Liberals get hacked, Gina strikes while the iron’s hot, and where’s thy Guardian angel?
Rinehart bangs the iron: Billionaire mining magnate and Hancock Prospecting chair Gina Rinehart has (again) lashed the concept of net zero as “unobtainable and expensive”, saying it will “negatively impact our way of life for generations to come”.
“Why not let those who want to reduce their emissions do so, and who want net-zero efforts, be the ones who pay for them? While Australia instead follows the lead of USA and other countries who put their citizens first,” Rinehart said.
Entirely uncoincidentally, Gina’s comments follow Hancock Prospecting’s joint approval alongside Rio Tinto for a $2.5 billion Pilbara iron ore expansion, dubbed Hope Downs 2.
Net zero does indeed look somewhat unachievable if one continues to open giant iron mines.
Where’s thy Guardian angel: Guardian Australia remains without a political editor, now more than three months after Karen Middleton resigned from the role in March and despite there having been a federal election in the interim.
Middleton resigned after taking several months of medical leave, with the leave coinciding with counterclaims of workplace misconduct between Middleton and Paul Karp, the paper’s former chief political correspondent. Karp now works at The Australian Financial Review as NSW political correspondent.
Options to replace Middleton with someone of similar gravitas are few and far between. Middleton is a press gallery veteran of over three decades and authored a biography of Anthony Albanese in 2016. Rumours have flown around newsrooms of candidates in the frame to take the job, with figures from several state-based and independent publications having been raised with Crikey.
Katharine Murphy — Guardian Australia’s former political editor, who jumped ship to work for the prime minister (and whom Karen Middleton replaced) — has also reportedly now quit as Anthony Albanese’s press secretary.
Liberal hacking: Late last night, the Liberals started rolling out the first plank of Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s party rebuild, executing a bold digital strategy to… oh wait, no, the party’s official Facebook and Instagram accounts just got hacked.
As Leo Puglisi from 6 News spotted, it looks like a set of Facebook stories from the Liberals start spruiking boob jobs:
Meanwhile, Crikey’s Worm editor Rich James was treated to a pimple popper teaser on the Libs’ Instagram stories (click here to see it, if you’re game). Yum.
Banners ban ‘ban’: Australia’s eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant spoke at the National Press Club earlier this week about her plans for kids’ online safety, including her role in enforcing the teen social media ban.
Despite initially abstaining and only later supporting the government’s ban, Grant was a good soldier when she spoke about Australia being the first in the world to take the plunge on a policy like this: “It’s a bold move, yes, but every big change begins with someone willing to take that first step,” she said.
There was one moment that bumped a bit for us. The teen social media ban isn’t a “ban”, she corrected a journalist. “We’re referring to this as a social media delay. Not a ban. You know, a ban suggests a total prohibition.”
Funny you should say that, because Crikey remembers when the prime minister, comparing alcohol to social media, said that “we ban alcohol for under 18s”. Shouldn’t he have said delay? We also note that another one of Anthony Albanese’s transcripts for a radio interview where he spoke about the — ehem — delay was filed as being about the “social media ban”.
If only the US had something Israel wanted: Incensed at Israel and Iran after the ceasefire he helped mediate immediately collapsed, Donald Trump was recently reduced to the language of the snooker hall. “Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs,” he said. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
If only Trump, master dealmaker that he is, could find some kind of leverage over his troublesome ally. But like every US president over the past 30 years, he can’t seem to find a single bargaining chip with which to influence the behaviour of… a country that has cumulatively received hundreds of billions of dollars in US aid.
The last time a US president noticed they had some right to put conditions on that money was George H.W. Bush. In 1991, he withheld loan guarantees to Israel until he was satisfied the money borrowed would not go toward expanding Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories. Lo and behold, it got results.
But then, in the lead-up to the 1992 election, presumptive Democratic candidate Bill Clinton consistently attacked Bush for having “pressured Israel relentlessly to make one-sided concessions” and promised that “as president, I will put an end to this”. Bear in mind, that was just over the expansion of settlements, something that doesn’t warrant a word of disapproval under the current administration.
