Up for debate

TALKING THE TALK

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Labor Leader Anthony Albanese faced off in a pay-to-watch debate last night which the SMH branded a nil-all draw — but 100 undecided voters in the audience were 40% in Albanese’s corner and 35% in Morrison’s corner by the end (the rest remaining on the fence), meaning Albo won the evening, as the Herald Sun ($) reports. There were some low blows from the PM, as news.com.au puts it — Morrison accused Albanese of taking China’s side over national security, which the opposition leader called an “outrageous slur” as well as a lie. Morrison also said Albanese didn’t support asylum seeker boat turnbacks — which is not exactly true either. Albanese did vote against the policy but reversed his position three years later in 2018, as Guardian Australia delves into, and now Labor “completely supports” it.

There were many other claims thrown around, and ABC’s FactCheck was listening closely. Albanese was generally right when he said the cost of everything is going up while wages weren’t — the Consumer Price Index is increasing faster than our Wage Price Index, but health costs, house prices, and clothing are down very slightly. Morrison again trotted out his sensational claim the pandemic was 30 times worse than the GFC, but Crikey already debunked that as cherry-picked and mostly misleading. Morrison also claimed we vaccinated all of Fiji (not quite — New Zealand, the UK, India, and Japan sent vaccines too) and Albanese’s claim debt had doubled was right-ish (debt has doubled, from $280.3 billion to $568.1 billion since 2013, but the economy has grown too).

[free_worm]

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

China could have a military base in the Solomon Islands within four weeks, experts are warning, though the Solomon Islands PM is denying it’ll happen, The New Daily reports. We still haven’t seen their security pact (PM Manasseh Sogavare says he won’t release it without China’s permission) but an earlier draft included a line about “stopover and transition”, The Australian ($) reports, which could see China establish a small dock less than 2000km from Australia. The governments of Australia, the US, New Zealand, and Japan are all freaked out, AFR reports. Labor’s Penny Wong called the pact the “worst failure of Australian foreign policy in the Pacific” since WW2, the SMH continues, and Labor Leader Anthony Albanese questioned why the government sent a “junior” minister to appeal to Sogavare instead of Foreign Minister Marise Payne or Defence Minister Peter Dutton — Morrison said it was to avoid looking like we were throwing our weight around, but long-time former foreign minister Julie Bishop said Payne should get on a plane ASAP.

Speaking of China — Australian coal-mining communities are being warned our export boom will end “abruptly” because China will stop buying so much coal in the next few years, according to a new study. In 2019, China was buying 210 million tonnes, but by 2025 it’ll be slashed by a quarter — and that’s if China doesn’t change its tack on climate action, Guardian Australia reports. If it does, China’s coal imports will nearly halve by 2025. Even though the nation blocked our coal imports in 2020 amid our broken friendship, as The New York Times reports, Australia will still feel the effect of the biggest player walking backwards out of the global market.

CONTAMINATION NATION

A mine in the NT has been accused of dumping 10 million litres — that’s four Olympic swimming pools worth — of possibly contaminated water into a marine park, the NT News reports. Nathan River Resources were in court yesterday for the second time over the pollution charges — the NT Environment Department claims the mine dumped the allegedly contaminated waste into the Towns River, which flows into the Limmen Bight Marine Park in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Yikes. Meanwhile, we are now 52nd in a global ranking about our response to climate change (down from 35th), the SMH reports. That means even Saudi Arabia — an oil giant — is doing better than us.

In some happier environmental news, scientists say they’ll use solar panels to power a Tesla some 15,000km to inspire people to embrace green energy, Reuters reports. But they aren’t just any old solar panels — they were printed on a wine label printer, made of this lightweight, laminated PET plastic that costs less than 10 bucks a square metre. Scientists will set off in September, and plan to pop into 70 schools along the way to show the kids how powerful renewable energy really is.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

A big bear with an appetite for Italian biscuits has turned up in his town again after authorities released him back into the wild some 150km away. Juan Carrito the brown bear is two years old and first hit the headlines after he was found gorging on delicious biscuits in Dolci Momenti in Italy’s Roccaraso. Owner Marina Valentini says she was pottering around the kitchen at home when her husband called to say “Marina, there’s a bear in the bakery”. It was a surprise, but perhaps not a shock: Carrito was a bear about town, sleeping in the pine trees, playing with local dogs, entertaining tourists, and drinking from the fountains. Marsican bears are endangered, so people just let him meander about — until he “took the biscuit”, so to speak, with the brazen break-in.

So the Italian authorities captured Carrito and banished him to the mountains about two hours drive away. Then, last week, Carrito just randomly showed up in Roccaraso again. He’d even walked past several other towns on his way home (his movements are tracked on a little radio collar affixed to his neck). The president of the national park was like, at least he gave being a wild bear a go — for three weeks, he hunted and lived in his natural environment. But Carrito is a metropolitan man — he wants to be in society. And I’m sure the sweet, wafting smell of the bakery didn’t hurt either. Hey, they who have resisted the lure of a fresh tray of biscuits cast the first stone, I say.

Hope the coffee is hot this morning, folks.

SAY WHAT?

Jenny and I have been blessed, we have two children who haven’t had to go through that.

Scott Morrison

Heads shook in disbelief around the nation when the PM told the mum of an autistic boy it was a blessing he and Jenny did not have a child with a disability. Morrison went on to say he can only “try” to understand their aspirations for their children, and finished with “that is the beauty of the National Disability Insurance Scheme”. Labor senator Katy Gallagher tweeted in response that she feels blessed to have a daughter with autism, continuing “she teaches me things every day”, while shadow NDIS spokesperson Bill Shorten tweeted “every child is a blessing”.

CRIKEY RECAP

Don’t be fooled. Scott Morrison’s support for Katherine Deves isn’t about trans women in sport

Cam Wilson

Apr 20, 2022

23

“The anti-trans women in women’s sport private members bill created by Liberal Senator Claire Chandler, supported by Deves and backed by Morrison and a handful of government members is another misdirection. As Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg said, the Sex Discrimination Act already has carve-outs for allowing exclusion based on biological advantages that transgender people might have.

“Sports bodies around the world have spent years figuring out how to handle the intricacies of gender and competition. These policies are still being worked on, but also something that is well within their domain. The idea that the federal Parliament would come stomping into this area to mandate this is like if members of Parliament wanted to codify different boxing weight categories into law. It doesn’t make any sense.”

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The multi-billion-dollar rort no one is talking about

Bernard Keane

Apr 20, 2022

20

“But the damage was already done to taxpayers — and is now embedded in the PRRT system. The Greens have found in Australian Tax Office data that the current amount of deductions available to gas companies is $282 billion — or around 13% of GDP. Every single dollar of those deductions means a dollar less in PRRT payable. That’s why we now get less in PRRT revenue than we were getting in 2000.

“And that’s why, according to the Tax Office, gas companies won’t be paying any PRRT until the mid-2030s — even as they reap astonishing export returns worth over $100 billion a year. In fact, Shell has announced that it intends to never pay any PRRT on its profits from the Gorgon or Prelude fields. The biggest contributors to PRRT returns are oil companies: BHP and Esso’s Bass Strait projects.”

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Katherine Deves isn’t an outlier, she’s representative of online transphobes

Catherine Bouris

Apr 20, 2022

18

“Once I started looking, I found young women talking about women’s sports, women’s bathrooms, women’s changing rooms, lesbians being forced to date trans women, and non-binary identities not being real. I saw users praising plans to legislate which bathrooms trans people can and can’t use, and I saw people praising Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s decision to order child welfare officials to investigate parents who were allowing their children to receive gender-affirming care.

“I observed spaces on online platforms Twitter, TikTok, Giggle, Spinster, Ovarit and Discord. Twitter, TikTok and Discord are mainstream platforms you’re probably familiar with. The other three are less widely known, for good reason: they’re platforms created by radical feminists specifically to talk about things that would see (and have seen) them expelled from other platforms.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Russian, Belarusian tennis players barred from Wimbledon (Al Jazeera)

Netflix hints at password sharing crackdown as subscribers fall (BBC)

Shanghai’s low COVID death toll revives questions about China’s numbers (The New York Times)

Italy puts 25C limit on air conditioning as energy debate rages (The Guardian)

‘Our last days’: Ukraine commander in Mariupol appeals for help (Al Jazeera)

US home prices hit a record of $375,300 in March (The Wall Street Journal) ($)

Canada’s inflation rate jumps to new 31-year high of 6.7% (CBC)

Boris Johnson has apologised twice in two days for breaking the law. Now what? (CNN)

UK court approves extradition of Julian Assange to US (SBS)

THE COMMENTARIAT

Hard to find a loser when the girls play against the boys in a respectful way — Ben Cameron (NT News): ” It was easily the most distressing day in my 10-year-old life to that point. Back in the late 1980s on a typically steamy, summer afternoon in Mildura, country Victoria, I was dragging my feet off a local cricket field, with bat lugged behind, after being comprehensively clean bowled in a grudge match against a rival primary school … What made it worse – in my then tiny, undeveloped mind — was that those stumps had been rearranged by a girl, who looked to be bowling 10km/h quicker than I could ever dream of.

“… How times have changed. The boys competing against the girls has become more commonplace, and Darwin’s local cricket competition has some good runs on the board in terms of female representation. The development of women’s and girls’ sport will take another big stride forward in the Territory this season when PINT Cricket Club fields an all-female Under 12 team … The benefits extend far beyond admiration, though. Sport, like life, is a great teacher, and you learn more from your trials and tribulations than outright successes. And girls competing against the boys will only sharpen their strength, skill and resilience, while teaching their male opponents the value of respecting their adversaries — and perhaps learn to have a thicker skin if bowled out by a girl.”

With or without Trump, the MAGA movement is the future of the Republican Party — Thomas B. Edsall (The New York Times): “I asked a number of centre-right conservative thinkers the following questions: To what degree was the Trump takeover of the Republican Party a legitimate democratic insurgency by a white working/middle-class electorate that had been providing crucial margins of victory to the Republican Party, but whose opposition to liberal immigration and trade policies (and whose support for universal benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare) had been rejected by the Republican establishment? And will the tension between an increasingly “woke” corporate America and a Republican Party taking ‘anti-woke’ stands become a significant conflict?

“Most of those I contacted voiced considerable optimism that everyone on the first tier of prospective Republican candidates to replace Trump as the 2024 nominee, should such a development come to pass, could restore the Republican Party’s viability in presidential elections, especially in the suburbs. ‘For me,’ wrote Rich Lowry, editor in chief of National Review, ‘the obvious path ahead is national candidates — say, a Ron DeSantis, Tom Cotton or Glenn Youngkin — who learn the positive lessons from Trump, reject the negative, and, free of all his baggage, forge a new political and substantive synthesis that is appealing to the Trump base and the suburbs’.”

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE

WHAT’S ON TODAY

Online

• Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins will speak at a panel discussion on the National Student Safety Survey.

Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)

• Independent MP for Warringah Zali Steggall and independent candidate for Wentworth Allegra Spender will speak at the Fuel Security Summit hosted by The Smart Energy Council.

• Community Action for Rainbow Rights will hold a protest against Liberal candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, for her views on transgender issues.

Muwinina Country (also known as Hobart)

• Greens senator Peter Whish–Wilson, UAP’s Alan Hennessy, The Local Party’s Leanne Minshull, Animal Justice Party’s Ivan Davis, Sustainable Australia Party’s Todd Dudley, and Informed Medical Options Party’s Lynne Kershaw will speak about a federal ICAC, political advertising and integrity at a forum at the Hobart Town Hall.

Yuggera Country (also known as Brisbane)

• Author Lee Kofman will discuss her book, The Writer Laid Bare, at Avid Reader bookshop. You can also catch this one online.