Journalist Wendy Bacon arrested quelling coals to Newcastle

Last weekend, dozens of protesters jumped in kayaks and paddled into Newcastle Harbour to stage a blockade in the world’s largest coal port in part of an action organised by climate activist group Rising Tide.

More than 130 people were arrested. Among them was independent investigative journalist and activist Wendy Bacon, who at 79 has no fear of water, cops or vast hulking coal ships. She was charged with breaching sections of the Crimes Act by paddling into an exclusion zone set up around the harbour with the approval of Transport Minister John Graham designed to protect the shipping lane.

Attending the large, almost carnivalesque protest on Newcastle’s Horseshoe Beach with Knitting Nannas, an organisation of older female climate activists, Bacon told CBD she was driven by a sense of frustration at the way both state and federal governments had approved coal and gas projects with little apparent concern for environmental impacts.

“People who run fossil fuel industries only think of short-term profits. They don’t pay serious attention to their children and grandchildren,” she said.

Not that this is the first rodeo for Bacon, a Walkley winner and former journalism academic at the University of Technology, Sydney, who has just about lost count of how many times she’d been arrested.

In 1971, then a 20-something student journalist, Bacon spent a week in prison awaiting sentencing for obscenity charges after publishing a poem, C--- is a Christian Word at a time of heightened debate about censorship.

A decade or so of activism meant Bacon was denied membership of the NSW Bar in the early 1980s, a decision upheld by the state’s Supreme Court, which found her not a fit and proper person to practise law.

More recently, she was arrested twice during a campaign against the WestConnex toll road mega-project, although she was acquitted of any charges.

Despite that long history of being a thorn in the side of police and the establishment, Bacon told us the Newcastle action was a memorable one, arrest be damned.

“It was one of the most inspirational things I’ve been to in my lifetime,” she said.

Liberal fizzers

Silly season is usually a time for friends and colleagues to gather and celebrate the year that was. But what happens if the year that was contained nothing to celebrate?

This is the challenge facing our friends in the Liberal Party. A federal election annihilation, leaders dumped in both NSW and Victoria, Sussan Ley spending recent weeks looking anxiously over her shoulder – none of this has gotten anyone feeling particularly festive.

Little wonder that so many of the party’s end-of-year events have been fizzers. Exhibit A: Liberal senator Dave Sharma held his end-of-year thank you drinks at Commonwealth Bank Stadium in Parramatta, featuring a crowd of about 10 to 15, according to some estimates. One of those was senate colleague and opposition finance minister James Paterson.

Sharma, who served a term as the member for Wentworth (and lost the former blue-ribbon eastern suburbs seat twice for the Liberals), is taking his duties as the party’s upper house voice for western Sydney very seriously.

Alas, Sharma told the crowd he was no fan of the Parramatta Eels. What’s worse, he’s a Sea Eagles guy. At least Labor’s multimillionaire blow-in Andrew Charlton is happy to be seen in yellow and blue.

Exhibit B: On Monday, the NSW Liberals were sending around pings about available spots at the state division’s members’ Christmas drinks with Kellie Sloane. Not even a fresh leader, just weeks into the job, is enough of a drawcard for weary Liberal members to sip warm sparkling wine with their party comrades.

Loud luxury

Money, as they say, can’t buy you class. OK, it’s a tired old cliche, but also the truth.

And no money is more classless than money procured through criminal enterprise. This thought crossed CBD’s mind on Tuesday afternoon as we found ourselves confronted with a diamond-encrusted watch in lurid Tiffany & Co blue, with an estimated price between $20,000 and $30,000.

The watch was part of a large haul of luxury bling being sold by First State Auctions, which includes the final tranche of items requisitioned by the Australian Federal Police during Operation Elbrus, the probe that smashed the country’s biggest-ever tax rort.

Siblings Adam and Lauren Cranston, children of a former high-ranking Australian Tax Office deputy commissioner Michael Cranston, were among five people convicted of conspiring to dishonestly cause a loss to the Commonwealth and conspiring to deal with the proceeds of crime over their role in the $105 million crime. Michael Cranston was not involved in any wrongdoing.

Adam Cranston was sentenced to 15 years’ jail, with a 10-year non-parole period for his role as one of the architects of the payroll tax evasion fraud.

The auction is a window into what those ill-gotten gains were put toward. It includes dozens of Rolexes and plenty of garish jewellery with enough diamonds to secure multiple forevers.

Also on offer was a Birkin bag that could allow you, dear reader, to acquire that ultimate symbol of nouveau riche tackiness without spending thousands at Hermes first. And all of it, no doubt, a great big flashing siren to the feds who busted the scam back in 2017.

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