julian assange bob carr
(Images: AAP)

That was then, this is now Ah, the luxury of being a former politician, when you finally have the platform and influence to really make a difference. Just days after former foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop lamented the cuts in the foreign aid budget — a process she had overseen and defended in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 — we have Bob Carr, who continues his newfound interest in the case of Julian Assange:

“He faces the prospect of a living death inside an American prison, in very cruel conditions, because he let the world know about an American war crime,” he told Nine News. Not much to quarrel with that.

So why, back in 2012 (when Carr held the obscure post of Australian foreign affairs minister), did he say of Assange: “There’s an amorality about what’s been at work here; secrets being released for the sake of being released without inherent justification.”

And why did Carr boast in his diary at the time of “needling” Assange and his supporters by spouting facts that, “strictly speaking”, might not be true?

I stride out of an estimates committee in the morning tea break to do a press conference and point out that he has had more consular support in a comparable time than any other Australian. Strictly speaking, I don’t know whether this is the case. But it is a broad, healthy truth that I don’t think anyone could disprove. I do it to needle his self-righteousness … Sure enough, my needling has an effect.

Having a ‘good’ pandemic It would appear ground staff aren’t the only ones subject to long-planned cuts at Qantas under the cover of COVID-19.

It was revealed yesterday that while 2400 ground workers were nominally sacked in response to the crisis, internal documents from 2010 show outsourcing ground staff had been part of the organisation’s “vision strategy” for quite some time.

So were nurses and onsite medical centres there to assist sick travellers and injured staff.

The Transport Workers Union criticised Qantas for potentially moving to axe the nurses back in March.

And last month, according to internal documents leaked to Crikey, Qantas appeared to have done just that. So, on one level at least, the pandemic made Qantas’ 2010 dream a reality.

The world’s most persecuted people We suspect the Sky News after dark crew will twist themselves into coils over the case of Duncan Bendall. The Australian man has been awarded $180,500 by the Central London Employment Tribunal, which found his wife and business partner, Fiona Bendall, had racially discriminated against him in that she regarded Australians as an “inferior race”:

In one email to her husband Bendall wrote: ‘I hate Australian mentality and you have it (in) droves … And DO NOT say you are a founder in MY business MY efforts ever again You Leech.’

Is this ruling — very likely the first to ever designate Anglo-Australian as a legitimate category for discrimination — a further absurd blow against freedom of expression by over-regulation and the professional victim mentality?

Or does this only prove what Sky has always suspected — that there is no group worse treated than white Australian men, and that affirmative action and identity politics (Fiona’s “Female Social Network” was marketed as the height of “Girlboss” empowerment) destroys lives?