The shrinking British child

ACTU secretary, Sally McManus, said this year’s increase would “really help millions of working people to stay afloat”.

“It is a critical increase during this cost-of-living crisis,” she said.

“As it does every year, big business pushed hard for a cut that would see Australia’s lowest paid workers go backwards by at least $1350 a year.

“We call on the Reserve Bank not to raise interest rates again… as this would obliterate the raise low-paid workers have just gained.”

The employment minister, Tony Burke, welcomed the commission’s decision as “the best decision for workers we’ve ever had”.

He said it was “dreadful” some would interpret the wage increase as elevating the risk of higher interest rates.

British five-year-olds are getting shorter and experts attribute the trend to austerity policies that have impoverished lives. Previous studies had shown there was a slower increase in the average height of British five-year-olds after 1985. But recent research has shown that since the mid-2010s, things have got dramatically worse and the average height of five-year-olds has gone down.

“The link between height, nutrition and social circumstances can already be seen in childhood. There is a neat gradient – the greater the deprivation, the shorter the child,” said Prof. Michael Marmot, Director of the Institute of Health Equity at University College London.

Marmot said “it is really bad to be poor in Britain” and that health inequalities have increased during years of austerity. Health among the poorest people is in a state of decline, he added.

“Incomes of the poorest 10 per cent are way below those in other European countries. It means that people of low income cannot afford the basics of food, shelter and home heating.

“Both Conservatives and Labour in Britain put high priority on economic growth. I would rather see a reduction in health inequalities and growth in the height of five-year-old children. That way we will know that we have an economy that is really delivering for the health and wellbeing of all.”

‘Sports rorts for hospitals’

The Australian National Audit Office slams the Morrison government for mismanagement of health grants.

A review by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) found that a $2 billion Morrison government health and hospitals funding program was “ineffective and fell short of ethical requirements”, the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) reported.

The ANAO found grants were awarded to health projects despite being inconsistent with the rules for awarding Commonwealth funds, and nearly half of all the projects that were funded were in marginal seats.

The SMH said the Health Department “was reduced to monitoring the media to keep track of which projects had been selected for funding by the former Coalition government”.

Independent MP Helen Haines told the SMH the “report shows an appalling abuse of public trust. I am shocked that even our health care could be pork barrelled”.

“This could be sports rorts for hospitals,” she said, referring to a $100 million sports funding program that was also subject to a scathing ANAO review in 2020.

Funding highlighted as problematic by the report included a $4 million grant to the Esther Foundation, which provided counselling services and is now in voluntary administration, a $5 million grant to the Lord Somers Camp, a sporting organisation in Victoria, and a $25 million project to expand the Peel Health Campus in Western Australia in Liberal MP Andrew Hastie’s seat.

The earth enters unknown territory

A study warns we have exceeded seven of the eight variables for maintaining a healthy and just planet. In 2009, a team of renowned environmental scientists published an “extraordinarily influential” article in Nature magazine arguing that planet-altering human activities could be assembled into nine groups.

Thresholds were calculated for most of them, beyond which the result could spell danger for the planet and its people. At the time the scientists concluded that humanity has crossed three of these nine “planetary boundaries”.

An update on this research by the international scientist group Earth Commission has found that seven out of eight of the original thresholds have now been crossed.

The eight “planetary boundaries” are climate, natural ecosystem area, ecosystem functional integrity, surface water, groundwater, nitrogen, phosphorus, and aerosols.

Adding environmental justice to this list has led the authors to advocate that global warming should be limited to 1°C above pre-industrial levels. This is lower than the 1.5°C target agreed at the 2015 Paris climate conference.

The authors reason that keeping to 1.5°C might well enable the world’s more-affluent people to protect themselves, but it would create significant harm for the most vulnerable.

“Exceeding these boundaries is like entering completely unknown territory with conditions where we don’t know how the planet will behave,” one of the researchers, Daniel Ospina, told the Spanish newspaper El País.

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