Business before pleasure

GRIM FAIRYTALE

Obscene company profits are driving our record inflation, not our wages as the Reserve Bank had been warning about. The Australia Institute found big business earnings have caused more than two-thirds of our extra inflation, which has climbed to an eyewatering 7.8%. The central bank wants it to be between 2-3% so it keeps raising the cash rate (higher mortgages means less spending means more supply means cheaper stuff, so the theory goes). But wages are going up, and RBA governor Philip Lowe says both happening in tandem could cause a “wage-price spiral”, even though Treasurer Jim Chalmers has reiterated time and again that wage growth isn’t the problem, as Crikey reports.

The institute’s Jim Stanford said any claim that we need to restrict wage growth and sacrifice living standards to get inflation down is “an economic fairytale”. The research is clear, he said: most of the inflation exceeding that 2-3% benchmark is big profits. Qantas announced a record $1.43 billion half-year profit yesterday, Reuters reports, which came amid “Woolworths posting a 25% increase, Coles recording a 11% rise and the Commonwealth Bank reporting a 9% lift ($5.1bn profit)”, Guardian Australia notes. Fossil fuel titan Santos tripled its full-year net profit to $3.1 billion, the Brisbane Times adds, and Glencore’s profit soared 60% to $34.1 billion, Reuters says.

[free_worm]

GOOD COP, BAD COP

Bon voyage, Zachary Rolfe, may your trip be lengthy. The NT cop has left Australia after penning a 2500-word letter claiming he would’ve “got a medal” in any other jurisdiction in the shooting death of Indigenous teen Kumanjayi Walker. Rolfe claimed the NT police, coroner and its counsel tried to publicly vilify him during the “biased” inquest into Walker’s death, as The Australian ($) reports. It heard text messages from Rolfe where he said he “likes” to “towel up” First Nations peoples (understood to mean “beat up”), the ABC says, and another described Walker using a word “too offensive” to be read aloud. In the letter, Rolfe apologised but said messages were cherry-picked and he “talked shit about nearly every group at times”. He described himself as a “good cop” and made “no apologies for doing my job”. Rolfe shot Walker three times after the teen came at him with scissors. Rolfe was acquitted of murder.

Meanwhile Deputy Liberal Leader Sussan Ley says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Voice referendum campaign is a “reelection vanity project”. She’ll make the comments in a Perth speech today, Guardian Australia reports, continuing that Albanese would rather see the Liberals say no and the referendum fail (nonpartisan ones usually do) than get the Libs onside. It comes as Albanese accepted a Liberal request to send out official pamphlets explaining the Voice to voters. He was going to scrap it but changed his mind when the opposition asked him not to. The Yes campaign officially launched in Adelaide yesterday, the ABC reports, with a hefty $5 million donation from the Paul Ramsay Foundation to kick things off.

HIDDEN ASSETS

South Australians paid for former Liberal premier Steven Marshall’s make-up, The Advertiser reports. The paper FOI’d credit card receipts that showed $283.41 spent on Mecca make-up sponges, facial spray with aloe (?), mattifying sticks (??), and some $20 on a single lip balm, which might be the most shocking revelation of this whole saga. But it wasn’t Marshall getting those loyalty points — it was one of his faceless men toting the office credit card. Politicians’ expenses have been the topic of many conversations in SA lately — MP Michael Brown said Marshall should ‘fess up about the “taxpayer-funded purchases of concealer”, punning gleefully that it hit with the Marshall government’s “reputation for airbrushing its record”.

To another matter of state transparency now and the McGowan government will soon get the power to override councils on development application decisions because they keep caving to “the loudest complainer”, The West Australian ($) reports. Premier Mark McGowan confirmed he’d enshrine this pandemic-era fast-tracked pathway that let WA Planning Commission greenlight proposals that cost more than $20 million, even if local government said no. Mayors are furious about it, but McGowan brought up how Nedlands council blocked the construction of WA’s first kids’ hospice because of its oceanfront location, as the ABC reported, which councillors dismally described as an “A-class reserve”.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

We have discovered six ancient galaxies that are rewriting the rules of our universe, Crikey reports. It’s the latest revelation from our incredible James Webb Space Telescope, and something that caused lead researcher Professor Ivo Labbé to spit his coffee out all over his table. See, when we look through the telescope, we are actually looking back in time — all the way back to a mere moment after the big bang (OK, 600 million years, but still — just 3% of its current age!). One would think we’d only spot baby galaxies at practically the dawn of time, right? Well, we have just discovered what appears to be galaxies as mature as the one we live in right now.

Think of it this way, Labbé says: we’re looking at the kindergarten of the universe. “At kinder you expect to see toddlers. The average toddler weighs eight to 10 kilograms. What did we find? Toddlers that weigh 100kg but they’re only five centimetres tall. Very strange”. Scientists are scratching their heads. We’re going to have to revisit the most basic rules of cosmology, and rethink whether the dark ages even happened. That’s a term to describe a period of time when the dust was settling from the big bang, where the gas had to collapse and form our first stars and galaxies. “The universe is a lot weirder than the human imagination,” Labbé says. “You couldn’t make these things up.”

Hope something makes you feel a little awe today, and that you have a restful weekend.

SAY WHAT?

I hear your tone is very different when you interview me and that’s gotta change. You’ve gotta stop setting Black women up against one another and allow the truth to be told in a way that allows your listeners to get a fair and accurate account of what Black people are saying in this country.

Lidia Thorpe

The ABC’s Patricia Karvelas was taken to task by the new crossbencher after she called Labor’s Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney a “legend” but used a purported “very different” tone to talk to Thorpe. The former Greens senator added that Karvelas should allow her audience to contemplate a “progressive No” stance.

CRIKEY RECAP

Why is Dan Andrews so popular? Allow us to introduce Victoria’s opposition

Charlie Lewis

Feb 23, 2023

21

“We’ve long catalogued its beautiful dysfunction, its leadership oscillations between someone no one had heard of and someone who people had heard of for almost exclusively bad reasons, its public disunity, and its interesting preoccupations and interesting people touted as future leadership material.

“The past two weeks have raked all this to surface again — first through the public airing of a scathing report by party president Greg Mirabella, which argued former opposition leader Matthew Guy was so unpopular and the Liberals’ election campaign so negative that Victorians had no ‘reason or moral permission’ to vote for them. Guy publicly shot back that Mirabella was ‘factional and juvenile’ and that he should resign.”

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‘I won because God arranged it’: New Liberal MP’s emails show promise of $100,000 donation for preselection

Cam Wilson

Feb 23, 2023

55

“Controversial new Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming claimed she could secure $100,000 in donations if preselected, thanked a constituent who blamed COVID-19 on abortion and homosexuality, and claimed God ‘arranged’ her preselection.

“These details are contained in emails sent from Deeming’s Melton City Council email address, where she served as a councillor from 2020 to 2022. The emails were obtained through a freedom of information request and were released by advocacy group Sex Work Law Reform Australia on Monday night. Deeming, a former teacher, earned notoriety as a councillor and as a state candidate for her anti-transgender views and COVID scepticism.”

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Rampant wage theft and the theft of the common good

Maeve McGregor

Feb 23, 2023

28

“In other words, it’s a phenomenon that risks rendering Australia more unequal, more divided, more vulnerable, sicker, less knowledgeable and less equipped to meet the defining problems of the future. In a nod to an election commitment, the Albanese government told Crikey it would introduce legislation to criminalise wage theft by year’s end, as well as more broadly consider other measures to enhance regulatory and workplaces relations in the tertiary sector as part of its promised universities accord.

“Yet be that as it may, the failure to expressly mention any of those considerations in the 40-page discussion paper on the accord (released Wednesday) has caused some consternation within the union movement.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Israel bombs Gaza after rocket fire, deadly Nablus raid (Al Jazeera)

US picks [former Mastercard chief] Ajay Banga to lead World Bank (The New York Times)

Turkey steps up rebuilding plans as quake toll nears 50,000 (Reuters)

Swedish police chief Mats Lofving found dead after inquiry (BBC)

Why Google is blocking some Canadians from seeing online news (CBC)

At least five killed in open-pit coalmine collapse in north China (The Guardian)

[House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy defends release of January 6 footage to Tucker Carlson: ‘I promised’ (CNN)

THE COMMENTARIAT

Outrage offensive: when did ‘morality’ become a blunt instrument? — Waleed Aly (The Age) ($): “Now, progressive politics is turning, especially among the young, who are often less interested in freedom and more interested in power. Liberal notions like free speech and tolerance are being asked to give way to acceptance and representation. In this approach, the trouble with freedom is that it provides the freedom to, say, be a bigot. Disillusioned with this, a new kind of progressivism has arrived that wants to re-moralise politics.

“The trouble is that it arrives in a society that has long since forsaken a public moral language that goes beyond notions of harm. It wants to assert a moral orthodoxy, but the only morality it can imagine is one about power and politics. That’s why, even as it opposes liberalism it cannot escape using its terms, categorising all manner of things as ‘harmful’ or ‘unsafe’. Once you make those categories broad enough, they license the kind of moral responses we’re seeing proliferate: censorship, boycotts, shunning, excommunication. What’s left, then, is a morality shorn of spirit, subtlety and complexity.”

Mateship vital for Ukraine victory — and a safer world — Vasyl Myroshnychenko (The Australian) ($): “Right now, however, Russian forces, including thousands of Wagnerite mercenaries, are using up to 20,000 rounds of artillery shells every day — or 15 every minute — against Ukrainian positions and cities. Russian rockets worth $6 million each are fired from aircraft carriers into apartment buildings in places such as Dnipro and Mykolayiv. Kids die in their beds. It’s become a truism: if Russia stops fighting, there is no war; if Ukraine stops fighting, there is no Ukraine. And the Western values it fights for will have been sacrificed and scuttled. The door will then be open to not only full-scale invasion but full-scale genocide.

“That’s why we must maintain our resolve and bring this conflict to an end — a Ukrainian victory — as soon as possible. It is not in Australia’s or Ukraine’s interest that this war settles into a bloody, protracted stalemate. We cannot settle for that. The war needs to be won not only to make Ukraine and the world safer again but to end Russia’s desire to destroy others for glory and gain. Now moving into the second year of the war, you have our commitment that the values Australians and Ukrainians share will be strongly protected by Ukraine. When you invest in us — politically, emotionally and materially — you invest in a safer, democratic world. Our victory, with Australia’s steadfast support, will be the free world’s victory. Thank you for your mateship and trust.”

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE

WHAT’S ON TODAY

Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)

• Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia and New Zealand Vasyl Myroshnychenko will speak at the National Press Club.

Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)

• Writer Mimi Zhu will discuss their book, Be Not Afraid of Love, at Avid Reader bookshop.

Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)

• Author Danny Ramadan will chat about his new book, The Foghorn Echoes, at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.

Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)

• Melbourne writer and author of Copywrong to Copywriter Tait Ischia is holding a workshop for small business and sole traders about how to write for your audience, at the Wheeler Centre. You can also catch this online.