BREAKING NEWS Disturbing bombing threat is issued on video by masked man standing with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags: 'Every colony will burn'
A recently uploaded video shows a person, who appears to be male, sitting at a desk with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags while a Palestinian flag hangs in the background.
The man claims he is sharing an 'anonymous communique' on behalf of the 'cell that torched three cars' at Lovitt Technologies Australia, in Melbourne, on July 5.
The company supplies parts to the F-35 joint strike fighter program, a global initiative to help allied countries build fighter jets - including Israel.
Behind a black mask, the man claimed his group believes 'every worker' at Lovitt Technologies is 'complicit' in the 'genocide' occurring in Gaza.
'We will decide your fate, as you have decided the fate of millions,' he said.
'For the past few months we have been closely watching you. We have your addresses.
'All the information we have about you will be distributed to our underground networks.
'Stop arming Israel or else.'
The man then warned the attack on July 5 was 'not an accident or thoughtless act of vandalism'.
'If you continue making weapons components of any kind there will be consequences. Consider this a warning,' he said.
The video included detailed information on how to use firestarters to torch vehicles.
'Be mindful of fingerprints and DNA,' the man said.
As the video came to an end, the masked figure called for 'death to Israel, death to Australia, death to America'.
'Every colony will burn,' he said.
'We are behind the enemy lines of this genocide.
'It is our duty to attack the belly of this colonialist imperialist beast at every opportunity.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
3 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘Is my child safe?': Jason Clare faces a quagmire in childcare crisis — fixing a sector without controlling all the levers
More than 1300 worried parents nationwide joined a webinar on safety in early education this week from families advocacy network The Parenthood, tuning in after weeks of sickening reports of alleged abuse at childcare centres. Georgie Dent, CEO of The Parenthood, said the allegations from Victoria had panicked families countrywide. 'I haven't seen parents' trust in safety rattled in the way it is now,' she told Guardian Australia. 'It's not just parents in Melbourne or Victoria being fearful of early childhood education – many are engaging for the first time, asking 'is my child safe?'' Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email It's the quagmire facing education minister Jason Clare and early childhood minister Jess Walsh as parliament returns on Tuesday for the first time since the election. While this week was meant to be a victory lap for the government – highlighting Labor's thumping 94-seat caucus, capped by giving a parade to their Hecs debt reduction bill – the minister now finds himself facing urgent demands to safeguard a system where he doesn't control all the levers, with critical safety functions shared across eight state and territory systems. Labor has put early education at the centre of its agenda following prime minister Anthony Albanese singling out universal childcare as his 'legacy' during the election campaign – by giving pay rises to educators, offering childcare in its free Tafe program, and widening access to subsidies. But providers say they need more to keep kids safe. One major Australian childcare provider said they needed Canberra to do more on safety training and lead the states into establishing nationally consistent rules on reporting systems and stripping working-with-children accreditation, which can vary by jurisdiction. 'States don't talk to each other,' one executive said. More training, including pupil-free days each year for training – like primary and high schools – has been mooted. 'Quality and safety are inextricably linked. Better qualified and experienced teachers translate to improved risk,' Dent said, calling better training for workers 'the most significant piece' in keeping kids safer. Clare will introduce a bill this fortnight empowering the commonwealth to terminate federal subsidies to childcare operators guilty of egregious safety breaches, ban providers failing minimum standards, boost unannounced spot-checks and issue public notices to underperforming centres. A separate push for a national worker database, tracking movements of staff, will be considered separately at a meeting of education ministers in August. Clare has admitted progress has been too slow; there are questions about why abhorrent childcare abuse uncovered in 2022 didn't already lead to wider system changes. But let's park that for now, and focus on what Clare and Walsh will put forward this fortnight. While the Coalition opposition has pledged to be constructive and are likely to support the government, acknowledging the need for swift action, some Liberals don't believe the government's plan goes to the core of child safety issues. Shadow assistant minister Zoe McKenzie warned it 'may not go far enough' – with many pertinent powers resting with the states, the Coalition will urge Labor to show more 'national leadership' and prod the states into swifter action. The states are moving on their own. Victoria announced its own childcare worker registration system, and will require childcare centres to adopt the federal ban on personal devices or face a $50k fine. Dent said it went beyond parents and families, going to a broader economic imperative; with more families than ever needing two incomes to stay afloat, giving confidence about kids' safety while parents work is critical to keeping food on the table, she said. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion 'This sector has grown out of necessity … but the regulation and oversight has not kept pace. Education access, workforce capacity, it's all under strain,' she said. 'Child safety is not being guaranteed across the board to the extent parents and children expect.' Providers say they're eager to make their centres safer, but with some announcing the roll out of CCTV cameras in early learning and more choices for parents over the care of their children. Some say the money could be better spent, instead suggesting training more educators to ensure children aren't left alone with just one teacher. Concern has also been raised about the misuse of captured footage. Ten months ago, a Productivity Commission report setting out a pathway to universal childcare recommended an independent commission to take a 'comprehensive national view'. The PC noted 'limited transparency and accountability – both from governments and service providers'. Dent and The Parenthood have long called for such a model, as have the largest childcare providers, saying a major national body was critical to tie together safety, training, regulation and monitoring. Clare has said the government has 'an open mind' about such a body to look at safety issues. Other major providers have praised federal pay rises for educators, and free Tafe for educators, as gamechangers – but raised concern about completion rates and the quality of some vocational courses. More must be done to attract good people and keep them in the industry. G8 Education, one of Australia's largest providers, welcomed changes to improve safety – but a spokesperson said 'harmonising policies, regulations, systems and processes' across different levels of government was urgently needed. They also backed a national registry of staff working with vulnerable people as well as a national registration scheme for teachers. Parents want assurance that their kids will be safe, but Australia's cross-jurisdictional system means it's not an easy fix. Clare's job will not be easy. 'We need to be reassuring parents the vast majority of services are good and there for the right reasons, most are really well qualified,' Dent said. 'The challenge is restoring confidence where it's warranted and raising alarm where it's needed.' 'Parents are distressed.'
The Guardian
3 minutes ago
- The Guardian
A chance to change: the Sydney home helping break cycles of trauma, violence and jail
Josh* says he's not a violent man, but he has done violent things. It was only after a quarter of his life spent in and out of prison that he came to see the violence didn't happen in a vacuum. 'I had a pretty crap upbringing,' he says, sitting in the courtyard of a nondescript home on a quiet street in inner Sydney. The 42-year-old Gamilaroi man is warm and a fast talker. 'It was me and my brother,' he says. 'I didn't know my parents that well. There was always drugs and alcohol in the home, so I was pretty broken there.' Josh says his childhood was marked by run-ins with the police for breaking into homes and theft. 'It's sort of the lifestyle that I wanted when I was a kid,' he says. 'It's weird because that's what we thought was cool. Violence was accepted, drugs were accepted.' When he was about 30, married and with a family, his brother died by suicide. 'That's when my whole life changed,' he says. 'That's when I started using drugs hard, and that's when the domestic violence started.' Thousands of men in New South Wales prisons have carved a similar path through life. But Josh is among the lucky few who have received help to change it. Last June the number of people held on remand in NSW, and the number of Indigenous people in prison, reached a record high. The same month the Minns government passed legislation making it harder for domestic violence offenders who commit serious offences to get bail. But this had only a small impact on the custody population, according to Jackie Fitzgerald, the executive director at the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (Bocsar). The real driver, Fitzgerald says, has been the number of people charged with lower level domestic violence offences such as intimidation and breaching apprehended domestic violence orders. With more men in prison on domestic violence offences, experts say the obvious question is what is being done to prevent them reoffending on release. 'We know prison doesn't rehabilitate,' says Jess Hill, an investigative journalist and domestic violence advocate. A 2018 report concluded there was no difference in the likelihood of reoffending between offenders who start the domestic violence-focused program in prison – DVEQUIPS – and those who don't. But in any case these are offered only to the 14% of domestic violence inmates who have been sentenced for violent offences. The rest have been convicted on less serious charges or have yet to be tried. Rainbow Lodge is a home for men who are on bail or who have just been released from prison. It's where Josh came some months ago. He had been remanded in custody for nine months on domestic violence charges when he stood before a judge desperate to get bail. After the death of someone close to him, he had stopped using drugs. This made life inside more dangerous. 'It's hard if you're trying to do good in jail. You don't fit in. 'I was contemplating getting a fake address just to get out of jail,' he says. '[But] if I got out and I was homeless, I would have fallen back in with the old crowd.' He got lucky. The judge, rather than bailing him to live in the community or returning him to prison, opted for a third option: Rainbow Lodge. It's the largest of its kind in the state, and there are just eight rooms. It will soon expand to 13 with funding from the City of Sydney and generally runs with a mix of government and private funding. The ageing terrace on a leafy street in a residential area has a kitchen where the men cook together, and common living spaces. They each have their own room. Each is tidy with artworks and pictures of their families lining the walls. Cultural workers, psychologists and men with lived experience drop in to see the men and run programs such as art and music therapy. Men who have been through the three-month program are told to drop in again when they like, and they regularly do. The gate is always open. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email 'I know it's safe here,' Josh says. He says he had long felt alone and isolated, but much less so since being at the Lodge. The manager, Claude Robinson, says he gets phone calls every day from lawyers, parole officers and others asking if there is a bed free. There rarely is. The main aim is to break the cycle of offending and jail time. It's not specifically for violent men, but Robinson says it's on the rap sheet for most. 'We take the men nobody else will,' he says. They are men like Jarred, who says he has been in custody on six occasions for domestic violence offences. 'I asked my solicitor to try to get me into a rehab, and two weeks later, he had me in a bed here,' he says after finishing one of the daily programs at the Lodge. 'I'm very lucky to be here. [I like] being around all the boys here that want the same thing as me. 'In prison, it's a totally different environment. It's dangerous. There is a hell on earth, and it's jail. 'If anything you get worse.' The men all have the same undercurrent to their story: trauma and drug use as a Band-Aid. It's a clear cause of their theft or violence offences, Robinson says, therefore it is obvious what needs to be done to stop it – though not easy to achieve. 'For a lot of the guys, they've never been given an opportunity where people take the time to explain what's happened in their lives,' Robinson says. A psychologist who works for corrections and spoke on condition of anonymity says the department is trying to move towards a trauma-informed approach in its programs, but 'it's slow going'. 'I don't think they're finding that the current suite of programs are targeting the right needs.' He says change is slow because it means changing the culture in prisons, and 'treating offenders as people who have trauma issues and working through those issues rather than treating them as a number who don't get anything'. Josh says he couldn't recall anything he learned from domestic violence-focused programs while on a three-year stint in prison. 'EQUIPS is taught out of text books,' he says. '[This] is culture and it stems to your roots,' he says of programs at the Lodge. 'The teachers here, they've all got lived experience, so you relate to them different. They talk to you different.' Josh says his favourite part of the program has been time spent with Uncle Bubbly, one of the elders who helps out at the Lodge. 'He teaches me a lot about being a man,' Josh says, his voice quivering with emotion. Ivan Clarke created one of the programs run specifically for Indigenous men at the Lodge, Healing the Warrior. When Guardian Australia visits a session, held in another location nearby, Clarke is standing in front of a semi-circle of men talking about anxiety and trauma. 'We grew up being singled out for being black,' Clarke tells the men, who frequently nod while he speaks. Clarke tells them how being judged from a young age creates anxiety, which turns into being in a constant fight-or-flight mode. That only compounds in a violent home, he says. 'Think about the fear this creates. That stuff travels with us right into our adult life, if we don't tackle it, it stays with us. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion 'That doesn't make us bad men, it makes us traumatised men.' This is his main message. He says the program works because it's delivered by men like himself who have been through what the men have been through. 'The only way that this has worked is because it's designed by Aboriginal men with lived experience. It's facilitated and delivered to Aboriginal men who are living the experience,' he says. Over a year ago, the Lodge secured funding – and the approval of the governor – to run the same program for men on remand at John Morony Correctional Centre near Windsor, in Sydney's north-west. They wantto expand it to all remand centres. One man now at the Lodge, who cannot be named for legal reasons, did the program when he was in jail. 'To walk into the program and see that it was an elder, man that was awesome,' he says. 'I hadn't seen it in prison before.' He went into juvenile detention at a young age. 'It started the process for me,' he says. He then turned to drugs. 'If I wasn't getting high, I'd still feel the trauma,' he says. He says doing the program while on remand meant he finally had someone he could ask: 'Why am I feeling like this?' 'I'd been trying to get my life straight but I had no one to turn to.' There are few programs when men are on remand, because they are presumed innocent. Yet alleged domestic violence offenders spend an average of three months in custody – some up to a year, Hill says. 'You've got these people in a holding bay and most of the time we're not doing anything with them,' she says. Hill says there needs to be a greater focus on justice reinvestment – focusing on what drives reoffending rather than a purely punitive approach. Asked if she backs what the Lodge is doing, she says she supports whatever has been shown to work. 'Whether it's in prisons or in communities or both, ideally, [justice reinvestment] makes complete sense on every balance sheet, whether that be a fiscal balance sheet or whether it be on a recidivism balance sheet.' Locking up domestic violence offenders costs the state more than $320,000 a day, according to corrective services figures. In the government's budget, released in June, the corrective services budget increased by 35%, from $1.7bn in 2024-25 to $2.4bn. There was an 80% increase in the capital expenditure budget for prisons. Hill says government policy is focused on punishment rather than stopping the cycle of reoffending. 'There's definitely a zeitgeist towards tough on crime. We've seen that all across the country. It's very difficult to get paradigm shifting reform through in Australia, depressingly so.' Nicole Yade, a chief executive at Women's and Girls' Emergency Centre, says: 'It's really not as simple as locking people up and the problems go away.' She sees the complexity first-hand, with more than 200 women and children staying in refuges run by the centre every night. 'An AVO doesn't make a difference, they just continue to breach the AVO and then they're locked up again, and they're out again, and they breach it again, and then the cycle continues. 'If we only work with women and children, we're missing half the story.' 'I don't think that prisons are therapeutic environments, and I'm not sure if that work is possible in a prison, to be honest.' About half the men who come through the Lodge last the full three months. Most of those who drop out end up back in prison. Robinson, who has been on the board of the Lodge since 2014, says that doesn't mean they have lost their chance to change. He knows this because he was once one of those who dropped out. He came through the Lodge in 2006 after four and a half years in prison on drug offences. At that point he says it was more of a halfway house. It didn't have the programs it has today. 'I ended up back in jail six weeks later because I got an inheritance, and I just ended up at the Cross again, sitting in the Astoria Hotel with my girlfriend shooting it all up,' Robinson says. Back in prison he did a program known as Ngara Nura, which has since been axed. He says this is what changed him. 'I remember I got to that program and they said to me: you're not a bad person but your behaviour is unacceptable,' he says. 'No one had ever separated the two, and I think that's what we try to do here in Rainbow.' Robinson and Clarke say support for men who are outside prison is just as important as for those inside. Many domestic violence offenders never reach sentenced custody, with 74% of DV offenders serving their sentence in the community, according to Bocsar. Clarke says it's important for judges to have that third option when they know prison or a return to the community are both wrong. He and Clarke want to see a Lodge equivalent in every region. But they say the key is having men like them with lived experience to run it. Josh is among the 50% of men who complete three months at the Lodge. 'It's given me time to explore who I am and what I really want,' he says. 'I'm still learning today.' The next step, away from the people at the Lodge who have become like family, can be the most difficult. The Lodge helps all those who leave find a house, and stays formally connected with them for another two years to ease their transition. The men are told to visit for a chat or drop into a program whenever they like. 'I know when I leave here I'll stay in close contact with them,' Josh says. 'They're people I want to keep in my life.' He says his life might have been different if he had come to the Lodge 12 years ago, after his brother died. 'I'm not a violent person, but I've done violent things, and when someone's on drugs, they turn into a totally different person. 'I needed help at that moment. It's sad that that's not offered to people. 'They just throw you in jail and forget about you.' Full names of the men interviewed have been redacted
The Guardian
3 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The Nationals' net zero bomb threatens to fracture the Liberals' decades-old alliance
A handful of moderate Liberal MPs decided that enough was enough. As the party debated whether to reunite the Coalition after a brief but damaging split with the Nationals in mid-May, the MPs drew a line in the sand. While the Nationals insisted on four demands for reunification – on nuclear power, supermarket break-up powers, regional communications and a $20bn infrastructure fund – for some Liberals, abandoning policies for net zero carbon emissions by 2050 would be a step too far. MPs who took part in a rush of party room debates in the tumultuous 48 hours point to the intervention of New South Wales moderate Dave Sharma, who insisted the Liberals could never be credible with mainstream voters if they abandoned such a fundamental element of climate policy. Others, including Zoe McKenzie, Maria Kovacic and Andrew Bragg, spoke privately and publicly in favour of holding firm. 'The view was we could not hide from serious climate policies and we could no longer be seen as accepting climate deniers,' one Liberal MP says, speaking anonymously about the closed-door talks. 'The Liberal party moved too far from its core values because we were dictated to by the Nationals. Peter Dutton let it happen and they're trying to do it again now on net zero.' But the agreement between the Nationals leader, David Littleproud, and his Liberal counterpart, Sussan Ley, to rejoin forces, cobbled together 48 hours after the split, did not settle the question of net zero – leaving it as one of the biggest questions facing the Coalition this term. In the final part of a series on the future of the Liberal party, Guardian Australia spoke with insiders about the latest conflict in the Coalition's climate wars, and how it threatens to permanently fracture the decades-old alliance. Opponents of net zero are not wasting any time. The Nationals have launched their own review, led by dogged climate critic Matt Canavan and the party strategist turned senator Ross Cadell. Outspoken former leader Barnaby Joyce has promised a private member's bill to end 'the lunatic crusade' of net zero when parliament returns this week. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email It was Joyce who initially signed the party up in the first place, negotiating with Scott Morrison's Liberals back in 2021 in exchange for an extra spot in cabinet. The Queensland Liberal-National MP Garth Hamilton calls net zero a 'blank cheque' for economic decline, while Andrew Hastie, considered a potential future Liberal leader, says he wants out of the 'straitjacket' plan. One close observer of the Nationals' dynamics says if a vote on net zero took place in Canberra this week, opposition to the policy would be locked in 13 votes to six. That result would be a mirror image of Canavan's leadership challenge to Littleproud in the days after the election, when he ran on an anti-net zero platform. Despite his two-to-one loss, Canavan claims the party's policy review as a win. He argues the Nationals were bullied into signing on five years ago on the basis that it had popular support in the polls. 'This would be the same polling that sent us shockingly astray in the recent election,' Canavan said in May. He did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Colleagues say Canavan shares anti-net zero content in a party chat on the messaging app Signal 'at all hours of the day and night'. There is widespread anger at the Nationals within senior ranks of the Coalition. Liberal MPs – reduced to a rump in metropolitan seats in part because Labor successfully tied them to Joyce and Canavan during successive campaigns – fear another round of the climate wars could kill the party. The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is scathing, calling the Coalition 'hopelessly divided' over something the rest of the world agrees on. 'These Coalition parties, the Liberals and Nationals, learned absolutely nothing on 3 May,' he says. In her first press conference as opposition leader, Ley was asked if she was abandoning her support for net zero. A former environment minister, she has previously talked up the economic opportunities of net zero and insisted she wanted to get there 'as quickly as possible'. As leader, she said the Coalition was committed to the renewables transition but stopped short of endorsing net zero, again. 'No policies have been adopted or walked away from at this time,' Ley said. After a historic thumping at the election, few in the Coalition were in good spirits as they trudged back to Canberra to start another term in opposition. After days of threats about breaking up the Coalition, the Nationals, led in part by the Senate leader, Bridget McKenzie, pushed over the precipice. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion Bad blood lingered from the high-profile defection of the Country Liberal Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from the Nationals to the Liberal party room, part of a plan for her to run for the deputy leadership under Angus Taylor. Senior Nationals always expected Price to one day switch to the Liberals and seek a lower house seat in pursuit of her ambition to eventually become prime minister. But the timing and the nature of the political betrayal incensed her former Nationals colleagues, sending them into what one Liberal describes as an 'emotional rage'. Senior Nationals were given roughly an hour's notice before Price issued a statement on the afternoon of 8 May confirming the move to her 'natural home', the Liberal party. Coalition colleagues quickly ascertained the plot had been in the works for weeks, engineered in part by the former prime minister Tony Abbott. Guardian Australia has been told the failed play damaged friendships between Price and McKenzie, who serve in the upper house together, as well as between McKenzie and frontbencher James Paterson. The Nationals have just four senators in the new parliament. Price is a favourite with the section of the Coalition closely tied to Sky News After Dark commentators on News Corp's network. Her high-profile role during the voice to parliament referendum and her no-apologies brand of rightwing politics lights up the Sky audience. One Nationals member says the network's hosts road test attack lines like a political party, sticking with two or three key messages that resonate with their loyal audience. But after two losses to Labor and the messy years of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, some within the Coalition believe Sky is a habit Liberals and Nationals need to kick. Internally, it is viewed as an outlet to speak to other members of parliament and to practise speaking on broadcast TV. Former Abbott strategist Peta Credlin, the network's marquee presenter, has campaigned against net zero and urged the Coalition to move further to the right following one of its worst-ever election defeats. 'The venn diagram of Sky viewers and Nationals opposing net zero is a circle. It is the same people,' a Nationals insider says. The Nationals will thrash out their position on net zero in a meeting of MPs set for the middle of next month. Ley has ordered two reviews for the Liberals – one on the election loss and the other into the party's future, including branch structures and membership base. The election postmortem, led by party elders Pru Goward and Nick Minchin, could speak to the net zero problem, but two diametrically opposed policies from the Liberals and the Nationals will set up an inevitable clash before the next election. The former deputy prime minister Michael McCormack, who insists on speaking to journalists on the record, says the Nationals' original support for net zero came during China's campaign of economic coercion against Australia and amid significant anxiety among exporters. European trade deals required net zero policies to be in place. 'The world is in a very different place now,' McCormack says. 'America has made its view clear, and other countries are following suit. Opposition to renewables infrastructure in regional communities is real and you can't come to Canberra and argue against the views of your electorate.' Labor is watching closely. As it pushes ahead with the transition to renewable energy and talks up Australia's commitment to the Paris climate agreement, there is political opportunity in the Coalition's dysfunction. An observer who lived through the first two decades of Australia's climate wars says Anthony Albanese could be the ultimate winner from any move to ditch net zero. 'If he's smart, Albanese might choose to leave Barnaby's private members sitting on the notice paper so it stirs fights between the Liberals and the Nats for six months. Then he could, at a time of maximum political convenience, bring it on for debate,' they say. 'Joyce has handed Albo the timer to a bomb planted inside the Coalition party room.'
