Listen to the full show podcast with Michael Mclaren

Suzette Meade, President of the North Parramatta Residents Action Group, who have met with treasury and delivered a business case for a cultural precinct on the 30ha State government owned heritage grounds at north Parramatta.

 

As reports & documents became available under pressure from community, museum professionals & heritage experts, the group says it has become increasingly clear that Parramatta is not getting the museum it was promised. 

 

Instead it would be a monster flexible event space with residential level that will demolish Parramatta’s already diminishing heritage assets with Willow Grove & St Georges Terraces.

 

The group have been strongly campaigning for the Museum of NSW to be created in the Fleet Street Heritage Precinct instead of closing the Powerhouse Museum in Ultimo.

Listen to the full show podcast with Michael McLaren.

With about one-third of taxpayers about to do their own tax returns, Michael is joined by Heather Moore, Chartered Tax & Business Advisor / Associate Director at NKH Knight Financial Services, for some timely advice on what deductions can be claimed for those having worked from home during COVID-19 lockdown.

The tax office has already announced that they’re expecting to see a drop in claims related to laundry and travel expenses, as fewer people attended their normal workplace for the final quarter of the 2020 financial year.

In many cases, the number of kilometres travelled for work purposes will also have dropped for FY2020 compared to last year’s tax return.

If your claims look really high compared to other people in the same income level and same occupation, and perhaps even in the same location, the ATO has warned that they might have to ask questions on the claim.

Listen to the full show podcast with Michael Mclaren

Michael is joined by Robert Borsak, NSW Upper House Member & Leader of the Shooters Fishers & Farmers party, who was chair of the Parliamentary Inquiry into Museums and Galleries that ran from 2016 to 2018, who says in the moving of the Powerhouse Museum from its present location, that “there is no doubt that this is about a government grab for inner city real estate.”

 

The new museum will be constructed on a flood-prone site alongside Parramatta River with a 2016 flood study finding much of the site fell within one-in-20 and one-in-100-year flood levels and was also subject to localised flooding.

 

Wide campaigning during late 2015 and early 2016 by many individuals and organisations, including the Powerhouse Museum Alliance, successfully gained over 12,000 signatures on a petition to keep the Powerhouse Museum at its Ultimo site while also supporting a specific cultural facility in Parramatta.

Listen to the full show podcast with Michael Mclaren

Michael speaks to Leo Schofield, Ad man, Journalist, Food Critic & former trustee of the Powerhouse Museum, who writes that with the unnecessary moving of the Ultimo Powerhouse ‘we are about to witness one of the most shameful acts of cultural vandalism in the history of this country’.

 

Mr Schofield writes, ‘On June 30, the NSW government will shut down to the public the Powerhouse Museum in Ultimo, where it has existed as both a landmark and an attraction for 134 years, and gradually demolish it to make way for sale of the site to a preferred developer.’

 

‘This operation has, in my opinion, been deliberately and falsely described as a "relocation". It is no such thing. To me, it is the wholesale destruction of a much loved institution and its replacement with another entity that will bear as much relation to the current museum as a Picasso does to a postcard. Only a miserable group of objects will be displayed in a smaller, uglier building in distant Parramatta.’

Listen to the full show podcast with Michael Mclaren

Michael is joined by Gary Morgan, Chairman of Roy Morgan Research, who says the latest ABS figures were “phony” and called on the government to revise the definitions.

 

“The current definitions were made up after the Second World War,” he said.

 

“Things have changed a lot. There’s far more women and part-timers in the workforce. People change jobs more.”

 

Mr Morgan, whose company produces its own survey-based jobless rate, notes that there are now far more women and part-time workers in the workforce, and people change jobs more.

 

Record uncertainty about the job market and doubts over the relevance of the 'official' ABS unemployment rate have prompted calls for more information on the number of welfare recipients and a rethink of how 'unemployed' is defined.