It all started with a seemingly innocuous joke. During a dinner to celebrate the Rural Women’s Awards in Parliament House on Tuesday night, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese dropped an off-script remark about a discussion with Indonesian president-elect Prabowo Subianto concerning beef exports. “When we had dinner – beautiful Australian beef .
.. not the live export .
.. we made sure it was dead.
” It’s fair to say the rather limp gag failed to land. Despite the joke not making it into the version of the speech distributed to media, it was quickly swooped on by the federal opposition, and some farmers’ groups, who are very upset about the government’s decision to ban live sheep exports. The Coalition did not see the funny side of Anthony Albanese’s beef joke Credit: John Shakespeare In a press release hammered out on Wednesday morning, Nationals leader David Littleproud said farmers were “disgusted to the core” by Albo’s comments.
Campaigners from an agriculture group called “Keep the Sheep” were extremely upset, Littleproud said. “A joke in extremely poor taste by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese shows he holds Western Australia and our live export trade in complete contempt,” shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash thundered. The good old days when Liberals and Nationals fought tooth and nail to give Australians the right to say far more offensive things seem forgotten.
Farmers are no laughing matter. The PM’s office, meanwhile, maintained that Albo was actually trying to talk up Aussie beef. “The PM was reinforcing the importance of the Australian beef industry.
Exports of beef to Indonesia hit a record high in 2022-23,” a government spokesperson told CBD. “The government fulfilled an election promise on the live sheep export ban and has offered an adjustment package. We will continue to discuss this with the industry and the WA government.
” If that was the sentiment, it got lost in the predictable partisan noise. It’s company reporting season! Which is sort of like corporate Christmas, where you get to find out who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. Let’s start with $3 billion listed pizza-pusher Domino’s.
On Wednesday, the company dropped its full-year results with what looked like some bad news: their closely watched Same Store Sales comparison for the first seven weeks of this financial year – basically a measure of how much pepperoni they are slinging – was down 0.2 per cent compared to the same period last year. Yikes! Soon after, the company issued a correction: actually it was good news, not bad news, as sales were up 2.
8 per cent. Which, given you’re dealing with millions of dollars in revenue, is a hell of a rounding error to make. Meanwhile, the appointment of Kerri Hayman as head of Australian and NZ operations has raised eyebrows, as Hayman is the sister of group CEO Don Meij .
Hayman is amply qualified as a 36-year Domino’s veteran who has worked as the operations director for the UK-listed Domino’s. Despite both enjoying lengthy careers under the same brand, Hayman reckons she and her sibling have carved out their own spaces. “We’ve grown up in the business together,” she told this masthead on Wednesday.
“I think we’re just both massive Dominoids.” Now, sure, Domino’s are in the business of making pepperoni pies – not accounting. A tech company with a focus on, say, logistics, would surely do a much better job.
Or not. WiseTech, whose meteoric rise up the ASX since 2016 has turned founder Richard White into a billionaire, put out their financial results at 9.30am – and then immediately recalled them.
And then sent them out again, seemingly unchanged. Oh, and whoever put the recall out appears to have accidentally cc’d in dozens of journalists, exposing their email addresses. Not a good look for a tech company.
From a low-key childhood in Castlecrag, Martin Indyk wound up working in the corridors of power in the White House. The Australian-raised diplomat, appointed as the United States’ ambassador to Israel by then-president Bill Clinton, was commemorated at a private event hosted by the Lowy Institute on Tuesday night, weeks after his death from oesophageal cancer. A room packed with diplomatic, political and business figures heard tributes from Sydney business identity David Gonski, Lowy Institute boss Michael Fullilove, its deputy chair Steven Lowy, US Consul-General Christine Elder and federal Labor MP Peter Khalil, who worked for Indyk at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, and delivered tributes from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong.
Former ABC Q&A host Tony Jones gave his recollections of interviewing Indyk, a Middle East expert renowned for both his staunch advocacy for Israel and fierce criticism of that country’s settlements in the West Bank. Other guests included the Albanese government’s new antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal and former New Israel Fund Australia chief executive turned Labor staffer Liam Getreu. As someone with a front-row seat to American foreign policy in the Middle East under both the Clinton and Obama administrations, Indyk had his fair share of stories.
Pub baron Bruce Solomon recounted a dinner being interrupted so Indyk could take a call from Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Even in the final days of his battle with cancer, Indyk was fielding calls from the likes of the Clintons, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights.
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