Fleeting contact

A MEASURED RESPONSE

One of the brains behind the Doherty Institute modelling which informed our roadmap out of COVID says: it’s time to cool it — a bit. Jodie McVernon confirmed to Guardian Australia that she was working with governments to tone down public health responses which we used through the first three waves, saying we have access to vaccines and contact tracing is less important now. It’s the “frog in the kettle”, she reasoned. “We lose sight of how much everything escalated as we moved more into the position of zero community transmission and had to deal with Delta and all these other things that have been heightening risks over time”.

Happily, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has reported a decline in new global COVID-19 cases, The New Daily says, for the first time in more than two months. There were 3.6 million cases last week, down from 4 million the week before. There’s also been a 7% decline in deaths, WHO adds. The US, India, Britain, Turkey, and the Philippines are seeing the most cases at the moment. It comes as Australia’s international borders are on track to open by December (to the vaccinated), ABC reports, as long as 80% of over 16s are fully vaccinated by then. The international vaccine passport (which shows your vaccination status) will be different to your domestic one (which allows you to enter businesses), however — they’ll be two separate apps on your phone. NSW’s will look like this, while the software’s trial will begin in October.

[free_worm]

HOLDING OUT FOR A ZERO

Prime Minister Scott Morrison told the US we will work towards a goal of net zero after President Joe Biden warned climate change was rapidly approaching “a point of no return”. Morrison has continually declined to commit Australia to net zero by 2050, but in a characteristic tongue-twister, said “In Australia, it’s not enough to have a commitment to something — you’ve got to have a plan to achieve it … You have a plan to meet your commitment. If you don’t have a plan, you don’t have a commitment”, as The Australian ($) reports. Morrison is yet to publicly present a plan on how we will reach net-zero emissions. China — the world’s largest carbon emitter — said their emissions will begin to decline by 2030 and that they’ll reach net zero before 2060.

Nationals MP Darren Chester has become the latest to stray from the unofficial party line, urging the Nats to release a “credible” policy on reducing emissions which includes net zero by 2050. He told Guardian Australia the party will lose a younger voting base without it. Of course, some experts have said net zero by mid-century isn’t actually enough: it has “licensed a recklessly cavalier ‘burn now, pay later’ approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar”, as The Conversation puts it, and is “too little too late” in that it falls woefully short of stopping a 1.5C temperature rise by the end of this century, as CCAG says.

DOLLARS AND SENSE

Chinese property developer Evergrande is on the brink of collapse, in what some are calling a Lehman Brothers moment. Alarm bells sounded on Monday when Evergrande failed to make two payments to bank creditors, but agreed it would settle interest payments on a domestic bond, as Reuters reports. But the mega-company still reportedly owes cash to around 171 domestic banks and 121 other financial firms, according to the BBC. So what does it all mean? Well, China is the world’s second-biggest economy, and property development makes up a quarter of the gross domestic product. Evergrande is the country’s second-biggest developer, and also the world’s most indebted, as Yahoo Finance explains.

So the group’s debt default could send shock waves through the Chinese and global economies, Al Jazeera reports, just like the culmination of events that led to the 2008 GFC. How? ABC explains that uncertainty over Evergrande’s future could cause investors to withdraw their cash from big banks all over the world, meaning the banks couldn’t meet funding or lending commitments. If Evergrande actually defaults, banks could be forced to lend less money. Voila — a credit crunch. But the AFR says don’t worry — Evergrande’s total loans account for about 0.1% of all loans in China. “These are not the ingredients for a Lehman moment”, they predict.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

Pandas love their independent, joy-filled lives and don’t care about finding someone to have sex with, a new study has found. In what is an inspirational finding for single people everywhere, the study found that pandas who live in cool, moderately low-lying areas with lots of bamboo around will settle down and enjoy their days, rather than going out to find a mate.

Unfortunately, that can mean the panda’s genetic diversity can decline, which could lead to their extinction as a species. So researchers say we should keep pandas about 80% comfortable at all times — I’m imagining that involves creating some sort of bamboo calorie deficit — so their dissatisfaction leads them to go out and pursue casual sex. Fortunately, this year Chinese officials said giant pandas were no longer endangered in the wild, but that doesn’t mean we should start pandering to their dokuritsu wishes. Go forth and date — it’s for the good of your species!

Hope you feel strong and independent today, too — and apologies for the late Worm yesterday, folks. A technical error stopped it from firing out at 7am.

SAY WHAT?

I just think it’s time for some of our dearest friends around the world to prenez un grip about this and donnez moi un break.

Boris Johnson

The British PM quite literally told the French to “get a grip” amid their outrage about Australia ditching our $90 billion deal with them. The indignant French foreign ministry initially withdrew its ambassadors to the United States and Australia over what they decreed “duplicity, disdain and lies”, but after a chat between France’s Emmanuel Macron and US’ Joe Biden, it was agreed that the US-based diplomat will return.

CRIKEY RECAP

More than 60,000 Australians are touched by state control

Amber Schultz

Sep 22, 2021

5

Unlocked

“Crikey has interviewed a dozen families affected by guardianship orders across the country and corresponded with several others. As well we have spoken to 13 academics, five lawyers, three advocates, one private investigator, have contacted tribunal and state representatives, and spoken to several anonymous sources working within hospitals and state trustee and guardianship offices.

“One of the cases Crikey has investigated is so concerning that representatives of the Disability Council International in Geneva became involved, calling for the Queensland government to launch criminal investigations. In this series, Crikey investigates, step by step, exactly how the state can seize control of a person — and how people’s bank accounts are drained in the process. To read more pieces in this series, go here.“

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Keating aside, progressive politics goes missing as the country readies for fight of its life

Guy Rundle

Sep 22, 2021

110

“In a tone you only get to take when you’re an ex-PM, Keating excoriated not only the Morrison government but the supine Sinophobes in The Age/SMH, such as the haha ‘froth-mouthed’ (Keating’s words) Peter Hartcher and the ‘lizard king’ (my words) Chris Uhlmann.

“Keating makes the points that constitute the obvious opposition to the deal: that we are lacing ourselves into an old imperial alliance, working off a systemic misconstruction in which China — a land-based, internal power — is presented as if it were the next sea-based global imperium, as the UK and then the US had been in the past two centuries.”

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Dan ‘the sledgehammer’ Andrews hits raw, small and painful nerves

Kishor Napier-Raman

Sep 22, 2021

81

“Sledgehammer thinking also resulted in the persistence of arbitrary, theatrical restrictions that have little epidemiological backing but go a long way to building community resentment. Victoria shut down playgrounds. It will continue with the curfew until October 26, even though we knew last year it was always about police enforcement, not public health.

“When picnics are allowed, people still won’t be able to take their masks off to drink alcohol because once there was an illegal pub crawl.Many of the Andrews government’s tough public health measures have been very effective. But the sledgehammer approach results in too many blunt, reactive decisions that do little more than make people’s already crummy lives a little more miserable.”

READ ALL ABOUT IT

At Afghanistan’s ‘Guantanamo’, ex-inmates recount abuse, torture (Al Jazeera)

Lithuania urges people to throw away Chinese phones (BBC)

Shots fired at car carrying Ukrainian President’s key aide in attack labelled assassination attempt (ABC)

Second line of defence: Taiwan’s civilians train to resist invasion (The Guardian)

Bid to weed out GPs’ cannabis oil objections (The Australian) ($)

Carlos the Jackal seeks reduced sentence for 1974 grenade attack (The New Daily)

WHO warns low air quality kills 7 million a year, issues new AQGs (Al Jazeera)

New bombshells show Trump’s coup threat was real and hasn’t passed (CNN)

Brazilian health minister tests positive for COVID-19 after attending UN meeting (SBS)

What will it take for electric vehicles to create jobs, not cut them? (The New York Times)

Threat to New Zealand cricketers came from India, says Pakistan (Al Jazeera)

THE COMMENTARIAT

How to lose friends and infuriate people — Niki Savva (The Age): “The ongoing Porter saga and the clumsy, slippery way the announcement of the awkwardly named AUKUS was handled — without apology and with the overt insult the French could not be trusted to keep a secret — has dimmed any hope that it could work as another road map out of COVID to an early election. Over breakfast, Australians watched Morrison standing beside a man who could not remember his name, who looked like he should have stayed in bed, and another man who looked like he had just got out of bed.

“Sleepy Joe Biden, fresh from the Afghanistan withdrawal disaster, and Boris Johnson, who has had trouble counting the number of children he has, desperately seeking to create a place for Britain in the world post-Brexit. One of Australia’s most senior and most respected former diplomats, John McCarthy, who chafes at the overhyping of the deal while not dismissing its importance, is still mulling over its implications. But he seems sure about one thing: none of those three leaders is up to the challenges which lie ahead.”

Ban spit hoods! — Nat Cromb (IndigenousX): “This piece is about one such family who in wake of the loss of their beloved Wayne ‘Fella’ Morrison and who we have had live-tweeting from the IndigenousX Twitter account because today, the SA Parliament will vote on Fella’s Bill, otherwise known as the Statutes Amendment (Spit Hood Prohibition) Bill, to permanently ban the use of spit hoods in South Australia … Since 2016 Fella’s family have called for banning spit hoods — the torture device that Fella was forced into before taking his final unassisted breaths — by law in all institutional contexts: prisons and police custody, mental health centres, immigration detention and everywhere else they may be used.

“Fella’s mother, Caroline Andersen, welcomes the vote toward legislating the ban on spit hoods, saying, ‘The last time I heard my son’s voice was a week before his image became synonymous with these barbaric devices. I welcome this step toward accountability, but it isn’t the end for us. I call for a Royal Commission into my son’s death, and a national ban on spit hoods, so that other parents don’t have to suffer this grief.’”

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE

WHAT’S ON TODAY

Australia

• Senator Penny Wong will speak at the launch of a United States Studies Centre report about how the Biden administration should compete for influence in the Indo-Pacific via webinar.

• Former prime minister Julia Gillard, now the chair of Beyond Blue, will discuss mental health reform in Australia via webinar.

• Journalist Gary Nunn is in conversation with writer Benjamin Law about the former’s new book, The Psychic Tests, via webinar.

Yuggera Country (also known as Brisbane)

• Australian businesswoman Cathie Reid will chat with Freelancing Gems’ Fleur Madden about entrepreneurship and women in leadership at the Brisbane Business Hub.

Kaurna Country (also known as Adelaide)

• Adelaide’s indoor plant guru Markus Hamence will host an indoor plant workshop at West Torrens Auditorium Gallery.