ALBANESE’S EDUCATION PITCH
MPs and senators are returning to Canberra today as we reach the final few sitting weeks of the year, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese either firing “the starting gun for the federal election” or staging a “personal relaunch”, depending on who you ask.
The Sydney Morning Herald highlights Albanese’s “campaign-like rally” in Adelaide yesterday where he made a third education pledge in as many days. His commitment to 100,000 ongoing fee-free TAFE places a year follows increases in the income threshold for HELP loan repayments and wiping $16 billion from outstanding student debts. The education pledges would all start after the next federal election, due by May. The event on Sunday also included what the paper says is likely to be Labor’s election slogan: “Building Australia’s Future”.
On Sky News at the weekend, senior Liberal frontbencher Simon Birmingham, perhaps previewing the opposition’s planned response to the announcements, said the government was trying to spend its way back into power.
Elsewhere, the AAP highlights the House of Representatives is expected to pass laws supporting a 15% pay rise for early childcare workers this week. The newswire also quotes Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke saying misinformation laws will be back up for debate this week and reports laws preventing the NBN being sold off, plus aged care and merger reform, will all be debated.
In another report on the very busy time facing those in Canberra, AAP says a group of independent MPs and senators are hoping the impasse over the government’s housing reforms will be resolved before the end of the year. The government has expressed huge frustration at being unable to get reforms like its Help to Buy and Build to Rent bills through Parliament due to opposition from the Coalition and the Greens.
The AAP quotes Senator Jacqui Lambie as saying: “We’ve got two more weeks left this year to get this done. This polling backs up what Australians have been telling me — they are sick and tired of the Greens and the coalition holding up action on housing for those Aussies who most need it.” Wentworth MP Allegra Spender added: “It’s time that the Greens and the Liberal-National parties stopped blocking constructive housing policy. My community wants action, not politics.”
The comments will be most welcome by Labor, but as the newswire points out, this week will also feature Senate estimates hearings where “questions about MPs’ travel arrangements are expected to feature prominently”. Continuing last week’s theme, AAP says the Coalition plans to continue to ask questions about the prime minister’s relationship with Qantas (another reminder — my colleague Anton Nilsson reported back in February that “nearly all MPs and senators have accepted gifts from Qantas, and 92% of them have declared membership in the airline’s exclusive Chairman’s Lounge”.)
The economy is also set to (continue to) be a significant talking point this week with the Reserve Bank of Australia’s next interest rate decision due on Tuesday. Pretty much everyone expects the board to hold the cash rate steady at 4.35% with underlying inflation still not where the central bank wants it. Capital Brief and The Age say the more interesting thing will be what the bank thinks of the upcoming impact of the US election on November 5 and its prediction for the global economy.
Meanwhile, Guardian Australia and AAP are highlighting the three-day hearing by the Fair Work Commission beginning today on the use of sleepover shifts. The Australian Industry Group wants sleepover shifts, where employees are asleep for periods overnight while on site but required to be on hand at a moment’s notice, to be classified as a break between shifts. Unions have called the proposal reckless and negligent.
Lastly, The Australian reports a $7 billion military-grade satellite communications system is set to be cancelled.
US ELECTION: TOO CLOSE TO CALL
Obviously it’s not just the RBA that is going to be watching events in America intently over the next few days. The week of the US election is upon us and the world is set to be gripped by what the polls reckon is going to be a very close-run thing.
On Sunday (local time) the candidates are making last-minute pitches in the vital swing states, with Republican candidate Donald Trump heading to Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia while Democratic candidate Kamala Harris has visited Detroit, Michigan.
The New York Times reports Trump told his rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, earlier that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House following the 2020 election. “It said we had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left. I shouldn’t have left, I mean, honestly.” The paper writes the former president added: “We did so well, we had such a great -“ and then stopped talking, before adding “So now, every polling booth has hundreds of lawyers standing there.”
The NYT flags Harris told the congregation at Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ in Detroit on Sunday the country is “ready to bend the arc of history toward justice”, adding “Let us turn the page and write the next chapter of our history.”
The current vice president’s appearance on the iconic TV show Saturday Night Live the evening before has generated plenty of headlines. The plans for Harris to appear on the show alongside comedian Maya Rudolph, who has been depicting her during the campaign, were apparently kept a secret right up until her motorcade appeared outside the New York studio.
The Guardian highlights Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has claimed Harris’ appearance on the show was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule”. The Hill, however, reports a spokesperson for the FCC said the agency “has not made any determination regarding [political] programming rules, nor have we received a complaint from any interested parties”.
At his rally in Pennsylvania, The New York Times reports Trump questioned recent polling which surprisingly shows him behind in Iowa, as detailed by The Guardian here. The 78-year-old also apparently spent nearly 20 minutes trying to instil doubts about the election. CNN has a feature detailing how the former president is “laying the groundwork to dispute the election results — again”.
Talking of all that polling, the one thing everyone can agree on is — it’s far too close to call and no-one really knows for sure what is going to happen. The final set of polls by the NYT and Siena College reckon Harris is just ahead in Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin with Trump ahead in Arizona and pretty much a dead-heat in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania. As the paper states “the results in all seven states are within the margin of sampling error, meaning neither candidate has a definitive lead in any of them.”
It’s going to be a long week.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
Two Australian mathematicians have declared the “infinite monkey theorem” is misleading.
The famous adage says that given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a keyboard would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.
The BBC reports Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta have stated the time it would take for a monkey to replicate The Bard’s plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.
They also did calculations based on roughly 200,000 chimpanzees, the current global population, and being able to type at one key per second until the end of the universe. Even then the chimps wouldn’t even come close to typing out Shakespeare’s works, the broadcaster added.
Apparently the probability of one chimp being able to produce a random sentence like “I chimp, therefore I am” is one in 10 million billion billion.
Woodcock told the New Scientist. “If every atom in the universe was a universe in itself, it still wouldn’t happen.”
Say What?
More than a hugely successful album, ‘brat’ is a cultural phenomenon that has resonated with people globally, and ‘brat summer’ established itself as an aesthetic and a way of life.
The Collins Dictionary
Inspired by Charli XCX’s sixth album, Brat, the meme no-one could escape is now also the word of the year. For those still not caught up, according to the dictionary the word is characterised by “a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude”.
CRIKEY RECAP
If Donald J. Trump, by some lapse in cosmic reason, should triumph on November 5, will he do as he has promised and Make America Great Again? And which America? The one he aimed to Make Great Again back in 2016, or the one he restored to greatness during his four years in office up until 2020 and which the Democrats have since wrecked?
Or is it both or neither? Or, more confusingly, both and neither?
America is a funny old place. If famed Civil War photographer Matthew Brady were still alive and had a femto-camera instead of one of those daguerreotype deals on sticks, and could capture every single moment of America’s storied history at once to make a giant flicker book that we could all watch in a single second, the retinal burn left on our brain would be that of a jewel-toothed hillbilly in a billowing night-shirt standing over a New York subway air vent, liberty torch aloft in one hand and recently fired telescopic rifle in the other.
Part of why it will be business as usual under Trump in the United States is that it won’t change much if Harris were to win. Granted, women’s reproductive rights will likely be a champion cause and the issue has motivated voters in several state elections to reject draconian Republican legislation.
But Trump and Harris are both fighting over who can most aggressively mitigate the apparent menaces of immigration. Here in Australia, the Labor government is introducing unmodelled legislation to cap international students in our universities. The Coalition approves. A large part of the rhetoric centres on cashed-up Asian students driving up real estate prices. It’s not quite “illegals are taking our jobs and eating our pets”, but there is a similar appeal to the public’s viscera.
This appeal is made in an increasingly platform-based and global mediascape. This means of doing politics comprises a mutual reinforcement between the process of enshittification and the spectacularisation of political culture. As Big Tech chases diminishing value, information (and misinformation) by meme increases. The mutual reinforcement will continue if Trump wins — he and MAGA are so much of its fuel — and Australia is too small a player to exercise much control here, even if the government manages to age-restrict social media access.
A Trump-imposed “peace” in Ukraine will be a modern-day Munich that only illustrates the benefits of breaching international norms and attacking neighbours, and would bring the threat of Russian assaults on European countries closer still (it will also be interesting to see how Australia’s MAGA fans react to such a disaster, given the Albanese government has been repeatedly criticised by the Coalition for not being pro-Ukraine enough).
There’s one more area where a Trump victory will have an impact on Australia. Large swathes of the right, and their media cheerleaders at News Corp and Seven, are already Trump supporters who seek to import Trump’s political tactics. The result is a toxic politics of white grievance, racial division and male anger in which US conspiracy theories and culture wars are reflexively echoed here, no matter how little relevance they have.
If Trump wins again, the lesson they will learn is that such tactics can only ever be temporarily defeated, but will triumph in the end. The politics of hate, of racism, of misogyny, of denialism and rage, will be given a turbo boost in an Australian polity already experiencing greater division and bitterness than at any time in recent decades. And that may be the greatest damage of all.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Spain’s king and queen pelted with mud in flood-hit Valencia (BBC)
How Elon Musk’s own account dominates X (The New York Times) ($)
Here’s how election night will unfold hour by hour (CNN)
Russia sends nearly 100 drones into Ukraine, as Zelenskyy urges tougher sanctions against Moscow (Associated Press)
Iran arrests woman who stripped in protest at ‘abusive’ dress code policing (The Guardian)
Hundreds showed up for a Halloween parade. They got ‘ghosted’. (The Washington Post) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
What happens next if Donald Trump loses the US election? — John Lyons (ABC): A separate poll, conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research, found that four in 10 registered voters said they were “extremely” or “very” concerned about the possibility of violence in the days after this election.
Trump is 78. Many Americans say he has nothing to lose, and that his bitterness from having the 2020 election “stolen” from him — he still insists that it was — if added to any defeat this week could see him either openly urging violence or “dog-whistling” to create unrest.
If Trump loses, he faces years of court cases — including possible criminal charges. Victory would mean he’s able to forestall any such proceedings.
The Pauline Hanson verdict is welcome but only cultural change will remove Australia’s stain of racism — Arif Hussein (Guardian Australia): … beyond legal protection, it will take cultural change to rub the perverse stain of racism off this country. Change in who we listen to, from perpetrators who spread fear and division, to people who unite us in solidarity.
Change in making reporting incidents of racism easier and more effective to hold perpetrators accountable. Change in a collective reckoning with the truth of Australia’s violent history towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
That is how we begin to counter the fear, hatred and racism which permeates through Australia. That is how we push equity, respect and justice forward. That is how we make Australia a place where every person is welcome and belongs.
