Prosecuting his case

POLICING THE POLICE

ACT police officers allegedly waged “a very clear campaign to pressure” the director of public prosecutions (DPP) Shane Drumgold not to prosecute the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins, according to a letter Drumgold sent to the territory’s top cop. Drumgold wrote to the chief police officer to complain about “inappropriate interference”, Guardian Australia reports, and called for a public inquiry into the police. The police union is fuming about the allegation, dubbing it “desperate attempts to smear AFP and ACT policing” by Drumgold. The Australian Federal Police Association also questioned why the letter was given to Guardian Australia when it had personal details of cops in it — the union continued it would complain to the office of the Australian information commission and the ACT ombudsman “regarding the possibility of FOI breaches”.

And Deanna “Violet” Coco’s 15-month imprisonment for her 28-minute peaceful protest has hit the international headlines. The BBC reports the UN’s special rapporteur on peaceful assembly, Clément Voule, said he was “alarmed” by Coco’s sentence. Her lawyer will be appealing the jail term, which has an eight-month non-parole period, calling it “extraordinarily harsh” and “baseless”. To another peaceful activist now and Sydney icon Danny Lim, 78, who was left with serious injuries after an encounter with NSW cops, cannot walk unaided anymore. Lim is often spotted wearing wry poster boards with political or non-political messages on them — last week, footage showed two officers trying to detain him after Sky News says he failed to move on. He was then taken to St Vincent’s in critical condition. “Danny Lim needs two walking sticks to get around,” his lawyer wrote on Twitter.

[free_worm]

STATING THE OBVIOUS

The NSW Liberals are fuming over maverick Treasurer Matt Kean saying something was wrong with the party after a former junior staffer won preselection over the most senior female Liberal, the SMH reports. The Pittwater branches want the state council to censure Kean, who publicly added that he was devastated Roads Minister Natalie Ward had been passed over in the seat of Davidson. It was a double whammy for Kean after Families Minister Natasha Maclaren-Jones didn’t get the numbers for her bid for Pittwater — Rob Stokes is resigning at the March election, and he and Kean were hoping for a female to replace Stokes in that seat too. Of 44 Liberals in Macquarie street, just 13 are female — about 29.5%.

Meanwhile, we have a new Victorian Liberal leader (a man) who has vowed to appeal to progressives. A total of 33 state Liberals voted for Hawthorn’s John Pesutto for the top job, ahead of another man, Brad Battin. If Pesutto’s name rings a bell, it might be because in 2018’s “Danslide” he rather awkwardly learnt he had lost his blue ribbon seat while a panellist on ABC TV. (To Pesutto’s credit, he was described as being completely “gracious” in what would’ve been an “excruciating experience”.) After winning his seat back and now the leadership, he says it’s a new era for the Victorian Liberals after the leadership of two-time loser and the perhaps somewhat less gracious Matthew Guy (The Age reports Guy had his “cranky pants” on at the partyroom meeting for the leadership vote). Pesutto, a former lawyer, adviser and staffer for the Institute of Public Affairs, says he’ll be more constructive, get more women into Parliament, and promote juniors more.

FREE AS A BIRD

A wind farm in Tassie has received the green light on the condition it shuts down operations for nearly half the year so the orange-bellied parrots can migrate, ABC reports, and reader, I enjoyed typing that sentence. The Environment Protection Authority (EPA) told the Philippines-based multinational renewables company ACEN it can build up to 122 turbines on Robbins Island and Jim’s Plain, north-west of Smithton to create a 900-megawatt wind farm, as long as it shuts down for five months a year. The EPA’s director said the research findings about the sweet bird were clear, and they did a heck of a lot of it — the most “significant and comprehensive assessment” he’s seen in his time in the top job. ACEN’s CEO was like, we’re happy about the approval, but a bit shocked by the shutdown rules.

Meanwhile, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek says companies would have to pay compensation for destroying habitats, and she would appoint a green cop to enforce new rules in sweeping legislation to be finalised next year, as The Australian ($) reports, but a climate trigger is not on the table. The trigger is a mechanism that would require Plibersek to consider climate change impacts in major development decisions — the Greens and crossbench were calling for it, meaning Plibersek’s bill might struggle to pass the Senate next year. Her colleague Clare O’Neil, the home affairs and cybersecurity minister, was also talking climate change yesterday, the AFR reports, saying the resources it diverts pose a major security risk to us. And former Labor rising star Terri Butler, who lost her seat in May, has joined Griffith’s Climate Ready Initiative (CRI) board to develop a plan for climate readiness, reports Mirage News.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

More than 9000 pigeons from 50 countries have flocked to Thailand for the Pattaya International Pigeon Race and a shot at $2.6 million in prize money, as Crikey reports. Australia sent 13 teams with a total of 72 pigeons, while 58 of the birds qualified for the big race. I’m deadly serious. The Pattaya is actually five races across a mammoth 1815-kilometre course that’s divvied up into 245-kilometre, 280-kilometre, 330-kilometre and 430-kilometre legs, as well as a grand final spanning 530km next month. The course, Crikey’s Julia Bergin assures us, has been certified by the honourable “FCI Racing Pigeons Grand Prix”. Western Australian pigeon liaison agent David Van Aalst says he used to send birds to race elsewhere too, but why would he bother? Pattaya is the biggest in the world. The flighty athletes are treated with the utmost care, even spending time mentally preparing (one assumes) at the avian equivalent of an Olympic village before the big race.

But how does one prepare a pigeon for competitive racing? It ends up costing about $1000 a bird to get them to the starting line — there’s travel, race entry, pre-match “primping and priming”, and birds need to be between 45 and 60 days old, fitted with a little registration ring, microchipped, vaccinated and quarantined. And they’re not just plucked off the street — the thoroughbred pigeon’s heart is double the size of the average one, with a “unique 1:1:1 ratio of breath to heartbeat to wing beat” allowing them to fly at top speed from dawn to dusk, one expert says. Pigeons might have a bad reputation as the “rats of the sky” but they’ve had an enormously respectable history. Pigeons helped launch the international news agency Reuters and carried messages from historical heavyweights like Genghis Khan and Caesar. They’re also experiencing somewhat of a pop culture renaissance — Sex and the City star and fashion icon Sarah Jessica Parker was recently photographed toting a pigeon clutch bag. And you can too for the low, low price of $1315.

Hoping you see something with fresh eyes today too — and have a restful weekend.

SAY WHAT?

What I am most worried about is cascading disasters. Imagine a future January, where we see a Black Saturday-size bushfire in the south-east, a major flood in the north, then overlay a cyberattack on a major hospital system in the west. Our country would be fully absorbed in the management of domestic crises.

Clare O’Neil

Sends a shiver down the spine. The home affairs minister said climate change is a security threat to Australia in that disasters often divert our armed forces and our attention, leaving us potentially vulnerable in what is shaping up to be a fairly highly charged geopolitical environment.

CRIKEY RECAP

Hiding in plain sight: the media scramble to colour in the Albanese outline

Christopher Warren

Dec 08, 2022

57

“As regular readers of Murphy’s style in Guardian Australia would recognise, she writes breezily, stepping through the decades with a light touch on the electoral campaign before jumping into the post-election challenges. Though like most political writing, the essay leans more into politics than policy, shifting a bit too quickly through his years in opposition and then as a senior minister in complex portfolios.

“The narrative is also interrupted by a chapter that lurches to report the rise of the teals. An important story clearly told, but a distraction from the “how did the government get here” arc. Murphy’s essay is an early draft of how the media are coming to think of Albanese. There’s still a way to go before the gallery settles on a consensus on him. The problem? Albanese is not the sort of person the parliamentary watchers on the Canberra balcony are used to seeing at the prime ministerial podium.”

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‘Short of dictatorships, we are world leaders’: Australia’s record on criminalising environmental protest

Maeve McGregor

Dec 08, 2022

54

“Against the backdrop of this legislation, now the subject of constitutional challenge, environmental demonstrators across Australia have regularly been denied bail or otherwise forced to contend with disproportionate bail conditions, while those residing in New South Wales have had espionage activities undertaken against them by a new police unit, Strike Force Guard.

“In a statement to Crikey on Wednesday, New South Wales Deputy Premier and Minister for Police Paul Toole defended the laws … Had such laws existed at the time of many of Australia’s historic environmental wins — from the Franklin River to the Kakadu and Jabiluka blockades — most, if not all, would not have succeeded.”

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Quotas alone can’t erase the Coalition’s legacy of policies that keep women poorer

Kristine Ziwica

Dec 08, 2022

30

“At the current rate, it will take 70 years to reach equality in full-time employment and more than 200 years to reach income equality. What’s more, in 2020 women reported poorer health than men in all bar one domain, including in mental health, physical and social functioning, and bodily pain. More women than men experience elevated psychological distress, with rates rising sharply in women aged 18 to 24 and 55 to 64 over the past two decades.

“Over the past 30 years, the gender gap has reversed, with women slightly more likely to vote for the Coalition in the 1990s and men more likely to vote Labor. Today, more men prefer the Coalition and more women prefer Labor. And while the gender gap in voting for the Coalition peaked in 2016 and 2019, with 10% more men than women voting for the Coalition and that gap narrowed slightly in 2022, it was not because the Coalition did better among women, but because they lost votes from both men and women.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Iranian forces shooting at faces and genitals of female protesters, medics say (The Guardian)

Iran conducts first protest-related execution (Al Jazeera)

Brittney Griner released from Russian custody in prisoner swap with Viktor Bout (Reuters)

[US] House passes bill to protect same-sex marriage in landmark vote sending it to Biden (CNN)

EU backs Croatia’s entry into Schengen, rejects Bulgaria, Romania (Al Jazeera)

Greece calls for calm amid protests against police shooting of Roma teenager (EuroNews)

Chinese students in UK told to ‘resist distorting’ China’s COVID policies (The Guardian)

Ed note: no content from The New York Times today folks — I’m observing a digital picket line and not engaging with the media brand today. You can read more about it here.

THE COMMENTARIAT

China’s rhetoric has changed but not its plan to dominate — Tony Abbott (The Australian) ($): “Let’s be clear about the choices here. Helping Taiwan risks a wider war as China blockades air and sea routes of resupply. Not helping Taiwan guarantees the collapse of the US alliance system as America abandons a friend in need, and that spells the end of the postwar liberal order that has produced more freedom, more safety and more prosperity than mankind has known before. Any pause to reflect in Beijing that Putin’s misjudged war may have created is useful only if Taiwan and its friends use it just as judiciously — to prepare for the worst as well as simply to hope for the best.

“For Taiwan, this should mean hardening its infrastructure, shielding its military assets, learning how to ‘swarm’ an invasion fleet, trying to acquire an Iron Dome-style missile shield and, to change Beijing’s calculus, trying to acquire the capacity to strike back hard. And to manage this escalating preparedness without driving its own citizens to conclude that freedom is not worth the fight. For the other western Pacific democracies it should mean more rapid acquisition of defensive and offensive missile systems, more developed defensive and offensive cyber capability, plus rapid planning for the economic resilience needed to cope, not only with the cessation of trade but also with the impact on production of the loss of Chinese intermediate goods from every critical supply chain. Some would argue this interdependency of China and the world makes conflict impossible, but I doubt that’s the view from Beijing, where trade and investment are seen as strategy by other means.”

NBN bet could have paid off if the Coalition hadn’t messed it up — Kevin Rudd (The AFR) ($): “The Albanese government’s decision to liberate the national broadband network from its obligation to fully recover its construction cost has been hailed by all the usual ideological and corporate suspects as a sign the NBN could never have generated a commercial rate of return. But all this crowing — notably from The Australian Financial Review, whose editor’s ideology dictates knee-jerk hostility to most forms of government intervention — is based on a deeply flawed factual premise. The truth is we’ll never know if the NBN could have broken even, because of the Coalition’s catastrophic decision in 2013 to detonate the business and technology model that my government announced in 2009.

“Before Tony Abbott took over in 2013, the NBN was on track to deliver fibre-to-the-premises broadband speeds up to 100 megabits per second, at a capital cost of $37.4 billion, by the early 2020s. But that policy was never put to the test because, barely two years after the first homes were connected, it was shredded by the Coalition at the behest of News Corporation. Abbott, arguably the most ruthless political campaigner of our era, had built his career campaigning against technological change — from mobile phone towers in the 1990s to wind turbines in the 2010s. In pursuit of the prime ministership, Abbott wilfully blinded himself to the future needs of the economy by arrogantly dismissing superfast broadband as ‘essentially a video entertainment system’. Abbott publicly instructed his communications spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull, to ‘demolish the NBN’.”

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE

WHAT’S ON TODAY

Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)

• The Finders Keepers Market kicks off today, with independent art, design, food stalls and a bar, at The Cutaway.

Whadjuk Noongar Country (also known as Perth)

• Academics Kirsten Holmes, Vanessa Quintal, Min Teah, Hiroshi Hasegawa, Momoko Fujita and more will speak at the Australia-Japan Tourism Symposium at Curtin City Campus.

Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)

• ACT Minister for Human Rights Tara Cheyne, ACT commissioner for sustainability and the environment Sophie Lewis, and ACT Minister for the Environment Rebecca Vassarotti will all speak about our right to a healthy environment, at Canberra Museum & Gallery.