10 things you need to know this morning in Australia

Happy Monday. The end of the year is in sight.

1. After the Grill'd CEO sent a panicked email to staff the other week prefacing a negative story about the burger company, we've all been waiting to find out what it was. Turns out it was about five stories, as part of an investigation led by Adele Ferguson for the SMH and The Age. The company has been dinged for low wages and food safety, exploiting traineeships, and treating its franchisees poorly. Oh, and forging details on a liquor license. Seems the only thing they didn't do was, I don't know, illegally sell nuclear weapons to terrorists.

2. Anthony Albanese has drawn a line in the sand. The Labor Party leader says Australia should continue to export coal while striving to meet its emissions targets, arguing the global need for coal would be met anyway. “If Australia stopped exporting today there would not be less demand for coal – the coal would come from a different place,” Albanese said in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. It will be interesting to see how Labor's incredibly delicate balancing act between its two core constituencies, basically pleasing neither of them 100%, will pay off.

3. Australian graphic design platform and unicorn Canva has announced a slew of new features and products for 2020. The announcements, which include a video editing offering and a free tier of the product for schools, clearly represent the brand trying to branch out and establish itself as more than just a slick graphics tool for newbies. Considering it has been lavished with an eye-popping valuation of $4.7 billion – in a time when people are increasingly skeptical of sky-high valuations – that's probably quite necessary.

4. Despite mounting controversies and the government's eagerness to take action against the tech titan, a recent survey has found Google is the brand with the strongest reputation in Australia. The Brand Institute of Australia’s 2019 National Reputation Health Report found Google was the strongest when taking into account seven factors, which drive brand reputation. Coming in at second was Bunnings – which has dealt with its own share of controversy, but perhaps not to the extent of Google.

5. It was revealed at the tail end of last week the government is paying TV tradie Scott Cam $345,000 over two years as a 'national careers ambassador'. Cam's role is to encourage young people to consider vocational education and a trade – not a bad gig if you can get it. Before the dollar figure was revealed in Senate estimates, the government claimed Cam's salary was "commercial in confidence".

6. In 2017, Finland tested a government-backed, unconditional basic income test – the first country in Europe to do so. It was widely considered a failure, but now many researchers believe the test was fundamentally flawed. “It [was] barely a test of basic income,” one researcher said. “At best, it is a test of a very limited basic income in an extremely specific context for an extremely specific population.” It comes as one US presidential candidate, Andrew Yang, has made UBI a core part of his platform.

7. Gossip from Uber's London Christmas party suggests the company's legal team thinks they'll beat the ban in the city. One likely argument Uber will make is that a ban of the entire company from the entire city is a disproportionate response given what is alleged – that 14 drivers out of 45,000 had falsified their identities.

8. Netflix has been forced to deny it blocked a user who spoiled the plot for one of its shows on Twitter. A Twitter user called "Muعad" posted a thread explaining how the upcoming show "Messiah" was a rip of the Islamic tale of al-Massih ad-Dajjal, meaning "deceiver Messiah." The company told Insider it had "not blocked this user", despite his claim.

https://twitter.com/Sultaan_Mo1/status/1201975354572845058?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1201975354572845058&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.insider.com%2Fnetflix-denies-blocking-twitter-user-exposed-messiah-plot-famous-story-2019-12

9. Silicon Valley's newest startup trend is... shoeless offices. I think there's something in the water over there. Apparently, the trend involves providing 'shoe cubbies' and letting staff spend the workday in slippers, socks, or going barefoot. Sounds very homely.

10. Scandal: British GQ apparently removed China’s President Xi Jinping and Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn from its list of the world’s worst-dressed men out of fear of causing offence. “We are conscious that digitally published stories travel globally and can gain traction where they lack the necessary context and can cause unintended offence,” a spokesperson said. You probably could have foreseen that one.

BONUS ITEM
Here's a fun end-of-decade list for you: the 39 best scientific discoveries of the past decade. No flying cars yet, but we did find the "God particle", which I suppose is pretty cool.