NOT HAPPENING
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton wants a TikTok ban in Australia like in the US, Sky News Australia reports. A bill passed by the American lower house would ban the app’s parent company ByteDance or force it to sell, but the Senate will likely mull the legislation for months now. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said we wouldn’t be copying the US, but Dutton said we should if photos of kids are scraped “from their accounts and stored by a third party” like a country, state actor or crime group. Meanwhile, remember how the Pharmacy Guild of Australia warned hundreds of pharmacies would close if the government allowed 60-day prescriptions, with Dutton supporting the lobby group? Yeah, 87 new ones have started up since, Guardian Australia reports, which is a 50% uptick from the same time last year. Australians have saved $11.7 million on almost 3 million 60-day scripts between September and January, the paper adds.
Meanwhile, the number of troops we sent to Iraq alongside the US was going to be slashed by more than a quarter (from 840 to 600) by the Defence Department in 2004, but John Howard’s Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) vetoed it. The US would be pissed off and that’d damage our chummy relationship, the PM&C reasoned, as The Age reports. It was contained in missing documents that were released yesterday, which also showed Howard was keen for the US to think Australia was “pulling its weight” even though we became less interested in the search for weapons of mass destruction. It cost us $4 billion and we never found any — indeed a US report found former Iraq president Saddam Hussein had destroyed the last of them in the 1990s, as The Guardian reported.
NEW SOUTH WAILS
NSW independent Roy Butler has written to Premier Chris Minns about how the government’s new youth crime package will make it so much harder for kids to get bail. Butler’s vast electorate covers 44% of the state’s land mass, Guardian Australia reports, including some of the most disadvantaged communities. NSW Labor’s new bail tweak would introduce an extra test for 14- to 18-year-olds on bail having been charged with breaking and entering, or stealing vehicles. We need locally designed “intensive residential programs” as an alternative, Butler said, saying some kids see prison as a rite of passage and others just enjoy getting enough food to eat. It comes as a rural NSW woman living west of Dubbo has shared a tragic story about not being able to get reception to call 000 while her husband died, the SMH reports.
Meanwhile, Minns says his state could get an extra 10,000 police and 10,000 nurses if they got more GST, and Treasurer Daniel Mookhey has told the federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers that NSW wants a larger slice of the pie by switching to a per-capita model ($3.6 billion more), The Australian ($) says. But Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already said we aren’t changing it — it’d be a political death wish, especially after four seats flipped red at the last election in WA (Hasluck, Tangney, Swan and Pearce). Some background: WA got this special deal in 2018 where it gets at least 70 cents for every dollar of GST, as the ABC explains, up to 75 cents in 2024-25. Why? It was thought the price of iron ore would slump — of course, it surged. But not everything is peachy in cashed-up WA — the rental vacancy rate is down 0.13 points to 0.75% in Perth, The West ($) reports, the lowest of any capital city. In regional WA, the rate is double that at 1.47%, the PropTrack Rental Affordability Report found, which is still dismally low.
I SWEAR
Tabcorp boss Adam Rytenskild has resigned after allegedly calling someone a “useless c**t”, The Australian ($) reports, saying his exit will probably cost up to $10 million in lost shares and options. Cripes. The comment was allegedly made during a meeting with external stakeholders about a female regulatory official, The Age added. Rytenskild said he can’t remember saying it but agreed to leave anyway. Meanwhile, four-time Olympian Cate Campbell said she didn’t mean to be disrespectful when she called the US team “sore losers”, the Brisbane Times reports, after the US put themselves in first place on the medal tally at Tokyo 2020 (the country had the most medals, but usually the country with the most golds goes there — in this case, Australia). It was more a jibe about the US’s self-centric view, Campbell said — like look at the “World Series” baseball championships… that are between the US and Canada only.
Meanwhile, the UK barrister working on the Matildas captain Sam Kerr’s case has been described as “glamorous” by The West Australian ($) for some weird reason. Silk Grace Forbes represented Kerr when she pled not guilty earlier this month on a charge of “using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress and the offence was racially aggravated” for allegedly calling a British cop a “stupid white bastard”. It could come to an end at a hearing on April 26, when the matter returns to court — Kerr doesn’t have to be there, however. Meanwhile, businessman Dick Smith is still on his small Australia crusade, The Daily Telegraph reports, saying record migration in January (125,410 arrivals) was a “disaster for families”.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
Vale Paul Alexander, a Texas man who has died aged 74 after living nearly all of his years inside a massive cylindrical vat known as an iron lung. As a six-year-old boy, Alexander contracted polio, a highly infectious disease that mostly affected kids, leaving one in 200 either completely paralysed or dead. It was the 1950s, and the small boy was placed in an iron lung, which is a mechanical respirator that mimics breathing, with his head poking out the front. It was only meant to be used for a short time, and when surgical intervention advanced and polio vaccines came on the scene, the machines fell into the pages of the history books. But Alexander didn’t want surgery and became one of the last people in the world to spend his life in the lung.
Not that it held him down. Alexander taught himself to breathe by taking in gulps of air and forcing it down his throat, as The Guardian tells it, going to college to get a law degree, passing the bar to become a lawyer, heading to court to represent clients, authoring a memoir and learning to paint (using a brush in his mouth). Still, he couldn’t force his breath down when he wasn’t awake, and retired to the iron lung often to rest and sleep. He never planned to be a disability activist, Alexander told the paper, but he felt compelled to fight for his way into spaces that wouldn’t have him, and to prove people wrong when they told him he couldn’t do something. He just didn’t see anyone else like him around, so he figured “I’ll just pave the way”.
Hoping you never let anyone tell you what you can’t do, and have a restful weekend.
SAY WHAT?
Well, on my Facebook I have 200,000 followers, and most of them are under 30. They like my post when I said I like a hamburger, I like a lettuce, I love vinegar chips — they can relate to that. I still do love vinegar chips.
Clive Palmer
The mining billionaire shares his secrets to influence the Australian youth with Crikey’s Anton Nilsson. It’s likely working better than buying their vote — the United Australia Party founder spent an estimated $60 million on advertisements in 2019’s election and didn’t win a single seat.
CRIKEY RECAP
Threats, lawsuits, smears: How the global war on fact-checkers and misinfo experts came to Australia
“If you’ve ever seen a Facebook or Instagram post covered with a grey banner that says it contains ‘false information’, that’s the result of Meta applying the findings of one of its third-party fact-checkers. After one of its partners submits a fact check, Meta uses an algorithm to detect when a post contains some erroneous information and applies the banner to it.
“Users have to click through a prompt explaining why the post was given this banner, including a link to the outlet’s fact check, before being able to see the post. Meta also limits the reach of posts that it detects contain disproven misinformation on Facebook, Instagram and, now, Threads; penalising the accounts in the platform’s algorithms and removing monetisation features for those who shared them.”
“The most recent was a former Australian Taxation Office (ATO) employee, who was sentenced on Tuesday to five years in prison for corrupt conduct after accepting bribes from a taxpayer who was being audited. That sentencing was revealed in a NACC media release on Wednesday, the first time the watchdog had issued a media release about a specific case.
“A NACC spokesperson told Crikey there had been two previous convictions resulting from its investigations, which until now had not been reported publicly. In all three cases, the NACC investigations had been inherited by the former Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI), which was absorbed into the NACC when the corruption watchdog was created on July 1, 2023.”
“The pilot problem’s first public victim was Rex, which has been forced to cut regional services as it cannot properly crew its fleet of 57 SAAB propeller planes, whose pilots are at the very bottom of Australian pilot pay scales. Rex cut services on several routes last September and late last month confirmed they would remain on ice for a further seven months at least.
“While the official line has been supply chain and spare parts issues, industry insiders tell Crikey that a lack of pilots is the real problem. Qantas has ‘frozen’ its pilots at regional subsidiaries (National Jet Systems, Sunstate, Eastern and Network Aviation) that run its QantasLink and fly-in-fly-out charter services, leaving them unable to apply for better-paid jobs in the company’s Jetstar and mainline divisions.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
‘Death trap’: Israeli forces kill six in new attack on Gaza aid seekers (Al Jazeera)
TikTok ban: China attacks ‘bandit logic’ of [US] House vote (BBC)
Princes William and Harry to appear separately at event honouring Diana (CNN)
Former Fiji prime minister Frank Bainimarama found guilty of interfering in a police investigation (ABC)
Trump launched CIA covert influence operation against China (Reuters)
Berlin’s techno scene added to UNESCO’s cultural heritage list (euronews)
Much of west and central Africa without internet after undersea cable failures (The Guardian)
Schumer urges new leadership in Israel, calling Netanyahu an obstacle to peace
(The New York Times) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Like Peter Dutton, John Gorton once had a nuclear plan. It didn’t end well — Michelle Grattan (The Conversation): “More generally, the opposition aims to persuade regional voters that nuclear is better than having their areas covered with power lines and wind farms that many find ugly and intrusive. This would probably resonate in many areas, provided Dutton could allay other doubts with these voters, such as about cost. The cities will be another matter. In teal and similar seats, a strong commitment to renewables is likely to make voters unsympathetic to the nuclear case. The opposition may not have great hopes of winning back the teal electorates, but it will be aware of the risk of losing more seats to teal candidates and so it has to be careful. In outer suburbia, Dutton’s target territory, the danger for him is that voters see nuclear power as a side issue.
“Yes, they will hear his claim it would mean lower power prices but, even if they buy that very contested argument, they’ll know that would be far into the future. Hard-pressed families are interested in the here and now. And that goes to a broader problem for Dutton’s nuclear campaign. It could lead up a dry gully, a debate that consumes time and effort better spent on more central cost-of-living and other issues. Dutton says the opposition won’t be a small target at the election. Even if that’s sound thinking, he needs to have reasonable confidence that ‘big target’ policies will carry a more than fifty-fifty chance of paying significant dividends. He doesn’t have much political capital to spend. The likely dividend from the nuclear policy could easily be a net negative.”
Ruling helps keep the road clear for protesters — Chris Merritt (The Australian) ($): “The real issue therefore is not whether the right to protest should be restricted, but where the boundary should be drawn and who should do the drawing. Democrats would argue that this should be the work of Parliament because it is best placed to take account of community sentiment and changing circumstances. If politicians draw boundaries that are at odds with community expectations, they can always be replaced once their failures become apparent. That is not an option if this work is left entirely to the judiciary. The best judges know this and can be identified by their self-restraint. After the chaos that has affected the streets of Melbourne in recent days, Victorians might wish to consider whether they are happy about the way the current limits on the right to protest are working.
“When Extinction Rebellion protesters stopped traffic on the Westgate Bridge, it was entirely foreseeable that this would have dangerous consequences — particularly on those needing urgent medical attention. Nobody should be too surprised that this is exactly what happened. A woman being rushed to hospital was unable to proceed and was forced to give birth at the side of the road. Mother and child are reported to be fine. But the penalty imposed on those who put their lives at risk can only be described as trivial: 21 days in prison. In practical terms, that means the boundary on the right to protest in Victoria barely exists — at least when compared to NSW, where a similar incident could attract up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $22,000. Compared to this, Victoria privileges protest and disruption while giving less weight to community welfare. The boundary between these conflicting goals needs to change. And the NSW Roads Act might be worth considering.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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Writers Kim Scott, Tony Birch, Carly Sheppard, and Kamarra Bell-Wykes will speak at Blak & Bright 2024 Opening Night held at The Capitol.
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Author Jessica Mudditt will speak about her new book, Once Around the Sun, at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.
