Australia

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. 

Queensland’s controversial ban on puberty blockers and other hormone therapies is unlawful because of a failure to properly consult health executives on a decision affected by political interference, a court has heard.

The supreme court in Brisbane on Wednesday heard the ban should be overturned as part of a legal challenge launched by the mother of a transgender child. The mother cannot be identified for legal reasons.

Her lawyers told the court that Queensland Health’s director general, Dr David Rosengren, was required by law to consult with the executive of any service affected “in developing a health service directive” before he issued the order, banning such transgender hormone therapies for new patients aged under 18, on 28 January.

[…]

On the day the directive was issued, the state’s health executives were called to a Microsoft Teams meeting at 10am for consultation on the decision, which lasted 22 minutes.

At the same time as that meeting, Nicholls was announcing the decision at a press conference, the court was told.

Mark Steele KC, representing the mother, said Rosengren had signed off on publishing the health service directive an hour earlier and had repeatedly urged staff to ensure it was published at 10.30am.

The directive was published at 11.06am.

Steele told the court that Rosengren must have done so to line up with the end of Nicholls’ press conference.

“That can’t be genuine consultation if it’s just a fait accompli,” Steele told the court.

A majority of Victorian renters have experienced a "significant tenancy issue", yet only half of them made a complaint due to fears of landlord retaliation, a new report based on a survey of 1,000 renters has found.

The survey by the Consumer Policy Research Centre (CPRC) found 79 per cent of renters in Victoria had faced at least one problem in the past 12 months.

The most common issues were delays to repairs and maintenance, "unreasonable" rent increases and excessive photos and videos being taken during inspections.

But only 52 per cent of the affected households lodged a complaint, and even fewer — just 2 per cent — escalated their complaint to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT).

"What we saw is that there is a broader challenge that even where legal protections exist, renters may not feel safe or supported to use them," CPRC deputy chief executive Chandni Gupta said.

Um… You've heard of the Nazis, haven't you?

During the final day of the hearing on Tuesday, the court heard from a member of the public who observed the rally on December 3, 2023.

Mark Doery was a witness presented by the defence.

"It just looked like a bunch of boys in a group, going for a walk," Mr Doery told the court.

"Nothing stood out as offensive to me, but that's just me."

[…]

"The prosecution has not proved the behaviour of the accused was offensive," Mr Sewell said.

Ultimately, Magistrate Mike Wardell agreed and said he had not been convinced of Victoria Police's case that Mr Sewell's behaviour during the rally was "deeply or seriously insulting".

"Behaviour deemed unacceptably offensive by some, may not trouble others at all," Magistrate Wardell said.

"The test … is whether the impugned behaviour is so deeply and seriously insulting … as to warrant the interference in the criminal law.

"Society is evolving in attitudes all the time … Fringe groups are arising all the time."

This is an absurd claim. As an Australian who grew up in arguably (and famously) the most homogenously small-minded and bigoted part of it, I can assure you that "Russian operatives" did not turn Australia racist overnight via Facebook. Australia is a big box of racist fireworks; forty years of fiscal austerity is the match tossed in.

ASIO is investigating pro-Russian social media influencers who are working with an offshore media organisation to condemn Australia's support for Kyiv, while also using "social media to spread vitriolic, polarising commentary on anti-immigration protests and pro-Palestinian marches", he said.

"These state-sanctioned trolls are more than propaganda puppets; they want to turn hot-button issues into burning issues, tipping disagreement into division and division into violence," he said, giving the annual Lowy Institute address.

A large neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Network, had also attempted to leverage recent anti-immigration and cost-of-living rallies in Australia, he said.