Chris Crewther may missed the slam dunk this time.

From the Crikey grapevine, the latest tips and rumours …

Chris Crewther might be getting dunked on in Dunkley. Terri Butler has managed to ruin a perfectly good meme, and the Accident Compensation Concilliation Service is still not solving any arguments … 

Meme murdered: the Butler did it.  You can track the life cycle of meme from birthday to death, and like all good weird art, usually the point where a meme flatlines is when it’s absorbed by the mainstream. Usually in Australia, that means the twitter account for a police force use it. In this case, Labor MP Terri Buttler has achieved a kind of giddy perfection in her perfectly tonedeaf destruction of the American Chopper meme —  which shows a tableau of two reality show stars engaging in a heated, chair throwing argument, and is routinely subtitled with all sorts of amusing absurdity (you know, if you like that sort of thing). Butler used it to slam Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s recent announcement of $5 billion in infrastructure funding for Victoria. 

Problems for Crewther. MP for Dunkley, Chris Crewther last week launched a savage attack on individuals in his local Basketball Association under the cover of Parliamentary Privilege — we won’t repeat them here, but they are quite something. But, according to a tipster “apparently he seems to have sent it on to a bunch of people from his own Dropbox account” — could this remove the claims — which, as we say, are about 1 million on the scoville scale — from the shield of Parliamentary Privilege?

Crewther told Crikey he had shared the speech with some of the constituents who had raised these issues with him, because of an issue with the parliament website. It had been in a private capacity, he said, and he later deleted the link.

Peak body Basketball Victoria have launched an independent investigation into the allegations raised in Crewther’s speech.

Buyback playbook. We are about to see another example of the US template corporate Australia will use if the Turnbull government can introduce its tax cuts for companies.  In the coming weeks over 300 companies in the S&P 500 list are due to release their reports, and while analysts are looking for a 17% to 18% growth in earnings (with some of that coming from the unfunded tax cuts of President Trump), the real story will be two other areas — dividend increases and buybacks generated by the Trump tax cuts for corporates. 

Some analysts reckon that by the end of 2018, buybacks will top US$800 billion — 60% more than 2017. February saw a rush of share repurchases, with the value of announced stock buybacks surging to a record $153.7 billion fromS$59.9 billion in January, according to US financial data group TrimTabs. February’s record also topped the previous monthly record of $133 billion set in April 2015. On Thursday Broadcom, a big computer chip maker, revealed plans for a $12 billion buyback between now and November 2019. That was after president Trump had blocked it from buying a big US rival in Qualcomm. Rather than hand out higher wages or lift investment, it said its profits were so fat that it would reward shareholders.

Returning capital to shareholders through buybacks also serves to boost earnings by reducing the outstanding share float — in turn, boosting the bonuses of senior managers, led by the CEO, the chief financial officer, senior divisional heads and of course the board. That’s because bonus (cash and shares) are linked to growth in the share price and growth in earnings per share. Buybacks achieve both. US analysts at Credit Suisse estimate that buybacks are likely to contribute 2% to earnings in the first quarter. Except a majority of the Business Council’s 130 members in Australia are not interested in spending any savings from the Turnbull company tax cuts on higher wages, but on themselves through buybacks and higher dividends. 

Concilliation devastation. We continue to hear from disgruntled staff at Victoria’s Accident Compensation Concilliation Service. We’ve been told that two board members have already left since their appointment last year, and on top of the fact that 11 staff have gone — some of whom were very highly rated by their colleagues — our tipsters tell us many of the new recruits have CVs inexplicably free of any workers’ compensation experience. What on earth is going on over there?

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