OUT OF THE BLUE AND GREEN
The teal uprising in the federal election was mostly brought about by former Labor and Greens supporters, rather than voters defecting from the Liberals, according to a new Australian National University study. Of those who voted teal, 31% had voted Labor in 2019, 24% for the Greens and just 18% for the Coalition, the ABC reports. (23% voted other.) This year’s teal result was a tactical thing, the study said, aimed at unseating the Liberals — cast your mind back to 2019 and you might remember GetUp waging a similar campaign to unseat (successfully) Tony Abbott in Warringah, and (unsuccessfully) Peter Dutton in Dickson, as Guardian Australia reported at the time. The study also found Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was the most popular leader since the record high of Kevin07 fever — Albanese was more popular at the election than Adam Bandt, Barnaby Joyce and Scott Morrison. Indeed Morrison was the least popular leader in the study’s long history.
And it seems Albo is still riding that popularity wave — the latest Newspoll showed the PM’s approval rating hit a record high of 62%, compared with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s 36%. Voters in the survey were satisfied Albanese had done what he had promised to do, The Australian ($) reports, including ramming through the controversial industrial relations laws and the national anti-corruption body in Parliament’s final sitting weeks. Interestingly, support for minor parties and independents has fallen to the lowest level since the May election. It comes as the Greens plan to introduce a bill to drop the voting age to 16, the Brisbane Times reports. Giving teenagers the right to vote is a top priority for the Greens in 2023, the party’s youth spokesman, Stephen Bates, said.
MONEY FOR (BREAD AND) JAM
About a million young people, students and carers will get the largest increase in their social welfare payments since 1998, the SMH reports, as youth allowance, Austudy and carer allowance payments rise by 6.1% on January 1 thanks to indexation. (This happens automatically — the government didn’t proactively increase it.) Inflation reached 7.3% in the 12 months to September, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, thanks to skyrocketing house prices, gas bills and furniture costs.
Speaking of — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is trying to win over premiers Annastacia Palaszczuk and Dominic Perrottet on a coal price cap, The Australian ($) says, with the PM’s office asking state governments to recall their parliaments, the SMH adds. In return, the Queensland and NSW leaders want compensation for their generators and producers, thought to be “in the billions”, a source told the paper. NSW Treasurer and Energy Minister Matt Kean was like, why are you involving us? “Our legal advice is [the federal government does] have the powers to cap coal prices if they want to go down that path,” Kean told Sky News. It comes as federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers will be pleased about a big lump of lucrative coal for Christmas — our federal budget will be fleetingly balanced, according to the AFR, as iron ore, coal and natural gas prices are tipped to add $58 billion in tax revenue over the next four years.
BRITTANY HIGGINS SUES LIBS
Former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins will sue former Liberal ministers Linda Reynolds and Michaelia Cash as well as the Commonwealth, reportedly for about $3 million in compensation, the SMH says. The paper says lawyers have “set out an intention to sue for sexual harassment, sex discrimination, disability discrimination, negligence and victimisation” in documents sent to the ministers, while the dollar figure came from “sources”. Reynolds said she found out in March about a civil claim against her — on Friday the suits told her that it would go ahead this month. The SMH adds that “Higgins’ lawyer Noor Blumer threatened to seek an injunction to stop the Herald publishing the story”. Yikes. Both former ministers have a Morrison-era indemnity against any such claims so they wouldn’t be personally liable.
It comes as Higgins made her first public comments since Bruce Lehrmann’s second trial for her alleged rape was cancelled and the charge was dropped. Higgins said she didn’t understand the “asymmetrical criminal justice system” before now, saying she had to surrender her “telephones, passwords, messages, photos” and “data”, and claimed Lehrmann did not have to do the same, labelling him “not [held] publicly accountable”. Lehrmann’s team declined to comment on Higgins’ statement, The Australian ($) reports, while he is reportedly mulling his own legal action, according to Guardian Australia.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
They say every person has a book in them. What they don’t say is whether that book should come out. Last November, The Guardian’s Tim Jonze joined half a million people on an audacious quest to write a book in a month. It’s called, fittingly, National Novel Writing Month, and it involves writing precisely 1667 words a day. It wasn’t easy, Jonze says — long nights, ignoring his children, and even jotting words down during a medical procedure. But he completed the challenge and placed his manuscript gingerly on his shelf, already wincing at the memory (and the carpal tunnel). He had never once read it in the year since — and he was dreading what he would find when he picked it up again. However, upon reading it cover to cover recently, Jonze says his book was not as bad as he imagined. “It is much, much worse,” he reports gravely.
He was hoping he would’ve started out strong, but no. The early chapters were dismal — “characters you’d cross the street to avoid”, he says. “A character in a car kills the engine. Then they kill the lights. Then the engine again. At this point I could kill the author.” But, he says, it did get a little bit better. Even the sex scenes, “written hastily and shamefully, with my mother-in-law in the same room”, were alright — no worse than others he’s read from published authors, anyway. The main thing he learnt from completing the National Novel Writing Month? That he will “never let anyone read it again, including myself”. But it also made Jonze realise that he could write another book in future, if he was struck by a good idea (and had longer than a month). It’s affirming to realise we’re capable of something that felt beyond us, no matter what we end up with.
Wishing you a spring in your step this lovely Monday morning.
SAY WHAT?
16- and 17-year-olds can drive cars, work, enlist in the Australian Defence Force, and serve their communities, yet they have no say in the composition of their own government.
Stephen Bates
The Greens’ youth spokesman says getting kids the vote will be a top priority for the party in 2023, arguing student protests show that teens 16 and older deserve to have their voices heard. It wouldn’t hurt the Greens’ voter turnouts either, one would think.
CRIKEY RECAP
New details revealed in Taronga Zoo lion escape as investigation drags on
“Taronga Zoo did not wait for an assessment from government officials before reopening its grounds to the public following the escape of a pride of lions from their enclosure in early November, a move an animal rights MP has called ‘outrageous’. New details of the lion escape were revealed earlier [last] week in previously unreported preliminary findings …
“Crikey can also reveal that investigation is taking longer than expected. The Animal Justice Party’s Emma Hurst, who sought information from the DPI in NSW Parliament, told Crikey she had more questions she wanted answered.”
White paper and ‘Good, good, good’: how China’s protesters are evading Beijing’s censorship on social media
“The country’s top social media platforms, WeChat, an all-in-one app with messaging and semi-public posting options, and Weibo, a microblogging website, are tightly controlled by the government and posts can be pulled down in a matter of seconds.
“But in the precious window of time before posts get deleted, activists and other users are rushing to download and screenshot them for recirculation, creating a viable way of circumventing censors, at least temporarily.”
Who will drink from the poisoned Vic Lib leadership chalice?
“Following a less than optimal election result, Victorian Liberal Leader Matthew Guy has fallen on his sword for the second time, a feat few in politics ever achieve. His exit, pursued by a bear, leaves what’s left of his party with the unenviable task of finding a new leader.
“Despite some well-intentioned talk about renewal, the most likely outcome will be another well-to-do, straight, white man with church ties offering more of the same. However, having hit rock bottom and with nothing to lose, the Victorian Liberals should cast their net much wider, argues Crikey satirist Tom Red.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Russia will not export oil subject to Western price cap, deputy prime minister says (Reuters)
Tigray forces in Ethiopia say 65% of fighters have left frontline (Al Jazeera)
Macron blasted for saying Moscow needs ‘security guarantees’ to end the war (EuroNews)
Trump calls for the termination of the Constitution in Truth Social post
(CNN)
Fears of deadly infection surge as China abandons zero-COVID policy (The Observer)
First Nation in western British Columbia making strides toward energy sovereignty (CBC)
Iran prosecutor general signals ‘morality police’ suspended (Al Jazeera)
Indonesia’s Mount Semeru volcano erupts as authorities raise alert level to high (SBS)
THE COMMENTARIAT
It’s our Voice — So let us speak — Kelly Menzel (IndigenousX): “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities have been systematically violated and silenced since the invasion and colonisation of Australia. In addition, our knowledges have been appropriated and misused. So, for a non-Indigenous person to wander in and express opinions, thoughts and ideas about our business — without expertise — from a significant media platform, further violates and silences our voices. It also appropriates our cause and redirects the light and attention on to them and further away from us and our opinions, thoughts and ideas about our sovereign business …
“When discussing matters that impact the nation now called Australia, it is imperative that those affected, such as First Nations peoples, are centred and privileged in the discussion. This means those who are non-Indigenous must remain respectfully silent unless invited into the conversation by us. Otherwise the risk is privileging whiteness and perpetuating racism and discrimination. There is also great harm in centring the wrong voices regarding the Voice to Parliament. This is not right-way. It de-platforms and derails the issue and potentially spreads detrimental misinformation. It directs attention away from critical discourse between mob and collectively silences us. It also recolonises us and perpetuates what WEH Stanner refers to as the ‘Great Australian Silence’.”
Hero, martyr, victim … but was Gough Whitlam a great man? ($) — George Brandis (The Age): “His martyr’s mantle became a shield against criticism of the shambles his government had become. Meanwhile Sir John Kerr was fated to be forever cast as the pantomime villain, caricatured in his top hat as the malign agent of a devious and unscrupulous establishment. Overwhelmingly, the academy, the arts community, much of the media and most of the commentariat signed on to this nonsense. It has been part of the left’s mythology ever since. One result was that almost every subsequent appraisal of Whitlam has been unreliable. Biographies have ranged from the merely admiring (Jenny Hocking) to the abjectly adoring (Graham Freudenberg), and every shade of hagiography in between …
“There is no doubt that Whitlam captured, and came to embody, the spirit of his time — so much so that many of the achievements of others were, in later years, lazily associated with him. It was Harold Holt, not Whitlam, who began the demolition of the White Australia policy; John Gorton, not Whitlam, who made the decision to end Australia’s military engagement in Vietnam; Gorton, not Whitlam, who established the Australia Council and introduced the tax breaks upon which the success of the Australian film industry was built. But so much was Whitlam the choice and master spirit of the age that those, and many other reforms, came to be attributed — erroneously — to him.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Online
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SEEK’s Matt Cowgill, Deloitte’s David Rumbens, and CEDA’s Cassandra Winzar are among the speakers in a webinar exploring the coming labour market conditions.
Yuggera Country (also known as Brisbane)
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Former senator and AFR columnist Amanda Stoker will be at the launch of a new book, White Elephant Stampede, held at the Norman Hotel.
Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)
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Leading China sociologist Ching Kwan Lee will speak about whether Hong Kong’s 2019 anti-extradition movement was a revolution of our times, at the Finkel Theatre, ANU.
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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Writer Don Watson will speak about his new book, The Passion of Private White, held at The Wheeler Centre.
