Thomas Mayo’s broken Voice — and heart

YES WE CAN

Yes campaigner Thomas Mayo says he feels an “emptiness in my chest” one week after the Voice to Parliament was resoundingly rejected by Australians. He told Nine newspapers he doesn’t want to blame the Australian people for the result, noting 5.5 million had voted Yes and 70,000 had volunteered for the Yes campaign. Rather, he wants the Coalition — the “people who aspire to lead this nation” — to think about the misinformation it spread about the referendum, calling it a “true shame” and a “wasted opportunity”. Mayo says he maintains hope that Australia will one day soon “address this still unfinished business of recognition”. It comes as the Albanese government will not make any Indigenous policy until it considers five responses from Indigenous collectives, land councils and organisations, The Australian ($) reports. Four refer to racism as a reason for the failed referendum, the paper adds.

Meanwhile The Project’s Steve Price has wrongly claimed an unsigned letter from Indigenous leaders and organisations suggested all No voters were racist. You can read the open letter here. There is no mention of the word racist, and four mentions of the word racism — referring to the backlash, the campaign, historical wrongs and the constitution itself — not No voters. It did, however, refer to “the majority of Australians” committing “a shameful act whether knowingly or not”. Thankfully co-host Waleed Aly questioned Price’s assertion, saying he didn’t think it said that. It comes as No advocate Nyunggai Warren Mundine called the letter a “disgraceful attack on Australia and Australian people”, as Sky News Australia reports.

IT’S AN ILL WIND…

It’s going to feel like winter again this week, news.com.au reports, dropping below 15 degrees on Thursday if you live in southern NSW and Victoria, the SA coastline and all of Tasmania. But the mercury will be above 40 in northern NSW and southern Queensland. Heck. To more weird weather now…  A senior manager at the Bureau of Meteorology was sacked for tacking on an extra couple of days in Paris while at a UNESCO conference, she alleges, as the SMH ($) reports. Jasmine Chambers claimed her boss, chief scientist Dr Gilbert Brunet, told her she was fired for the leave, even though Brunet had approved it. He was allegedly worried about journalists FOI’ing the BoM and discovering it, or it coming up in Senate estimates (a messy drama in the courtroom, one might think, is hardly better press). Chambers retorted to Brunet that she knew her rights and the termination was retracted, but then she ended up redundant in a restructure a few months later. Was it a sham redundancy? Stay tuned.

To another woman who’s lost her job — MasterChef Australia has dumped Melissa Leong, the AFR ($) reports, after four years alongside co-hosts Andy Allen and the late Jock Zonfrillo. It’s because Leong is hosting spin-off Dessert Masters too and the shows needed distinction, a Ten spokesperson said. Allen will return alongside MasterChef runner-up Poh Ling Yeow and Michelin star chef Jean-Christophe Novelli, according to rumours anyway. To more probable job insecurity now and Wollongong Mayor Gordon Bradbery told a pro-Palestinian rally that he “understood why Hamas did what it did” because when you “treat people like animals” they have to “fight [their] way out”, the ABC reports. The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies called the “reprehensible” and “irresponsible” words not worthy of a leader. Bradbery said he could’ve made his condemnation of Hamas more clear. Since October 7, 5,100 Palestinians and 1,400 Israelis have been killed, Al Jazeera adds. Half of the dead Palestinians were children.

DOLLARS, NO SENSE

Australian taxpayers’ money for the 64 former Manus Island refugees under the PNG humanitarian program has gone missing, a whistleblower told Prime Minister James Marape, or at least is severely diminished. Guardian Australia reports the PNG Immigration and Citizenship Authority employee said the Australian-sponsored program has been a mess of corruption — no tender for contracts that went to inexperienced companies, and instances where the family of government officials had their cars hired via a front company. But PNG’s chief migration officer Stanislau Hulahau said that’s bollocks. The paper notes we really don’t know much about this money — the Morrison government signed it away quietly and the Albanese government refuses to reveal more. But Albo is releasing his diary! Rex Patrick’s crusade to get the 197 days has been approved at long last, he writes for Michael West Media.

Meanwhile more revelations from the explosive leaked tapes of Australia’s richest man: King Charles had asked Anthony Pratt to stop making (completely legal) payments to him before he took the throne, the SMH ($) reports, and donate to his charities instead. The paper says they were at least $100,000 a year until 2021. Pratt said Charles didn’t want the Australian to “bring down the monarchy” (lord, grant me the confidence of a chatty male billionaire). Pratt added he didn’t want a knighthood because “it’s like everyone’s got one”. It comes as former US president Donald Trump called Pratt a “red-haired weirdo from Australia” and denied he had told the billionaire AUKUS secrets. Meanwhile Australia’s spy agency will team up with Microsoft to build a “cyber-shield” against security threats, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will announce today in the US, The Age ($) reports.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

WA man Luke Baldock was taking a leisurely walk along the shoreline of the Donnelly River with his partner when his life suddenly came to a crossroads: he’d spotted a dinghy with a man and two kids aboard being sucked rapidly out to the ocean as a sandbar opened. I can watch on in horror, he thought, and possibly live with the regret for the rest of my life, or I can try to do something. When the boat flipped in the rapids, Baldock’s mind was made up. He sprinted along the river, watching as the man’s head popped up, and then a child’s head. There was one kid unaccounted for. Baldock leapt into the water, swimming past the waterlogged pair to check they were alright, barely taking his eyes off the belly of the boat.

Putting every ounce of strength into his strokes, he swam some 100 metres through the current. He tried not to let doubts creep in, but at one point he thought: I might not come back from this. “There were big waves bashing down and a lot of dark water running,” he recalled to The West ($). Finally he reached the boat and dived under it, feeling blindly for a life jacket. That was when his hands clutched a kid-shaped thing. Miraculously the child was completely fine — they’d been breathing in an air pocket beneath the boat. Baldock swam both kids back to shore to the cheers of awe-struck onlookers. Last week he was celebrated for his bravery in the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s national search and rescue awards. Baldock says he was shocked to receive the award. The father and two kids, however, would’ve been less so.

Hoping you feel courageous enough to do what’s right, not what’s easy, today.

SAY WHAT?

The Failing New York Times story … about a red haired weirdo from Australia, named Anthony Pratt, is Fake News.

Donald Trump

The former US president and probable Republican nominee for the 2024 race said he had never spoken to Australia’s richest man about AUKUS submarines, but he did speak about “JOBS, A GREAT ECONOMY, LOW TAXES, NO INFLATION, ENERGY, DOMINANCE, STRONG BORDERS, NO ENDLESS WARS, LOW INTEREST RATES, and much more!” [emphasis his own]. One might wonder what dominance entails exactly.

CRIKEY RECAP

Our politicians are misleading us over the Israel-Gaza war

MAEVE MCGREGOR

“Immerse people long enough in the assertion that Hamas’ war crimes constituted a genocidal attack on the Jewish faith as distinct from Israel and its policies, and eventually, perhaps inevitably, some will accept it as truth. This rhetoric is slippery and insidious precisely because it deadens and renders subjective our humanity.

“With one hand, it frames Hamas’ war crimes as ‘unprovoked’ and religiously motivated, and with the other, it conceals from view the volley of atrocities Israel has long visited on Palestinians. It’s more devious than the raw power so deftly wielded by Dutton on the home front precisely because its misleading nature is quieter, less overt.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Rapid ice melt in west Antarctica now inevitable, research shows (The Guardian)

Wall Street rebounds as 10-year Treasury yield retreats below 5% (Reuters)

UK government concludes that hospital bombing was not committed by Israel (euronews)

China linked to propaganda campaign targeting [Canadian PM Justin] Trudeau, [Opposition leader Pierre] Poilievre, says Global Affairs (CBC)

Mapping Gaza’s neighbourhoods flattened by non-stop Israeli bombings (Al Jazeera)

Turkey’s president submits Sweden’s NATO bid to Parliament for ratification (euronews)

THE COMMENTARIAT

My father didn’t want to live if he had dementia. But then he had it. — Sandeep Jauhar (The New York Times) ($): “Courts have generally ruled that an advance directive should be prioritised as an expression of the will of a person when he is presumably independent and rational and has the time and the presence of mind to reflect on what he wants. However, isn’t that also a kind of bias that risks lowering the moral standing of the patient in later years? A person’s current wishes, even if formed in a state of cognitive impairment, must count for something. As a son, how do you withhold lifesaving treatment from your demented father who, through gestures and utterances, seemingly expresses a desire to live?

“My brother often said that my father was living a life of ‘plus-minus’, by which he meant that it basically added up to zero. In my darkest moments, I believed this too. But perhaps we were suffering over our father’s condition more than he was. His world had shrunk, but so too had his desires, his perspective, his expectations of what constituted a worthwhile existence. The man who’d craved recognition and respect more than anything else no longer seemed to care about those fickle rewards. To my brother, our father was no longer the person he once was. To me, he was still the same person, just a changed one.”

Indigenous leaders’ statement a ‘dead-end car wreck’ — Greg Craven (The Australian) ($): “Bipartisanship was negated from the very start by Albanese. He did not want it. He excluded the Coalition from all meaningful discussion. This was to be a Labor triumph. Dutton merely trailed in his wake. The Indigenous inner circle know all this, because they were part of the decision. They knew exactly what Albanese was doing, and key players just did not care. They stated confidently that the referendum was so obvious it did not need bipartisanship. Dutton was the dupe who eventually fell from grace, but  only in the wake of Albanese. As to lies and disinformation, the No case had more than its fair share. The Yes case had a few of its own.

“But the determination of supporters of the Voice to damn any argument with which they disagreed as a lie was one of the worst features of the campaign. As to the media, there was overwhelming support. Regarding conservative think tanks, well they would oppose, wouldn’t they? On international interests, it’s hard to imagine. The most alarming aspect of the letter is the view it presents of the modern Australian nation state. Allowing for deep hurt, loose language and insider terms, it comes very close to repudiating the Australian polity along with its constitution. Many or most of the writers may not have meant this, but words do haunt. This is not about the commonplace recitation of sovereignty and land unceded …”

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WHAT’S ON TODAY

Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)

• NSW Premier Chris Minns will give the Kathleen Burrow Research Institute annual lecture at St John’s College.

• Author Toby Walsh will talk about his new book, Faking It, at Glee Books.

Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)

• Outgoing National Farmers’ Federation president Fiona Simson will address the Rural & National Press Club.