LOOK WHO’S TALKING
Chinese President Xi Jinping has told Prime Minister Anthony Albanese he attaches “great importance to your opinion” and that their relationship is worth “cherishing”, as The Australian ($) reports. The pair met for 32 minutes on the sidelines of Bali’s G20 — Xi continued that we are both “important countries” in the Asia-Pacific and thus should work on our relationship to help foster peace in the region and beyond. But Albo brought up some sticking points too: the $20-billion-a-year export trade bans that rocked our wine, coal and lobster industries, among others; the detained Chinese-Australian journalist Cheng Lei and blogger Yang Hengjun; rumours Russia could be eyeing the nuclear button. The SMH adds climate change, human rights in Xinjiang, and Taiwan were also spoken about (hell of a lot to cover in a half-hour chat).
Albo says there were no breakthroughs on either side, as Guardian Australia says, but it was a good chat — “constructive”, he said. It’s a big deal considering Beijing ghosted us three years ago, breaking off all high-level contact and even screening calls from Australian counterparts after we called for a COVID-19 origin probe. Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham, who was barred by his Chinese counterpart as trade minister in the previous government, commended Albanese’s chat with Xi, although he defended the Coalition’s hard-line stance in barring Huawei. So what else went down at the G20 on its first day? ABC has a good wrap this morning — AP (via ABC) says Russia’s steely Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went to hospital, though a spokesperson denied it. Indonesian President Joko Widodo called for the end to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying the world can’t move forward until it does — look at food security, at energy, at finances, Widodo says. All are in peril, and it’s affecting poor countries the worst.
TO PROTECT AND SERVE
Australia could be about to better protect its whistleblowers with a bill to be introduced in the final sitting fortnight of the federal Parliament, Guardian Australia reports. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus is going to announce it today — the draft legislation was approved by cabinet on Monday. So what is it? The bill comes from recommendations in the 2016 Moss review of the Public Interest Disclosure Act — we don’t know exactly which of the review’s 33 recommendations the bill implements, but among them was giving witnesses the same protections that disclosers get, whether it be from reprisal, civil, criminal and/or administrative liability. The review also called for lawyers to get access to security classified information. We’ll find out more next week when it passes caucus. It would come into force at the same time as the National Anti-Corruption Commission — mid-2023.
Speaking of anti-corruption, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet has come out swinging for his state’s ICAC compared with the federal model, the SMH reports. He’ll give a speech today describing NSW’s as having “real teeth, and real powers to root out corruption in public service”, continuing: “You only have to compare our system with the integrity measures put forward at the federal level — and still not in place — to understand that in NSW the bar is set very high.” Perrottet’s long and loud support of ICAC has raised many an eyebrow, considering his predecessor Gladys Berejiklian resigned amid the intense pressure of her very public hearings (and, granted, her big mistakes too), and considering Perrottet’s former fellow Liberal leader Scott Morrison infamously called it a “kangaroo court”. But Perrottet says that’s misguided — anti-corruption institutions are a “legacy of the Liberals and Nationals”, he’ll say. Hey, wondering where the findings of the Berejiklian saga are? Me too! ICAC is yet to deliver its final report, as Crikey reports.
GOING THE EXTRA NILE
Controversial Christian politician Fred Nile, 88, is leaving the NSW Parliament after 41 years, Guardian Australia reports. But he’ll miss his final bill — described as “the culmination of my life’s work and public ministry” — going before Parliament. It was co-written with the progressive MP Alex Greenwich and proposes better safeguards for Indigenous culture and heritage. It might seem uncharacteristically progressive, but Nile did help legislate Indigenous land rights in the 1980s. He has made more headlines over his political life, however, for what Greens Senator David Shoebridge described as creating a “platform for homophobia and transphobia” — indeed Nile infamously prayed for rain before every Mardi Gras (he actually apologised for that last month in an interview with the SMH), but remains loudly against same-sex marriage and abortion decriminalisation. Guardian Australia also wryly recalls a 2010 statement when Nile denied he or his staff had been “perving over a pornographic film”, as the ABC reports, explaining it was done for research purposes. Mhm.
Speaking of resignations — some 10,500 public sector workers in Queensland resigned last year, The Courier-Mail ($) reports, bringing the resignation rate to one in 20 people. Auditor-General Brendan Worrall has warned the state will languish under a “talent shortage” unless sweeping changes are made. He suggested the state embrace flexible work, and make more data and digital hires. The Sunshine State’s public sector isn’t exactly getting good press at the moment, however: Queensland Police has apologised after a whistleblower who leaked audio recordings of officers using racist and violent language was called a “rat” and a “dog” in a private Facebook group for police officers, Guardian Australia reports.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
Rats headbang to Queen, according to a new study. Boffins at the University of Tokyo recruited 10 rodents for the aural study, fitting them with teeny tiny motion sensors and playing the catchy tracks of Mozart, Lady Gaga and Queen to see what the rats did, as the ABC reports. Incredibly, the sensors showed they started bopping to the beat, a clear synchronisation “without any training or prior exposure to music”. The team theorised the rats might like faster music because their bodies and heartbeats work at a faster pace — but they vibed the most to Mozart’s original composition pace of 132 beats per minute. Just like humans, the researchers noted, the rats bopped slower as the music was sped up. It’s important stuff: if we can understand the neural mechanism music tickles, one scientist said, we can use it more effectively to create happiness. And we could possibly answer a much bigger question: namely, why and what mechanisms of the brain create human cultural fields such as fine art, music, science, technology and religion?
And it’s not just rats that love Queen. Snowball the cockatoo exploded on to the internet with his head-banging to Queen, and scientists around the world were blown away. See, Charles Darwin sort of predicted this. “The perception, if not the enjoyment, of musical cadences and of rhythm,” wrote Darwin in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, “is probably common to all animals”. Snowball’s moves made scientists consider a huge evolutionary concept: musicality is a biological ability, like language, not a learnt one, like reading, as The New York Times says. The key to proving this is taking treats out of the equation to ensure the animal is boogying down with no reward except its own pleasure. And that’s what Snowball the cockatoo is doing. He’s trying new moves — 14 in total in the video, in fact, while staying on beat. “He’s not just doing this stereotyped robotic thing,” a biologist tells the paper. “He’s actually experimenting.”
Hoping something moves you today too.
SAY WHAT?
I didn’t want anyone else’s sloppy seconds, particularly Sydney’s, so now that we’ve got [all nine matches of the AFL], we put on the best show that we can and then that sets us up for the future.
Peter Malinauskas
The SA premier was red-faced when someone pulled him aside and let him know “sloppy seconds” is defined, by the Macquarie Dictionary anyway, as shagging someone who just shagged someone else. Malinauskas apologised, saying he didn’t intend for it to mean something sexual. Offending Sydney was his only intention.
CRIKEY RECAP
Watch the fiction, read the unauthorised bio: Lachlan Murdoch and the world’s most newsworthy media family
“It’s a brave man to take on an unauthorised biography of one of the richest and most powerful men in global media. It’s an even braver woman to take on a review of that book, in the pages of a publication currently being sued for defamation by said mogul.
“Luckily for me, award-winning writer Paddy Manning’s book, The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch, stops just before Crikey republished its article alleging the Murdochs were ‘unindicted co-conspirators’ in the January 6 uprising in Washington, DC. Which means I can review the book without having to keep an eye on the defamation lawyers.”
Fake Twitter accounts abuse Adani critics and spread pro-fossil-fuel content
“A network of Twitter accounts are trolling critics of fossil-fuel giant Adani while also promoting pro-Adani and fossil-fuel content. Crikey has found more than 25 accounts that appear to be part of a digital ‘astroturfing’ operation — an attempt to fake grassroots support on social media for a cause.
“At first glance, they appear to belong to ordinary people tweeting about a range of interests including celebrities, sport, space and travel. However, each one also regularly tweets specific, pointed attacks at individuals and media outlets that have criticised Adani, and amplified positive news about it or its founder, Gautam Adani. And experts who’ve looked at the tweets suggest there is some coordination.”
What a difference a seat makes — why 51 is the magic number for America’s Senate
“On Saturday, incumbent Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto cemented her reelection victory for a second six-year term, securing the 50th seat in the chamber for the Democrats, and meaning they will retain their Senate majority in the 118th Congress.
“With the Georgia Senate contest headed to a run-off between sitting Senator Raphael Warnock and challenger Herschel Walker on December 6, Democrats have the chance to increase their majority to 51 seats. This might not sound like much, but it would have huge consequences. The 50-50 Senate split of the past two years was a rare anomaly in US history.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Russia and Ukraine have tortured prisoners of war: UN (AL Jazeera)
Netherlands to ban laughing gas from January (BBC)
What riding in a self-driving Tesla tells us about the future of autonomy (The New York Times)
Activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah breaks hunger strike in Egypt (Al Jazeera)
Average [Canadian] house price down by more than C$170,000 since February (CBC)
Germans turning 18 to be offered €200 culture pass ‘birthday present’ (The Guardian)
Trump ally Kari Lake loses to Democrat Katie Hobbs in Arizona governor race (BBC)
Republicans on verge of US House majority in midterm elections (Reuters)
Sperm counts worldwide are falling even faster than we thought (EuroNews)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Is recycling the problem, not the solution? — Liam Mannix (The Age): “In lab experiments, scientists find people are much more likely to use plastic bottles, rather than glass, if they think they are going to be recycled — and to feel better about themselves for doing so. And when people are told their food waste will be used to make biofuel, rather than binned, they are twice as likely to throw away perfectly edible food. People even use more wrapping paper to wrap a same-sized gift if they think the paper is going to be recycled … This behaviour is not isolated to recycling. People are more willing to pollute when they can buy carbon offsets, for example.
“Again and again, researchers find that doing something good for the environment seems to give us mental licence to do something bad, a broadly studied phenomenon known as the ‘licensing effect’. Based on their recycling experiments, some researchers suggest governments should stop promoting recycling because it just encourages people to consume … It remains cheaper and easier to buy virgin materials than recycled plastic. We see this show up in the data: we recycle 68% of our cardboard but just 16% of our plastic, according to industry estimates.”
Nationalism is the ideology of our age. No wonder the world is in crisis — Gordon Brown (The Guardian): “Most important of all, nationalism has replaced neoliberalism as the dominant ideology of the age. If, for the past 30 years, economics drove political decision-making, now politics is determining economic decisions, with country after country weaponising their trade, technology, industry and competition policies. The win-win economics of mutually beneficial commerce is being replaced by the zero-sum rivalries of ‘I win, you lose’, as movements such as ‘America first’, ‘China first’, ‘India first’ and ‘Russia first’, ‘my tribe first’, threaten to descend into an us versus them geopolitics of ‘my country first and only’. And with national security establishments now freezing the central bank reserves of hostile regimes and limiting access to global payments systems, trade, technology and capital wars are set to intensify.
“The one hopeful sign of cooperation is NATO unity over Ukraine. But this should not blind us to the scale of global disunity, with almost all of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East standing aloof from sanctions against Russia and even condemnation of its war crimes. Very few can ever benefit from this fragmentation, and almost everywhere inequality is on the rise. Warehouses in Asia, America and Europe have sufficient grain reserves to feed the world, and yet there is no global distribution plan and the World Food Programme struggles with only half the finance it needs to prevent famines. Energy producers are making unprecedented profits while consumers struggle with unpayable bills. Yet there is no plan before the G20 to address this, or the halving of global growth, inflation, currency imbalances and debt, or to undo some of the damage done by resistance at COP27 to even honouring the promise of $100 billion a year for the developing world.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Online
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Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs Minister Andrew Giles will give a keynote speech at the “Evolving Australia’s Migration System” event held by CEDA.
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Researcher Jordan Guiao will talk about his new book, Disconnect, with ABC’s Ariel Bogle, at Glee Books.
Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)
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ANU College of Law’s Ernst Willheim will give a seminar on some of the history of decisions to go to war, at the ANU.
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Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke will speak to the National Press Club about modernising Australia’s workplace relations.
