Bank levy panders to dislike, SMH columnist tackles distaste
Has Clive Palmer been inspired by another well-known, well-padded multi-millionaire?
Robert Carling, writing for the Centre for Independent Studies website, on the new bank levy yesterday:
This is a serious new tax that has not gone through the public exposure and consultation processes that such a proposal would normally warrant. It has never been proposed by any review of the Australian tax and banking systems. It has come out of the blue. It is an illustration of populism in that it panders to the public’s dislike of banks. As an example of the hunger for revenue, the levy joins other new taxes as opportunistic appeals to populist sentiment: one on foreigner-owned residential properties deemed by the government to be “vacant” for more than six months of the year; and on employers bringing in workers from overseas.
Elizabeth Farrelly ruminates on the Fairfax strike on The Sydney Morning Herald’s website yesterday:
Don’t howl. After 36 hours of trial-by-Twitter, I’m done with howl. Scab, they roared. Scab dog. Scab dickhead. Scabby scab-face. (Twitter’s brevity precludes nuance.) I was accused of hypocrisy, of selfishness, of undermining solidarity. One bloke adjured spitting on me, others advocated violence. It was a hailstorm of hate, with some Fairfax journalists among the trolls … To all those who vowed never to read me again because I’d “broken the strike” I say this. To read only those with whom you agree is to slit your own intellectual throat. You’ll end up voting for Trump.
The Australian Financial Review’s Rear Window columnist Joe Aston gave a Melbourne colleague a serve on Monday:
Reporter Michael Bachelard is someone whose oeuvre we admire … but his public comments on the steps of Media House in Melbourne on Wednesday were preposterous. “I would recommend that people don’t buy (The Age),” he said … a TV reporter asked him what (readers) should do now. “Subscribe … Nobody can deny the economic problems with print media so the best thing you can do if you like the journalism you read in The Age is to subscribe to it.” How does an intelligent person sequentially utter (let alone reconcile) two such antithetical statements? And is that really the extent of the union’s alternative plan for Fairfax’s metro publishing division?
High-profile Muslim Susan Carland in The Conversation on Thursday:
Many Muslims see the Qur’an and hadith as a defence for their arguments against sexism, not as a stumbling block to women’s liberation.
Carland (married to TV star Waleed Aly) was profiled in Fairfax’s magazine Sunday Life last September:
Carland’s fixation with Rik Mayall, who played a sociology student in The Young Ones, inspired her to become a sociologist.
The BBC website describes Mayall’s character thus:
Mayall played obnoxious, poetry-writing anarchist Rick … obsessed with Cliff Richard, starring alongside Adrian Edmondson. Their slapstick comedy … achieved cult status.
The Australian’s Sarah Elks reports on Clive Palmer’s Federal Court appearance in Brisbane on Thursday:
Mr Palmer, clutching a sick bag and a breathing apparatus, staggered into the witness box, after his barrister said his painkiller … had badly affected his memory. Mr Palmer said his mind was so addled by the drug he could not … remember his Amex PIN.
In June 2015, Paul Barry, writing in the SMH, recalled Alan Bond’s May 1994 Federal Court appearance in Sydney:
Clutching his sandwiches in a green plastic bag … stares into space like a zombie, as if he’s brain dead … he shuffles out of court, a sad figure in a crumpled raincoat, bent and pale. But round the corner, out of sight of the cameras, he straightens up and tosses the bag away.