Award for Woodside CEO and the inevitable raygun conspiracy

The big mistake of the Libs

Things aren't going well for the NSW Liberals, but at least they're keeping us on our toes here at Tips and Murmurs. Recent clues we have received include an interesting internal memo and some details about the party's embarrassing failure to nominate candidates for the local elections.

Before we get to the memo, some background: Until last year, corporations in the city of Sydney had twice the voting rights of residents. In October, the New South Wales Labor government changed a law that had previously given eligible corporations in the region two votes in local council elections, while residents each had one vote.

In the words of NSW Minister for Local Government Ron Hoenig: “The changes were made by the Liberals [in 2014] in a brazen attempt to oust Sydney Mayor Clover Moore from office and give the party an electoral advantage in control of Sydney Town Hall.”

It turned out that the law had actually given the party an electoral advantage. An internal document of the Liberal Party was leaked to My goodness makes it clear that the Labour Party's change of course has damaged the Liberals' chances in the next election on 14 September.

“While the constituency secured two seats in the 2021 Sydney local government elections, there have been changes in the City of Sydney Act 1988, The reduction in the votes of the entrepreneurs has significantly reduced the division’s chances of taking second place,” the document says.

The office of Mayor of Sydney is a prestigious position that comes with a lot of power, personnel and money. The Daily Telegraph As reported last year, “the mayor will be allocated $47 million in taxpayer funds over the next decade,” and the current mayor has 22 full-time staff members with an average salary of $179,000 per year.

Do you know what will further damage the Liberals' chances in the local elections? The lack of a nomination.

The party made a spectacular mistake yesterday, missing the deadline to file nomination papers for several local government areas. The deadline was 12pm and was very tight, the NSW Electoral Commission told us.

Several Liberals we spoke to were speechless about what had happened, with one noting: “Several council meetings were held minutes before the deadline… this shows utter incompetence.”

According to our sources, the Liberals will not be able to contest in key communities such as Northern Beaches, Lane Cove, Wollongong, Campbelltown, Camden and the Blue Mountains. In Georges River, North Sydney, Penrith, Canterbury Bankstown and Maitland, the party hopes that at least some of the candidates have been properly nominated.

In a statement on Wednesday afternoon, party headquarters apologized to “the non-nominated councilors and the party membership more broadly” and blamed a lack of “secretarial resources” for the error.

At least the nominations for the Sutherland Shire appear to have gone well – loyal readers of this column will know how hard the Liberals have worked to put together their list of candidates for this election campaign.

And the second place on the City of Sydney's ballot? It seems that this nomination was also submitted too late. On Thursday morning, the Electoral Commission's website listed only one Liberal candidate, namely the incumbent councillor and number one on the ballot, Lyndon Gannon. Well, he was unwinnable anyway.

AEC for CEO

Apparently it is not enough that fossil fuel industry figures have millions or even billions of dollars at their disposal every year, or can rely on successive governments of all stripes and levels, the police and large sections of the media to do their bidding. They also need and deserve many awards and accolades. And so Woodside Energy's CEO Meg O'Neill was named “Energy Person of the Year” by the African Energy Chamber (AEC) for her “unwavering commitment to harnessing Africa's oil and gas resources for inclusive growth”.

AEC is a Johannesburg-based oil and gas lobby group that is currently preparing class action lawsuits against financial institutions that refuse to invest in African fossil fuel projects on environmental, social and governance (ESG) grounds, and has labelled environmental group Friends of the Earth as “not friends of Africa”, which should give you an idea of ​​what this is all about. It must be wonderful for O'Neill to finally get some recognition after being overtaken by Gina Rinehart in the 2023 WA Person of the Year vote.

That's it folks, the smoking raygun

As we noted earlier this week, Olympic breaker and academic Rachael Gunn (or Raygun) is like a kind of polymorph, twisting and turning into whatever shape the viewer assigns her. So after being the personification of courage and embarrassment, a colonizer and beneficiary of the woke mind disease, it was probably inevitable that she would end up where every overexposed figure ends up – the subject of a conspiracy theory.

A tweet claims that the Australian Breaking Association was “FOUNDED by Raygun and her husband. Who advised [WorldDance Sport Federation] to work with this organization? Rachael Gunn. Are you starting to get it? The Australian Breaking Association (AusBreak) runs a competition every year that only 10-15 women enter, and of course Rachael “wins” it and her husband becomes the coach of the team.” Quickly attached notes pointed out that none of this is true: Neither Gunn nor her husband are founders of the Australian Breaking Association and are not involved in its leadership, which a Google search would quickly reveal.

That hasn't stopped the tweet from garnering three million views (we're amazed Elon Musk didn't say the news would be “very concerning if true” or something) and forming the basis of a change.org campaign calling on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to “hold Raygun Rachel Gunn and Anna Mears to account for unethical conduct in Olympic selection.” At the time of writing, the campaign has nearly 40,000 of the 50,000 signatures it is aiming to reach.

Such a crap

US ambassador and former prime minister Kevin Rudd is spending $20,000 of taxpayers' money to transform his Washington residence into some kind of “bizarre drag queen nightclub”, Sky News Australia presenter Danica De Giorgio reported in disbelief last week.

“You won't believe what Kevin Rudd is up to now. He has squandered taxpayers' money on gay pride parties, yes, you heard right,” said De Giorgio.

Sky and 2GB's Ben Fordham picked up the article in Nine newspaper's CBD column and reported on a document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealing the costs of a Pride party hosted by Rudd in June last year, which included spending almost $3,000 on a DJ set by drag queen Kitty Glitter.

And of course, the use of taxpayers' money is always worth investigating. We just don't recall Sky or Fordham being overly alarmed when it was revealed that Rudd's predecessor Joe Hockey (now a regular Sky contributor) had spent more than $45,000 on a “garden party” for various US dignitaries – including $7,690 on “entertainment” (though the exact guest list was kept secret for years). What makes one event a barely credible use of taxpayers' money and the other a perfectly reasonable use of twice the amount is something we can't even begin to guess.

We asked Rudd if he thought this was an appropriate response from the media, but he did not respond before deadline.