News update for Mon 3 Feb 2025

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

Feb 03, 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:

Laura Tingle: Anthony Albanese keeps campaigning in traditional mode, but Peter Dutton steals most of his oxygen - ABC News

In between, the media's attention was tied up with the alarming news that a caravan containing explosives, and the address of Jewish targets, had been sitting on the side of a road in outer Sydney for six weeks.

In the political realm, however, that quickly devolved into an attack on whether the prime minister and state politicians knew/didn't know/should have known/should have said something about the caravan.

Little matter that the various police forces expressed their concern that the story had leaked and could compromise their investigation.

TDA interviews the Prime Minister - The Daily Aus Podcast

Some time before mid-May, every Australian over 18 is going to walk into a polling booth and cast their ballot. As the road to the 2025 election becomes shorter, the political, social and economic conversations about the decisions in front of us are becoming more frequent. On today’s episode, we sit down with the Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese.

Listen to The Daily Aus Podcast

Also > Politics Podcast with Michelle Grattan: Albanese dumps Nature Positive legislation and considers shrinking the electoral reform bill - The Conversation

From hate speech laws to super tax changes, what tops Labor’s agenda before heading to the polls? - The Guardian

The parliament returns in Canberra on Tuesday for one of the last sittings before the election campaign, with a full slate of legislation to deal with.

Several big-ticket items were left on the Senate floor last year after being stuck at an impasse with both the Coalition and crossbench, including electoral donations reform that would have capped major donations and election spending.

You can expect what the government does put forward this week, and whether it secures enough support to pass bills, will have a significant impact on its messaging to the public during the election.

Here we run through the top items left over on the government’s agenda:

Vast censorship of political “donations” data - The Klaxon

The Australian Electoral Commission has quietly executed the biggest act of political “donations” censorship in the nation’s history, making it effectively impossible to determine the true identity of many “donors”, despite payments being above disclosure thresholds.

The AEC has pulled the tens of thousands of “donor returns” from its “transparency portal”, despite it legally being required to provide the documents to the public under law that has been in place for over a century.

The AEC itself states: “The AEC is required by legislation to publish returns on the Register”.

It can be revealed the AEC is instead only providing the public — and only weeks after requests are made — with highly redacted versions of the once public documents, from which it has blacked out key information.

Rex Patrick: Nuclear waste. AUKUS agency's reckless indifference - Michael West Media

The Australian Submarine Agency deals with high-level Defence secrets and fissile material, yet it has been caught ignoring security obligations while threatening Rex Patrick, who reports on their conduct.

Last Friday, government solicitors acting for the Australian Submarine Agency sent me a warning against publishing some embarrassing information about their conduct.

Neither I nor MWM will be subject to their bullying, however.

The Logic of Destruction and How to Resist It - by Timothy Snyder

Trump’s tariffs (which are also likely illegal) are there to make us poor. Trump’s attacks on America’s closest friends, countries such as Canada and Denmark, are there to make enemies of countries where constitutionalism works and people are prosperous. As their country is destroyed, Americans must be denied the idea that anything else is possible.

Deportations are a spectacle to turn Americans against one another, to make us afraid, and to get us to see pain and camps as normal. They also create busy-work for law enforcement, locating the “criminals” in workplaces across the country, as the crime of the century takes place at the very center of power.

Podcasts have helped sway many young American men to the right. The same may well happen in Australia - The Conversation

The 2024 US presidential election saw a historic shift to the right, driven by the largest swing of young male voters in two decades. Analysts attribute this partly to podcasters like Joe Rogan, whose unfiltered, conversational content bypassed traditional media to mobilise this demographic.

Our own research shows that Donald Trump’s podcast strategy during the election campaign boosted his support by 1% to 2.6%, with more than half of this linked to Rogan’s platform. In contrast, Kamala Harris’s reliance on traditional, curated media lacked the authenticity that resonated with Trump’s base.

This trend has clear parallels in Australia.

New George Pell survivors come forward - 7am Podcast

At George Pell’s funeral, some of Australia’s most powerful people paid tribute to a man they believed was wrongfully smeared by accusations of child sex abuse. But even as his supporters venerated his legacy, the National Redress Scheme was offering compensation to men who survived Pell’s abuse as children. Today, investigative journalist and contributor to The Monthly Louise Milligan shares the stories of two survivors who want the world to know what Pell did to them, and how a new legal strategy deployed by the Catholic church is denying survivors justice.

Listen to the 7am Podcast

Ariel Bogle: Papers, polls, PR and politics: meet the powerful lobby firm with a finger in every Tasmanian pie - The Guardian

Tasmania’s Derwent Valley Gazette is not the kind of publication that generally springs to mind as part of a powerful media empire. For 72 years, it has quietly served the local news needs of the region west of Hobart.

But some in the island state are concerned that ownership of a string of local publications and a polling company has passed to owners that also operate a powerful lobby firm, present political commentary on their own podcast and who have worked on campaigns for the incumbent Liberal government.

Font Public Relations, based in Hobart, represents clients with a high profile in the state including Airbnb and Salmon Tasmania.

Also read > Tasmania – the corruption isle? | The UK Sussex Centre for the Study of Corruption

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‘Pivotal moment for reform’: Review into First Nations healthcare in prisons calls for sweeping changes - The Justice Map

A wide-ranging report commissioned by the federal government has called for “urgent and proactive” system-level reforms to improve the standard of healthcare provided to First Nations people in prison.

Consulting firm Nous was contracted by the Department of Health in late 2023 to undertake a review of First Nations healthcare in prisons for just under $700,000.

The final report was released publicly in December by the federal government.

Also read > Youth Justice: punishment or prevention? - Pearls and Irritations

Liberals eyeing 40% council rate hike in teal area as opportunity for cost of living attack - Crikey

Voters in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, where the council just voted to hike rates by close to 40%, should expect Liberals to target their local federal teal MPs with cost of living attack lines.

Crikey understands the Liberal Party, which lost the Northern Beaches seats of Mackellar and Warringah to independent challengers in recent years, plan to use the rate hike as an argument not to vote for the teals in the upcoming federal election.

The proposed argument would go roughly like this: because the councillors who voted in support of the hike are essentially a “teal” grouping due to the support they’ve received from political funding outfit Climate 200 and federal MPs Zali Steggall and Sophie Scamps, those MPs should bear some responsibility for the rate rise.