KAMAHL IS NO YES MAN
Former Liberal staffer turned Sky News Australia host Peta Credlin has repeated a debunked myth that $40 billion has been spent on Indigenous programs every year, as Sky News reports. She was supporting Malaysian-Australian singer Kamahl who made the claim on The Project — it was fortunately challenged by Hamish Macdonald who pointed out it had been “fact-checked as false”. So where did it come from? The Conversation delved into the oft-repeated figure of $30 billion (making the $40 billion claim unchallenged if you went to google to get more info… Is that intentional? You decide). It was actually leading No campaigner Nyunggai Warren Mundine who made the claim to Q+A back in 2016. But Credlin claimed overall budget numbers from all state and territory governments showed the figure was true. Actually, the Productivity Commission estimated that just $5.6 billion went to Indigenous-specific or targeted services. Never let the truth get in the way of a good soundbite, eh?
This comes as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has claimed, yet again, a lack of detail was the reason the Voice to Parliament was flailing in the polls, the SMH ($) reports, though the paper added rather pointedly: “Dutton did not mention that no referendum has ever been won without bipartisan support.” Speaking of the devil in the details… the corporate watchdog has commenced proceedings against an unnamed Deloitte partner who still works at the Big Four, Guardian Australia reports, though the referral details are being kept quiet. The partner will go before a disciplinary panel for investigation, and Deloitte told ASIC they won’t do any audit work in the meantime. So what can a panel really do? Quite a bit actually, the paper says: it can look at whether the auditor has worked lawfully and whether they’re fit to remain an auditor. If not, it can suspend or cancel an auditor’s registration.
SUFFER THE CHILDREN, AND THEIR MUMS
Thirty-three Australian women and children have been unlawfully detained in a Syrian detention camp for four years, Save the Children has told the Federal Court, and our government is choosing to look the other way. They’re the wives, widows and children of Islamic State fighters but none of the detainees have been arrested or charged with any crime, Guardian Australia reports. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) has already asked countries such as Australia to take them back, Save the Children says, but we haven’t requested their return. The government retorted that it’s not responsible for Australians who went to Syria.
To a rather different legal case involving children, and the WA Cook government is headed to court opposite 14,000 Indigenous people, including kids, who worked underpaid or unpaid on farms, cattle stations and institutions between 1936 and 1972. The West Australian ($) reports they were categorised as a “controlled native” under shitty defunct laws that allowed the Department of Native Welfare to hold three-quarters (!) of their pay in trusts. The parties failed to reach an out-of-court settlement. To more modern labour laws now and federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s employment white paper, which had 31 long-term reform directions and a new union-endorsed definition of “sustained and inclusive full employment”, lacked goals and targets to slash unemployment and poverty, the Australian Council of Social Service said via The Australian ($). Some 150,000 more Australians will be unemployed next year, ACOSS warned, taking the rate from 3.7% to 4.5%. At least Tim Gurner will be pleased.
PARTY GUYS
Self-described creator of “alt-right Australia” Clifford Jennings, who tried to branch stack the Young Nationals and once admired Nazis, was recently spotted campaigning alongside independent Wagga Wagga MP Joe McGirr, Michael West Media reports. He’s since been given the boot, but how did Jennings creep back into politics? He was banned for life from the Nationals, as the SMH ($) reported, but popped back up at a Christian Democratic Party event last year, MWM’s Steph Preston writes. Then the nationalist got the job at McGirr’s office at the beginning of this year. It may surprise you to read Wagga is a former blue ribbon Liberal seat — much to the ire of the Nats — but after the whole squalid Daryl Maguire-Gladys Berejiklian saga, it was snatched by the independent.
Meanwhile the SMH reports Victorian Senator and Victorian Liberal president Greg Mirabella wants former-Liberal-now-independent David Van’s federal Senate seat. Mirabella lost a casual vacancy to “Clive Palmer’s $110 million man” Ralph Babet last year, and has now nominated for the third spot on the party’s ticket. The parliamentary investigation into allegations against Van will finish in six weeks — some Liberals are hoping it’ll force him out of politics, opening up another casual vacancy. To another independent senator in the headlines now and David Pocock has urged the Fremantle Dockers board to ditch its filthy sponsor, Woodside, as WA Today reports. The former Wallabies Test captain says Woodside just wants to greenwash itself while it continues to expand its fossil fuel operations in WA. It’s not just the science, Pocock warns — professional sporting organisations may face legal liabilities if they don’t act on climate.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
The origin of life on earth, not to mention the creation of the solar system, may be within our grasp after the largest sample from an asteroid plonked down in Utah’s sandy desert. Considering the thing fired towards earth at 44,500km/h and burned at some 2,760 degrees along the way, there had more than a few watching on nervously as an infrared tracking camera showed it streaking through our sky — at 20,000 feet there was a collective intake of breath when the parachute opened well before the 5,000-feet mark. Thankfully it didn’t matter. No fewer than four helicopters jammed with scientists, engineers and military personnel descended on to the desert scene, disembarking in heavy safety gear to approach the oracle of truth before it was contaminated.
It was somewhat of a knock and run, or perhaps the equivalent of an Uber Eats driver casually tossing your dinner on to your doorstep from his bike, for the robot spacecraft the Osiris-REx. It dropped the sample on the way past our world as it headed off to Apophis, another asteroid. The nerds at NASA are eagerly awaiting getting at the contents today and we’ll get the inside scoop on the sample on October 11. So what could it reveal? Oh, nothing major, just the “unaltered, pristine insight into the building blocks of the solar system”, space expert Pierre Haenecour told Al Jazeera. The sample is really the gift that keeps on giving, NASA’s Lori Glaze added via The Guardian. “They are a treasure … for scientific analysis for years and years to come, to our kids and our grandkids and people who haven’t even been born yet.”
Hoping you feel a sense of wonder and awe about it all today.
SAY WHAT?
There would have to be a bipartisan approach to creating this, and being the shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, I would absolutely expect to be sitting at that table.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price
The leading No campaigner says she absolutely expects to help inform how a Voice to Parliament operates if the referendum succeeds — against her prominent campaigning, that is.
CRIKEY RECAP
“There are few things sadder in public administration than a public servant who thinks they’re a political player — a bureaucrat convinced they should be participating in the power games of elected officials, and that they have some political nous to bring to the table … On Pezzullo’s watch, the Department of Immigration, and then Home Affairs as it became, has delivered:
“The Paladin contract scandal, which was exposed in 2019; a major review concluding our migration system was no longer fit for purpose; the Cape Class patrol boat debacle; appalling processing of citizenship applications; losing control of Australia’s borders to an organised illegal migrant scheme under Peter Dutton; more than 100 people unlawfully detained by Home Affairs; a scathing secret review revealing major weaknesses in Home Affairs’ visa systems being exploited by criminals; a breach of caretaker conventions by the department; major bribery allegations in relation to payments made to Pacific politicians.”
“This goes to the heart of the paradox. One of the advantages of having a Voice assembly would be to sift these claims to cause and effect, to make the question of policy more procedural. Indeed, it’s even simpler than that. The Voice is presented as being something that would solve a whole series of riddles of policy, etc.
“But one of its principal roles would be to point out that we simply do not spend enough money on things like remote area health commensurate to the challenges and demands; that is as much because we don’t spend enough money on a whole range of social problems, sufficient to alleviate them. The good news about this substantially disengaged political process now under way? It may not deliver a Voice, but it is also unlikely to bring into being a white ethno-nationalist movement of any strength either.”
“Highlights include claims that offshore asylum seekers were being encouraged to self-harm, or making false allegations of sexual assault and then ‘trying it on’ with abortion requests to get to Australia (baseless); that there were murderers, rapists and paedophiles among the Nauru contingent (baseless); that the father of the Biloela family left Australia while he was seeking asylum here (false).
“If it were just that Dutton was relentlessly negative, a cherrypicker of convenient statistics, a master of misleading three-word slogans, and an expert at punching down on the vulnerable (all of which he is), then he’d be in the Tony Abbott realm where taking his words seriously would still serve some arguably useful social purpose. But Dutton goes further. When he’s cornered, he just makes shit up.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Taliban weighs using US mass surveillance plan, met with China’s Huawei (Reuters)
Spain has among the EU’s highest number of young people out of work and education, but why? (euronews)
‘Supercontinent’ could make earth uninhabitable in 250m years, study predicts (The Guardian)
US recognises Cook Islands and Niue as independent states (CNN)
Robert Menendez: US senator vows he will be cleared in bribery case (BBC)
THE COMMENTARIAT
‘Player’ Mike Pezzullo undone by power play — Michelle Grattan (The Conversation): “He’s tough and polarising, with supporters and bitter enemies. Critics have long questioned his judgment. On security matters, he’s the hawks’ hawk. While at first blush his texts appear highly partisan, that is too simplistic an interpretation. He fights bureaucratic and policy/ideological battles, rather than being directly party-political. His addiction to texting is certainly bipartisan. Within the Albanese government they joke about it starting first thing in the morning and running well into the night. As a public servant, Pezzullo has served both sides of politics.
“When in the Defence Department, he was lead author of the Rudd government’s 2009 defence white paper, which raised the hackles of China. Earlier, he was a senior staffer to Kim Beazley when Beazley was opposition leader. His primary interest is defence — he would have liked nothing better than to head the Defence Department. When Anthony Albanese won government, some in Labor wanted Pezzullo gone. He survived not least because the new Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil, in charge of this huge, sprawling empire, needed an experienced hand. In some ways, Pezzullo is a stickler for process — as we saw when [Scott] Morrison was trying to make political use of a boat headed for Australia on election day — which makes these texts all the more shocking. But he portrayed himself as acting in broader interests …”
How do we raise trillions of dollars to fight the climate crisis? The answer is staring us in the face — Gordon Brown (The Guardian): “Last year, the oil and gas industry across the world banked about $4 trillion, according to the head of the International Energy Agency. This represents one of the biggest redistributions of wealth from the world’s poor to the richest petrostates. The record energy prices that have produced these unearned gains have not only caused dramatically rising poverty and debt in the global south, but have also stymied decades of progress in extending power into homes, villages and towns that were previously without electricity.
“Let’s put this in perspective: $4 trillion is a bigger sum than the entire UK economy and about 20 times all the international aid budgets of the world. It is 40 times the $100 billion-a-year target for the global south that was pledged in 2009 for 2020 but never reached. The windfall has given energy exporters, including the Gulf states and Norway, nearly $1 trillion of earnings from their foreign sales alone, and the failure to recycle a fraction of these gains to the world’s poorest countries is one of the great scandals of our times. It is this lottery-style bonanza, amassed by petrostates, that is the backdrop to the COP28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates. The summit will be chaired by sultan Al Jaber, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, which is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the windfall.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)
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Leading No Campaigner Nyunggai Warren Mundine will speak about Voice to Parliament at the National Press Club.
Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)
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Writer and refugee advocate Nadine J. Cohen will talk about her new novel, Everyone and Everything, at Avid Reader bookshop.
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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YA author Will Kostakis will talk about his new novel, If You Tell Anyone, You’re Next, at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.
