GREENER PASTURES
Greens Deputy Leader Mehreen Faruqi is suing One Nation’s Pauline Hanson for tweeting that Faruqi should “pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan”, the ABC reports, which set off a “frenzy of hate and abuse” directed at the Greens senator. Faruqi alleges Hanson violated section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act with the “insulting and humiliating” tweet, which came after Faruqi tweeted she could not mourn the late Queen Elizabeth, “the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised people”. See both tweets here in this Daily Mail story. Here’s what Faruqi wants: for Hanson to undertake anti-racism training, pay $150,000 to a not-for-profit, delete the tweet and pin a post to her profile for three months that says she has “committed unlawful offensive behaviour”.
Meanwhile Labor has shaken hands with the Jacqui Lambie Network to support its $10 billion housing affordability future fund, Guardian Australia reports. It would see a minimum of 1200 social and affordable houses built in each state and territory over five years — all the Albanese government needs is those 11 precious Greens votes in the Senate. State and territory leaders are urging the minor party to greenlight it — but the Greens are demanding a rent freeze and up to $5 billion of direct spending on housing. Meanwhile Nationals Senator Matt Canavan has questioned on Sky News why “any young person” would vote for the Greens, a rather out-of-touch thing to say considering more young folks voted Greens than the Coalition at the last election, as Guardian Australia reports. He scoffed at 15 Greens MPs owning 14 investment properties. Glass houses, Canavan: 100 Coalition politicians owned 209 homes and investment properties as of May 2022, as realestate.com delved into.
RE-UNION
More than a quarter of a million nurses, carers, cooks and homecare workers will get a 15% pay rise funded by the government from July 1, The Australian ($) reports. Treasurer Jim Chalmers will announce it today, part of a $11.3 billion kitty for aged care staff. In dollar figures, a registered nurse will make about $200 more a week, and personal care workers about $141 extra. About 85% of aged care workers are women, Chalmers notes, so it’s good news for pay inequality — and hopefully it will lure more young Australians into the sector, which is chronically understaffed. If this 15% bump is ringing a bell, it’s because the Fair Work Commission greenlit it last year, as the SMH ($) reported, though the government wanted to stagger it over two years. The industrial umpire said no. It’s a little less than what the Health Services Union wanted — a 25% pay rise, about $5 extra an hour.
Speaking of union battles, McDonald’s has admitted for the first time in Australian history to leading an “unlawful” anti-union campaign in its store, The Advertiser ($) reports. Well, a franchisee has. Current and former staff at Murray Bridge McDonald’s have won a mighty war, alongside union the SDA, against Delbridge Investments Pty Ltd (the franchisee). It agreed to pay $275,000 in fines and legal costs for contraventions of the Fair Work Act at the eleventh hour before workers were headed to the Federal Court. Incredibly, the old boss created a template form for employees to resign from their union and told them they wouldn’t be promoted if they were a member. It comes as another powerful union — the CFMMEU — has demanded Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe resign or be sacked because of comments that inflation would come down soon, The Australian ($) reports, even though nearly a dozen cash rate rises are yet to make a dent.
PUTIN SEES RED
The Russian government says the Ukrainian government tried to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin with a drone attack and vowed revenge, The Guardian reports. Two drones were used in what it dubbed a “terrorist attack”, the Kremlin said in a statement, though no-one was hurt. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his government wasn’t involved, calling the strategy an “exclusive defence war” fought on home soil: “We don’t attack Putin, or Moscow. We fight on our territory and defend our towns and cities,” he said via the BBC. An adviser to Zelenskyy said it was probably “guerilla activities of local resistance forces”, adding that it’s not like buying drones is hard these days.
But the Russians are irate. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said the attack left Putin no choice but to “eliminate” Zelenskyy. A senior Ukrainian presidential official reckons the whole saga is a cover for Moscow preparing a major “terrorist provocation”, Reuters reports grimly. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says he hasn’t yet seen evidence the drone attack even happened and that one should take the story with a “very large shaker of salt”. There’s no progress on getting imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich free from Russia, Blinken said via CNN — there’s just no “clear way forward”. It comes just one day after World Press Freedom day — Michael West Media delves into the cases of our own whistleblowers Julian Assange and David McBride, describing the former as “the world’s most famous political prisoner, tortured”.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
The end of the world has happened. Well — a world, not ours specifically, but it is our eventual fate billions of years from now. Astronomers say a planet about 1300 times bigger than earth has been eaten by a star about 12,000 light years away from us, as The Guardian reports. It’s the first time we’ve captured the moment when an ageing star swells so much that a planet starts to skim the surface of it (and you thought your ageing relatives were a pain!). First, chunks of the atmosphere were torn off over six months before the whole planet was eventually chomped. Then “the star eerily glowed for about six months as it swallowed”, as The New York Times ($) writes, like some sort of python digesting a fluffy bunny. Cripes.
Astronomers noticed the star was becoming loads brighter over a 10-day period and figured it was about to merge with another star. But it was spewing a rather low amount of gas at the point of impact — too low to be a star. Only something about 1000 times smaller than the star could have such an effect, like a rock skipping on a cosmic pond. “That’s when we realised this was a planet crashing into its star,” space boffin Kishalay De said. The team was blown away, and a little existential. “This is going to be the final fate of earth,” he added. That’s because, at the end of any star’s life (including our sun), it swells up to a million (!) times its own size. In our case, the sun will gulp down Mercury, Venus and earth entirely. But don’t worry — we have five billion years until that happens. Probably. I mean, they’re almost certain. Almost.
Hoping you enjoy today like it’s your last.
SAY WHAT?
If only the media would cover the persecution of Julian Assange with the same the same zeal as the wedding of shock jock Kyle Sandilands, and the controversial attendance of Albo.
Michael West
The independent media founder questioned why there is a “feeble silence” in Australian media around Assange, who is in a UK maximum security prison, arguing it would’ve been unimaginable two decades ago that an Aussie whistleblower exposing the crimes of another nation would be indefinitely imprisoned without strident action from our government to get him home.
CRIKEY RECAP
“Some of the campaign’s most authoritative voices secured the fewest media mentions. Anderson, the Uluru Dialogue co-chair, had just 1.5% of total media mentions, the lowest share over the campaign’s first two months, and Mayo accounted for 1.8%.
“Davis made up a slightly higher share of mentions, at 3.9%, but Langton emerged as the most prominent non-government spokesperson for the Yes camp, securing 386 mentions, or 4.1% share of coverage. However, the Yes campaign’s disadvantage in raw total mentions may be outweighed by its larger reach on its appearances, according to one measure.”
“Fifteen years at the top of any company is generally seen as poor corporate governance, but chairman Richard Goyder and his board had found it strangely difficult to part with their often controversial chief executive, who he praised as ‘the best CEO in Australia by a length of a straight’.
“That’s understandable. Joyce brought his fellow directors ever-increasing board payments while the wages of other employees were systematically slashed. Qantas failed to deliver a single new aircraft ordered by Joyce — who did not bite the bullet until 2019. The first delivery is due at the earliest late this year.”
“Raising the rate debate clearly makes Labor uncomfortable. The Rudd and Gillard governments had a less-than-stellar track record in welfare policy, refusing to raise the unemployment benefit across six years in office. Most notoriously, under Julia Gillard, Labor tightened eligibility for the sole parent payment, plunging tens of thousands of single parents (mainly single mothers, of course) into poverty.
“While Wayne Swan can rightly claim credit for lifting the rate of the aged pension as treasurer, he also raised the age of pension eligibility to 67, highlighting the problem of long-term unemployment for older Australians. Now that it is once again occupying the government benches, Labor has discovered that squaring the circle of fiscal responsibility and social need is rather more difficult than it might have hoped.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Australia warned of ‘over-mining’ risk in race to secure minerals needed for clean energy (The Guardian)
World hunger worsened in 2022 due to Ukraine war, new UN data shows (euronews)
Brazilian police raid ex-president Bolsonaro’s home, seize phone (Al Jazeera)
New Alzheimer’s drug slows disease by a third (BBC)
Tucker Carlson sent a racist text to a producer: ‘It’s not how white men fight’ (CNN)
Jeffrey Epstein documents, part 2: dinners with Lawrence Summers and movie screenings with Woody Allen (The Wall Street Journal) ($)
Whitecap Dakota First Nation signs historic treaty with Canada (CBC)
THE COMMENTARIAT
The future of the internet depends on who controls the South China Sea — Maurizio Geri (The SMH) ($): “As one of the world’s most important shipping lanes for oil, minerals and food, whoever dominates the South China Sea will control more than a fifth of global trade. But the biggest economic asset up for grabs in the region is big data — and the future of the entire internet depends on who wins the battle to dominate this strategic waterway. More than 486 undersea cables carry more than 99% of all international internet traffic globally, according to the Washington-based research firm TeleGeography. The bulk of them are controlled by a handful of American technology giants, namely Google-owner Alphabet, Facebook-owner Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.
“South-East Asia’s internet economy is expected to reach $1 trillion in value by 2030. Whoever controls the Asia-Pacific’s subsea cabling infrastructure will not only dominate this booming economy, but control the global internet. Internet data flows, carrying everything from emails and banking transactions to military secrets, are more valuable than oil. As such, the world’s subsea cabling infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable not only to sabotage but also to espionage — spy agencies can easily tap into cables on their own territory. That’s why geopolitical rivalry between the US and China has increasingly focused on controlling the world’s subsea cabling networks.”
It’s time to understand the difference between native title and land rights. — Nat Cromb (IndigenousX): “Notwithstanding the original intent of the Keating government, it still was seeking to force colonial legal concepts across the prevailing cultural authorities and governance that pre-existed colonisation. The fact that this legislative ‘answer’ to case law is what First Nations peoples are pointed to as land rights is both insulting and upsetting when the practice within the native title system speaks to the truth of its application … The native title system allows objections to mining activities and those objections are always overruled. This means that if Aboriginal people object to mining operations on their country, they are precluded from negotiating things like royalties or compensation when the mine ultimately goes ahead.
“The entrenched racism is rife in the native title system and it is a mechanism for further disenfranchisement. At every turn, we see First Nations’ resistance to mining and other destructive industries on Country. We have seen a massive alignment with non-Indigenous allies like Sydney Knitting Nannas and 350.org who see land rights as climate action as having land in the hands of First Nations’ will ensure that Country is preserved and protected against the industries who are the greatest contributors to emissions impacting the climate. Regardless of this continued resistance, the government decisions continue to favour these industries that not only take the resources outside of the country but the profits too — all at the expense of our people and Country.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)
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Artist Dylan Mark Bolge will discuss his latest exhibition, Leaf SZN, at Aboriginal Art Co.
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The Australian Space Agency’s Tori Tasker, HINDSITE Industries’s Liam Scanlan, Boeing’s Heidi Hauf, CSIRO’s Nick Carter, and Gilmour Space Technologies’s Rosie Wall will all speak at the Aerospace Xelerated Pitch Competition at The Precinct.
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