IN DEEP TROUBLE
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that this item mentions a deceased person.
The Labor government has either turned back asylum seeker boats or returned asylum seekers who came here on them seven times since May 2022, Guardian Australia reports, affecting nearly 200 people, including 14 kids. There have been twice as many boat attempts than during the final years of the Coalition, the paper notes, which turned back two to three vessels a year between 2016 and 2020. So much for Scott Morrison’s on-the-nose “I stopped these” boat trophy. So how does it work? Either we intercept the boats and force them back to their origin country’s sea border, or else we send asylum seekers back by plane or sea. For instance, 15 people were reportedly flown back to Sri Lanka right after the election, as Sky News Australia reported.
Meanwhile, WA’s Corrective Services Minister Paul Papalia lied about the night Indigenous boy Cleveland Dodd was found hanging in his cell in Unit 18 of adult Casuarina Prison, according to his mother, Nadene Dodd. Papalia said it took “minutes” for guards to respond to the teen saying he was going to take his own life, and praised the guards. It actually took 16 minutes, the ABC says. Sixteen minutes! During that time Cleveland called again to say he was going to hang himself. Papalia reckons “minutes” was per the information he had — but he spoke to Nadene a week later and reiterated it was minutes. He “sat and he looked at us and he told a big lie to our face”, Nadene said, adding: “Unit 18 is a disgusting, dark, cold place that no kid should be in.” Papalia should resign, WA Opposition Leader Shane Love said.
A TALE OF TWO LEADERS
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is a “very handsome boy”, China’s Premier Li Qiang says, or at least his constituents think so. It comes after a clip of Albo walking along the Bund River in a yellow Matilda’s jersey and a Rabbitohs cap went viral, The Australian ($) reports, although it was actually the paper’s correspondent Will Glasgow who recorded it. Glasgow shared it on WeChat with some local mates, who shared it on China’s version of Tiktok, Douyin. And the internet did its thing. One headline in China read “The Australian prime minister’s morning run on the Bund in Shanghai immediately made passersby feel friendly”. My stars. Now to business — Albanese confirmed Australian support for the One China policy, agreed to both countries having a three- to five-year visa for visitors and business people, and Beijing is probably going to remove tariffs on wine, lobster and beef, the SMH ($) lists. Also, annual leader dialogues will resume, Sky News Australia adds.
Meanwhile, former PM Scott Morrison’s gift to Donald Trump of a statue of Australian war hero Leslie “Bull” Allen carrying a wounded American soldier has been ditched, The West ($) reports. Four long years after Morrison “stood under the starry sky in the White House’s famed rose garden” and promised it, as the paper put it, the sculpture we delivered was that of a rock representing the trauma of war. It comes as Sky News Australia host Andrew Bolt said the opposition should put Morrison on the front bench to beat Labor. “He’s not an idiot,” Bolt said. The bar is so very low. Bolt says Morrison should be foreign affairs spokesman because Simon Birmingham is too much of a bureaucrat, even though Morrison’s trip to Israel has largely gone down like a lead balloon, as SMH ($) readers say. To another (former) Liberal now and then-health minister Greg Hunt’s department awarded $10 million in COVID contracts for 46 million unusable face masks, Guardian Australia reports.
DOB IN THE BAD GUYS
Tax advisers have to dob in their colleagues’ bad behaviour or face jail time, The Age ($) reports, and Big Four executives will be banned from membership of the regulating Tax Practitioners Board. Greens’ finance spokeswoman Barbara Pocock, who spearheaded the amendments that’ll go before the Senate today, says the minor party is “fixing the loophole that allowed big consultants to regulate themselves”. We know how well that turned out this year… It can’t happen again, Pocock says, adding that partners will not be able to turn a blind eye to unethical behaviour or will face a $15,650 fine or jail. Compared with an exec salary, however…
To other companies behaving badly — GiveTree CEO Sam Joel has quit after he posted a bunch of offensive comments to women on Linkedin, the AFR ($) reports, including telling one woman to “Get off your period. Get good. Earn your salary with skill not pr lol. Pathetic.” Another of his comments reportedly asked whether someone was single, adding: “Assuming I wanna bang you, because let’s be honest — you look. Fat.” Charming. He apologised and GiveTree said he was getting therapy to “address his sexist and, at times, misogynistic behaviour towards women”. Meanwhile, NT Police Senior Constable Brad Wallace says the silence around Indigenous women and children’s deaths was “sickening”, the NT News ($) reports. It barely hits the local papers, he says, and rarely hits the headlines outside the NT. Mainstream media should do better, he says, and I couldn’t agree more.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
You can snatch back six years from the grim reaper by doing eight simple things, according to a new study, and they all come back to the heart. Researchers worked with more than 6,500 adults with an average age of 47 to develop Life’s Essential 8. Doing these things, the study said, will lower your biological age — that’s a term that denotes how far along the ageing process a person is. For instance, the average age of those with dodgy hearts was 53, but their biological age was 57, whereas those with healthy tickers were aged 41, but their biological age was 36. So what are the eight magic rules? First and foremost — embrace a diet of whole foods (such as oats and brown rice), fruits and veggies, lean protein, nuts, seeds and olive oil. Second, get your butts out that door. Researchers recommended 150 minutes of activity a day, though you can half that if you do higher-intensity stuff such as swimming, playing sport, or Pilates.
Third — time to put the vape in the bin. Ciggies, e-cigarettes and vaping fast forward the ageing process, as The Guardian reports, and they’re the leading cause of preventable death in Australia. Fourth, get yourself to bed earlier — adults need between seven and nine hours’ sleep a night (the beaming light from a device 10 centimetres from the face that contains all the world’s information might be complicating that somewhat). Those things are probably going to make the rest of the list pretty straightforward: keeping your weight in check, monitoring “bad cholesterol” levels, blood sugar levels, and blood pressure (less than 120/80 mm Hg is good, the American Heart Organisation says). As it turns out, looking after our hearts, Columbia University’s Nour Makarem says, keeps us young. While filling them with love, one might add, makes life worth living.
Hoping the coffee is hot this morning, folks.
SAY WHAT?
I’m sure [the visit from Morrison and Johnson] is appreciated but you’ve got to remember they’re two guys that are out of office. They’ve got plenty of time. I’m not saying they’re unemployed, but they’ve got plenty of time.
Malcolm Turnbull
Spare a thought for the constituents of Cook, where Scott Morrison is still the local MP. Turnbull waved away calls for Anthony Albanese to visit Israel, saying the PM needed to keep advancing the interests of Australia: “Leave the showboating for ScoMo and Boris.“
CRIKEY RECAP
“Zionism’s worst dimension, its historic back-channel connections to fascism, its strange, repeated apeing of Nazi manner and style, is coming to the fore.
“The more relentless, measured and impersonal the death it allocates, the more hopped up and malignantly crazy the ministers in its fascistic, settler-led government become, as do its local backers. Israel’s supporters deprave themselves by their active indifference to these grey, franchised extinctions.”
“By dint of patience and restraint, Albanese and Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong have patched up the relationship to a reasonable state, even if it is never going to return to the kind of joyful embrace celebrated by Murdoch and the Liberals in the 2010s.
“But let’s not pretend it hasn’t happened entirely because the Xi regime decided the deep freeze wasn’t working. Neither a starry-eyed panda-hugger like Abbott nor a railing Sinophobe like Morrison, Albanese has merely set the stage for a China that has switched back to engagement.”
“Thanks to the fog that engulfed every Victorian’s brain over the course of, shall we say, a difficult 2020 and 2021, this one is largely forgotten. But we in the bunker have never stopped thinking about it. How did this happen? How complacent had the Andrews government become that a minister allowed herself to be filmed — from more than one angle! — feeding several babies into a shredder?
“It was part of a Nine report on the Victorian government’s destruction of 368 unsafe toys ahead of Christmas, captioned ‘Taking a leaf out of the Grinch’s playbook, the Victorian government has DESTROYED 368 unsafe toys ahead of the holiday season’, which is pretty funny in itself.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
One month of Israel’s war: What’s happening to Palestinians outside Gaza? (Al Jazeera)
Myanmar junta facing biggest challenge yet after new offensive by armed groups, analysts say (The Guardian)
Takeaways from Donald Trump’s contentious testimony in his civil fraud trial (CNN)
SoftBank’s WeWork, once most valuable US start-up, succumbs to bankruptcy (Reuters)
Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa resigns over corruption scandal (euronews)
[Trudeau] government set to miss 2030 emissions targets, says environment commissioner audit (CBC)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Wouldn’t work for free? If you’re paying for childcare, you already are — Shane Wright (The SMH) ($): “One of those punishments is the high workforce disincentive rates facing women who might be in a position to work an extra day or a few hours. The report noted that in a family where both parents earn about $60,000 a year if they worked full time, the second earner would be working for $2 an hour on their fourth day of the week and nothing if they worked a fifth. Questions of equity or fairness aside, we can all agree it simply does not make financial sense to work for free …
“Currently, there are about 7.6 million men either working or looking for work out of a total of 10.8 million old enough to be considered in the workforce. That’s a workforce participation rate of 71%. By comparison, the participation rate among women is at 62.1%. If the female participation rate matched that of men, there would be close to an extra 1 million Australian women holding down a job or looking for one. Since the 1960s, there have been massive advances in assisting women into the workforce.”
Joe Biden is in trouble — John Della Volpe (The New York Times) ($): “Still, as Mr Biden’s team knows, there is little margin for error. He beat Mr Trump by less than 1% of the vote in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin in 2020 and less than 3% in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada, in a campaign with no meaningful third party competition. Mr Trump appears formidable in early polls against Mr Biden, and the president’s approval ratings remain stubbornly low. And for many of these young Americans, even if they won’t be voting on foreign policy, they will be voting on whether they feel Mr Biden is in solidarity with them and their values of freedom, justice and human rights for everyone.
“Most, if not all, of these progressive voters still won’t embrace Mr Trump, to be sure. But if they swing from being ardent Biden voters in 2020 to being sceptical, frustrated or forlorn voters in 2024, it’s the president who will pay the bigger price, even if his standing improves among some centrists and Jewish voters. Consider Michigan, a swing state that has been critical to the victory of Democratic presidential candidates. The politics in Michigan, where the president’s standing should benefit from the recently announced tentative agreements between the union representing many autoworkers and their employers, is suddenly more challenging with an Arab American population of more than 300,000 and approximately half a million college undergraduates who are almost all eligible to vote next year.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Writer Clare Press will talk about her new book, Wear Next, at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.
Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)
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Former PM Malcolm Turnbull and former Sydney mayor Lucy Turnbull will speak to the National Press Club.
