Labor’s billion-dollar manufacturing fund is ripe for exploitation and pork-barrelling

There's too much secrecy surrounding Labor's Future Made In Australia fund, which is ripe for exploitation and pork-barrelling.

The current argument over Labor’s Future Made In Australia Bill has some high stakes — more than just Labor’s dream of returning to the glory days of Australian manufacturing, or its political strategy of posing as the party of making things here at the next election.

The fund — which the government says totals over $22 billion — could become the biggest pork-barrel in political history in the wrong hands, with only a fairly flimsy “National Interest Framework” to protect taxpayer interests.

The PsiQuantum deal, which saw $900 million committed to a US company by the federal and Queensland governments, amid extraordinary secrecy and no rationale or cost-benefit analysis, could be a glimpse of the future under the bill — complete with Labor-connected lobbyists smoothing the way for the deal.

Of particular concern is the “Economic Resilience and Security Stream” of the fund, which panders to the delusion that Australia must join with other countries in onshoring production of “strategic” industries to secure supply chains in the name of sovereignty and security. In the words of the framework, that opens the way to anything where a politician decides “some level of domestic capability is a necessary or efficient way to protect the economic resilience and security of Australia, and the private sector will not deliver the necessary investment in the absence of government support”.

The word “necessary” is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence, because it’s virtually guaranteed that anything funded under the framework won’t be “efficient”. The government’s bill requires “sector assessments” to be undertaken to identify where we need such “domestic capability”, and for those assessments to be tabled in Parliament — but only after Treasury has redacted anything deemed commercially sensitive. That’s a guarantee that any independent analysis of those assessments will be hamstrung by the withholding of key information.

As the PsiQuantum deal confirms, secrecy will be an abiding theme of this vast trove of cash. Tasmanian economist and national treasure Saul Eslake made a key point back in May: not only does the word “security” invariably signal bad policy, it becomes a justification for secrecy — producing “the tendency of governments to use ‘security’ as a reason to conceal some or all of what they are doing”.

That’s the case just as much under Labor as it was under the obsessively transparency-resistant Morrison government. Anthony Albanese and crew are every bit as bad when it comes to allowing taxpayers to see what they’re doing.

Independent MP Helen Haines — who last year proposed a new non-government controlled parliamentary committee to oversee grants administration, which would have been a big step forward in terms of preventing pork-barrelling — is leading the charge against A Future Made In Secrecy. She is proposing that the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit be given a permanent role in overseeing the unredacted sector assessments and the tabling of details about who has been awarded taxpayer largesse under the scheme.

In truth this doesn’t go far enough — the sector assessments are only the framework for investment decisions that government will be making in each of the industries it has decided to intervene in. And the threat isn’t so much pork-barrelling as governments investing in ridiculous projects that happen to be in a sector deemed “security”, “sovereign” or “strategic”.

A glimpse of how absurd A Future Made In Australia could be is available in a great piece today by the Financial Review’s Michael Read, who contacted a bunch of industries that patently have no claim on any strategic or “sovereign” status, like chocolate manufacturers and caravan markers, to hear how they intended to try to plunder taxpayer funds.

Their risible claims are only different in degree, not kind, from the rationale for any “strategic” or “sovereign” industry. And the absurdity of the “Economic Resilience and Security Stream” is that a bunch of other countries are doing exactly the same thing, including a number of Australia’s allies. As the Productivity Commission has noted, if we don’t want to rely on China for crucial supply chains in the event of a number of pandemics, fear not — the Americans are spending large amounts of their taxpayers’ money (or, more correctly, borrowed money, given the extraordinary US budget deficit) onshoring supply chains there.

Australia is ideally placed to free ride on the idiot protectionism of other countries like the US — but instead we’re wasting our own money doing the same.

Nor is it clear why, instead of building up entire supply chains, we don’t do what we already do with fuel and simply stockpile goods we deem to be at risk in case there’s another virus or China attacks Taiwan — something far cheaper and more efficient, given we can take advantage of other countries’ decisions to produce their own supplies, thus producing a global glut (think solar panels, the target of the Albanese government’s most absurd investment).

Here’s something for Haines and the Greens and crossbench senators to think about: one of the best things Labor has done in recent decades is establish Infrastructure Australia (IA) to provide an independent assessment of infrastructure projects, free from the interference of pork-barrelling politicians. Anthony Albanese was the minister who created IA and he’s restored it under his prime ministership after the Coalition politicised it. For a similar-sized pool of taxpayer funding, why isn’t Labor prepared to establish Resilience Australia, or Sovereignty Australia, or whatever they want to call it, to independently examine what investment projects politicians want to put taxpayer money into?

If a Future Made In Australia is everything Labor claims it will be, there should be no qualms about allowing an independent assessment.

Are you concerned about pork-barrelling under a Future Made in Australia? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

The remarkable diversity of people who think gambling ads are out of control

From current Labor MPs, to former PMs and premiers, to major players in the gambling industry itself, there's a broad coalition of people who think gambling advertising should be more strictly regulated.

This article is an instalment in a new series, Punted, on the government’s failure to reform gambling advertising.

“I’m not convinced that complete prohibition works,” Government Services Minister Bill Shorten told the ABC’s Q+A as justification for Labor’s all-but-confirmed decision to water down restrictions on gambling advertising, which were recommended by the party’s own inquiry.

Apart from displaying his lifelong talent for sincerely believing whatever it is his leader says at the time, Shorten appears to be in a shrinking minority of people who believe the government’s proposal is adequate.

Labor MPs

Perhaps the most important cohort Labor leaders need to convince is their own colleagues. Backbencher Mike Freelander told the ABC over the weekend that “we’re being softened up and pummelled by the gambling industry … The ministers who are talking are just repeating the language of the gambling lobbyists.”

Freelander added it was “disgusting” the gaming industry was briefed on government plans “long before caucus was”.

Then there’s the added sting that the recommendations for a full ban on gambling ads came out of an inquiry that was the last political act of the late Labor MP Peta Murphy. Jodie Belyea, who won Murphy’s former seat of Dunkley, has also pushed for a full ban, as has first-term Boothby MP Louise Miller-Frost.

Victoria’s Gaming Minister Melissa Horne, meanwhile, said it would be “nothing short of disgraceful” if the Albanese government didn’t ban all gambling ads, calling on the ALP to “adopt each and every” recommendation of the Murphy inquiry.

(Former) Liberal MPs

While he joined the pile-on after it was revealed the government was forcing anyone briefed on its gambling proposals to sign non-disclosure agreements, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has gone pretty quiet on his own modest proposals to restrict gambling advertising.

Not so for his predecessors John Howard and Malcolm Turnbull, however, who signed the Alliance for Gambling Reform’s open letter calling for both parties to take up the inquiry’s recommendations. “Many Australians are alarmed about the proliferation of gambling advertising on our screens and the mounting losses through gambling,” Howard said. “I believe gambling losses are responsible for enormous harm across the community.”

“Our political leaders should follow the courageous example of the former New South Wales premier, Dominic Perrottet. As an unapologetic sports fan, I am troubled by how advertising is now linked with all our major sporting codes and what message this is sending to our children.”

Perrottet is one of the very few political leaders to take a stand on gambling when it could actually cost him something — and cost him it did. His signature on the open letter appeared alongside those of two former Victorian premiers: Labor’s Steve Bracks and Crikey‘s granddad who hates us Jeff Kennett.

Gambling companies ( …?)

As Bernard Keane has pointed out, for all the talk that Labor is simply rolling over in the face of powerful gambling interests, gambling companies are actually divided on a full advertising ban. Australia’s biggest gambling company, Tabcorp, told Murphy’s inquiry, “There is too much gambling advertising. There should be further restrictions on when and where gambling advertising occurs.” The company has since shifted from offering to voluntarily ban its own TV ads to now supporting an outright ban.

The Australian Hotels Association, whose largess has done so much to limit regulations on gaming in Tasmania over the years, is entirely agnostic on a ban. Clubs Australia, whose NSW branch in particular has been notoriously aggressive and successful in prosecuting its political aims, also claims to want tougher online gambling regulation. 

Further, Sportsbet, the largest online gambling firm and the sector’s biggest advertiser, along with Pointsbet and Entain, which owns the Neds and Ladbrokes brands, has criticised the government’s exclusion of shirt and stadium advertising from its proposals: “Excluding jerseys and in-stadia advertising from any live sport ban, as has been reported, would undermine the policy intent of any reforms,” a Sportsbet spokesman told the Australian Financial Review.

Public health experts

Oh yeah, lest we forget, an assortment of boring old public health academics and addiction treatment centres have said the government’s proposal is completely inadequate.

Professor of public health at Deakin University Samantha Thomas, Associate Professor Charles Livingstone from Monash University’s School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, addiction treatment and research organisation Turning Point, former president of the Australian Health Promotion Association Gemma Crawford, First Nations senior research fellow at the Menzies School of Health Research Dr Beau Jayde Cubillo, co-CEO of Financial Counselling Australia Dr Domenique Meyrick, Suicide Prevention Australia CEO Nieves Murray, and many, many more have put their name to calls for the government to adopt a full advertising ban.

Anyone affected by problem gambling can get immediate assistance by calling the National Gambling Helpline on 1800 858 858 for free, professional and confidential support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Foxtel CEO goes into damage control after Jewish, media groups slam Nazi salute

Patrick Delany has moved to quell the backlash by meeting with a Jewish community group and sending an email to staff after Crikey obtained an image of his offensive salute.

Note: this story contains graphic content.

Foxtel CEO Patrick Delany has gone into damage control over an image of him performing a Nazi salute, meeting with a Jewish community group and apologising in an all-staff email.

Jewish and diversity groups have criticised the former Fox Sports CEO’s gesture as “deeply concerning” and an example of “toxic workplace behaviours”.

On Sunday night, Delany sent an email to Foxtel staff apologising for the gesture, which he made in the mid-2010s, largely reiterating the statement he gave to Crikey in response to our initial exclusive reporting on the leaked image.

“I am very sorry for my actions and sincerely apologise to people who have been hurt or offended, especially members of the Jewish community,” he wrote.

“The picture is completely inconsistent with my values and beliefs, and family connections.”

On Monday afternoon, Delany met with NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip, who told the ABC Delany had apologised for performing a Nazi salute.

“We accept Patrick’s apology and recognise his and [News Corp chair] Lachlan Murdoch’s strong and unequivocal repudiation of antisemitism in the past 10 months,” Ossip told the Nine newspapers.

“Patrick made clear that, regardless of the context in which the salute was performed, he understood the offence and hurt that the gesture causes Jewish Australians and the many Australians whose family members were killed or injured fighting the Nazis during World War II.”

This meeting came as another Jewish community group and a media diversity group expressed concern that this kind of behaviour has been prevalent in the industry. 

Media Diversity Australia CEO Mariam Veiszadeh told Crikey that this image shows Australian media isn’t doing a good job of holding itself to account.

“This news comes at a time when many inside and outside of Australian media are holding up a critical mirror to the industry, calling out toxic workplace behaviours which seem to have been flourishing for decades,” she said in a statement.

Veiszadah said the revelation that there are “skeletons in the closets of all key players” shows why her organisation continues to advocate for improvement across the sector on issues like racism, sexism and cultural safety.

The Jewish Council of Australia’s executive officer Sarah Schwartz condemned Delany’s salute as “deeply concerning”. 

“Equally [concerning] is that he operates in a media industry where he felt this was somehow okay. It shouldn’t need to be said that the salute is an offensive and violent act not only for Jews, but also for other racialised groups,” she said in an emailed statement.

Schwartz said the image showed how forms of bigotry are “all too accepted” in society, including in the media.

“That the same person can sign a pledge to ‘say no to antisemitism’ and also feel comfortable doing a Nazi salute just goes to show that we need more than superficial pledges,” she said. 

The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, which Delany said he has approached for a meeting, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Sunday, Delany told Crikey the image was “shocking” and suggested it may have captured him “demonstrating the similarity” between a Nazi salute and a gesture performed by fans of A-League team Western Sydney Wanderers during a chant.

When an experienced ambassador to China speaks on AUKUS, we should listen

Ross Garnaut has cautioned Australia against putting all its eggs in the AUKUS basket at a time when relations with China are growing ever more important.

A revamped AUKUS agreement has just been tabled in Parliament. Over the past few years, there have been no shortage of critics of the nuclear submarine deal with the US and UK, and there have been many ways of persuading the public that it is a bad idea.

One particularly relatable approach, likely to reach young people, comes from Greens foreign affairs spokesperson David Shoebridge in the form of a two-minute TikTok. Likening Australia’s buying of US submarines to Australians buying second hand American-made cars, Shoebridge vividly evokes the essence of the deal.

Senior Labor figures, on the other hand, have taken advantage of their status to voice their views, often delivered in colourful, punchy metaphors that are readymade for headlines. Former prime minister Paul Keating said the British must have seen us as “suckers”, describing AUKUS as the “worst deal in all history” and saying it will turn Australia into the 51st state of the US. And former foreign affairs minister Bob Carr described AUKUS as “fragrant, methane-wrapped bullshit”.

The most recent attack came from another former Labor foreign minister, Gareth Evans, who called AUKUS “a joke in bad taste”. He also said that Defence Minister Richard Marles’ “love for the US” was “so dewy-eyed as to defy parody”.

Evans made these remarks in a two-day symposium titled “AUKUS: Assumptions and Implications”, which was held at the Australian National University last week. Twenty speakers from universities, think tanks and the media spoke on various aspects of the submarine deal, including the bureaucratic and political processes necessary for its success, the military capability it promises, its implications for nuclear non-proliferation, and its probable economic and social consequences.

Organised by the Academy of Social Sciences and led by a handful of senior scholars including Hugh White, the conference opened with an hour-long keynote from Ross Garnaut, who, among many other roles, was the principal economic adviser to former prime minister Bob Hawke and was Australia’s ambassador to China from 1985 to 1988. As an economist, Garnaut has built his career around the analysis and practice of policy connected to development, economics and international relations in Australia, Asia and the Pacific.

Garnaut’s contribution to the conference was to provide context for the discussion of AUKUS. Unlike the politicians quoted above, he did not criticise the deal directly, instead taking the audience on a historical journey. He told the story of how Australia learnt, through trial and error, to live in a region marked by racial, cultural and political diversity, and to project its interests and values on the global stage.

Featuring prominently was an account of how our initial loyalty to the UK and our later alliance with the US informed our trade, defence and foreign policies vis-à-vis Australia’s Asian and Pacific neighbours. His wide-ranging speech was not intended to generate attention-grabbing headlines or soundbites. But what he said — drawing on his six decades of thinking and experience — warrants careful attention and reflection.

Garnaut said his work has informed him that Australia can be an effective sovereign nation as a democracy while geographically situated in a region with “differences in cultures, political institutions and economic strengths”. But to achieve this requires Australia to look to the future, where other large Asian states such as Indonesia and India as well as China will become much more important to Australia than the US — “while China is likely to increase its economic and strategic weight relative to the US for a number of years, it will soon go beyond the peak of its relative weight against the other large states of Asia”.

Hence, he cautioned Australia against putting all its eggs in the basket of a US hell-bent on preserving its supremacy: “There is no future for our two peoples and there may be no future for humanity unless our US ally can get used to being one of several powerful states in a world that allows primacy to none of them.”

Garnaut explained the importance of seeing the Taiwan issue in a historical context, as we worked out how to position ourselves vis-à-vis the US:

In a changing world, one thing that doesn’t change is that any government in China will be determined never to allow Taiwan to emerge as an independent state … We want the people on Taiwan to live under a political system as close as possible to that preferred by most of them. Ultimately this will be worked through by Chinese on the mainland and in Taiwan. Friends of the US need to explain to Americans who think they have the people of Taiwan’s welfare guiding them, that it is dangerous to encourage thoughts of independence.

As a former diplomat in China with an intimate understanding of China’s political rhetoric and behaviour, Garnaut was also keen to stress a point that has eluded many commentators about China’s intentions regarding Taiwan, explaining that it is a “dangerous mistake” to interpret China’s longstanding refusal to rule out the use of force to prevent Taiwan’s independence “as an indication of its willingness to use military force against other states”.

These ruminations about Australia’s past lead listeners to question the claim that AUKUS is in our national interest. Garnaut asks, “Is AUKUS consistent with the preservation of Australian sovereign independence in future decisions on war and peace?”

Garnaut is certain that should Australia end up being involved in a war over Taiwan, the consequences will be perilous:

America would be damaged by war with China over the status of Taiwan, but, short of a major nuclear exchange debilitating both great powers, its sovereignty would not be at risk. Australia’s would be. Indeed, I doubt that Australia could survive as a sovereign entity the isolation from most of Asia that would be likely to follow anything other than a decisive and quick US victory in a war in which our military was engaged.

When a man such as Ross Garnaut speaks, it would be foolish not to listen.

Should Australia rethink the AUKUS deal? How should we navigate our relationship with China? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

Dutton brings the populist war home with anti-Muslim talking points

Peter Dutton's call to ban Palestinians coming from Gaza was perfectly pitched to echo through the national news cycle. And the media took it up with gusto.

Australian political reporting works with the unspoken assumption that Canberra operates in a vacuum, untouched by global trends.

The result? Last week’s over-heated rhetoric on migration was presented as a serious response to public concerns rather than what it was: a dangerous and divisive injection of the global right’s anti-Muslim rhetoric that has long been powering its hate machine.

Just returned from a meeting in Israel with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security advisers and off the back of a meeting with his own “national security” team, Peter Dutton catapulted the global right’s campaign against Muslim migrants into the centre of the Canberra discourse with his call to ban Palestinians coming to Australia from Gaza.

The framing was perfectly pitched to echo through the national news cycle. “Dutton finds his mark,” crowed The Australian.

Dressed up as being all about “Australia’s interests”, it was a local polish to the divisive exploitation of Muslim migration pioneered by the European right.

The Dutton Gaza ban itself was not even original — Donald Trump was pumping the idea as far back as October as a reprise of his 2017 “Muslim ban”. The rhetoric veers close to the notorious Great Replacement theory promoted by former Fox star Tucker Carlson (that migrants are brought in as a voting bloc to replace “real” citizens), with Dutton saying “the prime minister has clearly had a political motivation here” and was seeking a “political dividend”.

The Australian intervention could not have come at a worse time, just weeks after English far-right groups networked to shock the community by generating anti-Muslim riots across England towns and Belfast in Northern Ireland, which were rebuffed by significantly larger anti-racism demonstrations in support of migrants and refugees.

Since the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, the network of right-wing parties across Europe, as well as Trump’s MAGA Republicans, has found in Muslim migrants the perfect “them” to counterpoint their populist “us”. It drove the right’s pre-COVID surge in the Brexit referendum and the elevation of France’s Rassemblement National in the 2017 elections.

Its rhetoric has replaced the gentler Howard-era dog-whistle of “we decide who comes to this country” with an out-and-proud trumpeting: “Muslim invaders”, as the movement’s thought leader, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, told Germany’s right-wing tabloid Bild in 2018.

The result is what the Brookings Institute described as “the one percent problem”: a relatively small number of Muslim migrants turned into “one of the defining issues of the populist era” where “nearly every major right-wing populist party emphasises cultural and religious objections to specifically Muslim immigration”.

It has left traditional centre-right parties with a hard decision: resist the moment (like Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in Germany or the post-Gaullist Republicans in France) or jump on board, like the US Republicans. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t: oppose the populist right and become irrelevant; or pander to its extremism, prioritising unity over electability.

Dutton has given us his decision: tilt right, MAGA-style, to keep the movement together (and to protect his own back), perhaps recognising that the much-celebrated fragmentation of Australia’s two-party system is happening more on the right-wing fringe than it is on the high-profile teal centre.

The rise of right-wing micro-parties has been concealed by their diversity. In the most recent election, parties like One Nation, UAP, the Liberal Democrats and Katter’s Australian Party collected just over 11% of the vote. Add in the more domesticated right-wing Nationals, and about a third of right-of-centre voters opted to cast their ballot for a party on the ugly side of Menzies’ Liberals.

By comparison, the drift of disaffected Liberal voters to centrist independents has been far smaller, although (like the old Country Party) regional focus and strategic (and preference) votes from Labor and Greens voters has maximised the teal representation that has caught the public eye.

In most European democracies, the fragmentation to the left has offered traditional social democratic parties the same choice: compete or cooperate.

In Australia, Labor and the Greens seem to have come to a sort of coopetition – cooperating at election time through preference deals, competing between times (although the more aggressive approach by the Greens under the Albanese government threatens to fracture these arrangements).

Dutton’s weaponisation of national security comes as the US national security establishment (aka ”the blob”) is trying yet again to disentangle itself from the vulgarities of populist politics. This month’s lead article in the blob’s house journal, Foreign Affairs, noted the populist right’s attempt to make everything a matter of national security, concluding: “If everything is defined as national security, nothing is a national security priority.”

Australia’s own blob — more or less a franchise of the Washington original — seems to have got the same memo, with ASIO boss Mike Burgess turning up on Insiders last weekend in an attempt to hose things down.

Regardless, the media is more than happy to keep amplifying Dutton’s anti-Muslim bell. So don’t expect him to stop ringing it.

What do you make of Dutton’s plan to ban people fleeing Gaza from coming to Australia? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

Australia doesn’t just influence detention regimes globally — it exports them

Former Manus Island detainee Behrouz Boochani on how Australia has been actively promoting its immigration detention policies abroad.

Recently, an international conference about camps and border studies was held at Graz University in Austria. I had a chance to participate and discuss Australia’s policy on asylum seekers and refugees. Throughout the conference, Australia was referenced constantly. Wherever I went, I heard of the nation’s banishment of refugees to Manus Island and Nauru cited as a cruel example of the detention industry.

We refugees in Australia have made global headlines over the past decade with different stories of our collective resistance. It is obvious to us how the nation’s detention process has spread internationally.

Many say Australia has inspired other countries, as evidenced by the United Kingdom’s recent plan to send refugees to Rwanda. This is true, but it is not the whole story. Australia’s complex system of violence is spreading globally not only because it is an “inspiration” but also because the nation’s governments have actively influenced, embedded and legitimised detention regimes through language, legal and political frameworks, and a new industrial network of security companies.

Australia has spent $12 billion on its sophisticated detention model over the past 12 years, establishing a large industry from which private companies have benefited. The process has been opaque at best: still today, unanswered questions remain regarding the government’s contracts with private security contractors, such as Paladin, which has faced an AFP investigation following allegations of million-dollar bribes to secure the backing of high-ranking PNG officials to enable it to run offshore processing on Manus Island.

Australia has actively exported this model. In August 2016, Australia welcomed six Danish politicians to visit Nauru to explore the possibility of replicating the system, who then met with Australian officials in Canberra. One of the politicians, Martin Henriksen, a member of the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party, explained that Denmark could maintain refugee camps in Kenya or Greenland, saying, “Australia has found an interesting model. The government will continuously assess different migration policies by looking at the experiences of other countries, including Australia.”

In 2022, former PM Tony Abbott visited the UK and actively promoted Australia’s regime. He urged UK ministers to change the law to establish something similar. In an interview with GB News, he said, “In the end, this is one of those situations where success creates popularity, and because the policies succeed, they are widely adopted. And I certainly think there’s a lesson there and a potential model for other countries such as the United Kingdom, who have a problem with illegal arrivals by boat.”

Australia’s immigration policies and rhetoric also introduce potent discourse and language around “national security”, which demonises people seeking asylum and justifies the violations of human rights, in which refugees are banished to a cage in another country where they are outside the law.

Australia is not the first country to establish such a regime: wealthier countries have historically treated other countries as open prisons to detain refugees, minorities or different ethnic groups. In the early 20th century, the Nansen Office and the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees primarily transferred Russians and Armenians between countries. During World War II, when European countries refused to accept Jewish refugees, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador positioned themselves as destinations for Jewish refugees, consequentially gaining political and economic benefits at a state level. Another example is America’s detention of refugees from Haiti in Guantanamo in 1990.

Yet it is clear that Australia in particular has left an impression on contemporary governments. We have heard how “stop the boats” has been widely used in the UK. We have heard how conservative politicians in the UK have said “We want to save lives at sea, which is why we do it”. And although the Labour Party, which won the recent UK election, has announced it is not going to follow the policy of banishing refugees to Rwanda, this does not mean this increasingly popular practice of sending refugees elsewhere has stopped.

These days, banishing refugees to poorer countries is a widely discussed policy across the EU. The right-wing government in Italy has a contract with Albania, and recently Germany has been using other countries to deport Afghan refugees. Denmark is also following this model. Australia continues to exile people from its shores, with the number of people sent to Nauru topping 100 over the past months, in addition to the 50 or so people remaining in Port Moresby who were originally sent to Manus Island. After 11 long years, these people face continued uncertainty about when they will be transferred to a third country. 

This nation’s detention system has deep roots in colonial settlement and historical colonialist mentality. Whereas it once committed a genocide against Indigenous peoples, and still today commits violence against them, today its targets include refugees. Yet while I believe the people of Australia think treating refugees cruelly is just a domestic issue, the reality is that this nation’s model has transcended the region to an international level. 

At a public event in Groningen in the Netherlands, an Australian couple stood up in the crowd, crying, and said to me, “we cannot believe there is an event about how our country has become a cruel example — we are ashamed of it.”

Perhaps this was the first time they could see with their own eyes that this tragedy transcends Australia.  Perhaps they saw the Groningen event, and me on stage, as an embodiment of what Australia has done to refugees.

Should Australia be exporting its refugee policy? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

Is Trump Media’s plummeting share price a canary in the coal mine?

Shares in Donald Trump's company Trump Media have sunk to new lows. Meanwhile Truth Social users continue to decline.

Is this an early prediction of the US presidential election in early November?

On Monday, the share price of Donald Trump’s Truth Media — which houses the loss-making Truth Social platform — hit a new low since his deal with Digital World Acquisition Corp went through in March: US$22.24, down more than 3.5% in the day and barely a third of its peak price of US$66 in late March. That was when Trump held a small but consistent average lead over Joe Biden in national presidential election polls.

As Crikey predicted back in March, the share price has proved a useful barometer of Trump’s political fortunes. When Biden narrowed the gap to less than 1% in April, the share price plummeted to its previous low, US$22.84. In May, as Trump again widened his average lead, the price soared back above US$50. The price spiked again to nearly US$40 when Trump and Biden debated, exposing the president’s frailties and starting the weeks-long period of growing pressure on Biden to withdraw from the race. (The price also rallied 32% when Trump survived an assassination attempt.)

The last peak, more than US$41, was in the week before Biden pulled out of the presidential race. Since then it’s been a steady decline, by more than 40%, as Kamala Harris seamlessly replaced Biden, leaving Trump visibly flailing. Last week, the shares fell more than 9% even as the US stock market had its biggest week since last November.

Trump remains — for now, given he has to hold his shares for six months — the majority owner of Trump Media & Technology. And Truth Social, Trump’s own social media platform, is the company’s main asset. The fact Trump himself has gone back to Twitter/X in recent days, and appeared on that platform in a risible “interview” with right-wing tech billionaire Elon Musk a week ago, said all that needed to be said about the value of Truth Social. The platform is probably now best known for the Trump campaign using it to claim he would deliver a “unified Reich“.

In its most recent corporate filings, Truth Social revealed that in the June quarter it lost US$16 million. Its user numbers have declined from 3.26 million users at its launch in 2022 to just over 2 million in June.

Should politicians be allowed to sue for defamation?

Australia's defamation laws historically favour reputation over freedom of speech, and our politicians aren't shy from using them.

Western Australia Senator Linda Reynolds is already embroiled in a bruising defamation fight against her former staffer Brittany Higgins. Now, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is reportedly considering suing independent MP Zali Steggall after she told him to “stop being racist”.

It has become impossible to miss the fact that our political class — including some who invoke freedom of speech while disparaging others — is remarkably keen on defamation litigation in response to actual or perceived slights.

It’s rarely a good look when the powerful sue the less powerful. It is an especially bad look for a democracy when politicians, who enjoy not only power but also privileged access to communication platforms, pursue legal avenues likely to bankrupt all but the best-resourced defendants.

The freedom to speak one’s mind

Flawed democracies such as Singapore are rightly condemned for leveraging defamation law and compliant courts against political dissent.

While Australia’s situation is less problematic, our defamation laws historically favour reputation over freedom of speech.

An oft-cited case in contrast is the United States, where politicians and other public figures can succeed in defamation only if they prove the publisher knew they were communicating a falsehood, or were reckless (careless to a very high degree) as to the truth.

Statements of opinion — for instance, that Donald Trump is racist — are practically never in violation of the law. In the words of the US Supreme Court:

It is a prized American privilege to speak one’s mind, although not always with perfect good taste, on all public institutions.

The US approach is based on the classical liberal idea that “the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones”: speech should generally be free, and public debate in the marketplace of ideas will sort out right and wrong.

Putting conditions on free speech

The argument for free speech without guardrails may be losing traction in a post-truth world. Many modern audiences, willingly or not, occupy echo chambers and filter bubbles in which biases are reinforced rather than challenged.

It is almost as if the High Court of Australia foresaw this in a 1997 defamation case where it held that Australia’s constitution did not require total freedom of political communication. Reasonable limits were appropriate because widespread irresponsible political communication could damage the political fabric of the nation.

Although the High Court reached its conclusion via textual interpretation of the constitution rather than deeper philosophical musings, the court’s position reflects modern preoccupations with how speech should be regulated in a democracy.

But the political appetite for defamation litigation in this country suggests the law has not yet struck the right balance.

The point of defamation law

Recent reforms to defamation law have tried to eliminate frivolous lawsuits by introducing a threshold requirement of serious harm to reputation. A better approach may have been to presume that all defamation is trivial.

Unlike other civil wrongs, which often result in physical injury or property damage, defamation’s effect on a person’s reputation is intangible.

Unfairly tarnished reputations can usually be repaired by a public apology and correction, perhaps aided by nominal compensation for hurt feelings and to deter further defamation.

It is therefore a mystery why courts and legislatures have allowed defamation proceedings to become some of the most complex and expensive civil claims around, and why damages are so large.

A high-profile case can easily generate millions of dollars in legal costs on both sides, dwarfing the final award which might itself run to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Taiwan offers a useful contrast. There, although politicians can sue for defamation, proceedings are relatively simple and damages are much smaller — one might say proportionate to the harm done.

Under both approaches, the successful litigant, whether it be the publisher or the person whose reputation has suffered, is vindicated. Surely that is the point.

Where only the wealthy can afford to assert their rights, and where vindication of reputation takes a back seat to airing grievances, punishing opponents and enriching lawyers, defamation law is in a state of dysfunction.

Should pollies sue?

It’s sometimes said that politicians should not be able to sue for defamation at all because they themselves can say what they like under the protection of parliamentary privilege, immune from defamation and other speech laws.

Parliamentarians do enjoy that protection, but its personal benefit is secondary. Parliamentary privilege, like courtroom privilege, exists because the nature of democratic (and judicial) deliberation requires that anything can be said.

If a politician steps outside Parliament and repeats a defamatory statement first made within its walls, they are vulnerable to being sued. David Leyonhjelm learned this the hard way, and Steggall may, too.

It’s reasonable that politicians should also have rights of action in defamation. But those rights must be constrained according to what is appropriate in a democratic society.

A way to better align defamation law with democratic expectations may be to return cases to the state courts and reinstate juries to a prominent role. Currently, the overwhelming majority of cases are brought in the Federal Court, where they are decided by a judge sitting alone.

If a public figure claims their reputation has been tarnished in the eyes of the community, we should test that factual claim with members of that community under the legal guidance of a judge. That might make for a welcome injection of common sense.

This piece first appeared in The Conversation.

Democratic National Convention underway

Democrats are racing to amend their policy platform to reflect Kamala Harris rather than Joe Biden, and new data shows Australia's most common workers have a devastatingly long wait when saving for a house deposit.

DNC KICKS OFF

The world’s attention has once again turned towards the US election as the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Chicago, with Kamala Harris set to formally accept the party’s presidential nomination.

President Joe Biden will headline the first night of the convention with a farewell speech that only a few weeks ago he had no intention of giving. Instead of setting out his plan to win a second term in office, Biden will use his speech to highlight how his vice president is the best person to carry on his legacy, The New York Times reports.

Politico writes Biden’s speech is set to deliver a stark warning about the dangers of another Donald Trump term, with the convention as a whole to highlight Biden’s accomplishments and Harris’ readiness for office. The site reports Biden, 81, is entering the four-day event with “mixed feelings” after being pressured by his own party to drop out of the race. Also speaking on the first day of the convention are New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former secretary of state and 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, first lady Jill Biden and the Bidens’ daughter Ashley, CBS News reports. Harris will reportedly attend Joe Biden’s speech later, with her own happening on Thursday.

The convention is set to be targeted by numerous protests throughout the week, with the BBC reporting those demonstrating against US support of Israel during the war in Gaza gathering on Monday afternoon with thousands expected to attend. Last week, Axios said House Democrats attending the convention had been advised “not to book hotel rooms under their own names or engage with protesters if confronted”.

Such has been the breakneck speed regarding Biden’s removal from the Democratic ticket and Harris’ ascendancy that the party’s 2024 platform, which delegates will vote on on Monday night, repeatedly refers to Biden’s second term and the accomplishments of his first, the Associated Press points out. Having backed the Biden administration’s goals (what with, you know, being his vice president) and not having had much time to set out her own platform since the dramatic events of July 21, there is significant interest in what Harris will say about her vision for the country on Thursday. NPR has compiled a list of what Harris has said so far, regarding what she’d do if she and her running mate Tim Walz defeat Trump and JD Vance in November.

MOST COMMON WORKERS PRICED OUT OF HOUSING

A parliamentary library analysis requested by the Greens reportedly shows childcare workers, aged carers and teachers are among those being priced out of the housing market, Guardian Australia says. The data is said to show someone working in Australia’s most common job, a general sales assistant, on a full-time income of $62,600 a year would need to save for more than 40 years to achieve a 20% house deposit. If retail managers and aged or disability carers saved 15% of their salary each year it would take them almost two decades.

Guardian Australia reports the data, based on Reserve Bank lending figures, CoreLogic house price data and ATO income data, reveals no-one employed in the top 10 most common jobs in Australia could currently afford to buy a house without experiencing housing stress, where mortgage repayments represent more than 30% of income.

The findings come as the AFR reports new Housing Minister Clare O’Neil has summoned the state housing ministers to Western Sydney for urgent talks. The paper says the federal minister will push her state counterparts to “dramatically step up progress for renters and would-be buyers”.

O’Neil told the paper that while passing the government’s stalled housing legislation, including the Help to Buy scheme and build-to-rent bill, was important, more could be done outside Parliament.

“We’re going to need to find solutions to the housing crisis outside of Canberra, in the cities and regions, working with builders to help them bring more homes online more quickly, and building deeper partnerships with the states, who own many of the housing levers,” she said. “If we push on these partnerships, we can make a big difference to housing supply and affordability, and the Greens and Liberals won’t be able to hold us back or slow us down.”

O’Neil will reportedly also meet with Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather in the coming weeks as his party continues to block legislation, calling for initiatives such as rent freezes, more affordable housing, better conditions for tenants, and tax incentives for property investors, including negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts, to be reduced.

Elsewhere, the AAP reports the minutes from the latest meeting of the Reserve Bank of Australia board will be released later today and no doubt be poured over by traders as they try to predict the central bank’s next move. The decision to hold rates at 4.35% and hint at no rate cut for the rest of the year continues to dominate proceedings.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE…

Are you ready for what has been declared the funniest joke at the annual Edinburgh Fringe festival?

You sure?

OK, here you go.

“I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship but I bottled it.”

Boom tish.

The gag is from comedian Mark Simmons, who triumphed in the shortlist of the 15 best jokes at this year’s Fringe. The Press Association quoted Simmons as responding to the win with: “I’m really chuffed to win U&Dave’s Funniest Joke Of The Fringe. I needed some good news as I was just fired from my job marking exam papers, can’t understand it, I always gave 110%.”

The joke shortlist was drawn up as the judging panel of comedians and critics who attended hundreds of shows during the Fringe and submitted their favourites. A public vote involving 2,000 people then picked the winner.

Second place went to Alec Snook for his joke: “I’ve been taking salsa lessons for months, but I just don’t feel like I’m progressing. It’s just one step forward… two steps back.”

Simmons’ victory came ten years after he first performed at the Fringe as a solo act, when his friend convinced him to do an open mic night.

Say What?

Switching nationality was a difficult decision, and not one I took lightly.

Matt Richardson

The 25-year-old cyclist, who won three medals for Australia at the Olympic Games in Paris, has announced on Instagram he is switching nationalities and from now will represent Great Britain. Richardson was born in Kent, England, and moved to Western Australia at the age of nine and maintained dual citizenship, the BBC reports. In Paris he won silver medals for Australia in the keirin and individual sprint, as well as a bronze in the team sprint.

CRIKEY RECAP

Harris has forced Trump to talk policy. But that’s not how he works

BERNARD KEANE

And Trump and his campaign are rattled. The first big sign that they weren’t prepared for Harris and were shocked at how well she has been doing was Trump deciding he didn’t want to debate her. He demanded in early August she appear on Fox News instead of the ABC, then reversed himself after a week and said he would debate her after all.

That revealed a lot. Frontrunners prefer not to debate — they have nothing to gain. Remember the contortions Julia Gillard went through in 2010 when the first week of her campaign against Tony Abbott had her cruising to victory, enabling her to dismiss talk of a debate with him, only for Kevin Rudd to blow up her campaign, leaving her the underdog who suddenly insisted Abbott debate her.

The second and more important sign was that Trump’s racist and misogynist abuse of Harris failed to stop her ascension in the polls (or diminish the size of her crowds, a subject Trump has a weird obsession with), forcing him to contemplate the unthinkable: talking about policy.

Exclusive: Leaked photo shows Foxtel CEO ‘demonstrating’ Nazi salute

CAM WILSON

Foxtel CEO Patrick Delany says an image obtained by Crikey showing him giving a Nazi salute may have been taken while he was “demonstrating the similarity” between the offensive gesture and a gesture used by A-League fans, while on set at Fox Sports.

In a statement provided to Crikey, Delany said he was “shocked” to see the image, which appears to be from the 2010s. “The fact I demonstrated this offensive salute was wrong and I unreservedly apologise,” he said.

Crikey has obtained images showing the then Fox Sports CEO on what looks like Fox Sports’ A-League “Hyundai Matchday Saturday” pre-game program set during the 2014-15 season.

‘Exactly what the Kremlin hoped’: Australia delays Masha Gessen visa over Russia conviction concerns

CHARLIE LEWIS

Writer Masha Gessen has said the Australian government has “functionally denied” them a visa, after delays and a “last minute” request for further documents meant Gessen was unable to board their scheduled flight to Australia this past weekend.

The Department of Home Affairs’ delay apparently stems from concerns over Gessen’s recent conviction in Russia. In mid-July, Gessen — a regular contributor to outlets such as The New Yorker and The New York Times — was sentenced in absentia to eight years imprisonment by a Moscow court after having written about alleged Russian war crimes during the nation’s invasion of Ukraine. The court claimed Gessen had spread “false information”.

“The Russian government’s persecution of me has one purpose: to make me feel unfree even though I am living in exile and they can’t currently jail me. What they can try to do is make it hard for me to move around the world,” Gessen said in a statement. “I am shocked that the first allies the Russians have found in this quest to constrain me are the Australian authorities, who have functionally denied me a visa.”

“This is exactly what the Kremlin hoped would happen,” Gessen added.

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Blinken says Israel OKs a plan to break the ceasefire impasse and urges Hamas to do the same (Associated Press)

UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch among missing in Sicily yacht sinking (The Guardian)

Ukraine hits third bridge in Russia’s Kursk, says buffer zone is final goal (al-Jazeera)

Philippines, China trade blame after vessels collide in South China Sea (Reuters)

Women harmed by vaginal mesh in England get payout (BBC)

Old aircraft carrier, once part of mighty Soviet fleet, burns in Chinese lagoon (CNN)

THE COMMENTARIAT

I fled Gaza to Australia not by choice but as a matter of survival. How can I be a security risk? — Plestia Alaqad (Guardian Australia): My life in Gaza was constantly at risk, and I could have been targeted and killed at any moment. Had I stayed, there is every chance that I would’ve been one of the 40,000 Palestinians killed by Israel, of which as many as 17,000 are children, over 11,000 women and 113 journalists like me. A Lancet study even suggests that the Gaza death toll could exceed 186,000.

I had less than 24 hours’ notice that I was leaving Gaza, but it wasn’t one of those times where I was excited to pack to go on a vacation. It felt like I was living everything my grandpa once lived through during the Nakba in 1948. I left Gaza with a heavy heart, a fake Dolce & Gabbana top, a black jacket and lipstick.

And now that I’ve fled and survived, I find myself this week a “national security risk” for Australia?

What worries me most about election night — Rachel Maddow (The New York Times): Imagine an election night this November in which the two parties are trading swing-state victories. The Democrats capture Nevada, while the Republicans take Arizona. The Republicans win the big prize of Pennsylvania, while the Democrats top them in Wisconsin and Michigan. The nation is waiting on Georgia. If Georgia goes red, it’s President Trump; if Georgia goes blue, it’s President Harris.

Then, local news headlines start to circulate. There are reports of unspecified “problems” in the vote in Fulton County. And in Gwinnett County. And in DeKalb, Coffee and Spalding Counties. Republican officials are refusing to certify the results in their counties. They say they are making “reasonable inquiries.”

As legal challenges wend through the courts, a wave of disinformation, confusion and propaganda swells, fueled by unproven claims that something is amiss in these Georgia counties, and also by similar noise — and possibly also certification refusals — in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Nevada. (All have seen local Republicans try the certification refusal ruse since 2020.)