Canberra, Australia – Australian politics appears set to face a reckoning after a wave of allegations of sexual assault and harassment committed by multiple politicians and staff at Parliament House in the country’s capital.
Allegations have so far been made against a male political staffer, alleged to have raped a female colleague in 2019, against Attorney-General Christian Porter, accused of sexually assaulting a female acquaintance when both were teenagers in 1988; and against a senior aide of a member of parliament, alleged to have sexually harassed several teenage girls.
“The 1990s saw a sudden rise in women in parliament, but even now, only a quarter of politicians are women,” Blair Williams, a research fellow at The Australian National University’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, told Al Jazeera.
Our hot new neighbour
A newly discovered exoplanet might be our best chance of studying the atmosphere of rocky worlds, according to an international team of astronomers.
Located 26 light-years away in the constellation of Virgo, Gliese 486b is classified as a super-Earth – bigger than our planet but smaller than the ice giants Neptune and Uranus. Other than its rocky composition, the planet has very little in common with our own; humans would bake on its 430-degree-Celsius surface, which might even have rivers of lava flowing across it.
But astronomers reckon we could still learn a lot about what makes planets habitable by peering into Gliese 486b’s atmosphere, which is handily “puffed up” by its temperature.
5 steps women can take to improve their retirement readiness Morningstar.com.au | 07 Mar 2021Text size
Contributing authors: Shani Jayamanne, investment Specialist, Morningstar Australia, Emma Rapaport, editorial manager, Morningstar Australia and Christine Benz, director of personal finance, Morningstar Inc.
Women s superannuation is not so super. At retirement, Australian women on average have $157,050 whereas men have $270,710 a gap of $113,660, according to data released by the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia in 2018. The gap between women and men extends to younger cohorts too. Women aged 30-34 have balances of $33,750, whereas men have $43,580. The gap is closing, albeit slowly.
Why women are lagging behind