BURKE AND DUTTON TRAVEL
As new Home Affairs supremo Tony Burke travels to Indonesia for bilateral security talks after being sworn in to his new position, The Australian is keen to highlight the fact surveillance flights for detecting illegal boat arrivals off Australia’s northwest coast have dropped 22% in two years. The paper says new figures show surveillance flying hours for Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB) dropped 2% in the last financial year following a 20% drop in 2022-23. It adds the OSB stats show three boats carrying a combined 49 people were intercepted in June, but don’t yet include the fact over 70 people were turned back by the Australian Border Force in July.
Sky News says while Burke is in Bali he will attend the 10th Indonesia-Australia Ministerial Council on Law and Security and co-chair the fifth Sub-Regional Meeting on counter-terrorism and transnational security.
Also travelling this week is Opposition Leader Peter Dutton who is in Israel for a three-day trip to meet with senior government officials and “members of the community that were impacted by the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks”, Sky News reports. Dutton was due to meet Foreign Minister Israel Katz and then Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Monday, Sharri Markson said. “Today, Australia and Israel have a strong bilateral relationship traversing trade, agriculture, technology, security and more. It’s a relationship which will only grow stronger built around our devotion to democracy in a world where our values and way of life faces old and new threats,” Dutton said in a statement, SBS reports.
Yesterday, Dutton’s office was caught up in the controversy caused by Nationals’ frontbencher Barnaby Joyce telling a wind farm protest rally at the weekend to use their ballot papers as bullets to “say goodbye” to the prime minister, the ABC recalls. Joyce later apologised for using the metaphor and Dutton’s office said the apology was appropriate, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese claimed the former deputy prime minister should be sacked. “I am not sure what Barnaby Joyce has to do to lose his job. Peter Dutton has had four reshuffles already. There should have been a fifth today,” he said.
DELIVERY, DELIVERY, DELIVERY
As Albanese and his government brace for the latest inflation data on Wednesday and the interest rate decision that will follow, the new “election-ready” cabinet has been out and about trying to explain its plans for the future.
New Housing Minister Clare O’Neil told the ABC most Australians don’t realise how much money the Albanese government has invested in housing. O’Neil, who lost her job as home affairs minister in the weekend reshuffle, told Afternoon Briefing her new gig was going to be all about “delivery, delivery, delivery” as concerns over the speed of the government’s $32 billion housing plan continue. The Greens responded by calling O’Neil’s rhetoric “a new salesperson selling the same failed policies”, with housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather saying the government should reopen talks over negative gearing, rent freezes and capital gains.
Meanwhile, new Workplace Relations Minister Murray Watt has told The Australian his first ministerial briefing focused on what action should be taken against the CFMEU as it represented a “big and urgent priority” for the government. He said allegations published by the Nine newspapers about CFMEU’s construction arm were “shocking and seriously disturbing”.
As Nine journalists continue to strike over a pay dispute, Guardian Australia claims Watt was one of the three Labor ministers who withdrew from appearing at a summit hosted by the Australian Financial Review after concerns about crossing the picket line. The AFR’s government services summit was due to take place today but was reportedly cancelled at the last minute on Monday. The other two ministers The Guardian claims withdrew, Bill Shorten and Katy Gallagher, said simply “the AFR cancelled the conference”. Meanwhile, Nine said the reason the summit was axed was due to the ongoing industrial action. Yesterday Crikey took a look at how Nine management are filling the pages of their papers with their journalists on strike, especially the attempts to cover the Olympic Games.
Speaking of which, after Australia’s Chris Burton grabbed an individual eventing silver in Paris, Ariarne Titmus and Mollie O’Callaghan squared off in the pool, with the latter claiming the women’s 200m freestyle gold and a new Olympic record. Titmus took the silver.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
We all like to bring a memento or two back from our holidays, but most of us would probably rather not find ourselves in Alex O’Neill’s position when he found a bat hiding in his family’s luggage.
During a stay in a cottage on Kinlochmoidart Estate in Lochailort, Scotland, the baby bat somehow managed to get into Alex and his partner’s bags and travel back to Glasgow with them, the BBC reports.
Having discovered the winged creature in his bags and contacted the Bat Conservation Trust, Alex was connected with microbiologist and former vet nurse Tracey Jolliffe who took on the challenge of returning the bat, which she named Raspberry, to its home.
Tracey put a call out on social media and a family from Wrexham, Wales, who happened to be visiting Glasgow on their way further north were able to take Raspberry to Strontian before a countryside ranger took her back to Kinlochmoidart Estate, where she was released back into the wild.
Sarah Winnington-Ingram, who runs the estate, said: “It’s quite unusual. There is a lot of wildlife up here and people see bats all the time, but not like that. I’ve never even seen a bat in the cottage before either. It’s great to see it back home safely.”
Say What?
Spot something missing?
Kai McKenzie
The 23-year-old surfer whose leg was severed by a shark last week has joked on Instagram about his injury. McKenzie was attacked by the shark while surfing at North Shore Beach, near Port Macquarie, last Tuesday. On Monday he posted a picture showing him smiling in hospital with his “crew”. McKenzie’s leg washed up onshore after the attack and was taken to hospital but could not be reattached. Guardian Australia reports a GoFundMe page for his treatment and recovery has so far raised almost $170,000
CRIKEY RECAP
And if “stop the students” doesn’t have quite the political imperative of “stop the boats”, the ability to achieve a marked reduction in immigration in a system that is primarily demand-driven will be crucial to the government’s reelection narrative, especially with the opposition promising large, though unclear, migration reductions.
But this is a department that leaves its ministers in the dark and fails to plan for legal outcomes it doesn’t want, so the chances that Home Affairs will provide a trouble-free run to the next election for Burke and Albanese are small.
A row of reporters were lined up outside Brisbane’s Magistrates Court for their live television crosses for hours before the inquest into the Wieambilla attack was set to begin.
They repeated variations of the same lines, promising viewers that the next few weeks will reveal answers to questions that have haunted survivors, family members, police and the public for years: how could something like this happen?
Over the next month here in Court 4, Queensland’s state coroner Terry Ryan will preside over a probe into the deaths of police officers Constable Matthew Arnold, Rachel McCrow and a neighbour, Alan Dare, at the hands of Gareth, Stacey and Nathaniel Train on a remote property in regional Queensland on December 12, 2022.
On Friday, journalists at The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review, WAToday and Brisbane Times walked off the job for five days in response to the last pay offer made by Nine management in negotiations over their enterprise bargaining agreement.
The last time this happened, Nine [then Fairfax] journos were putting their jobs at risk by engaging in illegal industrial action. This time, Nine decided to test the resolve of its heavily unionised workforce — soon after announcing job cuts while sending Scott Cam to the Paris Olympics to promote The Block — during the extremely small window of time they are legally allowed to strike.
So, how does management keep their best performing product going without the people who usually fill it — let alone during both the Olympics Games and the most crowded election schedule in human history, dominated by the unfolding drama of the US election?
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Two children die and nine injured after ‘ferocious’ knife attack in Southport (The Guardian)
World leaders cast doubt on Maduro’s claim of victory in Venezuelan election (The Washington Post) ($)
Japan wanted higher inflation. It’s here, and it hurts (The New York Times) ($)
Six-week abortion ban takes effect in Iowa (BBC)
FBI to ask for Trump’s ‘perspective’ in shooting probe witness interview (CNN)
Former BBC presenter Huw Edwards charged with making indecent images of children (The Financial Times)
THE COMMENTARIAT
A new terror has entered the Gaza war: That it is ushering in an age of total immorality — Nesrine Malik (The Guardian): The result is a world that feels as if it’s in the jarring middle of that transition. Where political events move forward with speed, folding Gaza into the normal. Images and accounts from Gaza, most recently of US doctors telling CBS News of children with sniper wounds to the heads and heart, compete with attention absorbed by the US election. With memes, farce and the trivial clutter of the digital world. Gaza comes to us in a montage of reels and posts: viewer discretion is advised/Kamala is “brat”/disturbing images/recipe details in caption/Rashida Tlaib holds a “war criminal” sign.
What world emerges after this? The war on Gaza is simply too big, too live, too relentless for its forced normalisation to occur without unintended consequences. The end result is all of humanity degraded; the end result is a world in which when the call comes to aid people in need, no one will be capable of heeding it.
My plan to reform the Supreme Court and ensure no president is above the law — Joe Biden (The Washington Post): I served as a US senator for 36 years, including as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. I have overseen more Supreme Court nominations as senator, vice president and president than anyone living today. I have great respect for our institutions and the separation of powers.
What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.
That’s why — in the face of increasing threats to America’s democratic institutions — I am calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy.
