Libs’ big blunder
Things are not going great for the NSW Liberals, but at least they’re keeping us busy here at Tips and Murmurs. Among the latest tips we’ve received is an interesting internal memo and some details on the party’s embarrassing failure to nominate candidates for local council elections.
Before we get to the memo, some background: until last year, businesses had twice the voting power of residents in the City of Sydney. In October, the NSW Labor government changed a law that until then gave eligible businesses in the area two votes in council elections, compared with one each for residents.
In the words of NSW Local Government Minister Ron Hoenig: “The amendments were made by the Liberals [in 2014] in a brazen attempt to oust Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore from office and give the party an electoral advantage in controlling the Sydney Town Hall.”
It turns out the law had indeed given the party an electoral advantage. An internal Liberal Party document leaked to Crikey makes clear Labor’s change has hurt the Lib’s chances at the next election, which will happen on September 14.
“While the division secured two positions at the 2021 local government election for Sydney, since that election, changes to the City of Sydney Act 1988, reducing the business vote, have significantly reduced the division’s chance of securing the second position,” the document reads.
The lord mayoralty of Sydney is a prestigious position that comes with a lot of power, staff and money. As The Daily Telegraph reported last year, “the lord mayor will be allocated $47 million in ratepayer funds over the next ten years”, and the current mayor has 22 full-time staffers with an average salary of $179,000 per year.
You know what else will hurt the Liberal’s chances at the council elections? Failing to nominate.
The party messed up spectacularly yesterday and missed the deadline to hand in paperwork for nominations for several local government areas. The deadline was at midday and was a hard one, the NSW Electoral Commission told us.
Several Liberals we spoke to were dumbfounded by what had happened, with one noting: “There were multiple councils done minutes before the deadline … this is total incompetence”.
According to our sources, Liberals won’t be able to contest important councils like the Northern Beaches, Lane Cove, Wollongong, Campbelltown, Camden, and the Blue Mountains. In Georges River, North Sydney, Penrith, Canterbury Bankstown, and Maitland, the party hopes that at least some of the candidates were nominated properly.
In a statement on Wednesday afternoon, the party HQ issued an apology to “endorsed councillors that were not nominated and to the party membership more broadly”, blaming a lack of “secretariat resources” for the error.
At least the Sutherland Shire nominations appear to have come through just fine — loyal readers of this column know how hard the Liberals worked to get their ticket in order for that one.
And that number two spot on the City of Sydney ticket? It seems that nomination might have been handed in too late as well. As of Thursday morning, the Electoral Commission’s website shows only one Liberal candidate, the sitting councillor and number one on the ticket, Lyndon Gannon. Oh well, it was unwinnable anyway.
AEC for CEO
It is not enough, apparently, that fossil fuel industry figures command millions or even billions of dollars a year, or that they can count on successive governments of all stripes and levels, the police, and large swathes of the media to do their bidding. They also need and deserve lots of prizes and awards. And so Woodside Energy CEO Meg O’Neill has been awarded “Energy Person of the Year” by the African Energy Chamber (AEC) for her “unwavering commitment to harnessing Africa’s oil and gas resources for inclusive growth”.
AEC is a Johannesburg-based oil and gas lobby group that is currently preparing class action lawsuits against financial institutions that refuse to invest in African fossil fuel projects on environmental, social and governance (ESG) grounds and has described environmentalist group “Friends of the Earth” as “no friends of Africa”, which should give you a sense of what it’s about. It must be wonderful for O’Neill to finally get some recognition after she was pipped at the post for 2023 WA person of the year by Gina Rinehart.
This is it, people, the smoking Raygun
As we noted earlier this week, Olympic breaker and academic Rachael Gunn (or Raygun) is like some sort of top rocking polymorph, twisting and coiling into whatever shape the viewer imposed on her. So it was probably inevitable, after being the personification of courage and cringe, coloniser and beneficiary of the woke mind disease, that she would end up where every overexposed figure does — the subject of a conspiracy theory.
A tweet argues that the Australian Breaking Association was “FOUNDED by Raygun and her husband. Who advised [WorldDance Sport Federation] to partner with this org? Rachael Gunn. Starting to see it? The Australian Breaking Association (AusBreak) runs a competition every year that only has 10-15 women show up, and obviously Rachael ‘wins’ this and her husband becomes the team coach”. Notes swiftly attached pointed out that none of this is true: Neither Gunn nor her husband are founders of the Australian Breaking Association and are not involved in its leadership, something a Google search could quickly reveal.
But that didn’t stop the tweet from getting three million views (we’re amazed Elon Musk didn’t say the news was “very concerning if true”, or something) and forming the basis for a change.org campaign asking Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to “Hold Raygun Rachel Gunn & Anna Mears Accountable for Unethical Conduct Olympic Selection”. At the time of writing, it has nearly 40,000 of the 50,000 signatures it is seeking.
Such a drag
US Ambassador and former PM Kevin Rudd is spending $20,000 in taxpayers’ dollars to turn his Washington residence into some kind of “bizarre drag queen nightclub”, Sky News Australia host Danica De Giorgio reported incredulously last week.
“Well, you won’t believe what Kevin Rudd is up to now, he has blown the taxpayer dime on gay pride parties, yes you heard that correct,” De Giorgio said.
Sky, along with 2GB’s Ben Fordham, picked up on the item in the Nine paper’s CBD column reporting on a document, obtained under freedom of information, revealing the costs of a pride party held by Rudd in June last year which, among other things, spent nearly three grand on a DJ set by drag queen Kitty Glitter.
And obviously the use of taxpayers money is always worth looking into. It’s just that we don’t recall either Sky nor Fordham being unduly disturbed when it was revealed Rudd’s predecessor Joe Hockey (now a regular Sky contributor) spent more than $45,000 on a “garden party” — including $7,690 for “entertainment” — for various US dignitaries (though the exact invite list was something successive governments fought to keep secret for years). What makes one event a scarcely believable use of taxpayer money and the other a perfectly reasonable use of twice as much we couldn’t begin to guess at.
We asked Rudd if he felt it was a proportionate response from the media but he didn’t get back to us before deadline.
