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Victoria Police have apologised for accidentally brutalising a man who could draw public attention to his mistreatment. Nik Dimopoulos, a prominent member of Melbourne’s queer community, had his arm shattered by Critical Incident Response team — an injury described by a surgeon as “12 on a scale of 1 to 10”. The police have apologised, but only for bashing the wrong person; they emphasised they were looking for a “Lebanese” suspect. As Lauren Caulfield and Jess Ison point out: “This was not a ‘stuff up’, as claimed by Luke Cornelius, Assistant Commissioner of the Northwest Metro Command. Nik was detained outside of Hares & Hyenas because his appearance fit a racialised description. He was not the person police were hunting for, but this violence should not be tolerated against anyone. While the identity of the target person was mistaken, its execution is par for the course of a police institution that uses brutal force. … This is normal policing on display.” As if to prove the point, The Age today reports on another “mistaken identity” CIRT atrocity, in which an Indian man’s head was repeatedly bashed into the concrete footpath, breaking his jaw. Normal policing on display.

The News Corp propaganda machine has recently come under fire — from without and, crucially, from within. First, a junior producer on Sky News wrote about the “crisis of conscience” that forced her to quit after the Christchurch massacre, given that Sky promotes and legitimises the white supremacist ideology that drove the shooter. Then veteran journalist Tony Koch unloaded on the “unbalanced rubbish” published by The Australian and its “predictable, weak, unresearched and juvenile” columnists. Excellent reporter Rick Morton was recorded giving his honest assessment of his employer: “People will tell you going back a decade it used to be a very great paper, and in many ways it still is, but some of the craziness has been dialled up. … It is a moral quandary that I have wrestled with for the entire seven years I’ve been at the Oz. Am I lending credibility to a horrible machine?” And Richard Cooke wrote a blistering, must-read critique of the “political propaganda entity”, concluding, “as the entity is constituted now, my answer is yes – Australia would be a better country without News. Of course it would be. Either it changes, or we do.”

It’s difficult to wrap your head around the sheer scale of the extinction crisis revealed by the UN’s global assessment report on biodiversity: “The Report finds that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history. The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900. More than 40% of amphibian species, almost 33% of reefforming corals and more than a third of all marine mammals are threatened. The picture is less clear for insect species, but available evidence supports a tentative estimate of 10% being threatened. At least 680 vertebrate species had been driven to extinction since the 16th century and more than 9% of all domesticated breeds of mammals used for food and agriculture had become extinct by 2016, with at least 1,000 more breeds still threatened.” The report was “compiled by 145 expert authors from 50 countries over the past three years, with inputs from another 310 contributing authors”. The chair of the committee says, “it is not too late to make a difference, but only if we start now at every level from local to global. Through ‘transformative change’… a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.” There is no time to waste.

Patrick Marlborough calls for a sense of perspective: “There is a gross imbalance in Australia’s ‘political’ violence. On one side, we have the eggers, the recent total sitting at two, who have delivered a scrambled message of discontent and rage at powerful political figures, figures from a political class that also wields violence, but on a much grander and ominous scale. … For almost 20 years Australia’s Prime Ministers have been active dungeon keepers of the nation’s brutal gulag archipelago. Few have reveled in the role as much as Scott Morrison, who is, after all, the current iteration’s gloating mastermind. We are by now, as citizens, privy to the dark nature of our illegal detention camps. Children as young as ten attempt suicide by immolation, mouths are sewn shut in desperate protest, and minds and bodies are broken by a wheel that we have all had a hand in turning. It is a violence beyond that of an egg (unbroken) to the head.”

Emma Dawson’s latest column for The Guardian begins: “Most of the poor people in the world are women. In no country on earth are women economically equal to men, and Australia is no exception. Research from Acoss and the University of New South Wales last year showed that a higher share of people living in poverty in Australia are women. The experience of living below the breadline in our very wealthy nation is a gendered one, for reasons that are complex and intertwined. … At its heart is the simple fact that women do the lion’s share of caring for others. Caring is women’s work, and our society does not value women’s work.” The column goes on to lay out the statistical proof that poverty is gendered in Australia, and is well worth reading.

The full bench of the Fair Work Commission has made an important decision to protect workers’ privacy. A casual sawmill operator, Jeremy Lee, was sacked when he refused to provide his biometric data so that the company could introduce mandatory fingerprint scanning. He argued [$] that upholding his sacking would change “the nature of the relationship between employer/employee from an exchange of labour to one which includes the collection of employees’ sensitive information”. The FWC ultimately agreed, ruling that “administrative convenience” for the company was not a good enough reason to trample Lee’s privacy. A company must instead prove that biometric scanning is “reasonably necessary” — and less intrusive alternatives must first be considered. The Commission also clarified that “any ‘consent’ that he might have given once told that he faced discipline or dismissal would likely have been vitiated by the threat. It would not have been genuine consent.”

Railcorp is a labour hire company that provides train drivers to the Roy Hill mine. It employs just over 50 train drivers through a subsidiary company. Just before negotiations for a new EBA were due to begin, they created a new subsidiary and used it to hire two new drivers, who then voted for a non-union EBA. The other 50 workers were transferred across, denied their right to bargain for an agreement. The Fair Work Commission said: “ultimately the position of those employees would not appear relevant to the approval requirements imposed by the Act… albeit the notion of them becoming employees was clearly contemplated.” This corporate structure shell game is becoming widespread in certain industries. BHP has created its own labour hire company, secretly made a non-union EBA with nine employees, and now intends to transfer hundreds of workers at mines around the country onto that EBA. The AFR reports [$] this is the result of “eighteen months of hard thinking” by BHP managers, will cut wages by up to $55,000 for a typical roster, and will allow BHP to unilaterally move workers around the country. This loophole in our bargaining system must be shut down.

Australia’s far right is having a breakout moment — perpetrating a major terrorist attack, allegedly coordinating with Liberal MPs [$], having a Senator openly oppose “black” migration to Australia, assaulting journalists, allegedly building pipe bombs, infiltrating the National Party, cutting preference deals with the National Party, and so on and so forth. This doesn’t occur spontaneously — the spread of these ideas has been going on for years, if not decades, without being taken seriously by the authorities. In that time, Andy Fleming (known as Slackbastard) has been researching right-wing extremist networks, exposing and documenting their ideas and organisations. When you see mainstream news reports on these topics, the underlying source of their intelligence is Andy’s blog, which he has produced voluntarily for fifteen years. He’s launched a Patreon to support his work — be generous.

The new issue of The Tribune was released today — it’s well worth subscribing — and one highlight is Dawn Foster’s passionate call for an urgent focus on eliminating child poverty: “Child poverty should be ended not because children are particularly innocent and therefore incapable of changing their circumstances: that presupposes that some poverty is deserved, and that adults on low incomes are not also subject to economic structural violence, but simply not trying hard enough to lift themselves out of poverty. No poverty should exist, but child poverty is most often at the root of all poverty — few who grow up in it escape it in later life. … Children can’t wait years for policies to be developed that offer limited sticking plasters for the misery they experience: every skipped meal or cold night is, step by step, depriving a child of the life they deserve. Fulfilling human potential means battling for children’s happiness and for human rights to be taken seriously: work has to pay more, but the state must also provide economically and materially.” (The magazine also launched its companion podcast, Tribune Radio; the first episode is an interview with Foster.)