From the Crikey grapevine, the latest tips and rumours …

Rhiannon takes aim. Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon has sent an email out to Greens members defending herself and taking aim at others as part of the preselection battle for first spot on the NSW Greens senate ticket for next year’s election. The email largely deals with why she decided to run again — a theme that allows her to take a few shots at some of those with whom she had run-ins in the past year. She refers to the “debate” within the party regarding education funding (which resulted in her being suspended from the party room): 

“I was not intending to run for preselection. However, circumstances changed in June this year with regard to the debate over school funding and the Greens NSW principled position that MPs adhere to policy.

“As the Greens NSW Senator I believe I was obliged to uphold the policy as determined by members, to support grassroots members campaigning for full Gonski and to stay true to our word with school teachers and their unions who campaign so hard for public schools.”

However, she insists there was never “a split vote” on the matter.

Rhiannon also dedicates an entire section to “media misrepresentation”:

“It was concerning to see my actions and the Greens NSW misrepresented in the media. I believe there was no alternative but to stand up for our policy on public education …”

“Sadly such attacks have surfaced in this preselection. Last week in the Sydney Morning Herald an anonymous Greens source accused me of breaching the preselection rules. It’s disappointing that a member should speak to the media instead of raising it through our party processes. It was clearly designed to damage my reputation.

“I consulted with the Returning Officers about the article and they wrote to me expressing their view that there has not been a breach of the rules. I understand that no complaint has been made about my preselection work.”

 

Biopic up. So it turns out that Saturday Paper founding editor Erik Jensen’s acclaimed, unconventional biography of Adam Cullen, Acute Misfortune, is being adapted for the screen — cropping up in the MIFF Premiere Fund slate for 2018. The prospect intrigues Ms Tips on so many levels, and raises so many tantalising questions: will it try to mimic Jensen’s book, or be a straight biopic? Will it be from Cullen’s perspective, or Jensen’s? Is Jensen a character, and if so who’s playing him? We put in a call to Jensen’s office to ask what he knew about the project, but he didn’t get back to us before deadline.

Women’s Ashes put to the test. Ms Tips was greatly looking forward to settling in and watching the women’s Ashes Test yesterday, only to find that it wasn’t actually showing, with Nine filling their afternoon schedule with the likes of Are you being served? and Come dine with me: couples. Why, given the network previously broadcast the one-day games between the two nations, and will be doing so for the upcoming (and possibly series deciding) T20 games, has it been left to Cricket Australia to stream the first ever day-night Ashes Test? As ever, it’s partly money, and we hear it has to do with the internal machinations between Nine and Cricket Australia. The production costs are hundreds of thousands a day, and Nine has been losing money on the deal for years. Perhaps the cost of several days of test cricket was just too much for the network.

Hollie to go lightly? The debacle around eligibility to nominate for government reached “oh come on” levels around the time Stephen Parry remembered his British lineage, and has since engulfed John Alexander, and implicated several more. But this morning we plumbed a new depth, with Hollie Hughes — the Liberal candidate next on the ticket under former Nationals senator Fiona Nash — herself being questioned, not for citizenship, but for her time on the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Crikey has followed the “jobs for the boys” approach to AAT appointments for quite some time; will more of the Liberal mates appointed in this last batch be watching the High Court with interest when it comes to their own political ambitions?

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