Federal Labor MP Matt Thistlethwaite is savouring an oyster as we chew the fat on what he calls the “barbecue stopper” of 1999: the Australian republican referendum. Seafood may be on our plates, but the move for an Australian head of state is on the menu.
“I was quite involved in the ’99 campaign,” recalls the member for the Sydney seat of Kingsford Smith. “Remember the intensity? Everyone was arguing about it across the nation.”
“It does not represent the Australia we live in and it’s further evidence of why we need to begin discussing becoming a republic with our own head of state. We are no longer British,” he said at the time. It’s a theme he’s been passionate about since becoming the first member of his Catholic family to go to university.
“I was really attracted to the arguments Paul Keating was putting up in the early ’90s about Australia finding its way in the world as an independent mature nation, particularly in the Asia Pacific. We moved away from the United Kingdom for our security alliances, our defence alliances, our trading relationships were increasingly with Asia. It was our neck of the woods. We were the lead economy in the Pacific. It made sense for us to think about standing on our own two feet with our own head of state. That’s been a passion of mine since uni days and I said in my maiden speech to the parliament that I wanted to use my time there to try and bring it back onto the agenda.”
Thistlethwaite was elected to the Senate in 2010, then in 2013 to the House of Representatives, on Garrett’s retirement. He is a well-known face in one of the safest Labor seats in the country, not just because of his activism in politics, the surf club, swimming and social groups.
He’s also married Coogee “royalty”: one of the eight offspring of beloved local doctor Joe Casamento, whose retirement celebrations as Randwick rugby club’s doctor of 40 years Thistlethwaite helped organise last month on Coogee Oval. He’s more of a rugby league than union guy, sharing a passion with his PM for the local Rabbitohs (they marched together in 2000 to save South Sydney from NRL exclusion).
He turns 50 next Tuesday, now lives in Matraville with his nurse wife Rachel and their four daughters (14, 12 and twins who are seven). He feels his daughters’ demographic: those who weren’t born, or are too young to remember 1999, will be key in securing an Australian head of state.
Quiet quitting: The workplace trend taking over TikTok
“THEY PRETEND TO PAY US, AND WE PRETEND TO WORK:” The rise of “quiet quitting.” It’s “where people who may not necessarily be ready to throw in the towel but feel fed up with the seemingly unrewarding hustle culture of the workforce are no longer going that extra mile to impress their bosses.”
In academia this is known as “retiring in place.” I wonder if it will survive the cutbacks of the coming recession.
Class-Action Lawsuit Accuses Oracle of Tracking 5 Billion People PC Magazine
Jay Shetty, host of the podcast “On Purpose,” believes anyone can lead change at work. Here’s how.
How workplace bullying went remote / BBC: “Workplace bullying is thriving in the remote-work era, as technology opens new avenues for unkind behaviour. At first, Joyce didn’t identify what was happening in her workplace as bullying. Her company had been largely remote for years, and she felt no physical threat from her colleagues. “I didn’t really think about that,” says the communications worker based in east England. “I still had in my mind the traditional idea of bullying as somebody getting in your face.” Yet over time a feeling grew that her boss, who was new to the company, was consistently singling her out in uncomfortable ways. “It would be a group email where I would say one thing and she’d come back with another, or she would put me on the spot in a Zoom meeting without any prior warning,” she says. Many incidents seemed small in isolation: one day her boss changed all of the work social media passwords so Joyce was no longer able to access the accounts; on another, Joyce got an email reprimanding her for “pushback” against her boss’ ideas. The incidents piled up. Despite having worked at her company for years, over a period of six months, Joyce says she went from loving her job to wanting to resign…Of course, bullying has long been an issue in workplaces, and encompasses a wide spectrum of behaviour, typically associated with in-person work. A familiar scenario might be a domineering boss publicly berating an employee to humiliate them, or a group of colleagues leaving the office for lunch together, deliberately leaving another behind. For some employees, remote work has provided relief and distance from the everyday distress of dealing with such incidents. Yet there is also evidence that, as companies have increasingly switched to remote and hybrid models, workplace bullying has not only continued but thrived, often in more subtle ways – especially as technology has opened new avenues for unkind behaviour…”
What If You Tried to Swallow a Whole Cloud?
Wired: Ask an absurd question, and xkcd’s Randall Munroe will give you a (somewhat) serious answer. An exclusive excerpt from his upcoming What If? 2. – “What does a star smell like? What’s the tensile strength of snow? How much actual dinosaur does a toy dinosaur contain? If you drove a car to the edge of the universe, how much gas would you use? What’s the market value of a shoebox full of LSD?
Are all the churches in the world big enough to hold all the bananas? “I like ridiculous questions, because nobody is expected to know the answer,” Randall Munroe writes in the introduction to What If? 2, his second book of serious answers to hypothetical questions sent in by fans. You may know Munroe as the creator of the web comic xkcd, which offers wry commentary (usually involving stick figures wearing various hats) on science, technology, history, politics, and the daily micro- and macro-follies of human life.
There’s a sincerity about his projects, a nerdy excitement that reminds you of talking to a 10-year-old—assuming you know a 10-year-old who can explain what a naked singularity is and why theoretical physicists hate them. Nerdy-kid excitement is what WIRED is all about. The following pages contain Munroe’s answers to two questions: What if some of outer space turned to soup? And what if you tried to swallow a cloud?…”
