You can listen to the Front on your smart sneaker every morning to hear the latest episode. Just say play the news from the Australian. From the Australian, here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Tuesday, June twenty five. The Albanese government is to tell the Aboriginal Justice Service NAJA to show leadership on family violence. That's after The
Australian's revelation its chairman beat up his pregnant partner. The lead author of the government's Defense Strategic Review has warned the debate over Peter Dutton's nuclear energy plan has the potential to run off the rails and turn Australians off nuclear all together, a threat to the Navy's future submarine program.
That story is live now at the Australian dot Com dot a U. A fresh scandal is engulfing the UK's Conservative Party, with allegations five people, including a police officer with links to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, bet on the election date before Sunac announced when it would be. Voting is in just two weeks and everyone's betting Labour's Keir Starmer will be PM. But there's something about Starma, a dashing former human rights barrister that might surprise you.
Hello, darling, how's it going.
Your mother's trying to fix you up with some deforce.
Human rights parris.
Pretty nasty beast apparently, who deem Tom?
Maybe this time Mom had got it right. Come on. One of the greatest characters in modern movie history is Mark Darcy, played by Colin Firth in the Bridget Jones's Diary franchise. He was a charming, handsome, almost unbearably pompous lawyer named after Fitzwilliam Darcy, the hero of Jane Austen's eighteen thirteen masterpiece Pride and Prejudice.
Mother, I do not need a blind date, particularly not some verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and dresses like a mother.
His nemesis and rival for Bridget's affections was suave TV executive Daniel Cleaver played by Hugh Grant, a cad for the ages there fight scenes two men who don't know how to fight, reveling at each other our cinema classics.
Do you have any idea? What's centruy we actually live in?
Are you gonna sit outside. I'm not gonna have to drag you.
I'm gonna have to drag me.
They fall into a fountain and have the least dignified brawl ever caught on film.
Do you know what, mate, if you're so obsessed with Bridgete Jones, why don't you just marry her?
Because then she definitely shagged me. It has long been rumored, ever since it came out that Keir Starmer was the inspiration for mister Darcy, the handsome but slightly stuffy human rights lawyer who is the great love of Bridget Joins and Bridget Joins Diary.
Richard Ferguson is the Australian's National Chief of Staff. We should note that Helen Fielding, the author of the Bridget Jones books, has denied basing Mark Darcy on Kiir Starmer.
I think it's hard not to see him as a kind of mister Darcy figure. Keirs Starmer has led an incredibly interesting life. He was very much a lawyer rather than a politician, never really involved in student politics, ended up in the Chief prosecutor in England.
He is how Britain's Channel four News framed it.
I've used to run the Crown Prosecution Service. Fire was Director of Public Prosecutions. Director of Public Prosecutions. He wants you to know about these five years in his career, the job for which he was knighted.
I've taken down terrorist gags in my path.
Had some controversies. For example, you know he never prosecuted the terrible BBC personality and later revealed mass pedifile Jimmy Saville.
The evidence is now overwhelming that one of Britain's most beloved entertainers, the late Sir Jimmy Saville, was also a predatory sex offender.
But he was considered to be a very tough on cream prosecutor, went for big sentences, and then he joined the Labor Party got into parliament in twenty fifteen.
That was when David Cameron's Conservatives scraped into coalition government, leaving Labor ed Miliband and Starmer on the opposition benches.
So he thought he was joining kind of the new ed Meliban government after a ruckety coalition between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. Instead, he's been forced to Levey's years in oppositionion and Levi's years in oppossession under Jeremy Corbin.
Corbyn was the hard left Labor leader whom Starmer would eventually replace after a thumping defeat of Labor at the twenty nineteen election.
And it has made him a ruthless figure, but also a very safe and sometimes people would say slightly gellibella figure when it comes to policy.
In particular, Starmer is promising to rebuild the public health system a clean energy transformation, and he's sent a chill through the middle classes with a plan to put the broad based VAT tax on private schools.
It's a very Daniel Andrews esque policy. It's essentially putting up what we would call a GST on private school fees. Now private schools have a little bit of a different relationship I think than here in Australia. I think a lot more people use private schools Australia than they would in Britain. But it has slightly dented his attempts to portray himself as somebody who supports aspiration, as somebody who
supports people who want to grow wealth. And after Jeremy Corbyn, who is a Marxist, admitted that by his own admission, he had worked very hard to try and re establish Labor as a party that can work with business. Is a more kind of classic labor corporadist sort of socialist left, probably a little bit like Anthony Albanezy.
So he's not going to tear down the establishment.
He's definitely not going to tear down the establishment. He does have a knighthood, after all, he is Sir Kiir Starmer. He's really made a point of trying to reintroduce patriotism into the Labor Party. Of course, Jeremy Corbyn famously didn't sing God Save the Queen, was an avid Republican, turned up to tripping the color in donkey jackets and things like that. He is very much portrayed himself as a supporter of the king, obviously a supporter of the late Queen.
He does want to make changes to the House of Lords. He wants to stop all lords over the age of eighty being active participants in the Second Chamber, and we want to get rid of head reditary peers and people who become lords by birth. The manifesto is that eventually the House of Lords will be abolished. I mean this has been the opinion of Towny Blair and Gordon Brown as well, but it's about Lake the Republican Australia for
the Labor Party. It mate saying didn't theory, but I think when it comes to the practice, they're less keen to run into it. But I think that's another example of how this is not a prime minister who's going to tear down the establishment anytime soon. This is nor Jeremy Corbin.
This campaign kicked off last month in a downpour. It was the campaign launch a snap election called by pam Rishi Sunak in an attempt to get the jump on Labor, complete with a Churchill esque speech out the front of ten Downing Street. But Sunak's team clearly forgot to look out the window first, and seconds after Sunac opened his mouth, the heavens opened and he was drenched.
Over the next few weeks, I will fight for every vote. I will earn your trust.
And then someone with a loud speaker started blasting Sunac with things can only get better, the nineteen nineties anthem and the Labour's unofficial theme song.
China is looking to dominate the twenty first century by stealing a lead in technology, and migration is being weaponized by hostile states to threaten the integrity of our borders.
I think your take out from his appearance in the reign was that he was a bit of a drip. Now as his campaign improved it all since the beginning.
No, he's not just a DREP. He's a whole stalking puddle. I mean, he's lost in the puddle. It may be the most disastrous political campaign and modern Western politics since oh who knows. I mean, he mikes bell short and entries of me looks like campaign geniuses. Makes Hillary Clinton look like a competent campaigner.
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables, right the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, islamophobic, you name it.
It's been a terrible campaign and it's not all of his fault, but a lot of it is his fault. He has no eye for politics. Unfortunately, the skipping of d D was a completely not disaster, which I think Kelder's campaign stone dead.
That's where Sunac flew home early from D Day commemorations in France to give an interview to ITV that delivered one of the most toe curlingly awkward moments in modern politics.
Have you ever gone without something. Yeah, I mean I growt My family emigrated here with very little, and that's how I was raised. I was raised with the values of hard work.
What did you go.
Without as a child? Lots of things, right, because my parents wanted to put everything into our education and that was a priority.
So what sort of things had to be sacrificed?
Lots of things, right, I mean, give me an example, all sorts of things, like lots of people. There'll be all sorts of things that I would have wanted as a kid that I couldn't have, right, But famously, SkyTV that was something that we never had growing up.
Actually, this scandal where members of the top Tory campaign team are now being investigated for betting on the election date because they had found out the election date before the Prime minister announced, it has I think shocked people and it was reminiscent of the party Gate scandals under Boris Johnson and where people were having parties during COVID lockdowns and Tory staffers were having parties during COVID lockdowns, in which it seems to be one role for Tory
staffers in one role for everybody else. His top cabinet ministers are basically out there admitting they're not going to win and that it's all about stopping Labor from having the massive majority. And he looks completely defeated. Ressisternaki looks as if he doesn't want to be there. I think he's thinking about his next job in Silicon Valley. But it's a very sad end for the Tory Party's fourteen years of power.
There are predictions hard to fathom that the Tories could see their three hundred and forty four seats chipped down to just one hundred in Britain's six hundred and fifty seat House of Commons. That would be worse than the conservatives nadir the nineteen oh six election, when they were reduced to just one hundred and fifty six seats. Coming up the populist firebrand who's stealing all sun acts thunder. The Australian's full of expert analysis from politics to business.
We'd love you to join our subscribers and always be the smartest person in the room. Check us out at the Australian dot com dot a U and we'll be back after this break. There's certainly a dynamic voice on the Conservative side of UK politics. But it's not one of the Tories. It's Nigel Farage, the populist and europe campaigner who's now turned his attention to securing Britain's borders.
Nigel Farage really came on the scene to advocate for Britain's exit from the European Union, really before it was popular. In many ways. One of the reasons that David Cameron called the Brexit referendum in twenty sixteen was to head off Nigel Farage doing what Nigel Farage appears to be doing no, which is completely gobbling up the Tory vote. No. He ended up doing very well when he ford something called the Brexit Party when Theresa mel was failing to
get in Brexit done. And he ran again obviously in twenty nineteen, but didn't do very well because Boris Johnson managed to get a lot of that vote that he was taking back. But this time he's been able to really establish himself as a very very powerful voice. He has made a major stumble though, I think, and that he's basically revealed himself as soft on putting.
Hang on a second, we provoked this war. Of course, it's his fault he's used but we provoked the invasion, and very interestingly, once again ten years ago, when I predicted this, By the way, I'm the only person in British politics that predicted what would happen, and of course everyone said I was a pariah for daring to suggest it.
He said that the EU had a lot to blame for the situation in Ukraine, and I think a lot of traditional Tories who are very anti Russia and very pro Ukraine may be turned off by that. So I think that was a mistake on his part. But things are looking good for him. He's running in Clacton, which is a seaside town which has the second oldest population of ell the electorates in Britain, so I think he'd
have a very good chance there. But famously he did say before he decided to run in this election, which was not a sure thing, he said, do I really want to spend every weekend in Clarcton? Well, they see what they've WoT to say about that.
Richard Ferguson is The Australian's National chief of Staff. You can check out all our journalism right now by joining our subscribers at the Australian dot com dot au