News update for Mon 17 Feb 2025

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

Feb 17, 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

BREAKING NEWS: Police investigate potential Islamophobic assaults at Melbourne shopping centre - The Guardian

Casey Briggs: Peter Dutton most likely to be next prime minister, according to YouGov poll - ABC News

The Coalition would be in the best position to form government if an election was held today, according to a new estimate from pollster YouGov.

The ABC can reveal the results of YouGov's latest MRP model, which finds the Peter Dutton-led Coalition would be likely to win about 73 seats, with a lower estimate of 65 and upper estimate of 80.

A party needs 76 seats to govern in majority. The model estimates there is a 78 per cent chance of a hung parliament, and a 19 per cent chance of the Coalition winning a majority.

Climate 200 to help bankroll candidates in four Labor seats at federal election - The Guardian

Climate 200 will help bankroll independent candidates in four Labor seats – including one held by a cabinet minister – among 35 campaigns it will back at the federal election.

The fundraising vehicle’s final list of target electorates confirms it will support the former journalist and anti-salmon farming campaigner Peter George in his bid to unseat the agriculture minister, Julie Collins, in Franklin in southern Tasmania.

The climate-focused group will also donate to Kate Dezarnaulds in the hyper-marginal Labor-held seat of Gilmore on the New South Wales south coast, and Phil Scott, who is contesting Darwin-based Solomon, held by the Labor MP Luke Gosling.

Greg Jericho on why it’s time for a rate cut - Full Story Podcast

Tomorrow the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia will announce their first – and highly anticipated – decision on interest rates for the year. Chief economist at the Australia Institute and Guardian columnist Greg Jericho tells Nour Haydar why he thinks a failure to cut rates would be one of the most political and misguided decisions the RBA would have to make in recent history

Listen to The Full Story Podcast

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John Hewson: Truth in advertising should be an urgent priority - The Saturday Paper

Advance was at it again in last week’s Victorian byelection in Prahran, apparently. One voter posted on X, alleging that when they went to the ballot box there were “Advance Australia bullies everywhere” warning them not to vote Greens. Independent candidate Buzz Billman posted that he had “removed [his] volunteers from polling booths … due to safety fears”. Billman noted “volunteers from Advance verbally abusing other candidates and their volunteers, as well as voters”. A spokesman for the lobby group rejected the claims.

Advance received $15.6 million in donations in the past financial year, according to an investigation by Guardian Australia, and its “largest single contribution came from the Cormack Foundation, best known as an investment company for the Liberal party, at $500,000”. This is very significant as it’s the first time I am aware of that the Liberal Party has financially supported an unaffiliated far-right group through their biggest slush fund.

NDIS reforms aim to make the scheme fairer. But we’ve found the groups struggling to gain access - The Conversation

When the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was established in 2013, one of its driving aims was to make disability services and support systems fairer.

However, our new research shows significant inequalities remain, with some groups finding it much harder than others to be deemed eligible and access a funding plan.

Recent NDIS reforms in part aim to address inequity, and to manage costs.

So, what can we do to ensure these reforms don’t further embed existing inequalities? Here’s what we found.

Don’t say the P word - The Shot

Nobody ever worked out exactly what crime Antoinette Lattouf had committed; but they didn’t miss in ensuring she was punished for it.

Watching the seemingly endless parade of ABC apparatchiks through the witness box of the Federal Court, one was struck by two things: the stark whiteness of the power structure of the national broadcaster; and the intensity of everyone’s denial that they were in any way personally responsible for the decisions that were made.

From Ita down, nobody at any point wanted to take Lattouf off the air.

Also >

Antoinette Lattouf v the ABC - The Guardian’s Full Story
ABC sycophancy erodes our democracy - Pearls and Irritations
Social cohesion a fantasy when the media peddles division and double standards - Bernard Keane for Crikey (paywall)

Who should take responsibility for youth crime? - Pearls and Irritations

A baby might be kicked into life as the result of a careless moment behind the woodshed or a romantic frolic in a grand four-poster bed. Either way, nine months later, that squirming mass of new life will enter the world – wanted or unwanted, prepared for or not.

Yet, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, there is no legal or moral mandate ensuring that this child is taught responsibility. No law requires parents to teach their offspring how to distinguish right from wrong, nor how the legal system operates or what happens if they choose to break society’s rules.

So, if that child grows into a teenager and one day breaks the law, whose failure is it? Who should be held accountable – the child, the parents, or both?

Lucy Hamilton: Australians for Responsible Citizenship and NatCon: networks of networks - AIMN

It is easier to understand the constant war drums in support of Israel in Australia’s rightwing spaces if one pays attention to the new nationalism: it unites nationalist projects from the West, Israel and India with the desired in-group marked by religion instead of race. An Israeli Settler intellectual is important to shaping the movement; his career has been fostered for decades by the Atlas Network.

This week in London, assorted radicalising Right figures, many from British Commonwealth country members, are meeting at the second conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). Over 50 Australian politicians and media figures are attending, and it is interlinked with other networks aiming to influence illiberal and coercive projects. Australians cannot ignore it.

Paddy Manning: What the Murdoch kids said on the stand: Inside the Project Harmony trial - Crikey

‘You are completely disenfranchising me and my siblings. You’ve blown a hole in the family.’

Murdoch-watchers were reeling over the weekend from a one-two punch of revelatory features — in The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic — which have shifted our understanding of the bitter succession feud now playing out in the Nevada courts, and the likely implications for the future of the family’s conservative media empire, comprising Fox and News Corporations.

First came the Times piece, by the dream team of Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, who have broken scoop after scoop on the Murdochs since their landmark “Planet…

Also read > Bad blood and bitterness in Rupert's broken clan - David Hardaker for The Politics

Launch Episode: The Sunday Shot Podcast

In this launch episode of The Sunday Shot, hosts Jo Dyer and Dave Milner are joined by Rachel Withers (Crikey) and Anthony Klan (The Klaxon) with a special interview with Richard Denniss from The Australia Institute - where they discuss #auspol events of the week.

Listen to the launch episode replay of The Sunday Shot (broadcast live every Sunday at 9am)

The best of both worlds? How Australia’s unique democracy evolved - The Conversation

Australia was a striking incarnation of modern social organisation. It was historically perhaps the most developed instance of the harnessing of democracy with bureaucracy, for two reasons.

First, its settlement and development were documented in detail. Instructions to and reports from colonial governors, the manifests of convict ships, the documentation of immigrant arrivals — all were resources for those managing colonial development.

Second, as population increased, colonial governments needed to raise loans from the mother country to develop the infrastructure necessary for private enterprise to flourish.