Rick Morton | Author
Rick Morton
Reviews
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25.01.2022 https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//coali/160104240010465 "This week, a federal government plan to bring forward $700 million in university research funding was leaked to the media and has been independently confirmed by The Saturday Paper. According to one university vice-chancellor, however, the move is only a short-term tactical fix. This is not new funding it has simply been taken from money announced for future years. While the $700 million may help to win support... for the contentious higher education reforms, it will cover less than half the annual research funding shortfall that will emerge from major changes created by the Job-Ready Graduates Bill. What the bill does, in effect, is break a historical link between teaching and research at Australian universities. It will see Commonwealth subsidies fund only the cost of universities delivering instruction in a course, a so-called realignment. The bill will also increase student fees for some courses, such as the arts and humanities, while lowering them in others. It will create 100,000 new student places, mostly at regional universities."
23.01.2022 An aged care worker from the commonwealth's last-minute surge workforce gets tested for Covid-19 then goes to work at a Benetas home for 3 days. On the third day, they are told while at the nursing home they are positive for coronavirus. The outbreak kills 4 people. The same worker had previously filled shifts at a home with an outbreak but Benetas weren't told. ... https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//feder/159801840010309
22.01.2022 Covid-19 offered a strategic opportunity like no other event before it. Far-right groups are exploiting misinformation and apparently disparate conspiracy theories to hasten the decline of liberal democratic institutions across the western world. "The conspiracies often turn back on themselves, like an ideological möbius strip, though this matters little. Fidelity is outranked by force. In this way, adherents of various theories believe either that coronavirus is a global sha...m; or just a flu; or not as deadly as claimed; or a dangerous virus cultured in a lab, designed to kill proles; or any combination of the above. Similarly, they may state that 5G mobile phone coverage is a health risk on its own; or that it is the source of the virus; or that it will be used, through the subsequent race to find a vaccine, to control individuals." https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//how-co/15895512009831
22.01.2022 I've been filing smaller pieces for news app Inkl. It's a good way to get even more news out into the world as people come to me with tip-offs and info. "The federal aged care regulator handed a $2400-a-day strategic communications contract to a 'master of reputation management' and another consultant near the peak of Victoria’s fatal coronavirus second wave when its quality assessors were overwhelmed by the scale of the outbreak." https://inkl.com/a/VabgMMSRPPl
18.01.2022 It's not just the death statistics of Covid-19 we need to worry about. This virus is a master at hijacking the human body. It has been linked to at least 7 cases of Guillain Barré syndrome, meningitis, a litany of other autoimmune conditions and and its post-infection damage looks, acts and feels identical to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. My piece from the weekend: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//lost-/159620400010189
17.01.2022 In short, this needs to be a landslide. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//trump/160406280010627 In Michigan and Pennsylvania, meanwhile, minority voters have been receiving robocalls falsely warning them that mail-in voting would result in the harvesting of their private information to be sold to debt collectors and the police.... While disinformation targeting Spanish-speaking voters focuses on immigration, Middlemass said, the messaging for Black voters plays on fears about law enforcement for example, that if you vote by mail, that information will be used to get you on an old warrant. So these really racialised messages are used to target very particular communities and enough of them will be dissuaded, she said.
17.01.2022 Two days before the ABC confirmed that up to 250 jobs will be cut across the organisation, the federal government finalised a $200,000 offer for consultants to prepare a report on news and media business models looking specifically at the impact of public broadcasters on commercial operators. This is a hobby horse of the broadcaster's rivals, especially News Corporation. Now the government is looking at it." The report is not intended for public release. ... https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//exclu/159318000010021
16.01.2022 "In responses to questions at senate estimates, the National Disability Insurance Agency revealed that, as of September 30, 2019, it is estimated that the range of participants likely to have left residential aged care is in the vicinity of 180-320. That figure is across the life of the NDIS and, even at the upper estimate, represents less than 5 per cent of the thousands of young people stranded in residential aged care. In the middle of 2017, this figure was estimated at ...6243 people. Since then, the numbers have fallen to about 5300 young people, which the NDIA recorded as an 18 per cent decrease in its most recent quarterly report. However, The Saturday Paper has confirmed most of these people did not leave aged care they simply turned 65 and are no longer recorded as young people. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//young/159378480010063
15.01.2022 https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//the-c/159983280010409 Part One of my investigation into the aged care mess. How did we get here? "Its origins lie in the changes made under the Howard government in the late 1990s, which ushered in a 23-year failed experiment; a live study of human patients that saw falling care standards, dramatic loss of professional skill and soaring profits.... The Saturday Paper can reveal that Rozen, who is senior counsel assisting the commission, will recommend an end to this experiment when he makes submissions to royal commissioners Tony Pagone and Lynelle Briggs this week. He will recommend winding back the clock, essentially, to where it was before 1997, by mandating significant minimum staffing levels in nursing homes. For more than two decades, no such requirement with an explicit prescription for registered and enrolled nurses, therapy and personal-care workers has existed anywhere in aged-care law. Before John Howard’s 1997 aged-care changes, the number of registered nurse (RN) hours that a typical nursing home with 60 residents was funded for and received was 308. Within a decade, it dropped to just 198. Today, it is 168 hours in a week."
13.01.2022 https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//the-c/160043760010442 Part Two of my investigation into the collapse of aged care in Australia. You will want to read this. Every single detail in here comes from more than 4000 pages of evidence tendered to the Royal Commission. This what happened under the Coalition. "The report, known internally as the 'viability project', found 141 of Australia’s 873 nursing-home providers were at 'extreme risk of imminent failure'.... It found a further 89 providers 'that will be in severe financial stress within two years'. The report was commissioned by the Department of Health as evidence mounted that the government may have to repay billions of dollars in accommodation bonds should these providers collapse. Between them, the nursing homes listed by the 'viability project' hold $5.3 billion in bonds."
12.01.2022 I think this is probably the most important story I have ever written. One phone call on June 10 condemned aged care residents in the middle of a once in 100-year pandemic to die in their nursing homes. This teleconference was heated, and commonwealth and NSW state government officials were warned repeatedly that people would die if they did not enact a policy to control infection spread in aged care facilities. Instead, they were told "that's your responsibility." A NSW Heal...th deputy secretary, speaking less than a month after the 19th resident at Newmarch House died from the virus, said "people keep forgetting there were a lot of good outcomes at Newmarch." The protocol developed on this call would serve as the template for the Victorian crisis. Now scores more are dead and dying. Please read and share, if you can. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//exclusive-the-phone-c
10.01.2022 As Sydney pub billionaire Justin Hemmes is drafted by two levels of Coalition government -- he is close friends with Treasurer Josh Frydenberg -- to provide advice on economic policy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, details about his $100m legal battle over alleged underpayment of staff reveal an empire built on an old Howard-era zombie workplace agreement. Hemmes says Merivale would never have made the decisions it did to become as big as it has if it knew the agreement was unlawful. My story this week: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//inside/15925752009994
09.01.2022 The first sign something had shifted came in late August, when letters began arriving from the Department of Home Affairs. Written entirely in English, they were addressed to refugees who had been brought to Australia for medical treatment and then remained in the community. The letters announced that these people would be shifted to a different visa class. They would be given work rights for the first time, but beyond that would lose all government support. They would be evi...cted from their housing and their income supplements ended. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//exclu/160285320010560
08.01.2022 Get this: the federal government is paying bonuses to private job agencies for 'placing' and keeping people in a job that ends up being paid for by JobKeeper. It's a taxpayer cash merry-go-round as doubt clouds future for those on income support. "An internal document, sent to Jobactive providers by the federal Department of Education, Skills and Employment and obtained by The Saturday Paper, reveals that job agencies have even been paid bonuses for people who theoretically r...emained employed after the $87 billion JobKeeper payment was announced. 'An Outcome may be payable where an Outcome was already tracking for a participant who moves onto the JobKeeper Payment through their previous employer or applies for/receives JobSeeker Payment initially then moves onto the JobKeeper Payment through their previous employer' the guidance document says. The consequences of this decision to allow job providers to double dip are substantial for taxpayers, and a potential goldmine for the private agencies. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Jobactive caseload has more than doubled to 1.4 million people up from 630,000 in February while mutual obligations for job seekers were temporarily suspended because of the virus. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//exclu/159862320010323
07.01.2022 https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//what-/160345800010591 All of the now-controversial appointments were made by former senator Mitch Fifield when he was Communications minister. Fifield elevated one-time Queensland Liberal National Party president Bruce McIver to the position of an Australia Post director in December 2015 and former Liberal senator Michael Ronaldson in May the next year.... In 2017, Deidre Willmott who served as chief of staff to two Western Australian Liberal leaders and spinner for mining magnate Andrew Twiggy Forrest also became a director. Tony Nutt was added as a director in 2018, the year after he resigned as federal director of the Liberal Party. Finally, Mario D’Orazio a former Channel Seven executive was made a director in March last year, just two months before Fifield retired from parliament at the last federal election.
04.01.2022 Please read this. It's important. Daniel van Roo will never know if his now-incurable cancer could have been treated were it not for his 18-month battle to convince doctors something was seriously wrong. He says that over at least 14 different consultations with general practitioners at a clinic in Sydney’s Surry Hills between March 2015 and September 2016 during which he complained of crippling exhaustion, unexplained abdominal pains, night sweats, weight loss and groin pa...in near swollen lymph nodes his symptoms were treated as STI-related in origin. A gay man, van Roo was tested more than 50 times during those GP visits for sexually transmitted infections, none of which returned a confirmed diagnosis of any STI. His tests, however, showed other concerning trends falling haemoglobin levels and red blood cell counts, dramatically increasing lymphocyte numbers and platelets 30 points below the acceptable range. Something troubling was happening in his body. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//exclu/159438960010102
02.01.2022 In the middle of April, a close descendant of the coronavirus strain that first took hold in the Chinese city of Wuhan all but disappeared in Australia. On April 16, this S strain was found in a 79-year-old woman in Victoria, but her diagnosis would represent the end of the line for the first wave of the outbreak in Australia. Social distancing had been a success. Lockdown policies starved the virus of venues for large-scale contagion.... As this original lineage petered out in Australia, though, newer versions of the virus were taking off in Europe and the United States. This was not a surprise scientists expected the SARS-CoV-2 virus to mutate as it spread, and there’s no evidence these versions in Europe or the US were more potent or infectious than what was seen in Wuhan. But the changes did provide a useful map of where the virus may have been and where it might be headed. And when genomic testing first identified these newer versions in Australia, they were showing up in returning travellers in mandatory hotel quarantine. This meant that as long as this system held, the nation was on track to all but eliminate Covid-19 in the community. Then, the virus got out. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//how-t/159499440010121
01.01.2022 In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government awarded a $5.77 million contract to an aged-care staffing app that claims to have no duty of care for the quality of its workforce or liability for the care provided. The contract is for a surge workforce in nursing homes affected by Covid-19 infections and is valid until the end of June. It went out as a limited tender on the grounds it was to protect human health and is therefore exempt from the Commonwe...alth’s own procurement rules. The Mable app connects aged-care providers with freelance workers to fill holes in staffing. Payment is made through the app, which ordinarily takes a 10 per cent commission. In a memo sent to nursing home providers in April, the Department of Health announced it would pay wage costs for any crisis workers employed via the Mable app. It does not appear that the government would subsidise workers who were not employed through the app. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au//exclus/15901560009868
