CREDIT… HISTORY
Australia will lose its triple-A credit rating in the next seven years because of climate change, according to researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and East Anglia via the SMH ($). Australian taxpayers and businesses will be among the 20 worst-affected in the world when it comes to the economic hit, the study found, even if the world manages to limit warming to two degrees (we’re on track for a five-degree warming as our oceans heat at a record-setting pace, so…). Our credit rating basically shows whether we’re good for repaying our debt. So what do we do? Fund the green boffins! We’ve got to create policy that drives investment into the private sector as it works to mitigate climate change, one expert said. It comes as Treasurer Jim Chalmers prepares to release the latest intergenerational report — he says climate change is our biggest challenge and opportunity in the next 40 years, affecting “our nation, our economy and our budget”.
So what else is in there? Our population will grow at 1.1% over the next 40 years, its slowest rate since Federation, the report continues via Guardian Australia (it’s been 1.4% during the past 40 years). Why? We’re living longer, healthier and more kid-free, creating an ageing population — indeed when millennials enter old age, the number of people over 65 will double, and those over 85 will triple. We’ll need lots more workers in “healthcare, aged care, disabilities or early childhood education”, Chalmers says per the SMH ($). But the Business Council of Australia says the real focus should be on “quantum technologies, hydrogen, semiconductors, vaccines, green energy including wind and battery technology, and defence manufacturing”, as the AFR ($) reports — big biz is calling for the Albanese government to take the $15 billion national reconstruction fund and make it look more like the Joe Biden’s $500 billion industry subsidies package, as The New York Times ($) explained.
WHAT WOMEN WANT
Family Court Judge Kylie Beckhouse has barred a father from seeing his two youngest kids, aged 13 and eight, because he led them to “question their gender identity”, The Australian ($) reports, after all three children (the eldest is 16) identified as non-binary. Beckhouse said the father wasn’t a bad parent, but had “confused” them and made them more “vulnerable” by raising them without societal gender norms, particularly as they dealt with their parents’ breakup. He can see them again in four months. What a dismal precedent. It comes as a South Australian football club is red-faced after a newsletter published an opinion that asked “Who’s meant to clean the kitchen?” while the Matildas played on Wednesday night, adding “Uber eats woulda been busy”, as the ABC reports. The club’s president, Jack Daniels, apologised.
Speaking of male/female representation… opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume is coming for home affairs spokesman James Paterson, The Age ($) reports, after Hume confirmed she’s running for Paterson’s top position on the Victorian Senate ticket. It’s moderates (Hume) v Victorian right (Paterson), and comes four years after then-PM Scott Morrison made a deal to put Hume in the second spot to ward off hungry conservative challengers. Paterson probably has the numbers to stay put, insiders say, but the Coalition’s “women problem” remains a vote barrier. Meanwhile, ABC matriarch Ita Buttrose may be staying put — she is contemplating extending her tenure as chair after her five-year term ends next March, The Australian ($) reports, with plans to meet Communications Minister Michelle Rowland soon to talk about it.
FUTURE TENSE
We’re buying $1.3 billion worth of Tomahawk missiles from the US, Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy will confirm today, a total of 200 after the defence strategic review said Australia needs to “beef up the ADF’s medium-range advanced and high-speed missile defence capabilities”, as the NT News ($) puts it. The US and UK are the only countries that have the missiles, which will go on the navy’s Hobart-class destroyers — though they could eventually be fitted to the AUKUS submarines, The West ($) adds. We’re also buying $431 million worth of 60 air-to-ground missiles and $50 million worth of missile weapons that have a range of more than five kilometres.
Meanwhile the Defence Department has given EY an $8.4 million (!) contract to design an AUKUS safety agency, the SMH ($) reports. The regulator will be part of the Defence Department, so not exactly independent, and Greens defence spokesman Senator David Shoebridge was flabbergasted we picked a pro-nuclear consultant to design a watchdog. He pointed to EY’s work with US firm NuScale Power Corporation, China General Nuclear Power Co, and Tokyo Electric Power Company which ran Fukushima. Speaking of, Japan is about to release treated radioactive wastewater from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean, The New Daily reports. What could possibly go wrong? Tokyo Electric Power Co say it’s got to happen because of the risk of leaks. The International Atomic Energy Agency said it could be OK as long as the water treatment works, though radioactive material tritium will remain in it.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
It’s a mystery for the ages — who defecated on the floor at Karen Whitehouse’s wedding? She was marrying Helen McLaughlin on a boat in Amsterdam back in 2018 when, at precisely 9.45pm, she discovered a large human stool in the women’s toilets. Not in a toilet — in the room, right there in the middle. Whitehouse was floored — she could not believe this shit. After the wedding, the couple stayed up all night discussing who on their guest list could have done such a thing. And it wasn’t just them — after word got out about the crappy situation, all their friends wanted to discuss the mystery. “There was one party where we must have spoken about it for four hours,” she said. So the couple enlisted their Kiwi friend and amateur sleuth Lauren Kilby to create a 13-part podcast aptly titled Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding? back in 2020, attracting a few hundred listeners to the comedic-crime series.
But the “poodunit”, as The Guardian writes, has become a sleeper hit, recently skyrocketing to the top of the podcast charts in the UK and hitting No. 5 here in Australia thanks to some tweets going viral. And it’s not hard to see why — it’s about something undeniably gross, but there’s a bald-faced sense of seeking justice paired with one of the lowest-stakes mysteries possible, wrapped lovingly in a sheer overarching silliness and joy. The trio rig up friends to a lie detector, speak to a clinical forensic psychologist and a psychic, and request underwear from all guests (a total of zero people hand their knickers over), and they keep circling back to Henk, a friend who for some reason spent most of the evening in the women’s toilets, even eating in there. Now the trio are preparing for a second season about another unsolved case. “Anything the police would laugh at,” says Whitehouse. “That’s our area.”
Wishing you far less mystery in your Monday.
SAY WHAT?
To all the women who have been pushing and fighting over the years, this is for them and from them.
Aitana Bonmatí
The Spanish footballer, whose team beat England to win the Women’s World Cup, dedicated her Golden Ball award to women everywhere trying to achieve gender parity with men.
CRIKEY RECAP
“A 2021 Facebook post from Charity TV Global says that [Leila] Melki raised $10,000 for anti-child sexual exploitation charity Project Karma. Melki has tweeted about fearing ‘child trafficking by elite corporations’, a common fear of QAnon believers. (Ironically, she posted a TikTok claiming that the arrest of Andrew Tate for rape and sex trafficking charges earlier this year was ‘taking the fall for other elites child trafficking’).
“Melki was given a spot in the fourth season after another contestant gave up their spot for her and represents Mindfull Aus. Despite the high rates of suicide attempts among the trans community, Melki has repeatedly posted anti-trans rhetoric. She encouraged her Facebook followers to protest about the Nike campaign featuring trans woman Dylan Mulvaney who she called a ‘mentally ill man dressed as a woman’.”
“The emissions abatement targets it took to the last election are far too low; its safeguard mechanism, and its reliance on fraudulent carbon credits, is insufficient to deliver them. Its refusal to countenance curbing Australia’s massive fossil-fuel exports is exacerbating global heating, and undermines the capacity of Australia to play a good faith global leadership role. Still, implementing election promises and not going beyond them remains the Labor mantra.
“It may take another Black Summer — lives lost, vast tracts of the continent blackened, wildlife destroyed by the billions — to provide the government with the political cover it feels it needs to strengthen its emissions reduction efforts, to enable it to say to voters that it needs to move beyond the targets and mechanisms it took the 2022 election.”
“For one thing, said Hamish McPherson, president of Labor’s Benalla-Euroa branch in Victoria and the state’s Labor Against War representative, it was telling that [Richard] Marles carefully ignored inconvenient truths regarding global defence spending, for which the United States accounts for 39% and China 13%. The same holds for his failure or unwillingness to offer any specifics about the nature of the supposed threats emanating from China, much less the dangers of any policy of hostile alignment against it.
“Indeed, he scarcely spoke of China in direct terms at all, even though no-one credibly supposes AUKUS is not intended to preserve US strategic influence within the region. On the question of sovereignty, he took issue with the suggestion AUKUS in any way militated against it, inviting Labor rank-and-file members to believe the converse.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Spain defeat England 1-0 to win Women’s World Cup (euronews)
Israeli embassy officials attempted to influence UK court cases, documents suggest (The Guardian)
Russia’s first lunar mission in 47 years smashes into the moon in failure (Reuters)
GOP senator says Trump should drop out and calls classified documents case ‘almost a slam dunk’ (CNN)
Te Pāti Māori [party] announces list, may elect NZ’s youngest MP, aged 20 (Stuff)
Niger coup leader proposes a three-year transition of power (Al Jazeera)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Australia’s biggest AUKUS risk? Our allies’ Plan B — Bob Carr (The Age) ($): “Turning AUKUS into a piece of alliance gospel, we’ve forgone any bargaining power and will have to settle for anything — including steep increases in cost beyond the $3 billion talked of. And three subs, not five. Or just one, for training crews. And after a long wait into the 2030s, leaving us exposed as the last of the six Collins class are retired. Port Kembla, Newcastle and Brisbane seem to have disguised any enthusiasm for hosting the east coast base, a key part of AUKUS. Labor people in the Illawarra, worried about local anti-nuclear feeling, have been reassured by Canberra that site selection won’t get under way until the 2030s, and take a good part of the decade, and that Port Kembla, with its coal traffic, isn’t suitable anyway. They’ve been told the navy prefers further north. But Newcastle would reject it and a Queensland site invites endless agony about the protection of the reef and resort-based tourism.
“The most heroic assumption of AUKUS is that the British can deliver. Its Barrow-in-Furness shipyard struggled with the Astute class of nuclear submarines. Mark Francois MP, a member of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, called the Astute a ‘disaster’ and said ’something went horribly wrong at Barrow and has continued to go horribly wrong for years’. It’s also attempting to build a new class of ballistic missile-firing sub called Dreadnought. The first was intended for service in 2024, then 2028 and now the ’early 2030s’, according to the Ministry of Defence. BAE systems, awarded the tender for the AUKUS sub, is also seriously behind on our Hunter-class frigates selected in 2017, and still not even able to sign a contract … There is no precedent for building a submarine hull in one country, installing another country’s technology and assembling it in a third which has no nuclear expertise. There is no expectation of delivery in the 2040s.”
Economic ‘low road’ a dead end fix to our productivity woes — Jennifer Westacott (The Australian) ($): “Australia faces the choice between two futures; one where we continue to have low economic growth dampened by low productivity and low competitiveness, resulting in lower wages growth and lower living standards. This would be a low road for Australians and is totally avoidable. Or a high-wage, high-growth future with a dynamic economy driven by more resilient, globally facing industries where the country adds value to everything it produces. This is the high road of growth, opportunities and world’s best practice. It is an economy fuelled by enhanced productivity, greater competitiveness and our ability to unleash the talent of our people to deliver sustained higher wages, maintain full employment and vastly improved living standards.
“To realise a future where Australians enjoy greater prosperity, we must begin by urgently drawing some lines in the sand. As a nation, we can no longer accept record low business investment as a share of GDP, where more money leaves the country than comes in. Investment drives innovation, which drives productivity and drives higher wages. We can no longer continue to accept an underperforming skills system that fails to prepare Australians for the huge change in the tasks that make up their jobs that will occur as the world of work changes. We cannot continue to have students leaving school and choosing the wrong study or career paths. Nor can we accept a situation where we lack a national system of early childhood education. And we cannot bequeath our children and grandchildren a lower standard of living than ours.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Somali refugee Yasir, Catholic Bishops Conference of Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands’s Jason Siwat, and former refugee Thanus Selvarasa will speak about how they are helping the 77 refugees left behind in Papua New Guinea and what Australians can do at the NSW Teachers Federation. You can also catch this one online.
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YouTuber Jordan Shanks, also known as friendlyjordies, is hosting a seminar about confidence at the Kinselas Hotel.
