DUTTON MINERS’ BFF
Peter Dutton’s planned remarks to the Minerals Council of Australia later today have led the news overnight, with the opposition leader set to declare he will be the best friend the mining sector “will ever have”.
The ABC reports Dutton will say he plans on “turbocharging” more than 420 mining and energy projects. Speaking at the council’s conference in Canberra this morning, the Coalition leader will also reference the industry’s concerns over the government’s industrial relations and environmental laws, the broadcaster said.
“Not since the days of imposing a carbon tax on your sector, or a mining tax on your sector, has a prime minister and a government been so out of touch with the need to keep our mining and resource sectors strong,” Dutton will say. “But today I give you this commitment: a Dutton Coalition government will be the best friend that the mining and resources sector in Australia will ever have.”
The AAP reports Dutton will also pledge to defund the Environmental Defenders Office and limit the ability for third parties to challenge decisions under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Dutton’s “unabashedly pro-resources pitch” will no doubt alarm conservation groups, the ABC says, especially given a significant portion of the potential fast-tracked plans include high-emissions gas and coal projects.
The Minerals Council of Australia conference will today also hear from Resources Minister Madeleine King. The Australian says she will tell mining bosses the opposite of what Dutton is claiming and that “no government in recent memory has put the resources industry at the centre of its policy-making in the way that the Albanese government has”. King will say while not all policies will be agreed on, the importance of the sector is a given and the government works on its best interests “every single day”. The ABC reports she will also say there is no time to lose in meeting allies’ growing demand for critical minerals.
Also leading the news agenda this morning is the government’s move to ban life insurance companies from discriminating against people based on genetic testing. Guardian Australia says Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones will announce later that life insurers will be prevented from using the results of predictive genetic testing in their underwriting assessments. The site said the move was part of plans to encourage greater use of predictive technology in preventative health. The ABC reports the announcement comes after a consultation earlier this year addressing genetic discrimination in life insurance, which resulted in 97% of the submissions supporting a total ban.
Not leading it, yet, but also on the agenda this morning is the Land Forces 2024 International Land Defence Exposition which opens at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre and is expected to attract thousands of protests. Guardian Australia previously reported it could be Victoria’s biggest protest in decades.
HARRIS AND TRUMP DEBATE
In world news, one story is set to dominate the next 24 hours: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s televised presidential debate. The ABC event at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center kicks off around 9pm ET (11am AEST) and will include the same rules as June’s infamous debate between Joe Biden and Trump — namely microphones will be muted when a candidate is not talking, they cannot ask each other questions and there will be no audience, The New York Times flags.
CNN reports part of Harris’ preparation has involved getting ready for potential insults and derogatory comments from the former president. Harris has apparently spoken extensively to Biden and former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, both of whom debated Trump in the past. The broadcaster also reports Trump’s team has been telling the 78-year-old not to respond to any potentially “goading” remarks from Harris in the debate, given his reactive tendencies.
On that theme, Politico reports Harris is bringing two former Trump administration officials to the debate as her guests. Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci and former national security official Olivia Troye will be in Harris’ corner at the event in Philadelphia.
With no other presidential debates currently agreed to and the US election now only eight weeks away (early voting is set to begin within days), much is being made of how crucial the debate is for both sides. The New York Times calls it “one of the highest-stakes 90 minutes in American politics in generations”.
The paper has a handy list of what to watch out for in the debate and what each candidate needs to deliver and avoid.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
If you happened to be in Chongqing, south-west China, earlier this week you might have witnessed the rather unusual sight of local residents’ underwear being blown across the city, The Guardian reports.
An unexpected windstorm, with gusts of 76mph (122km/h), hit the Chinese city on Monday and caused the laundry of unprepared residents to lift off their balconies and fly into the air.
“I just went out and it suddenly started to rain heavily and underwear fell from the sky,” the paper quoted a resident as posting on Weibo. Another local said losing his underwear had initially caused him to “laugh like crazy” but had also now turned him into a “lifelong introvert”.
The Guardian said Chongqing and the surrounding region had been suffering a severe heatwave and authorities used cloud-seeding technology to try and break the weather. Rain followed, but so did the windstorm — although the authorities said, despite what the residents believed, the two were not linked.
Apparently, millions of people viewed hashtags such as “underwear crisis” on Weibo on Monday with tens of thousands of comments posted. The short-video app Douyin was also filled with videos of underwear “flying through the skies, landing in the street and snagging on trees”, The Guardian said.
Say What?
I called her and said, ‘Watch out … there’s a door coming’
Josh Waterson
The Broulee, NSW, resident called his daughter after seeing an object falling out of the sky towards South Broulee Beach, the ABC reported. Waterson said the object, which turned out to be the door of a small plane, landed about 50 metres from his daughter. The broadcaster said Eurobodalla Shire Council had claimed the pilot told airport staff “the door latch was not secured properly”.
CRIKEY RECAP
The government plans to introduce legislation to enforce a minimum age for access to social media, according to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. It’s all a little vague at this point — no age limit has been flagged and won’t be until a trial of “age-verification technology” has been completed.
The government getting access to yet more personal information? What could go wrong? Oh, that’s right, the following could go wrong:
Government data breaches, hacks and just plain screw-ups with personal data have peppered the past decade in Australia.
An Indigenous Voice to Parliament was giving Indigenous peoples something white Australians didn’t have, and was thus racist, argued No supporters. In fact, any recognition at all of Indigenous peoples was racist, some argued. Any attempt to even discuss Indigenous disadvantage was racist — during the Voice campaign, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price argued that Indigenous peoples only got benefits from dispossession and colonisation, and there should be no separate policies for them.
The cheapening of the charge of racism isn’t confined to Indigenous issues. Tony Abbott and the Murdoch press accused Labor of racism in refusing to support Abbott’s now-forgotten free trade agreement with China (more recently, of course, Labor has been accused of being not Sinophobic enough). While he happily denounced Labor senator Sam Dastyari as “Shanghai Sam”, Scott Morrison accused Labor of racism in targeting Liberal MP Gladys Liu.
Nor is it confined to the right. While rightly keen to draw attention to institutional and systemic racism, the Greens have a tendency to find racism everywhere they look: AUKUS is imperialist, racist and colonialist. The British monarchy is racist. Parliament is racist. Inevitably, the Greens themselves are racist, according to former Green Lidia Thorpe (not to be confused with the time the Minerals Council claimed Bob Brown was xenophobic).
Young people have been advocating for mechanisms that more efficiently incorporate their rights and needs into climate decision-making, arguing for substantive protection of these rights. Mechanisms like the Duty of Care bill, which would compel governments to consider the health and wellbeing of current and future generations in the face of climate change, or more broadly, calls to lower the voting age to 16 indirectly force a longer-term perspective.
But neither of these proposals have been embraced. Instead, both proposals have been deflected with the promise of hearing the voices of young people through existing youth advisory groups.
Rather than implementing a mechanism by which they would have to consider the needs and interests of young people, it seems the government prefers to give themselves a choice. They can take this advice, or they can do the polar opposite.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
France, Germany, UK sanction Iran for supplying missiles to Russia (Politico)
Elon Musk’s misleading election claims reach millions and alarm election officials (The Washington Post)
Ex-partner who killed Ugandan athlete dies from burns (BBC)
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs loses $100m default judgment over sexual assault allegation (The Guardian)
From BBQs to the CSIRO, King Charles and Queen Camilla’s Australian itinerary revealed (The Sydney Morning Herald) ($)
Ukraine fires deadly drone barrage at Russia, taking war closer to Moscow (The New York Times) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Yes, PM, we should keep kids off the apps. But how, exactly? — David Crowe (The Age): There is not even an agreement on the best age to define as the legal limit. Albanese suggested 16 in a radio interview on Tuesday, in line with Dutton’s proposal in June. Malinauskas suggests 14. This simply confirms that the policy is a general proposal, not a blueprint for change.
All of this looks incredibly hard — and perhaps impossible. It will require more consultation, unity at national cabinet, a review in Parliament and, most likely, a bipartisan agreement.
Even so, the concerns about social media are real and the trends in mental health are deeply troubling. The moral response is to do something about it. Years ago, leaders could not figure out what to do, so they did too little. Years later, there is a justified concern that social networks can deepen social problems.
There is, finally, a commitment to act. The onus is on Albanese to prove to parents that his plan can work.
I feel deep sympathy for Kate and I’m glad she’s better. But this dance with the media devil won’t work — Marina Hyde (The Guardian): I wonder if we will come to look back on that supposed great virtue of our age — controlling the narrative — and see it for the cornered form of submission it so often is? I felt nothing but immense pity for the cancer-stricken Princess of Wales before the release of her intimate family video yesterday, and the sheer weirdness of the resulting enterprise has only magnified the pathos of her situation. Watching the three-minute film, shot by some ad man, I wondered who could possibly feel it was anything but sad that a recovering post-chemo mother should feel that this is her best option for keeping “well-wishers” at bay a little longer.
A lot of people could, it seems from the feverish coverage since it dropped — meaning that convention demands I couch the notion that the existence of the video is in any way weird as “my unpopular opinion”. In which case, allow me to chuck in another unpopular opinion: this sort of thing appeals precisely to the grownups who when Diana died demanded that the then Queen leave off comforting her grieving 12- and 15-year-old grandsons in Scotland to come back to London — in effect to look after them instead. The selfishness and self-importance of a certain stripe of loyal subject is at best demandingly prurient and at worst grotesque. We hear a lot about the male gaze. The royalist’s gaze could do with more unpicking.
