DUTTON, TRY AND UNDERSTAND HIM
John Farnham has allowed his 1986 hit “You’re the Voice” to be the official soundtrack of the First Nations Voice to Parliament campaign, Peter Dutton wants a second referendum if the first one fails, and Anthony Albanese’s polling numbers have dipped badly. Those are some of the referendum news dominating today’s headlines.
Farnham said his biggest hit had “changed his life”, according to ABC News: “I can only hope that now it might help, in some small way, to change the lives of our First Nations peoples for the better.”
According to a transcript issued by the Yes23 campaign, its director Dean Parkin told reporters in Perth: “There are certain generations in our country that grew up with John Farnham and have been inspired and entertained by John Farnham over the years. So they love him. We love him. And I think him coming on board with that absolutely iconic song is nothing but a great thing.”
Dutton told Sky News at the weekend he was a fan of Farnham’s, but also mocked the Yes campaign for using “You’re the Voice”: “I think in a sense it’s the appropriate theme song for the Yes campaign because remember the key line in the lyrics there is ‘You’re the voice, try and understand it.’ … I honestly don’t think most Australians understand it and they want to be informed.”
Dutton also told Sky the Coalition would go to the next election on a promise to hold another referendum, should the October 14 one fail. Dutton’s referendum would be to “recognise Indigenous Australians in the constitution”, but leave out the creation of a Voice. The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald ($) report this morning Yes campaign leaders such as Uluru Dialogue co-chair Professor Megan Davis, and an MP from Dutton’s own party, have savaged the idea. “There’s no use going to a referendum if it’s not going to change the daily lives of First Nations peoples,” Davis told the newspapers. And Liberal backbencher Bridget Archer said Dutton’s idea would be “tokenistic”, adding: “Many No campaigners have also complained about the cost of this referendum as well, yet are advocating that they want to repeat the process.”
Meanwhile The Australian ($) reports an opinion poll has found the prime minister’s personal approval rating has dipped from 52% in July to negative territory, 46%. Support for the Voice fell in the same Newspoll to 38%, with 53% saying they intended to vote No. Parkin, however, said the Yes campaign believed “about 35 to 40% of the Australian people are undecided”.
THE SILENT TREATMENT
The Labor government has left 2000 questions posed in the Senate unanswered since it took office, Guardian Australia reports. “The latest figures for questions on notice, both for Senate estimates and on the notice paper, show there are more than 2000 overdue questions as of last week,” the outlet reports today. Opposition Senate Leader Simon Birmingham said the “poor response rate” showed “blatant hypocrisy” on the part of the Albanese government: “Having come to office promising greater transparency, its failure to answer Senate questions by the due date is in effect contempt, not only of the Senate, but Australians who rightly expect ministers be held to account.”
But a spokesperson for the government said it wasn’t trying to dodge responsibility, and added questions on notice had doubled since the Coalition was in government: “In the first two rounds of estimates, the government answered all but two. We will continue to respond to all outstanding questions … When the opposition left government, they left nearly 1000 questions unanswered dating back as far as 2019.”
SAY WHAT?
If you set foot inside Fortescue now, it is calm, focused, relieved, and everyone is head down and tail up.
Andrew Forrest
Fortescue has lost nearly a dozen senior executives in the past two years — including three in the past week alone. Chief executive Fiona Hick, chief financial officer Christine Morris, and subsidiary Fortescue Future Industries director Guy Debelle were the latest to quit. But according to Forrest, all is well. The billionaire chairman of the $62 billion mining company told The Australian ($) at the weekend the exiting executives simply couldn’t handle the “boiler room” conditions at Fortescue, and hadn’t been fully onboard with his green vision. “You put a lighthouse on a hill and aim at it [but] there was a feeling that another lighthouse was emerging and the organisation — particularly when the chairman was overseas for three months — was being pushed towards another lighthouse,” Forrest said. The newspaper also reported a recent “think tank” shindig at the Forrest family’s “ancestral home” at Minderoo station in Western Australia had been anything but convivial. “According to sources with knowledge of the meetings, the event was particularly tense and draining as Hick and Forrest clashed over the strategic direction of the company,” The Australian reported. Forrest said the get-together had made it clear to him “there were outliers, and those outliers had to make a choice”.
CRIKEY RECAP
“An arm of disgraced consultancy PwC provides ‘advice to government’ on ‘Indigenous matters’ — and has been given more than $44 million in federal government contracts. The entity, ‘PwC’s Indigenous Consulting’, has been extremely — and increasingly — successful in attracting federal government contracts, official filings reveal.
“PwC’s Indigenous Consulting has been awarded $44.58 million in federal government contracts since 2015. In 2022 alone it was given federal contracts of $13.78 million, almost double any other year. Fuelling its success has been more than $14 million in ‘limited tender’ contracts — including more than $10 million awarded under a procurement regime for small Indigenous businesses.”
“The mask, slipping for years, is now fully off: Qantas under Alan Joyce despises its own customers as much as it despises its workers. It illegally sacked workers during the pandemic. Now we learn it illegally sold tickets for flights it knew would never happen.
“The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC)’s case against Qantas is forensic. It lists the flights cancelled days, weeks, and sometimes months in advance, the ticket sales that continued weeks, sometimes months, after the cancellation, and the refusal to tell people unlucky enough to have trusted the airline. All clear breaches of Australian consumer law.
“As a number of observers have pointed out, it’s very similar to the big banks’ fee-for-no-service scam (cost: $4.7 billion and counting) — except there’s a clear element of deliberation in Qantas’ behaviour. It knew the services would never be provided but kept offering tickets.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Ukraine breaks Russian stronghold’s first line of defence (The Guardian)
Russia strikes Ukrainian ports near NATO border ahead of talks to resume grain deal (CNN)
One dead at US Burning Man festival during heavy rain (BBC)
Singer Jimmy Buffett dead after four-year fight with a rare form of skin cancer (Associated Press)
Gabon reopens borders three days after military coup (Reuters)
Human ancestors were near extinction some 900,000 years ago, study says (France24)
Chile will search for more than 1000 victims of forced disappearance by Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (NPR)
China’s economic slowdown reverberates across Asia (Financial Times) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Voters are distressed by the ‘moral blindness’ of corporate Australia — Gareth Hutchens (ABC): “Australians have never been more distrusting of corporate Australia. That’s what researchers at Roy Morgan have found. They say corporate Australia’s behaviour since the onset of COVID has led to dramatically soaring distrust, and voters are distressed by the amount of ‘moral blindness’ they see among corporate leaders.
“They say Australians are angry with firms like PwC, Optus, Telstra, Medibank, Rio Tinto and Facebook/Meta, following huge data breaches and other scandals. And Qantas has fallen from one of the country’s most trusted brands to one of its most distrusted.”
Size matters, even if Australian banks are no longer at peak profitability — Millie Muroi (The SMH) ($): “The aphorism goes that ‘bigger is better’, but that may not seem the case with the multibillion-dollar banking sector. Commonwealth Bank, NAB, Westpac and ANZ are household names — they dominate the market and are known as the ‘big four’. You could even say they have BBE: big bank energy.
“Australians love to hate them, but they’re pretty popular. Together, they hold about $1 trillion, or about 73%, of all Australian household deposits, and about the same proportion of home loans. By comparison, the four biggest banks in the United States held about 45% of household deposits in 2021.
“This means that Australian banks have a lot of power to flex. The bigger a company is, the harder for competitors to put up a fight. And the less competition, the more those big companies can set their own terms. In the business world, less competition — as a rule — means firms can charge customers more.”
In 2023, poverty still has a woman’s face — Shona Hendley (Mamamia): “On a trip to Kenya, Kirsty Robertson watched a local woman in her 40s writing her own name for the first time. ‘You can’t describe what that is like but just being able to see the joy on her face, knowing that this is going to open up a whole new world for her is incredible,’ Robertson explains.
“This skill, one that many Australian children master before beginning school, for a large proportion of Kenyan women, is something they will never have the opportunity to learn. It is also one of many examples of how women are disproportionately affected by poverty, not just in the African nation but across the globe.”
