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Editor's note
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It’s usually only during elections that we need to brush up on specialist terms like dividend imputation. But this time around we are being called on to understand one soon after the election. It’s “deeming”. Before the election it wasn’t much of an issue because interest rates had remained on hold since 2016. Since the election, they’ve been cut twice. And “deeming rates” have remained unchanged.
The government has promised to review them amid cries that they have become a new “retiree tax”. It’ll be hard to make sense of the review, and the very expensive budget decisions that might result, without first understanding what they are and why we have them.
As I outline in today’s explainer they began as a way to stop people cheating in order to get the pension. They’ve arguably morphed into a means by which the government can cheat people out of entitlements.
Meanwhile, on this day 50 years ago, David Bowie released the now classic song Space Oddity. As Mitch Goodwin writes, the track was originally commissioned as a novelty song for a promotional film. But the melancholic tale of Major Tom, floating in his tin can in space, became ‘a cultural touchstone for a historic moment of human engineering and blind courage’.
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Peter Martin
Visiting Fellow
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Top stories
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Deeming rates began as a way to stop people cheating in order to obtain the pension.
Shutterstock
Peter Martin, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
It's a good idea to deem income, but of late we've doing it badly.
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David Bowie in the film clip for Space Oddity: the song would become an anthem for space exploration with an enduring appeal.
YouTube
Mitch Goodwin, University of Melbourne
Fifty years ago, on July 11, 1969, David Bowie released Space Oddity. With its adventurous orchestration, unsettling harmonics and melancholy narrative, the now classic song captured a moment.
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Wes Mountain/The Conversation
Graeme Smith, Australian National University
How does China go about winning back the hearts and minds of the world? Its obsession with control and misplaced soft power efforts are clearly not doing it any favours.
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Business + Economy
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Thalia Anthony, University of Technology Sydney
Queensland's payment to settle a stolen wages class action marks the first recognition that these claims have legal as well as moral and political merit.
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Science + Technology
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Milovan Savic, Swinburne University of Technology; Kath Albury, Swinburne University of Technology
In order to reach younger audiences, social media apps must get past the gatekeepers of preteen online engagement: the parents.
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Hanika Rizo, Carleton University; David Murphy, Queensland University of Technology; Denis Andrault, Université Clermont Auvergne
New findings suggest the core has been leaking for the past 2.5 billion years, and that could help scientists understand how the core was formed.
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Education
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Graeme Gardiner, University of Southern Queensland; Gail Ormsby, University of Southern Queensland; Luke van der Laan, University of Southern Queensland
Previous studies that explored whether chess improves children's cognitive abilities have had mixed results. We found playing chess wasn't linked to better standardised test scores.
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Cities
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Tony Dalton, RMIT University; Andrew Hollows, RMIT University
Without a place to live it is nearly impossible to take care of your mental health needs.The upcoming Royal Commission should recognise the connection between stable housing and mental health.
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Environment + Energy
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Trevor Thornton, Deakin University
Australia doesn't want to deal with its own recycling waste, so why do we think other countries should do it for us?
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Elizabeth Sinclair, University of Western Australia; Charlotte Birkmanis, University of Western Australia; Robert Pemberton, University of Western Australia
This year's national conference of the Australian Marine Science Association is a plastic-free zone, as marine scientists aim to reduce the environmental burden of throwaway plastic.
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Health + Medicine
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Lauren Bloomfield, Edith Cowan University
The flu vaccine is built on the strains expected to circulate in a given year. While the majority of strains circulating this year are matched in the vaccine, there's one strain we didn't predict.
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Gillian Oliver, Monash University; Peter Bragge, Monash University
Patient information dumped on the side of the road in Brisbane recently has raised the issue of how hospitals and clinics manage their old paper records.
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Arts + Culture
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David Thomas Henry Wright, Murdoch University
Digital writers use innovative tools to tell new and complex stories. In contrast to e-books, their works depend on electronic code to exist.
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Politics + Society
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Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra
Ken Wyatt, the Minister for Indigenous Australians, announced plans to hold a referendum to enshrine constitutional recognition of Australia's Indigenous peoples during this parliamentary term.
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Shahram Akbarzadeh, Deakin University
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani staked his political fortunes on bringing Iran out of isolation. Now, it appears he's losing control to hard-liners in Iran.
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Featured jobs
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Deakin University — Geelong, Victoria
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Featured events
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