Page 7 - Amber Schultz News Today

I’m thrilled to have recently joined the Crikey team as associate editor. I’ll be diving into stories that are at the intersection of the internet, politics and Australian culture — like the tale of why outgoing maverick MP George Christensen is suddenly promoting books on Amazon. One of the biggest stories this week was the backlash to the government’s India travel ban — a ban that, as Bernard Keane wrote, seemed very much like a dog-whistle that blew up in the prime minister’s mo...

This week marked the 106th anniversary of the landings at Gallipoli and the 25th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, with the memorial service for the latter covered beautifully by Charlie Lewis. But while the occasions saw many gathering to remember lives lost, politicians took the moment to warn more conflict may be brewing — a task Peter Dutton and Mike Pezzullo relished, as Kishor Napier-Ramen wrote. Bernard Keane and Guy Rundle also found that it was a convenient explanation for a b...

%%dynamic_content_876%% Hypocrisy, insincerity and bigotry: not exactly light topics to kick off your weekend, but they’re words that describe how this week went down. Bernard Keane covered how Prime Minister Scott Morrison tried to distract us all from the dying planet with a dig at “inner-city wine bar elites” (perhaps forgetting there’s a wine bar underneath his own electorate office). The Coalition admitted coal is killing the planet but denied the government had any duty of care f...

The Government’s Terrible Milkshake Ad Misses The Point Of Consent Education Young people in Australia right now are looking for a comprehensive understanding of consent and sexual assault. These videos do not provide that. We missed you too. Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Twitter, so you always know where to find us. When a government authority shares information, it should be appropriate, tested and reliable. However, as we’ve seen in recent years, the Australia...

Share on Twitter The federal government has removed two videos from its new online resource about sexual consent and respectful relationships following community and stakeholder backlash. The suite of videos, digital stories, podcasts and other materials on The Good Society website was launched last week, as part of the governments $7.8 million Respect Matters program.  But the resource has faced significant backlash from rape prevention advocates, womens rights groups and politici...

%%dynamic_content_876%% This week Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that Australian troops will be leaving Afghanistan in September, marking 20 years in the country — the end of our longest conflict. Ever vacuous, Morrison said the war brought us freedom. But as Bernard Keane wrote, the conflict was a failure on multiple fronts which left Afghanistan and the West less safe. Morrison said it wasn’t the right time to talk about alleged war crimes committed by Australian troops. With mo...

To illustrate this point, Crikey asked three high-school-aged girls to share examples of sexual harassment they’ve experienced in recent days, months and years. At a high school in Sydney, aged 16: “A boy in the year above approached me around 8.30 in the morning and asked me for pictures of my feet. It told him it was inappropriate and he walked away.” On Instagram, aged 16: “I got sent a message saying, ‘You looking for a sugar daddy to take care of your needs and spoil you financi...

A protesters holds a placard during the Womens March4Justice in Canberra (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas) Australian politics got very personal this year. The injustices women have been battling for decades have been exposed at the heart of government: sexual assault, sexual harassment and workplace inequality. Women were treated as political inconveniences, minimised and denied. In response, we rallied and marched, created petitions and demanded change. We don’t stand before our political leaders a...

(Image: Tom Red/Private Media) Defence Minister Peter Dutton has issued defamation threats to a number of social media users who labelled him a “rape apologist” after he made dismissive comments about Brittany Higgins. Dutton has targeted a wide range of people with letters from his lawyers, from unemployed Twitter users to prominent politicians including Greens Senator Larissa Waters (who later apologised). We shouldn’t be surprised. This is the same man who in 2016 demanded a photo of h...

Was the debacle of the vaccine rollout always inevitable? Looking at the government’s track record, it’s hard to avoid the sense that it was never going to be done well. There’s no doubt a mass vaccination campaign is a complex, almost wartime-like challenge: source sufficient supplies, choose in advance between different options without clear evidence of efficacy or safety, and then get them to recipients via three separate distribution arms — primary health care, aged care and the sta...