The U.S. government, the Pentagon and big tech: key components of U.S. imperialism. Part 3

Written by: Alex M. on 12 October 2026

 

Not content with selling out Australia’s defence and foreign policy to U.S. imperialism, federal and state governments are only too willing to sign us up to U.S. big tech. So much for sovereignty. In this third and final part we will examine how Australia’s so-called political leaders have continued their abject subservience to U.S. imperialist interests in their handling of AI, datacentres and big tech.

Marles and Charlton meet with big tech

 

In a piece by The Age’s chief political reporter Paul Sakkal, published on 3 September, it was stated that after meeting with Deputy PM Richard Marles and junior tech minister Andrew Charlton, key players from Anthropic, Open AI, Amazon, Google and Microsoft were keen to make big investments in Australia. Furthermore, they were happy to locate datacentres in remote areas of Australia. According to the report, the meeting with tech executives, Marles and Charlton which took place in San Francisco, helped smooth the way for U.S. big tech investment in this country. (1)

 

The spin on this piece is clear. Australian government ministers and officials allegedly have leverage over U.S. big tech because of the public backlash against the data centre rollout in North America. So concerned are the big tech figures about the pushback from the U.S. public that they are willing to accommodate some small conditions on data centre and other AI related investments in various parts of the globe, in order to continue their hyper-scaling AI and AGI projects. Hence the reported agreements given to Marles and Charlton which; will locate datacentres in remote parts of Australia; will add renewables to the grid to help power the datacentres and; gives in-principle agreement to Labor’s AI standards. Such agreements open up the possibility for Anthropic to invest $21 billion in a Large Language Model (AI) training facility located somewhere in Australia.

 

A sticking point with Anthropic’s proposed investment is the vexed issue of allowing access to copyrighted material. The federal government has to allay concerned Australian citizens’ fears that the unhindered scraping of copyrighted Australian material by Anthropic will not go ahead, yet that is what Anthropic wants. A proposed way out of the conundrum is a compensation package for ‘creatives’, yet even this appears to be too much for Anthropic to contemplate. Bear in mind that the scraping of material from the internet, a process that has been going on for quite a while now, is the plundering of humanity’s patrimony for the primary benefit of private tech corporations. As others have said about the training of LLMs, it is akin to ‘the wholesale theft of intellectual property rights.’

 

The leverage spoken about in this article is largely delusional. Marles and Charlton met with figures from big tech in San Francisco, sometime in August. Prior to the trip Marles made it clear that the key driver for meeting with big tech representatives is to ensure that Australia does not miss out on the AI boom, which ‘is the biggest hinge point in Australia’s self-reliance since World War II as AI models become pivotal in running services such as telecommunications, banking and even national security.’ (2) The self-reliance that Marles spruiks is the exact opposite of what is actually happening; for self-reliance read becoming abjectly dependent on U.S. big tech. Marles is part of a cabal of Labor (and other) politicians that actively seek to make Australia a mere vassal of U.S. imperialist interests. 

 

Pax Silica

 

As we have seen in Part 1 of this series, the U.S. ruling class is trying to maintain the United States’ hegemonic position by way of Pax Silica a part of which is what Edward Ongwese Jr calls the ‘Compute Axis’. (3) The ‘Compute Axis’ refers specifically to the oil rich Gulf states choosing to pivot away from oil and into a big tech future, making deals with Silicon Valley tech bros, while Trump and his family rake off some of the cream as deal enablers. Ongwese Jr argued that the ‘Compute Axis’ may have foundered on the rocks after Iran bombed Amazon Web Services data centres in Bahrain and the UAE. Putting that to one side, Pax Silica is succinctly described by Ongwese Jr as ‘an American-led project that would secure control over supply chains for artificial intelligence and the chips to run it, at the same time creating a new dependency regime and tech stack that could be backed up with the threat of violence (economic or otherwise).’ (4)

 

It is important to note that the AI boom that Marles and others are so keen for Australia to be a part of has a strong geopolitical element associated with it. Marles is not unaware of this when in the same Age article he is reported as saying that it was critical for Australia to work closely with the U.S. in its battles for tech supremacy with China. Not for Australia to access the cheaper open source AI from China; that would be opening up Australia to Chinese intelligence gathering! (5)

 

Australian government ministers and officials appear to be falling over themselves to be part of the latest U.S. imperial project that is Pax Silica, which is spun as self-reliance and the meek conditions proposed by Albanese indicative of leverage. The tech bros are not renowned for their integrity nor their honesty and Australian ‘leaders’ have already shown their hand in their eagerness to not miss the AI boom. The U.S. tech oligarchy know that they have the upper hand in these negotiations and will agree to some not very onerous conditions in order to get what they want.

 

Australian dependence on U.S. big tech

 

In a submission to the public inquiry into AUKUS, Adjunct Professor Warwick Powell detailed the issues arising from not having tech sovereignty: 

 

Modern national sovereignty is inextricably tied to technological sovereignty. A nation that does not control its digital infrastructure, cloud architecture, data pipelines and core algorithmic platforms operates at the discretion of those who do. American willingness to weaponise its dominance in information technology systems has been ably demonstrated by Farrell and Newman’s 2023 book Underground Empire.

 

Australia’s reliance on foreign proprietary "technology stacks" — specifically US-dominated cloud systems, enterprise software, and emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) models —creates deep operational dependencies: 

 

• Loss of Digital Autonomy: Key government services, critical infrastructure, and defence systems rely on proprietary architectures subject to foreign jurisdiction, regulatory shifts or export control regimes (such as ITAR and US cloud regulations).

• Complicity in Immoral and Unethical Warfare: The rapid deployment of automated foreign AI platforms in military intelligence and target selection directly links Australia to the operational ethics and legal violations of foreign technology developers —including documented strikes causing mass civilian casualties and deaths that directly breach international law.  (6)

 

Australia’s craven dependence on U.S. big tech not only surrenders our sovereignty but also allows for unprecedented levels of surveillance and data gathering by U.S. corporations. Palantir being the prime example. (7)

 

Palantir again

 

It comes as no surprise that Palantir has managed to insert itself into various federal government departments, Police forces and big Australian corporations. A quick glance reveals three government departments that have contracts with Palantir; the Department of Defence, AUSTRAC., and the NDIS.  AUSTRAC being the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre which acts as a regulator and financial intelligence unit. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) also has contracts with Palantir as does the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), and some state police and corrections systems. In the corporate field, Rio Tinto and Westpac have Palantir contracts. Coles also had a contact with Palantir but a concerted public campaign forced Coles to cut its ties with the tech giant. 

 

The public pushback against Palantir has gone global and for good reason; Palantir is an unapologetic supporter of U.S. imperialism and Israeli genocide. It is a company that mines data on an industrial scale and its software has been used in the killing of hundreds, if not thousands of innocent civilians. There are no guarantees that it is not using data gathered from various entities that it has contracts with in Australia, with federal and state governments placing little or no constraints on Palantir. In fact, Palantir has used the good old revolving door to further its interests in this country with a former Labor MP Mike Kelly recruited by the company in April this year. (8)

 

The unseemly haste of the datacentre roll out

 

According to Ben Eltham of Crikey, federal and state politicians have drunk the AI boom Kool Aid. That is, there has been the uncritical acceptance of the hyper-scaling and urgency narrative promoted by big tech oligarchs, by our elected representatives. Eltham argues that for federal and state politicians and high-level bureaucrats, the so-called AI boom with its attendant rapid roll out of datacentres is the latest version of the mining boom and it will boost the economy, increase productivity and enhance national security. Gripping Canberra and other capital cities is a techno-optimism helping create an environment that waives regulations and community consultation in order to ease the building of the AI infrastructure. (9)

 

The rush to build the datacentres has created resistance from concerned citizens worried about energy and water consumption, noise and air pollution associated with massive datacentres built in suburban areas. Hence the move by Marles, Charlton, Albanese and others to get U.S. big tech to agree to locate said centres in remote locations.

 

Underpinning the global datacentre build and the U.S. based AI project as a whole is a financial bubble, the size of which dwarfs the dot.com bubble and is possibly bigger than the sub-prime mortgage bubble, whose collapse led to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. No thought has been given to what happens with the datacentres when the bubble finally bursts. It is not even on our ‘leaders’ radar, so infused with techno-optimism are they. 

 

In conclusion, the above shows that Australian bourgeois politicians are only too happy to sell out Australian sovereignty to U.S. big tech and to continue our vassalage to U.S. imperialism. We need to bring about an independent and socialist country that puts peoples’ needs first.

 

 

(1) ‘AI tech giants pledge remote infrastructure’, The Age, 3 September, 2026, p.6. 

(2) ‘AI tech giants…’ The Age, p.6.

(3) For more on Pax Silica see the insightful contributed article here: https://www.cpaml.org/post4.php?id=1789343340&catitem1=Fighting%20Imperialism%20around%20the%20world&catid1=15

For Part 1 of this series go here: https://www.cpaml.org/post4.php?id=1786514106&catitem1=Fighting%20Imperialism%20around%20the%20world&catid1=15

(4) https://www.thetechbubble.info/p/how-much-a-dollar-cost 

For the official U.S. State Department website go here: https://www.state.gov/pax-silica/ 

(5) This is not to say that China would not or does not use technology to gather data either domestically or in other countries; it does. However, the anti-Chinese hysteria demonstrated in a recent 4 Corners ‘investigation’ regarding the possibility of hacking into a BYD Shark EV, which went to air on Monday 21 September, conveniently overlooks the massive elephant in the room that is U.S. surveillance and data gathering in this country.

(6) Submission to the AUKUS public inquiry, 13 August 2026, https://aukuspublicinquiry.com/#view-submissions p. 5.

(7) For more on Palantir see Part 2 of this series: https://www.cpaml.org/post4.php?id=1788761502&catitem1=Independence%20From%20Imperialism,%20People%27s%20Rights%20&%20Liberties&catid1=14

(8) See here for Mike Kelly’s recruitment and his rationale for joining the company: https://www.palantir.com/kelly-explains-his-decision-to-join-palantir/

(9) https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/10/08/ai-policy-australia-artificial-intelligence-openai-anthropic-amodei-altman/

 

 

Supermarket Wolves

Written by: Duncan B. on 6 October 2026

 

(Photo supplied)

Australian dairy farmers are unhappy with Australian supermarkets, and with good reason.

In April, Coles raised the price of its one, two and three litre bottles of own-brand milk, with the extra money to go to dairy farmers to help with the extra costs of fuel and fertiliser thanks to Trump’s war on Iran. One-litre bottles went from $1.65 to $1.85, two-litre bottles went from $3.20 to $3.55 and three-litre bottles went from $4.65 to $5.15.

In September, Coles announced that the subsidy payments would cease on September 8th. However, while the farmers have lost the extra money, Coles is also slugging consumers because the price of Coles milk has not returned to the former level. One- litre bottles are now $1.75, two-litre bottles are $3.40 and three-litre bottles are now $4.95.

In May, French-owned dairy processor Lactalis also gave farmers a 5 cents per litre increase, but has ended this subsidy at the end of September.

Australian Dairy Farmer president Ben Bennett did not mince his words in describing the supermarkets. He said they had made “a big song and dance” about how much of the temporary increase was flowing through to farmers and processors, but said only about 5 cents of a 20 cent increase actually flowed through to suppliers. “The supermarkets continually masquerade as lambs, but they’re wolves. They’re quite frankly opportunists, and that’s not healthy for a sustainable industry. That hubris character they’ve got is because they’ve got too much power."

Another reason that dairy farmers are unhappy is the increasing amount of cheese being imported into Australia, mainly from New Zealand, the US and the European Union. In 2025-26, 115,825 tonnes of cheese were imported into Australia. This was about 10,000 tonnes more than the previous year. 37,842 tonnes came from New Zealand, 46,456 tonnes from the US and 29,263 tonnes from the European Union.

Australian dairy farmers and processors are angry that Australian dairy imports into the US face a tariff of 12.5%, while the US has open access to our market landing cheese at prices Australians cannot compete with.

The cheese imported from the US is going into cheese sold under house brands in supermarkets, such as Woolworth’s Hillview Tasty Cheese. US cheese is also being used by fast food chains such as Guzman Y Gomez in its 255 stores selling Mexican-style food. Guzman Y Gomez has also stopped using Australian pork in its restaurants. Instead, they will be importing 25 tonnes per week of frozen pork from Denmark, at a saving of $1.50 per kilo over the local product.

Governments Budgets and Competing Class Interests -MAKE THE RICH PAY

Written by: Ned K. on 11 October 2026

 

Every year Federal, State and Territory Governments announce their Budget expenditure for the coming financial year. Budget announcements by governments are preceded by lobbying from competing sectional interests of the capitalist class. The biggest corporations, many of them foreign owned, usually engage the most expensive lobbyists to present their case to governments. Small businesses which may influence voting patterns in marginal electorates, especially in an election year, still come a distant second behind the large corporations.

Regional corporate interests are taken into account more so if the commodities they produce are mainly for exports. An example of this is iron ore mining in the north-west of Western Australia.

Government budgets are attempts to manage capitalism as a whole for the coming year and to minimise corporate campaigns against the governments of the day.

The other factor determining the allocation of government money in the yearly budget is the voice and actions of the working class.

The major parliamentary political parties and the large corporate sector of the capitalist class keep an eye on the voice and actions of the working class. That is why Prime Minister Albanese and State Government Premiers attend conferences by big business 'think tanks' such as SEC Newgate Australia which surveys thousands of Australian people each year to get a sense of what are the issues that the majority of Australians are most concerned about.

In SEC Newgate's 2026 Survey, they asked what issues were either extremely concerned about or quite concerned about. The results were not all that surprising with the percentages of people for each issue answering extremely concerned or quite concerned listed below.

Cost of living 86%
Crime/safety 72%
Housing Affordability 66%
Health Care Services 65%
Interest Rates 60%
Political Uncertainty 60%
Housing Availability 60%
Rental Availability 54%
Rental Affordability 59%
Education 54%
Immigration 54%

Under capitalism, it is impossible for governments to address all the issues that are most widely and deeply felt by the working class (which includes a broad range of income levels) and the interests of big business in particular. So many large corporations pay minimal or no tax at all that State Governments, fearful of increasing more tax burdens on to workers and losing the next election they face, borrow more and more from big banks, including foreign owned banks. 

For example, the South Australian Government debt level in 2026 is $26 billion and predicted to be $37.6 billion in a couple of years' time.

The Gross State Product (GSP) in South Australia in 2026 is $115 billion which means the debt level is 22.6%. In its 2026 budget it announced that it will spend $45.4 billion over the next four years on Health Services, while still throwing money to Santos who pays little or no tax and even more money to AUKUS's nuclear submarine base in South Australia. 

The SA Government Budget papers included plans for A "Red Tape Reduction" review by an SA Productivity Commission with the aim of "lower costs for business".

In South Australia as in other States and Territories, the main sections of their economies are in the control of big corporations, many of these foreign owned.

Nowhere in the Budgets at any level of government are there even moderate TAX increases on the profits of large corporations with huge profits going overseas.

Even the most well intentioned of governments at any level to hand down budgets to solve the people's major concerns such as cost of living will fail unless they are budgets whose underlying aim is "MAKE THE RICH PAY"

 

Firmus launches what looks to be a great financial bubble

Written by: Nick G. on 8 October 2026

 

(Above: The dangerous bubble. Puck magazine 22 October 1902   Public domain image)

 

On October 6, Australian data centre company Firmus launched its initial public offering (IPO) of shares for private investors, taking the privately-owned company into the public sphere.  It valued its shares at $A11 each, in what the Australian Financial Review called, on October 6, “hottest float headed to the ASX in more than two decades”. The company is hoping to raise $A7 billion from those buying its shares.

The IPO closed on October 8, and Firmus will begin trading on the ASX on October 23.

Firmus and the creation of surplus value

What does Firmus do, and how can investors feel confident to claim their share of future surplus value when Firmus products, which contain surplus value created by human labour power embedded in the production process, are turned into profit realised through sales?

Marx’s explanation for the value of products was that workers had to work part of their day to create in the product the value that was necessary for the employer to pay their wages, but that any time surplus to that requirement, that is the additional hours of the working day, resulted in workers creating a surplus value for which they were not paid. This surplus value was left over from the need for the employer to cover the cost of their wages, and was the source of a company’s profits when those products were sold.

When automation is taken to its extreme, robots and other components of production, driven by AI programs, obviate the need for much, if not all, human labour power. Marx predicted this in his late 1850s unfinished manuscript on political economy called “The Grundrisse”, where he predicted the situation where, through automation, “the value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude…”

So, how does a data company like Firmus, create surplus value, and hence profits for its shareholders?

What do data factories make?

Firmus is something a little more than a data centre. The latter are large pieces of physical infrastructure which store, process and transmit data at a huge cost in energy and water (for cooling).

What Firmus operates are data factories (in some parlance, referred to as AI factories), large pieces of physical infrastructure which transform data into products, particularly AI models, predictions, tokens for cryptocurrency mining, and generated content. They also consume huge amounts of energy and water.

A data factory does more than store and transmit data; it organises data for the production of artificial intelligence on a huge scale.

Unlike a data centre, which requires servers and storage facilities, a data factory requires huge numbers of graphics processing units (GPUs), specialized electronic circuits designed for digital image processing, and accelerators to speed the process, enabling them to perform billions of calculations in the proverbial blink of an eye. A data factory Firmus proposes to build on Batam Island, Indonesia, is designed to house up to 170,000 Nvidia GPUs. 

What it doesn’t require much of in its production process is human labour power as Marx foretold in The Grundrisse.

But it is axiomatic in Marxist political economy that only human labour power is the source of surplus value, and hence of profit.

What does human labour power contribute to a data factory production process?

Why then run a data factory, or rush to invest in one?

While it may appear that machines do all the work, there is still a component of human labour power distributed throughout the system that contributes to the final product of a data factory.

Some of that is directly applied, for example, technicians who install and repair equipment, workers who ensure electricity supply and maintain associated infrastructure, and even “front of house” workers engaged in customer relations. There are also operators who monitor AI systems (the latter may soon include legislatively required independent or third-party evaluators whose role will be to “ensure that humans stay in control”). These are all applications of living human labour power.

There is also a component of (intellectual) human labour power that has already been used up in systems design, software program development, research and design of AI models, and related pre-production tasks, and although their labour power has already been used up and is theoretically “dead”, its value is embedded in its products and services and transmitted through them to data factory products.

This “dead” labour is transmitted to a product when living labour arranges its participation in the process of production. The constant capital (machinery, robots etc) transfers its value to the product through wear and tear, mediated by living labour. It transfers, but does not create. The amount transferred in a given production period is determined by the wear and tear of the constant capital — its depreciation over its useful life. If a machine is worth $1,000,000 and produces 100,000 units over its life, roughly $10 of its value enters each unit (ignoring moral depreciation, interest, etc.).

As with all applications of machinery since the capitalist destruction of hand manufacturing, the more that machinery and the less that human labour power are applied in production generally results in greater efficiency and greater productivity but, over time, lower sales volume can result if the market of wage workers is increasingly impoverished.

In the long run (even in the short run when bubbles burst) producing a hundred times more of a product does not mean the production of a corresponding scale of value. Greater productivity can result in products of lesser value if there is less input from human labour power producing surplus value. This can be compounded when competitors flood the market with the same or similar products at a reduced price.

Prices (as distinct from value) may be artificially maintained for a time by monopoly control of production (whether by copyright protection or buying out of competitors), or by breaking into new markets.

Gambling with fictitious capital until the bubble bursts

Those institutional finance capitalists (approximately 50% of the IPO is reserved for existing investors including Nvidia and Blackstone) and “mum and dad” investors who have bought into Firmus and have a claim on its future surplus value may have stopped using their capital as a non-productive “hoard”, but only through a process that separates their capital from production, rendering it a “fictional” or “virtual” capital so long as surplus value has not yet been created.

When it is, there will be a period when speculation will enable a return on investment, but it is always a gamble.

The gamblers run the risk of being deceived by the promise of production on scale, unaware that increased productivity does not necessarily create increased value, but rather, can create its opposite.

In that respect, Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock was correct to warn that the AI investment boom, which includes data centres (and we use it here as a generic term for data/AI factories as well) “could be a bubble”. 

She was echoing the views of the General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements (the “reserve bank” of central reserve banks), Pablo Hernández de Cos, who said in an interview with India’s Economic Times on September 11, 2026 that “the AI investment boom may become unsustainable. The reasons are two-fold.

“On the one hand, like many previous technology booms, there has been a race among firms to capture and obtain market share. This naturally leads to a certain degree of overinvestment. By definition, if there is overinvestment, that can also be a source of a bust at some point, particularly if returns disappoint. 

“The second is related to the fact that the capital expenditure behind the AI investment boom is increasingly reliant on debt and leverage. An important element is that there are also relatively opaque private-credit structures and circular financing arrangements that create very complex interdependencies. So, if there is a disappointment in returns, we might have a bust in investment and this could be amplified by these financial channels. Why is this important? It is important per se, but also because, as we all know, the AI investment boom has been critical for the resilience of the global economy in recent years.”

We would not expect that general manager of the BIS to express such a warning in Marxist terms. But it is a warning none the less.

And an AI bubble will not be restricted to AI but will affect the “resilience of the global economy” for years.

This is also the view of AI analyst Will Lockett who wrote on October 1:

AI companies are burning cash at a furious rate, have racked up an astronomical amount of debt, have almost entirely exhausted all private funding routes, and have no viable path to profitability. This is a recipe for imminent bankruptcy, triggering a financial crisis through a massive debt default. This is why all of the AI labs are rushing to form IPOs, because going public is the last pool of money capable of fending off this collapse for at least a year or two.

The rush to IPOs began in spectacular fashion last June when Elon Musk’s SpaceX became the largest ever IPO, at a valuation of US$1.77 trillion. By late July 2026, SpaceX shares had fallen approximately 50% from their peak reached during the week after the IPO, causing Musk to lose his trillionaire status.

Applying for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange is Nscale, a European-based data factory created by Joshua Payne, an Australian former coalminer and construction worker. The company hopes to raise $US35 billion through its IPO.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are lining up for IPOs.

However, investors are already sounding the alarm bells on Firmus, whose founder Oliver Curtis was jailed in 2016 for two years for insider trading on derivatives. On October 6, the Stocks Down Under website warned investors in an article titled “Why we wouldn’t touch the Firmus IPO with a 10-foot pole”.

The latest news is that there has been a failure to attract the predicted capital, and Firmus may have to lower its share price to around $8 in an effort to get more people on board.

Just like pumping air into a balloon eventually causes it to explode, so the pumping of cash into AI IPOs is heading for a bursting, and Firmus might just lead the way.

 

SA AI Royal Commissioners announced

Written by: Nick G. on 6 October 2026

 

The announcement by the SA government of the three people to head its Royal Commission into AI provides some evidence of the political and economic direction that the Malinauskas government hopes it will take.

Last August, we commented on the visit by Malinauskas to the US, which preceded the decision to hold a Royal Commission. Vanguard: AI – the rush to a Royal Commission in SA

Perhaps somewhat rashly, we concluded that:

It is certainly unlikely to pursue the option of AI for the benefit of others than the corporations and their governments. 

It is equally very doubtful that it would look at how the people could own and use AI for socially beneficial purposes if it was taken out of the hands of private profiteers.

So, how do the three commissioners stand in relation to those conclusions?

Iain Ross

The chair is retired Federal Court judge Iain Ross. According to Wikipedia he worked for the ACTU as an industrial officer, beginning in 1986 then became assistant secretary of the ACTU under Bill Kelty. In 2012 he became president of Fair Work Australia and has been on the board of the Reserve Bank from 2023.

The best that can be said about Ross is that he has proved his usefulness to the capitalist class during his time with the ACTU, and subsequently been promoted to positions of trust in legal and economic circles to serve the big end of town.

Assisting Ross as Commissioners are Kate Pounder and Christopher Manning.

Kate Pounder

Pounder worked for some time for controversial US management company McKinsey and Company. She was a Partner in a startup analytics firm, AlphaBeta, that was later sold to Accenture, where she worked on a number of projects related to labour market and training reform. She was inaugural CEO of the Tech Council of Australia, and was a Board Member of Essential Energy, a leading energy distribution company in regional communities. She also chairs RNA Australia, a new body overseeing the pilot RNA manufacturing facility in NSW. (Ribonucleic Acid is a molecule essential for most biological functions and can carry genetic information.)

As recently as July 2025, Pounder was appointed to take charge of US data giant OpenAI’s policy development in Australia.

Kate Pounder’s husband is Andrew Dempster. He was a Director at KPMG for 8 months in 2019, following which he was head of policy to the Leader of the Opposition (Albanese) until May 2022. After the election, he became a senior adviser to Cabinet until July 2025. In February of this year, he took up a position as Head of Engagement at McKinnon’s, a privately-established foundation doing policy work aimed at governments.  One of its management team is former SA Deputy Premier Dr. Susan Close. This year it demonstrated its “non-partisan” credentials by naming Senator James Paterson as its “Federal Political Leader of the Year”! We mention Dempster just to show Pounder’s extended social and political contacts and to illustrate the closeness between Labor and the corporate world.

Christopher Manning

The final Commissioner is Christopher Manning, an Australian-American computer scientist and applied linguist specialising in the areas of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. He has authored several books on related topics. He works at the US Stanford University.

Manning is also General Partner and Investment Partner at AIX Ventures which focuses on investing in and advising companies working in NLP, reasoning, and other AI areas. NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming asserts a connection between neurological processes, language, and acquired behavioural patterns, and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals. 

AIX Ventures has an investment portfolio of more than 70 AI companies, including Hugging Face which came to prominence after the incident from May to July 2026 when AI agents developed by OpenAI escaped their testing constraints to access the Internet and break into Hugging Face. AI safety experts described the incident as the first in which AI escaped human control to commandeer resources in other companies or data bases and schemed to conceal its actions.

Manning is also a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Moonlake AI, a frontier research lab building world models. Where large language models (LLMs) are based on harvesting and synthesising text, world models use both text and imagery (pixels) to design robotic functions that, according to Moonlake, “can unlock great economic value and free people from undesirable work”.

Its website provides examples such a café that wanted a robot to operate its coffee dispenser using the equipment already at the counter. Moonlake designed operations for Dexmate, a dual-arm robot that needed to pick up a cup, hold it beneath the outlet while pressing the tap, and return it upright. The task had to fit around shelves and neighbouring equipment in a working shop. It was able to cut the design process from an estimated week’s work to less than 7 hours by feeding digital images of the workspace into its programming.

A second example was that of a data centre that wanted to develop cable-repatching tasks that included flexible cables the robot could interact with. Designed around an OpenArm robot from Anvil, and by feeding digital images of the data centre into its programming, Moonlake was able to create a working robot to carry out its tasks in less than 12 hours, compared with the estimated two weeks of manual modelling.

Both tasks, and others like them, are designed to reduce human labour power in the production process.

There are two main thrusts to the Royal Commission’s terms of reference. There is mention of how to “realise the social benefits of AI while protecting people and society from AI-related risks” and that thrust is designed to engender public confidence in AI. That means firming up the conditions for its social licence, and overcoming community apprehension and opposition.

Most, however, of the terms of reference contain an economic thrust, namely “using AI to improve productivity, innovation and economic growth”.

Malinauskas is a political wheeler and dealer par excellence. 

Maybe the conclusions we reached in our earlier article were not so rash after all.

Revisionists say China cannot be imperialist

Written by: Nick G. on 2 October 2026

 

Around the world, revisionists claim that China remains a socialist country, that it cannot be imperialist, and proclaim it as the leader of an anti-hegemonic bloc opposing US imperialism.

This has an undoubted influence on some on the Left who naturally and emphatically oppose US imperialism and cannot wait to see it defeated once and for all.

One of those who sought to prove that China cannot be imperialist is Jason Hickel. We analysed his views in the Autumn 2026 issue of our theoretical journal Australian Communist. It can be accessed here with the relevant article on pages 3-6.

Central to Hickel’s thesis is the World Systems Theory division of nations into core, semi-periphery and periphery based on the unequal transfer of value. According to Hickel, the transfer of value from China to the West has allowed it to rise from the periphery to the semi-periphery, but prevents it from becoming a part of the imperialist core.

Now another revisionist-aligned academic, Carlos Martinez, has come out with a co-authored book titled “China’s Foreign Policy and the Making of a Multipolar World”.  Accompany the book is an 18-minute video presentation (China isn’t imperialist – here’s the proof). 

This person’s line is very similar to that of Jason Hickel.  He quotes Lenin’s five characteristics of imperialism but then reverts to the core and periphery focus of Immanuel Wallerstein and his World Systems Theory, and says, like Hickel, that China can never become imperialist because it is subject to the core’s transfer of value from China, keeping it in a peripheral or semi-peripheral state.  

Martinez bases his video and his book on the belief that “a multipolar world provides a way out of imperialism for everyone.” China is presented as a champion of multipolarity and as an anti-hegemonic force, and hence the appeal to those want to see the defeat of US imperialism. 

However, China has its own hegemonic aspirations, and as a former socialist country still professing to implement Marxist principles, it cannot be expected to follow the same path to imperialism as the established Western imperialist powers. It is using its economic power to oust other imperialists from investment opportunities across the globe. Its strategy of “winning the war without fighting”, borrowed from the ancient Sun Zi, was also outlined by Chinese General Qiao Long who we quoted on pages 18-19 of “Explaining China…” 

Martinez says that “the export of capital requires a state strong enough to intervene in every corner of the globe”. And that is what China has built. The mandate of the PLA (which includes the Air Force and the Navy) is to “safeguard China's security and interests in new domains” and to “safeguard the security of China's overseas interests”.  

For those seeking to understand how China managed to raise itself from being a socialist member of the Third World, the Global South, to become a member of the imperialist core, the booklet “Explaining China…” refers to “Conditions under which capitalist restoration leads to social-imperialism” (p 13-20) and provides the basis for understanding the developments that allowed China to enter the core imperialist group.

Efforts must be made to counter views sympathetic to Chinese social-imperialism. We do not want the US to launch a war with China, but neither do we accept the view that China’s expansion is a n altruistic strategy designed to oppose US hegemonism. There should be no support for China as a leader of anti-hegemonic struggle when it is striving for hegemony itself.

 

Biggest local and foreign companies still paying no Australian tax

Written by: Nick G. on 2 October 2026

 

(Photo supplied from original by fernando Goncalves)

Eleven years ago, public outrage at large local and foreign corporations engaging in tax evasion or avoidance, legal or otherwise, compelled the Australian Taxation Office to release an annual list of the largest corporations and their taxes.

The lists are compiled from companies that have an annual income of $100 million or more, so it really represents only the tip of an iceberg if all companies were represented.

Nevertheless, the eleven years’ worth of data shows that roughly one-third of the largest corporations in Australia contribute nothing in taxes to the government’s ability to pay for the programs and services it has to fund.

Minimal attempts to compel corporations to pay taxes on their Australian earnings have had little effect. In the 2013-14 financial year companies comprising 38% of the 1539 largest local and foreign companies operating in Australia paid no tax.

 

For the 2020-21 financial year, that per centage had only fallen to 32%. 

 

The figures for the latest financial year, 2024-5, show that per centage has still only fallen to 28%, an improvement on the 2013-14 figure, but indicating that big companies can use various means to continue to avoid paying tax.

 

Fossil fuel giant Santos Ltd, which paid no tax in 2024-25 on $5.1 billion in earnings, is a serial offender, having paid zero corporate tax on nearly $52 billion in sales over the 11 consecutive years of ATO public disclosures. 

 

Japanese-owned Ichthys LNG Pty Ltd has paid no tax (including the Petroleum Resources Rent Tax) for the last seven years on total earnings of $53 billion. Its Japanese owner, the oil company Inpex Corporation, owns and operates a gas field off the north-west coast of Western Australia, said to be one of the most significant energy projects in the world.

 

Optus owner Singtel, with an $8.3bn income in 2024–25, has paid no tax for five years.

 

Notorious Brazilian meat company JBS Global Meat Holdings, which has over 250 production facilities around the world and whose products reach consumers in 180 countries, paid no tax on its 2024-25 income of $4.8 billion, and has a recurring pattern of paying no tax.

 

Even those companies that do pay tax sometimes pay very little. Three random examples are:  

 

• Arrow Commodities Pty Ltd, which exports wheat, feedstocks and many other agricultural commodities, paid only $512,130 on 2024-25 earnings of $678,394,324

• Atlas Fuel Australia Ltd paid only $135,931 on earnings of $264,100,261

• China-based UBI Logistics (Australia) Ltd paid only $36,316 on earnings of $106,581,823.

 

Years ago, our Party advanced the tactical slogan “Make the Rich Pay”.  It was based on the premise that the rich weren’t paying enough for the social programs of the people.  It now transpires that the rich constantly strive, and often successfully, to pay nothing at all, year after year.

 

As an immediate demand, “Make the Rich Pay….something, anything” still resonates.

 

However, the days when we continue to tolerate the rich at all are drawing to a close.

 

Ultimately, this struggle between the rich and the rest will have to be resolved by bringing private ownership of industry, finance and commerce under the control of a working class state in a socialist and independent Australia.