Join the club And so it was decided, in this, the year 2021, that an elite men-only club ought to stay that way. Of the 693 votes cast by The Australia Club members on whether to change their membership rules, 62% voted against allowing women to become members. Among the 693 voters were former prime ministers John Howard and Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull wouldn’t comment on his vote but told The Australian as “a lifelong feminist” we could probably guess. But then, if the self-application of “feminist” made your actions predictable, I would have predicted he’d have left the organisation by now (or maybe just not joined)?
Beyond that is the eyebrow-raising involvement of Sue Cato, spinning for a club at which she has to be signed in by a male member and only on weekdays. The Australia Club’s status as a “private club” is what renders it exempt from anti-discrimination law, so it’s worth remembering that these guys got nearly $2 million in taxpayer-funded JobKeeper.
Crossing the ALPs Now that the Biloela family are to be released into community detention in Perth — after so many Labor MPs have made their case a cause célèbre, urging the government to show greater compassion — it’s worth interrogating what might be different under a Labor government.
Labor’s 2021 national platform is now online, and on page 126 we find their stance on Australia’s border and immigration detention; it still maintains offshore detention and mandatory detention. We should note, there are differences in tone (say, the commitment to “strive” to keep mandatory detention to 90 days, which contrasts with Coalition moves to make it potentially indefinite).
And if you think we’re being unfair pointing this out, perhaps raise it with ALP Deputy Opposition Leader Richard Marles, who told the ABC this morning that it was “absolutely correct” that there was no substantial difference between Labor and Coalition policies in this area.
Deep in the Pitt Kudos to Keith Pitt for trying to imply that it’s “green activists” such as Greenpeace leading the attacks on the beleaguered oil and gas industry. The resources minister will criticise the charity in a speech to the Australian gas lobby today, claiming it is trying to use the “courts and bureaucratic processes” to delay major projects and “potentially cripple companies”.
Greenpeace will no doubt be enamoured by the insinuation. But of course it’s not “greenies” that, in 2021, are the greatest threat to oil and gas companies. Pitt might want to update his speech to include large corporate investment funds such as BlackRock that are abandoning high-risk projects, not to mention international agencies that are forcing companies to decarbonise. Even *checks notes* mining billionaire Andrew Forrest, who, after making his fortune digging up iron ore, now fancies himself as the face of climate action.
The BRS goes on The thing they never tell you about suing a publication for defamation is that, not only do you risk calling greater attention to the allegations against you, you might well end up putting a lot of new information on the public record that doesn’t reflect brilliantly on you. So it has proven with Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most decorated soldier, who is currently in the process of suing various publications for printing allegations of war crimes and domestic violence against him.
Apart from revelations of a distressing amount of stray dog murders by SAS soldiers, Roberts-Smith provided a character witness to his colleague who faced a court martial (because he was “still a good soldier”), after the soldier had left a bag with “hundreds of rounds of ammunition” in his car, which was then stolen and involved in a fatal accident in Western Australia. Most shocking of all, Roberts-Smith volunteered that he hired a private investigator to follow his ex-girlfriend to a Brisbane abortion clinic when the pair agreed to terminate a pregnancy after they’d broken up.
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