Whilst I’m delighted to be launching The Aussie Wire, it’s a tragedy that The Aussie Wire is needed.

I was first confronted by the failure of the media when I started my Youtube channel in 2009. My very first video was about the Melbourne Desalination Plant white-elephant (a prophecy that has most certainly come true) and about the fact that instead of wasting money on the Desal Plant we should instead have built a new dam on the Mitchell River in Gippsland… again it’s a prophetic call given the multiple floods that have caused enormous damage on the Mitchell river since then.

But that video itself was not particularly remarkable in the grand scheme of things. What’s remarkable was the public reaction to it… or more specifically to me.

I began to have people reaching out to me via Youtube, then someone tracked down my email address, then someone tracked down my phone number! Lot’s of different people using different methods to talk to me, and they were all urging me to do another video about one topic or another.

I don’t remember most of them but I do remember one person asking me to do a video about how the government were putting in a set of lights instead of a roundabout in an intersection in Clyde, and they were very persistent!

I said no to them and to everyone else. After all, that 2009 video about water supply to Melbourne was just a one-off, I actually did it because my Cousin suggested I do it! I was working as a forklift driver in a refrigerated logistics company and becoming a political commentator was not in my plans!

So of course I said no to these strangers asking me to do more videos… after all, who was I? I wasn’t a journalist or a film professional or anything! They should take their stories to the mainstream media…

But therein lies the problem. I said ‘no’ because it’s not my job and there are others who’s job it is… but those journalists were also saying no! I began to realise that having so many people turn to a one-hit wonder youtuber with their stories was a symptom of a very deep problem: The media were not doing their job.

Sure enough some time went by and someone approached me with a story I couldn’t say no to, it was about the North-South water pipeline… another white-elephant, and again my video on that subject proved prophetic.

Time passed and I continued making videos about the drought and the water supply issues that Melbourne was having in 2010-11. And I started paying more attention to politics and to the media, and that’s when I saw it.

I saw with my own eyes the complete failure of the media, the ‘capturing’ of the media by the political class, and how self-respecting journalists had turned themselves into nothing more than government mouthpieces.

I ended up making a video titled: Liars, Dam Liars (misspelling ‘Dam’ was deliberate), and Politicians.

In that video I laid bare 10 flat out lies told by the Victorian Government and repeated without question by the Mainstream Media… Lies such as claims that ‘leaky pipes’ were losing more irrigation water every year than the total amount of water in the system that year! That’s a lie that was told in parliament and recorded in Hansard, but was betrayed by the Victorian Government’s own reports on water.

Another example was the claim that the North-South Pipeline was a ‘two way pipe’. Again, repeated without question by the media.

The trouble with that claim was that the pipe only had pumps at one end, meaning water could only from from the North to the South! In addition the pipe diameter reduced as it flowed down the Southern slopes of the dividing range… which makes sense if water is coming from the North because it accelerates as it flows down, requiring less diameter… but once again puts the lie to the claim that the pipe was ‘two way’.

I could go on but if you want the details of all 10 lies, and the way the media betrayed us by repeating those lies without question, then you’ll have to go to my Topher Field Youtube channel and scroll back to 2011!

The point was that as far back as 12 years ago I saw with my own eyes, and without a shadow of doubt, that this idea of journalists being relentlessly pursuing stories and chasing the truth and ‘speaking truth to power’ just wasn’t true. That’s the Hollywood version of a journalists, and it’s about as real as the Hollywood version of romance.

Fast forward to Covid and of course that same media dishonesty, that same lack of curiosity, that same laziness, was on full display for all to see.

Politicians lied relentlessly about Covid, Lockdowns, Masks, Vaccines, Protestors, and me personally, and the media just repeated it all without any question or even a right of reply.

Today’s media are overworked, too busy meeting deadlines and filling column-inches to actually do the work involved in real journalism, and with only a handful of exceptions the people we call journalists are mere mouthpieces. What’s worse is that the fabled ‘fourth estate’ has abandoned their role of ‘speaking truth to power’ right at a moment in history where those in power have turned against their own supposed principles.
The ‘free west’ isn’t anymore. We don’t have freedom, we have ‘permission’ and that’s not the same thing. We saw that clearly during Covid in my former home state of Victoria where what we had ‘permission’ to do was changing on a daily basis, and those of us who dared do things that we didn’t have ‘permission’ to do, such as protest against the violation of human rights by our government, were met with violence, arrest, criminal charges, and legalised extortion in the form of fines. And where were the media? They were compliant, supine, faithfully repeating the talking points and catch phrases of the political class. They gave no voice at all to anyone who dared to disagree with the government approved message. And the people knew it. Victorians flocked in record numbers to people like Avi Yemini from Rebel News Australia, people like Rukshan who simply stepped up as a citizen-journalist and documented events as they happened, people like me, where my audience multiplied by nearly 15 fold during the Covid era!

Why? Well it was the same as why people were clamouring to get me to do stories for them way back in 2009: Because the mainstream media was denying them their voice.

At The Aussie Wire we’re here to give freedom a voice. We are here to be your connection to the truth. We are here to fill that void that the MSM has left.

I’m incredibly proud of what my team and I have created over the last few months, and grateful for the opportunity to be the spearhead of such an important project. I’m pouring everything I’ve learned over 13 years as an independent journalist, as well as all that I learned during the ‘Battleground Melbourne’ era, into The Aussie Wire.

This is just the beginning, but I believe it’s the beginning of something truly incredible that will reshape Australian Media forever.