Last chance: the extinction crisis this election is ignoring
Australia is facing an extinction crisis. Over the next week, we will bring you stories of hope, resilience and determination as passionate volunteers across Australia stand up for Australia's endangered species.
Most parliamentarians might be surprised to learn it, but Australians care about nature. Late last year, the not-for-profit Biodiversity Council commissioned a survey of 3,500 Australians to gauge what they thought about the environment. A vast majority of people – 96% – said more action was needed to look after Australia's natural environment.
'Last chance' highlights the people trying to circumvent this in their own quiet way by working to save threatened animals where they live.
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Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Daily Mail
Aussies unleash after Scott Morrison receives top accolade in King's Birthday Honours: 'Baffles me'
Australians have lashed out after Scott Morrison was awarded the highest accolade in the King's Birthday Honours List. The former prime minister, who led the nation for four years from 2018 to 2022, was recognised for his 'eminent service to the people and the parliament of Australia, particularly as prime minister'. A Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) is the highest award of the Order of Australia honours system. It is followed by Officer of the Order (AO), Member of the Order (AM), and Medal of the Order (OAM). Former prime ministers are typically honoured in the King's Birthday awards, but the 30th prime minister's recognition sparked widespread criticism. Mr Morrison's term as prime minister was overshadowed by multiple controversies, including his secret appointment to several ministerial portfolios, involvement in the Robodebt scandal, and his widely criticised remark during the 2019 Black Summer bushfires: 'I don't hold a hose, mate'. On Monday, Australians took to social media to blast the former PM. 'If you get a shiny trinket just because your a*** has occupied the PM's chair then what is that trinket worth?' one Australian wrote on X. 'Someone should have intervened to deprive Australia's worst ever Prime Minister of this award.' 'It baffles me that we award public servants for doing the job they were paid for. I understand if they do something 'special', but politicians very rarely do,' another added. 'Morrison certainly did nothing 'special'. Not to mention the retirement package that they all enjoy.' 'It's demeaning of the honour system to be giving this cruel, disingenuous s***-bag any honour,' a third added. One Aussie kept a close tally of Mr Morrison's missteps. 'You lied to the public. Repeatedly. You appointed yourself to five secret ministries. Then claimed it was no big deal,' they wrote. 'You prayed the virus away, outsourced the vaccine rollout, then took credit when premiers fixed your mess. 'You fled to Hawaii during a bushfire crisis. Then blamed your daughters. 'Oh Scotty. Even your religion's ashamed of you. Jesus turned water into wine. You turned democracy into a private members club for gas executives.' Some Australians said Mr Morrison was 'underrated'. 'Respect, well deserved,' one wrote. 'Well deserved, Scomo is very underrated and deserves a lot more respect than what he is given,' another said. Since the establishment of the Order of Australia in 1975, every ex-prime minister has been appointed a Companion except Paul Keating. He declined because he believed the honours should be reserved for those whose community work went unrecognised. Mr Morrison's honour specifically points to his 'notable contributions to global engagement, to leadership of the national Covid response, to economic initiatives, and to national security enhancements, especially through leadership of Australia's contribution to AUKUS'. He received significant support during the early days of the pandemic, with an April 2020 Newspoll revealing he had the highest satisfaction rating for any prime minister since Kevin Rudd in 2009. But by the end of his second term, he had become the most unpopular major party leader since at least 1987, according to an Australian National University study. The King's Birthday Honours List names 581 people in the General Division of the Order of Australia, including academics, ex-sport stars, leaders and creatives. 'These honours recognise the selfless service, integrity, achievement, creativity, and care that flourish across our country,' Governor-General Sam Mostyn said. Fourteen people were appointed to the highest honour, AC. Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, best known for their work on films including Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby and Strictly Ballroom, received the accolade for their service to the arts. Environmental scientist Mark Howden, who served as a vice chair on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was also appointed to AC alongside business leader Jennifer Westacott and NASA climate science centre co-director Graeme Stephens. Bangerang and Wiradjuri woman Geraldine Atkinson has been named an Officer (AO) of the Order of Australia for her work with Indigenous communities and reconciliation.
Daily Mail
31-05-2025
- Daily Mail
I moved from the UK to Australia two years ago. Aussies tell themselves a big lie - the real, infuriating truth about this country is clear, writes MAX AITCHISON
Long before I arrived on these sun-kissed shores, I thought I had grasped the idea of the Australian soul. The tolerant, open-minded, 'she'll be right, mate', approach to life Aussies like to show to the world. It was, my reading informed me, the great land of larrikins – a proud tradition of holding a healthy disrespect for rules and order that drew its inspiration from the legendary outlaw Ned Kelly. A nation of plucky underdogs who viewed their former British overlords with contempt. A land where rugged individuals laughed in the face of authority and forged their own meritocratic identity. A people who valued common sense, who fought for their own beliefs and scorned the establishment's stuffy rules. It seemed to me that Kelly and his heroic last stand embodied what it was to be Australian. Yet, having lived in this country for over two years, I now realise how naive I was. For it is painfully – infuriatingly – obvious that a very loud minority of modern Australians have much more in common with the men who strung Kelly up, than the mythical outlaw himself. As the late, great Australian critic and journalist Clive James once observed: 'The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts, but that so many of them are descended from prison officers.' I see this slavish adherence to rules and pettifogging everywhere, at all levels of society, from the individual to the state. I see it in my multi-millionaire banker neighbour who rang the council to send out a ranger to fine me $350 for parking four inches across his driveway, rather than leaving a note, which would have achieved exactly the same thing. I see it in the council rangers who not only demanded that a family pour out the champagne they were drinking to celebrate Christmas day onto the hot sand of Bondi Beach, but also to pop and pour their unopened bottles too. I see it in the surly staff at the Avoca surf club restaurant who, on Good Friday of all days, refused a table to a young couple and their two children, both of whom were under the age of three, because the toddlers had committed the inexcusable sin of not wearing shoes inside. I see it too, more times than I care to mention, in the power-hungry bouncers staffing Sydney's pubs and clubs who seem to relish in ruining any decent night out. 'How many drinks have you had?' – the question to which there is no right answer, honest or otherwise. I see it also in the intensely passive aggressive note left on my windshield after I had the temerity to leave my car parked in the same, entirely legal, spot on the street I live on for two weeks, which read: 'Has this car been abandoned? We will call the council and have it removed – residents.' I had half a mind to flip the paper and write: 'Hi resident. Also resident. Why don't you get a life and mind your own business?' (And yes, I am starting to wonder if there is something wrong with my neighbours). Regardless, I see it everywhere: this curtain-twitching, joy-extinguishing, fun-sponging desire to pursue conformity at all costs. And it's not just confined to neighbourhood spats, officious hospitality staff of lowly council bureaucrats. This rotten, rule-making insanity runs right through the heart of state and federal governments across the country. Of course, it plumbed new depths during the pandemic. State premiers, drunk off power and acting like Communist dictators, families unable to say goodbye to loved ones and the appalling case of a pregnant woman in her pyjamas being taken from her home in handcuffs for daring to stand up to the tyranny. But it didn't end there. Take the upcoming social media ban for children under the age of 16 or the $420,000-a-year eSafety Commissioner whose job seems to entail telling social media companies to remove mean posts, sometimes made by people in foreign countries. You hear politicians praising these measures as 'world leading', as if being the first country to do something precludes any discussion over whether it's actually a good idea in the first place. Because they're not. The eSafety Commissioner is about as useful as a chocolate teapot and if anyone sincerely thinks that children aren't going to get around any ban in a matter of seconds then I have a good bridge to sell you. No, what these laws are all about is pandering to Australia's obsession with policing other people's lives. And nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of Sydney restaurateur Nahji Chu, whose Lady Chu eatery in Potts Point was visited last Friday by unsmiling council bureaucrats who were unhappy with her potted plants. In an explosive showdown, filmed by a staff member, Ms Chu unleashed on the council employees: 'This is 'f***ed up, this whole city is f***ed up! 'I'm not a f***ing naughty school kid, so don't speak to me like that. 'I'm paying f***ing taxes and I'm paying your wages, so f*** off. 'I'm trying to activate this f***ing dead city, so don't shut it down.' While a family website such as this one cannot condone Ms Chu's colourful language, I applaud her sentiment wholeheartedly. Here is an Australian hero, willing to stand up for herself and others in the face of joyless officials. This is a woman who fled the communist Pathet Lao regime as a child in 1975, only to then be thrown into a Thai jail cell with her father where she caught TB and languished for three months. Her family then bounced around Thai refugee camps for three years before they eventually became among the first Vietnamese refugees to settle in Australia. Ms Chu has worked in the varied worlds of fashion (where she once helped dress Kylie Minogue) banking and hospitality, a sector in which she has built and lost an empire before starting all again from scratch with the popular Lady Chu in 2021. She was gloriously unapologetic when she spoke to my colleague Jonica Bray earlier this week. 'There is no fun in this city, you can't do anything or you face a fine,' she said. 'No one even leaves their house anymore - they just work to make money and go and spend it overseas where they can get culture and have a good time.' And she's right. If the average Australian allows the small but powerful minority of rule-lovers to win, then the country must drop any pretense to being some kind of laidback nirvana and must face a reckoning with its true identity. I urge all proud Australians to follow Ms Chu's lead and resist loudly and openly – to stand up for the values and the spirit that makes this country so great.
Daily Mail
29-05-2025
- Daily Mail
Hybrid work model best for productivity, says Australian government report on working from home
A landmark government report has revealed working from home is actually more productive than coming into the office - in moderation. WFH really took over during the pandemic with more than a third of Australians now doing their job at home. With managers trying to get staff back into the office more often, the Productivity Commission has concluded work from home arrangements are in fact more productive, as staff are spared the long commutes. 'Allowing workers to work from home some days can improve worker satisfaction and allows people to benefit by avoiding the commute to work, meaning they have additional time for other purposes,' it said. Working from home has proven particularly popular with women, who are more likely to be the primary carers of children, making them the key beneficiaries of flexible arrangements. A hybrid model, mixing work from home and the office, was seen as the best approach to encourage creative interactions. 'Workers do not need to be in the office full-time to experience the benefits of in-person interactions,' it said. 'As a result, hybrid work (working some days remotely and some days in the office) tends to be beneficial to productivity, or at least, is not detrimental to productivity.' The Productivity Commission, however, said in-person interactions were more likely to spark initial breakthroughs. 'A key reason for this is that in-person interactions may be better for collaborative tasks and idea generation,' it said. 'Experimental evidence from engineering firms indicates that idea generation benefits from in-person interactions but in-person and virtual teams were equally effective in evaluating and selecting ideas that have already been developed.' The report cited the case of IT firm, during the pandemic, spending more time on meetings 'which reduced the time available for work tasks; meaning hours worked increased while output declined'. 'The evidence on working from home is still evolving. However, given most studies find hybrid work to be either neutral or positive for labour productivity, there is no evidence to suggest that the trend towards hybrid working has contributed to the productivity loss phase of the productivity bubble,' the commission said. But it warned that less experienced workers may struggle with work from home. 'For less experienced workers, in-person interactions may be an important avenue for skill development as there may be a greater knowledge transfer from senior workers and junior workers through informal in-person interactions,' it said. Working from home has become a divisive topic with the Commonwealth Bank and ANZ requiring staff to spend 50 per cent of the time in the office, while Woolworths wants staff to return to the office three days a week. Former Liberal leader Peter Dutton lost the last election, and his own seat, after dumping an election policy plan to force Canberra-based public servants back into the office, as other public servants working from home across Australia feared they would be next. The policy was so disastrous politically that Jane Hume, who devised that unpopular WFH plan, was dumped as the Opposition's finance spokeswoman in new Liberal leader Sussan Ley's reshuffle. Before the pandemic in March 2020, just 12 per cent of Australians reported working from home on all or most days of the week. The proportion of Australians working everyday from home more than doubled to 31 per cent by September 2020, when Sydney and Melbourne were in lockdown. After those lockdowns, 27 per cent worked from home at least some of the time during the week, indicating increased popularity of more hybrid work arrangement. By August 2024, 36 per cent of those with a job reported that they usually worked from home. 'As working from home is a fundamental change to how people do their jobs, it is likely to have implications for labour productivity,' the report said. Australia is in a productivity crisis, where output for every worker declined by 1.2 per cent in 2024. The culprit, however, wasn't work-from-arrangements but a lack of new investment in technology that would make workers more productive. 'Capital matters for productivity because more capital (the machines, equipment and other durable goods that are used as inputs in production) means workers can produce more goods and services,' it said. During the 1990s to the mid-2000s, productivity in Australia grew at an annual pace of more than two per cent as the introduction of the internet enabled companies to more efficiently share data. Economists are hoping artificial intelligence could revive Australia's faltering productivity - regardless of whether staff are based at home or in the office.
