Let me stand next to your Shire
Last month we told you about a “shit fight” in the Sutherland Shire, where the Liberal Party is trying to finalise its ticket for the September 14 council elections. “There’s a lot of games played at the moment,” one source told us at the time.
Today we can report those games are still ongoing. While Liberal sources tell us the tickets for the other councils in NSW have been all but completed, the situation in the Shire remains murky.
Longtime Liberal Mayor Carmelo Pesce is facing opposition from party colleagues who want a new leader should the party retain power. People with insight into the internal deliberations say those colleagues have several problems with the concept of Pesce’s continued leadership: bad headlines, the sheer length of his three consecutive terms as mayor, and his unsuccessful run at preselection for Scott Morrison’s former federal electorate of Cook, located in the Shire.
But Pesce does appear to have powerful backers. Sources claim NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman has made phone calls in support of Pesce — a big get, given the head office doesn’t tend to go against the party’s leader — as has Eleni Petinos, a state MP for the area. A spokesperson for Speakman declined to comment on whether the leader supports Pesce, and Petinos did not respond to a request for comment.
Crikey is further told Pesce had a deal in place with fellow councillor Hassan Awada, whereby Awada brought a sizable amount of votes in favour of Pesce’s Cook preselection bid, in return for a promise that Pesce would resign after the preselection, whether he won or not. The deal was supposedly facilitated by such party heavyweights as ex-state treasurer Matt Kean and was said to be widely known among other Liberals. Other sources have categorically denied there was ever a deal in place. Kean did not respond to a request for comment.
Pesce, Awada, and other councillors to whom Crikey reached out declined to comment, understandable given Liberal Party rules forbid members from discussing internal party matters. Either way, the lateness of the hour will trigger bad memories among NSW Liberals, who watched their preselection process ahead of the 2022 federal election collapse into shambles.
Lowe Blow
Freedom of information (FOI) applications, even in the degraded system we have, can yield gold — thus, it’s always worth running an eye over the disclosure logs collected by the wonderful Right to Know website. While it came out last year, we feel we should bring this one to your attention.
You may recall that in March 2023, then Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe told the Financial Review summit that “… we’ve also been receiving letters recently, saying — this is the first time since I’ve been the governor — ‘Thank you for preserving the value of money,’ because there are parts of the community who know how damaging inflation is”.
If that sentence gives the same impression as all those US progressives whose young children are weirdly invested in the next presidential nominee, you’re not the only one. An FOI applicant, who identifies themselves only as “Ayn Rand Superfan” wanted the receipts:
Part of our joy at this request is the fact that in responding to this request, the RBA was forced to address “Ayn Rand Superfan” with what reads as an “extremely not bothered” tone:
The RBA specifies that the glowing correspondence was received by email rather than letter — thus the RBA could not provide the envelopes ARS was after.
In addition, they only released subject lines, rather than full correspondence.
Subject lines such as:
- “Phillip Lowe is brilliant”
- “Great Job On Economy”
- “Keep up the good work”
- “I support Reserve Bank and their decisions to raise rates”
“With a couple of exceptions”, notes Anthony Dickman, secretary, RBA, “the subject lines give a clear
indication of the nature of the feedback (positive). For the subject lines that do not do this, I can confirm that the content is positive, and that each email contained statements of support of the board’s decisions to raise interest rates across the current tightening cycle.”
So there you go, Lowe apparently told no lie.
Australia mentioned!
Roughly four years ago, we noted the flurry of Australians involving themselves, one way or another, in the lead-up to the US election. At the time, it was largely representatives of the more addled edges of the mainstream — say, Miranda Devine’s KCNA-like series of love letters to “invincible hero” Donald Trump, “who not only survived every dirty trick the Democrats threw at him, but the Chinese virus as well”.
But, as is the way of things, the drift in the last four years has been to the weird and the chronically online, and our hometown heroes are no different. So when Adin Ross, who was banned from Twitch after his channel became to slurs what an orchard is to apples, interviewed Trump, what platform should host the footage but Kick, where Ross went after his Twitch ban? As Crikey reported last year, Kick is part-owned by Australian crypto-gambling billionaire Ed Craven.
Taking a step further into the thicket, as he seems determined to do, was Trump’s VP nominee JD Vance. Back in 2022, cramming as many racist conspiracy theories as he could into one sentence, Vance told a podcaster that he favoured a national ban on abortion, fearing that states would be allowed to regulate them individually after the (then still hypothetical) repeal of Roe v Wade:
… then, every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity.
The podcaster in question was Australian Aimee Terese, a figure who represents such a pure expression of online culture war provocations that it’s very difficult to believe they aren’t simply X algorithms coalesced into human form. We don’t have time to go into all of it… suffice to say if you are familiar with her work, I’m sorry to report you are among a cohort whose overexposure to social media has the same effect on the brain as a mercury-flavoured vape.
