Rape

• Australians could be forgiven for feeling weary of political scandals.
• For reporters and pundits, scandals generate excitement and drama, something more novel than the tedium of day-to-day political processes.

Flying high

• Consequently, the public and press have been quick to anger when politicians are caught misusing or abusing their taxpayer-funded travel entitlements.
• But his new Senate leader, John Gorton, took a different approach, tabling all the hidden documents in the Senate.
• Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who had originally appointed his “political mother” Bishop to the role, found his position weakened too.

Mining for misdemeanours

• In the colonial era, wealthy landholders and squatters sought to influence parliamentarians with monetary bribes.
• In 1869, a Victorian parliamentary select committee found that pastoralists and investors, led by the highly influential squatter and speculator Hugh Glass, had engaged in “corrupt practices”.
• Glass and his peers had kept a fund of money for bribing MPs during debates about land reform.
• In 1930, federal treasurer and former Queensland premier Ted Theodore was forced to resign, pending an inquiry into his financial affairs.

Pork-barrelling

• Is pork-barrelling – the art of directing public funds and grants to marginal electorates – a form of corruption?
• Much of it goes unpunished, but occasionally an egregious case arouses the public ire.
• Read more:
  View from The Hill: Bridget McKenzie falls – but for the lesser of her political sins

Grey areas

• But sometimes, sex scandals are newsworthy for their own sake, public administration aside.
• In 1975, Deputy Prime Minister Jim Cairns and one of his staff, Junie Morosi, found themselves at the centre of a media scandal.
• As his recent biographer Sean Scalmer put it, the inquiry was “a hammer blow” to this “would-be gentleman”.
• Read more:
  Welcome to the new (old) moralism: how the media's coverage of the Joyce affair harks back to the 1950s

Why scandals matter

• Scandals matter because they illuminate the tensions that shape our political processes.
• A core pillar of responsible government is that ministers are accountable to parliament.
• There have been many innovations in Australian politics in the hope of minimising corruption and avoiding scandal.

Joshua Black is affiliated with the Australian Historical Association, and the Whitlam Institute at WSU.

• Charlene Jeffs escaped the fundamentalist cult, her testimony helping to bring the church’s leadership to justice—including Charlene’s husband, Lyle Jeffs.
• A modern-day heroine of women’s rights, Charlene now shares her breathtaking memoir, Tell Your Heart To Beat Again, chronicling the path to freedom and reclamation of agency.
• This incredible book begins with Charlene’s carefree upbringing in fundamentalist Mormonism, winds through her shifting adolescence, and unveils the confusion and hurt of her marriage.
• Written to help those recovering from religious trauma, sexual manipulation, and high-control relationships, Tell Your Heart To Beat Again is living proof that life after abuse exists—and that it can be more beautiful than we dare to hope.

• (Link Article: https://www.mdpi.com/2037-0164/14/4/77 )
  “The ability to scale breeding in a precise and repeatable process is the central breakthrough of our high-speed breeding process, which we refer to as the Trait Machine™ System.
• Here, we demonstrate two case studies of improving oleic oil content and developing pod shatter reduction in Brassica napus by using gene editing tools on an industrial scale.
• There are four BnaFAD2 genes involved in oleic oil content and eight BnaSHP genes involved in pod shatter tolerance.
• In order to develop these two traits, we delivered nuclease ribonucleoproteins with Gene Repair Oligonucleotides (GRONs) into protoplasts, with subsequent regeneration into plants on an industrial scale, which encompassed robust tissue culture protocols, efficient gene editing, robotics sampling, and molecular screening, vigorous plant regeneration, growth, and phenotyping.

• NEW HAVEN, Conn., Nov. 10, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nema Health (Nema) , a virtual treatment program delivering evidence-based care for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), announced today it has closed a $4.1 million seed round.
• The fundraise was co-led by Optum Ventures and .406 Ventures, with participation from GreyMatter Capital and additional angel investors.
• Nema also announced the launch of its care program in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut with a national insurance partner.
• The company plans to expand nationwide and to partner with other commercial insurance plans, as well as Medicaid and Medicare.