GAMBLING BAN ROW
Cabinet Minister Bill Shorten has all but confirmed the federal government will resist calls for a blanket ban on gambling ads, the ABC has said following his appearance on Q&A last night. During Monday’s show, Shorten said he was “not convinced that complete prohibition works”. The Albanese government has come under sustained pressure to initiate a total ban as it prepares to respond to the 2022 Senate inquiry into online gambling harm, chaired by the late Labor MP Peta Murphy, which recommended a total ban.
Shorten claimed last night commercial media operators were “under massive attack by Facebook” and needed the gambling revenue. “Some of you might say, ‘well, bugger them, just don’t worry, we don’t need free-to-air media’ … but free-to-air media is in diabolical trouble. That’s the discussion we’re not having,” he said.
Guardian Australia reports the Greens are going to try and amend an unrelated bill on television transmission to try and pass a total ban. The government’s current proposal instead involves “gambling ads being banned online, in children’s programming, during live sports broadcasts and an hour either side, but limited to two an hour in general TV programming”.
The AFR says the government will refer a decision on whether to ban gambling advertising on playing fields and player jerseys to another inquiry that will involve state and territory representatives. The paper also reports backbench Labor MPs, such as Mike Freelander, are becoming increasingly frustrated with the government’s position on the issue. Having already briefed gambling companies and media outlets, the final policy is expected to go to cabinet later this month, along with the full response to the parliamentary inquiry, the AFR added.
(Crikey’s new series on the government’s failure to reform gambling advertising, Punted, can be found here)
Shorten also used his Q&A appearance to further fuel the flames of the row over who is to blame for the high inflation and interest rates. The NDIS and government services minister said of the claims the government was to blame: “I see this pure doctrine from the Liberals and other conservative commentators who say it’s all the government’s fault about inflation. It is not.”
“If you keep rates up too long or suddenly withdraw a lot of government expenditure, you could push us into more diabolical recession-like circumstances.”
He then declared the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) was “not immune from criticism”.
“The RBA told investors and homeowners and mortgage holders three years ago, four years [ago], that interest rates will stay low for a long time. That led a lot of people into tough circumstances. I think there should have been more criticism of the RBA then and maybe we wouldn’t be quite where we are.”
The row over inflation and cost of living was unsurprisingly brought up in yesterday’s question time as Parliament returned from its winter break. Also discussed, to the discomfort of the government according to Guardian Australia, was the future of the makarrata commission after the prime minister ruled it out despite it being an election promise (see previous Worm). This morning the site leads with polling apparently showing voters endorse Anthony Albanese’s decision not to establish the commission. The latest Guardian Essential poll found just one-third of voters want a Treaty with First Nations peoples, a truth-telling commission or a legislated Indigenous Voice, the report said.
PAYMAN VS LABOR
Sky News led overnight with its interview with ex-Labor Senator Fatima Payman in which she claimed “every interaction, every event I went to, every speech I delivered was controlled, was reviewed”. The senator, who quit the party last month over its position on Palestinian statehood, added: “I don’t think the Labor Party was ready for me. It is great to have somebody who ticks the diversity box, but that diversity in appearance comes with diversity in thoughts and values and representation.”
Yesterday The Australian reported Ziad Basyouny, a 44-year-old doctor, will formally announce his decision to stand as an independent candidate in Tony Burke’s seat of Watson in Sydney today. Guardian Australia says he’s the first of several independents expected to challenge in federal Labor seats amid anger at the party’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza. Basyouny told the site: “And that is the major issue here — he [Tony Burke] doesn’t represent our views [when he’s] in Canberra. The last year has shown us that Labor won’t listen to its constituents on things like Palestine, housing or the cost of living, and if you stand against the wind you’ll be punished.”
Elsewhere, the Guardian features the alarming finding that “not a single infant or toddler food product stocked in Australian supermarkets meets standards set by the World Health Organization (WHO)”. AAP says the study from the George Institute for Global Health found more than three-quarters of the 309 food products reviewed failed on overall nutritional requirements, usually due to too much sugar, and none met the WHO’s standards on prohibited claims, such as statements about being organic or free from colourings and flavours.
Looking ahead to today, AAP also flags former Prime Minister Scott Morrison is set to give evidence at Senator Linda Reynolds and Brittany Higgins’ high-profile defamation battle, and the June quarter wage price index from the Australian Bureau of Statistics is due out later.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
Scientists have declared horses are much smarter than previously thought. The Press Association reports on a study from Nottingham Trent University (NTU) which found the animals did better than expected in a “complex reward-based game”.
The BBC explained the study involved 20 horses who were rewarded for touching a piece of card with their nose. Then a “stop light” was introduced and the horses only received a treat when they touched the card when the light was off. The horses initially kept touching the card though, regardless of the light, but in the third and final stage of the research, the horses were subjected to a 10-second timeout if they touched the card with the light on. The animals reportedly quickly changed their behaviour and all 20 animals learned how to avoid the timeout.
Louise Evans, a PhD candidate based in NTU’s School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences, said: “We were expecting horses’ performance to improve when we introduced the timeout, but were surprised by how immediate and significant the improvement was.
“Animals usually need several repetitions of a task to gradually acquire new knowledge, whereas our horses immediately improved when we introduced a cost for errors. This suggests that the horses knew all along what the rules of the game were.”
The study has been published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
Say What?
This is unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining!
Elon Musk
The owner of social media platform X has been heavily promoting his live interview with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The event is due to happen at 8pm ET (10am AEST) today. Trump, who was banned from the site (then called Twitter) in 2021 and reinstated by Musk in 2022 but posted just once (his mugshot), has begun posting again in the shape of election ads. As Business Insider points out, the return to X by Trump has (so far) been unlike his previous usage when he would frequently post controversial and inflammatory comments, which he is instead still doing on his own social platform Truth Social.
CRIKEY RECAP
This being the most risk-averse Labor government in history, the chances of it taking on the networks, at least without some impressively large form of compensation for them, look slim. Perhaps, in 10 years’ time, in that form of l’esprit de l’escalier that afflicts former politicians who find in retirement the courage that eluded them while in office, Prime Minister Albanese might be a signatory to an open letter calling for further gambling regulation.
But by then the free-to-airs will probably be dead, too, gone the way of the printed newspaper with the horse-racing form guide tucked in the middle.
In the midst of the Fatima Paymania that intoxicated federal Parliament last month, the contribution of one politician to Australia’s vaunted social cohesion stood out: Peter Dutton.
The context was the Labor Party’s existential panic that Payman’s exit from the party may be the trigger for a political insurgency in safe Labor seats with large Muslim populations.
Asked about this, Dutton warned that the next Parliament could “include the Greens, it’ll include Green-teals, it’ll include Muslim candidates from Western Sydney. It will be a disaster”.
Standard Dutton, who never saw a division he didn’t think was worth stoking.
But this time he is being sued for it. A group called the Alliance Against Islamophobia has launched a complaint with the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board, alleging that Dutton’s comments breached section 20C of the Anti-Discrimination Act, which makes unlawful a public act that incites hatred towards, serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of, a person or group of persons because of their race. In short, racial hate speech.
While Dutton will dismiss the claim as political theatre, it comes at an interesting time and does raise a significant legal and societal question.
A new Australian meme was born over the weekend: Raygun, aka Rachael Gunn, the Olympic breakdancer who bombed so hard she sparked an avalanche of international discourse.
The 36-year-old b-girl and academic failed to score a single point in the first (and potentially last) breakdancing competition at the 2024 Paris Olympics, with an unconventional routine featuring kangaroo hops and floor-writhing in place of the sport’s usual tricks.
It was a deliberate choice, as Gunn admitted: “I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative, because how many chances do you get in a lifetime to do that on an international stage?”
Was her performance creative, camp, cringe… or an act of colonisation? The internet is undecided.
Let’s run through the takes.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Hospitals evacuated as wildfires spread near Greek capital Athens (Sky News)
Two 12-year-olds plead guilty over UK riots (The Financial Times)
Trump falsely claims Harris campaign used AI to fake crowd in Detroit (CBS News)
Heat aggravated by carbon pollution killed 50,000 in Europe last year — study (The Guardian)
Illinois school worker Vera Liddell gets 9 years for $1.5 million chicken wing heist (The New York Post)
THE COMMENTARIAT
As an ex-Twitter boss, I have a way to grab Elon Musk’s attention. If he keeps stirring unrest, get an arrest warrant — Bruce Daisley (The Guardian): In my experience, that threat of personal sanction is much more effective on executives than the risk of corporate fines. Were Musk to continue stirring up unrest, an arrest warrant for him might produce fireworks from his fingertips, but as an international jet-setter it would have the effect of focusing his mind. It’s also worth remembering that the rules of what is permitted on X are created by one of Musk’s lesser-known advisers, a Yorkshire man called Nick Pickles, who leads X’s global affairs team.
Musk’s actions should be a wake-up call for Starmer’s government to quietly legislate to take back control of what we collectively agree is permissible on social media. Musk might force his angry tweets to the top of your timeline, but the will of a democratically elected government should mean more than the fury of a tech oligarch — even him.
The problem is not A.I. It’s the disbelief created by Trump – Zeynep Tufekci (The New York Times): It’s no accident that Trump has made it a habit to portray credible news organisations as untrustworthy liars, and many of his supporters seem to have internalised that message they were open to in the first place.
Once trust is lost and all credibility is questioned, the lie doesn’t have to be high quality. It doesn’t have to be supported by highly realistic fake AI. It doesn’t have to be so easily disprovable. To work, the lie just needs a willing purveyor and an eager audience. The AI, then, is but a fig leaf.