RSA Daily

For atheists, rationalists and secular humanists in Australia

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Good morning ,

Ziggy Switkovski's report into the governance, culture and accountability at PwC identifies the usual problems of large organisations, mostly focused on internal systems. In my view (and my PhD was in Organisation Theory), the main problem is the structure of these large audit, accounting and consulting firms: they are run by internally elected partners (and Switkovski's review specifically excludes this factor). The same problem applies at big law firms. For all their shortcomings, at least large corporates have boards with some independence and accountability to shareholders (and shareholder activist firms).

Lead stories

New research by Roy Morgan suggests the bad image of corporations spreads beyond the PwC tax scandal: there's also the data breaches at Optus and Medibank, the Harvey Norman JobKeeper scandal, Rio Tinto’s destruction of the Juukan Gorge, Qantas’ refusal to pay back any of the $2.7 billion in COVID government handouts and the class action by hundreds of thousands of customers fuelled by the airline’s unwillingness to refund $2 billion in cancelled flights.

In Crikey, Leslie Cannold writes of theretiring chairman of US joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, "I see Milley as a moral hero".

Pauline McGrath suspects her husband’s decision to die was hastened by his fear of ending up in a Catholic palliative care facility that might have denied him access to voluntary assisted dying.

Other stories of interest

New theory of Alzheimer's: Recovery of lost memories, in mice

It could be "loss of nerve cell connections", not beta-amyloid plaques. 

Oxford Was The Murder Capital of Late Medieval England, And It Was All Because of Students

"Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers."

Dementia leading cause of death in women in 2022

Former Qantas CEO faces jail threat if he fails to appear at Senate inquiry

Though Monique Ryan says it's an "empty threat".

Got a comment on any of these stories? 

Write to me at president@rationalist.com.au

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