Linkage

Key points

• Poor building quality, conditions and environmental performance is prevalent in Australia’s housing stock. In a large, national survey in 2022, 70 per cent of households reported one or more major building problems.
• The ability to accurately measure and monitor the characteristics of the housing stock as a whole has never been greater. The current national data infrastructure is insufficient.
• Australian policy that deals with housing standards is fragmented across federal and state and territory governments, and portfolios. When compared to international benchmarks, it is weak and overly reliant on voluntary measures.
• A national strategy to improve housing standards should be developed. Short-term, considerable opportunities exist to enhance housing standards via mandatory disclosure of performance at point of sale or lease, minimum standards in the rental sector and stronger performance requirements for new houses.
• Policy action will have to balance lobbyist resistance. Lessons from two case studies show that change is possible but requires mobilisation of a strong narrative by advocates.

This is quite touching. If I had my time over, I'd be a librarian.

Part of the magic of a library, as I was reminded over and over again in the days I spent at Battle during winter and spring, is its capaciousness as social infrastructure. It is very important, Giles said to me that Thursday, that there is “somewhere where everybody can come”. In its disparity of needs and personalities and ages sharing a common space, its tolerance and resilience, the modern library has the potential to feel, as it did on that wintry morning of the quiz, like nothing so much as a big and rackety family.

The trouble comes when libraries – and the underpaid, overstretched people who work in them – start to become sole providers for all these things: when years of cost-cutting mean that the state has effectively reneged on all but the most unavoidable of its responsibilities to the troubled, the poor, the educationally challenged, the lonely, the physically unwell, the lost or the homeless. “We risk becoming a social care safety net,” said Nick Poole, the outgoing CEO of the library association Cilip, and “our staff are not clinical staff”.

[…]

Do you ever feel intimidated? I asked Giles one day. “Yeah – occasionally,” she said. Libraries have a largely female workforce. There is a policy at Central that no one should work alone, but female staff can still feel vulnerable. In his eye-opening 2017 memoir about working at a regional library, Reading Allowed, Chris Paling told the story of a reader, “the Thin Man”, who took to stalking a female library assistant home.

That Saturday, lunchtime was a challenge. Staff had 15 minutes, but Curran was struggling to give everyone a break while making sure no one was on a desk alone. “It hurts the head,” he said. Eventually he solved it by getting less than five minutes himself – which he used to make Giles a cup of tea. They passed each other in front of visas and Curran gave Giles a shoulder bump. Giles rolled her eyes, tolerantly, at me. She had a cold she could not shake, but had gone into work anyway. “I wish people knew,” Giles had said to me one day about Battle, “just how much effort we put in. I think we would like it to mean more to people.” It’s a point that comes up among library staff again and again.

The Australian Financial Review reported that NIB’s CEO has said that the insurer needs an increase of around that mark because “ultimately, we have to cover claims inflation like any insurer because if you don’t eventually you go out of business.”

While this might seem obvious, it ignores the reality that the main reason private health insurers might go out of business is because people hate the product they offer, and even with all the carrots and sticks designed to force people to take out health insurance, a majority of Australians do not want it.

Over six years ago I pondered if private health insurance was a con. In the time since, during which we have experienced the greatest health crisis in a century, nothing has really changed the answer.

Not only does it remain untrue that private health insurance takes stress off the public system, it also remains a fib to call it private – it’s a public system merely carried out in an inefficient manner to deliver a product most people don’t want and haven’t ever wanted.

In the late 1990s, after 15 or so years of Medicare, fewer than a third of Australians held private health insurance. Then John Howard decided that the private sector needed help from the public sector.

He introduced a surcharge to penalise higher income earners who did not have private health insurance.

The stick was not enough. Howard then tried the carrot: providing a rebate on your private health insurance. These rebates are quite pricey – the government this year will spend about $7.5bn on them.

It did bugger all – you literally could not pay people to buy it.

Sorely tempted to just copy and paste the whole thing. As is usual with danah, every other sentence deserves to be on a t-shirt.

In short, “Does social media harm teenagers?” is not the same question as “Can social media be risky for teenagers?”

The language of “harm” in this question is causal in nature. It is also legalistic. Lawyers look for “harms” to place blame on or otherwise regulate actants. […]

Risk is a different matter. Getting out of bed introduces risks into your life. Risk is something to identify and manage. Some environments introduce more potential risks and some actions reduce the risks. Risk management is a skill to develop. And while regulation can be used to reduce certain risks, it cannot eliminate them. And it can also backfire and create more risks.

[…]

In the United States, we have a bad habit of thinking that risks can be designed out of every system. I will never forget when I lived in Amsterdam in the 90s, and I remarked to a local about how odd I found it that there were no guardrails to prevent cars from falling into the canals when they were parking. His response was “you’re so American” which of course prompted me to say, “what does THAT mean?” He explained that, in the Netherlands, locals just learned not to drive their cars into the canals, but Americans expected there to be guardrails for everything so that they didn’t have to learn not to be stupid. He then noted out that every time he hears about a car ending up in the canal, it is always an American who put it there. Stupid Americans. (I took umbrage at this until, a few weeks later, I read a news story about a drunk American driving a rental into the canal.)

[…]

People certainly face risks when encountering any social environment, including social media. This then triggers the next question: Do some people experience harms through social media? Absolutely. But it’s important to acknowledge that most of these harms involve people using social media to harm others. It’s reasonable that they should be held accountable. It’s not reasonable to presume that you can design a system that allows people to interact in a manner where harms will never happen.

[…]

I will admit that one thing that intrigues me is that many of those who propagate hate are especially interested in blocking children from technology for fear that allowing their children to be exposed to difference might make them more tolerant. (No, gender is not contagious, but developing a recognition that gender is socially and politically constructed — and fighting for a more just world — sure is.)

Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.

Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.

[…]

In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
3. There is no 3.

My happy but plain vanilla life stands in contrast to the lurid rhetoric and terrifying intentions of Governor Greg Abbott, his allies in the state Legislature, and Republican lawmakers across the country, as well as the goals of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s extremist blueprint for America’s future. Friends out of state urge me to leave Texas, which is where I have always lived. They fear for my safety. Some trans people I know refuse even to travel through Texas.

Their fears are not unwarranted. What I’ve found, however, is that even in rural Texas the average person couldn’t care less about my gender. Most Texans who know me and hear my story are supportive, wherever they happen to lie on the political spectrum. They may not understand it, but they accept it and move on. Those who do shun, hate, or fear seem, in my view, to be either insecure in their own identity or to be captured by merchants of fear in right-wing media.

Trans people endure constant psychic strain as we make our spaces and serve our communities while lawmakers plot our extinction. But the staged uproar over our supposed effrontery has less to do with reality than with our antagonists’ covert aims and unexamined anxieties. Someone I know recently suggested that trans people bring hate upon our own heads by always seeking attention and affirmation. The prosaic truth is that we simply want to exist.

This is just heartbreaking. And this was two years ago!

As some states become increasingly hostile to transgender youth, families are weighing a difficult decision of whether to leave their schools, jobs and communities behind to flee to a state with greater LGBTQ protections.

There's a freaking pandemic going on!

In short:

The government will introduce laws to restrict protesters in Victoria, following a series of anti-Semitic incidents across the state.

Face coverings, certain flags and attachment devices will be banned at protests.

The government will also introduce legislation which would establish protest-free zones around places of worship.

There's a place of worship on practically every block in the CBD!

Premier Jacinta Allan said recent discussions with Victoria's Jewish community in the wake of the recent suspected terror attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue had informed the move.

[…]

"There are too many who want to qualify anti-Semitism or make excuses for it, and I want to make it absolutely clear that I never will."

Yes, well, it really wouldn't do have a precise definition of anti-Semitism, would it? Best to just define it as "anything I don't like". That's appropriately respectful of Jewish people. This is just disgraceful and obviously targeted at the weekly pro-Palestinian rally in Melbourne.

To paraphrase Judi Bari, I hope the Victorian Police catch whoever was responsible for the synagogue fire. And sack them.

Finally, the pervasive tendency among nominally anti-MAGA leaders to accommodate Trumpism in power and cling to a treacherous idea of “normalcy” is also rooted in foundational myths that shape the collective imaginary of liberal America, in particular. We may be decades removed from the heyday of the so-called “liberal consensus” of the post-war era, that shared understanding among the country’s elite that America is fundamentally good, the institutions essentially healthy, and the U.S. inexorably on its way to overcoming whatever vestigial problems there might still be – but such ideas of exceptional goodness are still powerful today. They often go hand in hand with a mythical tale of American democracy being exceptionally stable. Never mind that, empirically speaking, multiracial democracy has existed for only about 60s years in this country and has been hotly contested at all times: What could possibly happen to America’s supposedly “old, consolidated” democracy? A fundamentally healthy, functioning, consolidated democracy cannot, in this imagination, be brought down by an authoritarian threat rising within its midst. So, either the system is not healthy – or the Trumpist regime is not an acute threat to the survival of American democracy. The latter is a much more comfortable proposition.

The Left in the U.S. doesn’t want an energetic president with the power to bend the executive branch to the will of the American people. They don’t want a vibrant Congress where great questions are debated and decided in front of the American people and the tradeoffs made there. They don’t want empowered members. They want discouraged and bored back benchers. They want all-empowered career “experts” like Tony Fauci to wield power behind the curtains.

And in America, the scary part is that this regime is now increasingly arrayed against the American people. It is both woke and weaponized. The national security state, with organs like the FBI, NSA, and CIA, are aligned against the American people, who are outraged by this revolution they never assented to. The FBI is investigating concerned parents attending open school board meetings as domestic terrorists. They are putting political opponents in jail. The NSA is surveilling the conversations of citizens. Therefore, the hour is late and time is of the essence to expose the charade, rally the country against it toward self-government once again, and seize every leverage point to arrest the damage.