A quick scan of today’s news paints a very sorry picture of a callous, incompetent, ideologically-driven, and arguably corrupt, government.
Aboriginal youth are being detained at a rate of more than 20 times that of non-indigenous young people in the justice system.
There is rising unmet demand in Australia for accommodation for people who are homeless, new figures show. The Productivity Commission report showed 33.8 per cent of Australians needing access to accommodation services in 2018-19 were not getting them.
Older Australians are waiting longer to enter residential aged care, with most waiting about five months after being approved for a spot by a health professional. The median waiting time was 152 days for 2018/19, an increase from 121 days from the year before, according to a Productivity Commission report released on Wednesday.
More pensioners than ever are having to work part-time just to get by according to new research, with nearly 5 per cent of people on the pension now doing paid work.
In Australia in 2019, politicians spent more time discussing how best to punish environmental protesters than they did devising legislation that might protect the climate. In part, the pivot away from climate represents a simple bait and switch. After the world recorded its second-hottest year ever, conversations about hazard reduction help drown out conversations about climate. But the new focus also shifts the debate in a direction the government likes.
If environmental bureaucracy had prevented hazard reduction (it didn’t), the answer lies in slashing green tape, an easy extension of an already existing ideological commitment to deregulation. More importantly, the identification of (a largely bogus) arson outbreak transforms an ecological crisis into a law and order problem, paving the way for new legislation and fresh penalties.
A legal challenge against plans to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight has been launched in the Federal Court. The Wilderness Society is taking the national regulator – the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) – to court after it granted conditional environmental approval to Norwegian oil company Equinor to conduct drilling.
Nationals deputy leader Bridget McKenzie is facing an investigation into whether she breached ministerial standards as part of a sporting grants scandal.
Councils and sports clubs in Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah received more than $1m in grants under a controversial federal program, including a $70,000 grant to a surf lifesaving club of which Abbott was a member. Trent Zimmerman did not declare to parliament that he was a patron of the Hunters Hill Rugby Club, which received a $500,000 grant just before the election.
The office of Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton was suspected of leaking information it was told was classified about the cost of medically evacuating refugees to Taiwan, as the Government geared up to campaign against newly passed medevac legislation last year.
And that’s just today’s news … so far.
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