Australia

Text exchanges between Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Reece Kershaw and PwC partner Mick Fuller have revealed more extensive conversations between the pair than the commissioner previously suggested to parliament.

"The debris field is consistent with a catastrophic, high impact [crash]. Sadly I can confirm unidentified human remains have also been observed in this location by the remote operated underwater vehicle.

"Due to the nature of the debris field positive identification of the remains is unlikely to occur until we recover more of the wreckage."

Next year, Australia will introduce a global minimum tax aimed at preventing multinationals based within its borders from evading tax.

It's been dubbed the "race to the bottom".

However, Singapore's effective tax rate can be much lower, as its government has incentives that greatly reduce or remove tax obligations for multinationals that set up operations and services in that country.

Last year, the ATO reached a settlement of almost $1 billion with mining giant Rio Tinto over its Singapore-based subsidiary.

Professor Sadiq says the tax will "raise very little" for Australia, providing $210 million by the 2024 financial year, "less than half a per cent of the $93 billion in company tax revenue" expected for that year.

Professor Sadiq says it would be better to distribute corporate tax revenue to countries with a company's activities actually take place.

(I welcome any recommendations for a better summary website to use.)

Exclusive: Department’s $32,000 contract, which comes after PwC tax leak scandal, slammed as ‘laughable scenario’

Original article link: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/01/australian-made-childrens-tv-content-found-to-have-collapsed-between-2019-and-2022

Locally made Australian children’s television content decreased by more than 84% between 2019 and 2022, shrinking from 605 hours to just 95 hours, a new report shows.

The drastic decline in local children’s content is recorded in the latest Australian Media and Communications Authority (Acma) report into compliance with Australian commercial free-to-air television content rules.

The report found that all 13 metropolitan and 62 regional television networks met the required quota of a minimum 55% Australian content during viewing time between 6am and midnight on their primary channels.

The three major networks – Seven, Nine and Ten – all exceeded the quota, with 76%, 79% and 71% respectively.

But in 2020 the Coalition government abandoned the quota for children’s free-to-air television, introducing a point system instead to allow more flexibility for commercial broadcasters.

The then communication minister, Paul Fletcher, justified the change at the time, saying most children were now accessing screen content through either the public broadcaster or streaming platforms, not commercial networks.

Children’s local content advocates have highlighted Acma’s findings, saying the weakened Australian content and children’s television standards (ACCTS) framework was responsible for 500 fewer hours of content.

“It shows that, without regulation, commercial platforms won’t make any investment in children,” said Jenny Buckland, the chief executive of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation.

“They’ll focus entirely on the primetime content and content for adults.

“It really means that the ABC and – to some extent NITV – the public broadcasters, have become the main game in town for children’s content.”

The chief executive of Screen Producers Australia, Matthew Deaner, said the Acma findings were “damming evidence of the failure of this framework to provide Australian children with any content that reflects their own lives and their own experiences”.

“The damage done in the changes to the regulatory framework in 2020 are truly coming home to roost,” he told the Guardian.

“[This is] especially true for children, where Australian content available for them has plummeted to an incredible low.”

The peak body which lobbied the previous federal government to loosen the local content quota for children’s television, Free TV Australia, said in a statement the Acma results showed that the commercial networks had “again shot the lights out in delivering Australian content to Australian audiences”.

“We are committed to bringing Australians the great local drama, trusted news, live and free sport and captivating entertainment that they love,” said Free TV’s chief executive, Bridget Fair, in the statement.

In relation to children’s content, Fair said commercial television licensees had exceeded the 250 points of first release Australian programs annually required, the system that replaced children’s content quotas in 2020.

“All metropolitan licensees over-delivered on the annual points quota under the ACCTS, averaging 319 points across the year,” she said.

Deaner said Free TV Australia’s opposition to a 20% reinvestment in local content by its online streaming competitors was further damaging the local industry,

“Commercial broadcasters are failing Australian audiences when it comes to investing in first-release children’s and quality drama content, yet they oppose streaming services being required to provide these,” he said.

Modern estimates put the last time the North Wellesley Islands were connected to the mainland to at least 10,000 years ago.

Several years ago, Professor Nunn started working with linguistics expert Associate Professor Nick Reid from the University of New England to collect these submergence stories and date them according to the sea levels reported within.

"I think it's absolutely awesome that people are still telling a story today has been passed down for 99% of that time by word of mouth, rather than being written down."

"My colleague at UniSC, Dr. Adrian McCallum, has a project which is looking at stories of when K'gari was still connected to the mainland and people could walk across," Professor Nunn said.

If you recharge credit on your prepaid phone you now have to give them your card details because they disabled PayPal from their app.

Say what you like about the show (and you'd probably be right), but one valuable thing Neighbours provides is a great place for aussie actors and crew to cut their teeth.

In case any help is needed regarding trauma, please reach out to this organisation through the gov site: https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/mentalhealth/services/Pages/support-contact-list.aspx#trauma

What a monster and sad to see the abuser impacted so many victims for him to be caught

AFP seems to have to overcome a tough obstacles to arrest this person, as they have to correlate objects in the background to identify the locations lead to this child abuser

Actions on nation audit for carers as a follow-up: https://youtu.be/OY5amBpxmLo

👉 ArtsHub

TALK TO ME – BEHIND THE SCENES

21 July 2023 By Matthew Jenkin Breakout directing duo Danny & Michael Philippou discuss their transition from YouTube content creators to their first feature film, Talk To Me.

Having amassed over 6 million YouTube subscribers and 1.5 billion views, Danny & Michael Philippou – known on the platform as RackaRacka – reveal that their stardom online was by accident.

“We kinda fell into the online creating. We never set out to become YouTubers,” Michael Philippou explains. “We always wanted to make film and television… we just got swept up in the world of YouTube.”

In this behind-the-scenes video, the brothers discuss how their YouTube channel gave them the opportunity to experiment and learn, how they designed the ceramic hand in the film and why they prefer to do visual effects in-camera.

Talk To Me is released in cinemas 27 July, 2023.

Natasha Fyles tells National Press Club that Northern Territory is ‘not for turning’ on the project

Penny Wong says she's raised concerns over 'alarming' democratic trends in Israel with its government as it pursues a controversial overhaul of its judicial system.