By Kishor Napier-Raman and Noel Towell
CPAC is back, baby! And no, we’re not talking about the renowned Cessnock Performing Arts Centre, but the Conservative Political Action Conference which will hit Sydney’s Luna Park in early October.
Who will it be?Credit: John Shakespeare
Top of the bill among the speakers so far announced is Oxford-educated British rapper Zuby – Google it, mate – who has (self) released three albums but will probably be better known to the CPAC throngs for his views on trans women in sport. Spoiler alert: he’s not a fan.
No right-wing gabfest these days would be complete without a roll call of political has-beens, so we have former Queensland senator Amanda Stoker, former Howard government minister Gary Hardgrave and very former MP Ross Cameron. The only serving politician on the line-up so far is the hardline Northern Territory Country Liberal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
There’s intrigue too, with a mystery “British political campaigner” to be announced in due course. Could it be Mr Brexit, Nigel Farage? Probably. His appearances at these affairs, including Sydney in 2019, are a bit cliched by now. Farage’s latest US CPAC, in Florida in February, also featured none other than Donald Trump himself.
But who could be the “former prime minister of Australia” who will attend the Sydney event? We’ve only got seven of those, and we can safely rule out Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull.
CPAC has never exactly been John Howard’s scene while Tony Abbott was asked, and refused, to register as an agent of foreign influence after addressing the event in 2019. The former member for Warringah has been putting himself out there of late, though, so he’s a maybe. Scott Morrison hasn’t had a heap to say publicly (in Australia at least) since his election loss in May, but he is an outside chance at best. It would be quite the coup, though.
Balance of improbabilities
There was an undeniable romance to the merger of the behemoth AustralianSuper and minnow the Labour Union Co-operative Retirement Fund (LUCRF), which was completed in June as the first-ever industry fund folded into the biggest.
The LUCRF’s 130,000 members would have been confident their nest eggs were going into a very safe pair of hands in AustralianSuper, which has established a reputation as a slick operation under chief executives Ian Silk and more recently Paul Schroder.
But the powerhouse fund’s newest members got a nasty shock when letters arrived from AustralianSuper confirming their retirement savings were now in the capable hands of the industry leader, but left out the most important bit – their super balances.
Emails have been dispatched in the past couple of days, owning the error and promising fresh letters that will include the bits that matter.
AustralianSuper spokesman said the fund apologised to its new members, assuring CBD it was an administrative error by the fund’s investor services contractor. That could happen to anyone, we suppose, but it’s a shaky start all the same.
Young Liberals unleashed
The Liberals are still in the process of working out just what the hell went so wrong in May, when former prime minister Scott Morrison led the party to its worst electoral performance since WWII.
The party’s youth wing has a few ideas, though. In a scathing submission to a post-election review conducted by former president Brian Loughnane (the better half of Tony Abbott’s old puppet master Peta Credlin) and Senator Jane Hume, the Young Liberals lash out at the Morrison government’s “failure to articulate a long-term vision”. Ouch.
On climate, “genuine inaction” mixed with a “lack of leadership” and unhelpful comments from pro-coal Nationals created the perception the party was “dragged kicking and screaming” toward net zero, in sharp contrast with the Liberal state governments in NSW and Tasmania.
The Morrison government “broke its promise to deliver a federal integrity commission” and failed to “attract, retain and promote women”, leading to a loss of faith among female voters.
The submission also urged the party to cool it on the culture war stuff – claiming the debate around trans women in sport kick-started by Warringah candidate Katherine Deves, and the Morrison government’s desperate failed attempt to ram through a religious discrimination bill – were “distracting fringe issues”.
We wonder if Peter Dutton will listen.
All’s Wells
In the latest news from Labor land, Sports Minister Anika Wells’ interim chief of staff Elliot Stein is leaving her office to join UNICEF as head of government and external affairs.
Stein, who had a brief three-month stint in Wells’ office handling the transition from opposition to government, previously worked with Jim Chalmers, and with minister Joe Ludwig during the Rudd-Gillard years.
Meanwhile, Wells’ fellow Queenslander Terri Butler, who lost her neighbouring seat of Griffith (once held by Kevin Rudd) to the Greens, is a bit less “free for lunch” as her Twitter bio now reads.
She’s now off to chair the new environmental not-for-profit Circular Australia. Interestingly, the media contact for the announcement was one Alex Cramb, a former Anthony Albanese spinner who retired to his farm in Gippsland after the election win.
We hear he’s doing a bit of freelancing on the side.
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