CLIVE’S LATEST JIVE
Clive Palmer has accused the Commonwealth of breaching our ASEAN free trade agreement in regards to coal exploration permits, Guardian Australia reports, in a whopping $41.3 billion damages claim brought by his company Zeph Investment. The Commonwealth’s silks dismissed the allegation as completely “unsubstantiated”. If this is ringing a bell, it may be because Zeph is already suing over another alleged ASEAN breach regarding WA stopping Palmer from getting compo over his Pilbara project — at the time, WA said it may have bankrupted the state coffers, as the ABC explains. I tells ya, Palmer’s lawyers must be living the high life. The Attorney-General’s Department has revealed the mining billionaire and his many companies have launched more than 30 court cases against the WA government and the Commonwealth “in recent years”, The West Australian ($) reports, where Palmer personally was the plaintiff in nearly half (12). But the department said the number could be higher, because a search for all his company names was not “feasible”.
To more fossil fuel news and a new code of conduct for the sale of LNG on the east coast kicks in today, the AFR ($) reports. It enforces the $12 a gigajoule cap on wholesale prices first introduced in December, but also includes price cap exemptions for smaller producers who sell to us rather than overseas. The rules put “government at the centre of the gas market”, the Australia Petroleum Production & Exploration Association (APPEA) said in a statement via Reuters, and urgently called for investment in gas to avoid shortages.
SWIMMING WITH THE FISHES
Mermaids took former PM Harold Holt out to sea, never to be seen again. It’s a story that is being used as evidence in an important native title dispute involving Rove McManus’s wife, actor Tasma Walton as The Age’s ($) Jack Latimore delves into, over a 13,000 square kilometre patch from Werribee to Wilsons Promontory in Victoria. Several folks in the Bunurong Land and Sea Council, of which Walton is a part, say their ancestors lived there when James Cook arrived — Walton told the Federal Court about her cultural ties to the area, including when her grandmother told her the spot where Holt was swimming “is mermaid country. Her belief was that [mermaids] took him”.
Meanwhile, 47% of people are pro-Voice to Parliament, 43% are opposed and 10% don’t know yet, according to Guardian Australia’s latest poll. By demographic, people over 55 (34% will vote Yes) and Coalition voters (33% will vote Yes) were the stragglers. It comes as 80% of Indigenous peoples support the Voice, according to Indigenous leader and lawyer Noel Pearson when speaking to the Queensland Media Club yesterday, the Brisbane Times ($) reports. Just under a third (28%) of the country’s Indigenous peoples live in Queensland, the AFR ($) adds. Lockhart River Mayor Wayne Butcher also spoke, saying constitutional recognition was crucial, pointing out quite correctly that bodies such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission were casually binned when new governments came in.
CHILL PILL
The abortion pill will become way easier to get under sweeping changes from August that’ll see every doctor in the country allowed to prescribe it, and every pharmacy in the country allowed to stock it, the SMH ($) reports. The changes will also allow nurse practitioners to prescribe it — they account for about 1% of nurses and can be found in sexual health clinics, Indigenous health organisations, and mobile services for the homeless. The abortion pill is known overseas as RU486 but here we call it the MS-2 Step — you can take it up to nine weeks into a pregnancy (compared with 24 weeks for surgical abortions, depending on the state). But only one in 10 doctors and a third of pharmacists can deal with the abortion pill right now because of all the certification and registration red tape.
Meanwhile Victoria Health is probably going to cut 305 full-time health staff in the next year, the Department of Health’s Euan Wallace told an all-staff meeting, as Guardian Australia reports. He said the department had to do its bit in the May state budget’s plan to find $175 million in 2023-24 and $544 million in 2024-25 from public service workforce cuts. But it won’t be frontline staff on the chopping block, a spokesperson said. From healthcare to welfare, and debt collectors should return the “shameful” $11.6 million in taxpayer money they got from welfare recipients in the illegal robodebt scheme, the Australian Council of Social Service told Guardian Australia. The Greens’ Janet Rice agreed, saying it was “disgusting” that Dun and Bradstreet (now Illion), Australian Receivables Limited and Probe Operations profited from the suffering of innocent people. Earlier this year, the Albanese government said Services Australia wouldn’t work with private debt collectors any more.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
In 2008, Greg Ross had what some might call nearly impossible in Australia — a high-flying job in the arts as acting CEO of a theatre company. So why did he feel like utter crap? The 57-year-old was staring morosely out the window on a flight home to Perth, run down and stressed out to within an inch of his life. Once the wheels jolted the plane on to dry land, he’d made up his mind: he’d quit and become a truckie. Ross had no experience, but he wanted to drive “the biggest road trains in the world: five trailers, 190 feet long, 480 tonnes, two engines”. He’d always found machines fascinating, telling Guardian Australia he loved “extracting the performance” from them. Once the somewhat dubious HR person at the trucking company gave him a trial, he was smitten. At the wheel of a road train, “You are the machine,” he says.
Now he does 12-hour work days, 14 days in a row — it seems like a lot for someone post-burnout, but as the earthy Australian landscapes unfold in front of him, and Leonard Cohen croons softly from his stereo, it’s a kind of meditation. “Other times, I just want silence,” he says. “If you’re doing a 300-kilometre round trip, the ability to think is wonderful.” After a “sublime, tear-inducing” Cohen concert in Perth, a moved Ross wrote a glowing review that was read by a woman in Germany named Ann–Kristin. The pair corresponded for a while, meeting in person for the first time shortly afterwards. The loved-up couple will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary next year. Thinking back on his corporate days, he says he was an “overconfident … prick”. Nowadays, a serene life has left Ross feeling like an entirely different person. “The glass is always half full with me,” he says. “And there’s a waiter coming with another bottle.”
Hoping you choose the rooms that you live in with care, today and always.
SAY WHAT?
I know that the Labor government doesn’t stigmatise those on welfare. We certainly have increased their Commonwealth rent support, we’ve increased the single mothers payments, we’ve increased Newstart. I don’t think the journey stops there.
Bill Shorten
It’s a big call from the former Labor leader, who may be forgetting voter anger over his predecessor Julia Gillard’s single-parent benefit change that left single mothers between $60 and $100 worse off a week by shifting them off parenting payments once their youngest kid turned eight. Gillard, who has barely been allowed to live it down, said she wanted to get more women into work.
CRIKEY RECAP
“Under ministers Scott Morrison and Marise Payne, a group of senior welfare bureaucrats drew up a plan to start levying welfare debts on citizens who had previously received welfare payments, based on government data. Services Australia worked up a crude algorithm. It took Australian Taxation Office data about employment income and ‘matched’ it to histories of welfare payments. If the algorithm showed that a recipient had received a benefit when their income was too high, a debt would be raised.
“The onus would be on welfare recipients to prove they were innocent: if they couldn’t explain, or didn’t contact the department, they would simply be issued with a debt. Commercial debt collectors were engaged to harass victims. In September 2016, the system started to churn out 20,000 debt notices a week.”
“So DHS officials pursued what turned out to be an effective end-run of the Senate and the DSS. They told themselves that the DSS’ legal advice — which would be reaffirmed twice between then and the 2015 budget process — was wrong, and got their own legal advice from their own lawyers, though the request was vague and addressed other legal issues, not income averaging. And in January 2015, they began preparing a minute that would make its way through Payne to Morrison about the proposal, in consultation with the DSS.
“That meant the DHS had to find a way around or through the DSS. They opted to pretend that the income averaging at the core of the proposal had been removed. The commission found that DHS official Mark Withnell had changed the wording of the PAYG proposal to remove any reference to ‘smoothing’, ‘averaging’, ‘apportioning’ or the need for legislative change …”
“The one reason that Threads’ success is worth rooting for is that its development bucks a trend on the internet by building something that’s more open. Threads is built on ActivityPub, which is an open web protocol like HTTP and email. While not yet operational, Meta plans to make the app compatible with other ActivityPub services like Mastodon and WordPress.
“The point of that technical mumbo jumbo is to demonstrate that Threads isn’t a new little walled garden on the internet that doesn’t connect with anything else (the same cannot be said of many of Meta’s previous services). Instead, it’s something that can be built on, something that can be transformed and, since Meta has promised to let people to transfer their networks to other ActivityPub services, something that can be walked away from — meaning the company needs to keep serving its users or face losing them.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Foxconn dumps $19.5bn Vedanta chip plan in blow to India (Al Jazeera)
Erdogan links Sweden’s NATO membership to Turkey’s EU accession (Reuters)
History made as first transgender woman crowned Miss Netherlands (euronews)
Dutch PM Mark Rutte to quit politics after government collapse (BBC)
Heatwave last summer killed 61,000 people in Europe, research finds (The Guardian)
Biden meets King Charles III for the first time since coronation (CNN)
THE COMMENTARIAT
On the weekend my footy team lost. On Monday, there was a $190k bounty on my head — Kevin Yam (The Age) ($): “My alleged crimes were calling for action in response to China’s crackdown on Hong Kong in meetings with Australian members of Parliament and the foreign affairs minister, as well as testifying by video link before United States Congress. Hong Kong is my birthplace. I moved to Melbourne in 1986 as a 10-year-old and did my secondary and university education here before moving back to Hong Kong. I spent more than two decades there as a student, lawyer and democracy activist, until I returned to Melbourne in 2022. What Hong Kong authorities now accuse me of has all taken place since 2022, when I returned to Australia as an Australian citizen.
“I first got involved in Hong Kong legal sector politics in 2014, which led to me and some friends founding Hong Kong’s Progressive Lawyers Group in 2015. This led to pro-Beijing media in Hong Kong running a full-page story on me being a ‘black hand’. However, before my return to Australia in 2022, I had already been ‘retired’ from activism for a few years. Only after resettling in Australia did I think that since I’ve got a voice in a free country, I had to use it for my beloved Hong Kong. I knew that speaking out like this would mean I could never go back to my birthplace. But I had no idea how much my recent actions had attracted Beijing’s attention until that tweet arrived.”
Strange Indigenous obsessions mar official citizenship booklet — Greg Sheridan (The Australian) ($): “What are the most sacred beliefs of Indigenous Australians? Surely it’s that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the saviour of humanity. Because, just to let mere facts obstruct stereotypes for a second, the majority of Indigenous Australians identify as Christians. You’d never guess this reading the absurd booklet that the Department of Home Affairs forces those folks seeking to become Australian citizens to study and regurgitate. I once thought such a process would be beneficial. Little did I reckon on the wretched, corrosive power of identity politics and contemporary ideological fashion to infect every area of national life.
“The booklet contains some useful information but fully expresses the dismal ideological obsessions of our time. In a publication of nearly 90 pages, festooned with photos of people and symbols the authors think praiseworthy — chiefly Indigenous Australians — and with a truly weird account of our history, there isn’t a single acknowledgment of the positive contribution of Christians and Christianity. Since the 19th century the majority of Australians were Christian. More than 96% of soldiers who enlisted in World War I were Christian. The vast majority of Australian philanthropic effort has been Christian and Jewish. There isn’t a sentence acknowledging this.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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Greens Leader Adam Bandt, Labor MP Josh Burns, independent MP Zoe Daniel, human rights lawyer Kavita Naidu and the Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss will discuss new coal and gas projects in Australia at a public forum at St Kilda Town Hall.
Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)
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Author Grant Parkin will talk about his new book, Yourself or Someone Like You, at Avid Reader bookshop.
