 I've been asked to talk and answer the why questions. Why did Australia help the CIA overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile? And also, why did I get involved? Because obviously, I'm not Chilean. So I'll address those two questions in my talk. I got involved, actually, because I'm a researcher of Australian foreign policy. And I began in 2007 trying to declassify Australian records on East Timor because of the Indonesian genocide in East Timor that had been aided and abetted, I believed, by the Australian government and a number of other countries. And I was fighting a case of the administrative appeals tribunal. There was a government team of lawyers, five lawyers, and I was representing myself. They were intelligence chiefs in the room. And a journalist called Hamish MacDonald of the Sydney Morning Herald covered this case. And a lawyer called Ian Latham emailed me on the 8th of May, 2010, from out of the blue I didn't know him, saying, Mr. Fernandez, I've read about your case in the Herald. If you'd like some help, drop me a line. And so I emailed him and that began our collaboration. I don't think he even realized he'd be doing this for more than a decade after that. So I thank Ian very much for his work. Now this would be possible without him. And my solicitor, Hugh MacKinn, who might also be there. I also understand Brian Tuey might be in the audience. A wonderful journalist, a real legend. He and his colleague Bill Pinwell's book, Oyster, is required reading. Everything I'm going to say assumes the content that they've already provided. So I don't want to go over their work and their discoveries. The Timo case is where we began and it's important to understand it because of the secrecy provisions that applied to it because they apply to all our cases. When you go to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and you're asked to see these government records, the Attorney General of Australia can sign a certificate called a Section 36 certificate which provides an exemption. It means that the government, that's the National Archives, the intelligence agencies, they can hear your arguments, but you can't hear theirs. They make some brief statements, but then you have to leave the room because of the Attorney General's certificate and they present their arguments in secret. So you don't really know what their arguments is. You've got to guess their arguments if you can. So in the case of the Timo matter, we appeared in court in December 2010 and we made our submissions. The government then produced its Section 36 certificate. We had to leave the room and about two and a half days later we were called back in and said, well, we were told, well, the government's now made its submissions. Do you have anything to say? Now, obviously what can we say because we don't know what their submissions are, but we were able to guess and we made some counter submissions and we actually won that case. We won a few documents which were declassified. That was just the beginning. We went through a number of other cases on Timo and Indonesia. But then I went into the question of Chile because of my interest in Australian foreign policy, not specifically because of Chile. And we were able to ask for records pertaining to Cambodia and Chile. And the reason is the United States did not have an embassy in Cambodia in the late 1960s and in 1970. And so the Australian embassy in Cambodia was actually handling the American's interests. And there were persistent rumors at the time that ASIS, the Australian secret intelligence service, had been involved in the overthrow of another leader, the leader of Cambodia, Norodham Sianook, the prince. And the ambassador, our ambassador in our embassy in Penang, Penang, in Cambodia, as soon as the overthrow of that country's leader had happened, his next posting was directly to Santiago, Chile, where once again we know, thanks to the sterling work of Brian Tuoy and Bill Pinwall, that ASIS may have assisted and did in fact assist in some way the CIA. But that was because Brian Tuoy got copies of documents that had not been officially released. So we wanted official confirmation and official admission from the government that they'd done something on this matter. But we were blocked at every step. We received section 36 certificates over the course of Timo, Indonesia, Chile, Cambodia. We received blocks from five attorneys general, Robert McClellan blocked us, Nicola Roxton blocked us. George Brandis blocked us. Christian Porter and Michaelia Cash. The only person who didn't block us, and that's only because he was only attorney general for 11 weeks in 2013, was Mark Dreyfus. And we didn't have a case during those 11 weeks when he was attorney general. We won many cases. We lost more than we won. But it's important to make a distinction between defeat and failure. Defeat just means that the forces against you were too strong. And so you got defeated and there's no problem with that. You know, failure on the other hand is a more serious problem. And that is that the cause was not worth fighting for in the first place. So Ian Latham, Hugh MacKinnon and I have been defeated many times and we've won. But that's not a problem being defeated. It's just that we've never failed because it was still a worthwhile cause. And that's also true, I think, about those who want justice for Chileans and the very idea of Chile getting control of its own copper resources rather than making them available to American corporations in the manner desired by American corporations. That struggle is a just struggle. And so if you've been defeated, it's not a failure. It's important to keep that in mind. When we got to the administrative appeals tribunal, we cross-examined the head of the ACES, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. My lawyer, Ian Latham, cross-examined him twice under oath. He didn't like the experience, I have to say. They initially began by saying that we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any records. Not that we've got the records, but it would harm national security to show them to you today. Rather, to even confirm or deny that we've got the records, would harm national security. So once the cross-examination began and the prospect of more cross-examination and submissions and so on were happening, ACES withdrew that position. And a few days before that we went into the tribunal, they said, all right, we've got documents, but we can't tell you what they are. And so there was more cross-examination. At one point, the head of ACES grumbled. He grumbled that, well, Putin's spy chief in Russia doesn't have to be cross-examined like this. But of course, it's Australian law. And if you want to live in Russia, go and live in Russia. But we have laws here and you've got to accept that you've got to be cross-examined on your evidence. Of course, the Attorney General's certificates were still in force. So quite often their witness would say, well, I can't answer this right now, but when you leave the room, we'll answer it to the tribunal. What do we find? Well, in the first instance, let's go back to what was known, thanks to Brian Tuey, Bill Pinwell, and an immigration minister at the time in 1972, 73, called Clyde Cameron. Clyde Cameron found out as immigration minister that asio officers, not ACES, but asio officers were masquerading as immigration officers in the embassy in Santiago and a number of other countries in our embassies and many other countries. He thought that was unacceptable. He reported it to the prime minister and inquiry into the intelligence agencies was underway anyway. And so that was part of the inquiry. And after, to cut a long story short, we basically got admission finally on the 2nd of June, 2021, at the end of a very long first day of submissions and cross examinations that the ACES officers realized that they couldn't hold on to their position of, you know, can't give you anything. They had some of their people testify behind a screen so you could just hear their voice. It was all security theater in order to impress everybody with how, you know, sensitive the whole thing is. It was finally confirmed that ACES did in fact open a base in Santiago that they acted as a go-between between the CIA and the coup plotters in Chile. And we have confirmation of the fact that they had a safe house. They had cars, a safe. We know the combination number of the safe. And we also know, thanks to certain allegations that were raised, we believe anyway, thanks to allegations raised in the parliament, that they had hired a Chilean woman as a locally employed staff member in the embassy who was related to the head of the Chilean secret police. And we have very credible allegations that certain Chileans who'd been given entry to Australia under the humanitarian entry program were in fact betrayed by people in the embassy to the Chilean secret police and those people were then abducted and killed. That's the kind of information that is still being protected by the government. And it should not happen in my view. It's exactly the kind of information that should be revealed. What do we know about the extent to which, what do we need to know about the extent to which our intelligence officers in our embassy betrayed Chileans who'd been given humanitarian entry, betrayed them to the Chilean secret police where they could be tortured and murdered and disappeared. That's the kind of information that I hope you can pursue in the future. We also know that there is a case before the courts right now of a Chilean national who's been given, who went to Australia some years ago, but is fighting extradition back to Chile because she's alleged to have committed torture or Aidan abetted some things like that. And what we wanna know is to what extent are people like that being protected by our intelligence agencies? How did they get in there? How did they get to Australia? And what did the intelligence agencies know about that? You have to assume that there is some collaboration unless there is some contrary evidence, okay, because the level of secrecy is just too high. And I very much hope you take up the cause now to declassify further records on Chile that are held by Australia. Now, the why question about why it overthrow Allende, I've written about this in a book called Sub-Imperial Power and I've given an interview to Counterpunch and the indefatigable Rodrigo Acunha has been writing about it. And so I very much hope you read that. But basically the idea was that to overthrow the Calvo Doctrine, the Calvo Doctrine is the doctrine of Carlos Calvo, an Argentinian jurist who said that foreign companies who wanna come into Latin America and to Chile, wherever else, should have the same treatment as Chilean companies. They shouldn't get special treatment. But the United States wanted to impose an imperial foreign policy whereby foreign corporations get special treatment. They can take governments to court in a private tribunal, not use the normal country's courts. And so the overthrow of Allende put Chile's copper resources in the hands of Western corporations and away from the Chilean people. But around the world, the process of Western corporations getting rights and privileges beyond what normal domestic people and corporations get began in Chile. Now, I know that there was a protest of Chile at the New South Wales Parliament by some of the Chileans because a New South Wales parliamentarian named Peter Phelps praised Pinochet for some of his economic work. And while it's understandable to criticize and protest on the basis of morality, you shouldn't simply assume that the people are right even about economics because neoliberalism did not just fail in the global financial crisis of 2008 and it didn't just fail now into 2022 and 2023. Neoliberalism failed in Chile itself. It failed in 1982. Five years after the Chicago boys and neoliberal economics were brought in to reform Chile's economy, to privatize austerity, crackdown on unions, they tanked the economy, they crashed the economy. And the only thing that kept it going that we're getting revenues from was the copper company that was nationalized, the Codelco company. So the failure of neoliberalism actually happened under Pinochet's watch. And so when people criticized Pinochet for his morality, they somehow give up the most vital ground of saying, well, maybe his economics were good. No, it was bad. His economics failed in their own terms. They did not give prosperity to the majority but rather only to the minority and they've created the conditions of anger and immiseration around the world and that began in Chile. And so that's the why question, why we got involved in Latham, Humacon and myself and why ACES assisted the United States to overthrow Chile. And I very much hope that you take up this matter. I wish you the best of success. Good luck.