Blow the Truth

Our genitals are such an important and sensitive part of our bodies. So it’s not surprising that keeping them healthy was as important in antiquity as it is today. Some ancient ideas about our genitals, and ways of caring for them, may make us wince, and certainly wouldn’t be recommended today. But one attitude remains.

  Image by  Mohamed Hassan  from  Pixabay By the end of this year, the experience of using search engines in Australia won’t be as simple as it has always been. That’s thanks to a new online safety code announced yesterday by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant. Among other measures, it will require all Australian users to provide assurance of their age when they sign into a search engine account. So what’s the new code about? How will it work in practice? And how exactly will it affect kids – and adults – in Australia who use search engines such as Google? What’s in the new code? The code orders providers of internet search-engine services such as Google and Microsoft (which owns Bing) to “implement appropriate age assurance measures for account holders” within six months. The code requires providers to review and mitigate “the risk that Australian children will access or be exposed to online pornography, high-impact violence material, a...

  PM Anthony Albanese Grattan on Friday: Anthony Albanese had good motives but his referendum has done much harm The National Anti-Corruption Commission the other day issued its weekly statement about its work program. The government legislated for the NACC late last year, it began operations on July 1, and it’s now going full steam. What if Anthony Albanese had taken the same approach to the Voice ? The Senate would have passed the legislation. The Voice could be operating right now. Instead, the Voice is dead and reconciliation is, at least for the moment, a wasteland. In medicine they say “do no harm”. Albanese was well motivated, but a great deal of harm has been done. The prime minister and others will say, the Indigenous people wanted a Voice in the constitution, not simply a legislated Voice. How could he ignore that, when he made his pre-election promise to pursue the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full? It sounds a compelling argument. Except when you c...

  Photo QLD Police Dash Cam Media outlets across Australia have carried headlines about a “youth crime crisis” in recent months. While drawn from actual events, often involving serious criminality and antisocial behaviour, these often sensational reports have the same narrative subtext. The story is one of “bad kids” doing bad things in otherwise “good communities”. Our understanding, as a society, of who we are is informed in part by the media. What the youth crime crisis is and who we understand young offenders to be corresponds with media framings of these individuals and their actions. More often than not, the reports present a “good-bad” binary: where “bad” young people who do bad things should be locked up to protect “good” people. It’s a basic, albeit understandable, reaction that makes sense in terms of a logic of punishment and retribution. For the Youth Community Futures research project, we have been working with groups of young people to explore how they engage w...

Indigenous people   Governments have failed to properly share decision-making with Indigenous people to accelerate Closing the Gap, despite formally undertaking to do so, according to a scathing indictment by the Productivity Commission . The commission says too many government agencies consult Indigenous people “on a pre-determined solution, rather than collaborating on the problem and co-designing a solution”. The broad-ranging criticism is contained in the commission’s first review of the 2020 “ National Agreement on Closing the Gap ”. The Albanese government will use the findings to reinforce its pitch for the Voice – which is that Indigenous people are not being properly heard on what needs to be done to tackle the problems in health, housing, employment, education and other areas of disadvantage. The review says: “There appears to be an assumption that ‘governments know best’, which is contrary to the principle of shared decision-making in the Agreement.” The nation...

  Australians’ satisfaction with life as a whole is at its lowest level in 21 years, according to the latest Australian Unity Wellbeing Index survey , a collaboration between Deakin University and mutual company Australian Unity. Each year since 2001 we have surveyed a geographically representative sample of 2,000 Australians about how satisfied they are with their lives as a whole, along with their satisfaction with seven key life areas to compile an overall measure: the Personal Wellbeing Index. Our survey was conducted in May and June of 2022, by which time inflation was exceeding 6% and the Reserve Bank of Australia had delivered the first two of ten consecutive interest rate rises. There have now been 11 since May 2022. In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, we actually saw an improvement in satisfaction with life as a whole. The decline since likely reflects pressures like cost of living but also conforms with a longer-term trend since 2010. Measuring per...

  Drag Queen Story Time Protesters derailed a Monash City Council meeting on Wednesday, demanding the cancellation of a sold-out drag storytime event at Oakleigh Library in Melbourne’s southeast. This is just the latest in a string of drag performances for children throughout Victoria being cancelled or postponed in response to protest. The central message of these campaigns (accompanied by varying levels of vitriol) is the same: “let our kids be kids”, “protect our children” and “hands off our kids”, while simultaneously labelling performers and supporters of the events “paedophiles”. This is part of a global backlash. Similar protests and cancellations have happened in New Zealand , the United Kingdom and the United States . The argument in support of drag emphasises the impact on the performers at the centre of these events and queer community, arguing that the cancellation of these events is a form of discrimination and a contravention of human rights . But the deb...

  Liddell coal-fired power station After more than five decades, the last operating units of the Liddell coal-fired power station will close this month. The station’s owner, AGL, is Australia’s largest carbon polluter . Liddell’s closure will reduce the company’s emissions by 17% . Liddell, in the New South Wales Hunter Valley, is Australia’s oldest coal station . It started operations in the early 1970s – about the same time the Datsun 180B was released, and before the Sydney Opera House officially opened! In the same way a Datsun 180B was a great car in its day, Liddell was the cheapest and most reliable electricity generation technology in the 1970s and 1980s (at least if you ignore the long-term costs of carbon). But like all coal-fired power stations in Australia, Liddell’s performance declined as it aged. It became unreliable and inefficient. One unit of the station closed last year, leaving three operating. Governments must act to make sure our electricity grid d...

National Press Club   Former Prime Minister Paul Keating has launched a swinging attack on the Labor government over the AUKUS submarine agreement, accusing Anthony Albanese of relying on “two seriously  unwise ministers,  Penny Wong and Richard Marles”. Keating lashed the deal for a tripartite build of nuclear-powered submarines as “the worst international decision by an Australian Labor government since the former Labor leader, Billy Hughes, sought to introduce conscription” in the first world war. “We have gone from a defend Australia to a forward defence policy,” Keating said, while insisting China posed no threat to Australia. He made his criticisms in a long speech and question-and-answer session at the National Press Club. In a direct challenge to Albanese, Keating said: I dare the prime minister to explicitly suggest or leave open the question that Australia might go to war over Taiwan – at the urgings of the United States or anyone else. Keating sai...

  Wars are world-shaping. Beyond their immediate human and physical tolls, wars alter the fates of societies and states; of clans, cultures and leaders. They establish new lines of access to resources and influence, determining who has what – and who doesn’t. They set precedents for how future wars are justified and, in the case of attempted conquest, wars can ultimately redraw the map of world politics. One year after its unprovoked invasion on February 24, 2022, Russia’s war against Ukraine encompasses all these dangers. With Ukraine waging an existential battle for its very survival, and Russia seemingly happy to settle for destroying Ukraine if it fails to conquer it, neither side has any incentive to stop fighting. Absent the complete collapse of either the Ukrainian or Russian armed forces, the grim reality is that the war will likely drag on throughout 2023 – and potentially beyond it. 2023 will be crucial But what happens in Ukraine during 2023 will be cruci...