Australia

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has sparked a new discussion about the resurgence of a 'White Australia' policy — a controversial series of laws that discriminated against non-European migrants.

On Tuesday, the managing director of publishing, Tory Maguire, told staff the company was looking to cut “around 30” positions, made up of voluntary and targeted redundancies. Maguire said the exercise was not simply a matter of cutting costs, but was an “evolution” to adapt to structural change.

“In the last 12 months, as we have discussed many, many times at the publishing town halls, we are in an extreme state of disruption because of AI,” she said.

The company has plans to retrain and to hire people for “digital-first, reader-savvy, data-informed roles”...

The announcement came two years after Nine Entertainment cut 200 jobs, including 90 positions from the legacy mastheads and the AFR.

It's been nearly 60 years since a mysterious spy base was opened in a sacred stretch of Australian outback. Even today, what happens inside Pine Gap remains a closely guarded secret.

Last month, the Christian Brothers, a Catholic order with a shocking record of child abuse, informed a court it was going broke and would not be able to afford to pay out survivors.

An actuarial report detailing the state of the Christian Brothers finances was released to the media on Monday, alongside other court documents.

The report reveals there are currently 340 redress claims involving the Christian Brothers, which will cost the religious order an estimated $25m.

But the report also predicts the Christian Brothers will be subject to another 590 redress claims, worth $40m, in future years.

Survivors and plaintiff law firms are angry that the Christian Brothers has spent the past decade transferring vast and lucrative holdings of property to a separate entity, known as the Trustees of Edmund Rice Education Australia, for nominal amounts of $1. That entity is resisting any attempt to sell off those properties to help pay survivors.

Plibersek said the government would take a “forensic approach” to the matter.

(Ok, this is a test case. The article is about Gen Z in general but is relevant to Australia. The author is an Australian academic. I am not sure if this fits into the 'Australia' community. Mods, please advise)

Many young people are left feeling as though they no longer have any meaningful stake in a system that demands their compliance while it systematically engineers their obsolescence.

As social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff puts it, we are living in a

harsh social habitat produced by a decades-old regime of neoliberal market economics in which our sense of self-worth and need for self-determination are routinely thwarted.

Indeed, younger generations face a unique existential crisis as algorithms increasingly shape taste, preferences, decisions and more. Teens are “living inside a contradiction”, encouraged to embrace AI while they report it’s hurting their learning.

In the 20th century, baby boomers had greater agency over how much technology was integrated into their lives, and there was more opportunity to opt out. Studies show older generations were able to evaluate their adoption of technology based on factors like “compatibility with lifestyle” and affordability. Email and mobile phones weren’t viewed as essential to everyday life, nor was upgrading to a clock radio or a TV with a remote control considered as “inevitable” as having an AI chatbot on your smartphone is today.

Today, AI and algorithms feel unavoidable to younger generations, because they’re built into the very fabric of society. Tech CEOs argue the dominance of AI is inevitable, but the people in power aren’t engaging in dialogue with younger generations.

The high-pitched whirr of coal trains between Newcastle and Muswellbrook has been the backdrop to life in the NSW Hunter region for more than 100 years, but a new soundscape is set to take its place as the renewables transition gathers pace.