Anthony Albanese and John Howard (Image: Private Media)
Politicians might find the courage to fight the media after they leave politics, but it's a different story when they're in office.
This article is an instalment in a new series, Punted, on the government’s failure to reform gambling advertising.
John Howard would like Anthony Albanese to do something he never did himself as prime minister: take on Australia’s big media companies.
That’s the inevitable consequence of what Howard and others have urged the government to do in an open letter on the need to implement the late Peta Murphy’s recommendations on banning gambling advertising.
Howard signed the letter alongside Liberal successor Malcolm Turnbull, and luminaries on both sides of the political aisle — Dominic Perrottet, Steve Bracks, Jeff Kennett, along with Lucy Turnbull, Greens and independent MPs, and a who’s who of the anti-gambling lobby.
Of the major political figures signing up, only Perrottet has walked the walk on gambling. He took on the most powerful gambling lobby of all, the hotels and clubs industry in NSW, and paid the price for it; his defeat in 2023 ensured the poker machine lobby would retain its malignant grip on public policy in that state via the rotten Minns government.
Howard himself “banned” online casinos, foreign betting companies and in-play betting way back in 2001, but that has never prevented the emergence of what is now a $7 billion locally licensed online gambling industry.
Perrottet should be singled out because, in comparison to the poker machine heavyweights, the online gambling lobby is minuscule — and one of its biggest members, Tabcorp, actually wants a ban. It’s the online gambling industry’s friends at court that are the problem — the big media companies and the big sporting codes. Both are addicted to gambling revenue. And while no politician is overly keen to have a blue with sporting codes, it’s the media companies that put the frighteners on politicians.
Howard certainly never picked a fight with the free-to-air television broadcasters. For all the seamless union between the Liberals and News Corp, the Murdochs never got any regulatory favours from Howard’s government, because Seven, Nine and Ten, and particularly Kerry Stokes and James Packer, didn’t like it.
The free-to-airs didn’t want digital TV to be used by new broadcasters or even used for multichannelling, so Howard stopped that (“Mr Wishy-Washy flexes his muscles”, News Corp tabloids angrily responded at the time). They didn’t want any changes to anti-siphoning, so Howard stopped that. And when they wanted a watering down of the media ownership and foreign ownership rules, Howard obliged them in 2006, with News Corp fobbed off with a half-baked “use it or lose” anti-siphoning scheme.
So while the free-to-airs are now dying, it remains a bit rich for Howard to encourage any successor to pick a fight with them — assuming that he signed the letter in good faith and not out of a desire to see Labor mired in a war with Nine and Seven six months out from an election. The example of Perrottet will be fresh in Labor minds: Perrottet didn’t lose the 2023 election because of his support for cashless gambling, but it didn’t help having the most powerful lobby group in the state attacking his government and backing his opponents.
This being the most risk-averse Labor government in history, the chances of it taking on the networks, at least without some impressively large form of compensation for them, look slim. Perhaps, in 10 years’ time, in that form of l’esprit de l’escalier that afflicts former politicians who find in retirement the courage that eluded them while in office, Prime Minister Albanese might be a signatory to an open letter calling for further gambling regulation.
But by then the free-to-airs will probably be dead, too, gone the way of the printed newspaper with the horse-racing form guide tucked in the middle.
Anyone affected by problem gambling can get immediate assistance by calling the National Gambling Helpline on 1800 858 858 for free, professional and confidential support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Is Howard being a hypocrite, or does he have a point? Should the government introduce a total ban on gambling ads Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Bernard Keane is Crikey's political editor. Before that he was Crikey's Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics.
Just like the tobacco and fossil fuel industries, the gambling industry finances research that just happens to support its position.
This article is an instalment in a new series, Punted, on the government’s failure to reform gambling advertising.
At a 1996 meeting of gaming industry executives in Las Vegas, Frank Fahrenkopf, a former Republican National Party chairman who had recently become president of the American Gaming Association (AGA), set out the defence the industry would use against growing threats to its social license, and thus its expansion.
“Our industry cannot afford to make the mistake made by the tobacco industry,” he said. Rather than deny that gambling addiction existed, as tobacco industry figures had with nicotine, he told his colleagues that the gaming industry must not only concede there was such a thing as problem gambling, but that it must lead the discussion around it.
To that end, the AGA set up the National Center for Responsible Gambling (renamed the International Centre for Responsible Gambling, or ICRG, in 2020), which has dominated gambling research in the US ever since.
Just like the tobacco and fossil fuel industries, the gambling industry finances research that just so happens to support its position. But in terms of informing the largely unquestioned terms of the debate, the gambling industry might have had the greatest success of all.
The Reno Model
The ICRG website has a page called “research milestones“, providing a “sample of some of the most innovative studies” that have been funded by the organisation. Among them is a paper called “A Science-Based Framework for Responsible Gambling: The Reno Model”. Produced in 2004, it listed six “fundamental assumptions” under which this model would operate. They were:
(1) safe levels of gambling participation are possible;
(2) gambling provides a level of recreational, social and economic benefits to individuals and the community;
(3) a proportion of participants, family members and others can suffer significant harm as a consequence of excessive gambling;
(4) the total social benefits of gambling must exceed the total social costs;
(5) abstinence is a viable and important, but not necessarily essential, goal for individuals with gambling-related harm; and
(6) for some gamblers who have developed gambling-related harm, controlled participation and a return to safe levels of play represents an achievable goal.
The paper described its goal as shaping “the direction for developing responsible gambling initiatives … and [stimulating] a rich and enduring dialogue about responsible gambling concepts and related initiatives”.
To that extent, it has been a great success. The language of “responsible gambling” and of the “problem gambler” have been widely adopted by regulators and embodied in legislation and regulatory texts.
The true extent of industry influence on setting this agenda in its early days are opaque, as for many years gambling research rarely disclosed its sources of funding. The Reno paper contains no disclosure about how it was funded, though a paper from 2015, “Extending the Reno model” (by the same authors) thanked the following organisations for their “support” of the project:
La Loterie Romande (Switzerland), ClubNSW (Australia), Camelot (United Kingdom), La Française des Jeux (France), Loto-Québec (Québec, Canada), and the National Lottery (Belgium).
The primacy of individual responsibility
Associate Professor in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University Charles Livingstone told Crikey the responsible gambling paradigm shifted the emphasis from the industry onto the individual gambler.
“It proposes that the reason people get addicted is because of individual attributes or weaknesses, rather than the harmful product,” he said. “It purports to demonstrate concern and offer the prospect of rehabilitation, but simply ignores the high risk associated with common products.”
“What we’re talking about is a product which has enormous potential to addict.”
Two of the Reno model architects, returning to and defending the model in 2021, argued: “When individual responsibility is minimised and the social setting exaggerated, we have established a formula for social chaos. To avoid this circumstance, we must … establish a balanced view of gambling and its host, agent, and environment influences.”
‘Partnership’ with industry
As the parliamentary inquiry chaired by the late Peta Murphy — whose recommendations the government appears committed to watering down — concluded:
There is too much potential for the gambling industry to be involved in the development of gambling regulation and policy in Australia. Australia’s licenced [wagering providers] have been successful in framing the issue of gambling harm around personal responsibility while diminishing industry and government responsibility. This has been to the detriment of Australians experiencing gambling harm.
Indeed, one of the tenets of the responsible gaming framework is the necessity of “partnership” between the industry, regulators and researchers. In 2014 Professor Alex Blaszczynski, one of the architects of the original Reno model, defended his decision to accept more than a million dollars from ClubsNSW for research by saying “Because of the nature of gambling, you do have to start looking at gaining access to data held by the industry, by patrons who are in industry venues and start looking at real life research that provides sensible, evidence-based information”.
Further, Blaszczynski has insisted there are safeguards in place to prevent industry from meddling in or suppressing the outcomes of his research and told the Nine papers in 2022 that nobody had ever found inaccuracies in his work or argued with his findings.
The situation is even more pronounced overseas. Along with the tens of millions of dollars pumped into research by the ICRG, US universities frequently enter into partnerships with individual casino companies: In 2023, Michigan State, Louisiana State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Denver, and the University of Colorado, all announced multiyear partnerships with sports betting companies that included “placing ads at [college sport] games, along with promises to, for example, focus on responsible gaming and education”.
Meanwhile, the UK’s biggest gambling addiction charity GambleAware received £46,565,912 (more than $90 million) from gambling operators in the 2022-23 financial year.
But in the smaller market of Australia, gambling money still goes a long way. Last year, the Centre for Excellence in Gambling Research was established at Sydney University, described as a “multi-disciplinary centre dedicated to advancing research on gambling behaviour and minimising harm”. It was paid for by a $600,000 funding commitment from the International Centre for Responsible Gaming.
Anyone affected by problem gambling can get immediate assistance by calling the National Gambling Helpline on 1800 858 858 for free, professional and confidential support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Charlie Lewis pens Crikey's Tips and Murmurs column and also writes on industrial relations, politics and culture. He previously worked across government and unions and was a researcher on RN's Daily Planet. He currently co-hosts Spin Cycle on Triple R radio.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton (Image: AAP/Russell Freeman)
The opposition leader knows exactly which fears he is playing into.
In the midst of the Fatima Paymania that intoxicated federal Parliament last month, the contribution of one politician to Australia’s vaunted social cohesion stood out: Peter Dutton.
The context was the Labor Party’s existential panic that Payman’s exit from the party may be the trigger for a political insurgency in safe Labor seats with large Muslim populations.
Asked about this, Dutton warned that the next Parliament could “include the Greens, it’ll include Green-teals, it’ll include Muslim candidates from Western Sydney. It will be a disaster”.
Standard Dutton, who never saw a division he didn’t think was worth stoking.
But this time he is being sued for it. A group called the Alliance Against Islamophobia has launched a complaint with the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board, alleging that Dutton’s comments breached section 20C of the Anti-Discrimination Act, which makes unlawful a public act that incites hatred towards, serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of, a person or group of persons because of their race. In short, racial hate speech.
While Dutton will dismiss the claim as political theatre, it comes at an interesting time and does raise a significant legal and societal question.
It also parallels another case, currently awaiting judgment in the Federal Court: Senator Mehreen Faruqi’s claim that Senator Pauline Hanson breached the equivalent federal hate speech law (section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act) when the One Nation leader tweeted that Faruqi should “pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan” because Faruqi had dared to say that she was not mourning the Queen’s death. Full disclosure: I am Faruqi’s lawyer.
In both cases, the claimants are seeking to expand the boundaries of what has historically been treated by the courts as legally unacceptable hate speech. They are classics of a particular genre of racist rhetoric: the deniable slur.
Hanson’s defence was that, when issuing her imperative to Faruqi, she was blind to her target’s race, origin, religion or colour (in fact, she testified that she didn’t even know Faruqi was Muslim). She would, she said, have told anyone who dissed the Queen to do the same, although on what basis she drew a distinction between Faruqi and any other Australian citizen was less clear.
The point, however, was not so much whether Hanson’s justifications contained any internal logic, but the significance of the coded language she chose to employ. Faruqi’s case was that Hanson was using a form of words — essentially, “go back to where you came from” — that, while in literal terms race-neutral, is immediately understood in its full racist meaning by both its victims and perpetrators.
For Dutton’s part, he defended himself by exclaiming that “my problem is not with somebody of Islamic faith — quite the opposite … but when you say that your task is to, as a first order of priority, to support a Palestinian cause or a cause outside of Australia, that is a very different scenario”.
In other words, what Dutton said was — like Hanson — race-neutral. He referenced Payman’s reason for resigning, which was her support for recognising Palestinian sovereignty. That is a cause outside of Australia, and apparently enough to disqualify a politician from legitimacy in Dutton’s eyes.
He wouldn’t want to dig much deeper with that logic, given how many MPs on all sides frequently vote with their feet on causes outside Australia, including in favour of the cause of Israel.
The real meaning of Dutton’s words was not lost on anyone: Muslim politicians would vote Muslim, not in our national interest but in the interest of the nebulous force sometimes called “political Islam”.
It picks up on a trope that Hanson has been playing since she said we were “in danger of being swamped by Muslims”. She has claimed, repeatedly, that Muslim people hold values that are incompatible with those of Australia.
One Australian value is the dread fear of foreign invasion; not by hostile nations, but waves of people of colour. The White Australia policy was constructed to keep them at bay, and our offshore refugee gulags of today are manifestations of the same anxiety.
That’s what Dutton was consciously invoking, and he was using (admittedly not very) coded language to do it.
Victims of racism can easily explain what it’s like being subjected to the constant micro-aggressions of a society that only ever welcomes you on a conditional basis. For Indigenous peoples, the irony of being vilified on their own stolen land is ridiculous. For immigrants and their descendants, it just hurts.
Not that what Dutton or Hanson said was a micro-aggression. It was in-your-face silencing.
The debate we haven’t quite had, in this country of immigrants, is this: is it tolerable any longer to protect speech that does not overtly incite violence or dehumanise whole peoples completely (like Donald Trump calling immigrants “vermin”), but which tells racists their prejudices are fair and the targets of racism that their skin makes them lesser?
Everyone thinks they know where the line is. The courts will decide that for us. It’s good we’re asking the question.
What did you think of Dutton’s comments about “Muslim candidates”? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Michael Bradley is a freelance writer and managing partner at Sydney firm Marque Lawyers, which was created in 2008 with the singular ambition of completely changing the way law is practised.
Former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce (Image: AAP/Joel Carrett)
The question remains: why is Alan Joyce, someone who has so badly affected Qantas' reputation and value, getting any bonus at all?
In the great tradition of Australian corporate mea culpas, the Qantas board has decided to give itself a very light wrist tap following its damning governance report into its performance and management.
The report — by former McKinsey partner Tom Saar, whose old consulting company has a major contract with Qantas — says everything that observers have long noted: the board was in thrall to ex-CEO Alan Joyce, was short in skills, was too reactive, was too collegiate. The fact Qantas needed an expensive external review to tell it this says all you need to know about the airline.
The national carrier had a “command and control” leadership style with “centralised decisions and an experienced and dominant CEO”, Saar said, adding that the board was financially, commercially and strategically oriented but that this should have been ”complemented by enhanced focus on non-financial issues, employees, customers and all stakeholders”.
Qantas chairman Richard Goyder and chairman-elect John Mullen said: “The board’s mode of engagement with management did not always achieve the right balance between support and challenge.”
As part of its wrist-slap,directors on the board between 2022 and 2024 who still remain with the company will receive a 33% reduction of their “base” or cash pay this year.This won’t affect departing directors Jacqueline Hey, a former chair of both Bendigo and Adelaide Bank and AGL, and Maxine Brenner, a director of Telstra, Woolworths and Origin Energy.
But financial impost on some directors should be seen in the context of a board stuffed with multi-millionaires, one that has continued to hand itself pay rises, even as Qantas forced a two-year pay freeze on its staff that preceded annual salary rises of just 3%. For example, Goyder’s remuneration for his part-time role jumped from $442,000 in 2019-20 to $604,000 three years later — a rise of 37%.
There is the usual litany of promises in response to the report’s recommendations, but besides their own small penalties, the board’s only material response has been to slap its senior executives, including departed CEO Alan Joyce, with bonus cuts totalling $14.1 million for the 2023-24 financial year.
But Joyce’s headline $9 million cut to his bonus — about $5 million after tax — is only a rounding error on the $130 million or so he banked during his time as CEO. Despite being at the helm during a string of scandals, he still walks away with almost $15 million for his final year. Let’s also not forget that Goyder signed off on a $17 million share sale by Joyce, while they both knew the ACCC was investigating Qantas for selling seats on cancelled “ghost” flights.
The remaining unanswered question by the Qantas board is why Joyce, someone who has so badly affected the reputation and value of a once-iconic company, is getting any bonus at all. If someone further down the management ranks inflicted that sort of damage, they wouldn’t just lose their bonus, they’d lose their job. Joyce will also continue to reap long-term bonuses under previous remuneration plans.
As with so many of Qantas’ announcements, the spin has worked a treat. Headlines peppered with “Pay slashed” make it sound as if Joyce has been seriously punished, but the starting figure was obscene to begin with.
The timing of the report is worth noting, too, coming before Federal Court Justice Michael Lee has decided the quantum of damages that the airline must pay for the illegal sacking of 1,700 workers on Joyce’s watch. Whatever that quantum is, you can bet it’s going to be somewhat larger than the handful of millions withheld from already wealthy executives. Qantas has already paid $120 million to settle the ghost flights debacle. The timing also neatly clears the decks for another multibillion-dollar profit result in three weeks.
Plus, the fact that current CEO Vanessa Hudson was included in the senior management who had their bonuses cut surely casts doubt on whether she was the best candidate to lead the company.
Michael Sainsbury is a journalist based in Asia with more than 20 years' experience writing about business, business politics and human rights across Australia and the Asia-Pacific.
News Corp's sale of Foxtel represents the dying embers of Rupert Murdoch's grand plan for a global television subscription network.
It’s official: News Corp’s Foxtel is on the market. The bargain basement sale of Australia’s declining pay-TV monopoliser and struggling streamer sounds the last post on the most ambitious play by Rupert Murdoch.
Once central to the Murdoch dream, Foxtel now no longer fits. It’s just the last piece left over from Rupert’s grand 1990s vision to build a global television subscription network, dominating the supply chain from content creation to distribution, burrowing into your eyeballs through your wallet.
It’s unlikely Foxtel will long outlast the sell-off, with the rumoured private equity buyer expected to do what private equity does: strip it for parts. Sell what it can. Milk dry what it can’t sell. Close what it can’t milk.
Just 20 years ago, Murdoch’s global vision seemed within his capacious grasp. In Australia, Foxtel had beaten competitors to be the sole distributor at scale, with control of key sports rights (and joint ownership of the National Rugby League) essential to building audiences. He’d also secured a long-term lease to build a major production studio at Sydney’s Moore Park.
The Australian operation matched a controlling (albeit minority) stake in Britain’s BSkyB and interests in Germany and Italy. In Hong Kong, James, then the favourite son, was leading the drive to build the Asian link with the Star Television Network in eastern and southern Asia including — most audaciously — into China.
In 2003, Murdoch’s world network seemed to be coming together as he captured a controlling stake in the major missing piece: the largest US satellite distributor, DirectTV. It was an intoxicating moment, but no sooner were all the pieces laid out on the table than it began to fall apart.
In retrospect, it was probably always too big a reach for one man. The deals he’d had to make putting it together proved its undoing: by 2006 the partnership with Liberty Media’s John Malone had collapsed, and giving up DirectTV was the necessary price of getting Malone off the News Corp share register.
Next, the UK domino dropped when the phone-hacking scandal forced the Murdochs to give up their full takeover bid for BSkyB. Then the China dream ended, with Rupert selling Star China (and divorcing his third wife, Wendi Deng).
Murdoch recalibrated, splitting the broadcast distribution and production assets into 20th Century Fox before selling most of them to Disney. Foxtel was stranded, oddly bundled up with the print and digital assets in the new, much smaller News Corp.
Foxtel struggled with high costs, rapidly evolving technology and low market penetration, peaking at about 30% of households (compared to more than 80% in the US and UK). Despite the company’s political clout, it could never convince either Labor or Liberal governments to waive the anti-siphoning laws that protected free-to-air broadcasters’ priority access to sporting rights.
Faced with the innovator’s dilemma, News Corp retreated to its core competency of regulation manipulation, with a long campaign to block or neuter the National Broadband Network. As technology continued to disrupt the sector, neither the Murdochs nor News Corp’s Australian management ever quite knew what to do with Foxtel, one moment zigging to bigging it up, the next zagging to freezing it out.
In 2011 Rupert elevated the network to the centre of his Australian operations by promoting Foxtel boss Kim Williams to run the whole of News. Two years later, Williams left, pushed out by the company’s old media editors’ campaign to put newspapers back at the heart of the company.
The company then turned to consolidation. The Murdochs bought back the share of the business that Rupert had gifted to Kerry Packer as part of the settlement of the Super League wars. Ownership of Australia’s Sky News was swapped from Britain’s BSkyB and its Australian partners to News Corp Australia. Program production and distribution were merged into a new Foxtel company, two-thirds owned by the Murdochs (and consolidated into News Corp accounts) and one-third by Telstra.
News Corp played with floating Foxtel — with the hope that a recapitalisation would pay off the debts Foxtel owes to both News Corp and Telstra (including the capitalisation of unpaid services the two owners had contributed to the platform).
Too late; Foxtel pivoted to streaming, trying various iterations that have all struggled. Most global suppliers can’t be bothered releasing Australian figures, but Binge seems to sit in fourth or fifth place behind Netflix, Stan, Disney and, perhaps, Prime and Paramount+. It faces losing its most valuable product when HBO launches its own expected streamer next year.
The sports streamer, Kayo, dominates Australia’s key sports — cricket, rugby league and AFL — but sports rights are a margins business, with competition from other streamers (and from Nine) threatening to squeeze those margins as costs rise.
According to the AFR, the company is hoping to clear about $1 billion from the sale and recoup the money Foxtel owes it. Worth it to quietly bury a failed dream.
Christopher Warren is an Australian journalist and writer. He was federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance until April 2015, and is a past president of the International Federation of Journalists.
A greyhound at an adoption day (Image: AAP/Flavio Brancaleone)
Victorian taxpayers are handing more than $20 million a year to the greyhound abuse industry even as the grisly toll from its racetracks mounts.
The Victorian government — Australia’s biggest-taxing government, which is running a budget deficit and mired in more than $150 billion in debt — is spending more than $40 million a year propping up the state’s lethal greyhound racing industry, the state’s Parliamentary Budget Office has found.
Banning the industry would generate more than $20 million in net savings that would reach nearly $90 million over four years and $260 million by 2035, the PBO found, in response to a costing request from Animal Justice MP Georgie Purcell.
The Victorian government last year increased its point of consumption tax (POCT) on gambling and then lifted the proportion it returns to the state’s animal-exploiting industries. It is currently handing more than $40 million a year to the greyhound abuse industry, in addition to individual grants from programs like the Racing and Training Facilities program. The Victorian PBO estimates that if greyhound racing was ended, it would lose around $20 million a year in POCT revenue.
Victoria is a particularly lethal place for dogs: 29 have been killed racing this year in the state alone, more than twice as many as the next most lethal state, Western Australia. According to statistics kept by the Coalition for the Protection of Greyhounds, 365 dogs have suffered major injuries in Victoria this year.
In a recent report, the state’s “Greyhound Racing Integrity Unit” gave a long list of cases of abuse, negligence, doping and live baiting in just the three months from April to June, with offenders given trivial fines or short suspensions, with the penalties often suspended.
“In a cost of living crisis where people are clearly struggling and every dollar counts, pouring tens of millions into an industry that combines animal abuse and gambling is inexcusable. This report now confirms that it has no economic value either,” Purcell said.
“In the same four-year period that the government plans to waste nearly $90 million to prop up greyhound racing, it is also spending $165 million on preventing and responding to gambling harm. The two are simply not compatible, and only further demonstrates the inappropriate and dangerous relationships that our governments continue to share with gambling industries.”
Bernard Keane has cared for rescue greyhounds since 2016.
Bernard Keane is Crikey's political editor. Before that he was Crikey's Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics.
Rachael Gunn, aka 'Raygun', breakdancing at the 2024 Paris Olympics (Images: AAP)
Rachael Gunn, aka Raygun, is Australia's latest meme. But is the Aussie academic turned Olympic breakdancer creative, camp or cringe? Pick a side!
A new Australian meme was born over the weekend: Raygun, aka Rachael Gunn, the Olympic breakdancer who bombed so hard she sparked an avalanche of international discourse.
The 36-year-old b-girl and academic failed to score a single point in the first (and potentially last) breakdancing competition at the 2024 Paris Olympics, with an unconventional routine featuring kangaroo hops and floor-writhing in place of the sport’s usual tricks.
It was a deliberate choice, as Gunn admitted: “I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative, because how many chances do you get in a lifetime to do that on an international stage?”
Was her performance creative, camp, cringe… or an act of colonisation? The internet is undecided.
Let’s run through the takes.
Is this really our best?
does the Australian breaking community have tea on Raygun bc I really need to know how she qualified for the Olympics ?
The absurdity of Gunn’s performance had the couch experts immediately questioning how she qualified. Was this, as Anna Meares, Chef de Mission of the Australian Olympic team, insisted, “the best breakdancer female that we have”?
As it turns out… probably not.
The campaign to add breaking to the Olympics was led by the World Dance Sport Federation (WDSF) – a ballroom dancing organisation. After the addition was confirmed in 2019, an Australian administering body was cobbled together and a qualifying event — the WDSF Oceania Breaking Championships — was held in October 2023.
Raygun won the open women’s event from a field of 15 b-girls, then it was off to Paris!
White mediocrity
Was it a good look for Australia to field a white woman in a sport originated by Black people? For some, this was the perfect example of white mediocrity being elevated over the more talented people of colour who are truly embedded in breakdancing culture.
What the world needs to understand is that Raygun represents a very specific and uniquely Australian White Woman ™️ in academia. One who is so intent on ‘decolonising’ that she’s done a full loop back round to colonising again
Notable mention to IT millionaire and expelled NSW Liberal Matthew Camenzuli, who tweeted: “Breaking is the expression of the people from the streets, on the street… What would Dr Raygun know of this life.”
The irony reached incredible levels when Twitter users unearthed Dr Raygun’s academic work. Was the Mr. G-esque routine actually a searing political commentary about how the institutional “sportification” of breaking marginalises the very people who give the form cultural relevance? Was this bad on purpose?
Wild this take is literally in the conclusion of her paper on the topic & she still took up all that space with those moves on the largest possible international platform. But please, Raygun, tell me more about your concern for historically-marginalized folks being left out. ? pic.twitter.com/4mxlqor78s
Then there was the predictable camp of politicians who take issue with the fact that cultural studies exist at all. Liberal Senator Gerard Rennick tweeted the most urgent of questions: “Just how many obscure and pointless courses do universities offer that are subsidised by the taxpayer?”
Rachael Gunn, aka “Raygun”, performing in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games (Image: AAP/Dan Himbrechts)
Criticism = misogynistic trolling
The backlash was, of course, swiftly followed by the backlash to the backlash.
Anna Meares categorised the criticism of Gunn’s performance as misogynistic trolling, saying: “Now you look at the history of what we have had as women athletes, have faced in terms of criticism, belittlement, judgment, and simple comments like ‘They shouldn’t be there’.”
Gunn herself also weighed in, referencing the Kath & Kim comparisons made of her green and gold tracksuit, posting to Instagram stories: “Looking forward to the same level of scrutiny on what the bboys wear tomorrow.”
Raygun won the Olympics, actually
Was a portion of the commentary about Gunn derisive, mocking and misogynistic? Of course, this is the internet. The trolls are well fed! But the virality brought big-name supporters too.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese praised the fact that she “had a crack”. Craig Foster praised her “guts to be different”. Peter FitzSimons penned a column featuring the rallying cry “We are all Raygun!”
Love this.
Australians shouldn’t leave people behind because they do things differently.
We get around them. And lift them up.
That’s what we learn as team athletes, anyway.
Raygun stepped up and did her stuff in front of the world, her way.
Even the judges that scored her exclusively with zeroes said her performance wasn’t exactly bad, and that Raygun should be celebrated for embodying the spirit of originality in break dancing.
Perhaps the fact that everyone knows Raygun’s name is all that matters? In case you hadn’t heard, Australian b-boy J-Attack didn’t make it out of the group stage either. Japan’s b-girl Ami and Canada’s b-boy Phil Wizard won the women’s and men’s gold medals, respectively.
Attention is worth more than gold medals, baby!
Is Raygun an Australian hero or zero? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Crystal Andrews is Crikey's readers' editor. She is also the founder of Zee Feed, a digital media outlet producing feminist commentary on news, social issues, digital and pop culture for young Australian women.
Still from the 1959 film adaptation of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (Image: AAP/Mary Evans Picture Library)
Restaging Australian classics can be like finding a 40-year-old VB can in your parent's garage. Sure, there's a novelty, but I'm not going to drink it.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year thinking about the late Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and it’s been fascinating reading the obits for Lawler coming from big theatre companies, journos and the like. It was nice to see Guy Rundle take the thought a bit further than “Vale Ray Lawler”.
I’m a theatremaker; you could probably say my mates and I are more like the “German shrieking” types mentioned in Guy’s article, without the Blanchett budget. Last December we got stuck into workshopping The Doll. We wanted to uncover what the hell we were supposed to do with this thing, and why it endures.
We’ve all had some personal experience with it, mostly through drama school, whether via the audition process (my first interaction was an audition booklet for the National Institute of Dramatic Art) or scene studies. We’ve all seen it a few times, ranging from amateur to mainstage.
Look, it’s kind of always the same, isn’t it? Someone wheels out the old piano, a ‘50s radio on the mantlepiece, Barney wears a Hawaiian shirt, a few floral dresses are thrown in for good measure. Text unchanged and the beats are hit. Watching it feels like an obligation — like watching The Castle, but two and a half hours long and not as fun.
During this workshop, we came up with two questions we wanted to address. What do we do with the Australian classic? And what does it mean to us as theatremakers in 2024?
We tried all sorts of things. We played it off the page, we rewrote the text to be more contemporary, we added Neighbours title sequences and played it out as a soapie, we toyed with the idea of doing an Ivo van Hove strip-down. We added our personal stories, used the story events as a Wiggles-esque group song, knuckled into the Australia-nah and ramped up the crikeycore. It was a blast, but we learned that the play is t-i-g-h-t.
What worked best for us was presenting our own relationships to the work and how we are still living in the shadow of this play. We’re putting on our version, This is the dust we’re in, for the Melbourne Fringe Festival (named for the line the distraught Roo bellows in the final scene).
Guy’s article calls for an Australian theatre canon. Although the mentioned writers deserve the praise, I don’t think the answer is restaging Australian classics. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a vicious breakneck version of The Removalists, but I’m unsure it works as a contemporary piece. So, what? Do we then present it as a period piece? I dunno… I’ve seen it a few times now and it feels like a recent relic, like finding a 40-year-old VB can when cleaning out your parent’s garage. Sure, there’s a novelty, but I’m not going to drink it.
I’m always asking: why this? Why now in Australia? Particularly when I look at our main- and off-stages. Do I need to see it again? Where’s the risk?
Resistance to change and the refusal to move on or grow up are major themes in The Doll. More than anything, this feels deeply Aussie. Australia loves looking back, but the theatre should be a place where we spend more time in the now.
Sunset near the Eiffel Tower during the Closing Ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games (Image: EPA/MARTIN DIVISEK)
The sun has nearly set on Australia's most successful Olympic Games ever, and the latest poll shows Labor and the Coalition tied at 50-50.
CLOSING CEREMONY UNDERWAY
Australia’s most successful Olympic Games is drawing to a spectacular end, with the closing ceremony in Paris currently in full flow. Finishing with a record 18 gold medals (plus 19 silver and 16 bronze, making a total of 53), the Australian team ended the 2024 games in 4th place overall.
The United States topped the final table after finishing with 40 gold medals, the same number as China, but with a superior total medal count — 126 to 91. Team USA’s final gold came in the last event of the entire Olympics, the women’s basketball, and came down to the final play in an unbelievably tight final against France. The Guardian recalls how the US won by a single point, 67-66, after France’s Gabby Williams’ buzzer-beating last shot of the game was judged to have been just inside the three-point line, denying the hosts the chance to take the final into overtime.
Recapping the final day of competition, the ABC reports Day 16 saw Australia winning bronze in the women’s basketball, overcoming Belgium for the Opals’ first medal in 12 years, and in the velodrome where Matthew Richardson and Matthew Glaetzer won silver and bronze respectively in the men’s keirin. A dramatic final lap saw three riders crash out meters from the finish line, with Glaetzer’s wife later confirming to Nine he had declared “I did a Bradbury” after claiming third place in front of the crashed riders, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.
Elsewhere, in the final moments of the Olympics, American gymnast Jordan Chiles posted a short statement on Instagram, declaring: “I am taking this time and removing myself from social media for my mental health thank you,” after she was stripped of the bronze medal she won in the women’s floor final, BuzzFeed reports. Chiles lost her medal after authorities backed an appeal by the Romanian Olympic Committee claiming Chiles’ team’s inquiry into her score, which had initially placed her outside the medals but then saw her promoted to third, was outside the one-minute limit for such appeals, the BBC explained. Romania’s Ana Barbosu was handed the bronze instead.
Lastly, the Associated Press reports a man was arrested for climbing the Eiffel Tower hours before Sunday’s closing ceremony. The newswire said French police evacuated the area around the Eiffel Tower after a shirtless man was seen scaling the tower.
The Paralympics are up next, beginning on August 28.
LABOR, COALITION NECK-AND-NECK
The latest Newspoll conducted for The Australian shows Labor and the Coalition level at 50-50 on a two-party-preferred basis, as Parliament resumes following the winter break. The paper says the polling shows a majority of voters expect a hung Parliament at the next federal election, with Labor’s primary vote falling one point to 32% and the Coalition’s rising one point to 39%. The Oz reckons such figures suggest “there is little prospect of Anthony Albanese calling an early election for this year”.
The AAP highlights that the polling also shows a drop in popularity for both the prime minister (43%) and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton (40%). The Coalition’s seven-point lead on first preferences is also not enough to put it in an election-winning position.
In other polling, the Resolve Political Monitor for The Sydney Morning Herald shows voters have marked down Labor “over its handling of the nation’s finances after a political dispute about public spending and high inflation, shifting more support to the Coalition on a key test of budget management”, David Crowe said. That polling has Labor’s primary vote at 29% and the Coalition’s at 37%.
Patricia Karvelas writes for the ABC that this week is “pivotal for Anthony Albanese as he reaches for the reset button” with the prime minister’s new cabinet facing the prospect of questions over the cost of living crisis, interest rates, housing, the CFMEU, immigration and much more.
As politicians return to Canberra, the AAP says security at federal Parliament, airports and politicians’ events will be “noticeably thinner” as federal police officers prepare to go on strike. The Australian reports the Australian Federal Police Association (AFPA) wrote to all parliamentarians on Sunday informing them that AFP officers will be removed “from key locations including Canberra Airport and Australian Parliament House during sitting weeks” as well as “withdrawing Australian Federal Police resources from federal political functions and events unless they carry a ‘significant’ threat rating”.
The Albanese government has offered public servants an 11.2% pay rise over three years. The AAP reports AFPA president Alex Caruana said the offer placed officers in the same category as desk job public servants, leaving them no choice but to take their first industrial action this century, stating: “The deal currently being presented is toxic.”
Also, in case you missed it on Insiders yesterday, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess has claimed friendly nations were among the “three to four” nations detected actively working to interfere within Australian communities, the ABC reports. “I can think of at least three or four that we have actually actively found involved in foreign interference in Australian diaspora communities,” he said. “Some of them would surprise you, some of them are also our friends.” Burgess warned he would be willing to name nations publicly if the threat continued.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
A fireman has caught one of the rarest sharks imaginable — a Lego version that had been lost at sea for 27 years.
Richard West, 35, discovered the toy on the top of his fishing nets 20 miles south of Penzance, Cornwall, last week, the BBC reports. According to The Guardian, the tiny shark was one of five million pieces lost overboard in the “Great Lego Spill of 1997”, when cargo ship Tokio Express was hit by a freak wave. The paper said the pieces were still washing up today.
Upon finding the Lego shark in his fishing net, West contacted the Lego Lost at Sea project, which confirmed it was the first shark to have been reported from the infamous spill. The BBC said almost 52,000 Lego sharks were lost off the Tokio Express on 13 February, 1997.
“I could tell straight away what it was because I had Lego sharks in the pirate ship set when I was little. I loved them,” West said. “It’s been 25 years since I’ve seen that face.”
Commenting on his prize catch, the 35-year-old added: “I was so excited. I was more happy about finding the shark than anything else I caught this week. It’s priceless — it’s treasure!”
The Guardian said Tracey Williams set up Lego Lost at Sea as a “bit of fun” but it grew significantly with thousands of followers on social media as a global community of beachcombers monitor where the Lego and other cargo spills are popping up.
Say What?
I am so proud, proud for them, proud of them, proud to be here with them.
Anna Meares
The chef de mission of Australia’s Olympic team paid tribute to the team in her final press conference in Paris. The 2024 games were the most successful in Australian Olympic history, with 18 golds. Much of that success has been due to female athletes. The Sydney Morning Herald said Mearles paid special tribute to their success on Saturday: “I think the simple visibility of women in sport is making an impact, and we’re seeing that impact. My daughter has asked me: ‘Mum, can I play this sport?’ And how nice as a parent that I can sit there and say: ‘Yeah, baby, you can’… As a female athlete and as a woman, we know what it’s like to feel excluded. I’m certainly not going to act in that capacity to our male teammates … But it’s undeniable that our women have been exceptional at these games.”
Gina Rinehart at the 2024 Paris Olympics (Image: AAP/Dean Lewins)
Australia’s richest person is “almost like this godmother figure”, two-time 2024 medalist and sport headline writer’s dream Elijah Winnington told a press conference. “I don’t know many other financial backers would come to the swimming every single night, waving the Australian flag and standing up for every single person’s race. Without her financial support, we would have nothing other than prize money.”
The mining magnate responded to Australia’s early flurry of medals by holding a lavish celebration of “Gina Inc” — a boat party down the Seine featuring a dress code of gold Rossi Boots and, less strictly observed, white shirts from Rinehart’s beef producer, S. Kidman & Co (meals via Rinehart’s 2GR wagyu beef). Oh, and if you were an athlete you had to be able to accessorise with a medal — no podium finish, no invite.
Rinehart has dropped roughly $10 million a year on swimming, beach volleyball and rowing since 2012.
This is about Murdoch’s belief that Lachlan is the best champion of his real legacy: the creation of a business that seeks to disrupt, usurp and generally mess with anything progressive on a global scale. We should care about this because Murdoch has done much of this under the guise of journalism, or some corrupted form of it that, on balance, has done more harm than good. At times it’s been a scourge on democracy.
For decades News Corp has demonised groups and causes it has disagreed with. It has targeted progressives, the LGBTQIA+ community, Muslims, scientists, environmentalists, refugees and immigrants, as well as countless others. The journalism has often been unbalanced and sensationalised, involving phone hacking, gotcha stories and ambushes.
Let’s not forget the page-three girls, the brazen regime-changing crusades in support of right-wing politicians and against progressive governments. There’s even been sustained collusion with known liars, some of whom have held very high office. For decades, far too many of Murdoch’s news outlets have debased the craft of journalism across three continents.
It’s not that James or Lachlan are particularly villainous, at least as far as billionaires go. It’s that they’re all too typical of the very rich. “They are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald told us a century ago, “soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand”. It’s a personality type perfectly captured in Succession’s portrayal of the fictional Roys.
Just about every feud within media-owning families ends (as the Fairfaxes did) with break-up and sell-off. (One of Rupert’s growth hacks was exploiting these feuds in old media families.)
Similarly, the sale or break-up of News Corp and Fox remains the most likely outcome of the current Murdoch family bun fight. Plenty of the worthless properties — many in Australia — won’t survive the transition. But the poison of oligarch ownership will endure whoever ends up with the parts left over.
The Olympics, a triumph of ambition, Llift France from its gloom — Roger Cohen (The New York Times): Even if political problems flare again in the coming weeks, as they almost certainly will, a core pride at a remarkable accomplishment, impossible without the contribution of all sectors of society, appears likely to endure for a long time.
It is as if the renowned schools of France that produce world-class engineers and world-class analytical thinkers found a way to fuse with the creators of French artistic beauty, turning Paris into a sumptuous, efficient stadium and its sometimes surly inhabitants into some of the kindest people on earth.
Things worked; the party grew; people relaxed. The dismissive French “bof” and shrug gave way to a universal smile. Paris became a city of cheers and murmurs. Inclusiveness — of French people of every origin, skin colour and creed — was a core theme from the opening ceremony onward in a society torn by tense debate over immigration. The embrace extended to visitors from all over the world.
Beneath the veneer of the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Palais, Paris had a problem — Jordan Baker (The Sydney Morning Herald): Instead, it was the epicentre of complaints. The food was cold, athletes said. The British complained about uncooked meat. A much-proclaimed emphasis on sustainable plant-based meals left athletes hungry for protein. British swimmer Adam Peaty said there were worms in the fish. “A disaster,” said the German men’s hockey team.
“They started running out of food,” said Australian tennis player Daria Saville on social media. “Some nights, I’d just have canned tuna and rice in the Australian building.”
There’s an old cliché about Europe that goes something like this: in heaven, the couturiers are French, the mechanics are German, and everything’s organised by the Swiss. In hell, the French are the mechanics, and the Italians are the organisers. During the Paris Games, the French skirted close to their stereotype of style over substance; they may have hosted the most beautiful Games of the modern era, but there were some mechanical failures under the bonnet.
Rich James is Crikey'sWorm editor. He was previously news director at BuzzFeed Australia, executive news editor at the i paper, senior editor of EMEA at Storyful, and deputy news editor at Metro.
