TAX, LOVE, AND CARE
Some 149 aged care homes with four- or five-star ratings didn’t meet standards including treating residents with dignity and respect, giving good clinical care, or supporting health and wellbeing, Guardian Australia reports. But these minimum quality standards, assessed by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (ACQSC), are not considered in the star rating system for compliance. And those stars are often used by families to decide where to send their loved ones, the paper says. The ACQSC said only corrective action, not non-compliance, impacts a rating, but a former health department official said it shows how “misleading” the stars are. Meanwhile SA’s ambulance service is sending taxis to 36 triple-0 callers a week, The Advertiser reports, costing taxpayers $121,686 in two years. Ramping (ambos queueing at emergency) hit a record 4,285 hours in November, the paper notes.
It comes as Peter Dutton says Anthony Albanese’s leadership is “over” if the government ditches the stage three tax cuts, Sky News Australia reports, because the opposition leader decides these things, or something. Sky notes the reform means 94% of Australian taxpayers will face a maximum marginal tax rate of 30% or less. Sounds great right? Except more than 80% of the cuts will go to people in the top 20% of incomes, and two-thirds of the cuts will go to men. People in the lowest third of incomes get nothing, the Australian Council for Social Services says. Dutton was droning on about breaking election promises, even though his predecessor Scott Morrison broke election promises including a federal watchdog, creating 1.3 million jobs in five years, delivering a surplus, building 47 commuter car parks, planting a billion new trees, and more, as The Daily Mail listed. Albanese has steadfastly said the stage three tax cuts are going ahead.
WORDS OF WAR
The Albanese government has not officially designated October 7’s massacre as an overseas terrorist act, The Australian ($) reports, so Australian Jews can’t access the Victim of Terrorism Overseas Payment under the Social Security Act. Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said the government was “considering further ways” to support Australians and their families, but opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson urged action, saying loved ones of the slain need support to “rebuild their lives” after “the worst massacre since the Holocaust”. The paper notes it took under two months to designate the 2015 Paris ISIS attacks and the 2016 Berlin attacks under our legislation.
To another overseas conflict now and we won’t be sending our retired Taipan helicopters to Ukraine like it asked, Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy confirmed, because there’s none in a fit state to fly. They’re being taken apart ahead of their burial at a defence site, ABC reports — how oddly touching — and it would be a huge dollar figure to get them working again, Conroy said. We retired the Taipans in September after four Defence personnel died in a Queensland crash. Meanwhile, Japan wants to test missiles in Australian military ranges, the AFR reports. Japanese missiles have already been fired in Exercise Talisman Sabre war games, and Defence told the paper we’re happy to collaborate when it provides “mutual benefits”. The Japan Times says it’ll help “enhance deterrence against Beijing’s provocative military activities in the Indo-Pacific region”.
TRUTH AND POWER
The University of Western Australia’s Michael “Mick” O’Leary has been accused of a “lack of regard for the truth, lack of independence and lack of scientific rigour” by Federal Court Judge Natalie Charlesworth in the high-profile Munkara v Santos case, The Australian ($) reports. The associate professor was brought in as an expert witness in the Indigenous heritage case battling to stop the Barossa gas field in the Timor Sea to protect Aboriginal songlines in the ocean. But the judge found O’Leary lied to Tiwi Islanders in a “cultural mapping” exercise — the National Indigenous Times delves into it — and she ended up dismissing the case this week.
Staying in WA and some 9,200 homes have no power after severe thunderstorms damaged lines, The West ($) reports, with residents in Wheatbelt and Goldfields told to prepare for up to seven days of darkness. Non-essential travel to the two towns should be avoided, authorities said, with the outage affecting the power supply, water supply, telephone services, internet connection, fuel stations and retail outlets. Meanwhile WA’s Health Department barred the South Metropolitan Health Service from negotiating with private operator Aegis Health in its $55 million deal, documents WA Today FOI’d show. The 80-bed medihotel is just weeks away from being built but there’s still no service agreement in place.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
If you have seven minutes free every day for the next week, you may be able to feel some iota of joy in an otherwise meaningless existence filled with horror. That’s tongue-in-cheek, but it can genuinely feel a little ignoble to feel pure joy in the overlapping cost-of-living and housing crises amid a global context of war and impending climate doom. And I’m not talking about listening to a podcast while cleaning your home, which is making utility feel fun — that is not joy. So what is it? Ask Big JOY, a citizen science project based at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Some 88,000 people have tried the week-long program since it launched, including The Guardian’s Emma Beddington, who was rather unsettled when her first task was to listen to a laugh track.
Her next task was to ask people to tell her something “fun, wonderful or inspiring that they’ve experienced” lately. Stories of holding one’s newborn granddaughter, spotting a rare bird, and shagging a Canadian oncologist followed. Big JOY urged her to respond “That must have felt great!” but Beddington writes, “I am not American, so I don’t”. (Also, it wouldn’t be the most fitting response to someone having sex). Her next task is to listen to one of the Dalai Lama’s favourite Buddhist prayers, and the cynic in her groans. By the end, she finds herself crying. Other tasks include writing three positives that came from something negative, making a gratitude list, a nature-based awe exercise, rating her values, and finally, doing something kind for five people. “Who am I, Amélie Poulain?” she writes “I don’t even see five people most days”. But she does it. She darns her husband’s jumper and gives some groceries to a food bank. It does make her feel good, about 14.13% more, to be precise. No small thing right now.
Hoping you spot an opportunity for a good deed today too.
SAY WHAT?
In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control all territory west of the Jordan. This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do?
Benjamin Netanyahu
In a chilling admission, the Israeli PM said he would only agree to a peace deal that would see his country gain security control over the entire Gaza Strip.
CRIKEY RECAP
“NCA, the News Corp Newswire does a vox pop piece collecting the public’s views on the decision. Of the seven people they speak to (a family of three and four other individuals) most complain about price gouging and the lack of support provided by Woolworths to Australian producers.
“Only the ‘all-Australian’ family, who moved to Cronulla from South Africa in 2000, expressed any specific attachment to Australia Day on January 26. The piece runs under the headline ‘Aussie family said they will ‘think twice’ before shopping at Woolies’.”
“But ‘The Sun Wot Won It’ [headline] brag in the UK and the 1996 launch of the overtly right-wing Fox News on US cable encouraged academics to have another look. An analysis of British elections between 1997 and 2010 put a number on it, concluding The Sun’s support was worth about 2% of the vote.
“In the US, a 2007 study found that between 1996 and 2000 both the Republican turnout and vote went up significantly (in a statistical sense, at least) in towns where Fox News was on cable. It’s not just Trump forcing the change. The fragmentation and siloing of audiences shift focus from the power of persuasion to the revenues arising from confirming the biases of the audience you already have.”
“Meanwhile, the latest building approvals data shows we plan to build more apartments still. In Sydney and the ACT a majority of approvals are for dwellings other than separate homes, suggesting that before long Sydney will have separate homes as a minority. Canberra is further from that eventuality but rushing there quickly.
“As the next chart shows, 46% of new building approvals in Sydney are for separate homes. That’s unusually high for Sydney, where as much as two-thirds of approvals have been for townhouses and apartments in recent history. Post-2017, and especially since COVID, we are in a little apartment backlash. But it is unlikely to last.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Pakistan missiles strike Iran in retaliatory bombing as tensions soar (Al Jazeera)
Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks (The Guardian)
US weekly jobless claims at 16-month low; homebuilding takes breather (Reuters)
BAFTAs 2024: ‘Oppenheimer’ takes the lead as ‘Barbie’ falters and ‘Poor Things’ gains momentum (euronews)
In a rare move, Singapore charges a government minister with corruption (The New York Times) ($)
Pope Francis says sexual pleasure is ‘a gift from God’ (BBC)
THE COMMENTARIAT
It’s time to reimagine our communities, not have the same Invasion Day debates — Nat Cromb (IndigenousX): “We cannot be free until all are free; we will feel no emancipation from colonisation until the structures of colonisation are dismantled in a reckoning that has been a long time coming. This applies to the treatment of Indigenous people here and on other continents — we (society at large) cannot be free, until all are free. Contrary to what fearmongering potatoes will have you thinking, this reckoning is not of the colonial violence kind (although it makes sense as to why reprisal is the only counter to hundreds of years of violence that you can think of). Instead we are doing the work in reimagining and reviving our ways in our communities in spite of the violence all around us. It is in reimagining our communities to be as they should be – caring, nurturing, healthy, happy and with enough.
“Enough means very different things to different people. Enough to people raised and creating their own communities of people-centred care and wellbeing dynamics consider enough to be that people have a bed, they have food, access to good health care and the ability to live how they choose to live. Enough to the power structures that force feed ideals of capitalism through media and policies is the individual pursuit of wealth and having comfortable excess. This disparate outcome and approach to thinking is what gives us such unwell communities. Where we are in mental health crises, where homelessness is out of control, where artifice and the pursuit of it leads to competitiveness and ugliness in human behaviours. All of this, a result of capitalism introduced by colonial forces.”
From bot reporters to the loss of a legendary editor, the Daily Mirror is hanging by a thread — Jane Martinson (The Guardian): “For publishing local newspapers — where cuts have been savage — as well as the only national newspaper to have consistently backed the Labour party since the end of the first world war, Reach’s historic titles are particularly important in an election year. Launched in 1903, when most titles were written by and for a narrow elite, the Mirror’s left-of-centre politics and working class support caused historian AJP Taylor to say that ‘the English people at last found their voice’. I grew up in a Mirror-reading household, not long after it became the biggest-selling paper in the world with a circulation of 5m. Even by the time Phillips joined the company in 1998, sales had halved to 2.3m, mainly because of competition from the Sun and the Mail.
“Partly to counteract the shortfall, as well as increased print costs, newspaper cover prices shot up by 13% just last year. The Mirror now costs its dedicated but dwindling band of cash-strapped readers £1.40 a day, compared with £1 for the Sun. Reach’s last set of accounts make for grim reading. Hence the job cuts. [Editor Alison] Phillips is understood to have chosen to go rather than preside over any further cuts in local coverage or expensive but award-winning journalism such as the Partygate scandal. The exit of a national editor may have prompted headlines, but losses in local papers come at just as high a cost. On Wednesday, fans protested the loss of a dedicated football reporter for West Bromwich Albion at Birmingham Live. If no one is dedicated to following the fortunes of a Championship football club, what hope for dedicated court or local council reporters?”
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WHAT’S ON TODAY
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Sydney Festival 2024 continues, with more than 1,000 artists coming together for more than 150 events.
