News update for Thur 29 Aug 2024
Your trusted guide to the top independent news and views of the day...
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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Scroll down for today’s news and views…
TODAY’S BREAKING NEWS UPDATES: See all the breaking news of the day through The Guardian here - and through 6 News here
Dr Liz Allen: Dumping gender and sexuality questions from the census doesn’t make us less gay – it leaves us uninformed - The Guardian
All roads lead to the census. For knowledge about who we are as a community – even the very roads we drive on – the census is the guiding beacon of truth.
Counting people and finding out the who, what and where is central to tax reallocation, identifying needs and providing resources. Without quality census data, governments are blindfolded.
Democracy depends on the census to inform electoral representation and help fight misinformation and disinformation.
But on Sunday something extraordinary happened.
Read more from Dr Liz Allen for The Guardian
Also read >
As a gay man, I’m tired of Labor’s photo-op politics. So I quit! - The SMH/Age
Labor resolute as LGBTQI groups condemn census silence - AAP
Sex discrimination commissioner urges Labor to reverse decision excluding gender and sexuality census questions - The Guardian
The Punters' Propaganda War Against the Mining Industry Begins! -
Punters Politics
The Punters delve into the insidious propaganda war being waged by mining giants like Gina Rinehart, Santos, and Woodside, who are using sports-washing, political cronyism, and misleading ads to hide their exploitation of Australia's resources. The Punters announce their bold plan to fight back against the mining industry's lies.
Listen to Punters Politics Podcast
How much are you paying for terrorism insurance? - Michael West Media
Australian commercial property insurers have been forced to cover declared ‘terrorist incidents’, and some insurance customers are asking whether they’re being gouged by the terrorism levy.
Are you a commercial property owner in a regional city like Toowoomba or Bendigo kept up at night by the prospect that the Islamic State (IS) group might target your bakery or op shop? If so, your insomnia has probably worsened since the federal government raised the national terrorism threat level from ‘possible’ to ‘probable’.
Well, MWM is here to reassure you that – even if Isis takes issue with your sacrilegious pasties or plants a bomb beneath the blouse rack – your insurer may have to cover you for any damage they do.
That’s because they have to. And there’s also a $14 billion pool of Commonwealth money, which hasn’t been drawn on in 20 years, sitting there to help them pay you out.
Read more in Michael West Media
Inquiry into anti-semitism a Trojan Horse for the Israel lobby - Pearls and Irritations
In June this year, Liberal MP Julian Leeser introduced a bill in Federal Parliament for a Commission of Inquiry into Anti-semitism at Australian Universities (2024).
According to Leeser, the Australian Human Rights Commission, tasked by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with carrying out a general inquiry into racism, including anti-semitism, was unsuitable due to its support for the “rights of protesters” and other evils. Despite the AHRC’s scandalous silence on anti-Palestinian rhetoric, apparently “systemic racism against Jews is the order of the day.”
Any definition of anti-semitism that includes criticism of Israel conflates Judaism with Zionism, making the racist assumption that all Jews support a Jewish supremacist state. In fact, there has been consistent Jewish opposition to Zionism since its inception, and Jewish opposition to Israel’s egregious violations of Palestinian rights and international law ever since the establishment of the state.
Read more in Pearls and Irritations
If something can happen once, it can happen again – Dennis Glover’s reading of history sounds an alarm about the present - The Conversation
Are we living in a pre-war rather than a post-war world? This is a legitimate question, given that there are more than 120 armed conflicts worldwide.
Repeat is a short book divided into two parts: Tragedy and Farce. Each part consists of five chapters with a repeated sequence of titles. These chapters address the five stages that triggered the second world war and could trigger a global war if repeated. The key stages are:
Sowing the wind (creating difficult economic conditions)
Populism (allowing those willing to exploit hatred to gain power)
Savagery (descending into an era of murder and violence)
Preliminary war (letting populists plan and win early conflicts)
Consequences (waking up to the reality of massacres and global war).
According to Glover, we are in danger of repeating the mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s, which led to the most destructive war in history.
Today’s cartoon by Cathy Wilcox for The SMH/Age
TODAY’S BREAKING NEWS: See all the breaking news of the day through The Guardian here - and through 6 News here
Greg Jericho: Unemployment is rising and Australia’s economy is weak – but don’t hit the recession alarm just yet - The Guardian
Next week’s March quarter GDP figures will once again put the spotlight on the weakness of the economy. But questions about a recession are already with us and the answer is rather complex.
Australia’s economy grew just 0.1% in the last quarter of 2023. That is, to be blunt, not a lot. Given that each quarter the growth figures are revised slightly, there is a small worry that next week we could find the December quarter revised to go backwards. If the March quarter then fell, that would mean hello, recession! Population: us!
The good news is that this is unlikely. The quarterly growth figures do change but usually they go up, not down:
Read more from Greg Jericho for The Guardian
New solar, wind and battery boosts reliability outlook, but AEMO says no room for more delay - Renew Economy
The Australian Energy Market Operator has offered a neat demonstration of what a difference a few committed solar, wind and big battery projects can make to an electricity market outlook, with warnings of looming supply gaps issued just months ago absent from AEMO’s latest 10-year forecast.
The 2024 Electricity Statement of Opportunities (ESOO), published by AEMO on Thursday, says the progress of nearly 6GW of grid-scale generation and storage projects, and 365 km of new transmission lines, has made for a much less gappy outlook for the National Electricity Market.
Read more from Giles Parkinson for Renew Economy
Also read >
Heatwave brings Australia's winter weather to an abrupt end as climate change up-ends the seasons - The ABC
Climate action is crucial to Australia’s standing in the Pacific - Crikey (paywall)
‘Immoral and unacceptable’: Tuvalu calls on Australia to set urgent deadline to end fossil fuels - The Guardian
Peter Dutton’s road to nowhere - Inside Story
The opposition leader has an electorally ineffective obsession.
Peter Dutton has a nasty habit he just can’t break: attempting to stir public resentment towards — and let’s not mince words — dark-skinned immigrants, actual or potential. It’s his go-to comfort zone. African gangs; the Fraser government’s Lebanese intake; all those refugees who either take Australians’ jobs, he warns, or languish on the dole.
Casting further (and this one suggests he spends too much time in the far-right reaches of social media, where it’s a cause célèbre) he’s been down the rabbit hole where white South African farmers “need help from a civilised country like ours” and would be “the sorts of migrants that we want to bring into our country.” Julie Bishop had to clean up that mess.
Read more from Peter Brent for Inside Story
Rachel Withers: ‘Purplepingers’ wants a ‘cheeky revolution’. But does he have a real plan for the Senate? - Crikey
Jordan van den Lamb, aka @purplepingers — the newly announced Senate candidate for the Victorian Socialists — wants to talk about alternatives to capitalism.
“I don’t believe that we would know what that looks like until, you know, there’s a cheeky little revolution. And then, you know, the people decide.”
The Senate bid is not an altogether surprising move for the 28-year-old, who first garnered attention for his “shit rentals” website and videos, and whose public call for squatting in empty homes attracted the ire of property owners and panel show hosts.
While he’s mostly known for housing, van den Lamb cites his other areas of concern as Indigenous deaths in custody, attacks on workers (“not a big fan of that”), cuts to the NDIS (“um, no thank you”), and Australia’s involvement in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza (“if we could just not do that, that’d be fantastic”), noting his policies will “largely be informed by Vic Socialists platforms”.
Read more from Rachel Withers for Crikey (paywall)
Can a 10-year-old be responsible for a crime? Here’s what brain science tells us - The Conversation
The age a child can be arrested, charged and jailed in Australia is back in the spotlight.
Last year, the Northern Territory became the first jurisdiction to raise the age of criminal responsibility from ten to 12. Now its new, tough-on-crime government has pledged to return it to ten. It comes after Victoria walked back its earlier commitment to raise the age to 14, settling instead on 12.
But the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child says 14 should be the absolute minimum. It raised this age from its earlier recommendation (in 2007) of 12, citing a decade of new research into child and adolescent development.
So what does the science say? What happens to the brain between ten and 14? And how much can those under 14 understand the consequences of their actions?
Also read > NT kicks off 'opportunity' plan by locking up children and throwing away key - Independent Australia
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Quick Links…
Can quality journalism survive in Australia? - Follow The Money Podcast
‘Millions benefitted’: why generations see Deng Xiaoping as the architect of modern China - Pearls and Irritations
Australian PM caught on camera joking with senior US official over funding of Pacific policing plan - The Guardian
Grief and shock in Melbourne after Tamil asylum seeker dies by self-immolation - The ABC
Julian Leeser said I shouldn’t nominate’: Why Philip Ruddock got rolled by the Libs - Anton Nilsson for Crikey (paywall)
Officials Confirm Arrest Of Billionaire Telegram CEO Pavel Durov In France: Here’s What We Know - Forbes Australia
TODAY’S BREAKING NEWS: See all the breaking news of the day through The Guardian here - and through 6 News here
Share your views on Australia’s media landscape through TrueNorth’s short survey
You’re up to date for Thursday the 29th of August. See you tomorrow!
TODAY’S BREAKING NEWS: See all the breaking news of the day through The Guardian here - and through 6 News here