SA Premier Steven Marshall (Image: AAP/Morgan Sette)

LABOR GAINS

Former South Australian premier Steven Marshall will quit his nine-year reign as leader of the Liberal Party after he lost the weekend’s state election, news.com.au reports, the first time an opposition has beat an incumbent since the pandemic began. As of Sunday afternoon, Marshall had actually copped a whopping 7.1% swing in his own seat in Adelaide, and ABC says his resignation could be a moot point if he loses his seat to Labor challenger Cressida O’Hanlon in the first place. Some pretty high-profile Liberal scalps have been claimed so far — it looks like the former transport minister Corey Wingard has lost his seat to Labor challenger Sarah Andrews. Overall, ABC election oracle Antony Green says, the SA Liberals look to have lost seven seats in total — so SA Labor Leader Peter Malinauskas will form a majority government after his convincing win. One to watch is One Nation — the fringe party looks like it might gain the final upper house seat.

A sign of things to come in May’s federal election or nothing to worry about? Prime Minister Scott Morrison says — surprise, surprise — the latter, continuing state elections such as South Australia’s deal with “state issues”, Guardian Australia reports. Morrison did say his party would be scrutinising the SA election tactics, however. On ABC’s Insiders yesterday, Finance Minister (and SA resident) Simon Birmingham echoed the PM, saying the SA Labor campaign had “many misleading aspects” and warned the federal counterpart could do likewise. Incidentally — Birmingham’s wife is Courtney Morcombe, who is Marshall’s chief of staff. But Labor’s national president waved all that away, saying Marshall’s defeat was a clear sign voters are rejecting the Liberal brand, plain and simple — and that should have all federal Coalition MPs “trembling”. Now all eyes are on two marginal federal seats in SA — Boothby and Sturt — which The Australian ($) says will become even more difficult for the Coalition to hold on to.

[free_worm]

HARD TRUTHS

A whopping 82% of Australians aged 16-24 have experienced mental health issues during the pandemic, and one in four have thought about suicide, according to a grim survey from the SMH that spoke to 1000 respondents. One respondent told the paper she found herself getting up to sit in front of the computer, asking “what’s the point?”. Orygen director Patrick McGorry said our mental health system has been inundated during the pandemic, and the workforce is burnt out. He called on the government to invest more money in mental health, saying the 20 Medicare-subsidised psychology appointments were falling short. Thankfully the weekend brought some reasons to be hopeful about the pandemic — there were no fatalities recorded in Victoria, the NT, the ACT, and Tasmania on Saturday, The New Daily reports, “welcome evidence” the pandemic could be fading.

And yet it’s not just young people who are missing out on medical care — Guardian Australia reports this morning that 51 asylum seekers who were brought to Australia for medical treatment remain in detention here, according to a refugee support group. Since 2017 about 206 people have been released on bridging visas (but cannot settle here) or to other countries, but no one is really sure why some are granted freedom and others aren’t. Of those remaining, there is one woman, and the 51 people are from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Iran. Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews acknowledged they posed no risk but blamed Labor for a backlog.

UPDATE ON UKRAINE

About 750 Ukrainians in Australia can apply for a three-year temporary protection visa, the government has announced, which means they can work, study, and access Medicare, ABC reports. It’s good news for another 4250 Ukrainians abroad who have been granted passage here under skilled migrant visas or family reunion visas — they can apply for the protection visa when they arrive too. But there’s no limit on how many can apply, Morrison says, continuing that “we are prepared to meet the demand” whatever it ends up being. We’ve also banned alumina exports to Russia at the weekend, Al Jazeera reports, which is blowing a hole in about a fifth of of Russia’s alumina needs.

Overnight, as The Australian’s ($) live blog reports — Russia has fired hypersonic missiles at strategic targets in Ukraine; Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called the siege of Mariupol a war crime and urged Israel to abandon its neutrality in protecting Jews in Ukraine; and China’s ambassador to the US denied they were sending weapons to Russia — yet, that is.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

Benevolence is on the rise globally folks, according to the UN’s World Happiness Report. Researchers spoke to people in 150 countries to gather their data for the annual survey to work out who’s happiest and why. They found that all three forms of benevolence are up 25% from 2021 — namely donating to charity, helping a stranger, and volunteering. Researcher John Helliwell told CNN he found the results a “big surprise” considering the world is facing some hard times, from war to a pandemic, but the report continues that worry and stress actually decreased in 2021. Wondering why? Helliwell reckons people can assume the worst about society, and find themselves pleasantly surprised about how their community rallies together.

The report also concluded that, in 2022, the world’s happiest people live in Finland, which ranked first for the fifth time in a row. In Finland, people can enjoy good life expectancy rates, pretty high GDP per capita, strong social support, low levels of corruption, community generosity, and the freedom to make their own decisions. Plus, healthcare and education are free, and welfare is abundant. So what can we learn from the Finns? Even though it’s dark and chilly for a big part of the year, one journalist found that citizens feel quiet gratitude for their opportunities. She writes “Finnish happiness isn’t an outwardly exuberant zest for life, but more of a reserved contentedness and inner peace”.

Wishing you a calm Monday morning.

SAY WHAT?

It’s our coal. We dug it up, we arranged [shipping], we put it on the ship and we’re sending it there to Ukraine to help power up their resistance.

Scott Morrison

Send in the coal, says the PM, who once rather infamously brandished a black lump of it in Parliament. The government will donate 70,000 tonnes of the stuff to help the coal-fired power stations operating in Ukraine.

CRIKEY RECAP

Drunk, in a woman’s hotel room: revelations of Brian Houston’s behaviour threaten his hold on Hillsong

Mar 18, 2022

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“In a recording obtained by Crikey, Dooley outlined an incident which apparently took place in 2019 at a hotel where a group of Hillsong figures was drinking, including a woman who was not on Hillsong’s staff. Dooley said Houston had been on anxiety tablets at the time.

“‘Later that evening he went to go to his room. Didn’t have his room key and ended up knocking on the door of this woman’s room and she opened the door and he went into her room,’ he said. ‘The truth is we don’t know exactly what happened next …”

Hillsong’s wall of silence points to a brewing scandal — which may be about to break

Mar 18, 2022

6

Unlocked

“Observing Hillsong, the megachurch of Scott Morrison’s pal Pastor Brian Houston, can be a little like watching the Kremlin. Or the Vatican. Sometimes you can only tell that a major ruction is on the way by a whisper here and a whisper there. The only evidence might be the unexplained removal of a close confidante from the inner circle of the ruler.

“And don’t count on the organisation ever coming clean with full and frank answers for public consumption. Hillsong manages information as well as any large corporation, which is to say it is very good at controlling the narrative and minimising the damage.”

How the idea of a woman bullied to death can take on hero status

Mar 18, 2022

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“Politics — the sort of politics that informs party factions, where there is some vestigial attachment to a position on big political questions — is now so far from the daily imagination that many just don’t begin to understand it, or how it could drive people … Thus, with the small band of Labor rightists around Kitching willing to ramrod the victim narrative that they knew the media would be amenable to, the wider right has sprung into action behind it.

“Their willingness to do so is a measure of their desperation in the face of Labor’s strong numbers, because they are now muddying the messaging they’ve been pumping out with regards to the Russia-Ukraine war: that the West has become weak and decadent and self-absorbed.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Shane Warne remembered at private funeral in Melbourne (Guardian Australia)

Fear of political turmoil as Pakistan PM faces no-confidence vote (Al Jazeera)

Spain, seeking better ties with Morocco, shifts stance on Western Sahara (The New York Times)

Russia ridicules idea its cosmonauts wore yellow for Ukraine (Al Jazeera)

Launch of .au domains will allow Australians to drop .com from web addresses (Guardian Australia)

6 killed after car drives into crowd in Belgium (BBC)

Charges laid against man after worshippers at Ontario mosque attacked with bear spray (CBC)

School where hundreds were believed to be sheltering is bombed in Mariupol (CNN)

Truth is another front in Putin’s war (The New York Times)

THE COMMENTARIAT

The Tories’ bellicose posturing on Ukraine is dangerous — and unfair to us — John Harris (The Guardian): “Among certain politicians, by contrast, there is far too little of that kind of thinking. Over the past three weeks, the unimaginable awfulness of what has happened in Ukraine and the fact that Vladimir Putin’s invasion is such a matter of moral clarity has encouraged a lot of rhetoric and posturing that has been shrill, banal and full of a misplaced machismo. The war, says one Tory MP, is Boris Johnson’s ‘Falklands moment’.

“The vocal Conservative backbencher Tobias Ellwood — a former soldier in the Royal Green Jackets, and now an active reservist — insists that the west’s response shows ‘we’ve lost our appetite, we’ve lost our confidence to stand up: to stand tall’. And while he and other Tory MPs — including zealous believers in Britain breaking from the EU, suddenly holding forth about the urgent need for international unity — have been making sense-defying demands for Nato to impose a no-fly zone, some of the cabinet have come out with their own very unsettling pronouncements, seemingly thinking that if Putin talks tough, they should talk tougher.”

Action on Ukraine exposes Canberra’s muted response on Myanmar — Susan Banki (The SMH): “A powerful military deliberately targeting civilians. Opponents imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Villages razed and cities surrounded. Internet access and humanitarian aid blocked. Refugees fleeing across borders in all directions. This may sound like the war in Ukraine, but it is also the grim reality of Myanmar under a violent and repressive military junta that has been trying to enforce its rule since a coup in February last year. While the Russian invasion of Ukraine has rightly captured the world’s attention, the deteriorating situation in Myanmar has largely slipped from view.

“Given the prompt, coordinated international response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including sweeping sanctions, intensive diplomacy, humanitarian aid and, more controversially, weapons transfers, some in Myanmar are understandably wondering why the military junta has not faced something similar … Russia, a nuclear armed power, invaded a sovereign state on the edge of Europe and the borders of NATO, with huge geopolitical ramifications and prospects for dangerous escalation. In Myanmar, the military acted within its borders, and the country is of comparatively far less strategic and economic importance in the eyes of most nations.”

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WHAT’S ON TODAY

Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)

  • Superannuation, Financial Services and the Digital Economy Minister Jane Hume, NSW Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg, Macquarie Bank’s Andrew Gee, and Visa AU’s Anthony Jones are among the speakers at Australian Blockchain Week 2022.

  • Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities, and the Arts Minister Paul Fletcher and the shadow spokesperson for Infrastructure, Transport, and Regional Development Catherine King are among the speakers at a CEDA conference discussing Australia’s infrastructure sector.

Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)

  • Labor candidate Abi Kumar and Senator Kristina Keneally will speak at a fundraising dinner supporting Labor’s bid in La Trobe.

Kaurna Country (also known as Adelaide)