Tag: australia

Mainstream Naysayers Gather As Hopes Rise For 4th Year Of Record Coral On The Great Barrier Reef

In the next few days, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) will issue its annual report on the state of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). For alarmists promoting the Net Zero fantasy the news has been dire over the last three years, with record coral reported across the largest reef in the world.

Such is the obvious despair even daft excuses suggesting it is the wrong type of coral have been heard.

Faced with inconvenient facts, the usual groomed game plan in mainstream media has been to issue dire warnings of possible imminent collapse and then keep schtum when the sensational figures surface.

Recently the BBC gave us its “’underwater bushfire’ cooking Australia’s reefs”. Alas, the Australian Government’s Reef Authority is less cataclysmic in its reporting, noting indications in June this year that there were “no current heat stresses across the Reef”. Between April 14th and May 31st, 342 impact inspections were carried out which found coral bleaching on just three of the 34 reefs surveyed.

Keep reading

Australia Bans YouTube for Children Under 16

The government of Australia has reversed its decision to grant YouTube an exemption from its sweeping ban on social media for children under 16. YouTube’s parent company, Google, is threatening legal action, but Australian officials vowed to push ahead with the ban.

“We can’t control the ocean, but we can police the sharks, and that is why we will not be intimidated by legal threats when this is a genuine fight for the wellbeing of Australian kids,” Communications Minister Anika Wells said when Google threatened to sue.

Australia announced its “world-leading” plan to bar children from using social media in November 2024. Despite resistance from Internet freedom advocates, and difficult questions about precisely how such a ban could be implemented, the relevant legislation was quickly passed, and the ban is set to take effect in December 2025.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese gave a press conference on Wednesday in which he pledged to promote Australia’s social media ban to other countries at the United Nations General Assembly in September.

“I know from the discussions I have had with other leaders that they are looking at this and they are considering what impact social media is having on young people in their respective nations, it is a common experience,” Albanese said, appearing with the parents of children who were bullied to death on social media.

“We don’t do this easily. What we do, though, is respond to something that is needed here,” he said.

YouTube was granted an exemption from the ban when it was passed by Parliament in November, for several reasons. One was that YouTube was viewed as an important source of information for teens, so even though it carried potentially harmful content, the good was thought to outweigh the bad.

LGBTQ groups insisted YouTube was an important resource for gay and lesbian children, while public health groups said they used the platform to distribute important information to young people. Australian parents found YouTube less alarming that competing platforms like TikTok. YouTube also featured less direct interaction between users than most of the social media platforms that troubled Australian regulators.

A final objection to banning YouTube was that logging into the service is not required – visitors can access the vast majority of the platform’s content as “guests.” This meant there was no practical way to hold YouTube accountable for policing the age of its users.

Naturally, many of the platforms that were targeted by Australia’s social media ban resented the exemption granted to YouTube. These complaints might have had some bearing on the government’s decision to cancel YouTube’s exemption.

According to Australia’s ABC News, YouTube was added to the social media ban at the request of eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who wrote a letter to Wells asking for YouTube’s exemption to be rescinded. Inman Grant said her recommendation was based on a survey of 2,600 children that found nearly 40 percent of them had been exposed to “harmful content” while using YouTube.

Keep reading

“Snuff videos as a sales pitch”. Rafael boasts of human testing in Gaza death camps

Australia’s government awards rich contracts to Israeli drone maker Rafael, which skite to investors about killing Palestinians. Stephanie Tran reports.

Israeli weapons manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems has posted a video showing an unarmed man being stalked and killed by a drone in Gaza, using the footage to advertise the weapon responsible for his death.

The video, posted to the company’s official account on X, shows a Spike Firefly loitering munition drone as it hovers above a man walking alone through the rubble of a heavily bombed area. The drone silently tracks the man before detonating directly above him, killing him instantly. 

Meanwhile, a young Palestinian girl, Hala, was executed yesterday with a bullet to the the head fired by a quadcopter drone. It is even more grotesque that Israeli weapons manufacturers are crowing about their human testing labs – which are the killing fields of Gaza.

The Spike Firefly drone, first unveiled by Rafael in 2018, is a lightweight, soldier-deployed loitering munition designed for urban combat. Weighing just three kilograms, the drone is launched from a canister and can fly silently above a target for up to 15 minutes before striking with high precision.

The drone can be operated remotely with a tablet, and its camera feed allows operators to stalk targets in real time.

According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has increasingly relied on drones like the Firefly to kill civilians in Gaza since October 7, 2023, with quadcopters being deployed in densely populated residential areas and refugee camps. Their report documents multiple instances of drones being used to assassinate individuals in violation of international humanitarian law.

Keep reading

The BIZARRE reason why the ABC shielded the Mushroom Killer

A series of leaked internal emails has revealed that ABC News Editorial Policy Manager Mark Maley ordered journalists not to publish “unflattering” photos of Erin Patterson, a woman convicted of murdering three people, out of concern they might cause her emotional “distress”.

The taxpayer-funded images, captured in May by international agency Agence France-Presse, showed Patterson being led into Latrobe Valley court in Morwell. Legal restrictions had initially blocked their release, but those lapsed following Patterson’s conviction on Monday for the murders of her ex-husband’s parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and family friend Heather Wilkinson. She was also found guilty of attempting to murder Ian Wilkinson.

Despite the photos being taken legally in public, and made available to global media, Maley instructed ABC producers not to use them. “Gratuitous invasion on her distress/privacy,” he described them in an internal email, according to media reports.

ABC’s 7.30 executive producer Joel Tozer pushed back, arguing the images were vital for coverage of a highly significant, visually restricted case. “No one has been able to see (Patterson) for the past 10 weeks,” Tozer wrote.

Keep reading

Government REFUSES to release ‘eSafety’ data behind YouTube kids ban

Labor Communications Minister Anika Wells has refused to release the research that underpins the eSafety Commissioner’s push to ban 15-year-olds from using YouTube.

The contentious recommendation, made by eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, has sparked widespread concern among stakeholders and the public. Yet Wells has declined to release the data informing the advice, citing the regulator’s preference to delay publication.

Sky News reports that the eSafety regulator has repeatedly blocked its attempts to access the full research, instead opting to “drip feed” select findings to the public over several months. This is despite the Albanese government expected to make a final decision in just weeks.

A spokesperson for Wells said: “The minister is taking time to consider the eSafety Commissioner’s advice. The minister has been fully briefed by the eSafety Commissioner including the research methodology behind her advice.”

However, the Commissioner’s own “Keeping Kids Safe Online: Methodology” report reveals several weaknesses in the data. The survey relied entirely on self-reported responses taken at one point in time and used “non-probability-based sampling” from online panels, described in the report as “convenience samples”.

Keep reading

‘Delete, Silence, Abolish’: America’s estranged allies ramp up perceived censorship, speech rules

Overt government control of the internet is expanding within America’s increasingly estranged allies and threatening to spill over national boundaries, likely renewing earlier confrontations with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the world’s richest man and creator of America’s newest nascent political party.

The European Union last week made its officially voluntary three-year-old “Code of Practice on Disinformation” legally binding under the Digital Services Act. It’s now a “Code of Conduct” to be used as a “relevant benchmark for determining DSA compliance” for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Bing, TikTok, YouTube and Google Search.

These “very large” online platforms and online search engines were already signatories of the 2022 code, whose commitments include taking “stronger measures to demonetise disinformation,” increasing fact-checking across the EU and its languages and improved reduction of “current and emerging manipulative behaviour.”

Australia imposed an age-verification law for harmful content that makes the Texas law recently upheld by the Supreme Court look like a type-your-age prompt, applying to not only pornography but also “violent content” and “themes of suicide, self-harm and disordered eating,” in the words of eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant.

Last week she registered three of nine “codes” submitted by the online industry, covering “search engine services … enterprise hosting services and internet carriage services such as telcos,” and has sought “additional safety commitments” on remaining codes for “app stores, device manufacturers, social media services and messaging” and broader categories.

The same day, Canada suspended a U.S. tech firm tax to avoid trade recriminations from the Trump administration. Justice Minister Sean Fraser told the Canadian Press that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government is taking a “fresh” look at predecessor Justin Trudeau’s proposed Online Harms Act, which went down in Trudeau’s political downfall.

Anti-censorship group Reclaim the Net flagged pressure on Carney’s government to revive C-63, which famed Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson claims would criminalize wrongthink. Trudeau-appointed Senator Kristopher Wells pressed Government Representative Marc Gold to commit to further criminalizing “hate” in a “questions period” last month.

Keep reading

Australia’s Latest Temporary Military Deployment To Europe Is Connected To Containing China

Australia agreed during last month’s NATO Summit to deploy an E-7 Wedgetail airborne early warning and control aircraft and up to 100 troops to Europe till November at the bloc and Poland’s request in support of Ukraine. This will be carried out under “Operation Kudu”, which “is the Australian Defence Force commitment to the training of Armed Forces of Ukraine personnel in the United Kingdom.” It follows a prior such deployment to Ramstein Air Base so the latest one isn’t really all that newsworthy.

That doesn’t mean that it’s insignificant, however, since it’s important for observers to understand why Australia is continuing to militarily involve itself in a conflict on the opposite side of the planet. The reason is that Australia is doing so as a quid pro quo for Anglo-American support in containing China through AUKUS. Regardless of whether one agrees with it, the Australia government nowadays considers China to be an adversary – largely due to Anglo-American influence – and formulates policy accordingly.

Sending arms to Ukraine, training its troops in the UK, and once again carrying out a temporary military deployment to Europe isn’t just a way to pay back its AUKUS allies, but also a means for obtaining experience in the event that China gets involved in a regional conflict. Whether it’s against Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, and/or the US, Australia expects to involve itself in a similar way as with Russia-Ukraine via the aforesaid means of arms shipments, training, and early warning and control missions.

Moreover, by showing solidarity with NATO in its proxy war on Russia through Ukraine as explained above, Australia hopes that the bloc’s European members will repay the favor if it involves itself in a future AUKUS+ (AUKUS, Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines) proxy war on China. Even though they’d probably do this at their American “daddy’s” behest, albeit as a quid pro quo for “defending Europe from Russia” in this case (as they sincerely but wrongly believe), it’s a suitable pretext for the public.

The larger goal is to craft the perception of a “Global West” that stretches across the Atlantic and Pacific to encompass both halves of Eurasia, thus enabling the US to “Lead From Behind” in containing China in the future and maybe once again Russia too depending on events. Australia’s role is therefore to serve as an example of an Asia-Pacific country contributing to the European front of the US’ present containment campaign against Russia to justify European countries contributing to a future Asian front against China.

Keep reading

Insidious Australian Government in full PANIC MODE destroying all evidence of the Covid CLOT SHOTS including statistics, records and clinical data

The Australian Government is under intense scrutiny following revelations that it plans to destroy vital clinical data and biological samples from the publicly funded QoVAX study, which examined the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

As reported by The Exposé, this move has sparked widespread concern over a potential cover-up, especially in light of the government’s broader pattern of avoiding accountability for vaccine-related harms. Critics argue that the destruction of such irreplaceable evidence would hinder scientific transparency and obstruct justice for those seeking answers.

  • Broken Promises and Legal Evasion: The Australian Government has failed to deliver on its promise to launch a Royal Commission into COVID-19 vaccine harms and has argued in court that it holds no duty of care toward individuals injured by the vaccines.
  • Suppression of Adverse Data: Authorities have neglected to fully investigate over 1,000 reported vaccine-linked deaths, including 35 on the day of injection, and altered statistical methods to obscure a rise in non-COVID excess deaths post-vaccine rollout.
  • Destruction of Critical Evidence: The government is moving to destroy biospecimens and archive data from the QoVAX study—an extensive, taxpayer-funded trial tracking vaccine safety in over 10,000 Queenslanders—despite legal warnings to preserve the materials.
  • Allegations of a Cover-Up: Critics argue that the decision to shut down and erase QoVAX findings amid growing global scrutiny of mRNA vaccine safety reflects a coordinated effort to conceal potential harms and avoid accountability.

Keep reading

Australia Orders Search Engines to Enforce Digital ID Age Checks

Australia has moved to tighten control over the digital environment with the introduction of three new online safety codes, measures that raise pressing privacy and censorship concerns.

These codes, formalized on June 27 under the Online Safety Act, go beyond introducing digital ID checks for adult websites; they also place substantial obligations on tech companies, from search engines and internet service providers (ISPs) to hosting platforms.

Businesses that fail to comply face the threat of significant financial penalties, with fines reaching as high as 49.5 million Australian dollars, or about $32.5 million US.

The codes seek to restrict Australian users’ exposure to material classified under two categories: Class 1C and Class 2.

Class 1C encompasses “online pornography – material that describes or depicts specific fetish practices or fantasies.”

Class 2 covers a broader range of content, from “online pornography – other sexually explicit material that depicts actual (not simulated) sex between consenting adults” (Class 2A), to “online pornography – material which includes realistically simulated sexual activity between adults. Material which includes high-impact nudity” or “other high-impact material which includes high-impact sex, nudity, violence, drug use, language and themes. ‘Themes’ includes social Issues such as crime, suicide, drug and alcohol dependency, death, serious illness, family breakdown, and racism” (Class 2B).

Schedule 1 – Hosting Services Online Safety Code, companies that provide hosting services within Australia, including social media platforms and web hosts, are compelled to implement six compliance measures.

A core requirement obliges these services to manage the risks posed by significant changes to their platforms that could make Class 1C or Class 2 material more accessible to Australian children.

Schedule 2 – Internet Carriage Services Online Safety Code targets ISPs. It mandates the provision of filtering tools and safety guidance to users and empowers the eSafety Commissioner to order the blocking of material deemed to promote or depict abhorrent violent conduct.

The Commissioner has previously exercised similar powers, as in the directive to block footage of a stabbing circulated on X.

Schedule 3 – Internet Search Engine Services Online Safety Code directs search engine providers to roll out age verification for account creation within six months.

These platforms are also instructed to develop systems capable of detecting and filtering out online pornography and violent material by default, where technically feasible and practicable.

Keep reading

Taxpayers WHACKED with $66k legal bill for E-Karen’s failure

The eSafety Commissioner’s failed legal battle against Elon Musk’s social media platform X and Canadian activist Chris Elston — better known as Billboard Chris — will cost Australian taxpayers approximately $66,000.

The Administrative Review Tribunal on Tuesday threw out a takedown order issued by Commissioner Julie Inman Grant in response to a controversial post by Elston criticising the World Health Organisation’s inclusion of radical transgender activist Teddy Cook on a policy panel.

In February 2024, Elston shared a post on X stating: “This woman (yes, she’s female) is part of a panel of 20 ‘experts’ hired by the WHO to draft their policy on caring for ‘trans people’. People who belong in psychiatric wards are writing the guidelines for people who belong in psychiatric wards.”

Inman Grant deemed the post “degrading” and issued a takedown notice to X on March 22, threatening the company with a $782,500 fine if it failed to remove the post. X blocked the content, but subsequently challenged the decision alongside Elston.

On Tuesday, the Tribunal sided with X and Elston, ruling the takedown order invalid. Deputy president Damien O’Donovan stated that there was no evidence Elston intended for Cook to see the post.

“In the absence of any evidence that Mr Elston intended that Mr Cook would receive and read the post, and in light of the broader explanation as to why Mr Elston made the post, I am satisfied that an ordinary reasonable person would not conclude that it is likely that the post was intended to have an effect of causing serious harm to Mr Cook,” the ruling read.

An eSafety spokesperson confirmed the legal challenge had so far cost “approximately $66,000”, and acknowledged the Tribunal’s guidance.

eSafety said it would continue an agenda to “protect Australians from online abuse” while taking the Tribunal’s findings into account.

Keep reading