'His work was a soft and comforting relief from most of the day’s news. I cannot remember censoring a single Leunig cartoon and nor would I have censored any of the cartoons that upset his recent editors.'
After 55 years at The Age, Michael Leunig filed his final cartoon for the newspaper last week after he was fired by Nine in what he described as “a throat-cutting exercise”. The popular cartoonist has been declared an Australian Living Treasure, but has also drawn ire over the decades for various controversies including his critique of working mothers who use childcare and taking an anti-vaccination stance.
So should we mourn the axing of Michael Leunig? In today’s Friday Fight, The Saturday Paper’s arts editor Alison Croggon argues in the negative, and the former editor of The Age Michael Smith argues in the affirmative.
The firing of Michael Leunig by The Age is the blow that ends an unparalleled era of world-class cartooning at the paper.
Leunig was one of the Magnificent Seven — a stable of cartoonists who adorned The Age simultaneously in the 1980s and 1990s. The others were the devilish Ron Tandberg, the master draughtsman John Spooner, the incomparable Bruce Petty, the brutal Peter Nicholson, the whimsical Arthur Horner and the social justice warrior Les Tanner. All geniuses. They were the greatest group of cartoonists ever assembled in a daily newspaper anywhere in the world.
I came to realise this when I was a visiting journalism fellow, along with 20 or so other internationals and Americans, at Stanford University in 1986. At the end of the first semester, we were each asked to give a presentation on a distinctive feature of our paper/magazine/television/radio station.
I showed my colleagues the work of the Magnificent Seven. They could not believe that one little paper Down Under could house so many cartoonists, and they raved about their work. Curiously, the cartoonist they lauded least was Tandberg, who was probably the most popular Age cartoonist, providing the most belly laughs for readers. The Americans just didn’t get him.
I learned that many newspapers with bigger circulations than The Age had only a single cartoonist, and many others had none, relying on syndicated cartoons. The Magnificent Seven was one of the reasons The Age, at the time, was repeatedly named as one of the best 20 newspapers in the world by Columbia University in New York.
So yes, we should mourn the loss of Leunig as a symbol of the end of a great era in Australian cartooning.
When I was in the editor’s chair, I never ”edited” Leunig. I just put him in the paper. His work was a soft and comforting relief from most of the day’s news. I cannot remember censoring a single Leunig cartoon and nor would I have censored any of the cartoons that upset his recent editors.
Admittedly, they were mostly the days of Mr Curly, forlorn ducks and gentle social commentary. It was before Leunig sharpened his political focus, particularly against wokeness and noisy interest groups. Leunig’s colleague Tandberg believed he failed if he did not offend someone. Just quietly, so did some of us editors.
Michael once said: “At the heart of any good cartoonist’s work there is an essential mischief and a delight in socially inappropriate expression — a risky flirtation with moral danger, bad taste and cheerful obscenity — and this impulse is often the vital fertilising agent in the conception of what can end up as a wonderful joke.” It was ever thus for Leunig. The difference these days is that too many editors want to put that stuff on the spike.
Cartoonists were an important part of the internal culture and soul of the paper. In the days when most of the 300 or so editorial people worked alongside each other in the newsroom, the final hours before deadline were often a fireworks display of creativity — a great piece of writing would land on the desk, a magnificent picture, a brilliant headline, a breaking story, a spirited debate about the Oxford comma. Discussions with cartoonists would help editors get to the kernel of an issue.
Nicholson would sweat for hours to get his work right, using every minute of his approaching deadline. Tandberg would pace the newsdesk at night looking for fresh stories headed for page one, then draw a cracker on the spot in a few seconds. Editors fretted about balance and fairness, not to mention defamation. Cartoonists were allowed to be outrageous; they had a licence to mock, a permit for mischief.
The melancholy Leunig would stay away from those deadline pressures. Few of his cartoons depended on the news of the day. He would wander into the office in the calmness of the next morning and do some contemplation. They were different times. The times of the rivers of gold, before the disastrous attempted privatisation by Warwick Fairfax, before receivership, recession and the invasion of the internet.
My favourite Leunig cartoon depicted a man and his son in a caravan watching a live telecast of the sunset while the real thing was happening outside their window. It spoke to a regular Leunig theme: the need to appreciate the simple, natural things instead of the distractions and perils of modern life.
Leunig was not everyone’s cup of kombucha. Many found him bewildering, including the editors of our sister paper, The Sydney Morning Herald, who took years to acquire the taste and publish him. Millions more stuck Leunig cartoons on their fridge.
The loss of the last of the Magnificent Seven is another bookmark in the decline of newspapers. They were there…
DING DING DING. MICHAEL SMITH HAS GONE OVER HIS ALLOCATED WORD COUNT.
… in the golden age. The decline of newspapers has run in parallel with the decline in the number of cartoonists employed by the papers. It is a global problem — in the US, the Association for American Editorial Cartoonists estimated fewer than 30 cartoonists held newspaper positions by 2021.
The great era of Australian political cartooning began in Sydney in the 1960s when The Bulletin hired Les Tanner and Bruce Petty. Bill Leak emerged at The Australian. Then the centre of gravity moved to Melbourne with the migration of Tanner and the appearance of Leuning, Tandberg, Nicholson and Spooner. Petty joined in, then Horner, of Colonel Pewter fame, returned from England.
The Age still has a group of journalistic heroes, but the bench is thin and the leadership stumbled when it caused Leunig to react so bitterly — feeling he had been betrayed by the way his departure was announced.
'Like many of his generation, perhaps the most privileged in the history of the Western world, Leunig’s career inscribes an arc from anti-capitalist, individualistic politics to anti-woke warrior.'
After 55 years at The Age, Michael Leunig filed his final cartoon for the newspaper last week after he was fired by Nine in what he described as “a throat-cutting exercise”. The popular cartoonist has been declared an Australian Living Treasure, but has also drawn ire over the decades for various controversies including his critique of working mothers who use childcare and taking an anti-vaccination stance.
So should we mourn the axing of Michael Leunig? In today’s Friday Fight, former editor of The AgeMichael Smith argues in the affirmative, and The Saturday Paper’s arts editor Alison Croggon argues in the negative.
I’m not sure that mourning is something anyone can compel or forbid. Mourning essentially isn’t a conscious decision: you grieve — or don’t grieve — involuntarily. Sorrow is a resonance of the soul, something that emerges from the depths of being. There’s no “should” about it.
Of course, mourning also has many public aspects. There is all the paraphernalia of the funeral, the formal ritual of laying a body to rest, which is more about those left behind to deal with incomprehensible loss and change. The desire to show respect towards someone who perhaps you didn’t know personally but whose passing touches you.
In any case, mourning seems a big verb to ascribe to the departure of Michael Leunig from his regular gig at The Age. After all, even though he was lucky enough to work there for 55 years, it’s not like he’s dead.
I’m of the generation that grew up with at least two or three dog-eared collections of Leunig in the bookshelf. My father — at the time a paid-up Liberal Party member — bizarrely subscribed to Nation Review, a satirical publication that featured many of Leunig’s cartoons, among articles from Germaine Greer, Mungo MacCallum, John Lurie and many others. We all had those “innocent bystander” t-shirts. Nation Review turned up weekly in our mailbox until, after a particularly lubricious Bob Ellis film review that 10-year-old me read with pop-eyed fascination, it mysteriously stopped arriving.
At his best — when he managed to temper his tendency for saccharine whimsy with a razor-sharp wit — Leunig was a wonderful cartoonist. I began to realise he wasn’t exactly harmless in 1995, when he published “Thoughts of a baby lying in a child care centre”. “Call her a cruel, ignorant, selfish bitch if you like, but I will defend her,” thinks the baby. “She is my mother and I think the WORLD of her … The failure is mine … I hate myself…”
Unsurprisingly, it kicked up a storm. At the time I was the sole parent of three small children — who, I feel compelled to add, grew up into wonderful adults — and was lucky enough to access government-funded childcare. I was the only mother I knew who wasn’t crushed by guilt for having to work, but by then I had had my own argument with the oppressive and misogynist cult of motherhood.
Like many of his generation, perhaps the most privileged in the history of the Western world, Leunig’s career inscribes an arc from anti-capitalist, individualistic politics to anti-woke warrior. Although perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the world has moved on beyond him, and instead of responding to new voices in the polity, he has merely become more entrenched in what are now old and stale ideas.
In 2017, for instance, he drew a cartoon of a solitary Leunig-figure, with a banner saying “ME”, facing a menacing crowd with an “LGBTQ” banner. Appended are a couple of doggerel verses (doggerel verse is a major part of late-Leunig whimsy): “Lonely little weirdo / Minority of one / Nothing much to celebrate / Not a lot of fun / So much persecution / So much pain and strife / Lonely little everyone / Trying to make a life”.
This cartoon was published just after the bitter equal marriage campaign, which generated a horrific level of homophobic abuse. It illustrates both the egocentric switcheroo that characterises so much of Leunig’s less palatable work and the increasingly cloying whimsy that disguises its essential ugliness as “innocence”. Leunig expresses the anger of a man adrift in a world that questions his place at the apex of social power. He is unable to perceive that the structural forces that enable his privilege — and the suffering of others — are also the sources of his own discontent.
As Robbie Moore said in 2021 in Meanjin, Leunig has embraced a “reactionary politics of male victimhood”:
Male privilege doesn’t exist, he argues in a 2017 essay: aren’t we all just humans? And there, in that argument, he betrays his privilege. As a white man, he’s never needed collective action to fight for his own status as human, to fight for basic rights and dignities.
People still love his work, and that’s their right. But it’s a love threaded with nostalgia for the free-wheeling, masculinist larrikinism of the 1970s. It was a time when men were real men, women were real women and troublesome minorities of every kind knew their place. If those times have passed, that is all to the good. No, we should not mourn that toxic nostalgia.
Alison Croggon is a Melbourne poet, novelist and critic, and arts editor of The Saturday Paper. Her most recent book, a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, was shortlisted for the 2023 NSW Premier's Literary Prize for Translation.
Royal Australian Navy Admiral Ben Key speaks with US and UK counterparts in Perth (Image: AAP/Richard Wainwright)
Exclusive: Australians aged over 65 are about twice as likely to strongly agree AUKUS is a good idea, according to a new poll.
Older Australians are much more likely to feel positive about AUKUS than younger ones, new research by the United States Studies Centre shows.
Crikey got access to exclusive data from the research centre’s 2024 “Allies and partners” poll, released today, breaking down attitudes towards AUKUS by age group.
The data shows Australians aged 65 and older are about twice as likely to “strongly agree” it’s a good idea for the country to have nuclear-powered submarines.
Twenty-nine percent of respondents in that age group said they strongly agreed, and 39% said they agreed with the statement. Among people aged 18-34, just 14% said they strongly agreed, and 24% said they agreed. In the 35-64 age group, those percentages were 17% and 34%.
Just 5% of Australians older than 65 “strongly disagree” that the subs are a good idea, compared with 11% of 18 to 34-year-olds.
US Studies Centre research associate and report co-author Ava Kalinauskas said the results were unsurprising.
“Our research suggests [young people] are more likely to care about issues like climate change rather than defence or security,” she told Crikey.
“Our polling consistently finds that young Australians are far more sceptical of the United States than older Australians, and remain unconvinced by traditional messaging on Australia’s alliance with the US.”
Overall, just over half of Australians — 51% — said AUKUS was a good idea. However, 39% said the submarine project wasn’t worth the cost, and 52% thought it would lock Australia into supporting the US in an armed conflict.
Coalition voters were more likely to agree AUKUS was a good idea, with 66% in favour, compared to 50% of Labor voters.
The Australian government expects to receive its first Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarine from the US by the beginning of the next decade. But the first SSN-AUKUS submarine, which would incorporate technology from the UK, US and Australia, isn’t projected to be delivered until the early 2040s, or about 15 years from now.
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.
Twice opposition leader, the retiring minister is a victim of the supreme paradox of ambition: the greater the height, the further the fall.
The most significant Australian election of modern times was in… 1998, when Kim Beazley went down to John Howard, the Bomber gaining a mere 50.9% of the two-party-preferred vote. Whaaaaaaat? Yes, Howard retained the prime ministership with only 49.1% of the vote, suffering a massive hit over the GST but still winning 13 more seats than Labor, 80 to 67.
The reason usually cited is Labor’s rotting old factional system delivered so many duff candidates, selected through stacked branches and dealmaking at the top, that it saw a plunging vote in electorates where this fresh meat was stored, thus distorting the vote spread. Had better Labor candidates pulled the vote back, Beazley would have been prime minister during 9/11. He would have, within his own very right Laborist politics, handled it magnificently — Labor would have taken the mantle of wise foreign policy leaders, and Howard would have gone down in history as a ghastly error by a desperate party. History is a [redacted].
Thus to Bill Shorten, the coming man always and the great never was. He is slipping from history before our eyes, ground between the smooth stones of events. Twice opposition leader, exiled to the minor ministries during government, he is already being forgotten, a victim of the supreme paradox of ambition: the greater the height, the further the fall.
He has achieved more than most of us will in changing peoples’ conditions, for better and worse. Yet his life looks like a failure and an absurdity due to the frenetic, futile hustling to become prime minister that ended in an overpaid sinecure running an educational establishment, which is pretty much Yass Tech.
He was a “faction man”, as dubbed by David Marr in his mostly uncomprehending essay on Shorten, a boy and then an adult within the affinity groups of ambition that replaced the actual factions in the 1990s. Born in student politics, based on university clubs and youf networks, the fragmentation of factions favoured psychologically flawed individuals with a need to manipulate others, conspire against all and gather people unto them.
They set up a process where, with a few exceptions, even the vestigial intellectual policy activity of older factions went by the board, and politics became a process of gotchas, drops and drop-ins. Labor was at war with itself for 25 years, but not as a clash of left and right titans; it was simply a blasted landscape of warlords, Mad Max read as a guide to politics. It has exhausted many, killed a few and driven thousands from the party. It has been instrumental in the success of the Greens, as people who would rather be in a workers’ party decided that (until recently) the Greens offered a chance to connect policy to politics without endless headbanging on microwars.
This sort of factionalising was the making and breaking of Shorten. He could not free himself from a crowd of cronies, who made the Mad Max crew look like a Methodist chapel tennis club. Whatever bound them all together, they have gone up and gone down with it. Those around Shorten made a play in his interests through the elevation of senator Kimberley Kitching, and then the use of her death for internal party warfare. This recent episode of internal sabotage of Anthony Albanese, plus an attempted takeover of the Transport Workers Union and the laying of the LGBTQIA+ census question boobytrap, was the last desperate act, defeated. Exit faction man, already become ghost. What a pointless waste of time and energy so much of it has been.
Now, it will happen again. As four or five seats become vacant or abolished in Victoria, the national executive is dropping in candidates who solve the party’s internal problems, while creating new ones in the — possibly imminent — election campaign. If increasingly fragmented electorates feel they are being taken for granted in a sort of party drone attack, “safe” and marginal seats will go in every direction. The fanger is not that the Coalition gets a majority, but that Labor loses its plurality so badly that the surviving teals have no alternative but to talk to Peter Dutton about forming government.
If that happens, it will be another moment in which Labor threw away its future for its petty internal ambitions and the failure of its members to bring to heel a privileged elite. Redux and on steroids, 1998.
Will you miss Bill Shorten? 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.
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.
Bill Shorten announces his retirement (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)
As the Albanese government struggles to make its mark, Bill Shorten is a reminder that if good policy isn't always good politics, politics can still be a vehicle for good policy.
It doesn’t seem, at least to this correspondent, that long since Bill Shorten arrived in Canberra, wearing the tag “future prime minister” that had been draped over him ever since the Beaconsfield mine disaster gave him a national platform to display his excellent media training. In fact it’s been 17 years, 18 by the time he quits in February, and two failed attempts to become prime minister, and two ministerial stints focused on what will surely be his enduring legacy, the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
It was Shorten who as a parliamentary secretary in the Rudd government not merely lifted the profile of Australians with disabilities and the need for the country to do better by them, but championed disability services reform, beginning Labor’s trajectory toward the establishment of the NDIS. Under Julia Gillard, Shorten had carriage of the Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) reforms, not to mention the minor issue of industrial relations.
FOFA was bitterly contested by the Coalition, the big banks — who all ran disgraceful wealth-management businesses — and the financial planning community. Like all ministers back then, Shorten had to negotiate legislation through the lower house as well as the Senate, and managed to land FOFA in 2012. The Coalition would try, and fail, to repeal it when in government, but it has since become part of the financial regulation furniture.
It’s important to remember that fight, and what history tells us about it. Shorten and Labor were absolutely right to take on the banks, shonky financial planners and their political supporters in the Coalition, to help bring an end to the shocking rorting by the big banks’ and AMP’s wealth management services. It would take the banking royal commission to fully expose the industry’s disgusting behaviour — Labor under Shorten was initially cool on a royal commission, but when he joined the Greens in calling for one, it created unsustainable pressure on Malcolm Turnbull (at the 2016 election debate in western Sydney, Turnbull had accused Shorten of “wanting to put the banks in the dock”, under the illusion that would prompt disapproval from the audience, but instead they cheered). But FOFA — which is now fashionably blamed for making financial advice too expensive — was a crucial step in making wealth management and retirement incomes safe for ordinary Australians.
As opposition leader from 2013, Shorten survived the Abbott government’s attempt to destroy him via the trade union royal commission, and almost brought Turnbull undone in 2016 with a wholly unscrupulous but savagely effective campaign around the fictional privatisation of Medicare. And right up until he lost the unloseable 2019 election, he received the kind of loyalty and support from his colleagues that he had signally failed to provide Rudd and Gillard, whom he serially plotted against in favour of the other.
That, along with his inexplicable support for the likes of Kimberley Kitching, shoehorned into the Senate at Shorten’s insistence in 2016, would permanently shroud Shorten’s political character even as he seemed set for victory in 2019. Shorten, like John Hewson, will forever be known for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But like Hewson, Shorten — along with his shadow treasurer Chris Bowen — perished on the hill of good policy.
Most of the media constantly bleat about the dearth of good economic reform by the current generation of politicians; Shorten did the right thing and took a suite of good reforms to an election, only for the likes the notionally pro-reform Financial Review and the Murdoch press — Shorten, uniquely for a political leader, refused to kiss the ring of Rupert — to demonise it as class warfare. To see the media now talking about the housing crisis is to be reminded of the toxic role played by the media in attacking Shorten’s sensible proposal to limit negative gearing to new residential construction.
Things may change in the future. Some of the reforms proposed by Hewson in 1993 are now deeply, and incontestably, embedded in Australia’s economic framework. One can only hope some of the excellent reforms proposed by Shorten and Bowen in 2018 — especially negative gearing and ending the appalling franking credits rort — similarly become part of the furniture in the future.
Ultimately, though, it will be the NDIS that is Shorten’s legacy, given he was a key progenitor of it, and the minister charged with bringing it under control after Labor returned to power. His current reforms — tortuously negotiated through Parliament and with the states and territories — are decried by disability advocates (who no doubt feel betrayed given Shorten in opposition denounced every Coalition reform as an existential threat to the program) as some sort of fundamental assault. In fact, not merely will NDIS funding remain at record levels, but it will continue to grow, albeit at hopefully a far slower rate than the double-digit growth Labor inherited. Arguably no-one else could have negotiated such a package of changes — only Shorten, one of the people responsible for the very existence of the NDIS, could so aggressively pursue reforms to rein the program in.
If the tag “future prime minister” was never fulfilled and his powerbroking role in the Rudd and Gillard governments was a blight on his record, Shorten proved an unexpectedly positive influence on the quality of discourse in Australian economic debate. He leaves, in the NDIS and FOFA, a substantial policy legacy. As the Albanese government struggles to makes it mark, he’s a reminder that if good policy isn’t always good politics, politics can still be a vehicle for good policy.
How will you remember Bill Shorten’s political legacy? 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.
Bernard Keane is Crikey's political editor. Before that he was Crikey's Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics.
Pornography, Russian propaganda and unruly family members — just another week in US politics.
A few weeks ago, when Crikey interviewed Masha Gessen, the writer and assiduous chronicler of (among other things) the Trump era in US politics said they were worried the US media was falling into all the same traps as they did in 2016.
Gessen cited a recent experience at a conference at Columbia Journalism School where the editors of various major US publications were asked how they would approach a second Trump presidency. “And they all had a version of a response that was like, ‘Oh, we just have to do our jobs. We know what journalism is. Just say what’s out there. Just be objective.’”
But one cannot report on Trump’s manner of speech using the traditional tools of journalism and remain objective — take the examples listed by The New Republicmedia writer Parker Molloy, who notes that the following Trump post:
I have reached an agreement with the Radical Left Democrats for a Debate with Comrade Kamala Harris. It will be Broadcast Live on ABC FAKE NEWS, by far the nastiest and most unfair newscaster in the business, on Tuesday, September 10th, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Rules will be the same as the last CNN Debate, which seemed to work out well for everyone except, perhaps, Crooked Joe Biden. The Debate will be ‘stand up,’ and Candidates cannot bring notes, or ‘cheat sheets.’ We have also been given assurance by ABC that this will be a ‘fair and equitable’ Debate, and that neither side will be given the questions in advance (No Donna Brazile!). Harris would not agree to the FoxNews Debate on September 4th, but that date will be held open in case she changes her mind or, Flip Flops, as she has done on every single one of her long held and cherished policy beliefs. A possible third Debate, which would go to NBC FAKE NEWS, has not been agreed to by the Radical Left. GOD BLESS AMERICA!
Former president Donald Trump on Tuesday announced he has ‘reached an agreement’ to participate in a September 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, noting that ‘the rules will be the same as the last CNN debate, which seemed to work out well for everyone.’
Another example — attempting to find footage of Trump appearing to talk as though his opponent was still Joe Biden, rather than Kamala Harris, will get you several pages of results referring to Joe Biden calling Harris “vice president Trump” shortly before he stood down.
Molloy calls the process “sanewashing”, which is probably the only way to get the word “sane” into coverage of the US election in 2024.
For example: the evangelical, ultra-MAGA Republican North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson — who has referred to the LGBTQIA+ community as “filth” — allegedly bought “hundreds” of bootleg porn videos and went to a porn shop nearly every day of the week in the ’90s and early 2000s, according to a recent report.
Louis Money, a former employee of the store, who told the press that Robinson should “be judged on everything else, but he should not be judged for this” quipped “I know he might have problems with gay people, but I don’t think he has problems with lesbians.” Money’s band even did a song about the saga, called “The Lt. Governor Owes Me Money”.
That was only just weird enough to make our list.
Walz comes tumbling down
The Trump campaign and its online supporters have been revelling in the news that various members of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s extended family are Trump backers, after a picture of the “Nebraska Walz’s (sic) for Trump” was circulated by various right-wing figures; including Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, Jack Posobiec and the former president himself.
In the last few days, Walz's brother and multiple other members of his extended family have come out publicly against him and for Trump. Is anyone in the leftwing media going to cover this? https://t.co/62JhQfFePc
While Posobiec’s claim that Walz’s “entire family” has turned on him is an exaggeration — this lot are distant cousins — Trump supporters apparently had a great get in Walz’s own brother Jeff, whose Facebook post saying there were “stories (he) could tell” and that his brother wasn’t “the type of character you want making decisions about your future”, was picked up in the media. NewsNation called him to clarify what those stories were, and… brace yourself:
Nobody wanted to sit with him, because he had car sickness and would always throw up on us, that sort of thing. There’s really nothing else hidden behind there. People are assuming something else. There’s other stories like that, but I think that probably gives you the gist of it.
No coming back from that, I think we can all agree.
Basic Tenet
The spectre of Russian interference in US elections, so dominant in the early years of the Trump presidency, has returned. A 32-page federal indictment, unsealed by the US District Court of the Southern District of New York on Wednesday, has alleged that a cadre of online right-wing personalities including Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Sky News favourite Lauren Southern have all become unwitting agents of Russian information warfare.
The Department of Justice is alleging that since its founding in 2022, Tenet, the right-wing media company that has previously employed all of the above, served as a front for Russian agents to spread Russian state-directed content.
The allegation is that a pair of employees of Russia’s state-owned media company RT — Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva — used shell companies in the Middle East and Africa to secretly pour nearly $10 million into Tenet between October 2023 and August 2024, while directing it to spread anti-US and anti-Ukraine messaging.
In one particularly troubling instance, Afanasyeva is alleged to have pressured one of Tenet’s founders regarding coverage of the bombing in Moscow in March, for which ISIS claimed responsibility. Afanasyeva wanted to “focus on the Ukraine/US angle” and claim that “mainstream media spread fake news that ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack yet ISIS itself never made such statements” while saying it was “suspicious” that the attackers had fled toward the Ukrainian border.
The commentators themselves have insisted they had no knowledge of Russian involvement, claiming they have been “deceived“. As never-Trump conservative writer Christian Vanderbrouk put it, there’s a decent chunk of irony in seeing commentators who portray themselves as uniquely sensitive to psyops and conspiracies become so credulous when “a mysterious foreigner offers them fantastic amounts of money for practically nothing”.
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.
Portraits of ADF personnel who lost their lives to suicide (Image: AAP/Bianca De Marchi)
This report has to be the one that finally changes defence in this country.
Content warning: this article contains content about self-harm and suicide.
The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide (DVSRC) will hand its final report to the governor-general on Monday. Then, it will be up to the government to table the report so we can all read it. Don’t expect the government to rush on this. The report will be huge, complex and, frankly, harrowing. The recommendations will be broad and, if implemented, change how Defence works.
Consequently, you can expect the government to play politics on it. The minister will also have the voices of the ADF in his ear — inevitably seeking to water down and control any change. The government will sit on the report as long as it can, release it when it can gain the most politically, then kick the can of reform down the road, past the next election. We can already picture the Minister for Defence Richard Marles saying: “A review body will be established to assess the recommendations and how they can be done.” The government will desperately not want to be wedged by the Coalition on anything to do with the ADF or national security.
The DVSRC began in July 2021, received 5,889 submissions, held hearings across the country in public and private, and documented thousands of cases of abuse, bullying and maladministration that led serving members and veterans to self-harm and suicide. On average over the last 10 years, 78 serving or ex-service members have died by suicide every year — three deaths every fortnight. Both serving members and veterans have higher rates of suicide, self-harm and suicidal thoughts than comparable Australian populations.
It took a decade of consistent agitation from the veteran community and families to finally get the royal commission established. In 2019, a 300,000-signature petition calling for a commission was rejected by the Morrison government. In March 2021, a non-binding motion calling for a royal commission passed both houses of Parliament with cross-party support. At that point, the political reality was too much for the government to resist. This history matters as it shows us that successive governments and Defence Departments did not want the commission — as they knew what it would find.
The lack of commitment to the royal commission shown by Defence and the government has been exemplified by the obfuscation and feet-dragging they have undertaken in an attempt to stymie the commissioners. Nick Kaldas, the chairing commissioner, noted in 2023 the commission had “faced significant delays in the provision of vital data and information sought from Defence” adding “we commissioners fear the defence hierarchy is simply waiting for this inquiry to end so that it can go back to business as usual.” This “wait it out” is a standard Defence tactic to any critical report, and they know they can wait out most change as ministers switch and governments fall.
The central recommendation that the DVSRC will make is a new entity be established to provide oversight of the change Defence will have to undertake and make sure there is accountability for suicide prevention. This is a key recommendation as Defence has a long history of ignoring and/or paying lip service to recommendations (the favourite being the meaningless “in-principle” support), all the while waiting out reviews, inquiries and ministers. As the commission notes, “The royal commission has identified at least 57 previous inquiries or reviews relating to Defence and veteran suicide over the last 20 to 30 years, which resulted in some 770 recommendations for change. Despite this, there has been no improvement in military suicide rates and the senseless loss of life continues today.”
Of course, we have been here before. It was 20 years ago that a Senate inquiry recommended an independent oversight body to monitor and investigate complaints outside of the ADF’s chain of command. This recommendation was rejected by the ADF and government of the day on the basis that it was essential for a military to control its own processes.
We should be prepared for this same line of argument to be used against the royal commission’s recommendations. The pro-military commentariat will claim the ADF cannot possibly fight wars if it has an independent oversight body scrutinising its conduct. This line of attack will be used to ignore or water down such a body. The ADF thinks it is exceptional and above proper scrutiny — this must change.
The Australians hurt by their service to their country are the ones who most need reform to be done. Every year wasted is another 80 lives lost. This report needs to be the one that changes Defence.
For anyone seeking help, Lifeline is on 13 11 14, Open Arms Veterans & Families Counselling is on 1800 011 046, and the ADF All-hours Support Line is on 1800 628 036.
Associate Professor James Connor is a military sociologist at UNSW Canberra.
Ben Wadham
Ben Wadham is a professor in sociology (defence and veteran studies) at Flinders University in South Australia. He is a veteran of the Australian Army, having served in the Royal Australian Infantry Corps and the Royal Australian Corps of Military Police.
Why are we subsidising vehicles that make us all less safe?
First, we stopped buying small utes. Then we started buying 4×4 utes almost exclusively.
The utes started getting bigger. Then a new kind of ute showed up, one so big they call them trucks.
This is a big problem and I’ve cared about it for a very long time.
I’m delighted to say people are furious about it suddenly, thanks to a stellar data analysis in The Economist. The weekly magazine begins its feature with a story of a Ford Focus being rear-ended by a RAM 3500, one of the biggest trucks on the road. A six-year-old girl in the Ford Focus died, while the driver of the RAM 3500 was physically unharmed.
If you’re going to be hit by another vehicle, you want that other vehicle to be as small as possible. These days, however? Other vehicles usually aren’t small.
The Economist crunched the data on 7.5 million two-vehicle crashes involving 15 million cars. They found big trucks obliterating other road users, time and time again.
“For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles,” the piece says.
How you might use this information as a consumer is very different to how you might use it as a policy maker.
Imagine a weekly concert with no rules about what you can bring in. The first Saturday night, a few people bring milk crates to stand on. The next Saturday, lots of people have milk crates. The Saturday after that, people are bringing in step ladders, and a few Saturdays after that, if you go to the concert without a large A-frame ladder, you’re crazy — you won’t see a thing.
Everybody would see better if big ladders were banned. But everyone has to spend money on these crazy contraptions just for a chance to see.
This is an example of an arms race. Another example is two countries, each investing millions and billions expanding their navy or air force to deter the other from attacking. Both would be better off with an effective treaty, rather than devoting so much of their income to defence. But each is forced by the actions of the other to spend money, running to stand still.
To those of us versed in game theory, an arms race is a catastrophe. A way of making the world worse for absolutely no gain. More than mere waste — abject destruction. The term is not always well understood, though.
“It’s an arms race!” I say, wide-eyed and nodding in anticipation.
The other person looks blankly at me.
Vehicle size increase is an arms race and the price we pay is death.
The top-selling vehicle in Australia this year is the Ford Ranger, and the year before that it was the Ford Ranger too. Sedans haven’t been in the top-sellers list for years now. In another few years the remaining sedans from the heyday of sedan sales will all be retired, and any remaining people driving small-medium cars will be at big risk.
Those ANCAP ratings do not reveal this. ANCAP gives out a 5-star rating to cars depending on how they perform in their class. They give small cars 5-star ratings because they don’t want to encourage people into bigger cars. I see the logic but it helps obscure an important fact about our fleet: while some cars are safer than others, some cars are also more dangerous than others.
I was driving in Melbourne the other day and out of nowhere, all the traffic in my lane stopped. About five seconds later I got rear-ended, hard, by another driver who wasn’t looking. Luckily for me he was driving a small, sporty Mercedes rather than a huge ute. While my car was written off, I wasn’t hurt. If he’d been a tradie with tattoos instead of an old bloke with a poodle, I might be in a neck brace. (The poodle got a shock when his airbags went off but was fine).
Some of the leading research on how dangerous cars are to others is being done right here in Australia, by researchers at Monash University. They’ve been doing a version of what The Economist did, and doing it for a very long time. They call their outcome “aggressivity” and they find the most dangerous cars for other occupants are big SUVs.
Now, the Monash researchers have also controlled for one of the biases The Economist researchers did not, which is that not all crashes are multiple vehicle crashes. If you smack into a tree, you want to be in a big vehicle. The sweet spot for reducing death to others and reducing risk to yourself appears to be found in the medium SUV. So says the numbers. So it was pleasing to see the RAV 4 rising to the top seller spot in the month of August.
But that is probably temporary. The unbeatable logic of an arms race says we will all be driving much bigger cars before long.
I’m very impressed by the power of the free market. Often what you want to do is step back and let that power roar. But when what the market is achieving is detrimental, we need to check that power. Because if we don’t, then the relentless logic of size expansion will continue unchecked, and a car the size of a Mazda CX-5 will begin to look as quaint as a Mini Minor.
The big American cars are the ones we should target first. The Economist finds these heaviest few vehicles do the worst damage:
Vehicles in the top 10% of our sample — those weighing at least 5,000lb [2,268kg] — are involved in roughly 26 deaths per 10,000 crashes, on average, including 5.9 in their own car and 20.2 in partner vehicles. For vehicles in the next-heaviest 10% of our sample — those weighing between 4,500lb [2,041kg] and 5,000lb — the equivalent figures are 5.4 and 10.3 deaths per 10,000 crashes. A back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that if the heaviest tenth of vehicles in America’s fleet were downsized to this lighter weight class, road fatalities in multi-car crashes — which totaled 19,081 in 2023 — could be reduced by 12%, or 2,300, without sacrificing the safety of any cars involved.
The absolute worst thing about all this is we are actually subsidising these big utes with a tax cut. The ATO treats any commercial vehicle as a business input and exempts it from luxury tax. So if you’re pricing up vehicles, a large car and a big ute may look comparably priced even if the big ute has more features. The tax break is an extra nudge in the direction of massive utes, and it’s the last thing we need. Getting rid of it would save lives.
Do you have a giant car? Why? 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.
Jason Murphy is an economist and freelance journalist. He has worked at The Australian Financial Review and for the Republic of Nauru and the Australian Treasury. He blogs at Thomas the Think Engine.
NBN connection boxes listed for sale on Gumtree (Image: Gumtree)
NBN connection boxes are listed for as much as $60 on online marketplaces despite being 1) free and 2) legally the property of NBN Co.
If you’ve ever scrolled through Gumtree or Facebook Marketplace, you’ve likely seen people selling something that’s absolutely not their property.
Australian online marketplaces are awash with listings for “NBN connection boxes”, which are devices that connect your home or work to the national broadband network so you can use the internet.
These little boxes, usually white or black with the NBN Co logo, are typically found tucked away under desks or in closets in most Australian houses. Crucially, these belong neither to the homeowner nor the person who signed up with the internet provider.
NBN Co owns these boxes and is aware of people selling them online. It wants you to know that it is sick of having to replace them after people take them.
“NBN Co owns the NBN connection boxes, and they should not be removed, sold or moved to a different address. Each box is linked to a specific property and must remain there,” an NBN Co spokesperson told Crikey. Most devices have “property of NBN” written on them.
Despite this, there are dozens of NBN boxes listed for sale online right now for as much as $60, despite being both free and — if they’ve already been set up — completely useless if used anywhere other than the original address. It’s a problem that has been going on for years and it’s unclear whether any of these boxes are actually ever purchased.
Part of the reason for this problem is likely due to confusion between NBN boxes and the devices used to connect homes to the internet.
NBN connection boxes — also called network terminal devices — are modems that either connect through fibre to the curb (FTTC) or through a hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) connection. Then there are routers (sometimes also called modems), which connect your phone or computer to the NBN box, whether through a corded or wireless network, that is owned by the individual.
If your eyes glazed over, the only thing you really need to understand is that most of our homes have two internet boxes with flashing lights that talk to each other. One is supposed to stay with the house and is owned by NBN; the other is owned by the occupant and goes with them if they move. Understandably, people get the two confused, which is why both end up online.
When this Crikey reporter tried to tell the people who had listed the boxes for sale that they were supposed to stay with the house, their answers did not suggest they were grateful for the help:
“Okay, people are selling them on Gumtree. I’m not the only one.”
“Anyone can use this is brand-new, never used.”
“Listen, first of all this is none of your business if you aren’t buying, secondly this is NEW IN BOX which means they have NEVER BEEN INSTALLED IN OR SENT TO ANY HOUSE BEFORE, thirdly the supplier gave me a written email saying I was free to do whatever I want with it, so please stop bothering me. Goodbye.”
In 2020 and 2021, NBN Co had to replace 101,402 boxes, although a significant portion were due to lightning damage. Even among missing boxes, the company said the majority are not being sold online. It’s likely many are taken by Australians who are moving and anticipate having to set up these devices in their next residence.
Understandably, NBN Co is trying to let people know that there is no benefit to hoarding those little internet boxes.
“We are currently running an information campaign to educate the public about the importance of leaving the boxes behind when moving. We are also collaborating with the real estate industry and exploring how we could work with them to reduce the incidence of missing devices.”
Cam Wilson is Crikey’s associate editor. He previously worked as a reporter at the ABC, BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Gizmodo. He primarily covers internet culture and tech in Australia.
Paul Lupton writes: The ALP are justified in reminding the Greens that their action in blocking the carbon reduction plan caused a lost decade of progress in reducing Australia’s pollution levels and its contribution to global warming. We are now reaping the effects, as the increased adverse climate events produce major impacts on government and individuals’ personal financial outlays.
Had the Greens not been so stubborn and negotiated instead to produce outcomes more in keeping with the Greens philosophy, then Australia’s outcomes would have been much more beneficial.
Jim Allen writes: Theory one about the CPRS defeat: the Greens made a mistake. Well, Labor would say that wouldn’t they. If CPRS was worth fighting for, why didn’t Rudd go for double dissolution? He blinked! Abbott thrived. Rudd has admitted the mistake was his.
Theory two: the Greens voted it down because it wasn’t good, let alone perfect. Ross Garnaut, Labor’s appointed star adviser on climate policy, was very critical of the CRPS once Rudd had negotiated too many loopholes. Rudd went to Turnbull for support, not to the Greens, a gamble that failed spectacularly. The media has tended to overlook that, and over the years has given Labor plenty of rope to blame the Greens.
The failure to find or restore major party bipartisanship on this issue is at the heart of the problem. The minor party that is the wrecker is the Nationals, not the Greens!
Ross Bell writes: As the article points out, those events of 2009 are beyond the political memory of most. The reason Labor got into the habit of bringing it up again and again to the point of nausea is that it began as an exercise in instant revisionism to blame the Greens when they were not at fault. Like all falsehoods repetition was, and still is, used to breathe some life into it.
The reason the Greens voted against the scheme of 2009 was that Rudd point-blank refused to negotiate with them before the piss-weak CPRS was put to the vote. How could the Greens vote for it after they were shut out of any negotiation, and the government’s own adviser, Ross Garnaut, said it was rubbish?
To this day Labor refuses to admit any of the above.
Peter Barry writes: The reflex reaction to any mention of the Greens blocking the CPRS in 2009 is to accuse the party of seeking perfection rather than the rejecting of a woefully inadequate proposal. The value of their approach was proven two years later when a new scheme to put a price on carbon proved to be highly effective even after just two years of operation. At the time, it was considered as the leading carbon reduction scheme in the world. It had a built-in mechanism to ratchet up the price steadily to make it ever more effective.
A price on carbon is the gold standard of climate policies. There are few loopholes for polluters to weasel their way out of paying appropriately for their emissions. It was killed by climate change-denying Tony Abbott.
Labor has become timorous and pusillanimous on so many issues. Who they think they are representing is a mystery. It is certainly not the voters who optimistically, but foolishly, ushered them into office in 2022.
Ross Devine writes: In 2009, the ALP and the LNP negotiated a scheme that was not fit for purpose. There was no good reason for the Greens to support it.
Had the Greens voted for it, no doubt the LNP would have campaigned against it and won power in 2010 rather than in 2013. The Greens-supported Gillard government introduced an economical and effective alternative in the carbon tax.
If the ALP wants to gain Greens support, it should produce better policies and tone down its hostility. My own thoughts are that the ALP is ambivalent about Greens support — embarrassed if they get it and angry if they don’t.
Tim Hollo writes: Bernard Keane is on the money, literally, with his analysis of Albanese’s capitulation to WA, except to the extent that he makes it about the state of Western Australia vs the rest of the country.
What’s going on here isn’t the equivalent of pork-barrelling to win votes. It’s not about the voters. It’s not even really about WA, unless that stands for “Woodside Australia”. This is state capture, pure and simple. Democracy and voters’ interests don’t come near it.
Jeff Ash writes: The GST distribution model has always been inequitable. It includes mining royalties, but not gambling revenue. WA has extremely limited access to poker machines and is the better for it. Should successive governments have sorted this out? Absolutely, the entire tax system requires an overhaul.
Ed Jordan: Why do both Labor and Liberal governments let resource giants dodge tax? All Australians should benefit from our enormous but finite resources. Something stinks…
I’m in the Carine electorate, I hope we get a “teal” candidate very soon.
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.
RBA governor Michele Bullock (Image: AAP/Bianca De Marchi)
RBA governor Michele Bullock is standing by her board's interest rate decisions, and Donald Trump and Kamala Harris agree on a set of rules for next week's presidential debate.
RBA STANDS BY HIKES
Rising mortgage costs and high inflation could force some Australians to sell their homes, Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock has acknowledged in a speech that’s dominating front pages this morning.
As The Sydney Morning Herald reports, Bullock “stood by the bank’s current interest rate settings, arguing that inflation pressures — particularly in home construction, insurance and the rental market — continued to be high in some parts of the economy”.
“If we don’t get inflation down, that’s bad for everyone, absolutely everyone. So that’s the job I’m focusing on. That’s the job the board is focusing on … I really think the board thinks at the moment, we’re still on that narrow path,” she said.
The Australian, which headlined its article “Attention, Treasurer Jim Chalmers!”, notes Bullock’s comments come after Chalmers “pointed the finger at the central bank for hammering growth ahead of weak GDP figures, which eked out a 1% gain over the 12 months to June, despite record government spending”.
HARRIS, TRUMP PREPARE FOR CLASH
In the US, where the presidential election campaign is heating up, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican ex-president Donald Trump are preparing to debate each other next week.
As NBC News reports, the two sides agreed to a set of “ground rules” set by the network ABC ahead of the televised clash, including one that says “candidate microphones will be live only for the candidate whose turn it is to speak”.
A previous debate sunk President Joe Biden’s campaign for reelection, so it’s fair to say the stakes are high.
Trump’s campaign is certainly feeling the pressure — as Guardian US reports, the Republican’s path back to the White House has narrowed, with several states now out of reach.
“The Republican presidential nominee’s campaign has diverted resources away from Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire — states Trump was boasting he could win while Biden was the Democratic candidate — to focus instead on a small number of battleground states,” the story says.
Instead, “special attention” is being paid to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
The internet — social media particularly — is, how do we put this delicately… full of jerks. Instagram influencers are a special breed, and when they’re not trying to sell you a pyramid scheme or some kind of invigorating mushroom powder, they just want to get that perfect shot of themselves in some sort of natural wonderland.
The town of Pomfret, located in the US state of Vermont, is sick of it, and has been successfully fighting back against hordes of tourists trampling all over their town in an attempt to capture the area’s particularly resplendent autumnal colour.
“[We have] experienced an unprecedented surge in Instagram and TikTok-fuelled tourist ‘influencers’… [who] have damaged roads, had accidents, required towing out of ditches, trampled gardens, defecated on private property… and verbally assaulted residents,” the town said on a GoFundMe page raising money for damages.
As a result, the town council voted to close the most popular road for leaf peeping to non-residents during the tourist season and enforce it with regular patrols. A timely reminder to always be respectful on your visits out of town so as not to ruin it for everyone else.
Say What?
This project has been pretty crazy, from beginning to the end.
Ali Abbasi
There’s a new movie about Donald Trump, set in 1980s New York and featuring stars like Succession‘s Jeremy Strong. But good luck catching it in a cinema. As the Associated Press reports, producers have had a very tough time securing proper distribution for it, partly because of opposition from Trump’s legal team. Abbasi, the director, says the project is “still not completely there,” despite a planned US premiere date for October 11.
Queensland MP Bob Katter (Image: AAP/Private Media/Zennie)
Bob Katter is at the Kingo ordering a bag of chips to eat with his oysters. It’s the first sitting week after the parliamentary winter break and I’m in Canberra interviewing crossbenchers. When I go up to request an interview for the following day, Katter says he’s having dinner with “Monique and Allegra” in the other room, and invites me to join. So begins my evening with the Father of the House.
As it turns out, Allegra Spender is not there. He’s mixed her up with Kate Chaney, who is dining nearby. But Monique Ryan is there with her team, being regaled by Australian politics’ most colourful storyteller.
Between tales of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and egging The Beatles, Katter repeatedly asks Ryan why she and her fellow teals left high-paying jobs for politics. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that they might have done so on principle. But it speaks to a question I have for the 79-year-old, who will soon be honoured with a portrait marking 50 years in politics: Why is he still there?
It doesn’t seem, at least to this correspondent, that long since Bill Shorten arrived in Canberra, wearing the tag “future prime minister” that had been draped over him ever since the Beaconsfield mine disaster gave him a national platform to display his excellent media training. In fact it’s been 17 years, 18 by the time he quits in February, and two failed attempts to become prime minister, and two ministerial stints focused on what will surely be his enduring legacy, the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
It was Shorten who as a parliamentary secretary in the Rudd government not merely lifted the profile of Australians with disabilities and the need for the country to do better by them, but championed disability services reform, beginning Labor’s trajectory toward the establishment of the NDIS. Under Julia Gillard, Shorten had carriage of the Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) reforms, not to mention the minor issue of industrial relations.
Just like anything that involves even semi-direct contact with actual humans, politicians engaging in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) can be fraught. Even if you avoid any major blunders or controversies, you risk revealing that you are just profoundly dull. Dull is not something we’d call newly independent Senator Gerard Rennick, but he did experience the other side of the process: getting a fairly savage down-voting and some pretty hostile questioning about his views on COVID-19 and climate change. But what really caught our attention was Rennick’s username, the absolutely weapons-grade handle “Cool_Revolution_4559“.
We asked Rennick where he came up with the account name, and alas, it wasn’t his idea. “I had to create an account and that’s the name they gave me — no planning on my part” Rennick, who recently ditched the Liberals to form the People First Party, told Crikey over text. But he obviously quite liked it, saying: “Maybe I should have used that for the party name,” followed by the cry-laughing emoji.
Shorten didn’t give Labor a parting shot, he gave it a parting gift — David Crowe (The Sydney Morning Herald): Bill Shorten leaves the federal government with a huge gap to fill, a solid legacy to build upon and an astute message about how Labor can win the next election. He declares total confidence in the government’s fortunes, of course, but he offers some words to remember about the practice of politics.
“Labor is at its best when we know what we stand for — and we will fight for things,” he said at the press conference on Thursday morning to announce his departure from federal cabinet next year. He said this when asked about previous elections, rather than the one to come, but his advice comes without an expiration date. And it is exactly what his colleagues need to be told.
These 12 Pennsylvania voters could decide the election. They aren’t thrilled about it — Patrick Healy, Kristen Soltis Anderson and Adrian J. Rivera(The New YorkTimes): No state is more coveted by Donald Trump and Kamala Harris than Pennsylvania, since their best strategies for an electoral college victory hinge on winning it. With polls showing a tied race there, we spoke with 12 Pennsylvanians for our new Times opinion focus group: voters who supported Joe Biden or Trump in 2020 and are not hard-core partisans.
While the group leaned toward Harris, her support was pretty soft. Few of the participants could articulate a strong argument to vote for her on her merits. They are eager for a candidate to rally behind, given their worries about the country, especially the economy, but they haven’t heard enough specifics from her about how she would lower costs.
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.
