CORRUPTING US
An inquiry by former ASIO director general and Defence boss Dennis Richardson found Australia paid companies linked to “suspected arms and drug smuggling, busting sanctions on Iran, corruption and bribery” to run our offshore detention, as The Age put it. Public servants didn’t access “readily available” intelligence and other info, he found, so they missed integrity risks. Not only that, people weren’t communicating effectively about the contracts — within Home Affairs and between the department and government. His report also found Paladin Group’s Craig Thrupp personally made an estimated $150 million after he won a contract to run Manus Island’s processing until 2019, and that Paladin had allegedly paid bribes to foreign officials to keep the contract. Richardson said he told the AFP and National Anti-Corruption Commission.
Meanwhile, the WA corruption watchdog has axed an investigator because she had an affair with someone involved in a sensitive investigation, The West ($) reports. Reporter Ben Harvey appeared to enjoy writing the story, including phrases like “busted having sex” and “a thick dossier riddled with salacious details about the affair”. Cripes. We’ll learn more when it’s tabled in state Parliament. Overseas now and possibly the world’s most corrupt person, probable Republican nominee (and let’s face it, next US president) Donald Trump says he’ll encourage Russia to do whatever it wants to NATO countries who spend too little on defence, news.com.au reports. It would be a blatant violation of the NATO Treaty which stipulates all countries have to take action if one is attacked (the same rule that was used post-9/11).
HOME/SCHOOLED
The Greens will hold Labor’s “help-to-buy” housing scheme hostage until they get a single-property limit to negative gearing, Guardian Australia reports. Treasurer Jim Chalmers said negative gearing is here to stay (when the cost of owning a rental property is more than the income it makes you, creating a taxable loss) but the Greens say it and capital gains tax discounts (like the six-year rule) are making the housing market so much harder for renters and first home buyers while propping up the landed gentry. And the minor party has the balance of power in the Senate. So what is the help-to-buy scheme? The government will cover up to 40% of a new home — meaning smaller deposits and loans. The Coalition is voting nay, so Labor needs the minor party and two crossbenchers — but independent David Pocock says he agrees with the Greens because it’s easier to buy a second home than a first in Australia.
Meanwhile, one-third of Australia’s four million school kids can’t read properly, the Grattan Institute found, because our teachers use discredited methods to teach it — including “whole language”, ABC explains, where kids are exposed to good literature leaving them guessing definitions of unknown words. It’s a “preventable tragedy”, the think tank continued, and it’s costing us $40 billion a year because kids go on to be disruptive at school, unemployed after it and even jailed. We should universally teach reading using structured literacy, the report said, where sentences are broken down by element and kids are taught to sound out words. Meanwhile, Hepburn Shire Council Mayor Brian Hood said he’ll ditch his world-first ChatGPT lawsuit after it falsely said he went to jail for bribery, The Age reports, because the “offending material” was removed from the AI bot’s results in an update.
YOUR JOYCE
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce must explain the circumstances that led him to be filmed lying on a Canberra footpath, the ABC reports. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, whose political point barely bothers with a target, accused Greens and Labor staffers after an unknown member of the public drew a chalk line where his body was, but vowed to speak to Joyce anyway (as did Nationals leader David Littleproud). Dutton also said someone should have helped the former deputy PM, but approaching a possibly drunken man lying on the pavement swearing into his phone late at night isn’t exactly a lesson one would teach their daughter. Joyce told the broadcaster he’d fallen off a plant box and was “animately” swearing at himself, though sources told the SMH he was feeling the effects of alcohol and medication.
Meanwhile, Dutton has vowed to unpick the new “right to disconnect” laws if he ever becomes prime minister, the ABC reports. A mistake in the legislation could subject bosses to criminal prosecution, which will be corrected — but Dutton said it’ll still make things weird between employers and employees. Business Council of Australia boss Bran Black and Australian Industry Group boss Innes Willox said it’ll kill flexibility, The Australian ($) says, with the latter arguing employers will “play hardball” by refusing requests to leave work early to pick up the kids or go to the dentist. From productivity to inflation now and suppliers to Coles have been told to cut their prices by as much as 14%, The Courier-Mail reports. Freight, shipping and raw material costs are cooling, Coles pointed out, and your prices should fall too.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
Eight years ago, a French man named Richard Plaud glued two matchsticks together with a dream to replicate the iconic Eiffel Tower. It took 706,898 more matchsticks, 23 kilograms of glue, some 4,200 hours, and an unreported number of mental breakdowns, but Plaud’s towering dream officially came true this year. His tower was scaled down to 7.2 metres, SBS reports, but that still made it the tallest structure ever made using matchsticks. Until it wasn’t. Officials at the Guinness World Records informed Plaud that his so-called record was null and voided by one teensy, tiny, matchstick-sized problem.
At first, Plaud painstakingly cut the red tip off each match. But it was an odious step for the several hundred thousand matchsticks he knew he’d need, so he rang the manufacturer to get a special type instead. Thus, the Guinness World Record official had sniffed, you did not use commercially available matches. A devastated Plaud shared the tale on Facebook, lamenting that his eight years of work would not result in a record as keen worldwide watchers hoped. The ensuing outcry saw director of central records services (dream job alert) Mark McKinley quickly reverse the decision. We were a bit too harsh, he admitted, and Plaud’s record is “officially amazing”. He was elated, saying he never regretted the project for one bit — the accolade is great, but it was his “purely personal dream”.
Hoping you continue to build your dream today too.
SAY WHAT?
As you probably know, I am extremely well travelled. There was a ridiculous “curfuffle” last year when the news got out that I am often asked to travel with the Boss on his VIP jet. Well, duh! Who else is going to calm him down, prep him for press conferences and maintain team morale?
“Toto the dog”
Cringe was felt around the country when Nine newspapers published an op-ed purportedly written by Anthony Albanese’s dog that included a throwaway reference to pornography website Pornhub. It was written by former ABC journalist Deborah Fleming.
CRIKEY RECAP
“Middleton started her career in 1984 as a copyperson at The Canberra Times, becoming a cadet in 1986. She left the Times in 1989, joining the Herald (later known as the Herald Sun) in the press gallery. She left for The Age in 1992 to become a political reporter, before moving to West Australian Newspapers in 1997 as political editor.
“She joined SBS as chief political correspondent in 2005, and held the role for a decade before going briefly freelance and joining Schwartz Media’s The Saturday Paper in 2016 … She also published a book in 2016, a biography of now Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, titled Albanese: Telling It Straight.“
“There’s no shame at News Corp Australia. Its propaganda outlets complain about the evils of inflation and Labor’s economic mismanagement, while its various arms — Foxtel and REA Group — gouge consumers for millions of dollars extra a year in higher charges.
“Indeed, recent price rises from Foxtel and REA are good examples of exactly the kind of ‘sticky inflation’ that worries the Reserve Bank so much. REA Group, 61% owned by News Corp and a major profit earner for the company, managed to raise prices by 13% for home buyers using its listings service and 8% for renters.”
“Most of the past 40 years of politics has been about the withdrawal of the certainty once provided by governments in Anglophone economies — the removal of communitarian economic policies like industry protectionism, centralised wage fixing and extensive government ownership.
“The certainty these had offered workers and the community was replaced with a deliberate, pervading sense of economic precarity: workers, like national economies, had to face the cold winds of competition in a globalised economy, had to make their own way without any government help, with their whole value consisting in their economic functions — as a worker (more correctly, an independent contractor, or more recently a gig economy worker), a consumer, a shareholder.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
‘We’re going to do it’: Israeli PM set on invasion of Rafah (Al Jazeera)
Pakistan election: Pact may shut out [jailed ex-PM] Imran Khan supporters (BBC)
Hungary’s president resigns amid uproar over child sex abuse case pardon (CNN)
2024 Super Bowl: How to watch the game and halftime show across Australia (SBS)
Nigerian bank CEO and family among six killed in California helicopter crash (The Guardian)
Russia using Elon Musk’s Starlink to coordinate attacks, Ukraine claims (Stuff)
Trump says he gave NATO allies warning: pay in or he’d urge Russian aggression (The New York Times) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Why our response to Joyce having one for the road is mid-strength — Sean Kelly (The SMH): “Not long ago drunk politicians were heroes. Bob Hawke’s larrikin reputation was built to a fair extent on his drinking feats before he was prime minister. In 2007, when Kevin Rudd’s trip to a New York strip club became news, some in Labor braced for impact, but voters seemed to love it. Since Hawke was PM, perhaps even since Rudd, something has shifted. In 2015 Abbott publicly skolled a beer. In a piece discussing what felt odd about this, journalist Judith Ireland wrote, ‘perhaps it is that it was an unmistakably and assertively macho act – amid a chanting group of hyped-up dudes. And that it came from a Prime Minister who has been trying for the last 18 months to convince us that he is also the Minister for Women.’
“The way we read the act depends both on the times and the person, and the ways they are entangled. Hawke’s drinking was taken as a sign of who he was, which made sense in the context of the time he led the country. By the time Abbott led, masculinity and its place in the nation had shifted; the way Abbott personified a certain version of masculinity had become troubling. We have changed the way we interpret drinking, but there is something that hasn’t changed, too. In 2018, Jacqueline Maley wrote in this masthead that a woman would not be allowed the ‘level of personal complexity’ that Joyce was. When a woman transgresses, it is used to point back to her as a cartoonish type of some sort. Men’s failings are used as pointers to their depth.”
Pity SUV drivers, fast being priced out of their badges of contempt for the planet — Catherine Bennett (The Guardian): “Another member of the luxury SUV community, who says she is unable to drive her child to school now that insurance for her £56,000 Range Rover Velar has risen to £890 a month, accused the car’s makers of ‘destroying lives’. As a result, she told the Mail, she would ‘never again’ buy a Range Rover. Which is a start, I suppose. It’s probably too soon to tell whether a combination of car thieves, leasing deals and inadequate security could achieve what years of campaigning and shaming on the colossal emissions of SUVs have failed to do: a general realisation that these vehicles are just not worth it. But, promisingly, the BBC reports that the scale of the thefts “may have a knock-on effect on demand for vehicles, particularly luxury models”.
“To date, the best efforts of environmentalists, most recently by a group calling itself the ‘Tyre Extinguishers’, who let down tyres by night, have not conspicuously dented the market for SUVs. Even recent reports about their ever-growing bulk, to the point, in cities, that they sprawl on to pavements and into neighbouring parking bays, has been received, you might think, with a complacency that must seem extremely unfair to plus-sized airline passengers whose territorial incursions are, at least, unintended. Given the abundant evidence on their harm, including by electric versions, massive SUVs in cities can only be a badge of contempt for others: a deliberate choice from consumers who are willing to advertise, along with their generous contribution to carbon emissions and serious injury, zero interest in sharing space.”
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WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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Author Sharlene Allsopp will speak about her new book, The Great Undoing, at The Moat.
