TERRITORIAL APPROACH
We need to restrict alcohol across the entire Northern Territory, Indigenous academic and leader Professor Marcia Langton says, as an “absolutely necessary public health measure” to reduce domestic violence (DV) and sexual violence. “You have to have alcohol restrictions in place at all times — no exceptions,” Langton said, as the ABC reports, not just in Aboriginal communities, otherwise “grog runners” will exploit the system. There’s always a way of allowing people such as tourists to drink without making it available to everyone, she added — look at the Gove Peninsula’s individual liquor permits. Langton also slammed the NT for allocating just $20 million to DV, the NT News ($) continues, saying the $180 million recommended by stakeholders was the “absolute minimum” needed. She was speaking at a DV inquest.
To the other territory now, and nurses, social workers and counsellors can talk about the option of voluntary assisted dying to terminally ill people in the ACT, The Australian ($) reports, if new legislation introduced on Tuesday passes the parliamentary muster. It also allows patients with 12 months or less to live to access assisted suicide — compare that with Victoria, Tasmania, NSW, South Australia and Western Australia where it’s six months, and Queensland where it’s 12. But Canberrans would have to have a condition that is “advanced, progressive and expected to cause death”, be suffering intolerably, be over 18 and be living in the ACT for a year. Speaking of illness — Australia is officially in its eighth COVID wave, the Brisbane Times ($) reports, but we are past the emergency phase because of our vaccinations and previous infections.
DOLLARS AND SENSE
One of Australia’s two biggest port operators didn’t pay a cent of tax, Guardian Australia reports, despite making $4.5 billion in eight years. How? A new report alleged DP World may have “artificially reduced profits”, though it says it paid “in accordance with Australia’s tax regulations”. Therein lies the problem, Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research’s Jason Ward told the paper: our tax laws suck. Although the ATO says there are non-illegal reasons a company may pay no tax, Ward says Australia needs “public country-by-country reporting for all multinationals” who operate in Australia. Labor promised to introduce country-by-country tax reporting in July 2024.
This comes as Australia’s homes cost a record amount in Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane, Guardian Australia reports. Prices in Sydney are 7.51% higher than a year ago, while Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth prices are double that, at 15% higher. CoreLogic said its national home value index surged 0.9% in October alone, up from September’s 0.7%. It comes as Brisbane City Council removed and dumped inner-city park tents, sleeping bags and toiletries, leaving the homeless, well, more homeless. “They don’t give you the opportunity to take your stuff,” one person told the Brisbane Times ($). Meanwhile, about 86,000 people repaying Centrelink debt will get a pause after the Commonwealth ombudsman found an income test used had “misinterpreted and unlawfully applied” the Social Security Act from at least 2003 until December 7, 2020, (separate from robodebt). 7News reports people who make BPAY payments or bank transfers need to stop. Direct debits will be paused by Services Australia.
THE GREAT DIVIDE
Everyone in the Labor Party should condemn “from the river to the sea” chants that call for the extermination of the state of Israel, former minister Stephen Conroy told Sky News Australia. That’s the view of Hamas, and the “murderous criminal terrorists” in that group are “not committed to a two-state solution”, he said. Conroy called Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s criticism of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese supposedly not going hard enough as “cheap politicking”, though acknowledged “mixed views” more broadly in the Labor Party about the Middle East. It comes as former prime minister Scott Morrison said Beijing might exploit Albanese’s China trip for propaganda purposes, the SMH ($) reports. “He cannot control what the Communist Party in China will do with that and how those images will be used, and how that can be taken advantage of,” Morrison said.
To more political division now and the WA opposition is in meltdown after Nationals MP Merome Beard defected to the Liberals last night, WA Today ($) reports, meaning Liberal leader Libby Mettam could become opposition leader without forming a coalition with the Nats. Here’s what happened: the Liberals were relegated to a minor party after the 2021 election which left them with just two members in the lower house. The Nationals had four. The Nats told Mettam they’d give her the opposition leader role so the two parties could form a coalition if she a) didn’t run candidates against theirs, and b) if they ran a joint upper house ticket. At the weekend, the Liberals said no — and now with three MPs in the lower house (and seven in the upper house) they don’t need the Nats anyway.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
It’s 1938. Hitler addresses Nuremberg, there are air raids in Spain, and the world is on tenterhooks about another Great War. The way most people learn about these things is in a packed broadsheet newspaper, or sitting in armchairs around a tinny radio. But when American families settle in on a chilly November night and hit the switch on their radio, they are met with news of an apocalypse. Terse news bulletins continually interrupt the programming to inform listeners of a sudden intergalactic explosion, and then of a strange object falling on to a farm in New Jersey. A news correspondent reports live, telling listeners that they’re seeing creatures come forward right before their very eyes. The local cops, the reporter continues, are waving a flag of truce. People all over the country sit on the edge of their seats. The reporter is nearly hysterical when they say the creatures have incinerated the cops with a heat ray before the feed goes dead.
The airwaves linger silently for a moment before newscasters inform people it is a mass alien invasion; the US military, they tell frozen listeners, is futile. Citizens are fleeing earth as alien war machines release plumes of toxic gas, a live report from a Manhattan rooftop continues, before it goes dead too. Emergency lines were absolutely jammed, the ABC says, as panicked listeners scrambled to understand how to survive the end of times. The whole thing is actually just a Halloween episode called “The War of the Worlds”, written by one Orson Welles, then just 23 years old. Police actually break into the CBS radio station and are held back by executives as they try to stop the episode (which continues on from its gripping opening). There are reports of people barricading themselves in and even car accidents, though it’s been debated since. The next day, a not-very-apologetic Welles apologises at a press conference. “What a night,” he told a friend. They came “looking for blood”, he recalled, and they were so disappointed he “wasn’t haemorrhaging”.
Hoping you know what’s what today.
SAY WHAT?
It should never have stopped, and it wasn’t Australia that stopped it. It was China who stopped it because they didn’t like the fact that we stood up to them.
Scott Morrison
Never one to embrace responsibility, the former PM said it wasn’t his fault that China rolled out a slew of tariffs against Australian producers of wine, barley, coal, lobster and more, even though he was prime minister at the time.
CRIKEY RECAP
“There are Telegram groups where people in Gaza report where the bombing is happening, and there was a single message in there that named my street, in my neighbourhood, and I suddenly thought: ‘This is my family.’
“I immediately called my mother in Gaza to check if everyone was safe, and she told me not to worry and said she would call me back. Ten minutes later my brother called me from Gaza. He said: ‘It’s your sister.’ I didn’t understand what he meant. He said: ‘They targeted her house, and the house just obliterated above their heads’.”
“In 2021, Australia’s most prominent real estate data company CoreLogic bought property technology company AiRE for its ‘real estate digital assistant’ RiTA. The artificial intelligence product analyses customer data to create call lists and, unknowingly to the recipient, automates text message and email communications with prospective and current investors, buyers and landlords.
“RiTA also creates a prospectability score to determine the ‘best owner for a user to prospect’ which is based on data including the kind of property and when it was last sold.”
“Heh heh. So, you know those ‘close doors’ buttons in elevators that don’t work? Or the pedestrian crossing buttons that don’t do anything? That’s kinda what our ‘Manage Booking’ feature is. ‘Qantas did not represent to consumers that the ‘Manage Booking’ page would, at all times, necessarily reflect the latest scheduling decisions that Qantas had made.’
“So when we cancel your nebulous bundle of contractual obligations, we left it on our website so you could have fun pretending to manage details like booking a seat or ordering a meal. None of it had an actual result, but we like to think it made you feel better while you did it. Yet again, we’re thinking of you!”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Dozens killed in Israeli air attack on Gaza refugee camp: Medical official (Al Jazeera)
Microsoft accused of damaging Guardian’s reputation with AI-generated poll (The Guardian)
Canada’s economy hasn’t grown since May, new GDP numbers for August show (CBC)
Scott Robertson officially takes over from Ian Foster as All Blacks head coach (Stuff)
Open hatred of Jews surges globally, inflamed by Gaza war (Reuters)
Spanish bishops apologise for abuse but dispute ‘outrageous’ figures (euronews)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Seat at world table a priority amid global turmoil in Ukraine, Middle East Israel-Hamas conflict — Anthony Albanese (The Australian) ($): “What happens in the world matters at home. Global dynamics impact our security and our economy but, as we’ve seen through times of COVID and conflict, we also feel the effects in our household bills and jobs. We feel it every time we visit the shops or the petrol pump. Everything is interlinked. Never has this been more evident than during my visit to Washington last week. My meetings there came at a time when our world faces a set of profound challenges. We are confronted by threats to peace and tests of the international rules-based order, making the work of strengthening our US alliance as essential as it has ever been.
“For more than eight decades our alliance has thrived, even through testing times. A partnership of equals where we respect each other’s vital interests and work together in common cause. Last week, I worked with President Joe Biden to turn the game-changing climate and clean energy compact we signed in May into a commercial reality. Critical minerals and rare earths are the key to unlocking a net-zero economy, and Australia is uniquely positioned to be a major player in this rapidly expanding sector. We are the world’s largest supplier of lithium.”
Past lies about war in the Middle East are getting in the way of the truth today — Zeynep Tufekci (The New York Times) ($) : “In the Middle East, the devastating aftermath of that war — justified by false claims — has never ended. To make matters worse, the Israeli government has a long history of making false claims and denying responsibility for atrocities that later proved to be its doing. In one example of many, in 2014, four boys younger than 13 were killed by Israeli air strikes while playing by themselves at a beach — three of them hit by a second blast while desperately fleeing the initial blast.
“There was first a concerted effort among some pro-Israel social media activists to claim the explosions were due to a Hamas rocket misfiring. The Israeli military initially claimed that ‘the target of this strike was Hamas terrorist operatives’. However, the beach was near a hotel housing journalists for Western outlets, including at least one from The New York Times, who witnessed the killings. The Guardian reported that journalists who visited the area in the aftermath saw no weapons or equipment and that kids regularly played there. Israel then investigated and exonerated itself. Peter Lerner, then a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said that it had targeted a ‘compound belonging to Hamas’ naval police and naval force (including naval commandos) and which was utilised exclusively by militants’.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Eora Nation Country (also known as Sydney)
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Writer Stuart Lloyd will talk about his new book, Started Out Just Drinking Beer, at Better Read Than Dead bookshop.
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Author Vivian Bi will talk about her new book, Sunshine in the Dark, at Glee Books.
