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Author: Binoy Kampmark

  • MEDIA

    Dark days for Australian journalism

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 07 June 2019
    9 Comments

    The gradual additions to Australia's national security framework, in the absence of an entrenched constitutional right protecting the press, has made the conditions ripe for such raids. As Andrew Wilkie warns, such matters begin incrementally: a law here, a raid there, then 'one day you wake up and we look like East Germany'.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Boris, Brexit and taking it up to political bull

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 03 June 2019
    2 Comments

    An enduring memory of the 2016 Brexit campaign was the claim by pro-leavers that the EU was extracting some £350 million a week. The claim, ignoring EU subsidies, returns and contributions to Britain, was so outrageously proud and inaccurate, it stuck. Which leads us to a novel citizen's experiment on the issue of lying in politics.

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  • MEDIA

    Christchurch Call vs cybernaut sovereignty

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 20 May 2019

    The troubling feature of this move is that governments are urging online companies to become vigilant gatekeepers and policing agents of internet material. In doing so, an undue degree of importance is placed on the devil of technology rather than the weakness of humanity.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The politics of police shootings

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 02 May 2019
    8 Comments

    Found guilty for the slaying of Justine Damond Ruszczyk, Mohamed Noor became the first police officer to be convicted of murder in Minnesota in 'recent memory'. Minneapolis police spokesman John Elder insisted race had no part to play. A closer reading of the entire process presents a more complex, and troubling picture.

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  • MEDIA

    Assange: Arresting the fourth estate

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 12 April 2019
    20 Comments

    You do not have to be a member of the radical transparency credo to appreciate the dangers of this prosecution exercise. You do not even have to like the man. What we are facing is an attack on the fourth estate, one rebooted and refined by Assange's efforts to facilitate the disclosure of classified material to expose abuses of power.

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  • MEDIA

    Sense and censorship in social media crackdown

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 03 April 2019
    5 Comments

    The thrust of the Morrison government's changes is one of heavy handed and forced deferral, outsourcing government policing by vesting it in social media platforms. Israel's Cyber Unit, by way of contrast, has been seeking the same object via more subtle means, collaborating with Facebook and YouTube to remove errant posts and content.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Policy, not paranoia, is the antidote to Trump

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 26 March 2019
    3 Comments

    The Mueller investigation was meant to be the confirmation of every parochial instance of anti-Trumpism. The mechanism was the supposed Russian connection. It provided a perfect distraction on domestic politics, taking attention away from debates on refugees and borders and discussions on poverty and social reform.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    NZ shooter: The myth of Australian values

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 19 March 2019
    24 Comments

    Penny Wong dismissed Tarrant as un-Australian, a dangerous point given that Australian values have been rather flexible in their deployment. The same treatment is reserved for Anning: 'He does not represent who we are.' The painful truth is that Anning and Tarrant are representative of an aspect of Australian national identity.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Navigating the post-Medivac ugliness

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 15 February 2019
    16 Comments

    Having failed to prevent tinkering to the border protection regime, the Morrison government returned to the well Australian politicians have drawn upon when faced with electoral crisis. Mathias Cormann was no less crude in adopting a mode that speaks wonders to the desperation of a government awaiting its electoral deliverance.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Lecturing Venezuela

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 30 January 2019
    6 Comments

    Think of how it grates with the non-interference doctrine of the UN. Such interference 'must be forcible or dictatorial, or otherwise coercive, in effect depriving the state intervened against of control over the mater in question'. Yet many countries, most purported liberal democracies, have very happily made Venezuela the exception.

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  • MEDIA

    Press wake in fright to Assange prosecution

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 28 November 2018
    6 Comments

    With the evidence of a cobbled prosecution case against Julian Assange irrefutable, the at times previously mute press has become concerned. To get at Assange, goes this fear, is not to punish a narcissist keen to make etches in history; it is, by its very spirit, to attack the entire vocation, cause, and role of journalism proper.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Elegy for Sisto Malaspina

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 15 November 2018
    2 Comments

    What is so urgent here is not a sense of being morbid. Nor, in the main, was there even a vengeful note. This was unalloyed grief, unimpaired by manipulation and political exploitation.

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