NO PORK, NO DIARY
The Albanese government has been accused of pork-barrelling after 40 of the 54 electorates that received funding to improve mobile phone coverage were Labor-held, The Australian ($) reports. Three others were held by independents, while seven of the 11 Coalition seats chosen are marginal. Opposition communications spokesman David Coleman called it Labor’s version of sports rorts, but Communications Minister Michelle Rowland waved that away, saying the areas chosen were based on community feedback including in high-risk bushfire zones. The paper notes that in NSW, 25 of the 26 grants went to Labor seats.
Meanwhile, former senator Rex Patrick still hasn’t seen Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s diary. Patrick, writing for Michael West Media, first FOI’d the diary 197 days ago, and Ronald Mizen at the AFR tried his luck last year too. Both were told it would take too much time (Mizen’s request is going before the AAT now). A member of the public tried to FOI just two weeks of the diary this week — and was also rebuffed. What gives, asks Patrick. Diaries from the attorney-general, treasurer, workplace relations minister and foreign affairs minister were all released without issue. Patrick says each appeal for the diary costs “time and resources”, meaning “public money”, and besides, it’s in the public interest. The Centre for Public Integrity’s Geoffrey Watson told the AFR ($) last year there was “no good reason why the diary records of any politician, especially ministers, should not be openly available”.
GAME OVER
A footy competition that brings hundreds of remote players to Alice Springs has been cancelled because of “antisocial behaviour”, NT News reports. Councillor and Alyawerre man Michael Liddle moved a motion that the council pull its support for the 2023 season so the comp could return to the bush. Liddle said Alice Springs needed “respite” at the moment as the town reels from lifted booze bans, and besides, the NT government should invest more in remote communities, Mayor Matt Paterson said. It comes as opposition spokesman on Indigenous Australians Julian Leeser said the removal of the cashless debit card had left Alice Springs in a “shocking” state where “alcohol-fuelled violence” is on the rise, Sky News reports. He visited the WA towns of Laverton and Leonora with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.
To other local politics news and a Queensland Labor councillor, Kara Cook, has slammed the sexist comments female elected officials have to cop online after someone asked if she gave oral sex to a random man she applauded who helped her with her broken-down car. The former domestic violence lawyer has been in politics for five years as a councillor for Brisbane’s Morningside, as SBS reports, but she’d never received such a jarring response to such a “mundane” post. And it’s not just from faceless trolls — in 2018, Cook lodged an official complaint with the council’s CEO after someone made cat noises to her in the council chamber while she was speaking. The Jenkins report found three in five female parliamentarians had reported sexual harassment, as Women’s Agenda reported. It comes as new legislation proposed by Victoria’s peak body for council staff says misbehaving councillors should be suspended for up to three years, The Age ($) reports, as “appalling” conduct is causing a big turnover of staff.
IN AND OUT
Outspoken Liberal Bridget Archer’s days could be numbered in the party, according to a former senior strategist to a Tasmanian Liberal premier and the right-wing powerbroker Eric Abetz. Guardian Australia’s Katharine Murphy spoke to Brad Stansfield who claims “certain forces” are planning to dump Archer at the next federal election. Archer is known for speaking her mind and breaking ranks — most recently on the super tax break conversation, but also on the emissions reduction target, Labor housing policies and the censure against former PM Scott Morrison. So why is she still a Liberal and not a crossbench defector? Shrug. She says the values “mean something” to her. Plus she has some powerful friends — Tasmanian Premier Jeremy Rockliff among them.
To another Liberal who could be on the way out (of leadership anyway) and the SMH reckons NSW Labor is going to win in March. It notes a quarter of voters are undecided — which is no small chunk — but Labor’s primary vote has shuffled one point up as the Coalition’s has stepped back two. It’s the result of the latest poll from Resolve Strategic, which also found Premier Dominic Perrottet remains preferred as premier over Labor Leader Chris Minns, 38% to 34%. It comes as a finding by an NSW parliamentary inquiry criticising Perrottet for influencing the government’s search for a UK trade commissioner was changed at the last minute, Crikey reports. Minutes from the committee meeting showed Perrottet’s name was scrubbed from a line because the committee didn’t have enough evidence to say he did so.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has posted a photo on his social media showing what he says is a real-life elf. Well, an aluxe, which is a mischievous woodland spirit in Maya folklore. He posted the photo, which kind of has Babadook energy, alongside a stone bust depicting a happy little creature, and wrote that the two photos were of the Maya Train works, a rather fraught train project that will traverse the Yucatán Peninsula (where tourist hotspots Cancun and Tulum are). The photo with the deer-in-the-headlights creature in it, López Obrador said, was taken by an engineer three days ago — “apparently an aluxe”, he added, somewhat fantastically. The other photo, he says, is “a splendid pre-Hispanic sculpture” by artist Diego Prieto in Ekʼ Balam, an archeological site. “Everything is mystical,” he ended the tweet.
But it may not be everything it seems to the Mexican president. Several Mexican news outlets said it was a similar photo to another, purportedly of a witch, that circulated on social media in 2021. So what are aluxes? Mayan expert David Stuart told The New York Times they’re trickster characters in folklore, kind of like a leprechaun, and known for low-level offending like pinching small items or leaving gates open. They were about 40 centimetres high and had hairy bodies, a man from a Mayan village told a university magazine, adding that they appear on roads sometimes. But not everyone can see them. “You’ll be walking along, and they’ll surprise you. ‘What’s that kid doing standing there?’ And when you look back, it’s not there anymore. It’s a spirit; it’s the wind. But the image stays in your eye, so you remember.”
Hoping what we know, and what we don’t know, fills you with equal reverence.
SAY WHAT?
You took 5 for 12 against New Zealand, you were Australia’s second-highest scorer. Were you playing in the under-12s?
Waleed Aly
During an interview with Australian T20 World Cup-winning captain Meg Lanning, The Project host confused her with bowler Ash Gardner who took five wickets against our Kiwi rivals. Some raised their eyebrows at Aly’s well-intentioned joke equating the women’s professional team with a kid’s team.
CRIKEY RECAP
Lidia Thorpe’s gutsy Mardi Gras protest is the return of actual politics
“Claims by the LGBTQIA+ left that queer is inevitably radical are utterly bogus. First, from the 1980s onwards, gay lib was smoothly integrated into the mainstream, following legalisation.
“Queer’s initially transgressive, disruptive impact has modulated as its advocates have become a major proportion of Australia’s cultural producers. Queer is now the house ideology of middlebrow, knowledge-class culture, as tediously rote and moralistic as was once the Christianity it went up against.”
What is the legacy of the Australian Christian Lobby’s Martyn Iles?
“We’re not so sure about that — the ACL certainly lived up to its ‘lobby’ function in the years after Iles took over from Lyle Shelton. Crikey takes a look back at the successes and failures of Iles’ time in charge …
“The saga around the [religious freedom] bill perhaps sums up Iles’ time in charge — a lot of attention and influence that exceeded what you would expect from a lobby group representing a sectional interest within a sectional interest (a 2017 poll found more than half of Australian Christians supported marriage equality, and 61% didn’t like ‘conservative groups’ like the ACL speaking on behalf of them).”
‘State-sanctioned intimidation’: armed police raid home of climate protester who defaced painting
“Partyka, who lives alone, told Crikey six police officers turned up to her Perth apartment at 8am and presented her with a search warrant … As Partyka recalled, the initial door-knocker was a plain-clothes police officer and the only person visible when she opened the door.
“But: ‘Around the corner, there were five more. All the other cops were hidden. And apart from the first guy in plain clothes, all the others were wearing proper vests. It was pretty confronting.’ She said the police spent an hour in her home, photographing and/or collecting her belongings — her laptop, phone, notebook …”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Murdoch acknowledges Fox News hosts endorsed election fraud falsehoods (The New York Times)
‘Fall of democracy’: Georgia’s foreign agent law widely condemned (EuroNews)
Amazon employees will be able to use stock as collateral for home loans (The Wall Street Journal) ($)
Iran investigates poisoning of 650 schoolgirls with toxic gas (BBC)
Twitter under fire for censoring Palestinian public figures (Al Jazeera)
Earthquake shakes [New Zealand’s] lower North Island and South Island (Stuff)
Nigeria’s opposition parties call for election to be scrapped (The Guardian)
THE COMMENTARIAT
I am mourning the loss of something I loved: McNuggets — Adrian J Rivera (The New York Times) ($): “For a while, I continued to defend this way of eating to other people and to myself. Whereas critics and sceptics baulked at the ease with which processed food could be acquired and produced, I lauded the efficiency of the industrialised food system. Where the foodies squinted at the amalgamating of animal products and preservatives into something palatable, I sang the praises of foods that were, in their mediocrity, paradoxically pretty good. Whereas the closet processed-food enjoyers (I know you’re out there!) fretted about processed food being unnatural, I wondered who needed nature, anyway, that source of decay and death.
“I was embarrassed to find an ally in Donald Trump. His love of Big Macs, Filet-O-Fishes and Diet Coke made people’s heads explode. When he served a feast of fast food at the White House? The scandal! Still, for me, McDonald’s in the White House sounded like a dream. It was easy to laugh at the contradictions between Mr Trump’s cultural tastes and his class status, but I understood that those very contradictions are what made him a democrat with a lowercase d, just another American who ate processed food, what he calls ‘Great American food’. But the more time I spent in this world of homemade ice cream and duck and kale, the more familiar it became to me. Further moments of alienation helped accelerate my assimilation …”
This deal could have been struck in 2021 – but the last thing Brexiters wanted was to get Brexit done — Fintan O’Toole (The Guardian): “There was, though, an even more profound reason to avoid realistic negotiations on the protocol. The miasma of craziness that occludes this whole terrain emanates from the inconvenient truth that the protocol is, in horse-breeding parlance, by Johnson, out of the DUP. It was the DUP that made it inevitable by helping to bring down Theresa May, whose ‘backstop’ agreement would have prevented the need for any controls on goods crossing the Irish Sea. And it was Johnson who, with his usual mastery of cynical opportunism, double-crossed the DUP, created the protocol, and used it to win an election.
“But all of this had to be denied. The Frankensteins had to disown their monster. And the way to do that was to indulge in the fantasy that what they had done could somehow be undone. This mirage was conjured from two impossible demands: that the protocol be scrapped and that the European Court of Justice should cease to be the final arbiter of EU law as it applied to Northern Ireland’s operation of the single market. The beauty of these demands, for those who wished to drown the whole story in obfuscation and amnesia, was that they were so fantastical. They pushed the reality of what Johnson and the DUP had achieved — a serious weakening of the union — into a parallel universe of high dudgeon and glorious defiance.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Online
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VicHealth’s Sandro Demaio and the Cycling Embassy of Denmark’s Marianne Weinreich will chat about healthy and sustainable cities in Australia and Denmark in a webinar held by the Australia Institute.
Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)
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Transport and Infrastructure Minister Catherine King will speak to the National Press Club.
Whadjuk Noongar Country (also known as Perth)
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WA Minister for Climate Action and Environment Reece Whitby, United Nations Association of Australia WA division’s Sandy Chong, and executive director of hydrogen and new energies at the Department of Jobs, Tourism, Science and Innovation, Anthony Sutton, are among the speakers at Collaboration for Climate, held at the Tim Winton Lecture Theatre.
