Wilkinson had ‘limited role’ in Higgins broadcast

COURT UP

Presenter Lisa Wilkinson merely “read the pre-prepared script” on The Project during its segment revealing former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations against a then-unnamed colleague. The Australian ($) reports Wilksinon’s lawyers are arguing she had a “limited role” in the segment as part of her defence in the alleged perpetrator Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation suit (he always denied the allegations against him and the rape charge has since been dropped). Wilkinson’s silk Sue Chrysanthou said her client was an experienced journalist but had worked as a presenter on the show without any decision-making or investigative responsibility. Federal Court Justice Michael Lee’s verdict could be given any day now.

Meanwhile, Sydney silk Bret Walker is working with a team to overturn the result in disgraced soldier Ben Roberts-Smith’s failed defamation suit, the Brisbane Times reports. His 10-day appeal against the verdict, which found the former SAS soldier was a probable war criminal, begins today. He also wants the court to award damages, or have another judge do so. The paper notes that a successful appeal would mean Seven mogul Kerry Stokes no longer needs to pay $16 million to Nine newspapers to cover its costs, as he agreed to in December. To a very different case now, with Kate McClymont’s latest report for the SMH delving into how no fewer than 17 people sued the Rooty Hill Pigeon Racing Club over a membership stoush. Several aren’t even paying members and one has died, leaving just one successful plaintiff and a mystified Supreme Court judge.

REST IN POWER

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers please note that this article mentions deceased persons.

Vale Lowitja O’Donoghue, the “mother” of reconciliation, who has died aged 91. The Australian ($) reports the widely-celebrated trailblazer was the first Indigenous woman to train as a nurse at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, the first chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and the first Indigenous person to address the UN General ­Assembly from the podium. The paper adds that then-PM Paul Keating wanted O’Donoghue to be the first president of an Australian republic, but John Howard defeated him before the idea could progress. She also famously turned her back on Howard as he spoke at the Australian Reconciliation Convention in 1997 because he refused to apologise to the Stolen Generations, of which she was a survivor. O’Donoghue is one of the most remarkable leaders in Australian history, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.

Meanwhile, an inquest begins today into the death of Indigenous man Joshua Kerr, 32, who was found dead in his cell at Port Phillip Prison. His mother, Aunty Donnis Kerr, told The Age his body had bruising on it suggesting he’d rolled on the floor for hours prior to his death — he’d been in COVID isolation after attending a family funeral. Kerr, who has been advocating for the rights of Indigenous peoples for years, remembered her son as an “absolute gem” who was “always laughing”. It comes as protesters walked alongside a police march at Melbourne’s Midsumma Pride Parade holding a sign that read “No pride in prisons – VicPol + SERCO – Queers hate you”. One person was dressed as a pig and splashed with red paint, Sky News Australia reports. “I’m very proud of the way that police officers showed restraint today,” Chief Commissioner Shane Patton said, which some might say is a chillingly low bar.

MONEY TALKS

You could save a thousand bucks a year per vehicle from Australia’s first fuel efficiency standards, the Albanese government has vowed. It forces car manufacturers to cap the amount of emissions they produce, ABC explains, which leads them to release more hybrid and EV models. Australia and Russia are the only two countries in the OECD that don’t have a fuel efficiency standard, and it’s turned Australia into a dumping ground for the world’s old petrol-powered clunkers while keeping our EV market small and pricy. The legislation will go before Parliament before mid-year, Guardian Australia reports, and take effect next January.

Meanwhile, your mortgage repayments will probably remain stable this week as pundits predict the Reserve Bank won’t hike the cash rate (4.35%). The AFR reports the economy is slowing faster than previously thought thanks to inflation falling to a two-year low of 4.1%. So when might we see a rate cut? Money market traders think August (an expected reduction of 0.25%) and December. Meanwhile a win for renters in Queensland as the state banned rental bidding (when prospective tenants are plunged into a bidding war for a rental property), news.com.au reports. Queensland Premier Steven Miles will also remove bridging loans for rental bonds as part of a $160 million renter package announced today.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

Several detectives sit in a dimly lit room in Mumbai, one gently smoking a cigarette, scrutinising their flighty suspect. The only sounds are the ceiling fan clicking through its rotations above and the occasional rustle from the tense occupants. At the steel table stands a pigeon, watching the authorities with its beady eyes, its sinister motives unknown. The suspect was found near a port in the Indian city with two rings around his legs scrawled with unknown characters. A Chinese spy pigeon, scandalised authorities declared, and swiftly whisked it into custody on suspicion of espionage. Eight months passed, SBS reports, as detectives worked day and night to decipher the code.

As it turned out, the pigeon was just an open-water racing bird from Taiwan that had accidentally flown much too far west. Rather red-faced police immediately cleared the bird of all suspected espionage and gave it to the Bombay Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for a little health check-up. The pigeon was released back into the wild last Tuesday with nothing more than some ruffled feathers. It’s actually not the first time either — in 2020, Indian authorities released another pigeon that had been suspected of spying but turned out to be the pet of a Pakistani fisherman. You’d know this if you had rung my phone number that’s printed on her leg bracelet, he added.

Hoping you can assume the best, not the worst, of people today.

SAY WHAT?

In my previous life I’d been a bouncer in a pub, and I was very close to returning to that field of endeavour. Because I was thinking, ‘You can’t do stuff like that mate’.

Barnaby Joyce

The former deputy PM says he was livid that then-PM Malcolm Turnbull went to him with (what turned out to be very much true) rumours that he’d had an affair with his staffer who was pregnant. Joyce married Vikki Campion last year.

CRIKEY RECAP

‘No evidence’ pro-Palestine Sydney Opera House protesters chanted ‘Gas the Jews’, say police

CAM WILSON

“On Friday morning, NSW Police Deputy Commissioner Mal Lanyon said that an audiovisual and acoustic analysis by an expert determined with ‘overwhelming certainty’ that the chants were ‘Where’s the Jews?’.

“Police said they had also obtained several statements at the Opera House from people who believed that they had heard ‘Gas the Jews’, but were not able to identify anyone chanting this.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Namibia’s President Hage Geingob dies aged 82 (Al Jazeera)

US elections: Biden wins South Carolina Democratic primary (BBC)

An intense atmospheric river moves into California, threatening to flood roads and trigger mudslides (CNN)

Houthis vow more Red Sea attacks after third wave of US-UK strikes on Yemen (The Guardian)

Police in Dearborn, Michigan on alert after WSJ opinion piece (Reuters)

Canadians can ask for legally produced psilocybin. Getting it isn’t always easy (CBC)

At least 28 dead after bakery shelled in Russian-occupied Ukraine (euronews)

Wildfires threaten 2 Chilean cities, destroying 1,000 homes and killing dozens (The New York Times) ($)

THE COMMENTARIAT

Albanese has finally come to the realisation that he’s in power — Sean Kelly (The SMH): “Governments can do things, oppositions can’t. This year has seen a series of political reversals. Late last year, I listed three ways Dutton was besting Albanese. The first: he was willing to pick fights, where Albanese ducked. Already this year, Albanese has picked two fights, with the supermarkets and on tax cuts. The second was speed: Dutton was nimble, Albanese lumbered. This year, Albanese struck first on supermarkets; when Dutton sought to hit back, Labor responded fast. Just two weeks later, Labor switched topics to tax cuts, and now it was the Coalition’s turn to lumber clumsily: it would reverse Labor’s changes, no it wouldn’t, wait and see, we’ll wave them through.

“Together, these two enabled the third reversal. Last year, Dutton drove debate. Now, with the tax cuts, Albanese has got the nation talking about what he wants, on his terms — something he had largely failed to do both as opposition leader and prime minister. Not skilled at sharp attacks or witty lines, he has two options. One is to avoid topics, as he did in the 2022 campaign, which has shaped his governing style since. As one old Labor colleague remarked to me, it has been a prime ministership marked by omission. Until January, when he used the other option: dominating debate by making a splash.”

Taylor Swift and the profound weirdness of MAGA — David French (The New York Times): “But while traditional partisan pettiness can explain the knee-jerk negative reaction to Swift, it can’t come close to explaining the incredible weirdness of the recent theory emanating from people with some of the largest platforms in MAGA America. According to them, Taylor Swift’s extraordinary popularity isn’t the organic outcome of a talented and appealing superstar’s bond with her fans. No, according to them, Swift’s rise is an ‘op’ or a ‘psyop’ engineered by the deep state in order to benefit Joe Biden.

“A central part of the plot, of course, is Swift’s fake, deep-state-invented relationship with [Travis] Kelce. Thus when the Chiefs struggled earlier in the season, it was a source of right-wing schadenfreude. But now that they’ve surged into a berth in the Super Bowl, it has all been revealed as part of The Plan. Again, it’s all just so dumb and strange. But dumb and strange is par for the course with MAGA. If we imagined conspiracy theories as movies, we’d say ‘Taylor Swift: Psyop’ was brought to you by the same studio that produced cult classics such as ‘Pizzagate’ and ‘The Seth Rich Conspiracy,’ not to mention the tentpole franchises ‘QAnon’ and ‘Stop the Steal’.”

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE

WHAT’S ON TODAY

Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)

• Emerging writers Adam Novaldy Anderson, Forever Tupou, Daniel Nour, Natalia Figueroa Barroso, Yasir Elgamil, Katie Shammas and Winnie Dunn will talk about a new anthology called Povo at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.

Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)

• Author Paul E. Hardisty will talk about his new book, The Forcing, at Avid Reader bookshop.