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Draft a point of view speech.

Submit a proposal (see below) to you teacher (Due: Week 10, T2

Rehearse.

Present point of view speech  Week 2 , T3 - Monday 22 July.

Submit final copy of your speech and a bibliography on the day of your presentation.

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Proposal (due Week 10 - 17th -21th June)

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Proposal (due Week 10 - 17th -21th June)

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This year the Australian government pledged almost $1bn to help women leave violent relationships. Anthony Albanese has announced $925m to help victims of violence leave abusive relationships and a ban on deepfake pornography as new measures to combat violence against women. Some argue that the police need to have more power when it comes to family violence, while others think that extending police power will give them the same power as a magistrate and this shouldn't happen.

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https://spark.adobe.com/page/EpxVlvbJk702w/

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Aron D’Souza wants to disrupt the world of sport by hosting a lucrative competition where athletes are allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs, an idea experts say raises dangerous health and ethical issues. The Enhanced Games will be the “first sporting event in the world without drug testing”, says D’Souza. At the Enhanced Games, the “couple of hundred” competitors will be able to take any performance-enhancing substances they like — from anabolic steroids to growth hormones and testosterone replacement therapy.

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Social media platforms and tech companies will be required to stamp out harmful material created using artificial intelligence, such as deep fake intimate images and hate speech, under new online safety rules from the federal government. Updates to the Basic Online Safety Expectations (Bose) on tech companies will also ask them to ensure their algorithms, which dictate what users see online, do not amplify harmful or “extreme” content, including racism, sexism and homophobia.

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For the past few years, it’s been impossible to escape the impact of inflation. Meeting our most basic needs – such as food, housing and healthcare – now costs significantly more, and wage increases haven't kept up.

Australia now finds itself in the midst of an economic downturn, putting further pressure on households. What should be done to help Australians during the cost-of-living crisis?

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Below is a link to the Plain Speaking Awards for you to have a look at and 3  Youtube clips of powerful persuasive speeches
https://vcaa.vic.edu.au/news-and-events/events-and-awards/pesa/state-final-speeches/Pages/Index.aspx

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Britt Wray: How climate change affects your mental health

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"For all that's ever been said about climate change, we haven't heard nearly enough about the psychological impacts of living in a warming world," says science writer Britt Wray. In this quick talk, she explores how climate change is threatening our well-being -- mental, social and spiritual -- and offers a starting point for what we can do about it.

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Opposition leader Peter Dutton argues Australia needs nuclear power to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

But many feel that nuclear power is not feasible for Australia. It is too slow, too expensive and inappropriate for our energy needs.

Some politicians are insisting that nuclear power is the only answer to Australia’s net zero commitments. While those opposing nuclear power claim that these groups may be trying to deflect the urgent action on climate change that is needed.

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Over the years AI has been responsible for many technological advancements that have improved the lives of many. It has helped diagnose diseases and develop new drugs and treatments. In the finance sector it has been used to reduce the risk of large scale fraud. Additionally, it has supported business in improving efficiency in the workplace.

However, there are growing concerns about AI posing a threat to humanity. There are no laws to restrict its use and many worry that it will be used for evil. Some believe it will lead to countless job loses, privacy risks and increase the risk of war.

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The internet has been humming of late with the news that a group of venture capitalists were going to stage an athletics event that would encourage athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs.

The Enhanced Games is the brainchild of Australian lawyer and entrepreneur Aron D'Souza and bankrolled by a small group of billionaires including the co-founder of Pay Pay Peter Thiel, venture capitalist Christian Angermayer and Balaji Srinivasan who was the first chief technical officer for the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

The plan is to allow athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs in a bid to "help them reach their full potential".

It's the answer all the cynics have been crying out for. We've all heard people say: "Why don't you just let them all get on the drugs and go for it?"

The games promise a team of medical experts will supervise athletes and has already gained one big name signing, Australian Olympic 100m freestyle silver medallist James Magnussen.

The premise is that the current credo in world sport as overseen by the World Anti-Doping Agency and national bodies, such as Australia's Sport Integrity Australia is "anti-science".

It frames the fight against doping as an attempt to stifle athletic ability.

"After years of oppression, we are seeing a push-back against the anti-science dogma purported by the incumbent sporting leagues," a statement on the Enhanced Games website reads.

"Enhanced athletes embrace the human belief in scientific development, ignoring the anti-science dogma," it says.

The website even boasts a video from an athlete who claims to have broken Usain Bolt's 100-metre world record.

The only problem is he doesn't identify himself, which has the effect of immediately dialling the credibility meter down to zero.

The CEO of Sports Medicine Australia Jamie Crain is sceptical about the use of the word "science" in the Enhanced Games PR material.

"Science is the process of experimenting and observing and recording results and adjusting accordingly to get a certain outcome or just to understand a topic," Crain said.

"And in this context that means they're going to be giving otherwise fit people experimental substances to see what the outcomes is in the hope it might make them faster or stronger.

"Is that good science? If it produces a fast athlete who ends up with medical complications down the line, you would argue, no, it is not good science."

He says not one of his members has expressed support for the concept in their capacity as health care professionals.

The CEO of the Australian Sports Commission Kieren Perkins said "I cannot see any responsible and ethical person thinking the Enhance Games is even remotely sensible".

"As soon as you start to go down the murky slope of allowing these sorts of drugs to be involved in the system you are completely setting aside the athlete's physical and mental wellbeing and prioritising commercial gains and that's not a place we want to be," Perkins said.

Magnussen though - is up for the challenge.

The carrot is a $US1 million incentive if he can break the 50m Freestyle world record.

"To be completely transparent, the money is a huge part," he wrote for News Corp.

"A $1.6 million Australian dollar prize is hard to ignore."

Behind the spin that the enhanced games are an advertisement for good science, there are those who argue this is purely and simply a money-making venture.

D'Souza has plans to stage the event annually and stream it on platforms like YouTube.

And who would argue that he wouldn't have hundreds of millions tuning in to see bulked and juiced-up athletes on steroids and any number of other drugs they could inject (medically supervised of course).

The website is promising to pay athletes but doesn't say how much, although elsewhere D'Souza has intimated that $US100,000 would be an appropriate starting point for athletes who qualify.

The question that arises is what extent would athletes go to achieve qualification?

It's hard to escape the conclusion that the Enhanced Games will be akin to some kind of freak show - a form of an experimental gladiatorial bout for the benefit of the paying public.

But at what cost to the participants?

"No gladiatorial bout ever ended up being good for the two people in the ring," Crain said.

"It's always going to end badly somewhere, and purely for the entertainment of those people watching, and the people watching are taking no risk.

"We'd be entering a world where the athletes are performing for the attempt to win glory and money for everyone else's entertainment, and I just don't think that's a good outcome."

The question that hasn't been answered by the founders of the Enhanced Games is what is fair game in terms of doping and where do you draw the line?

Speaking to Andrew Webster for the Nine newspapers, D'Souza said the Enhanced Games organisers would never encourage rampant drug taking.

"We have a safety system in place in which world-leading clinicians are developing a full-system health check-up protocol. You have to be within certain biomarker ranges to compete. If you have an enlarged heart, you won't be able to compete," he told Webster.

But that doesn't answer the question as to what drugs would be fair game for the athletes in the Enhanced Games beyond your run-of-the-mill steroids.

Nor, what ends athletes might be prepared to go to qualify before they were under the auspice of a medical committee.

"Are the athletes truly going to be free to choose what they take?" Crain said.

"Or are they going to be under pressure from third parties (such as pharmaceutical companies or sponsors) to experiment, which I think would almost certainly happen?"

Professor David Bishop, professorial research fellow at the Victoria University's Institute for Health and Sport, has heard of researchers who've found mice that have increased their endurance through gene doping, be inundated with requests by athletes for the same treatment despite the fact those treatments haven't been approved let alone trailed on humans.

"What are the actual limits they put in there?" he asks of the team at the Enhanced Games.

"Properly medically supervised some of these things are safe," Professor Bishop said referring to steroids - which are frequently prescribed in topical creams or through the likes of cortisone injections.

But Professor Bishop, who admits to being so anti-drugs he doesn't even take paracetamol, is wary of the argument that "if a little bit's good then two or three times is better.

"While medical supervision may reduce some of the risks, taking performance-enhancing drugs won't be risk-free and there's still a lot we don't know about the long-term risks of taking even the more common substances," Bishop said.

"We know even less about the risks of newer techniques, like gene doping - if they want to allow and encourage any and every potential performance enhancer, that could be very dangerous.

"Is this just no guard rails at all?"

"The first death is going to put a dampener on things."

Professor Bishop warns the concept of the Enhanced Games is reflective of a broader attitude in society that anything can be fixed with a pill.

Likewise, it could be argued that the Enhanced Game concept is a one-dimensional approach to breaking world records.

Just as people used to say Ian Thorpe's big feet gave him an unfair advantage, they missed the point that he also had to spend tens of thousands of hours training his body and refining his technique; a super drug-charged body doesn't guarantee anything.

Elite performance also demands elite coaching, training and nutrition.

One of the biggest advances in elite performance has been in the field of biological sciences and physiology which has informed better training that is specifically targeted for particular athletes.

Likewise, other advancements in bio-mechanics and computer technology have allowed athletes to work on improvements in their stroke, strike or throw.

We now know more about nutrition to fuel exercise; more about recovery - the list goes on.

It also ignores the fact that elite sport is very often self-selecting. Professor Bishop uses rowing as an example.

"Something like rowing is basically (limited to) white private school kids, and we're still not tapping into the best potential athletes out there," he said.

There are a myriad sports that are exclusive by means of cost or other forms of economic inequity.

James Magnussen says he wants to see if performance-enhancing drugs will allow him to swim as well as a 32-year-old as he did when he was a world champion at 20.

The bell curve of athletic performance would suggest that for his chosen sport, he is past his best - as evidenced by the fact that he retired six years ago.

And it may be that he's prepared to spend countless thousands of hours getting back into the kind of shape that will allow him to swim world-class times and that performance-enhancing drugs could help him to train more and recover faster.

We'll see.

He's the sort of athlete the Enhanced Games are targeting - older and retired athletes who are willing to take the money and risk to experiment on themselves.

As he says: "This is not for everyone, and it is certainly not something for young athletes."

For now, the Enhanced Games is nothing more than a slick website, containing dubious and unverifiable claims and some questionable logic.

The concept throws up many more questions than it claims it will answer and at first glance will do little to prove the assertion that just taking performance-enhancing drugs will lead to world records.

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The Enhanced Games backers say they're testing the limits of human potential but the truth is far murkier

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The organisers of the proposed Enhanced Games claim they're championing science and raising the ceiling on athletic excellence. But it raises more questions than answers, writes David Mark.

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How deepfakes gave rise to the ‘liar’s dividend’ and troubling questions over what’s real on the internet

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Could you spot a news article written by a chatbot? Generative AI is changing the way we make, access and share information, and reshaping the future of journalism.

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LONDON, May 5 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence could pose a "more urgent" threat to humanity than climate change, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the "godfathers of AI", recently announced he had quit Alphabet (GOOGL.O) after a decade at the firm, saying he wanted to speak out on the risks of the technology without it affecting his former employer.

Hinton's work is considered essential to the development of contemporary AI systems. In 1986, he co-authored the seminal paper "Learning representations by back-propagating errors", a milestone in the development of the neural networks undergirding AI technology. In 2018, he was awarded the Turing Award in recognition of his research breakthroughs.

But he is now among a growing number of tech leaders publicly espousing concern about the possible threat posed by AI if machines were to achieve greater intelligence than humans and take control of the planet.

"I wouldn't like to devalue climate change. I wouldn't like to say, 'You shouldn't worry about climate change.' That's a huge risk too," Hinton said. "But I think this might end up being more urgent."

He added: "With climate change, it's very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon. If you do that, eventually things will be okay. For this it's not at all clear what you should do."

Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI fired the starting pistol on a technological arms race in November, when it made AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT available to the public. It soon became the fastest-growing app in history, reaching 100 million monthly users in two months.

In April, Twitter CEO Elon Musk joined thousands in signing an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of systems more powerful than OpenAI's recently-launched GPT-4.

Signatories included Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, and fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.

While Hinton shares signatories concern that AI may prove to be an existential threat to mankind, he disagreed with pausing research.

"It's utterly unrealistic," he said. "I'm in the camp that thinks this is an existential risk, and it's close enough that we ought to be working very hard right now, and putting a lot of resources into figuring out what we can do about it."

In the European Union, a committee of lawmakers responded to the Musk-backed letter, calling on U.S. President Joe Biden to convene a global summit on the future direction of the technology with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Last week, the committee agreed a landmark set of proposals targeting generative AI, which would force companies like OpenAI to disclose any copyright material used to train their models.

Meanwhile, Biden held talks with a number of AI company leaders, including Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the White House, promising a "frank and constructive discussion" on the need for companies to be more transparent about their systems.

"The tech leaders have the best understanding of it, and the politicians have to be involved," said Hinton. "It affects us all, so we all have to think about it."

Reporting by Martin Coulter, editing by Deepa Babington

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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AI pioneer says its threat to world may be 'more urgent' than climate change

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LONDON, May 5 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence could pose a "more urgent" threat to humanity than climate change, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton told Reuters in an interview on Friday. Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the "godfathers of AI", recently announced he had quit Alphabet (GOOGL.O) after a decade at the firm, saying he wanted to speak out on the risks of the technology without it affecting his former employer.

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n the field of artificial intelligence, doomerism is as natural as an echo. Every development in the field, or to be more precise every development that the public notices, immediately generates an apocalyptic reaction. The fear is natural enough; it comes partly from the lizard-brain part of us that resists whatever is new and strange, and partly from the movies, which have instructed us, for a century, that artificial intelligence will take the form of an angry god that wants to destroy all humanity.

The recent public letter calling for a six-month ban on AI lab work will not have the slightest measurable effect on the development of artificial intelligence, it goes without saying. But it has changed the conversation: every discussion about artificial intelligence must begin with the possibility of total human extinction. It's silly and, worse, it's an alibi, a distraction from the real dangers technology presents.

The most important thing to remember about tech doomerism in general is that it's a form of advertising, a species of hype

The most important thing to remember about tech doomerism in general is that it's a form of advertising, a species of hype. Remember when WeWork was going to end commercial real estate? Remember when crypto was going to lead to the abolition of central banks? Remember when the metaverse was going to end meeting people in real life? Silicon Valley uses apocalypse for marketing purposes: they tell you their tech is going to end the world to show you how important they are.

I have been working with and reporting on AI since 2017, which is prehistoric in this field. During that time, I have heard, from intelligent sources who were usually reliable, that the trucking industry was about to end, that China was in possession of a trillion-parameter natural language processing AI with superhuman intelligence. I have heard geniuses - bona fide geniuses - declare that medical schools should no longer teach radiology because it would all be automated soon.

One of the reasons AI doomerism bores me is that it's become familiar - I've heard it all before. To stay sane, I have had to abide by twin principles: I don't believe it until I see it. Once I see it, I believe it.

Many of the most important engineers in the field indulge in AI doomerism; this is unquestionably true. But one of the defining features of our time is that the engineers - who do not, in my experience, have even the faintest education in the humanities or even recognize that society and culture are worthy of study - simply have no idea how their inventions interact with the world. One of the most prominent signatories of the open letter was Elon Musk, an early investor in OpenAI. He is brilliant at technology. But if you want to know how little he understands about people and their relationships to technology, go on Twitter for five minutes.

Not that there aren't real causes of worry when it comes to AI; it's just that they're almost always about something other than AI. The biggest anxiety - that an artificial general intelligence is about to take over the world - doesn't even qualify as science fiction. That fear is religious.

Computers do not have will. Algorithms are a series of instructions. The properties that emerge in the "emergent properties" of artificial intelligence have to be discovered and established by human beings. The anthropomorphization of statistical pattern-matching machinery is storytelling; it's a movie playing in the collective mind, nothing more. Turning off ChatGPT isn't murder. Engineers who hire lawyers for their chatbots are every bit as ridiculous as they sound.

The much more real anxieties - brought up by the more substantial critics of artificial intelligence - are that AI will super-charge misinformation and will lead to the hollowing out of the middle class by the process of automation. Do I really need to point out that both of these problems predate artificial intelligence by decades, and are political rather than technological?

AI might well make it slightly easier to generate fake content, but the problem of misinformation has never been generation but dissemination. The political space is already saturated with fraud and it's hard to see how AI could make it much worse. In the first quarter of 2019, Facebook had to remove 2.2bn fake profiles; AI had nothing to do with it. The response to the degradation of our information networks - from government and from the social media industry - has been a massive shrug, a bunch of antiquated talk about the first amendment.

Regulating AI is enormously problematic; it involves trying to fathom the unfathomable and make the inherently opaque transparent. But we already know, and have known for over a decade, about the social consequences of social media algorithms. We don't have to fantasize or predict the effects of Instagram. The research is consistent and established: that technology is associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety and self-harm among children. Yet we do nothing. Vague talk about slowing down AI doesn't solve anything; a concrete plan to regulate social media might.

As for the hollowing out of the middle class, inequality in the United States reached the highest level since 1774 back in 2012. AI may not be the problem. The problem may be the foundational economic order AI is entering. Again, vague talk about an AI apocalypse is a convenient way to avoid talking about the self-consumption of capitalism and the extremely hard choices that self-consumption presents.

The way you can tell that doomerism is just more hype is that its solutions are always terminally vague. The open letter called for a six-month ban. What, exactly, do they imagine will happen over those six months? The engineers won't think about AI? The developers won't figure out ways to use it? Doomerism likes its crises numinous, preferably unsolvable. AI fits the bill.

Recently, I used AI to write a novella: The Death of an Author. I won't say that the experience wasn't unsettling. It was quite weird, actually. It felt like I managed to get an alien to write, an alien that is the sum total of our language. The novella itself has, to me anyway, a hypnotic but removed power - inhuman language that makes sense. But the experience didn't make me afraid. It awed me. Let's reside in the awe for a moment, just a moment, before we go to the fear.

If we have to think through AI by way of the movies, can we at least do Star Trek instead of Terminator 2? Something strange has appeared in the sky - let's be a little more Jean-Luc Picard and a little less Klingon in our response. The truth about AI is that nobody - not the engineers who have created it, not the developers converting it into products - understands fully what it is, never mind what its consequences will be. Let's get a sense of what this alien is before we blow it out of the sky. Maybe it's beautiful.

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The apocalypse isn't coming. We must resist cynicism and fear about AI | Stephen Marche

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n the field of artificial intelligence, doomerism is as natural as an echo. Every development in the field, or to be more precise every development that the public notices, immediately generates an apocalyptic reaction.

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The AI revolution: Google's developers on the future of artificial intelligence | 60 Minutes

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national regional affairs reporter Jane Norman

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The US and Japan have ‘tripled down on nuclear’, could it be time for Australia to shift its attitude?

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For decades, Australians have been hesitant to embrace nuclear power – but there are signs attitudes might be shifting as younger Australians see climate change as their generation’s existential threat.

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An energy crisis in Australia has seen prices spike and supply issues plague much of the country's east. The federal energy minister, Chris Bowen, claims the previous Coalition government left behind a "bin fire" that meant Australia was "ill-prepared ... for the challenges we are facing today".

But the Coalition has tried to blame the new and "inexperienced" Labor government. What's actually causing the crisis and what can governments do about it?

How are energy prices set in the first place and who sets them?

The gas market is opaque, meaning few people can actually see what the price is, whereas we can see the wholesale price for electricity every five minutes. By wholesale price, we're talking about the costs we pay the generators for the electrons travelling down the wires to our homes and businesses.

Only about a quarter of the cost the average consumer pays in their retail bills relates to that cost of generation. On top of that, we are forking out for infrastructure that delivers the power when we flick a switch, as well as all those annoying ads urging us to change our retailer.

But the price of power isn't just up to the retailers and energy companies. There are also national and state regulatory bodies, of which there are two players you need to pay attention to: the Victorian government which sets a market price for that state, and an Australian energy regulator that sets the standard price for those in south-east Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. In combination, they're really setting a standard price that signals to the general market what the cost of electricity should be and nudges the different players to get close to that number. It's called the default market offer.

Can companies charge more than the default market offer?

The default market offer provides a benchmark and is a way to anchor prices. The retailers typically look to offer around those prices, if not slightly below them because that's where they expect their competitors to be.

If you are being charged higher than the default market offer, you can switch companies and get a better deal. If you do nothing, that is what you're going to pay, but if you do a bit of work, you can do better, which is why the Australian Energy Regulator, which sets that offer, does encourage people to look around.

How much are energy bills expected to rise over the next year?

Last month we got an indication of how the default market offer was going to increase. At the most, it's going to go up by 18%, but mostly it's less than that. In New South Wales, for example, it'll probably be adding either $119 or up to $227 more per household. But in South Australia, for example, only $124 on average more, and Queensland somewhere in between. So an extra 18%, or a couple of hundred dollars over the next year, for a regular household in some states. For others it's probably closer to 8%.

What prompted these price rises?

Energy in general has been getting more expensive since about the September 2021 quarter onwards. As economies started to come out of Covid restrictions there was a rush of demand as businesses ramped up and people returned to offices. But Covid also restricted the supply of energy, and if you've got the same demand, but less supply, prices will go up.

That was a factor already in train before Russia invaded Ukraine and kicked everything else up another notch. Russia is one of the biggest energy exporters in the world. And because of the invasion, there were immediate sanctions placed on Russian oil and gas. So Europe in particular, but others as well, had to start scrambling to find sources of energy from elsewhere - and that was a key reason why energy prices started to spike.

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Meanwhile, the biggest supplier of electricity in Australia is still coal, but Australia's coal plants are ageing and many of them are being earmarked for closure. There is less maintenance and there are more breakdowns. In recent weeks we've had pretty much a third of the coal capacity offline, which is another key reason why prices have started to rise. On top of that, coal supply has been affected by the flooding.

Then along comes winter to bump up demand - this is the season when sustained energy use is the highest across Australia. And for places such as Victoria, there's a lot of gas heating, and that puts extra strain on what is typically the busiest time for generators.

There are four factors contributing to the "perfect storm" facing Australia's energy market right now: the general rise of energy costs, the Russian invasion, coal outages and the weather. The question is whether this is just going to be a short-lived storm or one that rolls through the winter and potentially beyond.

So what happens when the regulator caps prices?

The market rules have built-in price caps so that if wholesale prices are too high for too long, the limits automatically kick in. The calculation is based on a rolling seven-day cycle and if prices total a bit less than $1.4m in anystate, the regulator imposes a $300/MWh price.

That's what happened starting in Queensland on 12 June, with the cap imposed on the other four states in the market within days. One consequence, though, was a bunch of generators would arguably lose money at that price given the soaring cost of gas and coal if bought on the market.

Depending on the efficiency of the gas plant, for instance, it can take $400-$440 worth of gas to generate the 1MWh that it could only sell for $300.

These high-cost generators then withdrew their bids, creating the rolling shortfalls in the days afterwards. As each supply gap loomed, regulators would then order these generators to get spinning with the pledge to compensate for any losses - but they would have to apply for the make-good payments. Delays may be as long as six months, Joshua Stabler, an analyst with Energy Edge, said.

What about when it suspends spot market electricity trading?

The Australian Energy Market Operator (Aemo) effectively pulled the plug on the wholesale market serving the eastern states on Wednesday because the "ring-a-generator" process to order output had become unsustainable given the flurry of forecast shortfalls.

The regulator will set up a "command and control"-like system that will create "one simple place where generators can put all their availability and it can be dispatched in a simple and methodical way", Daniel Westerman, Aemo's chief executive, said after the suspension.

"Once we are confident we can operate it and not see generators withdrawing their availability then we will restart the market," he said, adding regulators will assess conditions every day.

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It's the first time the entire national electricity market has been suspended, so there is some novelty in it. Previously, single markets such as Tasmania and South Australia, had seen suspensions, including the latter's notorious "black" state event in 2016.

To the extent the problems are based on the reduced availability of coal plants and high demand because of winter chill, it may be a while - perhaps months - before the market resumes normal operations.

During the suspension, the generators get paid a flat rate of $300/MWh and then compensated for any losses.

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Australia's energy crisis explained: from price caps to the suspension of electricity trading

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How the Ukraine war, ageing coal, Covid restrictions and winter combined to create the 'perfect storm' in the power market

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The prospect of nuclear power in Australia has been a topic of public debate since the 1950s. While we have never had a nuclear power station, we do have 33% of the world’s uranium deposits and we are the world’s third largest producer of it. Periodically, as with the changing of the seasons, various individuals appear in the media singing the virtues of nuclear energy onshore – claiming it is the only option for clean and reliable electricity in Australia. In fact, nuclear power in Australia makes no sense and wasting time and energy debating it is a distraction from genuine climate action.

Why doesn’t nuclear power make sense for Australia?

1. Nuclear power stations can’t be built anywhere in Australia. They are banned in every state, and in every territory. Such bans were introduced because of community concerns about the health and environmental risks. Many parliamentary inquiries at a federal and state level – see this Victorian Inquiry, this Federal Inquiry, and this South Australian Inquiry for instance – have been held into nuclear, and all have concluded that nuclear power makes no sense in Australia.

2. Nuclear power stations are expensive and take too long to build. CSIRO says by far the lowest cost way of producing electricity is with solar and wind even when factoring in storage. In contrast, the costs of building and operating nuclear in Australia remain prohibitively high. Further, analysis conducted by the nuclear industry itself shows nuclear power stations take an average of 9.4 years to build – compared to 1–3 years for a major wind or solar project. Australia needs to replace its ageing coal-fired power stations as quickly as possible, and should be slashing its emissions by 75% this decade. As shown in the Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan, by far the cheapest and quickest way to do this is to r amp up renewable energy paired with storage like pumped hydro, and batteries.

3. Nuclear power poses significant community, environmental, health and economic risks. Radiation from major nuclear disasters, such as Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, have impacted hundreds of thousands of people and contaminated vast areas that take decades to clean up. Even when a nuclear power station operates as intended it creates a long-term and prohibitively expensive legacy of site remediation, fuel processing and radioactive waste storage. They are also water hungry – requiring massive quantities of water for ongoing operations.

4. Nuclear power is not renewable. Uranium is a finite resource just like coal, oil and gas. While the operation of a nuclear reactor does not create greenhouse gas emissions, all other parts of producing nuclear power are polluting from mining, to construction, decommissioning and waste management.

Australia is one of the sunniest and windiest countries on earth, with enough renewable energy to power resources to power our country 500 times over. Building large-scale wind and solar projects is the cheapest way of producing electricity here, even when paired with storage. It is also low risk, renewable and non-polluting. The bottom line is – nuclear power is the slowest, most expensive, most dangerous and least flexible form of new power generation for Australia. It makes no sense. So let’s stop wasting time, and get on with building more renewables.

Nuclear Power Plant Isar II, Bavaria, Germany. Photo by Flickr user Brewbooks licensed under (CC BY-SA 2.0)

What is a nuclear power station?

Nuclear power stations run on uranium. When the nucleus of a uranium molecule is split inside a reactor, heat is produced. This process is called nuclear fission. The heat produced from this process is used to create steam from water. The steam drives a turbine that powers a generator. The generator creates electricity.

Unlike coal and gas, no greenhouse gas pollution is created in the operation of the nuclear reactor. However, all other steps involved in producing nuclear power – from mining, to construction, decommissioning and waste management – result in greenhouse gas pollution.

Join the Climate Council for more helpful explainers from Australia’s leading climate communicators, straight to your inbox.

Case study: Hinkley Nuclear Power Station, United Kingdom

When this project was first being promoted, the CEO of British energy company EDF Vincent de Rivaz predicted that the Hinkley C nuclear power station could be switched on in 2017. It is currently slated to open in June 2026, almost a decade late even if this extended deadline is met.

Around the same time, the UK government priced the project at 4 billion UK pounds. It is now expected to cost between £22bn and £23bn.

The price for Hinkley’s electricity was fixed in a so-called “strike price” at £92 per megawatt-hour, rising with inflation. This won’t rise, even though the costs of building the project have gone up. However, that is still expensive energy when the latest offshore UK wind farms have agreed to strike prices of less than half that (around £40 per megawatt-hour).

Read more: BBC News

Meeting the climate challenge means taking bold and decisive action this decade with the technologies that are ready to go in Australia today. The significant limitations nuclear energy faces means that there is no real prospect of it playing a role in reducing Australia’s emissions.

By Climate Council  /  18 January 2022

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Nuclear power stations are not appropriate for Australia – and probably never will be | Climate Council

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The prospect of nuclear power in Australia has been a topic of public debate since the 1950s. While we have never had a nuclear power station, we do have 33% of the world’s uranium deposits and we are the world’s third largest producer of it. Periodically, as with the changing of the seasons, variou…

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Violence against women is a serious and widespread problem in Australia.

But violence against women is also preventable. To prevent violence against women we need to understand it. This page provides information on the prevalence and nature of violence in Australia.

"Violence against women is any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life."

Key statistics on violence against women

Violence against women is experienced across all communities and cultures. However, its nature, prevalence and risk factors differ within population groups. Below are some key statistics related to the Australian population:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women experience disproportionally high rates of violence, and are Anecdotal evidence suggests that non-Indigenous men make up a significant

The impact and cost of violence against women

Violence against women takes a profound and long-term toll on women's health and wellbeing, on families and communities, and on society as a whole.

Gender inequality and discrimination

Gender inequality must be addressed if we are going to prevent violence against women. Gender inequality exists in many forms in Australia. Here are some examples:

Making progress in Australia

While violence against women is a problem of epidemic proportions in Australia, it is not inevitable, it is preventable.

And there have been many signs of progress. For example,

The National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032 was developed and supported by the Commonwealth, state and territory governments.

There is increasing focus on establishing prevention infrastructure to ensure our efforts are effective and lead to long-term social change. Examples of prevention infrastructure include sustained political leadership, policy, regulatory and legislative reform and national monitoring and reporting mechanisms. You can read more about it in Change the story.

Our Tracking progress in prevention report measures progress towards preventing violence against women in Australia over 10 years. It demonstrates that Australia's approach to prevention is based on sound evidence, and shows encouraging signs of progress. People working in primary prevention can use the findings to inform their efforts and investments, to help maximise impact and advance progress.

Taking action

While progress has been made in Australia, there is much more to do. No one person or organisation can bring about an end to violence. A collective, national effort is needed, by addressing the drivers of violence against women across all areas of society. Individuals, families, communities, organisations and systems (like the legal system) all play a role.

For more detailed statistics

For further facts and statistics please visit the following websites:

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Quick facts about violence against women

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Key statistics on violence against women from Our Watch, a national leader in primary prevention of violence against women and their children in Australia.

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Two children gunned down by their father. A woman seriously assaulted after officers ignored her request for a protection order. An attack that left a victim with a partially punctured lung recorded as "domestic violence - no offence".

When police fail to follow operating procedures, the consequences can be deadly.

"My mother and I made it clear that our lives were at risk - we were repeatedly ignored, repeatedly failed," domestic violence victim-survivor Ariel Bombara told reporters last week in the aftermath of a double shooting murder at the hands of her father.

"Authorities should have helped us stop him and they failed."

The pair had fled Ariel's father Mark Bombara in March. Seven weeks later, he went to a home in suburban Perth where he thought his ex-wife was hiding, and shot and killed her best friend Jennifer Petelczyc and her 18-year-old daughter Gretl. He then turned the gun on himself.

In a damning statement, Ariel accused the WA Police Force of dismissing multiple pleas for protection, denying requests for a restraining order, ignoring specific warnings about her father's guns and, ultimately, failing to protect the community.

WA Police are investigating the actions of the officers involved.

The inadequacy of police responses to domestic violence is not limited to Western Australia. In 2022, inquiries in Queensland and Victoria uncovered similar problems. Late last year, a series of coronial inquests unearthed critical flaws in Northern Territory police responses to family violence while in South Australia, a royal commission into domestic violence will examine police intervention as part of its inquiry.

The Review of NSW Police Force responses to domestic and family violence incidents, published in June 2023 by the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC), analysed more than 100 cases where the NSW Police Force (NSWPF) found officers had breached the force's own protocols and failed to properly investigate family violence.

Some breaches are chillingly reminiscent of the accusations levelled at WA Police: failure to seize firearms, failure to record statements, failure to seek protection orders.

In one 2020 case with disturbing parallels to the WA murders, a woman reported a DV incident by her ex-partner, a registered firearms licence holder. The officer - who later faced a criminal charge - didn't create an event report, brief other officers, or complete any firearm checks. As a result, police didn't seize the man's guns.

Several days later, the man went to visit his ex-partner at home. The woman managed to escape but the man shot and killed someone else at the home before turning the gun on himself.

NSWPF made a range of findings against officers including lying, falsifying official records, neglect of duty, and deficient/inadequate investigation. At least one officer faced criminal charges.

All up, the review of 102 upheld complaints identified 171 breaches of the police force's own domestic violence operating procedures.

Odds are, these figures represent a fraction of the true number of inadequate investigations, according to experts.

"It's likely that the problematic number of investigations is much, much higher because, basically, most women won't actually put in a complaint ... They're reluctant to pursue any further connection with police after that difficult experience," said Professor Douglas.

"And the worry is, if they have a negative experience with police, they don't go back for support from police in the future."

Breached firearm procedures

In eight of the 171 failures, officers breached legal requirements and internal NSW Police Force operating procedures relating to firearms at domestic violence incidents.

Most of the officers involved were senior constables.

Officers who investigate a family violence incident have a statutory responsibility to inquire about the presence of any firearms in the home. If a police officer establishes that there are firearms in the home, they must inquire after, search for and seize them.

A litany of police errors contributed to the 2018 shooting murders of Jennifer and Jack Edwards by their father John, according to the coronial investigation. Their mother Olga took her own life five months later.

John Edwards was able to lawfully purchase the firearms that he used to gun down his children and himself following numerous failures by police.

Breaches spanned multiple attempts by Olga to report John's violence. They included recording an earlier incident as "no offence" instead of assault, not taking victim statements, not recording the two children as victims, and not recording John Edwards as the "person named" nor Olga as the victim.

According to the coroner, this additional information would have been enough for a protection order - known in NSW as an apprehended domestic violence order (ADVO) - which would have triggered mandatory refusal for a firearms licence.

Under the strengthened gun laws before WA's parliament, a family and domestic violence complaint would automatically strip firearms owners of their guns.

NSW Police agreed "in principle" with LECC recommendations that event reports include more information about the seizure of firearms and operating procedures require officers to record details of firearm checks.

Failed to protect child at risk

In eight instances, officers failed to follow legal requirements that make it mandatory for them to report children at risk of significant harm to the Department of Communities and Justice.

Further, police that believe children are at risk of immediate harm have the power to remove them from the home.

In one 2019 incident, a woman reported to police that her husband had assaulted her while she was holding their young child in her arms. The officer made no notebook record. The event report stated the woman had reported a verbal argument and did not disclose any DV offences. In the Child At Risk section, the officer wrote that the child appeared "healthy and happy", despite never checking the child's welfare.

The officer was investigated for falsifying official records, served with a warning and placed on a six-month conduct management plan.

In another example, a woman reported that her ex-partner had breached his ADVO orders, assaulted her and taken one of their children away. The officer failed to create an event report, including any record of the child's welfare.

The LECC did not make specific recommendations about this section, noting police operating procedures already require officers to report children at risk.

Failure to follow ADVO requirements

In 22 of the complaints upheld by the NSWPF, officers failed to comply with operating procedures for Apprehended Domestic Violence Orders.

NSW Police officers are legally obliged to apply for an ADVO if they suspect or believe that a domestic violence offence is likely to be committed.

In one case, police attended an incident involving a man, his ex-partner and her one-year-old. They had information about a history of domestic violence between the couple but after interviewing the pair, declined the woman's request for an ADVO.

Several weeks later, the ex-partner seriously assaulted the woman.

An internal investigation found the two senior officers involved "did not pick up on the victim's fears and failed to investigate the victim's allegations". One officer had already been sanctioned for inadequate investigation of another DV incident. The second was put on a conduct management plan.

"Every breach of an intervention order is a red flag that the victim-survivor is at risk of violence escalation and even death," said Monash University professor Kate Fitz-Gibbon.

Women's Community Shelters CEO Annabelle Daniel told the ABC that there's no such thing as a "low-level ADVO breach".

"Perpetrators will continually test the limits. That is a feature of coercive control."

She said one of the most striking contradictions in the WA case was the police response to Ariel Bombara's warnings that her father had 13 firearms: the officers donned bulletproof vests, yet refused her plea for a temporary protection order.

"If the police believed they could be shot, why did this case not meet the threshold for protection for [Ariel and her mother]?"

WA Police Commissioner Col Blanch has since told reporters the measure was not warranted based on the information the police had at that time.

The NSW report did not make specific any specific recommendations about ADVO procedures, noting existing obligations.

Failure to collect evidence, including statements

In 44 of the 171 failures reviewed, officers failed to properly collect critical parts of the brief of evidence.

These include 17 instances of failing to obtain witness statements or to even canvas the area to identify possible witnesses, 14 cases of failing to obtain victim statements, and 9 investigations in which officers didn't take photographs or obtain relevant CCTV footage at the scene.

In one case outlined in the LECC report, a woman with visible injuries to her face went to a police station to report that her ex-partner had assaulted her. The officer took no photos of the woman's injuries and told her that police would not investigate.

Daniel says victims statements are paramount to judging the risk of further harm.

"Victim-survivors' assessments of their own risk are extraordinarily accurate ... [They're] probably the best indicator of the risk that the violence will escalate," she said.

"Quite often [the victim-survivors] have lived with or been close to the abuser for years. They know the patterns of behaviour that they're demonstrating, so it's incredibly important that victim-survivors' fears about escalation are listened to."

Witness statements are equally vital, according to the LECC report, especially where there are no obvious physical injuries and the courts have to decide between the accuser's and defendant's versions of the incident.

The report doesn't make specific recommendations for this area. It points out that police materials already emphasise the importance of collecting evidence, that statements are among "the most basic and commonly used methods" for police to record events.

Missing, incomplete or falsified records

Police officers responding to a domestic violence incident in NSW must complete two key documents: a police notebook and event report in the Computerised Offender Policing System known as COPS.

Fifty-three of the 171 failures upheld after investigation by NSW Police involved problems with missing, incomplete or misleading notebook entries and event reports.

Nine instances related to officers incorrectly recording an event report as 'domestic violence - no offence' even though the victims had reported an assault. This included one case where the victim provided medical evidence of serious injuries, including fractured ribs and a partially punctured lung.

Five investigations related to officers falsifying information, including one in which the officer stated police had attempted to locate and arrest an offender. "This information was fabricated," according to the LECC report.

In another example from 2018, police lied to a complainant who had witnessed an assault on a young child. The officer told the complainant there was no use providing a statement because the play centre had told the officer that the CCTV footage was unclear. It turned out that the officer had never contacted the play centre.

The internal investigation described the incident as "an inexcusable failure" on the part of the officer.

Most breaches involved officers failing to "record all relevant information ... accurately and truthfully," according to the LECC report.

University of Melbourne law professor Heather Douglas told the ABC police sometimes downgrade domestic violence incidents at the request of the victim.

"This is often as a result of her fear of the ongoing threats and harm from her partner, and pressure from him to [downgrade the offence]," she said.

"It can also be because ... she doesn't want him to go to jail because she's relying on income and maybe support from [him]."

However, downgrading or not recording an offence can have serious ramifications, she added. "The behaviour of the violent perpetrator or the abusive partner goes unchecked and if there's future violence, it's more difficult to establish a pattern of abuse."

The LECC report recommended the force "ensure that a COPS event report is created for every domestic and family violence incident attended by police."

The NSWPF agreed in principle, advising that officers are already required to record every DV incident attended.

Other issues

The LECC report also identified 15 cases of inadequate supervision, 12 instances of failing to support the victim and 9 cases where prosecutions failed because "officers did not follow basic investigative requirements, such as subpoenaing witnesses to attend court or officers themselves failing to attend court".

Most of the failures involved senior officers, including chief inspectors, sergeants and leading senior constables.

Professor Douglas said this was not surprising.

"Police cadets have the most recent and up-to-date training about domestic violence. They're usually not very cynical at this point and they're taking on board what they've learned.

"Whereas with senior officers, they perhaps haven't had training on domestic and family violence for some years. They're more jaded and frustrated with the work in the field."

Poor conduct spreads when senior officers don't model appropriate police behaviour to junior officers that accompany them on a job, she added.

NSWPF agreed with the LECC's recommendation that officers be retrained at regular intervals throughout their careers.

Daniel told the ABC that police face onerous administrative workloads and streamlining internal processes would minimise inaccuracies.

"It takes about 150 pages of reporting in the police operating system to properly and fully record a domestic and family violence incident," she said.

"And if there are children attached to the incident or if there are children who witnessed it, who were there, then there's additional dozens of pages that need to be completed."

Professor Fitz-Gibbon said the recent spate of domestic violence tragedies across Australia had "called into question current frontline police ability to provide effective responses". She stressed the need to examine the justice system as a whole.

"The scale of the crisis and the range of documented failures within the justice system means that tinkering at any one point will not deliver transformative outcomes for victims."

Experts who spoke to the ABC emphasised that many victim-survivors report positive experiences with police. "They feel like some police have really saved their lives," Douglas says.

But whether the officer you speak to truly understands the complexities and dynamics of domestic and family violence is "still a bit of a lottery", according to Daniel.

"What we always need to remember, particularly in light of domestic and family violence matters, is that the ones that come to police attention are just the tip of the iceberg," she said.

"Women generally come to police as a last resort ... so when they do, they desperately want to be taken seriously. They want to be heard."

In a statement, a NSWPF spokesperson told the ABC that the team is "continuing to work through the reform outlined" in the LECC and other relevant reports published recently.

The statement outlined some of the changes launched since the report's release a year ago. These include a suite of technological advances designed to streamline the police response to DV, a Domestic and Family Violence registry of experts to advise and respond to DV incidents, and the implementation of recommendations from the 2021 parliamentary inquiry into coercive control.

The latter "constitutes the largest rollout of training for frontline officers" in about 20 years, according to the statement.

Credits

Reporting: Inga Ting
Design and graphics: Alex Lim

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'Inexcusable failure': Damning report on one police force reflects the failures of another

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A scathing report identified more than 170 breaches of the NSW Police Force's own domestic violence procedures, with officers failing to do the basics like seizing guns, taking a statement, or checking CCTV footage.

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How the police respond to a report of family violence

If you are in danger, the police will take immediate action to protect and support you. Call the emergency number '000' and ask for the police. If you have trouble understanding or speaking English, tell the first police officer you speak to so they can get an interpreter as quickly as possible.

If it is not an emergency, call or go to your local police station. See the for location and contact details.

Tell the police if you think the family member who has used family violence has a gun. The police can search the family member's house and take any guns.

The police can also refer you to support services for emotional, financial and legal support. These services can help you to find a safe place to stay if you need to leave your family home.

To help protect people against family violence, the police can also:

apply to the court for an interim intervention order

apply for a final intervention order

Issuing a family violence safety notice

The police can issue a family violence safety notice if a family member needs immediate protection.

A family violence safety notice:

protects an adult from a family member who is using family violence and contains similar conditions to an intervention order

Applying for a family violence intervention order

The police can apply for a family violence intervention order at the Magistrates' Court for a person who has experienced family violence. They may do this even if the affected family member does not want them to.

The police may also have a different view to the affected family member of what should happen with the intervention order.

If the police do not apply for you, they must still

explain what action you may take if you wish to apply for an intervention order yourself

Applying for an interim intervention order

An interim intervention order is a temporary order to protect a person from family violence until the intervention order application can be finalised in court.

Arresting a violent person

What the police can do once a family violence intervention order is made

If a family violence safety notice, interim order or final order is issued, the police can make sure the protected person is safe while the respondent makes arrangements to obey the order.

For example, the police can:

be at the house when the respondent collects their things to make sure the protected person is safe and property is not damaged

search for and remove weapons.

If a respondent does not obey the conditions of a family violence safety notice, interim order or final order, the police can arrest the respondent and them with a criminal . See .

Making a complaint about the police

Other support

More information

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What the police do about family violence | Victoria Legal Aid

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The role of police in dealing with family violence, including applying intervention orders and making family violence safety notices.

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Victoria's top cop wants police powers expanded to deal with domestic violence more decisively in the field.

Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton says family violence is the largest single issue police deal with - taking up a staggering 40 per cent of police work.

That's a call for help every seven minutes.

A woman is killed by a former or current partner on average every week in Australia, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. For men, the casualty rate averages one every month.

Graham Ashton is calling for his officers to be given new powers to issue intervention orders on the spot, circumventing the courts.

"That for us would result in ... less trauma for victims and certainly for offenders, more clarity around what the expectations are on them," Mr Ashton said.

"It avoids the need for parties to have to come together at court, spend all day hanging around the court precincts together for what's five or 10 minutes before a magistrate."

Under current laws, when police respond to a family violence call, they only have power to issue a family violence safety notice which provides immediate, but temporary, protection while the victim waits for a court to issue a more permanent intervention order.

A number of recent high-profile murders of women have again drawn attention to flaws in the system designed to protect victims of domestic violence.

The coroner last week released her findings into the murder of Joy Rowley by her one-time partner in 2011 on the same day as the deaths of three other women dominated the headlines in Victoria.

Ms Rowley was strangled in her home by James Martin Mulhall, who is serving a 16-year jail term for her murder.

Police acknowledged there were multiple times they should have acted to prevent an escalation of Mulhall's behaviour, but failed to.

It led the coroner to recommend Victoria Police review all family violence-related deaths where there was a known history of violence.

But the force wants changes made to the intervention order system now.

Magistrates 'frustrated'

Police issued more than 11,000 safety notices last financial year - almost double the number issued four years ago.

The safety notice also acts as an application for an intervention order and requires the offender to appear at a magistrates court within five days to begin the court process for obtaining an order.

Under the proposal from Victoria Police, safety notices would be done away with and replaced with intervention orders which could be issued by officers in the field.

Do you know more about this story? Email vicindepth@abc.net.au

The victim and offender would only have to go to court if either party wanted to challenge the order.

Mr Ashton said in the vast majority of cases, intervention orders aren't contested in court, and victims would be better served not being required to attend court.

"The victim has to come to court and often be in the same room as the perpetrator while the issues are still really hotly contested and the emotions are still there," he said.

"We feel that in a lot of those cases the orders that are made ultimately by the magistrate, are in line with the safety notice already, so they're not really contentious contested matters.

"I have had magistrates express frustration to me that they're only getting five to 10 minutes on any one case, and some of those cases they really need to put some significant time into.

"The magistrates could spend time on the quality matters, those contested matters, that they really need to put the time into," Mr Ashton said.

Investment in courts 'takes priority'

But Domestic Violence Victoria is not confident police should be granted extra quasi-judicial powers.

Chief executive Fiona McCormack said victims were normally distressed when they called police for help and should not be asked to make decisions about the conditions of an intervention order on the spot.

"When women end up at court ... they will have had time to have legal advice at the court around things like ensuring the children are included on the order," she said.

"Asking a woman at that point to make those decisions is not realistic and would only end up with women being in situations where they have an order that's just not going to work for them.

"We've had a Royal Commission into Family Violence which provides us with the roadmap of the system we need to build.

"Investment in courts is a really important priority and we would see following that map that's been provided to us by the royal commission as a real priority."

Royal commission called for wait-and-see approach

The Royal Commission into Family Violence has already examined Victoria Police's proposal to give officers the power to issue intervention orders in the field.

In its final report handed down in 2016, it recommended the Victorian Government wait five years before seriously considering the scheme.

The Commission found the proposal could free up court and police resources, but that Victoria Police would need to significantly improve the quality and consistency of its response to family violence before it could be considered.

Since then, Victoria Police has established a Family Violence Centre of Learning at the police academy and delivered new training to its officers.

Mr Ashton said the force had lifted its level of knowledge and improved its service to a point where the proposal should be implemented three years earlier than the Royal Commission recommended.

But Safe Steps Family Violence Response Centre chief executive Annette Gillespie said police were still mistaking domestic violence victims for perpetrators.

"Women can sometimes be labelled as the perpetrator of violence when in fact they've been experiencing violence for many, many years and are really defending themselves against that violence," she said.

"It's so important that not only is ... the perpetrator held accountable for that violence but that women get the support that they need.

"Sometimes going to court can mean that they are linked into the support services that they require."

Victorian Police Minister Lisa Neville has asked the Department of Justice to develop a plan to implement the police proposal and start consulting with police and the courts.

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As women keep dying in family violence, Victoria's police chief proposes a big change

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Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton calls for powers to be expanded as he looks for new ways to combat domestic violence.

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Athletes' lives could be at risk if the Enhanced Games are allowed to go ahead, says Australian Sports Commission boss Kieren Perkins.
The Games is a proposed Olympics-style event where doping is allowed.

The event, founded by Australian businessman Aron D'Souza in 2023, would not be subject to World Anti-Doping Agency rules.

"The idea of an Enhanced Games is laughable," Perkins said at the SportNXT conference on Tuesday.

"Someone will die if we allow that sort of environment to continue to prosper and flourish."

Perkins, a former Olympic, world and Commonwealth champion swimmer, added: "We don't want people to be taking performance-enhancing drugs because of the significant impact it has on them and their future and their future families."

D'Souza told reporters the competition would prioritise athletes' well-being.

"We're health-testing to make sure our athletes are healthy and safe to compete," he said. "I don't want an athlete to be injured or die in competition.

"How are we going to do this? By doing full system health check-ups on all of our athletes; blood work, echocardiograms, maybe even MRIs.

"New advances in technology are also very useful and enable continuous real-time health screening."

Earlier this year, D'Souza said athletes scheduled to take part in this summer's Olympic Games in Paris had expressed an interest in competing at the Enhanced Games.

World Athletics president Lord Coe said anyone who does is "moronic" and would face a lengthy ban.

Former world champion swimmer James Magnussen agreed to come out of retirement in February to compete and attempt to swim faster than the 50m freestyle world record, which was set in 2009, in return for $1m.

The event is planned to include athletics, swimming, weightlifting, gymnastics and combat sports, though no date or venue has yet been set.

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Enhanced Games: Athletes' lives could be at risk, says Kieren Perkins

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Athletes' lives could be at risk if the Enhanced Games are allowed to go ahead, says Australian Sports Commission boss Kieren Perkins.

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The Enhanced Games – a drugs Olympics where cheaters can prosper | Ben Bloom

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Entrepreneur Aron D’Souza has a plan to host ‘science-enhanced superheroes’ at an event which encourages doping

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The Federal Court has chosen not to extend a temporary order for social media company X, formerly Twitter, to hide videos of a Sydney terrorist stabbing globally.

The eSafety Commissioner has been trying to force the platform to take down about 60 instances of the footage, showing an attack on Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Wakeley in Western Sydney, in April.

Under the Online Safety Act, passed in 2021, the Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has the power to demand the removal of so-called "class 1 material", on pain of significant fines.

In the days following the stabbing, X agreed to "geoblock" the posts, meaning most Australia users could no longer see them, and refused the eSafety Commissioner's removal notice, which would have had a global effect.

Elon Musk threatened to sue in response, but the regulator acted first, making a successful application in the Federal Court for a temporary injunction to force X to hide the videos.

That court order has been in place since April 22, but X has not obeyed.

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Court allows terrorist attack vision to stay on X, despite eSafety Commissioner request

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The federal court has ruled no extension will be given to X to hide videos of the Wakeley stabbing globally.

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P arents are losing the fight against multi-billion dollar tech platforms who continue to knowingly expose children to harmful content that is affecting their mental and physical health.

Suicide and self harm has skyrocketed children under 19 and eating disorders are up 200 per cent over the last 12 years.

Experts say that in that time there has been one fundamental change in children's lives - the utter explosion of social media use.

We must protect our children.

News Corp's Let Them Be Kids campaign, along with parents from across Australia and experts in mental health, child advocacy, and child protection, is calling on the federal government to raise the age limit to access social media to 16 to stop the scourge of social media and give our kids back three years of childhood.

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Let Them Be Kids: Save our teens from social media scourge

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The age limit that children can access social media should be raised to 16 as Australian kids face the worst humanitarian crisis of a generation.

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Safety by Design puts user safety and rights at the centre of the design and development of online products and services.

Rather than retrofitting safeguards after an issue has occurred, Safety by Design focuses on the ways technology companies can minimise online threats by anticipating, detecting and eliminating online harms before they occur.

This proactive and preventative approach focuses on embedding safety into the culture and leadership of an organisation. It emphasises accountability and aims to foster more positive, civil and rewarding online experiences for everyone.

Safety by Design also acknowledges the need to make digital spaces safer and more inclusive to protect those most at risk.

It encourages technology companies to alter their design ethos from ‘moving fast and breaking things’ or ‘profit at all costs’ to ‘moving thoughtfully’, investing in risk mitigation at the front end and embedding user protections from the get-go.

All Safety by Design initiatives have been developed through in-depth research and consultation with industry for industry.

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Safety by Design is about making sure that the foundations and scaffolds are in place to build safe and positive online environments.

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Chatbots, deepfakes and love: How AI is changing our lives | Four Corners

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Why is Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suddenly so keen to deliver extra cost-of-living relief - keen enough to summon Labor members of parliament to Canberra for a briefing on Wednesday, followed by an address to the National Press Club on Thursday?

One immediate reason is that he is keen to make sure Labor wins the upcoming by-election in the outer-Melbourne electorate of Dunkley on March 2.

But the cost of living wouldn't matter much for Dunkley - and it wouldn't matter much for the rest of us - unless it was really biting.

And despite what the treasurer himself has been trying to tell us, it is biting.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has been pointing out that in the June quarter and the September quarter (the three months to June and to September), real wages grew for the first time in years. By that, he means that the wages index compiled by the Bureau of Statistics began growing faster than the consumer price index.

It's better than growing more slowly, but it tells us next to nothing about what's happening to buying power. Here's why.

Way back in the late 1990s, more than a quarter of a century ago, the consumer price index used to actually reflect the cost of living. It included all of the big costs incurred by households including - importantly - mortgage interest payments, which at the time accounted for an average of $5 of every $100 each wage earner spent.

Then in September 1998, in response to representations from the Reserve Bank and the Treasury, the bureau changed the way it calculated the index, excluding mortgage and other interest payments in a decision it acknowledged would make the index worse at measuring living costs.

It still carries the warning on its website, saying the consumer price index is "not the conceptually ideal measure for assessing the changes in the purchasing power of the disposable incomes of households".

The index actually does a pretty good job of measuring changes in living costs at times when mortgage rates aren't much changing, but at times when they are tumbling it'll overestimate living costs, and at times like the ones we are in when mortgage rates are soaring it will way understate what's happening to living costs.

We know by how much. For years the bureau has also published a separate set of measures it pointedly calls "living cost indexes". These do include mortgage and other interest charges, and for households headed by employers (those for whom the buying power of wages matters) they are substantial.

Living costs are up 9 per cent rather than 5.4 per cent

Whereas the consumer price index (the one quoted by the treasurer) increased 5.4 per cent in the year to September, the living cost index for households headed by wage earners climbed 9 per cent.

For these working households, the price of food climbed 4.8 per cent in the year to September, the price of electricity 14.5 per cent and the price of mortgage interest charges 68 per cent.

It's the increases in mortgage rates that have made the increases in the other prices hurt so much.

Nine per cent - the overall increase in prices faced by wage-earners - is way above the typical wage increase of 4 per cent.

Bill Mitchell of The University of Newcastle points out that on this measure, the correct one, the buying power of wages has been falling for 10 consecutive quarters. He says it puts the treasurer's comments in a wholly different light.

We are right to distrust the CPI

Working Australians are right to distrust the consumer price index, which is something the Australian Council of Social Service warned the bureau about when it made the change.

Each month the Melbourne Institute asks Australians whether their family finances have deteriorated over the previous year. Usually, about one-third of those surveyed say they have.

But for more than a year now around 50 per cent of those surveyed have been saying their finances have got worse, a peak not seen since the global financial crisis, and one that has lasted longer.

Asked about family finances over the next 12 months, more than 30 per cent say they'll worsen further. It's usually 20 per cent.

Looked at from today's perspective, the arguments put forward in 1997 for weakening the consumer price index as a measure of living costs seem weak.

The Treasury noted that many welfare recipients didn't have mortgages and that a consumer price index that excluded them would better reflect their living costs.

The Reserve Bank argued that interest rates were "conceptually different from other prices" and in any event wanted them excluded because it found it hard to use higher interest rates to bring down inflation if those higher rates pushed the measure of inflation up.

The change attracted little attention at the time because mortgage rates weren't moving much. By the time they did, it had been bedded down.

Things might start to turn around soon

For most of the time since the change, mortgage rates have either increased gradually or been cut, meaning the difference between what the consumer price index has been telling us and what's been happening to us hasn't been too stark. It's been stark lately because interest rates have been rising quickly.

The good news (and there is good news) is that financial markets expect rates to begin falling this year, with the next move down. Inflation as measured by the consumer price index (inflation excluding mortgage rates) is already falling.

We get the next official update on the consumer price index next week (and the update for the lesser-known living cost indexes a week after that).

It makes now a particularly good time to announce measures to address the cost of living crisis. We need them because we really are in something of a crisis. Things are a lot worse than the official index suggests.

And there's a chance that soon they'll begin to get better, allowing the prime minister to claim a win.
Peter Martin is a visiting fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. This article originally appeared on The Conversation.

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The true cost of living has climbed far faster than we've been told. Here's what's actually going on

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Now is a particularly good time to announce measures to address the cost of living crisis. We need them because things are a lot worse than the official index suggests, writes Peter Martin.

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The cost-of-living crisis has roots in property but whether you rent or pay a mortgage, there’s a dark tunnel ahead

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Right now Australia is in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis that has its roots in the property market, the availability of housing and high levels of personal debt. Are there any tangible solutions, asks David Taylor.

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Helping people in need during a cost-of-living crisis: Findings from the Australian Community Sector Survey - ACOSS

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Acknowledgements Foreword Recommendations 1 Executive Summary 2 Communities face acute daily living pressures

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Cost of living crisis forcing students to take on more hours of paid work

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Most university students supporting themselves say it is negatively affecting their studies, survey finds