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Binoy Kampmark
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Binoy Kampmark - Latest News [Page 88]
Idiot Voters and Trolling the Internet: Russia and the US
Tuesday, 14 November 2017, 5:24 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The program usually pokes fun, riddles and irks a fourth estate that has long given up the chase for verity. Media Watch , after years of weather beaten but reliable service, remains Australia’s only real source of genuine critical comment about ... More >>
Trans-Pacific Follies: Australia Asleep as Canada Wakes Up
Monday, 13 November 2017, 7:31 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It was as dreary as listening to the formulaic assessments of political economy by an unreconstructed Leninist. But Sunday morning with Steve Ciobo, Australia’s trade minister, was such an occasion. More >>
War Commemoration Porn: Remembrance Day Celebrations
Monday, 13 November 2017, 2:09 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The officials are called one by one to lay wreathes, a ceremony of mechanical efficiency. With each laying comes the sense of wonder at how this could happen. Political figures are the first to vote in parliaments and side with the executive when it comes to ... More >>
Fixations of Propriety: The Manus Closure Scandal
Saturday, 11 November 2017, 10:50 pm | Binoy Kampmark
When confronted with the spectacle of the malnourished, the impoverished, the famine stricken, and the desperate, the Australian political instinct is simple: Why did these poor fools get themselves into this mix? With each wave of refugees arriving ... More >>
When Illness Matters: Massacre in Texas
Thursday, 9 November 2017, 10:03 am | Binoy Kampmark
The massacre at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs was, to put it simply, effective and spectacular. It also had the resonances of the primeval, ignoring the sanctity of the church in favour of murder within it. The alleged assailant managed ... More >>
A Triumph of Accountancy: The Paradise Papers
Tuesday, 7 November 2017, 5:42 pm | Binoy Kampmark
This was another case of the big and the powerful undercutting the tax systems of the world. But could anyone be genuinely surprised at the revelations to come out of the Paradise Papers on the workings of the tax haven industry? More >>
Binoy Kampmark: Why WikiLeaks Was Right
Monday, 6 November 2017, 1:58 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It took some time of muzzling and concealment before the horror, but various Democrats have finally come clean about the Hillary Clinton machine: things were, it seems, rigged, stacked, and doctored. This was the language of Bernie Sanders and Donald ... More >>
Fallon’s Fall: Sexual Harassment Storm in UK Politics
Monday, 6 November 2017, 10:01 am | Binoy Kampmark
Sexual harassment - it’s revelation, that is - is all around at the moment, a toxic cold that is giving political establishments not so much a sneeze as debilitating pneumonia. In Britain, the cold covered various parties, initiating investigations, ... More >>
The Deepening Crisis on Manus
Sunday, 5 November 2017, 12:55 pm | Binoy Kampmark
What a weekend it has been. The Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea may well have closed, but the protests, and those resident at the camp, continue to defy and prevaricate. At a protest in Melbourne on Saturday, Australian Greens ... More >>
A Lethal Gift: The Halloween Attack, Trump and Immigration
Friday, 3 November 2017, 2:35 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It could not have been scripted better for the demagogues and security hysterics. With the country still grieving in confusion in the aftermath of the Las Vegas slayings, inflicted by an individual who resisted the classification of terrorist at the hands ... More >>
Binoy Kampmark: Chaos on Manus Island
Tuesday, 31 October 2017, 12:25 pm | Binoy Kampmark
There are standoffs, threats and continuing tensions over the imminent closure of the Manus Island Detention Centre. (The politically palatable term here is “processing centre”.) This closure, instigated by legal ruling by the Papua New Guinea Supreme ... More >>
The Last British Empire Paedophile Artist - Donald Friend
Monday, 30 October 2017, 8:45 am | Binoy Kampmark
Righteousness is never pretty, and it tends to often respond after the fact. The fallen hero, or at least the figure shrouded in mystery, is suddenly found to be a creature of ill repute, tarnished, and therefore, in need of emotional and psychic ... More >>
Strafing Parliament: Australia’s Citizenship Ruling
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 1:09 pm | Binoy Kampmark
And they fell like ninepins. Weeks of predictions, optimistic readings, and hopeful signs were dashed as the members of the highest court of Australia laid waste to members of Parliament. Citing a section in the Australian constitution that has become ... More >>
Pirating into the Czech Elections
Thursday, 26 October 2017, 5:08 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The Pirate Party are buccaneering their way into European politics, having found a foothold in the testy soil of Central Europe after colonising, in small measure, various hamlets in Sweden, Germany and Iceland. The Czech Pirates (PPCZ), a term ... More >>
Corker and Flake Take Aim: GOP Rumblings Against Trump
Thursday, 26 October 2017, 4:15 pm | Binoy Kampmark
GOP members were fuming. Republican Senator Bob Corker of the Foreign Relations Committee was incandescent; Senator Jeff Flake oozed regret and despondency. Both spoke with the freedom of those not seeking re-election, a chance, in other words, to ponder ... More >>
US Soldiers in Niger: A Hidden Global Mission
Wednesday, 25 October 2017, 10:08 am | Binoy Kampmark
Empires of scale are often spread thinly across fields of operations. Vast, often opaque functions on the ground are not necessarily conveyed with accuracy to the metropolitan centre. Command structures, for all the sophistication of instant modern ... More >>
Environmental Protest: Bob Brown wins in Australia
Wednesday, 25 October 2017, 10:07 am | Binoy Kampmark
Environment activists and watchers will be detaching themselves briefly from their various points of resistance to observe the implications of a High Court decision in Australia that was handed down last week. The decision found that various anti-protest ... More >>
When Conspiracies Meet: Donald Trump & the JFK Files
Tuesday, 24 October 2017, 9:27 am | Binoy Kampmark
It seems the perfect recipe, a union of minds and fates. A case, long disputed, deliberated over, conspired over, meets a modern US president who favours the notion of birther theories, rigged systems, corrupt elites and corrosive establishments. As President ... More >>
A Matter of Fifty Degrees: Climate Change in Australia
Sunday, 22 October 2017, 10:32 am | Binoy Kampmark
A country baked to the core, its citizens roasted, an electricity grid battered to its limits. Capital cities trapping scorching heat, toasting its citizens and assaulting the young, the elderly, the infirm with temperature fluctuations. This is the vision ... More >>
The Trans-Tasman Spat Show: NZ-Aust Tensions
Friday, 20 October 2017, 1:29 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It was an awkward moment for Australia’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop. News had arrived that a New Zealand government had been formed after a lengthy period of deliberation. (The election took place on September 23.) More >>
