Rocking those boats

SHIPS IN THE NIGHT

We’ve bolstered our border patrol for possible people smuggler attempts after we binned our temporary protection visas in favour of a clearer pathway to citizenship. The ABC reports extra defence surveillance aircraft and ships are headed to the north of the country after Rear Admiral Justin Jones requested backup. The Coalition put a bit of a dampener on the news that 19,000 refugees could apply for a better visa when it warned that people smugglers could see it as an opportunity. Jones posted a video this week, which translated into several languages, reiterating that nothing had changed: any “unauthorised boat voyage to Australia will be turned back”.

Meanwhile Spain wants to make our navy “more lethal”, according to The Australian ($), after a $10 billion offer to build six heavily armed corvettes (a ship, not a car), and three more air warfare destroyers. State-owned shipbuilding company Navantia is ready to build now, Spain’s Secretary of State for Defence Maria Amparo Valcarce Garcia said, and we could build them in Australia if you want. The bid was received by former defence minister Stephen Smith and former defence chief Angus Houston, who handed over their Defence Strategic Review to the government this week. And The Age reports that US aircraft carrying nuclear weapons could pass through Australia without us ever knowing it. Our nuclear treaty forbids us from having nuclear weapons in the country permanently, but Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong said: “The US has a ‘neither confirm nor deny position’ which we understand and respect.”

[free_worm]

REIGNING IN QUEENSLAND

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has vowed to establish a treaty with First Nations Peoples in a historic first for Australia. She received a standing ovation yesterday, Guardian Australia reports, after confirming the legislation to establish a First Nations Treaty Institute would be introduced to Parliament next week. And another thing — Palaszczuk isn’t going anywhere, she told The Courier-Mail. Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is though. She announced her shock resignation, just days after Moldova’s PM Natalia Gavrilița walked and weeks after NZ’s PM Jacinda Ardern did the same. Palaszczuk, whose decision to talk to the Courier will raise eyebrows considering the, erm, less-than-flattering coverage it usually churns out about her, said she was proud to have delivered what she promised: stable government. Thinking on her legacy, she answered that it’s really about how “Queensland has come of age” in the eight years of her reign — not least because of the interstate defection during the pandemic.

The Labor premier said she’s conscious of the Green uprising in the Sunshine State — the Greens won three seats at the federal election, something The Conversation wrote actually fits with the state’s long history of left-wing radicalism. Speaking of the Greens, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said it would be shocking to see the minor party side by side with “Peter Dutton and Barnaby Joyce to vote against action on climate change”. It comes after its leader, Adam Bandt, said his party would support the safeguard mechanism updates only if there were no new coal and gas projects. It was met with much scoffing from Labor, as The Australian ($) reports, but Bandt was like, “All we’re asking is to do what the science tells us is the bare minimum.” He’s dead right — the International Energy Agency said a full year ago that the only way we can reach net zero by mid-century is for there to be no new oil, gas or coal development, as The Guardian reports.

MEMORIES ARE MADE OF THIS

You ever buy a toilet seat online and then get followed around the internet by ads for toilet seats for weeks? New reforms would allow you to opt out of the targeted ads, as well as erase your digital footprint and sue for breaches of privacy. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus will release a review of the Privacy Act today and told Guardian Australia he’d be looking at the EU’s “right to be forgotten” for our legislation too. Dreyfus said yesterday that 2022’s data breaches were “distressing for millions of Australians” who deserve better protection online.

Meanwhile, the ATO has told Senate estimates that PwC was marketing a tax avoidance scheme to overseas clients within weeks of new laws rolling out in 2016, the ABC reports. The consultancy pulled the scheme because it wasn’t in line with “community expectations”, and a former PwC partner was sanctioned by the regulator when it emerged he was part of Treasury consultations on the laws and then shared the government’s plans with colleagues. Yikes.

Reader, I just noticed quite a clarification in today’s The Age that I figured is worth repeating here as I mentioned the story in your Worm. Liberal MP Jason Wood told the paper that millions in Liberal grants were not from the Safer Communities Fund as reported, but rather pre-election commitments that did not need to be vetted by Home Affairs — which, if true, torpedoes the paper’s story quite spectacularly. The Age sheepishly added that the Vihara Buddhist temple is in the seat of Bruce, not Holt as it reported. Hey, mistakes happen to all of us.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

Londoner Grace Linden can’t sleep. But she can’t just lie there in the dark, waiting patiently for sleep either. So she listens to audiobooks, or even the radio — anything other than “the canyon of doom, where all around shouts of ‘you’re screwed’ reverberate”, as she writes for The New York Times. Recently, Linden has started listening to the Shipping Forecast, a BBC radio production that’s as old as time, where a measured voice describes the whipping gales and icy tides around the British Isles. It’s so well-loved in the UK that band Radiohead and Dame Judi Dench have both praised it. There’s something about it, Linden says, that lulls one into a strange reverie. It always begins with a faithful line “And now the shipping forecast, issued by the Met Office,” and really is never longer than 380 droll words, a little bit longer than this Lighter Note.

But someone has stitched them all together to create hour-long compilations, which are “poetic and hypnotic, a free-form ode to the seas”. The sort of thing Hemingway would have loved, as the disembodied announcer begins in Viking, a sea area near the Orkney archipelago, and takes your consciousness on a tour of the wild, frightening coast. The voice recites rhythmic phrases like “Wight, Portland, Biscay” or “low Southeast Iceland, 1000, losing its identity by the same time”. It makes absolutely no sense to anyone who doesn’t know maritime, Linden says, which makes it even more haunting. Last year the BBC revealed plans to end long-wave transmission sometime soon. Linden hopes the forecast endures, even when technology moves us forward. “Like the sea itself,” she writes, “the Shipping Forecast is a reminder of the larger, more elemental forces at play, those things that are much more powerful than any of our individual worries or wants.”

Hoping you feel rested today.

SAY WHAT?

Giving absolutely everything of yourself to this job is the only way to do it. But in truth, that can only be done by anyone for so long. For me it is now in danger of becoming too long.

Nicola Sturgeon

Another one bites the dust. The leader of Scotland — known as the first minister — has called time after eight years, saying the position was consumingly demanding. It follows former NZ PM Jacinda Ardern’s departure for the same reason.

CRIKEY RECAP

Australia’s billion-dollar welfare-to-work system gave recipients fake CVs — with people’s real details

Cam Wilson

Feb 15, 2023

13

“Welfare recipients are required to do certain tasks as part of Workforce Australia’s points-based activation system. These include applying for jobs, doing volunteer work and completing online learning modules for Workforce Australia (which replaced jobactive).

“A module titled ‘Résumé templates: because you don’t have to start from scratch’ included a seemingly fake CV but with a real phone number. Crikey confirmed this with the phone number holder, whose name we have withheld for their privacy and whose identity is different from the name listed on the CV. This person had been receiving phone calls as a consequence of their number being listed on the module.”

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‘Grossly let down’: ABC boss questioned about welfare of journalist at centre of Alice Springs controversy

John Buckley

Feb 15, 2023

39

“ABC managing director David Anderson has been questioned about the welfare of a radio journalist whose work was the subject of a recent ABC ombudsman review — and the centre of a subsequent media storm — amid fears competing news outlets are ‘misreporting’ the national broadcaster’s coverage.

“In the face of questioning during Senate estimates on Tuesday, Anderson addressed the findings of an ABC ombudsman report that found ABC News breached editorial guidelines on accuracy and impartiality in a radio report on a community meeting in Alice Springs.”

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Values-led capitalism lasted a fortnight. Now Jim’s batting for bankers — again

Guy Rundle

Feb 15, 2023

67

“You know, in all this, it’s the rusted-on Laborites I feel sorry for. They’ve had a tough time since the election, and to have the treasurer dangle the idea of ‘values capitalism’ and ‘impactful investment’, and then fall into lockstep with the RBA and the ABA, might be a bit too much for them.

“Your correspondent noted, in remarking on a paragraph in Jim’s Jimbonomics essay about his home town of Logan — that its decades-long deprivation and underfunding was an exciting opportunity! — that post-Parliament he won’t be spending too much time there, and would probably move on to, you know, the ABA or something.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Bird flu spreads to new countries, threatens non-stop ‘war’ on poultry (Reuters)

Watch: Scotland First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation speech (EuroNews)

Lower North Island rocked by magnitude 6.3 earthquake (Stuff)

Nigeria election triggers deluge of ‘fake news’ on social media (Al Jazeera)

Amish dog breeder explains how [Republican congressman] George Santos allegedly stole puppies (CNN)

Estimates suggest China’s COVID wave may have killed 1m people (The New York Times)

‘Extreme situation’: Antarctic sea ice hits record low (The Guardian)

THE COMMENTARIAT

Media shouldn’t be asked to gaslight Voice opponents — Nyunggai Warren Mundine (AFR) ($): “Demonising their opponents’ arguments as racist and lacking credibility is a convenient way for Voice supporters to avoid answering the many legitimate questions and concerns that have been raised about embedding an Indigenous Voice in Australia’s constitution. Here’s just a few. We’ve had four national, elected Indigenous voices since 1973. There’s been an Indigenous voice in operation for most of the past 50 years. Why will this Voice succeed when all others failed? Prime Minister Albanese says the Voice is needed to close the gap. If he believes that, why not legislate for it now? And why wait until after the referendum to settle on the details to be put in place?

“If the government really believes the Voice will close the gap, why wait? The only solution to poverty and disadvantage is economic participation — kids going to school and adults in jobs. How will the Voice increase Indigenous economic participation? The Voice will advise on matters affecting Indigenous people. That’s everything. In the same interview, Pearson said there was almost nothing Indigenous people wouldn’t want to advise on, including tax, health and education. How will this work in practice? Will ministers be able to make a decision without consulting the Voice first? Will the Voice take over from the many Indigenous bodies who already work with and advise governments? Indigenous people aren’t a hivemind like The Borg from Star Trek. We don’t agree on everything, even though the whole premise of the Voice assumes we do.”

Do ask Alice: why my people need a Voice in the wilderness — Catherine Liddle (The Age) ($): “The Voice is about guaranteeing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a say in matters that affect us. It is about going to people, whether they live in a remote community or a major urban centre, and asking them: ‘Who do you want to speak for your country?’ Because no matter where we live, we are a sovereign people. And we should get to decide who talks for us and the country we are responsible for. And more importantly, we have to know governments are listening to us. Right now, it’s still hit and miss as to whether governments listen. If Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory had an effective Voice we would not be seeing the current situation playing out in Alice Springs.

“What is happening in my home town is the direct result of decades of failed policy, of failure to resource remote communities and listen to our aspirations and our solutions. There have been many voices in Central Australian communities warning for years about children leaving for the bright lights of Alice Springs, sleeping rough, wandering the streets, going hungry, getting into trouble. Grandmothers, many of them survivors of the Stolen Generations, have been working and speaking up to secure a better future for their grandchildren. But how does a nana living in a remote community or town camp have her voice heard in the corridors of power? A constituted Voice would give weight to their work and many others, fire ambition and ensure the policies and agreements we develop in good faith aren’t at the whim of the government of the day.”

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE

WHAT’S ON TODAY

Online

• Secretary-general of the International Chamber of Commerce John Denton will speak about global geopolitical and economic outlook one year on from the start of the war in Ukraine, in a webinar for CEDA.

Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)

• Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury Andrew Leigh will be in conversation with authors Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow about their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism, at the ANU.

Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)

• Head of public affairs at the United States consulate general in Sydney, Adelle Gillen, is doing a meet-and-greet where people can ask her about global careers and the future of the Australia-US alliance, at the United States Studies Centre.

• Author Paul Dalgarno will speak about his new book, A Country of Eternal Light, at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.