20/23 VISION
Let us import wine and lobsters to China again, and free the Australians held on dubious charges while you’re at it, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong told Chinese Communist Party’s Foreign Affairs director Wang Yi in a “frank” conversation, as the ABC reports. News anchor Cheng Lei and democracy activist Yang Hengjun are languishing in detention on espionage charges shrouded in secrecy, as the SMH ($) reports. Wong didn’t say much, only that she “raised the circumstances” of both Australians. To transparency matters back home now and the Centre for Public Integrity has warned that Victoria’s political donation laws may be “entrenching incumbency” and damaging “political equality”, The Age ($) reports, because money is drowning out good ideas. Labor’s donation cap of $4320 over four years is good, the think tank said, but campaign spending needs to be reined in. Victoria and Western Australia are the only states without electoral spending caps, the paper notes.
It comes as Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has admitted doctors who conduct voluntary assisted dying under state laws could be prosecuted under Commonwealth ones, the Brisbane Times ($) reports. A Howard-era amendment to the Commonwealth criminal code says you can’t use phones and computers to discuss suicide, and it’s made doctors reluctant to use telehealth to support such patients. The paper FOI’d docs that said Dreyfus was aware of the issue. Meanwhile the Law Council of Australia says the states having different ages of consent puts young people at risk of unwittingly criminalising themselves, the SMH ($) says. In most jurisdictions, it’s 16, but in SA and Tasmania it’s 17. Plus NSW, Victoria and the ACT have “affirmative consent” laws where an enthusiastic yes is required, but South Australia and Western Australia have “lower thresholds”, as the paper puts it.
BANKING ON IT
Treasurer Jim Chalmers will probably announce the new Reserve Bank governor today, the SMH ($) reports, but it had better not be a pal of the government’s, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says. Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy and Finance Secretary Jenny Wilkinson are frontrunners after Philip Lowe’s seven-year term completes in September. (The Australian ($) adds deputy governor Michele Bullock is up there too, and says insiders reckon Chalmers’ pick will be a woman.) But Dutton says even the optics of a governor who was a senior figure in either the Labor or Coalition governments would leave the pick “tainted”. Former governor Bernie Fraser says that’s “nonsense” — we need someone with a good grasp of fiscal policy, he pointed out. It comes as new rules for how the central bank sets our interest rate will be the next priority, the Oz says — known as the “Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy”.
Meanwhile Dutton says former PM Scott Morrison is innocent until proven guilty, even though a royal commission published a 990-page report that found Morrison both misled Parliament and didn’t make sure the robodebt scheme was legal. Still, Dutton told 2GB’s Ray Hadley as Sky News reports, it’s not a judge and jury process, and said Labor was trying to get “political advantage” out of this ahead of the Fadden byelection on Saturday. Memo to Dutton: Fadden is held by outgoing Liberal MP Stuart Robert, the former Coalition government services minister who admitted that he lied to Australians about robodebt because of “cabinet solidarity”, Guardian Australia explains. Robert told the royal commissioner: “As a dutiful cabinet minister, ma’am, that’s what we do.” Dismal.
COMPETING VOICES
The No campaign lobby group Advance Australia is running two other Facebook pages, one called “Referendum News” and the other called “Not Enough”, according to a Guardian Australia “exclusive” that Crikey’s Cam Wilson reported on in May. The Guardian’s story does reveal some recent spend (well, a ballpark): “Not Enough” spent between $29,900 and $40,000 getting its ads into your feed, while Referendum News spent between $20,000 and $39,840 on the same. As both outlets report, neither Facebook page acknowledges its connection to the anti-Voice lobby group behind it… nor, one might also note, does The Guardian’s story acknowledge Crikey’s.
Meanwhile actor Tasma Walton fears for her family and her livelihood after her involvement in a native title dispute before the Federal Court became public, The Age ($) reports. Her lawyer, Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal Corporation’s Chris Athanasiou, told the court she wants to withdraw from the proceedings because she has become the “poster girl” for the “no case”. But the judge wasn’t persuaded, saying they were mid-trial. It comes as First Nations folks across the Pilbara region backed the Voice to Parliament when Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles and Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney met with Traditional Owners at the annual on-country bush meeting at Yule River, Guardian Australia reports. Importantly, however, across the country only 84.5% of eligible Indigenous people are registered to vote, the Brisbane Times reports, well short of the broader figure of 97.2% of Australians overall.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
Wimbledon, the oldest and most famous tennis championship in the world, is made possible by a heck of a lot of brains: those of 500 carefully picked enthusiasts from the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club (AELTC), the 1300 employees it recruits for the nail-biting fortnight (including ball kids from the local schools), the 5000 third-party workers who provide food, cleaning and security — and a single hawk named Rufus. He’s been employed for 15 years by the AELTC after his predecessor Hamish retired, and he has one job: hunt pigeons. Or at least, shoo them away from the courts. Rufus, whose official job title is “Bird Scarer”, has some 17 hectares to patrol with his eagle eye during the championships. It might sound glamorous — indeed he frequently meets with press and fans, becoming as synonymous with Wimbledon as strawberries and cream — but it has been dangerous, too.
On an innocuous evening in 2012, Rufus was relaxing in a car parked on a leafy street in south-west London when a brazen thief — or indeed thieves — noticed him. When the Davis family, his owners, realised he was gone, they were devastated, as The Telegraph tells it. They have four falcons and another hawk, but Rufus was the “chief”, not to mention a near-superstitious overhead sight each morning at Wimbledon. The police were on the case and social media was aghast, sharing a #FindRufus hashtag. Could a murderous pigeon enthusiast have snatched him? Strangely, they do exist! Then a hawk matching Rufus’ description was found at Wimbledon Common — the family cheered when it was their dear Rufus. His feathers were undoubtedly ruffled, and he was promptly given loving baths and lots of quails to eat. He has “refined, expensive tastes”, Imogen Davis said. Good for him.
Hoping you get the same level of TLC as Rufus today, and have a restful weekend.
SAY WHAT?
We’ve made it clear to the government we don’t believe it should be somebody who is familiar, if you like, to the government, somebody who has been working very closely with the treasurer, or the finance minister, or the prime minister.
Peter Dutton
The opposition leader doesn’t want the new RBA governor to be a pal of the government’s, although presumably didn’t have an issue with his predecessor Scott Morrison stacking the independent tribunal that reviews government decisions, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, with Coalition pals before the last election.
CRIKEY RECAP
“We have a party gagging on an identity crisis as though it were a particularly troublesome post-nasal drip. The ongoing response to Labor’s inability to merge its lore (Albanese is the son of a single mum who grew up in public housing) with its reality (pension support below the poverty line in the worst housing crisis in the nation’s history) is a hissy-fit of arm-folding, self-imposed stasis …
“A self-perpetuating tantrum that demands obsequiousness from the beholder and titty-time from a base that itself is becoming ossified, wandering around the empty halls of its hallowed past like Miss Havisham in an oversized, tattered It’s Time shirt. The only way to discontinue the daily whiplash is for the government, the ALP and its zealots to stoop down, dust off and finally don the black hat.”
“As if PwC didn’t have a bad enough year, the embattled firm has been drawn into the robodebt scandal. Fearful of any more bad press, PwC has acted swiftly after the robodebt royal commission highlighted that the firm was paid $853,859 for a report it never delivered. PwC has said it will repay the money in full — which would mean a roughly 0.03% hit to its annual revenue of $2.6 billion — and has also parted ways with a partner who gave evidence to the commission.
“To be fair to PwC, it appears the consultancy had been fully prepared to deliver the report, which had been pitched by the Department of Human Services (DHS) in January 2017 as an external process review of the robodebt scheme. But a mysterious direction from then-DHS secretary Kathryn Campbell in June 2017 to PwC saying it didn’t need to finalise the report meant the consultancy was off the hook.”
“Johnson is now, Semafor reports, shopping around a podcast on the classics. He has of course made his stated love of the classics a big part of his ‘bumbling posho’ persona — telling radio station LBC that Pericles is his favourite politician, and sprinkling references to the Roman emperor Augustus throughout the saga where he removed the whip from 21 Tory MPs rebelling over Brexit in 2019.
“This is the Augustus who famously purged his former allies to establish his autocratic rule, and who Johnson called ‘a chill and subtle tyrant’ during a 2016 debate on ‘Greece v Rome‘. So when BoJo and his wife Carrie announced the birth of their third child together — and Boris’ eighth (that we know for sure) — what other name would they choose than Frank Alfred Odysseus Johnson?”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Hollywood actors poised to strike, join writers on picket lines (Reuters)
Stagnant UK economy lagging behind EU, new figures show (euronews)
Kosovo’s PM gets doused with water, inciting a brawl in parliament (CBC)
Guatemala prosecutor suspends party of anti-corruption election candidate (The Guardian)
Thailand’s Pita says he won’t give up PM bid despite parliament loss (Al Jazeera)
Italy swelters under deadly ‘Cerberus’ heat wave which could break European temperature records (CNN)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Taiwan solution is diplomacy rather than nuclear hell — Bob Carr (The Australian) ($): “For its part, Taiwan steers away from a declaration of independence. Only 13 of the world’s nations see Taiwan as independent. But it has enjoyed self-government with a contestable political system and a prosperous economy. This strategic ambiguity has served us. A Taiwan that resembles Hong Kong is not desirable. I said in my recent interview with Mark Bouris, it would be preferable to a nuclear war. On what a war would look like, I’d trust over Monk the judgment of Admiral James Stavridis, head of NATO from 2009 to 2013. Stavridis also led two carrier strike groups and saw action in the Gulf. His novel, 2034, imagines a US-China war. He describes the loss of two American fleets because of China’s cyber and missile strength.
“After this shattering blow, a weak US president does what John F Kennedy declined to do in the Cuban missile crisis: resort to the first use of nuclear weapons, specifically over the Chinese city of Zhanjiang, population 7 million. The Chinese response destroys San Diego and Galveston. Stavridis’ dystopia has been acknowledged as credible by two former US secretaries of defence, Robert Gates and James Mattis. This author then does something no-one else has attempted: a description of the new world order that follows the war. China and the US are catastrophically maimed by the hurtling of tactical nukes. Goodbye to any notion of a US-led world order. In a swirl of radioactive winds, leadership passes to a triumvirate of India, Russia and Iran.”
Fadden byelection is Dutton’s immediate hurdle but party reform is the bigger challenge — Michelle Grattan (The Conversation): “Labor has made the most of the discredited Robert, who faces other integrity questions separate to his role in robodebt. Despite the welter of bad publicly about the former MP, some in Labor believe voters’ thoughts will be squarely on their own personal circumstances. The Liberals have going for them the cost-of-living pressures. They are also seeking to exploit concern over crime, targeting the state Labor government, which has lost its pandemic gloss and faces an election next year. The Liberals are urging voters to send messages to both federal and state Labor.
“Both sides are focusing on the local. The Liberals’ Cameron Caldwell is a long-time councillor with a small-business background. He has a bit of history — prior to the 2012 Queensland election he was dropped as a candidate after a complaint that he had, some years before, attended a ‘swingers club’ (dressed in a pirate outfit). He said he was there with his wife for a drink. Dutton, campaigning in Fadden on Thursday, promoted Caldwell as a ‘local champion’. Labor’s candidate, Letitia Del Fabbro, is a nurse educator at Griffith University. Like Mary Doyle in Aston, Del Fabbro ran at last year’s federal election, which means she had already done the spadework by the time the byelection came.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kaurna Country (also known as Adelaide)
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Assistant Minister for Charities Andrew Leigh will hold a town hall meeting for the charity sector at Adelaide Town Hall.
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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Harvard Medical School’s Ben Shore will give the Ian Torode guest lecture at The Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne.
Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)
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Author Anita Heiss will host a book swap to raise funds for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation at Avid Reader bookshop.
