Why Deborra-Lee Furness' ‘insightful' statement could also be a big mistake
After almost two years of dignified silence, it's been a dramatic 24 hours for celebrity exes Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness.
Yesterday morning came a big update in the pair's split, some 20 months after they both announced they were going their separate ways after 27 years of marriage: Furness had officially filed for divorce, the pair having come to an agreement that is reported to include a 'handsome payment'.
Hours later, an update nobody saw coming: Furness released an explosive statement about the split to the Daily Mail, calling out an 'traumatic journey of betrayal' that 'cut deep'.
She said the 'breakdown' of the couple's marriage had been 'a profound wound', but also suggested she was better off single.
All eyes were then on Jackman, who hours later posted an apparently unrelated video of him nailing a complicated jumprope routine during a stage show.
The song he was dancing to? N*Sync's break-up anthem Bye Bye Bye.
It didn't seem like it would turn out this way when the former couple released their PR-managed joint break-up statement back in September 2023, filled with therapy-speak about 'navigating [the] transition' with 'gratitude, love and kindness'.
They signed off that announcement with a promise: 'This is the sole statement either of us will make.'
Sydney divorce lawyer and founder of Kalpaxis Legal, Cassandra Kalpaxis, told news.com.au today that Furness' public statement was a reminder that 'raw emotions' are involved in even the most amicable of divorces.
'Amicable divorces are common, but that doesn't mean the people involved weren't hurt during the relationship or the separation. It simply means they're choosing to prioritise getting through the process quickly and respectfully over trying to emotionally damage one another,' Kalpaxis said.
She described Furness' surprise statement as 'insightful'.
'It's a reminder to those of us working in this space that divorce is really an emotional process, not just a legal one. Around 80 per cent of separation is about emotion. You're detaching from another person, and your nervous system needs to reset from that connection, those routines, the familiar voice, and shared behaviours.'
Speaking broadly, Ms Kalpaxis did concede that hurting parties can run into trouble when they air their grievances so publicly – particularly in a split as high-profile as this one.
'When I work with high-profile clients, I always advise them not to speak publicly about the split. It's never received the way it's intended, not by the media, friends, or family, because context and tone are everything,' she said.
'Things are easily misinterpreted, and that one comment can get back to the other person, be taken the wrong way, and spark acrimony. That's often how amicable divorces turn acrimonious.'
Ms Kalpaxis also said that a number of factors would've been taken into account to calculate the terms of the former couple's divorce settlement – among them, Jackman's earning power as a Hollywood A-lister, and their respective ages (Jackman is 56; Furness 69).
'For someone like Deb, who's a little older than Hugh, we'd expect her age and her future earning capacity to be taken into account. Similarly, his greater capacity to earn moving forward would also be factored into the overall division,' she speculated.
And Ms Kalpaxis offered some simple advice for any couple – A-list or otherwise – looking to keep things amicable as they navigated a split.
'One of the key ingredients to an amicable split is acknowledging the hurt that may have been caused, whether or not you agree with the other person's perspective. People have different lived experiences of the same relationship,' she said.
If both people can accept that their behaviour wasn't perfect, and let's face it, none of us are perfect all the time, and still commit to getting through the process in a fair and respectful way, then that really lays the groundwork for an amicable separation.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
ABC News
33 minutes ago
- ABC News
The economic reform round table should discuss AI and robots, not just tax and productivity
Let's hope the economic reform round table in August does not turn into a three-day argument about tax reform. Nobody can ever agree on whether a sustainable budget is best achieved by less spending or more tax, let alone what taxes should be increased or new ones imposed. The 25 citizens in the assembly would be better off trying to come up with a decent set of policies on artificial intelligence and robots. And they could start with a briefing about what US President Donald Trump will reveal in his AI Action Plan to be announced on July 23, and follow up with a rundown on China's eight-year-old strategy to become the global leader in AI by 2030. As for the five reports on productivity's five pillars commissioned from the Productivity Commission by Jim Chalmers in December, and the 453 ideas people have sent in, a way for PC chair Danielle Wood to instil a sense of urgency into the round table might be to read out this article from the Financial Times last week about Meta Platforms Inc offering as much as $150 million sign-on bonuses for AI engineers working for the developer of ChatGPT, OpenAI. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to build a team that will help him create AI that is smarter than human beings. And the staff at OpenAI have apparently been knocking him back! The combined market value of the five leading AI companies – Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia – is $20 trillion, almost twice the value of all houses and units in Australia. The only way any of this makes sense is that Meta, OpenAI and the other peddlers of AI are going make more money from it than from any other technological revolution in history. And the only reason the rest of the business world will pay so much money for AI software and robots is because they will make even more money by replacing humans and increasing the productivity of those still employed. There are two ways of applying AI in a business: top down and bottom up. At the risk of over-simplifying it (but not much) top-down involves a business's executive leadership team deciding to use AI to replace a bunch of human workers by, say, getting it to write software code, or do data entry, answer phone calls or write articles like this one. Bottom-up is where individual employees use AI to become better at their jobs. The key to making the bottom-up use of AI work is writing a good prompt, which is rapidly becoming one of the more important modern workplace skills. An AI consulting business called Fourday is building a 'prompt library' for clients and has developed a prompt writing assistant called Prompt Cowboy. You write into it a sort of lazy, plain language prompt and it spits out a much longer one that is better designed to get the best answer from the AI. ChatGPT performs better with a more detailed, better-written prompt. Fourday founder Henry Badgery says it is possible to get productivity increases of 30-40 per cent with AI but many businesses are reporting no extra value at all because: "You're not using it correctly. You're not asking the right questions because that's essentially what a prompt is, you're asking it the right question, you're giving it the right information to answer your question." If the round table is going to be pragmatically useful in lifting productivity, it should do two things: first, develop a national system for helping small to medium enterprises and employees to write better AI prompts, and second, modernise the welfare safety net so people don't have to be scared of it, allowing companies to replace workers with AI without worrying about contributing to societal breakdown. Specifically, the government needs to rethink unemployment benefits. The current JobSeeker system is not fit for purpose because it's assumed to be a temporary payment for a job seeker. The money is not enough, and the points system that includes the need to apply for four jobs each month won't work if there aren't any jobs to apply for. A Universal Basic Income for everyone, as some are pushing, is going too far, but the government needs to prepare for a period of more permanent unemployment – even if it's not needed in the end because AI does not cause mass unemployment. Business executives and staff need to embrace AI and a good safety net is needed for that to happen. It's another reason for more tax revenue, along with the need for more public housing. And more tax revenue comes down to a new tax – either a wealth or inheritance tax – or increasing the GST. Australia's two previous bouts of major tax reform when tax revenue was falling short of government spending also involved new taxes: capital gains and fringe benefits in 1985 and GST in 2000. Twenty-five years later revenue is short again because of the aging of the population, the NDIS and the decision to increase defence spending. But the near-hysterical response to the plan to reduce the tax break on superannuation balances above $3 million suggests that a new wealth or inheritance tax is too hard. Lifting the GST rate towards the global average of 15-20 per cent is what it will probably have to be. The problem with GST is that it's regressive – it hits the poor more than the well-off. But there is a solution to that, invented by UNSW Professors Richard Holden and Rosalind Dixon. In their book From Free to Fair Markets Holden and Dixon suggest increasing the GST rate to 15 per cent and applying it to all goods and services, but only levying it on spending above a threshold of $12,000 per year. How? By giving back each taxpayer 15 per cent of $12,000, or $1,800, each year, preferably in two six-monthly payments of $900 – simply put it in their bank accounts. Holden and Dixon have modelled the outcome and say the higher GST on a broader base would double GST revenue from $90 billion to $180 billion and that the refunds would give back half that, leaving $45 billion in net extra revenue which they say could be spent on income tax cuts and eliminating the budget deficit. Whether $12,000 ($1,000 per month) is the right threshold for GST-free spending could be debated, but the idea is worth spending an hour or two on at the round table. Then the 25 round tablers could get on with the real business of AI and robots. Alan Kohler is finance presenter and columnist on ABC News and he also writes for Intelligent Investor.
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
An online casino banned in Australia is streamed live from Melbourne
Four young men are locked in a makeshift prison cell at an undisclosed Melbourne location. Under the watchful eye of several security cameras, the inmates attempt to regain their freedom in an unusual way: by spinning slots on an online casino. It is all part of an online game show run by Shuffle — an Australian-run online casino that is banned in its own backyard. Shuffle accepts cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to place bets, bypassing banks and other institutions that could provide oversight and transparency to its operations. Under Australian law, online casinos are required to block Australian users from accessing their services. And yet key executives at Shuffle are gambling on the company's own live broadcasts, plainly located in Australia as they do so. Ishan Haque has been central in the casino's marketing efforts, which have included recruiting an army of what he calls "micro-influencers". He was one of the four men locked in the fake prison cell: his three co-conspirators were all gambling streamers based in the US who had flown to Melbourne to take part in the stunt. When not participating in special events, the casino's affiliated streamers broadcast themselves gambling from their bedrooms and, in some cases, purpose-built studios. They ride the highs and lows, yelling over the microphone as they win and lose. Some regularly complain that they can not afford to pay rent and beg their audience for more money to gamble with. "They might have 9,000 followers," Haque explained in a rare podcast appearance with gambling investor Tom Waterhouse, "but they're highly engaging in the community". As affiliates of the casino, these streamers are entitled to a cut of the money lost by players they have referred to Shuffle. This sets up a complicated dynamic: the more their fans lose, the more the streamers stand to gain. Mark R Johnson, a gaming culture researcher at the University of Sydney, has watched dozens of hours of gambling live streams across various online casinos. Many streamers demonstrate signs of disordered thinking around gambling, says Dr Johnson, as do the viewers commenting in their live chatrooms. "From an ethical perspective, it's sad to watch these harmful ideas be perpetuated and go unchallenged," he told the ABC. The affiliate relationships offered by online casinos — and the promotion of gambling they represent — have created a "paradigm shift" in live streaming culture, he said. It is no longer a community focused on the shared love of a game: there is now money to be extracted from one's fans. It was Shuffle's much larger Australian-owned competitor, Stake, that brought this form of influencer marketing into the mainstream, signing some of the world's popular streamers to multi-million-dollar deals. Contact Julian Fell at tips@ if you have any information about crypto casinos in Australia. Most Friday afternoons, Haque is at Shuffle headquarters in Melbourne's CBD, hosting the company's weekly lottery. The young entrepreneur wears a black suit and purple tie, and engages in constant patter throughout the broadcast. On a recent week, the jackpot was around $3.8 million — a sign of the casino's growing popularity. Shuffle is accepting around $2 billion worth of deposits each month, according to analytics service Tanzanite. This puts Shuffle among the top five "crypto casinos" globally, just two years after its launch. The largest, Stake, processes roughly as many bets as Ladbrokes' global parent company Entain. All this success comes despite the bans on Shuffle and Stake across some of the world's largest online gambling markets: Australia, the US and the UK. "Due to licensing restrictions, we cannot accept players from Australia," visitors are informed when trying to access the site from a blocked region. "If you're using a VPN, please disable it and try again." It is a handy hint — a quick Google search of "VPN" returns pages and pages of results offering the exact product needed to bypass Shuffle's geo-blocker. Many of them are free. By providing a random address in Tokyo, the ABC was able to "verify" its account, instructed to make a deposit in crypto, and even given the option to buy it directly on the site with a credit card (Australian cards are not accepted). There was no proof of residence or identity needed. On the live stream, Haque interacts with viewers in the chat room, wiling away the time until the lottery is to be drawn. Part of the patter involves spinning the slots and giving away the winnings to those watching. All of this is happening from the Shuffle office in Australia, where the service is supposed to be banned. When asked about this practice, Australia's media regulator, ACMA, said it knew of the company but was not aware of its affiliates using its products in Australia. "We will seek additional information from Shuffle about this," said an ACMA spokesperson. Many players around the world have found ways around Shuffle's processes for checking identities and locations. The three streamers who were invited to Melbourne for Shuffle's fake prison game show were all based in the US, where online "crypto casinos" are also banned. Another prominent Shuffle promoter was a 19-year-old Texan resident, who was later charged with hacking and fraud offences in the US. Before his alleged crimes came to light, he was a well-known Shuffle affiliate who often exchanged friendly banter with Shuffle's staff on social media, including co-founder Noah Dummett. There is no suggestion that Shuffle knew about this affiliate's alleged criminality while he was partnered with the casino. Yet another of the casino's former partners was in close contact with Shuffle's owners. In private messages seen by the ABC, she told co-founder Dummett all sorts of things about herself, including her location in Nebraska, while she was gambling on the platform and referring users to it. Properly regulated casinos — both online and offline — are covered by strict anti-money laundering laws, requiring them to "know your customer" when funds are transferred in and out of their accounts. In a public forum post, Dummett claimed the affiliate had used multiple forged ID documents and was therefore banned on the site. "I was not aware of her United States residence," he wrote. "I would've closed her account sooner if I had proof of this." Shuffle and its owners did not respond to multiple requests for comment. While Shuffle is headquartered in a Melbourne skyscraper, it is licensed on the gambling-friendly Caribbean island of Curaçao through a separate business entity. The former Dutch colony offers a favourable tax system to online businesses. Since 2020, businesses in Curaçao pay no tax on income derived from overseas customers — for an online casino, that is almost all of it. Shuffle is registered at an unassuming house on a gravel road in the capital of Willemstad, an address it shares with at least one other well-known online casino. The global nature of these operations makes it difficult for regulators to deal with them. A casino could be operated out of Australia, serve Japanese customers and hold a Curaçao gaming licence — not to mention the streamers promoting them from other parts of the globe. Several online casinos registered in Curaçao have been issued warnings by Australia's media regulator, ACMA, for illegally targeting Australians. Many have had their sites blocked by Australian internet providers at ACMA's request, though usually these do not have geoblocking features and even explicitly advertise to Australian customers. But there are calls for the regulator to go further. In a 2023 report titled You Win Some, You Lose More, a parliamentary committee handed down several recommendations about how to reduce the harms associated with online gambling. The committee recommended blocking transactions to illegal gambling operators, and "stronger sanctions for companies and known individuals who profit from illegal gambling". It also called for better collaboration with overseas regulators, especially in places like Curaçao where illegal sites proliferate. Two years on, little appears to have changed. Australians own and operate three of the world's largest crypto casinos — two of which have made their owners into billionaires, with Shuffle doing its best to make it three. The Australian government has not yet formally responded to the 2023 report.
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
Turnbull and Kovacic are the latest to weigh in over quotas for women in the Liberals
As the Liberal Party grapples with its spectacular election loss and works out how to rebuild, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley is approaching it as if there's a giant sign above her head that screams, "I'm not Peter Dutton". Her speech at the National Press Club this week was loaded with hints that fit this thesis. Even the decision to address the National Press Club itself — a forum Dutton viewed as a space of the Canberra journalistic elite and snubbed consistently — was a signal. She has also flooded the youth and women's podcast space to send the same point. And from the moment she was on her feet at the press club she acknowledged the traditional owners of the land — a sentence that had not only become absent from the Liberal leadership lexicon — it was by the end of the election campaign a full-blown culture war that put even more nails in the Liberal Party's already bolted-in coffin. If you swim in right wing algorithms — especially on X — you'll see that all of these choices by Ley are being mocked as symbols of "Labor Party-light". In the subterranean online world Ley's leadership is being painted as too "woke". Ley's job over the next year is fraught with danger. She might be given a period of brief peace but most Liberals you speak to privately concede that it will be difficult to keep that peace for the entire term. One of those big debates that's just starting to get heated is the issue of women's representation. On this issue you will hear a lot of over the top language. Ley says she will be a zealot for women's representation in the party. Shadow Defence Minister Angus Taylor says he will crusade to have more women elected. Fancy words. But after the two previous elections, leaders said similar things. The issue of gender quotas is the one philosophical and cultural mountain that the Liberal Party has never been prepared to climb. And even by the party's own reckoning, it is failing. Beyond the hard arithmetic of imposing quotas, every other strategy is little more than vibes and positive thinking. Vibes don't get women elected, and if women are not at the table in large numbers Australian voters will continue to turn their backs on the Liberal Party. If everyone agrees with such a passion that the party needs a stampede of women — what's the hold-up? Opposition Defence spokesperson Angus Taylor this week rebuked gender quotas for political parties, a move that was widely regarded as undermining Ley's openness to the idea. Timing is everything in politics and just six weeks earlier Ley and Taylor fought for the Liberal Party leadership. One pitched her credentials as the modern Liberal centrist leader — the other as the centre right cultural figure that could re-engage the existing base. The problem is the existing base is old, white and male. Ley's National Press Club speech featured her claims she would consider quotas if the party's state divisions saw them as the solution to gender equity. Days later Taylor said mentoring and recruitment was a better way to do it, adding that the Labor Party "subverted democracy" with its quota strategy. "I believe in democratic processes, and I don't believe in subverting them, but I also know from my past experiences that mentoring, recruitment support is the way to make sure you have the people you need," Taylor said. "The Labor Party will do things their own way. And they do subvert democracy, and that's a matter for them. At the end of the day, if you're going to have quotas, it means you are going to subvert democratic processes." Subverting democracy? Labor women were lining up to respond. The numbers speak for themselves. Only one-third of Liberal MPs are women. That compares to 56 per cent of Labor MPs who are women. Cabinet Minister Tanya Plibersek told Insiders the Liberals used quotas for Nationals MPs on their frontbench pointing out the contradiction in the tools they use for promotion and representation. "They've got a quota of National Party MPs that have to be on the frontbench," she said. "So they're happy to have quotas for National Party MPs. It's just quotas for women that they're not prepared to use. "Does Angus Taylor really want people to believe that the 28 most talented Liberals in the whole country are the people who've made it into the federal parliament?" Plibersek pointed out that the Liberals had ignored a non-binding 50 per cent target for female representation put in place after the 2022 election. Here is some free advice to the Liberal Party. Every time they talk about women and quotas and anyone implies that the Labor quotas have led to the promotion of women without merit the ALP has a literal party. They won this debate so long ago it provides Labor with a free kick of monumental proportions. I was a high school girl when Labor had this debate and settled it. Now, here we are 30 years later and the Liberals are still having a debate the community resolved in the 1990s. Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull told this column senior Liberal men, including former prime minister Tony Abbott and Angus Taylor, left the impression that they were happy with the male dominated party as it is. "The Liberal Party has said it needs to recruit more women into its parliamentary ranks for years and for just as long resisted quotas on the basis it undermines the right of party members freely to choose their own candidates. But nothing has changed and the party room has fewer women than ever," Turnbull told me. "Those who oppose quotas need to explain what their alternative is, otherwise people will reasonably conclude they are quite happy with the male dominated status quo." Opposition frontbencher Julian Leeser has called for preselection primary contests, instead of quotas, and other Liberals including former minister Simon Birmingham and NSW senator Maria Kovacic have called for mandated quota systems. Kovacic tells this column that quotas are no longer a philosophical discussion, but have become a source of urgency. "We must address the persistent and systemic under-representation of women in our party, the temporary implementation of quotas is now both necessary and urgent," she tells me. "Quotas will serve as an effective interim measure to correct these structural imbalances." Kovacic believes the scale of the gender imbalance in the Liberal Party demands "immediate and decisive action". "Delaying the adoption of quotas in favour of softer incremental approaches alone, such as mentoring and leadership programs is no longer viable. That opportunity has passed. We must change, and change now." The NSW Liberal Women's Council will debate gender quotas at a meeting in Sydney this week. Those pushing for change won't go down without a massive fight. Patricia Karvelas is host of ABC News Afternoon Briefing at 4pm weekdays on ABC News Channel, co-host of the weekly Party Room podcast with Fran Kelly and host of politics and news podcast Politics Now.
