Australia

The State Library of Victoria (SLV) conceded it had “created unintended concerns” with its proposal to cut 39 jobs and reduce services to focus on more “digital experiences”.

Musician Nick Cave was among 220 distinguished names to sign an open letter calling for the board to explain the restructure, which would have halved the number of reference librarians, from 25 to 10.

In a statement, board president Christine Christian said the library had “decided to withdraw” the proposal after “careful consideration of feedback”.

“Our focus will remain on strengthening services, modernising operations and ensuring the library continues to thrive as a leading home for history, arts, culture and knowledge for the next generation,” she said.

An email was mistakenly sent to a junior doctor who allegedly spoke up about being rostered on for 10 night shifts in a row, a practice which has been deemed unsafe for staff and their patients.

The message from a manager stated, “I wonder if any of them realise that they are a doctor and that this is what happens.

“Oh, that’s right… I forgot.

“Life style before career.

“God help us in the future.

“We are going to have a workforce of clinical marshmellows.”

Doctors Union President Dr Nicholas Spooner said the email was not an isolated incident at one hospital.

“It is a symptom of the broader crisis within our public hospitals that is playing out across NSW,” he said.

“Hospitals are severely understaffed and can’t meet patient demand. We have a toxic workplace culture that demands doctors risk their own health and safety to fill rosters.

Home ownership is falling fast among poorer Australians who are approaching retirement. Between 1981 and 2021, home ownership rates among the poorest 40 per cent of 45-54 year-olds fell from 68 per cent to just 54 per cent.

Most older working Australians who rent do not have sufficient savings to keep paying rent in retirement. The poorest 40 per cent of renting households aged 55-64 have less than $40,000 in net financial wealth.

Commonwealth Rent Assistance, which supplements the Age Pension for poorer retirees who rent, is far too low.

The government has lifted the maximum rate of Rent Assistance by 27 per cent – over and above inflation – in the past two budgets. But even after these increases, a single retiree who relies solely on income support can afford to rent just 4 per cent of one-bedroom homes in Sydney, 13 per cent in Brisbane, and 14 per cent in Melbourne.

And the rents paid by people who get Rent Assistance have increased nearly 1.5 times faster than the maximum rate of the payment since 2001.

Well said, this fellow:

Supporters of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and elements of the media have steadfastly defended the indefensible – the atrocities against Palestinians – and this campaign has deliberately created a serious confusion in our national discussion about what antisemitism is.

Antisemitism is not criticism of Israel or Zionism, nor is it a timeless or mystical hatred. It is not something caused by migration. It’s a political and historical form of racism that takes different shapes in different contexts. Right now, it is real, escalating and sometimes lethal – but it is being tackled in exactly the wrong way.

We have heard calls not only to investigate how a massacre occurred, but to place universities, protest movements, migrants, cultural institutions and human rights bodies under suspicion. As though they are responsible for bloodshed.
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I want antisemitism confronted. I want it named and addressed with urgency. But I do not want it treated as a political tool, a justification for silencing dissent or expanding state power in ways that will ultimately harm us all.

Do I hear dominoes falling with grim predictability? Plus: there's a Northern Territory Government? You learn something new every day.

In short:

Health Minister Steve Edgington has announced the Northern Territory government will no longer fund puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormone treatments for children.

He said the government's public health focus would instead "remain on adolescent mental health services".

What's next?

Mr Edgington says the policy will affect "a handful of young teenagers" who had been accessing the treatments through the NT's public health system.

[…]

Children in the Northern Territory will no longer have access to publicly funded puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones after Health Minister Steve Edgington announced the government would follow Queensland's lead in suspending the treatments. […]

"Territory kids deserve to grow up free from these dangerous, ideologically driven practices with irreversible consequences," he said.

"The Territory's public health focus will remain on adolescent mental health services."

The move follows pressure from the Australian Christian Lobby, which presented a petition to the government in October 2024, calling on it to "suspend all medical and surgical transitioning for children in the NT".

Key findings

• The housing sub-function of the Federal Budget was $3.5 billion in 2021/22, but this did not include key housing support measures such as Commonwealth Rent Assistance and property tax concessions. With these included, actual 2021-2022 federal expenditure on housing is estimated at $27 billion.
• The share of federal housing spending going to the lowest 20% of income earners declined from 44% in 1993 to 23% in 2023, while the share going to the top 20% increased from 9% to 43%.
• In the last decade alone, the share going to the top 20% of earners has increased by over a third.
• The share of total federal housing expenditure going to property investors rose from 16.5% in 1993-94 to 61.4% in 2021-22.
• Investor tax concessions have grown from $1.5 billion in 2000 to an estimated $17 billion in 2024, effectively operating as a shadow housing policy with a significant impact on the market.
• In 2023-2024, federal investor tax breaks will be worth almost five times the amount spent by the Federal Government on social housing and homelessness services through the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement and the $2billion Social Housing Accelerator Fund, announced in 2023.
• Strategic expenditure on social housing and homelessness services, which are negotiated between the Federal and State/Territory Governments, once made up well over half of total federal housing spending. Now just 7% of total federal housing expenditure goes toward these programs.

You can't make this stuff up:

Insiders at Australia’s biggest private company – Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting – have lifted the veil on what they describe as a “bizarre” culture within the organisation that includes annual requests to thank Australia’s richest person.

While not compulsory, the thank you messages are encouraged by senior executives and are requested across the company, including from workers at its mine sites.

[…]

One former employee describes the thank you messages as a “wild concept”, particularly given that Rinehart has become the country’s richest person in part off the back of her staff’s work.

“We are encouraged to email her thanks for literally making her the richest person around,” he says. “Because the transaction where I work my guts out and she becomes even more rich is not enough – we should thank her yearly, apparently.”

[…]

Insiders have told Guardian Australia that staff are frequently exposed to political material, with an email seen by the Guardian encouraging workers to listen to Trump’s inaugural address.

The email, sent as an Australia Day message by Veldsman, talks about Rinehart’s visit to the US and Trump’s “strong commitment to creating a field that attracts investment into the US, something our government here in Australia could learn a thing or two about! While Australia has punched above its weight on the global stage, we are faced with increasing headwinds brought about by ill-conceived tape and tax that is stifling business.”

Guardian Australia understands that Hancock Prospecting distributes the conservative magazine the Spectator in the company’s office buildings and mining sites.

"I have not seen anything like this anywhere else in the world," said Lisa Given, professor of Information Sciences from RMIT, who specialises in age-assurance technology.

"As people learn about the implications of this, we will likely see people stepping up and saying, 'Wait a minute, why wasn't I told that this was going to happen?'"

From December 27, Google — which dominates the Australian search market with a share of more than 90 per cent — and its rival, Microsoft, will have to use some form of age-assurance technology on users when they sign in, or face fines of almost $50 million per breach.

[…]

Despite the apparent magnitude of the shift, it has mostly gone unnoticed, in stark contrast to the political and media fanfare surrounding the teen social media ban, which will block under-16s from major platforms using similar technology.

As for why so few people have noticed, it may be because the changes took place away from the halls of parliament, in the relatively dry world of regulation.

[…]

Search engines will have a suite of options to choose from for checking the ages of their Australian users.

There are seven main methods listed in the new regulations:

• Photo ID checks
• Face scanning age estimation tools
• Credit card checks
• Digital ID
• Vouching by the parent of a young person
• Using AI to guess a user's age based on the data the company already has
• Relying on a third party that has already checked the user's age

A petition is currently calling for the SLV management and government ‘to withdraw any proposed changes and hold a public meeting, where Victorians can have a say in how their library is run’.

What needs to be debated at such a meeting is as basic as the question: what’s a library for? It would appear that, under the current and immediate past leadership, a core function of this cultural institution includes “programs, scholarships and advice to budding entrepreneurs”. Indeed, Christine Christian donated $2 million to the Library for that purpose.

StartSpace, set up with Christian’s money, provides free membership for what it calls “co-working”, plus, for $350 a month membership, access to the “Loft” with conference and printing facilities, as well as training programs and mentor sessions. When then-CEO Kate Torney announced its opening in March 2020, her statement underlined that “StartSpace functions solely to benefit the community and does not operate for profit”.

Torney also mentioned that “leading international professional services firm PwC” (the company contracted but failing to review Robodebt in 2017) was, at that time, providing a training program on a pro-bono basis.

So, while the professional services of a company implicated in the illegal Robodebt scheme are acceptable, writers contracted to deliver workshops to teenagers were, on the advice of the Board led by Christian, not trusted to deliver their program without breaking the law.

A nice little potted history of Australian telecommunication privatisation failure:

A closer look at the record tells a different story. Technological progress in telecommunications produced a steady reduction in prices throughout the 20th century, taking place around the world and regardless of the organisational structure. The shift from analog to digital telecommunications accelerated the process. Telecom Australia, the statutory authority that became Telstra, recorded total factor productivity growth rates as high as 10% per year, remaining profitable while steadily reducing prices.

But for the advocates of neoliberal microeconomic reform, this wasn’t enough. They hoped, or rather assumed, that competition would produce both better outcomes for consumers and a more efficient rollout of physical infrastructure. […]

The failures emerged early. Seeking to cement their positions before the advent of open competition, Telstra and Optus spent billions rolling out fibre-optic cable networks. But rather than seeking to maximise total coverage, the two networks were virtually parallel, a result that is a standard prediction of economic theory. The rollout stopped when the market was fully opened in 1997, leaving parts of urban Australia with two redundant fibre networks and the rest of the country with none.

The next failure came with the rollout of broadband. Under public ownership, this would have been a relatively straightforward matter. But the newly privatised Telstra played hardball, demanding a system that would cement its monopoly position in fixed-line infrastructure. The end result was the need to return to public ownership with the national broadband network, while paying Telstra handsomely for access to ducts and wires that the public had owned until a few years previously.

Meanwhile the hoped-for competition in mobile telephony has failed to emerge. The near-duopoly created in 1991, with Telstra as the dominant player and Optus playing second fiddle, has endured for more than 30 years.