Australian growth to fall to decade-low

Good morning, early birds. The International Monetary Fund has painted a gloomy picture for Australia’s economic growth, and new information obtained by the ABC adds light to its Afghan Files investigations. It’s the news you need to know, with Rachel Withers.

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THE COMMENTARIAT

Politicians too poor at their jobs to fix poverty – Ross Gittins (The Age/Sydney Morning Herald): “You could be forgiven for not knowing this is anti-poverty week. The poor, as we know, are always with us – which is great because it means we can focus on our own problems and worry about the poor’s problems later. We can fight to protect our tax breaks, then get around to wondering about how easy we’d find it to be living on $280 a week from the Pollyanna-named Newstart allowance. But it’s not just our natural tendency to let our own problems loom larger than other people’s. It’s also that, as property prices make our cities ever more stratified, we so rarely meet people from the poorer parts of town. We find it hard to imagine how hard they find it to make ends meet, and to lift themselves out of the hole they’ve fallen into.”

It’s preservation versus pennies for rocks of ages like Uluru ($) – Chris Wooley (The Australian): “I had the chance to climb Uluru when I was last filming there, but the local custodians had asked us to film only near the base and we respected their wishes. This nation­ has taken so much from our original people, to indulge what might be considered a romanti­c superstition seemed the least we could do. I don’t believe in virgin birth, transubstantiation, resurrection, angels or life after death, but I would never deliberately profane a site sacred to those who do. And there is always a chance that I am wrong about religion. When I die, how confounding it might be to meet the Rainbow Serpent.”

Without encryption, we will lose all privacy. This is our new battleground – Edward Snowden (The Guardian): “In every country of the world, the security of computers keeps the lights on, the shelves stocked, the dams closed, and transportation running. For more than half a decade, the vulnerability of our computers and computer networks has been ranked the number one risk in the US Intelligence Community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment – that’s higher than terrorism, higher than war. Your bank balance, the local hospital’s equipment, and the 2020 US presidential election, among many, many other things, all depend on computer safety. And yet, in the midst of the greatest computer security crisis in history, the US government, along with the governments of the UK and Australia, is attempting to undermine the only method that currently exists for reliably protecting the world’s information: encryption. Should they succeed in their quest to undermine encryption, our public infrastructure and private lives will be rendered permanently unsafe.”

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