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Jeff Sparrow draws lessons from AOC for Australian progressives: “Those who want to change the world can’t shape their ideas according to the conventional wisdom about what the public will accept, whether on refugees, climate change or anything else. … [L]eadership — particularly progressive leadership — entails challenging, rather than simply reflecting, the status quo. It means being prepared to displease media moguls or political insiders; it means fighting to popularise ideas that might initially seem difficult or extreme. As Danton, who knew something about changing the world, put it: ‘We need audacity, and yet more audacity, and always audacity!'”

From a fascinating Richard Denniss essay on how Government conducts cost-benefit analysis: “According to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), an Australian life is currently worth $4.5 million and each year of premature death is worth $195,000. This number is not top secret — on the contrary, it is contained in a short and eminently readable memo entitled ‘Best Practice Regulation Guidance Note: Value of statistical life’. … Intriguingly, … the head of PM&C, Dr Martin Parkinson, earns $896,400 per year, which suggests that a year of your life is worth less than a quarter of a year of his working life. Just saying.” Denniss raises some challenging questions about how we value different lives in different contexts.

Greg Jericho on the wealthy elite in Australia and abroad: “My goodness they’re getting scared. Their world, which has them at the top of the heap, setting — nay, rigging — the rules, and where they can repeat to themselves over and over that their success is all about merit and personal brilliance, is cracking all around them. They’re scared and have retreated into stupidity and fallacy.”

Huge crowds joined Invasion Day rallies around Australia yesterday, including over 40,000 who marched through Melbourne, where the speeches focussed on youth suicide and deaths in custody. One key demand was the repeal of public drunkenness laws, which disproportionately affect Indigenous people. Last year, Tanya Day was arrested for public drunkenness after falling asleep on a train, and died in Castlemaine Police Station. Her family is calling on the Andrews Government to implement the recommendation of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody to repeal the law.

Airport services contractor AeroCare has had its dubious interpretation of shift limits in the Ground Staff award thrown out. The Federal Court said the company’s claim that two shifts in one day were really just one “split shift” was “artificial”, “self-serving”, and “substantially eroded” the Award’s protection of shiftworkers. In 2013, AeroCare’s “split shift” system was approved by the FWC’s notoriously anti-union Graeme Watson, leading to workers stuck at the airport for up to 14 hours with 6 unpaid. (Watson was appointed to the FWC after helping draft the Coalition’s WorkChoices laws, and is now back at home advising the Coaliton.) AeroCare’s attempt to renew the system in 2017 was rejected for undercutting the award, and the Federal Court case was an attempt to push it through again.

In a post about nuclear power, John Quiggin makes a comment in passing that for Australia, “the big problem is that our ancient and dirty coal-fired stations are being kept alive by the anti-renewable stance of the LNP. Contrary their claims of being more reliable than renewables they routinely break down when most needed.” Sure enough, as Victoria faces record temperatures, “three [coal] power generators across Yallourn and Loy Yang A have shut down”, and power failures are likely. So burning coal not only intensifies heatwaves, it also makes them more deadly by making it harder for people to ameliorate the heat.

Paul Daley reminds us that 26 January has been an Indigenous day of mourning far longer than it has been Australia Day: “in the media/political to-and-fro over another date, the real Australian malaise is all but forgotten. And that is: until Australia deals with the unfinished business of Aboriginal sovereignty and historical truth telling there will be no appropriate date upon which to celebrate a supposedly unified nation. Until Australia reaches a black/white settlement over sovereignty, through commonwealth and state treaties and a formal process of historical reckoning, it’s pointless marking other dates on the calendar.”

The World Economic Forum, an invitation-only gathering of the mega-rich elite, this year “aim[s] to foster systems leadership and global stewardship while recognizing the actuality of a more complex, ‘multiconceptual’ world”. Anand Giridharadas explains what these gatherings are really about: “Conferences and ideas festivals sponsored by plutocrats and big business — such as the World Economic Forum, which is under way in Davos, Switzerland, this week — host panels on injustice and promote ‘thought leaders’ who are willing to confine their thinking to improving lives within the faulty system rather than tackling the faults. … The only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens.”

“Workers are defaulted to being non-union in employment relationships across the world.” But why must that be the case? What if union membership was the default, with scabs required to opt out? Noting that “roughly half of all workers across richer Anglophone countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, want to be union members but a majority cannot exercise their preference because they belong to a non-union workplace”, a group of academics has proposed a union default system that might strengthen union density, lower membership costs, and allow union resources to be deployed more effectively to organise new workplaces.

Australia’s most prominent golliwog collector, former Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett, has lent his support to the campaign to move Australia Day — but only because he doesn’t like public holidays: “We aren’t that serious about it. If we were, we’d celebrate Australia Day on the day it falls and not have a holiday if it fell on the weekend as it does this year.” He wants it moved to 1 January, so it can share the New Year holiday. Still, the fact that a man who names his racist dolls after his Aboriginal employees can support #changethedate suggests we should be pushing for IndigenousX’s more ambitious #changethenation instead.