JUST GO, SCOMO
Liberal MP Bridget Archer thinks it’s time former prime minister Scott Morrison resigned from Parliament and let the party get on with it, The Age ($) reports. The outspoken Tasmanian, who was the only Liberal to censure Morrison over his many ministries, says she found his denial of the damning robodebt royal commission report findings against him “disappointing”, adding it’s too hard for the Liberals to move forward with him sticking around. But another anonymous MP told the paper Morrison wouldn’t resign now because the private sector wouldn’t touch him in the wake of the report. Former Department of Human Services (DHS) secretary Kathryn Campbell, former Department of Social Services secretary Renée Leon, and a former DHS general manager Mark Withnell may also be considering their future after the royal commission found adverse findings against them, Guardian Australia reports. Withnell was accused of misleading cabinet by omission for not flagging the income averaging method nor the legal implications of it. The SMH ($) adds Campbell went on leave from her $900,000-a-year job with the Defence Department last week, before the report’s release.
Speaking of the Coalition’s questionable legacy, Sky News host Peta Credlin called former PM Tony Abbott “the boss” several times in a story about their new podcast in The Australian ($). Shudder. That’s not the name of the podcast, just me having a moment. It’s imaginatively titled Abbott and Credlin, and they plan to help conservative politics in this country to “fight back”, according to Abbott. Credlin says it won’t be a complete echo chamber, describing Abbott as more black and white about social conservativism. But economically and religiously they’re the same level of conservative, she adds. Sounds like a hoot. Credlin says people decrying the end of conservative politics need to get a grip, saying there’s no need to move to the centre.
BILLION-DOLLAR DEFENCE DEAL
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will announce one of the biggest defence sales in our history today — we’re selling 100 Brisbane-made Boxer heavy weapon carriers to the German army for more than $1 billion, the AFR ($) says. It’ll mean production and supply, so there’ll be a boost to local jobs too, though the manufacturer is German defence contractor Rheinmetall Defence Australia, which is headquartered in Redbank, quite close to Brisbane. To a former PM now and Paul Keating called the head of NATO Jens Stoltenberg a “supreme fool” over plans to open an office in Japan, Guardian Australia reports, the first such outpost in the region. French President Emmanuel Macron agrees, saying China has “little to do with the North Atlantic”.
It’s all going down at NATO, where Albanese is also talking about us getting a membership of the G7’s German-led “climate club” for countries committed to deep emissions cuts — it’s not clear why Australia would qualify. It comes as the auditor-general is looking into the so-called “solar rorts” scandal — a $29 million Albanese government program for community batteries that independent South Australian MP Rebekha Sharkie says feels very similar to sports rorts. The Australian ($) says 40% of the suburbs chosen for the batteries were in marginal seats, 34% were in safe Labor seats, and 24% were in safe Coalition seats. Meanwhile, the plastics we buy each year are doing the same damage as a third of all cars on our roads, according to analysis from the Australian Marine Conservation Society and WWF Australia that Guardian Australia reports on — some 16 million tonnes of greenhouse gases. So don’t forget your reusable coffee cup this morning, folks.
NO TIME TO CHAT
China’s “app for everything” WeChat may have shown contempt for federal Parliament by refusing repeated requests to appear at a parliamentary inquiry that might ban it, even though social media giants TikTok, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn have all agreed to show up, The Age ($) reports. The app is used by about a million people in Australia, but there are fears about foreign interference because of Beijing’s close grip on Chinese companies. Liberal Senator James Paterson basically indicated that if WeChat doesn’t show up, it’ll probably be banned. It comes as Twitter’s Elon Musk wants to sue Meta over its new app, Threads, saying “competition is fine, cheating is not”, as the BBC reports. Meta denies a former Twitter staffer designed the app, which had 70 million sign-ups as of a couple of days ago.
Meanwhile Meta has promised to boost funding to fact-checkers to target abuse and misinformation around the Voice to Parliament referendum on Facebook and Instagram, Guardian Australia reports. It’ll also create a partnership with ReachOut for mental health support to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Meta’s Mia Garlick said it learnt a lot from the damage the equal marriage postal survey caused vulnerable groups. It comes as One Nation’s Pauline Hanson has released a book called Reasons to Vote For Albanese’s Voice that is completely empty, as The Daily Mail reports. In a video, she said if you vote Yes, “You’re not going to be able to get out of it, because you would have enshrined it forever in the constitution.” Memo to Hanson: that’s the point.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
Antonia Case has discovered the meaning of life — having something to do. It’s the culmination of two decades spent seeking the answer to what creates a flourishing life, as she writes for The Guardian. In 2006, she and her partner, Zan, decided to go all in on the question, packing a car with everything but a computer, phone, camera, compass or anything that could connect to the internet. They “used the sun” to find their way to Patagonia, the first stop on a multi-country trip where she pondered the question through a dozen seminal philosophy texts. Are we Homo sapiens, man the thinker, she wondered, or Homo faber, man the maker? We are fundamentally happiest “doing”, she says — we need to “work, create, innovate and build, [because] when we create the world around us, we create ourselves”, she writes. Or as Winston Churchill put it: “To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies and they must all be real.”
Case, who continued on through Chile, Peru and beyond to France, Spain and lastly over to Australia, meeting endless subcultures of various productivity, now says complex questions about the meaning of one’s life can be easily distilled into a simple consideration one might have when hanging by a pinky off a cliff: why would you want to live in that moment? Would it be your clothes, car, or success, or would it be the opportunity to see loved ones, watch a sunrise, and laugh merrily? “It’s likely to be the same things you’ll notice in a person who is flourishing — kindness, readiness to be involved, appreciation of the beauty of nature, spontaneity, love of life and, more than anything else, their sense of joy: that elusive emotion, which appears to be the hallmark of flourishing.”
Hope you can enjoy the finer things in life today, whatever that looks like for you.
SAY WHAT?
When the problems were brought to the attention of the government at the time, the program was stopped. I’m sorry to those people adversely affected, I truly am.
Peter Dutton
The opposition leader claims robodebt was stopped when its legality was called into question, even though the report found its “unfairness, probable illegality and cruelty became apparent” in early 2017 and “the path taken was to double down, to go on the attack in the media against those who complained and to maintain the falsehood that in fact the system had not changed at all”.
CRIKEY RECAP
“Not merely was robodebt disastrous as a policy process, but its implementation was also a catastrophe, ‘the result of its being put into operation in haste, rather than conscious decision-making’. Its ‘disastrous’ effects became clear from September 2016, the report finds, and by the start of 2017, ‘robodebt’s unfairness, probable illegality and cruelty became apparent’.
“Instead of amending or ceasing the scheme, the Coalition relied on a faulty ombudsman’s report — the result of more deception — ‘as proof of the legality and appropriateness of robodebt against all comers’ … The scheme completely failed to achieve any of its intended goals: none of the cost savings ever materialised.”
“When questioned in the past, Robert has insisted that his financial arrangements were in line with the Morrison government’s ministerial standards. This meant that, under the Morrison government’s ministerial code of conduct, Robert was ultimately answerable to the prime minister on conflict-of-interest questions.
“It is common practice at federal and state levels for the prime minister or premier to have the role of custodian of ministerial integrity — a central problem for former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian. A NACC inquiry might well interrogate whether or not this remains an acceptable practice.”
“If Peter Dutton — like Linda Burney — wasn’t born into wealth and privilege, he too is surely a member of an elite, if words have any meaning. He has made millions from decades of property investment. He has been a federal MP for over 20 years and a frontbencher since 2004, repeatedly serving in senior ministerial roles.
“Similarly, Mundine is a former ALP president and successful businessman who chaired and part-owned a company that received millions of dollars from the Coalition government and had to move from Sydney’s north shore to campaign for Gilmore in 2019. If Whitton-born former teacher Burney — who has multiple investment properties — gets to be part of an elite, then Dutton and Mundine do too.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Russian, Turkish ministers talk after Turkey sends Ukrainian commanders home (Reuters)
Biden says war with Russia must end before NATO can consider membership for Ukraine (CNN)
Nauru prepares to mine deep seas in big climate controversy (Al Jazeera)
Evacuation orders issued for 2 regions in northern BC as hundreds of wildfires burn (CBC)
Super Rugby Pacific: Tana Umaga named head coach of Moana Pasifika (NZ Herald)
Far-right violence on the march again, warns French intelligence chief (euronews)
US says it killed Islamic State leader Usamah al-Muhajir in Syria (The Guardian)
THE COMMENTARIAT
The ‘sealed’ chapter of the robodebt report should be released — Michelle Grattan (The Conversation): “While at first blush Holmes’ argument for suppressing the names sounds fair and the right thing to do, it is in fact flawed. By not identifying people publicly, this does a disservice at several levels. The case for secrecy can be made, but it is trumped by that for disclosure. The general public, and especially the victims of robodebt, deserve to know who has been referred. The scheme did immense damage to a huge number of people. The commission has been scathing about many individuals. There is a strong case for revealing what actions it believes should be taken against which people.
“The secrecy is also unfair to some involved in the hearings who have not been referred. People may assume, wrongly, that they have been. On the other hand, have some individuals not been referred when it might be expected they would have been. Individuals who have been referred can identify themselves, but it can’t be assumed they will. (A couple of former ministers on Friday were quick to say they had not received referral notifications.) The situation becomes even more opaque when no number has been given of the referrals. One would expect a hierarchy among the referrals — being recommended for criminal charges is not the same as being referred for lesser action.”
Left’s identity crisis means Dutton can be a champion for equality — George Brandis (The Age) ($): “This poses a problem for identity politics: what happens when the grievances of the minority are addressed? One of the grounds of the decision in the Harvard students case was that affirmative-action admissions policies were no longer required to serve the purpose that was their original rationale. Yet once-marginalised minorities are often reluctant to abandon the status of victimhood. Anti-discrimination policies are meant not to entrench minority disadvantage but to eliminate it. This takes time — perhaps a long time — but such policies are designed to succeed, not to fail …
“Meanwhile, those who do not belong to an identified minority increasingly find that there is nobody to speak up for them. Whose life chances are better in modern Australia: the gay kid from a loving family in a wealthy suburb who goes to an elite school and will sail into university? Or the impoverished kid from western Sydney who suffers the tyranny of low expectations but does not belong to any self-identifying minority? Who speaks for him in the babel of minority voices?”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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The 2023 Hot Desk Fellows Mark Hewitt, Victoria Kenworthy, Lauren Mullings, Shoshanna Rockman, Melanie Schuijers and Jamie Tram will give excerpts from their creative projects at The Moat.
Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)
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Author Anna McGahan will talk about her new book, Immaculate, at Avid Reader bookshop.
