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Premier Chris Minns has been busy.
According to the latest ministerial diaries for the June quarter, finally released this week, the big man had 82 meetings in that three-month window. Among those, the premier had plenty of time for some usual suspects. There was a catch-up with Sydney supremo Peter V’landys about the NRL. A “public affairs” meeting with The Daily Telegraph. A pow-wow with octogenarian ad man and colourful racing identity John Singleton.
But there were also a few surprises.
In June, Minns and Treasurer Dan Mookhey met Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who travelled to Sydney and Melbourne on a junket to promote infrastructure and trade that reportedly cost her taxpayers north of $US219,000.
The governor popped in for a coffee and meet and greet. We hear the premier was won over by Whitmer’s un-showy vibe, while his Michigander counterpart loved her time in Australia (and later met with Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan in Melbourne).
Whitmer is one of a handful of rising Democratic stars touted as a serious prospect to run for the presidency in 2028. But Minns is a bit of a political kiss of death for Democrat governors from the upper midwest.
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In 2023, he met Minnesota governor Tim Walz, then barely known in Australia except to those suffering a nasty case of West Wing Syndrome. Walz would, of course, later become the former vice-presidential candidate to Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election after a series of sharp-elbowed performances on Fox News that he never quite managed to live up to. This was the campaign that slipped away from the Democrats and returned Donald Trump to the White House.
Clearly, it was the trip to Sydney that lost it.
All court up
Ever since billionaire man-child Elon Musk bought the beloved social media platform formerly known as Twitter, renamed it as X and turned it into a hotbed of reactionary conspiracy theories and racist memes, there’s been an ongoing exodus from the app.
Progressive posters have retreated to a rotating cast of new echo chamber-like Twitter dupes, and many serious people will still swear that BlueSky is a serious platform. More corporate types, and a fair few journalists, have migrated to LinkedIn, where the discourse is a little more cringe but a lot less insane than Musk’s X.
The latest to make the switch is the High Court of Australia, which announced last week it would be publishing its social media updates on LinkedIn rather than X, where it has been posting since 2018.
It’s all part of a much-needed online refresh for the nation’s top court, which has a new website that now works on mobile and has shed some of its old bugginess and UX-confusion.
Senior judges and many of the barristers who appear before them aren’t known for their technical wizardry. Phillip Street rumours suggest at least one prominent Sydney silk still has all email correspondence printed out by an assistant.
With the High Court now trying to get with the times, they have no more excuses.
Nup to the cup
Now to the Canberra bubble, where even reusable coffee cups are treated with suspicion.
CBD hears there’s been a hot beverage crackdown at Parliament House.
Not long ago, staff entering the building handed their Craig Reucassel-approved KeepCup to security staff before retrieving it on the other side of the scanner. Some security staff made people take the lid off and show them the contents and even take a sip to prove it wasn’t poisoned.
Now, a reusable cup that has metal in it will set the scanner off, so takeaway hot drinks are placed in a perspex box and scanned for nefarious substances.
CBD asked the Department of Parliamentary Services about the latest crackdown, but couldn’t rouse them for a response.
Wearing the Crown
Nothing better sums up Australian TV’s night of nights better than the fact it was hosted at a tacky casino whose operator is teetering on the brink of collapse and which has all the ambience of a suburban pokie den.
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But before the leading lights of the small screen had walked the red carpet at the Star Sydney, another embattled casino operator across the harbour was unveiling its latest celebrity-ish ambassador.
Zoe Foster-Blake, wife of entertainment dude-bro Hamish Blake and a beauty industry powerhouse in her own right, announced before the Logies she was a Crown ambassador, while posing for a pre-show snap in one of the suites at the private equity-owned casino group’s phallic Barangaroo tower.
“Just on hashtags, here are some real ones: #sponsored @crownsydney #crownpartner #crownsydney because I’m a newly Crowned, er, Crown ambassador; they are now officially my home away from home,” Foster-Blake told her 791,000 Instagram followers.
“I’m chuffed, I bloody love this place.”
In these pages, of course, Crown is better known for years of regulatory lashings over failed money laundering controls that led to the exit of billionaire nepo baby boss James Packer and a revolving door of top executives.
See – we bloody love the place, too!
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