Family matters: Following Tuesday’s Tips, we were asked whether we’d discuss other prominent political dynasties after mentioning the Baillieu family’s relationship to the race in Kooyong, as well as the Katter family’s potential new au pair.
And fair enough. After all, the Baillieus aren’t the only famous family running around in Kooyong this election. Liberal candidate Amelia Hamer is well-known as the grand-niece of former Victorian premier Rupert Hamer (after which Hamer Hall is named). Rupert’s brother David was a former member for the Victorian federal seat of Isaacs and later a senator for Victoria, while their grandfather-in-law was Sir William Murray McPherson, the 31st premier of Victoria. And David and Rupert had an uncle named George Swinburne, the state member for Hawthorn in the early 20th century and the founder of Swinburne University. Which is a fun way to round out this little lineage, because Amelia currently is a lecturer at that very university.
Sticking on this week’s Succession-esque theme, our friend Mark Di Stefano over at The Australian Financial Review reported this week that the Minerals Council of Australia’s principal media adviser Annabel Clunies-Ross had been seconded to the Liberal election campaign in Sydney, and the surname rang some bells.
Those readers privileged enough to have attended the Australian National University will note there is a Clunies Ross Street that forms the west boundary of the campus in Canberra (among many other landmarks that take the family name). The Clunies-Ross family are the original settlers of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and for over 150 years ruled the archipelago as a private fiefdom. Needless to say the family has done well for themselves.
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The hate media brigade: The wheels appear to be falling off Peter Dutton’s campaign bus, with the opposition leader pivoted from culture wars to lashing out at the media. Having joked on Nova FM on Wednesday morning about wishing he hit an ABC cameraman instead of the Channel 10 one he actually hit with a wayward drop punt earlier in the campaign, and then going on Fox to jokingly fat-shame his own travelling press pack, Dutton has turned on the taps of vitriol in the last week of the campaign. He has already branded the ABC and Guardian Australia “hate media”, and offered up more than a few anti-ABC soundbites.
One wonders whether the resentment has built from having spent the majority of a parliamentary term avoiding interviews that aren’t with Sky News and then being forced to leave the echo chamber during an election campaign.
In any case, Crikey understands there’s more than a few disgruntled journalists on the Dutton bus, sick of being branded “activists, not journalists” by the Liberal leader. To be fair, I’d be pissed off too if the bloke waking me up at 5am every morning kept dumping on me as a professional.
Doesn’t like his own medicine: Not to toot our own horns, but following Crikey’s coverage of politicians spamming the electorate, it seems everyone else took up the cause too. It’s had some unexpected consequences, and some… less unexpected ones.
Harry Fong is the Queensland barrister and Trumpet of Patriots Senate candidate responsible for authorising Clive Palmer’s latest moneypit — the incessant spam texts that just about everyone’s gotten. This resulted in Fong’s own mobile number, previously freely available on the Bar Association website, being incessantly spammed by irate members of the public. Fong’s profile on the website has since been taken down, but unfortunately when you Google him, the number remains on his Google business listing.
Speaking to Guardian Australia’s Ariel Bogle, Fong said that the flood of messages killed his phone battery, and that he didn’t personally send out the texts. Not only that, he’s got no idea why Trumpet of Patriots chose to use his name to authorise the texts.
No junk mail: We’re all tired of the election. Particularly us terminally online journalists, who work long hours in the content mills slavishly covering every little gaffe, policy hint, or refusal to answer a question — all so you, dear reader, can be well-informed when it comes time to do the deed at the ballot box.
But perhaps no-one is more tired than this voter. This photo was sent in by a tipster in the Western Australian seat of Canning, where Liberal rising star Andrew Hastie will be looking to hold the electorate on a razor-thin 1.2% margin. Eleven flyers in three weeks might feel desperate, but we dare say Hastie may well be.
