Gunning for an early election?
“The budget and Labor resignations over citizenship have helped the government. Senior people in both major parties concede such momentum may be harder to muster next year.”
As Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison sell their ‘election’ budget, the prime minister is weighing up a poll that could be as early as August.
News
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The Victorian right’s capture of the Liberal Party
“It is one thing to stage a Trumpian takeover of the party; another to find enduring electoral success. Certainly the party’s moderates feel this way. But perhaps Kroger has simply sniffed the wind. Elites can run an anti-elite campaign.”
While the fight for the Liberal Party plays out in its state branches, Michael Kroger’s far right has captured Victoria and is bedding down for Napoleonic preselections.
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Fuel reduction a smokescreen for logging burns
“Logging fires aren’t there to protect life and property.”
The smoke drifting into Melbourne from fires in Victoria’s central highlands, described by a government agency as the result of bushfire management for community safety, is mostly due to logging industry burnoffs.
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The truth about wage stagnation
“During the past couple of decades, and more particularly since the global financial crisis 10 years ago, the balance of bargaining power shifted radically from workers to employers and shareholders. ”
While the government trumpets its jobs figures, it refuses to engage with wage stagnation. The truth is, nobody knows by what formula wages will go up again.
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Dhaka’s climate refugees a warning
Dhaka is on the frontline of climate change disaster, as refugees from Bangladesh’s flooding south are migrating to the capital in abject poverty. Experts fear that failure to persuade regional towns to rapidly expand could lead to anarchy.
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Trump’s Iran pact pullout snubs Europe
US to reimpose sanctions on Iran. Trump believes Iran decision will impress North Korea. Mahathir sweeps back into power in Malaysia.
Opinion
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Jane Caro and Lyndsay Connors
Ruining Gonski’s school funding plan
“The LNP have been brazen about their commitment to what they call ‘independent’ schools, including those that charge high and ever-mounting fees. They have claimed their partiality towards these palaces of privilege is ‘part of their DNA’. Under Turnbull’s mutated (and mutilated) Gonski, 87 per cent of public schools will still not be funded to the agreed minimum school resource standard by 2023. Sixty-five per cent of fee-charging schools, however, will be funded above it.”
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Paul Bongiorno
Morrison’s budget fails to inspire
“Voters are being asked to buy a pig in a poke. Morrison wants them to take him on trust. This is despite the fact he is a treasurer whose budget last year did not foresee the massive revenue increase that materialised over the past four months, a revenue lift that Treasury has baked into its forecasts for the forward estimates and projections out to 2025. In all budgets, assumptions are contestable, but some of the key ones in this budget are close to unbelievable.”
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Gadfly
Bringing Downer the house
The people running the Twitter account at Australia House in London produced a marvellous photograph of the new high commissioner addressing his minions in a marbled reception hall. The staff looked as though they were having a perfectly miserable time as His Excellency Bookshelves Brandis droned on. They’d only just got rid of Fishnets Downer; now they were rolling their eyes, wondering what this new turkey from the Nasty Party would be like.
Letters & Editorial
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What this government hates is scrutiny. That’s what these cuts are about. This is the government whose communications minister is a card-carrying member of the Institute of Public Affairs, a body that lobbies for the ABC to be privatised. It is a government that hates, deeply hates, the public broadcaster.
Culture
Angel Olsen on turning fandom to stardom
When Angel Olsen first found community in the Chicago indie music scene, she was an unabashed fan-girl. Now she’s an accomplished artist who commands the stage with a voice that is pliant and pitch perfect. “Something changed when I got introduced to indie music. Then later someone was like, ‘You need to listen to Leonard Cohen, you need to listen to Fairport Convention, King Crimson, The Velvet Underground…’ And I was like, ‘Okay, this is it.’ ”
The second season of Westworld continues the series’ Baudrillardian illusions of reality and fakery as its robots develop a class-consciousness rare on our screens.
“She begins everything with a drawing. She draws to bring her ideas into the world. To think and to see. Paintings start as dreamlike images, scribbled or sketched from a fragment of thought or idea. She paints in layers, over time. Asks herself questions: What should be there? A different colour? Another shape? She turns her paintings upside down, or views them through a mirror, to see in a different way. There is a clock on the wall of her studio. But she loses time. Hours can pass as minutes, or minutes as hours. Time is mostly unnoticed.”
Food
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Pipis and periwinkles with new potatoes and seaweed butter
“The pipi is defined by a triangular shell and is found in the shallows of estuaries and beach sand flats. Pipis are very accessible to gather and for the next level of funk, we bring in the periwinkle. This dish is a bit of a celebration of all things shallow-water-gathering. Plus, the addition of potatoes and butter has never hurt a thing.”
Life
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Following a break-up, one woman decided to enter the world of ‘sugaring’. A year in, she is still looking for her ideal sugar daddy.
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Bringing discussions of identity, representation and appropriation into fashion studies, Kimberly Jenkins says designers need to better understand customers’ interest in the meaning of their clothes.
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Heart and soul: Ashleigh Hewson, 38, rugby player
Wallaroo Ashleigh Hewson on how rugby union burned into her soul and why she’d love to get into coaching.
Books
The Quiz
1. On what date will Prince Harry and Meghan Markle marry? (Bonus point for naming where they will marry?)
2. Which entertainer was born Onika Tanya Maraj in Trinidad and Tobago in 1982?
3. Is the Japanese city Nagoya north or south of Tokyo?
4. Which song features the line: “Foreign types with the hookah pipes …”?
5. The logo of which company comprises three overlapping tuning forks?
6. Is the Portuguese wine arinto a red or white wine?
7. The Man of Property is the first book in what series?
8. The asteroid belt is located between which two planets?
9. Is a pangolin (a) a musical instrument; (b) an animal; (c) a temple; or (d) a tropical plant?
10. Who plays Debbie Ocean in the film Ocean’s 8?
Quotes
TAX
“I think those forgotten people, those people that don’t have organised lobbyists to speak for them, also ought to be in the calculation of the government at the moment.”
The former treasurer makes the case for people earning $200,000 a year. It’s probably not what Robert Menzies was talking about when he coined the phrase, but then not much in the modern Liberal Party is.
BANKS
“We are truly sorry. The issues highlighted in our advice business are unacceptable.”
The interim chairman at AMP fronts shareholders after findings at the banking royal commission. The company’s solution so far has been to lose all its female board members.
BROADCAST
“Stable, adequate funding is essential if we are to continue to deliver for Australian audiences.”
The ABC’s managing director responds to the more than $120 million in cuts levelled against the broadcaster. The government agrees with her, which is why it’s refusing the money.
REFLECTION
“Attempts to make it a more right-wing party have never ended well… Abbott’s leadership was probably the only time that the Liberal Party in government pursued a set of policies so ideologically right-wing.”
The former attorney-general reflects on the Abbott years. If he consulted the diary he released after years of legal battle, he would remember he was a minister in the very same government.
BOOKS
“I am listening to and learning from women’s stories in this essential and overdue cultural moment.”
The author pulls out of the Sydney Writers’ Festival after being accused of forcibly kissing a graduate student. His definition of “learning” remains imperfect.
INVESTMENT
“I’m starting a candy company and it’s going to be amazing.”
The entrepreneur announces he is getting into sweets, presumably because Oompa Loompas can’t be unionised. In other surprising news, he is dating the singer Grimes.
