SCHOOL OF THOUGHT
The wife of NSW Emergency Services Minister Jihad Dib was “disciplined” by the Education Department for her pro-Palestine activism, according to Sky News Australia. Sharri Markson reports she heard a recording of a Teachers for Palestine group meeting on Friday where Erin Dib said the principal at Burwood Girls High School was spoken to by the department’s director about Dib’s activism — a spokesperson told Sky a teacher had been counselled about “communications on the conflict in the Middle East”. A protest outside federal Education Minister Jason Clare’s office was also discussed on the recording, in which Dib mentioned who her husband was, as a matter of transparency. The story doesn’t say Dib spoke about the plan, however.
Meanwhile ABC union members passed a vote of no confidence in ABC managing director David Anderson by 125 votes to three, The Age ($) reports, and Anderson has finally agreed to meet with staff. Reportedly global affairs editor John Lyons was particularly dismayed at the meeting, calling Tuesday one of ABC’s darkest days — that’s when leaked WhatsApp messages showed the Lawyers for Israel campaign to have broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf sacked. The ABC board will hold an emergency meeting today. Meanwhile news.com.au is smugly reporting Lattouf said in a November video: “As an independent and freelance journalist, nobody can fire me.” Phrases like “an extraordinary claim” and “bragged” were included in the non-story.
CUT TO THE BONE
Federal cabinet will meet today to finalise cost-of-living support measures, the AFR ($) reports, ahead of tomorrow’s snap meeting. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Labor was trying to find ways to put more dosh in the pockets of low- and middle-income earners, but his office again confirmed its position on stage three tax cuts had not changed. As Guardian Australia reports, the Parliamentary Budget Office found the bottom 40% of Australian households get absolutely nothing in the first year (!), the middle 20% get $1.2 billion, and the top two-fifths of earners receive $15.9 billion and $3.6 billion respectively. Put another way, 77% of the cuts go to the 20% wealthiest people. Yes, because it is those people who deserve more money right now. Look at the ABC’s story if you’re a visual learner. But the cuts are legislated and can’t be changed with a parliamentary debate, the SMH ($) notes.
Meanwhile the watchdog should take a close look at the prices of our supermarket duopoly Coles and Woolies, former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission boss Allan Fels told Treasurer Jim Chalmers. What’s with the pair advertising once-normal prices as specials, Fels asked, and look at their profits while the price of butter nears $10? The problem, Fels continued as Guardian Australia reports, is that the two players haven’t had a price war in years, and the ACCC can’t do anything about it unless the government orders it to.
IT’S AN ILL WIND…
Queenslanders are bracing for a category three cyclone to hit later today, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) warns, with buckets of rain to fall from Ayr to St Lawrence, including Townsville, Mackay and the Whitsunday. The ABC reports it’ll probably turn into a severe tropical cyclone with winds of up to 120km/h and probable flash flooding in the northern and central part of the state as the week unfolds. Tropical Cyclone Kirrily, as it’s known, is forecast to be stronger than December’s damaging Cyclone Jasper when it makes landfall, the Brisbane Times ($) adds. Meanwhile 9,413 homes in Brisbane had no power last night, nearly half of the 22,050 total suffering a blackout from the heatwave in south-east Queensland. Sky News reports the heat will ease today.
Staying in Queensland a moment and the families of three alleged victims have complained to Queensland police about racial profiling, Guardian Australia reports. Three Indigenous kids were dropped home by police, who told families the kids had trespassed. As it turned out, the kids were allegedly restrained by two vigilantes using dog collars — the men were later charged with assault and deprivation of liberty. It comes as wannabe landlords are illegally renting out backyards and sheds, sometimes without running water, to desperate renters on Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree, The Courier-Mail ($) reports. In November, Queensland had just 5,500 homes for rent.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
A musician from Florida was strumming the keys of his guitar, listening to the dulcet tones of metal music he was creating. First Christian Nolen dabbled in a little Deftones, twanging his way through those big power chords, then made sure his guitar was tuned to drop C to strum through System of a Down’s hit, “Chop Suey”. Nolen tried not to bob his head along or move it at all, however, because his brain was exposed to surgeons who were carefully cutting out a tumour. It’s called an awake craniotomy, The Guardian explains, the sort of surgery where the patient is not under anaesthesia so doctors can keep one eye on their brain function as they work. The theory goes that if the music suddenly gets sloppy, doctors know they’ve gone too far.
Nolen had been diagnosed just 10 days before with a glioma on his right frontal lobe after the left side of his body had lost all feeling. Sitting him down, doctors had asked him if he’d bring his guitar into the operating room and play for them while they operated. Awesome, he replied, thinking he’d never pass up such a unique experience. He was familiar with the practice, but he thought it was the far-fetched invention of Hollywood screenwriters, not a real medical procedure. Next thing he had woken up to “people actively working inside of [my] head”, he told local press in Miami, about two hours into the surgery. It was an insane feeling, but once he was assured all was well, he relaxed into it and started playing some metal. “This is wild,” he told smiling surgeons, who ended up successfully removing his tumour.
Hoping you don’t pass up on a unique experience either.
SAY WHAT?
In [Ron DeSantis’s] concession speech posted on social media he quoted Winston Churchill: ‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.’
Adam Creighton
Erm, don’t you mean “misquoted”? Churchill never said those words, according to the International Churchill Society, quite the gaffe for the former US Republican presidential candidate who The Australian’s Washington correspondent rather glowingly describes as “younger, more disciplined and polished, a war veteran complete with a picture perfect, scandal-free family”.
CRIKEY RECAP
“[Ron DeSantis is] polished and practised, faintly uncanny and off-putting. When he talks of kids being indoctrinated or an invasion from the southern border, he comes across like Trump after a glow-up from those aliens in The Faculty.
“The competent, serious Trump routine was never going to pry away Trump’s supporters — they don’t just want the culture war, they want the narcotic rush of Trump’s scattergun glee. They don’t just want unachievable promises about returning industrial jobs and a border fence, they want a guy they can imagine having a big go in a truck on the White House lawn.”
“McIlveen gave an interview in 2010 to The Australian, then as the editor of the Manly Daily, where he criticised ‘the number of pious sloths who mistake laziness for journalistic ethics, without bothering to find out how their readers or viewers might see a story’ as his biggest frustration with modern journalism.
“McIlveen referred to a controversial Seven story at the time about former NSW transport minister David Campbell, which showed him secretly visiting a gay men’s club, as a ‘cracker’, criticising Crikey’s coverage of the story as ’embarrassing’ and the Fairfax papers as ‘dross’.”
“Another contributing factor could be a possible cognitive dissonance in their perception of Israel. China was one of the places that welcomed Jewish refugees during World War II. China doesn’t forget that Israel is one of the first countries that recognised China.
“The Chinese people are known to look up to Jewish people for their intellectual achievements, their work ethic, and their cultural and scientific contributions to the world.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
How Israel has repeatedly rejected Hamas truce offers (Al Jazeera)
Navy Seals presumed dead after anti-Houthi mission (BBC)
Malia Obama debuts short film The Heart at Sundance Film Festival (CNN)
Ukraine war drives shift in Russian nuclear thinking — study (Reuters)
Brussels begins review to possibly unfreeze €76 billion in cohesion funds for Poland (euronews)
SUVs drive trend for new cars to grow 1cm wider in UK and EU every two years, says report (The Guardian)
Stockmarket today: Dow touches 38,000 for first time (The Wall Street Journal) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
London mayor Sadiq Khan says what Labour dares not: the wafer-thin Brexit mandate cannot hold forever — Gaby Hinsliff (The Guardian): “The longing to hear someone just admit that Brexit has hurt this country, and that the damage now urgently needs to be fixed, is so strong you can almost touch it in places. More than seven years in, remainers are sick and tired of being told to respect leave’s always wafer-thin mandate, especially now that 51% of Britons (and 61% of Londoners, according to YouGov) say they’d vote to rejoin the EU given a chance and 42% would like at least to re-enter the single market. What Khan said is therefore a classic example of something Labour still daren’t say nationally, but increasingly risks being punished for not saying in places such as London.
“The capital isn’t just laid back about immigration from Europe — it’s built on it, requiring a steady flow of young people from all over the globe not just to staff its cafés and restaurants and hospitals and schools, but to make it feel like the cosmopolitan place it always used to pride itself on being. London’s universities were a honeypot for Europeans before Brexit, its tech sector needs their skills and the city needs their business, so why should it have to tiptoe respectfully around something that’s estimated so far to have cost the capital about £30 billion?”
Here is one way to steal the presidential election — Lawrence Lessig and Matthew A. Seligman (The New York Times) ($): “The scenario we see as the most alarming was made possible by the Supreme Court itself. In a 2020 decision, the court held, in our reading, that state legislatures have the power to direct electors on how to cast their electoral votes. And this opens the door to what we think is the most dangerous strategy: that a legislature would pass a law that directs electors to vote for the candidate the legislature picks. The question now is whether there is any way to close that loophole before a stolen election slides through. The cases that led to the decision involved electors in 2016 who had voted contrary to their pledge.
“Recognising that Hillary Clinton, the winner of the popular vote, would not be elected president, these electors worked to rally enough Republican and Democratic electors to vote for a Republican candidate other than Donald Trump, thus throwing the election into the House of Representatives. Three electors from the state of Washington cast their votes for Colin Powell, the former secretary of State, rather than for Clinton, who won the popular vote there. Clinton also won the popular vote in Colorado, where one elector attempted to vote for John Kasich, the former Ohio governor who had run for the Republican presidential nomination that year. Those electors were punished by their states with fines and removal as electors.”
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WHAT’S ON TODAY
Kaurna Country (also known as Adelaide)
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South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, SA Arts Minister Andrea Michaels and Adelaide Festival artistic director Ruth Mackenzie will announce news about the 2024 Adelaide Festival.
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