Is anyone listening to Sally McManus?
The ACTU boss made a wild and unsubstantiated allegation on Monday night. We decided we’d better check it out.
ACTU boss Sally McManus made a wild and unsubstantiated allegation on the ABC’s Q+A on Monday night.
Asked if she would be willing to download the Morrison government’s new absolutely voluntary and not at all tracking app (which the government can’t seem to convince its own backbenchers to download), McManus said: “Yeah, I’ve thought about this myself and, I’ll tell you something funny, as a union leader, and probably most union leaders just assume the government’s spying on everything we’re doing, so our phones, our emails, everything.”
Host Hamish Macdonald asked: “You really assume the government spies on you?”
McManus replied: “Yeah, yeah. They do. They tap phones, they do all of those things. So for them to find out who I’m coming in contact (with) on my Bluetooth, who cares?”
Should we trust the Australian government and public health researchers with the personal data stored on our phones? #QandA pic.twitter.com/51Cu6WLF8g
— QandA (@QandA) April 20, 2020
Now, you’d think this Big Brother Nineteen Eighty-Four spying (or America right now) claim is one the government would be keen to refute. So we asked the minister in charge of the app, Stuart Robert. His office referred us to Attorney-General Christian Porter (self-confessed new BFF of McManus). Who referred us to Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton. Who referred us to Robert. We may be in a pandemic but this is some red-tape ridiculousness. As Strewth’s mum would say: they couldn’t run a meat raffle in a (closed because of social distancing) pub!
Incidentally, we’re reliably informed Robert’s office WhatsApp was amused to discover France and Germany have released a coronavirus app called ROBERT, for ROBust and privacy-presERving proximity Tracing protocol.
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Shot at a bigger picture
Anthony Albanese couldn’t help himself when asked about Virgin jobs on Monday: “Scott Morrison cares about his job. We’ve seen that with Malcolm Turnbull’s book, the extent to which he was prepared to fight to get the one job that he wanted. What I want is a prime minister who fights for every job of every Australian.”
The Opposition Leader didn’t receive a bootleg copy of A Bigger Picture: “I am not on the Prime Minister’s office’s email list, obviously.” But Eric Abetz did. ABC host Patricia Karvelas gave him enough rope, asking: “Did you have a little look before you deleted it?”
The Tasmanian Liberal senator replied: “Well, what I would say, one nice thing about it is that it was dedicated to Lucy (Turnbull).” That sounds like a yes! Will he buy a copy? “I doubt it, no,” Abetz said. Perhaps he (and other MPs) will use the taxpayer-funded book allowance to purchase one instead?
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Always keep receipts
On Monday we noted Tony Abbott was named 642 times in Turnbull’s 704-page opus. How many mentions does Lucy get? Just 225.
Dutton scored 239, Morrison 188 and Mathias Cormann 82. The Finance Minister complained to ABC’s RN Breakfast on Tuesday: “Malcolm’s book is his version of history, it substantially differs from my clear recollection of events.”
Less than a half-hour later, Turnbull phoned in: “As you know, I’m very careful about facts. For example, Mathias suggested that he never said to me that we, the government, had a treasurer problem. Just to refresh his memory, he said it to me on the 17th February, 2017, at 4.39 in the afternoon.”
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Some more (Turn)bull
Two more excerpts from A Bigger Picture. Page 622: “Alan Tudge had a mix of complaints about policy and people. He claimed, without any particulars, that (Turnbull senior adviser) Sally Cray had ‘briefed against him’. I reminded him of how Sally had helpfully and discreetly managed a rather awkward situation he had got himself into. ‘If she’d wanted to brief against you, wouldn’t that have found its way into the public domain, Alan?’ I asked. He went a little pale but conceded the point.”
And page 643, after Morrison won the top job: “We left Canberra that Sunday, for the last time. The new prime minister had the big plane so one of the Challengers was waiting to take us back to Sydney. As we drove out to the RAAF base, the police in our car were told we wouldn’t be allowed to drive on to the tarmac and up to the plane. A nice touch, I thought. We’d have to carry our bags across the tarmac, a perfectly forlorn sight for the cameras to record from their positions on the other side of the airfield fence. I rang the Defence Minister (now Foreign Minister), Marise Payne, and got the order countermanded.”
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Cracking wise
Who zinged it better? Turnbull on ABC’s 7.30: “If Dutton had become leader, not even Bill Shorten could have lost the election.” Or Shorten on Sky: “I mean, if you were going down to the bookshop to buy Malcolm’s 677 pages in the time of coronavirus and the cops pulled you over, I’m not sure you wouldn’t get fined for a non-essential job there.”
strewth@theaustralian.com.au
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