The campaigner behind Phelps, Banks and Steggall
“In so-called safe seats around the country, a small army of locally prominent independent candidates has begun to emerge. A good many of them are using the services of Damien Hodgkinson, set to be a pivotal backroom figure in the coming election.”
Having helped get Kerryn Phelps elected, Damien Hodgkinson is running campaigns for eight independents at the election, including Julia Banks and Zali Steggall.
News
Read
“Having seen the policy and watched Morrison’s misrepresentations of climate reality in media interviews, Tim Baxter, a fellow of the Law School and associate of the Climate and Energy College at Melbourne University, doesn’t see Australia cantering towards its climate goals. He sees a gallop. The ‘Gish gallop’.”
Scott Morrison says his new $3.5 billion climate fund will cut Australia’s emissions, but experts warn he is playing a numbers game that is ‘essentially dishonest’.
Read
“For nearly 20 years, the Australian Catholic Church’s response to child sexual abuse was shaped by a child molester.”
The lifelong damage George Pell caused to his victims is now well known. In the wake of the cardinal’s conviction, his work and his prominent supporters are cast in a new and horrific light.
Read
“The world’s Catholic bishops in a remarkably uniform pattern engaged in a psychological process called ‘special moral disengagement’ in which they laid aside their moral compasses, seeing the abuse as a sin and not a crime, and not prioritising the rights of the child over the priest perpetrator, who was recycled to yet another parish or another diocese or even overseas. ”
Read
Revelations that more than 2000 people died after receiving a Centrelink robo-debt notice highlight the failings of an already flawed system that continues to target the vulnerable.
Read
Making nuclear summits great again
Trump and Kim hold second summit on North Korea’s nuclear program. Marshall Islands seeks to lift atolls as climate change sees oceans rise. The US plans to send further aid and impose additional sanctions on Venezuela. ISIS brides in limbo.
Opinion
Read
Robert Manne
The myth of the great wave
“The lives of the 1000 are being destroyed not as a means to an end but for no reason. If the offshore processing and turnback policies are retained, both John Howard’s settlement policy and the Turnbull–Obama deal have revealed that the people sent to Nauru and Manus Island can be brought to Australia without any prospect of a new wave of asylum seeker boats.”
Read
Paul Bongiorno
Climate of fear as election campaign begins
“The 2019 election campaign began in earnest last Sunday. There is a feeling among government politicians that Morrison will go to the polls on May 11. If he does, that’s an 11-week campaign. Liberal MPs need no persuading they are in the fight of their lives. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, facing a challenge from independent Liberal climate change advocate Oliver Yates, already has his posters up in prominent places around his electorate, Kooyong. ”
Read
The nation’s chief electrician, Gus Taylor, has had a frightful time trying to get his hard-baked socialist policies up and running. It was late last year that the free enterprise Greens blocked his bright plan to subsidise coal-fired power plants. For the Greens, steeped in the wealth-creating force of free markets, smaller government and lower spending, handing over taxpayers’ money to underwrite power from coal was anathema to their Ayn Rand-based philosophy. Undeterred, Red Gus is now bludgeoning electricity suppliers with price controls.
Letters, Poem & Editorial
Read
Maxine Beneba Clarke
Communion
and if hell exists
hail mary, full of grace
then surely they have lived it
Read
When The Saturday Paper launched, we promised a newspaper for a country more serious than it is sometimes credited as being. Australia’s seriousness has never wavered, despite the farce of the people who stand at its top. Five years after printing that first issue, our job has never been clearer: to keep writing what others will not.
Culture
In 2012, a prominently reported rape and murder of an Indian student revived interest in Sohaila Abdulali’s 33-year-old account of surviving her own attack. Since then the author has used her new platform to encourage unflinching debate about violence against women. “When I started writing this book, nobody was talking about rape. And even in that short time, people are now starting to want to speak about their experiences and understand them. That people want to understand and talk about it – makes me feel hopeful. There’s a lot in the world to feel hopeless about too, but there’s still hope.”
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child succeeds in furthering J. K. Rowling’s remarkable canon, with a greater dramatic thrust than the films but all the heart of the books that seduced young and old alike.
“We both arrive early, even though it’s a Sunday morning and the restaurant won’t be open today. ‘I’d have been here anyway,’ he says with a small laugh as he strides towards the door. Peter Jo is so familiar with this place, it’s like seeing him arrive home. I watch him put the key in the lock, slide the door across, and follow him up the stairs. Everything is dim, just for a moment, before the lights flick on. ‘Water?’ he asks, heading behind the bar. I select a table and look around. Tucked down Melbourne CBD’s Niagara Lane, Shik isn’t a place you’d likely stumble across by accident – you need to seek it out.”
Life
Read
While deaths from lightning bolts instantly make headlines, for those who survive, ongoing and little understood health issues may continue to manifest long after the initial strike.
Read
The centuries-old sport of real tennis is still compelling for 27-year-old Jo See Tan, with its demands of speed, strength and chess-like strategy.
Books
Puzzles
1. Where are the headquarters of Cathay Pacific Airways?
2. Who was Britain’s last Tudor monarch?
3. Roma received 10 Oscar nominations. How many did it win? (Bonus point for naming its director.)
4. Dundee, Perth and Stirling are all major cities in which country?
5. Which cricketers last month won the Allan Border Medal and the Belinda Clark Award?
6. On a keyboard, which number does the ampersand appear on?
7. Who is the adoptive father of the cartoon character Swee’Pea?
8. What is a female swan called?
9. Bacillus anthracis is the organism that causes which disease?
10. François Hollande succeeded whom as president of France?
Quotes
LOYALTY
“When it comes down to it, you always seem to either fold, stay silent or betray your allies.”
The far-right polemicist asks a video question on Q&A. This comment was actually directed at controversial professor Jordan Peterson and not at host Tony Jones.
COURTS
“Cardinal Pell is a lively conversationalist who maintains a deep and objective interest in contemporary social and political issues.”
The former prime minister offers a character reference for the disgraced priest. Child abuse, it seems, is only a horrifying national emergency when it’s being used to justify an intervention in the Northern Territory.
APPOINTMENTS
“I respect the independence of the ABC as our government always has.”
The prime minister appoints Ita Buttrose as the new chair of the national broadcaster. As Donald Trump’s presidency has shown, being famous is the best quality in a leader required to fix a troubled bureaucracy.
FILMMAKING
“The ref made a bad call.”
The director responds to Green Book’s best picture Oscar win. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ lack of judgement is only eclipsed by that of the film’s writer, Nick Vallelonga, who tweeted that “Muslims in Jersey City [were] cheering when towers went down” on 9/11. And that of its director, Peter Farrelly, who used to think it was funny to get his penis out during production meetings.
AMERICA
“It’s absurd on its face.”
The White House press secretary responds to former Trump staffer Alva Johnson’s allegations that the president kissed her against her will in 2016. Some would say it’s absurd a president can be accused of sexual misconduct by 23 women and still remain in office.
NEGOTIATION
“Then he should vote for a deal. Simples!”
The British prime minister argues for her Brexit deal by quoting a meerkat from a popular 2009 insurance commercial. No doubt an attempt to invoke a happier time for Britain, when the country was only facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
