Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

Having a good pandemic Crikey has long kept watch on the big winners of the COVID-19 era. One of the biggest is the big international consulting firms that have made billions off the government’s unprecedented recovery spending.

In April we reported that Accenture was one of the companies behind the federal government’s botched vaccine rollout. It got $8 million to be the “lead data partner” tracking the vaccine. But that’s just a drop in the ocean compared with what it is now set to receive to manage the government’s digital border passes that will allow overseas Australians to return home. As The Sydney Morning Herald reported this week, it could land Accenture a nice $75 million payday. Hopefully we’ll have more to show for it than an infographic.

A total Karen Monday was a day ending in Y, so the chances were good that the government would be pushing for greater counter-terrorism powers. In a speech to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews called for greater power for security agencies to “impose tailored supervisory conditions specific to the risk posed by the terrorist offender if released into the community, where the court is not satisfied that continuing detention is appropriate to prevent that risk”. After 22 such laws since 2014, we’re sure this is the one that will get the job done.

But the bill flagged in her speech is hardly new. It was introduced into Parliament more than a year ago by then attorney-general Christian Porter and is one of 12 being looked at by the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security. Hell, the idea of “extended supervision orders” has been knocking about since 2017. But as has been well established, the Morrison government would never let that get in way of an announcement.

No Harmer no foul When it comes to emergency services, conservative politicians and the ABC are usually on a unity ticket: the ABC is the only media outlet with the regional reach and preparedness to devote resources to supporting communities in times of emergency or crisis.

Not so in NSW, apparently. Gladys Berejiklian’s Emergency Services Minister, David Elliott — whose trip to France for a holiday during the black summer bushfires meant so much to people — prefers to undermine the ABC.

After Sydney Breakfast host Wendy Harmer pointed out he’d never been on the program she hosts with Robbie Buck, no matter what the emergency, since he became a minister, an outraged Elliott took to Facebook to post the potent rejoinder that, erm, he had in fact done ONE interview with Harmer, though not on Breakfast, in 2017, and not when he was emergency services minister, a title he surrendered to Troy Grant between 2017-19.

Elliott accused Harmer of “#fakenews” (there’s one we haven’t heard in a while) and replied to one commentator’s suggestion that Harmer “should have stuck to comedy” with: “She would have gone hungry.” (Rather at odds with the truckloads of money Harmer made in FM radio but anyway.) Apart from Elliott getting personal when he’s been shown to be wrong, it seems he thinks the people of NSW should ignore the ABC during emergencies given it is prone to “#fakenews”. One to remember during the next NSW crisis. Oh, wait…

It’s all academic It’s a bit of a humanities department move, so it might preclude us from any form of future government support should we need it, but we’d like to propose a thought experiment: can you imagine any other industry other than academia — responsible for such a large portion of Australia’s exports, haemorrhaging nearly 40,000 jobs and rife with serious wage theft — having not a single advocate in the government?

Of course, the fault in part has to lie with the sector, a very bright bunch somehow unable to collectively advocate for themselves. Compare this with the mining industry, which has access to both parties and wields great influences. Unis, meanwhile, get lectures about free speech and pretzel-like contortions to exclude them from government support.

Meta Gala How much does it cost to get a message out there? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ “Tax the rich” dress at the Met Gala, the annual event which costs US$35,000 to attend and where the super-rich bring along robot babies and dress like an alien royal family, was immediately met by howls of “hypocrite”. It appears she anticipated this: the dress was borrowed — from a “sustainably focused, Black woman immigrant designer”, naturally — and the ticket was likely to have been paid for by a donor. Presumably the fact that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump never pretended they wanted to address inequality is why their appearances didn’t get the same kind of coverage.