PC GONE MAD
Treasurer Jim Chalmers will declare today that “Australia has a productivity problem”, The Guardian reports. His speech to CEDA in Brisbane comes ahead of a Productivity Commission key five-yearly economic blueprint to be released on Friday, which has found that Australians will be working two hours more a week while earning 40% less if the country’s “poor productivity performance” doesn’t improve over coming decades. For what it’s worth, we in the Crikey bunker have long been pointing out the decade or so over which productivity growth has utterly outstripped wages growth.
The Australian ($) says Chalmers’ speech will make it clear the government isn’t going to implement every recommendation contained in the 1000-page PC report: “We don’t believe productivity gains come from scorched-earth industrial relations, for example, or from abolishing clean-energy programs.”
Chalmers will set out five key areas the Albanese government has to address: a growing services sector; the costs associated with the climate crisis; the need for a more skilled and adaptable workforce; the use of data and digital technology; “geopolitical tension and uncertainty”. One thing Chalmers will not be promising is any major cost-of-living packages in May’s budget, what with $368 billion that has to be found for the eight submarines that mean so much to the struggling mortgage payers of this country.
KEATING UP APPEARANCES
Speaking of, former prime minister Paul Keating has given a National Press Club address for the ages, approaching the AUKUS submarine deal with the restraint and delicacy of a bull navigating the crockery section of a particularly cluttered antique store. In the process, he lambasted Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his “unwise” senior ministers Penny Wong and Richard Marles, calling the deal “the worst international decision by an Australian Labor government since the former Labor leader, Billy Hughes, sought to introduce conscription to augment Australian forces in World War I”.
“Every Labor Party branch member will wince when they realise that the party we all fight for is returning to our former colonial master, Britain, to find our security in Asia — 236 years after Europeans first grabbed the continent from its Indigenous people.”
Having taken on the “dopes” and “ning-nongs” ($) of the national security establishment, he saved some particularly savage and personal remarks for the journalists of the Nine papers. When The Sydney Morning Herald national correspondent Matthew Knott asked about Chinese human rights abuses, Keating shot back that after the “Red Alert” series Knott co-wrote with Peter Hartcher for the Nine papers, he “should hang [his] head in shame”.
“I’m surprised you even have the gall to stand up in public and ask such a question, frankly. You ought to do the right thing and drum yourself out of Australian journalism.” Bloody hell. Unsurprisingly, negative responses to Keating’s address dominate the Nine papers today, with both The Age ($) and The Sydney Morning Herald ($) offering separate editorial rebuttals.
Over at The Australian ($), Keating’s remarks get no warmer reception — foreign editor Greg Sheridan, whose writing on AUKUS might as well have little love hearts drawn in the margin, opens with a bit of wit that Keating himself may have grudgingly enjoyed, arguing that Keating’s attack on Albanese is “not from the left, nor from the right, but from the past”.
PUBLISHER OF ‘DEBUNKED’ LETTER SACKED
The editor of Launceston’s The Examiner newspaper has been sacked after the controversy over the publication of an allegedly fabricated “anti-transgender” letter, The Australian ($) reports. Mark Westfield — previously a staffer to controversial Liberal Warringah candidate Katherine Deves and Malcolm Turnbull as well as business editor at the Oz — was dismissed on Tuesday night.
As Crikey reported this week, The Examiner published a letter to the editor last Tuesday that claimed a trans woman undressed in front of children in a women’s changing room at a local aquatic centre. According to the letter, when parents complained to council staff they were told there was nothing they could do and were banned for life. The City of Launceston immediately issued a statement disputing the claim: “No such incident has occurred at the facility. It is regrettable that no attempt was made to check the veracity of the claims before publication”.
Westfield said the paper did “all it could in the circumstances”, but conceded that he came away thinking the author had made it up after he spoke to her and she refused to give any details on the account.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
Look, this is just the world we live in now, and we have to make peace with it: a Japanese YouTuber, Yoshikazu Higashitani, better known as the celebrity gossipmonger GaaSyy who found fame exposing alleged celebrity scandals, was elected to Japan’s upper house back in July, having run for a populist party that opposes licence-fee funding for Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK.
I know what you’re thinking: “Wait, don’t tell me that hasn’t quite worked out?”
According to The Washington Post ($) on Wednesday, Higashitani’s “colleagues” in Japan’s House of Councillors voted to expel a him after he failed to show up for work — not even once. Yep, the 51-year-old, having parlayed his more than 1.2 million subscribers into a spot in the upper house, promptly scarpered. It’s not just that he hasn’t set foot in the parliament since his election — he’s so committed to failing to do his job, he hasn’t been in the country.
SAY WHAT?
“So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that, um … This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral … I mean, woke is something that’s very hard to define, and we’ve spent an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. Um, sorry, I — it’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.
Bethany Mandel
The conservative author has written a book on the evils of “woke” but was weirdly unprepared when a TV interviewer asked her to define the word. We’re sure that doesn’t reflect anything much about the intellectual heft of people who so frequently reach for the term.
CRIKEY RECAP
‘Ask Alan’: Alan Jones is returning to radio with a spot on a small, regional community station
“After hanging up the microphone, Alan Jones is returning to radio after agreeing to host a daily segment at a small community radio station.
“Earlier this week, Central Coast radio station COAST FM 96.3 announced the radio shock jock would be joining the Gosford-based station to host an ‘Ask Alan’ segment each weekday to be aired twice a day, at the invitation of Rich Lister and recently announced patron John Singleton.
” ‘The story is very simple: John Singleton and I have been mates for 1000 years,’ Jones told Crikey.”
Inflation is too tricky and too sticky to be left to the RBA
“More than 14 years ago, a couple of months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Queen Elizabeth II was treated to a lecture at the London School of Economics on the origins and effects of the economic calamity then engulfing the world. At the close of the speeches, she asked the gathered economists one unceremoniously obvious question: ‘Why,’ given the enormity of the crisis, ‘did nobody notice it?’
“The same grave question will undoubtedly be asked if (and when) the Reserve Bank of Australia’s hawkish approach to the inflation problem of today steers the economy into what increasingly feels like an inevitable downturn.”
It’s meet-the-candidates night in Upper Hunter, where all roads lead to roads
“At a stand-up microphone in the Doug Walters Room of the Dungog Memorial RSL — small curtained stage behind, serving hatch, shining honour boards, it’s the old town hall. Archie Lea, an aged Christian bruiser in a leather jacket, is revealing the divine plan for him to be the member for Upper Hunter. Except it didn’t come out that way. He said: ‘Din wan be cand slectch buGog tuther pass.’ That’s cleaned up. Archie makes Martin Ferguson (‘Hi. I’m Marn Fern’) sound like Kenneth Williams.
“Each candidate has 10 minutes. Archie, a respected local doctor, is just getting started. The room’s patient. They seem to know him, all too well. The doors flap in and out a couple of times as people go for drinks and the noise of the main bar — Bubbleburblebapbadking! of pokies and Peter Hitchener on the TV — floats in. ‘Godsa rope Lill passton,’ Archie says. (God says we should reopen the Liddell power station, I think it was.)
Welcome to meet-the-candidates night in Dungog.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
‘Unleashing police dogs onto children is racist’, CCC boss tells WA committee (WAToday)
‘Targeted for seeking the truth’: Brett Forte whistleblowers demand justice (The Courier-Mail)
Senate powerbrokers target ‘ridiculous’ $254 billion tax cuts to fund subs (The Age)
Australian Federal Police seize $300,000 cash from traveller flying from Perth to Sydney (The West Australian)
Credit Suisse shares plunge as bank fears continue (BBC)
Colombian coalmine explosion kills at least 11 (Al Jazeera)
Pakistan police postpone arrest of ex-PM Imran Khan, easing unrest (Daily Maverick)
As Russia looms, US seeks influence in West Africa’s fight against Islamists (Reuters)
THE COMMENTARIAT
A fleeting interest — Rachel Withers (The Monthly): “As is often the case in politics, the ABC comedy Utopia skewered the situation years ago. In an episode in which the government decided to spend a mind-boggling amount on defence, the gathered strategists would not specify why, and agreed only to nod along when Tony deduced that China was the target, our trade routes were what needed protecting, and that China was our largest trading partner. “So under this scenario, we’re spending close to $30 billion a year to protect our trade with China… from China,” Tony surmised. In the case of the AUKUS deal, it’s quite clear that China is who we are looking to counter. But it’s still not entirely clear why we are sinking $368 billion into submarines that will, as The Betoota Advocate quips, ‘halt China’s invasion by 14 hours’.
“Is it really in Australia’s strategic interests to be poking the dragon, permanently aligning ourselves with the US against a power we could never actually defend ourselves against? Is China really enough of a threat to us that we need to spend $368 billion? Are these wildly expensive nuclear subs necessary, or prudent? Shouldn’t we, I dunno, talk about this a little more before signing away our collective future?”
Benefits of the voice will far outweigh risks — Robert French (The Australian) ($): “The Voice is intended to bring together those experiences and perspectives to try to influence change in our laws and practices for the better. That is not just a benefit for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It is a benefit to the whole of the Australian people.
“There will inevitably be Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who disagree with particular positions advanced by the Voice. Their criticism and alternative views can still be advanced to Parliament and the government, as can those of any Australian. The Voice will derive its moral authority from its constitutional status. That does not require that it have legal authority to bind the Parliament or executive to give effect to its representations. The risk that advice from the Voice could have that effect is non-existent.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kaurna Country (also known as Adelaide)
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The final meeting of the Indigenous Voice referendum working group before legislation is introduced to Parliament.
Yuggera Country (also known as Brisbane)
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The results of audits of the Queensland government’s 20 core departments and 233 other state entities will be tabled in Parliament in the State Entities 2022 report.
Nationwide
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The ABS is due to release its labour force data for February.
Eora country (also known as Sydney)
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A hearing for the RTBU and Sydney Trains Federal Court lawsuits over plans to shut off Opal card readers in ongoing industrial action.
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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A case management hearing in case brought by Pabai Pabai and Guy Paul Kabai over whether Australian government owes a duty of care to Torres Strait Islanders to take reasonable steps to protect Torres Strait Islanders, their traditional way of life and the marine environment in and around the Torres Strait Islands from climate change impacts.
