Keeping AAT it What’s the go with departing Administrative Appeals Tribunal president Justice David Thomas? Today the Oz reported that he was quietly standing down and plummeting all the way to the Federal Court after it was “revealed” his brother Geoffrey had made a $100,000 donation to the Liberal Party the day before Thomas was announced as AAT president.
Except … that donation has been on the public record since 2018. Apart from the years of delay in this attack of transparency, we can’t help but notice a touch of inconsistency in how the whole “conflict of interest” thing is being applied. If we are to decide that Thomas is unable to resist the influence of his brother, what are we to make of the near decade of former Liberal Party politicians, staffers, donors, candidates and other assorted LNP associates who have been appointed to the AAT, as Crikey assiduously catalogued in 2019, and has returned to since?
Tio has rocked for a long, long time We’ve seen a surprising lack of attention for this one in Australia: former Liberal Party powerbroker Tio Faulkner has ended up in a remand cell in New Zealand.
This week Faulkner will be sentenced for pushing thousands of kilograms of concrete and reinforced steel into Tauranga Harbour in an attempt to extend his land. Some witnesses allege he was constructing a private “park”, but he claims he was attempting to mitigate the affects of climate change.
Faulkner, you may recall, was a staffer for Zed Seselja when he was territory leader for the Canberra Liberals and local Liberal Party president. This latest episode is only the last in his glorious post-party career. You recall he’s the founder of Marriage Alliance, which burnt out like a Roman candle on the failed side of the marriage equality debate — the compacted ashes returned as anti-trans group Binary.
Kisch details The holiday season is definitely over when Gerard Henderson’s Media Watch Dog crawls back into the yard — with a doozy of a complaint about Tim Soutphommasane’s glorification of Bolshevism!!! What??? No!!! Actually, no. Soutphommasane, tweeting on the Djokovic drama, noted that the case now “arguably surpasses that of Egon Kisch for Australian political absurdity”.
Kisch, a 1930s communist journalist, jumped ship in Fremantle to avoid an entry ban, and had his visit legalised by Doc Evatt, then at the High Court. Hardly Djokovic level, Gerard notes, chiding Soutphommasane for making light of communism, propaganda, etc. It would certainly look as if Soutphommasane is guilty of bit of a beat-up on that evidence.
But of course Gerard omitted everything that made the Kisch case absurd.
Kisch was compelled to take our ridiculous “dictation” test, in which arrivals could be tested in any European language — and deported if failed. Trouble was the Mitteleuropean Kisch knew every European language that the authorities could test in. So he was retested in Scots Gaelic — which sent the case to another High Court challenge on the grounds that it didn’t count as a European language. Which passes the Djok test, and what Soutphommasane was unquestionably referring to.
Why would Hendo omit this key detail? Because the dictation test was an embarrassing joke, eagerly supported by the right-wing UAP government. And possibly because Kisch’s visit saw him address huge crowds in Sydney about Nazism and concentration camps — in 1935, three years before Robert Menzies was praising Hitler as a “very fine gentleman” in 1938? Too embarrassing for a Menzies loyalist to include? — Guy Rundle
Know your audience A tipster has sent us a reminder that Google ads can work extremely well or extremely poorly, depending on your view. Yesterday’s Australian Financial Review piece on the towns at risk from the decline of coal exports sits below an ad exhorting the reader to “switch to 100% Aussie” as part of a mission for “100% renewable by 2030”:
