From the Crikey grapevine, the latest tips and rumours …

With military precision. If there’s a change of government at the next election, some companies already have a foot in the door. This morning, a Labor MP was to host Lockheed Martin — yes, the manufacturer of the flying heap of crap — in Parliament House to discuss the company’s “industrial narrative”. “I will be hosting a briefing with Lockheed Martin Australia CEO, Vince Di Pietro, this Wednesday at 9:30am,” Labor MP for Wills Peter Khalil emailed colleagues this morning.

“Discussion topics will include Lockheed Martin’s industrial narrative and continuing investment in Australia, and partnerships with Australian companies, specifically around existing capabilities such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and C-130 Hercules aircraft.  The discussion will also include Lockheed Martin’s investment and partnership in STEM initiatives, especially their STELaRLab in Melbourne.”

Illustrating the “revolving door” nature of the military-industrial complex, Di Pietro is a former senior naval officer. We hope at least someone asked him if the F-35 is still asphyxiating its pilots, catching fire, unable to shoot or getting beaten by 30-year-old aircraft in dogfights.

Throwing stones. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has today ramped up her rhetoric against Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, asking on Sky News if Shorten was “directing his troops to ask these questions in other parliaments around the world” after it was revealed yesterday that Penny Wong’s chief of staff Marcus Ganley had spoken to New Zealand Labour MP Chris Hipkins about New Zealand citizenship laws. Hipkins then asked questions about NZ and Australian citizenship laws in New Zealand parliament.

Yesterday Bishop said she “would find it very hard to build trust with members of a political party that had been used by the Australian Labor Party to seek to undermine the Australian government”. A Crikey tipster tells us that if Bishop wants to ask anyone with experience in influencing a foreign government, she should just walk down the hall to PM Malcolm Turnbull’s office. This newspaper clipping from The Guardian in the UK in October 1988 covers then-barrister Turnbull’s praise of British Labour leader Neil Kinnock for questioning the way the UK government had conducted the Spycatcher trial in parliament, as well as the line that Turnbull had suggested that Kinnock raise the issue:

“The initiative in contacting Mr Kinnock was taken by Mr Turnbull, who wanted him to raise the roles of Sir Michael and Lord Rothschild, who, the court heard, had acted as an intermediary between Mr Pincher and Mr Wright.”

History is fun, isn’t it?

Trust us, we’re banks. When it comes money laundering, the Commonwealth Bank is our national champion, but it has a long way to go to match Deutsche Bank. Earlier this year the bank copped a US$630 million fine in the US and the UK relating to US$10 billion in laundered money from Russia (plus there was a trivial US$41 million fine a couple of months later). That hasn’t stopped the local arm of the bank weighing in on the issue of wage stagnation and offering a “novel” solution. Adam Boyton opined in today AFR that we shouldn’t be increasing wages as it would make Australia less competitive and cost jobs, etc, etc. Instead, he says: “I’ve previously proposed in these pages that government should embark on a serious deregulation agenda in concert with business and peak business groups. In return, businesses which benefit from that agenda agree to real wage increases.”

So there we go — businesses will deign to give us tax cuts if we’re good and cut regulation. But we wonder which kind of regulation Boyton has in mind. Couldn’t be … anti-money laundering regulation, could it? Deutsche Bank could probably have handed out a lot of bonuses except for that pesky multi-hundred-millions fine …

Grounding the Flying Kangaroo. We hear users of the Qantas Frequent Flyer system encountered major issues with the website yesterday, with half of members unable to log in to due a “system compromise”. One Crikey tipster spent “over three hours” trying to sort the issue out. Consumer website Product Review shows at least one person had similar issues, with a user posting this morning that she had “[b]een on Qantas site over 2hrs & still can’t book a flight using my rewards points, no matter how hard I try using different stages of process to log in to Frequent Flyer Account!!”

 

A Qantas spokesperson told Crikey“due to maintenance” some users had encountered “intermittent login issues between Monday evening and Tuesday morning”. They added that this affected the main website (qantas.com), but not other channels through which a user might access their points, such as Qantas points or Qantas epiqure. No general correspondence about the login issues, or the nature of possible workarounds was sent to users of the service, but the spokesperson told us “going forward we’ll look at including that advice on the login error message”.

Where’s the ABC? Back in 2014 the ABC cut its New Zealand correspondent’s position because of budget cuts. Dominique Schwartz was the last, having been in the land of the Long White Cloud since 2010. Given the furore about Barnaby Joyce, that looks like a foolish cost cut now.

Well, this is awkward. A tipster tells us that the Queensland University of Technology decided to let its students know last week that they should vote in the marriage equality plebiscite through the phone app used by students. “Love is love. Vote for equality” was the headline, with an unequivocal message in favour of enrolling to vote and voting yes at the plebiscite.

Not long after that, users of the app got a second notification, taking that message straight back:

So is love love or not?

*Heard anything that might interest Crikey? Send your tips to boss@crikey.com.au, use our guaranteed anonymous form or other ways to leak to us securely