Penny! Are 191.5 tons of nitrocellulose we sent to Israel “nonlethal in nature”? 

Like Macklemore and Ed Sheeran, and Ed Sheeran’s band and Ed Sheeran, relations between Penny Wong and myself are “complicated”. As a responsible global citizen and advocate for international law, for three years I have dutifully sought to inform the Foreign Minister of the unfolding genocide in Palestine, a barbarity I have been reporting on at work, a situation I am gravely, gravely concerned about. 

Accepting finally that the dream of an intellectual rapport and being Twitter buds with Senator Wong has died, this week I took the more formal, mildly less troll-y avenue of sending five questions to the Foreign Minister’s media office. We will publish her answers in their entirety if we ever receive them.

The questions are as follows:

1. Public shipping documents in the United States show that Thales Australia sent 191.5 tons of nitrocellulose, predominantly via the Yarraville port in Melbourne, to a company called St. Marks Powder in Florida, across at least 15 shipments since late 2023 (see a sample of one such shipping document below). From there, the company openly boasts of turning this into mortar shells and arming Israel. A former signals officer in an artillery regiment in the Australian Defence Force has told The Shot that this is enough propellant for more than 20,000 155mm mortar shells. (Though for short range use, requiring less propellant, such as in Gaza, the figure could be significantly higher.) Were the 191.5 tons of nitrocellulose Australia sent to the IDF “nonlethal” in nature?

2. Is nitroglycerine a “nonlethal” part of a bomb?

3. Is RDX “nonlethal”? 

4. Now that US President Donald Trump has expressed his desire to dismantle the international courts, will the Australian government give up on international law, too? I ask this in the context of the Australian government potentially breaking international law in relation to its material and diplomatic support of the Gaza genocide, illustrated most clearly in the continued supply of F-35 parts and now these explosives.

5. Can you guarantee that Zomi Frankcom, an Australian aid worker deliberately targeted and murdered by the IDF, wasn’t killed using Australian manufactured explosives?

Let’s recap quickly. In June, in an article called “Australia is manufacturing explosives for Israel’s atrocities”, The Shot revealed further grotesque levels of Australian complicity in the Gaza genocide. Much has happened in the time since publishing. The supply chains are being searched for our sources. New evidence has surfaced, and there are new points that need to be stressed publicly – not just for the cause of Palestinian liberation, but for transparency’s sake, and for the moral soul of Australian democracy.

Previously, multiple sources inside the baby-killing machine confirmed to us that two factories, one in Mulwala NSW and another in Benalla VIC, are manufacturing nitroglycerine, nitrocellulose, and RDX, all deadly explosives that end up in the blood-soaked hands of the IDF. 

Explosives leave the factories in unmarked trucks by night, which we independently photographed occurring. The tankers then cruise down highways to ports in Naarm/Melbourne and Gadigal/Sydney, where they are packed onto ships bound for intermediaries in Singapore and the United States before, ultimately, obliterating Gaza and its trapped population. Less shooting fish in a barrel, more blowing up a barrel with mortar shells. 

What we didn’t know at the time was how much explosive we were sending to the genocide. Today, we have a glimpse of the picture. At least 191.5 tons of nitrocellulose. Crucially, this is just one of the three types of explosives we know we are sending to Israel. And through just one factory, in just one of at least two confirmed supply lines. It’s reasonable to infer that a staggering portion of the rubble, of the death, of the infanticide was carried out using Australian made explosives. You know, the little gold kangaroo on the green triangle. 

Cameron Leckie, a retired Army Major in the ADF, told us what this quantity of nitrocellulose means on the ground: “That would be enough propellant for around 20,000 155mm artillery rounds. Which isn’t actually that much in conventional combat. Over 3000 (105 mm) artillery rounds were fitted at Long Tan for example in one battle lasting a few hours. Against unarmed civilians, however, such a quantity is of course massive. And Israel would be firing at short ranges I would imagine, so that would mean that they can get more than 20,000 rounds for the same amount of nitrocellulose. Shorter range uses less. I was the signals officer in an artillery regiment in Townsville for a couple of years, so I have a basic understanding of how artillery works.”  

The shipping documents confirming this disturbing quantity were unearthed by a researcher and activist named Adam Adelpour, a member of a group called Stop the War on Palestine. We met at the Pine Gap Convergence, where he told me after The Shot’s initial story he’d gone digging down that rabbit hole and was compiling a detailed report, with co-author Penny Howard, using American shipping information. The impacts of our actions are always fascinating when you push back a little harder and pay enough attention to the ripples.

In the immediate aftermath of The Shot’s story, Greens Senator David Shoebridge grilled the Australian Defence Force in Senate estimates about the explosive evidence. The ADF’s responses were evasive gobble-dee-gook, or, more charitably, military parlance. “Our exports to Israel are in-line with Australia’s defence capabilities,” military brass repeated like a pull-string GI Joe. To the strict definition of those words, and allowing consideration for the order in which they are placed, this means sweet fuck all. We export what we can export, essentially. I asked Senator Shoebridge what on earth this was supposed to mean. 

“Well, you tell me, right!? 

“Every time you see doublespeak in that space, it’s hiding a hard truth. I think that’s the thing I’ve learned. Doublespeak hides hard inconvenience, and that was apparent in that exchange.

“They also talk about our exports to Israel, right? And that leaves them open to say, ‘well, Singapore exports to Israel’ or the ‘United Arab Emirates may have exports to Israel’ or ‘the US may have exports’. ‘Maybe it’s stuff that is sourced in Australia, but our direct exports to Israel, blah blah.’ 

“[The same doublespeak is used for] US nuclear weapons stationed here. They are here, but they’re not ‘stationed’ here, because they wash in and out on warships and aircraft. We could permanently always have US nuclear weapons here, but none of them are ‘stationed’ here because if we had them ‘stationed’ here that would be in breach of the Treaty of Rarotonga, so they’ll just ‘cycle through’.”

Now, in a healthy media environment – that is, one not totally beholden to genocidal supremacist billionaire dickheads – such significant news implicating Australian complicity in a genocide would have garnered follow up coverage in the mainstream press. But we do not have a healthy media environment. We have a fetid swamp.

The corporate press refused to follow the story, despite it being the biggest breaking news on social media that entire week. Peter Hartcher, a hawkish columnist typically obsessed with military hardware, at least when it means “Boo! China is scary”, claimed he hadn’t seen the reporting when pressed about it by Tina Quinn on The Fourth Estate podcast. He should at the very least be aware by now. For these archetypical reporters, the types who exist on access to ADF leaks and are members of a National Press Club sponsored by Thales Australia, the company operating the death factories, there is nothing to see here, apparently. 

From the top down, through the government, through the media, through pathetic celebrities and milquetoast fence-sitters, through civic institutions, through sell-out unions, we have seen cowardice and complicity in enraging quantities over the last few years. The people of Australia are better than this – Pew polling shows that 80% of us despise Israeli atrocity and our complicity – and they are being failed.   

But through the cracks, light is breaking. There is an uneasy tension between winning popular sentiment and having actual power, but the narrative has been fundamentally seized. This week, one of the biggest pop-stars in the world was almost instantly cancelled for refusing to take a stand against Israeli atrocity. At the same moment, the Red Lines Package was introduced into Australian parliament, a collection of four bills seeking to end Australian complicity in the genocide by, among other things, banning military exports. The package was brought by Dr Sophie Scamps MP and Senator David Pocock, and co-sponsored by Senators Lidia Thorpe, Mehreen Faruqi, Fatima Payman and Andrew Wilkie.

Thinking strategically, the weakest point in this baby-massacre chain is the ports. We’ve seen over and over again that it only takes a few canoes to shut them down. Just as relevantly, we should look to the genuinely humanitarian, admirable recent past of the Maritime Union of Australia. Of the MUA’s noble actions on behalf of humanity during the fight against apartheid South Africa, and again against the John Howard/Peter Reith iteration of the Evil Empire in the late 1990s. 

Brave souls who have MUA cards in their pockets have boarded the Sumud Flotilla and sailed off to hell. And yet still, today, Australian workers are loading Australian explosives onto ships that ferry them off to the killing fields of Gaza and Lebanon. Do Australian workers have the legal right to refuse to load these explosives? To not stain themselves on blood-soaked shifts? Does the MUA still have that fighting humanitarian spirit it was once so admired for? These are discussions that need to be had within the movement as a matter of urgency. Those poor kids are relying on all of us to do more. The time is now.

We’ll post Senator Wong’s response if we get one in a separate post. 

Free Palestine.