Squiz Today – Wednesday, 8 December

THE SQUIZ

Two surveys released yesterday have painted a gloomy picture for modern Australian women. The Bureau of Stats reported that half of Australian women have been sexually harassed. And according to the Melbourne Institute’s latest Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, women do vastly more unpaid work on chores and childcare than men. “Women with young children are the most time-stressed and you can see why,” said report co-author Professor Roger Wilkins.

TELL ME MORE ABOUT THE REPORT ON HARASSMENT…

It’s not easy reading. The report says that a 3rd of women copped inappropriate comments about their body/sex life, and 30% had experienced unwanted touching. Younger people and people who struggled to pay the bills were more likely to experience sexual harassment. And it’s not just women: a quarter of Aussie men have experienced sexual harassment in their lifetime. For both men and women, reports of incidents have increased since the last survey in 2012 – but that could be due to changing attitudes to coming forward, the report says. With a lot of it happening in the workplace, it’s seen calls for the recommendations from Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins’ 2020 Respect@Work report to be implemented in full.

AND WOMEN ARE STILL DOING MOST OF THE CHORES?

Yep, according to the study of 17,000 Australians – and keep in mind it was taken before the pandemic when researchers say women picked up even more of the domestic slack. The Melbourne Institute found that women log twice as many unpaid working hours than men – in some cases up to 60 hours a week – on things like housework and childcare. The gap in unpaid labour was particularly large for heterosexual couples with dependent children at home, with the gap rising sharply after the birth of their first child. Women also felt more time-stressed than men, with 38% saying they were often or “almost always” under the pump, compared to 29% of men. There’s been a 40% rise in women reporting psychological distress from the same study in 2007. “The stigma around mental illness has declined a lot, so we think there’s a greater tendency for people to be willing to report that they are struggling,” report co-author Dr Ferdi Botha said.

Victorian Ombudsman slams border rules as ‘unjust’

The Victorian Ombudsman Deborah Glass has wrapped up an investigation of the state government’s handling of border restrictions during the last COVID-19 wave over winter and has found that the system focused on locking people out rather than getting them home safely. Victoria closed its border with NSW on 11 July, and many of the people who applied for a permit to return home for things like funerals, medical care, or to start new jobs were refused entry, despite being fully vaccinated and returning negative COVID tests. The investigation found that 2,736 of the 33,252 applications were granted before the borders reopened on 14 September – that’s 8%. Glass was at pains to point out she cast no judgement on the government’s decision to close the border. But on administering exemptions to enter the state, thousands of Victorians were subjected to treatment that was “downright unjust, even inhumane,” she said.

Biden and Putin talk as fears of a Ukraine invasion grow

Six months on from their summit in Geneva, Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have had a two-hour meeting – this time to discuss the tense situation on Russia’s border with Ukraine. From Putin’s side, he’s set a “red line” on NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe. What that means is the security organisation that counts Western Europe, Canada and the US as members is talking to Ukraine about joining. That would put the military might of those nations too close for Russia’s comfort. For Biden’s part, he’s not digging Russia’s massing of 94,000 troops and military equipment on the Ukraine border, with experts predicting an invasion in early 2022. Before the meeting, US Government officials said that Russia would be threatened with the toughest economic sanctions in an effort to stop any military escalation against Ukraine. So you can see why the talks have been described as “critical”… Putin is said to be seeking a guarantee NATO will stay clear of his neighbour.

Meta told to pay up for Rohingya hate speech

In a landmark move against the social media giant, dozens of Rohingya refugees in the US and UK are demanding that Facebook (now called Meta) pay ​​US$150 billion in compensation for allowing the spread of hate speech against the ethnic minority on its platform. It’s believed that around 10,000 Rohingya Muslims were killed during a brutal crackdown by Myanmar’s military in 2017, and 700,000 more fled over the border to Bangladesh, where they still live in refugee camps. A British law firm said Facebook’s algorithms “amplified hate speech”, and the company failed to “take appropriate and timely action”. Under American law, Meta is mainly protected from being held liable for content posted by its users, but lawyers argue that is not the case in Myanmar, where Facebook is considered a critical communications platform for a majority of the adult population. #SquizShortcut

Another crypto exchange bites the dust

One of Australia’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges is being wound up by liquidators, leaving investors in the lurch. MyCryptoWallet – which allows people to buy and sell digital currency such as Bitcoin – is the second exchange in as many months to collapse in Oz. Corporate watchdog ASIC was said to be investigating multiple complaints of missing funds, and now it’s believed that some 20,000 customers have lost their digital currency. That’s because unlike regular banks, the cryptocurrency sector is unregulated and that means customers have no guarantee their funds are safe. The crypto community suffered another loss recently – Mr Goxx, the currency trading hamster, died recently. After his final day of trading on 22 November, his hamster-sized crypto portfolio was up 19.7%. Vale, little guy…

Sounds of Australia inductees named

“Sorry” is what then-PM Kevin Rudd said to Indigenous Aussies in 2008 – and now the speech has been inducted into the National Film and Sound Archive’s (NFSA) Sounds of Australia for 2021. It joins the soundtrack to 1982 film The Man from Snowy River, Gotye and Kimbra’s 2011 smash-hit Somebody I Used to Know, Jim Davidson’s Dandies’ Where The Dog Sits On The Tuckerbox from 1938, 1986’s Wide Open Road by The Triffids; and Renee Geyer’s 1975 classic Heading In The Right Direction. And Gaywaves – a groundbreaking community radio program dealing with LGBTIQ+ issues that ran on 2SER between 1979 and 2005 – also received a nod. The 10 new inductees join 150 sounds currently in the NFSA’s Sounds of Australia archive, which date back to 1896. Pump it up…

11.00am (AEDT) – Cricket – 1st Ashes Test – Australia v England – Brisbane

12.30pm (AEDT) NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet addresses the National Press Club – Sydney

ABS Data Release – Labour account, September; National study of mental health and wellbeing for the 2020-21 financial year; births and fertility rates, 2020

AIHW Release – Life and work experiences of Australians with chronic conditions

A birthday for Nicki Minaj (1982)

Anniversary of:
• the birthdays of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542), singer/actor Sammy Davis Jr (1925), and rocker Jim Morrison (1943)
• John Lennon’s death (1980)
• SpaceX becoming the first private company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft, after the second launch of the SpaceX Dragon (2010)