The Mike Hosking Breakfast

A probe into Crown Resorts has recommended the embattled gaming giant should be denied a Sydney casino licence, in a crippling blow to its A$2.2 billion ($2.3b) Barangaroo project.
The NSW Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority (ILGA) in its report tabled to the state parliament says Crown Sydney's casino licence should be revoked after revelations of illegal money laundering within its Melbourne and Perth venues.
ILGA's report said the James Packer-backed casino was not a suitable licensee holder within the state.
Earlier on Tuesday, Crown began preparing for a potential investor backlash following the public release of the report, by placing its shares into a trading halt.
Questions over whether Crown is fit to hold the licence were sparked by media reports in 2019 that alleged it facilitated money laundering activities at its Melbourne and Perth casinos through Asian high-roller junkets.
Crown said in a statement it intended to make an announcement once the findings from Commissioner Patricia Bergin were made public on Tuesday afternoon.
NSW Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello told reporters he would table the ILGA report after question time.
"At the heart of the report is a relationship between organised crime, money laundering and gambling. And more importantly what steps we can do to protect the community against these sinister elements," Dominello said.
That method of publishing means the report's findings will fall under parliamentary privilege, protecting any MPs discussing the information from potential defamation lawsuits.
Much of the long-running inquiry focused on a room at the Melbourne venue exclusively used by Suncity – Macau's biggest junket operator – with leaked footage showing huge wads of cash being exchanged for gambling chips.
While Crown executives rejected accusations of "turning a blind eye" to the activity, an explosive last-minute revelation came from Crown counsel Robert Craig during closing submissions that incensed Bergin.
Craig revealed two independent reports had concluded "cuckoo smurfing" — a form of money laundering where large transactions are split into small transactions in a bid to disguise them — could be seen in the accounts of two Crown subsidiaries.
"There was no notice of any of this," Bergin said in response.
"It just seems to me to be rather unsatisfactory.
"This material should have been produced last year or at the beginning in February when the material was summonsed."
At the company's annual general meeting in October, after a large number of Crown executives gave evidence to the inquiry, chair Helen Coonan "unreservedly apologised" for "governance and risk management failings".
The company insisted in closing submissions the board had taken action to rectify them, including "board renewal".
The inquiry also heard that as Crown's biggest shareholder with a 36 per cent stake, reclusive billionaire James Packer was given special treatment — getting privileged information through a controlling shareholder protocol agreement — despite quitting the board in 2018.
The agreement was terminated during the inquiry, so it was now a "stock standard" relationship, Crown's lead lawyer Neil Young said.
Counsel assisting the inquiry had argued Packer should have no association with the Barangaroo venue at all due to prior poor behaviour.
In his testimony, Packer admitted to threatening a businessman over a deal in 2015, and acknowledged the conduct was "shameful" and "disgraceful", but blamed it on his bipolar disorder.
The inquiry heard most of Crown's directors were hand-picked by Packer and it was suggested he was the driving force behind the company's push to secure more of the junket market.
ILGA delayed the planned December opening of the Barangaroo casino but Crown was granted an interim liquor licence for certain non-gaming operations including the Crown Towers...

The Government is seeking a timeline of events that led to Otago's lead contamination crisis.
It's announced an independent, rapid review into the health response, following the detection of unacceptably high lead levels in the water supplies of Waikouaiti and Karitane.
Residents are currently being offered free blood tests, to detect any longer term exposure.
Associate Health Minister Ayesha Verrall told Mike Hosking the Government wants to know who did what and when, so it doesn't happen again.
She says it will look at when health authorities were notified about the lead recordings, and when action was taken.
Preliminary results and recommendations from the review are due back next month.
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There's support from both sides of the political aisle for enforcing dress standards in the House of Parliament.
Maori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi was kicked out of the House yesterday, for wearing a hei-tiki around his neck instead of a tie.
The party is now in talks with Speaker Trevor Mallard about changing the rules.
Labour's Stuart Nash says Waititi is wrong, and needs to follow the rules.
National's Mark Mitchell agrees, saying if standards are allowed to slip, people will turn up to Parliament in T-shirt and shorts.
On the issue of Trevor Mallard’s behaviour, Stuart Nash says that although the Speaker's rape allegation was indefensible, it isn't enough for him to lose his job
National wants the Speaker to be punished for spending more than $300,000 dollars of taxpayer money on a legal case, after wrongly calling a Parliamentary worker a rapist.
It plans to file notices of motion through the year.
Nash says what Mallard did WAS inexcusable, but he has owned it and apologised for it.
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Donald Trump's second impeachment trial has begun.
The former US President is accused of inciting a deadly insurrection on Capitol Hill early last month, to stop the certification of electoral votes.
The trial has kicked off with a four-hour debate on whether the proceedings are constitutional.
The Washington Post's Natalie Jennings told Mike Hosking short of something dramatic changing, only one result is likely.
"Even Democrats want a quick trial, and they acknowledge there is almost no chance enough Republicans are going to want to convict Trump."
Joe Biden is steering clear of today's impeachment trial.
Jennings says President Biden is getting on with business.
She says he's doing economic events, talking about schools opening and speaking about anything else besides the trial.
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A major bank has reservations that new loan-to-value rules will take the heat out of the housing boom.
The Reserve Bank's return to lending restrictions will see owner occupiers needing a 20 percent deposit, and investors 30 percent, in March.
ANZ CEO Antonia Watson, told Mike Hosking ANZ is doing less lending since introducing its own 30 percent restriction in December.
But she says it remains to be seen if the market will slow.
“The LVRs won't be a silver bullet, as a lack of homes are among other areas that need fixing. There are all sorts of things which need to be fixed, with one of them being the supply side.”
Watson says home buyers are making the most of low interest rates, but businesses are uncertain.
She says businesses are cautious about expanding, as they know that one more lockdown will change the economy.
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THE BEST BITS IN A SILLIER PACKAGE (from Wednesday's Mike Hosking Breakfast) Doing the Right Thing Is Pointless/Not a Story/Mandatory Fun/Can't Follow the Rules/Sounds Disgusting

There are two losers and a winner out of the Trevor Mallard no confidence vote, come, scandal.
Like most things in life, it didn’t need to be this way.
Trevor Mallard destroyed a reputation, if not a life. The poor man's lawyer the other day suggested in court the man still feels like a leper.
Mallard doesn’t talk about any of this. For a while last year when the full detail of the mess he created became public, not to mention the bill that we are picking up, the press gallery chased him about the place for a while. But he hid, ducked, and said nothing.
The big question as to just what he thought he knew, to be able to say the things he did, remains largely a mystery.
But here's the thing, everyone makes mistakes. If he'd gotten a grip on himself early, fallen on his sword, apologised profusely, offered amends, asked for forgiveness, and generally behaved like a human being, at least some of the carnage could have been mitigated.
He didn’t, and we are where we are.
The winner is National, because this is exactly the sort of thing an effective opposition should be doing.
They should not just be on the side of right, they should be representative of, what I suspect is the majority view of the country, when the government because of petty party politics isn't doing their job.
Matters of justice, decency, and morals should be the domain of a good opposition. Even as they can't win a vote of no confidence, given they don’t have the numbers, they win a moral victory and hang a few reputations out to dry.
Which brings us to the losers. Obviously, Mallard who if he had any shred of decency would have, along with the aforementioned apologies, have quit as Speaker. You can't oversee rule, demeanour, and behaviour when your record is as stained as his.
And the Labour Party who, by defending him, protecting him, sticking their fingers in their ears, and pretending it'll all go away, align themselves with him and his character.
By protecting him, they protect the indefensible as though its acceptable. That speaks to their character as much as Mallard's.
Yes, with time this will be just another mess swept under a carpet, politics is like that.
Lives and reputations tossed asunder, only drawing attention until the next news cycle, press release, or headline.
But doing the right thing is still important. National, by not letting Christmas get in the way the way Labour had hoped, are indisputably doing the right thing.

Donald Trump’s historic second impeachment trial opened Tuesday in the Senate with graphic video of the deadly Jan. 6 attack on Congress and the defeated former president whipping up a rally crowd — “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol!” — as he encouraged a futile fight over his presidency.
The lead House prosecutor told senators the case would present “cold, hard facts” against Trump, who is charged with inciting the siege of the Capitol to overturn the election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Senators sitting as jurors, many who themselves fled for safety that day, watched the jarring video of the chaotic scene, rioters pushing past police to storm the halls, Trump flags waving.
“That's a high crime and misdemeanor,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., in opening remarks. “If that's not an impeachable offense, then there's no such thing.”
Trump is the first president to face impeachment charges after leaving office and the first to be twice impeached . The Capitol siege stunned the world as rioters ransacked the building to try to stop the certification of Biden’s victory, a domestic attack on the nation’s seat of government unlike any in its history. Five people died.
Acquittal is likely, but the trial will test the nation’s attitude toward his brand of presidential power, the Democrats’ resolve in pursuing him, and the loyalty of Trump’s Republican allies defending him.
Trump's lawyers are insisting that he is not guilty of the sole charge of “incitement of insurrection,” his fiery words just a figure of speech as he encouraged a rally crowd to “fight like hell” for his presidency. But prosecutors say he “has no good defense” and they promise new evidence.
“Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye,” the acting sergeant at arms intoned to start the trial.
Security remained extremely tight at the Capitol, a changed place after the attack, fenced off with razor wire and armed National Guard troops on patrol. The nine House managers walked across the shuttered building to prosecute the case before the Senate.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that Biden would not be watching the trial of his predecessor.
“Joe Biden is the president, he’s not a pundit, he’s not going to opine on back and forth arguments,” she said.
With senators gathered as the court of impeachment, sworn to deliver “impartial justice,” the trial was starting with debate and a vote over whether it’s constitutionally permissible to prosecute Trump after he is no longer in the White House.
Trump’s defense team has focused on the question of constitutionality, which could resonate with Republicans eager to acquit Trump without being seen as condoning his behavior.
But the House prosecutors argued there is no “January exception” for a president on his way out the door. Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., referred to the corruption case of William Belknap, a war secretary in the Grant administration, who was impeached, tried and ultimately acquitted by the Senate after leaving office.
“President Trump was not impeached for run of the mill corruption, misconduct. He was impeached for inciting a violent insurrection - an insurrection where people died, in this building," Neguse said."If Congress stands by, it would invite future presidents to use their power without any fear of accountability."
It appears unlikely that the House prosecutors will call witnesses, in part because the senators were witnesses themselves. At his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, Trump has declined a request to testify.
Trump’s defense team has said it plans to counter with its own cache of videos of Democratic politicians making fiery speeches. “We have some videos up our sleeve,” senior Trump adviser Jason Miller said on a podcast Monday.
“In trying to make sense of a second Trump trial, the public should keep in mind that Donald Trump was the first president ever to refuse to accept his defeat,” said Timothy Naftali, a...

An international team of experts investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic say it is "extremely unlikely" the virus came from a lab — and it is likely to have originated in an animal other than bats.
Dr Peter Ben Embarek said the World Health Organisation team's findings suggest "that the laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain introduction of the virus into the human population".
The team said the virus was likely circulating for several weeks before it was detected in December 2019, as they delivered a summary of their findings on Covid-19 in Wuhan on Tuesday night.
Embarek, the WHO's food safety and animal disease specialist and chairman of the investigation team, said that according to their research, an intermediary host species is "the most likely pathway [for crossover into humans] and one that will require more studies and more specific targeted research".
The panel said it was likely other animals may serve as reservoirs, including those from the feline family, given the high susceptibility of minks and cats to the virus.
Professor Liang Wannian, head of the expert Covid-19 panel at China's National Health Commission, said other possible animal reservoirs are "massively undersampled, or this research is not adequate enough".
The panel said the reservoir hosts of Sars-CoV-2 are yet to be identified and Embarek said this was a "work in progress".
He said the coronavirus samples identified in bats and pangolins are not "sufficiently similar" to Sars-CoV-2 to suggest a direct link.
Embarek said the team has tried to find what other animals at the Huanan seafood market could have introduced the coronavirus, and "a lot of work needs to be done to better understand these interesting pathways".
This includes products that were moving in and out of the market, those produced at that time and/or still available. "The market was dealing primarily with frozen animal products and mainly seafood but there were also vendors selling products from domesticated wildlife and imported products," he said.
"There is the potential to continue to follow this lead and animals that were supplied to the market in frozen and other semi-processed or raw form."
Exposure and detection
The team arrived in China on January 14 and spent two weeks in quarantine before high-profile site visits and key interviews.
They aimed to get a better understanding of the starting point of the Covid-19 outbreak and whether the timeline would change, and how the virus emerged and jumped to the human population.
"In terms of understanding what happened in the early days, did we change dramatically the picture we had beforehand? I don't think so," Embarek told the media briefing.
"Did we improve our understanding? Did we add details to our story? Absolutely."
Liang said early circulation of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 infection, was a "very important part" of their review.
He said some samples were detected "even earlier than the first case reported", indicating the "possibility of misreported calculations in other regions".
But he said it is considered "unlikely" that any substantial transmission of Sars-CoV-2 was occurring in Wuhan in October and November 2019.
Some of the early Covid-19 cases were associated with the Huanan seafood market and other cases were linked to other markets, but some had no market association at all, Liang said.
He said some of the Huanan market cases had identical genomes, suggesting they are part of a cluster.
Further research is also needed to determine the role played by cold chain food products in transmission, Liang said.
Embarek said they concluded there was no evidence "of large outbreaks that could be related to cases of Covid-19 prior to December 2019 in Wuhan or elsewhere".
He added: "We can also agree that we have found evidence of wider circulation of the virus...

'Stop F***ing sell GME': that was the title of a thread on social media on Friday.
It’s a bunch of investors who thought by buying GameStop, a failing video company in the US, and pumping it up, they’d teach the heavy weights of Wall Street a lesson by squeezing their short.
I hope you’ve read up on this. This is a moment in time that yet again shows that too many who want to make a noise, make their noise with no for thought, far less expertise.
Having bought in, having made their point and presumably having cost a few hedge funds a fortune, people then bailed as people normally do when they see a stock rocket for no good solid economic reason.
They take their profits and run. Some ran to silver, some probably went back to the dark rooms from where they came.
But what they did by running was leave the bewildered and stupid holding stock that was bought at a price far higher than it was when the line 'Stop F***ing sell GME' started trending, a price that will never been seen again.
One analyst summed it up well. There were a variety of reasons why this happened, why it ended the way it did, and why it was always going to end the way it did.
The whole thing was leaderless. And that is social media to a T: it’s a pile on, it’s one idiot after another reading something, deciding it cool and before you know it, and it’s a ‘thing’.
And when there is no leader, there is no coordination, and when there is no coordination, it’s every person for themselves.
And given ultimately, whether they want to admit it, it was driven by greed. The moment the penny drops and you work out you’ve made some free coin, you’re gone, leaving the dopier ones holding the losses and wondering where their movement vanished to.
I note with interest the IRD here is looking for profits from the scheme so it was truly global.
But what is it they say about a fool and his money?
You’d like to think this would be the beginning middle and end of it, but that would be to deny human nature and the way it is.
So the only question is how long before you think we are back here saying the same thing again?