Tag: australia

U.K. Actress Emaa Hussen Charged with Importing $208m Worth of Meth into Australia

British actress Emaa Hussen was charged in Sydney after allegedly trying to smuggle roughly $208 million worth of methamphetamine into Australia through concealed “charcoal” shipments coming from Ghana, outlets reported.

The BBC reports that Hussen was arrested in a drug bust after allegedly trying to smuggle a massive amount of 320 kilograms of meth from West Africa into Australia. She appeared before a Sydney court on Thursday after being charged with attempting to import a commercial quantity of methamphetamine into Australian territory — which carries a maximum life in prison sentence.

Hussen, 34, is known for her roles in the 2013 film Redemption  and in a spinoff of British soap opera EastEnders that first aired in 2010.  The actress was refused bail last month and is due back in court in August.

The Australian Federal Police informed that it launched an investigation in April after Australian Border Force (ABF) officers in Sydney detected anomalies in shipping containers coming from Ghana. The illicit substance was found concealed in purported bags of coal. Further testing determined the substance to be methamphetamine.

Hussen allegedly attended the storage facility and supervised over several men as they unpacked the container, with a number of bags transported to a house in Blacktown. AFP investigators later executed a search warrant and arrested the British actress.

“Police located 32 bags at the house, which were allegedly those that had previously contained methamphetamine,” AFP said on Thursday. “Electronic devices and a notebook were also seized and will be subject to further forensic examination.”

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Report: Personal Crimes in Gun-Controlled Australia Triple that of Gun-Friendly USA

Personal crimes such as rape and sexual assault are three times higher in gun-controlled Australia than in the USA, a report in the Spectator/Australia on Wednesday details.

Written by Malcolm Roberts and John Lott, Jr., the report begins by explaining that the establishment media’s approach to coverage and the method of compiling crime stats leads many to believe Australia’s “crime rate is low compared with the countries like the United States.”

The media “reinforces the myth” of lower crime while less than 20 percent of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to Australian police. However, in the U.S.,  45 percent of such personal crimes are reported to police. This difference in the level of personal crime reporting skews the figures seen by the populations of both countries and feeds into the establishment media’s low-crime narrative.

After a hard look at the real numbers, Roberts and Lott wrote: “Australia’s rape and sexual assault rate is roughly three times higher than that of the United States. Australia’s assault rate is about twice as high, and its burglary rate is about 2.5 times higher. Robbery is the only category where the two countries report similar rates.”

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Australia Tried To Tax Smoking Out of Existence. Now 80% of Tobacco Aussies Consume Is From the Black Market.

The Australian government has spent the last decade introducing steep tax hikes to curb smoking, and, as a result, the country has the most expensive cigarettes in the world. The average price of mainstream cigarettes is 54.99 Australian dollars per pack (about $40). But the eyewatering prices have driven people to the black market.

In 2025, an estimated 80 percent of the tobacco consumed in Australia was illegal, up from 12 percent in 2017, according to new analysis from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The study, which is the first attempt by the Australian government to estimate the size of the black market, found that “prices for legal tobacco products have almost tripled since December 2016 driven by annual tobacco excise increases, while estimated prices of illicit tobacco products have remained relatively constant.” Since 2020, household spending on legal cigarettes and tobacco has almost halved, but between 2017 and 2025, the amount of nicotine consumed in Australia has risen by almost 40 percent.

Meanwhile, between 2016 and 2025, the price of legal cigarettes nearly tripled while tobacco duty revenue more than halved. As a result, the Australian Treasury has downgraded tobacco excise revenue by $8 billion over the next five years in the latest federal budget.

Lower tax revenue is hardly something to mourn, but Australia’s collapsing legal tobacco market has come with a far darker consequence: a severe wave of gang violence, including firebombings and shootings. Since 2023, organized crime groups linked to Australia’s illicit tobacco and vape market have been tied to “more than 200 firebombings,” “at least 3 homicides,” and “multiple other non-fatal violent attacks,” according to the Australian Intelligence Commission.

“It’s hard to see how it could get any worse,” Rohan Pike, a former Australian Federal Police detective and Border Force member, tells Reason. Pike, who created and led Australia’s Illicit Tobacco Strike Team, says the violence is now an “old-fashioned turf war” and that criminal gangs, attracted by the profits, are fighting to control distribution.

Pike says criminal groups are opening pop-up convenience stores, intimidating legitimate retailers into selling their products, and backing up those threats with “firebombings and other types of violence.” Organized crime syndicates have destroyed hundreds of tobacconists, convenience stores, and hospitality venues, forcing legitimate businesses out. “Every part of the tobacco control policy is uncontrolled at the moment,” says Pike.

Public awareness of the black market rose last year when Katie Tangey, a “completely innocent” 27-year-old woman, was killed in Melbourne in a case of mistaken identity linked to the tobacco wars. “We know it is linked to the illegal tobacco trade. That’s one thing we can say with a high degree of certainty,” Detective Inspector Chris Murray told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “This was always our fear, that someone would die as a result of the tobacco wars and unfortunately this has come to fruition.”

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Australia: Victoria’s Labor government oversees police state raids against anti-war protesters

Victoria’s Labor government under Premier Jacinta Allan is spearheading an increasingly authoritarian offensive against basic democratic rights, deploying counter-terrorism police in pre-dawn raids on the homes of peaceful anti-genocide protesters.

These operations are part of a broader turn to police-state methods by Labor at state and federal level, as it deepens its participation in escalating imperialist violence internationally and imposes a historic assault on the social rights of the working class.

The immediate aim of the raids is to silence and punish those who oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the war on Iran. But their wider purpose is even more sinister: to create an atmosphere of fear, to send a message that anyone who publicly challenges the war drive or the destruction of social conditions can expect to be treated as a security threat, have their home invaded and their life turned upside down.

The most recent raid occurred at about 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday 12 May, when Victoria Police’s Security Investigation Unit (SIU)—a counter-terror squad—descended on the home of an individual known only as “Alex,” an anti-genocide protester who had been arrested at a rally against the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in February.

In an interview with Sydney Criminal Lawyers, Alex said officers smashed open the bathroom door while she was on the toilet and grabbed her phone from her hand.

Alex was not charged, but was handed a notice compelling her to surrender her passwords, which she refused to do. The warrant cited potential offences under Victoria’s newly strengthened “hate” and “incitement” provisions—including “incitement on ground of protected attribute” and “threaten physical harm or property damage on ground of protected attribute”—yet police refused to say what specific words or actions supposedly justified a counter-terrorism raid.

“The SIU is a counterterrorism unit. One of their specialities is disruption. They want to disrupt people perceived as political enemies of the state. They’re also involved in preemptive policing and surveillance,” Alex said.

This was at least the third wave of such operations targeting Melbourne-based pro-Palestinian activists in as many months.

At about 7:00 a.m. on 17 April, roughly 50 Victoria Police officers raided four homes over a satirical guerrilla-theatre protest outside the US consulate on St Kilda Road, held on 26 March in opposition to the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran. The three performers—adopting the stage names Gina Minehard, Moregun Chase and Peta Philewrangler—poured oil and fake blood at the consulate entrance. 

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Australia MOCKED globally for ABSURD laws after Sex Discrimination Commissioner tries to justify “male pregnancy”

Multiple debates from inside Australian Federal Parliament sittings on women’s rights, sex, and gender have instantly gone viral around the world, and fair enough too, because the clips are pure insanity.

Politicians, commissioners, and so-called experts are twisting themselves in knots, desperately avoiding the simple truth: women have established separate rights based on biology, and no, men cannot become women. They cannot even answer the most basic question on earth: What is a woman?

This should not be controversial. It should not even require a parliamentary debate. Yet here we are in 2026, watching highly paid officials struggle with kindergarten-level biology.

It all kicked off after the Federal Court’s absurd Giggle v Tickle ruling, which effectively declared trans women are legally women, flinging the door wide open for biological men into female-only spaces. The backlash has been fierce, with the case now destined for the High Court. In response, Nationals MP Alison Penfold introduced a bill to restore some sanity by protecting women’s spaces, women’s sport, shelters, bathrooms, and change rooms based on biological sex, not feelings.

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Australian Federal Court rules ‘trans women’ are REAL women

Australia’s Federal Court has delivered its long-awaited judgment in the Giggle v Tickle appeal, finding in favour of Roxanne Tickle.

The full court, made up of Justices Melissa Perry, Geoffrey Kennett and Wendy Abraham, handed down the decision today after a two-day hearing last August.

The case involved Sall Grover, founder of the women-only social networking app Giggle, who had removed Roxanne Tickle, a biological male who identifies as a transgender woman, from the platform. Grover appealed an earlier 2024 ruling that found the exclusion amounted to indirect discrimination. Tickle cross-appealed, seeking a finding of direct discrimination and higher damages.

The court ruled that Giggle and Grover directly discriminated against Tickle on the ground of gender identity by excluding them based on their gender-related appearance, as shown in a selfie, and then refusing to readmit them. 

The judges agreed with the original decision on the interpretation of special measures under the Sex Discrimination Act, concluding that the app’s women-only policy did not provide a defence in this instance. They increased the damages award to $20,000, taking into account what they described as aggravating conduct by Grover.

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As People Worry About the Hantavirus, Some Recall This Scary Story Out of Australia

An outbreak of the hantavirus on a cruise ship has many worried we’re about to experience COVID 2.0. The WHO said the other day that this is different, and that the hantavirus — a rat-borne illness — is better known than SARS-CoV-2 was. But with reports that almost two dozen of the cruise ship passengers have returned home, many are worried there’s another pandemic on the horizon.

This writer’s older sons, who were 13 and ten during COVID, both expressed such concerns.

We’ll see what happens, but someone raised a very interesting connection. Two years ago, more than 300 vials containing deadly viruses went missing from an Australian lab. 

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Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban Fails: 73% Ignore It

Australia’s under-16 social media ban has been in force for four months and the headline finding from a new working paper out of the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute is that around three-quarters of the teenagers it targets are ignoring it.

The paper, “Why Bans Fail: Tipping Points and Australia’s Social Media Ban,” surveyed 746 Australian teenagers between March and April 2026. Among 14- and 15-year-olds covered by the ban, only about 27% are complying. The other 73% are still using Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Threads, or Kick, the ten platforms the law designates off-limits to anyone under 16.

The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 took effect on 10 December 2025, making Australia the first country to outlaw teenage social media accounts at the federal level.

More than a dozen other countries and numerous US states are now considering versions of the same approach. The Australian model places enforcement entirely on the platforms, which face penalties of up to A$49.5 million for failing to take “reasonable steps” to keep under-16s off their services. Teenagers themselves face no legal sanction.

The teenagers know this. According to the survey, only 22% of banned teens believe they personally face any consequence for using a banned platform.

47% correctly understand that the consequences fall on the companies. Awareness of the ban is near-universal at 86%. The teens aren’t confused about what the law says. They’ve simply concluded, accurately, that the law isn’t aimed at them.

Getting around the restrictions takes minimal effort. 75% of banned teens describe circumvention as easy or very easy.

The most common workarounds are the obvious ones: lying about age on verification prompts (57%), entering false birthdates at sign-up (44%), borrowing a parent’s or older sibling’s account (42%), and routing through a VPN (30%). 64% of 14- and 15-year-olds in the survey have not had their accounts removed at all. The platforms haven’t found them. A quarter of non-compliers report that a parent, older sibling, or other adult helped them sign up for a new account after a previous one was deactivated.

The researchers also asked teenagers a more interesting question. What share of your peers would need to stop using social media before you stopped? The average answer was 69%. Some teens placed the threshold even higher. The result holds across every way the question was framed, whether the reference group was age peers, classmates, the wider school, or “a typical person your age.” The numbers came out between 62% and 69% in every variant.

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Australia Wants To Force Big Tech to Pay Legacy Media

The Australian government wants to take 2.25% of Meta, Google, and TikTok’s local revenue and hand it to legacy news publishers. The platforms can avoid the bill by signing commercial deals with those same publishers. Either way, money moves from the companies people actually use to read and share information, into the bank accounts of the established media class.

The draft legislation is called the News Bargaining Incentive. The word “incentive” is an odd choice. A levy you can only escape by paying a private third party is a tax with extra steps, and the third party has been chosen for you. Australian Community Media, Nine Entertainment, News Corp Australia, and the public broadcaster ABC sit at the front of the queue.

Communications Minister Anika Wells announced the plan in Sydney on Tuesday. “People are increasingly getting their news directly from Facebook, from TikTok and from Google, and we believe it’s only fair that large digital platforms contribute to the hard work of journalism that enriches their feeds and that drives their revenue,” she said.

The idea treats the act of users sharing links as a form of theft from publishers, rather than what it actually is, which is people choosing to talk about the news on the platforms where they spend their time.

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Report: 60% of Australian Teens Are Evading Social Media Ban

The Molly Rose Foundation (MRF), a British-based group that generally favors online safety measures for children, published research on Monday that found about 60% of Australian teenagers are evading their country’s landmark ban on social media accounts for children under 16.

MRF’s report was entitled “Australia’s Social Media Ban – Is It Working?” The report concluded it wasn’t, not really, although the ban has significantly impacted the online activity of Australian youth.

“There are significant questions about the effectiveness of Australia’s social media ban. Three fifths (61%) of 12–15 year-olds who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts,” the report noted.

MRF found that over half of the 12 to 15-year-olds who used the most perilous of the social media platforms, including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, were still able to access those services. 

Seventy percent of children who responded to the survey, which was conducted in partnership with Australia’s largest online youth panel YouthInsight, said it was “easy” to avoid the social media ban. Fifty-one percent of respondents said the ban made no difference to their online safety, and 14% said they felt less safe after the ban was imposed. 

“This may reflect a range of factors, including their displacement to smaller or more poorly moderated platforms, their experiences on sites not covered by the ban, or a perception that online platforms have pivoted from safety towards prioritizing access restrictions,” the report’s authors ventured.

The ban does seem to have reduced the amount of time children spend online overall, which will likely be taken as a positive development by child safety advocates.

MRF suggested some of the blame for the questionable effectiveness of the ban lies with social media companies, which do not appear to making very aggressive efforts to detect or deactivate accounts created by under-16 users, after headlines were made by a large number of account deactivations in the early months of the ban.

On the other hand, about 5% of the children who evaded the ban were using virtual private networks (VPNs), a tool that has been successfully employed around the world to mask user identities and evade digital censorship. VPNs are a very effective tool for masking user identity, which is why censorious governments are looking for ways to ban them.

MRF noted in passing that one of the earliest government efforts to ban children from online platforms was undertaken by South Korea, which prohibited online gaming for children from midnight to 6:00 a.m., beginning in 2011. The ban “initially resulted in a reduction of time spent online,” but those improvements faded over time, and in fact Internet use by children wound up increasing. The South Korean government eventually discontinued the ban.

MRF felt its report directly contradicted claims by the Australian government that its ban on social media for teens has been “very successful in its early days,” and this could have implications for other countries thinking about bans of their own, including the United Kingdom.

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