NOT FUN AND GAMES
Lawyers for the Commonwealth Games Federation in London are reportedly working out whether the Victorian government owes millions of dollars in compensation for bailing as the 2026 host, The Australian ($) reports. It says lawyers are looking at costs incurred, substantial damages, plus the additional costs incurred for a new host because of the shorter preparation time. Plus there’s the “multibillion-dollar” bill for project work and compensation in the regions that Victorian taxpayers will need to pick up, The Age ($) adds. Federation boss Katie Sadleir said she was blindsided by Premier Dan Andrews’ decision, who cited a cost blowout from $2.6 billion to possibly $7 billion, and claimed other states had reached out to her to host the games — though it wasn’t NSW, Premier Chris Minns tweeted; and it wasn’t South Australia, Premier Peter Malinauskas confirmed via The Advertiser ($). Queensland and Tasmania said no too, news.com.au ($) reports.
So who messed up the estimate? It was Ernst & Young, government sources say (PwC must be so glad another of the big four is in the spotlight at long last). But the games’ organisers didn’t know external consultants were involved until yesterday, Guardian Australia continues. Last they heard last month, the cost had grown to $4 billion — mostly because Andrews wanted the games to take place in the regions as well as Melbourne, meaning there were big infrastructure costs. So what now? There’s really only one state that can afford the games, Gold Coast Commonwealth Games chair and former premier Peter Beattie said via the Courier-Mail ($), and that’s Western Australia (Queensland arguably could too, considering it posted the country’s largest surplus ever, but it has the Olympics in 2032 to prepare for). Premier Roger Cook said WA wouldn’t take it on as sole host, as 6PR reports, but confirmed he would support a multi-city event.
LET’S EAT, DRINK AND BE FRIENDS
Lift our trade restrictions on barley, wine and live lobster, Treasurer Jim Chalmers told Chinese Finance Minister Liu Kun in a “friendly” way at the G20 in India, as the ABC reports. He also raised the fate of journalist Cheng Lei and democracy activist Yang Hengjun, about whom Australia is “very concerned”. If this is sounding familiar, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong raised the very same points when she met her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi last week, the ABC reports. But that didn’t stop the AFR ($) from describing Chalmers’ meeting as a “breakthrough” — it was the first of its kind in four years, to be fair, as well as further evidence our relationship with Beijing is thawing after the wintry Morrison government years.
To another Labor minister now, and Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, Treasury and Employment Andrew Leigh says Labor’s factions can be “profoundly undemocratic” because they create a “rigid duopoly” that can muzzle policy debate, the SMH ($) reports. Those who choose to be factionless are often “motivated not by power, but by altruism” and shouldn’t be treated like “second-class citizens” within the party. The paper notes Leigh is factionless — and a junior ministerial position seems ill-fitting for a person who has a doctorate in economics, has written 10 books, and worked for a major law firm before his 13-year stint in Parliament. To another matter that has more than a whiff of jobs for mates, and ICAC asked Fire and Rescue NSW to investigate allegations former commissioner Paul Baxter engaged his “personal friend” in consultancy work worth nearly $500,000, the SMH ($) reports.
FAIR WORK
Forcing the unemployed to study, go to job interviews or work for the dole can be punitive and actually stop people from getting jobs, according to Labor’s draft national platform. It was sent to delegates ahead of Labor’s conference in August, Guardian Australia reports, and says mutual obligations are good in theory, but need to be revised to bake in trust and accountability for both government and jobseekers. “In May the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, called for work for the dole to be reinstated, apparently unaware that the program still exists,” the paper adds dryly. Speaking of — one of the country’s most respected constitutional lawyers and pro-Voicer Greg Craven is pissed he was quoted in the No pamphlet after he wrote Dutton “the world’s longest text” when he heard he might be, the ABC reports. Craven, who is “100% committed” to the proposal to enshrine the advisory body in the constitution, is going to complain to the AEC to try to get the quotes removed.
Meanwhile chief executive of West Arnhem Regional Council Paul Hockings reportedly has been stood down after staff brought alcohol into the dry community of Maningrida for cultural awareness training, the NT News ($) reports. Yikes. An NT Police spokesman confirmed eight people were fined for bringing booze into the community, but said cops believed it was only for personal consumption. Staying in the NT a moment, and state government funding to public schools in the Top End — where 39% of the students are Indigenous — has fallen by 7.75% in real terms, Guardian Australia reports. “In 158 of the 200 most educationally disadvantaged schools in Australia, the student population is more than 50% Indigenous; in more than half of those 200 schools, the figure is above 90%,” the paper adds. To finish on something positive — universities will get government funding to enrol every Indigenous person who meets academic entry standards under Labor’s education reforms, The Australian ($) reports.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
The Guardian’s Dale Berning Sawa doesn’t exactly have a common name. So when she began receiving emails regarding matters such as golf rules, carpenter bees, CPR short courses and smoking weed, it gave her a pause. Was she living a secret second life, perhaps sleepwalking her way through several uncharacteristic and indeed illegal hobbies? Or could it be that an imposter was living the very antithesis of her life, some sort of sociopathic identity theft taken to the extreme? As it turned out, there is another her, and she’d been accidentally getting that woman’s correspondence. Still, it’s fascinating to discover another you, she says. (I can attest to this feeling, having been blown away that there is another Emma Elsworthy in the UK who — Worm reader, I kid you not — works as a journalist too, mostly for outlets like Murdoch’s The Sun. No comment). Hirokazu Tanakas was equally enthralled by the concept and went so far as to organise a meet-up with 177 others with an identical name to his, breaking a world record and feeling “thunderous joy” in the process.
Berning Sawa typically responds to the emails to let the sender know she was not the intended recipient. But one caught her eye, from a woman she’s calling Joni — it mentioned that a person named Bob has asked her to bring her insect collection to a meal. It finished: “Lots of love and stay dry. Have you checked your bridge lately?” Berning Sawa was immediately enthralled, responding that she was writing a book about a girl who collects dead bees, and she had to know more about this collection. Plus what bridge?! Joni turned out to be the other Dale’s big sister, an 88-year-old woman, and Berning Sawa loves to keep in touch, even though the no-nonsense elderly gran doesn’t get it. I’m cutting grass today, she wrote recently, who cares? Berning Sawa does — she says her only explanation is that “we all want connection, even in its most random, accidental forms”. Indeed it’s these coincidental moments that can make us feel pause about the magic of life — though I wish my name wasn’t on a story about Brits eating biscuits in the shower.
Hoping the smiles come easily today, folks.
SAY WHAT?
Victoria’s is a pretty weird Australian state government. It combines the ideology of Bernie Sanders and the social policies of San Francisco with the fiscal prudence of Puerto Rico.
Greg Sheridan
The Australian columnist says Victorian Premier Dan Andrews’ decision to cancel the 2026 Commonwealth Games is almost the definition of “sovereign risk”.
CRIKEY RECAP
“But the most offensive, egregious lie is that a Voice to Parliament would divide Australians. ‘All Australians are equal before the law,’ the No campaigners insist, in total defiance of the reality of the vast overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system. ‘Enshrining in our constitution a body for only one group of Australians means permanently dividing Australians.’
“This is a blatant restatement of the lie of terra nullius, which has been legally discredited for three decades. Indigenous peoples are not ‘one group of Australians’, like any other minority. They are our First Peoples, separate and distinct from every other Australian by virtue of prior ownership of this continent, and their subsequent dispossession, attempted genocide and oppression. To demean Indigenous peoples as simply another minority group being unfairly elevated is to maintain the racist lie that they didn’t exist before white invasion.”
“On the contrary, one way — perhaps the only way — of neutralising or diluting genuine, far-reaching scandals, such as robodebt or Morrison’s baffling secret one-man government, is to label any inquiry announced by the opposing side as necessarily and irreducibly partisan. Something heralding a dangerous descent into calcified polarisation emblematic of our American counterparts and therefore posing a threat to our democracy.
“The criticism or technique, so far as it encompasses all scandals — however bad or objectively terrible or not terrible — glosses over such distinctions (at least so far as Labor is concerned), relegating any inquiry into said scandal as little more than an echo chamber of partisan obsessions. At its heart, the argument of Kelly and Kenny is that Labor’s recent inquiries into robodebt and the secret ministries confirm we have entered the realm of what might be called ‘total politics’ …”
“Take one salient example. A severe long-running drought in the western Mediterranean has dramatically cut olive oil production in Spain — by far the world’s biggest producer, responsible for around 40% of global production — and in Italy and Portugal, the No. 2 and No. 4 producers respectively. Only Greece, the No. 3 producer, has maintained production, and it’s currently being battered by a heat wave as well.
“The result: global olive oil prices have soared, first to levels not seen since the 2000s, and now to all-time record levels, with recent spot prices topping $7000 a metric tonne. The economic costs already, and likely to be, incurred due to global heating are the subject of growing analysis. In April, the International Monetary Fund published a working paper examining inflation induced by climate change-related events since 1970 and concluded heat events lead to sustained price rises in advanced economies …”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
‘Disloyal views’: Lithuania strips Russian residency permits (euronews)
Tunisia anti-fake news law criminalises free speech: legal group (Al Jazeera)
Italian hospitals report sharp rise in emergency cases as Rome hits 41.8C
(The Guardian)
Russia strikes Ukraine grain port after exiting export deal (Reuters)
January 6 probe: Trump says he expects indictment (BBC)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Calling out Teo was like killing Bambi, but my concerns were justified — Henry Woo (The SMH): “Back in May 2019, I expressed concerns about the large numbers of patients of Dr Charlie Teo seeking donations to help pay for the costs of surgery on the crowdfunding site GoFundMe. I don’t think anybody could have predicted that, four years later, he would be found guilty of professional misconduct by the Health Care Complaints Commission. I was drawn to browsing the GoFundMe site after I saw a TV news piece that drew attention to the plight of yet another child for whom donations were urgently needed to enable life-saving brain cancer surgery.
“I remember finding it difficult to reconcile why in Australia – where universal healthcare exists through Medicare – so many desperate patients and their families would be seeking donations to pay for urgent brain cancer surgery from just one individual surgeon. It is well recognised that if surgery is to be routinely allowed in public hospitals, it must have sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the balance of risk, benefit and cost can be justified. It is not so well recognised that, should evidence be lacking, individual cases can be supported through discussion and recommendation by multidisciplinary cancer meetings or through clinical trials approved by hospital human research and ethics committees.”
Is Labor setting Michele Bullock up for failure? — Caroline Di Russo (The Australian) ($): “Last week the Albanese government announced Michele Bullock would replace Philip Lowe as the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia. Bullock is a lifer at the RBA and replaced Guy Debelle as the deputy governor in April last year. She is clearly qualified for the role and there appears to be little, if any, doubt about her ability to do it. And that really should be the end of it: competent person is appointed to commensurate role. Instead, the fourth sentence of Jim Chalmers’ statement refers to Bullock as the first female governor of the RBA.
“True to form, the Albanese government never misses an opportunity to tick a box and indulge in pointless identitarianism. After all, the political solution to any problem is to appoint a woman. The reality is — regardless of competence — a bloke was never going to be appointed governor. That’s because, in 2023, being male means you’re fundamentally unsuitable for anything except self-flagellation and paying tax. And while the blokes who run the Labor Party are revelling in arrogant self-congratulation, a successful RBA governor needs more than a simple blessing from the treasurer who appointed her.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)
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Education Minister Jason Clare will address the National Press Club.
Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)
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Author Graham Perrett will speak about his new book, The Long Story, at Avid Reader bookshop.
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, Treasury and Employment Andrew Leigh will speak about a more competitive Labor Party at Per Capita.
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney, the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership’s Noel Pearson, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, journalist Kerry O’Brien, the First Nations Referendum Working Group’s Thomas Mayo, constitutional law professor Anne Twomey and more will speak about why the Voice to Parliament is essential for all Australians at Sydney Town Hall.
