The colossal price rises on the east coast, brought on by excessive gas exports, have been a disaster for Australian manufacturers and households.

On this episode of Follow the Money, manufacturing industry representative Geoff Crittenden and Australia Institute Principal Advisor Mark Ogge join Ebony Bennett to discuss how governments can ensure there’s more gas available for Australians.

Whistleblower Richard Boyle has been spared jail after exposing unethical debt-collection practices at the Australian Taxation Office.

Judge Liesl Kudelka sentenced Boyle, 49, in the South Australian District Court on Thursday, seven years after the former debt collection officer went public with allegations that led to reforms within the ATO.

In a plea deal with prosecutors, the Adelaide man has admitted four criminal charges, reduced from the original 66 laid after he appeared on the ABC’s Four Corners program.

Family and supporters sobbed in court when Boyle received no conviction on all four counts, no penalty and a $500, 12-month good behaviour bond.

“Blowing the whistle can be a tough gig”, said Judge Kudelka, who accepted his poor mental health was directly linked to his offending.

Addressing a protest in support of Boyle outside court, Whistleblower Justice Fund founder Rex Patrick sad Boyle and his wife Louise had “been through hell”.

“Richard Boyle is a hero,” he said.

“He actually thought he was protected. It’s taken four judges, and silks and lawyers to work out whether or not he was protected.

“He went in thinking he was, but it turns out that he wasn’t. All he did was press a record button, he took a photograph, he sent an encrypted email to his lawyer.”

In a speech in 2024, Boyle said the experience had left him “broken, physically, mentally and financially”.

The Human Rights Law Centre’s Kieran Pender said prosecuting whistleblowers had “a chilling effect on people speaking up”.

“The sentencing of Richard Boyle concludes a long and sorry saga that significantly undermined whistleblower protections in Australia,” he said.

“It is critical that the Albanese government and Attorney-General Michelle Rowland now act to better protect whistleblowers and ensure cases like this never happen again.”

Mr Patrick said Boyle’s treatment was “disgraceful” and there was no public interest in prosecuting him.

“The federal government knew whistleblower laws were broken and had made a commitment to change them,” he said.

“The attorney-general (Mark Dreyfus) could have, in the public interest, stopped the prosecution, and he didn’t do that.”

Independent senators David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie have tabled the Whistleblower Protection Authority bill in parliament “but that’s only a start”, Mr Patrick said.

“We also need to change the laws so that people are protected when they do reasonable things in the context of preparing a public interest disclosure … the government knows that bit’s broken, and yet they did nothing.”

Scarlet Wong continued:

My Palestinian colleagues were treated with humiliation and subjugation, queuing through separate caged checkpoints and being held up at gunpoint for hours in the hot sun while I experienced freedom of movement and safety as a non Palestinian.

However, after spending 10 months in the West Bank, I experienced collective punishment regularly, including the blocking of ambulances and aid, and when our head of mission tried to bring antibiotics to help our sick colleagues in Gaza, he was ordered by the IDF to bin them at the border. The cruelty and impunity of the IDF towards Palestinians shocked me.

I’ve never seen the world the same way again, unprovoked yet protected by IDF settlers, terrorized, tortured, burnt alive Palestinian children in their villages.

If children defended themselves or retaliated by throwing rods, they would be incarcerated or shot. If this was unprovoked, we knew it was possible if provoked.

A year ago, when I went to Gaza, I tried to bring in whatever I could, a carton of scalpels after our shipment had been seized, a life straw prescription glasses for.

A child, watercolor pencils for my translator’s child, protein bars, warm clothes, medications. But now my colleagues who are entering tell me that they can’t enter Gaza without having their calories counted, in case, God forbid, they try to share their food with someone.

Anything to sustain life is forbidden from being brought in batteries, formula, medication. So does our government expect our 18 international colleagues to perform miracles under these circumstances? Our colleagues currently attest to limbless children who have no parents yet have to travel to the Gaza humanitarian fund queuing to die. Are we meant to sew their limbs back on? Are we meant to shield them from bullets as we operate? What are our medical teams expected to do in these circumstances?

Honestly, what do you think MSF, or any of us can do without food, medical supplies and safe access? So do you want to know the diagnoses of mental health in Gaza?

I diagnose human cruelty. I diagnose erasure. I diagnose genocide.

Images of child shepherds hiding behind rocks as Israeli settlers massacre their flock of mothers in traumatic Birds without anesthesia, unable to lactate from shock of little hands desperately grabbing mine to the sounds of quadcopters shooting infiltrate my sleep every night, after staying silent in exchange for access to patients, we no longer have a choice but to tell the world the truth.

As a constituent of Warringah, a citizen of this country, I am angry that MSF and humanitarians have to do what our governments will not.

Know that unless you urgently act to help end this genocide, our colleagues are likely to suffer retaliation for sharing this testimony with you today. We need you to act now. Malcolm Fraser had the courage and moral conviction to fly refugees here. He chose humanity over politics. What is our current government doing and what will our legacy be

Scarlet Wong a Sydney-based psychologist who served as mental health activity manager in Gaza in March 2024 with MSF also spoke at the Friends of Palestine event.

Wong became very emotional as she described what she had witnessed:

Helping people down on their luck was a part of our national identity. When my parents, who were refugees, came to Australia, the Fraser government once sent Qantas planes to airlift refugees, and I grew up believing in these values, which is why I work for MSF, where I visited the West Bank in 2021 and Gaza last year, I’ve been asked to share what mental health conditions I saw in Gaza, so I’ll give you the example of Tom, but I won’t say how I know him, as I fear for his life.

Tom was hit by an air strike and almost died suffering severe injuries. He was taken to hospital immediately by his family. Israeli soldiers then stormed the hospital.

They arrested Tom for surviving their strike, and immediately snapped his crutches and beat his wounds. Soldiers then transferred him to did him [an Israeli] prison, known as a place where humanity goes to die.

They showed him pictures of his wife and sister and told him, we’ve killed them all. They showed him pictures of his house and said, we’ve blown it up. They pretended to offer him food, and as he reached for it, they stomped on his hand and left it to go gangrenous. They deprived him of medical care. A female soldier mocked him, threatening sexual violence if he didn’t stand

Tom’s family now tends to a broken man still imprisoned in his mind in a state of complete dissociation. So what diagnosis should I give someone who’s dissociated after being psychologically and physically tortured, while the destruction of hospitals has left people with pre existing psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia, wandering the streets without treatment and inpatient care, the majority of presentations do not constitute pathology.

Dissociation, hyper vigilance, panic attacks are all appropriate survival responses to psychological torture, including the persistent hovering of high tech drones threatening to kill at any moment.

I’m a mother of three, and last year, yes, I was terrified to go to Gaza, but I was more afraid of looking into my children’s faces if I were to tell them that I did nothing when Palestinians were being ethnically cleansed.

Glenn Connley

Hobart is now, officially, the oldest capital city in Australia.

And, after three elections in five years (to achieve the same result), they probably feel it.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released this year’s Median Age and Sex Ratio data.

It reveals that Hobart’s median age is 39.3 years, which places it ahead of Adelaide (39.2) at the top of the nation’s age table.

Darwin is the youngest capital city (median age of 34.8 years), ahead of Canberra (35.7).

But that’s nothing compared to the more granular breakdown, which has the retirement seaside community of Tea Gardens/Hawks Nest, just north of Newcastle in NSW, as the oldest in the country, with a median age of 66.5.

The Canberra suburb of Acton, which is populated by ANU students, is the youngest in the nation, with a median age of just 21.1 years.

Darwin is the only capital city with more men than women, with 105 blokes for every 100 women.

Every other capital is home to more females than males, with Hobart (95.2 men for every 100 women) and Adelaide (96/100) the most lop-sided ratios.

Labor’s bill to protect the penalty rate changes has passed through the parliament. The ACTU is pleased. Sally McManus:

Penalty rates are an essential part of working Australians’ take-home pay.

They compensate people for working unsociable hours and giving up time away from family and loved ones.

Protecting penalty rates also protects the weekend. The minute employers can pay people the same no matter the day they work, Australians can kiss goodbye the weekend.

Unions welcome the Albanese Government delivering on this election promise. Without these laws, workers in retail, admin, banking, and finance would stand to lose thousands of dollars a year under proposals by big employer lobby groups.

Workers’ pay will no longer be at risk from employers engaging in a race to the bottom to strip away basic protections needed to maintain the services we all rely on.”  

One of Australia’s biggest mining companies, Fortescue, has co-published a report with a leading science organisation, calling for an end to Australia’s biggest fossil fuel subsidy.

The report by the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering calls out Australia’s Fuel Tax Credit Scheme for “subsidising diesel and discouraging uptake of alternative fuels.” It calls for the scheme to be phased out, “especially in high-emission sectors”.

When they say “high-emission sectors”, they mean mining.

Wait a second!? A mining company calling for an end to a subsidy to mining companies?!?…like The Australia Institute has called for for over a decade?

As unlikely as that sounds, Fortescue have been going hard on decarbonisation for years now. They see themselves, and Australia more broadly, as having an advantage in a greener mining industry, and the Fuel Tax Credit Scheme is slowing this down.

But much of the mining industry (think BHP, Rio Tinto, Gina, Adani) is happy to sit back, pollute and enjoy the $10 billion per year diesel subsidy.

A money fight between big mining companies!? Get your popcorn!

Here is what Usman Khawaja told the room where David Pocock was hosting a parliamentary friends of Palestine gathering:

From my point of view, this has, and still does, remained a humanitarian issue.

People want to muddy the waters and want to make it political and want to make it religious, but at the crux of it, it has always been a humanitarian issue. Innocent people have been dying for two years now and being starved out from Israel. And as we know, it is a man made famine. We know it is.

And so whenever anyone tries to bring religion or bring politics into it, I just don’t agree with that whatsoever.

For me, the way I explain is – say you have a good friend, and he is going out and he is killing people willy nilly. We know it is not right, and we say ‘why are you doing this’ and he says, ‘these people are rubbing me the wrong way, I don’t like the cut of their jib’.

[So you say] ‘Well that is not right, you can’t do that, it is illegal. You are not allowed to go out and kill people’.

And he is like, ‘well, that is just the way I feel.’

Would I still be friends with this person? The answer is no. I wouldn’t be. His values don’t align with my values. I would not be friends with them. And I would draw a line in the sand very quickly.

The same analogy that I used there, applies to Israel and the Australian government. We are allied, and we are accepting these war crimes. We accept these war crimes from an an ally, right now today, against the people of Palestine in Gaza, what then [is it for them] to turn around and [to do it to someone else. Do it to us, to anyone.

The standard we set for them should be higher than the standard we set for anyone else because we are aligned. And if we aren’t aligned, I am hoping, obviously the government doesn’t believe in the starvation of innocent people, then we should detach from that and we should make a statement and act.

Because if we settle on harsh words, and the reality is the harsh words do not have any impact, or care. Israel doesn’t care. Then maybe if we act, maybe then a few other nations will act and then together we can actually put enough pressure on Israel to stop what they are doing.

That is all I really wanted to say.

We will bring you some of the press conferences David Pocock has held with Australian cricketer Usman Khawaja. There was one at 9am, where he said the prime minister had pulled out of a meeting between the pair to speak on gambling reform. By 10am, Albanese had met with Khawaja where he said he asked the prime minister to be brave.

Khawaja spoke to Mike Bowers and said:

I would never tell the PM to do anything. I didn’t tell the PM to do anything.

We just had a conversation, and what I said was, I think there’s an opportunity for Australians and the Australian government to be leaders. And there is opportunity for him to be one of the great leaders and unlike what Netanyahu is saying, that his legacy will be tarnished, I think it is quite the opposite. I think the community and younger generation Australians think it is actually an opportunity to be his legacy, standing up for what is right and for the people.

And I just wanted to thank him for getting a pathway to recognise Palestine as a state and to finally be able to..they have been dehumanised for so long, so first and foremost, I just wanted to thank him for that, and that I appreciate it, because it takes courage, and I just wanted to say that I think Australia can be very influential, I think our voice can be respected, and hopefully we can do that for the right reason and get full aid back in Gaza.

 

Australia’s first large-scale soft plastics recycling facility has opened, which means you might be able to start recycling all those empty packets piling up in your kitchen again.

The plant has already processed tens of thousands of tonnes of the stockpile leftover from the ill-fated REDcycle scheme, which collapsed in 2022.

The $9.1 million in state and federal investment in the facility is no doubt a step in the right direction. But, as research from The Australia Institute shows, the amount of plastics consumed in Australia has doubled since the year 2000, and it is expected to double again by 2050.

A more effective way to deal with the waste is to not create it in the first place. That’s why the European Union has a tax on plastic waste, set at €0.80 per kilo. Australia Institute research shows that if Australia applied a tax on plastic packaging at the same rate as the EU, and charged it to plastic producers and importers like Spain does, it could raise $1.5 billion a year…