CLEAN-UP AFTER DEADLY WEATHER
The clean-up is set to get underway today after extreme weather across three states left a woman dead, homes destroyed and towns on flood watch, AAP reports.
Strong winds and rain, which began on Sunday evening, resulted in the death of a 63-year-old woman after a tree struck a cabin at a holiday park in Moama near the NSW-Victoria border on Monday, Nine News said. Her husband was taken to hospital and treated for minor injuries.
The AAP reports more than 120,000 Victorians were left without power on Monday due to the weather, with 660 homes damaged by the winds and abnormally high tides. The Bureau of Meteorology says low-lying properties in Tasmania could be under threat from flood waters with evacuation warnings in place, while the ABC reports thousands of homes and businesses in Tasmania remain without power.
The extreme weather comes as politicians continue to bicker over environmental reforms. The Sydney Morning Herald reports Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has had a dig at the Greens for getting in the way of the government passing legislation to create an Environment Protection Agency. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese caused a stir when he told The West Australian yesterday the government could water down the agency’s powers in a bid to gain the Coalition’s support to get the legislation through Parliament. Rather than having the power to approve or block projects, the new watchdog would instead just oversee existing nature protection laws, the ABC said.
The SMH quoted Greens environment spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young as saying on Monday: “Labor caving in on environment laws would be the final nail in the coffin for Labor’s environmental credibility before the next election.” In response, Plibersek cited Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather addressing a CFMEU rally last week. “[The Greens] are more interested in defending [former union boss] John Setka than defending the environment,” the minister said.
The political fighting comes as the Clean Energy Council’s latest investment readout shows Australia could miss its renewable energy target without a significant increase in financial commitments for new electricity generation in the last months of the year, the AAP highlights.
MISSING HOUSING TARGETS
Talking of missing targets, construction bodies have welcomed new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showing a 10.4% increase in the number of dwelling approvals during July but warned the national housing accord is still set to be missed, the AAP reports. The newswire quotes Master Builders Australia chief executive Denita Wawn as saying: “If we remain at this pace, we’re looking at creating about 831,000 new homes over the next five years.” The housing accord says 1.2 million new homes need to be built by the end of the decade.
Meanwhile, Workplace Relations Minister Murray Watt has backed Labor’s industrial relations changes ahead of his meeting with “frustrated” mining and business representatives in Perth today, The Australian reports. The paper highlights the industry’s belief Labor’s multi-employer bargaining and “same job, same pay” changes will undermine the Pilbara mining region. It’s understood Watt will seek to ease concerns but won’t walk away from any of the industrial relations changes.
Watt said on Monday: “It’s surprising that [Opposition Leader] Peter Dutton and his WA-based workplace relations spokesperson Michaelia Cash want to make life harder for local workers, by repealing our workplace laws. We also strongly support the mining industry in Western Australia and we support those mining companies, unions and workers who are seeking to collectively bargain. I certainly won’t criticise employers and unions who seek to reach a workplace agreement.”
Albanese and his cabinet are on a campaign blitz in WA this week with a series of announcements being made. However, they risk being eclipsed by Wednesday’s GDP data, especially after Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he would not be surprised if growth was “soft and subdued” and claimed successive interest rate rises were “smashing the economy”. The prime minister defended those comments yesterday, the AFR said, and added economists are predicting tomorrow’s data will show the slowest rate of GDP growth since the early 1990s recession, excluding the pandemic downturn.
All of which will need some seriously good political spinning from the government, which might be a tad tricky given The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday the prime minister’s communications chief has resigned. Brett Mason’s exit comes nine months after he took on the role following Liz Fitch’s resignation. The paper said Mason, who is reportedly off to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, is set to be replaced by Kevin Rudd’s former press secretary Fiona Sugden.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
(Apologies in advance for the slight UK focus in the next two sections, it won’t happen again…)
Harry Potter fans were left disappointed on Sunday after gathering at London’s King’s Cross railway station hoping for a nod to J.K. Rowling’s famous books.
Those in attendance had hoped to hear an announcement that the fictional Hogwarts Express would be leaving from platform nine and three-quarters at 11am on September 1, as has happened in previous years, the Press Association said.
Unfortunately, there was no repeat of the “tradition” which attracted hundreds of people last year. There was no announcement and the made-up train wasn’t featured on the departure board either.
PA said Potter fans booed when neither occurred.
To be fair though, they had been warned. Warner Bros Discovery issued a statement back in July declaring: “Come 1st September, fans are strongly discouraged from travelling to Kings Cross as there will be no event, departure board or countdown at the station.”
Say What?
Regrettably, I think we all forgot to wish him a happy birthday at the 08:30 [meeting] this morning, which I feel a bit embarrassed about.
Sir Keir Starmer’s official spokesperson
In a big oops, the UK’s prime minister’s entire senior team forgot to wish him a happy birthday on Monday. A No.10 insider was quoted by The Guardian as claiming it was “really bad” no-one remembered Starmer’s 62nd birthday. The PM probably has more than enough on his plate to worry about such things though.
CRIKEY RECAP
The opposition leader could have said the government has no business prying into people’s sexuality, even on a voluntary basis. He could have said the census is already large enough and further expansion isn’t justified. Instead, he labelled it “woke”. Why?
Clearly he wants to paint Labor as the creatures of a minority of LGBTIQA+ people, while he represents the “vast majority” of ordinary (read: heterosexual) Australians.
This peculiar othering of LGBTIQA+ people passed without notice amid the furore caused by the government’s stuff-up. What also passed unexplored was the argument from LGBTIQA+ groups that not having a census question was not merely a broken election promise by Labor, which it was, but also one that made them, in the words of one representative, feel “invisible and demeaned“.
That seemed to sum up a widespread feeling among the LGBTIQA+ community that a census question not merely generates valuable data for policymakers, but its absence also showed they were once again being deliberately ignored by the census being “straightwashed”.
Even if we were to debate this on the grounds of free speech, it’s not clear this would be favourable to these two tech barons. It’s easy to get caught up in the online discourse about free speech, but much of it revolves around America’s extremely limited restrictions on speech. The reality is the majority of Australians want to see the internet more regulated. The vast majority sided with Australian regulators over Elon Musk in another internet stoush. Being a free speech absolutist is an extreme position, even if it might not feel that way when you spend time in online spaces where these issues are debated. It’s worth mentioning, too, that at least some of the charges for Durov are related to providing encryption services. The details of these remain to be seen but these unprecedented charges may in fact be a genuine attack on free speech.
But really, this debate is not about that — or at least, not primarily. This is about two companies who pick and choose when to champion free speech, and when to ignore it, or choose to twist its definition to mean something else altogether. As Musk accuses the Brazilian judge of being an evil dictator, consider this comparison: the legal systems of two democratic nations versus two tech oligarchs, elected by no-one, flaunting the rules of the countries they choose to operate in. Who do you think is exerting unchecked and extreme power over the way we are allowed to talk?
The past year has been a brutal one for the Australian media industry. Job cuts have been made all over the country (Crikey has been tracking them here), with more than 400 roles slashed in the past few months at Seven West, Nine Entertainment and News Corp alone. And the industry is set for even more pain as the money from publishing deals with tech giants Meta and Google dries up.
Despite the cuts, however, some of us are eating well. And by us, we mean those in the C-suites. Today Crikey rounds up the profits and executive pay at the biggest media companies in the country so you can see how much corporate executives are making relative to the performance of their companies (or the job cuts they’ve made).
READ ALL ABOUT IT
UK suspends some arms exports to Israel over humanitarian law concerns (al-Jazeera)
Netanyahu not doing enough to free Gaza hostages, says Biden (BBC)
France confronts horror of rape and drugging case as 51 men go on trial (The New York Times) ($)
Trump tells Fox News he had ‘every right’ to meddle with 2020 election (Daily Beast)
Nasa astronaut reports ‘strange noise’ from Boeing Starliner spacecraft (The Guardian)
Celebrity ‘Russian spy’ whale found dead in Norwegian waters (CNN)
THE COMMENTARIAT
‘It’s time to give up on normal’: What winter’s weird weather means for the warm months ahead — David Bowman (The Conversation): Heavy winds struck south-east Australia over the weekend as a series of cold fronts moved across the continent. It followed a high fire danger in Sydney and other parts of New South Wales last week, and a fire in south-west Sydney that threatened homes.
The severe weather rounds out a weird winter across Australia. The nation’s hottest-ever winter temperature was recorded when Yampi Sound in Western Australia reached 41.6C on Tuesday. Elsewhere across Australia, winter temperatures have been way above average.
We can look to the positives: spring flowers are blooming early, and people have donned t-shirts and hit the beach. But there’s a frightening undercurrent to this weather.
Earth’s climate has become dangerously unstable, and it’s only a matter of time before we get the bad combination of hot and dry weather, strong winds and a spark. None of this should come as a surprise. The sooner we stop expecting Australia’s weather to be “normal”, the sooner we can prepare for life in a wild climate.
Is Anthony Albanese fated to lead the last majority government? — Lidija Ivanovski (AFR): In the lead-up to the next federal poll, expect to see Dutton and his disciples like doomsday preppers warning of a Green infiltration of a future Labor government, while conveniently ignoring his own glaring predicament. Expect to see team Albo decrying any suggestion of it. And fair enough. The images of Gillard and Bob Brown sitting down to a signing ceremony in 2010 with wattle pinned to their lapels is still the stuff of trauma for seasoned Labor staffers. “Never again,” they say. The other fly in the ointment of that scenario is personal; Albanese has carved a career fighting off Greens at a local level. His loathing of their pantomime politics would see him prefer to deal with anyone but.
Still, the major parties might not have a choice. Marriages of convenience (even political ones) are just that — convenient. You’d rather not be there, but you’ve run out of options.
