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In Australia government funded and supported institutions, and their clergy bound by doctrine and oaths of allegiance to a foreign Vatican sovereign daily act with impunity to pervert justice, minimise and cloak rape in eternal secrecy, prioritizing papal loyalty over truth, victims and national law.
#1066
When a weapons company's profitability becomes part of the growth of Australia's sovereign wealth, I think we have to be capable of asking more
PUBLISHED: September 30, 2026 9:06:55 AM UPDATED: No Updates
Prompted by Gareth Hutchens, "Weapons makers, SpaceX and semiconductors feature in Australia's Future Fund portfolio", ABC News, 30 September 2026. Read the ABC article .
Sometimes I read a news article and find myself struggling, not so much with the facts, but with what we have apparently decided those facts are allowed to mean.
An ABC report on Australia's Future Fund published on 30 September 2026 is one of those articles.
Australia's Future Fund has grown from an initial $60 billion in 2006 to about $290 billion today, while also managing tens of billions of dollars across several smaller funds.
That sounds like a remarkable national financial achievement.
Then you begin looking at where some of that money is invested.
The ABC reports that the Future Fund continued investing in major defence, aerospace and weapons companies during the first half of 2026. It bought additional shares in Thales and another 8,000 shares in Israeli defence company Elbit Systems. The value of its Elbit holding increased from $8.6 million to $19.7 million during those six months.
And I find myself asking a question that seems almost too obvious:
Should we really be building Australia's future wealth partly upon the products of war?
I understand the argument that a country needs defence.
I understand that Australia exists in a world in which armed conflict occurs and that governments have an obligation to protect their populations.
But that is not quite the question troubling me.
There is a difference between reluctantly deciding that weapons are necessary for defence and deciding that the manufacture of weapons is an appropriate place from which to derive national wealth.
One is about protection.
The other is about investment.
And once we become investors, something important changes.
Our financial interests can become attached to industries that prosper in a world becoming more heavily armed.
That does not mean Australia wants wars to occur.
It does not mean every company involved in defence benefits from every conflict.
Nor does investment in a defence company mean that an investor approves of every action undertaken by that company or by every government purchasing its products.
But it does create a contradiction that I think deserves much more attention than we give it.
We say we want peace.
We say we want international stability.
We say we want children to grow up safely.
We speak about human rights, international law, fairness and human dignity.
And then somewhere inside the machinery managing our collective wealth, war and preparation for war can appear simply as another investment category.
I struggle with that.
War is not an abstraction to the people underneath it.
It means homes destroyed.
Hospitals destroyed.
Schools destroyed.
Parents burying children and children losing parents.
It means displacement, hunger, disability and poverty.
It can destroy in minutes infrastructure and social systems that took generations to build.
And the consequences do not stop when the shooting stops.
Populations can live with the physical, economic and psychological consequences for decades.
So when a weapons company's profitability becomes part of the growth of Australia's sovereign wealth, I think we have to be capable of asking more than:
Did the investment produce a good return?
We also have to ask:
What conditions in the world allow that market to grow?
And:
Is that something from which we are comfortable deriving our prosperity?
Australia likes to tell itself a particular story.
We are a country of the fair go.
It is one of those phrases Australians use almost instinctively.
It means different things to different people, but somewhere inside it is a belief that power should not simply crush the person who possesses less of it.
That people deserve dignity.
That people deserve opportunity.
That people should not be arbitrarily deprived of the chance to live their lives.
But surely that principle cannot suddenly disappear when the person concerned lives somewhere else.
A child born in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Israel, Yemen or anywhere else did not choose the circumstances into which that child was born.
Nor does someone's religion, nationality, politics or understanding of history remove their humanity.
If we genuinely believe in a fair go, then surely there has to be some limit on our willingness to prosper from circumstances in which other people lose theirs.
An important part of this discussion is that Australia has already accepted the principle that not every lawful investment is automatically an acceptable investment for the Future Fund.
The Future Fund's responsible-investment exclusions cover activities including cluster munitions, anti-personnel mines, specified nuclear-weapons activity, chemical weapons, biological weapons and primary tobacco production.
So the principle has already been established.
There are things from which Australia has decided its sovereign wealth should not profit.
The real argument is therefore not whether ethics belong in investment decisions.
They already do.
The question is where we draw the boundary.
And that boundary is not inevitable.
It is a choice.
The ABC notes that Norway's sovereign wealth fund excludes a number of companies in which Australia's Future Fund continues to invest, including Airbus, BAE Systems, Boeing, Caterpillar, Elbit Systems and General Dynamics.
Norway's approach does not automatically tell us what Australia's policy should be.
It tells us something more fundamental:
Democratic societies can make different choices about what they are prepared to profit from.
Who made this choice for us?
That is not an accusation directed at the people administering the Future Fund.
They operate under legislation, investment mandates and policies established within Australia's system of government.
The ABC also reports that some holdings arise through passive, index-tracking investment strategies rather than the Future Fund directly selecting every individual company.
But that explanation actually makes the democratic issue more interesting.
Because if the machinery produces outcomes that Australians have never meaningfully considered, perhaps we should be examining the machinery.
At what point does a decision become too morally consequential simply to disappear inside financial administration?
When do citizens get to say:
No. That may be profitable, but we do not want our country making its money that way.
Or, equally, after considering the arguments:
Yes. We believe these industries are necessary and investment in them is legitimate.
Either position can be argued.
What troubles me is the possibility that we never really make the decision at all.
This is where I struggle with the idea that representative democracy, by itself, gives citizens sufficient control over what is done in their name.
We are told that if we disagree with the direction of government, we can express that disagreement at the next election.
But several years is an extraordinarily long time in government.
By the time another election arrives, the decision that concerned us may already have been implemented, the money spent, the contracts signed, the investment embedded and the consequences dispersed through institutions that simply continue operating.
The issue itself may have disappeared beneath hundreds of newer controversies, scandals, failures, announcements and crises.
And ordinary people have lives to live.
They have rent to pay.
Food to put on the table.
Children and families to care for.
Jobs to keep.
Health problems to manage.
They cannot spend several years maintaining constant attention on every decision made by governments and institutions in their name.
That creates an enormous imbalance.
Government and its institutions operate continuously.
The citizen's formal opportunity to intervene is intermittent.
Power operates every day. The vote arrives every few years.
I do not think those things are equivalent.
If sovereignty genuinely belongs to the people, it cannot exist only for a few minutes inside a polling booth every several years.
That may give citizens a choice about who will exercise power next.
It does not necessarily give them an effective way to challenge how power is being exercised now.
To me, meaningful sovereignty requires something more.
It means citizens retaining practical ways to question, expose, challenge and, where necessary, require reconsideration of significant decisions while those decisions still matter.
Otherwise our sovereignty risks becoming retrospective.
We are allowed to object after the decision.
We can investigate after the money has been spent.
We can hold an inquiry after the harm has occurred.
We can vote against a government after years have passed.
But none of those things necessarily gives the citizen the ability to intervene at the point when intervention could still change the outcome.
That distinction matters.
Accountability after an event is not the same thing as democratic control while the event is occurring.
There is another problem with relying upon the next election.
Time buries things.
Today's disturbing decision becomes tomorrow's old story.
Another failure replaces it.
Then another.
Political controversy accumulates until individual decisions become almost impossible to keep in public view.
A population can become exhausted simply trying to remember what it was supposed to remain angry, concerned or vigilant about.
That does not require a conspiracy.
It is almost an inevitable consequence of the difference between the continuity of institutional power and the limited attention available to individual citizens.
We go back to paying the rent.
Buying groceries.
Going to work.
Looking after one another.
Living.
Meanwhile the machinery of government keeps moving.
That is why meaningful sovereignty cannot depend solely upon remembering everything until the next election.
A functioning democracy needs mechanisms that work between elections.
That does not mean citizens should administer every department or vote on every government decision.
Complex societies require delegation and expertise.
But delegation should not become disappearance.
There should be a point at which enough citizens can say:
This decision is significant enough that you must explain it, expose the evidence behind it and allow it to be challenged before it simply becomes permanent.
That is very different from government by constant referendum.
It is a principle of continuing accountability.
It recognises that elected government needs enough authority to govern, while citizens need enough continuing authority to remain sovereign.
Without that balance, we can end up with something that is democratic at the moment of election but increasingly remote from democratic control during the years that follow.
There is a serious argument on the other side.
A country that refuses to manufacture or purchase weapons does not thereby cause every other country to disarm.
Deterrence may prevent conflicts.
Military technology can protect civilians as well as military personnel.
A nation that is unable to defend itself can become vulnerable to a nation that does not share its commitment to peace.
Those questions cannot simply be wished away.
Neither should they be.
But acknowledging the need for defence does not require us to abandon the ethical distinction between having a defence capability and treating warfare as a source of investment return.
We should be able to discuss both things at once.
Perhaps after that discussion Australians would decide that investment in defence companies is necessary and legitimate.
Perhaps we would decide that some categories are acceptable and others are not.
Perhaps we would establish broader human-rights tests.
Perhaps we would broaden existing exclusions.
Perhaps we would leave the present system substantially unchanged.
The important point is that these are choices which should be visible enough for Australians to understand and contest.
This is what makes the term Future Fund so powerful.
It invites the question.
What future?
We could imagine Australian wealth increasingly built upon renewable energy, medical research, sustainable agriculture, housing, water security, environmental restoration, education, advanced manufacturing, transport and science.
We could invest in technologies that reduce disability and enable people to live longer, safer and more independent lives.
None of those areas is ethically uncomplicated.
Almost no major investment is.
But there is surely something worth examining when the prosperity of industries capable of producing destruction becomes part of the prosperity we are relying upon for ourselves.
The issue is larger than whether one particular investment is right or wrong.
It is about how decisions of consequence become embedded in institutions acting in our name without most Australians ever being asked to consider the principle involved.
The ABC reports that this latest six-month investment report was published quietly, without a press release or public announcement.
By the next election, today's Future Fund report may be buried beneath years of other events.
Most Australians will have had far more immediate things demanding their attention.
Yet the investments can remain.
The policies can remain.
The precedent can remain.
And eventually what was once a choice can begin to look as though it was simply the natural order of things.
Perhaps this is the part I find hardest.
The Future Fund is not somebody else's investment account.
It represents Australia.
It operates in our name.
Its successes become our successes.
Its assets become Australian public wealth.
And therefore I cannot simply look away from the question of how that wealth is accumulated.
There are things governments do in our name that become so institutionalised, so administratively normal and so buried beneath technical language that eventually we stop noticing the moral decision underneath them.
The numbers become abstractions.
Shares.
Returns.
Asset allocation.
Portfolio performance.
Risk exposure.
But somewhere beneath an investment in a weapons manufacturer is a weapon.
And somewhere beyond the weapon is the possibility of a human being upon whom it will be used.
That connection should not be allowed to disappear merely because there are several layers of financial administration between us and the consequences.
I don't pretend there is a simple answer.
What I cannot accept so easily is that we should stop asking the question.
What sort of world do we claim to want?
What sort of world are we financing?
And if those two worlds are different:
shouldn't the people in whose name these decisions are made have something meaningful to say about it while the decision can still be changed?
That, ultimately, is what meaningful sovereignty requires.
It does not mean that citizens make every decision.
It means that citizens never permanently surrender their authority to determine the principles under which decisions are made in their name.
Sovereignty exercised only retrospectively is a very limited sovereignty.
Sovereignty exercised only for a few minutes at an election every several years is more limited still.
If democracy is to mean something beyond the periodic selection of those who govern us, citizens need effective ways to intervene while decisions still matter.
Perhaps the relationship between citizen and government should contain a much clearer democratic boundary:
This far you may act for us. Beyond this point, you must come back and ask us.
Otherwise democracy risks becoming something we exercise periodically, while government is something that happens continuously.
And I am not sure that periodic sovereignty is sovereignty in any meaningful sense at all.
Prompted by Gareth Hutchens, "Weapons makers, SpaceX and semiconductors feature in Australia's Future Fund portfolio" , ABC News, 30 September 2026. Read the ABC article .
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