Russian dissident Masha Gessen granted last-minute visa
Mostafa Rachwani
The Russian dissident and author Masha Gessen has been issued their visa this morning.
Gessen was on RN Breakfast this morning and confirmed that they had received their visa.
They had said yesterday their visa had initially been “functionally declined” after the Department of Home Affairs demanded documents that were “not possible” to source.
Those demands initially included police checks from Russia, and then police and FBI checks from the United States, where Gessen has never been charged or convicted of anything.
Gessen, an outspoken critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, is based in the US and was due to arrive in Australia last weekend to speak at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas this coming weekend.
Gessen was charged in Russia on charges of spreading false information about the military and was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison in July.
Key events
It’s party room meeting day so the morning will probably get a little calmer. Grab your fifth coffee. Touch some grass. Consider how demure you are. (Yes, it is possible I am too online.)
We’ll bring you the updates as soon as the meetings break.
Master Builders chief: ‘The ABCC was good, but it didn’t go far enough’
The CEO of Master Builders Australia, Denita Wawn, has been doing a lot of media since the deal between the government and the Coalition on the CFMEU administration legislation was announced.
Wawn told Canberra radio 2CC earlier this morning talking about the need for a stronger industry watchdog:
The ABCC was good, but it didn’t go far enough. The ABCC only looked after industrial relations laws, and we’ve seen from all the media reports in the last month or two, this is more than that. This is about criminal behaviour. This is about anti-competitive behaviour. This is about governance issues of our sector, and as such we have consistently called for a regulator that covers all of the issues. The nature of the industry, with its contracting and tight deadlines, means that it’s ripe for problems.
Four royal commissions have said you need a special regulator with more teeth, so bizarrely enough, the government and the Coalition are both right. We need to combine their thinking and make sure that we do get the special regulator that we really deserve.
Peter Dutton has already introduced legislation to reinstate the ABCC, which the government does not support.
Privacy reforms may not protect workers from medical tests, thinktank says
Proposed privacy law reforms may not go far enough in protecting workers from invasive medical tests, a new study has found.
The Australia Institute study, released on Tuesday, investigated the experiences of workers from the mining sector who were forced to undergo blood tests during the recruitment process with little explanation.
The report’s author found proposed privacy law reforms, including a “fair and reasonable test”, would not be strict enough to curtail the practice.
The findings come in the same month changes to the Privacy Act are expected to be tabled in parliament, as promised by attorney general Mark Dreyfus.
– via AAP
Does the pen licence still have a place in modern schooling?
Slightly outside politics, but something that should unite us all – Caitlin Cassidy has looked at the pen licence, and its place in modern education.
Fun fact: I didn’t get my pen licence until I was in Year 7. At the time it was called ‘regrettable and consistent messy writing’ but now they call it ‘ADHD’.
Russian dissident Masha Gessen granted last-minute visa
Mostafa Rachwani
The Russian dissident and author Masha Gessen has been issued their visa this morning.
Gessen was on RN Breakfast this morning and confirmed that they had received their visa.
They had said yesterday their visa had initially been “functionally declined” after the Department of Home Affairs demanded documents that were “not possible” to source.
Those demands initially included police checks from Russia, and then police and FBI checks from the United States, where Gessen has never been charged or convicted of anything.
Gessen, an outspoken critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, is based in the US and was due to arrive in Australia last weekend to speak at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas this coming weekend.
Gessen was charged in Russia on charges of spreading false information about the military and was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison in July.
Bandt says CFMEU legislation is ‘threat to the rule of law’
Adam Bandt also had some comments about the CFMEU administration legislation deal between the government and the coalition:
On CFMEU, Bandt said:
Labor has chosen to work with the anti-union, anti-worker Liberals to rush through legislation that civil liberties groups are saying is a serious threat to the rule of law.
Under this legislation, if there’s a change of government, Michaelia Cash could sack the administrator and appoint Tony Abbott to run one of the country’s biggest unions.
People will find themselves facing lifetime bans from working in the industry, but there’s no process that is required to go through beforehand to prove any allegations against them, and as a result, there could be a number of people who’ve done absolutely nothing wrong who find themselves with a black mark against their name and unable to get their way back into their job.
This is what happens when you rush serious legislation like this.
Bandt also rebuffed suggestions the Greens had not been critical of the allegations against some branches of the CFMEU:
There should be no tolerance for sexism, for violence, or for corruption. All of those things have no place in any workplace or in any organisation, whether it’s a corporation or a union or a government.
But what Labor and the anti-worker Liberals have done is rushed through legislation that is an unprecedented attack on the rule of law.
Bandt says Dutton has ‘made a career out of punching down’
The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, held a quick doorstop this morning (unscheduled press conference, traditionally held as someone is entering or exiting a door) where he was asked about the Coalition’s latest attack lines on Palestinian visas.
Bandt said:
What is clear is Peter Dutton has made a career of punching down. [He] has made a career out of punching down and attacking vulnerable people who are doing nothing more than seeking safety.
But Labor bears some responsibility here as well. Labor has from day one backed the invasion of Gaza.
And still, even as we hear horrific news that polio is now breaking out in Gaza, that there is a human-engineered famine, that people can’t get enough to drink … Labor refuses to put any pressure on the extremist Netanyahu government to stop the invasion.
We’re calling on the government not just to allow our people to come here to seek safety, but also to put pressure on the extremist Netanyahu government to stop the bombing and the invasion which is forcing people to flee in the first place.
Community legal centres call for funding to address ‘workforce crisis’
Community legal centres are launching a national campaign today at Parliament House, calling on the Labor government to properly fund their services.
Community legal services support about 180,000 people a year, often at the worst time of their lives, but say they are turning away twice as many people as they can help.
It is not a new problem – community legal services have been very vocal about the funding cliff they face. Here is an article from March:
The Save Community Legal Centres Campaign has three demands:
-
Immediate funding injection of $35 million to address the workforce crisis, as recommended by the Independent Review of the National Legal Assistance Partnership
-
Additional $135 million each year to sustainably address overall community demand
-
Additional $95 million each year to fully meet domestic and family violence demand
Australian Conservation Foundation drops legal challenge to Scarborough gas project
Adam Morton
An environment group has dropped a long-running legal case against Woodside Energy’s proposed Scarborough gas development off Western Australia’s north-west coast.
The Australian Conservation Foundation said it had decided not to proceed with the two-year-old case in the federal court after “it became apparent that the case was unlikely to succeed”.
ACF had challenged the federal government’s approval of the $16.5bn project, and argued there should have been an assessment of the impact the development’s emissions would have on the Great Barrier Reef.
In a statement, ACF said “the reality is that Australia’s laws work in favour of fossil fuel interests”.
There is still no explicit requirement for climate damage to be considered under our key national nature law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. This means that, even today, major fossil fuel projects are being approved that will lock in huge volumes of carbon pollution well beyond 2050.
Woodside welcomed ACF’s decision. It intends to sell most of the gas from Scarborough to north Asian countries, including Japan.
Campaigners have estimated the project could lead to about 1.6bn tonnes of CO2 being released into the atmosphere over its 30-year lifespan.
A sales assistant can ‘never’ save for a home deposit, Greens say
The Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather is keeping the pressure on the government over housing policy, releasing a new analysis of ATO, RBA lending and CoreLogic house price data showing just how unaffordable house ownership has become.
Sarah Basford Canales has covered the analysis, here:
Chandler-Mather said the Parliamentary Library analysis shows no one earning the average wage of the top 10 most common professions in Australia could afford to buy a house.
A full time child care worker starting to save for a house deposit now, wouldn’t reach their goal until 2055. Meeting their mortgage repayments (on an average loan) would take 92% of their wage.
Housing stress is considered anything taking up over 30% of your earnings.
A sales assistant would “never” be able to save for a home deposit, Chandler-Mather said.
Millions of renters have been caught in a cruel trap, stuck paying massive rents, at best decades away from saving for a home, where even if they can get a mortgage the repayments are completely unaffordable,” the Griffith MP said.
How long do the millions getting screwed by Australia’s broken housing system have to wait for this painfully unambitious government to grow a spine and start taking real action on the housing crisis?
