Voices about to get much louder

A PRICE TO PAY

No campaigner Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price may push for a Senate inquiry into big biz donating tens of millions to the Yes campaign, The West Australian ($) reports. The opposition spokeswoman on Indigenous Australians says shareholders of the companies, which include Wesfarmers, BHP and Rio Tinto, have told her they were angry at not being consulted first. “A lot of people are asking, ‘If there is money left over, how is it going to be dispersed?’ ” she added. The Yes23 campaign was like you’re just trying to distract people from the fact you’re backed by billionaire businessman Clive Palmer (who pledged $2 million for No).

Meanwhile we won’t legislate a Voice to Parliament advisory body if the referendum fails, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirms, saying he will respect the outcome. It comes as Yes voters are at an all-time low, according to The Australian’s ($) Newspoll of 1,225 people, down to 34% (58% are No voters, and 8% didn’t know). Queensland is now the state with the most No voters, the Brisbane Times adds. It’s always funny to see how the paper puts the competition between Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton — today it writes Albanese’s lead has reduced “to the tightest margin since the election”… at 17 whole points, that is. And veteran journalist Ray Martin says a Yes voter who doesn’t google the details of the referendum is a “dickhead” as well, news.com.au reports. It comes after a speech he made where he said the No slogan “If you don’t know, vote No” implied that a voter was nothing more than “a dinosaur or a dickhead who can’t be bothered reading”.

A QUESTION, MARK

Former Western Australian premier Mark McGowan pressured the independent Environmental Protection Authority to scrap climate guidelines, according to its former chairman, Tom Hatton, that is. The guidelines said new fossil fuel projects in WA should offset all their emissions using carbon credits, as Guardian Australia reports. McGowan allegedly called Hatton and said they should be binned in what Hatton called an “unprecedented” move in the EPA’s half-century history. If McGowan did it, former premier Carmen Lawrence told the paper, it was “certainly improper” and shows the power of fossil fuel companies to sway government.

Now to more ethically questionable premier behaviour — Revenue NSW is garnishing $3,000 from more than 5,000 bank accounts, the ABC reports, and it’s right to do it, Premier Chris Minns says. The outstanding payments are for hotel quarantine — there’s almost $40 million in outstanding fees and the government needs that money, Minns says. Further south now and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has confirmed she won’t front the parliamentary inquiry into the abandoned Commonwealth Games, the Herald Sun ($) reports, even if she gets a request to. Allan, the minister responsible for the Games, can’t be forced to address the hearings because she’s not in the upper house, the paper adds. To another inquiry now and we’ve just learnt Transport Minister Catherine King sponsored a parliamentary pass for a Qantas employee, the SMH ($) reports. We also learnt the airline has donated $300,000 of free flights as part of its support of the Uluru Dialogue and the Yes23 campaign.

WAR-TORN

Israel has declared war against Hamas. At least 600 Israelis and 413 Palestinians have been killed in 24 hours, the ABC reports, something Hamas “will pay an unprecedented price” for, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed. “This war will take time. It will be difficult,” he added. Okay, so what’s going on? Hamas, an “Islamist militant group designated as a terror organisation by the US, European Union and Israel”, as CNN puts it, has controlled Gaza since 2007. Two million Palestinians live there, as Al Jazeera continues, but it’s blockaded by Israel. Hamas is probably funded, equipped and armed by Iran, a spokesperson for US President Joe Biden said, and it launched a barrage of attacks on Israel at the weekend.

Hamas said it’s in retaliation to “atrocities in Gaza against Palestinian people” and “our holy sites like Al-Aqsa [mosque]”. It’s the third holiest site in Islam, Reuters explains, and it was raided on Wednesday. Why? Rules say non-Muslims can visit, but only Muslims are allowed to worship there — but Jewish people have been praying there more and more. That’s because it’s on a hill known to Jews as Har HaBayit, or Temple Mount — it overlooks the Western Wall, a sacred place of prayer for Jews. So what happens now? The UN Security Council is about to hold a closed-doors meeting, the BBC reports, and the US military is sending naval vessels and combat aircraft. Both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong condemned Hamas, SBS reports, saying: “Israel has a right to defend itself.” But this is just the latest — albeit extreme — escalation in a complex decades-long and deadly conflict between Hamas and Israel that The New York Times ($) breaks down in a cracking timeline.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

Tom Robinson likes to row while starkers, nude, naked as the day he was born. It means less chafing, and besides, he’s basically only had birds for company for some 18 months. Robinson, 24, had long dreamed of becoming the youngest person to row across the Pacific Ocean (and possibly the most naked), so the young tradie from Brisbane built a boat from scratch and flew to Peru in early 2022. He’d been on the high seas ever since (apart from four months spent in the Cook Islands during the cyclone season) bringing him all the way to the final and most dangerous leg of his journey last week. Robinson had been sitting inside the cabin thinking about some dinner when freezing ocean water suddenly poured through his hatch. A rogue wave flooded his boat in a heartbeat.

Robinson swam out of the cabin and saw the red hull of the capsized boat bobbing in the water. His world record attempt was over. Waves were washing over him as he tied himself to his vessel and activated his satellite phone to send out a distress signal. Then it was a waiting game. Some 14 hours later, a gleaming P&O Pacific Explorer appeared, with some 2,000 passengers from Auckland spotting a rather tanned guy waving in the water below. Robinson’s adventurous spirits were not exactly diminished by the ordeal — he told the NZ Herald he was already thinking about going to Vanuatu to row the last leg, as well as writing a book about his journey. His rather relieved dad said they could see the comedy in the tragedy too: “He had to climb up to the deck of the ship on a rope ladder with nothing on. What a way to get rescued, in the nude.”

Hoping you’re as undeterred about your dreams today.

SAY WHAT?

A dickhead is someone in the Australian vernacular who says or does something stupid, that’s what we say about it. Now if you vote in this really important election and if you vote No because you don’t know, well I’m sorry but you are a dickhead.

Ray Martin

Stop being so precious about swearing, the veteran journalist said. The word is an Aussie as Aussie comes, and the sentiment remains: don’t vote No if you don’t know. Google it instead.

CRIKEY RECAP

It’s time to end the myth that there could have been a different, better referendum

BERNARD KEANE

“But it’s not on Albanese, or anyone in the Yes camp, or for that matter Dutton or anyone in the No camp. It’s on voters. At some point in a democracy you have to recognise that voters have agency.

“If the majority of voters reject recognition of First Peoples, they’re indicating what the nature of Australians truly is, however unpleasant that may be. All Anthony Albanese has done is give them the opportunity, the platform, to show their real nature to the world, and to First Peoples. The consequences are ours to own.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Israel’s security cabinet has declared the country is at war (euronews)

Powerful earthquakes kill 2,053 people in Afghanistan. Here is what to know (Al Jazeera)

[Simone] Biles becomes most decorated gymnast in history (BBC)

Campaigners aim to lower support for China on UN human rights council (The Guardian)

Any new Armenia conflict would be France’s fault, Azerbaijan’s president says (Reuters)

THE COMMENTARIAT

The hidden moral injury of ‘OK boomer’ — David French (The New York Times) ($): “This debate unfolded as the term “OK Boomer” was taking off, both as a silly mockery of tech-ignorant grandparents and an angry battle cry against an older generation that younger Americans believe failed them. Worse still, they just won’t get out of the way. It’s impossible to ignore the advanced age of key American leaders. Joe Biden is 80. Donald Trump is 77. Mitch McConnell is 81. Chuck Grassley is 90. Feinstein was 90 when she died in office. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 87. Age was on 76-year-old Mitt Romney’s mind when he announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection to the Senate …

“I don’t equate all these situations. Some of the sentiments expressed at the start of the pandemic were monstrous. Concerns about ageing and often infirm leaders at the highest levels of American politics, in all three branches of government, are far more understandable and much less grotesque than asking senior citizens to court death in the midst of a pandemic. The generational dismissiveness inherent in ‘OK Boomer’ lies somewhere in between. Nonetheless, there is a common theme — a shift to viewing older people in America not as assets, but rather as obstacles. They’re barriers to our own dreams and ambitions.”

What the PM must say in the most important speech of his life — George Brandis (The SMH): “Next Saturday night, Anthony Albanese will make the most important speech of his life. It is the speech that will define his prime ministership. While it will be an important speech whatever the outcome of the referendum, if, as every opinion poll predicts, the Voice is rejected, it will be more important still. Just as the campaign itself divided us, Australians will react to the result in sharply different ways: relief for many, but hurt and disappointment for many others. Albanese needs to rise above the partisan divisiveness of the campaign and speak to both sides as the leader of the whole nation.

“Of all the things he needs to say, the most important are these eight words: ‘We respect the decision of the Australian people.’ No political rhetoric about a great opportunity having been missed. No self-indulgent nonsense about the nation’s heart being broken. If the people decide not to enshrine the Voice in the constitution, there can be no calling into question the legitimacy of their decision. While we can expect lamentation and anger from some disappointed Yes supporters, from the prime minister himself, anything less that an ungrudging embrace of the result will not meet the occasion. And it needs to be ‘we’, not ‘I’: Albanese must associate all members of his government with the unequivocal acceptance of a democratic outcome. Whatever the result, Albanese’s most important job next Saturday will be to bring the nation together.”

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE

WHAT’S ON TODAY

Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)

• India’s former national security adviser Shivshankar Menon will give the Owen Harries Lecture at the Lowy Institute.

• Actor Pia Miranda and author Melina Marchetta will launch the former’s new book, Finding My Bella Vita, at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.

• Former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, and broadcaster Alan Jones, will discuss the Voice to Parliament, the misinformation bill and COVID in an event at the NSW Parliament.

Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)

• Author Graham Akhurst will talk about his new book, Borderland, at Avid Reader bookshop.