The reality of Australian cricket’s boor war
“Our Test team is notoriously obnoxious and globally disliked. Privately, there’ll be a broad indulgence of schadenfreude.”
As the public reels from cricket’s ball-tampering scandal, the Australian Test team’s win-at-all-costs attitude has finally seen it caught out.
News
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Dutton uses visas as second criminal sentence
“It’s resulting in people being locked up – potentially forever – not by the ruling of a court, but by the hands of a politician.”
A South Sudanese man who grew up in Australia awaits deportation from Christmas Island, as Peter Dutton uses ministerial powers to punish refugee members of ‘Apex’.
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Tim Storer’s stand on corporate tax
Tim Storer’s demands for broader reforms to corporate tax rates show the Senate newcomer to be a man not for turning.
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When news emerged that fraudulently obtained information from Facebook users had been used to shape political outcomes, a violent storm erupted. In fact, ill winds had been brewing over digital data harvesting for years. So why didn’t anyone care?
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Gap not closing on Indigenous disadvantage
“In short, the gap between urban and remote Indigenous communities is widening faster than the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities is closing.”
The government’s assessment of Indigenous disadvantage ignores how far behind remote communities are compared with cities, and how top-down policy-making reinforces economic disparities.
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Russian diplomats expelled around globe
Julie Bishop hauls in Russian ambassador Grigory Logvinov; students take anti-gun protest to Washington; US national security adviser replaced.
Opinion
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Mike Carlton
The land of the fair gone
“In the great scheme of things the cricketers are small fry. They haven’t killed anyone, raped small boys or turned widows and orphans out onto the streets. Their chief crime was to lay bare the national delusion that our sunburnt country produces generation after generation of clean-limbed superheroes, morally spotless whether they are bayoneting Johnny Turk or hurling cricket balls at South Africans. So much for that. Appalling as it was, the cricket cheating scandal is merely a symptom of a wider national sickness. A culture of greed, selfishness, envy, cruelty and often criminal corruption is gnawing at the nation’s heart.”
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Paul Bongiorno
Abbott’s giving up is not the same as letting go
“The fact is Abbott has given up on the Coalition winning the next election. Last weekend he told an invitation-only meeting in his Sydney’s northern beaches electorate that the government ‘is heading for a massive defeat’. The upside to this prospect, he told the 20 or so people present, was it that would ‘help the Coalition to rebuild’. But the former prime minister says there’s no appetite to change the leader ‘even though the political situation is so dire’.”
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Gadfly
Throwing the book at Dutton
The Russians know a thing or two about how to hold a press conference. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin holds an annual end-of-year session running for about four hours. In Canberra, his ambassador, Grigory Logvinov, was responding to the expulsion of two diplomats as part of a Western response to chemical weapon attacks on the Skripals in London.
An insider’s outside view
A new podcast from Schwartz Media
Join Richard Denniss, The Australia Institute’s chief economist, as he tackles Australia’s most important political and economic issues in a new weekly podcast.
Find The Lucky Country on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
Letters & Editorial
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So Tony Abbott thinks Australia would be better if it were built in Pauline Hanson’s image. He thinks the Liberals should do preference deals with One Nation. The former prime minister is willing to defile the prestige of that office to endorse a book of racist speeches. What a grotesque spectacle.
Culture
Author Sarah Sentilles’ churchless faith
Author Sarah Sentilles was once set on the priesthood, but she questioned church doctrine. Now her experimental writing interrogates state violence, using juxtaposition to expose the gaps in what we know. “If God is bigger than anything human beings can say about God, then all the things we say are going to fall short. So if you’re not questioning them, you’re actually engaged in idolatry of some kind. Doubt, to me, is very ethical.”
Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope revisits worthy themes close to the director’s heart, but lacks the daring to take his filmmaking to new heights.
Whanganui River guide Charles Ranginui
“I see Charles Ranginui from afar and he has a camera to his eye. He has it pointed at a pair of half-submerged rubbish bins, and then out into water that’s full of debris. I watch a chest freezer float past. The branches of a huge tree break against the town bridge as it sweeps beneath it. I can smell mud, and the water is brown with silt.”
Food
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“This dish came out of trying to think of new things to do with squid. My kitchens have always been intentionally limited by equipment. This technique came out of trying to use the protein as a carb. Slicing the squid like a noodle also opened up how it could take on different flavours, either from the land or the sea. The squid should always taste like squid, but you can easily sit other flavours with it.”
Life
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On the road between gigs in Serbia, Hugo Race can recall the optimism in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell as more recent history comes darkly to bear.
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The founder of Lindsay magazine knew exactly where she wanted her career to go but lacked the courage to make it happen. Then, an unexpected misstep set her on the path she’d always envisioned.
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The Mayor: Stewart McSweyn, 22, runner
From a cattle and sheep farm on King Island to the 2018 Commonwealth Games: Australian 10,000 metres champion Stewart McSweyn hits his stride.
Books
The Quiz
1. Andrew Mackenzie is the CEO of which Australian company?
2. Easter always falls on the first Sunday after what?
3. Who portrayed Queen Elizabeth II in the first two seasons of The Crown? (Bonus point for naming the actress who will play her in season 3.)
4. What is the capital of Jordan?
5. Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in what year?
6. Which Australian rugby union player appears in the Tradie underwear and workwear ads and is TV’s next Bachelor?
7. Which physicist was born 300 years to the day after Galileo’s death and died 139 years to the day after Albert Einstein’s birth?
8. In which novel does this quote appear: “Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”
9. Who designed the little black dress worn by Audrey Hepburn at the beginning of Breakfast at Tiffany’s?
10. Who will replace Rex Tillerson as United States secretary of state?
Quotes
BABYSITTERS
“I thought if they gave an undertaking that they wouldn’t work while they were here, I would grant the tourist visas.”
The immigration minister takes time out of his busy schedule torturing refugees to grant tourist visas to a pair of au pairs. His compassion knows no bounds – except race and religion, and maybe language and probably a couple of other things.
COAL
“I agree with Xi Jinping: it doesn’t matter if it is a black cat or yellow cat so long as it catches mice.”
The minister for resources explains why he loves coal and doesn’t care much for renewable energy. A better analogy might have been one that didn’t come from a dictator or rely on pests, but when you’re in conflict with the world’s scientists it’s hard to be choosy.
POETRY
“Once crucial conversations / Kept us on our toes; / Was it really in our interest / To trample Charlie Rose?”
The actor uses his debut novel to share a poem he wrote about the Me Too movement. Penn longs for a simpler time when you could masturbate in front of co-workers and knowing a rhyme for “toes” was mistaken for talent.
RACE
“If over the last two decades we had been more ready to heed the message of people like Pauline Hanson and less quick to shoot the messenger, I think we would be a better country today.”
The former prime minister launches Pauline Hanson’s book. He and Hanson have mended their relationship, largely because they are the only two people in the world who agree Australia is not racist enough.
GUNS
“Instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes.”
The former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination offers his view of the students protesting for gun reform. Until they can stop getting shot, it’s really not fair that they keep lecturing everyone else.
SPORT
“It’s a stain on the game we all love and I have loved since I was a boy.”
The former vice-captain of the Australian Test cricket team apologises for his role in the ball-tampering scandal. It was really more of a scratch on the game, but his point is made.
