COOKING UP DRAMA

Liberal women make up just three out of every 10 people in the Coalition party room, the lack of female representation was a reason for the Coalition losing the 2022 election, and Scott Morrison said he’d love to see a female successor in his vacated seat of Cook, so the Liberals preselected a man with a 53% of the total votes (158 of 296). He’s a 41-year-old former McKinsey consultant named Simon Kennedy who tried and failed to win the seat of Bennelong in 2022, ABC notes. He also opposed vaccine mandates, the SMH adds. Last night Kennedy faced competition from Howard-backed Veteran Family Advocate commissioner Gwen Cherne (35 votes) and Sutherland Shire Mayor Carmelo Pesce (90 votes), the SMH reports.

The Liberals hold the seat with a 12.5% margin, so Cook would be basically a sure thing for Kennedy — but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did say he’d “wait and see” whether the Liberals chose “another bloke” before deciding whether to spend Labor’s war chest funds on a battle in a blue ribbon seat (which includes Cronulla, Caringbah, and Rockdale). Teal backer Climate 200 said no prospective independent had approached them to run, Guardian Australia reports, and Simon Holmes à Court added that any prospective candidate has to come from the community. A final bit of ballot news from overseas — the US Supreme Court has unanimously thrown out Colorado’s attempt to bar Donald Trump from Super Tuesday’s ballot considering the January 6 insurrection, The Age reports, a massive win for the former president on a key day during his pursuit of the White House a second time.

PROTECT AND SWERVE

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will announce a $2 billion green energy fund that’ll give loans, guarantees, equities and insurance, the AFR says, at Melbourne’s Australia-ASEAN summit today (meanwhile, Opposition leader Peter Dutton is taking nuclear power plants to the next election). It comes as Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong says Indo-Pacific and Southeast Asian countries are facing “destabilising, provocative and coercive actions” while not naming Beijing, urging “preventative architecture”. But Wong should call a spade a spade, ANU National Security College’s Jennifer Parker said via ABC, because ASEAN’s “silence” on Beijing’s moves in the South China Sea undermines maritime security. Albanese was careful when asked about Gaza/Israel, saying everyone was concerned about “instability”.

Speaking of — film critic Shane Danielsen has left The Monthly after he filed a story about Berlin Film Festival controversies regarding Gaza, The Age reports. But the discontent began when he wrote a review about the film American Fiction which opens with a Black character writing the title of Flannery O’Connor short story The Artificial N****r. Danielsen didn’t want the N-word censored in his story, so he quit but quickly retracted his resignation. After The Monthly’s Michael Williams received his film festival story, the saga took another turn when the editor told Danielsen he’d accepted the critic’s resignation after all. Williams says it was because of their email thread, not the festival story (which the London Review of Books published instead). There has been a “historic internal point of contention” at The Monthly’s parent company Schwartz Media about how it covers the Israel-Palestine conflict, as Crikey put it. Here’s some recent coverage.

COURT COSTS

Former federal Liberal MP Andrew Laming has to pay back $10,360 in travel expenses, which includes a 25% loading fee, a court had ruled as Brisbane Times reports. Laming challenged the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority over its finding that some of his travel in 2019 was not parliamentary business, but the court sided with the watchdog. Laming is running for mayor of Redland City Council in Queensland’s March elections. Meanwhile, former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins and her fiancé David Sharaz will meet with Liberal Senator Linda Reynolds today after arriving from France, WA Today reports, in an attempt to settle to avoid a high-profile defamation trial over some social media posts. We also learned Reynolds’ payout from the ACT government over former director of public prosecutions Shane Drumgold’s claims was $90,000, SBS reports.

Meanwhile, Queensland Premier Steven Miles may be referred to the Speaker over allegations he misled Parliament by denying he sent a text to his factional colleague Ali King. He’ll probably apologise today over the denial, according to The Courier-Mail anyway, which came when King asked her constituents to send job applications for work at a new hospital to her electorate email. Finally, Victorian Opposition Leader John Pesutto says all is well after his chief of staff Rodrigo Pintos-Lopez and director of communications Nick Johnston both quit over the weekend, Sky News Australia reports. Pesutto also insisted his job is safe after the Herald Sun reported that MPs have been gathering numbers for a possible mutiny while he battles a defamation case against exiled former Liberal Moira Deeming.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

The telephone trilled in the crisp office of a British architect. “Stephen Levrant speaking,” the firm’s founder spoke into the receiver. He listened carefully for a minute, and with thinly disguised incredulity, repeated the request back to the caller. “To be clear, you want me to build — not fix, but construct — an intentionally crooked building?”. The person on the other end was the owner of the Crooked House pub, a 260-year-old building in Himley. The wonky structure had been ravaged by a suspicious fire, and the owners had been slapped with an enforcement notice demanding they rebuild it or bulldoze it. But it needed to be rebuilt exactly as it was, the enforcement notice stipulated, which is to say, a structure with no right angles.

It’s not impossible to do so, Levrant told The Guardian, but the engineering of it is something else. Before the fire the pub had sunk 1.2 metres into the ground, while “everything is out of kilter and you’ve got gravity acting in a completely different way”, he said. It had undergone patchy reinforcements over the decades to prop it up, including buttresses and steel rods. We’ll need to start with a foundation laid on an angle, the architect predicted, with a “lot of drawing” and calculation to follow. Even though many experts would scoff that there was little reason to rebuild the Crooked House pub considering it would have little historical value, Levrant sees it differently. After all, “History never stops”, he says, and “the rebuilding of the pub becomes part of its history”.

Hoping you think outside the structure today too.

SAY WHAT?

This morning Mr Minns has said that ‘Sydney was an obvious choice for the King to stop at’. He should have thought of that before he purposefully insulted the King on his Coronation Day.

Australian Monarchist League statement

The hardcore royalists are pissed the NSW premier didn’t light up the Sydney Opera House with King Charles‘ face after his coronation, with Minns citing a cost of up to $100,000 for the state. It has never been confirmed that Charles was “insulted” by this.

CRIKEY RECAP

Dutton needs a Plan B. It involves going where few Liberals have gone before

“The complaint, even from within the Liberals now, is about the lack of policy from Dutton. At no stage has Dutton explained in detail how he’d address the cost of living, or housing, or energy. True, the Liberals have retained their 2022 election commitment to allow people to access their super for housing, which would pump tens of billions into an already crazy housing market, benefiting baby boomer Liberal voters and merely pushing prices up for everyone else.

“And we’re now told the opposition leader will unveil details about his nuclear power plan. But nuclear power is a culture war, not a policy — a culture war in support of coal-fired power because it requires us to prop up coal-fired power stations decades beyond the end of their lives.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Netanyahu rival Benny Gantz to meet US leaders (Al Jazeera)

Iran elections: Record low turnout in polls as hardliners win (BBC)

Auckland Airport denies queues are getting worse as former PM hits out (NZ Herald)

France makes abortion a constitutional right in historic Versailles vote (The Guardian)

Trump wins Colorado ballot disqualification case at US Supreme Court (Reuters)

Alleged IS militants in Russia’s North Caucasus killed in shootout with security services
(euronews)

Apple fined $2 billion by E.U. for using app store to thwart competition (The New York Times) ($)

THE COMMENTARIAT

Rebooting farm productivity will help achieve climate goals — Jared Greenville (The AFR): “Agriculture is at the centre of a number of challenges facing Australia: from feeding domestic and international consumers while cost-of-living pressures rise, to helping the economy reach net zero and further improving sustainability credentials while delivering more water for our environment. Making sure we can meet these challenges efficiently will be key, as farmers manage more than 55% of Australia’s landmass, are responsible for three-quarters of the nation’s water consumption and are set to bring in $84.9 billion in gross value of production in 2024-25, plus $64 billion in export earnings.

“But if we look at the pressures facing the sector now and over the medium term, we are seeing costs rise faster than revenues and a return to declining terms of trade. Farmer terms of trade, a measure of the ratio of prices received for output to the prices of input, has fallen by more than 16% since 2020-21. At the same time, productivity growth has slowed and is sitting at 0.6% on average between 2000-01 and 2021-22 … We have far fewer farms today — 87,800 in 2021-22 — than we did at the start of the 1980s, when there were close to 120,000. Water reform and land-clearing laws have been unpopular among some in the sector. And we have seen some industries get smaller, while others have grown — horticulture has grown by 73% whereas livestock products, which include wool and dairy, have fallen by 61%.”

What would it take for Russia to use nukes? Leaked files provide a clue — Peter Hartcher (The SMH): “Russia and China have a dualistic history — one moment friends, the next moment enemies, then switching back again. They were united in Communist solidarity early in the Cold War, then plunged into the Sino-Soviet split. In 1969, Chinese forces ambushed Russia over a disputed island and the two nations fought a furious series of border skirmishes lasting half a year. Moscow considered a nuclear attack on China, which also had nuclear weapons by that stage. It might have descended into nuclear war and the situation was so tense that Mao Zedong ordered the evacuation of Beijing at one point. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping signed their so-called ‘no limits’ partnership two years ago. China has supported Russia economically and diplomatically in its war on Ukraine.

“But it has kept some distance — Beijing has declined to send military aid openly to Russia. The second fascinating revelation from the leaked Russian files is Moscow’s apparent readiness to use nuclear weapons. … At the moment, while Russia appears to have the advantage in its war on Ukraine, Colby thinks that Putin is most unlikely to resort to nuclear force. And, even if he did, Putin would risk having an underwhelming effect, says Colby: ‘I think they tend to exaggerate the battlefield consequences of relatively low-yield tactical nuclear weapons. If he does it and it doesn’t work, it’s not a high payoff.’ He points out that Russia has not tested its weapons in many years. As for China, Xi gave powerful tacit endorsement of Russia’s war by visiting Moscow last year.”

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WHAT’S ON TODAY

Online

Kulin Nation Country (also known as Melbourne)

• Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury Andrew Leigh will launch his new book, The Shortest History of Economics, at the University of Melbourne.

Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)

• Midnight Oil founding member Jim Moginie will talk about his new book, The Silver River, at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.