SYDNEY STABBING
A Sydney police officer was stabbed twice in the back of the head before pursuing and apprehending the alleged perpetrator, the SMH reports. Detective Superintendent Mark Fileman said the injured officer, who was situated near Hyde Park, was quickly joined by many other police in apprehending the suspect due to the heavy police presence in Sydney’s CBD, there covering Israel-Palestine protest activity. It’s the third high-profile stabbing in Sydney recently following the Bondi Junction attack and the Wakeley church stabbing. Fileman says it shows that police should be given greater powers to search members of the public for knives.
It comes as police have clashed with Israel-Palestine protesters in Melbourne, with The Australian reporting officers were “forced to spend Sunday afternoon keeping the peace outside Parliament”. The Age says around 7,000 people attended two separate protests, with police making six arrests. The Oz says a “long list of politicians and community members” addressed the pro-Israel “Never Again is Now” rally, including Liberal Senator James Paterson and former Liberal candidate Nyunggai Warren Mundine.
PRESIDENT-AT-LARGE
Overseas now and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s helicopter has crashed in the country’s mountains, the ABC reports, with the whereabouts of the president still unknown. The Guardian says that Iranian state TV claims the helicopter’s crash site has been found, a claim disputed by Iran’s Red Crescent humanitarian organisation. Heavy rain and fog are apparently hindering search efforts in the difficult terrain. The SMH says that there has been “immediate speculation from international commentators and online conspiracy theorists that the helicopter incident would be blamed on Israel”, though there appears to as yet be no evidence of any foul play.
Back home and The Guardian is reporting that major lenders are sometimes simply ignoring requests for assistance from those undergoing financial hardship in repaying their mortgage loans, according to an ASIC report to be released today. The issue is reportedly horrendous red tape and difficulty in completing hardship applications, leading to one-third of applications being dropped before completion. Who would own a house these days? Especially when, as The Age reports, your once award-winning estate might one day be subject to massive flood risk. Kensington resident Richard Reilly says new modelling that shows his house at risk of flooding is “confronting” — just like his flood insurance bill, which has increased from $180 to $5,000.
Say What?
How often do we see mass immigration passionately defended as if it exists for the benefit of foreigners, and that putting Australians first is racist? That’s how we also got this disastrous policy of multiculturalism.
Andrew Bolt
The Herald Sun’s chief attack dog decries the horror of a multicultural Australia in response to Peter Dutton’s calls to reduce immigration numbers.
Crikey Recap
“The ‘decisive action on the housing crisis’ Dutton refers to is his proposal, backed by the Liberals’ band of industry super haters (half of whom lost their seats in 2022), to enable young people to raid their superannuation to buy a house. That will push up house prices for the benefit of older asset owners and leave younger people without any retirement savings at all. It’s a very, very smart policy, because it ostensibly appeals to younger voters, and you can cry freedom against the iniquities of compulsory super, while every single cent of the benefits flows to the Liberal Party’s boomer base.
The problem is, Dutton’s fiddling at the margins on migration. He promises to cut permanent migration by a small amount, temporarily, but it will spring back up to 160,000 within four years. His commitment on foreign students — a far bigger contributor to the housing crisis and, ironically, almost entirely young people, albeit not ones registered to vote — is little different to Labor’s. ‘We will reduce excessive numbers of foreign students studying at metropolitan universities to relieve stress on rental markets in our major cities. We will work with universities to set a cap on foreign students.’”
“The YIMBYs currently want cities not merely planned on a spreadsheet, but resembling one, made of gray lines and numbers. Decrying the city as a museum, they propose instead the city as a mausoleum, in which we’re housed in blocks of numbered drawers. They need to reconstitute their position on the historical city and their magical thinking about the market so that a common cause on real action on affordable housing can be made.
Before and while we renovate the idea of the historical city, and until they revise their approach, every skerrick of power and influence has to be directed at the fight to defend the historical city. We, and our predecessors, conservatives and communists together, and all points between, held these back from ruin once, and we have to do it again. The struggle is unique. Bad policies and governments come and go. Once our history is gone, it’s gone. And we with it.”
“Us landlords are the most hard done by sorry sods in this sodding country, constantly having to manage the cruel and bitter expectations of our tenants — who I see as my children! — though they beat and batter us with requests for indulgences like ‘heating’, ‘water’ and ‘less carbon monoxide’, as if we’re some sort of quick-dial Jehova able to conjure these things from thin air (Susan, if your apartment feels ‘thin’, listen to your body and lay down and sleep instead of emailing me every five minutes, okay?!?).
To be a landlord in Australia is to be vilified, villainised and vasectomised (at least in my experience) by cruel ungratefuls who would love nothing more than to see us lose an empty investment property just so they may scuttle in and claim it for their own, like some cannibalistic hermit crab.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
The Trump trial is disturbing on so many levels (The New York Times) ($)
More than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent them (BBC)
Attempted coup foiled in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Euronews)
Russian attacks on Ukraine’s Kharkiv region kill at least 11 people (Al Jazeera)
Hikurangi scenario shows 22,000 Kiwis could die in a quake — are we doing enough to prepare? (The NZ Herald) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Decreasing costs in the federal budget is good news, usually — but not when the cause is fewer babies — Patricia Karvelas (the ABC): “But the government is acutely aware that families are ‘under the pump’ as the treasurer likes to say — and without that pump reducing its pressure, having children will become harder for many. If you don’t believe me, survey any random woman of child-bearing age and you will work it out pretty quickly. It’s hard to get ahead even without children. The stark reality is hard to ignore.
Australia’s current birth rate is 1.6, which is well below the ‘replacement rate’ of above 2.1 births per woman. For a population to grow, countries need families to have more than two children to replace their parents and account for infant mortality. When you juxtapose these numbers with the parallel debate we are having about immigration, the mixed messaging becomes pretty apparent. We need more people in the short and long term — but we haven’t quite worked out how to accommodate migrants and how to make Australians think it’s worth having more babies.”
Why has an Israel-Hamas ceasefire been so elusive? A timeline of key moments in the search for peace — (The Conversation): “However, ceasefires are not a panacea. This is as true for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it is for many other conflicts around the world, like Ukraine, Syria and Sudan. Ceasefires are often just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what needs to be done to provide meaningful, structural security for those most affected by complex systems of violence that transcend times of war.
Since 2007, there have been five major conflicts between Israel, Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza. All of these wars have ended in some sort of ceasefire agreement. Some of these ceasefires have been unilaterally declared, while others have been negotiated and agreed to by the parties to the conflict. Since the earliest days of the current war between Israel and Hamas, there have been numerous calls and attempts to negotiate a ceasefire.”
