Bedside hearing for teen facing terror charge

Stephanie Smail: Hello and welcome to The World Today. It's Friday the 19th of April. I'm Stephanie Smail coming to you from the lands of the Turrbal and Yugera people in Brisbane. Today, concerns increasingly desperate renters are falling victim to social media scammers and at the top of her game, but near the bottom of the pay scale, American basketball champion Caitlin Clark's skills are drawing all the attention, but only a fraction of the male player's earnings.

Lorraine Landon: People need to continue to voice their disappointment and their, you know, anger in some instances where the equity is so different. They then will realise that these are our customers. We need to support what our customers want.

Stephanie Smail: After a week of shock and grief in Sydney following two major stabbings, a teenager is now facing a terrorism charge. The 16-year-old boy, who allegedly stabbed a bishop during a church service in Sydney's south-west, has faced a bedside hearing where his lawyer didn't apply for bail. Experts say it's likely he was influenced by others. Alison Xiao reports.

Alison Xiao: It's one of the most serious criminal offences in Australia. A 16-year-old boy accused of a stabbing attack at a Sydney church has now been charged with engaging in a terrorist act, potentially facing a life sentence.

Karen Webb: Police from the Joint Counter Terrorism Team attended a medical facility last night to interview the boy and he was subsequently charged with a Commonwealth offence for terrorism.

Alison Xiao: That's New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb.

Karen Webb: The incident relates to the stabbing of the bishop, we allege, on Monday night that was stabbed up to six times. We also allege that the boy had travelled for 90 minutes to attend that location from his home address.

Alison Xiao: Terrorism expert Professor Greg Barton says charges of this nature are rare.

Greg Barton: Thankfully in Australia, police do a very good job of detecting terrorist plots and disrupting them. So what we often see is charges laid of acts of preparation for an act of terror. We thankfully very seldom see somebody who's actually gone ahead and done something. But thankfully no one's died, including the perpetrator, alleged perpetrator, and therefore they're able to speak about their motivation with the police. So that's an unusual set of circumstances.

Alison Xiao: He says while the focus for now is on the teenager involved, it's likely because of his age that others may have influenced him.

Greg Barton: It's very, very likely that there are other people in the life of this 16-year-old who bear culpability. The critical thing is determining who else may have been involved. First of all to limit risk and the possibility of further attempts on attacks being made, but also to bring about justice.

Alison Xiao: There's been ongoing debate in the community this week about the labelling of the church stabbing as a terrorist act compared to the Bondi stabbings, which was not. Dr Josh Roose from Deakin University says authorities need to better communicate and educate the public about terrorism.

Josh Roose: People do see, particularly those who aren't necessarily educated in the definitions of terrorism, do see potential contradictions in that we're prosecuting one life attack and not another that appears to be ideologically motivated.

Alison Xiao: Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw says police will be meeting with faith leaders to provide reassurance to the community and answer questions.

Reece Kershaw: We target criminality, not countries. We investigate radicalisation and not religion.

Alison Xiao: A court heard this morning that the 16-year-old had a long history of behaviour consistent with mental health issues. He will now undergo an assessment by a forensic psychologist. Gamel Kheir, secretary of the Lebanese Muslim Association, says that the terrorism charge has alarmed some in the community.

Gamel Kheir: There is the fear that there may be some underlying mental issues which we would like that to be further investigated and further determined.

Alison Xiao: Mr Kheir says his community is dealing with a rise in Islamophobia and continued threats to their mosques and he's concerned about further social division.

Gamel Kheir: There is a real fear in the community that there will be some sort of retaliation, whether it's directly or indirectly. Our fear is it plays into the stereotype of the right-wings that would love to believe that every incident that a Muslim person does has a terrorist connotation to it and that there's no integration with the Muslim community. Even when we have incidents like this, it should unite us and not divide us.

Alison Xiao: Mr Kheir says he's planning to meet with the parents of the 16-year-old boy over the coming days to check on their welfare. The teenager remains under police guard in hospital and did not appear in court in person or on video link. The case is due to return to court in June.

Stephanie Smail: Alison Xiao reporting.

As the housing squeeze gets worse across the country and rents hit record highs, tenants are using social media to find somewhere to live. But advocates are warning renters are becoming more vulnerable to subletting scams on platforms like Flatmates and Facebook marketplace. Gavin Coote reports.

Gavin Coote: As the hunt for an affordable rental property grows more desperate, many are looking well beyond the traditional real estate platforms.

Karyn Walsh: Oh yeah, people are looking everywhere, like social media, but a lot of local networks around where can you find an affordable rental.

Gavin Coote: Karyn Walsh is the CEO of Micah Projects, a not-for-profit based in Brisbane that works with people experiencing homelessness, domestic violence and poverty. She's alarmed by the number of Queenslanders she's meeting who have taken to social media to look for a roof over their heads.

Karyn Walsh: Look, we see a lot of people that have informal arrangements where they're living in garages, you know, we have had situations where people have been able to park their car in someone's driveway overnight and sleep in the car. So continuity is a real issue because really the only continuity is if you can get a lease that's affordable and the options for getting that right across Queensland and Brisbane are, you know, getting less and less.

Gavin Coote: And new analysis shows rent rises are outstripping any increases in income support for young renters. Homelessness Australia has found that a 16 to 17 year old sharing a property in Sydney is paying as much as 94% of their income towards rent. In Brisbane, young renters are paying more than 80% of their income. With the situation so precarious, there's concern renters are even more vulnerable to exploitation.

Jordan van den Berg: Hello, welcome back to the state of rentals in Australia. I'm your host, Purple Pingers. Today we're in Wingfield, South Australia for 400 bucks per week.

Gavin Coote: Jordan van de Berg is a housing advocate whose TikTok account, which reviews rental property listings, has almost 200,000 followers.

Jordan van den Berg: I've visited places where the carpet is like squelchy with water and there's asbestos just over the stove top. I don't even know how, like it looked dystopian.

Gavin Coote: He reckons some landlords and even tenants are taking advantage of a tough rental market.

Jordan van den Berg: You know, I've seen sometimes people even sublet with just like, you know, here you can rent part of my living room with like a little room divider and a mattress on the floor for like 300 bucks a week. And yeah, it's just really depressing that we're starting to see a lot more kind of profiteering on these sites from both landlords and I guess people sub-leasing with this kind of weird landlord mentality, even though they are a tenant.

Gavin Coote: And the reliance on online platforms is also putting prospective renters at risk of being scammed. Antonia Mercorella is the CEO of the Real Estate Institute of Queensland.

Antonia Mercorella: We've heard some really disturbing stories about scammers placing photographs of properties they don't own, pretending that they're available for rent. And sadly, we've seen a number of people literally handing over thousands of dollars and even in one case, organising a removalist only to discover, of course, that they had been completely duped.

Gavin Coote: Penny Carr, the chief executive officer of Tenants Queensland, wants tougher legal protections for renters, including the removal of no-grounds eviction.

Penny Carr: We're talking to people who had very big rent increases last year, so $100 and more per week. And now they're getting their second one. So this sort of sustained crisis that we've found ourselves in is really impacting on those people who are just being pushed into, they're either being pushed out of the property on the basis of the rent increase, or they stay there and struggle with an unaffordable rent and often get themselves into a pickle.

Stephanie Smail: Penny Carr from Tenants Queensland, ending that report by Gavin Coote.

Doctors are warning Australians are waiting longer than ever for planned essential surgeries. A new report from the Australian Medical Association shows the wait for elective surgery is double what it was 20 years ago. It's prompted calls for urgent action, with health experts saying patients are waiting in pain for life-changing operations. Alexandra Humphries reports.

Alexandra Humphries: Public hospital patients are languishing on waiting lists, left in limbo despite needing potentially life-saving surgery, diagnostic procedures or operations that are essential to restoring their quality of life. GP Danielle McMullen sees the consequences in her clinic.

Danielle McMullen: I've got patients waiting for hip surgery, knee surgery, back surgery and plenty of other conditions where they're waiting in pain.

Alexandra Humphries: The Australian Medical Association's latest public hospital report card paints a grim picture. The median national planned surgery wait time, also known as elective surgery, has increased to the highest level on record to 49 days. That's twice as long as 20 years ago. Dr McMullen is also the Australian Medical Association's Vice President.

Danielle McMullen: While we have seen the raw investment in health and in public hospitals increase over years, that hasn't kept pace with the increased complexity of illness. We're seeing an ageing population and so that means with more older Australians, with more chronic disease and more complex disease, the medical care that they require isn't as easy or as simple as it may have been 20 years ago.

Alexandra Humphries: Dr Sarah Whitelaw is the Emergency Medicine Representative for the Australian Medical Association.

Sarah Whitelaw: What we're in at the moment is this vicious cycle where as we wait longer for elective surgeries people are in pain, we estimate about 20% of people are unable to work, there's strain on carers, there's increasing mental health problems and what we see is complications from those waits.

Alexandra Humphries: The Federal Government has committed to boost public hospital funding from 2025, but the AMA argues more urgent action is needed. It wants Federal, State and Territory Health Ministers to agree on an emergency action plan to address the problem. They estimate an extra $4.1 billion in funding is needed to clear the backlog.

Sarah Whitelaw: It will cost money and we think that should be shared equally between the States and the Federal Government and an emergency two year plan though could get us out of that vicious cycle.

Alexandra Humphries: Professor Stephen Duckett is from the University of Melbourne's School of Population and Global Health. He says the findings demonstrate patients' experiences are getting worse.

Stephen Duckett: Since that height of the pandemic and that hospital disruption, we've had time to get our act together and to improve care and to start to bring those waiting times down and that hasn't happened and that's what this report is showing.

Alexandra Humphries: The report card also finds the number of hospital beds per 1,000 Australians aged over 65 is at its lowest number on record. Professor Duckett isn't too worried about that figure.

Stephen Duckett: But we've got to remember that health care is changing rapidly, more and more care can be delivered at home and in my view should be. Patients can be treated in what's called hospital in the home and more of that is happening and that is helping to free up capacity so we don't need as many beds now as we used to.

Alexandra Humphries: The Australian Medical Association is hopeful measures to address planned surgery wait times will be included in next month's Federal Budget.

Stephanie Smail: Alexandra Humphries reporting.

Australia's health ministers say they're united in their support of a crackdown on the sale of vapes. The state and territory ministers say federal legislation regulating vapes is needed to stop a new generation of Australians getting addicted to nicotine. They believe that one in six high school students and one in four young Australians aged between 18 and 24 are already vaping. Rachel Mealey reports.

Rachel Mealey: Australia's state and territory health ministers speak with one voice when it comes to vaping. They've issued a joint statement on the need to take action to protect young Australians. New South Wales Health Minister Ryan Park says the problem can't be overstated.

Ryan Park: I think it is the biggest public health crisis facing young people right now and this is an issue that has got a head of governments right across the board. And what we need to do now collectively as governments across Australia is try and reduce that supply and the availability of this product particularly to young people who it's marketed to.

Rachel Mealey: Legislation currently before the federal parliament aims to crack down on the sale of vapes in Australia. If passed it would force vape stores to close by preventing advertising, supply and commercial possession and the domestic manufacture of non-prescription vapes. Minister Ryan Park says regulating the sale is the only way forward.

Ryan Park: Well look what we support is focusing on a prescription based model because what these products were designed to do is based on some research, not you know very clear, but some research indicates that they can assist people getting off cigarettes. So that's our focus but it'll have to be done through a prescription based model. They'll be then available through pharmacies in that way. What we don't support is what has essentially happened is these products that 97% of them contain nicotine marketed to a generation of young people that we don't want to see hooked on nicotine and face the same challenges that we did with tobacco and cigarette smoking in the last century. We have to move on this.

Rachel Mealey: Disposable vapes are commonplace in schoolyards across the country. They feature flavours like watermelon and bubblegum. Adjunct Professor Terry Slevin is the Chief Executive of the Public Health Association of Australia. He says allowing vape stores to operate alongside convenience stores should never have been allowed.

Terry Slevin: The vaping industry has lost its social license to operate. It's flouted laws all around the country. It's mis-labelled its products. The simple reality that more than half of the vaping products that have been tested that have been labelled as being non-nicotine containing, actually having nicotine as a constituency of the product, tells us we can't trust these people, tells us their deliberate strategy is to addict a new generation of customers and it also tells us that they will stop at nothing to make the enormous profits that they've been making.

Rachel Mealey: He's urging the Senate to listen to the nation's health ministers and pass the legislation.

Terry Slevin: So the balance that this legislation has to pass in the State's House, and that's what the Senate is, it's the State's House as our Constitution determines, should pay attention to the urgent attention that the States want the Government to pay when it comes to addressing this problem. This is not only in Australia, it's an international problem and the legislation that the Federal Government has put forward is world leading. So we urge every Senator to examine their conscience and ensure they're not influenced by the industry that's been very aggressive and very clever in the way they've put their marketing in place.

Rachel Mealey: The Government hopes the laws can be in place by July 1st. Coalition parties and the Greens have expressed their concerns but haven't yet declared how they'll vote.

Stephanie Smail: Rachel Mealy reporting.

India's super-sized elections are underway and the scale of the world's biggest democratic exercise is staggering. About a billion people are eligible to vote over seven different polling days across a huge area. To unpack these numbers and discuss the political landscape, I spoke earlier to Priya Chacko, who's an Associate Professor of International Politics at the University of Adelaide. Priya, thanks for joining us. Can you give us more of a scale of this voting exercise and the resources it takes to pull it off?

Priya Chacko: This is probably India's biggest election. There are about 970 million voters going to the polls. There are a million ballot boxes, 18 million first-time voters and India's a very big country with remote locations. So the Election Commission has to employ 15 million people to travel all over the country to reach all the voters. It's a very expensive election. All of this is predicted to cost about $12 billion.

Stephanie Smail: Who is the front-runner and what are some of the key issues for voters?

Priya Chacko: The front-runner is the ruling party, the BJP and Narendra Modi. Surveys show that the key issues for voters are inflation and unemployment as well and development. So economic issues are really high on voters' minds. These are all issues that the ruling party hasn't done very well on, actually. Inflation is higher than ever, unemployment is higher than ever and development has been very patchy. So I think the ruling party is hoping to get by on the support for Narendra Modi, who has cultivated a bit of a personality cult in India.

Stephanie Smail: So how is this ballot likely to shape the future of India and its relationship with neighbours like Australia?

Priya Chacko: This election is really consequential because it will shape the future of democracy in India and that will have enormous impact on not just Indians but everyone else in the world as well. India is such a big country and this government has shown that it's willing to use foreign policy to consolidate its autocratic rule in India through, for instance, transnational repression. So India is now being accused of assassinating dissidents in other countries. It's willing to use wars, for instance, with Pakistan to gain votes in India. So if Modi gets a majority, he will feel free to govern and concentrate power in ways that will take India closer to an autocratic regime.

Stephanie Smail: So who then are Prime Minister Modi's main opponents?

Priya Chacko: So the main opposition is an India alliance and that's made up of the Congress party, which is the main national opposition, as well as a bunch of regional parties. I'm not sure that people are convinced that the opposition has all the answers. So it's difficult to know how well the opposition is going to do.

Stephanie Smail: But do you think it will be considered a free and fair election?

Priya Chacko: This is probably the least free and fair election that India has ever had and it's because of the way the government is treating opposition leaders. One very prominent opposition leader is currently in jail. The opposition party, the Congress Party, has had its funding frozen so it can't campaign as effectively as it needs to. The independent press is under pressure. The mainstream press is very pro-Modi. Independent media are being arrested. They're having tax investigations against them so they can't use their resources properly. And all of these factors mean that the election really can't be considered free and fair, unfortunately.

Stephanie Smail: That's Priya Chacko, an Associate Professor of International Politics at the University of Adelaide.

Caitlin Clark is fast becoming the biggest name in women's basketball. She's the number one draft pick in the American Women's Basketball League and her final college level game was the most watched in decades. Despite all this, she's paid a fraction of what the men earn. Angus Randall reports.

SNL skit: The University of Iowa announced that basketball star Caitlin Clark will have her jersey retired and replaced with an apron.

Angus Randall: This is not a stand-up piece from the 70s. It's a joke from last week's Saturday Night Live about WNBA number one pick Caitlin Clark. The emerging basketball star popped up on the show to get her own back.

Caitlin Clark: Since you're such a big fan, I brought you a souvenir. It's an apron signed by me.

Angus Randall: But it's not the only time this week the 22-year-old has dealt with sexism. A reporter made a heart sign with his hands during her first press conference with the Indiana Fever.

Caitlin Clark: I do that at my family after every game, so it's pretty cool.

Journalist: Start doing it to me and we'll get along just fine.

Angus Randall: Her salary as a number one pick is also making headlines. She'll earn $118,000 in her first year. Pretty decent money, but compared to the men's first pick, it's pocket change. The latest NBA number one pick, Victor Wembanyama, is making more than $18 million in his first year. He earns Caitlin Clark's salary every three days. The disparity has attracted the attention of US President Joe Biden in a social media post he called for equality.

Joe Biden voiceover: It's time that we give our daughters the same opportunities as our sons and ensure women are paid what they deserve.

Angus Randall: Lorraine Landon worked in Australian basketball for five decades as a player, coach and administrator. She's in the Sport Australia Hall of Fame for her service to the sport.

Lorraine Landon : I think people need to continue to voice their disappointment and their anger in some instances where the equity is so different. And I think that they then will realise that these are our customers. We need to support what our customers want in the marketplace.

Angus Randall: The NBA brings in around $4.3 billion in its media deals compared to around $100 million in the WNBA. And male players earn 50% of the league's revenue, while women receive about 10% in their league. Lorraine Landon says the increasing passion for women's basketball gives the league more bargaining power.

Lorraine Landon : And until such time as there's TV rights similar to the NBA or other sports, then it won't happen. I think it's going to come, but I think it's still a little way off.

Angus Randall: Three Australians were selected in the WNBA draft. Isobel Borlase comes from South Australian sporting royalty. Her father played nearly 250 games in the SANFL, her mother was a champion netballer, and her brother is lining up tonight for the Adelaide Crows. She's been picked up by the Atlanta Dream.

Isobel Borlase: It's just a waiting game because you've got no control over and have no idea what the teams are thinking. So yeah, it was a lot of anticipation, but yeah, relief it's all done.

Angus Randall: Adelaide Lightning coach Nat Hurst says women's basketball closer to home is growing in strength.

Nat Hurst: Oh, we've got some, you know, amazing talent here and, you know, kids at college, we've got juniors coming up through, you know, it's super healthy and it's really exciting.

Angus Randall: For those in the top tier of women's sport, there's money to be made beyond their yearly salary through corporate sponsorships. Caitlin Clark is expected to sign a multi-million dollar deal with shoe company Nike, making her one of the highest earning female athletes in the country.

Stephanie Smail: Angus Randall reporting, and that's all from the World Today team. Thanks for your company. I'm Stephanie Smail.