As the alleged owner of 70 per cent of Australia’s print media, most of us would would head to something belonging to the Murdoch empire to find the major stories of the day in our small country. To save us from scouring through endless piles of tree-destroying newspapers, dear Rupert has kindly provided us with news.com.au where all of the nation’s (and at times the world’s) breaking dailies can be sourced. With so much going on in our political and environmental world, in particular with our under-performing prime minister and our over-heating country, I was eager to read up on the all the latest, news, findings, opinions and/or whatever.
To my gob-smacking bewilderment, nothing that I thought would be of any newsworthiness (to an intelligent person) could be found. These are the stories splattered all over the front of today’s news.com:
Bride loses 40 kilograms after wedding shock
Billionaire bunkers: Beyond the panic room, home security goes sci-fi
Hollywood stars caught in email stuff up
Woman cried after seeing Schwarzenegger naked
Neil Patrick Harris wins Instagram with boozy pics
Kardashian’s booty ‘definitely photoshopped’
Yahoo trashes Google, Apple and Snapchat live
Who is Madge’s brand new toy boy?
And on it goes. That’s the sort of rubbish the Murdoch media want us to read about. It isn’t fit for monkeys. How eerily different it was leading up to the 2013 election, by the way. Or on that matter, ever since Gillard won the 2010 election.
Meanwhile in real news, I found this over at Fairfax:
Where Abbott fails: pain must be seen to be shared
Here are some snippets from it:
. . . the government is bumbling and stumbling into 2014, imperilling the consensus necessary for genuine economic reform.
The government has started the year copping stick for floating the possibilities of a co-payment for previously “free” visits to bulk-billing doctors and charging Australians for consular assistance when they get into trouble overseas. They are not unreasonable things to consider within the overall context of how much we can afford as the nation ages and has proportionately fewer tax payers.
But such possibilities look unreasonable when they come from a government that also wants to pay an overly generous maternity leave allowance for the very well paid, reinstates the novated lease tax minimisation rort for the minority who can access it, puts the interests of the financial planning industry ahead of the interests of clients of the financial planning industry and wants the poorly paid to have no tax break at all on their superannuation contributions while ensuring well-off retirees – people with several million dollars in assets – continue to live in a tax haven paying no tax at all on high incomes, or even a little bit of tax on pretty high incomes.
So far, the impression given by the government is that it is committed to maintaining the privileges of the privileged, while whittling away at the breaks afforded the not-so-privileged.
Café Whispers 