Show me the WA to go home “The time difference in WA is crazy — you get off the plane and it’s 1998,” a friend of mine used to joke about our home state. Certainly the state government is doing its bit to affirm the nostalgic vibe of the place by putting out talking points on how best to combat climate change (with thanks to the Australian Institute’s Polly Hemmings who spotted it) which looked fairly dodgy back in 2007 when the Howard government was giving it a go. In this, the year of Our Lord 2023, the WA Labor government offers what it calls “eight ways you can contribute and take action right now” and what we call a monumental piss-take:
Yep, averting the actual apocalypse is largely about washing machine settings and attentive tooth brushing, apparently.
WA is a place that sees no conflict in the government putting out a media release about draft emissions reduction legislation co-written by the state director of an oil and gas industry lobby, where the lines of employment between politics and the resource sector crisscross like shoelaces and where climate protesters are arrested by counterterrorism police for graffiti made in wash-away chalk. Which might explain why “throw yourself upon the cogs of the machinery of a resource economy so it cannot function”, or, dear lord, even “political donations reform” don’t feature on that list.
Laboring the point Labor MP for Victoria’s Eastern Metropolitan Region Sonja Terpstra may have used her electorate office to advocate for the Yes23 campaign but apparently the campaign at large had nothing much to do with the ALP. In response to posts by marketing strategist and teal enthusiast Brent Hodgson, who confronted Terpstra with the poor performance of the Voice in ALP electorates, Terpstra went all Shaggy — “It wasn’t a Labor campaign — more detail that is missed,” she said, suggesting Hodgson take it up with Yes23. Given the centrality of the Voice to Labor policy in its first term of government, it’s an interesting take.
The Happy Home In the weeks after the May 2022 election, “Squat Morrison” started to trend on Twitter — as people began to wonder aloud when he was planning to depart Kirribilli House. He stuck around for nearly two weeks after being evicted by voters.
Morrison, like Tony Abbott and John Howard before him, broke convention by making Kirribilli his primary residence during his time as PM. So it was no surprise when he got up in Parliament yesterday to join Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in thanking the Kirribilli cook, Adam Thomas, who is retiring. Apart from being one of the nicer moments in a meaninglessly fractious question time, it gave Morrison a chance to cycle through his greatest hits, Jenny and the girls, pretending he’s a sports fan, and of course, curries:
… The only thing I think Adam and I ever disagreed on was the football teams we followed. I thank him for the many cooking tips he gave me with my curries and for indulging me in regard to the mess that I often made in that kitchen.
I do declare Ed Coper, author of Facts and Other Lies: Welcome to the Disinformation Age, has been in the media a great deal lately, talking about the billowing fog of misinformation that helped the No campaign to such a crushing victory at the weekend. Entirely fair — the guy wrote the book on the subject, after all. But when is it relevant to point out that he also did work for the government on the campaign? As Guardian Australia noted back in February, Coper “was brought in to advise the government’s referendum engagement group on misinformation and disinformation at a meeting in February”.
This fact didn’t make it into pieces quoting him from the BBC and The West Australian, and the ABC described him as a “Yes campaign adviser and executive director at Center for Impact Communications”. Weirdly, the relevance of this gig is not even consistent within publications — the Nine papers mention it in one piece quoting him, and don’t mention it in another.
Hard a-starboard Here’s one we’ll be watching with great interest: Starboard Value, the activist hedge fund run by Jeffrey Smith, has bought shares in News Corp, in what Reuters calls a “move that could presage new calls from investors for changes to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire”. It’s all dreadfully opaque at this point — we don’t know the exact plans or the size of Starboard’s stake, and all the concerned parties are keeping schtum so far, though we note that its first move appears to be to encourage News to sell its stake in REA Group, its real estate business.
Meanwhile, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK competition regulator equivalent to our ACCC, has launched a sweeping investigation into possible breaches of competition law — including allegations of wage theft and informal collusion between production houses to suppress payment levels — by some of the UK’s major TV broadcasters and production companies. The CMA investigation includes smaller production house such as Sister Pictures — whose productions include Chernobyl and Gangs of London — which is part owned by Elisabeth Murdoch.
