Australia, one of the 5 countries involved in the domestic and corporate spying, has recently come to the fore as a country that is covering up a bribery scandal concerning Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam.
According to a recent Wikileaks release, The Australian government has released a suppression order on the media and its citizens with the threat of imprisonment any one who makes public the bribery scandal. The order is to last for 5 years.
This is not the first time that suppression orders have been used according to CNN, in fact in the state of Victoria alone, in a recent report cited that in the five years between 2008 and 2012, Victorian courts issued 1,501 suppression orders, including 281 in the Supreme Court.
In fact Victoria is also a centre of arms manufacturing and has sold weapons to Indonesia. There is some question as to the size of the Armaments buisness in this state since the armaments industry was largely privatised and the information regarding this area of industry in Australia is no longer transparent (since 2001)
These suppression orders have been made for a variety of reasons and to a variety of media outlets already but not to stop information on the the biggest corruption case in this region.
One such order was used against a well known media outlet to suppress a story about an anti nuclear activist who dared to challenge Palladin Mining. Palladin Mining used Ashursts Australia to suppress a story about them threatening to sue a dear sweet 73 year old Noel Wauchope for comments made on her small blog. The Australian Newspaper had to retract its support of this blogger by removing the offending article from its website and decided to desist in supporting any further citizens that were being attacked by these corporations in a similar manner because of the threat of litigation. This was done using the defamation laws but was not fully successful as the article is still somewhere on the Internet but Australian based corporations have already proved their ability to micro manage public discourse.
Japan
Japan was recently involved with a similar situation in Vietnam concerning a railway project and bribes made to officials with money concerning Overseas Development Aid (ODA).
Japan has recently brought in a new and controversial secrecy law that limits reporting on anything deemed of national security, although it was publicly brought in to stop the media telling the world of the situation in Fukushima and to frighten the Japanese citizens into not talking about health and environmental effects.
Vietnam has had to prosecute some of its citizens who received the bribes after the information was released earlier this year in the Japanese press. Some of the ODA money was stopped but history shows us that this will be only for a short while to limit the blow-back from the Japanese public (It will be less likely that such a story will make the Japanese press again).
Prime minister Abe has also used the ODA to send Vietnam and other countries ships that might be used as coastal defense vessels against China (but claiming they should be used for Pirates. Although the ODA requirements presently require the money to be used for peaceful purposes only, the Abe administration is trying to change that to include armaments funding and to help Japanese business aims.
"The government decided last year to provide 10 patrol boats to the Philippines using ODA, and officials are mulling a similar offer to Vietnam amid rising tensions between those two nations and China in the South China Sea." (Japan Times June 2014)
Australia also supported the coverup of the Fukushima nuclear disaster by enabling the UK based Science media Centre to co-ordinate pro nuclear scientists to supply information to the Japanese media. This was done by setting up a Japanese Science media Centre to control the flow of information regarding the nuclear disaster to favour the Japanese nuclear industry. The Science Media Centre Australia is likely the reason that Australia is denying global climate change also.
UK, South Korea, Canada and USA connection
I have also to include the USA, South Korea and the UK when talking about arms, wars, spying and financial corruption. South Korea has become the single largest exporter of arms in the region even overtaking the UK.
The UK has just brought in this year changes to the Secrets act that gets rid of the "unclassified documents" classification all together and has increased its domestic spy charter in lime with Australia and japan and has seriously clamped down on Journalism and media freedoms.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
