RRR Midday News

Presented by Greta Bowyer and Jane Vashti Ryan

Technical producer: Claire Siracusa

Today’s bulletin went to air as Senator Nick Xenophon’s midday deadline for the naming and shaming of the Catholic priest at the center of the South Australian sex scandal was up. At 11:55am I spoke to the Senator, cut the grab and the news went live at noon.

Also in the bulletin… The federal government carbon tax introduced in the lower house, Independent Senator Nick Xenophon goes head to head with the Catholic church, and the Uniting Church is disgusted by Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s moves to change Australian law to allow for offshore processing of asylum seekers.

Listen to the bulletin here…

City Journal Online Opinion

Bloody Dog. And no one cares.

I have a proposal for you. And I’ll come to it in a minute.

My dog hurt himself on the weekend. He was unlucky enough to get his paw caught in some nasty crevice or other and pulled it out with such violence he ripped half his foot off.

Pretty gross.

He drew my attention to his gaping paw while we were waiting for the train at Parliament Station, just as a deeply precipitous Belgrave express drew in and scooped us off to his vet in the Dandenong Ranges.

As we sat on the train, Harry’s paw deftly bandaged in a sanitary napkin (I was a Girl Guide), he whined and scrambled and I soothed and clung. He was terribly distressed, and I, covered in puppy-paw blood, also lacked my usual vim and vigour.

I’m the first to admit that some of the characters one encounters on public transport lack the hygiene and vocabulary necessary to make them perfect travelling companions. I will also concede the fact that at first glance, a girl with a distressed, bleeding canine on her lap might not have broad appeal.

But as I sat there just waiting for the trip to end, it slowly dawned on me that people were actually moving away from us.

My dog isn’t a monster. Actually he’s very sweet and usually attracts an inordinate amount of attention, so my fellow passengers were certainly not frightened. He was bleeding, but it was contained and not excessive. I was showered and dressed for an afternoon at a country pub, so my usual scruffy appearance could not account for the carriage load of upturned noses.

Curious, I gazed about and realised that passengers didn’t really seem aware that they were shuffling away, or notice what I thought was my fairly obvious distress. Every single passenger had headphones on and their face stuck in a smartphone – their interest trained on Angry Birds instead of the flesh and bleeding pooch right in front of them.

When I catch the train, I like to talk to people, or at the very least eavesdrop. Kids are pretty funny when you get them on public transport – the excitement is palpable. Asking little Jimmy why he’s going to the city and hearing him try to wrap his chops around the word ophthalmologist is an excellent way to punctuate the every day.

Yarning to a traveller as you while away the stops brings the world to you, and gorgeous old biddies heading into town to visit their kids have usually got a tale or two to tell.

Lately though, the talent’s drying up. People are lost in their portable digital devices and it’s killing my buzz – I never heard of a better conversation starter than ‘Jesus Christ! What happened to your dog?’ – Not even a nibble, much less any kind of help.

So here’s my proposal. Next time you’re on public transport, take your headphones off, put your bloody phone away – those emails will still be there when you get where you’re going – and have a chat to the person sitting next to you.

You could have read it here first…

Catalyst Edition 2

Edition #2 is on the shelf boys and girls – and the theme is:

Seen & Heard

Meet Melbourne, Australia, Thailand.
Read about L’Oreal Fashion Week, 3D TV and Australian festival fever.
See what our sensational photographer Dan Greg0ric thinks Melbourne sounds look like

The land of Magazine

Catalyst is the RMIT flagship magazine. It enjoys six print runs of 3000 each academic year, and this year, the gal-they-call-editor is me!

The first edition is set to hit the shelf on Febuary 21: Travel and Survival. Edition two is already in the works with the theme Seen & Heard.

Joshua Heller, an LA Comedian, will be writing to us from SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. We’ve got a behind-the-scenes peek from an SBS Television Journalist at the kooky land of News, a spy at the VIP Loreal Melbourne Fashion Week VIP opening party, a profile on the most divine groupie ever to live – Pamela Des Barres – and a view from the front row of some serious spectator sports: kick-boxing, dishlickers, you name it.

For now, a small peek at some of the travel writing included in the forthcoming edition, plus an inaugural Editors’ Letter.

Enjoy..

Crikey: Day 10 – or The Last Day

The Daily Proposition: Look Up

Crikey Intern Jane Vashti Ryan writes:

People don’t look up very often. Straight ahead is a pretty comfortable place to rest your eye balls after all.  We look at eyelevel supermarket shelves and eyelevel advertisements. We stare at the back of peoples heads or look at our feet on the train home, plus we tend to have our faces buried in a portable screen most of the time.

So here is my proposition. Look up. You’ll be amazed at what you see.

Long term Look-Uppery will deliver strong results. You’ll see the seasons change, sky rises built, and you’ll probably remember to change the batteries in your smoke alarms more often too.

But I like to look up to notice the smaller, simple things.

Like roof top gardens in the middle of the city and the fact that three buildings in a row can perfectly embody three completely different periods of architecture. Clouds. People smoking in apartment windows while they watch the world go by. Blossoms. Dried out toilet paper globs on public toilet roofs. Graffiti. Strange new brands of mustard on the top shelf at the supermarket

I like seeing birds wrestle with precarious perches on out hanging tree branches, and I love seeing possums curled up asleep in the middle of the day. I love getting a wave from a window cleaner abseiling off a 50 storey building, and you can’t beat glimpsing the odd sky-writ marriage proposal.

You notice strange things when you look up, too. Doors that don’t seem to lead anywhere, mysterious blacked out windows, people hiding in trees and ratbags at windows gawking though binoculars.

You feel the sun on your face, and glimpse the horizon more often, which is excellent for your mental health

I also reckon when you practice looking up, you become more engaged in your immediate surroundings. A mate of mine says you can always tell when someone is a tourist, because they look up a lot, and I’d say that’s true. Thousands of people come to Australia from all over the world to visit Uluru each year, and yet I don’t know many Australian’s who have been. When it comes to having a good look around, the principle is exactly the same, and it means we miss out seeing all the interesting stuff.

I’ll wager there are plenty of tourists who have marvelled at the splendour of the Majorca House building on Degraves St in Melbourne. And I’d say for every one of them there is a local who drinks their coffee in its shadow every morning and never noticed it.

So try it for a day. Look up and let us know what you see…

You could have read it first here though…

Tags: Crikey, Daily Proposition

Crikey: Day 9

4. Race to the bottom: why our poorest pay the most tax.

 

Crikey Intern Jane Vashti Ryan writes:

 

Australia’s poorest pay the highest effective marginal tax rates, leading to long-term work disincentives for welfare recipients, according to a brief released by The Australia Institute this week.The document, Removing poverty traps in the tax-transfer system, will be submitted to the federal government in the lead-up to a new tax summit to be held by mid-2011, revisiting the Henry Tax Review.The review highlighted the anomaly, as did the incoming government brief (“red book”) handed to finance minister Penny Wong when she assumed the portfolio after the election.

According the brief, there’s a whacking great list of benefits that taper simultaneously when someone receiving benefits re-enters the workforce. This can lead to an effective tax rate of up to 100% for some, which translates to absolutely no financial benefit in re-entering the workforce. Welfare Rights Centre director Maree O’Halloran says the system is stacked against low-income families in particular.

“In the worst cases, an individual can face five different payments all tapering at once: Family Tax Benefit A, Family Tax Benefit B, Youth Allowance, Child Care Benefit, Public Housing. It’s like a house of cards, with the deck stacked against low-income families, unemployed people and secondary earners, usually women working casually,” she told Crikey.

A senior policy adviser at the Australian Council of Social Services, Peter Davidson, says if the structure tax system was changed, it would encourage more people on benefits to work: “The structure should be changed and extra work related expenses should be reduced. Income tests for Newstart Allowance should be reduced, and that overlapping of tapers should be removed.”

Single parent Susan Brown recently re-entered the workforce, and says she could never have afforded to work before her two girls reached school age. “I used to get $630 a fortnight now I get about $300 on top of which I have to pay for child care. If the girls weren’t in school, childcare would cost about $120 a day,” she said.

One of the most prominent poverty traps shown in the brief is that faced by public housing tenants, whose rent increases incrementally with their income. But O’Halloran says the disincentive to work starts long before welfare recipients actually take up tenancy.

“The workforce disincentives embedded in our public housing policies require urgent attention. If you’ve been on a waiting list for public housing for years you become very fearful about jeopardising your place in the long queue,” she said.

And policy manager at the Community Housing Federation of Australia Eddy Bourke told Crikey the problem is compounded by a chronic shortage of accommodation: “There’s a race to the bottom, when the state is only able to allocate housing to the very most vulnerable people in the community. People just won’t work if they think their chances of getting a place will be affected.”

Catholic Social Services CEO Frank Quinlan says the problems created by the complicated tax-transfer system are not new, but that the report certainly highlights the stark disparity in effective tax rates faced by people on low incomes. This figure, first published in the Henry Review, shows the level of tax paid by welfare recipients as they enter the workforce. It’s based on the yearly private income of single income couple with two children.

Source: Treasury, Australia’s future tax syxtem consultation paper, Chart 4.5, p.94

This graph shows the effective tax rate for a family earning $30,000-$40,000 per year is over 90% when tapering benefits and income tax are accounted for. This compares with the 35% paid by a family earning $70,000 per year.

In response to the figures, the brief states: “It is relevant to ask why such an arbitrary pattern of effective marginal tax rates in the welfare system is tolerated when it is surely within the wit of policy makers to design system that claws back welfare entitlements and extracts tax in a smooth and consistent manner.”

The brief echoes changes to the interaction between the tax system and the welfare system called for by Treasury. Quinlan says while basic human dignity is being called for, there is also an economic imperative at stake.

“Purely from an economic point of view it makes sense to improve the standard of living for Australia’s poorest people, and help them into the workforce, rather than deterring them from entering it,” he said.

But you could have read it first here…

 

Tags: Crikey, Politics, social welfare, Tax

Crikey: Day 7

Jane Vashti Ryan gets a scoop!

4. Our black health gap: less spent on primary aboriginal health

Crikey intern Jane Vashti Ryan writes:

Spending on primary health care for indigenous Australians is significantly less per person than for the rest of the population, despite an 11-year gap in life expectancy. The Australian Medical Association says the new data shows mainstream primary health services are failing indigenous Australians, with services not delivering adequate care or value for money. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report, commissioned by the federal government and released last Friday, shows primary health care spending for indigenous Australians is $327 per person in 2006-07 (the latest figures available), compared with $563 for non-indigenous Australians. It also shows spending on hospital care for indigenous Australians being treated for preventable diseases such as kidney and heart disease is as much as seven times higher that of non-indigenous Australians. AMA president Dr Andrew Pesce says the figures don’t come as a surprise. He told Crikey: “You would think there is equal access to these services for everybody and theoretically there is. But because of the lack of early access and health literacy in indigenous communities, you only see intervention when there is a crisis. “There’s a gap in service delivery that needs to be closed in order to close the gap in life expectancy between indigenous and non indigenous people that currently stands at about 11 years.” And the problem isn’t specific to remote communities. Dr Steve Hambleton, the AMA’s Queensland-based vice president, says 75% of indigenous Australians live in regional and metro areas, yet they are failing to access primary health care services. Recently speaking to an urban GP, Hambleton said the GP super clinic planned for that area should be an Aboriginal medical service. The GP said there are no Aboriginal people there, therefore it would be unnecessary. “There are 4500 indigenous people living in that area, they just don’t go to the doctor,” Dr Hambleton said. “For too long this issue has been under the carpet, but it’s out there, it’s obvious and we need to do something about it.” A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Ageing says the numbers reflect the policy of the previous government, and that Labor has put in place new policies to target these problems: “New funding arrangements under the Indigenous Chronic Disease Package provides substantial additional funding to the Aboriginal Community Controlled Health and mainstream health sectors.” The spokesperson also said non-admitted hospital health care for indigenous Australians was 2.2 times higher than non-indigenous people, suggesting not all primary health care delivery is included in the new numbers (read the complete departmental response to Crikey here). But policy manager at the Aboriginal Medical Service Alliance NT, Chips Mackinolty, says the most worrying figures show the level of spending for end-stage kidney disease. “The most startling figures are on renal disease where it’s absolutely clear that the greatest cost is in end-stage renal dialysis; 45% of total hospital spending for indigenous Australians goes to renal disease each year, usually dialysis,” he told Crikey. Mackinolty said kidney disease is one of the most expensive conditions to treat in its end stages: “Dialysis and transplants go off the charts in terms of cost. The most cost-effective thing to do would be to put money in primary health care instead of hospitals.” But mainstream primary health care services are failing to deliver the right care, according to Dr Hambleton: “Mainstream general practices are pretty scary places for many Aborigines, but when you see an Aboriginal person at the desk, that discomfort is alleviated. Every GP can improve the way they interact with indigenous clients, but the biggest bang for buck will come from community-controlled organisations.” More Aboriginal community-controlled health services are on the agenda for medical groups, but the problem won’t be fixed with health service improvements alone, says Mackinolty. “Improvements in primary health care will only improve these numbers by about 30%. The other 70% comes down to social determinants of health — things like employment, housing and education,” he said.

Tags: Crikey, Health, Indigenous, Politics

Crikey: Day 6

Today sees a new player on the scene of the Murray Darling Basin debate… An irrigation consultant who says half the water used for irrigation in Australia is going down the gurgler…

10. Farmers will survive, with more than a pinch of salt

Crikey intern Jane Vashti Ryan writes:

Could changing irrigation methods in Australia save water, the agricultural sector and ultimately the Murray Darling Basin? “It can go a bloody long way towards it,” irrigation consultant Jeremy Cape told Crikey today.  Only 30% of irrigators actually use an objective scheduling method to find out when to apply water. What does that mean? According to Cape, it means that while the debate rages over sustainable cuts to irrigation entitlements for farmers on the Murray Darling Basin, only about half of the irrigated water in Australia is used by Australia’s agricultural plants. The rest is down the gurgler. The alternative on offer is a standardised, water-efficient drip irrigation system, which allows the farmer to measure, within 5%, the amount of water being used. While the loss of water through wastage is contributing to the overall ill-health of the river system, it’s also causing massive hikes in salinity which isn’t just bad for the river system, and has serious repercussions for irrigators and dry-land farmers as well. Wentworth Group environmental engineer Tim Stubbs says water that drains below the root zone and into underground water tables draws the water — and a lot of salt — to the surface. “Australia’s landscape has a lot of salt in it. Because of damming and catchments we’re not getting flood planes and carbon moving, and we’re then getting massive build-ups of salt levels which makes the water salty,” he explained. “Up in Queensland around the Burdekin catchment they’ve been irrigating for 20 years now, and they’re really starting to see the effects of salinity. Sugar cane production levels are dropping.” Cane, who has worked in the irrigation sector for over 20 years, reckons the proposed water entitlement cuts could be easily met by farmers, and salinity levels could be much better managed if more efficient methods of irrigation were supported by the government. “In 1990 we had about 40 people employed in water usage efficiency by the NSW Department Agriculture. Now there are less than five. The support for extension staff who are working to support irrigators has virtually disappeared in the public sector,” he said. “There used to be a rural Water Use Efficiency in Queensland and this program no longer exists. It is possible to change methods of irrigation, meet those targets and maintain the health of the agriculture sector all at the same time.” Sean Hoobin is the fresh water policy manager from the World Wildlife Fund and agrees the cuts proposed must be met if the process is going to carry any real environmental weight. “There’s been a range of cuts recommended, and the ones being looked at by the government aren’t going to do the job. If we’re going to do this we may as well do it properly,” he said.

Tags: Environment, Politics

Crikey: Week 2

Bring it on.

That’s false bravado by the way, although I do wear a red helmet most places…

Crike: Day 5 Part II

20. Wine producers rue our dollar, and will students stay away?

Crikey intern Jane Vashti Ryan writes:

As Australian Institute of Export director Peter Mace put it: “It’s not bloody good.” The Australian dollar peaked at 99.2 US cents overnight, the highest it has been since the dollar was floated in 1983. And while Australian travellers are cheering, exporters and educators are bracing for significant fallout. Mace says the wine industry, the education sector and the manufacturing sector will all suffer if this hike is here to stay. “The Australian wine industry has little room to move on pricing with competition now coming from South America and South Africa, and manufacturing will suffer too. We’re a high-cost production country.” But the real doozie, according to Mace, will be the fallout for the education sector, one of Australia’s biggest export industries: “With the rising dollar, foreign students have to make the call on whether to come to Australia or look else where.” International student housing group International House director Elissa Jans is worried about the ramifications. “Last time the dollar peaked, we had feedback from overseas clients saying the rising value of the dollar really was a serious deterrent,” she said. “Students are looking for a bargain when they come and study. Normally they look at the UK or the US but they come here because it’s cheap. When the dollar rises this high they might as well stay at home.” Chief economist at the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation Roger Donnelly agrees certain industries will be adversely affected, but points out that rising currency value is a response to a potentially overheating economy. “It’s a safety valve for inflation and the RBA would have to be taking sterner action if we had inflation,” he said. The dollar has been boosted by strong unemployment figures and a weakening American dollar, but the threat of an international currency war looms large with fears that major economies are engaging in a “race to the bottom” in a bid to boost export growth. But you could have read it here first…

Tags: Business, Crikey, Dollar, Education