MONEY TALKS
The government will move to ban big political donations after the next election, the SMH reports, though Labor sources said the cap hasn’t been decided yet. It could limit the influence of people like mining billionaire Clive Palmer, who gave $117 million to the party he founded, the United Australia Party, or tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes, who gave $1.2 million to Climate 200. The paper called it the biggest election reform in a decade, noting the government will move to legislate a limit on how much is spent in each electorate too (remember the $1.6 million donated in the fight between Kooyong independent Monique Ryan and former Liberal Josh Frydenberg?). The ban is slated post-election (next September at the latest) so the Australian Electoral Commission has time to process it, and so Labor avoids self-benefit accusations.
He taketh away, he giveth — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced an “unprecedented” $4 billion for remote housing in the NT, the NT News reports, which will deliver 2,700 homes in Indigenous communities in the next 10 years. The newly-bolstered National Partnership for Remote Housing NT scheme will be 50/50 territory-Commonwealth funded, aims to cut overcrowding in half, and includes dosh for repairs and maintenance. The government will run the program with Indigenous land councils and the NT’s peak First Nations housing body, Aboriginal Housing NT. Meanwhile, the Coalition’s idea to let first home-buyers raid their retirement funds for a house deposit would make property prices in capital cities $75,000 more expensive, the SMH reports, and was declared “one of the worst public policy decisions” of the century by an economist.
HIGH AND MIGHTY
Greens leader Adam Bandt has claimed $963,166 in expenses in a year, the Herald Sun reports, including $23,000 on two private jets and $204,000 on printing costs. The paper notes Environment and Water Minister Tanya Plibersek, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese all claimed more. Bandt’s trips were: Townsville to Rockhampton to announce a coal transition plan ($8,300) and Brisbane to Canberra to launch the Greens’ election campaign ($15,000). As I wrote for Crikey, a private jet emits as much carbon dioxide in one hour (two tonnes) as the average person emits in one year. It comes as 50 passengers were taken to hospital following a “technical event” on a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner flight flown by Chilean airline LATAM from Sydney to Auckland, The New Daily reports. One person is in a serious condition.
Meanwhile, a social media video shows former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann alongside a man who appears to be cutting lines of powder with a credit card seemingly at the ocean-view three-bedroom northern beaches apartment Seven pays $2,000 a week for, The Daily Telegraph reports. (There’s no evidence Lehrmann was involved, however). “Bruce’s famous speech” was typed over the video, the paper says, while he says: “And Nadja. I love Nadja. I’m always constantly concerned for Nadja’s welfare”. The SMH notes Lehrmann, who studies law, hasn’t worked full-time in years. Meanwhile we should aim higher than our 2.2% growth forecast, Treasurer Jim Chalmers told AFR’s business summit, saying this is the “defining decade” if we want the next 40 years to be as good as the last.
SEND HELP
Israel has “refused to listen” to calls to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza through at least seven points of entry, Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic told ABC’s Q+A, citing the “life and death decisions” being made by the nation. More and more Australians will call for sanctions, Husic said — the paper notes he’s Australia’s first Muslim cabinet minister and represents a large Arab community in his Western Sydney seat of Chifley. He also called for Australia to restart $6 million in aid funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) like Canada and Sweden have — it was paused after Israel alleged Hamas links at the aid organisation, which has 13,000 staff.
Former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans agreed, Guardian Australia continues, saying the UNRWA had a “critical, indispensable and irreplaceable” role. Some 150 staff have already reportedly died, Evans said. Two interesting things: one, that Israel annually vets all UNRWA Gaza staff, and two, the Albanese government doubled Australia’s core funding for UNWRA, with $20 million delivered before this pause. In any case, Labor’s Julian Hill said, it’s up to Israel — people, including kids, “are starving to death just kilometres away from fully stocked supermarkets”. It comes as the cops are looking into allegations patrons performed Nazi salutes at a cinema screening The Zone of Interest, Guardian Australia reports, and a Queensland man says he was kicked and called a “Jew c**t” for wearing a shirt that said “I stand with Israel,” The Courier-Mail reports. He didn’t give his name.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
Missing kid Hussein Al Mansoory has been found two days after he went missing in Western Sydney to the ecstatic relief of his family, ABC reports. Al Mansoory, who lives with Down syndrome and is non-verbal, dashed away from Auburn Memorial Park on Saturday morning. His family were deeply distressed — not only had the boy disappeared without a trace, but it was also a sweltering heatwave out there. A community call-out saw no fewer than 100 determined locals head out their front doors to search high and low through the suburb for Al Mansoory, while 100 state emergency service volunteers quickly followed suit. After hours of searching through Auburn’s streets, parks, and public buildings to no avail, the police were called in.
Officers urged residents to check their backyards, sheds and garages, and were thrilled when someone rang the station to say they’d spotted him. It proved to be short-lived, however, as the caller said that Al Mansoory had run away visibly frightened. On Sunday, his family were completely “distraught” as Guardian Australia tells it, facing another anxious night without their little guy. Monday morning rolled around and police had deployed their every resource into the search when another phone call came through — this time from the local medical centre. We’ve got him, the medical staff told police, and he’s perfectly fine. Al Mansoory had been hiding in the stairwell of the centre but was not sporting any injuries. His family were thrilled, immediately enveloping their boy in hugs as he smiled away.
Hoping you don’t lose hope today.
SAY WHAT?
The problem is with all Mr Dutton and Mr O’Brien’s cases for nuclear, when you put scrutiny on them, they crumble like a Sao in a blender.
Chris Bowen
The Australianism had more than a whiff of former PM Kevin Rudd’s “fair shake of the sauce bottle” clanger. The climate minister was responding to Coalition bleating about nuclear power, even though Australia has enough renewable energy resources to power our country 500 times over.
CRIKEY RECAP
“The money that Australia has promised the US will begin to be paid in the 2025-26 financial year, according to officials. As an article on the Asia-Pacific Defence Reporter website pointed out last November, when the sum was made public it was widely reported in Australian dollars, when in fact it was calculated in US dollars, which at the current rate would mean a taxpayer cost of more than $4.5 billion.
“The US account, called the Establishment of Submarine Security Activities account, was set up as part of the US National Defence Authorisation Act, passed by Congress in December. The law says the money can be used for ‘any purpose authorised by law that the [US president] determines would support the AUKUS submarine security activities’ …”
“… The Conversation’s editor Misha Ketchell (my then-boss) and I made a submission to the Senate inquiry into media diversity calling for ‘a fund that is arms-length from government to allocate contestable grants for innovative, quality journalism, in a similar manner to the Australia Council for the Arts’ to be funded by ‘a tax levied on digital platforms (Facebook and Google) … should sufficient funds not be available through consolidated revenue’.
“Lawyer Lizzie O’Shea proposed some similar public-spirited alternatives. Such a fund could be governed independently and give out grants based on the quality and public value of the proposed journalistic projects, as opposed to the ad revenue they generate for Zuckerberg. And the tech giants couldn’t just avoid their responsibilities by ditching news …”
“Kate Middleton — whose absence from public life since surgery at the turn of the year has raised all manner of speculation about her true state (was she really recovering from plastic surgery? In a coma? Dead?) — put out a picture with her children over the weekend, marking Mother’s Day and thanking her well-wishers. Within hours, newswire service Associated Press sent out a ‘kill notification’ stating that the picture had been tampered with.
“Presumably, there is no picture issued by the palace that hasn’t in one way or another been touched up, but there is something comically inept about releasing an altered picture of the subject of various conspiracy theories, and then doing so poor a job (apart from the blurry hands and lack of a wedding ring, the background was suspiciously green for UK winter) that it creates its own conspiracy theories.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
India implements ‘anti-Muslim’ 2019 citizenship law weeks before election (Al Jazeera)
Trump will not give a penny to Ukraine — Hungary PM Orban (BBC)
Greta Thunberg joins climate protest blocking Swedish Parliament (The Guardian)
Biden unveils $7.3 trillion budget is campaign pitch for spending, tax goals (Reuters)
India and EFTA sign $100 billion free trade deal (euronews)
Princess Catherine apologises, saying she edited image (The New York Times) ($)
Reddit aims for $6.4bn valuation ahead of initial public offering (BBC)
THE COMMENTARIAT
It took a 6.30am message for Spencer Leniu to realise he’d used a racial slur — Andrew Webster (The Age): “This is the moment when you either believe Leniu — or call bullshit. When you accept that he’s truly remorseful for using the word in the season-opener in Las Vegas — or he just wants to get back on the field as soon as possible. When you hope the game can learn from this sorry episode — or it’s best to just shame the 23-year-old into oblivion … For mine, this strikes at the heart of the argument beyond the spin and leaked stories of the past week; whether he knew the term was racist or not. When Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh allegedly called [cricketer Andrew] Symonds a ‘monkey’, Leniu hadn’t even moved to Australia yet. He was eight years old.
“When [AFL’s Adam] Goodes was racially vilified, he was living in Mount Druitt, immersed in rugby league. He was 13 years old. His learned experience is different to others, to you and me, and to dismiss him when he says he genuinely didn’t know that the term ‘monkey’ was wrong is naïve. You don’t know what you don’t know. Leniu also gave a troubling insight into how players of colour in football teams speak to one another. He revealed that terms like ‘black c—‘, ‘blackie’, ‘coconut’ and ‘monkey’ was ‘common language’ in some environments. If that’s the case, the events of the past week will surely give every club reason to pause and consider the language that is used. We all should.”
‘Oppenheimer,’ my uncle and the secrets America still doesn’t like to tell — Ariel Kaminer (The New York Times): “Soldiers were marched through detonation sites when the sand cooled down enough to walk on; pilots were sent through the still-billowing clouds; sailors were lined up on nearby boats. At the Yucca Flat testing grounds in Nevada, an Army band was even summoned to play. I know that last part because my uncle Richard Gigger was the band’s leader. Richard enlisted in 1946. He was a 16-year-old Black kid in a still-segregated Army, but it got him from East St. Louis to Germany. While there, he got permission to attend a music training program in Dachau, of all places, led by members of the Berlin Philharmonic. It changed his life.
“Over the next decades he performed for heads of state, led ticker-tape parades through Manhattan and made numerous appearances on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show‘. On multiple occasions between 1952 and 1955, his responsibilities also included playing ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll‘ to accompany the most destructive force in human history … After 25 years spanning three wars, he retired from the Army and met my aunt Ellen … For Richard it started with a pituitary tumour. Surgeons removed it, but the result, a few years later, was a cranial bleed and brain damage that worsened over time. As a kid I found my uncle kind but intimidating, a larger-than-life mix of showman’s bravado and military rigor. After the bleed, all that was gone. He moved slowly and said little.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Online
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Economist Stephanie Kelton will talk to The Australia Institute’s Greg Jericho in a webinar about Modern Monetary Theory and her new film Finding the Money.
Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)
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Author Karen Viggers will talk about her new book, Sidelines, at Avid Reader bookshop.
