Australia’s Most Mentioned Issues in the News (August 6 – 12, 2016)
Editor’s Note: Welcome to this weekly recap of Australia’s news, powered by iSentia
A week into the Olympics, Australia is fourth place on the medal tally, winning 12 so far, with the United States in first place with 32. Australian swimmer Emma McKeon is leading local medalists, racking up a gold, silver and bronze so far. Kyle Chalmers won the first gold medal for Australia in the men's 100m freestyle since 1968, and is the youngest at 18 since Ian Thorpe to win a gold medal for the country. Australian basketball players, the Boomers, lead against the U.S. team by two in a close last quarter before being defeated 98-88, and swimmer Cate Campbell continues to break world records in her heats. PM Malcolm Turnbull said he is “angry and bitterly disappointed” about Tuesday night’s online Census attempt, citing failures on the part of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and systems provider IBM. The Census website was brought back online Thursday afternoon, after hackers reportedly made a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, leading to the site overloading and suffering hardware failures. A review of the outage is now underway, and the Privacy Commissioner is investigating.After the Reserve Bank cut its cash rate target to a new low of 1.5 per cent, in a reported effort to increase inflation, major banks have been criticized by the government for not passing on the full rate cut to customers. Commonwealth Bank CEO Ian Narev said periods of prolonged low interest rates make it harder for banks to deliver record profits, and PM Malcolm Turnbull announced the heads of Australia’s big four banks will be called before Parliament’s economics committee once a year to explain their interest rates and other corporate decisions. The Labor Party is instead calling for a Royal Commission into the sector. U.S. Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has been criticized for appearing to suggest his supporters could stop his rival, Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, from making judicial nominations by exercising their gun rights. Famous statistician Nate Silver, who successfully predicted 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 election, has given Donald Trump a 15 per cent chance of winning at last count, with almost 100 days until voting begins and polls in Clinton’s favor. The Guardian Australia released more than 2,000 incident reports leaked from the Nauru detention centre this week, reportedly revealing children are vastly over-represented as victims of alleged sexual abuse, assault, and self-harm. The leaks reportedly come from eyewitness accounts of caseworkers, guards, teachers, medical officers and child protection officers. Quote of the week: “If you’ve cheated, you’ve cheated” – Retired Olympics legend Michael Johnson, in support of gold medallist Mack Horton’s comments about Sun Yang
