CLEARING THE AIRBNB
The Queensland Greens want Brisbane homeowners who list their place on Airbnb to pay an extra $10,000 a year in a bid to tackle the housing crisis, Brisbane Times reports, and in Victoria a new levy on short-term stays could be as high as 7.5%, The Age ($) says. Brisbane Greens mayoral candidate Jonathan Sriranganathan will announce the policy today, which would increase the rate by 10 times, the paper says. We want to “piss off and scare away investors”, Sri will say, so there’s more housing for locals. Airbnb’s Michael Crosby says it shouldn’t happen, because “families are struggling to make ends meet” — perhaps missing that that is the very point of Sri’s policy. Meanwhile, the Andrews government is set to meet next week about its own short-term-stays levy, which would add about $17 a night for stays in metropolitan Melbourne and $42 for stays on the Mornington Peninsula. It’d raise $20 million a year from Melbourne Airbnbs alone.
Speaking of housing… former NSW Labor minister Tim Crakanthorp’s extended family has at least 50 properties collectively worth more than $67 million. He got the boot and came under ICAC scrutiny last month after he kept his family’s holdings quiet while he advocated for a $3.7 billion redevelopment in his electorate. He did disclose one property — owned by his wife — but not the “45 other properties”, the SMH ($) reports. Yikes. Meanwhile, Crakanthorp’s chief of staff warned Premier Chris Minns’ office that the Newcastle MP tried to bill the taxpayer for family holiday flights between Sydney and Moruya, according to The Daily Telegraph. But the staffer wouldn’t confirm to the paper.
PRICE WAR
Indigenous peoples do not need a treaty because there was no “declaration of war”, opposition Indigenous Australians spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price says. Speaking at an event hosted by The Australian ($), she claimed treaty and reparations were the first priority of the Voice to Parliament, and that those denying it were “gaslighting Australians”. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has repeatedly flatly rejected any reparations for Indigenous peoples, as the SMH ($) reports, adding there’s no mention of any payments in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Price also said Indigenous peoples were “suffering because of elements of traditional culture” and slammed Indigenous activists for trying to rewrite Indigenous history using “romanticism”. Guardian Australia has a cracking explainer that unpacks Price’s many eyebrow-raising claims.
This came after Price claimed Indigenous peoples did not suffer from the consequences of British settlement. She listed “running water”, “readily available food” and “opportunities” as things First Nations folks gained, the SMH ($) reports. Australia’s Indigenous population was also subject to the Stolen Generations until the 1970s, and at least 415 documented massacres — half of which were carried out by police and government forces — as Guardian Australia reports, not to mention mass land displacement, slave camps, and deadly disease at the hands of British colonisers. Meanwhile John “Wik 10-point plan” Howard has repeated the claim that there’s no detail in the Voice to Parliament and that we “haven’t been told precisely how many people are going to be elected”. It would be a national group of about 20 members, as 9News reported.
CREDIT WHERE IT’S NOT DUE
We’re cancelling our 700 million Kyoto carbon credits, Climate Minister Chris Bowen has announced, which were described by the SMH ($) as “credits for gases [countries] could have emitted but did not”. Basically, the climate accounting trick allowed countries to exceed climate targets, and then use the credits to top up years they failed to. Then-PM Scott Morrison vowed not to use the weak system in our 2030 target, but Bowen has cancelled them (they’re about a year’s worth of emissions) so future Coalition governments never can. The UK, NZ and Germany have long ditched the dodgy credits.
Meanwhile Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says renewable energy such as hydrogen can make us rich — just look at the record $2.5 trillion investment globally last year. He’ll tell a climate summit, “Energy security is economic security. Energy security is job security. Energy security is national security,” as The Advertiser ($) reports. We’ve got to ditch fossil fuels that are “making our climate unsafe and threatening our way of life” but gas is our backup plan, he continued, and metallurgical coal is needed for wind turbine manufacturing — so riddle me that. Finally, oil and gas giant Woodside has been forced to pause seismic testing for its Scarborough gas project, a win for “elated” Mardudhunera woman Raelene Cooper who said she had not been consulted as required. Seismic testing is 250-decibel sound that blasts every 10 seconds for months on end (it helps identify where to drill for oil and gas). It’s loud enough to penetrate rock and often kills small animals such as bread-and-butter-of-the-sea zooplankton, while damaging the eardrums of larger ones, such as whales and dolphins.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
We may have just seen the first evidence of an alien. A ufologist showed Mexico’s General Congress two alien mummies — or so he described them while under oath. These are “non-human beings”, a deadly serious Jaime Maussan told floored Mexican politicians, and they’re a part of our “terrestrial evolution”. They’re small, with three fingers on each hand and shrunken heads. Freaky. He said they were found in Peru in 2017 but date back about 1000 years, according to carbon testing carried out by researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, as The New York Times ($) reports. Wait, wait, wait, wait, the university’s researchers said. We did not confirm they were aliens, just that the carbon we tested was old.
Still, the truth is out there, and NASA wants to find it — it announced it hired its first director of UFO research yesterday, and vowed to share more UFO info with the public. It’s also encouraging citizen sky watchers to help gather footage — it might sound like the respected space agency is getting a little conspiratorial, but it’s that very scepticism that’s motivating top figures. We want to shift the UFO conversation “from sensationalism to science”, NASA’s Bill Nelson told reporters. Of course, many UFOs are things like “planes, balloons, drones” and “weather phenomenon,” NASA scientist David Spergel added, but some aren’t. So what do you make of the creepy little aliens in Mexico, one reporter asked him. “Make samples available to the world scientific community and we’ll see what’s there,” Spergel said.
Hoping you feel a sense of awe about it all today, and have a restful weekend.
SAY WHAT?
I have had a barrage of really horrible messages today calling me a c–t and a b-word and all kinds of stuff left on my phone.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price
The opposition’s key No figure says she’s been receiving unsolicited, unwelcome texts after unsolicited, unwelcome texts signed with her name appeared on thousands of phones with the phrase “Don’t know? Say no” in the Voice to Parliament referendum. But the abusive language towards Price has been condemned by Nationals leader David Littleproud, who said they’re providing her the “support and the protection” she needs.
CRIKEY RECAP
“Qantas isn’t alone in acting unlawfully towards its workers. Around 40% of Qantas’ fellow members of the BCA — the biggest firms in Australia — have (like Qantas) been guilty of wage theft, stealing billions of dollars from their employees. Underpayment is so systemic it has become a basic feature of how Australian businesses operate.
“Big business — amazingly given it claims underpayment is because of ‘confusing’ awards — is even worse than small and medium businesses; work by the Fair Work ombudsman in 2019 suggested that ‘just’ a quarter of smaller businesses were guilty of wage theft. Because when employers don’t get more ‘reform’, they resort to breaking the law.”
“This referendum and the proposed Voice to Parliament attempt to politically capture First Nations peoples and pacify our transformative movements. We endure state-sanctioned violence and fascism so the Australian population can bathe in the glory of their streamlined democratic state.
“I’m left questioning how we went from calling to defund the police, abolish prisons and #burnitdown, to completing the Commonwealth and entertaining the perspectives of racist tropes like ‘Advance Australia Fair’. For generations, our families who have lost loved ones in custody have been wailing for change. We have attempted to meet with prime ministers countless times to discuss solutions critical to saving Black lives. Time after time, we have been refused and neglected …”
“The researchers looked at 731 pieces of News Corp content from July 17 to August 27. They found The Australian was the most balanced, with 40% Yes arguments, followed by The Daily Telegraph with nearly 30%. Sky News Australia was found to have featured only 24% Yes arguments, and the Herald Sun was the least balanced, with 80% No arguments and 20% Yes arguments.
“The two commentators that mentioned the Voice most often were Andrew Bolt and Peta Credlin, and both featured almost exclusively No arguments in their coverage. Most other commentators were also found to have been heavily biased towards the No side. Chris Kenny, Tony Bramston and Greg Craven were notable exceptions who featured mostly Yes arguments in their texts and video content.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Functioning weather service may have prevented Libya flood casualties: WMO (Al Jazeera)
[Canadian] federal government to remove GST from construction of new rental apartments (CBC)
New files shed light on ExxonMobil’s efforts to undermine climate science (The Guardian)
Biden’s son Hunter hit with criminal gun charge in US special counsel probe (Reuters)
[The European Central Bank] hikes interest rates [to 4%] despite growing threat of recession (euronews)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Langton and Price fight with passion and gloves off for beliefs — Michelle Grattan (The Conversation): “Beyond the blame game and the political fallout, defeat would confront Albanese with an existential personal question. Did he do the Indigenous cause serious harm by embarking — with the best of intentions — on a mission possibly doomed from the start? Did ambition overcome judgment and a sense of history? … Trying to pick up the pieces after a failed referendum will be extremely difficult. So far, there is no evidence the government has a fallback plan. But it needs to craft one, because a void filled with little but anger or apathy or both would leave the country in the worst of places. While polling has found people want to see improvement in Indigenous lives, on the other hand we are already seeing some resistance to Welcome to Country and the like.
“Yet what would be the nature of a post-defeat plan? Legislating a form of Voice after a referendum loss would be seen as flying in the face of the result — although a non-constitutional Voice might be acceptable to many No voters. Anyway, Albanese has indicated he won’t go down that path. Given he was so measured in the rest of his election pledges, it was uncharacteristic of Albanese not to be more careful on this one. Perhaps he did think, as he often says, it was a modest ask. Perhaps he overestimated his own persuasive power, or underestimated the impact of the inevitable scare campaign. Perhaps he simply ignored the compelling story of past referendums.”
The false gift of giving women a corporate golden ticket — Gemma Tognini (The Australian) ($): “That there is a persistent narrative of female victimhood concurrently perplexes and infuriates me. Women are not hopeless. We are not helpless. We have agency and access. We have the support and collaboration of our male colleagues and, in many cases, a head start in the shape of things like gender quotas and, more broadly, a recognition that women bring a different skill set to the table. The duelling narratives of ‘woman succeeding in her own right’ versus ‘women must have an assisted pathway because of sexism’ cannot coexist. Like my late father used to say, stop trying to ride one horse and lead another.
“It’s like the corporate equivalent of the madonna-whore complex. We can’t be both. We can’t be equal in all things and requiring rescuing. I realise some of you may hold a different view but let me use these examples. Wanting the government to pour more money into female founders, for example, is a surefire path to failure. What happens when that funding goes and the often-brutal realities of the real economy kick in? Here’s the truth. The corporate environment doesn’t care if an idea is birthed by a man or a woman; it cares if the idea is commercially viable. The real world doesn’t care if the strategy is female; it cares if it’s sound and stands up to scrutiny.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will give the keynote address at the Future Energy Summit, which you can catch online.
Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)
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Musician Tien Cortez will speak about his new short story compilation, Bad Habit, at Avid Reader bookshop.
Kaurna Country (also known as Adelaide)
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Department for Trade and Investment’s Tim White and SA Chinese Chamber of Commerce’s Kok Wah See will speak about China’s economy and opportunities for SA business at the University of South Australia.
