Canva office policy overhaul after hosting pro-Hamas speakers

Canva co-founders Cliff Obrecht, Cameron Adams and Melanie Perkins.

Design firm Canva, founded by richlisters Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, welcomed the pro-Palestine and resistance movements into its Sydney office last week after doing much work to distance itself from both following the October 7 massacres in southern Israel.

Hosted at Canva’s Surry Hills HQ on Wednesday night was an event called Beyond the Ceasefire: Solidarity, Safety, and Justice, held on “unceded Gadigal land”, per the invitation, and which featured Hamas adorants Sara Saleh and Ahmed Alabadla.

Canva co-founders Cameron Adams, Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins.

Both are amply documented for their terror sympathising. Saleh has repeatedly expressed support for “armed resistance”, which is a polite phrasing for the bloodshed that occurred on October 7. So, too, has Alabadla, a NSW public servant who can’t understand why Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in Australia and who lionised its leader, Ismail Haniyeh, as a martyr following Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran last year, courtesy of an explosive device. The NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, which employs Alabadla, said it’s reviewing those remarks for any breach of the department’s Code of Ethics and Conduct.

Canva once wanted nothing to do with these elements and sentiments. In the days after October 7, The Daily Wire reported that the software company had removed templates on its design platform created by university campus groups to publicise their pro-Hamas demonstrations.

Sara Saleh.

Hosting a mob of Hamas-praising activists doesn’t exactly jive with the statements Canva supplied at the time, which said “violence of any kind goes against everything we stand for”.

A company spokeswoman told us the free event space “operates independently” from Canva’s core business activities, a sad excuse for the lack of oversight. Of course Canva wants to run a thousand miles from this balls-up; the event was hosted inside its building!

But given what’s happened, Canva tells us that it’s updated the venue guidelines to bar political and religious events from taking place there in the future.

“Canva was not involved in planning, organising, or selecting the topics for this event, and the group’s application omitted any mention of a political focus,” the spokeswoman said.

Heard that one before, haven’t we?

Craven bets big on Darwin

The talk of Darwin has been a stealthy visit by crypto billionaire Ed Craven, of Stake.com, who quietly touched down at the airport on Thursday in his newly purchased private jet. He was on a mission to finally submit the paperwork for a coveted local bookmaker’s licence and flew up for meetings with gambling regulators and NT Attorney-General Marie-Clare Boothby.

Registered in July, EC Aviation Pty Ltd is the owner of this aircraft, presumed to be a Gulfstream, and lists its director and secretary as one Edward James Macarthur Craven, the young money rich-lister and co-founder of the online casino giant. Whether it’s a G4 or Bombardier, is there a better way of transitioning into the blast furnace of Darwin’s heat for a top-level meeting? Fresh off the jet, sharper than Gillette.

Craven, not even 30 yet, and co-founder Bijan Tehrani have been jonesing to enter the Australian gambling market since at least 2023, their operations presently domiciled in the tropical, less-regulated clime of Curacao.

Stake.com co-founders Ed Craven, left, and Bijan Tehrani. Picture: Julian Kingman

Expansions last year saw Stake enter the Italian market by swallowing up one of its heritage sportsbooks; it separately obtained a licence to operate in Peru, where it remains. Two years ago the parent company, Easygo, acquired Betfair Colombia, giving it a licence to operate there until 2025.

Much activity all over the globe, but no word on a licence yet for the home turf, which has us wondering why Craven would come gliding into Darwin if not for discussions about an impending application and the likelihood of its success.

But what would we know? A spokeswoman for Easygo told us: “We meet with regulators from time to time, to listen and understand their priorities as part of monitoring gambling markets around the world.”

Roger that! Nothing to see here. Or is there?

‘Mate, mate, we hate’

And while we’re on the subject of Saleh, it’s odd that someone who supposedly “hates Australia”, as she once admitted, enjoys so much taxpayer largesse via government grants.

“We actually do hate Australia,” Saleh said, recounting an experience she had with a “fragile white man” in Sydney’s CBD.

In a video posted to her Instagram account, Saleh explained that the man had criticised the pro-Palestine protests as being akin to hating Australia. Saleh continued by saying: “I was like, mate, mate, you are not wrong. We actually do hate Australia. We are literally saying it to you. We hate the settler colonial project of Australia and the way that it treats First Nations people, the way that it is built on stolen land.”

So much hate!

Yet no compunction milking grants from the suckers at the Robert Morgan-chaired agency Creative Australia, which paid $37,440 to Saleh in 2022 and $32,760 in 2020, and much more to hopelessly anti-Israel organisations that she’s affiliated with. Education Minister Jason Clare just asked the Australian Research Council to investigate an $870,000 grant awarded to the maniacal Israel-hater Randa Abdel-Fattah. Surely it’s not too late for a wider, root-and-branch probe of other grants to be examined, too?