Penny’s pay bump wouldn’t fly in corporate Australia 

After stepping in to defend Anthony Albanese during the much-discussed melon controversy, Penny Wong has now landed a more lucrative stand-in role: earning the Prime Minister’s pay rate whenever he is out of the country.

Wong is serving as acting prime minister while Albanese attends the Pacific Islands Forum in Palau, with Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles also abroad on visits to the United States and Britain.

Under a recently adjusted Remuneration Tribunal arrangement, Wong is entitled to be paid at Albanese’s annual salary rate of $622,102 for the period she is temporarily carrying out the top job.

The political twist is hard to miss: Wong, as Foreign Minister, is receiving the extra pay while staying in Australia, as Albanese handles overseas diplomacy that would typically sit close to her own ministerial brief.

And Albanese does not pause his prime ministerial salary while Wong fills in. Instead, taxpayers are effectively funding two senior politicians at the Prime Minister’s pay rate at the same time.

Try that arrangement in the real world. If the chief executive of a private company travels overseas on company business, the board doesn’t start paying another executive the CEO’s full rate while continuing to pay the actual CEO every cent of theirs. Responsibilities are delegated, and that’s it.

Only in Canberra does the temporary delegation of duties require the creation of a second prime-ministerial pay packet. Aren’t we lucky this lot is looking after the nation’s finances.

The tribunal insists the change wasn’t requested by the government. That merely highlights that it’s a system-wide absurdity rather than a specially designed favour for Penny.

The acting PM position is itself largely ceremonial these days anyway. Albo remains contactable aboard an RAAF jet equipped with internet access and secure communications. He continues making decisions in every meaningful sense.

Well, to the extent Albo makes any meaningful decisions, that is.

Ooshie economics from a landlord minister 

Communications minister Anika Wells has found a novel way to explain Labor’s housing tax changes to Australians: talk to them as though they are toddlers.

Wells posted a video surrounded by dozens of Woolworths Ooshies, solemnly explaining that ‘both the Ooshie market and the Australian housing market are dictated by supply and demand’.

Under Labor’s reforms, Wells said, investors can ‘keep using the tax system to buy Ooshies, but only new ones’.

It was housing policy by Play School. All that was missing was Big Ted negatively gearing Jemima’s dollhouse.

And she’s the communications minister. Are we living through a real-world political satire?

But Wells left one particularly relevant Ooshie out of the display: her own investment property.

The minister’s latest register of interests declares a rental property in Chermside, as well as the Wavell Heights home she owns jointly with her husband. The Chermside property predates Labor’s reforms, meaning it’s protected by the government’s grandfathering arrangements.

Perhaps some Ooshies are more equal than others.

To be clear, the register doesn’t disclose whether Wells negatively gears the property and I am not suggesting that she does.

But if she does, she can keep doing so under the new rules. The restrictions she was explaining with plastic figurines apply to investors who came along after her.

In other words, Wells already owns the rare existing property Ooshie, and Labor has made sure no other kids can take it from her.

Aspiring first home buyers locked out of the housing market are apparently meant to be reassured by a ministerial landlord shuffling children’s toys around a desk.

Perhaps Wells’s next video can demonstrate how many Ooshies a young Australian needs to trade for a deposit?

Political safety comes with conditions

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland has managed to turn victim-blaming into government policy, at least when the victim is Pauline Hanson.

Hanson says escalating threats against her now require federal police protection.

Whether anyone agrees with Hanson’s claim that Albo’s rhetoric has contributed to the threats is neither here nor there.

Either way, the response from the nation’s first law officer should have been simple: political threats are unacceptable, full stop.

Instead, Rowland acknowledged that life was becoming increasingly dangerous for high-profile female politicians before immediately adding a qualification.

Hanson, she suggested, needed to ‘look at oneself and one’s behaviour’ and consider the standards accepted within her own party and ideology.

Come again?

It was the political equivalent of telling the victim to consider what she had done to bring the trouble upon herself.

Even some of Hanson’s fiercest critics on the other side are quietly shocked.

Imagine just for a moment if a male Coalition attorney general told a female Labor or Greens MP receiving physical threats to examine her own conduct and political beliefs as the cause.

Labor would demand his resignation within the hour. There would be sombre speeches about misogyny, safety and the dangerous consequences of blaming women for abuse directed at them.

But because the target in this real-life case was Hanson, Rowland apparently decided the usual rules don’t apply.

Her comments came after Albo labelled One Nation ‘dangerous, divisive and downright dishonest’ and told the Labor faithful: ‘We simply must defeat them. We owe it to history.’

The PM says politicians need to lower the temperature, then turns up at a Labor conference carrying a rhetorical blowtorch. When the target complains about threats, his AG tells Hanson to reflect on her own behaviour.

Apparently threats against women are always unacceptable, unless the woman’s name is Pauline Hanson.

Canberra discovers a new definition of ‘consistent’ 

Labor managed to have two refugee policies in a single working day last week, and by the following morning ministers were insisting there was no backflip.

Look over there, it’s a dog that’s really a cat!

On Thursday morning, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s office confirmed the government planned to cut Australia’s annual humanitarian intake from 20,000 places to 13,750 next financial year.

That wasn’t media speculation, it was confirmed from the responsible minister’s office.

Labor backbenchers promptly revolted. By late afternoon, Albo had intervened and declared that the intake would remain at 20,000.

The PM communicated his government’s final position by sending a text to an ABC journalist. Good government at its finest! Cabinet government is clearly overrated.

The following morning Health Minister Mark Butler insisted it was ‘not a backflip’, while Industry Minister Tim Ayres declared that the government’s approach had been ‘consistent all the way through’.

That is an impressive abuse of the English language even by Canberra’s standards.

Either Burke’s office announced a major migration policy without the approval of the PM, exposing extraordinary dysfunction at the centre of government, or Albo dumped the policy after his backbench revolted, which is the very definition of a backflip.

Both explanations are embarrassing to say the least. Neither resembles consistency.

Only one month earlier, Labor’s national conference had unanimously committed the party to maintaining the 20,000 intake in the short term, while continuing to aspire to 27,000. Apparently nobody thought to send the minutes of that meeting to the Home Affairs Minister who’s responsible for the policy.

Under Labor’s new policymaking model, cabinet is optional, a caucus rebellion counts as consultation and a reporter receiving a text message substitutes for a formal announcement.

Taxpayers can only hope Albo remembered to text Tony Burke as well.

Why Scarr should stop giving advice 

Former shadow immigration minister Paul Scarr has found a new vocation since Angus Taylor dumped him from the frontbench: advising Albo on who should be in cabinet.

His nominee? Labor senator Deborah O’Neill.

‘Deb should be a cabinet minister,’ Scarr gushed last week. ‘She’s got a very strong moral compass.’ He even volunteered to convey this brilliant recommendation directly to the PM.

Prime Ministers don’t generally take cabinet advice from backbenchers whose own leader has decided they aren’t fit for the shadow ministry.

Scarr’s record hardly qualifies him as a political talent scout.

As Sussan Ley’s shadow immigration minister, his instinct was to soften the Coalition’s position, reject talk of ‘mass migration’ and lecture colleagues not to ‘inflame emotion’ – precisely as voters furious about immigration were stampeding towards Hanson’s One Nation.

Hanson’s rise, neatly and accidentally accommodated by Scarr’s stupidity, is now threatening to destroy the very party the Queensland senator represents.

Taylor took one look at that political masterclass and returned him to the backbench. Quite right, too.

Scarr’s judgment of O’Neill is no sharper, and his timing couldn’t be worse.

Before delivering his sycophantic tribute, O’Neill had accepted flights and accommodation from defence lobbying firm Pyne & Partners to attend its nearly $5,000-a-head AUKUS conference in Washington. This was the subject of my column last Sunday.

At the time of the trip, O’Neill chaired parliament’s Defence Subcommittee and was just weeks away from becoming chair of the powerful new Parliamentary Joint Committee on Defence.

In other words, a defence lobbyist paid to fly a parliamentary defence watchdog to America to mingle with arms dealers chasing a slice of the $368billion AUKUS spend.

Everything was declared and within the rules, O’Neill’s office opined. Which is precisely the sort of threadbare defence she would’ve filleted had it come from one of the consultancy giants paraded before her corporations committee.

Yet Scarr sees a ‘very strong moral compass’ in the way Deb operates. Interesting.

It’s worth noting Scarr is a Liberal moderate, which makes him a factional ally of the former Liberal minister Christopher Pyne, whose lobbying firm took advantage of Deb’s penchant for a junket.

So Scarr couldn’t read the electorate on immigration and now he can’t recognise a glaring conflict of interest when it’s sitting right beside him.

If this is Scarr’s best judgment, Taylor performed a public service by consigning him to the backbench.

Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick has promised that, if the party wins the next general election, it would lift the income tax personal allowance to £15,000 within its first 100 days in power.

Mr Jenrick, who is being lined up as Chancellor in a potential Reform government, said the move would be designed to reduce pressure on millions of working Britons struggling with the cost of living.

The personal allowance — the amount people can earn before they start paying income tax — has remained fixed at £12,570 since 2021.

That freeze is currently scheduled to stay in place until 2031, even as criticism grows over what opponents have branded a “stealth tax” on workers as wages rise.

Speaking at Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham on Saturday, Mr Jenrick outlined the proposal, describing it as what would be the largest increase in the personal allowance ever introduced.

He said it would be his ‘mission’ to deliver the tax cut and promised to resign as Chancellor if he failed to reach the objective within the first weeks of a Reform government.

As part of a pledge to ‘make work pay again’, Mr Jenrick told Reform members: ‘The task is mighty. The hour is late. But our cause is right, and our country is worth it.

‘They tried to knock us down. We’re still standing. Now let’s get Britain standing again.’

Reform estimates hiking the personal allowance to £15,000 would save the majority of taxpayers around £500 a year and would benefit around 40million people overall. 

It will also take 2.9million people out of income tax altogether and ensure the state pension remains untaxed, the party said.

Under what is known as ‘fiscal drag’, millions of Britons have been dragged deeper into the tax system due to the freezing of the personal allowance and income tax thresholds in recent years.

Both Labour and Tory chancellors have been accused of ‘stealth taxes’ by failing to increase allowances and thresholds in line with earnings growth prompted by the cost-of-living crisis. 

Mr Jenrick argued the freezing of the personal allowance since 2021 under both Labour and Tory administrations has left the allowance £3,500 lower than it otherwise would be.

In his conference speech, he said that ‘there has never, in our lifetimes, been a worse time to be a worker in Britain’.

‘As Chancellor, I will wake each morning with one purpose,’ Reform’s Treasury spokesman added.

‘To make Britain a better place to be a worker than it was the day before. In the first 100 days of a Reform government, in our first Budget, we will raise the tax-free personal allowance from £12,570 to £15,000.

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Reform said the cost to the Treasury of raising the personal allowance would be £17.7billion in the first year, rising to £21billion in the fifth year of the next parliament.

The party is promising to fund the tax cut through £80billion of savings in government spending it has already identified.

This includes slashing billions of pounds from the welfare bill, Net Zero spending, and the foreign aid budget.

Mr Jenrick used his speech on Saturday to challenge Prime Minister Andy Burnham to match Reform’s pledge.

‘The hard choice for Burnham and for us is exactly the same,’ he said. ‘It’s either welfare waste, foreign aid and migrants — or the British worker. We choose the worker.’

At the last general election in 2024, Reform promised to raise the personal allowance to £20,000.

Mr Jenrick confirmed this remains the party’s long-term aim, saying: ‘When we can – only when it is paid for in full – I will go further, step-by-step, until we’ve reached Reform’s ambition of a £20,000 tax free allowance.’

Reform is looking to get its Birmingham conference back on track after the first day of the gathering on Friday was overshadowed by a fresh donations row.

Appearing on Times Radio earlier on Saturday, Mr Jenrick said two senior party aides are permanently suspended from their roles after undercover filming appeared to show them discussing how to disguise foreign donations.

Senior Reform figures have given conflicting accounts of whether James Orr and Dan Jukes’ suspension is permanent, or temporary and pending an investigation.

Mr Jenrick said: ‘They have been permanently suspended. There is obviously due process, and so there is going to be an investigation, and we want to learn all the facts, give them obviously a right of reply.

‘But Nigel (Farage) has acted very swiftly, as soon as he saw the footage. Some of their comments, it’s fair to say, were very disappointing and inappropriate.’

Pressed on the nature of the suspension, Mr Jenrick said: ‘Well, they have left the conference. They’ve been suspended from their roles.’

Mr Jenrick was later asked whether he still believed quitting the Conservatives for Reform was worth it after the scrutiny his new party had faced in recent months, and told the broadcaster it was ‘one of the best decisions that I have ever made’.

A Labour Party spokesperson said: ‘Robert Jenrick only seems to be interested in making people better off when Reform UK are trying to distract from the latest scandal engulfing their party. The public will see right through it.

‘Farage and Reform are funding policy after policy through mystery spending cuts, which could put local schools, hospitals and other vital public services at risk.

‘Meanwhile as soon as Andy Burnham became Prime Minister, he prioritised cutting taxes to provide much needed breathing space for families and businesses on the cost of living.

‘Labour remains determined to make people better off and drive good growth in every postcode.’

As Andrew Tate’s urgent fight to block extradition to the UK moved into a Miami courtroom last week, the self-described misogynist influencer appeared to lean on what he may have viewed as one of his strongest cards.

For a man whose online fame was built on inflammatory attacks on women, it was striking that a female witness emerged as a key figure in the legal defence of the alleged rapist.

Wearing understated black, with her dark hair carefully pinned up, Natasha Sesay gave evidence in support of Tate, describing him as “calm, thoughtful and caring” — a portrait sharply at odds with the combative alpha-male image that has made him notorious worldwide and, by his own account, helped generate a multi-million-pound fortune.

“It’s not real life,” said Sesay, 35, from Chelmsford, Essex, as she testified during a federal bail hearing for Tate, 39, and his brother Tristan Tate, 38.

“A lot of it is comedy. It’s a very different character from the person you see online versus the one I know personally,” she told the court.

Claiming to have known the former professional kickboxer for five-and-a-half years, she insisted Tate, whose foul-mouthed sexist rants have garnered him more than ten million followers and a business empire worth millions, was not only a loving partner but also a devoted parent.

She told the court that they have a child who is eight-and-a-half months old and are expecting a second in a few weeks via surrogacy.

‘He’s a great father,’ she concluded.

So what should we make of this strikingly sanitised portrait of a man whose hideous outpourings about women have seen him banned from all major social media platforms for violating hate speech guidelines?

As well as facing criminal proceedings in the US and Romania, Tate and his brother are wanted back in Britain on 56 charges involving rape and sex trafficking.

Can it really be possible that he is a dedicated family man; that all the woman-hating male supremacy he has spouted in recent years was simply part of an elaborate money-spinning act?

In fact, as the Daily Mail discovered this week, Tate’s relationship with the woman he referred to as ‘one of my chicks’ during an interview just three years ago is a tad more complicated than the rose-tinted impression given by Natasha in court last week – just a few feet away from where self-styled ‘Top G’ Tate sat shackled, in a tan-coloured prison uniform.

We have spoken exclusively to those that know Natasha, including her 66-year-old father who had dinner with his daughter and Tate just a week before the latter’s arrest in the US in July.

More, in a moment, of Natasha’s father’s first impressions of the notorious man his daughter is linked to.

A former friend back in the UK has also given an insight into Natasha’s life with Tate, first in Romania from where he ran his lucrative webcam pornography empire and, more recently, in Dubai where he moved last year with his entourage.

‘I think she feels she is the “chosen one” because she has lived with him in his main house in Romania for years and in Dubai. He’s bought her a house, designer bags and a boob job,’ they said.

So what on earth attracted Natasha to a man who claims that ‘monogamy is not natural’ and brags about having sex with all the women in his orbit because, according to his own perverse belief system, it guarantees their unwavering loyalty?

Former neighbours from Brentwood in Essex, where she grew up with her divorced mother Tracy and younger brother Nathan, remember Natasha as a ‘sweet and lovely’ girl whose parents separated when she was small.

Father Alex, who was born in Sierra Leone, moved to the US 30 years ago. Natasha attended a large co-ed secondary in Brentwood but dropped out without completing her A-levels when her mother became ill.

She found work in sales, taking jobs with carmakers Ford and Land Rover before starting work in 2013 with house-building company Bellway Homes.

The same year, aged 23, she embarked on a long-term relationship with a local car dealer to whom she got engaged and bought a house with.

That relationship ended amicably in 2020 – a year before she met Tate.

By then, she is said to have been earning around £60,000 a year from her sales work and the modelling she’d begun, appearing in music videos and promotions. She met Tate in 2021 after taking a hostess job with supercar event company, The Cannon Run, of which he was then a director.

In a 2021 video clip, she can be seen sitting behind him on a rented private jet transporting his entourage from Biggin Hill airport in south-east London to Ibiza.

Two years later, during a podcast interview he gave to Canadian YouTubers The Nelk Boys, Tate referred to ‘the chick Tash’ when asked who was on ‘cigar duty’, adding: ‘It’s a chick, one of my chicks, you know. One of my wives. I’ve got four wives.’

She can also be seen straddling Tate during a workout and being lifted by him into a flashy car in a promotional video he released about how to have a good relationship.

‘For them to look up to you with authority you have to show some confidence,’ says Tate in a voice-over.

‘They’re not going to completely bend over and comply with you just because you have a d***. Because I’m telling you, if you meet a woman who’s half good and you’re the Big G, she’ll behave.’

‘When they met it was as girlfriend and boyfriend,’ the friend said, adding that Natasha was ‘very strong-minded’ and not the kind of woman to be taken advantage of. ‘If she was being victimised, she would know about it.’

The friend added: ‘She is definitely one of his partners.’

Self-confessed womaniser Tate has frequently boasted of having a ‘roster’ of four girlfriends and being ‘loyal’ to all of them. In his twisted world that means looking after them, financially and physically, while they are expected to take care of him, his children and his home and remain absolutely faithful while turning a blind eye to his own promiscuity.

He laid bare this disturbing domestic set-up in a 2021 podcast interview.

‘What’s the point in pretending you’re with a guy and pretending he’s loyal? These girls are making good money. They’re living a very good life. They’re with a man they love. They’re with these other girls who are their best friends. There’s no disrespect in the house. My girls just understood, “I’m f****** all of you. If you don’t like it, leave”.’

He expanded on his theme in ‘The Tate Bible’, his guide to wealth, success and masculine power, describing how he had ‘a little penthouse with my hottest girls. The ones I actually wanted to spend time with’.

He added: ‘It would be me and the three of them, f****** and watching TV. Chilling. All would say in private, “I wish we were alone sometimes. I’d do anything to be just us”.’

While he’s been vague on exactly how many children he has, when pressed he admitted that it was around ‘10 or 12’.

Asked if the children had different mothers, he said: ‘Not all different but there’s been a few ovens to bake the bread.’

Tate, who said he had converted to Islam in 2022, went on: ‘I need 20 kids so, you know, I have no choice but to have four wives as Allah intended.’

Legal documents filed in Florida last year give a further insight into a disturbing arrangement which, from the outside, bears all the hallmarks of a harem. In one, US lawyers for one of their alleged victims say the Tate brothers deliberately created ‘jealousy and competition among the women which they can manipulate to their benefit’.

The same document refers to another woman living inside Tate’s home who ‘desperately wants to have a child with’ him.

The document features reams of text messages between Tate and another long-term female associate with whom he was in a relationship.

In one message, he mentions ‘another girl coming to the house for a week’ to work as a ‘cam girl’.

Using a slang word meaning ‘to scam’, he tells the other woman: ‘You need to famoose her like you did with Tash.’

On another occasion, according to the document, he asked the same woman to talk to ‘another woman he was dating, Natasha, to spy on her and report back’.

When Tate asks for an update, the woman tells him: ‘She just talked about you and her and how you’ve gone together places and how nice it is when you take her with you. How much she loves when you spend time with her and how you do things for her to show that you love her. That you want her to move in with you full time after the Cannon Run and spend more time together as a couple.’

Tate replies: ‘She’s testing you to see if you get mad… She’s running her mouth. You’re reporting to me. She’s a f****** child. You’re a real woman.’

He adds: ‘This is why it’s important you and I work together and just control them all.’

Natasha’s father Alex claims that he saw a very different side to Tate when he ate lunch with him and Natasha recently at Capital Grille, a Washington DC steak house popular with senior figures in Donald Trump’s orbit.

Tate, said Mr Sesay, took care of the bill at the restaurant, where a porcini-rubbed bone-in ribeye steak costs $93 (£67).

Speaking on the phone from his home in Maryland, he told the Daily Mail: ‘Everything was good. Natasha has never complained to me. I don’t interfere with my kids’ relationships.

‘The relationship between me and Mr Tate was cordial. There was mutual respect. He was very pleasant. He was very thoughtful and we talked about the grandkids. He told me he would take care of them and I said thank you.’

He added: ‘I just dealt with him as a human being and he seemed like a good guy.’

As for Natasha herself, Tate must have little reason to question her unwavering loyalty given her appearance in court last week.

‘I’m treated very well by Andrew at home,’ Natasha told the court, adding that her boyfriend has ‘never ever been violent toward women’. She said he was involved with his children and made them a priority.

Under cross-examination, Natasha admitted that Tate paid for her home in Dubai along with food, private healthcare, jewellery, cars, luxury bags and shoes.

She also revealed that British police raided her home in the UK and arrested her in February 2024 on suspicion of offences including prostitution, money laundering, tax evasion and modern slavery. She said she currently faces no charges.

‘It was frankly offensive,’ she told the court. ‘The things they were accusing me of were absolutely impossible.’

If anyone suspected that she was simply trying to portray her manipulative ‘manosphere’ influencer lover in a good light then, outside court, Tate’s lawyer Joseph McBride made a point of telling journalists that Natasha, who had flown from Dubai to give evidence, is ‘no pushover’ and that her ‘captivating’ testimony meant a lot to Tate.

He said the pair’s first child was born via IVF and that the second was being carried by a surrogate after Natasha suffered ‘brutal miscarriages’. The pair were committed to raising a family, he added.

US magistrate Judge Lauren Louis will issue a written ruling at a later date on whether to grant bail to Andrew and Tristan Tate.

At the hearing last Thursday – in which the brothers’ legal representatives also downplayed their wealth, insisting many of the cars and homes they film in are rented – defence lawyers claimed that the pair had complied with the terms of their release while battling charges in the UK and Romania.

But the British Embassy in the US has filed documents asking the judge to keep the brothers, who have boasted about having multiple passports, locked up while the UK pursues extradition. British authorities have until September 16 to submit a full extradition request.

Both men deny all the charges against them.

Andrew Tate told the court last week: ’I’ve never committed any of the crimes I’m accused of.’

He argued at length that his ‘Top G’ gangster persona was just ‘social media hyperbole’ and shouldn’t be taken literally.

But in the morally muddled world the brothers have created, the real challenge is knowing what is real and what is not.