(Image: Private Media/Tom Red)

Yesterday’s papers From editor-in-chief and mahogany-row heavy to “supplier” — such is the life of News Corp’s fleet of former editors, time-servers and friends of the family as the company’s bean-counters tighten the controls on newspaper budgets.

Changes were flagged on Monday, with an email seen by Crikey from the News Corp finance department — the various papers and other businesses in News Corp Australia will have to get approval from said department, rather than the editors and other senior executives:

From 12 July 2021, we are requesting suppliers A. Ensure all invoices are sent directly to our Accounts Payable email address and B. Include a News Corp Australia employee name and email address on the invoice in the ‘Attention to’ section.

That will delay and give the bean-counters some oversight and powers to flag excess payments to contributors, special deals, or the famed way of dealing with retired old stagers at News — giving them a weekly column. Presumably, this will apply to luminaries like Peta Credlin, Piers Ackerman, Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, as well as to casuals and contributors.

The requirement becomes compulsory on August 9, after which “invoices will not be accepted unless both of the above requirements are met”.

Could this be the start of the long-rumoured centralisation of services across News Corp being overseen by Damian Eales from Sydney (he was going to New York but COVID kept him in Australia)? There’s certainly a lot of money to be saved from the revamp — in the post-results briefing in February, News CFO Susan Panuccio said: “Just in relation to shared services, yes, we did quote $100 million for financial year ’22.”

IDPOL Ah, identity politics, huh? These days, it seems it doesn’t matter who you are, everyone’s trying to join a group and claim victimhood — and honestly, where does it end? I’m referring of course to the attempts to change the curriculum. Firstly there was the push from right-wing culture warriors to remove “critical race theory”, which they argued taught kids to “hate Australia”. It was a battle pretty easily won, on reflection, given it was never there in the first place.

And now that much-marginalised community, miners, have decided they want in. The Minerals Council of Australia, Australia’s peak body for miners, is arguing that the draft science curriculum, which only talks about coal and petrol in terms of their impact on the environment, “fails to inform students about significant contextual issues, including the importance of such commodities to a prosperous modern economy”.

Struggling with definitions Just as no one can currently tell us what an essential worker is, we seem to have a shifting idea of what it is to be Australian. See New Zealand-born Quade Cooper, who was considered sufficiently dinky-di to represent the Australian rugby union team 70 times over nearly a decade but, when it comes down to it, can’t make it official via citizenship.

Of course, the intersection of sport and citizenship has always warped reality somewhat. Remember Fawad Ahmed, who managed to get his application for asylum and then citizenship fast-tracked during a particularly fraught period of asylum-seeker discourse in 2012-2013? This just so happened to coincide with a fairly disastrous period for the national cricket team, and Ahmed — apart from being targeted by religious extremists for his work with women in Abbottabad — was feted as potentially the best leg spinner available to Australia this side of Shane Warne.