10 Things — the whiplash of woe and wonder that wraps up Australia’s news
This is Mayang Prasetyo. She was killed by her boyfriend Marcus Volke, who then killed himself when faced with police capture in Brisbane a few days ago.
Mayang worked as a chef and she was thought of by friends as “such a happy, cheerful person”. She travelled, she worked, it seemed like she had fun because that is how life should be. Her life was ended needlessly, taken violently by a man she trusted.
An experienced chef, Mayang had a full life and yet all the Australian media will talk about is whether she was a pr*stitute (a term sex workers consider a slur), continually reference her ethnicity, where she sat on the gender spectrum and combed through her social media like starved vultures to find and publish photos of her wearing bikinis.
Here’s one example in the Age. Here’s another in the Courier Mail. Just for contrast, see how differently the Jakarta Globe reported the murder-suicide.
How the media reports on news often impacts what we can learn and feel about the world that surrounds us. When the media is at pains to present a murder victim as some rare, salacious figure, it implies she is somehow responsible for her death, isolating her from protection based on her work, gender and ethnicity. People — no matter how well intentioned — can take that implication to be true, especially if it is repeated across major newspapers.
A woman dies every week at the hands of a current or former partner every week in Australia. It is a large scale terror they live with every day without newspapers to champion them, without Prime Ministers or parliaments to rush new legislation to protect them and without 800 raiding police officers to take away the men who physically abuse or murder them.
Mayang Prasetyo deserved better than to be victimised by a man who felt entitled to kill her and abuse her remains only to discover Australia’s media feel entitled to carry on the job.
She deserved better. Women deserve better. People must demand better from the people they know to the media they trust to inform them.
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Greg Hunt is talking out of something, alright…
Environment Minister Greg “Citation Needed” Hunt once went on BBC’s Newshour and was all pshawwwwww climate change isn’t a thing that affects Australia and, like, as if it is connected to the bushfires.
Hunt was on the program to bolster Prime Minister Tony “Slow Wink” Abbott’s old-man-burn that UN climate chief Christiana Figueres was “talking out of her hat” when she connected bushfires with climate change. The Environment Minister then told the program that “the senior people of the Bureau of Meteorology…always emphasise never try to link any particular event to climate change” and that he had “looked up what Wikipedia says”.
WIKIPEDIA! TAKE THAT CULTURAL CRINGE! BOOM! *drops mic*
But, much like the science linking fires and climate change, there’s also irrefutable proof that it was actually Greg Hunt talking out of his hat.
Fairfax obtained confidential Bureau of Meteorology briefings that show not only did the agency brief the Minister, they briefed him that the heatwave was part of “a pattern of global warming” and that climate change meant there would be more “severe weather conducive to severe bushfires occurring”. They told the Environment Ministerbefore he appeared on BBC’s Newshour. Funny given the minister can remember his three word Abbott-slogans but can’t remember official briefings.
When faced with the evidence that CSIRO had briefed him and had told him climate change was affecting bushfires, Greg Hunt angrily denied the claims and then tried to disprove the BBC existed using Wikipedia. He then told Cory Bernardi that the Freedom of Information Act wears a burqa.
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Australia abusing kids in detention because we are the worst
In news that hasn’t yet been published to Wikipedia, a new study shows that 80% of nearly 150 pediatricians thought Australia’s mandatory detention constituted abuse.
You won’t know about it though as they have signed gag orders that stop them talking about their views of placing kids in offshore processing prisons. However Human Rights Commissioner and could-well-qualify-as-opposition-leader Professor Gillian Trigg believes more doctors will start breaching the orders to let Australians know their thoughts — “in a situation like this where we have a very serious humanitarian issue, medical professionals are forced to consider whether to honour their hippocratic oath, or the terms of their contract which prevent them from being open about what they are seeing.”
The Guardian quotes Dr Peter Young, a former chief psychiatrist for asylum seekers in detention, who said the facilities were so badly managed it was inevitable sexual abuse and illness would follow: “you can’t create a detention policy like we have without knowing this – it’s wilfully ignorant.”
Scott Morrison just grinned in response and continued playing in his Super Security No Julies Allowed Mega Mecha Awesome Christified Agency.
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North Korea agrees to meet South Korea for coffee just this once
It’s taken a bit of back and forth via text message, but North Korea and South Korea have agreed to start talking again after the North sent a delegation to Seoul, including two close aides to the current delusional despot in power.
The high level talks are often useful as they result in reunions for families separated by a war that is still technically ongoing because a peace treaty has never been signed.
Meanwhile, Kim Jong Un has not been seen in a while, with rumours mounting the brutal dictator and fantasist is either obsese and limping, deposed via a coup or obsessed with cheese to the point of developing gout.
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Speaking of rights under threat…(aren’t we always?)
ALP MP Melissa Parke and Greens Senator Scott Ludlum have joined the online call for Australians to fight proposed data retention and parliament’s redundant security laws .
The third of the so-called anti-terror bills to pass through parliament (the first gave ASIO a blank cheque to spy online, the second currently being debated to give extra powers to raid and detain ‘foreign fighters’) is expected to include mandatory data retention.
Both Parke and Ludlum have given their support to the campaign Stop The Spies which seeks to educate and encourage Australians to voice their opposition to the laws.
To find out more about the campaign to fight data retention laws in Australia visit or view the #StopDataRetention hashtag on Twitter
Meanwhile, here’s a picture of Bill Shorten making his announcement on the laws:
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Damn Good Coffee
In news that just has to be shared because we all need a silver lining, Twin Peaks is returning!
David Lynch will write and direct the 9 episodes for Showtime which takes up the unfinished story from all those years ago.
After making the somewhat jarring trailer, Lynch then sweetly mingled around the production crew and gave them all severed ears.
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And back to the real terror
Back at the end of September, a group of Mexican students protested against government policies. Under police attack, 6 protesters were killed, 24 injured and over 50 missing. While 15 were eventually located alive and relatively well, the fate of the 43 missing students remained unknown.
But the discovery of mass graves has the country worried they contain the bodies of the missing students with families lining up to give DNA samples for identification as many of the bodies are burnt beyond recognition.
30 people have been arrested, many of them members of the Iguala city police. At least 8 of the arrested are said to be members of an organised crime gang who work in concert with the sections of the police force.
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Well, that was intense. Here’s some pretty clouds.
Image: thejetpacker.com
The hilariously named morning glory clouds have returned to far northwestern Bourketown in Queensland as they do every year for a few weeks.
The waters leading to Bourketown are apparently perfect to create the clouds, which don’t appear anywhere else in the world with such predictable regularity. Tourists and surf-gliders come to watch the event every year.
Somewhere over a nice cup of chai, someone is adamantly insisting they’re actually chemtrails.
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The best award season
Every day this week, 10 Things will note the Nobel prize winners as they are announced.
First off the rank is the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine — a split prize for Edvard and May-Britt Moser of Norway plus University College London’s John O’Keefe “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain”.
Their work is rightly celebrated as they’ve showen how animals gadd about the place, using what I will now call a “meat GPS”, helping us to work out where to go, where we’ve been and how to get back there again, often in complex circumstances.
The discovery of this meat GPS explains how we can revisit places without getting lost, like that time I found my way back to a great beef-bowl joint in Osaka despite not being there for 3 years since my last visit. I didn’t get a Nobel for this, but I did get a nice bowl of beef.
Though it’s the 102nd Nobel prize in this category, it’s only the 11th to be awarded to a woman. Barbara McClintock is the only woman to win the prize outright “for her discovery of mobile genetic elements” and being a bit of a dead-set legend in and out of cytogenics.
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Ferrets and packing peanuts make it all better
Amy’s note:
Huge thanks to my gelato-life partner Chuck for covering Monday for me while I was away talking about writing and reading things to people (anyone, really) at the National Young Writers’ Festival. He’s a champ so I will be covering Friday for him this week.
If you’d like to see how my brain word-vomits in real time, I’ll be live tweeting ABC’s Lateline at 10:30pm tonight before Malcolm takes it to Cash Converters. Follow me onTwitter or (and this is the far easier option) follow the conversation using the #Latelinetag.
But for now…
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