Yongah Hill

We hear Yongah Hill’s detainees are being threatened with transferral after the weekend riots. Is Windsor about to cause Joyce yet more anguish? And Tony Abbott shows he either has a quite magnificent sense of irony or absolutely none at all. From the Crikey grapevine, it’s the latest tips and rumours…

Yongah Hill to close? We’ve heard that Yongah Hill — the immigration detention centre in WA that was the site of an attempted suicide and riot over the weekend — is to be closed, and its detainees are to be transferred to an as-yet undisclosed location. “Don’t ask me where,” a tipster said. They told us this could also simply be a tactic it’s not uncommon for the threat of transferal to be used to “keep order”. We asked Border Force if there was any truth to this, and they directed us to a statement that said detainees would have to be moved due to damage to the centre:

As a result of this incident some detainees from Yongha Hill will need to be transferred within the broader detention network while repairs are carried out. While investigations are ongoing and to ensure the safety and security of the centre, we will not be providing further comment on the incident or detainee movements.

I’m not looking for a New England. We hear the phone polling has begun in the New England electorate — and according to our tipster “the way the questions were framed it seems pretty clear that Tony Windsor will stand as an independent in the coming federal election”. Could we finally be about to see a resumption of one of the most bitter feuds in Australian political history? Or will Windsor be content to boo from the stands, as he has since 2016? 

How Abbott that? Dignity expert and black hole of irony Tony Abbott is apparently addressing his Warringah electorate at a breakfast event on September 7 (we’re sure the fact that this is exactly five years since he assumed his doomed prime ministership is naught but a coincidence) featuring Jon Anderson as a guest speaker. The title of the talk is “Restoring Trust in Politics”. 

Myth busting. Sometimes Ms Tips is required to not confirm a rumour, but bust it. One such idea — which has been bubbling back to the surface since he assumed the leadership of the Liberal Party  — is that Prime Minister Scott Morrison is cousins with former 2GB shock jock and current head of news for Channel Seven in Sydney Jason Morrison. This has been addressed before by Jason back in 2015: “Common misconception is I’m related to Scott Morrison. It’s not true. I don’t have a brother or anyone in government!” But it is strangely persistent. It’s even on Jason’s Wikipedia page:

The citation that supposedly backs this assertion, incidentally, is an article that doesn’t once mention Scott Morrison, nor Jason having a relative in politics.

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