What Price Closing the Gap?

GAMES THEY PLAY

The opposition’s Indigenous Australians spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price will pursue an inquiry to audit the money spent on Indigenous peoples, she told Sky News Australia, but it’ll fail — and the right-leaning populist probably knows it. That’s because Labor, the Greens and senators David Pocock and Lidia Thorpe oppose it so the Coalition doesn’t have the numbers, Guardian Australia points out. (It’s also ironic that auditing spending was to be one of the functions of the Voice, you know, the one that Price opposed?) Anyway, the paper continues pointedly that the Australian National Audit Office has already conducted an audit of the National Indigenous Australians Agency — it recommended some changes, which the body is implementing. Plus, Thorpe said, we need better governance, not another audit.

To another political outsider now and United Australia Party founder Clive Palmer’s $40 million yacht has run aground near a swanky island in Singapore. The Age ($) said “it appeared to have gone inside a navigational buoy marking shallow water” — it’s not clear whether the big guy was on board but he does work from Singapore. Meanwhile the Gold Coast could save the 2026 Commonwealth Games for a Clive’s yacht worth of extra dosh. Games bosses met with Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate, the Herald Sun ($) reports, with the cost projection coming in at $650 million — just $50 million more than the $600 million Victorians paid to not have them. It makes sense, Victoria’s Deputy Premier Ben Carroll said — the Sunshine State has OIympic-level facilities.

NOT A FAIR COP

Three “primary-school-aged” girls, six 13-year-old girls and a 14-year-old boy were strip-searched by NSW police in the year to June, the SMH ($) reports, among 107 children overall. More than one in five were Indigenous kids. It’s worth adding that this number would increase substantially if it included incarcerated children. The paper says the numbers are on the rise, and by law cops can search without a parent present. Redfern Legal Centre’s Samantha Lee called kids stripping down in front of adults, cop or not, “child abuse”, and added that most strip-searches find nothing. If it’s enough to bar Qatar from using more of our air space…

It comes as spit hoods were used 82 times across Queensland prisons last year, Guardian Australia reports, even though they were described as “inhumane” by a 2017 royal commission into the protection and detention of children in the NT. A spit hood is a mesh bag that goes over the head and stops biting or spitting. NSW and Victoria don’t use them; SA and the ACT, as well as the Australian Federal Police, went further and banned them outright. Speaking of the NT — a bushfire half the size of Tasmania (2 million hectares) is burning in the Top End, the NT News ($) reports, one of 20 fires that firefighters are battling. The Bureau of Meteorology had predicted a “once in a decade” fire season simultaneously across central Australia and the NT, deputy chief fire officer Joshua Fischer said.

MPS ON THE BANDT WAGON

Sydney teal MPs Kylea Tink and Sophie Scamps and Tasmania’s Andrew Wilkie have supported a motion amendment that would delete the line reading Australia “stands with Israel and recognises its inherent right to defend itself” and replace it with a line that condemns “war crimes perpetrated by the state of Israel, including the bombing of Palestinian civilians”. It was put forward by Greens leader Adam Bandt, The Australian ($) says, and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies slammed it as “completely indefensible and morally reprehensible”. It comes as Israel’s Energy Minister Israel Katz said the country would resume the water supply into southern Gaza — though it’s not clear what good that will do, the ABC notes, because Israel has turned off the electricity needed to pump it. No fuel is getting in either — hospitals across Gaza only have 24 hours of fuel left, the ABC reports, at the same time as 50,000 women are pregnant, according to the UN via CNN. Plus Gaza-bound international aid is still stuck at the border, Egypt said via The Age ($), because Israel isn’t allowing it in.

Meanwhile the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt opened today — that’s the border Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong said Australians in Gaza were going to use before it was thwarted at the weekend, and presumably will now. Wong has cancelled her scheduled trip to Korea and Japan this week to focus on the Hamas-Israel crisis. Back home a moment and an SA man named Masoud Rahmani has removed “Death to Israel” from a sign that originally read: “You don’t need to be Muslim to stand up for Gaza. You just need to be human. Death to Israel and it’s [sic] allies.” The Afghan-born man told The Advertiser ($) that he believed “Innocent people shouldn’t be killed, but years and years of pushing them back into the corner — they’ll just lose it”.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

It’s often grumbled about, over schooners or cuppas, that Parliament is a place full of cartoonish buffoons and comically exaggerated stereotypes with childlike behaviour and ludicrous one-liners. It stands to reason, then, that the members of Europe’s Parliament (MEPs) did not feel out of place when their train accidentally took them to Disneyland instead of another dry committee meeting in Brussels. It’s one of four de facto capitals of the EU (along with Strasbourg, Luxembourg and Frankfurt), but there is no direct train from the EU Parliament in Strasbourg. It means several hundred MEPs have to change at Paris once a month, but this week they were met not with the rolling hills of the Alsatian city but rather with the garish head of Goofy.

Their train had unwittingly been rerouted to Marne-la-Vallée, the stop for Disneyland Paris, causing the politicians and their possé to crack up. It figures, a German MEP named Daniel Freund said, that the oft-described “travelling circus” of European pollies, their teams and journalists between the two cities led us here, the happiest place on earth. But “we are NOT a Mickey Mouse Parliament”, he wrote. Unfortunately, there was no “fairytale ending”, as euronews puts it, as politicians were not able to leave the train before the it chugged onwards. There was no word, it reported with a twinkle in its eye, whether the MEPs were “happy, grumpy or sleepy after their 45-minute Disneyland detour”. Ah-hyuck!

Hoping you can see the light side of life today.

SAY WHAT?

I think it’s clear that the Australian public is probably over the referendum process for some time.

Peter Dutton

In a move that will surprise no-one, the opposition leader has ditched a promise to hold a second referendum to recognise Indigenous peoples in the constitution (without the advisory body part), despite saying during the Voice referendum campaign that it was Coalition policy and the “right” and “respectful” thing to do.

CRIKEY RECAP

Australia is now a legal fiction

BERNARD KEANE

“Far from being a maintenance of the status quo, the success of the No campaign transforms the Australian constitution into a living lie, a rejection of historical fact in favour of white fantasy. The foundational document of Australia now deliberately, purposefully, with the endorsement of Australian voters, denies the foundational act of the Australian polity, the dispossession of First Peoples. It is now a legal fiction, and the country along with it.

“There are no ifs, buts or niceties around this transformational moment. The argument that it was a constitutionally enshrined Voice, not recognition, that was rejected doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. There is no recognition without a Voice, because the recognition requested by First Peoples begins with a Voice. Anything else is a fake …”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Can Lebanon’s Hezbollah afford to go to war with Israel? (Al Jazeera)

Daniel Noboa elected Ecuador’s youngest president (BBC)

Poland election: exit polls point to Law and Justice defeat as [opposition leader Donald] Tusk hails ‘rebirth’ (The Guardian)

Resignations, reflection and recrimination — what comes next for Labour (Stuff)

Gaza aid stuck as Egypt says Israel not cooperating (Reuters)

France to identify foreigners arrested for radicalism for possible expulsion (euronews)

THE COMMENTARIAT

Oh no! The New York Times is angry at us about the Voice — James Morrow (the Herald Sun) ($): “Bad news, Australia. The New York Times is mad at us. I know, it will be hard to collect yourself and go on with your day after hearing this fact. Readers who have access to an employee assistance program should consider placing a call to help get through these difficult times. But the problem, you see, is that Australia voted no — and by a good whack, too — to the Voice to Parliament. Rather than this being an example of a nation weighing up the pros and cons, thinking about the risks of tinkering with the constitution, and debating the best way to help Aboriginal Australians, to hear The New York Times tell it, the vote was an exercise in ‘crushing Indigenous dreams’.

“Oddly, the report by journalist Yan Zhuang about the result failed to note that, among other things, every electorate with a more than 5% Indigenous population voted No. And, ironically for a reporter who earlier claimed that ‘Trumpian misinformation’ was threatening to scuttle the Voice, there was precious little reference made to the misinformation peddled by the Yes campaign. A more sceptical journalist might have noted that the AEC pinged Yes campaigners for misleading tweets and signage, that by the time of the poll only 59% of Aboriginals (and not ‘more than 80%’) supported the Voice, that somehow a Yes vote wouldn’t endorse moving on to a Treaty, and much more besides … When we win, it is because we were on the side of angels.”

Israel’s allies have been reluctant to use the ‘R’ word. Now’s the time — Peter Hartcher (The SMH) ($): “Israel has one of the world’s most powerful militaries, somewhere between the fourth and 16th among 200 nations, excluding its nuclear capability, depending on which ranking you consult. Hamas, even with the money and weaponry supplied by its great sponsor Iran, is no match for the Israeli militarily. Hamas cannot defeat Israel on the battlefield. But Israel could yet lose regardless. Remember the logic of terrorism. It is a tool used by the weak against the strong. It succeeds when it goads the stronger power into overreacting, turning its strength against itself. The clearest example is the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US. Osama bin Laden managed to destroy buildings and kill nearly 3,000 civilians. The US duly moved to root out al-Qaeda from its base in Afghanistan. But then it overreacted with the opportunistic and unjustified invasion of Iraq.

“America’s losses in that misbegotten adventure were beyond bin Laden’s wildest dreams. Some 4,500 US troops killed, another 32,000 wounded, while the Pentagon spent about US$800 billion and the wider cost to the US Treasury was estimated at US$1.9 trillion. At least 180,000 Iraqi civilians died violently. The US coalition partners suffered 318 troop deaths of their own, including four Australians. For what? America opened Pandora’s box. The Middle East was destabilised. Consequences included the creation of Daesh, or Islamic State. US credibility was left in tatters. Probably the biggest winner were the ayatollahs in Iran, who took advantage of the chaos to emerge as de facto rulers of Iraq. Only America was strong enough to inflict so massive an injury on itself and its interests. It was one of the gravest strategic blunders of the century, with George W. Bush aided and abetted by Tony Blair and John Howard. And it was entirely avoidable.”

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WHAT’S ON TODAY

Online

• AIIA China Matters Fellow Yun Jiang, the Lowy Institute’s Merriden Varrall and historian Emma Shortiss will talk about China as an emerging superpower, in a webinar held by the Australia Institute.

Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)

• Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and press freedom advocate Peter Greste will speak about protecting whistleblowers and free press at the National Press Club.

• Former ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations Mitch Fifield will talk about the UN during global tensions at The Griffith Centre.

Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)

• Author Christine Wells will talk about her new book, The Royal Windsor Secret, at Avid Reader bookshop.