In The Guardian

Oh, FFS! Currency issuing governments do not — and as a matter of brute accountancy can not — "pay for" anything through tax revenue!

New Zealand’s new government will scrap the country’s world-leading law to ban smoking for future generations to help pay for tax cuts – a move that public health officials believe will cost thousands of lives and be “catastrophic” for Māori communities.

In 2022 the country passed pioneering legislation which introduced a steadily rising smoking age to stop those born after January 2009 from ever being able to legally buy cigarettes. The law was designed to prevent thousands of smoking-related deaths and save the health system billions of dollars.

The legislation, which is thought have inspired a plan in the UK to phase out smoking for future generations, contained a slew of other measures to make smoking less affordable and accessible. It included dramatically reducing the legal amount of nicotine in tobacco products, allowing their sale only through special tobacco stores, and slashing the number of stores legally allowed to sell cigarettes from 6,000 to just 600 nationwide.

Long sentences handed to two Just Stop Oil protesters for scaling the M25 bridge over the Thames are a potential breach of international law and risk silencing public concerns about the environment, a UN expert has said.

In a strongly worded intervention, Ian Fry, the UN’s rapporteur for climate change and human rights, said he was “particularly concerned” about the sentences, which were “significantly more severe than previous sentences imposed for this type of offending in the past”.

He said: “I am gravely concerned about the potential flow-on effect that the severity of the sentences could have on civil society and the work of activists, expressing concerns about the triple planetary crisis and, in particular, the impacts of climate change on human rights and on future generations.”

Nearly 160,000 people are living in hidden, often overcrowded and sometimes dangerous bedsit-style accommodation across England, analysis has found.

Intelligence compiled by councils suggests there are almost 32,000 unlicensed large houses in multiple occupation (HMOs). These are believed to be home to at least 159,340 tenants, who are often drawn by cheaper rents amid the cost of living crisis.

Conditions can be dire, with examples of more than 10 people sharing a single bathroom, squalid conditions and little protection in place should a fire break out.

Landlords have doubled their borrowing to invest in HMOs since 2018. A landlord renting to a single family can expect to generate 5% of the property’s value in annual rent, whereas a licensed HMO typically produces about 7.5%, and in some cases 10%. Profits in unlicensed bedsits are likely to be even higher, as landlords can cram in more tenants and do not have to comply with licensing standards.

Some of the first protests against lockdowns were outside of gyms. And I was trying to understand what was going on with that. Why were these super buff folks having these protests, doing push-ups outside of their gyms?

And I came to the conclusion that there was something similar to the way in which some ultra-religious people were reacting, where they were insisting no matter what this was, they had to go pray. They had to be in these collective spaces, because that was their force field. Prayer was their protection against death or what happens after death.

I vividly remember watching the news one night, and there was a story about a megachurch that had broken lockdown. Journalists were interviewing people as they were streaming out of the megachurch. And they said: “Aren’t you afraid of Covid? You’ve just been in a room with thousands of unmasked people singing.” And the answer from one worshipper was: “No way! I’m bathed in the blood of the Lord.”

I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming.

I think that spark burns quietly inside so many of us. Smouldering since those days when everyone watched. A few weeks ago, I went to have my hair cut. The new barber glared at me, a tough, gnarly, squinting Scotsman. I was a bit terrified. Far too scared to turn round and walk out. He sat me down and asked me what I do. I said that I work on Doctor Who. “Never watch it,” he barked. OK.

But then he drifted. He smiled and got a faraway look in his eyes. He said he did watch it when he was a wee lad. Tea with mum and dad then the TV on a Saturday night. He remembered how scared he was, one week, when a woman simply walked into the sea. I said: ‘That’s Fury from the Deep! From 1968! That was Maggie Harris, possessed by a Weed Monster from under the North Sea, walking to her death.” I told him he could go and watch it again, on the iPlayer, 55 years later. He laughed and said he might, and then we talked about everything – TV and family and life and love and loss. All because of an old TV show.

Michael Fotheringham, the director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, says the number of corporate landlords is increasing and should “in theory’” offer more stability to tenants.

“Institutional investors behave slightly differently [to small-scale investors], in that they’re more focused on rental yield and the longer term, and therefore tend to be more friendly to longer leases,” he says. “And because they’re often partners in the development of sites, [the buildings are] often higher quality.”

But because corporate landlords are “regulated exactly as well as small-scale investors”, there is no more protection for renters that would ensure “a guarantee of good behaviour”, Fotheringham says.

The executive director of advocacy organisation Better Renting, Joel Dignam, says Victoria should pull itself into line with the ACT and expand its rental protections to also ban no-grounds evictions after the first 12 months of a lease.

“[Forcing people out of a rental is] really hard to justify for a corporate landlord,” Dignam says. “They’re clearly not moving in, they’re not selling the property.”

The situation is particularly dire for people on low incomes, with a single person on jobseeker having to spend at least 78% of their income to rent a one-bedroom apartment in any capital city. In Sydney, a one-bedroom apartment would on average cost 137% of their $22,100 annual income, making it the least affordable place in the country.

A single pensioner would need to spend 50% of their income to rent in all capitals except Adelaide and Hobart and at least 32% of their income in regional areas.

To Fitzroy locals, carrot man – who calls the inner-city Melbourne neighbourhood home – is simply known as Nathan.

VKM first photographed him during Melbourne’s Covid lockdowns and over walks in Carlton Gardens a friendship was formed.

“I know him now just as Nathan,” VKM says. “When we were walking, I’m not thinking about the man with a carrot. But then you see people’s faces and people’s reaction and it’s like, ‘oh that’s right, I’m with the guy who’s got the carrot’.”

For such a public persona, VKM points out Nathan is “humble and shy”.

Guardian Australia approached Nathan for an interview via a friend, but was informed he was happy for the carrot to speak for him.

Boris Johnson told senior advisers that the Covid virus was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people” and he was “no longer buying” the fact the NHS was overwhelmed during the pandemic, the pandemic inquiry has heard.

In a WhatsApp message sent to his top aides in October 2020, the former prime minister said he had been “slightly rocked” by Covid infection rates and suggested he was, as a result, unconvinced that hospitals were on the brink despite public warnings from NHS chiefs and frontline staff.

The former chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, in his diaries described a “bonkers set of exchanges” in a meeting from that August. He noted that Johnson appeared “obsessed with older people accepting their fate” and letting younger people get on with their lives during the pandemic.

People leaving share houses during the pandemic lockdowns in search of more space are touted as one key reason behind the rise in low vacancy rates and high rents.

But community manager at Flatmates.com.au, Claudia Conley, said the trend is reversing.

“The volume of traffic we’ve seen in October we don’t usually see until December, indicating that demand for share accommodation is heating up well ahead of our peak season,” Conley said.

As the housing crisis continues to push people into homelessness, Everybody’s Home is calling for an ambitious plan of making one in 10 dwellings social housing over the next decade.