(Image: Supplied)

All well in the west Labor MP Julie Owens’ decision to quit politics is causing a few headaches for the party. First, it means her western Sydney seat of Parramatta (margin 3.5%) is well in play, giving Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s NSW first reelection strategy a bit more ammunition. More troublingly, preselection for Owens’ replacement will take place under the shadow of a simmering branch-stacking scandal.

In 2019, Queensland ALP secretary Evan Moorhead began a probe into widespread stacking across western Sydney branches like Granville and Parramatta, both in the federal seat. One recommendation was a temporary suspension of preselections in those branches, making it difficult to lock in a candidate. The report also found Julia Finn, the state member for Granville, had breached party rules, leading to her quitting shadow cabinet. Finn, who comes from the same “Laurie Ferguson soft-left” faction as Owens, is considered a frontrunner for Parramatta. 

But if Finn did step up, it’d come with plenty of baggage. While no adverse findings were made against her, and she maintains her innocence, it’s not a great look. And when the other frontrunner is Durga Owen, a young South Asian-origin woman, the whole thing has shades of Kristina Keneally’s candidacy in Fowler (although at least Finn is from the electorate).

More lockdowns? COVID-zero has been mugged by reality in NSW and Victoria, where reopening hasn’t unleashed a catastrophic wave because vaccines actually work. Still, COVID alarmists are fighting the tide of freedom. In the pages of The Saturday Paper, readers were greeted by a full-page ad, backed by a “community-fundraising effort” and anonymous “health professionals”, attacking governments for giving up on eliminating COVID, calling for a vaccination target of 90% of the entire population, and jabs for six-month-olds.

Yesterday “Health Before Profits” (known previously as Lockdown to Zero before that became too unpalatable), a group of Trots and Labor left-types committed to maintaining more aggressive COVID restrictions, outed themselves as the brains behind the ad. They also admitted they’d delayed publicly taking credit because many had been at a climate protest on Saturday, which is slightly hypocritical for a group supposedly committed to staying at home.

While the group’s assumption that “profit” is the only reason anyone would want to leave home again is a bit reductive, it’s hardly the most objectionable intervention in the debate — Clive Palmer’s anti-science advertising still gets a run in some of the country’s biggest newspapers.

Big Bird is a communist That said, we’re lucky to live in a country where most people have normal views on vaccines. Unlike the United States of America, where a tweet from Big Bird about getting vaccinated led to a predictable culture war with conservatives getting extremely mad at the Sesame Street character. 

“Government propaganda… for your five-year-old!” Texas Senator Ted Cruz screeched.

“Big Bird is a communist,” said one Arizona state Senator. Republican-aligned media figures used terms like brainwashing. All is well in the rotting carcass of MAGA. 

Gas-fired chameleon Australian fossil-fuel billionaire Andrew Liveris can be relied on for two things: he always changes his spots to suit the times, and will get an unfailingly generous run from journalists every time he does.

So it was with the news that Liveris wants a price on carbon. Of course he does. But the Dow Chemical chairman, who sits on the board of Saudi Aramco, was also the architect of the Morrison government’s gas-led recovery.
Once Donald Trump, who appointed Liveris as a manufacturing adviser, made him “tingle with pride”. By 2021, he was spinning in The Australian about how he’d masterminded Joe Biden’s infrastructure package. Ever the chameleon.