SWIFT REBUKE
The Saturday Paper ($) published an op-ed that accused Taylor Swift of being the “sound of whiteness” and allowing people to embrace their white privilege, raising some eyebrows online. Zambian-born Australian journalist Santilla Chingaipe said Swift “refuses” to engage with social and political issues, and should be writing about “the climate emergency, being repeatedly failed by our political leaders, racial injustice, the raging conflicts”. Sky News Australia noted Swift encouraged people to vote in the 2018 mid-terms and spoke to Rolling Stone about racism and “repulsive” white supremacy. Social media responses to the op-ed ranged from “cringe” to accusations of “sexism”. Meanwhile, the ABC reports Airbnb hosts in Sydney are cancelling on Swift concertgoers ahead of her four-show sold-out extravaganza this weekend. Some 75,000 people will be there each night, and the Australian Hotels Association says the harbour city’s hotels will be 100% booked.
The SMH’s Waleed Aly is the latest to write about Swift-mania, saying her fans have a similar zeal to former US president Donald Trump’s supporters, though there’s “no enemy at a Taylor Swift concert” except maybe her exes and ex-manager. Both billionaires get you, Aly says, and is there really such a thing as an ethical billionaire, as SBS wonders? Meanwhile, Swiftie dads are taking Australia by storm, The New Daily reports, with one survey from Spotify suggesting the proportion is 29% of all fathers. Collingwood star Jack Crisp is one of them, and says dads should embrace it because Swift is a good role model. Speaking of the footy (and to finish on something a little less sugary) WWE wrestler Grayson Waller says he wants to wrestle “dumb Aussie journos” after his tag team partner Austin Theory threatened to “smack the shit” out of The West ($) editor Anthony De Ceglie for calling wrestling “fake” and not as “hard” as AFL or NRL.
WAR AND PEACE
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) officials told Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong that “it would be open to us to vote yes this time” before we first voted for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza at the UN general assembly in December, Guardian Australia reports. A document the paper saw showed two reasons: the “unprecedented crisis on the ground” and the “shifting positions” of allies (it said the yes voters would increase from the prior motion’s 120 total and they did — to 153). It wasn’t an ideal motion because it didn’t condemn Hamas’ October 7 attack, so DFAT said we could support an amendment doing so, even though we knew it’d probably fail. It did. It comes as Sky News Australia’s Sharri Markson went through the Twitter likes of a Palestinian granted an Australian visa to try and find a story.
Meanwhile, some Jewish creatives doxxed by pro-Palestine activists told The Australian ($) they have received death threats and swastikas, had their families harassed, and been called a “cancer” in online hate mail. One told the paper she could see how the Holocaust happened now, while several others said most in the group were “progressive”, “wanted peace”, and “empathised” with Palestinians. According to the purported group chat log, some in the group petitioned ABC management about Antoinette Lattouf who was later sacked (she alleges unlawfully) as SMH reported, while The Conversation says some targeted pro-Palestinian literary journal Overland and its co-editors Jonathan Dunk and Evelyn Araluen by encouraging complaints to Deakin Uni where they work. Guardian Australia added that some encouraged others to contact writer Clementine Ford’s book publisher too. There were 600 members in the group.
VOICING CONCERN
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers please note that this article mentions a deceased person.
The organisation behind a Voice to Parliament’s “No” campaign is spending more on political ads in Dunkley than the Liberals, Guardian Australia reports ($25,000 vs $20,600). The death of Labor MP Peta Murphy sparked the by-election, and the government is pretty sure it won’t flip blue. But Advance has rolling billboards in the electorate urging voters to put Labor last, has plans to hammer letterboxes with anti-Labor flyers, ran full-page ads in Victorian newspapers about asylum seekers, and is targeting Dunkley with social media ads. Earlier this month, Crikey reported that Advance’s Facebook page during the referendum, Referendum News, rebranded to Election News and is posting Dunkley content.
Speaking of the Voice — former human rights commissioner Mick Gooda says he’s “angry with the Yes side” over the result, The Australian ($) reports, because nothing’s changed four months on. Or nothing good — emboldened Victorian and Queensland state oppositions abandoned their support for Treaty, as SBS reported. Gooda acknowledged the Close The Gap statement from PM Anthony Albanese but said he couldn’t see a “narrative” or “vision” of where to go from here. Gooda also wished Labor pursued a bipartisan approach by legislating the advisory body, but Albanese said no one in the referendum working group (21 Indigenous leaders) told him to. It comes as the inquest into the fatal police shooting of Indigenous teenager Kumanjayi Walker began again yesterday, The National Indigenous Times reports. The former officer in charge was shown a text message to Zachary Rolfe, who shot Walker three times, that referred to a “racist term”.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
The thieves crept towards the post office in San Giovanni in the dead of night, coming to a sudden halt when their ring leader did. Do you have the key, Italo “The German” De Witt asked one of his guys, who nodded back apprehensively. He’d had a couple of them drill holes into walls during the gang’s prior heists, but this was better. Cleaner, De Witt thought to himself approvingly. Silently sliding it into the door, the gang stormed up to a staff member loading an ATM with thick wads of euros. The staffer froze, then put their hands up, no doubt thinking “I’m definitely not paid enough to try and stop this”. The group packed €200,000 into backpacks and fled in minutes. It was so successful that they started planning another robbery — but it was scrapped when one of the guys had incontinence and needed a prostate exam.
After all, they were a group of grandparent-aged Italians ranging from 66 to 75 years of age. They’d been enjoying a dream run of heists in post offices across Italy, which came to a rather spectacular end when a botched burglary in the Don Bosco region was caught on camera. Six people were arrested, including De Witt, who was already infamous for a rather sophisticated heist of a bank near Rome’s Spanish Steps in the mid-90s, as The Guardian tells it. He walked away with a cool 210 million lira, or about $10 million, a fortune now but even more so then. When the group of alleged ageing thieves were brought into Rome’s police station in cuffs, there were more than a few smiles and nods exchanged with the cops. After all, the group were “old acquaintances” of Rome’s police, La Repubblica said.
Hoping you never feel too old for anything, and have a restful weekend.
SAY WHAT?
First off, for fellas, no flossing in bed, toenail clipping, belching or passing wind. Ever. I think we gals should also refrain from asking a partner to pluck our chin hairs.
Kathy Lette
The SMH columnist says the only things worse than celibacy are hepatitis and death, but for too many couples “‘talking dirty in bed’ involves a whinge about the dust building up on the skirting boards”.
CRIKEY RECAP
“Swift is essentially the last pop star of a certain type, the omega point of wall-of-sound, girl groups, doo-wop, country-pop, power-pop, alt-pop, pop-punk and every other variant. Does her totalising success reinscribe a white mythology in a way that leaves black music nothing else to be but the ‘dark other’, more exciting and dangerous, but also supplemental and secondary?
“The ancient moon goddesses would eventually become Artemis/Artemisia in the Greek/Roman pantheon, the white light of eternal girlhood, chaste and chased, but never caught (unlike the mighty Aphrodite who was, let’s face it, a bit easy).”
“Competition has always been the poor cousin of economic policymaking in the neoliberal era. Competition is the fatal flaw in the otherwise perfect theory of neoliberal economic reform. Neoliberalism espouses competition for all — workers, corporations, nations.
“But corporations, meant to be at the forefront of competition, reflexively sought, successfully, to reduce competition for themselves — turning market reform into what I’ve called the forced transfer of certainty from workers to corporations.”
“But both must bow to the true master of political invisibility — Richard Marles. This is the deputy prime minister, as well defence minister, overseeing some of the biggest spending in the history of the nation in the form of the AUKUS program.
“And in a poll that — I cannot this stress enough — ‘canvasses the approval of key figures in federal politics’, the pollsters either didn’t think to ask, or the Fin didn’t think to mention, how anyone thought he was doing.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Houthis order ‘ban’ on Israel, US and UK-linked ships in the Red Sea (Al Jazeera)
Alexei Navalny: Putin critic’s mother says she has been shown his body (BBC)
Google pauses AI-generated images of people after ethnicity criticism (The Guardian)
Biden calls Putin a ‘crazy SOB’ and criticizes Trump’s Navalny comments during fundraiser (CNN)
Nvidia races to $2 trillion mark as AI mania sparks Wall St tech rally (Reuters)
Albanian parliament approves controversial deal to hold migrants for Italy (euronews)
US examined allegations of cartel ties to allies of Mexico’s president (The New York Times) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Make no mistake, PM’s resolve is on the line over return of boat arrivals — Peta Credlin (The Australian) ($): “The last time Australia confronted a resurgence of illegal boat arrivals I had a seat at the table, and two things have always stuck in my mind from that time. The first was the general fear from officials that if the Abbott government didn’t stop the boats, as the Coalition had successfully done in the Howard era, we would never be able to stop them. The second memory was walking out of a meeting of the national security committee of cabinet — after those same officials had congratulated themselves for a sustained period of no boat arrivals — and thinking to myself: you are all the same people who sat in there under Rudd and Gillard and couldn’t stop the boats.
“The only difference between then and now was the change of politicians in the room and a prime minister with resolute determination that he would stop at nothing to defeat the people-smugglers and restore Australia’s sovereignty. It was a profound lesson in the power of resolve. We had it then, and under this current government it has gone missing; that and basic ministerial competence. Illegal migration is a scourge few countries seem able or willing to solve. In 2013, after 50,000 people arrived by boat under Labor, the fear was the people-smuggling trade was more sophisticated than ever, the supply chain of vulnerable people ever increasing, and the use of technology made things more challenging for law enforcement. As those who there at the time will attest, just rolling out the old Howard-era measures, such as turnbacks, temporary protection visas and offshore processing weren’t enough.”
Unshackle immigration from Home Affairs and give it its own department — Michelle Grattan (The Conversation): “But a boat (or even two — there was another landing late last year) does not an armada make. Australian authorities might need to lift their detection game — no doubt they are getting that message — but so far there is not evidence of a new wave of people smuggling. Further arrivals would change the dynamics but, in the absence of that, the opposition needs to be careful of overreach, for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s irresponsible, thinking of Australia’s national interest, to be in effect telling the people smugglers there are fresh opportunities for them. Signals are important: for example, there’s a suggestion last year’s release of the immigration detainees (in the wake of the High Court decision) fed into the people smugglers’ pitch.
“Secondly, the border issue is unlikely to play as strongly with voters these days. Kos Samaras of the RedBridge Group, a political consultancy that does regular research, says: ‘The political heat that was associated with the politics of boat people in the early 2000s is all gone. I think that we’re dealing with a different generation of politics now, and Australians generally just don’t get all that worried or concerned about what sort of people will stumble onto our shores and walk into a town looking for food’. With eyes firmly on their pockets, people are likely to see excessive rhetoric about boats for what it is, a scare tactic. The issue of boat arrivals should be distinguished from immigration, which is current in many people’s minds and related to debates around housing and cost of living.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)
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The Planning Institute of Australia’s Phil Heywood will talk about his new book, Planning for Community, at Avid Reader bookshop,
