Good morning, this is Stephen Smiley bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Monday 30 September.
Top stories
A legal loophole that is depriving migrant workers in Australia of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages is still not closed, despite the government agreeing “in principle” to include the workers in employee protections. Oppressed for his religious beliefs and driven from his job, Fu Cong fled China for a new life in Australia, eventually finding work in a printing company. But after it declared bankruptcy, Cong was left with nothing more than a string of dishonoured pay cheques, and no legal avenue of redress. While the government agreed six months ago to extend a protection known as the Fair Entitlement Guarantee to include migrant workers, it has not yet begun consultation about implementing it. A spokesman for the industrial relations minister, Christian Porter, has told Guardian Australia that “details of timing and the mechanism for consultation on this proposal will be outlined in due course”.
An Alice Springs woman says she was pursued by an external debt collector who warned it could seize her wages or stop her travelling overseas, all over a $3,700 Centrelink overpayment that a tribunal later found to be entirely caused by the agency’s mistakes. But Emma Delahunty, a single mother of a one-year-old, will be forced to pay back the money. The administrative appeals tribunal last month ruled that the debt would still stand because repaying it would not cause her “severe” financial suffering.
Boris Johnson has ramped up speculation he is planning to bypass a law that stops the UK from crashing out of the EU without a deal. In an interview with the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show, Johnson said the UK could still leave the bloc on 31 October despite the passing of the Benn Act, which aims to prevent a no-deal Brexit by forcing him to ask Brussels for a delay. Meanwhile, Downing Street has been forced to deny allegations that Johnson squeezed the thigh of a journalist under the table during a private lunch. Charlotte Edwardes alleges the incident took place at the offices of the Spectator in London shortly after Johnson became editor there in 1999.
World
Members of Donald Trump’s army of surrogates have gone into battle, as the beleaguered president seeks to fight back against a rapidly intensifying impeachment inquiry. Trump is accused of seeking dirt that would show that Joe Biden, a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, acted corruptly.
Houthi rebels in Yemen say they have killed 500 Saudi soldiers, captured a further 2,000 and seized a convoy of Saudi military vehicles. The extraordinary claims were made at a press conference on Sunday and have not been independently verified.
Support for Austria’s far-right Freedom party has plunged by more than a third, according to exit polls released after national elections on Sunday. But the party may still retain some power if the leading People’s party, which topped the poll, invites it to join its coalition.
Some of Hong Kong’s busiest shopping districts have descended into chaos, after police used teargas, rubber bullets, pepper spray and water cannons against protesters.
Elon Musk has unveiled a SpaceX spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo to the moon, Mars or anywhere else in the solar system and land back on Earth perpendicularly.
Opinion and analysis
We are at a tipping point on climate change on two fronts – a point from which there is no return, writes Greg Jericho. The first is action to deal with the climate emergency; the second is for the media to report on it with credibility: “The prime minister of this country is now suggesting the media are lying about the government’s climate change efforts. I don’t know about the prime minister, but I get my information from the Department of the Environment and Energy, which shows that annual emissions have risen every quarter since the government introduced its ‘emissions reduction fund’. The transformation into Ocker Trump is now so obvious that no journalist or media company can miss it. The tipping point is here.”
Simon Jenkins used to to think Boris Johnson could get a Brexit deal. But after last week, he’s changed his mind: “From the moment Johnson began his final climb to power, his appeal has been crudely populist. He has discarded the core Tory tradition of fiscal probity with a welter of spending pledges and tax cuts, plus plans for immigration control and toughness on crime. On Brexit, he has distorted a near trivial ‘freedom to trade with the rest of the world’ with claptrap about vassalage, sovereignty and patriotism. The idea that Brexit will bring a new dawn of national wealth is absurd. It is simply how Johnson became prime minister.”
Sport
Damien Hardwick has proved his doubters wrong to become an AFL great, writes Scott Heinrich. Hardwick presided over just eight victories in 2016 and was as good as broken but the transformation he has pulled off since then is now the stuff of Australian football folklore.
As a former player, Michael Cheika says he was “embarrassed” at the confusion the crackdown on high tackles is causing in the World Cup, after another match was held up by constant reviews on the big screen. Australia’s head coach was speaking after the Wallabies’ 29-25 defeat by Wales.
Thinking time: the rapid pace of video game nostalgia
One of the stranger side-effects of the breakneck speed of technological advancement is its ability to rapidly generate nostalgia: the greater the speed of change, the greater the volume of outdated technology in its wake. This phenomenon is most apparent in the world of video games. A 20-year-old video game feels far more dated than a 20-year-old novel, and games from the 70s and earlier are quite literally museum pieces.
That reality is a key theme at Game Masters, the video game exhibition that launched at Acmi in 2012 and has now, after seven years touring the world, found its way to Canberra. Eighty games, all playable, are arranged in a chronological history that starts with original Space Invaders and Pac-Man arcade cabinets and finishes with a selection from the vast choice available to players in 2019. But seeing this show as just a nostalgic day out for gamers would sell it short: it’s also a way to trace the evolution of a form that, only now, is starting to be taken seriously.
Media roundup
The Reserve Bank is poised to take interest rates below 1%, the Sydney Morning Herald reports, even as evidence grows its previous rate cuts have supercharged the Sydney and Melbourne property markets. In a new twist to the saga of the Australian Jock Palfreeman, 292 Bulgarian judges have signed a letter defending the appellate court’s decision to grant him parole, the ABC reports. And the Australian reports that the NDIA has overseen a threefold spending increase on contractors, recruiters and lawyers as it copes with a flood of new participants.
Coming up
A federal court judgment is due in a class action against Bellamy’s Australia, which makes baby formula.
Clive Palmer’s Queensland Nickel trial resumes in Brisbane.
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