NOT SO SUNNY STATE
The Queensland Police Service has sacked its First Nations advisory group because members refused to sign confidentiality clauses that would stop them from speaking publicly, Guardian Australia reports. In the past, the group of Indigenous community leaders and elders called for the resignation of the police union president after he penned what critics called a “racialised and divisive” op-ed, and accused the now Queensland police commissioner Steve Gollschewski of angrily pointing a finger while telling them “you people” don’t run the force. The paper notes the advisory group was sacked after Gollschewski was named acting commissioner, though it doesn’t say he was involved.
Meanwhile, Labor’s primary vote in Queensland has slid from 33% to 29% since last year, the Brisbane Times reports, according to a poll. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is the preferred PM in his state by 40% to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s 34%, quite the turnaround from last year’s result of 39-32 in Albanese’s favour. Overall, however, if the survey results were election results we’d have either a narrow Labor victory or a hung Parliament, an expert said, amid a gain in marginal seats for Labor. It comes as former Liberal MP Lucy Wicks told The Daily Telegraph an investigation into her complaints against NSW Liberal MP Taylor Martin was “incredibly violating”. Martin was booted from the Libs after an investigator found he’d been “abusive”. One of the text messages Wicks received from an unknown source read “footage has just emerged (of you)… its on the dark web. X rated at best. Casnt [sic] wait to see this surface on [sic] the media”. Wicks is considering returning to politics in the wake of women’s rights marches.
HAMAS CEASEFIRE?
Former treasurer Josh Frydenberg says university leaders need to clear out the “campus camps of hate”, The Australian ($) says, suggesting they were being “derelict in their duty to maintain a safe place on campus”. Frydenberg claimed many Jewish and non-Jewish students feel unsafe on Australian campuses, freedom of speech is trumped by safety, and that leaders should be “proactive and prevent a more violent action taking place”. To date, there hasn’t been any reported violence at any Australian campus protests, though a Monash protester told Guardian Australia a group of men dressed in Australian and Israeli flags destroyed their camp kitchen. The cops moved 10 people on without arresting anyone. It comes as Hamas agreed to a Gaza ceasefire overnight, CNN reports, but Israel hasn’t responded yet.
Australia is set to cast its vote this Friday US time on whether to admit Palestine as a full member of the United Nations, the SMH reports, up from observer status. It’s symbolic, but would be a good sign of the international mood for Palestinian statehood. The Albanese government hasn’t decided how to vote yet because the wording is still being decided (it can abstain too). The paper notes Fatah, Hamas’ moderate political rival, represents Palestine at the UN. Meanwhile, New Zealander Leroy Wilton has won his appeal to stay in Australia after having served jail time for domestic violence, the ABC reports. Typically foreign nationals will have their visa automatically cancelled if they get more than a year in prison — but a tribunal heard Wilton has lived in Australia since he was eight.
CHINA MIGHT
A Chinese military jet sent out flares in the flight path of an Australian Navy helicopter in what Defence Minister Richard Marles called a “very serious incident”, the ABC reports. It was 300 metres in front of the helicopter and 60 metres above it, causing our pilot to take evasive action. No one was harmed. Our helicopter was enforcing sanctions against North Korea in the Yellow Sea when it happened. Former Defence official Peter Jennings told The Australian ($) that Beijing was trying to bully other navies away from China, suggesting the Pentagon has a list of about 200 similar incidents.
Meanwhile, the Crown prosecution wants Defence whistleblower and lawyer David McBride to be jailed for more than two years, the SMH reports, alleging his sharing of confidential docs was for “personal vindication”. McBride pleaded guilty to three charges in November and has had his sentencing reserved for next week. His lawyers want a suspended jail sentence and an intensive corrections order instead of imprisonment. It comes as the teenager who was shot dead at the weekend amid a stabbing attack “went mad” on radical online propaganda, The Australian ($) reports, had a phone without internet to restrict access to extremist stuff, and tried to blow up a toilet block at the prestigious Perth school he attended. The police have said it’s too early to say whether it was terrorism.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
The decline of society may take many forms — natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, economic collapse — but for residents of North Yorkshire, it’s all in the punctuation. It began when staff at the local council announced it would be removing the apostrophe from street signs because it confuses the computer database. For instance, St Mary’s Walk would become St Marys Walk. Residents were aghast. An abomination! Difficult to even cast one’s eyes over! There could be no more dismal sign that “everything [is] going downhill”, as one local declared. These are truly the end times.
But valiant heroes, freedom fighters, and courageous rebels always rise up in the darkness, holding close in their hearts the vision, the hope, the dream of a better world. In this case, someone grabbed a marker and squiggled an apostrophe onto the sign. We must think of the future generations, one postal worker and former teacher told The Guardian, who must both respect the humble apostrophe and fear its absence. North Yorkshire Council responded hautily that they were hardly the first to remove the punctuation — indeed Cambridge Council did too… until they reinstated it per the mob’s wishes. Whether North Yorkshire will do so too is not clear, much like the meaning of their apostrophe-free sign.
Hoping you stand up for what you believe in today.
SAY WHAT?
[ABC] drag out a fringe extremist Jew with anti-Israel views that echo their own and present him as the real Jew.
James Macpherson
The Sky News Host was referring to Australian-German author and journalist Antony Loewenstein, who lived in Israel for years before the conflict escalation last October, has written several best-selling books, spoken to Crikey, the ABC, SMH, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Turkish radio and television, and won Australia’s peak journalism prize, a Walkley Award. It’s unclear what “extremist” refers to here.
CRIKEY RECAP
“The Klaxon and Crikey put questions to NIAA CEO Jody Broun this week, including why NIAA had given $711,544 of taxpayer money to an arm of PwC. We were told, ‘PIC is a separate entity to Pricewaterhouse Coopers Australia.’
“PwC’s Indigenous Consulting operates from PwC’s Sydney headquarters, shares a website with PwC Australia, has PwC Australia partners as directors, and is 49% owned by PwC Australia. As previously revealed, the remaining 51% is owned by just two people, both First Nations.”
“On Joyce’s watch, Qantas was found to have illegally sacked 1,700 workers, was fined $250,000 for standing down a health and safety representative who directed staff not to clean unsafe planes (and then lied about its actions) …
“… [Qantas] became Australia’s most complained-about company and a by-word for appalling service amid mass cancellations and lost luggage, was accused of slot hoarding to block competitors, and tried to rip off customers with COVID-era flight credits by shutting down access to unused credits.”
“A prominent example involves the case of former Liberal Party staffer Bruce Lehrmann, found recently to a civil standard to have raped colleague Brittany Higgins in Parliament House in 2019.
“Some members of the public have incorrectly taken Justice Michael Lee’s findings in the case to be equivalent to a criminal conviction, while others (including newspaper headline writers) have delighted in being able to refer to Lehrmann as a rapist, understanding the relative lack of defamation risk following judgment in a marathon trial.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Hamas accepts Qatari-Egyptian proposal for Gaza ceasefire (Al Jazeera)
Russia to hold nuclear drills following ‘threats’ from West (BBC)
Ontario legislature keffiyeh ban loosened, but not overturned (CBC)
Boeing’s Starliner capsule set for first crewed space flight, to compete with SpaceX (Reuters)
China president visits France, Serbia and Hungary: What is at stake? (euronews)
Four teenagers investigated over attack on German MEP (The Guardian)
Judge cites Trump for contempt, and says he is attacking the rule of law (The New York Times) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Labor’s spending could stoke inflation and leave us with forever deficits — Tom Dusevic (The Australian) ($): “After all, this is Jim and Katy’s third rodeo and they cleared out the stables in 2022. Canberra’s footprint got much bigger during the Covid-19 health and economic emergency and it’s clear that the size of government is now larger than it was before the pandemic, and growing. Federal spending as a proportion of the economy was just under 25% in the decades leading up to the crisis, and it looks like settling at just over 26% in the years ahead, because of the rising cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, health, aged-care, defence and debt interest. That’s an extra $25-30 billion in costs in today’s dollars. What to do?
“First, go for something strong, like imposing clear fiscal rules on a government in executive drift, rather than simply belting out the chorus line that the ‘budget is in better nick’. That’s a cyclical quirk; it won’t last or escape the notice of global credit scrutineers. In June 2022, a few weeks after the Albanese government was elected, Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy explained the long-run challenges facing the budget: spending was growing robustly, as was the burden of personal income tax, while productivity growth was stagnant. Funding Labor’s future priorities in spending, Kennedy said, would come by either cutting existing programs or raising taxes, both of which require skill and voter assent.”
How Vladimir Putin’s gas empire crumbled — Tim Wallace (The SMH): “It is the biggest loss in at least 25 years. The loss is a humiliation for the business and for the regime. Putin had thought the vast network of pipelines taking its gas into Europe had created an addiction that would force Western leaders to stand back and allow him to seize Ukraine, unwilling to wean themselves off the supply of energy. Before the war, this was a common view. Long after the seizure of Crimea and war in Donbas, Germany in particular pressed ahead with Russian gas deals, including the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was due to start operating when Putin launched his full invasion in February 2022.
“Gerhard Schroeder, a former chancellor of Germany, built a career in the Russian energy industry after he left office, clinging to his post as chairman of oil giant Rosneft for three months after the assault. But Europe’s leaders did not comply. When Putin turned down gas supplies, hoping a cost of living crisis would change their minds, instead of coming to an agreement they found sources elsewhere. Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany, which built much of its industrial prowess on the back of cheap Russian energy, swore the country must ‘never again’ become so beholden to hostile suppliers. In 2021, more than 40% of European Union gas imports came from Russia. That dropped to 8% last year, according to the European Commission.”
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Author Bri Lee will talk about her new book, The Work, in a webinar.
