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ABC staff to take protected industrial action for first time in 17 years

ABC staff have voted to take protected industrial action for the first time in 17 years over what they say is a poor pay offer from ABC management.

Hundreds of staff met today around the country and agreed to walk off the job for 40 minutes at 2pm on Tuesday to coincide with the Reserve Bank board meeting and BA official cash rate announcement, on 7 March.

Earlier they voted overwhelmingly in favour of taking industrial action, which will include different strategies up to and including a full 24-hour stoppage.

Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance media director Cassie Derrick said 90% of staff were in favour of taking industrial action because the offer from management was not good enough.

ABC managing director David Anderson has taken over the bargaining with unions but talks have stalled.

Derrick said:

This is not just about pay. It’s about ensuring a fair go at forging a career at the public broadcaster.

The union says the offer must also include back pay to the expiry date of the previous enterprise bargaining agreement.

MEAA media director Cassie Derrick said 90% of ABC staff were in favour of taking industrial action because the offer from management was not good enough. Photograph: Danny Casey/AAP

Updated at 23.05 EST

Key events

What we learned; Wednesday 1 March

And with that, it is time for us to put the blog to bed. Thank you so much for spending your day with us.

Before we go, let’s recap the big headlines:

Updated at 03.06 EST

Queensland public hospital waiting times blow out

From AAP:

The number of Queensland patients waiting longer than clinically recommended to see a specialist in public hospitals has surged more than 80% to 104,000 in a year, according to the state’s auditor general.

The Queensland Audit Office also revealed ambulances lost 134,155 hours waiting to transfer patients into hospitals in 2021/22, a rise of more than 20% over the previous year.

Auditor general Brendan Worrall’s report revealed outpatient services and ambulances are being hampered because the health system had reduced capacity to meet growing demand.

Worrall said the rising demand is due to Queensland having the fastest population growth in the nation, an ageing population, an increase in complex emergency presentations and mental health conditions and the impacts of Covid-19.

The health minister, Yvette D’Ath, indicated the suspension of elective surgeries by national cabinet in 2020 and Covid-19’s impact contributed to delays in specialist wait times.

Queensland health minister Yvette D’Ath (left) and premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. Photograph: Darren England/AAP

“We are investing significantly to lift up that recovery,” she said on Wednesday.

Updated at 02.44 EST

Eunice Wright was nine years old when she and her siblings were snatched from their home by police and thrown in a cell for the night.

With her mother in hospital with tuberculosis and father away at work, the wider family rallied to have the children returned, but instead they became members of the stolen generation.

Australia will co-sponsor Vanuatu’s historic bid for the international court of justice to rule on the climate crisis, including the legal consequences for causing significant environmental harm.

The Pacific island country will soon put a resolution to the UN general assembly seeking an opinion on the international legal obligations that countries have to act on the climate crisis.

Parliamentary inquiry told children being exposed to gambling via video game loot boxes

Video games such as Fortnite are exposing children to gambling and increasing their risk of addiction via “manipulative” in-game purchases known as loot boxes, AAP has reported.

That’s what a parliamentary inquiry into online gambling was told on Wednesday, with one researcher suggesting the games were taking “the absence of opportunities for real winnings to another level”.

Loot boxes, which feature in many video games, are a sealed mystery box players can either win or buy, and contain in-game items like costumes or weapons.

Consumer Policy Research Centre’s Chandni Gupta said research showed a link between purchasing loot boxes and developing a gambling addiction, even in children.

“There is little to no transparency on what is offered, how real money is converted to digital currency and also the randomness and design of loot boxes,” she told the inquiry.

“People are being manipulated to use real money which is converted into arbitrary digital currency for random digital content.”

The centre’s Erin Turner said they represented an “unequal transaction”.

“A business has quite significantly superior knowledge about an individual’s behaviour, their gaming behaviour, and a lot of data about how they’re engaging with the game that can be used to manipulate them,” she told the inquiry.

“I also don’t know how my behaviour … can be used against me to try to encourage purchases and push me over the edge.”

Updated at 01.54 EST

Controversial ParentsNext welfare scheme should be abolished, inquiry finds

The controversial ParentsNext welfare program would be abolished and replaced by a new service that dials down mutual obligations and offers cash incentives for parents, under the recommendations of a parliamentary committee.

A select committee inquiring into the billion-dollar employment services system has called for sweeping changes to the Coalition’s $484m ParentsNext scheme, which has faced criticism from welfare advocates and women’s groups over several years.

Updated at 01.40 EST

Olympian Ian Thorpe says his time in the pool was marred by homophobia

The swimming icon and five-time Olympic gold medallist Ian Thorpe didn’t come out as gay until after his stellar sporting career and says his time in the pool was marred by homophobia, AAP reports.

Speaking at the Sydney WorldPride Human Rights Conference about homophobia in sport, he blamed the media for sensationalist speculation about his sexuality.

“I was directly asked by a journalist at 16 if I was gay,” he said.

“That headline was ready to print on the basis of my answer and this was leading into the Olympics – so at the time I only thought of being gay as a negative.”

Ian Thorpe speaks at the Sydney WorldPride Human Rights Conference. Photograph: Bianca de Marchi/AAP

Reporters would not ask a minor such a question today, but Thorpe pointed to various football codes for entrenching casual and blatant homophobia, singling out Manly Sea Eagles rugby league players for not playing in a Pride Round last year.

“The NRL has basically copped out and is looking at introducing a respect round,” he said on Wednesday.

Thorpe questioned why athletes weren’t “willing to actually wear a few colours on their shirt that means so much to so many people”.

He appealed to athletes to show empathy and “understand what it’s like for a young gay person to grow up and to face disadvantage and discrimination”.

Updated at 01.34 EST

Charles Darwin University announces new Indian office

Charles Darwin University (CDU) has announced the opening of a new office in India during a trip to the nation with the education minister, Jason Clare.

A delegation of vice-chancellors are travelling with Clare on his visit this week in a sign of the higher education sector’s efforts to ramp up development prospects in the rapidly developing tertiary sector.

The minister will officially open the office – to employ six staff in the business district of Gurgaon – on Thursday afternoon alongside senior government officials.

CDU’s vice-chancellor, Scott Bowman, said the move aimed to attract students from South Asia to campuses in the Northern Territory and Sydney:

Establishing an in-country presence in India is critical to Charles Darwin University and the Northern Territory in achieving our international student growth ambitions.

It is a natural progression for Charles Darwin University towards helping attract students from one of the fastest-growing regions of the world, where quality higher education is valued. We are uniquely placed in our ability to offer exceptional graduate employment outcomes.

At a Universities Australia gala dinner last week, Clare announced he would sign a sweeping mutual recognition agreement for qualifications between the two nations as Australia aims to capitalise on India’s ambitious goals in the education sector.

It comes amid a drop in enrolments amongst Chinese students that has battered the university sector since the onset of the pandemic.

Updated at 01.02 EST

Indigenous advocacy groups raise concerns on NSW policing

Advocacy groups are raising concerns about how NSW police conduct policing duties and have responded to a new report by the state’s watchdog, the Law Enforcement Conduct Committee.

The report examined policing across the state and looked at how that has impacted Indigenous communities with advocates arguing that “consorting laws” are being misused, with First Nations people being disproportionately targeted under the policies.

The so-called consorting amendments were introduced in 2019 and made it a criminal offence for anyone to continue associating with at least two people who have been convicted of an indictable offence and were targeting serious organised crime such as bikie gangs.

The report released on Tuesday found that the NSW police issued 16,480 warnings to 2,671 people and that most were in response to less serious offences or warnings rather than serious crime.

The report found that nearly half of all those subjected to consorting laws identified as Aboriginal, with 42% of the 4,257 people warned or named in a formal warning being Indigenous.

A further 46% of all people who received a police warning from general duties officers were Aboriginal and in some parts of the state Indigenous people were vastly over-represented with over 75% of people in Western NSW identifying as Indigenous.

In total, 48 young people under the age of 18 were issued with a warning, and of those 12 were Aboriginal children or teenagers.

Nadine Miles, Aboriginal Legal Service NSW/ACT’s principal legal officer, is quoted in the statement as saying the laws are “unfairly” targeting First Nations peoples:

When parliament passed these laws, they handed police another tool to unfairly target Aboriginal communities. Far from targeting serious and organised crime, consorting laws have been used to criminalise social interactions and relationships between Aboriginal people.

She is calling for the parliament to reform the laws while Gabrielle Bashir SC, the president of the NSW Bar Association, said the report revealed that serious organised crime and offenders weren’t the only ones being targeted under the regime:

They are shocking figures. Equating warnings for consorting with diversion from the criminal justice system reflects a fundamental misunderstanding, which must be immediately rectified.

Updated at 00.59 EST

Regional community divided on local hospital

A community on the NSW-Victorian border remains divided over new hospital plans, as the local health service pleads for unity, AAP reports.

In October the NSW and Victorian governments announced $558m to upgrade the Albury hospital, despite local lobbying for a brand new one to be built on a greenfield site.

At Albury Wodonga Health’s annual general meeting on Tuesday, the chair, Matt Burke, stressed the key priority was that the future hospital be constructed on a single site, consolidating acute and subacute services.

“Every doubt cast on the new hospital is another person who loses confidence to seek treatment in their time of need,” he said.

“How long are you willing to wait for a new hospital that may never come while we have the funds to build a new one right now?”

Albury-Wodonga Health (AWH) provides services to almost 300,000 people in the twin cities, and the region performs below the national average on multiple health outcomes, including mental health, heart disease and life expectancy.

Updated at 01.00 EST

Queensland failed to protect some of its threatened species

The Queensland government has failed to fully deliver on five of the seven recommendations from a five-year-old audit that demanded better protections for Queensland’s threatened species.

Black-breasted button-quail, Julia Creek dunnart and wallum froglet are just three of the more than 900 plants and animals in the sunshine state that are threatened by extinction but do not have recovery plans in place.

But despite being under “considerable and increasing pressure”, species are being failed by a lack of coordinated approach from Queensland’s environment department, the auditor general, Brendan Worrall, found in a report tabled recently in parliament.

Worrall said the Queensland government’s biodiversity conservation strategy, released last October, “did not include measures or targets”.

“The current lack of measures reduces its ability to monitor outcomes for biodiversity, and demonstrate whether the strategy is achieving the results expected from the resources provided,” the report found.

“The department does not yet have a comprehensive framework to prioritise animals and plants based on risk”.

Natalie Frost, a nature campaigner with the Queensland Conservation Council, said that in the absence of a comprehensive framework, threatened species were not being adequately monitored nor recovery measures implemented

“We are in a climate and biodiversity crisis and it is appalling that species are not getting the protection they need here in Queensland.”

DES doesn’t have a comprehensive framework to prioritise animals and plants based on risk, meaning more than 1000 threatened species in Queensland are not adequately monitored and recovery measures are not implemented.”

The Julia Creek dunnart is one of the more than 900 plants and animals in Queensland that is threatened by extinction. Photograph: Chris Stacey

Updated at 01.01 EST