I’M A FIXER. I FIX THINGS
Political strategist Glenn Druery, dubbed the “preference whisperer”, has claimed Victorian Labor is reluctant to reform the voting system because it helps “keep the Greens at bay”, in a video leaked to the press by the Angry Victorians Party. In the video — see it here via the Herald Sun — Druery offers to help the party win seats for a fee of $55,000 each. He also spruiks his credentials including a 2018 CFMMEU deal that saw Labor put minor parties ahead of the Greens, resulting in the loss of four Greens seats, as Guardian Australia reports. So what’s the deal? Well, Victoria is the only place where voters can choose just one party above the line for the upper house on their ballot paper. Then their preferences are chosen for them by the party (voters can still vote below the line to choose their own preferences, but few do). The Victorian Coalition has referred the government to IBAC over Druery’s claims. The Age has a really good explainer if you’d like to delve into this more.
Meanwhile three Victorian teal candidates — Kew’s Sophie Torney, Hawthorn’s Melissa Lowe and Mornington’s Kate Lardner — are fine to use their preferred how-to-vote cards, the Victorian Civil and Administration Tribunal says. Previously the Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) told the trio their cards might mislead voters, as The New Daily reports — the cards show a ballot paper with only a 1 next to the teal names. We’ve got to number every box for our vote to count, which the voting card states several times, so the tribunal struck out the commission’s block. Torney was like, it sucks we had to waste money and time on this, but I’m happy we can get on with it without “further interference from the VEC”. So what was the VEC’s gripe? In the 2018 election about one in 20 votes were informal, and about a quarter were because people numbered only one candidate. Still, Kooyong MP Monique Ryan used a similar card without an issue…
HELPING OUT, HELPING IN
Mining billionaire Andrew Forrest will invest $740 million to help rebuild Ukraine after the war, the SMH reports. It’ll come from his family investment company Tattarang Group, and go into the massive $100 billion global fund led by BlackRock. Forrest says post-war Ukraine will be the “highest growth economy in Europe without any doubt”. The Fortescue Metals founder said he told OECD secretary-general Mathias Cormann he wanted to help back in March, and Cormann responded, oh, like a Marshall Plan? (That’s the term for a post-World War II US initiative to pump foreign aid into Western Europe). But Forrest said he didn’t want to wait four years after the war ends like the 1948 plan — they need it now. According to Forrest, when he ran it by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president told him philanthropy was awesome, but business investment had an 8 to 10 multiplying effect.
Hey, staying overseas a minute and Australian economist Sean Turnell is among 6000 Myanmar prisoners who have received a mass pardon for a national holiday, Guardian Australia reports. Turnell was detained by the junta last year in a military coup — it accused him of violating Myanmar’s state secrets act and put him away for three years. A buoyed Turnell landed in Bangkok last night and is seeing a doctor before he heads back to Oz and the embrace of his family. Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong was stoked, as was Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who spoke to Turnell. He’s in “amazingly good spirits” and is a “remarkable man”, the PM said, a man who was simply “doing his job — nothing more, nothing less”. Turnell told Albanese to tell Australians they “have been wonderful” not giving up on him, The Australian ($) adds.
A WHOLE LOT OF HOT AIR
Please stop being mean to us, Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association chairman Ian Davies says. He says political attacks on the energy sector could kill investment, make prices higher and undermine our national security. The resources sector has been unfairly “demonised”, The Australian ($) reports, even though it’s “underpinned the economies” here and in the Asia-Pacific. Aside from the known and impending peril we face from climate change, it might have something to do with paying your way. As per Crikey reporting, several of Australia’s biggest gas and coal exporters paid no income tax in 2020-21, data from the Australian Tax Office’s annual tax transparency report showed — that included AGL Energy, Woodside, Shell Energy, Santos, Chevron, BP, Glencore, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, (several of which are members of the APPEA) as per data collated by environmental expert Michael Mazengarb.
Davies said, yes, prices are very high at the moment, but market intervention doesn’t work. It comes after Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles confirmed the government was talking to the energy sector to bring our eyewatering bills down. Davies reckons the only solution is to invest in more supply, and stop opposing natural gas — a known fossil fuel. Speaking of dodgy climate solutions, last year Brisbane City Council paid $6 million for 404,000 carbon credits so the city could offset more than 520,000 tonnes of carbon emitted and still say it was carbon-neutral, the Brisbane Times reports. Greenpeace has slammed carbon credits as a “scammer’s dream scheme”, a “bookkeeping trick intended to obscure climate-wrecking emissions” and “tree-planting window dressing aimed at distracting from ecosystem destruction”. In the most simple terms, it’s like burning a pile of plastic while planting a single tree.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
The internet is playing a huge practical joke on US comedian Jimmy Fallon by pretending he’s dead. The popular Fallon, who has hosted The Tonight Show since 2014, has been “memorialised” by tens of thousands of tweets since Tuesday night. “#RIPJimmyFallon you may not have been funny, talented, smart, handsome, kind, genuine, or wise, however having the least funny late night show must count for something” one tweet reads, alongside a picture of cartoon character Jimmy Neutron. Another reads simply “#RIPJimmyFallon taken too soon” with a photo of none other than Danny DeVito. Fallon, who is perhaps the giggliest person on television, tweeted at controversial new Twitter owner Elon Musk saying “Elon, can you fix this? #RIPJimmyFallon” to which one Twitter user, not missing a beat, solemnly retweeted: “It’s almost like he’s still with us :(“.
The deeply unhelpful Musk was like, “Fix what?”. So Fallon just embraced it. He fronted up to TheTonight Show on Wednesday to a tent-revival style celebration of his non-death complete with a spirited gospel choir. “An interesting night last night for me,” Fallon began wryly. He had an arsenal of jokes relating to his own demise with varying levels of comedic effect. “When I heard Trump was running again, I said over my dead body,” he said. Incredibly, it’s not the first time Fallon’s death has trended on Twitter — “It wasn’t as traumatic the second time,” he assured the audience. This time, Fallon said he found out he was dead while out to dinner with his wife, Nancy Juvonen. “Oh man, that’s terrible. I loved you,” she responded dryly. Fallon said he wasn’t quite sure what to tell the internet — “I’m not?” The show’s announcer, Steve Higgins, concurred: “It’d seem like you’re bragging.”
Wishing you a lively Friday, and a restful weekend.
SAY WHAT?
But the choice made by prime minister Morrison was the opposite, re-entering into nuclear confrontation, making himself completely dependent by deciding to equip themselves [with a] submarine fleet that the Australians are incapable of producing and maintaining in-house.
Emmanuel Macron
The French president is still seething about our exit from the French submarine deal, saying all then PM Scott Morrison did was provoke China. Macron said Morrison thought he was giving us “freedom and sovereignty” but it did the complete opposite.
CRIKEY RECAP
‘Your Aussie friend and Trumpette!’: Gina Rinehart is an active member of Donald Trump’s female fan club
“Rinehart’s support for Trump is well known. The mining magnate was one of the special guests at Trump’s state dinner during former prime minister Scott Morrison’s 2019 visit to the White House, and has publicly praised the former president. What’s less known is Rinehart’s long-time membership to the Trumpettes, an international supporters group for female fans of Donald Trump, as noted this morning by Seven US correspondent David Woiwod.
“Founded in 2015 by socialite Toni Holt Kramer and three other women, the group tasked its members with one mission: ‘Your job as a Trumpette is to help get the real Donald J Trump elected, not the one the press wants you to believe in’. Rinehart is listed on the group’s website as a member, and the Trumpettes’ social media accounts have chronicled Rinehart’s extensive history with the group.”
Is Donald Trump even eligible to run for president again?
“Was January 6 an insurrection or rebellion? According to a single New Mexico State Court judge, it was. In September, he ruled that a county commissioner who had directly participated in the breach of the Capitol must be removed from his office and barred for life from holding any public office. In doing so, the judge expressly ruled that the riot and the planning and incitement that led to it constituted an insurrection under the 14th Amendment.
“That’s the only judicial precedent so far, and may not be followed in other state or federal courts. But the argument is powerful. One legal theory has it that the definition of insurrection can be taken from an existing federal law, the Insurrection Act, which empowers the president to call up the military against ‘unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States [that] make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States’.”
Australia is failing the tens of thousands of children who aren’t enrolled in school
“Australia is on a two-year-straight ethical decline according to data released today by the Governance Institute of Australia. The annual survey of 1000 people saw the nation slide down the morality metric — formally known as the Ethics Index — from a modest 45 last year to a meagre 42 this year. In 2020, the country came in at 52.
“The index has been running since 2016 and serves as a stocktake of ‘ethical issues and conduct’ in Australian society. In short, it’s a who’s who of principled and sub-par occupations, organisations and sectors, and a pitch for future challenges. So who’s dragging us down and propping us up? At the bottom of the occupation pile are state politicians.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Dutch court sentences three to life in prison for 2014 downing of MH17 (Reuters)
Bruno Carbone: one of Europe’s most-wanted criminals arrested in Syria (EuroNews)
PM Jacinda Ardern says NZ must be able to raise issues with China without ‘retaliatory acts’ (Stuff)
New [International Atomic Energy Agency] resolution censures Iran over insufficient cooperation (Al Jazeera)
UK faces biggest fall in living standards on record (BBC)
Malta set to ease its tough anti-abortion laws (EuroNews)
Emma Morrison is the first Indigenous woman to win Miss World Canada (CBC)
Myanmar frees former British ambassador and others in amnesty (The New York Times)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Why the Democrats just lost the House — Howard Wolfson (The New York Times): “The first mistake: after an independent commission created by voters failed to agree on a new map of House districts in New York, Democrats got greedy. Instead of drawing maps that were modestly advantageous, they went whole hog — producing an extremely gerrymandered map that invited a successful legal challenge. Second, the legislature apparently decided that voter concerns about crime and disorder were nothing to worry about. After three decades of falling crime, Democrats had got complacent and disconnected, and failed to recognise that the bail reforms they passed in 2019, eliminating cash bail for most misdemeanours and nonviolent felonies, were deeply unpopular. Those mistakes led to avoidable losses in the suburbs that helped doom national Democratic hopes to retain the House.
“The challenge facing Democrats in New York should have been clear last year when Republicans defeated a Democratic incumbent county executive and two district attorneys on Long Island. Fair or not, the Republican message was quite simple: bail reform passed by Democrats in Albany had created a wave of crime and disorder. At the same time, Democrat Eric Adams was swept into New York City’s Hall on a message of public safety. His message was also quite simple: as a former cop — and as a teenage victim of police brutality — he was well positioned to ensure both a reduction in crime and respectful policing. Sadly there is little evidence that Democratic leaders in Albany heard the alarm bells ringing on Long Island or saw the Adams victory in the city as a path forward.”
Interrupting isn’t necessarily rude — it’s just ‘conversational overlapping’ — Amelia Lester (The SMH): “But even as conversational overlapping has been found across cultures, technology is surely affecting its evolution. Think of texting — a medium some of those chatty friends I mentioned have taken to with aplomb, presumably because no one is around to interrupt them. One friend has even taken to leaving voice message texts to encapsulate the voluminousness of her in-person speech. These texts are invariably about her house renovation, and perhaps the slight resentment I feel about listening to them stems from knowing I cannot interrupt her.
“On the other side of the ledger, zoom has been a challenge for those of us prone to sync talk. The default in most meetings is to sit on mute until you take centre stage for a soliloquy. Moreover, what can be charmingly baroque IRL — think of Antigua’s ‘contrapuntal conversation’ — just sounds on zoom as though you’re talking over someone. For those of us who can’t resist an interruption, there’s always the written word. ‘Is that why you’re a writer?’ my fellow interrupter asked me. He didn’t mean it in a critical sense; he is, after all, a lawyer. I thought he was on to something. Putting words on the page imbues me with a control I just don’t have in conversation. And no, I won’t be taking questions.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kaurna Country (also known as Adelaide)
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Independent MP Helen Haines, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister Patrick Gorman, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones and Transparency International Australia board member AJ Brown will speak at the 2022 National Public Sector Governance Forum.
Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)
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Academic and social worker Franceska Jordan will talk about her memoir, Under the Boab Tree, at Avid Reader bookshop.
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Tree Veneration Society Inc founder Louise Fowler-Smith will chat about hr new book, Sacred Trees of India, at Glee Books.
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Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government Victor Dominello, Secretary NSW Health Susan Pearce, Secretary Department of Customer Service Emma Hogan, and NSW Department of Education Ruth Owen will speak at the NSW Council Event at Hilton Hotel.
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Immigration Minister Andrew Giles will speak at Kaldor Conference 2022 held at UNSW.
Yuggera Country (also known as Brisbane)
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Agriculture Minister Murray Watt will speak on a panel as part of a Queensland Farmers’ Federation event for National Agriculture Day, at Customs House.
