Pollins says the next episode in his “chequered history” with Laming came in 2016 when the MP attended the dying minutes of the AGM of the Wellington Point cricket club, of which Pollins was a member for 10 years.
Laming boasted that he would widen a local road and then suggested that the club’s young players may be ice users, which prompted outrage.
“We weren’t aware of any players on ice,” Pollins says. “It was such a generalised statement. Yes, ice is a very bad thing – but there are ways and means of saying something. This was very clumsy. We just all said ‘what an absolute dickhead’.”
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ADVERTISEMENT The Prime Minister could just not be further from what is going on in this country. I was out at that march, as well as a lot of other Labor figures and some government figures were as well. The power, the anger, the feeling that people’s voices aren’t being heard. That is what the PM is not acknowledging.
Her answer, however, was interrupted by Senator Small, who tried to make the point that the same Prime Minister who opened his door and invited the same representatives into his office?
The polite suggestion that Australia deserves a slightly higher standard from our political leadership was met with a Spectoresque wall of sound about the “rule of law”. Actual lawyers offered robust precedents of confidential inquiries where relevant information could be tested, and reputations defended and perhaps restored. They were ignored.
Other erstwhile allies in the media then stepped up to do the dirty work, pivoting seamlessly from the “macro” world, in which we should believe women’s stories of abuse, to the “micro”, where those stories are baseless accusations flung at friends. Perhaps intuiting that the “lying woman” defence might seem insensitive, they dusted off the “crazy woman” line from days of yore.
Last modified on Wed 17 Mar 2021 16.09 EDT
The Morrison government is likely to exempt submissions to the Jenkins inquiry from freedom of information and archive requirements after a concerted push from a bipartisan group of political staff to ensure that any complaints will be kept confidential.
The Labor leader Anthony Albanese flagged a potential confidentiality problem with the prime minister on Tuesday night after political staff had raised concerns about the risk of their submissions being made public.
Guardian Australia understands the major parties have been in talks about legislating an exemption to address those concerns, but if that’s the landing point, it will require quick action, because the Senate will not be sitting next week.
Whether that will lead to a similar doubling of house prices in Western Australia’s capital is debatable, but given the 100% increase in home loans, it is possible Perth will experience house prices growing at the pace they were during the peak of the mining boom in 2006:
Clearly, the combination of record low interest rates and the government’s homebuilder grants have led the surge, and have ensured house prices have grown out of sync with the rest of the economy.
That house prices are growing faster than are wages is also no real surprise – such a case has been standard for over a decade now: