Comment

The Australian Federal Police has sent to the prosecutors its brief of evidence about the ABC’s reporting on the Afghan Files, the big story about alleged killings of unarmed civilians by Australian soldiers. It looks as though reporter Dan Oakes could be in the frame for bringing us the news, but not so his colleague Sam Clark. Anyway, it was the first big AFP announcement, following its raid on the ABC’s HQ, since former Bowen Hills Bugle political reporter Renee Viellaris took over as the federal plod’s director of strategic communications.

Four days after the voters of Eden-Monaro kept the marginal seat in opposition hands, the Reserve Bank governor summed up the nation’s predicament: we are all flying by the seat of our pants. Scott Morrison, too, put it succinctly: ‘This is a global pandemic. There are no guarantees in a global pandemic. You have to deal with the situations that are in front of you.’ It is how you deal with these situations, or rather how lucky you are in dealing with them, that can mark a leader up or down.

While taking my young son on yet another visit to Canberra’s Questacon last year, I decided to walk him past a pair of statues of John Curtin and Ben Chifley. Watching the winter sun warm Chifley’s bronze face, I wondered, momentarily, what my son would have thought of me representing the seat named after Joseph Benedict Chifley. After all, I am the son of migrants from the former Yugoslavia, the same migrants who had been fair game politically in the late 1920s when Chifley first entered politics.

The facts of the case are unfathomable, when you lay them out: the real prospect a journalist could be charged for reporting on credible allegations of war crimes committed by Australian troops. But this is where things now stand, with the Australian Federal Police sending a brief of evidence to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, detailing a case against ABC journalist Dan Oakes for his reporting on the “Afghan Files”.

Where’s Kathy Jackson when you need her during a pandemic? It’s a cry Gadfly hears frequently as he gallivants around a boarded-up nation, so it’s timely to present a handy updated guide to events. Kathy was the national secretary of the Health Services Union of Australia, the outfit that represents a massive number of people who work in and around hospitals and nursing homes. As far back as August 2015, the Federal Court found Jackson had misappropriated union funds and ordered her to repay $1.4 million. Regrettably, she had been declared bankrupt two months earlier.

Unfailingly, since World War II, the voters in the New South Wales seat of Eden-Monaro have picked the mood of the nation at every federal election. Well, almost every election – 2016 and 2019 were the exceptions. Today those of the seat’s 114,000 registered electors who haven’t voted pre-poll will play the part of political weathervane, if not their more traditional role of bellwether.

What Cook represents, his continuing legacy in First Nations peoples’ dispossession and social injustice, perpetuates suffering. Public spaces such as Hyde Park should be welcoming to all. For this reason, and those further outlined below, the statue of Cook should no longer be displayed in the park, but conserved in a public museum.

It’s as though the entire conservative cause in our weird nation has been deracinated. The allegations against Dyson Heydon leave much havoc in their wake. His political sponsors, Little Winston Howard and the Mad Monk, look gormless, while he has blotted the escutcheons of luminous institutions from the High Court to the University of Sydney, where he is an emeritus professor.

When news broke this week that an independent inquiry at the High Court of Australia found former justice Dyson Heydon had sexually harassed six associates during his decade on the bench, my non-law friends and colleagues were incredulous. To them, the allegations of a judge repeatedly breaking the law read as hypocritical. Within legal circles though, friends and colleagues are exchanging theories about who will be exposed next. And we are all wondering whether anything will change this time.

“This is a genuine offer,” Anthony Albanese said of his plea to Scott Morrison to join him in ending Australia’s energy wars once and for all. But it’s hard to call it a truce when one side concedes nothing. There’s another word for that kind of deal.