Stuart Robert
Stuart Robert (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

BOB’S YOUR UNCLE

Outgoing Liberal MP Stuart Robert will be scrutinised by a parliamentary committee over his part in tech company Unisys briefing the government about border security systems while it was paying one of Robert’s friends to help get lucrative government contracts, the SMH ($) reports. OK, so what happened? Robert suggested the parliamentary committee hear from Unisys, and it agreed, but Robert didn’t disclose (rightly or wrongly) that he was good friends with David Milo. And Milo heads up consulting firm Synergy 360, which Unisys was paying in return for access to politicians. Robert “rejects any imputation or allegation of improper conduct” and denies he helped Synergy 360 and its clients win contracts, saying there’s “no way a minister could do it”. The paper ain’t saying it’s right… but it does note Robert resigned on Saturday from his Queensland seat of Fadden, which he held on a hefty 10.6% margin.

Speaking of internal Coalition dramas… NSW Nationals MP Ben Franklin wants to nominate for president of the upper house at the behest of his good mate Labor Premier Chris Minns, and the Nats are threatening to refer their own to ICAC, the SMH ($) says. The upper house — known in NSW as the Legislative Council — is evenly balanced right now, and Franklin getting the plum promotion would basically give Labor a majority. The Nats have been shocked, affronted and unequivocal, telling Franklin: do not take this job, with Nationals Leader Paul Toole declaring the possible promotion “disloyalty” on 2GB radio last week. But that’s news to Franklin: he says Toole told him weeks ago it was a “great idea … this is really good for us” and relayed a phone call where Toole supposedly told him: “I’m going to have to say that I’ve asked you not to do it.” The Coalition is infamously tense in NSW — at the March election, as Crikey reported, the Libs and Nats went head to head in both Port Macquarie and Wagga Wagga. It’s a powerplay manoeuvre that can split the conservative vote, undermining both. Yikes.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

Tomorrow’s budget will have $14.6 billion earmarked for the skyrocketing cost-of-living, but we don’t know exactly what it’ll look like yet. Guardian Australia says a rent assistance package and a JobSeeker rise for all (not just the over-55s) are on the cards. What could that JobSeeker rise look like? Maybe $40 a fortnight, the paper suggests, considering Scott Morrison’s $50-a-fortnight hike cost $9 billion over four years. We’ll probably see the payment for single parents’ age cut-off extended until the youngest kid turns 12, up from eight, a major win for many solo battlers. We can expect a surplus tomorrow, but it’s not all good news: our budget is in structural deficit, and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher has told all Labor ministers to tighten the belt and find savings in their departments to reallocate to future programs, the NT News ($) reports.

OK, ahead of the big budget reveal, here’s what we know so far: the $14.6 billion to be announced tomorrow will include the $1.5 billion in energy relief for households and small business (which get up to $500 off their bills), investments in energy efficiency, and cheaper medicine. Separately, there will be $55.3 billion for childcare, as Guardian Australia writes, (with $74.2 million for childcare workers), $7.8 billion for the defence strategic review recommendations as news.com.au ($) explains, a 15% pay rise for a quarter of a million aged care workers, $47.3 million for the NDIS to crack down on fraud, as the ABC reports, $2.4 billion tax increase for oil and gas giants, as Guardian Australia reports, and the superannuation tweak to balances over $3 million as the AFR ($) delves into. Phew!

INDIGENOUS AFFAIRS

The UN said it won’t change a key document that claims Tasmania’s First Nations peoples are “extinct”, The Australian ($) reports. The document, written in 1982, for Tasmania’s Wilderness World Heritage Area, says the region should be protected because “the Tasmanian [Aborigines] are now an extinct race of humans”. Tassie’s Minister for Parks and Aboriginal Affairs Roger Jaensch raised it with UNESCO and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, but both say the document is “part of the historic record”. Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek called it “wrong, insulting and hurtful” and vowed to pursue it.

Speaking of Indigenous issues, the Australian Olympic Committee is backing the Yes campaign for the Voice to Parliament, AOC president Ian Chesterman confirmed. He says it didn’t come to the decision lightly, Yahoo reports, but after consulting its Indigenous advisory group, felt certain the Voce would lead to reconciliation with First Nations folks. Meanwhile human rights lawyer and priest Father Frank Brennan’s proposed change to the Voice wording is “not legally sound” and should be thrown out, according to his brother, Tom Brennan. He writes in The Australian ($) that Frank’s proposal to confer to “ministers of state” rather than “the executive government”, would confuse things.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

Someone dumped about 200 kilograms of pasta by a stream in Old Bridge, New Jersey, and nobody knew why. The small town was positively captured by the outlandish discovery of spaghetti, macaroni and alphabet shapes, an eight-metre orgy of the delicious Italian staple. And it wasn’t just them. “Was it a caterer with a last-minute cancellation for a wedding?” The New York Times ($) wondered. “A restaurant cooking for a football team that never showed up?”. The local community group on Facebook was bubbling away like salted water over it. “We should send the perpetrators to the state penne tentiary,” one person suggested. The local Italian restaurant, which “serves spaghetti, linguine, penne, tortellini and gnocchi”, the paper points out tellingly, said: don’t look at us. The sauce thickens.

As soon as she heard about it, shrewd citizen-investigator Nina Jochnowitz went straight to see this impasta in person. She set about documenting the odd occurrence, which kind of looks like Cousin Itt laid down for a nap at a glance. After seeing her photos, town business administrator Himanshu Shah confirmed that they had indeed found “15 wheelbarrow loads of illegal dumped pasta” and the local police had cleaned up the mess. “It was not clear if a large fork had been used,” the paper adds. The police investigation’s ongoing, but by that stage, Jochnowitz was in for a penne, in for a pound — and discovered the culprit. It was a local family, and she was finding out more surrounding the mysterious circumstances. “I laugh now, but it’s a lot of pasta,” she said. Indeed.

Wishing you a little intrigue in your Monday morning.

SAY WHAT?

We’ve been here before with Qantas and, as always, our editorial independence won’t be affected by commercial pressure. The vast majority of people I speak to think Joe’s Qantas coverage is tough but fair.

James Chessell

The Nine publishing boss is indignant that Qantas is reportedly boycotting distributing The Australian Financial Review, even hiding newspapers from lounges, purportedly because columnist Joe Aston, who worked for Qantas 13 years ago, has slammed Qantas CEO Alan Joyce so many times. He recently finished a column that mentions the outgoing CEO’s frustration with Aston’s coverage with the sentence: “By now, any half-shrewd chairman would’ve told Alan to harden the f— up.”

CRIKEY RECAP

Daily Mail reporter who ran a secret racist Twitter account is now an editor there

CAM WILSON

(Image: Zennie McLoughlin)

“Crikey can reveal that Duncan remains employed at Daily Mail Australia despite the company repeatedly being made aware of his online racism, according to multiple former and current staff who spoke to Crikey on the condition of anonymity … One former Daily Mail Australia staff member said Duncan earned a reputation for pitching stories that would appeal to a far-right audience when he was hired in 2017.

“They gave an example of Duncan searching for inspiration for a story to write on the day of the 2017 Queensland state election. ‘He saw photographs of a woman in a burqa going to vote, and so he thought it was a good story. He did a whole article about it. I was stunned, I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ …”

Suing Latham and Hanson achieves nothing and risks a free-speech culture war

GUY RUNDLE

“Separately, Greenwich and Faruqi are helping their beleaguered targets turn tweets of squalid frustration into a free speech issue. Working together, they are going to revive One Nation from the outside, allowing Hanson and Latham to bury their differences over Latham’s tweet and turn this into a major battle over civil society and the ‘woke’ state.

“You had to be pretty hardcore to support Latham after his nasty pub-joke tweet, as a glance at its replies showed. But using progressive lawfare to attack a single tweet, later deleted, as constituting harassment is a genuine attack on the capacity to have some sort of public sphere that is not crisscrossed by the state’s supervision of speech.”

The right’s No campaign can’t see the painful contradiction in its ‘special rights’ argument

MAEVE MCGREGOR

“Indeed, it’s a contradiction that raises the question: how do you suppose the likes of Abbott and the right would describe the power wielded by such political lobbyists and powerful sectors? Perhaps the simplest and most obvious answer, if you were to put yourselves in their shoes, is ‘normal’ — even necessary — in the context of our democracy, notwithstanding the manifold problems of transparency it inspires.

“Why? Because the right has always seen its worldview, interests and the political power it wields as synonymous with the natural order of things. And that is why its political strategy is so dependably bent on framing or ‘othering’ any countervailing political force — like the Voice but also unions and environmentalists — as an almost existential threat.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Israel demolishes Palestinian West Bank school (Reuters)

Arab League brings Syria back into its fold after 12 years (Al Jazeera)

Russia to supply Wagner group more weapons and ammunition after threat to withdraw (euronews)

Decision on Chinese diplomat being made ‘very, very carefully:’ Trudeau (CBC)

Exiled PM’s daughter determined to ‘seize the reins’ in Thai elections (The Guardian)

Climate change: Vietnam records highest-ever temperature of 44.1C (BBC)

THE COMMENTARIAT

China is making its move in Ukraine, and the US has no chance of matching it — John Lyons (ABC): “China has swooped. After watching the war with great interest for 14 months, and repeatedly demonstrating support and friendship for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s President Xi Jinping has made his move. It was a magnificent sunny spring morning in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, on April 26 when Xi deigned to speak to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Since the war began 15 months ago, Xi has remained one of the few major world leaders not to have bothered to have a conversation with Zelenskyy, whose country is fighting to survive under attack from Russia.

“Instead, he has engaged in photo opportunities with Putin, even when it was clear to the world that Russia was relentlessly hitting residential buildings in Ukraine with missiles and drones. Indeed, Xi and Putin held a meeting at the Beijing Olympics three weeks before Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February last year. It defies believability that, as Moscow was amassing soldiers along the Ukraine border, the two men would not have discussed Putin’s by then well-developed plan to invade his neighbour. So for all these reasons the phone call on April 26 is hugely significant.”

Was the coronation worth it? The figures don’t lie — Rob Harris (The SMH) ($): “It would be wrong to say that the British public had been gripped by the prospect of the coronation. In fact, polls in the lead-up showed that two-fifths thought it was a waste of taxpayer money. Another found two-thirds didn’t care about it very much or at all. There has, after all, been a glut of royal pageantry in the past year: Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee weekend last June, followed by her funeral in September. While one suspects that after having witnessed such a stately event opinions have shifted, Britons are struggling as pressure continues to mount on household finances. New data shows the prices of food and non-alcoholic drinks in the UK are increasing at their sharpest rate in more than 45 years.

“Fresh food prices jumped a record 17.8% year-on-year for April, while the price of ambient products, such as tinned goods and other store-cupboard items, rose 12.9%. The king’s coronation cost British taxpayers many millions. But with no budget revealed for the historic national state occasion, and the government not commenting on the final bill, the true amount of public funds spent will be unknown for some time. Some predictions suggest Operation Golden Orb — the crowning of Charles III and Queen Camilla — could cost the nation between £50 and £100 million. Others have it higher. But, ultimately, it was among the greatest possible exercises in soft power.”

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WHAT’S ON TODAY

Online

  • UNSW’s Professor George Williams will host the Australian Republic Movement’s Craig Foster, UNSW’s Professor Megan Davis, and the Sir Zelman Cowan Centre’s Nyadol Nyuon in a discussion about Australia becoming a republic in a panel held at the Roundhouse.

Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)

  • Author Kylie Kaden will speak about her new book, After the Smoke Clears, at Avid Reader bookshop.

Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)

  • The University of Melbourne’s Xiao Ma, Queensland University of Technology’s Tan Yigitcanlar, Hanyang University’s Sugie Lee, and the University of Melbourne’s Kerry Nice will all speak as part of a series on Australia-Asia dialogue for urban innovation, at the University of Melbourne.