After my publishing of a piece expressing my views on the Commonwealth Party's response to heightening tensions in Ukraine (which I encourage you to read) it appears that the Commonwealth Times has rushed together a poorly researched and inaccurate response, that misrepresents my position expressed in numerous ways. I am writing this response as I believe that these inaccuracies should be properly represented.

From the first sentence, one can see that the main concern of Commonwealth Times journalist Malcolm Tucker is not factual accuracy. He claims that "earlier today Pitchfork News released an article claiming that since there is a very small amount of Ukranians who are far right we should condemn all 44 million of their country to the fate of being invaded without providing any non-soldier deployment aid."

This was not the argument I made. In fact, the issue of far-right militias is not one I addressed until the sixth paragraph of the article, and I explicitly stated that "even if we could ensure that Australian weapons will not be used by neo-Nazis, it would still be the wrong choice to intervene in Ukraine." It takes an astonishing lack of analytic and comprehension skills to fail to grasp this simple point, or more likely, a simple lack of care for the truth.

The reason I am against Australian intervention in Ukraine is because it is not our responsibility to intervene in foreign wars that have no impact on Australia. Yes, as a global advocate for peace, we should seek to deescalate and work to use our diplomatic leverage to ensure a non-violent outcome to the escalation we have seen, but we should not intervene. The presence of far-right ultranationalist militias fighting for the Ukrainian cause is certainly something to consider if we are going to provide Ukraine with aid, as the Commonwealth Party supports doing, but even if the extremists were completely absent, we still should not intervene in the conflict in my view.

The rest of the article essentially consists of ridiculous ad hominem attacks against me and my political party. I am not surprised to see this, but they should not be entertained as genuine arguments against my position on Ukraine. Tucker claims that the Socialist Party would support intervention if China was invaded because, apparently, we want to "defend Daddy Xis (sic) throne". Notwithstanding that an invasion of China would have a significantly greater geopolitical importance to Australia, which Tucker seems to not grasp, this is delusional fanfiction.

If Tucker or the Times have a genuine argument to make against my stance on Ukraine, I would welcome it, even if I may strongly disagree with it. Reasoned and vigorous political debate is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. Instead, they have resorted to falsehoods and mud-slinging, which should be given the exact amount of dignity and respect it deserves - none.