Bridget McKenzie is right. We need powers to break up Qantas

Bridget McKenzie might have been told by the Coalition leadership to pull her head in, but she's dead right on divestment powers in aviation.

Life can come at you fast on a sitting morning in Canberra if you’re a shadow minister.

At 5 am yesterday, the Financial Review published an op-ed by shadow infrastructure minister Bridget McKenzie headlined “Is it time to force Qantas to break up with Jetstar?” Within it, the Nationals senator opined:

I am calling upon federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers to include in his competition review a strong focus on aviation competition because of the failure of the aviation white paper to deal with this imperative. The treasurer will have failed another reform opportunity unless he deals with divestiture as a measure to ensure consumers’ interests are protected, and not at the mercy of the entrenched duopoly, and the proper role of divestiture.

Ah, divestiture. The opposition has had quite the time with break-up powers. The Nationals pushed for divestiture powers for big retailers, like supermarket duopoly Coles and Woolworths, earlier this year and were rebuked by Peter Dutton for their efforts — especially given the only other party in the building that backs divestiture powers is the Greens.

But by July, the Nationals had pushed Dutton and his shadow (or, more accurately, invisible) treasurer Angus Taylor to endorse the idea. Some Liberal backbenchers were deeply unhappy with it.

So it was this time around, too. And McKenzie, it seems, hadn’t sought the approval of the leadership for extending divestiture powers to aviation. Before too long, her leader David Littleproud went on Coalition in-house channel Sky News to back away from the idea and confirm it hadn’t been to shadow cabinet. For added measure, Dutton’s office made sure to kill it off.

By 11.45 am, McKenzie had to deliver a humiliating media conference insisting she hadn’t ever supported divestiture powers, merely that it was an option that should be considered. “In my opinion piece in the AFR, that I hope you have all read, I explicitly rule out needing to break up Jetstar and Qantas.”

Of course, she’d done no such thing.

The problem is, McKenzie is right. Divestiture should be on the government’s agenda as a policy tool. Even economists who refuse to accept that price gouging is going on in other sectors of the economy accept that Qantas’ dominance of aviation allows it to rip off customers and deliver poor service with impunity — particularly after the death of Bonza and the administration of Rex.

When Jetstar enters a market, Qantas actually increases its prices, evidence from Treasury has shown. It’s all the evidence needed of the benefits of subjecting airlines to a credible threat of break-up. Contrary to what Littleproud said yesterday, the evidence of the need for divestiture is actually stronger for aviation than for supermarkets.

Limiting break-up powers to particular sectors makes no sense anyway: why not Qantas, if Coles and Woolies and Bunnings face divestment? Why not the banks? Media companies? Energy companies?

The idea enrages big business and their media cheerleaders, and upsets traditional business-friendly Liberals (after all, where will their donations come from if they upset big business?) But once you allow divestiture for one sector, the pressure grows to extend it to wherever consumers are being ripped off by big companies, or where the latter are using their market power to harm smaller companies. And the Coalition, led by the Nationals, has stolen a march on Labor by embracing break-up powers for at least one sector.

It also gives substance to Peter Dutton’s insistence, from the first day of his leadership, that there would be a divide between his party and big business. McKenzie might have lost this particular battle, but the Nationals might yet win the war by making the Coalition a party less dedicated to looking after big business and more focused on delivering for consumers.

Watching big business and its lobbyists have conniptions over it will be a healthy source of entertainment between now and the election.

When everything and everyone is racist, the worst offenders hide in plain sight

In a world where so much is decried as racist, those who traffic in overt bigotry no longer stand out.

This article is an instalment in a new series, “Peter Dutton is racist”, on Dutton’s history of racism and the role racism has played on both sides of politics since the 1970s.

When John Howard called for reductions in immigration from Asian countries in 1988 in the name of social cohesion, the backlash against the then opposition leader was intense. Howard had earlier called for an end to multiculturalism as part of a “One Australia” policy, but his remarks calling for lower Asian immigration unleashed what Nationals frontbencher John Stone called “four or five weeks of absolute turmoil” — turmoil happily exploited by the Hawke government. Moreover, Howard’s stance was criticised by Liberal moderates and state leaders, as well as by former prime minister Malcolm Fraser. By May the following year, Howard had been ousted by Andrew Peacock.

Howard would later repudiate his remarks — he could do little else given the growing number of Chinese Australians in his own electorate. And he learnt that overt racism could be politically toxic. As prime minister, his exploitation of race would be coded and masked, with border control, property rights (to be protected against native title claims that would see people’s backyards seized) and “queue-jumping” refugees targeted instead of direct attacks on ethnic and racial groups. And Howard “understood” those who supported Pauline Hanson — who began her political life attacking Howard’s old target, Asian Australians — even if he didn’t agree with her.

Using other issues as code for racism was by no means novel. It was a standard technique of both Democrats and Republicans outside the South in the United States. If overt racism was acceptable below the Mason-Dixon Line, above it, politicians referred to “law and order”, “property rights” and freedom as code for the maintenance of brutal policing techniques and segregated real estate laws that prevented African Americans from moving out of ghettoes. But Howard elevated the use of racially coded issues to an art form in Australia.

Labor was not beyond learning the same lesson. While Howard had used his reputation for strength on border control as a cover for a high immigration program (prompting then-NSW Labor premier Bob Carr to complain that Sydney was “full”), in early 2013, Julia Gillard campaigned in western Sydney on a commitment to curtail 457 visas — visas that led, Labor argued, to an influx of exploited workers who undermined wages and kept apprentices out of jobs. These days, with both sides conscious of the crucial role of temporary workers in industries plagued by skill shortages, foreign students stand in as the unacceptable immigrant of choice.

As far back as 1988, to be deemed racist was unacceptably toxic. Howard rushed to insist he was nothing of the sort, even as he and his frontbenchers declared they wanted fewer Asian immigrants. But simply insisting one is not racist eventually became insufficient: one must insist one’s accuser is the real racist.

This, too, is an old trope — US civil rights legislation in the 1960s prompted not just opposition from segregationists but complaints about the lack of rights for white people, often phrased in terms like “victims’ rights” and property rights. Hanson has for several decades attacked Indigenous policies as discriminatory against white Australians, but the trope has gone mainstream over the past 10 years, with anything that could be labelled as some form of “special treatment” for Indigenous communities portrayed as a form of reverse racism or “divisive”.

An Indigenous Voice to Parliament was giving Indigenous peoples something white Australians didn’t have, and was thus racist, argued No supporters. In fact, any recognition at all of Indigenous peoples was racist, some argued. Any attempt to even discuss Indigenous disadvantage was racist — during the Voice campaign, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price argued that Indigenous peoples only got benefits from dispossession and colonisation, and there should be no separate policies for them.

The cheapening of the charge of racism isn’t confined to Indigenous issues. Tony Abbott and the Murdoch press accused Labor of racism in refusing to support Abbott’s now-forgotten free trade agreement with China (more recently, of course, Labor has been accused of being not Sinophobic enough). While he happily denounced Labor senator Sam Dastyari as “Shanghai Sam”, Scott Morrison accused Labor of racism in targeting Liberal MP Gladys Liu.

Nor is it confined to the right. While rightly keen to draw attention to institutional and systemic racism, the Greens have a tendency to find racism everywhere they look: AUKUS is imperialist, racist and colonialist. The British monarchy is racist. Parliament is racist. Inevitably, the Greens themselves are racist, according to former Green Lidia Thorpe (not to be confused with the time the Minerals Council claimed Bob Brown was xenophobic).

Hamas’ atrocities in October 2023 and Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza and, now, the West Bank, have led to mutual accusations of racism by pro-Palestine and pro-Israel advocates, with the latter terming any criticism of Israel’s actions antisemitic. That charge plays off the undoubted role of antisemitism in some sections of the pro-Palestine movement, just as there are out-and-out racists in the Israeli government and local pro-Israel groups. Labor has suggested the Greens are antisemitic and support violence, while crying foul at Peter Dutton’s claims the government isn’t tough enough on Palestinian refugees fleeing Gaza.

The proliferation of charges of racism thereby dilutes the stigma that once attached to it. In a world where everyone and everything is racist, those who overtly traffic in racism no longer stand out. In the long run, the weaponisation of charges of racism disarms everyone.

Is Peter Dutton racist? 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.

Polling on race: The secret is deniability

A voter’s reason for liking what Peter Dutton says may be racist or xenophobic, but they can easily defend that position in other ways without asking themselves any hard questions. 

This article is an instalment in a new series, “Peter Dutton is racist”, on Dutton’s history of racism and the role racism has played on both sides of politics since the 1970s.

Being too provocative on race issues is a career hazard for new major party candidates — but it’s been a while since a leader took electoral punishment for an approach seen as racially contentious.

John Howard’s 1988 support for reducing Asian immigration levels was followed by an eight-point drop in his already dire Newspoll net satisfaction rating, but didn’t affect the Coalition’s vote share. It did enable the Hawke government to expose splits in the Coalition with a symbolic Parliamentary motion, which probably contributed to Howard being rolled by Andrew Peacock the next year.

Peacock in turn spent much of the 1990 campaign railing against the Multi-Function Polis, a proposed Japanese high-tech planned community. His claim it would be an “enclave” earnt him a front page declaring him a “danger in the Lodge”, but the Coalition lost the election more narrowly than polling was predicting.  

It’s probably a myth that Howard’s handling of the 2001 Tampa incident saved his prime ministership, as the Coalition had been steadily recovering from bad polling earlier in the year anyway. Still, the incident saw a 20-point gain in Howard’s net Newspoll rating (from -10 to +10), the third-largest on record. The Coalition also jumped from about 49% to 52% two-party preferred. The September 11 attacks weeks later made Howard’s Tampa response look prescient, ending the 2001 election as a contest (though Labor in the end did well to avoid losing by more.)

In the current term, opponents hoped Peter Dutton’s opposition to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament would see him punished by voters, but it was never clear why an opposition leader should suffer for opposing a proposal, support for which was already tanking. In fact, the Voice campaign coincided with (and probably helped cause) the end of the long polling honeymoon phases for both Anthony Albanese and his government.    

The latest controversy is Dutton’s call to “pause” accepting Palestinian refugees fleeing Gaza. An Essential poll found 44% supporting Dutton’s call versus 30% opposing it. A Redbridge poll that refers instead to “a proposal for Australia to grant visas to Palestinians fleeing Gaza” had an almost identical result (44% oppose, 32% support).  

One reason Dutton’s approach here has gone down well with voters is deniability. It is easy to say (as Dutton has done using actual polling that still, somehow, occurs in Gaza) that this is not a race thing at all and is a conceivable terror risk issue. A given voter’s reason for liking what Dutton says may be racist or xenophobic, but they can easily defend that position in other ways without asking themselves any hard questions. 

With the Voice, there were plenty of not-obviously-racist arguments out there for voting No, but it also helped the No camp that a lot of Australian voters really are at least a little bit racist. A recent Essential poll with 58% preferring the idea that Indigenous peoples in Australia are disadvantaged because they make bad decisions (albeit in a forced choice against a more complex alternative) created some revulsion among readers, but there is plenty more of such material out there.

Luke Mansillo’s recent PhD thesis presents some disconcerting figures from the 2019 Cooperative Election Study. Only 40% and 47% of respondents firmly rejected the view that economic differences between “Aboriginal and white Australians” were caused by “racial differences in intelligence” and “fundamental genetic differences” respectively. Most respondents thought there was a little or something in these offers. Only around a fifth (23% and 19%) fully rejected explanations that said Aboriginal people lacked will power or did not teach their children necessary values and skills for school. Even fewer thought educational barriers (14%) or discrimination (17%) explained “a great deal”. 

No wonder the initial feelgood support for the Voice peeled itself off. Even had the proposal been less glibly approached or campaigned for, many voters don’t really buy that the gap in Indigenous outcomes could ever be closed that much by structural solutions, let alone by talking about them.  

Immigration-related polling often seems to suggest high xenophobia, but polls in this area are almost always marred by bad question design. For instance, recent polls regarding post-COVID compensatory increases often fail to state that immediate post-COVID levels are unlikely to be permanent, and hence can scare the voter into a negative response. 

There is also a risk of voters jumping at red-meat talkback slogans. A plurality of voters will often say that immigration is too high, but are they comparing a level they know about with a considered ideal, or are they just repeating a slogan because they are concerned about specific perceived negatives of immigration? For these reasons high-quality pollsters are often reluctant to explore the subject, and nuanced questioning is required.  

Is Peter Dutton racist? 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.

Macron’s new PM takes French politics from emergency to farce

History may in fact remember Macron as a handmaiden to the far-right.

September always lands with a thump in France. It’s la rentrée, or the great return: back-to-school on steroids. All that which has been suspended in the languorous days of July and August — when seemingly the whole country turns off the lights, closes the shutters and retreats to the beach or the mountains — is back with a vengeance. Bills are due, the commute is back on, workloads are onerous, bank are accounts empty, social calendars are unmanageably full. 

But in 2024, la rentrée hangover is worse than ever. Last night, the Olympics and Paralympics came to a close in a burst of fireworks over the Stade de France. Paris pulled off both games with serious panache, enchanting the world with astonishing venues, superhuman feats and the odd dancing clitoris. The end of the games coincided with the end of the halcyon fever dream that gripped the country over summer — one in which the far-right might actually be beaten.

In snap parliamentary elections in June and July, in which the National Rally came within touching distance of real political power for the first time, a coalition of left-wing parties shocked the country by finishing first, though short of a majority. And for once, cutting through the relief of stuffing the neofascist jack-in-the-box Marine Le Pen back into her container was a strange hope there might be a genuine alternative to her politics of hate and the milquetoast neoliberal technocracy we have had since Macron won the 2017 presidency. Some were even backing the googly-eyed anthropomorphised headwear-meets-sex-organ mascot for PM.

But after two months of a caretaker government and an “Olympic truce” — during which we were all only too happy to think about anything other than politics — Macron, who had called the elections in the first place to seek “clarity” from French voters, announced his pick for the prime minister of his new government: former Brexit negotiator, government minister and stalwart of the traditional right, Michel Barnier. 

The left coalition could certainly have played the situation more cannily. The members of the New Popular Front, which comprises the traditional left, the greens, the radical left and the communists, went into the parliamentary elections without a prime ministerial candidate, presumably because these erstwhile political foes couldn’t agree on who it should be. After their shock first-place finish, they took more than two weeks to finally decide on one, the little-known civil servant Lucie Castets.

We do not know whether Castets would have made a good prime minister because Macron never seriously considered her. He invited her to the Élysée Palace only to dismiss her candidacy, claiming a left-coalition-led government would immediately fall in a no-confidence vote in Parliament — probably true, because few in Parliament will work with the radical left France Unbowed party, the largest component of the New Popular Front.

Macron briefly flirted with the idea of appointing a former grandee from the traditional-left Socialists, but ended up plumping for Barnier, whose party, the Republicans, finished last of all the major players in the summer elections. His government will not fall immediately, because it will enjoy the support of the National Rally. In other words, in refusing to work with the left, Macron has turned the far right into kingmakers. (The New Popular Front was characterised by many politicians over the summer as too riven with antisemitism to work with. For Macron and Barnier, the party founded by a former member of the SS Waffen, whose candidates were actual Nazis, was apparently fine.) 

After the horror and promise of the elections, the new government was supposed to be a new dawn for a political landscape that has been riven with division, uncertainty and disenchantment bordering on nihilism for the best part of a decade. It was hoped in some quarters that a prime minister from the left could put a stop to Macron governing essentially by fiat, pushing through unpopular policies like the recent retirement reforms without parliamentary approval, using a constitutional power known as Article 49.3. Instead, France’s new headteacher, at least for the duration of the back-to-school period, is yet another conservative technocrat, now with the added frisson of enjoying the backing of the same far-right many of us spent the warmer months striving to defeat. 

Again, our political vocabulary fails us: Barnier, due to not being from a party with a rich tradition of Holocaust denial, is described as “centre-right”, while Macron and his party claim with diminishing credibility to occupy the centre. But it is not a centrist position to advocate for a moratorium on immigration, as Barnier did when he was running to be the Republican presidential candidate in 2022. This is the politics of the mad Brexiteer Nigel Farage, Barnier’s supposed foe, and or Geert Wilders, under whose aegis the current Dutch government operates. Meanwhile, the Macron government’s immigration bill from 2023 was sufficiently hostile for Le Pen to claim it as a victory. This is a centre that has not held. 

Macron’s merry political gamble to try to reset Parliament to see if it came out more to his liking has left him with a prime minister who looks like many of those who came before him — though at 73 he is just shy of 40 years older than outgoing PM Gabriel Attal. It has also left France with a record 126 National Rally deputies in Parliament, which is what allows them to play kingmaker in the first place.

This summer, the far right came the closest it ever has to real political power in France, and once again, voters banded together to deny them that opportunity. The largest proportion of them supported the left. After an election campaign that was genuinely terrifying for a great number of people in this country and several months of political horse-trading, we have ended up with a prime minister whose party holds the smallest number of seats in Parliament, who wants to stop immigration and who serves at the pleasure of Marine Le Pen. 

Since 2017, Macron has defined his presidency as representing the sensible alternative to the existential threat posed by the far right. History may remember him as its handmaiden.

Data breaches, leaks and fake IDs: Why teen social media bans could impact all ages

There's no shortage of reasons the government's proposed age limit on social media should make you nervous.

The government plans to introduce legislation to enforce a minimum age for access to social media, according to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. It’s all a little vague at this point — no age limit has been flagged and won’t be until a trial of “age-verification technology” has been completed.

The government getting access to yet more personal information? What could go wrong? Oh, that’s right, the following could go wrong:

Data breaches a-plenty

Government data breaches, hacks and just plain screw-ups with personal data have peppered the past decade in Australia. Off the top of our heads:

• In 2014 information on the personal details of nearly 10,000 asylum seekers and other people in immigration detention was accidentally embedded in data available on the website of what was then the Department of Immigration.
• In 2016 there was the farrago of the census, with a Senate inquiry dragging the Australian Bureau of Statistics for its disregard for privacy and lack of transparency.
• In 2017 the Department of Social Services notified current and former employees that the department’s credit card management system had been compromised, exposing more than a decade’s worth of personal information. This included credit card details, employee names, work emails, system passwords, Australian government service numbers and more.
• In 2017 Medicare was subject to a major breach, which the then responsible minister Alan Tudge claimed was the result of “traditional criminal activity” rather than a “cyber attack”.
• In 2022 NDIS participants saw a “large volume” of their sensitive data hacked and posted on the deep web. 

The companies that deal in age verification have also shown themselves to be vulnerable to attack. 404 Media revealed earlier this year that the company AU10TIX — which verifies user identities for TikTok, Uber and X (including, at times, by processing photographs of users and their driver’s licenses) — exposed a set of administrative credentials online for more than a year, which could have allowed hackers access to that data.

Politicking

Of course, the above examples are just old-fashioned mistakes. As Guardian Australia journalist Josh Taylor pointed out regarding the census in 2016, it doesn’t take into account what a future government might do with greater access to our personal data.

The story of blogger and welfare recipient Andie Fox leaps to mind. In 2017 she published a comment piece with The Canberra Times detailing her experiences of robodebt. The office of then human services minister Tudge promptly gave Fox’s personal information to Canberra Times journalist Paul Malone, which formed the basis of an article refuting Fox’s piece. The Australian Federal Police declined to investigate the leak.

Trickery

If we accept that age-based social media bans are desirable, as Crikey‘s Cam Wilson demonstrated, facial recognition software is vulnerable to being tricked. Wilson was able to convince Yoti’s online demo of its age-estimation technology that a stock image of a 10-year-old was old enough to purchase a knife using an aging filter.

I tricked a selfie AI age-verification demo into letting a child ‘buy’ a knife

Russian propaganda talking points would be very familiar to News Corp audiences

The Murdoch media has an enormous impact on Australian political discourse. But where are its ideas coming from?

The US Department of Justice indictments in Russia’s wryly dubbed “Good Old USA” misinformation rollout gave us a sudden, shocking look inside the continually changing world of fake news and how it is successfully reshaping the global political narrative, including here in Australia.

It’s not so much the scale of the disinformation. Or even the reveal that (unwittingly, they protest) right-wing YouTubers were being paid to promote Russian talking points. It’s the success the campaign has had in polluting a mainstream political discourse with racism and divisive invective across the world.

The key documents released by the US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigations include the long-expected reports of troll farms and bot marshalling in a worldwide “social media influencers network” that includes fake accounts across US states, France, Germany and other unnamed countries, and paid social media advertisements fed by a Moscow-based “text factory” and daily meme creation.

But the biggest shock has been the news that in a flashback to the 1930s, “Russian gold” (about US$10 million) was used to astro-turf America’s leading right-wing YouTube network, Tenet Media, a self-proclaimed “supergroup” of high-profile commentators like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin and Lauren Southern. 

They were among a group of 2,800 social media influencers identified by Russia. They spanned 81 countries and included television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think tank analysts, veterans, professors and comedians. Russia was also monitoring another list of over 1,900 “anti-influencers” (assumed to be opposed to Russian interests) from 52 countries. 

“We need influencers!” read a note to one of the meetings (according to an FBI footnote). “A lot of them and everywhere. We are ready to wine and dine them.”

Most of the Tenet crew have denied knowing anything about the substantial Russian money they were getting — not foreign agents, apparently, simply, um, unobservant, rhyming Humbert Wolfe for the new century:

“You cannot hope to bribe or twist,

Thank God! the British journalist. 

But, seeing what the man will do

unbribed, there’s no occasion to.”

According to Russian planning documents released by the FBI, the YouTube payments were a key part of a “Guerilla Media Campaign” to racialise economic and social discontent around eight talking points, such as “risk of job loss for white Americans”, “privileges for people of colour, perverts and disabled” and “threat of crime coming from people of colour and immigrants” (sounds like a daily news list for a few Australian media outlets).

Before Tenet Media shut down after the DOJ indictments (and before YouTube took all posts down from its platform) ,Wired magazine applied word counts in closed captioning on the Tenet videos to test whether the Russians were getting value for money. 

They found “the influencers stress[ed] highly divisive culture war topics in the videos, which carried titles like ‘Trans Widows Are a Thing and It’s Getting OUT OF HAND’ and ‘Race Is Biological But Gender Isn’t???’ The word ‘trans’ appears 152 times, and ‘transgender’ 98.“

The personalities tagged as receiving Russian money would be familiar to Australia’s Sky News after dark audience. 

Here’s Rubin early this year, for example, all chummy with Paul Murray in a semi-regular commentary about the US elections. And here’s Johnson with Piers Morgan puffing a “cool” Donald Trump. Southern had a stint as a Sky News contributor while living in Australia in early COVID times.

Little wonder media critics have been quick to point out that Murdoch family media personalities are at the centre of amplifying the talking points and catch phrases from the Russian-funded media, laundering them into everyday political conversation.

Indeed, the talking points would be recognisable to anyone with even the faintest awareness of Australia’s News Corp-dominated political discourse. After Fox reported on the list of Russian propaganda topics, Mediaite founding editor Colby Hall wrote: “Any viewer of Fox News opinion shows over the past few years will immediately recognise that the topics cited and neatly provided in on-screen graphic form are precisely the same ones featured in an everyday rundown on most Fox News shows.” 

Sometimes, it seems, Fox and News Corp aren’t enough. As part of the campaign, Russia created fake “doppelganger” pages — just like the real thing only more so! Links to pages like Fox were posted on social media with headlines like: “Zelenskyy loses in war and diplomacy”.

We are past the more innocent days when fake news spread through Facebook’s micro-targeting, shifting votes with viral memes about Clinton emails. Now, we’re getting a well-funded and more sophisticated play that seeks to set political narratives in stone and fight culture wars at a global scale.

‘Borderline mental’: News Corp journos slam company’s AI crackdown on popular transcription service

Exclusive: News Corp has tracked its journalists using Otter.ai and then blocked the service, after evaluating the company's AI use.

News Corp Australia has blocked journalists from using the popular transcription service Otter.ai, notifying staff identified using the service through their work email accounts that it was blocking access by September 13. 

Otter.ai automatically transcribes recorded audio and uses AI to assist in the accuracy of its transcription. It is one of the most popular transcription apps on the market, particularly among journalists. 

In an internal email sent to affected staff on September 5, seen by Crikey, News Corp chief technology officer Julian Delany said News Corp was “setting the highest standard for ethical use of AI in our business”. 

Delany said the company had recently undertaken “evaluation work” that includes “assessing existing AI applications and tool deployments found across NCA (News Corp Australia) that currently are not approved for use”. The email requested staff remove the application and said they would not be able to use the service on their News Corp devices once it was blocked.

Delany did not provide staff with an alternative, approved transcription option.

Crikey asked Delany whether News Corp Australia had consulted journalists before notifying them that Otter.ai was no longer approved for use, or whether management was aware of the ubiquity of services like Otter.ai. Crikey also asked what the prevalence of the use of Otter.ai specifically was at News Corp Australia, according to the company’s review, whether it would be providing an alternative service, and whether there would be any impacts on journalists who (as is understood to be common practice) continued to use Otter.ai in their line of work but through personal accounts and devices. 

Delany did not respond for comment. 

News Corp journalists who spoke to Crikey on the condition of anonymity expressed their dismay at the announcement, with one calling the decision “borderline mental”. 

“It is a product integral in workflow,” one said.

Another journalist told Crikey of their “frustration” at the position they had been put in by management, with no alternative yet made clear to staff. 

“If they had said, ‘Go use this instead,’ we’d be sweet,” they said.

News Corp announced a deal in May with artificial intelligence giant OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. It will give OpenAI’s generative AI platforms (including ChatGPT) the licence to access content from News Corp publications, including the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier Mail, The Advertiser, The Australian and news.com.au.

In July, News Corp Australia executive chair Michael Miller said media companies shouldn’t be “close-minded to working with AI companies”, defending the deal at the National Press Club in June. 

It is a divergence from the likes of The New York Times, which in December 2023 joined several other newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and The Denver Post, in suing OpenAI, accusing the company of using copyrighted articles without permission to train and feed their generative AI products. An OpenAI statement in January 2024 claimed the case was “without merit”. The case continues.

Has The Daily Telegraph abandoned its ‘coward attack’ campaign after a few weeks?

The Daily Telegraph appears to have been inconsistent in its promise to rebrand domestic violence matters as 'coward attacks'.

Six weeks ago News Corp’s The Daily Telegraph unveiled a new campaign — involving the NSW premier and police commissioner — that declared it would be referring to any alleged act of domestic violence as a “coward attack”, where the law permitted. 

“The assailants are really, by definition, the smallest of men. Our language should reflect that,” wrote editor Ben English and weekend editor Anna Caldwell in a July 12 editorial. 

An associated exclusive published that day quoted Police Commissioner Karen Webb referring to perpetrators as “cowards” who “have a choice” and were “choosing violence”. The piece also quoted NSW Premier Chris Minns calling the Sydney tabloid “100% right” to call out “all those cowards that have committed domestic violence particularly against women and children”.

“I think that that language is long overdue,” he said.

On July 12, English also promoted the piece on LinkedIn alongside a video featuring several Daily Telegraph local and court reporters retelling their experiences covering domestic violence in the NSW courts. 

Despite the high-profile campaign launch, however, the publication has been less committed to following through. A search undertaken by Crikey on September 9 found that since July 12, 28 articles could be found for the keywords “domestic violence” under The Daily Telegraph brand, compared to just five for “coward attack”.

Of those 28 articles, 16 referred to specific offenders; only one mentioned The Daily Telegraph’s campaign to rebrand offenders as “cowards” in the copy, while another used the word “coward” in the headline.

Of the 12 articles that didn’t refer to specific offenders, one referred directly to stalkers as “cowards”, and another to “cowardly” acts of domestic violence. One headline referred to “cowards”, while another mentioned cowards in the headline and detailed The Telegraph’s campaign.

Only one article found in the search, written by Telegraph weekend chief of staff Jake McCallum, was consistent in its reference to The Telegraph’s campaign and the terms “coward attack” and “coward assault”.

Dr Hayley Boxall, a domestic and family violence researcher at the Australian National University, said she had noticed The Daily Telegraph had been “a bit inconsistent in their terminology”. 

Boxall said there was “no evidence to suggest that changing the language in this way is going to make people safer”, despite the campaign having the support of the NSW police commissioner and premier. 

“I think it’s a very ideological kind of decision — and it’s completely understandable because people are angry and they’re frustrated. This year has been such a horrible year for violence against women, and I think that this is a very literal attempt to hold people accountable.” 

Boxall said the extent of the effect of The Daily Telegraph’s new campaign was aesthetics. 

“It might make us feel better in the community, it might make us feel like we’re holding people accountable, but there’s no real expert evidence to suggest it’ll make a difference.” 

When asked whether rebrands of violent crime had been tried before, Boxall said it was the latest in a long line of variously successful attempts. 

“We used to talk about wife-battering for example, but then we started talking about domestic violence, and then we’ve kind of changed that to intimate partner violence. More recently we’ve talked about branding it as domestic abuse to recognise that ‘violence’ makes us often think of physical violence,” she said. 

“This is probably one of the first attempts that I’ve seen of trying to use deliberately shaming language to try and make (domestic violence) perpetrators accountable — we’ve seen it in other areas of criminal behaviour. You can see it with the ‘king hit’. We deliberately changed the language around that to a ‘coward’s punch’ to try and make it more shameful to use these types of behaviours, but there’s no evidence to suggest that it actually works.” 

Indeed, before the beginning of the campaign, the majority of The Daily Telegraph’s use of “coward attack” or similar phrasing was in reference to alcohol-fuelled violence, often at licensed venues, previously described as ‘king hits’. 

Boxall said the approach by The Daily Telegraph was ultimately a “very simplistic way of looking at how we can address crime, and we’ve seen that with domestic and family violence and [other] really serious forms of violence, that just doesn’t really work.” 

Crikey asked editor Ben English several questions, including why the paper had appeared to dwindle in its use of the phrase “coward attack”, what the legal barriers might be as to the use of the term, and whether the paper stood by the premise of the campaign in light of some of the criticisms reflected by Boxall after its launch. He did not respond in time for publication.

If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.

Why ‘pronatalist’ politicians want voters to have more babies

It's not just JD Vance, and it's not just the US. Almost 30% of countries globally now have pronatalist policies — up from 10% in the 1970s.

JD Vance has long been concerned with declining fertility rates.

From decrying “childless cat ladies” to suggesting parents should have more of a say in the democratic process than childless voters, the Republican candidate for vice president of the United States has made the issue a cornerstone of his platform since he launched his political career in 2021.

But Vance is not alone in these views. His stance reflects that of many politicians and thought leaders around the world.

At the global level, we are witnessing the resurgence of a form of coercive pronatalism in the face of declining fertility rates.

From China to Turkey, pronatalism is on the rise

Almost 30% of countries globally now have pronatalist policies — up from 10% in the 1970s.

Two years ago, the Chinese government intensified its volte-face on the one-child policy, introducing pronatalist incentives and discouraging abortion in order to address a declining birth rate.

Recently, Vladimir Putin reinstated the “Mother Heroine” award for Russian women who have 10 or more children.

When German-Turkish footballer Mesut Özil married model Amine Gülse in 2019, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, a witness at the ceremony, urged the couple to have at least four children. (So far, they’ve had two.)

And in 2017, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described the restoration of natural reproduction as a “national cause”.

Others have gotten in on the pronatalist act, too — including father-of-12 Elon Musk, who has posted on X that “a collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far”.

Most recently, three-time winner of the NFL Super Bowl with the Kansas City Chiefs, 28-year old Harrison Butker, made waves in a college commencement address in the US when he praised his wife for leaning into her vocation as a wife, mother and homemaker.

Pronatalists such as Vance, Putin and Orbán see nationalism, motherhood and patriarchy as inextricably linked.

To them, women are constructed as primarily bearers of the nation and carriers of national identity. It is both their responsibility and sacred duty to reproduce.

What’s worrying the pronatalists?

The resurgence of pronatalism comes at a time of declining fertility rates globally.

A 2020 study led by University of Washington researchers projected a global world population of 8.79 billion by 2100 — considerably below previous UN estimates.

To take one example that’s broadly representative of trends across the globe: Ireland’s Total Fertility Rate — that is, the average number of children born to women in their child-bearing years — nosedived from 4.03 in 1965 to 1.5 in 2023.               

While today there are many more women of child-bearing age than there were 60-odd years ago, they’re having fewer children.

Today, many countries fall well below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 — the level at which the population would replace itself in the long run, ignoring migration.

That’s the case in the Global North but also across Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Consider Taiwan’s total fertility rate of 1.11; Aruba’s fertility rate of 1.2; Malaysia’s rate of 1.73; Australia’s rate of about 1.7; India’s total fertility rate of 1.96; and the European Union’s fertility rate of 1.46, to give just a few examples.

Global fertility is projected to dwindle even further over the coming decades.

By 2100, just six countries are predicted to have fertility rates above replacement level.

Fertility rates are also predicted to drop below one child per woman by 2100 in 13 countries, including Bhutan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

The key factor driving this demographic transition is the behaviour of women. It’s been long-established that the more education a woman has, the more likely it is for her to enter and remain in the workforce, and to limit the size of her family. This link was first identified in the industrialised countries of the Global North, but has more recently become a global phenomenon.

There’s another reason falling birth rates tend to alarm governments. The dependency ratio — that is, the number of people in the younger age categories that can support the number of people in the older age categories through taxation, care work, and so on — is altering dramatically as a result.

Traditionally, we think of population as a pyramid structure with lots of people at the base, and progressively fewer as you move to the top. But that structure is now being inverted: low birth rates and low death rates together are combining to create major new challenges for governments.

What about immigration?

One solution to falling birth rates, in some countries, has been to promote immigration. After all, immigrants can help bolster the numbers of working-age people in a host country and also plug labour market gaps in crucial areas such as healthcare, social care, domestic labour, farm work and hospitality.

But ironically, in the context of resurgent nationalism, many countries have become more wary about free movement across borders — seeking to restrict immigration and engaging in repatriation programs.

Indeed, the popularity of pronatalist policies on the far right is in alignment with a vehemently anti-immigrant stance. Their focus is to ensure higher birth rates among the native population only. (Remember Orbán from Hungary? He strongly opposes immigration as a solution to population decline and advocates instead a program of procreative incentivisation to boost the fertility rate.)

These pronatalist and anti-immigration stances are arguably misguided in a couple of ways.

Firstly, there is strong evidence that immigrants boost economic growth and are net contributors to their host societies.

Migrants are usually younger than natives in the receiving country, meaning immigration can help with the dependency ratio and fill job gaps. They create jobs through their entrepreneurialism, and also do jobs that natives are unwilling to do.

What’s more, immigrants can also support population growth in developed countries, as their fertility rate is higher than that of natives.

Secondly, history teaches us that pronatalist policies often have the effect of weaponising childbearing for political ends, and eroding women’s health and reproductive rights in the process.

After WWI, which saw millions of lives lost, many European countries developed pronatalist policies to bolster population. For example, Stalin reversed liberal birth control and abortion rights in the 1930s in favour of promoting multiple births.

Pronatalism, racism and eugenics also lay at the very heart of the Nazi regime. In the Third Reich, German women were actively encouraged to leave the workforce and produce children for the fatherland. 

And the imposition of a strict pronatalist policy by the Ceausescu regime in Romania from 1966, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, had a devastating impact on Romanian women and children.

Through a system of sanctions — including banning of abortion and birth control pills and a celibacy tax — as well as incentives — extra subsidies and rations for each new child born — the regime sought, unsuccessfully in the long term, to increase the population.

The policy underpinned the regime’s aims of maintaining a Romanian majority in multi-ethnic regions, ensuring a supply of young for military purposes and offsetting an aging population. It also resulted in impoverished families placing children whom they could not care for in state orphanages.

Today many countries are again pursuing “reproductive governmentality” and coercive pronatalism. In doing so, they’re seeking to exert social control over the choices made by women in relation to their fertility and their bodily autonomy.

But we know from history that pronatalist policies — especially those aggressively policed by the state — rarely produce the desired impact.

Rather, their unintended consequences produce both a deterioration in the health of women and a diminution in their human and reproductive rights.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

Albanese to announce social media age ban

Labor is planning on introducing a minimum age for access to social media, and Clare O'Neil highlights the 'total despair' of young people trying to find affordable housing.

SOCIAL MEDIA BAN

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will announce today that the government plans to introduce legislation to enforce a minimum age for access to social media, AAP reports. The legislation will be introduced before the next election and will draw on the report by former High Court chief justice Robert French (see yesterday’s Worm). AAP highlights the report, released by the South Australian government at the weekend, includes a draft bill with the legislative framework to ban children under 14 from using social media. It also requires social media companies to get parental consent for 14 and 15-year-olds to use their platforms.

However, the ABC says the federal government won’t commit to an age limit for social media until a trial of age-verification technology is complete. Guardian Australia notes the trial is set to begin its final phase this week. The site also says it understands the federally legislated age could be higher than what is being pursued in SA.

AAP quotes Albanese as saying in remarks released before the announcement: “Parents are worried sick about this. The safety and mental and physical health of our young people is paramount. We are taking this action because enough is enough.”

The Australian highlights SA Premier Peter Malinauskas’ push to set the age limit at 14 in the state, having commissioned French’s report in May. The paper said Malinauskas led the discussion on a social media crackdown in a national cabinet meeting on Friday. AAP quotes the premier as saying: “The evidence shows early access to addictive social media is causing our kids harm. This is no different to cigarettes or alcohol. When a product or service hurts children, governments must act.” Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen has said her government will also restrict children’s access to social media, Guardian Australia notes.

The site recalls Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has previously backed a social media ban for those under 16 and pledged to implement it within 100 days of being in office if he won the next election.

Talking of said election (does a day go by when it isn’t talked about?), the latest Guardian Essential poll shows more voters are blaming the Albanese government for interest rate rises, echoing the polling in the Nine newspapers we flagged yesterday. The latest polling did bring some good news for the government, with the majority of respondents backing the recently announced plan to cap international student enrolments in tertiary education.

HOUSING BLAME GAME

As predicted, the economy remains very much front and centre of political debate, with Housing Minister Clare O’Neil acknowledging on ABC’s Q&A program last night the “total despair” of Australians trying to secure affordable housing. “The thing that scares me most is when I look at how the housing prospects for young people in our country have changed since the 1980s,” she said. O’Neil, who has only been in the job six weeks following Albanese’s reshuffle, said housing affordability “deeply concerns” her and she was worried that “the bank of mum and dad has become almost a normalised part of the experience of buying a home”.

Shadow Housing minister Michael Sukkar, who was also on the show, claimed the government had to take responsibility for the housing crisis and tried to call out what he called an “unedifying display” regarding the back and forth with the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) over high interest rates, the ABC said. “It’s very clear that the government’s mismanagement of the economy, they’re now trying to find a scapegoat for. The truth is that interest rates are going to be higher for longer because of a suite of policies this government has put in place,” he said. O’Neil obviously disagreed and said in a “difficult environment” it was important for the government to be able to “balance things”.

The AFR and The Australian are also keen to highlight problematic themes for the government this morning. The former says analysis from the RBA and market economists shows inflation and higher taxes are eroding household incomes by three times as much as higher interest rates. The paper claims the reported stats undermine Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ previous suggestion high interest rates are “smashing” the economy.

Meanwhile, The Australian highlights Minerals Council chief executive Tania Constable suggesting the government’s industrial relations laws will bring conflict “to every ­workplace, in every industry”.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE…

The father of an autistic boy has tattooed the alphabet on his arm so he can always communicate with his non-speaking son, the BBC reports.

Dan Harris said his son Joshie, 10, relies on technology every day and uses software on an iPad, referred to as a “talker”, to communicate. However, the ever-present fear of the battery running out or an unreliable signal prompted Dan’s decision to get the tattoo so Joshie could always speak to him.

“Joshie doesn’t communicate in a traditional way. He has an iPad that can identify pictures and words and has images of his favourite people and things,” the BBC quoted Dan, from Peterborough in England, as saying.

“We have been in [the] middle of a forest and on a beach where there is no battery in talker and you can imagine the fear when we can’t communicate with him.

“As parents, we go through sadness as we can see he is desperate to communicate something. And now I have this tattoo on my left arm where alphabets are arranged in a way around a square box to help Joshie communicate.”

Dan is the founder of the charity Neurodiversity in Business and has been campaigning around the world on the issue of autism awareness, City A.M. reports. He and Joshie previously secured funding to install 100 communication image boards around Peterborough, the BBC said.

Say What?

Parents want their kids off their phones and on the footy field.

Anthony Albanese

The prime minister said social media was taking children away from real-life experiences, the ABC reports ahead of the government’s social media age restriction announcement.

CRIKEY RECAP

Peter Dutton is racist. Here’s the proof

BERNARD KEANE

Crikey’s series explores Dutton’s history of racism as well as the role racism has played on both sides of politics since the 1970s.

Race and racism have long played a role in Australian politics. Malcolm Fraser was attacked by Labor for extending humanitarian migration to South Vietnamese refugees. John Howard sought to weaponise Asian migration in the 1980s. In the wake of 9/11 and Tampa, the Howard government made a virtue of its tough line on asylum seekers and Australians of Muslim background, while Howard’s refusal to engage with Indigenous peoples came to characterise his prime ministership. The rise of the Islamic State once again saw Australia’s Muslim community targeted by Coalition politicians. The Gillard government made a virtue of its crackdown on temporary migrants.

But Peter Dutton stands out as the most plainly racist Australian political leader since the White Australia policy. Here’s the proof.

Macron’s new PM takes French politics from emergency to farce

MEGAN CLEMENT

Macron’s merry political gamble to try to reset Parliament to see if it came out more to his liking has left him with a prime minister who looks like many of those who came before him — though at 73 he is just shy of 40 years older than outgoing PM Gabriel Attal. It has also left France with a record 126 National Rally deputies in Parliament, which is what allows them to play kingmaker in the first place.

This summer, the far right came the closest it ever has to real political power in France, and once again, voters banded together to deny them that opportunity. The largest proportion of them supported the left. After an election campaign that was genuinely terrifying for a great number of people in this country and several months of political horse-trading, we have ended up with a prime minister whose party holds the smallest number of seats in Parliament, who wants to stop immigration and who serves at the pleasure of Marine Le Pen.

Since 2017, Macron has defined his presidency as representing the sensible alternative to the existential threat posed by the far right. History may remember him as its handmaiden.

How do you make a series about Lachlan Murdoch when he won’t participate? We asked the ABC

CHARLIE LEWIS

Earlier this year, Australian billionaire James Packer had dinner with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. At some point the subject turned to Lachlan Murdoch, the heir to the Murdoch media empire. Trump apparently brightened and said something to the effect of, “Oh yeah, I’d like to get to know Lachlan better.”

This is one of investigative journalist Paddy Manning’s favourite revelations from Making Lachlan Murdoch, the three-part Australian Story exploration of one of Australia’s most powerful people. The exchange also goes some way to explaining why the ABC is dedicating a rare three-episode arc to him: for all his power, and all the publicity that has followed him for most of his life, Lachlan Murdoch remains something of an enigma.

“[Packer’s anecdote] tells you something about the difference between Lachlan and [his father] Rupert,” Manning told Crikey. “Trump has known Rupert for 40 years or more. But Trump didn’t meet Lachlan until 2019, when there was a state dinner for Scott Morrison at the White House. So even Donald Trump wants to understand Lachlan better. To me that said a lot.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

At least 59 dead in Vietnam as Typhoon Yagi triggers landslides, floods (al-Jazeera)

Princess Kate says she has finished cancer chemo treatment (The Washington Post)

Harris and Trump tied in latest US election polls, as Tuesday’s debate nears (The Guardian)

After Georgia shooting, a grief-stricken city seeks solace, and answers (The New York Times) ($)

‘Someone is going to die’: Kerri-Anne Kennerley’s warning on Elle Macpherson’s breast cancer message (The Australian) ($)

Apple debuts iPhone 16 designed for AI (CNN)

THE COMMENTARIAT

The major parties could disappear if pollies and journos don’t tell the truth — Niki Savva (The Sydney Morning Herald): There is no way of knowing exactly what will happen next, only that something will. The aftershocks will continue. There is no law that says political parties must survive. All badly run or led enterprises inevitably collapse. Sometimes it’s desirable. That organisation needs time out to consider its reason for being, to re-examine its values, to reflect on who it is meant to serve.

Realignments have already rendered parties unrecognisable to their creators. The Coalition looks more and more like One Nation, Labor more and more like the Liberals used to, the Greens have morphed into Labor’s old guard left. The teals waft and weave between them all.

[Labor staffer Lachlan] Harris says it’s unrealistic to think Labor or the Liberals can broaden sufficiently to reverse the trend so that they can govern on their own. He predicts minority governments could become the new normal, with majority government still possible, although more as the exception than the rule.

Get a VPN and delete your cookies, Australia’s privacy laws are still lagging behind — Paul Karp (Guardian Australia): The Albanese government has decided to do privacy reform in two tranches. The first bill, likely to go to caucus on Tuesday and be introduced to Parliament on Thursday, would create a right to sue for serious breaches of privacy and implement Labor’s promise to crack down on doxing.

But stakeholders involved in confidential consultations believe that more consumer-friendly measures will be delayed until a second tranche, which is unlikely to be introduced before the next election, due by May 2025.

A children’s online privacy code that recognises the best interests of the child when handling their personal information is believed to be in the first tranche, which would help the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, defend against the charge of a do-nothing bill. But advocates fear ending the small business exemption has been pushed on to the backburner of the second tranche after an avalanche of industry lobbying about how expensive and difficult this would be.