Michael Bradley

1 month ago | theshot.net.au | Michael Bradley

As the saying goes, everything the Nazis did was legal, under German law. Hitler began by being lawfully elected, then invited to form government and become Chancellor under the constitution, following which he suspended everyone’s civil rights, suborned parliament and made increasingly repressive laws. Since government consists of three arms, you need to capture or neutralise all three if you want to be a proper fascist.

1 month ago | crikey.com.au | Michael Bradley

Israel has recommenced its war on Gaza, with airstrikes that killed more than 400 Palestinian people, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The psychology of this is deeply depressing. On the receiving end, an American doctor in Gaza was reported as saying:All I could think was: we’re going back to this, and the world is going to continue to not care.

1 month ago | crikey.com.au | Michael Bradley

Much has been said and written about the explosive-laden caravan in Dural that was never going to explode, most of it hyperbolic and almost all of it wrong. The story ran and ran all the way to Canberra, where the government swiftly rushed through amendments to federal criminal laws regarding hate crimes, caving to Peter Dutton’s demands to include mandatory minimum jail terms — in direct contradiction of standing Labor Party policy.

1 month ago | crikey.com.au | Michael Bradley

Universities Australia (UA), the peak body for our 39 universities, has adopted a definition of antisemitism, with the consequence that the definition is now an embedded feature of each institution’s self-regulation. The adoption of a sector-wide definition was a key recommendation of a joint parliamentary committee, which found there was an “urgent need for reform” to ensure the safety of Jewish students and staff.

2 months ago | theshot.net.au | Michael Bradley

Nobody ever worked out exactly what crime Antoinette Lattouf had committed; but they didn’t miss in ensuring she was punished for it. Watching the seemingly endless parade of ABC apparatchiks through the witness box of the Federal Court, one was struck by two things: the stark whiteness of the power structure of the national broadcaster; and the intensity of everyone’s denial that they were in any way personally responsible for the decisions that were made.