Tag: Domestic

• The banks are doing something right

  October 13, 2018 12:10 pm Comments Off on The banks are doing something right

  CONTENT WARNING: Domestic violence, sexual assault
   
  In August, a young woman who I haven’t seen in years shared a Facebook post. It was the first that I’d heard of the domestic violence policies of the Big Four Banks.
  I was sitting in the passenger seat of the car, three or four years ago, when my mother started speaking about a friend of hers who was faced with an impossible decision. She hadn’t worked in years, was raising kids, and had limited access to accounts controlled by her husband, but she desperately wanted to leave the relationship.
  To this my mother said, “money and assets are survival. Put it away before you get married and never speak of it again.”
  Yet, not everybody has the foresight, or the ability, or the initial capital to put away enough to leave a financially abusive partner, especially given that Australia has the second highest household debt-to-savings ratio in the world. Someone’s savings should never define their ability to leave a relationship.
  The Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence describes financial abuse as “difficult to identify” and “poorly understood.”
  Banks can now be one of the first points of call for survivors. They can make a difference in people being able to leave relationships and preventing them from falling into poverty once they make the brave decision to do so.
  So what are the Big 4 Banks doing about it, and how do you access their support? (Note: Banks cannot remove someone from a joint account without a court order).
   
  Commonwealth Bank
  The Commonwealth Bank Domestic & Family Violence Emergency Assistance Program offers:
  At the point of leaving:

  Access to specialist trauma counsellors
  Financial assistance
  Safe establishment of bank accounts
  Telephone support

  Broader support:

  Education programs on gender equity principles
  Training for ban employees and financial counsellors
  Access to an EXCELLENT resource on how to prepare to leave a financially abusive relationship, with a step by step checklist.

  Financial assistance DV policy (what to do afterwards in terms of loans with Commonwealth Bank):

  Homeowners wishing to move are provided a grant to support relocation
  Those who want to stay have options with their mortgages

  Payment deferral
  Reduced repayments
  Lower interest rates

  Restructuring loans
  Unsecured debts may be waived, or repayment assistance provided
  Preventing any restructuring from impacting credit histories

   
  National Australia Bank
  NAB has Domestic and Family Violence Assistance Grants  which provides 1.4 million dollars to support domestic and family violence prevention and early intervention
  NAB also provides a financial helpline called NAB Assist that can help women to get back on their feet if they are struggling financially.
  NAB is able to help by:

  “Setting up a transaction account for you that is not listed on Internet Banking,
  Changing your passwords and PINs,
  Changing addresses to keep your location confidential,
  Breaks from repayments or reduced payments for fixed periods,
  Stopping access to redraw on loans,
  Updating joint accounts so that both people need to sign on any changes (known as ‘both to sign’),
  Cancelling secondary credit cards,
  Offering financial and personal counselling.”

  Additionally, NAB has:

  Financial hardship assistance, in partnership with Uniting, can include family violence worker, safety planning, assistance leaving.

  In some circumstances this can include a grant towards rent, bond, or expenses to keep you safe.

  NAB advises you change your mailing address to either online statements and letters or a trusted friend if you have an emergency/separate account.
  https://www.nab.com.au/about-us/corporate-responsibility/customers/domestic-and-family-violence/financial-abuse
  Provides No Interest Loan Scheme (NILS) through community organisations

  Settlement Services International provides these

  ANZ (http://www.anz.com/about-us/corporate-sustainability/ad/july-2015-familyviolence/)
  Support for employees:

  “Access to our Employee Assistance Program, a free and confidential, short-term assistance program provided by qualified counsellors

  Have a specialist Indigenous EAP

  Assistance for employees who are concerned about safety at work
  Access to special leave and flexible work arrangements
  Relevant information on our intranet, including links to resources and support.”
  Worked with Rosie Batty to create a Global Domestic Violence Strategy to educate employees.

  Support for customers takes place via the Customer Connect team, the ANZ hardship assessment team. Note it takes 21 days to confirm an outcome for the following:

  Extensions of loans to reduce each repayment
  Deferring some repayment
  Refinancing personal loans
  Reducing/deferring credit card repayments

  Financial literacy training program (MoneyMinded)
  Westpac Group (https://www.westpac.com.au/about-westpac/inclusion-and-diversity/Inclusion-means-everyone-matters/anti-family-violence/
  https://www.westpac.com.au/about-westpac/media/media-releases/2017/28-november/)
  Support for employees:

  “Counselling
  Flexible working arrangements
  Time off work
  Financial assistance, $5000 grants via Westpac Employee Assistance Foundation
  Paid leave
  Emergency Accommodation
  Free financial planning from a BT Financial Planner: budgeting, superannuation, investment, insurance”

  Additionally, in its delightfully vague policy, it also has “Financial products and advice to support our customers” and co-hosts the White Ribbon Breakfast with Finance Sector Union.
   
  Recommendations:
  The Banks, for the most part, have made genuine attempts to improve their policies. Yet, it seems some are doing better than others.
  One-off programs are not enough to support customers through leaving abusive relationships. Banks need to, over the long term, take special note of survivors and actively help them rebuild their financial life, potentially with the support of the government. Banks are a point of contact, and the government should capitalise on this by creating support programs within banks, such as co-funding specialised counsellors, or by creating structured referrals to other government funded services.
  We need to view banks as a part of a complex interwoven system of domestic violence support, as opposed to being just the first point of call. To make them as effective as possible, banks must actively collaborate with local domestic violence services to ensure people are not lost through the gaps of inter-agency non-cooperation.
  Finally, banks must collaborate, not compete, with one another. Each bank should have an avenue whereby non-customers are referred to the people they need to speak to in their banks, and to other referral services.

  Jade Lin

• Meanwhile, in Canberra… #6

  May 20, 2018 10:14 pm Comments Off on Meanwhile, in Canberra… #6

  Budget Night is one of those weird Canberra spectacles. Journalists emerge from the lock up, where they have been held for six hours, cut off from the internet and holed up with the Budget papers. And then the treasurer appears at the despatch box, tasked with making the government sound wonderful.
  Last week, there was certainly a need to sound wonderful. An election is due in the next 12 months. As the clearest statement of a government’s intent, the Budget sets up a lot of the premise for the upcoming campaign.
  Gone are the days of Tony Abbott’s and Joe Hockey’s Budget emergency. The debt and deficit disaster is history now. The only emergency that matters is the one in the opinion polls.
  And what do you do when you are faced with electoral defeat? Cue up some personal income tax cuts, spread so far out over the forward estimates – the projection for years after the present budget – as to be basically meaningless. Just make sure there is something small to kick in from July.
  In the lead up, the government was touting their “Boomer friendly” Budget. At least they know their base. What they should have said was bland.
  But not bland in the “it doesn’t really matter way”. Bland in the sense of being completely devoid of vision or character.
  If you believe the government, the economy is in great shape, jobs are being created and next year treasurer Scott Morrison will deliver a slender surplus.
  Why, then, should we accept a cut to the ABC of $83.7 million over four years? The government wants to freeze the national broadcaster’s funding over forward estimates and subject it to another efficiency review. It will be the 10th review in 15 years.
  Morrison says the ABC has to “live within its means”. (He also revealed himself to be a fan of Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell, hoping that it would survive Aunty’s funding cut.)
  Cutting ABC funding is a pretty clear statement that a government has no regard for the intelligence and education of Australians. It sends a loud and clear signal that the government doesn’t see the importance of Australians telling Australian stories, of grappling with our national identity in intelligent, accessible forums.
  The ABC’s managing director, Michelle Guthrie, told ABC staff after the announcement: “In the coming year Australians will head to the polls for the federal election. More than 80 per cent of Australians value the ABC – a point that shouldn’t be lost on anyone seeking government.”
  SBS will have funding returned after the government couldn’t legislate to allow it to accept more advertising. It isn’t a real increase.
  But it’s not just the ABC facing cuts.
  Since coming to power, the Coalition has cut more than $50 million out of the Screen Australia budget. Now, the government is putting $3 million towards the “development of Australian film and television content.”
  The government has also announced a $140 million fund to encourage big Hollywood productions to film in Australia. It’s good for local workers and tourism, they say.
  It smacks of cultural cringe, investing in others to make Hollywood blockbusters rather than investing properly in Australian film.
  National institutions will also face cuts. While the National Gallery is getting some money to help with refurbishments, the National Archives and the National Library will lose 10 and 12 staff respectively.
  Making all of this worse is the $48.7 million over a four years earmarked for the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of James Cook’s first voyage to Australia. As the debate whether we should change the date of Australia Day has reached the mainstream, this decision shows a government not interested in any kind of reckoning about our country’s past.
  Cuts to the arts and libraries and the ABC might seem like prudent budget measures, victimless crimes with no real effect, but they are not only detrimental to the cultural life of the country, they reveal what kind of vision the government has for us: a vision of a blank face being crushed by the boot of parochialism forever.
  When I covered the Budget in 2016, I wrote in the Herald that, “For most young Australians, this Budget is not for us. We don’t benefit. We haven’t been offered our election pitch.” I could write the same again, and note once more the lack of action on housing affordability or climate change.
  It is good that there will be more places at universities for regional students and that access to Youth Allowance will be made easier for them, but it’s hardly a consolation in an environment which has prioritised cynical survival-instinct politics over the kind of long-term thinking students and young people need.
  It’s a shame for students that the Budget isn’t required to include tables of opportunity costs. It would cast very different shadows over what kind of Budget a government can get away with presenting.
  Over the next 20 years, the cost to the Budget from lower income tax receipts as a result of fewer students going to university will be between $2.2 billion and $3.9 billion, modelling commissioned by Universities Australia claimed.
  The Cadence Economics report found that the total economic impact of the higher education sector funding freeze would be between $6.9 billion and $12.3 billion over the next two decades.
  Belinda Robinson, Universities Australia chief executive, told The Guardian: “It’s a simple equation – less university funding means fewer skilled graduates, a hit to labour market productivity and less tax revenue for government.”
  But to see that, you’ve got to look beyond the ballot box at the next election and the Budget bottom line next May.
  And at the moment, the Turnbull government doesn’t have the right vantage point.
  Jasper Lindell is Woroni’s political columnist and a former news editor

  Jasper Lindell

• ANU and Ramsay Centre: Trading Academic Independence for Cash

  10:01 pm Comments Off on ANU and Ramsay Centre: Trading Academic Independence for Cash

  ANU loves to brag about its scholarships. Its brochures are plastered with smiling shiny faces of Tuckwell scholarship students reading books on green grass under blue sky, with dust and heavy industrial equipment from the nearby construction site neatly cropped out. But ANU – the thought leader that it is – is changing away from this, as it quietly releases piecemeal information and timidly defends its negotiations with the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilization (RCWC) over a divisive new scholarship and degree originally slated for 2019.
  Late last year ANU announced it was in negations with the RCWC to create a new Bachelor in Western Civilization for a cohort of 60 students, of which it would provide some 30 students with a $25,000 per annum scholarship. But this group doesn’t exactly have the same appeal as the kind-faced, generous Tuckwells, with their passion for education. No, RCWC is instead staffed by some of the most disliked politicians in Australian history and has repeatedly said it will use the degree to push its ideological beliefs.
  RCWC launched in November 2017 thanks to a $3 billion donation left by healthcare-magnate and top Liberal party donor Paul Ramsay. The group aims  to get universities to teach a positive interpretation of Western civilization. To achieve this RCWC turned to ANU, promising a fortune to the university if they establish a degree that adheres to the group’s goals.
  RCWC chairman and former prime minister John Howard described the degree as “an exercise in the unapologetic exposal of what Western Civilization has brought to mankind over the centuries.” There are three main issues with the degree: firstly, its politically biased approach; secondly, the ambiguity of RCWC’s control over the degree; finally, the involvement of sitting MPs and partisan political figures.
  Members of RCWC board and its CEO have repeatedly said that the degree will only address the positive aspects of Western civilization. Board member Tony Abbott said that RCWC is “not merely about Western Civilization but in favour of it.” Even when Howard acknowledged that western civilisation had “its share of moral failures”, he didn’t elaborate. Instead, Howard said people should look to the successes of western civilization, such as the defeat of Nazi Germany. Of course, Howard did not explain why Nazi Germany – a European nation-State influenced by Enlightenment thought, Christianity and Graeco-Roman culture – was not part of the West. Nor have any of the board members mentioned colonisation, fascism, autocracy or imperialism; governmental structures that characterised the West for far longer than modern democracies. RCWC will not address these issues. They are explicitly narrow-minded and have no intention of approaching western civilization with the complexity it requires. Such an approach is not only an insult to students, but also to those affected by the negative aspects of western civilization. 
  ANU and RCWC have both said they will respect the traditional course approval structures, but this hasn’t stopped RCWC officials from also saying the exact opposite. During negotiations, CEO Simon Haines said “we would not be wanting to hire somebody who is coming in with a long liturgy of what terrible damage western [civilization] had done to the world.” If academic integrity is respected, then a politically motivated third party should not get to have a say in the hiring and firing of staff. A similar stance has also been taken on the syllabus of the 16 new courses in the degree. RCWC said that they will choose the readings or “great texts” for the degree, while also saying that ANU will treat the courses like any other. These two things can’t be true at the same time. To drive home the strong arm tactics, Haines threatened to pull funding if the courses and teachers did not tow RCWC’s ideological line.
  There is also the issue of RCWC’s board members also being sitting politicians. On the board, there are both former MPs – Howard and Beazley – and, more worryingly, current MPs. Liberal Party parliamentarians Leeser and Abbott sit on the RCWC board and have a deep involvement with the new degree. A sitting MP – particularly an ideologically divisive one, such as Abbott – having input on the curriculum of a public university is extremely unsettling and goes beyond a simple philanthropic donation. With all these issues you might have thought that justifications for ANU’s deal would be stronger.
  The most common argument in favour of the degree is a version of: ‘well people can do Asian, studies major so why not a have a Bachelor in Western Civilization?’ The response to this is twofold. Firstly the Asian studies major is not funded by a group called the Xi Jinping Lord President for Life Appreciation Society. In fact, any whiff of political bias in any course is met with legitimate anger and concern. Courses at ANU are – or if the deal isn’t stopped, were – run by academics that have independent say over course material with the sole goal of educating students. As a result of this, the Asian studies major does not ignore negative aspects of said society or mislead their students to guarantee funding. Secondly, ANU already has a heavily Western-centric model for teaching the humanities – look no further than English, Ancient History and International Relations. And the best thing about these courses is that they don’t sell the education of their students to politicians for some extra cash.
  This extra cash will also come with its own cost. RCWC is not a charity: they are not donating, they are buying. RCWC is trying to make their own degree and is paying the university to turn a blind eye to academic independence to do so. The world will see this and treat the ANU accordingly. Secondly, there are MPs on the RCWC board. If they really wanted to properly fund universities they could do it the old-fashioned democratic way, not with the vast wealth of a political partisan’s estate. Finally, we as students also pay ANU, under the presumption that we will be given the best education possible. At a Ramsay Centre forum Rae Frances, Dean of CASS, was asked what the threshold donation for someone to create their own degree would be, she tongue in cheek replied “$50 million.” Well, we – the students – provide ANU with hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and we don’t ask for a degree that mimics our personal political bias. We just ask for the university not to sell our education to the highest bidder.
  Sam Brennan is an admin of the Facebook page ‘Keep Ramsay out of ANU’

  Woroni Comment

• Meanwhile, in Canberra… #5

  May 6, 2018 3:21 pm Comments Off on Meanwhile, in Canberra… #5

  So, you want to have a serious conversation about drugs?
  Prepare to speak out against the two major parties who are united in their opposition and don’t expect a fair hearing from the capital city tabloids. Talkback radio won’t be kind either.
  Society is told to look at illegal drugs equally, with fear and derision. Drugs are the domain of delinquents and good-for-nothing young people and no serious conversation is required, unless you’re talking about crackdowns, raids and policing.
  But the tide has changed on medicinal cannabis in Australia, so maybe public opinion is shifting on recreational use too?
  The Greens certainly hope so, announcing their a plan to legalise recreational cannabis while citing 55 per cent public support. Sales would be limited to people over 18, there would be no advertising, the drug would be sold in plain packaging and the tax revenue would fund education and drug treatment programs.
  “Prohibition has failed,” the Greens leader said. Di Natale, who was a doctor before he was a senator, continued: “the ‘tough on drugs’ approach causes enormous harm. It drives people away from getting help when they need it and exposes them to a dangerous black market.”
  The Greens’ policy would turn that black market into a lucrative one for the budget bottom line. Independent Parliamentary Budget Office costings released by the Greens show the policy would create a $1.8 billion a year windfall for the budget.
  A 25 per cent excise on sales, like the one applied to tobacco, along with GST and a reduction in law enforcement costs, would generate $3.5 billion for the government by 2020-21.
  Of course, the major parties have been quick to denounce the proposal. The federal health minister, Greg Hunt, said the policy was not “safe, responsible or something which should be allowed.”
  The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, called the announcement “political clickbait” and said the Greens want to legalise ecstasy. Cripes! (It’s not true, although the Greens platform includes decriminalising all drugs.)
  Shorten was right about one thing. The announcement is political clickbait.
  Remember back a few weeks to the Greens’ loss in Batman. Labor’s popular trade unionist, Ged Kearney, is now installed in Canberra after the Greens failed to break through Melbourne’s Bell Street curtain.
  Column inch after column inch has already been dedicated to this result, but most conceded the Greens’ flagship anti-Adani coal mine campaign failed to cut through. Although heinous, the reality of a mine which will be a bigger greenhouse gas emitter than the entire country of New Zealand wasn’t close enough to home.
  The Greens, then, are clearly looking for something will resonate in their would-be heartland: the inner city. Is legalising cannabis the policy to do it?
  Head to the official-sounding http://drugs.org.au/ and you will be under no false pretences about who the Greens are targeting with their campaign website. The site, titled “Just Legalise It”, is loaded with pictures of bright-looking young people enjoying a picnic and going to a gig. The kind of people who might turn their vote Green, if they haven’t already.
  But the Greens are not seen as a governing force. Perhaps the lesson of Batman is that voters will choose a party with a real chance of governing in the hope that at least some progressive positions will be adopted. The Greens just don’t have that kind of clout.
  Fans of legalising cannabis will take the win if, at some point in the future, Labor comes around to the idea and makes it happen. The Greens will cry foul over policy plagiarism, because a win on principle in this scenario doesn’t translate to political capital for the minor party.
  And “makes it happen” is the key phrase here. Cannabis is a state issue. But it could pay off the Greens, who probably now realise they need to pursue issues closer to home, and to capture the kind of attention that only comes with announcing policies others are quick to label controversial.
  What makes cannabis so controversial? Everyone who says we have to see it that way.
  “We need to get real about cannabis. Almost seven million Australians have tried or used cannabis socially but right now just having a small amount of cannabis in your possession could get you a criminal record,” Di Natale said.
  In 2008, Malcolm Turnbull, then opposition leader, gleefully told Tony Jones on ABC’s Q&A: “Yes, yes, yes. Yes, I’ve smoked pot. There you go.” This was a very different era, of course, where Turnbull was prepared to say Tony Abbott’s climate change policy was “bullshit”. How things have changed.
  Some things don’t change, though. Or take ages doing it.
  Would politics be better if policy could adapt faster? Chances are a politician will say the slow and deliberative process is what ensures we don’t rush a slew of madcap, harebrained policies through parliament and then need to apply constant legislative patches.
  But that’s exactly what we have now: this slow process hasn’t stopped bad policy before. Once an idea finds its political legs, it’s hard to stop it running.
  Before alcohol prohibition was adopted in the United States, Sweden and Russia in the early decades of the 20th century, expert commissions and committees in all three of those countries warned against the policy. It was later repealed after disastrous results.
  But few experts are able to put a stop to an idea with political backing and popular support. The experts now calling for an end to drug prohibition probably feel they have something in common with those ignored a century ago.
  Australia’s serious conversation about drugs has a long way to go. In Melbourne last month, 3AW host Tom Elliott said a safe-injecting room in North Richmond was a “Trojan horse”, predicted “probably” all drugs would be legal in five years in Victoria and said: “This is the thin edge of the wedge stuff.”
  If all progressive proposals about drugs have to be thin edges of wedges, then maybe the Greens’ announcement could be a thin edge of the wedge to force the serious conversation about drugs that Australia needs to have.
  Jasper Lindell is Woroni’s political columnist and a former news editor

  Jasper Lindell

• Meanwhile in Canberra #4

  April 17, 2018 3:03 pm Comments Off on Meanwhile in Canberra #4

  There was all the build up usually associated with settling in to watch a sunset. We all knew it was going to happen and we had a pretty good idea of when. And then, in a moment, it would be all over.
  This is how the wait for last Monday’s Newspoll result played out online the Sunday night before. We all wanted to be the first to see – or at least confirm for ourselves – that Malcolm Turnbull had failed his own test.
  “The one thing that is clear about our current situation is the trajectory,” Turnbull said in the infamous press conference when he publicly launched his bid to roll his predecessor, Tony Abbott. “We have lost 30 Newspolls in a row. It is clear that the people have made up their minds about Mr Abbott’s leadership.”
  Change Abbott for Turnbull in those comments and it takes on a haunting quality. It’s a statement Turnbull now regrets making.
  “Every month lost is a month of lost opportunities,” Turnbull said on 14 September 2015. In 2018, the lost months are still piling up.
  But take a moment to consider just how stupid this is: sitting up late on a Sunday night waiting for poll Twitter oracle @GhostWhoVotes to leak the results of the supposedly fateful Newspoll.
  At 10.15pm, the numbers dropped. “#Newspoll Federal 2 Party Preferred: L/NP 48 (+1) ALP 52 (-1) #auspol”, read the all-important telegraphic tweet.
  That was it. Turnbull had lost Newspoll number 30, failing his own test.
  It’s very easy to assemble a line up of politicians ready to denounce the importance of polls. “The only poll that matters is the one on election day,” reads one of the few talking points carved in stone on both sides of politics. But it’s also nonsense.
  There is great interest in the polls. Political action is weighed up against what it will or will not do for the polls.
  “My job is not to be distracted by the polls but to focus on our policies and on delivering for the Australian people,” Turnbull told The Australian last week after the Newspoll loss. What he really meant is that his job is not to appear to be distracted by the polls.
  In politics, where, as Turnbull says himself, the “election is there to be won”, saying you don’t care about the polls is like saying Ps get degrees and still needing an exemplary GPA to walk into a well-paid consultancy job.
  Sure, plenty of people declare their marks are irrelevant and Ps get degrees after their third lunchtime schooner in week 10, but they certainly don’t believe it.
  Polling doublethink is an important part of being seen to play the game. Turnbull’s first mistake was to show his hand by citing the polling as a reason for his 2015 leadership challenge.
  Of course it was but that doesn’t mean that you should go and tell anyone.
  ***
  All of this polling has a bizarre effect on the game of politics. At a time when strong belief in our political system and the politicians who inhabit it is hard to come by, there is often a lament for a lack of authentic leadership.
  The trouble is that polling has reinforced the messiah complex in Australian politics.
  When Turnbull became prime minister and Liberal party leader in 2015, he would have got the keys to the Lodge and a much nicer office. But he didn’t get the chance to brainwash the rest of his colleagues.
  Turnbull’s Liberal party is still much the same has the party of Tony Abbott’s era. Of course, cabinet has been shuffled but there was no wholesale replacement of ideology, factional alignment and power balance. It’s the new model body work with the same under-powered engine under the bonnet.
  A leadership change may imbue a sense of optimism, or reduce the sense of failure, but it won’t present a new party to the voting public.
  So instead of having made up their minds about a leader, the Liberals must seriously entertain the idea that voters have made their minds up about the party.
  Voters have looked to leaders for vision and leadership. The last decade has left them bitterly disappointed on both sides.
  We have been looking in the wrong place.
  We seem to have assembled enough evidence, and inflicted enough political pain, since 2010 to show that the fortunes of a party can no longer solely rest in a leader and that those fortunes could be resurrected with a quick and ruthless change.
  Turnbull has remained the more popular, more trusted and more experienced capital in the eyes of Newspoll respondents. Never mind his ship has gone wildly off course, has an engine room of potential saboteurs and is taking on water, fast.
  A reliance on polling distracts us from a real conversation about what the government is, or isn’t, doing.
  Polling is easy, getting your head around the National Energy Guarantee isn’t. Trying to understand why capital-l Liberals, Tony Abbott among them, now want to intervene in their beloved free market to save a coal fired power station takes more thought than comprehending Newspoll’s two-party prefered result.
  Polling is the indicator, not the oracle. A political landscape mapped by polling leaves little room to move. Any chance for genuine engagement will always be clouded with the thought of what it will do the polls.
  Too much care for the results leaves less time, and places less emphasis on, the substance: policy, action, debate, vision.
  If the 1600-odd Newspoll respondents are cemented as the most important constituency in Australia, then we all lose out.
  Jasper Lindell is Woroni’s political columnist and a former news editor

  Jasper Lindell

• The Right to Translation

  March 24, 2018 1:24 pm Comments Off on The Right to Translation

  Looking back, the evolutionary path of democracy is remarkable; the ancient Greek practice of old white men meeting on a hill to discuss pressing issues is barely recognisable as the precursor to modern Western democracies. This path has been carved out by an eternal struggle to uphold two fundamental tenets of democracy; equal franchise and free speech. We value free speech so highly that it was the First Amendment to the US Constitution, it is Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it is often cited as the impenetrable argument in issues regarding media, education, art, and in some cases, cake decoration.
  Our preferred tongue for free speech in Australia and the US is English; government, courts and public discourse are conducted almost exclusively in it. We see highly polished and sophisticated English in newspapers and journals, and a colloquial, snappy vernacular online. However, a quick glance at these nations’ demographics reveals that English is not an ideal language for all its people to digest, discuss, and present thoughts and opinions in.
  Data from the Australian government shows that as of 2016, 49 per cent of Australians were born overseas, or had at least one parent born overseas. 21 per cent of Australians spoke a language other than English at home. The US is similar. Though we rarely see these individuals’ opinions in mainstream public discourse, they are avid participants in free speech; niche language media has bloomed. The Epoch Times, the largest Chinese language newspaper in Australia, prints 1.6 million newspapers per week and boasts an impressive 200 million pageviews per month. Monolingual free speech sufficed in bygone eras where globalisation had not yet taken hold and proudly multicultural nations like Australia and the USA espoused racist policies and demanded cultural assimilation. At the time, an acceptable portion of the public could participate in free speech as was conducive to good democracy. Today, however, linguistic diversity poses a threat to free speech.
  We have now reached the climax of this chapter in the history of democracy. Is globalisation deemed to be repugnant to free speech, or will society find a way to mediate the two?
  To continue down the path of globalisation, we must introduce a universal right to translation. It will act to remove the linguistic barrier to fair, representative democracy. Furthermore, it will initiate a global culture of free speech and truly unlock the communicative and cooperative potential of the Internet.
  Such a right already exists to some degree; in US Federal courts, the accused possesses a right to an interpreter where appropriate. Also, services like Google Translate allow for reasonably accurate translations between many languages. However, they cannot capture the subtleties of language such as its connotations, diction, and tone, which are paramount in public discourse.
  The torch of democracy has been passed onto us to continue free speech. It is now time to create a universal right to translation to achieve this and show our commitment to equality, diversity, and acceptance.

  Noah Yim

• Meanwhile, in Canberra… #3

  March 19, 2018 1:46 pm Comments Off on Meanwhile, in Canberra… #3

  Before you could go through each day without any need to talk to anyone in person thanks to technological automation and intervention, there were some pretty menial tasks that people got paid to do.

  Not just the kind that Henry Ford made possible with the development of the production line, where a person would be tasked with screwing in a screw what would have seemed like a million times a day. We all seem to know people from our parents’ generation who entered the workforce doing some pretty tedious stuff, limited skill required.

  Sadly, it’s pretty hard to find a job in mostly office-bound Canberra that would involve separating pages from a tractor-fed printer these days, or working as an assistant in an architect’s firm tasked with writing the names of objects on plans with a Rapidograph pen and miniature stencil.

  We’ve got technology that can do that for us now. The stakes are higher to gain employment.

  A typing pool is more likely an exciting art installation of typewriters submerged in water in a makerspace in San Francisco, than an integral part of day-to-day communication and administrative work.

  But before we all get terribly excited about a new dawn on the age of leisure, where knock off time is brought forward and start time is pushed back, there’s some politics to contend with.

  Jobs have always been politically convenient. Those in power like to be seen to be creating jobs — take a look at Donald Trump’s Twitter — and those who would like to be in power like to point out that those who are aren’t creating jobs. It’s very predictable.

  Remember the 2016 budget? The era of “jobs and growth”, a political catchphrase that sounds fantastic, is what voters want to hear and is yet somehow totally devoid of meaning by itself. The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, boasted of the results this year. There were 400,000 jobs created in 2017 and 75 percent of them were full time.

  But wage growth is stagnant and many predict we’re heading towards a cliff: the future of work is far from certain and we should be doing more to think about what having a job and being employed will look like in the future. No wonder the Australian Council of Trade Unions launched a “Change the Rules” campaign, the largest since the “Your Rights At Work” campaign of WorkChoices-era, in response to four years of stagnant wages in Australia.

  But it’s not the only part of the story. In 2013, David Graeber, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, described what he called “bullshit jobs” in Strike! magazine. “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states, such as the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as it had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat),” he wrote.

  “Bullshit jobs” are things like telemarketing, public relations and unnecessary layers of administration which don’t add anything to the actual delivery of a service.

  Since then, the gig economy — ad hoc employment for single tasks epitomised by Uber drivers and people scurrying about on Deliveroo bicycles — has continued to undermine old notions of what it meant to have a job.

  Young people predominantly make up those in casual employment, often working in jobs around university commitments. It offers flexibility while they study. But if casualisation continues to creep into industries where once an employee could have expected benefits and security, we’re in strife.

  New data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that 32 per cent of people who were looking for work in 2011 are now employed full-time. Only 17 per cent of people who weren’t in the labour force in 2011 were employed full-time in 2016.

  You have the greatest chance of getting a full-time job if you’ve already got one. For the rest of us, it’s getting tougher. We’re working longer hours for less in insecure positions.

  In November last year, the McKinsey Global Institute declared in a study of 46 countries, which considered 800 different professions, that 800 million jobs would be replaced by automation in little over a decade.

  So how are we going to support ourselves?

  There’s the utopian model of universal basic income living, where we’re free to make stuff, think stuff and do stuff. Heading in that direction, though, would require us to get off our current course of intense work culture, where worthiness is pegged directly to busyness.

  In reality, it looks like we’re heading towards a job-starved market where our generation is forced to work across as many casualised positions as possible, never certain where the next pay cheque is going to come from. Already, there are academics, journalists and people in service industries who live like this.

  After considering this, hearing how the government talks about innovation doesn’t suggest they’re ready to confront what seems to be coming.

  The then minister for industry, innovation and science, Arthur Sinodinos, told a conference in May 2017 that we “have to be optimists”.

  “I know some people now ask ‘should we be a bit scared because innovation means that jobs are going in some areas’, but jobs are growing in others,” he said.

  New jobs were being created that we “we have no idea” about, Senator Sinodinos said. “This is the lesson of history. This is the lesson of technological progress.”

  In politics, saying that we “have to be optimists” is a bit like putting your head in the sand and hoping an issue will go away.

  The trouble is, it doesn’t look like the job dilemma is going to correct itself. It might pay to give it some attention.

  Jasper Lindell is Woroni’s political columnist and a former news editor

  Jasper Lindell

• Meanwhile in Canberra… #2

  March 7, 2018 5:00 pm Comments Off on Meanwhile in Canberra… #2

  By now we can only hope that Barnaby Joyce has slipped off into what passes here for ancient political history: a couple of weeks ago.
  Despite having a reputation which some might say is more tarnished than your grandparent’s silver, that hasn’t been used since their wedding day in 1956, Joyce didn’t rule out a return to the front bench or the leadership.
  And of course he wouldn’t. Politics is a strange place. Anything could happen, even when it probably won’t.
  Speaking after a game of political football (no, really – the politicians do actually get together to play touch football at Parliament House), Joyce told the conveniently assembled televisual journalists: “I don’t expect to return, but I will always do the very best job I possibly can in any role given to me.”
  Would he be like Tony Abbott? The man whose famous statement after losing the prime ministership that there would be “no wrecking, no undermining, no sniping” was clearly meant to be taken sarcastically. No, he said. “I will be Barnaby,” he said.
  Conservatives in Australia are often accused of wanting to return to the 1950s. As prime minister, Paul Keating got stuck into John Howard across the despatch box: “[Howard said the 1950s were] a very, very good period, a golden age. That was the period when gross domestic product per head was half what it is now; when commodities occupied 85 percent of our exports; when …” You get the idea.
  Joyce, though, is probably wishing Australia had stayed firmly planted in Howard’s golden age. Chances are, he’d still be deputy prime minister.
  Ream after ream has been dedicated to whether The Daily Telegraph should have splashed their front page with a photo of Vikki Campion, Joyce’s former media advisor and the woman with whom he is now expecting a child.
  The answer is clearly no.
  Should Barnaby Joyce’s affair have been exposed earlier? “Oh, I don’t know anything about that, Sir,” the schoolboys all lining up to participate in the cathartic act of denial would say. I’d heard about it though, and you have to wonder if the political columnist at Woroni is aware, who else might be…
  Hypocrisy is a quick way to wreck your own political fortunes in Australia. Joyce, the country conservative sticking up for family values while leaving his wife of two decades and his four daughters for his younger media advisors, had clearly trodden the path. We cringed as we looked on.
  However, in the old days of parliamentary Canberra (as much steeped in mythology as misogyny), this would never have got out. It was all hush hush, for those blokes parked out in that Parliament sheep paddock, a town of only 6,000 fellow Canberrans nearby.
  Now, a media advisor can find themselves in hot water for sending out a meme that showed a picture of Joyce and Abbott sitting next to each other in Parliament with the caption, “When you get in trouble in class and get sat next to the weird kid no one likes.”
  With more witnesses, participants and technological intervention comes more a sophisticated rumour mill and greater scrutiny. The standards the voting public demand may or may not be any higher than they ever were, but it’s much clearer now when they aren’t being met.
  You can see why Barnaby, from his back bench vantage, might be irritated with the modern world. The new Nationals leader and deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, is probably quite happy with the arrangement: more opportunities to claim travel allowances to his wife’s property in Kingston.
  Once upon a time, Malcolm Turnbull was incredibly popular. Now, in his diminished state, he’s left make sure the government doesn’t look like a total disaster. “Yeah, but he’s better than Tony Abbott,” is, in many cases, the foundation of his political support.
  With a trip to the US planned while Joyce was scheduled to take personal leave, Turnbull left the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, in charge. He was fourth in line.
  And with Turnbull out of the country, the man who is touted as the next Liberal prime minister, Peter Dutton, took to some pontification at the National Press Club.
  “In my view, there is a place for the pledge in a broader rejuvenated civics effort with school-aged children, regardless of their background,” he said, noting that new citizens already pledge allegiance to Australian laws, liberties, rights and the nation itself.
  A textbook example in how to make a headline. “Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton calls for US-style pledge of allegiance for Australian school children,” said The West Australian. Well not quite, but close enough.
  And then acting prime minister Cormann backed it. “I think it’s quite important for all Australians to be aware and conscious of our history, our culture and values,” he said. Never mind we constantly struggle to have any productive conversation about that history, culture or values.
  Australians, on the whole, don’t like to make a song and dance about their national pride (if they have any), so this sort of stuff will often sound a bit naff. But for Dutton, a person for whom the leadership speculation must have gone to his head, it’s a clear signal of the sort of Australia he’d lead. And the kind of campaign he’d run. And that he’s prepared to do it.
  His approach to immigration is hard line and cruel, Australians will be patriotic – or else, and he’ll be tough and will revel in the opportunity to demonstrate it.
  Which is exactly the kind of political leadership that the world is overloaded with. Toughness in spades, thoughtfulness in limited quantities.
  When’s Turnbull’s downfall? Does Bill Shorten actually play any part in it? Will Peter Dutton be PM?
  But for now, teetering on the edge, Turnbull holds on. Still the best option in the eyes of his party – and never mind the voters who haven’t had a chance to have a say yet.
  No wonder Turnbull looks pleased to be putting his thumb up next to Donald Trump’s, which he did when he visited Washington last week. He’s still in the game, even if it has us cringing culturally on the world stage.
  Jasper Lindell is Woroni’s political columnist and a former news editor

  Jasper Lindell

• Life vs lore: the truth about first-year uni

  March 6, 2018 7:17 pm Comments Off on Life vs lore: the truth about first-year uni

  As I prepared – with equal parts anxiousness, excitement and confusion – for the big move from Perth to Canberra, plenty of people had plenty to say about university. I knew it was a great opportunity, I knew I wanted to do it, but was I the right type of person? Was I ready?
  Lore of a kind surrounds every life stage. It’s almost a pact between people recounting an experience that some thoughts, some feelings, some moments will be preferenced over others. These seemingly millions of well-meaning instructors constructed lore around moving to university – but reality often shows up the flaws in this mythologising.
  The number one thing I was told was that you make lots of friends more or less instantly, especially in a residential college (Fenner, for those wondering). So many people I spoke to had met their best friends at university. College sounded like a place where everyone on a floor would dip in and out of each other’s rooms at random – where you cooked together and studied together, and where all property was more or less communal. I had readied myself for this experience. And of course, like all legends, this idea contained more than a grain of truth. But reality wasn’t quite what I expected.
  Most people at college are friendly, of course, and you will meet some amazing personalities. But you might not make lots of friends instantly, and that’s okay. While stress, sleep deprivation and homesickness might make you feel like everyone has a tight-knit group of close friends except for you, I can assure you this is not the case. It also might take you a little while to get back into the swing of making close friends. Since starting high school, personally, I’d had no need to turn the sort of friend you might talk to when you have a break from class into the sort of friend you can talk to about your feelings. Rest assured that you will work out how to do this again, and your closest friendships will probably be forged unexpectedly. Try not to pressure yourself. I promise it will be okay.
  Something no one will tell you is that uni – and particularly college – can get very isolating. You will probably find yourself spending long periods semi-voluntarily alone in your room, unable to just walk next door and talk to a parent or sibling about what’s going on in your life. If you’re used to relying on family, rather than friends, to be your core support system, this can be particularly difficult. You might have doubts and periods of homesickness well past the first few weeks of the year. This doesn’t mean you’re not ready to be here. It does mean that you’re reflecting on your experience quite intensely, which can sometimes take the enjoyment out of it. My biggest tips are to not put too much pressure on yourself to feel happy all the time, and to make use of the support available. When I have flashes of homesickness I’ll often spend time at our college café or in the common areas, because chatting to people makes me feel better. ANU Counselling is another wonderful resource, not only for people with existing mental health issues, but also for those who just need to talk to somebody without feeling guilty of burdening people with their problems.
  Something else I heard repeated like Chinese whispers was that nobody worked in first year. First year was a time to party and make lots of friends before you actually started putting some effort in. It’s worth getting this out of your head right now, because you will need to work in first year, and it’s worth starting early. I know plenty of people who nearly failed first year because they spent too much time socialising and too little revising, or didn’t watch their lectures until the day before the exam. If you sat exams to get into university, you can probably already tell me that you get better grades if you don’t leave things until the last minute. You don’t need to spend anywhere near all your time on work, but a few hours every day outside classes will be bucket-loads of help when exam period comes around.
  If you’re anything like me, you might also have internalised the thought that uni is a chance to reinvent yourself. Many of the adults I spoke to had goth or hippie phases during university, revealing little of their past to even their closest friends. This idea of reinvention weighed heavy on me as I started to introduce myself to new people. I wondered if I had changed too little since high school – whether the t-shirts and JayJays denim skirt I liked to wear were too twelvie to be me now. Writing this article, I’m wearing one of those same T-shirts and the same skirt. It’s not tucked in, the way I wore it at 17. My hair is also longer, and I’m wearing cuffs on my ears and makeup I couldn’t have imagined doing when I first got here. The moral of the story is you don’t need to forcibly ‘reinvent’ yourself. It will happen naturally, and you need not do anything major to speed up the process. You won’t struggle to make ‘cool’ friends just because you haven’t erased every trace of your high school self. It’s okay.
  In short, I think this article can be summarised with one principle: don’t put too much pressure on yourself. A million people will tell you that “uni is what you make of it”, but if you think and worry too much about whether you’re making the most of everything you’ll never pause long enough to have a good time. Let yourself be. The good times and bad times will come and go, so take them as they come and allow yourself to feel them in the moment. You’ll blink and the year will be nearly over.

  Tabitha Malet

• Changing The Date isn’t Everything, But it is Pivotal

  January 26, 2018 6:29 pm Comments Off on Changing The Date isn’t Everything, But it is Pivotal

  As the summer heats up, so does the debate surrounding the date of Australia’s national day. In 1994, all states agreed to declare the Australia Day public holiday on 26 January. This date commemorates the landing of Captain Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet in Sydney Cove in 1788. Although the landing was a pivotal point in Australia’s history, a Review Partners poll last year revealed that only 43 per cent of Australians knew the historical significance of  26 January. If less than half the population understands why we celebrate Australia Day on 26 January, then why must we cling to that date? In fact, a recent Australia Institute survey (Jan 2018) found that 56 per cent of Australians don’t object to the date being changed, so long as some form of public holiday to celebrate our nation is held.
  So, what is wrong with 26 January?  The landing of Captain Arthur Phillip on this date is synonymous with the invasion of Indigenous land and the subsequent near-annihilation of 60,000 years of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty. The causal nexus of this invasion with the foundation of White Australia makes them inseparable. For many Indigenous Australians, 26 January is not a day to celebrate, but a painful reminder of the beginning of centuries of colonial oppression and dispossession. It is inappropriate for us to celebrate our great country and all that it stands for, on a day that is toxic to many Indigenous Australians.
  Contention around this date isn’t anything new. Since the ‘Day of Mourning’ in 1938, Indigenous Australians have opposed 26 January as a day for national celebration and continue to fight this divisive date. However, in recent years, Australia Day has become a far more politicised affair. Earlier this month, the Greens’ leader Richard Di Natale declared his party will make changing the date a focus for 2018. Although a move in the right direction, some have interpreted this as merely a form of virtue- signalling, rather than a genuine attempt to address the issues facing Indigenous Australians. Labor’s Linda Burney, the first Indigenous woman in the lower house, argued that the Greens are worsening the political and ideological divide by linking a clearly bipartisan issue to a single party. Rather than being a mere stepping stone in the Greens’ popularity campaign, changing the date of Australia Day needs to be the first of many actions we take in becoming a more inclusive nation that values its Indigenous heritage, whilst acknowledging the extensive pain inflicted in its colonial past and the continuing systematic inequality facing Indigenous Australians in our present.
  The introduction of a First Nations voice in parliament would provide the opportunity for deep, lasting and significant change through the constitutional empowerment of Indigenous Australians and a meaningful move towards recognising Indigenous self-determination. This proposal was part of the Uluru Statement from the Heart released in May 2017, which encompasses recommendations from  Indigenous peoples across the country, following months of deliberation. Unfortunately, the Turnbull government completely dismissed this momentous statement – and so it’s not surprising that we are still debating the date of Australia Day.
  When our own prime minister is not open to empowering the most disadvantaged group in our society, how can we expect other people to be? When we live in a system that institutionally denies Indigenous Australians a voice, how can we ever hope to achieve equality?
  Whilst simply changing the date of Australia Day is not the solution to addressing inequalities facing Indigenous people, it is a symbolically important step. Amidst the furore of this debate, we must remember that changing the date will not in itself heal the wounds so deeply entrenched in our past. It will not lessen the degree of pain that generations of oppression have inflicted on Indigenous peoples, nor will it restore all that was stolen from them. Changing the date of Australia Day to one that is inclusive and can be celebrated by all Australians shows our commitment as a nation to progressing the rights of Indigenous Australians and creating a truly fair and equal society. But, it should only be the beginning.
  Lachlan is the current secretary of Labor Left

  Lachlan McGregor