FAKE NEWS
Tesla has accused the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI) of making knowingly “false claims” that Labor’s fuel emissions standards would increase the price of cars, Guardian Australia reports. Tesla, which has a board seat at and is an active member of the lobby group, said Ford, Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz are all at odds with the FCAI approach, which included a claim the standard would make utes $13,000 more expensive. The SMH notes the Coalition is also bleating about a price hike, but modelling shows it will amount to 1%, or $500. The standards, starting next year, basically cap manufacturers’ new car emissions, incentivising them to release more hybrid and EV models. Without the standards during the Coalition’s nearly decade-long reign, Australia became a dumping ground for the world’s most polluting clunkers, as ABC reported, because we were the last to introduce them out of everyone in the OECD (bar Russia).
Speaking of false claims, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is droning on about nuclear again as a “transitioning” power source, even though nuclear plants take 9.4 years to build and are illegal in every state and territory. He said Australia was an “outlier” for not adopting it — why would we? We’re the sunniest and among the windiest places on earth with enough renewable energy to power our country 500 times over (!). The business case has never stacked up either — inquiries in Victoria, South Australia and federally have found nuclear plants to be a dead end. WA Premier Roger Cook dismissed nuclear power as “ridiculous” and unviable, WA Today says, while The West ($) reports Nationals leader David Littleproud suggested we should scrap the nuclear ban and “find out through the marketplace”.
HOME MOVERS
In December 1983, a landlord could get 8% of a house’s value in rent each year ($110 a week for your median house costing $69,569). Today, landlords get just 2.7% ($574 for your median house costing $1,091,938). It’s according to Real Estate Institute of Australia data, the SMH reports, which found houses in Sydney, Adelaide and Canberra are overvalued by more than a third. Indeed a Sydney house would need to fall by $458,000 to be considered fair. What happens when we overvalue homes? Well, a severe recession or a huge cut in immigration would see prices tumble, one expert said. Still, interest rates are due to start declining in September, 9News reports, so probably house prices will increase instead. It comes as the Greens want a government-run property developer to build 610,000 cheap homes for renters and first-home buyers in the next decade.
Housing is also shaping up to be a top priority of the Coalition — Opposition Leader Peter Dutton added the new “home ownership” portfolio and Senator Andrew Bragg is shadow assistant spokesperson, The West ($) says. More changes in the Coalition’s shadow ministry per Sky News Australia: shadow spokesperson for home affairs and cyber security James Paterson is now shadow cabinet secretary too, MP Melissa McIntosh is shadow spokesperson for energy affordability and Western Sydney, and MP Luke Howarth is shadow assistant treasurer and spokesperson for financial services. Sky News Australia reporter Adriana Mageros said there’d been no changes to the Labor frontbench in “more than two years in government”, which is wrong, considering the party was elected in May 2022.
WAIT AND SEE
The Department of Social Services says people claiming the disability support pension (DSP) in Western Australia’s Yalgoo, Wyalkatchem and Kent waited on average more than 200 days between last September and December, Guardian Australia reports. Countrywide it was more than 80 days, which is nearly double the 46 days it took in 2022-23. Social Services Minister Bill Shorten blamed staff shortages and vowed to “blitz” the backlog. The Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union said it wouldn’t be so “life and death” if JobSeeker, which many apply for while waiting for the DSP, was equal to a living wage. SBS reports it’s about to go up slightly because of indexation — single people with no kids will get an extra $13.50 per fortnight.
Meanwhile, we’re paying 38% more for private medical services in the past three years, from $185 in 2020 to $256 last year according to Australian Prudential Regulation Authority data The Australian ($) looked at. One expert blamed the medical device industry overcharging and higher gap charges for profit-hungry specialists and insurers. Not only that, our health insurance premiums have risen 45% in the past 10 years. It comes after the government announced a 3.03% hike for your average healthcare policy, which is up from 2.90% last year, and 2.70% in 2022. But NIB said its prices would rise 4.1% while Medibank’s went up 3.31%. Never hurts to shop around folks.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
The haunting sands and husky voices of Dune have returned to the big screen this month in the long-awaited second part of the book-turned-epic film franchise, with various long shots of several red suns setting over the horizon interspersing the action. It’s directed, co-written and co-produced by Denis Villeneuve, a Quebecois filmmaker, who received a call from a woman named Josée Gagnon some months back as CBC tells it. She runs L’Avant, an organisation where end-of-life doulas sit by the dying in their final days. Gagnon had posted on Facebook that her client wished to see Dune: Part Two before his death, and a mutual friend had connected her to Villeneuve.
Sure, the filmmaker responded, moved by the dying man’s wish. Let’s organise a flight down to Los Angeles ASAP for the guy. But Gagnon told Villeneuve he did not understand. We can’t move him, she said, indeed we don’t even know if he will live to see next weekend. Villeneuve thought hard about the man’s final request, and figured there was nothing else to do but send his own laptop containing the then-unreleased version of the sequel to the hospital. His assistant couriered it up to the Canadian province and had staff and the man sign non-disclosure agreements before setting up the screening. He later passed while watching the three-hour epic. While some expressed disappointment he didn’t get to see the film’s end, Gagnon said it was no matter. “It was all there for him,” she said simply.
Hoping you enjoy the journey, today and always.
SAY WHAT?
[Our] agencies negotiated an arrangement with her to come to Singapore and perform and to make Singapore her only stop in south-east Asia. It has turned out to be a very successful arrangement. I don’t see that as being unfriendly.
Lee Hsien Loong
The Singapore prime minister defended a deal with mega-pop star Taylor Swift that saw her skip other Southeast Asian nations to do six shows in Singapore instead. Swift was provided with “certain incentives” from a government fund established to rebuild tourism post-COVID, which Thailand’s PM claimed totalled between $3m-$4.6m.
CRIKEY RECAP
“Like many Australian companies, News Corp, Seven and Nine devote as much effort to trying to influence regulatory outcomes in their favour as they do to providing goods and services to consumers and other business.
“From streaming content regulations, to cross-media rules, to the near-abolition of licence fees, to their resistance to gambling advertising regulation and — in the case of Seven and Nine — anti-siphoning, the big media companies are assiduous in lobbying, threatening, cajoling and otherwise encouraging major party politicians to look after them, almost always successfully.”
“We’re so inured though to old billionaire ownership of our media — the US-based Murdochs and Redstones, the much-mourned (in some quarters, at least) Fairfaxes and Packers — that we’re missing what the new caste of billionaires is doing to both global and Australia’s traditional media.
“It’s part an ideological project, part a crucial tool in the government-reliant crony capitalism that is replacing the market-driven neo-capitalism that collapsed in the 2007-08 global financial crisis. Through ownership of media, billionaire activists have discovered they can pair the ideology of a ‘free media’ with their corporate, cultural and political interests.”
“In 2018, then BuzzFeed News journalist Alice Workman published a story about former Lindsay MP Emma Husar which Husar claimed portrayed her as a ‘slut’ and ‘sexually perverted’. The Labor politician said the article claimed she had exposed herself to a colleague in a manner that referenced the famous Sharon Stone scene in the 1992 film Basic Instinct.
“She also said the articles claimed she was a ‘bully’ who ‘[misused] work expenses’. Husar vehemently denied the allegations, telling Parliament in December 2018: ‘I am not a bully, I am not Sharon Stone, I am not a thief and I did not deliberately misuse my work expenses’. The parties reached an out-of-court settlement in 2019 …”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Far-left group claims attack on Tesla factory in Germany (Al Jazeera)
Super Tuesday: Four things to watch out for as Americans vote (BBC)
Bitcoin rises above $69,000 in new record high (The Guardian)
As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsens, emaciated children seen at hospitals (Reuters)
Ukraine claims to sink Russian ship as US airman charged with sharing intel on dating site (euronews)
Go behind the scenes of all 10 best picture Oscar nominees (The New York Times) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Regional neighbours rely on us to speak out against China — Greg Sheridan (The Australian) ($): “Australia’s position with ASEAN over China, pre the Albanese government, was perfectly fine. It still is, unless Canberra decides to solve a problem that doesn’t exist and thereby creates a new one. Let me explain. Here’s a hot scoop. The 10 member nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have already been tipped off to the news that Australia is a longstanding strategic and military ally of the US, and that we have quite a lot of problems with Beijing’s regional behaviour. Generally, ASEAN wants Australia to maintain its strategic identity, though not all of them can always say so publicly. First, let’s pause to pay tribute to [Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Philippine President Bongbong Marcos].
“They both represent real democracy. Marcos overcame the once-negative legacy of his family name to resoundingly win a democratic election. He’s a much better president than Rodrigo Duterte was and he has restored strategic stability to Manila. Anwar is one of the most determined and courageous figures in Southeast Asia. He spent years in jail on trumped-up charges of sodomy. His life is a triumph of democratic activism. That’s not to say that both men haven’t said and done things over their careers that Australians would find difficult. But let’s be frank, ASEAN is diverse and internally divided. Recognition of this is its great strength, its monumental achievement, through relentless and exhausting diplomatic processes, has been to render internal state-on-state military conflict within Southeast Asia almost unthinkable.”
‘Say it ain’t so’: Sam Kerr charge comes as a shock — Greg Baum (The SMH): “That six-week lag between learning of the charges and informing FA probably constitutes a code-of-conduct violation in itself and may be grave enough to jeopardise Kerr’s captaincy of the Matildas regardless of the trial’s outcome. If it was Pat Cummins, say, you’d think he would be out of the job already. This is the narrative as we know it, and at one level it’s all too sordidly familiar. But it’s the meta-narrative that is so transfixing. Between the day of Kerr’s alleged criminal insult and now, the Matildas have grown into arguably Australia’s best-loved national team, filling stadiums wherever they go, inspiring women, converting men and re-defining our national vocation for sport, and Kerr — despite a wretched run with injury — has been the face and figurehead of a phenomenon.
“It’s incomprehensible now to realise that as Kerr scored that wonder goal against England in a World Cup semi-final in Brisbane last year, this case and all its possible ramifications might have been lurking somewhere in the deepest recesses of her consciousness. There was — and is — a wholesomeness about the way Kerr and the Matildas went about their business that made Australia universally and unreservedly proud. She was on a pedestal. It was not of her making, and perhaps was impossibly lofty anyway, higher in its saintliness than any men’s plinth. We’re prone to ascribing to our sporting heroes all that we want to be, and we invested a full GDP’s worth in Kerr. It’s our halo she was wearing.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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Space archaeologist Alice Gorman will speak about climate change at the Wheeler Centre. You can catch this one online.
Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)
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Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather and Property Council of Australia CEO Mike Zorbas will talk about housing at the National Press Club.
