Fare thee well, Fierravanti-Wells As the New South Wales Liberals quake themselves to rubble over the preselection process, conservative warrior and friend of Crikey Concetta Fierravanti-Wells has been dumped from the winnable Senate spot in favour of conservative and literal warrior Jim Molan. We took a look back over the annals of the veteran senator who contained multitudes.
- It seems significant that the most publicity she’s got recently has been in her strident calls for a decent integrity body at the federal level in the face of years of government inaction
- She went hard against Immigration Minister (and Morrison proxy) Alex Hawke earlier this year, arguing he fomented chaos to ensure the feds could get involved: “They create the dysfunction, and then use it as an excuse to get what they want. We need to stand up to those seeking to pull strings in the background”
- Back in early 2020 CFW took to the Senate floor to put together a veritable salad of right-wing preoccupations: conspiracies, climate change denial, left-wing terrorism, greater state powers of surveillance. After the bushfires that devastated Australia, Fierravanti-Wells blamed “extreme activism and perhaps ‘eco-terrorism’?” She argued “it’s time to use communications metadata in the investigation of arsonists”, citing “satellite data showing 87% of bushfires Australia are man-made (40% deliberately lit)”. This did not, in the long run, seem to stack up
- She caused more trouble for Morrison and co by joining the crescent of cookery holding their own government to ransom over vaccine mandates
- Back in 2012, among her many objections to marriage equality, she said LGBTQI+ couples didn’t even want to be monogamous.
The Sharma offensive Friend of the column and increasingly desperate Wentworth MP Dave Sharma has always been a master of optics. Remember how he marked International Women’s Day in 2021 not by acknowledging the political cesspit of sexual assault and misogyny but by handing out pretty flowers to women at a local shopping mall? Now, a tipster tells us, he’s bought advertising space above petrol bowsers, ensuring voters associate his face with spending well over $2 a litre for fuel.
Marshalled Former South Australian premier Steven Marshall has plenty of reasons to feel glum at the moment — ousted in a landslide after a single term, on the wrong side of the first change of government since the outbreak of COVID. But he can console himself that he’s at least noteworthy enough to make it into the world of celebrity gossip.
An anonymous celeb gossip Instagram account under the name of DeuxMoi, which has well over a million followers, runs among other things a “Sunday spotted” series of posts where followers can share their celeb sightings. And who should be there, spotted by AAP’s Kaitlyn Offer among glimpses of Daniel Radcliffe and Charlie Puth, than Marshall? This in turn necessitated the explanation of what a state premier was in the first place:
I’ve got the Power Last week gave us a news item that could have been concocted in a lab to make the blood boil: a politically connected millionaire businessman and his son dodged jail after hopping over Western Australia’s locked border in their helicopter. Neville Power, former leader of Scott Morrison’s secretive, highly corporate COVID-19 commission, and his son Nicholas instead copped an eight-month suspended sentence.
Deputy chief magistrate Elizabeth Woods said: “This was not a momentary aberration; it was a deliberate choice by each of the accused.” But she ultimately decided that jail, community service or a fine of up to $50,000 wasn’t appropriate, as the two men had no previous similar offences, and — get this — good character references.
But of course, WA has been pretty quick to send other COVID offenders straight to the slammer. According to WA Department of Justice figures released in September last year, nearly one in six people (64 of 384) who had been charged with breaching WAs border/quarantine laws were sentenced to prison or partially suspended imprisonment, with a further 74 receiving fully suspended sentences.
It’s worth noting that at the time, according to prominent Perth lawyer John Hammond, everyone who appealed their jail sentence had successfully argued that the punishment was excessive.
