What’s Happening Across the Ditch Today

In news that surprises absolutely no-one, Optus’ chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has quit. The spectacular resignation follows an even more spectacular outage recently, which cut off more than 10 million Australians from phone and internet services. The outage affected everything from banking to emergency communications. The Melbourne suburban train network was shut down and 000 emergency calls plunged into chaos.

It was the second reputational disaster on Ms Bayer Rosmarin’s watch after last year’s cyber attack, where her response – like the outage – was widely criticised.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin said that it had been an honour to serve as Optus CEO but that it was an appropriate time to step down.

Which might be better translated as, “getting out while the getting’s good”.

“I have come to the decision that my resignation is in the best interest of Optus moving forward,” she said.

The Australian

Bayer Rosmarin has been blamed for, not so much the fact of the outage itself, than the company’s woeful public response. To both the latest outage and a massive data breach last year, Bayer Rosmarin was excoriated for poor public communications. In the latest incident, the company took nearly three hours to make a public statement, while Bayer Rosmarin did not speak to the media for over six hours.

But Optus might want to ask its parent company to look to their own executive team.

The unnamed “international peering network” that Optus said had contributed to its 16-hour-long network meltdown last week is run by its Singaporean parent company Singtel, it can be revealed.

The embarrassing revelation comes as it can also be revealed a key executive, who left Canadian telco Rogers Communications less than two weeks after it last year suffered an almost identical outage to Optus, is now working for Singtel […]

The Rogers outage affected 12 million users, with around 25 per cent of Canada losing internet connectivity for about 15 hours.

Sydney Morning Herald

Meanwhile, in political news, it’s all happening in Victoria.

Erstwhile Dear Leader, “Dictator Dan” Andrews, is finding that there’s little love in hoity-toity golfing circles for the ex-premier who shut down Melbourne’s golf courses. For some unexplained “scientific” reason, golf courses within 100km of Melbourne were no-go zones during the World’s Longest Lockdowns. This meant that the bumpkins at Yarrawonga could chip and swing away, but the toffs on the Nepean peninsulas were verboten from indulging in what must surely be the world’s most socially-distanced sport.

Well, the golfers are having their revenge. Andrews was refused a membership at the ultra-exclusive Portsea club. Prominent members like talkback radio king Steve Price publicly threatened to tear up their memberships rather than endure the sight of Dictator Dan on the greens. Rumour has it that other clubs in the area are just as reluctant to have him as a member.

In an even more ominous sign, though, the Victorian Labor government has suffered a massive swing in Andrews’ old seat.

Labor has declared victory in Daniel Andrews’s former seat of Mulgrave, despite a fall of almost 11 per cent in the primary vote, with Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan “thrilled” with the result.

The Australian

She’s “thrilled” with a massive swing against her government? Or just “thrilled” not to be humiliated by losing a plum Labor seat altogether?

More ominous again for Labor is that the vote against them has shifted away from a high-profile independent and back to the Liberals. The Libs increased their vote by over 4%, while high-profile independent Ian Cook dropped nearly 1%.

Imagine what might have happened, had the Liberals had an electable leader, and not the sad, sorry, sack of dripping-wet, toxic blue-green algae it has.

But that might yet change. A high-profile legal case is about to hit Liberal leader John Pesutto right in the face.

A final attempt at mediation between Moira Deeming and John Pesutto has failed, with the expelled MP planning to file her defamation case against the Victorian Opposition leader in the Federal Court imminently.

Mrs Deeming released a statement early on Monday, confirming discussions on Sunday with Mr Pesutto and Victorian Liberal Party State President Phil Davis had broken down.

The upper house MP was expelled from the Liberal partyroom in May, following a protracted dispute with Mr Pesutto which dates back to her appearance at a “Let Women Speak” rally in March.

The event was gate-crashed, as such things are, by extremist socialists, from the far-left Socialist Alliance, to a far-right gaggle of neo-Nazis. Suspiciously, Victoria Police personally escorted the Nazis to the steps of Parliament House, where, after fist-bumping the cops, the Nazis infamously Heil Hitlered away.

“Both during and after our rally, I and the organisers publicly condemned the neo-Nazis, Nazism, antisemitism and bigotry of any kind. I did not know those neo-Nazis and did not arrange for them to gatecrash our event.

Mrs Deeming said she had been called into a meeting the following day, and “informed by the Liberal Party leadership that if I refused to denounce the ‘Let Women Speak’ rally and its organisers as being extremists and Nazis/Nazi associates, they’d move a motion to expel me from the parliamentary team.”

“Or, I was told, I could ‘just resign and make it easier on everyone.’ I declined,” Mrs Deeming said.

“I was then falsely and publicly accused by the Victorian Liberal leader, Mr John Pesutto, of being a knowing associate of neo-Nazi sympathisers and extremists, and therefore deserving of expulsion from the Parliamentary Liberal Party.

The Australian

To her credit, Deeming is nobody’s shrinking violet. Not only is she hitting back at the shrivelled nutsack Pesutto in the courts, she is spearheading a group of Liberal “mavericks”, who are packing them in at town halls and party meetings. By “mavericks”, of course, they mean “actual, traditional conservatives” in the Menzies mould. You know: the sort of Liberals whom Liberal voters actually vote for.

And, finally, as naked anti-Semitism goose-steps across Australian cities, the Volkische Beobachter ABC is right there, making sure the kids are as ignorant and violently as passionate as a Long Marcher could want.

The ABC Ombudsman is refusing to review episodes of the children’s news program Behind The News, despite receiving close to 100 complaints over its coverage of the conflict in Gaza.

The ABC? Biased? Never! Just ask them, and they’ll tell you.

Parents are up in arms but the kicker, and most tragic part, is that a number of students have also put their concerns in writing, including a year 3 student, whose father wrote to the ABC on her behalf asking for BTN to show “all sides”. The letter was then signed by the entire class.

They did not receive a response.

Another complaint was from the father of a nine-year-old public school girl in Sydney who said she was confronted after BTN was shown in class recently.

“A boy came up to me. I didn’t know who he was. He asked: Are you for Israel or for this other place … I didn’t quite get it. I told him Israel, and he said to me ‘I hope you die’,” the letter from a concerned parent said, calling the show “Palestinian propaganda made PG”.

Diary understands the ABC has not replied or responded to that or any of the complaints.

The Australian

Nowhere in its three segments did the ABC mention such paltry facts as that Hamas is documented as using civilians as human shields, and civilian structures such as homes, mosques, hospitals and schools for storage of weapons and munitions, or firing missiles.

In their defence, an ABC spokeswoman spluttered that, hey, they briefly mentioned, just once, the October 7 massacre, in its weepy, hand-wringing episode on the “tragedy” in Gaza.

No doubt the ABC will apologise to the Palestinian community and promise never to mention it again.