CHINA BECKONS
The prime minister is going to China. Anthony Albanese announced yesterday that he has accepted an invitation from Chinese President Xi Jinping, and as the ABC and others report, he hopes to secure the freedom of imprisoned Australians Yang Hengjun, Cheng Lei and others. Albanese raised those priorities during an East Asia Summit sideline meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Jakarta, and also “pressed China to keep on unwinding trade impediments in the wake of Beijing’s move to drop barley tariffs last month”, according to the ABC. “Australia has proposed that it pause WTO action against China over wine tariffs if Beijing agrees to conduct a rapid review of those barriers — but hasn’t yet received a formal response,” it reported.
The Beijing trip will be the first by an Australian prime minister to China since 2016. It is designed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Gough Whitlam’s China visit — he was the first prime minister to do so. As The Sydney Morning Herald’s Tony Wright recalls in an analysis piece ($) today: “Whitlam, in stating that Australia and China shared not just a common environment but common interests, was overturning decades of suspicion and outright hostility that had infected Australian policy towards China during the Cold War.”
Albanese told reporters in Jakarta his China visit would happen “later this year, at a mutually agreeable time”.
PAYNE RELIEVERS
The Liberal Senate seat rumour mill has started up again: today The Sydney Morning Herald ($) reports “speculation is mounting that former foreign minister Marise Payne will announce her retirement from politics imminently”. The story — which says Payne has made up her mind and could announce her departure “within days” — cites three sources, which are, of course, anonymous. That’s no shade on the SMH — the thing is, the party has rules in place to block members from speaking out about internal matters, and if people close to Payne have talked to her about it, they’re not likely to put their name to that knowledge because it’s up to her to speak for herself.
The Worm can confirm the theory Payne will quit the Senate isn’t new: there has been chatter in Liberal circles about it for months, some of which have reached this publication. One Liberal insider explained recently that when potential candidates for seats opening up are floated in the media, that can mean one of two things: either someone is sending out a “test balloon” to see how well the idea plays with the press and public, or someone is trying to ruin another person’s chances by bringing too much attention to their candidacy too soon.
That knowledge, coupled with the rules barring potential candidates for political seats from speaking out, means it’s difficult to know who is likely to nominate for Payne’s seat should she quit. For what it’s worth, the SMH ($) reported earlier in the week that No campaigner Nyunggai Warren Mundine is considered a frontrunner. He would be “likely [to] garner support from conservatives, the centre right, and even peel off moderate votes”, it said. Another likely candidate is former NSW transport minister Andrew Constance, who came within a few hundred votes of taking the lower house seat of Gilmore from Labor at the last election.
Last time a Liberal Senate seat opened up — only a few months ago after the death of Jim Molan — Crikey revealed that Mundine had decided not to nominate because he had made “a commitment to my family and to my business partners”. He said: “I’ve made a personal decision not to run, due to my family and businesses. In the next 18 months I will try and dance through this No campaign.” Ex-NSW Liberal Party president Maria Kovacic ended up winning a party ballot for Molan’s old seat, and was sworn into the Senate in June.
SAY WHAT?
I think it is true that the coming 12 months or so will be bumpy in the economy, and we know that the most important consequence of that is that people are feeling the squeeze.
Jim Chalmers
The treasurer told Guardian Australia he wasn’t sure the nation’s economy was in for a soft landing, as predicted by his department. An Australian recession isn’t totally unthinkable, although it wasn’t his “expectation”, Chalmers said. “We’ve got a lot going for us.” The ABC reported earlier in the week that Australian Bureau of Statistics data showed “the annual pace of growth for the economy has slipped from 2.7% at the end of 2022, to just 2.1% at the end of June, confirming a marked slowdown in the first six months of this year”.
CRIKEY RECAP
“Top Australian police continued to meet with the CEO of controversial facial-recognition software company Clearview AI after both the company’s and police’s use of its technology was found to have broken Australian privacy law.
“Crikey revealed in June that Australian Federal Police (AFP) had secretly met with Clearview AI staff in 2022, but new documents obtained by this masthead provide further insight into how police have continued to work closely with a company that violated the privacy of huge numbers of Australians while defying calls for more transparency about their relationship.
“Clearview AI is a US-based company that gained global notoriety for scraping billions of images of people off the internet without permission to create a tool that allows users to scan a photo and find matching photos and information about them — such as their name and location — from across the web.”
“Third time’s the charm for Australia as it races to finish a government transparency action plan that’s several years overdue. The deadline is December 31, and if Australia fails again, it will lose its status as an active member of a global transparency initiative called Open Government Partnership (OGP).
“As a member of the OGP, the federal government is expected to hand in a new national action plan every three years, but the former Coalition government never completed the one covering 2021 to 2023, which was due New Year’s Eve 2021. A top bureaucrat working in Scott Morrison’s office was warned in a letter from OGP chief executive Sanjay Pradhan, sent in February last year, that Australia had ‘acted contrary to the OGP process’ by failing to hand in the plan.
“A few months later, Labor won government, but it also failed to hand in an action plan by a new deadline set for the end of 2022. In February of this year, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus received a letter from Pradhan saying Australia’s tardiness had caused it to be automatically placed under review.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Russian missile turns Ukrainian market into fiery, blackened ruin strewn with bodies (Associated Press)
Gabon military government appoints former opposition leader as interim PM (Al Jazeera)
How tech is helping put past Latin American dictatorships in blockchains (Axios)
New video shows killer ‘crab walk’ out of Pennsylvania jail (BBC)
Hunt for terror suspect who escaped a London prison enters second day (CBS News)
Police searching for homicide suspect who escaped a university hospital in Washington, DC (CNN)
THE COMMENTARIAT
What will it take to get Australian airfares down? — Tony Webber (Guardian Australia): “If you have booked a flight over the past six months, you are likely to have been taken aback by the breathtaking increase in airfares. While the anecdotal evidence of a price hike is clear, there was a lack of publicly available data — until Qantas published its 2023 full-year results, which shine a light on what’s been happening to fares since COVID.
“In the six months to June 2023, compared with pre-COVID levels, Qantas domestic fares have increased by 22.6%. Its international fares have increased by 52.2%, while Jetstar fares for both domestic and international flights have increased by 27.4% over the same time period. It’s safe to assume that these increases represent one of the most rapid price hikes in our lifetimes.
“What makes these sky-high airfares worse is that they come at a time when we are dealing with an upsurge in interest rates, a rapidly rising general price level and moderate wage growth — all of which are quickly eroding the Australian consumer’s purchasing power.”
Transport minister struggles to find a landing strip amid Qatar turbulence — Michelle Grattan (The Conversation): “A few days ago, the furore over the government’s rejection of Qatar Airways’ bid for more flights into major cities was all about cheaper tickets and additional seats. Now the issue has doubled back to become, apparently, at least in part, about the mistreatment of the Australian women who were hauled off a flight in 2020 and subjected to invasive body searches, after a newborn was found abandoned in Doha Airport. Five of the women have a legal case on foot. It is back in the Federal Court on Friday for the 21st time.
“Transport Minister Catherine King, in yet another attempt to explain — or dodge explaining — her rejection of the Qatar application, said on radio on Thursday morning that the 2020 incident ‘wasn’t a factor in the decision, but it was certainly context for the decision’. This is as baffling as most of the other explanations King and other government members have given. Isn’t ‘context’ a ‘factor’?”
A year on, Charles is not the radical monarch some wished for — Rob Harris (SMH) ($): “The night following his mother’s death last September, an ashen-faced and solemn king appeared on television, tears welling, to pledge he would follow the late queen’s example of service with unswerving devotion.
“For all the talk of the rise of a radical monarch, it is clear in so many ways that Charles III is, in fact, a continuity candidate. After half a century in public life, perhaps we should have expected a 73-year-old was never going to be the great reformer he had decades earlier promised to be.
“A year after his ascension to the throne, Charles has weathered the at times rocky ride provided by his son Harry’s memoirs and Netflix documentary, the saga of his brother Andrew and his relationship with the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and slow-burning colonial reckoning from across the Commonwealth.”
