News update for Tue 28 Jan 2025

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

Jan 28, 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

How Australia’s ‘unfair’ dental system – and the way $1.3bn is spent – is driving inequality and leaving millions of people behind - The Guardian

Patients bear the brunt of dentist fees. But of the $1.3bn the federal government spends on the nation’s teeth, more than half goes to subsidising the uptake of private health insurance.

The inequality of Australia’s dental care system can be seen in the numbers, says Peter Breadon, the health program director at the Grattan Institute.

As people who cannot afford dental bills delay or skip treatment, untreated dental decay is on the rise and record numbers are turning up to hospitals for dental procedures, Breadon said.

“It is a big problem, and it’s a growing problem as the impact of missing out on care builds up and as our population gets older.”

Why Australia needs better whistleblower protections - Full Story Podcast

Blowing the whistle on corruption, wrongdoing and unethical behaviour can come at a huge personal cost for those who choose to speak out. Kieran Pender, associate legal director at the Human Rights Law Centre, tells Nour Haydar why more needs to be done to ensure workers who speak up about wrongdoing are protected.

Listen to The Full Story Podcast

Dave Milner: What would Grace Tame do? - The Shot

Don’t expect Tolstoy from me today, this is a thinly veiled ad for a T-shirt disguised as a column, but I will try.

I asked Grace on the phone why she felt compelled to wear such a badass, stylish, ethically produced and reasonably affordable T-shirt to meet the Prime Minister.

‘Isn’t it just fucking obvious? It surprises me how little people know about Rupert Murdoch. He doesn’t just own the news. He’s an oil baron. He sits on boards with defence contractors. For 50 years he has owned the biggest chunk of the public consciousness and contorted it in his own cruel image. I find Murdoch’s assault on our democracy far more offensive and disrespectful than swear words on a T-shirt.’

Amen.

John Lyons: Benjamin Netanyahu wants to end a two-state solution for Israel and Palestinians. How will Donald Trump respond? - ABC News

Over the next four years, all indications are that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu may extinguish any possibility of a two-state solution in the Middle East.

Many of Israel's far-right supporters in Australia, the US and elsewhere will celebrate this — Israel would effectively annex the Occupied Palestinian Territories, giving Israel more land and achieving the long-held aspiration of "Eretz Israel," or "Greater Israel."

But celebration would be misplaced. Any permanent land grab by Israel will come at the price of permanent conflict.

Sarah Schwartz: When Peter Dutton and the Coalition use the Jewish community as political footballs it makes all of us less safe - The Guardian

Amid a very real and terrifying rise in antisemitism, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, and the Coalition – prior defenders of the “right to be bigots” – have now appointed themselves our nation’s anti-antisemitism warriors. But their concern for Jews appears to me to be confected and self-serving. Mirroring the global far right, they have created an imaginary caricature of Jewish people to push their own political agenda. They use us as political footballs to stoke division, spread Islamophobia, attack the Labor party and push anti-immigration policies. In doing so, they make Jews less safe.

This week I’ve faced a relentless smear campaign by the Murdoch press and pro-Israel lobby groups for making this point during a comedy debate, and ridiculing Dutton and the Coalition’s imaginary conception of Jewish people as “Dutton’s Jew”.

Jack Waterford: Will public servants become agents of the party rather than the state? - Pearls and Irritations

One of the strong points Anthony Albanese made before the last election was that Scott Morrison had virtually abandoned honest government, good government, accountable government and transparent government.

He had installed government by cronies and was bypassing long established systems and processes designed to ensure that government was getting best value for money. His government was handing over billions to private sector interests without tenders and without satisfactory systems either for securing the public interest or for being able to retrieve money not used for the purposes for which it had been given.

Today’s cartoon by David Pope

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

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The election in Tasmania’s Franklin represents everything about this political moment - Crikey

An independent's campaign against Labor's fisheries minister asks: why are jobs and the environment presented as a zero-sum game?

Insurrection. It’s a word I didn’t expect to hear at the campaign launch for Peter George, the independent candidate running in the Tasmanian seat of Franklin. But that’s how George characterised what he’s planning: “An insurrection, a rebellion of Tasmanians against the big parties who have misruled for as long as anyone can remember.”

It’s bold rhetoric for a not even remotely marginal seat (in 2022 Labor MP Julie Collins’ post-election margin was a very safe 13.7%). It drew enthusiastic cheering from the crowd of around a hundred cool, woke grandparents, ready to mobilise in an uprising — for the state, for the nation, and for their grandkids.

Michael Pascoe: Will they or won't they drop the rate? Big Four banks betting against the RBA - Michael West Media

The Big Four banks are betting the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday will deliver the verdict that the RBA has been wrong on interest rates. Not that they’d dare phrase it that way, says Michael Pascoe.

It’s a brave soul who bets on what ABS statistics might be, but that’s what the money market in general and our big banks in particular do. They are making a big bet that this Wednesday’s CPI numbers will show the RBA has got monetary policy wrong, that rates should have been cut in November, if not considerably earlier.

Three of the Big Four reckon the much-ballyhooed “trimmed mean” inflation measure will come in at 0.5% for the quarter. The fourth bank (Westpac) is only a bee’s appendage higher by rounding up to 0.6.

ARENA to send more funds to home electrification, solar and batteries in deal with cross bench - Renew Economy

Energy Minister Chris Bowen has written to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency to accelerate solar electrification projects and save households more cash.

Bowen has used ministerial powers to direct the board to consider funding solar panels and home batteries following a deal struck with crossbenchers in exchange for support on Labor’s Future Made in Australia legislation.

The agency has to look at funding a project in every state and territory, including at least one in an Indigenous community and one in a low socio-economic area.

Is Deceptive Political Advertising a Form of Voter Suppression? - Sue Barrett

Democracy is often heralded as a cornerstone of freedom—a system where every citizen’s voice matters. Yet, as recent elections in the United States and Australia have revealed, the integrity of democratic systems is under threat from deceptive political advertising and voter suppression tactics. These practices raise a critical question: Does lying in political advertising amount to voter suppression? And if so, what does this mean for the future of democracy?

DeepSeek blows a trillion-dollar hole in the narrative of US exceptionalism - Crikey

By doing the same thing as Western AI models for a fraction of the price, China's DeepSeek smashed a trillion-dollar hole in US sharemarkets.

Well, the Chinese weren’t supposed to do that.

The first disruption to the triumphalist Trump narrative of a new American Golden Age enforced by tariffs, taxes and sheer magisterial will has come earlier than expected, via a trillion-dollar smashing of the Nasdaq index. It’s a demonstration that the entire business model of artificial intelligence, as pushed by Silicon Valley, might be wildly overcapitalised.

Worse, it came just a few days after Donald Trump hosted the announcement by donors Larry Ellison and Sam Altman of a US$500 billion investment in AI infrastructure. The framing was that new US president, by deregulating AI (what could go wrong?) and liberating his tech bro backers, was ushering in a new era of colossal investment that would cement America’s control of AI.

Also read >

Australia is a Deer in the AI Headlights - Sandy Plunkett
American capitalism just got a black eye - Robert Reich
‘Sputnik moment’: $1tn wiped off US stocks after Chinese firm unveils AI chatbot - The Guardian
What is DeepSeek and why did US tech stocks fall? - The Guardian

Australia’s drama dilemma: how taxpayers foot the bill for content that ends up locked behind paywalls - The Conversation

Headlines about Screen Australia’s latest annual Drama Report have highlighted one particular figure: a 29% drop in total industry expenditure compared to the year before.

But a closer look suggests this isn’t the most concerning finding. The report also reveals a significant chunk (42%) of the A$803 million spent on producing Australian TV drama in 2023–24 was funded by taxpayers.

What’s more – watching half of the Australian TV drama hours broadcast in 2024 required a streaming subscription. Watching all of them required seven different subscriptions.

With Australians’ funding of this commercial, for-profit sector on the rise, we can’t help but ask: what do Australian viewers get in return?