A personal view of Australian and International Politics
Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Brazilian Senator Flavio Bolsonaro was seen disembarking from a plane in Florida on Thursday morning, local time. (Reuters: Eva Marie Uzcategui)
In short:
Brazilian presidential contender Flavio Bolsonaro has arrived in the US and will be granted an entry visa.
Mr Bolsonaro lost Brazil's presidential election and had been facing mounting legal challenges for alleged corruption, money laundering and tax evasion.
He initially said he would remain in Brazil to fight the allegations but then disappeared, leading to intense speculation as to his whereabouts.
Flavio Bolsonaro has arrived in the United States, less than a week after losing Brazil's presidential election.
Mr Bolsonaro, who is the son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, had been facing a number of legal battles in Brazil and had been ordered by a court to surrender his passport earlier this week.
But the senator instead disappeared, prompting intense speculation that he had fled to the United States.
Mr Bolsonaro, who loses his immunity from prosecution when his Senate term ends in February, had said on Monday after the order to hand in his passports that he had no plans to flee.
"I have never thought about leaving the country," he said.
"I will hand over my passports and defend myself against this travesty, which is a clear attempt to intimidate me."
Brazilian Senator Flavio Bolsonaro could be seen being escorted out of Opa-locka Executive Airport, shielded by umbrellas. (Reuters: Eva Marie Uzcategui)
In pictures published on Thursday, Mr Bolsonaro can be seen disembarking a plane at Opa-locka Executive Airport near Miami, Florida.
Mounting legal challenges
The decision to grant Mr Bolsonaro a US visa will likely to deepen the rift between the US and Brazil, two of the Americas' most populous countries.
US President Donald Trump told reporters earlier this week that he would approve of Mr Bolsonaro coming to the United States, after his State Department said it would give them entry visas.
On Monday, a court ordered Flavio Bolsonaro hand over his passport. (Reuters: Agustin Marcarian)
Mr Lula has accused Washington of colluding with the Bolsonaro family to help return them to power.
Mr Bolsonaro's father, Jair Bolsonaro, also fled to Florida after losing the 2022 presidential election to Mr Lula before returning to Brazil three months later.
Jair Bolsonaro is now serving 27 years in prison for plotting a coup after supporters stormed government buildings in the capital Brasilia.
Flavio Bolsonaro, an incumbent senator for Rio de Janeiro, is under investigation by Brazil’s Supreme Court for alleged corruption, money laundering and tax evasion in two cases.
The court had ordered Mr Bolsonaro to hand over his regular and diplomatic passports by noon Tuesday, just two days after he lost the vote to Mr Lula.
It remained unclear whether he had complied, but allies said he also had an Italian passport.
The commission found Israeli forces have deliberately killed and seriously harmed children in the West Bank, after making a similar finding against their actions in Gaza. (Reuters: Mahmoud Issa)
In short:
Independent experts commissioned by the UN have found Israel committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in the West Bank while continuing to commit genocide in Gaza despite a truce in place.
Last September the commission accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, in a report released a month before a US-brokered ceasefire.
Israel's Foreign Ministry has condemned the latest report as a "propaganda document" and has continuously denied allegations of war crimes and genocide.
Israel has continued to commit genocide in Gaza since last October's ceasefire, a United Nations commission has found.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry also found Israeli forces had committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including extermination, persecution, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence.
The report, released the day before Israel's general election, said the country's forces had targeted Palestinians in Gaza and that the situation in the West Bank had "deteriorated gravely" since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel.
Israel's military said it had arrested 40 people throughout the West Bank and searched more than 400 sites since the start of the operation in Hebron. (Reuters: Ammar Awad)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the operation after Palestinian gunmen killed two soldiers on Friday, local time.
The war in Gaza started after Hamas-led attacks on Israel in 2023, when militants killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.
Israel responded with a campaign that has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians and displaced nearly all of Gaza's population, according to its health ministry.
Last September the UN commission, chaired at the time by 2026 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navi Pillay, found Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Israel rejected the report, labelling it "distorted and false", and has continuously denied allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In June the commission released another report accusing Israel of deliberately targeting and killing Palestinian children in Gaza, which Israel condemned as full of "errors and distortions".
In the West Bank
The report released overnight mainly focused on the actions of Israeli forces since October 2023, but also found "sustained settler violence" in the West Bank had formed part of Israel's "widespread and systemic attack" against Palestinian people.
The report said 254 Palestinians had been killed by air strikes in the West Bank between October 7, 2023 and the end of September this year. That compares to six deaths by air strikes from 2008 until the October 7 attacks, the commission found.
It found that sexual violence had been used to displace Palestinian people, while accusing Israeli forces of deliberately killing and injuring children in the West Bank.
Military operations since January last year have led to the largest displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967, with more than 34,000 Palestinians displaced as of August, the report said.
Commission chair Srinivasan Muralidhar said Israel's actions in the West Bank were part of "a broader strategy to exterminate and displace Palestinians" while imposing "unliveable" conditions in the area.
Israel's foreign ministry said the report was "a propaganda document detached from reality" and accused it of "delegitimising the Jewish state and legitimising jihadist terrorism against its citizens".
The Israeli mission in Geneva said the latest report was part of a "misinformation campaign to demonize the State of Israel".
"The attempt to destroy the Jewish state … continues today through efforts by actors such as the UN Commission of Inquiry to undermine Israel's legitimacy and deny its fundamental right to exist and defend itself," ambassador Daniel Meron said in a statement.
Mr Muralidhar said Israel's "excessive and discriminatory application of lethal force" against Palestinians over generations stemmed from its "colonising policies".
"Attempting to equate Palestinian statehood with a threat to the existence of Israel is blocking any viable attempts to realise Palestinians' right to self-determination," he said.
In Gaza
The report found Israeli authorities had continued to commit "genocidal acts with the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza", since the commission made its first accusation of genocide in September 2025.
It said much of the killing and harm was a direct result of Israel's expansion into Gaza.
When the ceasefire was declared in October 2025, the IDF held roughly 51 per cent of the territory — the boundary of that was referred to as the "Yellow Line".
The report said that line had become a "steadily encroaching de facto border", rather than a temporary ceasefire demarcation, and that Israeli-controlled areas had expanded to at least 60 per cent of Gaza.
From the ceasefire signing until early April, at least 196 Palestinians — including 43 children — had been killed near the Yellow Line, the commission said.
It found that Israeli forces continued using heavy munitions, drones, quadcopters, artillery and sniper fire in densely populated areas during the truce.
The commission also made findings against the Palestinian Authority, which oversees parts of the West Bank, saying its targeting of Palestinians with dissenting views including journalists and human rights defenders had resulted in killings.
Mr Muralidhar said despite "an increase in unnecessary and disproportionate" force since the October 7 attacks, the authority had failed to properly investigate the killings.
There was no immediate reaction from the Palestinian Authority.
AI technology is coursing so quickly through society that nothing feels immune from its impact. (ABC News: Jerry Rickard)
Do policymakers know what dark forces they're messing with?
In their rush to force AI on us, they're embracing a technology that is exceptionally good at destroying the things that bring meaning to our lives.
Artists, writers, and musicians have had their skills radically devalued by AI.
In recent weeks, we've seen footage of mathematicians crying because AI has triggered an existential and spiritual crisis for their profession.
Mathematics professor Francesco Maggi, when discussing the "remarkable ability" that large language models (LLM) have to generate mathematical proofs, says the technology poses a challenge to something deeply human.
So what are we doing?
Do policymakers appreciate that people are extremely concerned about a technology that has a powerful ability to devalue human creative expression?
We're living in a world of major system collapse, and policymakers are forcing technology into our homes (and data centres into our neighbourhoods) that will undermine the very things that bring meaning to our lives, and that would otherwise help us to cope with a collapsing world.
Strangely, we're not talking about it more.
Crushing the arts
It's hard to forget how Apple released a controversial ad in 2024 that featured a giant hydraulic press crushing musical instruments, a record player, piles of paint, books, cameras, sculptures, and other artefacts of human joy.
In the advertisement, a hydraulic press crushes an array of creative instruments. (AP: Apple)
Apple said it was trying to convey the visual message that its latest iPad Pro could fit a huge amount of technology into a new, thinner model.
But that wasn't how internet users saw it.
"The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley," the actor Hugh Grant wrote on X.
The filmmaker Justine Bateman asked: "Why did Apple do an ad that crushes the arts? Tech and #AI means to destroy the arts and society in general. This is not making things better. This is just making some people insanely wealthy, at the expense of all of us."
The wider public backlash to the ad was so intense that Apple soon apologised and withdrew it from television.
But the PR damage was done. The metaphor was too obvious. And there's been no sign, in the two years since, that Silicon Valley's chief executives really understood why people hated that ad so much.
Enshittification
And now AI technology is coursing so quickly through society that nothing feels immune from its impact, whether good or bad.
For example, this may seem unimportant in the scheme of things, but it's indicative of a larger societal issue. The Reserve Bank recently published a transcript on its website of governor Michele Bullock's "fireside chat" from September 22.
Michele Bullock says people see AI as a way to improve productivity. (ABC News: John Gunn)
The transcript used the American spelling for labour on seven occasions (i.e. it used "labor" instead of "labour"), so it had Ms Bullock saying this:
"What happens is that we combine labor and capital in a way that allows more output for the same amount of labor and capital, and that's what allows profits to rise, it allows real wages to rise, and improves living standards, and that's what we've observed over the long sweep of time."
And it used the Australian spelling for "labour" on seven other occasions, in the same transcript, with Ms Bullock saying this:
"Productivity, it's a really important concept, which means we use our resources, labour and capital resources, in more efficient ways that allow more output for the same amount of inputs."
That is extremely sloppy.
The RBA has long taken pride in its correct use of grammar and spelling in its written communications. It's always talking about the importance of its "credibility" as an institution. To see it publish such a sloppy transcript on its website was jarring.
If these types of "AI issues" are even affecting the RBA, what's it doing to other institutions?
Now, consider some bigger and more important examples.
We're currently reading stories every week about AI agents "going rogue" and hacking into government systems, bank accounts, and whatever else.
If private citizens were caught doing that, they would end up in prison. But since it's AI agents, it's often framed as though they're "escaping from a lab" and misbehaving like naughty children, with the assumption being that it's just a quirk of the technology that will be fixed over time.
Meanwhile, we're all hoping that we won't wake up one morning to find our personal data stolen and bank accounts drained.
This strange atmosphere of unaccountability for AI agents, mixed with apathy from our leaders, where there's little information being shared by authorities about what's actually going on and what can be done about it, is creating a huge amount of anxiety for people.
The 'great white hope' for productivity
Why are policymakers hardly acknowledging the anxiety?
Perhaps it's because governments see the AI investment and data centre boom as an economic lifeline out of our historic productivity slump.
In a speech last week, Treasurer Jim Chalmers said massive investments in the AI boom were ramping up competition for capital globally.
"Capital expenditure by the five largest hyperscalers in 2023 was $230 billion. It's now forecast to quadruple to over $1.1 trillion," he said.
"To finance this, corporate bond issuances by hyperscalers have exploded. Annual issuance averaged around US$40 billion five years ago, but is now projected to average around US$400 billion ($570 billion) in the next few years."
He said Australia was a "digital hub" in the Indo-Pacific with the land, energy, skills and capital to make the most of the AI investment boom.
"As one of the world's top 10 markets for data centre capacity, we have over $150 billion of AI infrastructure scheduled for the next five years, around 5 per cent of current GDP," he said.
Ms Bullock has acknowledged that people see AI as the "great white hope" to improve productivity.
People power
So where does that leave us?
When the ABC spoke to the American journalist Gil Durán recently, he said data centre protests in the US had become a focal point for regular people to come together as a community to fight billionaire power.
"The data centres are viewed, I think, as a physical manifestation of billionaire power on the land that's become this bogeyman, this monster, this alien invasion that arrives in your community to suck up your water and pollute your air and eat up your land, all for the promise that it will fuel a technology that will kill your job and possibly wipe humanity off the face of the planet.
"What's not to love?" he joked grimly.
But there's another element to the global AI pushback that's getting less attention.
Lots of people also despise how AI is radically cheapening our artistic and cultural output, and burning through fossil fuels to do so.
Will our children be able to make a living in the future as artists, musicians, and writers, or are those opportunities disappearing with every new data centre that's being built?
Where will we find joy in a future where AI has comprehensively debased the arts?
The concerns are genuine. Perhaps our leaders will give them more attention one day.
Artificial intelligence has taken over the book publishing industry, or at least that's the impression from the headlines. (Getty Images: Malte Mueller)
Is artificial intelligence an "existential threat" to traditional book publishing?
That's the impression we get from the headlines: online sellers flooded with AI "slop" books, publishing houses inundated with AI-generated submissions, book deals falling apart, and three literary prize winners so far this year being accused of using the technology.
Louise Doughty, a judge on the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize whose winner was accused of AI use, thinks so.
"We're only at the beginning of understanding the depth of that threat, and how we can combat it,"
she said.
Readers can still discern whether a text is AI-generated through certain "tells". (Getty Images: imaginima)
Readers struggling to 'keep up' with evolution of AI text
How do we even tell whether a book is AI-generated?
ABC Radio National's Critics Corner spoke to Matthew Rubery, professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University, trying to answer this big question plaguing some readers.
He said individual readers could still broadly discern whether a text was AI-generated, through "tells" including:
"It's not X, it's Y" constructions
Always giving three examples
Laboured metaphors
But Dr Rubery said the signs of AI usage "change a lot" and it was "very tough to keep up with it".
Matthew Rubery spoke to Radio National's Critics Corner about AI disclosure. (Supplied)
One potential solution to the issue is a "human-authored" certification.
Many certification schemes are gaining traction around the world, using a range of methods including interviewing the author, asking for their edit history and using AI tools to analyse their work.
Trevor Woods, CEO of the human-authored certification company Proudly Human, said he expected the AI tools to get less and less effective over time.
In the meantime, however, the service has attracted a spike in interest which Mr Woods said could birth a "brand new industry".
Should authors disclose AI use?
He predicts the certification industry could be worth "hundreds of millions or billions of dollars" at its height, adding that individual authors, publishers and writers' groups would be footing the bill.
When asked whether big tech companies or governments should be paying for the schemes, he said that was not a realistic aspiration.
"It's like asking the bad guys that have robbed you of everything to then give you a little bit of money back to try and make you feel better about it,"
he said.
Beyond the issue of writers bearing the cost of relieving readers' uncertainty around AI, Ms Doughty expressed concern about the emerging trend of using AI tools to detect AI-generated writing.
She said the tools were used to level accusations at this year's Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner, despite the prize's own investigations finding the winning work was human-authored.
"It's important for the industry to be aware of and guard against frivolous or malicious accusations of AI being used to derail a writer's career," she said.
Louise Doughty was a judge on the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. (Supplied)
She said the accusation "will always be easier to level at new authors" who did not have a body of work that AI tools could refer to, producing false positives and degrading reader trust.
"Absolutely, we must not end up with books written by AI, but we must also view AI diagnostic tools with the same level of scepticism,"
she said.
Ultimately, Dr Rubery says, "there will be too many challenges for this to be successful" in the long run.
But advocacy groups have tabled another solution at last week's Joint Select Committee hearings on artificial intelligence.
Groups like the Australian Publishers Association say the government should enact laws requiring the disclosure of AI use in texts, among other improvements.
However, there are fears that the government is going the other way, favouring the interests of tech companies over authors and publishers.
Copyright changes to 'displace' authors from the book market
A proposal leaked last month revealed the government was considering watering down copyright law to create an "opt-out" system where tech companies could train their AI models on authored work without permission until rights holders told them to stop.
At the Joint Select Committee hearings last week, writers and publishers urged the government not to pursue the changes.
"AI companies seeking an opt-out model are asking government to reverse a basic principle: if you want to use someone else's work, you should first seek permission," Hachette Australia and New Zealand head Louise Stark said while fronting up to the committee.
Louise Stark spoke at the committee this week. (Supplied: Hachette Australia and New Zealand)
"An opt-out model shifts the burden onto the very people whose rights should be protected."
A submission by the Australian Society of Authors noted it was not a future issue.
Tech companies have already scraped vast amounts of authored work in what a Microsoft executive termed "the largest theft of labour in human history".
The ASA also cited a UK report which found 86 per cent of authors surveyed reported a drop in income due to generative AI.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, author of The Uncaged Sky, attributes a drop in income to AI-generated summaries and knock-offs of her memoir posted online.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert says her memoir was scraped and reproduced with AI. (Supplied)
"If someone wanted to read a condensed version of my book in a couple of hours without paying for it, they could listen to this instead," she said.
"Each time a reader watches or listens to such a clip rather than reading or listening to my book is a sale I lose and royalties I don't receive."
It means AI-generated books are free to "displace" writers from receiving compensation for their own work, says Australian Publishers Association head of policy Stuart Glover.
Tech companies train their large language models on books without permission. (Getty Images: imaginima)
Dr Glover, who also fronted the Joint Select Committee last week, said it was difficult to determine just how hard AI displacement had hit the publishing industry overall.
However, he attributes the softening of the non-fiction book market to AI.
He said instructional books such as travel guides and cookbooks were at "particular risk".
"Anything which has a hard reference edge to it I suspect is in a kind of terminal decline," he said.
"It's very much a mixed picture, and it requires responsible regulation by the government."
A crackdown on copyright would put more legal pressure on publishers to ensure their writers were not using AI.
"For copyright to subsist it must be created by a human author," Australian Copyright Council CEO Eileeen Camilleri said.
She said using an AI spell-checker or editor would not void an author's copyright, but "where you put in a prompt and get it to generate … copyright is unlikely to subsist".
Dr Glover said that was because "copyright is vested in the expression … the kind of words that you use to create a work".
"It's not vested in the underlying ideas," he said.
"If you generated an output through a machine, even if you had a really great underlying idea but you used the machine to write the idea, then you've got no way of protecting that work and anyone can copy it."
If an author has used AI and it is discovered after their book's release, the publisher may not be able to sell it exclusively.
As a result, publishers have become more vigilant about the work in their submissions inboxes — from updating author contracts and applying for human-authored certifications to getting cold feet about publishing new writers.
The Joint Select Committee on Artifical Intelligence's final report is due on November 30.
