Dutton knew $9m contractor was bribery suspect

EASY MONEY

Australian businessman Mozammil Bhojani got a $9.3 million offshore detention contract from Home Affairs even though the cops had told then-minister Peter Dutton they were investigating the guy for bribery to Nauru politicians, the SMH ($) reports. Bhojani signed a contract on behalf of his company Radiance to provide accommodation for refugees and asylum seekers — if this is ringing a bell it may be because Guardian Australia reported on it in May, though the Dutton-AFP detail is new. The AFP’s acting commissioner spoke to Dutton about Bhojani in July 2018 — the very next month, Radiance signed the taxpayer-funded deal, and one month later Bhojani was charged (and ultimately convicted in 2020). “There is no suggestion that Dutton himself played a part in signing the contracts,” the paper adds, and he didn’t respond to questions.

Staying overseas a moment and the ABC has a cracking story about Australian Daniel Duggan, a former US Marine pilot who is fighting extradition to the US over allegations he trained Chinese military pilots between 2010-12. The charges — conspiracy, arms trafficking and money laundering — could mean up to 65 years in jail, a “death penalty” at his age, he says. (He’s 55.) He was an instructor at the Test Flying Academy of South Africa at the time and is alleged by the US to have received $182,000 for teaching the pilots, but there was nothing illegal about it, Duggan told the broadcaster. His lawyer, Bernard Collaery, also points out we were doing joint military exercises with Beijing at the time. Total hypocrisy, Collaery added.

TRADING PLACES

Those Beijing trade bans on coal, wine and lobsters had practically no effect on our economy — they reduced real GDP by just 0.009% ($225 million) — because we found new markets to sell to, according to the Productivity Commission. The Australian ($) reports we sent lobster to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam, and coal to India and Japan. Bad news for sweet teeth, though: Guardian Australia reports cocoa prices are up more than a quarter in the past year, while sugar is up by about a fifth — a record high. It’s partly because West Africa’s Ivory Coast has had a very wet spell that’s caused rotting and disease in the trees. The paper also notes that wholesale food prices for things such as meat, dairy, vegetable oils and most cereals have actually fallen in the past year. But supermarkets are not passing it on to the consumer — instead posting hefty profits. Woolies, for example, had a 14% uptick in profit from the year before, the ABC says, and Coles was up 17.1%. It boggles the mind that big business is profiting from essentials while people go hungry.

Meanwhile big biz is melting down over Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke’s plan to allow casual workers to become permanent after six months (down from 12 months), with the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Australian Industry Group saying it’ll create less job security, The Australian ($) reports. But the ACTU’s Sally McManus welcomed the changes, pointing out that a permanent job makes it easier for people to get a home loan or a rental property. It comes as the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union’s Zach Smith plans to call today for a super profits tax to go towards an estimated shortfall of 760,000 affordable and social homes. It echoes a Greens’ election policy that suggested a 40% tax on corporations with a turnover of more than $100 million, the Brisbane Times ($) says. Smith says we need it more — it would “guarantee every Australian has the basic right of shelter”.

KATHRYN CAMPBELL OVER AND OUT

Kathryn Campbell has quit her plum $900,000 role on the AUKUS advisory panel at the Department of Defence, the ABC reports, from which she had already been suspended without pay. Campbell was the head of the Department of Human Services during the robodebt era in 2014 — she “did nothing of substance” when she learnt of the illegality of the program that targeted Australia’s most vulnerable, the robodebt royal commission found. Dismal. She had since become head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade before the Albanese government quietly appointed her to the AUKUS role. She resigned last Friday, defence said. Meanwhile, the Coalition’s $200 million online welfare payment calculator is going in the bin, Government Services Minister Bill Shorten will say today via the AFR ($), the brainchild of former minister Stuart Robert. Shorten says there was “nothing to show” for the “hundreds of millions” spent on it.

Speaking of Robert… his associate John Margerison won’t front a parliamentary committee inquiry into procurement at Services Australia and the National Disability Insurance Agency because he’s “severed all ties” and left the country, according to his lawyer. Guardian Australia reports committee chair Labor MP Julian Hill was like, well the main part of the hearing is kaput then. Margerison controlled United Marketing — it was due to get 20% of Synergy 360 boss Kham Xaysavanh’s shares, and Synergy proposed a structure that would benefit Robert financially, though he denies it. Meanwhile another controversial figure has skipped the country, but he’s back to talk about it. Neurosurgeon Charlie Teo will be the main attraction at a dinner held by Sydney’s Royal Automobile Club, the SMH ($) reports, having returned from a motorcycle trip through the Himalayas. Teo called it a “reminder of the fragility of life” which the paper notes is ironic as the professional standards committee found he performed surgeries “without supporting statistical data or peer support”.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

On a summer day in 2014, alien life plummeted to the ocean near Manus Island at 45 kilometres a second — according to Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, that is. It was in the form of a fireball that was logged by the US at the time, but it wasn’t until 2019 that Loeb found the data. Last month, Loeb valiantly led an expedition to the spot to salvage the meteor’s remains, bankrolled by a crypto-bro Charles Hoskinson. If your eyebrow is cocked, you’re not alone — the scientific community had its doubts too, with many refusing to peer-review his work, not least because he declared we’d discovered alien life through a video in Times Square. Don’t get me wrong, Loeb said: it’s not like Kang and Kodos, but rather a “technological gadget with artificial intelligence”. Cripes.

It was moving too fast to be gravitationally bound to the sun, Loeb wrote in a scientific paper that was rejected, but then published in The Astrophysical Journal after the US Space Command said he made a compelling point. So for two weeks, a team dredged the ocean floor with magnets, cameras and lights to find metallic bits of the fireball, and they did find some — “glimmering beads, each less than a millimetre in diameter”, The New York Times ($) says. They’re mostly iron, with some other metals, and you don’t usually find that in the area, a marine geophysicist who wasn’t involved told the paper. They’re going for further testing. The idea is, if they’re older than our solar system, they’re interstellar, but that doesn’t make them extraterrestrial. The meteor scientific community remains doubtful, so Loeb is going back in to collect more from the sea. He might be wrong, the expedition’s organiser said, but we don’t know unless we look.

Hoping something fills you with awe today.

SAY WHAT?

There’s hope if [the protesters] grow up and do their research and they know what they are actually on about. Listening to them… ‘It will be always Aboriginal land.’ No it isn’t… It’s Australia’s land.

Pauline Hanson

The One Nation leader may benefit from a spot of research herself considering our country’s Indigenous population is the oldest living culture on earth, having lived here for at least 50,000 years before the British showed up unannounced. Australia became a country 122 years ago — the land was never ceded.

CRIKEY RECAP

Elon Musk’s Twitter rebrand is a desperate move from a floundering company

CAM WILSON

“The move is a signal that Musk continues to push the company towards his dream of transforming Twitter into ‘X, the everything app’. This is a plan to replicate China’s WeChat, an app that combines messaging with, among other features, payment services. You can do everything from chatting with your friends to paying your rent in WeChat. It’s ubiquitous and very profitable, everything that Twitter is not …

“During Musk’s 10 months of ownership, drastic staff layoffs make it unlikely the company has the technical capability to add significant new features as planned. Plus who’s going to trust it even if it does? It’s hard to imagine many reasonable people are going to look at the erratic way Musk has managed the platform — remember the inexplicable changing of Twitter’s logo to the Dogecoin logo? —  and decide to let the platform manage their finances.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Two protesters burn Qur’an outside Iraqi embassy in Denmark (Al Jazeera)

Greta Thunberg fined over Swedish climate protest (BBC)

Protests rage as Israel passes contested curbs on some Supreme Court powers (Reuters)

Pedro Sánchez rules out return to polls after Spanish vote delivers hung parliament (The Guardian)

How it unfolded: the night that cost Kiri Allan her career as a minister (Stuff)

‘We are at war,’ says Greek PM as new fire evacuations ordered (euronews)

THE COMMENTARIAT

Why bureaucrats can’t be left to censor free speech under Labor’s ACMA bill proposal — David Coleman (The Australian) ($): “Australia’s democracy is the best in the world. It is messy, frustrating and wonderful. People say all sorts of things — some brilliant, some mundane, some absurd. Many things are said that we may argue are misleading. Our democracy isn’t owned by any government or any bureaucrat. When governments seek to put undue restrictions on our democratic freedoms, we must speak up. The exposure draft for the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill recently released by the Albanese government contains many concerning provisions. If passed in its current form, it will curtail legitimate political speech in Australia.

“The bill gives the regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, very substantial powers. ACMA’s key power under the legislation is the ability to impose massive fines on digital platforms if it thinks they are not doing enough to stop misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is defined very broadly. It is information that is ‘false, misleading or deceptive’ and is ‘reasonably likely’ to ’cause or contribute to serious harm’. The bill then uses an extremely wide definition of harm, which includes things such as harm to the environment, harm to the economy or a section of the economy, or “disruption of public order or society in Australia’. There is no requirement that the maker of the statement knew it was misinformation or that they intended to cause harm. The potential application of the law is incredibly broad. Every day, thousands of Australians make statements that could be described as unintentionally misleading. Whether something is misleading or not is often very subjective. And clearly whether serious harm is likely to result from such a statement is also very subjective.”

It’s just too hard and too late to delay and recalibrate Voice referendum — Michelle Grattan (The Conversation): “To back off the current wording and timetable (the vote is due in the last quarter of the year and is expected in October) would be nearly impossible for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. He has come too far, invested too much. It would spark a serious backlash from Indigenous leaders, many of whom would likely see it as a sellout by the prime minister. Albanese would be opening another battlefront for himself. From the government’s point of view, prolonging the argument around the Voice into another year would distract attention from other parts of its agenda and take the issue dangerously closer to the next election.

“Some ministers would surely resist. If the referendum were merely deferred, with the wording unchanged, there’s no reason to think the Voice proposal would become any more popular. That could just provide more time for opposition to build. Bragg proposes ‘recalibrating’ the Voice in an effort to get bipartisan support. But trying to do this would be fraught, even if the government were willing to attempt it. When it needed a relatively minor change in the proposed wording, it ran into opposition from its Indigenous advisers, and had to compromise. To obtain bipartisan support — Bragg’s aim — the government would almost certainly have to retreat to seeking to put only recognition in the constitution, with a Voice simply legislated. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton would not be able to sign up to anything other than a gutted Voice, which was not in the constitution.”

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE

WHAT’S ON TODAY

Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)

• CFMEU’s Zach Smith will address the National Press Club.

Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)

• The Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, Ryan Neelam and Lydia Khalil, as well as La Trobe University’s Bec Strating will unpack the findings of the 2023 Lowy Institute Poll at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)

• Author Dennis Altman will speak about his new book, Death in the Sauna, at Avid Reader bookshop.

Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)

• Author Erin Riley will talk about their new book, A Real Piece of Work, at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.