WORDS MATTER
Opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie, shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, Forrest MP Nola Marino, Moore MP Ian Goodenough, Bowman MP Henry Pike, and Flinders MP Zoe McKenzie are all under fire for misquoting two former High Court judges on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the SMH ($) says. Former chief justice Robert French and former judge Kenneth Hayne both support the Voice and both had words cherrypicked from a parliamentary inquiry, including “unworkable” and “untenable”, for a dissenting report. Hastie told the paper he stood by his interpretation, but Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus says the “flagrant” misrepresentation is “deeply disappointing” and that Hastie should correct the record and apologise. It comes as the No side in the debate is calling on Australians to give Yes-supporting companies such as Woolworths, Commonwealth Bank and Qantas the “Bud Light Treatment”, news.com.au ($) reports, a reference to the share price plunge of a beer company in the US after a trans influencer featured in a social media ad, as The New York Times ($) reports.
Speaking of CommBank — it copped a $3.55 million fine for breaching the Spam Act, the largest in Australia’s history. Guardian Australia reports the big four bank sent 65 million emails to customers that breached the law because it required most to log in to unsubscribe. It comes as the Reserve Bank has been told to explain its reasoning for raising the cash rate to 4.1%, the highest rate in more than a decade. The ABC reports Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the bank’s job is to “squash inflation without crunching the economy” and we’re all very eager to hear about why the board thinks this rise will do just that. It’s not deterring governor Philip Lowe, who warned rates may increase again in the coming months in a continuing bid to curb inflation, the AFR ($) adds.
MARCHING ORDERS
Australia’s defence chief Angus Campbell says the damning Brereton inquiry will have “profound, broad-based and ultimately very positive effect” on our military, Guardian Australia reports. It found 25 current or former ADF members were implicated in the alleged unlawful killing of 39 individuals and the cruel treatment of two others in Afghanistan. Campbell commended Paul Brereton’s “service to our nation” as the latter prepares to head up the National Anti-Corruption Commission. Meanwhile, the SMH ($) reports disgraced former soldier Ben Roberts-Smith slapped, spat at and made a death threat to a fellow soldier known as Person 1, according to Judge Anthony Besanko’s findings on Monday. Still, Roberts-Smith has a fan in Hugh Poate, whose son was killed in Afghanistan in 2012. “These citizens in the village could well have been a civilian one day and pulling the trigger the next. That‘s the way the Taliban operated,” he told The Daily Telegraph ($).
Australian man Bodhi Mani Risby-Jones, 23, has been released from jail in Indonesia after “going on a drunken, naked rampage in Indonesia’s most conservative province”, as the ABC puts it. He reportedly paid $25,000 to fisherman Edi Ron who suffered a foot injury after allegedly being shoved off his motorbike by Risby-Jones. He made amends with Ron, whose wife says they are “like family” now. To other rather different Australians abroad now and Crikey’s Anton Nilsson spoke to two of perhaps 20 Aussies fighting in Ukraine. One lived there before Russia’s invasion and joined the military to defend the country — he compared the invasion to the Second World War in terms of “evil” and said “This was my time to step up” and do “everything possible to help out”.
NUCLEAR FRISSON
Uranium mining titan BHP is trying to convince the Albanese government to scrap “prohibitions” on nuclear energy, The Australian ($) reports, and pitched the idea to Treasury in the weeks before the May 9 budget. BHP’s Olympic Dam mine in South Australia has the largest-known single source of uranium in the world, and last year BHP’s chief technical officer Laura Tyler said it could form our “reliable baseload”, even though nuclear is way too expensive, much too slow to build, and Australia is one of the sunniest and windiest countries on earth. Meanwhile, in not-unrelated news, the Arctic’s ice will disappear completely for the summer months as soon as the 2030s, The Guardian reports. One scientist said it was “too late to save summer Arctic sea ice”, described as “the first major component of the earth system that we are going to lose because of global warming”.
It comes as Canadian company Brookfield, which plans an $18.7 billion takeover of Australia’s Origin Energy, has been revealed to be an “aggressive tax avoider in Australia” and abroad, according to a report by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research that Michael West Media delves into. Competition watchdog the ACCC said it would hold a public inquiry into the Origin takeover, but we haven’t seen it yet.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
A Finnish man named Anders Wiklöf was cruising along one of the roads in the Nordic country’s positively picturesque Åland Islands in the Baltic Sea. Life was good for the millionaire businessman, whose name was splashed across the islands’ main sports stadium in the regional capital, Mariehamn. He was driving 82km/h, over the 70km/h speed limit. A speed camera, evidently, which clocked him at a whopping 32km/h over the speed limit — somewhere along the road it had reduced, unbeknown to him, to 50km/h, as The Guardian tells it. When Wiklöf’s speeding fine showed up in the mail, he tore it open and gazed at the page, dazed. The penalty was the equivalent of $193,716.
See, Finland has this system whereby traffic infringements are calculated based on both the offence and the offender’s income — cops can check this by looking at a tax database on their smartphone. But Wiklöf really should’ve learnt his lesson already — he was fined a whopping $102,051 in 2018, and $152,233 in 2013, which compounded this fine. What are you gonna do, he said. “I have heard the government wants to save €1.5 billion [$2.4 billion] on healthcare in Finland, so I hope that my money can fill a gap there,” he told the local paper. It’s still not the world’s largest speeding fine, however. That goes to a Swedish motorist caught driving in Switzerland — which has a similar system — at 290km/h, who had to pay $1.8 million. That’ll slow you down.
Hoping you take it easy and enjoy the ride today.
SAY WHAT?
The situation in Australia was awful for me and there was supposed to be an agreement that once I had done the press call on arrival, I would be left to get on with my gap year in private. I was a teenager, and this made it clear that there was nowhere in the world, not even the Australian outback, where I wouldn’t be hounded by the press or paparazzi.
Prince Harry
The royal alleged to the High Court in London that tabloid paper the Daily Mirror hired private investigators to trail him on his gap year in Australia, adding one article described him as staying inside “watching videos” to avoid the cameras — a detail he spoke about only over the phone.
CRIKEY RECAP
“When Justice Anthony Besanko knocked out Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation claims in straight sets last week, Australia’s media mostly celebrated the result as a win for investigative journalism and press freedom. But in the days since, some conservative media have shuffled back towards the Victorian Medal recipient, hosing down the significance of the historic judgment and casting doubt on the reporting that led there.
“Leading the charge was Peta Credlin, who was one of the first media figures to defend Roberts-Smith. In a Daily Telegraph opinion piece the day after the verdict, Credlin took issue with drawing conclusions from Besanko’s findings about Roberts-Smith’s behaviour … But Credlin also wrote that even a criminal conviction wouldn’t be enough for her …”
“Crikey spoke to young men who belong to a small group of Australians who have given up the comfort and peace of life back home to take up arms and defend Ukraine against Russia’s invading forces. Over there, it’s a life of trenches and mud, of bullets, shells and drones.
“ ‘It’s a pretty shit experience when you’re at the zero line — you can’t really go outside and there’s a risk of being killed, constantly,’ Robert [a pseudonym] says. ‘Drones are flying everywhere — it’s a fucking nightmare at times.’ Robert has been in Ukraine long enough to know what life was like before Russia’s February 2022 invasion — which escalated a conflict that had been raging since 2014 in Ukraine’s south and east into a full-scale war across the entire country.”
“It was 2003, the last period of the great network TV era, and its distinctive genre, the made-for-TV movie, which tended to feature the sort of crime of which Folbigg was accused. In Folbigg’s case, a reversal occurred. Real life was seen through the prism of the cheap aesthetic of these movies the networks still played endlessly, and which were written straight out of the DSM manual.
“It is shaming to remember how little one questioned this at the time, as the trial popped up in the news — especially so for those of us who had some idea of how these cultural processes worked. I have the terrible feeling that, amid great divisions in Australia over refugees, 9/11, the organised hatred of Muslims by the right, and the Iraq War, some simple tale of individual mayhem fed by narcissism became a source of unity about the existence of evil.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Ethiopia rejects ‘ethnic cleansing’ accusation in western Tigray (Al Jazeera)
Ukraine war zone villagers flee floods after massive dam destroyed (Reuters)
The consent dilemma: why France is struggling to end forced sterilisation of women with disabilities (euronews)
PGA Tour, LIV Golf and DP World Tour agree to make shock merger (The Guardian)
‘Ducking hell’ to disappear from Apple autocorrect (BBC)
THE COMMENTARIAT
A very Philip Lowe guide to making a not-inevitable recession inevitable — Maeve McGregor (Crikey) ($): “What he’s attempting to do, in other words, is conceal the reality that the ideological assumptions underpinning prevailing monetary thinking are starting to crumble — and with it the credibility of the central bank as the oracle of all monetary wisdom. By pretending his orthodox theory still holds together, Lowe is then able to shamelessly bat away the contradictions that reside at its heart — chief among them the way in which it fuels inflation by, for instance, driving up rents (as mortgage holders pass on costs to tenants), something he’s conversely blamed entirely on red tape and lack of ‘supply, supply, supply’.
“The same holds for the legion of price rises witnessed in sectors dominated by monopolies and oligopolies, such as banking, large supermarket chains, resources and airlines — another consideration he refused to concede despite the weight of evidence to the contrary. And so too the way in which the poor, young and middle-income earners are bearing the brunt of inflation as the spending habits of older Australians continue unabated … In truth, there are only two reasons beyond institutional and personal defensiveness or even incompetence that explain Lowe’s conduct. One is he faithfully believes he needs to be seen to be acting on inflation lest a dangerous mentality that inflation is here to stay sets in.”
Mixed signals on nuclear power stations will scuttle AUKUS submarine deal — Ted O’Brien (The Australian) ($): “It’s not just about submariners, though. Although we will need some industrial assistance from our AUKUS partners, making AUKUS a success also will require an expansion of Australian industry and skills, especially with hundreds of thousands of components needed to build and maintain the submarines. We need to enhance our own sovereign manufacturing capability, and not just for a one-off procurement job but ideally for a broader mix of industries that will leverage nuclear technology for decades to come.
“Yet, despite the obvious contradiction, Albanese continues to oppose nuclear energy. The problem is bigger than the prime minister, however. There’s also a split in the National Security Committee, which he chairs. The National Security Committee is Australia’s peak decision-making body on matters of national security and consists of the government’s most senior ministers. If there were something on which these ministers might all align, you would think it would be AUKUS. But these ministers’ public statements suggest otherwise: just consider the video by Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen last month, disparaging Australia’s competence in nuclear technology. His criticisms had the effect of undermining our standing among AUKUS partners. Bowen argued that Australia not only lacked the expertise to manage energy-generating nuclear reactors but also that it would take us decades to develop it.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)
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Assistant Minister for Treasury Andrew Leigh will deliver a speech called “Better evaluation builds a stronger public service: the Australian centre for evaluation” at the Australian National University.
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Aged Care Minister Anika Wells will speak at the National Press Club.
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Author Chrisanthi Giotis will speak about her new book, Borderland: Decolonizing the Words of War, at Glee Books.
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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Harvard University’s Vincenzo Bollettino and Hannah Stoddard will speak about humanitarian challenges at Deakin Downtown.
