News by Leisa Scott
Premium Content
Subscriber only Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to believe that tucked away in the perfectly ordinary Brisbane suburb of The Gap, lived a family of spies. Mum, Dad and the three kids. They went on holidays to the Gold Coast with Soviet defectors, the Petrovs. Dad did the books for Abe Saffron, one of Australia s most notorious underworld figures. They d pop into the city looking like an everyday family posing for happy snaps but that was a ruse; they were busy collecting intelligence on could-be Communists. If it s a mission too outlandish, too impossible for you, that s understandable. Even the woman who lived this story finds big chunks of her childhood hard to believe.
Australia is a vibrant multicultural democracy with robust institutions, but in 2020 the global Black Lives Matter movement refocused attention on the severe disadvantage suffered by First Nations people in Australia, particularly the overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in prison and high rate of deaths in custody.
While Australia largely contained the spread of Covid-19, a severe outbreak in Victoria after a mismanaged hotel quarantine scheme led to more than 700 deaths, mostly residents of aged care homes. Police efforts to enforce curfews and lockdowns during the pandemic raised concerns over freedom of expression and the misuse of police powers.
Tuesday, 12 January 2021, 3:27 pm
Tom Peters
The report of the Royal Commission of
Inquiry into the Christchurch terror attack, made public
last month, asserts that there was no way any state agency
could have detected fascist gunman Brenton Tarrant and
prevented his massacre of 51 people on March 15,
2019.
This finding is not supported by evidence. All
the inquiry’s hearings were held in secret. Thousands of
pages of submissions, and hundreds of interviews, have been
permanently suppressed.
The commission’s
predetermined purpose was to whitewash the New Zealand and
Australian intelligence agencies and police, and to cover up
the role of governments in both countries in whipping up
New Zealand inquiry covers up police dismissal of anti-Muslim threats prior to 2019 terror attack
The report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch terror attack, made public last month, asserts that there was no way any state agency could have detected fascist gunman Brenton Tarrant and prevented his massacre of 51 people on March 15, 2019.
Al Noor mosque in Christchurch (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
This finding is not supported by evidence. All the inquiry’s hearings were held in secret. Thousands of pages of submissions, and hundreds of interviews, have been permanently suppressed.
The commission’s predetermined purpose was to whitewash the New Zealand and Australian intelligence agencies and police, and to cover up the role of governments in both countries in whipping up racism and Islamophobia, including through participation in US imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The final report was vetted and approved by the intelligence agencies themselves p