NEW CABINET, NEW HOME AFFAIRS
It’s the first day at work for Anthony Albanese’s “refreshed” cabinet, with the Home Affairs Department in particular looking very different today.
If you’re just catching up, on Sunday Albanese announced Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles were being removed from the troubled Home Affairs and Immigration portfolios and put in Housing and Skills and Training respectively. Elsewhere, NT Senator Malarndirri McCarthy was named as the new Indigenous Australians minister, Murray Watt the minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Julie Collins moves to Agriculture, Pat Conroy is the minister for defence industry and capability delivery, and international development and the Pacific, and Jenny McAllister, was named the minister for cities and the minister for emergency management.
The real winner in all of this is Tony Burke, whose job title is now nice and easy: minister for home affairs, minister for immigration and multicultural affairs, minister for cyber security, minister for the arts, and leader of the House.
The ABC says the decision to give Burke both Home Affairs and Immigration on top of his other briefs prompted questions about the 54-year-old’s workload. Guardian Australia quotes Albanese defending his decision with: “He [Burke] is certainly up for it, and what it means is that in terms of a department, there will be one person who will be responsible for it”. The prime minister later declared: “These combined changes, I think, represent a significant move forward. I would expect that this is the team that I will take to the election when it is held sometime in the future.” Those last four words have been seized upon by The Australian as “increasingly loud signals coming from government that an early election is seriously being considered”.
One other element of yesterday’s announcement that has attracted significant attention is the decision to move ASIO back under the Attorney-General’s Department, following the AFP and reversing the Coalition’s move to put both in Home Affairs. Coalition Home Affairs spokesman James Paterson posted on X that Burke would be minister for Home Affairs “in name only”. “Labor has completed the destruction of the Home Affairs portfolio as they always secretly wanted to — but never bothered to tell the electorate,” he added. The ABC reports Opposition Leader Peter Dutton responded to the reshuffle with: “It is nothing more than shuffling of deck chairs on the sinking HMAS Albanese.”
OLYMPIC GLORY
At the time of writing Australia is sitting pretty at the top of the Paris Olympics table with four gold medals as day two of the Games nears its conclusion.
Jess Fox, one of the flag bearers in Friday’s notable opening ceremony, won Australia’s fourth gold in the women’s canoe slalom K1 on Sunday. Her success followed three gold medals won on Saturday: Ariarne Titmus (who won the “race of the century”) in the women’s 400m freestyle, the women’s 4x100m relay team, and Grace Brown in cycling with the women’s individual time trial.
In the competitions still in their early stages, the Matildas just staged the most extraordinary comeback in the women’s soccer, beating Zambia 6-5 having trailed 5-2 at one point, the Herald Sun reports.
Elsewhere in the games, organisers have apologised after Christian groups, such as the Catholic Church in France, criticised parts of the opening ceremony such as the banquet scene featuring drag artists as “scenes of derision and mockery of Christianity”, the BBC says.
Paris 2024 spokeswoman Anne Descamps is quoted as saying: “Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group. On the contrary, I think Thomas Jolly [the ceremony’s artistic director] did try to intend to celebrate community tolerance. We believe this ambition was achieved. If people have taken any offence, we of course are really sorry.”
Also apologising was the International Olympic Committee after South Korea’s athletes were introduced as North Korean during Friday’s ceremony. The Guardian said IOC president Thomas Bach would meet with South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol over the incident.
Meanwhile, triathletes face the prospect of not being able to do any practice in the River Seine before they race on Tuesday with Sky News saying Sunday’s training session was cancelled due to “unsafe levels of pollution”.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
Not all social media has to result in the end of civilisations and the decimation of our attention spans; on rare occasions it can also result in wonderful discoveries.
Take fine art researcher Adam Busiakiewicz, who was endlessly scrolling on X/Twitter one day when he randomly noticed a missing portrait of King Henry VIII just hanging there in the background of a photo.
The photograph in question was posted by the Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire, showing a reception in Warwick’s Shire Hall, CNN said.
Writing in a blog post earlier this month Busiakiewicz recounted: “Strange discoveries can happen at any moment, it appears. This is especially the case when your eyes are particularly honed in on gilt frames that feature in the corners of photographs of peoples’ homes on social media.
“It happened today whilst I was scrolling at speed through ‘X’ (formerly Twitter), when I by chance spotted a portrait of Henry VIII with a distinctive arched top in a photo of a room in Warwick Shire Hall just posted by the Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire, Tim Cox.”
The painting turned out to be part of a famous set of 22 portraits commissioned in the 1590s by tapestry maker Ralph Sheldon, The Independent reports.
Busiakiewicz, who works as a consultant for the Sotheby’s auction house, told the BBC: “The fact I was lucky to piece together [what it was] in an hour is very exciting.”
Warwickshire County Council said the painting has now been moved to its Museum Collections Centre for further research.
Say What?
New mask, same task.
Robert Downey Jr.
The man who very famously helped launch the Marvel film universe as Iron Man was unveiled at Comic-Con in San Diego at the weekend as… another Marvel character. Forbes reports the casting of Downey Jr. as Dr Victor von Doom in the new Avengers films was met with “bafflement and mockery” by some fans online.
CRIKEY RECAP
By the time most Australians heard about the shooting at Wieambilla on December 12, 2022, it was already over. What had already begun was the complicated task of piecing together exactly what had happened that day and why.
It took just six hours from the time four police officers arrived at a remote property owned by Gareth and Stacey Train to carry out a welfare check on Nathaniel Train — Gareth’s brother and Stacey’s former husband — to the conclusion of the police operation that left the trio dead. During that brief period, two police officers and the Trains’ neighbour, Alan Dare, had been killed by the Trains, and two other cops barely escaped with their lives.
The shooting, which was subsequently declared a Christian-motivated terrorist attack, has raised further questions that are set to be answered at a coronial inquest next week in Brisbane. Crikey will be covering this inquest from the courtroom.
Australia’s urban fabric is ruled over by an adversarial planning system geared fundamentally toward exclusion. The planning system in its current form exists first and foremost not to enable great outcomes but to limit the possibility space of human action and potential, and, in doing so, to maintain an unequal status quo that keeps our cities inaccessible and unaffordable for people who lack sufficient political power.
This system is deeply immoral, anti-social, and must be reformed.
Just as lane markings on the road dictate where mobile land uses go, the lanes don’t regulate the speed or how many people use the road. The same is true of planning.
Whether the city is planned or not, the same property cycle leads to periods of apparent shortages because of market incentives, just as Barnett observed about the inter-war period. It is that cycle causing the rents and prices seen today not just in Australian cities, but globally.
In fact, Australia’s cities are world housing production leaders. We forget that in 2019 we had falling rents and a supply glut in Sydney. How did planning cause this? Or are property markets doing what they always do, regardless of planning?
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Venezuela votes in election as opposition challenges Maduro’s grip on power (Al-Jazeera)
Negotiators meet in Rome to revive push for hostage release and ceasefire in Gaza (The New York Times) ($)
Convicted rapist Van de Velde booed on Olympic debut (BBC)
Western DJs accused of ‘normalising war’ for playing at Russian techno events (The Guardian)
Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance (The Washington Post)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Anthony Albanese’s big risk putting Rudd-era immigration minister Tony Burke back in charge of borders — Simon Benson (The Australian): Albanese has kept the factions appeased, and noses unbloodied, as no one was punted from cabinet. But he may have created potential problems in the process with the indulgence of an ideological attack on the Home Affairs Department, which has been in its sights since Labor was elected, and long before it removed its secretary, Mike Pezzullo.
None of this may matter in the short term, however, with increasingly loud signals coming from government that an early election is seriously being considered. Albanese’s giveaway was the use of a new description on election timing — “sometime in the future”. Albanese’s reshuffle certainly adds to this speculation rather than diminishes it.
Which country will win the Paris Olympics? Don’t just count medals — Peter Coy (The New York Times): The Duncan-Parece model ranks countries according to how improbable their medal counts are if one assumes that all medal-winning nations have an equal propensity per capita for winning medals. Its measure of improbability is based on the so-called binomial distribution formula, which is the one you would use to calculate the likelihood of flipping heads, say, 10 times in a row.
Applying their method to the Tokyo Olympics, the top 10 countries in order were Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Hungary, the United States, Italy, Japan, Cuba and Jamaica. In the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, their top 10 were Britain, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, France, Denmark, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Germany and the Netherlands.
The authors thank Pfitzinger, the Olympic marathoner, for identifying the problem with the conventional ranking methods and urging them to solve it. They acknowledge that “there exists no perfect and absolutely ‘correct’ way to do Olympic national ranking.”
