after this could well be complete censorship and we are well along that road because of the secrecy of the governments operations. What we do know is that we don't know what is going on in this country, and that is dangerous.
My friend Andrew Rubin is an amputee. He’s lost his right hand, lower arm, right foot, and lower leg.
He used to be an avid runner and cyclist. He can’t do much of that
anymore, although his walking is getting much better. Soon he might be
able to run with his artificial leg.
Andrew is incredibly lucky.
The medical catastrophe that left his hand and foot so terribly
damaged didn’t kill him. But when his limbs never healed even after a
decade, he decided to undergo the amputations. It was his choice, and it
was made much easier because he knew what lay ahead: the most advanced
artificial limbs ever imagined. The kids call him Bionic Man now.
Andrew is lucky for another reason: He doesn’t live in Gaza.
According to the United Nations, 1,700 young Gazans are facing amputation,
mainly of their legs, in the next two years. They’re among the 7,000
unarmed Palestinians in Gaza shot by Israeli snipers over the last year.
Since last spring, thousands of Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Gaza
have poured out of their teeming refugee camps and houses every Friday
to join nonviolent protests, demanding an end to the siege that’s
destroying their lives, and the right to return to the homes Israel
displaced them from.
Even though they were nonviolent, they were met by Israeli snipers
from the beginning. Children, journalists, and medics were targeted too.
International law prohibits using live fire against unarmed civilians
unless the police or soldiers are in imminent danger of death. That’s
not the case in Gaza. A UN investigation of 189 killings during the
first nine months of the protests found that Israeli forces may have committed war crimes.
More than 220 Palestinians have been killed so far. Stunningly, more
than 29,000 have been wounded — including those 7,000 by live fire. So
far, 120 have had to endure amputations — including 20 children.
Anyplace else, their limbs might’ve been saved.
But Gaza has been under Israeli military siege for more than 10
years. Hospitals are massively under-equipped, many of them seriously
damaged by Israeli bombing. The delicate surgery needed to save
shattered bones is virtually impossible there, and the surgeons have no
access to the most up-to-date methods.
Andrew had a choice about his amputations. Gazans don’t.
Otherwise, those
1,700 young Gazans face the catastrophic loss of arms and legs, or risk
dying of infection. They’ll have virtually no access to the advanced
artificial hands, legs, and feet that my friend Andrew uses.
Unfortunately, U.S. taxpayers are funding this madness.
Every year, we send $3.8 billion directly to the Israeli military —
no strings attached — and American companies make the tear gas and other
weapons that Israel deploys against demonstrators. Washingto
n makes
sure that no Israeli officials, political or military, are ever held
accountable at the United Nations for potential war crimes.
Crueler still, the Trump administration has cut off funding
for the very UN refugee agency that staffs health clinics in Gaza, even
as it funds the Israeli military that’s filling them with gunshot
victims.
The protests, overwhelmingly nonviolent, continue — and the killing
has continued too, week after week. Meanwhile, there are so many
disabled kids in Gaza now that the beleaguered territory is setting up special sports leagues for them.
Israel needs to call off its snipers, lift the siege of Gaza, and
stop violating the human and political rights of Palestinians. And until
they do, American taxpayers need to close their checkbook.
It is disingenuous for the South African Jewish Board of Deputies to
single out a leader of the ANC, as if the Minister of International
Relations and Cooperation, Lindiwe Sisulu, was not implementing and
promoting ANC policy.
A
story is told of how two ladies, one day, spotted Nelson Mandela and
Joe Slovo. One wondered who the white man was with Madiba, the other
responded: “That’s not a white man, that’s Joe Slovo.” May
23 this year marks the 93rd birth of Yossel Mashel Slovo better known
to us as Joe Slovo or JS. As his name suggests, he was born in Obeliai,
Lithuania, to a Jewish family and came with his family, aged eight, to
South Africa in 1934. While his father was a truck driver and fruit
vendor in Johannesburg, Slovo left school at the age of 15 to start
working as a dispatch clerk later becoming a shop steward for the
National Union of Distributive Workers. A
year after leaving school, he would join the Communist Party of South
Africa, which would later become the SACP, and volunteered to fight
against the Nazis during the World War ll. Eventually, as we all know,
JS would become the General Secretary of the SACP while having been the
first white person to be elected to the National Executive Committee of
the ANC at Kabwe in 1985. He would be a sworn enemy of the apartheid
regime. Up
to the talks about talks at Groote Schuur, Joe Slovo was an item on the
agenda for the Nationalist Party. FW de Klerk and his colleagues hated
Slovo so much that they demanded that he not be included in the ANC’s
delegation. Madiba would hear none of it. Yet one wonders why they hated
him so much. Was
it because he was a Communist or Chief of Staff of umKhonto weSizwe?
Was it because he was a white man and therefore seen as a betrayer of
white people in South Africa? Or was it because he was a Jew? Even
though JS was an atheist, he would remain faithful to Jewish culture. He
would later marry another prominent Jewish anti-apartheid activist,
Ruth First. Yet
the story of JS and Madiba sums up the view that the ANC has had not
only of white people but also Jews. On the one hand, the story
illustrates that non-racialism which has been the foundation of the ANC,
more specifically from the days of the Freedom Charter. On the other
hand, it tells of an ANC that is simply not anti-Semitic. In
fact, the expulsion of the Gang of Eight, after the Morogoro Conference
in 1969, a conference JS played an instrumental role in, exemplifies
the intolerance that the ANC, whose membership was opened to all races
by this time, had of those Africanist members within its number that
criticised the organisation for being “hijacked by minorities”. Like
those who left the ANC in the late Fifties to form the Pan Africanist
Congress, the Gang of Eight were dissatisfied with the role and
prominence played by people such as Joe Slovo in the ANC’s leadership. Fundamental
to the understanding of the ANC, based on the universal principles of
the Freedom Charter, was that despite the fact that oppression under
apartheid was being led by and favoured white people, it could by no
means condemn or in fact judge all White people. Similar to the notion
of “an injury to one is an injury to all”, the ANC believed that, as
Archbishop Desmond Tutu would put it, freedom would free not only the
oppressed but the oppressor as well. White people themselves needed
liberation from the chains of apartheid. The
condemnation of the human rights atrocities perpetrated by the
apartheid Israeli regime is therefore not a condemnation of all Jewish
people. Far from it. In fact, the ANC believes that just as white people
needed liberation from the chains of apartheid, so too Israelis need
liberation from the atrocities perpetrated by the apartheid state of
Israel. The ANC will never hold all Jews responsible nor even condemn
them for the atrocities of Israel just as it never held white people, as
a group, responsible for the atrocities of the apartheid regime in
South Africa. The
ANC has a long history of the involvement of Jews in its membership and
its fight for freedom. It would be anathema for it and its members, and
especially its leaders, to be anti-Semitic and in fact one could be
disciplined for “sowing racism, sexism, tribal chauvinism, religious and
political intolerance, regionalism or any other form of
discrimination”. (Rule 25.17.6 of the Constitution of the ANC.) It
is therefore disingenuous and somewhat dangerous for the national
vice-president of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies firstly to
single out a leader of the ANC, as if Lindiwe Sisulu was not simply
implementing and promoting ANC policy and, secondly to thereby suggest
that the ANC is anti-Semitic because it condemns the atrocious abuses of
human rights in the Occupied Territories and the crimes perpetrated
against Palestinians globally. Even
more so, it is questionable for the SJBD to speak on behalf of South
Africa’s Jewry, as if there are not Jews who do not currently support
the State of Israel and even worst to suggest that they are lesser Jews
because they do not support Israel. If
Israel wishes to recall its ambassador to Pretoria, as a sovereign
state it has all the right to do so. The ANC and, in particular South
Africa as a sovereign state, should beg no country to keep its
ambassador in place where it does not wish to be represented. In fact,
the remarks made by the vice-president of the SAJBD are sectarian and
radical in themselves because it serves to cause anxiety and
apprehension about the ANC administration under President Cyril
Ramaphosa by suggesting that South Africa’s Jewry has an enemy. As
in the last 25 years of democracy, South Africa’s Jewry have nothing to
fear and have no enemies. What is well within the government of South
Africa, they would find, are enemies of discrimination, enemies of human
rights atrocities and enemies of violence. The
words of Nelson Mandela, who was seen with Comrade Joe Slovo by those
two ladies in that story, continue to reverberate across our country and
the ANC continues to listen to them. “As long as the Palestinian people
are not free, South Africa will not be free.” As long as Palestinian
people are not free even South Africa’s Jewry will not be free. DM Jessie Duarte is Deputy Secretary General of ANC
Electric vehicle charging startup takes on world first, Australia second
Labor's
ambitions to ramp up electric vehicles may be in tatters but some small
Australian startups are amongst world leaders in the sector.
Brisbane-based
Tritium manufactures the fastest electrical vehicle charging stations
in the world with 95 per cent of its production exported.
Dr
Michael Hajesch, chief executive of IONITY and Dr David Finn, chief
executive and co-founder of Tritium with a charging station in Germany.
"This
is a critical piece of infrastructure that allows electric vehicles to
make sense," co-founder and chief executive David Finn says.
Mr
Finn started Tritium in 2001 with his former university class mates Paul
Sernia and James Kennedy after they met as part of a university solar
car racing team.
"Back
in '99 we were driving across Australia on the power of a toaster and
it made you think 'there must be a better way of doing this'," Finn
says.
Production of electric bowsers at Tritium. Credit:Robert Shakespeare
Focus on charging
The
trio turned their attention to electric cars but decided to focus on
charging stations after identifying it as the key component enabling
easy uptake of electric vehicles.
"It
is high power to make it convenient," Finn says. "We really focused on
what we thought the driver wanted and brought that to the market place."
For
the first 10 years Tritium was in business the co-founders funded the
startup themselves and once they pivoted to focus on charging stations a
Commercialisation Australia grant took Tritium "from a bench top
project to something commercially viable".
"From there it has been the story of a growth company, we have had multiple funding rounds," Finn says.
"We launched in European and the North American market and have been riding a wave ever since."
We were driving across Australia on the power of a toaster and it made you think 'there must be a better way of doing this'.
David Finn
Its
biggest single customer to date is Ionity, a startup funded by
Volkswagan, BMW, Ford and Daimler which operates a charging network
across Europe.
"The
car companies have spent billions developing vehicle technology and
don't want to run the risk of people making a buying decision to stay
with a petrol car because they can't charge," Finn says.
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The company involved hopes to build one hundred more by the end of the
year but says Australia could miss an important window to the
potentially lucrative industry.
Heading for unicorn status
Over the past three years the startup's revenue has doubled every year and it employs 250 people.
Tritium turned over $13.4 million in 2017, $34 million in 2018 and is on track for turnover of $65 million this financial year.
"Even
if you just extrapolate that through for six years that is a billion
dollar company," says Finn. "We think it is going to accelerate because
the market place is changing. More vehicles to the marketplace will
accelerate adoption," he says.
Tritium is a Brisbane company that produces electric vehicle chargersCredit:Ruth McCoskerAustralia is among the top 20 nations for new car purchases but electric vehicles represent only 1.2 per cent of sales.
That
is set to change with only 11 models of electric car available in
Australia at the moment and 60 different models set to be available in
the next few years.
"Another factor is the price of batteries
dropping, they will reach parity with internal combustion energy in the
next few years," Finn says. "For us our focus is on making sure that the
petrol station equivalent is there."
Australian 'laggards'
While Tritium's chargers are being snapped up overseas, its products have not got the same traction in the Australian market.
Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon Brookes questioned why there was not more support for Tritium on Twitter last month.
"Fastest
chargers in the world," he tweeted. "Made in Australia. Manufacturer.
Exporter. Absolutely massive growth industry. And 20 per cent of the
jobs of Adani construction phase (not running the mine). From one Aussie
tech startup. Imagine if we leaned in?"
Tritium's technology is being used in Australia on a small scale through startup ChargeFox's network.
ChargeFox won
$6 million in funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency to
roll out an ultra-rapid charging network along the major driving routes
from Brisbane to Adelaide, including around Sydney and Melbourne, and
separately in Western Australia.
Marty Andrews is the co-founder of ChargeFox.
ChargeFox co-founder Marty Andrews says the startup has raised $17 million and is building 22 sites across the country.
"We
use a couple of different charging station manufacturers including
Tritium," Mr Andrews says. "It's an Australian-based company and they
create chargers as good as any in the world, there are only a handful of
companies that make these products. It's ironic to have them in our
backyard in a country which, frankly, has been a global laggard in the
industry."
Mr Andrews says it is hard for car manufacturers to bring cars to Australia if there is nowhere to charge them.
"We
are helping to break the chicken egg cycle and to give manufacturers
confidence to bring cars to Australia," he says. "We have the tech and
ability to do it here in Australia."
With the Putin/Russia Collusion Fairytale debunked, the undeniable
cancer of real foreign interference in our government demands an honest
airing.
Since American politics is mortally corrupt, one might wonder why
bother to expose one prime cause of its ethical degeneracy. If the
beast is dead, what use is determining what killed it? Well, it isn’t
quite dead and we have to live with it. If the public knew one country
has done more to subvert our government than all others combined it
might raise enough hell to stop it.
In terms of influence, there can be no serious denial that Israel
exerts by far the most powerful suasion of any foreign power on
America. Influence exerted by a foreign power’s registered lobby is
legitimate per our toothless protocol. Israel’s is not so registered,
but… details, details. So, when Republicans invite Bibi to smarmily
insult a sitting President in a joint session of Congress, that’s
influence, not interference. When, besides financing most Senators and
Representatives elections, Israel takes them on cushy, free PR junkets
to Tel Aviv, that’s influence, not interference.
Conversely, when Clintonista subversion of the Sanders campaign
appears on Wikileaks and is instantly imputed to Russia and
Putin–without proof and against expert technical evidence–that’s not
influence, it’s Russki interference. More absurdly, when–again, without
proof–the same Dem CFOs howl that Putin Trolls bought chump change
worth of dingy ads on Facebook that swung the election to Trump that’s…
but you get the picture.
What is obvious and has long been so–and has been emphasized by two
years of fraud and insanity regarding imagined Russian collusion–is that
influence is what your friends have; interference is what your enemies
do.
Why, when it is so blatantly obvious as to be a source of outspoken
pride for them, is the fact that Israel’s right-wing ruling clique
brazenly and continually interferes in American government in the most
aggressive and offensive way, universally denied? You want flagrant
foreign collusion with high officials in U.S. government? Open your
eyes. And your mind…
The reason it’s officially denied is that Israel’s Congressional
whores know that not to do so violates their deal. Not to back Israel
unquestioningly terminates it, and the loss of that money means loss of
office… to say nothing of the beating they’d take in the press and on
their reputations.
The great mass of Americans won’t admit what many can’t help but know
because they, too, fear being attacked for such bold honesty. They are
equally vulnerable to rough handling from the same source: the
massively powerful Israel Lobby, a unified phalanx of militant American
Zionists.
To be clear: Zionism has always insisted that Israel exists for Jews only.
The Israel Lobby–financed by vast American Zionist wealth–potent as
it is, could not leverage our politics if its tactics were exposed, and
it knows it. History gives it the key that makes rational assessment
of Israel’s policies impossible: the Holocaust and the true
anti-Semitism that was its cause.
Evocation of that horror allows any critique of Israeli government to
be sleazily labelled Anti-Semitism, and so to effectively nullify
argument. The dishonest and cynical Israel Lobby uses this tactic
shamelessly to blunt and derail sound criticism or even plain
examination of Israeli state behavior.
What then is Anti-Semitism? By definition it is antipathy or hatred of the Jewish people as a whole. An Anti-Semite espouses that categorical prejudice, and Anti-Semitism in word or deed pertains to Jews in toto. In contrast, behavior that is ugly, hateful, or injurious but not directed
at Jews as a whole, though execrable, is not Anti-Semitic, just as it’s
possible to hate a Catholic or Muslim without hating their religion or
their people.
It follows then, that criticism, even vicious, hateful criticism of
the Israeli State, is not inherently Anti-Semitic, and the claim is
false on its face. To attack the Israeli State is not to attack Jews as
a people since Israel is not home to most of Jewry and its polity by no
means defines or represents Jews in all their broad, complex range of
beliefs, practices, and principles.
To say that criticizing the brutal, repressive apartheid Israeli
government’s actions is Anti-Semitic is no more legitimate than to say
that condemnation of the American State’s vicious imperialist wars makes
one anti-American.
This disingenuous con needs to named and refuted around the world.
Is there criticism of Israel that is clearly Anti-Semitic? Of
course, there is! Plenty of it. Anti-Semitism is no less real and evil
because it does not apply to all critiques of Israel or all insults to
Jews or Jewish entities. Precisely because Anti-Semitism is so
vile and toxic a disease, and because it will continue to live in its
odious carriers, it is critically important not to vitiate the
ubiquitous contempt it arouses by cynically muddling its meaning.
The dishonest and defensive crying of wolf that the government of
Israel and the Israel Lobby deploy against any criticism of their
history and policy is, in addition to being morally contemptible, deeply
counterproductive in terms of Israel’s standing in world opinion.
Mounting a transparently false, blanket, all-purpose lament as a cover
for their most obvious and glaring crimes and cruelties cannot prevent
the world from seeing them for the corrupt and unjust power they are and
fiercely, adamantly opposing them.
Beyond the damage Israel’s cowardly dishonesty does to itself, a more
critical concern for Americans concerns what it has done and is doing
to exacerbate the rolling debacle of our misruled and floundering
country. The Israel Lobby, Zionism’s American voice, wielding the bogus
trope of Anti-Semitism as a club, infects and pollutes through its
agents and activists every niche of our government from the Presidency
and Congress, to Federal Departments and Bureaus, to State and local
offices.
Without Zionist acceptance Trump would not have been President, but
neither would Obama. Through the Lobby’s diligence we have made our
country hated by carrying Israel’s dirty water in the Middle East,
crippled and hamstrung enlightened policy at home, and been afflicted
with such creatures of nightmare as the Harpy, Nikki Haley, bughouse
pseudo-Christian loon, Mike Pompeo, and murderous psychopath, John
Bolton.
Nothing suggests the death grip Israel and its Lobby have on our fate
can be broken. So long as the Anti-Semitic Con is viable, even our
security is in jeopardy with its blind, sick, demented chosen monsters
in charge.
The fable of the eagle and scorpion comes painfully to mind. When
the bird, stung and bearing them both down to death, asks how the
scorpion could sting it after swearing not to do so, it replies, “You
knew what I was when you let me ride.” It was all too clear what Israel
was in 1947.
