EXCLUSIVE Leaked Sky News plans reveal network's high hopes for young presenter - but there's one complaint we keep on hearing... INSIDE MAIL
Word from Macquarie Park is that the 24-hour news channel has found its Gen Z poster girl - and she's already being groomed for prime-time stardom.
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Daily Mail
5 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Legendary Australian singer and Blue Heelers star Bobby Bright dies at 80 after devastating diagnosis
Legendary Australian singer-turned-actor Bobby Bright has died in Melbourne aged 80, three years after being diagnosed with lung cancer. The English-born singer moved to Australia at the age of nine and had an incredible career in both music and film, which lasted for over five decades. He was renowned for his long-time partnership with fellow singer Laurie Allen, after they joined forces in 1964 to form the celebrated duo Bobby & Laurie. They quickly became fixtures on Australian television, including regular appearances on the variety program The Go!! Show. Their debut record, I Belong with You, released under Melbourne 's Go!! Records, marked the beginning of their musical journey together. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. The duo's collaboration with The Rondells, featuring Wayne Duncan on bass and Gary Young on drums (later of Daddy Cool fame), produced hits that catapulted them to pop stardom. Their cover of Roger Miller's 'Hitch Hiker' soared to number one in Australia in 1966, cementing their place in music history. They also co-hosted a popular ABC musical variety show in 1966 called Dig We Must. In addition to his musical achievements, Bobby Bright pursued occasional acting roles. He notably appeared in the legendary Channel Seven police drama Homicide and took on the role of The Doctor in the Australian stage production of 'Tommy' in 1973. Bobby went on to become a fixture of Australian film and television, appearing alongside Lisa McCune in Blue Heelers and late American singer Aaliyah in the Melbourne-filmed Hollywood movie Queen of the Damned. Bobby's final acting role was in a 2015 short movie called Lazy Boy, alongside Neighbours star Steven Carroll. He also ventured into radio, serving as a DJ on Melbourne's 3XY. Heartbroken fans took to social media to pay tribute to Bobby. 'Very sad news. A lovely man,' one person wrote. 'Recorded some great music,' a second added. Following a career that spanned decades, Bobby continued to perform in Melbourne. He never retired and continued to wow crowds across Australia with his incredible performances until shortly before his death. His singing partner Laurie Allen passed away in 2002, and together they leave behind a legacy of unforgettable contributions to Australian music and entertainment.
The Guardian
5 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Lowering Australia's voting age to 16 without fortifying civic foundations would be misguided
Every few years, Australia resurrects the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 – usually prompted by a campaign or because some other country (with a fairly different electoral context) is doing so. And every time, we fail to address the question of whether we are prepared as a nation; in my opinion, the answer is no. It's not that I'm philosophically opposed to enfranchising 16‑ and 17‑year‑olds. After all, democracy thrives on fresh voices. The hitch comes when you hand a driving licence to someone who has never sat behind a wheel. Without robust civic and media‑literacy education, and without any clear evidence that 16- and 17-year‑olds themselves demand this change, we'd be giving young Australians an Ikea flat‑pack democracy with no instruction manual. I won't dignify the cognitive capability argument against lowering voting age – sharp minds exist among teens as well of course. But readiness is another matter. Internal efficacy – belief in one's ability to effect change – runs low: in the Australian National University Generation study of 3,131 16- and 17-year-old Australians, just 3.5% backed a lowered compulsory vote, 18% wanted a voluntary ballot and more than 70% favoured keeping the voting age at 18. This mirrored past statistics among older voting youth and the overall voting public – highlighting public reluctance for lowering voting age. This lack of confidence isn't surprising when earlier this year, school students have recorded their lowest civic‑knowledge scores in two decades, and 47% of gen Z voters said their main motivation for casting a ballot in 2022 was avoiding a $20 fine, not civic conviction. Thinking about where they get their information from, social media reigns supreme when it comes to news consumption. Forty per cent of 18-to-24-year‑olds get news on Instagram and 36% on TikTok, yet only 24% of all Australians have had news‑literacy training, according to the 2025 Digital News Report. Given this fragmented media landscape where political misinformation is rife and AI chatbots are increasingly asked to provide tailored news, any notion of voluntary voting – or haphazard enfranchisement – is nonsense unless we first mandate robust civics and media‑literacy education. Independent MP Monique Ryan's proposal of the fallback option of voluntary voting for 16‑ and 17‑year‑olds risks tampering with what ties our young people to the democratic system. If we waive fines for teen no‑shows, we'll replace steady turnout with shrugging indifference (precisely the problem our UK counterparts are trying to solve). In Australia, state-initiated registration and mandatory voting keep our youngest cohorts turning up in significantly higher numbers than in most democracies. In my PhD research across 35 OECD nations, these were the most important electoral design features that drive youth participation, not voting age. Removing them now would be a step backwards, not forwards. Now let's talk party politics. Young voters today are no monolithic bloc but a fractured constellation of issue‑driven minds. Election analyses show 18-to-29-year‑olds are more likely to switch allegiances mid‑campaign and to abandon major parties altogether. Ryan's bid to lower the voting age makes political sense: gen Z are already drifting towards independents and minor parties such as the Greens more than their predecessors, the millennials. So in practice, any voting‑age reform will likely remain a partisan tug‑of‑war rather than a matter of democratic principle. The Greens have been pushing to extend the franchise to 16‑ and 17‑year‑olds, arguing it would amplify youth voices in policymaking (even though enfranchised younger voters today remain poorly represented in policy outcomes than their parents). Labor fears that a younger, more progressive electorate would hand the Greens an entrenched advantage – and that voluntary voting for teens could undermine Australia's compulsory model. The Coalition seems wary that any electoral tweak is likely to advantage the left. Viewed this way, lowering the voting age looks less like principled reform and more like partisan manoeuvring – although injecting a small new cohort is unlikely to upend the broad electoral currents already in motion. Lowering the voting age certainly won't magically bridge the trust gap between young Australians and their representatives. Unless we first diagnose why so many youths distrust politicians, simply adding unprepared 16‑ and 17‑year‑olds to the roll risks token turnout or – under a voluntary scheme – a surge in protest abstention. The solution isn't a standalone ballot‑box fix but a two‑pronged approach (while maintaining compulsory voting): first we must invest in compulsory civics, media and digital‑literacy education across our secondary schools, and only then can we negotiate lowering voting age. Perhaps the moment is ripe to roll out these reforms in tandem. I'll leave it to Ryan, the Greens and the ALP to whatever mix of electoral legacy‑building or genuine youth advocacy they pursue – but I remain unconvinced that enfranchising new voters without fortifying their civic foundations is anything but misguided, if not downright harmful. Dr Intifar Chowdhury is a youth researcher and a lecturer in government at Flinders University
Daily Mail
35 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
PETER VAN ONSELEN: Virtue-signalling Labor slaps a 'plaque of shame' under Mark Latham - but what about Gough, Bob, Billy and Arthur?
Labor's decision to put a plaque beneath Mark Latham's portrait in the federal caucus room, declaring that his 'actions do not accord with Labor values', isn't brave. It also isn't principled. It's purely performative. A belated, sanitised act of virtue signalling that seeks to retroactively exile someone whom the party actually expelled back in 2017. Let's be clear: Latham's descent into reactionary populism, his inflammatory rhetoric and now the serious allegations against him (which he denies) mark him as a deeply divisive political figure. Repugnant even. He has taken public swipes at former colleagues, journalists, and, yes, even me. No tears are being shed here in defence of Latham the politician. But this is precisely why Labor's move reeks of cowardice, not courage. The party already expelled him eight years ago for joining a rival party, not for anything he said or did in the years since. Latham's portrait remained hanging all of that time. Now, suddenly, as vile allegations surface (yet remain untested, don't forget) the party moves to editorialise history. It isn't leadership, it's opportunism with a halo. Worse, the moral consistency of the gesture collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisy. If Labor is now in the business of annotating history, where's the plaque under Arthur Calwell's portrait: the former Labor leader who infamously said 'two Wongs don't make a White' while enforcing the White Australia Policy as Immigration Minister? Calwell was a Labor leader too. Are we to believe that racist policy, proudly defended at the time, is more tolerable on the walls of the caucus room than Latham's political apostasy? No plaque to clarify that modern Labor doesn't agree with Calwell's actions all those years ago? And why stop there? Gough Whitlam approved Indonesia's bloody invasion of East Timor. Should a plaque beneath his portrait acknowledge the thousands killed under tacit Australian approval? Bob Hawke's well-documented womanising and personal indiscretions: do they not 'fail to meet the standards we expect and demand '? Or is selective morality acceptable so long as the subjects remained loyal to the party - in contrast to Latham? If that's the logic, what about Billy Hughes? A Labor leader and PM in 1915 who was expelled from the party, formed a breakaway party with a group of defecting Labor MPs before switching sides and becoming a conservative Prime Minister. He was the ultimate political rat, yet Hughes doesn't get the Latham plaque treatment under his photo noting his expulsion. Do I even need to move into the state political sphere to outline the many former Labor leaders there who have disgraced themselves over the years in all manner of ways, yet their pictures continue to hang without disclaimers? Labor's decision to editorialise one leader's image while ignoring the moral failings or controversies of others isn't a statement of values; It's a signal to the culture warriors that Labor, too, can take part in the great historical sanitisation effort of our times. In this case, literally framing the past with a modern disclaimer. The Stalin reference made by Latham when responding to the move on social media might have been flippant, but it's not without merit. On X he wrote: 'Can't the Labor caucus go the full Stalin and white me with a trace around my head? Or replace that boring head shot with what (the media) says is my harem?' Stalin famously had political enemies erased from photos, a crude tinkering of history dressed up as loyalty to the party line. Labor isn't going that far, but the instinct is eerily similar. Rewrite the past. Cleanse the wall. Send a message. Gallagher says 'you can't erase history', but the plaque does exactly that. It reframes Latham's time as leader not for what it was (a failed but electorally serious 2004 tilt at government) but for what he became long afterwards. It renders the wall not a record of history, but a curated moral museum where every subject must pass a retrospective purity test. Except they target only Latham, because other ex-leaders with failings have stayed loyal to the Labor brand. This is the same slippery logic (unevenly distributed) that animates the statue-toppling fervour seen across the activist left in recent years. Tear down monuments to flawed figures, rename buildings, revise curricula. Not to better understand history, but to morally dominate it. Anthony Albanese still proudly displays a 2005 parliamentary speech delivered after Latham's retirement. He calls Latham 'a great political figure', also praising his commentary, even reflecting fondly on their time together It's less about acknowledging the complexities of those who came before, and more about projecting the righteousness of those who came after. It also raises an obvious question: if these values really mattered so deeply, why did it take until 2025 to finally act? Latham was expelled in 2017 for defecting to the Liberal Democrats. His political memoir that came out shortly after he resigned from the leadership in 2005 was utterly scathing. The plaque makes no mention of any of that, instead implying that his 'actions' - undefined but clearly referencing recent untested allegations - were the reason. If so, that's even worse: Labor has effectively pre-judged a matter that remains before the legal system, choosing to morally condemn someone before the process of justice has run its course. But are we surprised? And what of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's own history with Latham? On his personal website, Albanese still proudly displays a 2005 parliamentary speech delivered after Latham's retirement. He calls Latham 'a great political figure', also praising his commentary, even reflecting fondly on their time together. If the caucus room now requires plaques of moral distancing, should the PM's own website also come with a trigger warning? If not, why not? The contradictions pile up, and it's not just Labor. Look no further than the Greens, who are in the process of expelling their co-founder, Tony Harris, over controversial comments about trans issues. The current leader supports the move, while former Greens leaders Bob Brown and Christine Milne oppose it. A minor party that once prided itself on diversity of opinion has found itself unable to tolerate one of its own foundational thinkers, because his views no longer align with modern orthodoxy. Again, no defence of the comments, but it's worth noting how quickly today's progressive movements exile yesterday's heroes. This is the deeper problem: a political culture so fixated on moral branding that it can't distinguish between disagreement and heresy, between history and endorsement, between symbolism and substance. No one is arguing that Latham deserves celebration. I'm certainly not. But nor does he need to be ritually disavowed with a plaque designed to placate those whose only political muscle comes from policing the past. Certainly not as a knee-jerk reaction to allegations yet to be formally tested. If he no longer represents Labor values, let that be evident in the record, in how the party governs, not how it curates its party room. Labor's latest move is not leadership, it's theatrics masquerading as virtue.
