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On this episode, Paul Barclay talks with Kieran Pender, associate legal director at the Human Rights Law Centre. Kieran says that current laws leave whistleblowers unsupported, vulnerable to retribution and liable for prosecution. Australia needs to lower the cost of courage in the public interest.

This discussion was recorded on Wednesday 29 January 2025, and things may have changed since the recording.

Order What’s the Big Idea? 32 Big Ideas for a Better Australia now, via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Kieran Pender, Associate Legal Director at the Human Rights Law Center // @KieranHRLC

Host: Paul Barclay, Walkley Award winning journalist and broadcaster // @PaulBarclay

Show notes:

Whistleblowing While You Work: Using Rewards for Whistleblowing to Uncover White-collar Crime by Jack Thrower, the Australia Institute (October 2024)

Like millions of Americans across the United States (and beyond), I spent part of yesterday at a No Kings protest. I attended ours here in Santa Fe, where attendance estimates ranged between 5000-7000, several thousand more than expected. I had the pleasure and honor of being quite involved in the planning and in activities at the protest, working with my marvelous fellow members of Indivisible Santa Fe.

Before the event I did multiple radio interviews and one political podcast for the Santa Fe New Mexican. I also worked hard advising Indivisible Santa Fe about safety and law-abidingness, especially because No Kings – Santa Fe included a sidewalk march on what turned out to be the hottest day of the year so far.

In the pre-No-Kings interviews, I found it easy to draw a line between the rather quaint sounding "No Kings" label and the need to fight Trump's ever-more assertive efforts at dictatorship. We must keep exercising our First Amendment rights, a cornerstone of U.S. constitutional democracy. As I told the crowd in Santa Fe: just showing up to protest what the Trump regime is doing and and seeks to do is itself a manifestation of a rejection of authoritarianism.

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

Text originally published May 26, 2025

Buy my new book “A Genocide Foretold"

Join me for a live Q&A on my YouTube channel and X account tomorrow, Monday June 16 at 7:00 pm ET. We will discuss the ongoing developments in regards to the Middle East; war with Iran, the genocide in Gaza, politically driven assassinations in America and more. Questions will be taken from the comment section of this Substack post, as well as during the live on YouTube/X. To post your questions here, you must be a paid subscriber to my Substack.

For those who miss the stream, don’t worry — it will be available to watch on all platforms once it’s finished. Hope to see you there.

It was to be their very own tax that would grow with the economy. They could use that revenue to fund their responsibility to provide hospitals, schools, aged care, and housing, to name but a few.

But it turns out that the GST isn’t a growth tax.

GST revenue has grown slower than the economy and certainly slower than the cost of the services that they need to supply.

The ACT government needs to efficiently manage all the money it spends.

It needs to be striving to make the most of what it has. But that goal is being used as an excuse to accept that vital parts of government are underfunded.

Efficiencies are not going to solve the chronic shortage of public housing. They are not going to solve long hospital waiting lists.

We need to accept that the ACT government, as well as all the other state governments are lacking the revenue to do anything but fiddle at the edges of some of our biggest issues.

Fortunately, Australia is a wealthy, low-tax country and there are plenty of ways we can raise additional revenue.

The Greens’ recent proposal to increase the top rate of payroll tax is a great example of how more revenue can be raised from those who can most afford it.

What City Observatory Did This Week

The ODOT accountability charade.  The pat political answer to the problem of chronic cost-overruns on Oregon DOT highway projects running into the hundreds of millions of dollars is that the Legislature will insist on “accountability” in its new multi-billion dollar transportation package. But all of the so-called accountability measures are just transparent gimmicks—re-arranging the organizational deck chairs, or management buzzwords—none of which have any demonstrated effectiveness in lowering or even managing costs.  Case in point, the new “transportation package” bill, HB 2025, claims it will increase accountability by having the Governor appoint the head of ODOT.  That is exactly the opposite of what the 2017 Legislature claimed it was doing to “increase accountability” by taking the appointment power away from the Governor, and vesting it in the Oregon Transportation Commission.

Thank you, everyone, for your thoughtful questions! I answered most and tried to address the main points of those I didn’t include. I focused on topics that came up most often so look for the theme of your question even if you don’t see your name.

I do these Q & As once a month. If you’d like to submit a question, become a paying subscriber. You can do that here:

Subscribe now

I am very grateful for your support! I am also exhausted and trying to stay strong for the weekend. Look out for each other, folks! These are tough times and I’m impressed by the resilience and defiance I see out here.

And onto the questions…

Star: How do you tell when feuds that involve the administration are real or not (e.g. Trump/Musk recently)? David M: What are the odds that Trump/Musk is just kayfabe?

It doesn’t add up:  You can’t be accountable, unless you actually do “accounting.”

HB 2025, the “transportation package” in the Oregon Legislature purports to address ODOT’s massive financial problems, but only makes them worse

The bill provides only a fraction of the money needed to actually pay for promised mega-projects.  HB 2025 provides just $1.75 to $1.95 billion in resources for five listed projects that together need about $3.5 billion–and likely more.

HB 2025 also provides nothing to cover entirely certain and predictable cost overruns on the largest highway project in the state, the Interstate Bridge Replacement, which is likely to end up costing $9 billion–when long delayed cost estimates are finally released.  The bill also provides nothing for the $1.1 billion Hood River Bridge. Adding these projects would push the mega-project hole to $5 billion; far greater than the funds allocated in HB 2025.

In all, its an excuse for ODOT to pretend that funding is available, to launch mega-projects based on low-balled cost estimates and optimistic assumptions, only to come back and demand more money later–exactly the same management failures that produced the agency’s financial problem.

“Do you know the locus classicus of that exquisitely American intransitive verb, to absquatulate?” I am often asked. “Prefix, ab- as in from or out of; root, squat– from the reflexive verb, to seat oneself upon the hams or haunches; suffix -ulare, emulating other Latinate infinitives such as ‘to emulate’? Literally, to depart dragging one’s hindquarters; colloquially, to haul a** or tuck tail and skedaddle; literarily, to hasten away abjectly; melodramatically, to abscond in shame?”

“I believe I do,” is my unwavering reply, though these things are, of course, subject to eternal debate among those who care. “It is to be found on the second page of the Gold Hill Daily News in the Comstock, Nevada Territory, May 30, 1864.”

Some background and context are called for. In September 1862, Samuel Clemens, not yet boasting his soon-to-be famous nom de plume “Mark Twain,” walked into the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise office and started work as a reporter at $25 a week. In Virginia City, Twain would later write, “There were military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, ‘hurdy-gurdy houses,’ wide-gambling palaces, political powwows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, [and] a whisky mill every fifteen steps.”

The release last fall, after 44 years, of the Beach Boys’ abandoned masterpiece Smile is a milestone of American popular culture. Rolling Stone has called it “the most famous unfinished album in rock & roll history.” But Smile is also something much bigger. It is the pinnacle artistic achievement of a lost civilization, the middle-class, baby-boom, sun-soaked, clean-cut, work-hard-play-hard, bungalow-and-car culture of post-war Southern California. It was a paradise for the common man, one that produced legions of loyal and productive citizens, developed the modern aerospace industry, helped the West win the Cold War, and exported an attractive and fundamentally decent (if often vapid) vision of American life to every corner of the globe.

Western Migration

To understand Smile, you have to start by understanding the Wilsons, which requires understanding Hawthorne, California, circa 1961. In 1922, Murry Wilson arrived in Los Angeles at age five from Hutchinson, Kansas. His family was part of what journalist Carey McWilliams described in his classic 1946 study Southern California: An Island on the Land, as one of Los Angeles’s frequent “quantum leaps, great surges of migration”—in this case the 1920s oil boom that flooded L.A. County with white low-church Protestant burghers and strivers (mostly the latter) from the Plains and the Midwest.

But at press conferences in all three nations, reporters asked about Australia’s treatment of people from the Pacific who come to Australia on temporary work visas – it’s called the PALM scheme (which stands Pacific Australian labour mobility). In Vanuatu’s capital of Port Villa, which sends the highest number of people to work as part of the PALM scheme, Senator Wong assured one journalist that “PALM workers are entitled to the same conditions, legal conditions as Australian workers, and they should be treated as such.” Who wouldn’t agree?

Next time you’re looking over your pay slip, or looking for work, think about the basic rights you get that PALM workers don’t.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Journalist A. J. Liebling famously said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Today, in a world dominated by corporate capitalism — including subservient politicians and careerists — the press’s freedom has been eroded to mere margins. Journalist and writer Patrick Lawrence joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle the decline of journalism, which he details in his book, Journalists and Their Shadows.