SECRET G-G’S BUSINESS
The governor-general put off appointing former prime minister Scott Morrison to the five secret portfolios he took on during the pandemic, according to FOI’d documents as reported by Guardian Australia. David Hurley took two weeks to sign off on the last two ministries Morrison assigned himself — Treasury and Home Affairs — compared with one day for Health earlier in the piece. The Guardian continues that Morrison’s letters to the G-G included no reasons for him taking on the last three portfolios, though for the first two he argued “the severity of the coronavirus crisis requires that we are prepared for all eventualities”. Morrison’s actions will be scrutinised by former High Court Justice Virginia Bell — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has indicated he’ll strongarm Morrison into participating if he refuses. It’s not like the now-lonely backbencher is busy — though yesterday he announced he’d joined a union. He’s an honorary advisory board member of the International Democrat Union, Brisbane Times reports, which is a centre-right amalgamation of political parties. Ring a bell? That’s the conference he attended in Tokyo last month.
Speaking of Morrison — the AUKUS deal he signed with Boris Johnson and Joe Biden is the basis of a scathing attack from China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, the ABC reports. It says the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a “lopsided” report about the pact — China reckons our intention to build nuclear submarines violates a non-proliferation treaty and the IAEA is looking the other way. A ministry spokeswoman said lots of other countries are worried about it. It’s the first time China has spoken ill of the IAEA over AUKUS, but US and Australian officials reportedly scoffed considering Beijing has been developing its own nuclear submarines, as the broadcaster reports.
A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
Even though we’re buying electric vehicles at triple the rate we were, our car pollution has fallen by only 2%. Why? We’re also buying loads of gas-guzzling SUVs and utes, and that supersedes the good work, the SMH reports. A report from the National Transport Commission found about half of all cars sold last year were SUVs — but there are barely any low-emission options for SUVs and utes in Australia. So what’s the deal? Cars are about 9% of Australia’s emissions, not least because the average emissions of our cars are 160 grams a kilometre. But in Europe it’s just 115 grams a kilometre. The reason for that is fuel-efficiency standards — or rather a lack thereof in Oz, thanks to a decade of inaction from the Coalition government, as I write for Crikey (if you don’t mind a little self-promotion). Fuel-efficiency standards force manufacturers to produce lower-emission cars, and most everyone in the OECD except us (and Russia) has them. In short, it means Australia has become a global dumping ground for dirty cars, and we are snapping them up.
It comes as Australia has been named and shamed on the world stage for funding just a tenth of our fair share of global climate action, according to a new study from Oxfam and ActionAid Australia. We pledged to establish a $100 billion fund with a bunch of other countries at 2009’s climate summit, as Guardian Australia reports. When you split the bill, our share is $4 billion a year — but we’ve only contributed $400 million a year since. Meanwhile, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has ordered a review of all developments in Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula, which is home to more than a million pieces of Indigenous rock art. Some date back tens of thousands of years (!), The Australian ($) reports. Plibersek has an independent expert preparing a report to work out the impact on Indigenous cultural heritage sites — some say the area should be UNESCO listed. But Woodside Energy’s expansion is one of a bunch of multibillion-dollar projects in the area.
KING, QUEEN, JESTER
There’s so much zany news surrounding Queen Elizabeth II’s death at 96, I just had to bring you some of the highlights. First, her bees have been informed, as the ABC reports. It’s a superstitious tradition that has been around for centuries — the palace beekeeper said he went to Clarence House and Buckingham Palace on Friday to tell the seven bee hives of her death. “You knock on each hive and say, ‘The mistress is dead, but don’t you go. Your master will be a good master to you,’” he said. Second, King Charles had redundancy notices given to up to 100 employees at his former official residences while he was at a church service to honour the queen Sky News reports. Those affected include private secretaries, the finance office, the communications team and household staff.
In a mark of respect, McDonald’s will close all its UK restaurants on Monday for her funeral, 9News reports. She loved their double cheeseburgers (?). Crikey’s Charlie Lewis has many more quirky examples of brands paying their respects — the UFC, for instance, posted a memoriam in case anyone was wondering how the fighting world felt about the queen’s death. Politico is reporting that cashed-up mourners attending the funeral will be forbidden to fly there in a helicopter — they’ve been told it’s commercial flights only (the horror!). The BBC found it fitting to build a royal corgi family tree, which shows some of the weird and wacky names the queen gave her beloved dogs along the way (Myth, Disco, Mint, Sweep, Windsor Loyal Subject, and Windsor Quiz among them). The tree shows the dogs at the time of her death were, somewhat bizarrely, descended from a dog she received on her 18th birthday. May the weird content continue, I say.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
Could you do with a bit of shush? How about 17 years of it? Environmentalist and author John Francis spent nearly two decades shutting up. When he uttered his first words after not speaking for so long, he laughed at himself. Who’s voice was that, he wondered. Francis was 27 when he took his vow of silence, as ABC tells it, back in the 1970s. He had been arguing a lot with people about his decision to ditch cars after seeing an oil spill in California. His heart broke thinking of the bird and sea life that would have perished in that sticky black mess. But he found people got really irritated by his anti-car stance. “I said, you know what, I’m just going to shut up for the day,” Francis says. And that’s when he realised: he hadn’t been listening to people, not really anyway, because while they were talking he was thinking about what he would retort back to them. So he stayed zipped up.
He didn’t intend to say silent for 17 years, but Francis says “every day and every year I found something that was just so wonderful”. So much of our communication is non-verbal, he came to realise. And it didn’t stop him from getting his undergraduate degree, and then his PhD, nor learning to paint with watercolours and play the banjo. So what did he learn during those quiet years? That pearls of wisdom can be found in the most unlikely of places if people are given the chance to really be heard. That the inner dialogue can be very vain — but without the mind whirling about what one should or could have said, it becomes a quiet, calm place. And that humans must treat each other with kindness, so that our kindness will be extended to the problems in our surroundings — be it war, climate change, or any other crises. Everything is connected, and realising that is our superpower as a species. As artist Jenny Holzer once said: “It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender.”
Wishing you a little peace in your Thursday.
SAY WHAT?
I do know, from my experience in the health system, that sometimes you’ve just got to roll with the punches.
Natalie Hutchins
The Victorian education minister is in damage control after she told a Melbourne cancer patient who had to drive to Adelaide for an urgent brain tumour scan essentially to go with the flow. Right now, parts of Australia’s health system are comparable with a developing country’s, according to the AMA’s new president. He recommended that people bang down the doors of their local MPs to demand action.
CRIKEY RECAP
Sweden’s hard right has won, because progressives and liberals screwed up social democracy. Again
“About 100 years ago, a bunch of Swedish social democrats took a look at the European situation and decided they had a problem. Working-class revolutions had failed, Bolshevism was a dictatorship, and fascism had captured the patriotic vote. Working-class parties couldn’t capture a majority of the vote on their own, nor could such parties gain an overwhelming majority of the working class.
“Their answer was a turn away from class alone, and to the nation as a whole, with the idea of the folkhemmet — the nation as ‘the people’s house … The formulation allowed the SAP — the Swedish Social Democrats — to gain power, and hold it for just about all of the next 70 years, and about 85 of the last 100, while creating a society that largely abolished poverty without destroying enterprise and initiative.”
King Charles v pen and ink
“Any monarchy, particularly one as high-profile as the UK’s one, relies on projection. It has to earn the word ‘majesty’ through mystique and pageantry. The long reign of Elizabeth II helped, giving a sense of permanence, but it must be invested as much in the role as the person, allowing the seamless passing of that magic from one generation to another.
“Which could be a problem when the new king spruiks homeopathy, looks like a Pixar rendering of a depressed bat, and is apparently capable of losing a fight with a pen. Yep, that’s our new head of state, signing a condolence book for his mother with the wrong date and then coating his hands in pen ink (‘every stinking time!’ he huffs as he leaves the room, because of course this isn’t the first time he’s been bested by stationery).”
Scott Morrison lost Australia’s trust. Why then should we trust his secret $170bn submarine deal?
“It was a year ago this week that Scott Morrison appeared alongside Boris Johnson and Joe Biden to unveil the AUKUS security pact which would bind Australia, the UK and the US for decades. After years of work in the background, Morrison’s secret weapon was finally ready. Game-changing doesn’t quite capture it.
“AUKUS is the largest commitment to defence spending Australia has ever made — about $170 billion, according to the latest estimate from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. At a single stroke Morrison boxed Australia into a ‘forever’ pact with the Anglosphere powers, blindsided France, and ambushed the Labor opposition.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Trains in NSW to be free ‘indefinitely’ from next Wednesday as union steps up strike action (SBS)
End of the COVID-19 pandemic ‘is in sight’, WHO chief says (Al Jazeera)
In Pakistan’s record floods, villages are now desperate islands (The New York Times)
Armenia says 105 troops killed in Azerbaijan border clashes (BBC)
State of the Union: six takeaways from [EU President] Ursula von der Leyen’s keynote speech (EuroNews)
Three January 6 rioters charged in assault on officers found guilty of multiple offences (CNN)
Record number of young people in Japan rejecting marriage, survey shows (The Guardian)
US mortgage interest rates top 6% for first time since 2008 (Reuters)
Netflix estimates ad-supported tier will reach 40 million viewers by late 2023 (The Wall Street Journal) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Don’t ask me to give the queen a minute’s silence, ask me for the truth about British colonialism — Lidia Thorpe (Guardian Australia): “News of the queen’s death broke on the same day as my cousin’s funeral. My cousin, like more than 500 First Nations people in the last 30 years alone, died in custody. I was notified on Monday of another death in custody. The institutions that British colonisation brought here, from the education that erases us to the prisons that kill us, are designed to destroy the oldest living culture in the world. That’s the legacy of the crown in this country. The ‘British empire’ declared a war on these shores, against this country’s First Nations peoples. This led to massacres. And you want a minute’s silence from me. Their war continues and is still felt today — on our children, our men, our land, our water, the air we breathe. Yet we’re meant to kneel to the colonising force with our hands on our hearts?
“It is insulting that the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has called the September 22 public holiday a ‘national day of mourning for her majesty the queen’ when First Nations people have called for January 26 to be acknowledged as a day of mourning since 1938. We called for a day of mourning so that this country could understand how we’re still affected by colonisation today. We’re not grieving a singular human life; we’re reeling from the violence that is the legacy of the monarchy. Who gave permission for our flag to be lowered to half-mast? That power has been taken away from us, again.”
The ’90s are over: the republican movement needs a rebrand, and new faces — Osman Faruqi (The Age): “It’s probably time for those driving Australia’s republican movement to recognise that whatever they’ve been doing isn’t working — especially when it comes to engaging the generations usually the most primed to shake up things. When you picture the most prominent faces of the movement, and what exactly they’re campaigning for, it isn’t surprising republicanism has failed to gain traction, or momentum, among younger people.
“The two people most closely identified with the republican movement are former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and national chair of the movement Peter FitzSimons — also my colleague at The Sydney Morning Herald — both in their 60s. Turnbull reiterated his support for a republic earlier this year, after having been appointed chair of the republican advisory committee by Paul Keating in 1993, when he was in his 30s. It’s hard to think of anyone with a high profile in today’s movement who is in their 30s, let alone their 20s. While the two men’s dedication to the movement can’t be faulted, both are part of an elite media and political class. It shouldn’t be a shock that younger Australians find it difficult to relate to these champions of the cause.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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Philosopher AC Grayling will give his keynote lecture — “Technology, Climate, Justice and Rights: Can We Get the Whole World to Agree on Any of Them?” — in an event held by the Wheeler Centre.
Yuggera Country (also known as Brisbane)
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Author Clare Fletcher will chat about her debut novel, Five Bush Weddings, at Avid Reader bookshop. You can also catch this one online.
Kaurna Country (also known as Adelaide)
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The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s Megan Robson will speak at the Adelaide Contemporary Experimental’s Nice to Meet You series.
