CRIMINAL ‘JUSTICE’
Cops are lobbying the federal government to deport non-citizens accused of crimes that haven’t gone to court yet, The Age ($) reports. Non-citizens lose their visa if they are sentenced to more than a year in prison, but they can appeal it, and remain in detention while they do so. But police have written to ministers — including former home affairs minister Peter Dutton — and the department with the details of unproven crimes. That’s according to FOI’d documents that show immigration systems being used as an alternative to convictions and sentences, an expert told the paper. It comes as Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil confirmed up to 340 people may be released from immigration detention after the High Court ruling, The Age ($) continues, but called it “very unlikely”. They have already served their sentences but are stateless and have nowhere to be deported to.
Meanwhile opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson doesn’t agree with his boss Dutton’s argument that the government should re-detain 93 people already released, Guardian Australia reports. He carefully responded to ABC’s Insiders that we should investigate “all lawful options” — Dutton’s portfolio successor O’Neil went harder, saying Dutton knows full well what he’s suggesting is legally impossible. To another Labor minister now, and did you catch the rather fawning profile of Jim Chalmers in Nine newspapers’ the Good Weekend ($)? Chalmers is described as having “started the day by driving his body hard” at the gym, where many of the other patrons, the journalist notes, are “members of the local Pasifika community”. Okay? Between interviews with his mum and friends, the treasurer is warmly described as having “intellectual restlessness”, being “a hard taskmaster”, having an “unstoppable rise” up the political ladder, and being “highly media-savvy”. Indeed — a cynic might note you can’t buy this sort of oddly personal press.
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THAT…
Did you ask China’s President Xi Jinping about Australia’s injured Australian Navy divers or not, the opposition asked Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, as the AFR ($) reports. The incident happened in international waters last Tuesday, although the government didn’t release the details until after Albanese’s APEC trip to San Francisco — Defence Minister Richard Marles said the navy advised the People’s Liberation Army Navy destroyer multiple times about the divers, but it continued to approach with its sonar pulsing, The Australian ($) reports. Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson had a lot to say: that it was deliberate, egregious, malign behaviour, it was the opposite of the apparent friendship on display between the two nations, and Albanese should say whether he raised it. Though he might not be about to take advice from the Coalition on relations with China.
Meanwhile an Australian Army veteran Matthew Jepson has reportedly been killed by Russian artillery in Ukraine, the ABC reports. The Queenslander was part of an elite unit known as “The Chosen Company”, described as having the highest casualty ratio. DFAT confirmed an Australian had died but didn’t name him. To another major conflict now, and tens of thousands of Sydneysiders, and at least 15,000 Melburnians, marched at the weekend to demand a Gaza ceasefire and the release of Hamas hostages as the Gaza death toll surpassed 13,000 (of them, 5,000 were just kids). News.com.au went for low-hanging fruit, heading its story with “Shocking slogans” and starting its story about “anti-Israel protests” with the fact people had compared the Jewish state with Nazi Germany. Six paragraphs down we learn it was a group called “Queer Jews” who did so.
ME NO LIKE
Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart wrote to Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg asking him to delete more than 750 scams using her face and name, The Australian ($) reports. She said Meta needs to do more to stop vulnerable Australians being harmed — meanwhile mining our planet into more and more dangerous levels of warming hell continues. Speaking of — NT Chief Minister Natasha Fyles has been referred to NT’s ICAC over her Woodside shares, the NT News ($) reports, after she divested all 169 last Thursday. Fyles said she’d always been transparent about the shares, but former Labor member and independent Blain MLA Mark Turner said he felt “profound unease” about it. The code of conduct states that “ministers must divest themselves completely of all shareholdings … that may create a conflict of interest as a result of their portfolio responsibilities”.
Meanwhile Yamatji actor Ernie Dingo said we must protect the NT’s Aboriginal language interpreters because Indigenous languages are not taught in most schools in Australia, the National Indigenous Times reports. The paper sat down with him to hear his views about the failed Voice to Parliament referendum — he said it “hurt a lot” to learn “two-thirds of Australians don’t accept blackfellas, don’t want to accept blackfellas”. Dingo said he saw it as “our only opportunity in my lifetime to actually see a togetherness”. He said he feels bolstered, however, by community’s resilience to maintain language, lore and culture, and said generations before him had survived by taking that hurt and “channelling their energy in a different direction”.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
It’s 1952, and a grumbling, mumbling young student named “McNie” is doing detention on the grounds of Dalhousie School. His punishment was digging through the dirt with the school gardener, and the Scottish lad could not believe his rotten luck. Unbeknown to him, it was about to change. Uncovering what he thought was a lumpy potato turned out to be some sort of ancient treasure — the Royal Scottish Museum’s Cyril Aldred confirmed it was an important Egyptian red sandstone statue head, circa 1922-1855BC. It was swiftly whisked away from the crestfallen boy to be cleaned and catalogued. Incidentally, “McNie” would grow up to become a teacher at that very school, known to the kids in 1966 as “Mr McNie“. His students were fooling around during a PE class when one of the lads yelped from a sharp object in the ground.
“Mr McNie” set about digging it out and was floored to uncover an ancient sculpture of a bull. Lugging the thing to the same museum that identified his treasure as a child, staff confirmed it was an Egyptian bronze votive statuette of an Apis bull, from about 664-322BC. Leave it with us, museum staff urged him, and we’ll clean it up. But It seems “McVie” hadn’t outgrown his childhood penchant for mischief, as he declined the offer and disappeared without a trace with the bull, as The Guardian tells it. Finders keepers and all that. Several other Egyptian artefacts have been found at the school — former museum curator Elizabeth Goring called it “one of the most extraordinary stories that happened to me in my 26 years at the museum”. Whether they ended up in Scotland as noble souvenirs, or whether they were buried following spooky tales of the “mummy’s curse“, we just don’t know, Goring said. Some mysteries stay just that.
Hoping you can share your treasure today.
SAY WHAT?
It has become untenable for me and it runs against Labour Party values to stand by and watch the horrific scenes we are witnessing without calling for a ceasefire. The loss of civilian lives must stop.
Chris Hipkins
The outgoing New Zealand prime minister, in stark contrast to our PM Anthony Albanese, is calling for an immediate ceasefire to stop the “devastation and loss of life on a massive scale” in Gaza and Israel. It seems the c-word comes easier when it’s among parting words — conservative Christopher Luxon will be NZ’s next leader.
CRIKEY RECAP
“The government has been doing a lot of cleaning up of inherited messes. One is the direct result of Peter Dutton’s incompetence when at Home Affairs: the loss of control of border security in relation to tens of thousands of fake asylum seekers arriving by air and gaming a broken visa system and the AAT …
“And the High Court’s decision reinstating the citizenship of terrorist Abdul Nacer Benbrika, declaring 2015 citizenship law reforms unconstitutional — as was pointed out by a wide variety of observers at the time. They’re just the latest additions to a long list of examples of incompetence from the Coalition while in government.
“Optus’ outage appears less related to Qantas-style behaviour — a blatant contempt for customers, a commitment to reducing levels of service, underinvestment as a key corporate strategy, and unlawful treatment of its employees — than human error and the grim fact that infrastructure, no matter how gold-plated, occasionally breaks down.
“Telecommunications, along with aviation, is naturally a core area in the relentlessly expanding area of ‘critical infrastructure’ regulation by government — that once covered four sectors, but now extends to a mighty 11 — the primary effect of which has been to simply raise regulatory barriers to entry in sectors already prone to monopolies and oligopolies.”
“In crying louder to be heard, sometimes even (understandably) swearing our disbelieving heads off for the world to acknowledge Palestinians as actual humans, we now find ourselves entering into places that illuminate the graphic savagery. And here we must be very careful. We must strive to strike the right balance of dignified shouting without perpetuating the very demonisation we are fighting to end. Gazans are better, and deserve better, than that …
“In these stories we must search for a piece of ourselves. Tell not only horrors but personhood. Speak their names at the dinner table with friends. Stop gawking at the awfulness and then saying absolutely nothing, or worse, ‘We are thinking of you,’ and then doing absolutely nothing.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Premature babies evacuated from Al-Shifa and on their way to Egypt, as hostage negotiations continue (ABC)
Bolsonaro under investigation for ‘harassing’ humpback whale (The Guardian)
261 Georgia congregations leave the United Methodist Church over a divide on LGBTQIA+ issues (CNN)
A Jan 6 defendant pleads his case to the son who turned him in (The New York Times)
Maldives new president asks India to withdraw its military (Reuters)
Ukraine ‘light years away’ from joining EU, says Hungarian PM Viktor Orban (euronews)
Only minor obstacles to Israel-Hamas hostage deal remain, Qatari PM says (The Guardian)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Nation’s productivity, growth demands fairness in merger process — Jim Chalmers (The Australian) ($): “Next year marks the 50th anniversary of a groundbreaking piece of legislation that shaped the modern Australian economy. The Trade Practices Act, introduced by Labor in 1974, transformed the way companies operated and set the standard for what consumers should expect from business. Previously, firms could engage in all sorts of anti-competitive practices to inflate their profits without the risk of consequence or sanction. The new legislation changed all this, laying the foundations for a more productive and competitive economy in the decades that followed.
“The reforms enhanced consumer protections and outlawed behaviours such as price-fixing, collusion and false advertising. One of biggest changes was a ban on anti-competitive mergers. Today, as part of the government’s wider review of the nation’s competition policy settings, we are releasing a consultation paper on Australia’s merger settings. One of the big questions asked in the paper prepared by Treasury’s newly established competition taskforce is whether our current mergers regime remains fit for purpose. The US, the UK, Canada and the European Union have all reviewed or amended their merger rules in recent years.”
Dutton’s advantages over Albanese could yet turn out to be problems — Sean Kelly (The SMH) ($): “Last week’s sitting of Parliament was instructive at two levels. At the level of principle, there were causes for deep concern. Politically, it was a reminder of the contrasts between Dutton and Albanese. As we enter the second half of Albanese’s first term — we hit the 18-month mark tomorrow — these contrasts may be decisive. On Wednesday, Dutton rose in the Parliament to deliver a speech. Some of this was important: expressing concern at social disharmony and rising anti-Semitism. Some was justified: attacking the government for its obvious lack of preparedness when the High Court ordered the release of dozens of refugees, some guilty of serious crimes. All of this was lost because other parts went beyond the pale.
“Dutton crossed two lines. First, in his speech, he combined the High Court’s decision with the separate issues of anti-Semitism and the war in Gaza. At the very least, this risked looking like a dangerous attempt to roll issues that might tap into race into a single ball — not the typical move of someone concerned about social harmony. Worse, it dishonoured the important points he made about anti-Semitism, by including them as just one more part of a broad political attack. It should be said here that there is nothing wrong per se with a political leader arguing his opponent is failing on an issue of racial or cultural hatred — even that they are deliberately exploiting it … But it is crucial that this is done rarely, and that it is done carefully, with significant evidence.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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Writers Caroline Arnoul, Sienna Barton, Anneliz Marie Erese, moirra and Jack Nicholls will speak at The Next Big Thing, at The Moat.
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Immigration Minister Andrew Giles and Settlement Services International’s Violet Roumeliotis are among the speakers at the Migration Forum 2023 at The Fullerton Hotel.
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Poet Paris Rosemont will talk about her new collection, Banana Girl, at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.
