Capital Brief seems a little sympathetic to their view.
In a recent LinkedIn post, Shearwater founder Zac Zavos dismissed a sharp-elbowed column from our friends at the Financial Review’s Rear Window about Melbourne tech unicorn Linktree, which he dissed as an “attack piece”. Zavos urged his followers to subscribe to Capital Brief instead.
HUMAN FIGHTS WATCH
To Amnesty International Australia, where human rights activism and fighting for the downtrodden has taken a back seat to acrimonious squabbling and settling personal scores.
Next month, the organisation will gather for an extraordinary general meeting with just two agenda points. The first is a motion to remove former Labor MP Belinda Neal from the national board. CBD regulars would recall Neal, still best known for an alleged incident at Gosford nightspot Iguana Joe’s, was elected to the board last year on her fifth attempt.
But just over a year into her three-year term, Neal faces removal. And while the details of her removal remain confidential, we hear her recent election to Central Coast Council doesn’t vibe with the organisation’s constitution, which states that a member can’t run for political office. Past members who’ve run for office rescinded their membership first.
Seeking Amnesty: Anti-Chinese Communist Party advocate Drew Pavlou.Credit: AAP
The second agenda point is a resolution to readmit as a member anti-Chinese Communist Party advocate and inveterate poo-stirrer Drew Pavlou. Pavlou’s history with the organisation is bordering on the Sisyphean. Last year, he was expelled in the fallout from Amnesty’s infamously intemperate nine-hour annual meeting.
He successfully challenged that expulsion, only to be booted again this year, for reasons he insists are “entirely invented”, and linked to his social media commentary on X, where he’s regularly (and we mean, regularly) posting up a storm about the war in the Middle East, criticising progressive supporters of Palestine.
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In an expulsion letter seen by CBD, Amnesty International manager Katie Wood accused Pavlou of breaching the charter by making a series of posts that were “discriminatory, aggressive and homophobic”.
Pavlou told CBD the posts were an online joke about getting locked in a gay nightclub, intending to mock toxic masculine influencers, which someone at Amnesty took out of context.
“Kamala Harris talks about the politics of joy and Amnesty is trying to punish me for my humour and joy and my gayness in the old-fashioned sense of the term,” he thundered.
Pavlou also offered up a few more shots at the organisation, which he described as run by a “left-wing clique”, along with some other commentary about its leadership that our lawyers would prefer we didn’t print.
Read the full article here
