FOREIGN RECRUITMENT
The Albanese government will allow foreign citizens to serve in the Australian Defence Force in an effort to stem a recruitment crisis, the Herald Sun has confirmed. Changes in eligibility rules will mean permanent residents from the US, UK, New Zealand, Canada and Pacific Island nations will be allowed to join the armed forces if they’ve lived here for at least a year and haven’t served with a foreign army. Last month The Daily Telegraph reported that medical eligibility requirements were being loosened too, with conditions that previously automatically precluded up to 70% of applicants no longer being a barrier to entry. There are currently around 58,000 people enlisted in the ADF, with the government saying that 64,000 are required and that it’s aiming to get the number to 80,000 by 2040.
Meanwhile, two-thirds of voters support increasing the age limit for social media use from 13 to 16, a new Guardian Essential poll shows. The government is currently trialling age verification technology, with Labor premiers also looking to legislate higher age limits. The poll showed nearly half the respondents thought social media was a negative influence on children, though the same amount also seems to think compulsory full-time military service is a good idea. To another poll briefly and immigration and border control has surged to become one of the most pressing issues for voters, according to a True Issues survey reported by the Australian Financial Review. The cost of living remains by far voters’ biggest concern.
HOUSE TRAINED
Labor’s plan to build 40,000 new affordable houses has hit a roadblock, according to The Australian. Of the 400,000 registered construction companies in Australia, only about 500 are eligible to bid for government work, meaning the “$10 billion housing fund would struggle to deliver a completed new project in Labor’s first term of office”. The relevant impediment is the Work Health and Safety scheme run by the federal safety commissioner, an accreditation that reportedly costs $300,000-$500,000 and can take from nine to 12 months to get. And the houses themselves aren’t the only thing that needs building — surges in populations in dense areas of Melbourne are highlighting a lack of public and green spaces, according to The Age. City of Melbourne counsellors are reportedly “incensed” by the lack of action on an inner-west green space, saying, “Every month that passes … more apartments approved but no open space unlocked, just makes it more difficult and expensive to deliver.”
It comes as “yoga instructors, martial artists and dog handlers” have all reportedly been prioritised over construction workers on the government’s draft priority skills list for migrants, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. We need 90,000 more construction workers to build more than 1 million new houses by the end of the decade — but skilled tradespeople such as plumbers and bricklayers will have to undergo more extensive consultation than yogis before being allowed in the country. The industry is nonplussed, with the head of BuildSkills saying, “If it’s a building trade, let them in.” Lack of houses could also mean a lack of children, with the ABC reporting that more than half of young Australians are putting off having kids due to cost of living pressures. As well as postponing kids, up to 70% of young people are delaying medical treatments due to financial pressures, with similar numbers saying they are delaying buying a house for the same reason.
SAY WHAT?
Trump is saying he would consider dropping it so Biden won’t get any political blowback on making this decision, which is the right one.
Jennifer Robinson
Julian Assange’s lawyer fronted the ABC’s Q+A program to make a case for the political expediency of finally dropping the case against her client.
CRIKEY RECAP
“The lack of interest in the ‘why’ question whenever the issue of Trump’s appeal to a large segment of the US electorate comes into view is thus a serious problem. For the first time since the 1930s — and much more so than then, Father Coughlin never had a chance of breaking into politics — the United States is at real risk of sliding into fascist dictatorship. Coverage of Trump that fails to engage with that risk is adding nothing of value to discourse; if anything, it risks normalising Trump as just another politician, one operating within normal parameters, when he has demolished parameters both normative and legal repeatedly.
A clue to this reticence as to ‘why’ can be found in the attempted character assassination of Laura Tingle last week here. In a staggering example of truckling to its right-wing critics, the ABC censured Tingle for the opinion, that she voiced outside the ABC, that Australia was a racist country and that Peter Dutton was exploiting migration.”
“Australia is no stranger to this kind of bold electoral reform. We’ve always led the way on progressive changes to strengthen our democracy — from the secret ballot, to compulsory and preferential voting — and when it comes to lowering the voting age, we should be no different. In fact, we’ve done it before. It was the Whitlam government that, in the face of changing societal circumstances and an increasingly independent, mature and vocal group of 18-year-olds, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1973.
Fifty years on we have to acknowledge that times have, again, changed. Australia is not the country it was half a century ago, and neither are its young people. Just as 18-year-olds were better informed in 1973 than they were in 1923, we believe that 16-year-olds are now better informed than ever before. It’s time to expand the franchise to allow more young people to have a say, just as we did all those years ago.”
“In these cases, the good news culture is ‘enforced’ by real or perceived damaging consequences to those lower down the ranks who break the rules. But how can boards claim that they don’t know about serious problems fomenting away inside the companies they are charged with running? Disturbingly, boards regularly fail to effectively have oversight over the work of management. Too often board life is a sinecure — a gravy train of high fees for little real work. Any readers of my study of corporate behavior — Rogue Corporations. Inside Australia Biggest Business Scandals — are given more than a dozen such examples.
We don’t know that this was the case at Nine under Costello’s leadership, and short of a company-instigated review, the community is unlikely to find out. Boards remain in a cloistered world.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Biden expected to sign executive order restricting asylum (The New York Times) ($)
Imran Khan acquitted in state secrets case (BBC)
EU elections: Multiple French opposition parties file complaint over Macron interview (euronews)
Race to form South Africa’s next government: Who will the ANC ally with? (Al Jazeera)
Four more Israeli hostages died in Gaza captivity, Israel’s military says (Reuters)
THE COMMENTARIAT
The Liberal Party created the perfect female candidate in … Josh Frydenberg? — Jacqueline Maley (The Sydney Morning Herald): “The Frydenberg comeback chatter began on ABC’s Insiders on Sunday, and was advanced when former home affairs minister Karen Andrews came out publicly on Sunday saying there was an ‘opportunity’ for the Liberal Party to ‘reassess’ its preselections for key Victorian seats, including Kooyong, following a draft revision of electoral boundaries by the Australian Electoral Commission. The redrawing of boundaries would mean the seat of Higgins, which Labor wrested from the Liberals at the 2022 election, would be abolished. Another woman, former Higgins MP Katie Allen, had been preselected for that one …
[Amelia] Hamer would be forgiven for feeling less than supported. Any paranoia on her part would not have been allayed by heroically patronising comments from former Liberal MP Jason Falinski (also booted by a teal at the last election, from the affluent NSW seat of Mackellar). Asked on Sky News if Frydenberg should return to Kooyong, and if so, what about Hamer, Falinski said: ‘I think Amelia is a team player, and she would understand that we want to put our best people on the field.’ And anyway, he continued, ‘there are other seats, especially in state parliament, that need to be filled.’”
Coalition’s nuclear ‘facts’ don’t match global reality — Chris Bowen (The Australian): “Truth is the first casualty in a culture war. And proponents of nuclear energy in Australia are at the frontline of a culture war. The next election will in no small part be a referendum on nuclear power. This is at the choosing of the federal opposition, which has decided to make it the centrepiece of its energy policy. But as the late, great US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it: they are entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts …
The most common of the falsities about nuclear power, uttered daily by Peter Dutton (and repeated last week by Judith Sloan on this page) is that Australia is the only G20 country without nuclear power, or proposing nuclear power. What about Germany? Its last nuclear power plant was turned off in April last year. Since then, Germany has experienced record renewables output, energy price falls and a material drop in emissions. Chancellor Olaf Scholz said last year: ‘The issue of nuclear energy in Germany is a dead horse. Anyone who wanted to build new nuclear power plants would need 15 years and would have to spend €15-20 billion (A$16.2-$21.6 billion) each.’”
