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 Democracy overboard: Rupert Murdoch's long war on Australian politics | Kevin Rudd | Opinion | The Guardian

Australia has become a dangerously complacent country, dancing to the reactionary tune of the Murdoch press (Rudd)

The time has come for a full royal commission into the ownership and operation of the media in this country. Murdoch has too much power. The rest of the print media is now heading to the right. The ABC, under systemic editorial and budgetary attack, its board repoliticised by the government in defiance of the ABC Reform Act (2012), is now frightened of its own shadow. And social media offers no credible alternative as a common, neutral platform for any form of national political conversation.
Taken together with Clive Palmer’s $60m paid campaign against Labor leading up to the last election (the likes of which we have never seen before in our politics), the growing swagger of the conservative’s general assault on the independence of the public service and other national institutions like the ABC, together with the new intellectual respectability now being accorded the authoritarian right both in this country and across the west, we can no longer simply assume, in the absence of fundamental reform, that the Australian democratic project as we have know it for the last 100 years will necessarily remain the permanent condition of our politics for the future.

Only one Pacific Island language is taught in Australia — soon China will teach seven 

 Australia we are such losers languages aren't taught in our schools or Tertiary Institutes, Radio Australia was cancelled by Abbott;s "No Cuts to the ABC" and China is filling the void. (ODT)

China is pushing for more university students to learn Pacific Island languages — an area where Australia and New Zealand are falling behind.

  

ATO's treatment of whistleblowers 'scandalous', says submission to federal inquiry

 Australia's tax watchdog should be given powers to protect whistleblowers that make public interest disclosures, according to submissions to a federal inquiry.