DIGGING FOR DIRT
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is headed to court over coal project assessments, the Brisbane Times ($) reports. The Environment Council of Central Queensland (ECCQ) is trying to force her to consider global warming when she looks at coalmine development applications — there are 19 coal and gas projects in the pipeline awaiting her stamp of approval, but she’s already rebuffed the ECCQ’s request on three of them: Mach Energy’s application to expand its NSW Mount Pleasant open-cut mine; Whitehaven’s application to expand its NSW Narrabri underground mine; the Ensham coalmine extension in Queensland. Could this work? Maybe. The ECCQ says she has to consider human-induced climate change as the cause of harm to matters of national environmental significance — I wrote more on this here for Crikey.
Meanwhile Nationals MP Mark Coulton and Senator Bridget McKenzie say they did not trespass when they visited an inland rail project near Narromine after they were denied permission by Infrastructure Minister Catherine King. It’s “absolute complete bullshit”, Coulton told Guardian Australia, though an Australian Rail Track Corporation representative said it was “looking into the circumstances” of a photo that seemed to show the pair within the 15-metre exclusion zone. It comes as the auditor-general has found the Morrison government’s billion-dollar health and hospital grants were “ineffective and fell short of ethical requirements” as well as containing “deliberate breaches” of legal requirements, The New Daily reports.
ROAD WARRIORS
We’re about to give Ukraine a fleet of missile-capable, four-wheel-drive armoured cars known as the Hawkei (named for former PM Bob Hawke), the SMH ($) reports, which was at the top of Ukraine Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov’s wish list. It’s a “seven-tonne armoured car designed to be fitted with the same Norwegian-American air defence system that protects the White House”, the paper notes, and we have 1100 of them. Defence Minister Richard Marles didn’t confirm but he did acknowledge Reznikov’s list — we might hear more before Prime Minister Anthony Albanese goes to a NATO summit in Lithuania next month.
Meanwhile disgraced former soldier Ben Roberts-Smith was “intimidatory, threatening and controlling” towards a woman he had an affair with, Justice Anthony Besanko said. Check out the full reasonings behind the dismissed defamation trial here. He found Roberts-Smith had told her he’d “burn her house down” if she “did anything stupid”, The Age ($) reports, and that he had shown her photographs of herself undressed in bed, asking her “whether he needed to keep the photographs”. Dismal. The ABC has done a helpful wrap of the findings if you can stomach it. Besanko said that, overall, Roberts-Smith “was not an honest and reliable witness”, adding he lied at times — including about not burying USBs with evidence on them in his backyard. The SMH ($) reckons the findings were pretty emphatic and will be tough for Roberts-Smith to appeal — though it’s not exactly impartial.
INCARCERATION NATION
Two Australians facing the death penalty in Vietnam have been granted clemency, according to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Their identities are private at the request of their families, Guardian Australia reports, but Albanese described them as “very relieved” by the news. It wasn’t retired Sydney baker Chau Van Kham, 73, who is in prison on dubious terrorism charges — Albanese said Australia is seeking an international prison transfer for him. Chau is a member of Viet Tan, which the UN describes as “a peaceful organisation advocating for democratic reform” — he was arrested in 2019, given a four-hour trial held simultaneously with four others, and sentenced to 12 years.
Meanwhile Indigenous deaths in custody are at their equal highest since records began 15 years ago, the Report on Government Services found, with eight recorded in 2021-22 — the same as 2016-17. The public’s view of whether police treat people fairly and equally is at a 10-year low of 63.3%, Guardian Australia says. It comes as Kathleen Folbigg, once thought of as Australia’s worst female serial killer, is free after genome sequencing showed her four children were likely to have died of natural causes, and were not smothered as once thought. Euronews spoke to Spanish scientist Carola García Vinuesa who helped clear Folbigg — up to 35% of sudden deaths can be genetic, so Vinuesa and her team drew up a list of genes that could be the culprit. They sequenced Folbigg’s genome and found a mutation that two of her daughters shared. One of the world’s most renowned geneticists, Peter Schwartz, looked at the data and agreed. Folbigg walked free yesterday after two decades behind bars.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
The brazen thief peered through a bakery window in Vancouver through a pair of orange sunglasses and spied his prize. Sizing up the pastel-pink door of Sweet Something, he dropped a shoulder and shoved himself into the glass panel, the night eerily still around him. The door remained unbothered, so he gave it a kick, spraying glass all over the jaunty black and white tile inside. Stepping in, he grabbed his bounty — six delicious cupcakes. Success! But he looked around at the glass littering the floor and felt a bit sheepish. It’s just bad manners, he thought, fairly impolite stuff by any measure. So the thief grabbed a nearby mop and bucket and began cleaning up the glass the best that a mop can manage, as the CCTV footage showed.
It’s a “very Canadian break-in”, owner Emma Irvine told CNN, describing him as “really respectful”. It seems the cupcake thief was overcome with remorse for his sweet tooth because he rang the bakery a couple of days later and ’fessed up to the crime. He “profusely apologised”, Irvine told CBC, adding he seemed “really sincere”. Please, he begged her, let me pay for the door and the cost of the cupcakes (police said they were allegedly valued at $30). Irvine could’ve yelled at him, but she did something pretty powerful instead: she chose to see the cupcake break-in as the ultimate compliment, and forgave him. “I have a little bit of a soft spot in my heart for this guy,” she admitted. She asked the cops not to bother pressing charges, and promptly released a new cupcake — the “Crime of Passion” — topped with a mini pair of edible orange sunglasses.
Hope you can forgive someone today.
SAY WHAT?
I’m going to take six months off, decompress, not make any decisions, go for a cruise around the Antarctic believe it or not, go well away from any aircraft, and then make my mind up about what I want to do after that.
Alan Joyce
The outgoing Qantas CEO says he’s got big plans to travel after departing the spirit of Australia, though they don’t include air travel.
CRIKEY RECAP
“Since buying the company last year, the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX has overseen changes that have shifted Twitter to the right while using his position as one of the platform’s most followed users to amplify and answer the concerns of far-right users. These acts have emboldened the most extreme and fringe users, including neo-Nazis, to flock back to the platform.
“Once banished to alt-tech platforms like Telegram or forced to constantly set up new accounts that would be banned, Australian far-right groups are now able to stably operate accounts on Twitter. Australia’s best-known neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Network, has been able to maintain an account since November 2022 — created just days after Musk officially took over — where it openly promotes anti-Semitic and racist views.”
It was scandalous Stokes ignored the fact that, via his powerful position as the proprietor and chairman of Seven for almost 30 years, he was a custodian of journalism and free speech in Australia. Instead, he used his huge resources to launch an extensive legal war against a rival media company, individual journalists and even former SAS soldiers preparing to testify against Roberts-Smith, a now thoroughly discredited murderer and liar …
“Alternatively, Stokes could try to head off the coming backlash by apologising for backing Roberts-Smith, resigning as Seven West Media chairman, and donating $50 million of his estimated A$6.3 billion fortune to press freedom causes — out of which Nine’s legal costs could be covered and traumatised SAS soldiers who gave evidence against Roberts-Smith could claim compensation.”
“Having to baste our brains with Australian media daily, we in the bunker have developed an innate sense of stories that in their tone and content are completely unique to each publication. Take the following, published on last Monday’s front page and continued on page three, which we believe is in the running for the ‘most Sydney Morning Herald article possible’ award …
“Or our favourite, the kind that leads riverside mansion owners to form a ’boutique’ pressure group to address the pressing issue of noisy Sydney Harbour party boats, no doubt teeming with vulgar nouveau riche … Not in MY waterfront, thanks. It’s a novel take on the paper’s approach to development and Sydney’s nightlife. Alas, the piece devotes absolutely no space to where any of these people schooled.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Iran to reopen embassy in Saudi Arabia after seven years (Al Jazeera)
Mike Pence formally enters 2024 race, challenging Trump (The New York Times)
Ukraine war: ‘Offensive actions’ under way in east, Kyiv says (BBC)
Inside the fundamentalist Christian movement that wants to remake Canadian politics (CBC)
Apple expected to launch mixed-reality headset at WWDC (BBC)
US sues Binance and founder Zhao over ‘web of deception’ (Reuters)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Kathleen Folbigg pardon shows Australia needs a dedicated body to investigate wrongful convictions — David Hamer, Andrew Dye (The Conversation): “The Folbigg case is a particularly tragic case, but it’s not unprecedented. The criminal justice system carries an inbuilt risk of wrongful conviction. Ad hoc commissions of inquiries like the Folbigg inquiry are inefficient and expensive. The system needs reform. The Folbigg case is yet another demonstration that Australia needs a criminal cases review commission (CCRC) — a statutory body working at arm’s length to investigate claims of wrongful conviction.
“A CCRC would have the powers and resources to investigate defendants’ claims to have been wrongfully convicted. Claims found to have substance can be referred back to the court of criminal appeal. Standing CCRCs have proven to bring a cost-effective improvement to the accuracy of criminal justice systems overseas. Preferably, it would be a single federal body covering all jurisdictions, or failing that, one for each jurisdiction. Cases where miscarriages of justice are identified years later, such as Folbigg’s, do happen. In the past decade, Jason Roberts in Victoria was acquitted in a retrial after serving two decades in prison for the murder of two police officers.”
Tragedy of Afghanistan originates in poor decision-making at the top — Greg Sheridan (The Australian) ($): “The combined tragedies of the behaviour uncovered in the Brereton report and the defamation court findings against Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith will be further compounded if they lead to a weakening of the military capability of the Australian army, or its special forces, the SAS and the commandos. We all ought to remember that so far nothing has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal court. Inquiries, even defamation cases, can produce headlines and strange findings. That is not to dispute this defamation ruling, merely to note it’s not a criminal conviction.
“Nonetheless, the evidence that some Australian soldiers may have killed civilians, killed prisoners or directed that they be killed is substantial. This is certainly a grave matter. Any Australian soldier is bound by the special laws of war and the general laws of morality. In World War II, Adolf Hitler ordered that any allied SAS member who was captured should be executed. This was rightly regarded by the allies as murder. However, it would be a folly on top of a tragedy if we now went crazy in response, tarring all members of a unit with the crimes of a few, or instituting reforms that make our already incoherent defence force even less capable of combat than it is now.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)
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ASMR (Australian Society for Medical Research) Medallist 2023 Manu Platt will speak at the National Press Club.
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Author Ross Wilson will discuss his new book, This Accidental Present, at Glee Books.
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Author Pip Finkemeyer will discuss her new book, Sad Girl Novel, at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.
