Cyclone Alfred leaves hundreds of thousands without power
ALFRED AFTERMATH
After making landfall over the weekend, Tropical Cyclone Alfred has left hundreds of thousands of homes without power with “phenomenal levels” of rainfall triggering flooding across Queensland’s southeast and northern NSW.
The AAP reports more than a quarter of a million homes have been without power over the weekend, while the ABC notes multiple emergency flood warnings have been issued overnight, with the latest list here. The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) in the last few hours has also issued a severe thunderstorm warning for intense rainfall in southeast Queensland.
Matthew Bass, a BOM senior forecaster, told the broadcaster parts of Brisbane and the Gold Coast had witnessed a “rapid ramp-up in rainfall”. “Basically from the CBD out towards Ipswich, and then right through Kenmore, Mount Cootha, and through the Samford Valley — some of the rainfall totals are getting to pretty phenomenal levels,” he said.
AAP highlights how residents at Hervey Bay north of Brisbane were told to stay inside under an emergency declaration after almost 250mm of rain fell in hours, triggering flash flooding. The newswire says parts of Gold Coast also received an emergency warning late on Sunday, with communities told to “take action now” and stay off the roads.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese flew into Brisbane on Sunday. In a post on Instagram overnight he said the situation was “still critical and there are still serious risks”.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports a 61-year-old man who died after being swept into floodwaters in northern NSW on Friday has been identified as Tom Cook. The ABC has spoken to a neighbour who witnessed the tragedy.
The Age says 13 people injured when two Australian Defence Force vehicles crashed near Lismore are expected to make a full recovery, reporting two soldiers remain in a serious condition.
The Nine papers also report an “insurance catastrophe” has been declared, triggering “priority treatment for affected policyholders and triaging to ensure those hardest hit receive urgent assistance”. Insurance Council of Australia chief executive officer Andrew Hall is quoted as saying: “Insurers have received around 3,000 claims in the past two days and expect many more thousands of claims as residents return to their homes and understand the full extent of the damage.”
The papers say the remnants of Alfred are expected to bring another day of heavy rain to northern NSW after moving westward through Queensland, with hundreds of schools set to remain closed.
During the weekend, Albanese thanked UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer “for your sympathy for the impact of Cyclone Alfred” after the pair discussed the storm, the Ukraine war, and the AUKUS defence pact.
COOK WINS BIG
As expected, Premier Roger Cook won a thumping victory in Western Australia at the weekend.
At the time of writing, Labor sit on 41 seats, with the Liberals on five, and the Nationals on four. The ABC reckons there are still nine seats in doubt.
Speaking after securing a third successive term for Labor (and being elected as premier in his own right), Cook became emotional when talking about a moment of “pride and love” with his family on Saturday night. The Sydney Morning Herald says he cut his Sunday morning news conference short to embrace his wife Carly Lane who was watching on.
Earlier Cook has called the results “an emphatic victory for WA Labor and it’s a vindication of the strong government that we have provided for the people of Western Australia”.
Meanwhile, Liberal leader Libby Mettam said on Sunday she would leave it to the parliamentary party to decide the leadership after a third successive disastrous result, the ABC reports. The broadcaster says she also “acknowledged leadership speculation linked to Mr [Basil] Zempilas at the beginning of the campaign had a destabilising effect”.
Zempilas, the lord mayor of Perth, is on track to win the seat of Churchlands but has blamed a Labor attack campaign for his underwhelming performance, The Australian Financial Review reports. Cook dismissed the claim, saying “there was no Basil Zempilas campaign.”
The Nine papers reckon the Liberals will pick up just seven seats once the counting is complete. “Regionally, Labor performed poorly,” the papers state, flagging statewide the party’s primary vote suffered a 18% swing but the votes went to the likes of the Greens, Nationals and minor parties. In the upper house the Greens are also on track to secure the balance of power. Guardian Australia has picked out the main themes of the election, saying Liberal gains in inner suburbs were minimal.
Prime Minister Antony Albanese has congratulated Cook and Labor on the “extraordinary” victory, while Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has called the Liberals performance “a mixed bag”.
You know where this is going next… everyone is unsurprisingly now asking what the results mean for the federal election in May (how nice to actually be a tiny bit more specific on when it will be).
The Australian Financial Review writes that Labor MPs believe the Albanese government “is within striking distance” of holding all four federal seats in WA it won from the Liberals at the last election, with Saturday’s result lifting spirits within the party.
Elsewhere, The Australian reckons Cook will now “use his massive election victory, his booming personal popularity and the increasingly strong resources of WA Labor to help Anthony Albanese sandbag crucial federal seats in the state”.
The paper also has the results of its latest Newspoll, which show support for Albanese has risen with a hung parliament still looming. The polling apparently shows “a majority of voters don’t believe the Coalition is ready to govern after a single term in opposition”, with Dutton suffering a fall in his approval rating.
AAP highlights the result as representing the “first time since late last year that the Labor leader has had a better approval rating than the opposition leader”. Overall, the Coalition still leads Labor 51-49 on a two-part-preferred basis with primary support for both major parties rising.
With Albanese confirming on Friday he wasn’t going to call the election on Sunday or Monday, we now know the election will have to be on either May 3, May 10 or May 17 (the last possible date it can be). And we know we will now be getting a budget on March 25. And with it, Parliament will sit again.
Talking of which, the Nine papers reckon “a surprise revenue gain” is providing Labor with more options to help households in the budget, including a new round of energy bill relief.
Those US tariffs may well be coming this week though, with The Age reporting “Donald Trump’s top economic adviser has downplayed the prospect of any exemptions to the US president’s steel and aluminium tariffs”.
Kevin Hassett, chair of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters at the White House: “He [Trump] really doesn’t like the word exemption. If I walk in and offer an exemption, then I’ll probably get kicked out of the office. Maybe there’ll be some; we’ll see how it goes. I doubt it.”
Guardian Australia also highlights that Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of defense has said selling submarines to Australia under the AUKUS deal poses a “very difficult problem” for America.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
An artist of 20 years has finally found fame after a video of her reacting to one of her own pieces went viral.
The Moody Gardens resort in Texas posted the clip on TikTok at the end of last year and it has so far received around 6o million views, over 6 million likes and more than 32,000 comments, The Washington Post reports.
The artist in question goes by the name Marley and has been described as “the best artist in the world”. In the viral clip, Marley is shown loudly voicing her excitement at her artwork upon its completion and enthusiastically “wagging her tail”.
Marley is a squat northern rockhopper penguin and she attends art sessions twice a week at the Moody Gardens aquarium. During the sessions, she hops into a sponge soaked in paint and then walks across a canvas to create her work.
“Marley is truly a professional penguin artist at this point,” penguin biologist Janie Konetski said. “People who meet her at our penguin encounters are delighted with how big her personality is. She loves interacting with people and enjoys the entire process of painting and the enrichment it brings.”
The Washington Post says Moody Gardens decided to include painting as an enrichment activity for penguins two decades ago. The pieces created by the penguins, which cost $50 and the proceeds from which are donated to animal conservation efforts, are displayed in the gift shop and “usually sell within hours”.
Say What?
Thursday.
Justin Trudeau
The Canadian prime minister had a one-word answer to being asked last week: “Your foreign affairs minister yesterday characterised all this as a psychodrama. How would you characterise it?”
CRIKEY RECAP
The decline of the West has long been a beloved trope of the right: that the soft, irreligious, affluent citizens of the West were no longer up to the task of protecting the values upon which Western prosperity was founded.
Protecting from whom? Name your favourite other — the Soviet Union. Islam. China. Declining birth rates. Secularism. Immigrants. Globalism. But no matter the threat, it was always existential. It was always five minutes to midnight, the great test was always imminent, and we’d always fail it without an embrace of the right’s agenda.
Well, with stopped-clock inevitability, the right was, well, right. The threat to Western civilization is here. Except, the calls are coming from inside the house: it’s the right’s own champion, Donald Trump, who is the threat. All it took was three decades of white people being told they needed to start competing with the rest of the world and stop inflicting egregious discrimination on people unlike them. That, and a reality TV grifter who, whether or not he’s an actual Russian agent, loves dictators.
Oddly, the earnest thinkpieces about the fall of the West have dried up, even as it becomes more and more apparent that we need to take Trump both seriously and literally about his goal to wreck the existing world order. And it’s hard to think of a more telling moment in the collapse of the West we all grew up with than the prime minister of Canada saying that US tariffs were intended to wreck the Canadian economy in order to make it easier for the US to seize the country.
A hung parliament is increasingly likely, which would mean minority government and a powerful crossbench. Veteran independent MP Bob Katter tells Crikey he knows exactly what he’d push for in such a scenario.
“Immediately restore the market gardens to every community, immediately restore the right to take up private freehold title … and get rid of all those public servants in Brisbane and give us separate statehood,” Katter said.
Katter and his son, Queensland state MP Robbie Katter, have argued for North Queensland secession for years. According to the Australian constitution, federal Parliament can “admit to the Commonwealth or establish new states … as it thinks fit”, but territory belonging to a state can only break off and form its own state with the permission of the state Parliament.
“We will get the balance of power, and when we do, we’ll start to break away immediately,” Katter said. “I don’t know of a million people anywhere in the world who are ruled by a government 2,500 kilometers away, and I looked at all the state governments in Russia and Canada and very sparsely populated countries.”
The gender pay gap grew significantly at News Corp’s newspapers and Foxtel last year, with volatile figures emerging across the media sector.
The latest Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) figures show the gender pay gap of every private company in the country with more than 100 employees. This year’s is the second release of the report, which mimics gender pay reporting schemes that have been established in the UK.
The national gap for average total remuneration is now 21.8%, which sits steady on the previous year, but in the Australian media sector, those figures have been much more unpredictable, with some companies’ gender pay gaps increasing significantly.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Israel to cut off electricity in Gaza in apparent effort to force hand of Hamas (The Guardian)
UN urges Syria to act fast to protect people as hundreds of civilians killed (BBC)
Hedge fund giant Bridgewater bets against Australian stocks and bonds (The AFR)
Public servants will have right to disconnect repealed under Coalition government (The Sydney Morning Herald)
Trump wants to see more than just a minerals deal to restart aid and intel to Ukraine (NBC News)
Canada’s Liberals to elect a new party leader and prime minister. What to know (The New York Times)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Another decisive Labor win in WA, but much remains at stake — Narelle Miragliotta, Jacob Broom, Nardine Alnemr (The Conversation): Labor will now have to get on with the business of governing, and hope to be able to do enough in the intervening four years to remain competitive for a fourth term, especially among their own supporters. As expert Ben Raue has pointed out, some of the largest swings against Labor were “in their safer seats”.
The Liberals will have to make a decision about who will lead the parliamentary party. It is unclear whether Libby Mettam will remain the leader. Well before the results were in on election night, her colleague, Steve Thomas, was not prepared to offer his full-throated endorsement.
However, Mettam’s putative successor, Basil Zemplias, did not emerge from this election unscathed, barely scraping a victory in Churchlands despite his high-profile status. Realistically, however, Mettam is the only person with the experience to lead the party in the lower house.
The other relationship to watch is between the Nationals and the Liberals. The two parties are not on great terms, and with the federal seat of Bullwinkel to be fiercely contested, one might expect things between them to get worse before they get better.
The one question that really matters: If Trump defies the courts, then what? — Erwin Chemerinsky (The New York Times): Those in the Trump administration who carry out his policies and violate court orders could be held in contempt. But if it is criminal contempt, Mr. Trump can issue them pardons. Although civil contempt can involve being jailed until the person complies with the court order, that is enforced by the United States marshals, who are part of the Department of Justice and thus under the president’s control.
Defiance of court orders could be the basis for impeachment and removal. But with his party in control of Congress, Mr. Trump knows that is highly unlikely to happen.
If the Trump administration chooses to defy court orders, we will have a constitutional crisis not seen before. Perhaps public opinion will turn against the president and he will back down and comply. Or perhaps, after 238 years, we will see the end of government under the rule of law.
