Look who's back – and with back pay after escaping conviction

The Age

5 days ago

That's due to Section 229 of the Local Government Act clause (6): 'A councillor who is no longer stood down under subsection (1) is entitled to their allowance, including any allowance previously withheld under subsection (4), unless the councillor is convicted of the offence.'
Agirtan, a tax manager, pointed out at the time that her court-ordered donation was tax-deductible.
We sought comment from her but didn't hear back. The council confirmed the back payment.
And while she was suspended from the council, nothing could suspend her from social media during that period, which included a reference to her critics 'sucking each other off in the comments on the City of Kingston post'.
Positively Trumpian in its eloquence.
Back to the benches
A mere 11 weeks after the May 3 election, federal parliament has returned. Everyone wanted to put their feet up after that gruelling election campaign, we guess. Or hike the Great Wall of China.
The pollies slowly began to trickle back to Canberra, and on Sunday night, CBD's spies spotted Labor frontbenchers Murray Watt, Jenny McAllister and Tim Ayres enjoying a pre-sitting dinner at the restaurant Compa in the Canberra Centre. Expect more of that.
During the downtime, CBD brought you several updates about the great staffer exodus, and had some sport at the expense of the PM's chief of staff, Tim Gartrell, for what we thought was his weirdly school-prefect attitude to his underlings oversharing happy snaps with the prime minister on social media. Obligations under the ministerial staff code of blah blah blah, you understand.
We live in a Zoomer generation after all. If it is not posted on LinkedIn, did you even have a job?
But maybe he had a point: word has reached CBD of a former staffer whose profile on the romantic-encounter social media site Hinge once included a selfie with … the prime minister.
Anthony 'Aphrodisiac' Albanese. Somehow we don't think so.
PvO's Hollow State
The period following a federal election brings the inevitable flurry of political tomes by our various pundits.
Last month, CBD revealed that formidable columnist Niki Savva would be releasing a new book, appropriately titled Earthquake, just in time to send seismic rumbles through various Liberal Party Christmases.
Also getting in on the act is University of Western Australia politics professor and Daily Mail Australia political editor Peter van Onselen. His new book, The Hollow State: Power Without Purpose in Australian Politics, is due for an October release by niche right-leaning press Wilkinson Publishing.
It feels a slight step down from Hachette, which published PvO's 2021 book on Scott Morrison, but then again, PvO's own recent career arc has been a little chaotic.
He went from The Australian and Sky News to Network Ten and The Project before joining Daily Mail Australia last year.
Van Onselen has been a pundit whose notable career highlights included instances of being prominently wrong (his 'kisses of death' were the stuff of legend), but even we were amused to find this 2022 headline: 'Does Peter van Onselen have the kiss of death? How political guru predicted the 'future of Australian politics' in a single photo ... and got it VERY wrong' published in, er, Daily Mail Australia.
He quit as Network Ten's political editor in 2023, and was then successfully sued by his former employer for breaching a non-disparagement clause in his redundancy agreement (an agreement under which he trousered $165,000) by writing an article in The Australian calling the broadcaster 'the minnow of Australian television'.
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To be fair, he was technically right about that one, as Ten's ratings and financial performance has shown, but in our experience the negative commentary in The Australian about Ten used to be inversely proportionate to how much of the network was owned by The Australian 's boss of bosses, Lachlan Murdoch.
PvO told us his new book was some years in the making, a lament at the hollowing out of modern politics by those on both sides of the aisle that he hoped would be 'half-scholarly, half-populist'.