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The NSW state election may still be quite a while away, but that hasn’t stopped warring Labor and Liberal operatives from getting in early to till the soil.
Some nine months out from polling day, all the action has been happening on the fringes. Opposition Leader Kellie Sloane’s Liberal Party rabble has been busy invoking the success of years past. That is, when the party finds time between planning events with Rowan Dean and popping off about unisex toilets.
On the Labor side, all eyes are on Premier Chris Minns’ new candidate for Oatley, Elaina Anzellotti, who is beginning to look more like a Liberal Party fan each passing day.
Regular readers of this column will no doubt recall when CBD brought word of the corflute affixed to a pole outside Anzellotti’s home at the last election, which we hear curiously carried the name of Liberal MP Mark Coure, her Liberal opponent in Oatley.
Well, now it would seem that whatever support Anzellotti has had for Coure stretches back more than a decade. For the latest piece of evidence, we point you to this 2013 screenshot depicting a post by Anzellotti on Facebook featuring an image of a Coure calendar magnet slapped on her fridge.
“Prime position on our fridge!” Anzellotti wrote in the accompanying caption, which tagged the man and his wife.
As you can imagine, we were eager to learn more about when Anzellotti ceased to be a Liberal supporter. Sadly, though, no word from NSW Labor on that or on when she joined the party, whether Anzellotti has voted for Coure at previous state elections, or what – if any – relationship she has with Coure and his wife. Coure also declined to comment.
But an ALP spokesman did have this to say: “If Mark Coure spent less time investigating fridge magnets and more time delivering for the electorate of Oatley, so many people across the community who previously supported him wouldn’t now be campaigning to replace him,” they told CBD.
“Elaina is running for Labor because she believes Chris Minns and the NSW government are delivering for communities like Oatley after years of Liberal neglect of essential services.”
Banducci’s Blues
The outgoing TEG chief executive and erstwhile Woolworths boss Brad Banducci may not have been among the guests hobnobbing in Peter V’landys’ president’s suite at Accor Stadium on Wednesday night.
But it looks like the man sure was pining for it. Banducci was seen strolling the streets of Surry Hills with his family on Wednesday evening, only to stop outside the front of the Trinity bar on Crown Street during the State of Origin game to peer through the window to get a peek at the action.
We hear he’s a Blues fan, so our guess is it was all smiles for Banducci after James Tedesco’s desperate last-gasp try. At least he’ll have plenty of time to watch the footy through the rest of the season.
AI on AI on AI
Few sectors have been as alarmed by the rise of AI as the arts and cultural industries, where the explosive expansion of the technology that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude has set off alarm bells about jobs and copyright protections.
So to say we were amused to learn the Department of the Arts was using AI to summarise submissions from major arts and cultural organisations containing concerns about AI would be an understatement.
Word of the use of AI in the government’s consultation process over Labor’s National Cultural Policy reached us earlier this week. One senior figure in the sector told CBD AI had become the “number one issue” for them and their colleagues who have spent recent weeks preparing submissions.
“As one artist put it, ‘why would I bother writing something that they won’t bother reading?’” the source said. “It has caused a lot of distress among representative and member organisations, as well as individual artists.”
The policy falls into the patch of Home Affairs and Arts Minister Tony Burke, who seems to suffer a vegan-like compulsion to let it be known that he loves the arts. (For the uninitiated, he plays guitar.) Burke didn’t respond to a request for comment.
When we asked the department whether anyone there was actually reading these submissions, we were assured they were. With a little help from Microsoft’s Copilot afterwards.
“Every submission to the consultation for the next National Cultural Policy is first read by staff,” a departmental spokesman told CBD.
“Copilot has been used for generating summaries and identifying common themes. This supports efficient handling of large volumes of submissions. Copilot summary outputs are subject to human oversight and accuracy checks.”
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John Buckley is a CBD columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.From our partners
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