From the Crikey grapevine, the latest tips and rumours …

Government spends up on Uber jobs for young people. It’s fair to say most of the country has (rightly) been focused on the results of the marriage equality postal survey this week , but that doesn’t mean the government isn’t doing anything else. On Tuesday the government announced a plan to spend $1.4 million on a platform to get 80 unemployed young Australians work in the gig economy — through apps like Uber and Airtasker. The announcement came from the Department of Social Services, with a fact sheet saying:

“A digital platform will connect unemployed former students with short-term employment opportunities in the task-based [gig] economy. Jobs could include gardening, driving and delivery, catering and hospitality and child minding.”

The government has no idea if the plan, which would be training people for industries that have been accused of underpaying and exploiting workers, will actually work. A spokesperson for the department told InnovationAus:

“The purpose of these initiatives is to test whether an intervention works to reduce long-term reliance on welfare. It is not possible to predict success rates in advance – this is the purpose of testing new approaches.”

A timely reminder for our MPs. If the past few weeks of the Section 44 citizenship fiasco have proved anything, it’s that many Australians with British heritage have never questioned (or had it questioned to them) their sense of belonging in Australia — and perhaps not paid a whole heap of attention to their family trees. How lucky for Stephen Parry, Jacqui Lambie, John Alexander and Fiona Nash, that the Immigration Museum in Melbourne is about to start an exhibition specifically about immigrants from Britain (especially 10 Pound Poms). We got particularly interested at this point in the advertising sell:

“Between 1947 and 1981 nearly 1.5 million Brits arrived in an Australia that was predominantly white and British — it had worked hard to be so. Newcomers from Britain had all the advantages of a shared language, culture and history. So fitting in should be easy. But reality is never that simple.

What did the British actually experience? What did this mass migration mean for Australia at the time? What does all this mean for us today?”

Reality is never so simple as just fitting in, is it?

That’s not how you watch TV. The PM has copped a bit of a ribbing this week over his television choices — not what he watches, but how he watches it. First, there was the television on the floor as Malcolm Turnbull watched the results for the postal survey come in, and then it was this weird set up for watching the Socceroos. The television is sitting on a mantel piece at a weird angle to the PM’s chair, cords all over the place. After the $12 million reno job on The Lodge, you’d think the TV set up could be a bit better. The PMO tweeted this pic, only to get a response from an electrician in Melbourne offering to do a decent job of installing the cables.

Probably not the desired effect, but we hope the PM gets a good set-up out of this.

*Heard anything that might interest Crikey? Send your tips to boss@crikey.com.au, use our guaranteed anonymous form or other ways to leak to us securely