ISRAEL, HAMAS SWAP PRISONERS
Three hostages held in Gaza were released to their families on Sunday, the Israeli military has said, as the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel came into effect.
The New York Times says the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified the freed hostages and said they were captured during the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. The paper added Israel is expected to release 90 Palestinian prisoners later on Sunday (local time).
Reuters reports thousands of people cheered in Tel Aviv outside the defence headquarters as they watched a giant screen showing the three female hostages being released. The BBC identified the hostages as 31-year-old Doron Steinbrecher, dual British-Israeli Emily Damari, 28, and 24-year-old Romi Gonen.
The start of the ceasefire was delayed on Sunday morning, with the Gaza civil defence agency saying 10 people were killed by Israeli air strikes during the hours it was delayed.
Aid trucks began entering Gaza once the deal was confirmed, with trucks entering via Zikim in the north and Kerem Shalom in the south, as well as via the Rafah crossing, the BBC adds.
NYT reports: “As the truce took effect on Sunday morning, joyful Palestinians honked car horns and blasted music in the central Gaza city of Deir al Balah, where celebratory gunfire rang out and children ran around in the streets.” The paper adds Israeli officers said their forces had begun to withdraw from parts of Gaza.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said after Damari’s release: “The release of three hostages today is wonderful and long-overdue news after months of agony for them and their families. Among them is British citizen Emily Damari, who will now be reunited with her family, including her mother Amanda who has never stopped her tireless fight to bring her daughter home.”
The AFP quotes a Hamas official as saying the next hostage-prisoner swap will take place on Saturday. The ceasefire deal is set to be carried out in three stages, with the first six-week phase set to result in 33 hostages being released by Hamas in return for more than 1,800 Palestinian prisoners.
In Australia, thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne on Sunday in the hours before the ceasefire deal came into effect. The ABC reported at the time: “Many of the protesters say that now-delayed deal does not go far enough and some say they have no plans to end their weekly rallies.”
On his final day in office, CBS News reports US President Joe Biden declared on Sunday: “After so much pain, death and loss of life, today the guns in Gaza have gone silent.” He added: “Today’s ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages is a result of a principled and effective policy that we presided over for months. And we got here without a wider war in the Middle East that many predicted. And now it falls to the next administration to help implement this deal.”
Talking of the next administration, the soon-to-be 47th US president Donald Trump is holding a “Make America Great Again Victory Rally” at 3pm Sunday local time (Monday 7am AEDT) in Washington’s Capital One Arena, Reuters reports.
The 78-year-old’s second inauguration will take place on Monday at midday local time (Tuesday 4am AEDT). Due to cold weather, Trump will take the presidential oath of office inside the rotunda of the Capitol building, Reuters adds. At the weekend, thousands of people across the country staged rallies against the incoming president, ABC flags.
Trump’s victory rally on Sunday is set to involve speeches and appearances from the likes of Elon Musk, vice president-elect JD Vance, UFC boss Dana White, and conservative commentator Megyn Kelly, the newswire adds. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is apparently planning on attending the rally as well as the inauguration. The video-sharing app was temporarily unavailable in the US on Sunday due to the very loose-looking ban.
And in words I don’t really understand (as flagged in the Summer Worm… I did try and read up on the subject), Trump’s newly launched meme coin, $TRUMP, “has hit a market capitalisation of $13 billion (A$21 billion), Forbes reports. (Feel free to email me at worm@crikey.com.au if you have a simple way of explaining that to me)
Oh and as we brace for his arrival, here’s a handy list from The Guardian of all the things Trump has claimed he is going to do as soon as he’s sworn in. The Nine newspapers also have a list of the Australians expected to attend Monday’s inauguration.
DUTTON DRAWS LEVEL
In domestic news, The Australian Financial Review is leading on its latest polling which claims Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has drawn level with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as preferred PM.
The paper reports: “As communities in Sydney and Melbourne reel from a spate of antisemitic attacks, including cars being torched and vandalised and places of worship hit by arson attacks, the poll showed law and order overtaking climate change as one of voters’ top three concerns.”
Today Alabense will visit Tomago Aluminium in the Hunter region of NSW where he will pledge that a reelected Labor government will create a $2 billion production tax incentive for “green” or low-emissions aluminium, the AFR flags in its report. It also highlights Dutton’s “first election policy for the year”, unveiled at a rally in Brisbane yesterday; “a capped tax deduction of $20,000 for business-related meal and entertainment expenses for firms with turnover less than $10 million a year”.
In its analysis of the policy, which it brands as “not serious”, economics correspondent Michael Read writes: “Less than a week after condemning Labor’s cost of living policies as sugar hits, Dutton on Sunday announced a new sugar hit of his own.”
The ABC flags the announcement is uncosted and quotes Albanese as saying in response: “He [Dutton] has yet to come out with serious policy announcements … You have an opposition just continuing to be negative and say no to anything.”
Meanwhile, the AAP highlights Governor-General Sam Mostyn will today swear in four ministers at Government House as the PM’s mini-reshuffle comes into effect as Bill Shorten exits the stage. As a reminder: Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth adds the NDIS to her portfolio, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher takes on Shorten’s other responsibility as Government Services Minister, Early Childhood Education Minister Anne Aly becomes the junior minister for the NDIS, and Aged Care Minister Anika Wells is being promoted to the cabinet.
Albanese is set to address the National Press Club on Friday, which Laura Tingle at the ABC flags is the day before the anniversary of the redesigned stage three tax cuts.
Finally, Novak Djokovic has said he will not do an on-court interview at the Australian Open until he receives an apology from the Nine Network following comments by the network’s sports anchor Tony Jones, the national broadcaster reports.
“A couple of days ago, a famous sports journalist who works for the official broadcaster, Channel Nine, here in Australia made a mockery of Serbian fans and also made insulting and offensive comments towards me,” he told reporters. “Since then, he chose not to issue any public apology, neither did Channel Nine. Since they are the official broadcaster, I chose not to give interviews to Channel Nine.”
Djokovic is next up against Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz in an eagerly-awaited quarter-final.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
A commemorative coin featuring the words “Big Brother is watching you” is being released to mark the 75th anniversary of author George Orwell’s death.
The £2 ($A4) coin was released by the Royal Mint last week, with prices starting at £17.50 ($A34), the Associated Press reports.
The coin features what appears to be an eye, but is, in fact, a camera lens. On the edge of the coin is another quote from Orwell’s iconic novel 1984: “There was truth and there was untruth.”
Artist Henry Gray, who designed the coin, said: “With phones and cameras being everywhere in your house, and being listened to by advertisers on your phone, you are really aware of how you’re being surveyed — and that’s what 1984 is all about.
“That’s why the eye (in the design) isn’t a realistic eye. It doesn’t have eyelashes and things like that because I wanted it to be monocular. It’s almost like a camera lens staring at you all the time, unblinking.”
Say What?
Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that president Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!
TikTok
American users of the video-sharing app were unable to access TikTok at the weekend after it was banned over concerns about alleged links to the Chinese government. The Biden administration said it would not enact the ban and it was a matter for the incoming Trump presidency. Donald Trump has said he will give TikTok a 90-day reprieve from a ban once he takes office on Monday, the BBC reports. TikTok has since said it is “in the process of restoring service”.
CRIKEY RECAP
Fintan O’Toole’s magisterial portrait of then-future president Joe Biden in January 2020, “The Designated Mourner”, noted that by 1988 it was already an acknowledged cliché to say that the Delaware senator’s life “was touched by personal tragedy”. His first wife Neilia and their one-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a 1972 car crash. More was to come, with his son Beau taken by brain cancer in 2015. He lost and lost.
“Joe Biden is the most gothic figure in American politics,” O’Toole wrote. “He is haunted by death, not just by the private tragedies his family has endured, but by a larger and more public sense of loss.”
And so it ends, with Biden remembered as the US president who watched the White House, the House and the Senate fall to Donald Trump’s Republicans. Between this and the courts, the control of the country afforded to that coterie — with all its religious fanaticism and dreamy fascist rhetoric — is more or less unfettered. It has turned Biden’s time as president into the negative image of what it was supposed to be. He was supposed to be the steady, if uninspiring, hand that guides the republic back to normalcy following the unpleasantness of 2016 to 2020. Instead, he confirmed the era as Trump’s.
We’re back in familiar territory with the growing speculation about when Anthony Albanese will call the 2025 election. The power to dictate election timing — within constitutional limits — is considered by journalists to be one of the most potent weapons in the arsenal of Australian prime ministers, a tool of incumbency exploitable in a way that is unavailable to the majority of political leaders in Australia, hemmed in by set terms.
The media loves it. There’s none of that boring certainty that attaches to state elections, when the timing is known years in advance. Instead, the press gallery can endlessly speculate about if and when a PM might take that fateful trip to Yarralumla, an expedition inevitably accompanied by helicopter tracking, convoys of camera operators, and breathless live coverage — all of which adds exactly zero to meaningful public discourse but fills precious columns and television minutes.
However, evidence suggests the power of dictating election timing is at best a double-edged sword, and even the most experienced prime ministers can fall prey to the opportunity cost that attaches to any decision on when to go to the polls.
A pair of Sydney University academics being accused of antisemitism over comments made following the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel have asked a human rights watchdog to terminate complaints against them.
Scholars Nick Riemer and John Keane said in a statement that they had written to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) to say the allegations against them were “baseless” and that the complainants had not engaged with the commission in good faith.
“The complainants and their lawyers have from the outset treated the AHRC’s process as nothing more than a necessary procedural hurdle before they can fast-track the matter to the court,” the statement said. “This explains why they have been fundraising for a class action in the Federal Court since at least June 2024, a move which they described from the start as ‘imminent’.”
The complainants, a group of Jewish staff and students at the University of Sydney, allege the two academics engaged in unlawful discrimination against Jewish people under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA).
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Ratings in freefall and a shift to TikTok tastes: Triple J’s not very happy birthday (The Sydney Morning Herald)
Brussels orders X to hand over documents on algorithm (The Financial Times) ($)
Trump plans to designate cryptocurrency as a national priority (Bloomberg) ($)
‘Homeless people given free lunch’ to attend Trump Jr event in Greenland (The Guardian)
Prince Harry versus newspapers: This is the one that matters (BBC)
The wealth whisperers who save super-rich families from themselves (The Economist)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Peter Dutton can’t dodge the spotlight as the election draws closer — or his unresolved problems — Laura Tingle (ABC): Some believe Dutton is just not comfortable talking economics. Whether he is, or isn’t, there is increasing frustration among some of his colleagues that he needs to be doing it.
There are also inklings of concern about the opposition leader’s tendency to overstep the mark, or make mistakes, when under pressure: something his lack of media appearances for the past two and a half years has meant hasn’t necessarily been conspicuous.
The Coalition’s nuclear policy is deeply vulnerable on its costings and technical viability; his political judgement on the tax cut issue questionable; he has had to walk back claims or promises because he’s got the numbers wrong — as he did on migration figures last year.
Until now, there’s been a solid answer to that: “whatever he’s doing is working, so who cares”. But this week has given us a foretaste of how the political dynamics change in an election year.
Albanese’s inaction drives his own party towards extinction — Richard Flanagan (The Sydney Morning Herald): And yet, under Anthony Albanese, Labor gives the ever stronger impression that it has never seen a corporation that it won’t prostrate itself to. Each knee-step taken in his bizarre pilgrimage of national humiliation, from his log cabin origins to his house on the hill, is loudly tolled by the sound of the corporate cash registers jubilantly ringing with growing profits. Qantas and the promised legislation to make it pay customers compensation for late or cancelled flights? No action — ka-ching! The gambling industry and the ads more than 70% of Australians want gone? No action — ka-ching! More coal mine approvals, new gas fields approvals, $1 billion for a Gina Rinehart-backed mine? No problem! Ka-ching! Even a spineless environmental measure like Tanya Plibersek’s “nature positive” bill is axed by Albanese at the behest of the West Australian mining industry. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!
The word extinction was first paired with species in the 1880s as a result of a Cambridge don’s search for the last great auk, a penguin-like bird hunted to extinction by humans. “A healthy population existed until close to the time of the species’ extinction,” Tim Flannery wrote in a recent piece in New York Review of Books. “When it came, however, the decline of the great auk was swift and relentless.” While “the great auk was difficult to hunt at sea”, Flannery continued, “when it came ashore to breed it was uniquely vulnerable.”
And so too Albo. His much-remarked gifts of backroom dealing and party wrangling that worked in the darkness of factional intrigue serve him less well on the naked, exposed rock of government. In 2022, Labor secured just 32.58% of the national primary vote, its lowest vote since 1934. Labor’s electoral fortunes give every appearance of spiralling only further downwards at the next election, with the party falling, according to the latest poll, to 31%.
