News update for Mon 10 Feb 2025

Your trusted guide to the top independent news and views of the day...

Feb 10, 2025

Welcome to your TrueNorth news update where every weekday afternoon we share curated articles from Australia’s independent news media sector.

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TODAY’S BREAKING NEWS UPDATES: See all the breaking news of the day through The Guardian here - and through 6 News here

Laura Tingle: Peter Dutton is 'happy to take questions' but doesn't seem to have answers or a plan - The ABC

For the past two and half years, Peter Dutton has been exceptionally selective in the media appearances he makes, defying the "tradition" for decades of opposition leaders using any possible opportunity or platform to be noticed. Instead, he has often only done one or two interviews with friendly questions in a given week.

And, let's face it, it has worked for him until now.

Things have got a bit more edgy in the past month, with an election only a couple of months away.

Contraceptives and menopause treatments to be subsidised as federal government pledges $573m for women’s health - The Guardian

Australian women will save hundreds of dollars thanks to new subsidies for contraceptive pills and hormone therapy, in a major investment announced by the federal government.

The $573m package will put new contraceptive pills on the pharmaceutical benefits scheme (PBS) for the first time in decades. The move follows two parliamentary inquiries into reproductive health and menopause.

The raft of health measures also includes higher Medicare payments and bulk billing for intrauterine devices (IUDs) and birth control implants, which the government calculated could save up to 300,000 Australian women $400 in out-of-pocket costs.

Tim Dunlop: Honest politics demands that the independents not give their support to either Labor or the LNP before the election - The Future of Everything

One of the things you are going to hear ad infinitum in the lead up to the 2025 federal election is demands for the independents to say in advance which party they will support if the crossbench holds the balance of power.

It is a complete furphy and we shouldn’t be fooled.

Such a demand is yet another example of how the dominance of the two-party system has distorted how we think about politics. That system has taught us to presume that parties are the same as governments—that we can only have an LNP government or a Labor government—but that is misleading.

In the event of no-one getting a majority, it is up to the parliament to decide who has the confidence of the House.

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Women, community and chasing once safe Liberal seats - The Women's Agenda Podcast

A number of female Independent MPs changed the face of politics at the last election, winning once considered safe Liberal seats. And in 2022, Nicolette Boele almost joined them, achieving a 15.28% swing against the Liberal incumbent Paul Fletcher in what was once considered the safest Liberal seat in the country: Bradfield, in Sydney’s north. Nicolette hopes to go one step further this year, with the Federal election due by May. She joins the Women’s Agenda Podcast to share more about her campaign launch, what the past few years have been like and the power of community in supporting each other as individuals and also in achieving great things.

Listen on The Women’s Agenda Podcast

Also >

The movement we helped build: From Ian Macphee to Zoe Daniel - Pearls and Irritations
‘Leaving our kids a harder world’: Dr Sophie Scamps pushes government to consider young people in its decisions - Women’s Agenda

Most retirees who rent live in poverty. Here’s how boosting rent assistance could help lift them out of it - The Conversation

Most Australians can look forward to a comfortable retirement. More than three in four retirees own their own home, most report feeling comfortable financially, and few suffer financial stress.

But our new Grattan Institute report paints a sobering picture for one group: retirees who rent in the private market. Two-thirds of this group live in poverty, including more than three in four single women who live alone.

ABC sacking exposes the actions of the Israel lobby - New Politics

Once it becomes easier to sack commentators than to accept challenging viewpoints, society has lost sight of a key part of democracy – holding power to account, even when the truth hurts.

How far will the ABC go to protect the interests of the Israel lobby? That’s the key question in a legal case that exposes all the elements of political influence, media independence, and corporate misconduct.

The weekend byelection results were close to Labor and the Greens’ worst case scenario – but it’s not all good news for the Liberals - The Guardian

A glimmer of hope for Labor is that despite the drubbing on primary votes, only a trickle of voters in Werribee decided to jump ship to the Liberal party.

Despite the 16.7% swing away from Labor on first-preference votes, the Liberal candidate received just a modest 3.7% increase.

It suggests voters at a general election may return to Labor, at least via preferences – so trying to knock off Labor seats with comfortable margins might not be a winning strategy for the Coalition.

It’s certainly not a big enough showing for state Liberal leader Brad Battin and Peter Dutton if they believe their respective pathways to government will be through the outer suburbs.

Kos Samaras: Why woke capitalism is in trouble - Redbridge Blog

Over the past two decades, businesses and the political establishment have shifted their focus toward a growing subset of Western society: a professional class with significant spending power and outsized influence in parliaments and boardrooms.

This group emerged from the IT-driven industrial revolution that reshaped economies in the 21st century, creating a new middle class that gradually replaced the 20th-century managerial class. The latter had long served as the ballast for centrist and centre-right politics. In Australia, this managerial middle class was often the decisive force in election outcomes, delivering Bob Hawke’s landslide victory in 1983 and John Howard’s equally substantial win in 1996.

Also read > Labor goes weak on reform - Pearls and Irritations

At this point, a minority government looks likely - Pearls and Irritations

With the election still somewhere between eight and 14 weeks away, it is too early to get much of a guide from the opinion polls about the probable outcome – except that a majority Liberal-National Party Government, the result most favoured by those who have already punted their money on the result with the various betting agencies, is the least likely.

The polls generally have been moving in favour of the Coalition, and on average currently have the Coalition marginally ahead – 51-49 after preferences. Were the trend in the polls over the past two months to continue and the Coalition in fact achieved a 53-47 result after preferences, it could win an outright victory.

Queensland to the rescue? - Inside Story

History suggests Labor’s state election loss in the Sunshine State last October might — just might — work in Anthony Albanese’s favour.

How popular or unpopular was the Palaszczuk government in early to mid 2022? Was it a drag on federal Labor’s Queensland vote at the 21 May election? And how will premier David Crisafulli and team, in office since late October, be travelling when Queenslanders cast their 2025 federal votes? These questions, not easily answered, are important because the Albanese government needs to make gains in the northeast state if it is to survive this year’s federal election.

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Trump is unleashing sadism upon the world. But we cannot get overwhelmed - The Guardian

As Trump delivers a series of devastating and appalling executive orders and public pronouncements every day, it has never been more important to avoid being captured by his obscenity and focus on how the issues are interconnected.

It is easy to forget or sideline the executive orders of the previous week: bans on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and discourse as well as “gender ideology” in all federally funded programing, as new obscenities flood the news cycle. Threats of deportation to international students who engage in legitimate protest; expansionist designs on Panama and Greenland and proposals to take over the total and forcible displacement of Palestinians in Gaza from their land are announced in quick succession. In each case, Trump makes the declaration as a show of power, testing to see whether it can take effect. The executive orders can be stopped by courts, but the deportation of immigrants has already begun, as has the re-opening of the grotesque camps of Guantánamo.

Amy Remeikis: History tells us the danger of appeasement – we're not listening - The New Daily

On September 30, 1938 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stood outside 10 Downing Street and declared the Munich Agreement had appeased German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s territorial aims.

“I believe it is peace for our time,” he said. “…Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

It was this period of history that came to mind as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese refused, at least a dozen times, to criticise Donald Trump’s illegal and immoral ‘vision’ to “own” Gaza as if it were a run-down New Jersey warehouse, and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population through their forced removal to surrounding states.

How fossil fuel cash is powering Peter Dutton’s anti-climate election push - Renew Economy

Analysis of newly published political donation data details how the fossil fuel industry is aligning its vast financial support behind the Peter Dutton-led Coalition, ahead of another federal election fight over the future of Australian climate policy and the Coalition’s embrace of coal, gas and nuclear.

Last week, the Australian Electoral Commission published the political donation disclosures for the 2023-24 financial year. Analysis of the data shows how, in the midst of a global climate crisis, vast amounts of money flowed from fossil fuel companies and into the coffers of the major political parties.

Australia’s fossil fuel industry giants: including Woodside, Santos, Chevron and Adani were joined by several of the industry’s major lobby groups in gifting a combined $3.8 million to Labor, Liberals and the Nationals parties, and their fundraising vehicles.