BALI NINE RETURN HOME
The five remaining members of the Bali Nine are waking up to their first day in Australia after returning on Sunday having spent almost two decades in prison in Indonesia.
Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong said yesterday that Matthew Norman, Scott Rush, Martin Stephens, Si Yi Chen and Michael Czugaj had been released on “humanitarian grounds”. Wong and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese both thanked Indonesia’s PM Prabowo Subianto after a deal was reached for the men’s release.
The AAP reports the men’s future custodial status is unclear, stating: “Indonesia’s government said the five were transferred from Bali with the status of prisoner on Sunday morning and landed in Darwin. Jakarta said it had not granted pardons.”
The ABC says the five men, who had been serving life sentences for their roles in a botched 2005 drug smuggling plot, were accompanied by several Australian officials as they left Bali forever, having been banned from ever returning.
The broadcaster says it has been told the men “are effectively free to live unhindered in Australian society”. Guardian Australia reports Albanese said in a statement on Sunday: “This reflects the strong bilateral relationship and mutual respect between Indonesia and Australia.
“These Australians served more than 19 years in prison in Indonesia. It was time for them to come home. They will now have the opportunity to continue their rehabilitation and reintegration here in Australia.”
The ABC recalls how the Bali Nine ringleaders Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were executed in 2015, Renae Lawrence’s sentence was commuted in 2018 and Tan Duc Than Nguyen died of cancer the same year.
Indonesia’s senior minister for legal affairs, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, is quoted by AAP as saying yesterday’s transfer was “reciprocal in nature”.
“If one day our government requests the transfer of Indonesian prisoners in Australia, the Australian government is also obliged to consider it,” he said.
Elsewhere, Guardian Australia reports several Australians are seriously ill in Fiji with what local authorities suspect is alcohol poisoning.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed last night that it was providing consular assistance to two Australian families.
FISCAL UPDATE
Wednesday’s mid-year fiscal update is receiving plenty of attention with company tax receipts being downgraded for the first time since the COVID pandemic.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports Treasurer Jim Chalmers will reveal company tax collections will be down $8.5 billion on his budget forecasts from May. The drop is due to demand from China and prices for key commodities such as iron ore, coal and LNG softening, the paper adds.
“Challenges in the Chinese economy will have flow-on effects for our own budget and that will be clear in Treasury’s forecasts on Wednesday,” Chalmers said yesterday, Guardian Australia reports. “The global economy is uncertain, the global outlook is unsettling and that’s weighing heavily on our economy,” he added.
The AAP says the downward revision of the tax receipts over four years to 2027/28 in the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook “is more than twice the cost of the federal government’s energy bill relief for households. The conditions will also lead to Treasury downgrading mining exports by more than $100 billion”.
The SMH reports that as well as extra spending in sectors such as veterans affairs, Medicare and childcare, the budget deficit is expected to widen, with some economists suggesting it could exceed $42 billion. In May Chalmers forecast it would hit $28.3 billion.
Also being announced this week is an extra 5,000 social homes being built using $3 billion in joint funding as part of a fast-tracked round of the government’s Housing Australia Future Fund, the AAP reports.
The newswire says: “Housing Minister Clare O’Neil will announce a new partnership with the states and territories to deliver the additional homes under the Housing Australia Future Fund. The fund will support the delivery of 20,000 social and 10,000 affordable homes.”
Finally, AAP also flags the Albanese government revealed plans for its News Media Assistance Program (News MAP) overnight which will see local news at the centre of a $180 million media funding package.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said in a statement: “Local news and community broadcasting is at the heart of local communities and makes a vital contribution to national identity and media diversity.”
As part of News MAP $116.7 million will be invested over four years “to help build the sustainability and capacity of news organisations as they deliver public-interest journalism”, AAP reports. Almost $4 million more will go towards the country’s first National Media Literacy Strategy which has been designed by the education and media literacy sectors.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
A New Zealand man has won the Spanish world Scrabble title… despite not speaking Spanish.
Professional Scrabble player Nigel Richards, who holds five English-language world titles, won the Spanish championships in Granada last month, Associated Press reports.
Richards started memorising the language’s Scrabble word list a year ago, his friend Liz Fagerlund told the newswire. “He can’t understand why other people can’t just do the same thing. He can look at a block of words together, and once they go into his brain as a picture he can just recall that very easily.”
AP reports that in 2015 he also won the French language Scrabble world championship… despite not speaking French. That time he studied the word list for nine weeks.
An organiser of the Spanish tournament Alejandro Terenzani is quoted as saying: “It was impossible to react negatively, you can only be amazed. We certainly expected that he would perform well, but it is perhaps true that he surpassed our expectations.”
Say What?
He called it a campaign — there is no campaign. His criticism is wrong.
Michael Miller
The News Corp Australasia executive chairman spoke to The Australian about the prime minister’s claims News Corp is “cheerleading” for the opposition.
CRIKEY RECAP
Do the journalists covering Dutton’s nuclear policy ever read anything about the myriad of troubled infrastructure projects reported by their colleagues? Do they have no understanding that infrastructure in Australia is marked by hopelessly politicised project selection, poor business case development, wildly optimistic costing forecasts and the grim reality that the bigger the project, the greater the proportional blowout in its costs? Do they not remember how the NBN — initial estimate for the Coalition version, $29.5 billion; final cost, $54.5 billion — blew out?
They think it’s credible that the federal government — which decades ago outsourced or sold any infrastructure construction capacity — can rapidly build an entirely new industry, at a time when we can’t even build roads on time or within budget. If only we could power the energy grid with this nonsense.
Tourism Australia staff fear an audit report being released on Monday will be a bad look for the agency, sources have told Crikey.
Two sources with insight into the Australian National Audit Office’s (ANAO) inspection of the agency said the report was expected to be critical.
A note on the auditor’s website said the goal was to “assess … Tourism Australia’s procurement and contract management activities”. According to one of Crikey’s sources, the audit was expected to be critical of both.
“It sounds like it’s pretty damning,” the person said.
We emailed roughly 200 people the same eight questions and about one in four got back to us. It was an imperfect list — if we missed you, let us know for next year — but we contacted people from the following outlets: Nine’s major metropolitan mastheads as well as people in its broadcast divisions, The Australian Financial Review, Network Ten, Seven, SBS, the ABC, 2GB, Sky News Australia, Guardian Australia, the News Corp newspapers, The Conversation, Daily Mail Australia, Australian Associated Press, Apple News, Mamamia, Pedestrian and Schwartz Media.
We also included journalism academics, media lawyers and industry body executives, as well as people from smaller outlets like The Nightly, Quillette, Unmade, Capital Brief, the Koori Mail, About Time, The Daily Aus, Women’s Agenda, IndigenousX, Mumbrella, 6 News Australia and of course Crikey.
More than 50 people generously offered us their insightful, searing and sometimes cheeky thoughts on the state of the industry. In this instalment, here’s what they had to say on who survives the purge in Australian journalism and what outlets need to do to tough it out.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Israel to close embassy in Ireland as it criticises ‘anti-Israel’ policies (BBC)
Two Russian tankers sink in Black Sea spilling 4,300 tonnes of oil (The Guardian)
Harris debates her future: A run for California governor that would take 2028 off the table (CNN)
ABC agrees to give $15m to Donald Trump’s presidential library in defamation settlement (Sky News)
Jamie Foxx gets stitches after a glass was thrown at him during birthday dinner: He ‘is recovering’ (People)
Why some British pubs are running out of Guinness (The New York Times) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
The remaining Bali Nine are home. Does Indonesia really want nothing in return? — Zach Hope (The Sydney Morning Herald): Indonesia has been proud to show its new forgiving face under its recently inaugurated president, Prabowo Subianto, and the tight lips surrounding the deal, this masthead has been told, have been at the request of the Australians.
We are told the transfer of the men to Australia — they have not been pardoned by Indonesia — was an act of humanitarianism from a new president putting his best diplomatic foot forward. Is Indonesia really asking for nothing in return?
Both sides say there is no quid pro quo. We’ll have to take it on face value in this particular transaction. But Indonesian Co-ordinating Minister for Law, Human Rights and Corrections Yusril Ihza Mahendra has publicly raised the issue of detained illegal fishermen, even though he was unsure if there were any in Australian jails at present (the Australian Border Force will not answer this question).
Taking tips from John Howard, Peter Dutton knows the barbecue stopper is key to shaping the national conversation — Julianne Schultz (Guardian Australia): When Peter Dutton lumbered on to the national political stage in 2001 with his stiff policeman’s gait and hectoring manner, few saw him as prime minister heir and successor.
That this is what he has become is a measure, two decades later, of just how effective Howard’s remaking of the Liberal party has been. Under the Howard government, guided by Crosby Textor, and with a nod to the carceral logic of the penal colonies, cruelty became a badge of honour. Those affected were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, refugees, the poor and those historians who asked awkward questions that could only be answered by challenging the prevailing orthodoxy.
With the departure of two leading moderate Liberals (can Julian Leeser be far behind?), a new guard who learned their politics in right-leaning libertarian thinktanks now stand shoulder to shoulder with the leader.
