No one has to prove a conspiracy, only to provoke suspicion. No one is honest, everyone is lying. But at the end of the day Australian politics will always be a choice between Libs and Labor. Brutus Gillard or an evil weasel. Gillard has to take the job because the alternative is too awful to consider.

There is absolutely no evidence that the mining companies "knew" that they could "get" PM Kevin Rudd removed from power. This is an absurd statement.

The mining industry in Australia is divided into the giant mining companies and the lesser ones. The big miners have been placated by a deal brokered by the new replacement PM Julia Gillard. However the more minor miners are still very bolshy and are throwing their weight behind the opposition, hence giving the lie to the risible claim by Darren.

The Labor Party's strategists found out very quickly the clout that the big miners could wield by dipping into their virtually bottomless pit to fund anti-Labor ads.

The miners' explicitly stated intent was to back the Liberal-National Coalition Opposition - I do not think for a moment that they expected, much less engineered one way or another an internal ALP coup. Where is the evidence of this ludicrous claim? The move against Rudd caught everyone by surprise - the media, the Opposition and members of the Labor Party, as well as the punters. In that it was very well executed coup.

The reason why it worked, as I said in my prior post, was that there was a general dissatisfaction with Rudd for his unilateralism and unwillingness to work cooperatively with his cabinet and colleagues. The stoush with the miners merely added fuel to the fire. It must be remembered that current PM Julia Gillard, the beneficiary of the coup, and Treasurer Wayne Swan as part of the Gang of Four kitchen cabinet who made all the decisions, were also up to their necks in the formulation of the new mining super profits tax.

I will say this again, Rudd's high-handedness and rudeness was hated internally but tolerated while he was popular, but the marriage of convenience fell apart the moment it became evident that his name was mud out in the marginal electorates, many of which were vulnerable to well-funded propaganda because they were rural electorates where mining occurred in Queensland and Western Australia. The parliamentary Labor Party given the opportunity to oust him did not need any ukase from the mining lobby. That suggestion is just insulting to the average intelligence.

The other suggestion is just as riddled with falsehoods. The ALP has NOT ALWAYS been a booster for Israel. It is true that the Israel lobby managed to get to Bob Hawke, the trades union head and later PM when he needed their help via the good offices of the transport magnate Peter Abeles, a prominent Jew who facilitated the breaking of the pilots' union who in turn threatened the historic union-government accord to break the cycle of wage inflation that was the set piece of Hawke government's policy. (This is a separate and complex story which would take as away from the gist of this post, so I'll leave it for another time.)

But only some parts of the ALP assumed a warm relationship with Israel. Other factions of the ALP remained either neutral or even overtly hostile to it.

The Labor Party has had its ups and downs with Israel and its lobbies, recall the virulent anti-Israel left-wing Victorian Socialist Left faction leader and State Secretary Bill Hartley who was an active proselytiser for Iraq and Libya as well as the PLO; interstingly, Hartley's actions of sourcing funds for the government to fund its buyout of mining interests by going cap in hand to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party in 1975, were intrumental in bringing down the Whitlam ALP government. ALP had been out of power from 1949 until 1972 until Whitlam came along, Hartley helped to bury it until Bob Hawke came along in 1983. With friends like these...

It must be noted that the Coalition is an even stronger supporter of Israel and its policies than the ALP is: it was an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce lunch this week which featured addresses by the leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott and his warm-up man, the one-time treasurer in the Howard government ousted at the last election, Peter Costello, who, in support of Abbott and the Coalition used his address to viciously mock the current PM Julia Gillard, including a bizarre burlesque impersonation of her accent. There's gratitude for you - we remove a PM for you and you still poo on us form a great height...

The sentence that the "ALP always has been for capitalism, imperialism, Zionism" is just a period piece, a Leninist-style agit-prop and nothing more.

Lenin once characterised the ALP as a "liberal capitalist" party - it now makes no more sense than Zinoviev's pamphlet of the time about the West's labor movements in general: "They sell their birthright for a mess of pottage...They retard the erection of a new order in society which will of necessity free them, the 'aristocrats' themselves, from wage slavery. They become a tool of reaction."

I reckon we are over the New Order now, thank you very much, just as we are over the empty phrases of rote-learned propaganda. Unless one lives in N Korea that is...

I was lucky...I could see the writing on the wall when Hawke finally gave way to Keating and I got the hell out of Australia before Howard and then the recent rash of political clones and drones took over the Australian political landscape.

While Pilger can jar with his (sometime) holier than thou sermonising, I would rather live in his world than the sanctimonious, xenophobic, jingoistic, and smugly anti-intellectual society Australia has increasingly become.

Regardless of their position on the political spectrum the days of giants and visionaries such as Whitlam and Fraser have sadly passed.

Fraser said it best when he finally broke with the Liberals stating they were no longer liberal and had become just another conservative party.

The ALP is, as always, a faction riven collection of shallow, sneering, venal political queans who sold their collective soul during the Hawke and Keating years.

And when Australia finally elected, in Rudd, a man with an intellectual and global vision (even though I am opposed to his moral and religious views the man stood apart from his brawling contemporaries) what happens? The small and pernicious 'backroom' political hacks stab their own in the back once more.

From afar one wonders whether it is a case of Australia being led blithely into the abyss by a populist and hackneyed political class of scavengers or whether the Australian electorate is truly represented by these hollow and self serving political swine?

Perhaps its is simply the case of Australia getting the leadership they deserve? The 'lucky country' no more.

Antony Loewenstein (Independent Australian Jewish Voices and author of "My Israel Question") simply posits Israel Lobby disaffection as a factor of uncertain magnitude in Rudd's demise. I personally suppose that the slump in Rudd's popularity was the key factor i.e. it was a pro-Zionist-led Coup and not a Zionist Coup. Of course the inevitable pro-Zionist assertion of "anti-Semitism" re anti-racist criticism of the Israel Lobby is utterly false and extremely ugly and obnoxious when implied against an eminent anti-racist Jewish writer.

The pro-Zionist Australian Rudd-Gillard and Gillard Labor Governments have failed to demand extradition and trial of those Israelis (including Israeli Australians) involved in the violent terrorist attack on Australians in international waters and in violation of Australia's sovereignty through passport forgery.

Decent Australians will have a poor opinion of pro-Zionist Labor's cowardly dereliction of duty and of the disloyalty to Australia of the Australian Israel Lobby. As an anti-racist humanitarian, my view is that supporters of the racist Zionists running genocidal, war criminal, nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israel should be sidelined in public life, as have been those supporting racist groups such as the Nazis, neo-Nazis, Apartheiders and KKK.

A multi-author compendium about the ongoing Palestinian Genocide by Apartheid Israel has recently been published in London (John Pilger is one of many distinguished contributors): "The Plight of the Palestinians. A Long History of Destruction", edited by Professor William A. Cook (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010).

In his book "Collapse" Jared Diamond suggests that a population of 8 million or so would be realistically able to live sustainably, yet the population is now around 20 million and growing.