Thank Evans for that Farewell Great Australian Party Senate candidate Pete Evans, we hardly knew ye. Crikey noticed yesterday that the celebrity chef and conspiracy connoisseur was no longer listed on the team page of Rod Culleton’s party website and that his candidate page on Facebook was gone. We checked in with Evans and he tersely confirmed he was no longer running.
Taylor made It must be great when you’re the minister for emissions reduction and then a major polluter puts out a statement — in this case about being allowed to go ahead with a major gas project — and it’s so in sync with your world view you can’t improve upon it:
Bear this in mind when we get our next round of relentless press gallery grovelling about Scott Morrison’s supposed leadership on climate action — his net zero by 2050 was called an “epic event” by The Australian only this morning.
Adani wing Sometimes (and it’s rarely a good thing) there is a situation that seems manufactured in a lab for the purposes of appearing in this column. There is nothing I can add to the following tweet from Gautam Adani, head of the mega-polluting company that takes his name, announcing his support for “Energy Revolution: The Adani Green Energy Gallery” at London’s Science Museum — except to clarify that I didn’t mock it up in Photoshop:
ICAC handed We noted early on that New South Wales Labor leader Chris Minns has been awfully selective in the battles he has picked with the Liberal Party in that state. But the past few days have shown just how selective. You can scan back over his Twitter feed for the week and find not one mention of ICAC. Privatisation, infrastructure, interrogating how the government intends to safely emerge from lockdown — but nothing about a rival party whose previous leader is being investigated for the potential misuse of $35 million in public money.
Has Minns concluded that Gladys Berejiklian is still popular enough that any crowing would leave a sour taste with voters? Leery of inviting comparisons with Victorian Labor’s current travails in front of its state’s equivalent body? Or, for that matter, with NSW Labor’s own history?
Good Fued Guide Here’s one we didn’t see coming. Yesterday news.com.au’s Samantha Maiden published a piece filling in some blanks in Lisa Wilkinson’s recent account of the pay disparity between Wilkinson and former Today co-host Karl Stefanovic. One person to decide the story was beneath Maiden’s talents was Brittany Higgins. “Pressing update in the midst of a sitting week from the political reporter of news.com.au,” she tweeted in a reply to the story, adding a shrug.
Many were surprised at the tone, given the fact that the most pressing update Maiden actually faces is to the shelving capacity in her home to accommodate the metric tonne of awards she is likely to win for her reporting on Higgins’ abysmal treatment within Parliament. Indeed, Maiden was subject to a clumsy and later retracted implication from the prime minister and a hit piece from The Australian Financial Review for her troubles. Further, Wilkinson brought the story to a big TV audience on Ten.
Higgins went on to say Maiden “did a brilliant job reporting my experience however that doesn’t require me to agree with everything she writes in perpetuity” and that the pair “had a major difference of opinions about the role of journalists calling out bad behaviour … ” Maiden, for her part, has kept her counsel so far.
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