DE WOMEN AND DEMAND
The teals will demand a 75% reduction in emissions by 2035 as a minimum, The Australian ($) reports, if Labor is plunged into minority and needs to cut a deal with the crossbench to form government at next year’s federal election. The independent alliance includes Curtin’s Kate Chaney and North Sydney’s Kylea Tink. The Albanese government has just a one-seat majority right now, with Labor-held Dunkley headed to a by-election soon, while the teals make up six of the 18 crossbench seats. Speaking of demands — about 80 ABC journos could walk out unless management looks into radio host Antoinette Lattouf’s sacking over her social media posts, Guardian Australia reports, after a chain of leaked WhatsApp messages showed a letter-writing campaign from pro-Israel lobbyists targeting ABC management. Amazingly, the post that led to her sacking was a repost from Human Rights Watch, the contents of which the ABC actually wrote a story about itself using reporting from Reuters and AFP (and turned into a video).
Meanwhile Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong says we respect the International Court of Justice, but that doesn’t mean we support the premise of South Africa’s case of genocide against Israel, which The Australian ($) and the AFR both called the “strongest signal yet” that we don’t agree with the charge. Because Wong confirmed nothing? In any case, we aren’t a party to it, Wong added, nor are international submissions open. It comes as Wong promised an extra $22 million in aid to the Middle East, The Age says. The Conversation has a cracking explainer that delves into the case — at this stage, the court will decide whether the allegations are plausible rather than true, and if they are, will probably order a ceasefire. But Israel and Hamas could both ignore it.
FINE, CHINA
Taiwan says Australia not giving Nauru enough money for the detention centre led the Pacific nation to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, with Nauru also having asked Taiwan for $125 million to cover a “shortfall” from the centre’s closure. But Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil said Nauru’s detention centre isn’t closed and funding hasn’t changed. So why is Nauru saying there’s a shortfall? The SMH says it might be because it costs $350 million a year to keep the detention centre open, even if it’s empty (what?!) compared to $485 million with 22 asylum seekers held there. “Nauru is the 10th diplomatic ally lost by Taiwan since President Tsai Ing-wen was elected in 2016,” the paper adds. It comes as China’s economy grew 5.2% last year, the AFR reports, with Premier Li Qiang telling the World Economic Forum “the Chinese market is not a risk”.
Meanwhile it’s ironic the “China hawk and self-pronounced beacon of Liberal values and champion of free enterprise” Peter Dutton is calling for a boycott of Woolworths for not selling China-made Australia Day gear, Paul Syvret writes for Michael West Media. Staff have been abused and a Brisbane store has been vandalised since the grocer came under fire for the decision it says was made because shoppers don’t buy the merch. It comes as Liberal MPs Andrew Hastie, Dan Tehan, Jason Wood and Phillip Thompson are all paying for ads on Facebook bleating about protecting Australia Day from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and “corporate elites”, Guardian Australia and AAP report. Yawn.
IT’LL COST YA
If you have an account with Mexican fast food outlet Guzman y Gomez, alcohol retailer Dan Murphy’s, streaming service Binge, home shopping network TVSN and/or Event Cinemas, you might have been hacked. The SMH reports last week’s The Iconic hack was much more widespread than initially thought — scammers have purchased our login details from overseas hackers and posted in online group chats photos that purportedly show iPhones, clothes and alcohol they bought with other people’s money. Analysis showed some 15,000 Australian accounts had been accessed since November, and companies may not even realise it yet. It comes as telco Medion Australia has coughed up for a $259,440 fine after the Australian Communications and Media Authority found it had been too lax on 1,600 customer verification checks for SIM swaps. Nine people had theirs swapped illegally, The Australian says, costing them $160,000.
Speaking of big bucks — it costs $108,879 total to send your kid to a public school in Victoria, Futurity Investment Group’s Cost of Education Index found. The Herald Sun says Melbourne is Australia’s most expensive city for government schooling for the second year running. But it’s not just Melbourne — it costs more than $92,000 on average to put a child through public school from kindergarten to Year 12 in any capital city, the ABC continues — that’s $94,819 in Sydney, $90,785 in Perth and $88,186 in Adelaide. Compare that to $195,000 for Catholic schools and more than $315,000 for independent schools, however. Last year, Smith Family CEO Doug Taylor said, 30% of parents surveyed couldn’t afford school essentials — it’s now 50%.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
An archeological curator named Sara Rivers Cofield had just spent a bargain hundred bucks on a dress from the 1880s when she found a cryptic note stashed in a secret spot under the bustle. It read: Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank, Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, Fagan. Huh, she thought, and posted the 11 words to a blog in 2014, as CNN tells it, not realising she’d just kicked off a decade-long mystery. She knew she’d stumbled across something special — the buttons alone, she said, were worth more than she’d paid for the frock — but she had no idea what the words might mean. Was this dress worn by some sort of undercover female spy in the Civil War a la Belle Boyd? Was the wearer communicating in code amid a forbidden, secret affair? Or was it nothing more than a hodgepodge of words written by a mad woman?
Amateur codebreakers set to work. For five years, people reached out to Cofield letting her know they were certain they’d crack it soon. One of them was Wayne Chan, from the University of Manitoba in Canada, who pored over some 170 code books. Nothing. The researcher tossed it aside in exasperation like so many others had. Fast forward five years and Chan was looking into the telegraph era when a light bulb went on above the boffin’s head. The eleven words were indeed nothing more than a weather report — bismark meaning the weather station, omit meaning the air temperature and pressure, leafage meaning a dew point, buck meaning there was no rain, and bank meaning the wind and sunset. The Army Signal Corps had used the same code, and it wasn’t for top secrecy. Just to save a bit of dosh on communication costs.
Hoping the weather is fine this morning.
SAY WHAT?
Jesus was born sometime between June and October, yet we celebrate it in December — setting a time to reflect and celebrate is more important than the date itself. We don’t see the need to change the date [of Australia Day], however if a date change is necessary to save the celebration itself, then so be it.
Michelle Pearse
There’s an argument for changing the date we haven’t heard before. The Australian Christian Lobby’s chief executive made the comments after it had paid for ads on Facebook about protecting Australia Day.
CRIKEY RECAP
“Spare a thought then for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. At one time he was the Republican most likely, ‘Trump with a brain’, representing the progressive nightmare of autocratic hard-right thinking married to intelligence, work ethic and competence.
“He turned out to be nothing much at all. Thanks to a lack of product differentiation from the OG and his own quite profound lack of charisma, he has drifted so far down the pecking order that a sufficiently brutal result for him in Iowa could see his presidential campaign finished at the first hurdle. All of this is simply embroidery. Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.”
“Many local councils have chosen not to hold celebrations on January 26 or hold alternate events that acknowledge colonial legacies. The City of Sydney, for example, hosts a dawn reflection event where the Opera House sails are illuminated with First Nations art.
“In 2023, the Victorian government axed its Australia Day parade opting instead for a flag-raising ceremony and gun salute at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. There has also been a slow trickle of companies — such as Woolworths, Aldi and Kmart — drifting from the celebration, though this is likely a response to Australians spending elsewhere rather than corporate leadership …”
“States and territories are tasked with the bulk of the service delivery, which is another way of saying they spend a lot of money. However, they also have limited tax powers to raise that money. On the other hand, the Commonwealth has significantly more money-raising capacity than its need to spend.
“This is why on average a whopping 45% of state and territory funding comes from Commonwealth grants. This is the much-dreaded vertical fiscal imbalance. This 45% of funding, of course, doesn’t come without strings attached. A majority of Commonwealth contributions are tied up in grants or agreements that control the way the states and territories spend the cash.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
China vents fury at Philippines over Taiwan congratulations (Al Jazeera)
Emmys 2024: Succession, The Bear and Beef among winners (BBC)
Golriz Ghahraman resigns over shoplifting allegations … police visit former Green Party MP’s home (NZ Herald)
US targets Houthi anti-ship missiles in new strike on Yemen, officials say (Reuters)
Eurovision 2024: Nordic artists calling for Israel to be banned (euronews)
What to know as Trump faces another defamation trial by E. Jean Carroll (The New York Times) ($)
Fujitsu admits for first time it should help compensate Post Office victims (The Guardian)
THE COMMENTARIAT
How Trump’s opponents made Iowa easy for him — Ross Douthat (The New York Times): “But in another sense it’s absurd that it’s come to this again. If you paid attention to the wrangling on the debate stage last week, you could discern a few key areas of real policy disagreement — most notably over our Ukraine strategy. But just as notable was the extent to which their official positions were quite similar. DeSantis would accuse Haley of being insufficiently conservative or populist on some key issue, and instead of really defending a moderate or establishment position, she would insist that, no, she was just as conservative as him.
“Meanwhile, despite his populist affect, DeSantis wasn’t offering anything like the free-spending, almost-liberal promises that Trump made back in 2016; his squabble with Haley over the Social Security retirement age was not exactly a grand ideological battle. So if the two anti-Trump candidates could converge that much on the issues despite their different constituencies, even in a debate they spent hammering at each other, it doesn’t seem that hard to imagine a single candidate running a unifying not-Trump-again campaign. It would be a little more populist than Haley’s candidacy has been, a little less ideological and Cruz-ish than DeSantis’s approach to date — but not so radically different from the race that we’ve watched both of them run.”
Anthony Albanese’s doctrine is driving industry into a graveyard — Sussan Ley (The Australian) ($): “Labor’s industrial policy vacuum has real consequences. Just like Albanese’s promises to deliver cheaper electricity and cheaper mortgages, the promise that Australia would be making more things at home is dead in the water. According to recently released Australian insolvency statistics, manufacturing insolvencies have risen steeply on Labor’s watch. Just halfway into the 2023-24 financial year, 243 manufacturing businesses have already become insolvent. In 2021 across the same period this number was in the double digits. Alarmingly, today manufacturing insolvencies are about three times higher than the same period just two years ago. We are making less things here, not more.
“While Labor fiddles with press releases, real businesses are going bust and real workers are getting the sack. The tripling of insolvencies across Australian manufacturing businesses is the direct result of Albanese’s lack of an economic plan, failed industrial policies and distracted priorities. Labor promised it would rebuild Australian manufacturing, but all it has managed to assemble is an industrial graveyard. It is a graveyard that is now littered with once great Australian businesses. Worryingly, the insolvency numbers are getting worse, not better. As we near the end of Labor’s first term, the Prime Minister should be held accountable for his litany of broken promises. Albanese said he had a plan for manufacturing. The problem is that this plan was all about how to manufacture an election win, not build our economy.”
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WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kaurna Country (also known as Adelaide)
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Intending candidates in the 2024 South Australian First Nations Voice election can head along for an info session held by the state Electoral Commission at the Noarlunga Centre.
