GRACE TAME PRESS CLUB
Grace Tame (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

Going to work This week is the federal government’s women’s safety summit, (virtually) bringing together women’s advocates, business and community leaders and academics with the aim of guiding the next national plan to address violence against women and children that this government somehow didn’t feel too embarrassed to hold.

But it does appear the organisers have some sense of the topics they’d like to get a little less attention. There is only one instance of two panels clashing: the panel on proactive measures and the Respect@Work report, both of which run from 2.30 to 3.30 this afternoon.

You may recall from our coverage last week that the government’s response to the report has been utterly contemptible — it ignored it for a full year, then committed to implementing all 55 recommendations “wholly, in part or in principle” to take the heat off during the disastrous handling of the alleged rape of a staffer, before slinking away and then legislating a mere six recommendations (out of the 16 that could have made it into law). So it’s notable that everything in the summit gets its own clear air.

Huh? Still on the topic of the national summit, Australian of the Year Grace Tame was interviewed about that and other topics by Nine’s bandana-sporting historian Peter FitzSimons. It kicks off with the following “question”:

You seem to have reinvented the whole Australian of the Year position. We have had ambassadors and advocates, but you are no less than an activist! You no sooner got the biggest gong the government hands out than you started banging on it before banging on them, to push your cause to end sexual abuse in this country? (Emphasis added.)

You may see why we’ve put the word question in quotation marks — the eagle-eyed viewer will notice there’s not a question to be found in that truly tortured piece of imagery followed by a question mark. Full marks to Tame, who manages to conjure a response that isn’t “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Get with that zero News Corp is to commit to the milquetoast and tardy “net zero by 2050” target. The news was broken this morning through a rather credulous report from the Nine papers. (Calling News Corp “an influential player in Australia’s decade-long climate wars” is rather like calling Germany “an influential player in World War II”.) The details are sketched elsewhere in Crikey, but it’s worth noting Rupert Murdoch’s personal views: whatever his personal scepticism: “The planet deserves the benefit of the doubt.”

Oh, except that wasn’t part of this campaign. This was in 2006, before his empire helped expand Andrew Bolt’s audience into the millions, before Ian Plimer and Peter Ridd and Bjorn Lomborg, before hitting upon and rehashing the nonsense that the Bureau of Meteorology is tampering with climate data, before tying itself in knots to give the impression that bushfires were the work of arsonists and green tape.

Fifteen years have gone over the falls, during which action on climate change has been regularly fatal for any prime minister who has dared attempt it. But, hey, great, we’re sure that a two-week campaign in October (just in time for the next season of Succession!) will totally square the ledger.

Closing the book Facebook continues to have a rubbish year. It’s just been fined 225 million euros for WhatsApp data breaches, which is more than double the estimated cost of all those ACCC news deals, and the US Federal Trade Commission has refiled to break it up.

And finally, in what feels like an admission, Axios reported last week that the tech giant plans to pivot away from “political posts” and current events content.