Remember that feeling inside when the Matilda’s inspired the nation? Many of us didn’t even know the rules, everyone did by the end of it though. Excited conversations were had about whether we should call it soccer or football, as we recalled the nail-biting moments of that penalty shootout. Didn’t it feel good to feel connected to everyone? To enjoy goodwill so strong that you could hear the electricity crackling in the air. To feel pride so fierce that it gave you goosebumps and brought tears to your eyes all at once. It was addictive, and satisfied a yearning you didn’t realise you had.
This is what feeling united as a country feels like.
Our commonalities
Australians have more in common with Indigenous Australians, than we do differences. When we are being welcomed to country, we are being welcomed by a culture that welcomes us and respects country all at the same time. This isn’t far away from how many of us welcome people into our homes. ‘Make yourself at home’, or ‘my house is your house’, we say with affection. We hug and kiss each other on the cheeks and thank our guests for bringing a bottle of wine, or cake for us to enjoy together.
Time for change
It’s been fifty-six-years since the 1967 constitutional referendum gave the federal parliament power to decide upon Indigenous affairs. It was also when Aboriginal people were counted as part of the Australian population for the first time.
Twelve-years of consultation between over two-hundred-and-fifty Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Leaders and Elders, has led us to the Voice referendum. Politicians from governments on both sides have also been involved.
The constitution is a rule book from which laws can be made
Unless you’re a member of a local club or are a company board member, most of us have never voted to amend a constitution before. For clubs they usually relate to things like increasing expenditure to fix the facilities of the club toilets. For companies, it could be a constitutional amendment regarding shares.
This isn’t about one group of people having more rights than others
This Saturday’s constitutional vote is not about giving Indigenous people more rights than everyone else. Did you know that we are the only liberal democracy in the world without a Human Rights Act, or a Constitutional Charter of Rights? The author believes that we should be striving to include this into our constitution too.
This Saturday is about giving Indigenous people a seat at the table when it comes to the federal government making decisions about their affairs. Voting, Yes, will give them a way to provide advice directly to elected members of parliament; the ones that we vote for to do this type of work. The reason that the Voice needs to be formalised as part of the constitution via referendum, is to ensure that future governments can’t undo all of the hard work that has gone into getting to this point.
Final thoughts
As was explained to me by a voter that changed their mind about voting, No: “Who am I to stand in the way of a chance for Aboriginals to make their lives better?”
Indeed, how can we deny an opportunity that does not affect the vast majority of our lives in the slightest? Voting, No, will ensure more of the same, which clearly has not worked. Voting, Yes, will finally allow Indigenous Australians some control over their destinies.
Channel the warm glow in your heart that you felt for the Matilda’s, and vote Yes.
Opposition leaders and shadow ministries not getting enough air-time in traditional media, means that they’re unable to do their job keeping governments, ministers, and portfolios to account. We aren’t a democracy without their contributions. A prime example of this is NSW Opposition leader Chris Minns. Last week when NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, made the shock announcement about the daily Covid pressers, Minns announced his own presser for the vacated timeslot. Despite Berejiklian saying that Sunday was her last presser she held another one yesterday.
Minns held his short presser yesterday at 11am via Facebook with his Shadow Health Minister, Ryan Park. The lack of dead corporate language used as well as their to-the-point communication style was refreshing. Key points made were about the need for the NSW government to do daily pressers with clear communication, and the need for the opportunity to scrutinise decisions that they make. Other points made were about our healthcare system being in crisis, for Berejiklian to be accountable, and for other people in her Covid management team to do the pressers if she can not.
For today’s presser Minns was joined by his Shadow Minister for IR, Work, Health & Safety, Sophie Cotsis, and Dr Jamal Rifi at Belmore Park, the home of the Western Bulldogs. Cotsis explained how the community-led response there has boosted their vaccination rate from 20 percent to closer to 90 percent, for the first vaccine dose in 2 months.
Minns then thanked Dr Rifi for his “amazing work on behalf of the people of NSW, his care for his community and the innovative way that he approaches medicine and community care. Putting up a tent in your front yard in order to make sure that vaccinations were distributed to so many people is an example of Australian ingenuity and world class care.”
Next on the agenda was Minns calling for NSW Parliament to be brought back so that the government can explain the reasons for their policies, and how they impact millions of people in NSW. Minns also reasoned that daily pressers were needed not for “gotchas” or “politicking” but to clear up confusion about local health orders.
Dr Rifi then relayed the good news about his drive-through vaccination clinic at the Bulldogs sports ground being approved by the Commonwealth Department of Health, for the next 6-weeks. It will operate 3-days a week as of this week on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Dr Rifi explained that people were safer being vaccinated in their cars rather than indoors where exposure to Covid is higher. As well as the benefits of vaccinating kids with their families, and whole families being immunised at once.
Dr Rifi also said that if NSW Health gave them more vaccines on top of what the federal government has given them, they could operate 7-days a week because demand there far outweighs supply. The problem is a lot of workers there work long hours and can’t get their second jabs on weekends, but if they lift the curfew hours it will make it easier for workers to use the drive-through after hours at night. Kudos to Canterbury-Bankstown Council, Bulldogs League Club and the SES volunteers for helping to make all of this happen, heroes really don’t wear capes.
The presser wraps up with Minns reiterating that we need daily pressers from the NSW government because “you can’t make up rules that affect 7 million people, and then not explain the application of these rules over the coming weeks.”
The NSW Labor leader also had this to say about the NSW Parliament sitting idle: “If we’re sending 15 and 16-year old kids off to Coles and Woolworths to work to keep supermarkets open, then politicians should be going back to work.”
After watching these illuminating pressers it’s clear South West Sydney and Western Sydney are not being treated fairly. Curfews do need to be assessed and a clear explanation provided for why they still need to be in place in all areas especially those with low case numbers. Every effort should be made to help communities there to get their second dose without losing their income. It’s clearly not a case of people in these postcodes not wanting to be vaccinated, Delta made that call for them and many of us months ago. They don’t need more ‘get the jab’ messaging they just need more vaccines.
Every single political party turned up to parliament just now.
NSW Labor. One Nation. The Greens. Animal Justice Party. Shooters, Fishers and Farmers. Christian Democrats.
YouTube link for Tuesday’s presser with Chris Minns, and Shadow Minister for IR, Work, Health & Safety, Sophie Cotsis, and Dr Jamal Rifi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBDtW6rAwCQ
Murdochtopus has many arms that work in unison with News Corp, one of those arms is a think tank called the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). When Tony Abbott became Prime Minister the IPA wrote a list of 75 ideas for Abbott to think about which included:
50. Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function.
51. Privatise SBS.
The Abbott government and coalition government’s since, have cut funding to the tune of $783 million. By 2023 the cuts to the ABC will amount to $1 billion. Surveys continually show that the ABC and SBS are the most trusted news brands in Australia. So many cuts makes it incredibly hard to cut through the power of Murdochtopus and other conservative friends of the coalition in the media.
Image by ABC News.
Australia’s concentrated media ownership is one of the highest of the world
News Corp owns nearly 60% of the metropolitan and national print media markets by readership. The Nine Entertainment Co. and Fairfax merger in 2018, means that Nine is now the second largest media owner with a combined readership share of 23%.
80% of Australian free-to-air and subscription TV revenues are collected by three corporations: News Corp, Nine, and Seven Media Holdings.
Nearly 90% of the nation’s radio licences are controlled by News Corp, Nine, and Southern Cross Media (including their associated entities).
Why we need an independent media and newswire
News Corp, Nine and Seven controlling our information isn’t healthy let alone democratic. Our public broadcasters, independent media and the Australian Associated Press Newswire (AAP), fill the public interest journalism voids that commercial media can’t fill. Independent media focuses on audiences that get left behind, the issues that go unreported, holding power to account, and local issues that keep rural audiences informed and connected.
News Corp’s regional newspaper takeover in 2016 didn’t just add to his news monopoly, it gave him the power to close them down completely or to force people to buy digital subscriptions. This is exactly what happened last May. Some rural areas now have no source of news at all, some have bought News Corp subscriptions only to find that they‘re filled wih city-centric news not relevant to them, or their communities.
The AAP had a near death experience during the Covid lockdown in March last year when their two major shareholders, News Corp and Nine, decided to close it down. The reasoning for their decision was that the AAP couldn’t compete with free information from the Internet. The AAP was saved at the last minute by a group of philanphropists. Three-months later it became clear as to why they kept the profitable arms of the AAP for themselves, they were setting up their own newswire, NCA NewsWire, in direct competition with the AAP.
To nearly lose the AAP like that is alarming, we need our national newswire to tell all of our stories, not just those deemed of importance by the media giants. The AAP released the details of their Charter of Independence a month after relaunching as a not-for-profit news service last year. News Corp doesn’t have one, and it’s been 3-years since the Fairfax merged with Nine and they still haven’t signed one. These charters are vital for public interest journalism.
Media ownership report
I recommend reading the “Who controls our media”report. The report explains in laymen terms why it’s important for everyone to know about how media ownership such as ours, is not only unprecedented but dangerous for our democracy.
“I have two young daughters and I work as a registered nurse and a nurse educator. Murdoch [controlled News Corp] recently purchased the one local newspaper on the Sunshine Coast, The Sunshine Coast Daily. Now Murdoch can provide one side of a story without any competition or opposition.” Sarah – Sunshine Coast, QLD.
Sky News Australia has more YouTube reach than the ABC
The distribution of content across all media platforms to reach as many people as possible is where the real power exists. Sky News Australia subscriptions have been climbing since their 2019 distribution deals with YouTube, Microsoft, Facebook and Taboola. Sky News YouTube subscriptions are currently at 1.75 million and climbing, whereas the ABC has 1.38 million and let’s not forget that Sky News is broadcast 24/7 in places such as airports, hotels, and Parliament House.
News Corp is also the most distributed news brand on Facebook. Even if you don’t read Murdoch content, or watch Sky News, or listen to 2GB on the radio, the power of Murdochtopus means that you most likely will, in some shape or form. For eg. a front-page story via the Daily Telegraph or The Australian, can easily set the agenda for the day with other news outlets on TV, online and via the radio, following their lead and reporting about the same story. When only a few players exist their reach means that they don’t just set the agenda of traditional media and social media, they also influence our conversations and our minds.
Patience is a virtue, but lobbying and power gets the job done
In 2006 Murdoch got a taste of Google revenue via an advertising deal with his newly acquired MySpace that was worth $900 million. MySpace was taken over by Facebook in 2009 due to his focusing on monetisation of the platform rather than innovation. From then on Murdoch complained that Google was stealing from him by displaying snippets and links to his content.
In 2019, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) found that Google’s use of snippets and links was not theft. By 2021 the much-hyped mandatory Media Bargaining Code of Conduct for Facebook and Google, bore fruit with paid partnership deals for all three of the media giants.
This monetary advantage penalises smaller media players that have genuine concerns that the new deals will push News Corp content, especially in areas such as climate change, to the top of search results rather than that of the experts,
Cheap NewsFlash app by Foxtel set to launch in the last quarter of 2021
NewsFlash will live-stream content from news services that include Sky News, and Fox News. Reports say that it will cost around $5. A cheap app like this is a good way to attract new eyeballs as well as to keep newer audiences of Sky News, after Win TV ended their deal with them by signing a 7-year deal with Nine.
What can we do?
The petition created by former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was the largest e-petition in Australia’s parliamentary history. Over 500,000 people signed it for a Murdoch Royal Commission. The petition led to a Senate inquiry into media diversity which we can support.
There is the voluntary Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation but the code isn’t mandatory and unfortunately has no teeth yet. Twitter, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Tik Tok and Redbubble are the only ones to have signed up so far.
We can also get behind and support the Public Interest Journalism Initiative (PIJI). The PIJI have done research that found that a not-for-profit (NFP) news sector might be a viable solution. This approach could help to increase media diversity as well as to build sustainable new financial models.
“News is an essential service – as highlighted by successive national emergencies. Its diversity and coverage are essential to inform our citizens, strengthen our community and safeguard our democracy.” PIJI.
Sky News is already poisoning the minds of our loved ones just like Fox News did in America
Fox News has not just destroyed families it’s killed democracy there by taking away the ability of American’s to talk with one another, without getting angry and without shutting each other down. Regional Australian’s watching Sky News are already displaying the same symptoms.
Maybe we need to take a long hard look at the 1989 Liverpool campaign in the UK . Liverpool City successfully boycotted the Sun, a Murdoch publication, after it’s role in the false reporting of the Hillsborough disaster. Sales have never recovered.
If we don’t speak up now we’ve forever lost the propaganda and misinformation war playing out right now.
In 2013 former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott commissioned Andrew Forrest to do a review about Indigenous training and employment services. Creating Parity – The Forrest Review, was released in 2014 . It was overseen and authored by Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation, the big four banks, Coles, Woolworths, and many others. In 2017 while the calls for a banking royal commission were getting louder, the Minderoo Foundation invited senior executives from the banking and retail sectors, to attend a CDC Innovation Day. This was primarily “to create a roadmap for the development and implementation of an ‘item-level (SKU) blocking’ solution, and to solve other issues hindering the card’s acceptance, functionality and scalability.” The Innovation Day participants formed a working group to help Andrew Forrest produce his Cashless Debit Card Technology Report. If you read through the report it’s clear that it’s a meticulous plan for the government to implement.
A large scale rollout of the cashless debit card has always been the plan. This was made very clear in the review and the report. The cashless debit card (CDC), trials in regional areas to date have been managed by Indue Ltd, to give banks and retailers time to get their systems ready. The biggest problem for them to circumnavigate was the blocking technology. There has been so much focus on Indue, and the alcohol and drug narrative, that the banks taking over social security payments hasn’t received enough attention.
It was only in September last year (seven months after the Final Report of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, release), that the government started to mention them when they said that they were, “working with banks and business to iron out issues with the card’s use in stores, improve mobile phone payment technology and to merge the quarantined cash system with regular bank cards.” It’s only been two months or so since the latest bank scandal was revealed, this time it was Westpac accused of over twenty-three million breaches of anti-money laundering laws.
Social Security Laws
Before we go any further, it’s important to remember that because of the changes to social security laws to allow the CDC trials to occur in the first place, the eighty percent of the social security payment that currently goes to Indue to dole out, makes it the legal property of Indue. If we allow the banks to take over, billions of dollars will be technically owned by them. Activating the CDC is considered consenting to the trial, whether you want to or not, you have to have a contractual relationship with Indue, and agree to their terms and conditions. Because Indue is technically not a bank, legality wise, how will this work if the banks take over? Indue aren’t signatories to the Centrelink Code of Operation or the ePayments code, does the legislative tweak for Indue also cover the banks?
The latest CDC Bill is attempting to passlegislation that is alarming
Extension of the CDC in trial regions from June 2020 to 2021.
Extension of the CDC policy into Cape York and all of the Northern Territory (NT).
The inclusion the Age Pension and Distant Education Payments as mandatory income managed payments, within the Social Security Act for the first time.
Allowing the minister (Anne Ruston), to act by ‘notifiable instrument’ to sanction income management support payments up to one-hundred percent in the NT. Should a minister have the power to intervene directly into people’s lives with no parliamentary oversight? There are also no protections in the bill for people from the potential abuse of this power.
The removal the CDC numbers cap, opening it up for a national rollout.
The removal of independent oversight from within the CDC policy framework, and the removal of the evaluation reporting time limit of six months, at the end of the legislated trial period.
The last two points mean that the government is not even pretending that they’re trials anymore, that’s what the evaluations and reports are for. It also makes it easier to rollout across the country.
The push is on..
At first the narrative peddled by the government and much of the media was that the CDC trials were to tackle alcohol and drug addictions, then it morphed into unemployment. Now that the push is on to roll it out into the cities, it’s being promoted as a “financial literacy tool”.
“The reason we haven’t done it in the major cities is because we need to deal with this technology issue, which we are now close to resolving,” Anne Ruston told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
“For this to be a mainstream financial literacy tool for Australia it does need to be rolled out away from just rural and regional communities, and that’s the conversation we need to have with the Australian public over the coming months.
“It does need to have a broader application than perhaps the social harm reduction that the original policy was designed on.”
Nine newspapers to date, have reported the same information as above.
“People on social security know better than most about budgeting and don’t need the federal government to teach them,” ACOSS CEO Cassandra Goldie said in a statement on Saturday.
“The cashless debit card costs thousands per person to administer. This is a waste of money going to the big banks. These public funds should be going towards increasing Newstart.”
There are more middle-aged Australians on Newstart than ever before, it’s not their budgeting skills that have led them there, it’s a lack of jobs and ageism. People aged between forty-five and sixty-five now make up half of all unemployment support recipients, and sixty-five percent of Australians receive some form of Centrelink payment.
The banks flex their muscles in the social security sector
Banks now refer some of their customers to Foodbank in an attempt to help them budget so that can pay off their mortgages. Nearly half of all homeowners aged fifty-five to sixty-four are still paying off their mortgages, it was only fourteen percent, thirty years ago. It’s a shame that we can’t look at the root cause to fix things rather than band-aid solutions involving charities and banks, isn’t this what governments are for?
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has a new app called ‘Benefits Finder’. It’s an app that helps customers find money that they’re entitled to but have not claimed from the government. The app is identity driven and can tap the government’s biometric database of people’s digital identifications to assist it. I mention this because by becoming an identity broker they ‘could, in the near future, allow claims for social security benefits to be made from within a banking app.’
I think that things like this need to be talked about in the open and not behind closed doors.
Australia is nowhere near ready to be a cashless society, it may never be
Some may argue that the banks taking over could be a good thing because of all the dramas that those on the CDC trials have had with Indue missing payments etc. Even without taking into account the revelations from the Royal Banking Commission, and recent scandals, do we really want the banks which are profit based, involved in social security and matters that concern our most vulnerable people?
They’re also not fool proof, they have outages and things go wrong on a regular basis. Heck, technology itself is not the be all and end all as we saw during the heartbreaking bushfires. ATM’s were out, people were forced to steal food, and petrol and there was chaos in supermarkets, because people couldn’t access cash.
What else is on the horizon?
Back to The Forrest Review, the NDIS gets mentioned: ‘have the scope to expand to accept other government payments such as funding for care packages under the new National Disability Insurance Scheme.’
Work-for-the-dole too: ‘operating the government’s policy of Work for the Dole on a commercial basis so that tax free status can be used as an incentive to move organisations from a social enterprise to a profitable business that employs the most disadvantaged job seekers.’
Even Palantir: ‘Big data mining with specialist fraud firms like Palantir Technologies has proven extremely efficient at identifying fraud in a manner that the cash system has no hope of replicating.’ If you’ve not heard of Palantir, there’s a link at the bottom of this page for an article that I’ve written about it.
It’s also of note that original plan was for the CDC to be completely cashless.
In conclusion
Why are we allowing a mining billionaire, banks, and corporations to write and implement social security policies for the government? Is any of this even legal? Or is the government banking on nobody caring too much about it? These and so many questions need answering urgently.
The data collected from this is also worth a serious amount of money, not only that, the information collected could be used against us, to control us, to watch and monitor us, a terrifying thought, I know. This is why we have rules, regulations, and laws to protect us. If we just keep letting things like this slide, Australia will just be a mini-America, where corporations and the elite profit from the miseries of others, and essentially, run a government that benefits their interests.
Here are some links for other articles that I’ve written about this subject –
For those that don’t know much about the cashless debit cards (CDC), or income management, here is an article that I wrote with some history about income management in Australia, and how the BasicsCard came about, and here is my most recent one about the Indue card here. For readers that have already read these articles, please know that I have updated and edited them to reflect changes since writing them, and so that they can be read consecutively. We can also forget about the propaganda relating to the government doing it out of love for those with drug or alcohol problems. Why? Because there is already a government program set up for vulnerable people that have these problems, and yet they’re exempt from the CDC trials. Now that you have this background knowledge, let’s look at the bigger picture, and what it means for every single one of us if these types of policies continue.
Scratch the surface
What’s really happening is that the role of governing, and the public monies that fund governing, are being handed to the private sector piece by piece. Think about this, a private company, Indue, has not only been handed the power to dole out security payments for people, but also to decide what they can and can not buy, even whether to suspend or cancel a payment. Compare this with what is happening with human services that used to be run by the government, such as: Job Service Providers, the ParentsNext scheme, the NDIS debacle, Centrelink call centres, even PaTH Internships. We must also consider how private consultants are taking over the role of public servants, as well as the outcome of the privatisation of: major banks, airports, toll roads, the NBN, the energy sector, detention centres in Nauru and Manus, public transport, prisons, and private security companies, et al, to really see the full picture.
The transfer of money and power to the private sector, is the corporatisation of governing by stealth. I say stealth because governments have rarely taken these issues to elections, nor asked what the people want, they’ve done the bidding of lobbyists, donors, and corporations. This has been done very successfully in America since the 1980’s, especially so with private security companies, it partly explains why they’re perpetually at war with other countries, there’s money to be made.
The cashless society push
Yes, society is increasingly going cashless but we will always need cash as a backup plan with neverending online bank outages, emergency events such as bushfires, and because we’re not all digitally literate or connected across such a vast continent. In 2016 Germany ended up deciding against introducing a €5,000 cash transaction limit. It’s also of note that early this year the International Monetary Fund (IMF), suggested that to keep central banks relevant and to make negative interest rates work, cash would need to be phased out, meaning that you would need to pay interest rates to keep your cash in the bank. Our own government is currently pushing to ban cash transactions over $10,000 or more, this is being done under the guise of going after the ‘black economy’, despite IMF studies finding that our black economy has almost halved over the past 20-years. There are even fines and a gaol sentence on the table if you don’t comply. Quite the punishment when we consider continual corporate tax evasion, and the latest scandal by yet another one of the big banks, Westpac, which broke anti-money laundering laws 23 million times. All of this despite the Banks Royal Commission.
Last month Dr Johannes Beermann, Member of the Executive Board of Germany’s central bank, made some valid points where he promoted the importance of cash in his speech to the Payment Asia Summit in China, stating that:
“Cash offers an easy way out” from being locked into electronic payment systems; cash gives “independence from social control and data collection”; and “Cash is the obvious choice of payment method when it comes to personal privacy. This strengthens individual freedom.”
People should be able to have the freedom to do what they like with their finances, humans need autonomy to function healthily, it’s a human right of which the CDC and a cashless society takes away.
CDC trial merchant expects cards to be rolled out for ‘all’ social security payments
In case the screenshots are hard to read, here is the text from them, I can’t provide a link as the blog was pulled down once it started to get attention by CDC activists:
“We are currently looking to extend the number of sites so if you are interested in participating. We are very interested in talking
In some areas now, over 60% of the people have these new debit cards. For most of them, it is their only financial means. If you are in these areas, if you cannot accept these cards, you cannot make much trade with these people.
Soon it is expected that the number of these cards will rapidly increase. It is likely that within two years, these cards will be Australia Wide as these will be I expect the primary means of paying social security.
Plus I can also see many people with drug and gambling problems volunteering to go on these cards and the courts enforcing these cards too on people with problems.
If you want to look at it in dollar terms, we pay about $180 billion now in social security a year of which at least 80% plus will probably go through these cards. The adult population of Australia is around 18.2 million, so just with that, we are looking at about $9,000 a person a year.
For many retailers now these cards are significant and I am sure soon for many more
I feel very proud that in our market place we were selected to do these trials.”
Final thoughts
Is this person privy to information that the public is not? Time will tell. What we do know is that neoliberalism and ‘dole bludger’ propaganda, has over time, dramatically changed how many Australians view social security assistance. We are a resource rich country, it’s an obligation of the government to share the wealth with those that need it. Social security payments are also a form of economic stimulus. The money gets put back into the economy, it isn’t hoarded as the wealthy do. By giving it to a third party like Indue, to manage, it’s just another form of wealth redistribution.
The next part will look at how Indue and the government is getting away with it, and the push to open up income management for the banks.
Many thanks to all of the sourced researchers, my Twitter community, publications, and artists involved in this article.
A large scale rollout of the cashless debit card has always been the plan. This was made very clear in the review and the report. The cashless debit card (CDC), trials in regional areas to date have been managed by Indue Ltd, to give banks and retailers time to get their systems ready. The biggest problem for them to circumnavigate was the blocking technology. There has been so much focus on Indue, and the alcohol and drug narrative, that the banks taking over social security payments hasn’t received enough attention.
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