Four Corners 'meltdown' two hours before going to air. Plus, blind gossip hints at media Lothario's dark side... and which TV star has meth on his mind? INSIDE MAIL
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Sore corners
In case you missed it, Four Corners poured a steaming bucket of s*** on Melbourne neurosurgeon Greg Malham this week, digging
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The Guardian
10 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Violet loves attending her local state school, but some fear Queensland kids like her will be forced into ‘segregated' education
Violet had lots of friends over to her 11th birthday party, where they all sang karaoke and danced to Taylor Swift. As well as music, she's into swimming and loves being around people. Just like her big brother before her, Violet attends the primary school nearest her home in Yeppoon on the central Queensland coast. As with most students, Violet's education has had its ups and downs. Sign up: AU Breaking News email But this year, grade 5, has been 'a stellar, standout year', her mum, Shalee Gregson-Quinn, says. 'She's got a teacher who really understands that Violet's got a right to be there, that she will have a superior education by being there.' Given that Violet goes to a state school, one might think that right is assumed. But it is not always so for kids like Violet. 'It's just a by-the-way thing, but Violet has Down's syndrome,' her mother says. Which is what makes it so special that this vibrant young girl is surrounded by classmates who also see her disability as just a by-the-way thing – and a teacher, in Angela Hinds, who holds high expectations for Violet and works hard to ensure that she is 'included and engaged and happy'. Because those expectations help instil in Violet aspirations of the kind of 'ordinary life' that many Australians will take for granted: the chance to pursue meaningful work, to travel, to form relationships and make friends. 'It is life changing for a parent to feel that someone is so invested in your child's progress,' Gregson-Quinn says. So the community resources consultant is 'extremely disheartened' by a government announcement that she fears will mean many other young Queenslanders will miss out on an education like Violet's. In handing down its budget last month, the Liberal National party's (LNP) first since unseating Labor after a decade in power, the government announced what it claims is the 'largest special school investment in history', with a pledge to build six new special schools. This marked a significant change in direction from the 2018 high-water mark of a policy of including students with disabilities in mainstream schools, set out by then education minister Kate Jones, which advocates hailed as world leading. It is not just Gregson-Quinn dismayed by the move – the Australian disability discrimination commissioner, Rosemary Kayess, urged the LNP to 'scrap' its plan to build more 'segregated schools' on Thursday. 'It is deeply concerning that the Queensland government is blatantly ignoring all the evidence and expert advice in relation to the significant benefits of inclusive education for people with disability,' Kayess said. But, for the LNP, this investment in bricks and mortar is driven by at least two imperatives: one practical and one ideological. All six new schools will be built near existing special schools in south east Queensland growth suburbs, such as Coomera, that have seen enrolments rise in recent years. The former Labor government actually strayed from its inclusion policy and built a special school in Coomera, which opened in 2022. Its enrolment has more than doubled: from 134 to 280 students. 'Special school enrolments have increased by more than 38 percent since 2019 and we cannot ignore the growing demand from parents and carers who want to send their child to a special school,' the education minister, John-Paul Langbroek, said in a statement. But the new schools are not just a response to numbers – they reflect a guiding philosophy of this conservative government. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion The premier, David Crisafulli, said earlier this month that he acknowledged the 'different views' on educating children with disabilities, but told the press he 'wholeheartedly' believed in his government's policy shift. 'I really do; I believe in it for those kids and, ultimately, I believe in choice,' Crisafulli said. 'Everything I always do is about giving choice to an individual, and I think we have a real lack of special schools in this state. 'But, overwhelmingly, when I speak to teachers and when I speak to parents of special needs children, they want that choice – and we are going to give it to them.' Born profoundly deaf, Prof Alastair McEwin was one of six commissioners who handed down the final disability royal commission report in 2023, after four years of inquiry. McEwin has repeatedly said he never had a parent tell him they chose a special school – instead, they had to 'concede that mainstream schools cannot or will not support their child'. McEwin labelled Queensland's special school build 'alarming'. He was one of three commissioners to recommend they be gradually, but entirely, phased out of Australia. The commission, however, was evenly split on this matter. Its chair and two other commissioners recommended an alternative approach in which special schools be relocated 'within or in close proximity to mainstream schools', suggesting instead a number of ways through which the different cohorts could interact. The complexity of the debate is encapsulated in a statement from the Queensland Teachers' Union president, Cresta Richardson, who said state schools were 'proud to be leaders in the area of inclusion', but that 'parents and students who need to, should have access to special schools'. 'No two students are the same, and the expectations of parents can vary greatly from school to school,' Richardson said. 'The mainstream inclusion model does come with significant challenges and additional workload for teachers and school leaders, workload that requires training, resourcing, and funding.' Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Prof Linda Graham agreed that if systems weren't in place to support teachers to include students with disabilities into their classrooms, the result could be 'mayhem'. But the director of QUT's Centre for Inclusive Education said that 'pouring money' into the physical infrastructure of segregation reduced the incentive to make mainstream schools inclusive. 'We've been working very hard since 2018 to make this happen in Queensland, with reducing commitment from political leaders,' Graham said. 'Now they are just going to pull the rug out from underneath.'
The Guardian
10 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The stranger in a strange place is an enduring narrative in Australian fiction. But what if the crime scene is a whole continent?
Non-Indigenous Australians of my generation might have fleetingly pondered the curious names that flashed past the car windows on long ago family road trips – Massacre Bay, Skull Hole, Butchers Creek. Too few, however, might contemplate today how it feels to be dispossessed in a continent replete with topography, public buildings and institutions named in honour of your people's murderers – names celebrating the very acts of massacring Indigenous people without commemorating those murdered. Just on that, at least 10 places in Queensland alone are named Skeleton Creek. Discuss. Much contemporary Australian crime fiction is set in farms, small towns, the hostile bush and the red dusty expanses of various deserts; rural landscapes from which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people would probably have been violently dispossessed and massacred after European invasion. These crime novels are captivating, understandably popular and skilfully written. Most, with notable exceptions, focus on crimes committed within fictional contemporary settler communities. The names of some Australian places and the violence they connote seem perfect for the crime genre. Stranger than fiction indeed. But perhaps they are too real. In late winter 2023 I was well advanced on the draft of a novel I'd been steadily progressing since my last was published a year earlier. The characters were circling one another – conversing, doing to each other and being done to. Ghostly lines of plot were finding definition to steadily form a blueprint. I could envisage the final pages. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads This coincided with Australia's purported national conversation about the looming October 2023 Indigenous voice to parliament referendum. The mainstream political atmospherics were ugly and the so-called robust debate gave licence to resentful torrents of racism that manifested in absurd propositions that Indigenous people would somehow be unfairly advantaged by a yes result. Added to that was a burgeoning (and, as the referendum result would have it, emphatic) national repudiation of long-overdue imperatives of historical truth telling of how Australia has violently oppressed the world's oldest continuous civilisation. The debate and the referendum result reflected Australia's past as much as its present. This urgently changed my plans. I dropped what I was writing. New thoughts impelled me. What if I wrote a place that encapsulated this racism, historical denial and hatred? How would that history reverberate today? What is the town called? How did it get its name? These questions quickly gave shape to a place inspired by my travels throughout Australia and from my non-fiction writing and journalism. There were so many places where terrible acts of violence against Indigenous people were committed both in colonial and post-federation times. A number of these violent acts involved troopers, police and 'hunting' parties chasing or 'herding' Aboriginal people over cliffs to their deaths as infamously happened at Appin under the orders of Governor Macquarie in 1816. The fictional Leap could be in any Australian state or territory. It is ubiquitous for its violent connotation – the history of terror and colonial massacre seared into the landscape. Its imagined surrounds embody murderous frontier conflict, where the Indigenous custodians survived and endured but remain dispossessed, discriminated against and marginalised. Where a racially motivated cop can still shoot dead with impunity an Indigenous person in response to a wildly disproportionate physical threat. Where Aboriginal people die in police lock-ups after needless arrest. Where violent deaths of other Indigenous men and women have always been swept under the carpet by cops, journalists, politicians, the broader community … too many historians and writers. Where the very name of the town is a celebration of mass colonial murder. Fanciful? Read the news. It's a place where direct descendants of Black people's killers and the descendants of those they massacred walk the same streets. Where the Indigenous people will talk of that violence as recent because, given hundreds of generations of civilisation, it is only yesterday and today's oppression is part of its continuum. It's where the settler families mostly choose not to dwell on it at all. Sign up to Five Great Reads Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning after newsletter promotion Welcome to The Leap! The stranger in a hostile, strange, remote place is an enduring narrative in Australian fiction whose modern exemplar is, to my mind, Kenneth Cook's brilliant, unsettling 1961 novel Wake in Fright. This book was formative to the teenage reader – and the adult writer – in me and The Leap is partly intended as paean to it. My stranger is Ben, an Englishman who is vaguely conversant with his empire's colonial crimes (more so than many Australians he meets). The story begins, like many crime novels, with a dead white person. But Ben's quest is not to solve this killing. Instead he finds himself peeling back the layers of the victim's home town, its racially divided community and reverberating history. There is no misanthropic cop or prodigal son or daughter returned home to unearth clues about a mystery killing. For there is no single crime to solve in The Leap. No killer to track down. Just a vast colonial and contemporary crime scene involving countless offences against race, gender and social function. The scene – the whole district, the town and its stranger-than-fiction name – is the crime. Everyone knows who the offenders are – now and back when. There is no deeply buried big secret here, just deliberately forgotten truths. And that seems like an apt description of a far bigger place. Perhaps an entire continent. The Leap by Paul Daley is out now through Simon and Schuster.
The Guardian
10 minutes ago
- The Guardian
If the economics of broadening or lifting Australia's GST are challenging, the politics are horrendous
When Jim Chalmers declared we needed a national debate on reforming the economy to drive the next generation of prosperity, he scolded the media for its penchant for playing the rule-in-rule-out game. The irony is that from his high horse, the treasurer had almost certainly ruled out one major change: lifting or broadening the GST. If Chalmers is being disingenuous when he suggests nothing is off the table at next month's talkfest – and he absolutely is – then he should have ruled out changes to the consumption tax from the very start. Many economists argue that lifting or broadening the GST is an essential ingredient in any reform package that fundamentally improves the efficiency of the tax system. More GST revenue can pay for cuts to income and company tax rates, for example. This shift provides a structurally more stable tax revenue base, and sharpens incentives to work and invest. Labor as a party, however, is fundamentally opposed to changing the tax on consumption on the basis that it hurts poorer Australians. Sign up: AU Breaking News email And the worry about fairness is real. New analysis by the ANU's Ben Phillips shows that the GST is 'highly regressive'. Phillips' modelling shows the bottom fifth of income earners pay 5.4% of their income on consumption taxes. That's more than twice as much as the top 20% of households, where GST accounts for 2.6% of disposable income. Broadening the GST to include the things currently excluded – such as fresh food and education – makes the tax even more regressive. Phillips finds consumption taxes as a share of household budgets climbs to 7.9% for the lowest incomes, and 3.5% for those at the top. 'I think equity concerns are spot on,' Phillips says. 'There would have to be a complicated new approach to compensation for lower and middle income workers to make it politically feasible. 'We would be relying on there being some substantial economic gains from increasing the GST, and they are probably relatively modest.' If the economics of broadening or lifting the GST are challenging, the politics are horrendous. The first hurdle is the most obvious: the states get the revenue, while the commonwealth cops the heat. Even if the Albanese government could agree with its state and territory counterparts to share the proceeds, there is also the issue that the GST distribution system has been fundamentally undermined by the obscenely generous deal with Western Australia, the country's richest state. As such, a bigger GST pile without getting rid of this distortion would simply exacerbate what Saul Eslake has called 'possibly the worst public policy decision of the 21st century'. Which begs the question: can we get meaningful tax reform without lifting the GST? Ken Henry, who authored a major tax paper in 2010 and is considered the country's high priest of reform, argues that 'tax reform cannot be done piecemeal; a big package will be required'. He recently told The Conversation's Michelle Grattan 'it would be better not to constrain the reform process by ruling out the GST'. 'Having said that, I do think it's possible to achieve major reform of the Australian taxation system without necessarily increasing the rate or extending the base of the GST.' Such reforms could be paid for via higher taxes on natural resources, and on wealth and savings – both on capital gains and income from that capital (think property investments and superannuation). Chalmers' narrative for the reform roundtable apparently leans into Henry's view around some kind of tax 'grand bargain'. But again, the treasurer's ambition is much more narrow. He has famously described his approach to reform as 'bite-sized chunks', and defended his policy initiatives since coming to power as 'modest but meaningful'. In fact, the most obvious next steps for Labor when it comes to tax is reforming the treatment of family trusts, and introducing a road user charge to replace dwindling fuel excise revenue. Whether we need another roundtable to get there is an open question. Viva Hammer, who played a key role in designing America's immense Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, had some advice for policymakers. Speaking at a tax roundtable organised by the independent MP Allegra Spender, Hammer said the ambition should be 'to think about doing something better, and not something perfect, because perfection is for the angels'. Breaking it down to the lowest common denominator, the independent economist Chris Richardson's advice is 'let's just stop doing dumb things'. Speaking at the same event in Parliament House on Friday, Richardson said his number one 'dumb thing' is how we tax gas through the petroleum rent resources tax (PRRT). Australia over recent years has become a gas superpower. And yet, incredibly, the tax take has not changed at all, Richardson says. Labor's tweaks to the PRRT have not changed this reality – as Richardson says, the forecasts for revenue from this tax are a 'big fat nothing' in future years. 'Some people say you can't change because there would be some 'sovereign risk',' he said, referring to the claims that altering these rules puts off foreign investors and can choke off funding for the industry. 'Sovereign risk is where one side gets next to nothing across a long period of time, and our own stupidity has got us there, and we should do better.' Richardson believes we are also not charging banks enough for the implicit 'too big to fail' insurance provided by taxpayers. The two suggestions, he said, could raise $5-6bn a year.
