Damn, just when I was enjoying it. Facebook has announced that it will restore Australian news pages within days. The social media giant has reached a deal with the Morrison government over Australia’s world-leading laws to regulate Big Tech. So who blinked? Well, both parties have given ground.
It’s a story that will probably be familiar to BFD readers: yet another indigenous corporation involved in a major tourism development is mired in accusations of nepotism and corruption, while local indigenous communities continue to struggle. Only, this time it’s in Northern Australia: the renowned Kakadu National Park,
The diminished crowd at this year’s Australian Open final in Melbourne may not be exactly representative of public opinion in Victoria, but the crowd reaction at the trophy presentation might spell trouble for both the Federal and Victorian governments. For the Victorian government, it might be seen as a
Here in Tasmania, professional Aboriginal agitators are going all-in on their latest campaign: to “hand back” “stolen” Aboriginal petroglyphs in Tasmanian museums. Never mind that, as one local Aboriginal man said, the museums actually saved the artworks from almost certain destruction. His preference, he said, was for the artefacts
Fan Yang Deakin University Robbie Fordyce Monash University Facebook’s “news ban” in response to Australia’s proposed media bargaining code, has been hard to miss if you’ve spent any time on social networks recently. The social media platform has effectively halted all posting of links from Australian news
The world was shocked to discover that gangs of Pakistani Muslims had been allowed to prey, unchecked, on white and Sikh British girls for decades. They were allowed to get away with it because police, social workers and politicians knew all about it – and turned a blind eye. Even after
When the Chinese Communist Party brought the ban-hammer down on Australian exports, from wine to barley, they no doubt expected it to be the short, sharp shock “disrespectful” Australia needed. Instead, it was Beijing which was shocked. Far from folding immediately and begging for forgiveness (and money) from China,
The war between Big Tech and the Australian government is heating up. First shot fired was Google threatening to pull its services from Australia entirely. Now Facebook has gone nuclear and canned all local and international news. The move is the latest in the high-stakes standoff against the Morrison
When it comes to the industrial-scale rape of underage girls by gangs of racist criminals, trying to identify the “worst” aspect of the abomination seems pretty pointless. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that there are some twists to the horror-show that clearly made the victims’ sufferings infinitely worse. One
According to One News, Kiwi international relations experts are aghast at the latest trans-Tasman war of words, which they say is proof of different values and a worsening relationship between Wellington and Canberra. Australia’s decision to strip citizenship from a dual Australian-New Zealand national currently detained in
Ever since ditching the execrable Malcolm Turnbull, the Coalition under Scott Morrison has steadily been turning a paler shade of the deep teal it had become. Although reviled by the left-media as a deep-blue conservative, Morrison is steadily flushing greener as he endlessly panders to the shrill left
Jacinda Ardern is steadily chipping away at the trans-Tasman alliance. Ardern’s incessant fish-wife scolding of her Australian counterparts might play well to her cronies and lickspittles in the NZ media, but she is relentlessly alienating New Zealand’s most important ally – at the same time that she
As I’ve written elsewhere, the Chinese Virus seems to have eaten away at whatever passed for brains in the Western political class. How else to explain such lunacy as the announcement allowing adults to sit on a park bench with one other, or COVID-infected people being rushed out
Does the Chinese Virus rot the brain? Surely nothing else can explain the collective outbreak of mass lunacy that’s struck a great deal of the Western world – including the entirety of its media-political elite. They’ve all gone completely insane. Utter, stark-raving, barking mad. Collectively lost their
