Australia

The federal government thinks it might be. Real Estate Institute of Australia denies it.

Median yearly cost for a 12-14-year-old:

• Swimming: $400
• Soccer: $300
• Basketball: $300
• Aussie rules: $200
• Netball: $200
• Cricket: $180

Source: Australian Sports Commission, 2018 AusPlay report

On Monday, unionised workers at the University of Melbourne (where I teach) will go on strike. In the faculty of arts, the Melbourne law school, student services and library services we’ll stay out for a week – longer than any previous dispute at an Australian university.

Readers of a certain age might marvel at the recent wave of industrial action in higher education, perhaps remembering their own campus days with fond nostalgia.

But the system they recall no longer exists.

Across the sector, casual and sessional staff now deliver between 50% and 80% of undergraduate teaching. Many tutors don’t know from semester to semester whether they’ll have jobs – an insecurity that can last decades. Often they work at multiple institutions, assembling a patchwork of contracts through which to support themselves.

Naturally, such conditions affect students, many of whom now face the unexpected indexation of the huge debts they’ve run up to attend higher education in Australia – and in return receive minimal attention from staff. In some places, sessional employees have been allocated just 10 minutes to read an assignment and provide feedback.

Widespread precarity has facilitated a culture of illegal underpayment, with more than $80m in underpayments uncovered since 2020 across public universities, according to the National Tertiary Education Union’s wage theft report. The University of Melbourne alone has been forced to repay $45m in stolen wages.

Both permanent and casual staff report being constantly overworked. A recent open letter signed by more than 100 members of the Melbourne law school says: “In our experience … many full-time employees work well in excess of 50 hours per week; many part-time employees work full-time hours; and increasingly, we hear of colleagues working during annual and long service leave and not taking sick leave when ill.”

How did higher education get so broken? Pretty much the same way as everything else. We live amid the wreckage of formerly treasured institutions and services, despoiled by decades of marketisation and neglect.

Think of universal healthcare, something of which Australians were once rightly proud. Like education, the system looks serviceable enough if you squint at it from the outside. But behind the veneer, healthcare workers report ongoing staff shortages in chronically underfunded hospitals, with beds often unavailable and emergency departments stretched beyond capacity.

Back in 1945, Ben Chifley explained that every man and woman possessed “an indefeasible right” to social security.

“Deprivation of those rights or whittling down of the terms of those provisions would,” he said, “be a breach of trust with the whole Australian nation.”

Today, in a far, far richer country than Chifley could ever have imagined, the majority of those receiving jobseeker and parenting payments live below the Henderson poverty line. As a recent government report explained, many of the unemployed lack the ability to meet “the essentials of life”.

During the second world war, the old Commonwealth Housing Commission described the provision of affordable housing as a fundamental responsibility of government. “We consider,” it explained, “that a dwelling of good standard and equipment is not only the need but the right of every citizen – whether the dwelling is to be rented or purchased, no tenant or purchaser should be exploited for excessive profit.”

In 2023, almost three-quarters of young people believe they’ll never own a home. As for rent, Anglicare’s Kasy Chambers says bluntly: “Virtually no part of Australia is affordable for aged care workers, early childhood educators, cleaners, nurses and many other essential workers we rely on.”

Once upon a time, even Bob Menzies could urge funding for universities on the basis that they upheld “values which are other than pecuniary”.

But Menzies’ Tory paternalism suffered the same fate as Curtin and Chifley’s social democratic reformism, supplanted by a philosophy that considers “values other than pecuniary” a category error.

Higher education duly evolved into a huge industry, raking in billions from the lucrative overseas student market. Jockeying for profit, the universities employed the same strategies as other corporations, spending millions on consultants, including from scandal-ridden companies like PwC.

FOI documents from 2018-19 and 2019-20 revealed the extraordinary remuneration of top university executives: the 50 highest-paid employees at Sydney, Queensland and UNSW took home $350,000 a year, even before super and other benefits.

Many vice-chancellors receive huge bonuses on top of their already engorged salaries.

The University of Sydney pays Mark Scott a salary of $1.1m including bonuses; at Melbourne University, Duncan Maskell takes home $1.5m annually. Yet both Sydney and Melbourne feature among the worst-rated campuses in surveys of undergraduate experiences.

It doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have to accept the transformation of our institutions into corporations enriching the few while others have to strike for basic conditions. If previous generations could imagine services wholly dedicated to the public good, there’s no reason why we can’t do the same.

There's always some scam floating around Facebook, because if there was ever a more concentrated group of gullible idiots on the internet it's Facebook community pages, but what's the deal with the car detailing one?

Prepay and they never show?

They show up and request payment before work, then do a half-arsed job?

They get your personal details as being a gullible idiot and use it in a future scam?

Grab your car details, location, and when you won't be home so they can knock it off? Or rob your house?

My money is on it being an easy way to compile a list of brainless idiots who fall for every trick in the book.

The Australian Financial Review has been trying to make a big thing about nuclear power, and small modular reactors in particular. But it seems its ideological enthusiasm for the technology is trumping its fact checking capabilities.

To read the AFR series you’d be forgiven for thinking that SMRs already exist in western grids. Everything is in the present tense, as though the machines are already operating, or in commercial production.

Of course, that’s not the case. The first SMRs are unlikely to be built much before the end of the decade, and it could be years after that before they represent a commercial alternative, if then.

But it’s not just the fake tenses that detract from the AFR’s journalism, it’s the facts, or the lack of them, that grate the most.

Let’s take the latest instalment on the progress of SMRs in Canada, written by the paper’s Washington correspondent. We’ve taken a screen shot of the opening paragraphs of the online article above.

“By the end of the decade it (the Ontario government utility) expects to begin generation up to 1.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to supply 1.2 million homes with carbon-free energy,” it proclaims.

Er, no. The minister’s statement announcing the expanded program of a single 300MW SMR to four SMRs totalling 1.2GW makes it very clear that the three additional units won’t be online until 2034 or 2036.

That means, by the end of the decade, there might be one, sized at 300MW and it will only serve 300,000 customers.

That’s important because the nuclear fan club likes to make out the SMRs are not far away and mass deployment is at hand, and that we – Australia – can afford to stop wind and solar and wait.

But it’s clear that even in Canada – one of the biggest and most established users of nuclear in the world, with all the experience and regulatory and grid infrastructure – the authorities can’t see a second unit coming on line until the mid 2030s.

That misinformation certainly fooled the person responsible for the “key statistics” box on the right hand side of the AFR article (above) – which is designed to be a ready reference for those not bothered to read the article itself and in this case is completely misleading.

It tells readers that 1.2 million households will be served by the first SMR. No they won’t. The official release makes clear it is 300,000.

The key statistics box in the AFR article says there will be a total of 1.2 million gigawatts of nuclear. No, just 1.2 gigawatts, eventually. That’s one million times less than what is claimed by the AFR. Maybe just a blooper. But it is more than just a few zeros.

Why does this matter? It’s lazy journalism, bad editing, and is typical of the inflated hopium of the nuclear booster industry.

It’s perhaps telling that the only US politician the AFR quotes in support of nuclear is Vivek Ramaswamy – who shares conspiracy theories about 9/11, blames the recent Hawaii bush fires on “woke water” policies, and reckons Donald Trump has been the greatest US president of the 21st Century.

Ramaswamy, like the other seven Republican candidates in their primary debate this week, did not put his hand up when asked if he accepted climate science. “The climate change agenda is a hoax,” he added. Climate denial and nuclear boosterism often go hand in hand, because it is essentially about a delay to renewables.

Ramaswamy went further: “Unlock American energy, drill, frack, burn coal, embrace nuclear,” he declared. And this is the AFR’s go-to man in the US to push the nuclear argument.

Some might argue Ramaswamy’s “drill, frack and burn” mantra could be a fair summary of the AFR’s own view of the world. It’s not a view that is shared by the bulk of its business readers.

But neither is nuclear – it’s a marginal proposition at best. The Australian energy industry has looked its costs and decided no thanks, it’s too slow and too expensive. As the former head of the US nuclear regulatory commission observed, the drive for nuclear is – more than anything – about ideology.

Of course, the AFR is not the only source of misinformation in this new campaign for nuclear, nor is it the most egregious.

The rot starts at the top. The Coalition – which wants wind and solar stopped while we wait for SMRs – is not the least bit bothered by facts. Just one example: Coalition energy spokesman Jim O’Brien said this week that Canada sources 60 per cent of its power from nuclear. Not true, it is 15 per cent, and falling.

The Murdoch media does its bit, of course, but it is the social media campaign against renewables and for nuclear that is more insidious, and more outrageous – with sometimes absurd claims about wind turbines (they can’t spin by themselves and have to be powered by coal) and solar doing the rounds.

That campaign, depressingly, has taken root – and little more can be expected from the sometimes toxic nature of social media channels, Sky after Dark and even the “mainstream” Murdoch publications. But should we expect better from the nation’s business daily?

Can Pacific nations finally shame the government into taking stronger action on fossil fuels?

Queensland premier defends the government's decision to fast-track proposed law changes around police watch houses, saying it is "standard practice" and their job is "to keep the public safe".

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/1364446

The national cabinet has announced plans to build an extra 1.2 million homes by July 1 2029.

What if we committed to building homes that produced net negative emissions? Put simply, such buildings remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than are emitted during their lifecycle.

Building these homes in Australia would do much more than reduce national emissions.

Building airtight homes - known as a tight building envelope - avoids unwelcome heat gain or loss.

Examples of buildings with low, zero or negative net emissions already exist in the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Building 1.2 million homes that use such technology would scale it up, driving down costs.

Building all of the promised 1.2 million homes in a future-friendly way would show our governments recognise both the long-term imperative of climate action and this immediate opportunity.

Proposed law changes include allowing children to be detained in adult watch houses for the next three years

I always get a bit annoyed at his Olympics win being written off because everyone else stacked it, as if just getting to the Olympic final isn't a massive achievement in itself... I mean the Matildas got the keys to the city for losing a semi-final if you want to play it that way....

Nice to see him carrying on being a legend regardless.

The 49-year-old former elite short track speed skater and four-times Olympian was recognised with a commendation for brave conduct by Australian Governor General David Hurley.

Maybe charities shouldn't be giving out our details to tele-marketers.

Australia's dirtiest power station - the 2.2GW Loy Yang A brown coal generator in Victoria - will continue to operate until 2035 under a new deal struck with the state government which effectively kills hopes that Australia could reach 100 per cent renewables before that date.

The 2035 closure date is consistent with AGL's commitment announced nearly a year ago, when it brought forward the closure date by a decade under pressure from activist shareholder Mike Cannon-Brookes, and climate campaigners and scientists.

The confirmed closure date fits in with Victoria's own target of reaching 95 per cent renewables by 2035 - although that doesn't fit with the closure plans of the neighbouring Loy Yang B coal fired power station, owned by Alinta, which is still set for 2047.

It would also avoid an unplanned closure of Loy Yang A before the scheduled closure date "Through a risk sharing mechanism that will apply in the event of adverse market conditions transpiring before the scheduled closure date."

The confirmation of the closure data was hinted at last week when AGL announced an extension to its power supply deal with the massive Alcoa smelter in Portland.

The plea is "don't chitchat with the Maccos worker in the drive through. Just make your order as quickly as possible."

As part of the determined path to enshittification by our government I had to sit through a show and tell today that messaged that the next generation expects digital integration and solutions which is why we are prioritising centralising services and AI integration.

Apparently you fuckers want to prioritise bots triaging your HR grievances in the next ten years instead of making half these systems half accessible for future generations of public workers..

Fucking medical images being stored in Med Sync (MS Teams), AI parsing from external vendors.. what the actual fuck. Thank fuck we don’t actually disclose our data breaches..

End rant.