Latest news with #McBurney
Daily Mail
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Former head of Australia's most controversial trade union is accused of trying to get the AFL to SACK one of the league's top officials
The Fair Work Ombudsman has taken legal action against ex-CFMEU boss John Setka for allegedly trying to force the AFL to sack Head of Officiating Stephen McBurney. Setka, the former Victorian secretary of the CFMEU and one of the most divisive figures in Australian union history who stepped down from his union leadership role in 2023, is accused of threatening to block or delay construction projects connected to the AFL unless McBurney was removed. The threats were reportedly made through media statements and a post authorised on the CFMEU Vic-Tas Facebook page, warning, 'Good luck to the AFL with any plans to build any projects, as our members will not be building or supporting any projects that the AFL are involved in.' At the centre of the case is Stephen McBurney, a former AFL umpire who officiated 401 games, including four grand finals. After retiring, McBurney served as Australian Building and Construction Commissioner (ABCC) from 2018 to 2023, where he led over 50 legal actions against the CFMEU. That history is now cited as the reason Setka allegedly targeted him following his return to the AFL in March 2024 as Head of Officiating. John Setka is the former Victorian secretary of the CFMEU who stood down from his leadership role in 2023 The Fair Work Ombudsman has alleged that Setka tried to influence the AFL to remove Head of Officiating Stephen McBurney from his post In his previous position as Australian Building and Construction Commissioner, McBurney launched over 50 legal actions against the CFMEU Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth described the situation as a serious breach of workplace rights and industrial law. 'We are alleging that Mr Setka, and through him the CFMEU, have engaged in deliberate unlawful conduct against a former senior public official,' she said. The FWO's case hinges on public remarks made between 31 May and 14 June 2024, including a statement in The Australian in which Setka reportedly said, 'They will regret the day they ever employed him.' In a separate radio interview with 6PR, he allegedly stated, 'As far as we're concerned, we will pursue the ex-ABCC till the ends of the earth.' The FWO alleges these comments and actions were attempts to coerce the AFL into firing McBurney, in violation of sections 340 and 355 of the Fair Work Act. These sections make it unlawful to take adverse action or to coerce an employer to act against a person because they exercised a workplace right. Booth said the case sends a strong message across all sectors. McBurney is a former AFL umpire who officiated over 400 matches including four grand finals Setka and McBurney clashed for many years before Setka allegedly tried to have him removed by the AFL 'Mr McBurney had a lawful workplace right to perform his role as ABCC Commissioner without fear of future targeting,' she said. 'Threatening or coercive behaviour has no place in Australia's industrial relations system.' Setka's legal troubles are far from new. Over the years, he's developed a reputation as a fierce, combative union leader, earning praise from some for defending worker rights and scorn from others for his aggressive tactics. In 2019, Setka was accused of making controversial comments about domestic violence campaigner Rosie Batty, sparking widespread outrage. Though he denied the remarks, the incident led then-Labor leader Anthony Albanese to move to expel him from the party. Despite the controversy, Setka remained defiant and held onto his role until stepping down in 2023. McBurney, in contrast, has built a reputation for integrity and leadership in both sport and governance. His tenure at the ABCC drew praise from industry groups and criticism from unions. His return to the AFL was supported by the league and the AFL Umpires Association, with a focus on improving officiating and building talent across all levels of the game. The AFL has stood by McBurney throughout the controversy, resisting any pressure to terminate his role. League officials have not commented publicly on the legal action, but sources suggest there is strong backing for his continued leadership. The penalties sought by the FWO include up to $18,780 per contravention for Setka and up to $93,900 per contravention for the CFMEU. A directions hearing has been scheduled for May 9 in Melbourne's Federal Court.
New York Times
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Unfinished Opera Is Finished in Time to Be Newly Resonant
Instead of finishing his masterpiece 'Khovanshchina,' Modest Mussorgsky is drunk in a ditch. His friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov urges him to compose, using a walking stick to tickle him awake. But Mussorgsky would rather stay in the ditch, drunk. That's fiction: a scene from 'Moscow-Petushki,' a 1969 satire by the Soviet writer Venedikt Yerofeyev. But, said the composer, musicologist and author Gerard McBurney, who completed a new version of 'Khovanshchina' that premieres at the Salzburg Easter Festival on Saturday, the moment shows the mythic place of the unfinished opera in Russian history. 'Yerofeyev, writing to an audience who had probably never been into the opera in their life — they know this story about this great genius who is the emblematic Russian failure,' McBurney said in an interview. In real life, Mussorgsky 'embarked on this monstrous piece which was supposed to sum up the whole disaster of Russian history from beginning to end,' McBurney added. 'And he couldn't finish it.' McBurney has created a new, completed 'Khovanshchina,' and he joins a long line of composers and musicologists who did the same. Mussorgsky died in 1881, leaving key scenes in the final act unfinished. Rimsky-Korsakov made the first performance edition of the opera (which Mussorgsky preferred to call a 'musical folk drama'), and it premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in 1886. In 1913, Sergei Diaghilev enlisted Stravinsky (and possibly Ravel) to prepare another version for performance in Paris, and Shostakovich reorchestrated the score for a 1959 film. McBurney called his contribution to the palimpsest of 'Khovanshchina' a bridge, built from melodic sketches, between Mussorgsky's music and the Stravinsky finale. Last year, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, under Esa-Pekka Salonen, performed a concert version of McBurney's completion. On Saturday, it will be staged in Salzburg, with the same conductor and orchestra, and directed by McBurney's brother, Simon. A co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, it will travel to New York in the future. A recent rehearsal of 'Khovanshchina' in Salzburg showed the work coming together with a striking, contemporary vision. The piece concerns political intrigue in 1682, but this performance features a blunt, vernacular new translation of the libretto; a staging of skin-crawling immediacy; and a fierce, unsentimental reading of the score. Rather than neatly tying up loose ends, this production embraces the work's unfinished state. McBurney's bridge is fragmentary, sounding neither quite like Mussorgsky nor like an original piece. Hearing it, you can't forget how much is still missing from 'Khovanshchina.' 'We both agreed that it should be very simple, and instead of trying to create continuity between these bits and pieces, we should just accept that there isn't any,' Salonen said in an interview. 'These are fragments, and it just kind of is what it is.' McBurney has been fascinated with Mussorgsky since he was 14, when his father, the archaeologist Charles McBurney, traveled to Moscow and Leningrad to discuss his research findings with scholars. Charles mentioned to his K.G.B. minder that his son was fascinated by classical music; the minder gave him an enormous case of recordings from the state-owned label Melodiya to bring back to England. Those introduced Gerard to Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition' and 'Boris Godunov.' He soon became captivated by 'Khovanshchina' as well. 'I was always interested in its fragmentary and unfinished nature,' he said. In 1984, Gerard McBurney moved to Moscow, where he learned Russian and studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory. That experience has been invaluable for his work on 'Khovanshchina.' In addition to the musical reconstruction, McBurney has been making a contemporary English version of the libretto, with the translator Hannah Whitley, that preserves the original's vernacular. In one scene, the authoritarian Prince Ivan Khovansky tells the fanatical leader of the Old Believers, Dositheus, 'Together we will make Russia great again.' At another point, the title of the opera — often rendered as 'The Khovansky Affair' — is translated as something unprintable. Such choices capture the idiosyncratic style of the Russian libretto, which Mussorgsky developed, collagelike, from an obsessive study of the historical record and careful attention to the way people spoke on the street. 'He built himself an armature, and then he stuck these random bits on it,' McBurney said. 'And then, as the piece possessed him over the years, he started to weave in his own dreamlike riffs on the material.' Simon McBurney, the co-founder and artistic director of the theater company Complicité and an actor, is also interested in the work's contemporary resonances. His staging places it firmly within present-day authoritarianism. But, he said in an interview, the story of 'Khovanshchina' hardly needs updating. In the drama, there are no heroes, only ambivalent villains. Power asserts itself mercilessly, and the action is shot through with apocalyptic premonitions, which reminds him of our time. 'The young people I know sense the presence of the shadow, and therefore the impending catastrophe,' McBurney said. 'I'm not trying to bring it into the staging of the opera. It is there already.' Still, experience has taught him that relevance and realism are not the same thing. McBurney knows that the naturalistic acting style used in film can easily fall flat in opera, which has a slower pace in which the magic lies in a kind of zooming in on time. For 'Khovanshchina,' he worked with the singers to 'heighten' their acting, he said, making the movements onstage both slower and more intense. 'My job as a director is to get them — sometimes to teach them — how to hold the gesture in the body,' he said. 'Root it in the reality, but also find the dynamic form with the body which can work with the dynamic form of the music.' In Salonen's reading of that music, Mussorgsky's score is lean, metallic and very fast. Older recordings of 'Khovanshchina' tend to be sumptuous and Romantic, luxuriating in the composer's folk-inspired melodies. The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra renders the same melodies as ephemeral as the bits of text from which Mussorgsky assembled his libretto. Mussorgsky's unusual spinning modulations convey the feeling of events spiraling out of control. 'I thought from the start that it shouldn't linger, because history is moving really fast at this point,' Salonen said. 'There are some moments of calm — little oasis moments — but it should never be static.' Still, the past has had a way of inserting itself into this production. The Russian mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Karyazina sings the part of Marfa, who is caught between love and the strict dogmas of the Old Believers. Some of Karyazina's ancestors on her father's side were members of that faith. They never talked about it, until her grandfather told her about her roots while they were listening to a scene from 'Khovanshchina' on the radio. A tragedy of Mussorgsky's drama is how political upheaval severs connections among people, their land and their history. 'People want to feel that they're not just a bit of fluff and when they die, there will be nothing left of them,' Gerard McBurney said. 'Somehow, if they could feel that their roots drew from the soil they loved when they were first growing up — that's a constant theme in the text of this opera. It's the longing for an impossible dream.'
The Guardian
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘So resonant': the 19th-century Russian opera being revived across Europe
A Russian political leader sings about war with Ukrainians and the need for a 'durable peace'. The fractured political elite argues over whether they should pursue closer ties with Europe or embrace Russian traditions. The plot of Modest Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina was written in the 1870s and is set in the 1680s. But, as the characters lament the fact that their homeland is mired in an endless cycle of violence and unhappiness, the dark and brooding work can feel alarmingly contemporary. That may explain why productions of the long and complicated opera, which covers a period of political unrest that few outside Russia are familiar with and which used to be performed rarely in the west, are now springing up across Europe. Last summer, a staging at the Staatsoper in Berlin opened with a scene set in the modern-day Kremlin, with the entire action recast as a contemporary political re-enactment for propaganda purposes. Another new production premiered in Geneva last month with plenty of modern overtones: the character of a 17th-century scribe was portrayed as a hacker, sitting in an office chair as long lines of Russian computer code appeared on giant screens behind him. Later, the same screens showed video footage of the main characters debating, as if on state television political talkshows. Next week, yet another production of Khovanshchina will premiere at the Salzburg Easter festival, staged by the British director Simon McBurney. He said his production would be 'very much about today' rather than a historical recreation, and described the opera as 'hauntingly beautiful, and sometimes terrifying', in a video interview in between rehearsals. Photographs from dress rehearsals in Salzburg showed characters in strikingly modern dress, and McBurney said one of the key influences on his thinking for how to conceptualise the opera was a policy speech Vladimir Putin gave at the Bolshoi theatre some years ago. In fact, McBurney's original plan had been to put it on at the Bolshoi in 2022, in what would have been one of the first times a foreign director had staged a Russian classic on the country's most hallowed stage. McBurney worked on plans for the staging over many years with his brother, Gerard, a composer who spent time in Russia and has re-orchestrated the finale of the opera, which exists in many different versions because Mussorgsky left it unfinished. But the full-scale invasion of Ukraine made that plan untenable. The Bolshoi has since been taken over by the Putin loyalist Valery Gergiev, and late last year revived a hyper-traditional production of Khovanshchina with a set design first used in 1952. McBurney took his ideas to Salzburg, in what is a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera that will later be staged in New York. Rehearsal photos show a Putin-like suited politician giving a speech from a lectern featuring a modern Russian coat of arms, in front of a mock-up of the Bolshoi's distinctive stage curtain. 'I don't know how it might have gone down when I was going to do it in Moscow. I don't know what the consequence would have been for me. I'm very sad that we're not able to do it in the Bolshoi,' he said. Although productions of Khovanshchina inside Russia still tend to feature period sets and costumes, there is plenty in the opera that lends itself to a modern re-imagination. 'If you changed a few names in the libretto, it would describe current events. I can't think of any other opera where that would be the case,' said Esa-Pekka Salonen, the conductor of the Salzburg production. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion Calixto Bieito, the Spanish director behind the recent production in Geneva, said he wanted to leave some of the contemporary relevance to the imagination of viewers. 'Of course when you read the text you cannot avoid making connections with the present day, but those are connections for the audience to make, not for me,' he said in an interview before the premiere in Geneva. Still, the production was peppered with references to contemporary Russia. Not every opera house feels the time is right to stage Russian historical dramas. The Polish National Opera was due to stage Boris Godunov, another brooding meditation on power by Mussorgsky, in March 2022, but cancelled the run after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 'At times like these, opera is silent … Let our silence speak of our solidarity with the people of Ukraine,' Mariusz Treliński, the theatre's artistic director, said at the time. The opera was again scheduled for the 2024-25 season but conditional on the war in Ukraine ending; as that did not happen, it was again removed, and a spokesperson for the theatre said it was 'hard to say if or when' the production would run. But farther west in Europe, there have been fewer qualms about staging Russian works, further evidenced by news this week that Ralph Fiennes would direct Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in Paris next year. In June, the exiled Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov will stage Boris Godunov in Amsterdam. According to the website of the Dutch National Opera, he will 'incorporate his own experiences in Russia in this highly topical production'. Serebrennikov led one of Moscow's most successful theatres and mounted several opera productions at the Bolshoi before he was arrested in 2017, and spent nearly two years under house arrest before being freed. When it comes to Khovanshchina, which ends with the mass suicide of a religious sect by self-immolation, despite the firm Russian context there was also something more universal about the work, said McBurney. People were currently experiencing a 'perception of history', he said, and there was a sense in the air that we were on the brink of major change, just as there was when Mussorgsky was writing in the late 19th century. 'We are aware of a wave, and we don't quite know what form it's going to take, whether it's going to be a sudden acceleration of ecological disaster, or whether it's going to take the form of human violence, we don't know. But we do feel the wave, and in some sense that is why [the opera] is so resonant. You can feel the impending disaster,' he said.
The Guardian
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Beguiled: Clint Eastwood's 1971 version is a sweaty, southern hothouse
On paper, Don Siegel's 1971 southern Gothic melodrama The Beguiled appears the perfect candidate for a remake: a critical and commercial failure in its own time, its infamous reputation helped it linger in the margins of popular consciousness. Sofia Coppola would have thought as much when she directed her own take on Thomas P. Cullinan's source novel in 2017. While Coppola's version is full of distinct beauty, Siegel's original stands alone in its unyielding thorniness – that may have seemed like a career misstep for star Clint Eastwood upon its initial release, but now stands clearly as one of the most potent subversions of the masculine archetype he helped popularise. Eastwood plays John McBurney, an unscrupulous corporal fighting for the Union during the waning days of the American civil war. Wounded in rural Mississippi, McBurney is found drenched in his own blood by 12-year-old Amy, out picking mushrooms despite the many potential dangers. Amy takes the wounded McBurney to the seminary where she boards. Soon, his presence both as an enemy soldier and a man throws the ecosystem of the Confederate-sympathising, all-women school into disarray. McBurney immediately sets to work smooth-talking his way into the good graces of formidable headmistress Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page), naive schoolteacher Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman), and Hallie (Mae Mercer), the enslaved woman forced to do much of the physical labour around the school. Being boarded up inside the school's music room with a grave injury to his leg does little to dissuade McBurney from imprinting his sexual presence upon both boarders and faculty any which way he can – through charm, manipulation, and ultimately physical dominance. It's a setup that has only grown queasier over time. Eastwood commits to the lurid and the artful in equal measure; his McBurney is both brutish charm and self-serving facetiousness. The bolder McBurney's lies and manipulations, the more relaxed and convincing he becomes, right up until the mask slips off to reveal a raging entitlement underneath. It's an all-timer scumbag performance. Geraldine Page too takes southern stereotypes and finds countless flecks of subtlety as the headmistress. But the most stinging member of the ensemble is Mae Mercer, whose portrayal of Hallie heightens the power dynamics at play within the school. McBurney is an anti-slavery Unionist; the camaraderie he initially offers Hallie, missing from her interactions with the other women, is ripped away when she doesn't comply with his demands. Her character is excised in Coppola's remake, robbing the material of a terrifyingly frank demonstration of the collision between power, race and gender. To capture these ever-shifting alliances, the camera careens, crawls, corkscrews and swoons, as lithe and pliant as the branches of the willow trees encircling the school. The all-girls boarding school – all muslin, white lace and straw hats set amid a forbidding natural landscape – plays like a demented inverse of Picnic At Hanging Rock. In candlelight and shadow, these images feel like a waking nightmare. Director Don Siegel was no stranger to crafting films that condemned the very things they seemed to embody. His earlier sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a political Rorschach test of the McCarthy era – the titular body snatchers construed either as communists or their McCarthyist pursuants depending on who you talked to. While on one hand, The Beguiled seems to channel a genuine chauvinistic fear of the consequences of second-wave feminism's sexual revolution, Siegel posits that men have good reason to fear: they are more than deserving of retribution. Revenge, here, isn't best served cold – but rather hot, sweaty and southern. The Beguiled is available to stream on Binge in Australia and available to rent in the UK and US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
GA Supreme Court orders new look at whether abortion challenge lawsuit can proceed
A lawsuit challenging Georgia's near-ban on abortion is headed back to a trial court to decide if the people who want to overturn the law have legal standing to sue. The Georgia Supreme Court voted 6-1 on Thursday to require the trial court judge to re-examine standing issues, citing its own January decision that changed state law on who is qualified to sue. In the meantime, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney's ruling from September striking down the abortion law remains on hold. [DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] In an unrelated January case, the court ruled that only people and groups whose own rights are in question can sue in Georgia state courts, overturning an earlier rule that let some third parties sue on behalf of others. Andrea Young, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, which represents the plaintiffs, said the ruling 'has further delayed any possibility of justice for women and families in our state.' Monica Simpson, executive director of lead plaintiff SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, said the ruling 'is not just a procedural delay' and that it puts Georgians at risk of harm. 'Every day that the abortion ban remains in effect, it puts our families and our communities in danger and doubles down on white supremacy,' she said in an emailed statement. 'This delay is an injustice, but no legal roadblock will ever deter us from fighting for the bodily autonomy we need and deserve.' RELATED STORIES Georgia disbands current maternal mortality committee over leaked abortion information (Nov. 22, 2024) Georgia Supreme Court reinstates state abortion law while appeal is heard (Oct 7, 2024) Georgia judge rules to overturn state's heartbeat abortion law (Sept. 30, 2024) McBurney had ruled in September that Georgia unconstitutionally prohibits abortions beyond about six weeks of pregnancy, often before women realize they are pregnant. McBurney reasoned that privacy rights under Georgia's state constitution include the right to make personal healthcare decisions. Georgia's law, signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in 2019, was one of a wave of restrictive abortion measures that took effect in Republican-controlled states after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and ended a national right to abortion. It prohibits most abortions once a 'detectable human heartbeat' was present. At around six weeks into a pregnancy, cardiac activity can be detected by ultrasound in an embryo's cells that will eventually become the heart. Twelve U.S. states are now enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, and four states ban abortions around the sixth week of pregnancy. Voters in Missouri overturned a near total ban on abortions in November, and abortions resumed there last week. McBurney wrote in his ruling that 'liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.' 'When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then — and only then — may society intervene,' McBurney wrote. Georgia's prior law allowed abortions until viability, roughly 22 to 24 weeks into a pregnancy. Associated Press writer Kate Brumback contributed. [SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]
