'It’s difficult to understate just how much Harris is energising the Democratic base.'
Since Joe Biden dropped out of the US presidential race three weeks ago, a lot has happened in the Democrats’ camp, with the formal nomination of Kamala Harris and the announcement of her running mate Tim Walz energising the campaign.
But can the Democrats actually win this? That’s the question our debaters are throwing around in this week’s Friday Fight. Arguing for the negative team we have Crikey’s very own Charlie Lewis. And in the affirmative corner we have Ava Kalinauskas, research associate at the United States Studies Centre.
Kamala Harris’ ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket has shaken up the 2024 US presidential race and injected fresh life into the Democrats’ bid for the White House.
Just three weeks ago, 81-year-old President Joe Biden was muddling through media appearances and press conference gaffes, all the while struggling to hold onto support from traditional Democratic constituencies, let alone from within his own party.
The Democrats can now taste what was slipping away in the dying days of Biden’s campaign — a path forward to victory in November.
It’s difficult to overstate just how much Harris is energising the Democratic base.
Her entry into the race catalysed one of the largest fundraising spikes in US electoral history, bringing in US$81 million in just 24 hours — most of it from first-time donors. Harris’ recent campaign blitz touring battleground states, with her newly minted running mate Tim Walz, drew crowds of a size and spirit not typically seen until far closer to election day. And that’s not to mention how she is gaining traction online, as users take to social media to memeify her campaign, stitching together videos of Harris with gen Z pop culture touchpoints. Some are even comparing the surge of enthusiasm for Harris to the wave of excitement that surrounded Obama’s campaign in the 2008 presidential election, which he went on to win in an electoral vote landslide.
Recent polling suggests that this new momentum is translating into shifts in voter sentiment. The latest New York Times/Siena poll finds an almost 30-point jump in Democrats’ satisfaction about the choice of candidates this election compared to May, and confirms that Harris is winning back the key Democratic voting blocs that Biden was failing to consolidate, like Black and young voters.
But beyond energising the base, Harris is also making crucial ground in the all-important swing states which will ultimately decide the election. Polling is beginning to show Harris opening a four-point lead in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. These three “Blue Wall” states, in which Biden was haemorrhaging support, all voted for Trump in 2016 and flipped to Biden in 2020. If Harris can continue this trajectory and win these critical states in November, she has perhaps her clearest path to the Oval Office.
There’s no doubt that Trump and his allies can feel this sudden tidal wave of momentum shifting Harris’ way — and it’s placing them under pressure. Just last month, Trump was officially crowned the Republican nominee at an RNC that some suggested felt more like a religious ceremony than a party convention. Most commentary expected Trump to trounce Biden in an electoral rematch; he survived an assassination attempt which only seemed to energise Republicans, and Trump’s choice of JD Vance as a running mate was interpreted by many as a sign that Trump felt he needed to do little to expand his appeal beyond the base of voters already in his grasp.
It’s no secret that Trump doesn’t do well on the back foot. And if his campaign fails to adapt to Harris’ jolt to the election, it will struggle to blunt the momentum that has propelled her from strength to strength in recent weeks.
However, this is not to say that Democrats are certain to soar to an electoral victory in November. In 2019, Harris burst onto the Democratic primary scene with a groundswell of enthusiasm, but ultimately failed to deliver on the early promise of her campaign. She currently benefits from being a new face in a contest that Americans were increasingly bored of — but there’s only so much longer before the novelty may wear off.
The upcoming weeks therefore represent a crucial test.
Harris’ campaign has yet to lay out a specific policy agenda. But this ambiguity carries risk. Republicans are already filling the void with the left-wing positions from her previous primary run — like banning fracking and abolishing private health insurance — which she’s tried to distance herself from, and are out of step with the views of most moderate voters. Moreover, no amount of momentum can help Harris escape the fact she is tied to Biden’s record on immigration and the economy — two issues that matter most to the Americans she needs to win over in swing states.
But while it may be early days, with Harris at the top of the ticket, pundits can now say what they couldn’t necessarily about Biden’s campaign: the Democrats have a fighting chance in November.
Is the momentum behind the Democrats enough to win the presidency? Or is the bubble about to burst? 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.
If we look at numbers and history, rather than vibes, things look a lot less rosy for the Democrats.
Since Joe Biden dropped out of the US presidential race three weeks ago, a lot has happened in the Democrats’ camp, with the formal nomination of Kamala Harris and the announcement of her running mate Tim Walz energising the campaign.
But can the Democrats actually win this? That’s the question our debaters are throwing around in this week’s Friday Fight. Arguing for the negative team we have Crikey’s very own Charlie Lewis. And in the affirmative corner we have Ava Kalinauskas, research associate at the United States Studies Centre.
On November 8, 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign took part in the then-viral trend of the mannequin challenge. And who could forget her warmly received cameo on the hit comedy Broad City, which did so much to sure up her vote in California? It was the kind of knowing, media-savvy stuff that played brilliantly to knowing, media-savvy types in Democratic strongholds and, as it turns out, absolutely no one else.
I’m not sure what it is about the Democrats’ lusty embrace of Charlie XCX’s endorsement and jokes about JD Vance sticking his dick in a couch that reminded me of the 2016 campaign, except perhaps everything. To say that the Harris team’s embrace of meme culture feels easier and less corpse-stiff than Clinton’s is to clear a bar so low it’s currently liquefying in the earth’s core.
Meanwhile, how many times did Trump do or say something that made you certain his campaign could never recover? Access Hollywood? His misogyny toward Fox News’ Megyn Kelly? His mockery of a disabled reporter? His many legal troubles, including his explicit contention that a judge could not be trusted to do their job because they were of “Mexican heritage”?
For me, it was his mockery of a dead soldier’s family and of Republican senator John McCain for his years of torture during the Vietnam War. There was surely no more sacrosanct convention in US politics: mocking members of the armed forces or their families is Inland Taipan-like political poison. After this, I thought Trump’s campaign would be dead before it hit the ground.
And remember what an unmitigated joke Donald Trump’s campaign seemed in 2016? The laughter over “Drumpf” and “Covfefe”. The way talk show hosts essentially gave up on non-Trump material for the year, figuring to make “scathing” assessments of his buffoonery while they still could. Trump’s candidacy wasn’t just an unpleasantness that could be gotten out of the way, he was tipped to lose so hard that it would disqualify the Republican party from office for a generation. The New York Times gave Clinton an 85% chance of winning, and just as he would four years later, Trump prepared for a loss by claiming the process was rigged.
And after the roiling, uninterrupted scandal factory that was Trump’s time in office, Trump’s popular vote increased by nearly 12 million. So the apparent panic and chaos in the Trump camp doesn’t necessarily mean much about what voters will decide in November.
I take absolutely no joy in bringing any of that up. I only do so because large swathes of the media seem to be so intent on forgetting it, caught up in the vibes of the last three weeks.
“Kamala Harris must mobilize stan armies” writes Vulture, and like a lot of the coverage of Kamala’s brat summer, it’s borderline impossible to work out if it’s sincere, or an Onion headline that’s escaped into the real world.
Harris has inarguably arrested and reversed Biden’s slide in national aggregate polls in the bright autumn of his campaign, and the media, audibly breathing a sigh of relief at the prospect of a contest rather than whatever the hell a Trump/Biden rematch would have become, have been hyping it. CNN this week reported on the “surprising” bump in support for Harris in a key demographic: White non-college-educated voters in swing states. Biden’s improvement among that cohort (as opposed to Clinton) was huge in 2020, and they were the only cohort keeping him afloat in 2024.
So Harris now trails Trump by 14 points, rather than 25. Harris is now very marginally ahead in four of the seven closest swing states and 538 puts her ahead by 2.6% in its most recent national aggregate. Bear in mind that we are likely nearing the peak of Harris’ honeymoon period: next week’s Democratic National Convention. After that, the vigour and novelty of her entry and selection of her running mate will likely wear off, and questions of policy and communication will come to the fore. If we recall Harris’ first pitch at the presidential nomination — where early hype about her chances dissipated amidst high-profile policy backdowns and inconsistent messaging — there are very serious questions about how that will go.
A lot of what Harris is up against is no fault of hers. However hard they try to avoid doing so, Trump is held to a different set of standards by a mainstream media which has never known how to effectively hold him to account. And one of the fears that kept Democrats largely behind Biden (at least in public) for so long — that a decent, possibly crucial chunk of the United States might not vote for any black woman — is presumably as true now as it was in June.
Oh, and…
DING! DING! DING! CRIKEY EDITORS DECLARE LEWIS HAS PASSED HIS ALLOCATED WORD COUNT
…then there’s the fact in both 2016 and 2020, pollsters significantly underestimated Trump’s vote.
There is a long way to go, of course, and none of this is terminal for the Democrats. But a lot has to improve before the current sense of triumphalism pervading the party matches up with any kind of reality.
Is the momentum behind the Democrats enough to win the presidency? Or is the bubble about to burst? 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.
Charlie Lewis pens Crikey's Tips and Murmurs column and also writes on industrial relations, politics and culture. He previously worked across government and unions and was a researcher on RN's Daily Planet. He currently co-hosts Spin Cycle on Triple R radio.
Richard Shields (Image: Woollahra Municipal Council)
Exclusive: At an emergency meeting last night, powerful members of the NSW Liberals debated who should replace a sacked top official.
The NSW Liberal Party is gripped by paranoia and confusion and has begun a purge of officials after this week’s nomination blunder.
At a hastily called meeting last night, the powerful members of the party’s state executive agreed unanimously to sack state director Richard Shields, who has been in the job since 2023 and was blamed for the failure on Wednesday to hand in nomination paperwork for up to 140 candidates for local council elections.
Party sources told Crikey both Shields and the man who has emerged as his nemesis, state president Don Harwin, attended the meeting in person at the Liberal headquarters on Macquarie Street in Sydney.
Shields was questioned on the failure but didn’t give an inch, taking all questions on notice. Earlier in the night, he had issued a statement to reporters saying calls for his resignation were “premature” and arguing there should be a “proper review of the nomination process to establish the full facts”.
He also sought to redirect attention to Harwin, saying in the statement: “This year my focus — as agreed with party leaders — has been on preparing for the upcoming federal election. To maintain this focus … Harwin, a highly experienced party official and former minister, volunteered to run the local government nomination process. I had full trust that this would be delivered successfully.”
Harwin apparently did not take kindly to the statement, telling the meeting Shields had been “briefing” against him and questioning whether a party media advisor should stay employed due to their role in issuing the statement. Harwin did not respond to a request for comment.
Members of the state executive floated Chris Stone as a possible replacement for Shields. Stone has experience in the position — he held the state director job for eight years until 2023.
When he quit, he lamented the infighting that had hamstrung Liberals ahead of the last federal election: “Our main enemy is the Labor Party, and we need to ensure that we’re focused on the main game,” he told The Daily Telegraphat the time. Stone did not respond to a request for comment from Crikey.
While preselections for next year’s federal campaign appear to be proceeding on schedule, some Liberals worry that the chaos of the last few days will impact their chances of retaking government. Certain seats in Western Sydney will be crucial to that ambition.
“[Opposition Leader Peter] Dutton’s clear strategy involves winning some of those outer suburban electorates, like Werriwa and Macarthur, and some regional electorates in NSW as well,” Redbridge Group strategy director Kos Samaras told Crikey.
“The chaos puts them on the back foot logistically, they have to find someone who is fit and ready to run the operation in NSW.”
Samaras would know about the pressures of that sort of job, having been Labor’s Victorian deputy campaign director from 2005 to 2019.
“Whenever you lose a director from your team so close to a federal election, reappointing someone, getting them acquainted with the entire machine, it’s pretty difficult, it can take years,” he said.
“That being said, it might not be as seismic as people think, with regards to the federal election, because Liberal HQ in Canberra is going to run it all — state branches are effectively auxiliary support and run the logistical requirements of the campaign on the ground.”
Anton Nilsson is Crikey's federal political reporter. He previously covered NSW Parliament for NCA NewsWire, and before that, worked for Sweden's Expressen newspaper as well as other publications in Sweden, Australia and the United States.
A map of Hawksburn Estate from 1886 (Image: State Library of Victoria)
Secret marriages, stolen hats, Prue and Trude and the fearsome Destructor. Out of the sepia, the life of a 'burbadoon emerges.
Bertha Kitts (her real name) was looking for a place to start a small shop in 1914, and she found one, in Hawksburn. The railway station of this small suburb, between South Yarra and Toorak, had just been rebuilt and the line quadruple-tracked; small rows of red-brick double-storey shops were built on either side. Kitts took one, opening a dairy produce and fruiterers’ shop, essentially a fresh grocer.
The three other tenants — estate agents, tea rooms, dressmaker — would have known her as a modest fellow shopkeeper. They didn’t know, but we know (thanks to Australia’s world-class, addictive “Trove” history search engine) that Bertha had possibly been a professional thief.
In 1908 Kitts narrowly escaped a sentence for running the old hat scam: she and an elderly gentleman came into a North Melbourne haberdasher, and while he was being attended, she pushed him into the assistant and left with a hat she was trying on. When apprehended, the whole scenario was so confused that no-one could be prosecuted. It was a standard move, in the great days of the “short con” — no conviction was recorded, and it was buried in the local paper for Emerald Hill (South Melbourne). Getting away from any scandal was as simple as moving a few train stations down the road.
Hawksburn was the place to do it. This now-entirely built up, very bougie ‘burb was one of Melbourne’s first carved-out spec-built developments, bordered by Toorak Rd (north), Malvern Rd (south) and Mathoura Rd, just beyond Williams Rd, to the east. And westward? Well, no-one knows where Hawksburn stops and Prahran starts. By Chapel Street, you’re well out of it. But when? It is one of the mysteries of Hawksburn. It just fades away. Maybe Lambs Kebab on Malvern Rd marks it, the border running through the middle of the shop. Hawksburn (the name is the English form of Hapsburg, a hawk’s nest) comes in and out of existence, a ‘burban Brigadoon, summoned when anyone can manage to reassert that it is. It is not without quiet self-confidence, for all that.
The train line between Hawksburn and Toorak, before 1914. The building housing the straw hat factory survives (Image: Victorian Railways)
On the Malvern Rd shopping strip, sleek Ray-Banned puffer-jacketted couples get magic coffees take-away and chat outside the food store Stocked, waiting for slices from the vast blocks of terrine and pâté as women and a few men slip into Lily B, for handmade lingerie, its four naked mannequins standing guard in the window; outside Woolies, stressed salt-‘n’-pepper-haired dads yell at Thomas and Lola, to geddinthuhcar, as they load up the back of the Rover, with casserole and bubbles for the weekend at the chalet.
The winter sun shines off the gleaming white utensils in the window of Minimax, said to be where Gina Riley and Jane Turner found the models for Prue and Trude, the aproned, alveolar haute-bourgeois doubles of Kath and Kim. That said, it’s not all truffle oil and duck pâté. On Malvern Rd, there’s an old-style motor repair shop, barn size, slicked with oil within, gleaming chrome exhaust pipes hanging from its door outside, there’s a cat therapy centre, a Beaurepaires.
Corrie Perkin’s much-loved bookshop is sadly gone, but there’s Molony’s ski apparel, whose display window is changed weekly, with artfully arranged coordinated jumpers, pom-pommed beanies and ski pants, all red one week, then yellow, grey and black the next, splashy big colour like those huge French ad posters in the Armadale High St galleries. The houses are Victorian and modern McMansion as you go east, chicified old workers’ cottages and old “six-pack” ‘60s blocks of flats as you go west, and then you hit a vast housing commission tower, or towers, done in a three-spoke wheel, the most Le Corbusier-esque the commission ever got. What went to build it were rows of shops and streets of terraces, planed flat for the cult of the modern.
As a consequence of that — and the hordes of Kiwi backpackers, and overseas students, and me in the boxy old six-pack flats — Hawksburn has both the highest average household salary income in the country, and the greatest disparity of wealth in any urban locale. Hard rubbish week in Hawksburn is incredible: whole discarded living rooms out on nature strips, found sculpture assemblages of the last days of globalisation, discarded flat-screen TVs — texta’ed “works!” signs stuck to them — leaning against black tub chairs and IKEA drawer sets. They’re gone days before the van comes, the Kiwis and housos, and me, stripping them like ants dismantling a dead bird.
Other than that, the twain do not meet, the crooked path of Cromwell St, separating roundheads from cavaliers.
T’was possibly always thus. The Wurundjeri hung on late here, with corroborees in Prahran in the 1880s. “Hawksburn” itself was a farm, an austere pre-boom-style building, just near where Cromwell St now runs. I believe you can see a treeline that survived the demolition, though that may be wishful thinking. The farm went when the rail to Dandenong, then Gippsland, was put through in the 1870s. Melburnians knew the city was becoming something more than a village when “Hawksburn” was carved up for villas and terraces, which began to fill in the south-eastern bank of the Yarra, a process that has now swept Melbourne all the way to Gippsland itself.
So, by the time Bertha Kitts arrived, Hawksburn was Metroland, Pooterville, 19th-century suburbia, the dream achieved of a house and bit of garden away from the smoking city. Trove yields more stories, simply by plugging names from the Sands and McDougall address directory — the pre-White Pages report, listing the address of everyone in Melbourne — into its maw. It tells us of the bizarre sweet shop hold-up of 1943, when a gunman barged into the confectioners run by Muriel Downes, demanding cash, with the chilling phrase (for 1943) “Give me the contents of the till, please”. Downes, no candy-ass, said “You’ve come to the wrong place”, turned her back on him and fetched Mr Morris, a “lodger”, oh yes, who made a citizen’s arrest. Then it gets weird; well, let The Herald tell it:
MAN WHO HELD UP SHOP CALLS ON WOMAN AGAIN
A man, whom Miss Muriel Downes believes to have been the one who held her up at her confectionery shop in Luxton Road, Hawksburn, on Saturday night, called at her shop today carrying a revolver, and asked her to go to the police station with him.
Again? “Calls on” woman? Go to the police station together? Three months later, court reports attest, the gunzel was acquitted on all charges. And no amount of parsing of the reports gives you any clue as to why or what anyone was thinking. It’s the record of a vanished civilisation working off different principles.
The shop row itself was a bit of a hang for military types. Long after Bertha Kitts had moved on, shop 4 was a lending library and a venue known as Luxton Hall, which hosted military unit reunions in the 1950s. Like many lending libraries, it became that ubiquitous post-war thing, the Book Exchange, piles of Mills & Boon and pulp thrillers and Man International, and an old vet sat among them smoking himself to death. Shop 2 was even more exciting. The abode of Miss Bissland, whose dressmaker store ran for decades, and whose no-good brother George lived upstairs, as no-good brothers always do. George makes several motor court appearances — knocking a woman flying as she came off a tram was his personal best — before his masterpiece of scurrility, covered in the divorce court report “A Secret Marriage”.
In 1920, he married a young woman, Cora, née Everett, who lived around the corner with her parents. In a stroke of bastard genius, George persuaded her not to inform them that relations had passed beyond the engagement stage. He then proceeded to visit her there for years, while telling the increasingly rattled parents that he was setting himself up in business. When Cora eventually blabbed, the father offered them quarters there, at which point George, presumably a dead spit for Terry Thomas, remembered pressing interstate business.
We know all this from the divorce court reports. Thank God for fault-based divorce; without it we would have no idea how people really lived, but imagine the horror of having to expose your lovelorn foolishness in order to win a desertion divorce. Cora, in case you’re wondering, did not become the Hawksburn Miss Havisham. By 1928 she had, according to Table Talk, Melbourne’s society bible, become Mrs William D Hunter.
But in my opinion, that is not the most extraordinary thing that happened in Luxton Place, Hawksburn. Two decades on, the shop would be a milk bar, and surely the only one in Melbourne run by a Japanese and Anglo couple, the Kuramotos, Alan and Edna. Alan Kuramoto’s father had lived in Malvern Rd, selling koi goldfish from ponds in his garden andm according to his newspaper ad, “Japanese midget”, i.e. bonsai trees. Edna Kuramoto (née Dawson) was a strikingly beautiful and elegant woman, who clearly didn’t care what anyone thought about what she wanted. There’s a photo of her in the Chinese Museum photo collection, lighting a cigarette for Charlie Hoong, the then “mayor of Chinatown”. The pure poise of it!
Before the milkbar, Alan was a boxer, training at Fullalove’s boxing gym in Lonsdale St, where visiting American Black and Thai boxers trained, prevailing attitudes suspended in a sort of racial temporary autonomous zone, only to return in the publicity as the “Thai Fly” faced various “Great White Hopes”. Boxing was just too much damn fun to let the defence of empire get in the way. Alan went from amateur to professional in the early 1940s before, er, events cut his career short.
By then Hawksburn, as Hawksburn, was almost gone. Tens of thousands of students were educated between the brown walls of its very Victorianly Victorian high school, now Leonard Joel auctions, few of them from Hawksburn, and that kept the name alive. Earlier, it had seen the founding of the Try Society, a network of boys’ reform clubs, which provided Melbourne’s “newsboys”, the newspaper sellers — it’s possibly why they operated as a de facto gang for decades.
Car mobility killed, or almost, Melbourne’s ‘burbadoons, Hawksburn and Cremorne, Travancore and Tally-Ho, Graythorn, Yarraberg, Tunstall and others wholly forgotten. And then in the ’60s, someone whacked a great big sign over the top of Williams Rd saying “Hawksburn!” and we were saved, the quiet antique shops, the closed-down hat emporium with a single chair in the window, Lily B staff washing the mannequins at 2 pm (I like to take sandwiches and make an afternoon of it).
Husband cafe, with the best scrambled eggs and passive aggression in Melbourne, the Madisons and Cassidys interning for photographers, getting the lunch orders, the dog walkers and the kaffeeklatsches, the shy teenage first dates in the front window of Fratelli’s pizza, the “Cat and the Moon” drag bar (or something like that) in the ’80s, a shopfront on the other side of the station, which I passed then, on one of those all-night walks of your 20s, or of my 20s, half-filled notebook in an overcoat pocket, beckoned in by a Pierrot-faced bouncer-doorbitch, and did not go, and how might things have been different if I had.
Eighty years earlier, Bertha Kitts’ teenage maidservant had taken a fine hat and blouse of hers to attend a party. She hadn’t meant any harm, she said, at the inevitable court hearing, but she had not come back for two days, suddenly scared at Bertha’s possible reaction. And who is, when reading that court report, not with that girl, wanting for one night the power of a finely made hat to confer its power to create new possibilities, to be someone else for a night?
Bertha asked for no conviction to be recorded. By that act of mercy, the girl in question disappears from history. Bertha herself may have been innocent of the “hat scam” charge. We will never, ever know. And the whole place had at its centre, the Hawksburn (sometimes Prahran) Destructor, a mechanical garbage compressor installed in 1908, which roared and belched dust for blocks around, and was so huge that there is now a public park where it once stood.
But nothing is fully destructed now. All we Hawksburnians passed through this administratively created area, and the miracle of a ‘burb is that if we met up, from across a century, if we had loved the place, we would all have loved the same things about it: the avenues of plane trees, crests touching in the summer, or in winter, their bare branches like shatter lines in the white sky; the neat elegance of the Arts and Crafts station, done under the direction of Victoria Railways architect JF Harding, its exaggeratedly tall chimneys and wide platform roofs with more than a touch of the (yet unknown) Frank Lloyd Wright, the golden light of late afternoon caught in the perfectly composed rose gardens along Surrey Rd.
And these dozen people with their stories are from four dwellings and 20 years, in a suburb of 2,000 houses in the 500 suburbs of two centuries of this one small city. In The White Hotel of DM Thomas (sometime Melbourne resident), the narrator hovers at Baba Yar, and notes that you could have pen in hand here to the end of time and still not record all the lives. But you do not need a real-time massacre to make the point.
Hawksburn is a cut-out square, on one First Peoples’ land, a place made out of money and a draughtsman’s T-square. The sepia river of Trove, the anti-Lethe, remembering all, carries us all, the named and the eternally mysterious, away together. The final public appearance of a Bissland (the Hawksburn Bisslands are the sole Melbourne bearers of the surname) is a library record of Judith Masson Bissland’s Picturebooks to Grow On: An annotated bibliography of non-sexist picturebooks, a 1985 publication of Prahran TAFE, ring-bound and bubble jet printed, it being difficult to imagine a more ‘80s object. Today the shop row holds design offices and, where the tearooms were a century ago, a cafe.
Two years after digging all this out, I cracked, broke the “don’t leave the archive” rule, called the only Kuramoto in the Melbourne White Page, and got Peter, Alan’s son.
“Yeah, apparently Dad was going great guns in the boxing for a while.”
And then, “Forty-two, I guess, what, he was interned?”
“Interned?” A brief puzzled silence. “Oh, no. He joined the Air Force.”
“He joined the Air Force?”
“He used his mother’s name, Young.”
“And after being the only Japanese-Australian in the Air Force, he…”
Guy Rundle is correspondent-at-large for Crikey. He is also an associate editor at Arena Quarterly and contributes to a variety of publications in Australia and the United Kingdom.
The modern Labor party is about managing, not banning, capitalism.
This article is an instalment in a new series, Punted, on the government’s failure to reform gambling advertising.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, in 2022 around three-quarters of Australians had gambled in the previous 12 months and just under 40% gambled at least weekly. It’s a predominantly male habit: 80% of men compared to two-thirds of women had gambled in the previous year, more than twice as many men had engaged in sports gambling compared to women, and the number of men who gambled on animal racing was around 70% higher than women.
Those aren’t the most frequent forms of gambling — nor are poker machines (40% of men and 28% of women had played them in the past year). Lotteries and scratchies were by far the most common forms of gambling in Australia (70% of men, 59% of women). Part of that is presumably the widespread use of scratchies as gifts; no Christmas is complete without some distant relative gifting one a small card that requires a coin — once a plentiful object, now vanishingly rare — to unmask that one may have won $10.
The scratchie is the purest, most disposable form of gambling. Unlike sports gambling, where punters believe they can influence their chances of success with detailed knowledge of the contest — that is, corporations have monetised people’s passion for a sporting endeavour — and unlike poker machines, where one must physically visit a venue to lose money, a scratchie is simple: it’s pure luck, reduced to a form small enough and portable enough to fit inside a Christmas card.
Buying a scratchie or a lottery ticket is, primarily, buying a personal service. The consumer is purchasing the experience of having, for a few moments at least, a hope of a material improvement in their life, however remote. Gambling offers the hope of a cheat code for modern capitalism: instead of slaving away at a pointless, precarious job to pay off first your education debts, then your housing debt (if you’re lucky enough to have one), and then the cost of raising children to do the same thing as you, you can buy a chance to escape that Sisyphean ordeal.
Capitalism, as always, effectively monetises even the desire to escape capitalism. Football codes, once the preserve of suburban tribal rituals that offered communitarian connection and a weekend break from working-class drudgery, must now be professional, preferably global branding exercises, with fans encouraged not merely to watch the match but buy the (multiple, to maximise revenue) jerseys, download the app and wager on match outcomes with their mates. Gambling addiction is perfectly understandable, given it offers the same momentary escape from the banalities of 21st-century capitalist life as drugs.
In its own way, in the co-option of the desire for something outside the confines of the capitalist economy into just another way to take our money, boiled down into a single brief sugar-hit of hope, gambling is the purest form of capitalism, an enterprise that thrives best when it can both generate the problem and sell the solution, preferably in handy portable form.
That it is the big sporting codes and the commercial media that stand in the way of bans on gambling advertising thus makes perfect sense. The football codes are giant corporate edifices erected on the ruins of working-class community sentiment, like a flash, corporate-named and corporate box-filled stadium put up where an old shed used to be (“offering the very best in amenity that spectators have come to expect for their event dollar”).
The commercial media offer the faded memory of entertainment and journalism in exchange for sufficient consumer attention that gullible advertisers will pay to access it. That was once a potent capitalist exchange, now rapidly being replaced by a much purer form of personal advertising enabled by internet searches and revealed online preference — advertising-by-aerial-spraying replaced by direct injection into the decision-making parts of the brain. Like the addict bereft of any other meaning in their lives, the now-dying television broadcasters are hooked on gambling as the only thing between them and oblivion.
That Labor looks likely to offer nothing beyond merely managing the problem of gambling advertising also makes sense. This is a managerialist government, offering better management of capitalism as its defining characteristic, convinced that voters alienated by thirty years of neoliberal policymaking will back a government that promises to do a better job of making capitalism work for them, even as the traditional advocates of markets on the other side of politics abandon economic liberalism.
That’s why the Coalition was ahead of Labor in calling for a ban on gambling ads, and why over a year later the government is still tangled up trying to accommodate the commercial media, for the same reason that the Coalition embraced break-up powers for big retailers while Labor dismissed them as a Stalinist fantasy. Under Labor, capitalism is to be managed, not banned and broken up.
Bernard Keane is Crikey's political editor. Before that he was Crikey's Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan (Image: AAP/Joel Carrett)
Another government has caved to shock jocks and tabloids and failed to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility.
Fear is the key. With immigration, it’s the fear of being swamped by teeming millions of the desperately unmoored. With youth crime, it is the spectre of the cold-eyed devil child, coming through your window to murder you in your sleep.
The Victorian government has just dogged its promise to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility in the state from 10 to 14. It has caved in to pressure from the scientists of talkback radio and the social engineers at the Herald Sun, stoking two of the most primal aspects of the general fear people feel about crime — that it is always rising, and that lawless children are out of control.
The minimum age refers to the age below which a child cannot be charged with a crime because the law presumes on an absolute basis that they are incapable of forming criminal intent (that is, they don’t have a sufficient grasp of the difference between right and wrong to be able to consciously decide that they want to commit a crime).
The dividing line is, of course, arbitrary. You might be surprised to learn that, for example, in NSW it’s only been 10 since 1987; before that, children as young as eight could be prosecuted.
Above 10, the common law has long imposed a qualification, called doli incapax, which presumes that children under 14 cannot commit a crime; however, the presumption can be rebutted in any particular case by evidence that the child really did know what they were doing was seriously wrong.
Across Australia, all states have the minimum age at 10, whereas in the ACT and NT it is currently 12. Among advanced nations, these ages are low (no, I don’t count the USA as an advanced civilisation in this context).
The campaign to raise the age to 14 has been gaining traction for some years. So far success has been limited: the ACT legislated in 2023 to increase its age to 12 immediately and to 14 in 2025 (with a reservation that, for some very serious violent crimes, children aged 12 to 13 can still be charged). The Northern Territory also legislated in 2023 to go up to 12 but no further.
Otherwise, Tasmania’s government published its commitment last year to increase the age to 14, but not until 2029. The announcement has since been quietly removed from government websites, so it’s probably dead.
Internationally, countries go in all directions on this issue. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child treats 14 as the minimum acceptable level and has called on Australia to conform. UNICEF holds the same view, while the European Network of Children’s Ombudspersons advocates a progressive increase to ultimately exclude all children (below 18) from the criminal justice system.
The Australian Human Rights Commission reported in 2019 that 14 should be the minimum standard, citing widespread research outcomes in support.
The arguments for not criminalising wrongdoing by children are well-rehearsed and based on solid data. Largely they fall into three categories: the developmental point that children’s brains are still maturing and they lack capacity to properly engage with a system designed to punish adults, so it is inappropriate and pointless to treat them like adults; the fact that criminally punishing children is far more likely to turn them into lifelong criminals than achieve any positive result; and the over-representation of children from disadvantaged backgrounds in juvenile justice — in Australia, with graphic obviousness, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
Here’s a simple, incontrovertible fact: across Australia, Indigenous children are 24 times more likely than the average to be in detention.
It’s almost tedious to recite the evidence, however, because there is so much and it’s been known for decades. It provides unqualified, unanswerable support to the cause for lifting the minimum age, but it makes no practical difference.
That is because you can’t beat the fear, and Australia is blessed with an abundance of prophets of fear.
Last month, Queensland LNP leader David Crisafulli announced his party’s youth crime policy for the upcoming state election, with the catchy title “adult crime, adult time”. His policy theory: there is a “generation of repeat untouchables” who need to be stamped out, and the way to do it is to lock them up forever. Literally: in Queensland, the sentence for murder is mandatory life (minimum 20 years without parole), and Crisafulli wants that applied to children who commit murder too, even if they’re as young as 10.
As Queensland’s Human Rights Commissioner pointed out, the majority of children affected will be Indigenous. He warned that such a policy would put the state’s “international reputation as a modern democracy at stake”.
All music to the ears of the master of fear, Peter Dutton. Speaking at the LNP conference, he claimed that “crime, as we know, and as we live every day, it is through the roof.” He fully supports the notion of treating children like adults. Despite this being a state issue, he has vowed to keep the age of criminal responsibility at 10.
“They’re taking photos of elderly women and people who are scared in their homes,” said Dutton, squarely erecting the bogeyman of soulless child criminals to join his collection of mythical grotesques, alongside African crime gangs, Muslim politicians, the entire population of Lebanon and anyone who’s ever been to Gaza.
In this climate of fear, rational evidence-based policy has a hard road. In the meantime, suffer the little children some more.
Michael Bradley is a freelance writer and managing partner at Sydney firm Marque Lawyers, which was created in 2008 with the singular ambition of completely changing the way law is practised.
Former foreign minister Gareth Evanswrites: You missed a few PJK classics, as I recorded in this paragraph extracted from my book, Incorrigible Optimist: A Political Memoir. I think you’ll agree that the last on my list has a particular claim to immortality.
“Even some of his cruellest lines had a certain wit and elegance about them. Think of his description of Malcolm Fraser in 1982 as an ‘Easter Island statue with an arse full of razor blades’; or his response to Andrew Peacock returning as Liberal leader in 1989, ‘Can a soufflé rise twice?’; or his ‘Because I want to do you slowly’ response to John Hewson asking him in 1992 why he would not call an early election; or his dazzling extended riff responding to John Howard’s claim that the 1950s was a golden age, suggesting that Howard’s, and Hewson’s, proper place was in a museum alongside the other icons of that age ‘the Morphy Richards toaster, the Qualcast mower… and the AWA radiogram’.
In a line which, sadly, does not seem to have made its way onto the public record, I remember Paul also once describing, I think, John Howard — although it could have been any of a number of other Tories — as having “all the charm of a used suppository”.
He has been, and will remain, a hard act to follow.
Linda Mottram writes: Another that Keating lobbed at Howard during the 1996 election campaign: “Soon he’ll be offering us a free set of steak knives.”
Hector Cat writes: On a rehashed opposition policy: “Like a dog returning to its vomit.”
PJ writes: Question Time and in response to opposition leader Alexander Downer raising suspicions over the Prime Minister’s purchase of an expensive property in Woollahra. “The opposition leader believes only people born in large houses should live in them.” Boom.
Stephen Graves writes: One great Keating quote, though not a sledge, was said to John Button after a cabinet meeting that focused on major changes to the economy. Button confessed to being somewhat daunted by it all and Keating said, “Look, John, we’ve scrambled the big egg and we’ve just got to get it on the plate.” Brilliant.
John Robinson writes: “Unrepresentative swill…” should be on the list.
Mark Freeman writes: Desiccated coconut is priceless. It’s both nonsensical (desiccated coconut is little pieces) but totally right for a little coconut head like Howard. I still call Howard by that name.
Linda Raymond writes: Surely the use of Scott Morrison as a witness for the Reynolds defamation case against Higgins is the exemplar of an own goal? Every word he utters — right down to the most minor parts of speech — requires detailed fact-checking. Unless the defence counsel is so overwhelmed by having to cross-examine an ex-prime minister that they descend into a meaningless soft-pedal, it will be a popcorn moment in Australia’s legal history.
As for Reynolds, pleading the victim not only reveals her complete lack of insight and compassion, but also underlines why she was a “valued minister” in the Coalition government. Hubris, ego and dog-eat-dog ethics are the hallmarks of their policies and the individuals themselves.
What a thoroughly stupid, money- and time-wasting exercise Reynolds has undertaken. I hope both she and Morrison get the public pasting they both deserve.
Bill Robinson writes: It never ends, does it? Morrison making himself the martyr in doing God’s work.
His legacy is a litany of lies, misrepresentations, self-pity, delusional beliefs and the complete inability to self-examine. He leaves behind a trail of wreckage and is possibly the main cause of the current disenchantment of the populace with politicians.
Margaret Callinan writes: How sick am I of Scott Morrison’s sob stories? Let’s put it this way: there’s been recent talk of possible jail time for public servants over robodebt. From all that’s come to light it seems that would be appropriate in some cases, but if a single public servant is jailed before Morrison, an injustice as big as robotdebt will have been committed.
The competition is fierce but, for me, Morrison is the most disgusting person Australia has had as Prime Minister, causing harm everywhere he went and to everything he touched … from Robodebt, to AUKUS, to coal in Parliament, to telling women they should be thankful not to be shot when they marched in the streets. How long a list did you want?
The ego, the narcissism, the barefaced lying, the hypocrisy, the self pity… I never want to hear from him, or of him, ever again!
This article was written by a selection of Crikey readers. Letters may have been edited for length and clarity. If you’re pleased, peed off or piqued, get it off your chest by writing to letters@crikey.com.au.
A man holds the Aboriginal flag outside Parliament House (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)
Critics say the Senate inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and children has failed to make the bold recommendations required, and the RBA will face the House of Representatives today.
‘LITTLE JUSTICE’ FOR INDIGENOUS WOMEN, CHILDREN
The recommendations made in the final report from the Senate inquiry into missing and murdered First Nations women and children have been criticised for not going far enough. Yesterday, the landmark report said there had been “little, if any, justice” for many Indigenous women and children who had been murdered or disappeared, Guardian Australia said.
In response, Greens Senator Dorinda Cox, who introduced the motion for the inquiry and was a member of the committee, said: “These recommendations are weak and are not the bold and courageous action First Nations communities and stakeholders called for when they entrusted us with their courageous stories and shared the pain and the trauma they live with every day,” the AAP reports. Guardian Australia quoted her as saying she was “gutted” by the report as it does not do enough to address the “absolute crisis levels of violence” families and advocates spoke of.
The ABC says the recommendations, which followed two years of public hearings, include a widespread overhaul of police practices, a culturally appropriate and nationally significant way to recognise and remember the First Nations women and children who have been murdered or disappeared, a First Nations commissioner-type role on family violence, and an audit of the Attorney-General’s Department regarding its commitments to First Nations women and children.
National Justice Project chief executive George Newhouse says Parliament “needs to put some teeth into the report and its recommendations”, the AAP added, while Cox told the Senate on Thursday it was a “glaring omission” not to include a recommendation about improving data collection about missing and murdered Indigenous women and children.
Meanwhile, Guardian Australia led overnight with independent MP Zali Steggall’s criticism of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s claim people fleeing Gaza shouldn’t get a visa due to security fears.
In the House of Representatives yesterday, Steggall told the Coalition: “These are families that you are seeking to paint that somehow they’re all terrorists,” the ABC recalls. Guardian Australia says she told Dutton to “stop being racist” before withdrawing the comment. In response, Dutton accused her of being a Greens MP and holding “extreme views”.
Speaking to Guardian Australia later, Steggall doubled down, saying: “To raise an inference that we are to fear anyone coming here, seeking refuge from Gaza, any Palestinians, that there’s an inference they are all terrorists, or they are all linked with Hamas. Now that is, that is a racist inference. If [Dutton] is going to advocate for a policy that comes under the definition of racism, then that inference is there.”
CNN reports more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its war on Hamas following the group’s October 7 attack.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CANBERRA?
There’s a fair amount going on in Canberra today, including (as flagged in yesterday’s Worm), the annual Australia-New Zealand Leaders Meeting, which will see topics such as defence partnerships, deportations and migration discussed when Prime Ministers Anthony Albanese and Chris Luxon meet, the AAP reports. Ahead of raising issues such as the 501 deportees, Luxon declared: “Because we’ve got trust and friendship, we can actually talk about those things and have differences of opinion.”
As the blame game over inflation and interest rates shows no sign of slowing down, the Reserve Bank of Australia governor Michele Bullock and her colleagues are set to face the House of Representatives economics committee this morning. The RBA’s website states Bullock, deputy governor Andrew Hauser, assistant governor (economic) Sarah Hunter, assistant governor (financial markets) Christopher Kent, and assistant governor (financial system) Brad Jones, will all appear from 9:30am AEST. As Phillip Coorey recalls in the AFR (see the Commentariat below), Bullock has received significant attention for the RBA’s recent rates decision and predictions, as well as her comments about the state of the economy and what was causing higher inflation.
Also facing questions in Canberra today will be representatives from Google, Microsoft and Amazon. The big tech spokespeople will appear before the fifth public hearing of the Adopting Artificial Intelligence inquiry. The AAP reports they are due to be questioned about the risks and benefits of adopting AI tools in Australia. The newswire states a representative for Meta will also appear, although they are not currently listed on the public hearings schedule. The Attorney-General’s Department and Department of Industry, Science and Resources are also due to appear. The parliamentary committee is expected to release its findings in September.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
There’s nothing worse than being kept awake by inconsiderate neighbours or loud traffic noises outside your home. Or maybe there is.
Residents in San Francisco have recently been kept awake throughout the night by taxis endlessly honking loudly. Russell Pofsky told The New York Times the honking was happening “like every four seconds and continues and continues”. The other day it started around 5am, he said, causing Pofsky to lie awake feeling “in disbelief of what is actually happening”.
The main issue facing the residents was not the noise though, it was the fact they had no one to tell to be quiet because none of the the taxis actually had a driver. At the end of last month, driverless car company Waymo rented the parking lot for its autonomous vehicles to park in when not making trips or charging, the NYT said. Unfortunately for the residents who lived nearby, the cars were installed with an update that made them beep their horns whenever another car reversed close to them, Sky News said.
Resident Sophia Tung, who set up a livestream of the cars moving around and honking at each other, told The New York Times most of the noise tended to happen around 2am when the driverless cars left and 4:30am when they returned. “I assume that’s sort of like a peak downtime but, you know, it also happens to be my peak sleep time,” she quipped.
Waymo eventually popped up in Tung’s livestream to say the honking problem had been fixed, with the BBC, which has footage of the cars in action, quoting the company as claiming the fix to the vehicles “should keep the noise down for our neighbours moving forward”.
Say What?
I didn’t realise that would also open the door to so much hate, which has frankly been pretty devastating.
Rachael Gunn
The Olympic breaker and academic (also known as Raygun) posted a video on Instagram on Thursday in which she responded to the backlash to her performance at the Paris games. The 36-year-old said she “did take it [the competition] very seriously” and was honoured to have been part of the Australian Olympic team. With regards to “the allegations and misinformation floating around” about her selection, Gunn asked people to refer to the recent statement from the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) chief executive Matt Carroll who defended her selection, the BBC reports. In Crikey Recap below we look at some of those conspiracy theories floating around the internet.
For politicians like Dutton, whose primary selling point is his “strength” (in contrast to the “weak” Anthony Albanese), a calmer, less inflamed civic life is a disaster; peaceful resolutions of conflicts are a body blow. The political temperature must always be high, there must always be a crisis, one with the highest stakes possible, and we must always be threatened, preferably existentially so. They prosper in environments of hostility, anger and terror. They benefit from heightened risks to national security, and from terror attacks, because they believe such conditions suit their political business model — just as those conditions benefit the business models of media companies that make money from inciting grievance, fear and anger in their readerships, and, of course, benefit extremists and terror groups.
Just ask Benjamin Netanyahu — the Israeli prime minister helped fund and legitimise Hamas in order to prevent a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian conflict because his political business model relies on perpetual conflict to keep him in power and out of jail for corruption. Here, Dutton hopes for higher and higher levels of anger, conflict and alienation, and lower and lower levels of national security. At least there’s nothing hypocritical or dishonest about Dutton. There’s a very good reason why the phrase “social cohesion” barely ever passes his lips: it’s anathema to him.
The Liberal Party blame game is in full swing after the “absolute disaster” on Wednesday when the party’s NSW division failed to hand in the nomination paperwork by deadline for several council election contests.
State director Richard Shields is being blamed for the stuff-up and it doesn’t look like he will be long in the job, with NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman declaring on Thursday morning he told Peter Dutton and other senior party members the state director has to go.
Crikey understands some within the party are questioning whether it’s fair Shields should get all the blame; he had apparently delegated responsibility for the council nominations while he focused on byelections for state parliament and preparations for the coming federal election. Others would like to shift responsibility to the state executive members for delaying the process by playing “factional games” and creating a situation no administrator could have helped.
As we noted earlier this week, Olympic breaker and academic Rachael Gunn (or Raygun) is like some sort of top rocking polymorph, twisting and coiling into whatever shape the viewer imposed on her. So it was probably inevitable, after being the personification of courage and cringe, coloniser and beneficiary of the woke mind disease, that she would end up where every overexposed figure does — the subject of a conspiracy theory.
A tweet argues that the Australian Breaking Association was “FOUNDED by Raygun and her husband. Who advised [WorldDance Sport Federation] to partner with this org? Rachael Gunn. Starting to see it? The Australian Breaking Association (AusBreak) runs a competition every year that only has 10-15 women show up, and obviously Rachael ‘wins’ this and her husband becomes the team coach”. Notes swiftly attached pointed out that none of this is true: Neither Gunn nor her husband are founders of the Australian Breaking Association and are not involved in its leadership, something a Google search could quickly reveal.
But that didn’t stop the tweet from getting three million views (we’re amazed Elon Musk didn’t say the news was “very concerning if true”, or something) and forming the basis for a change.org campaign asking Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to “Hold Raygun Rachel Gunn & Anna Mears Accountable for Unethical Conduct Olympic Selection”. At the time of writing, it has nearly 40,000 of the 50,000 signatures it is seeking.
Treasurer might have created a monster with RBA reforms — Phillip Coorey (Australian Financial Review): But the move to eight RBA board meetings a year to deliberate on rates, each followed by the governor giving a press conference, went ahead — and arguably has backfired, in that it has not only elevated the status of Bullock, but enabled her to directly challenge the government’s views.
This has been amplified by her excellence as a communicator. Whereas everyone bar the pointy heads needed a translator when Lowe spoke, Bullock speaks directly to Beryl Stringbag.
This was on full display last week when the bank left rates on hold, ruled out a decrease before Christmas, warned the economy was still too hot, and that it would not hesitate to raise rates again if need be.
Chalmers and Albanese subtly took issue with the assessment that the economy was too hot and that this was being fuelled by state and federal government spending — only to be chastened for doing so.
Liberals’ spectacular council failure could not have been more disastrous — Alexandra Smith (The Sydney Morning Herald): The catastrophic administrative bungle that has plunged the NSW Liberals into chaos will have long-lasting impacts for a party that needs to regroup after a state election loss and win two looming byelections. It will also cause huge reputational damage ahead of the federal election.
The spectacular failure to meet a long-standing deadline to submit candidate nominations could not have been any more disastrous for the Liberals. The northern beaches, once its blue-ribbon heartland, is the worst hit, with not a single Liberal candidate nominated for the local government elections on September 14.
Instead, the party will likely surrender all power in that area to the Your Northern Beaches group, which has become a powerful force under the leadership of popular mayor Michael Regan, who is now the MP for Wakehurst.
Rich James is Crikey'sWorm editor. He was previously news director at BuzzFeed Australia, executive news editor at the i paper, senior editor of EMEA at Storyful, and deputy news editor at Metro.
