Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
‘Australia is not naive’ to threats of foreign interference, PM says, but cautions against ‘leaping to conclusions’
Prime minister Scott Morrison says Australia is “not naive” to the threat of foreign interference amid explosive claims that the Chinese communist party wanted to infiltrate Australia’s parliament.
Describing the alleged plot as “deeply disturbing and troubling”, Morrison said the government was determined to protect Australians from foreign interference and had bolstered laws to strengthen the powers of intelligence agencies.
The prime minister is relentlessly pursuing the politics of panic, but validating voter anxiety can only go so far
It’s possible I have Harold Bloom lodged in my head lately because he loomed large in my youth, and he died recently, but when I listen to Scott Morrison, increasingly I think of Bloom, and The Anxiety of Influence.
If you are too young or productively educated to have encountered Bloom, he is the literary critic who held that all writers have to confront the writers who came before them, in the process creating imaginative space for themselves. Bloom’s theory is more complex than my simple rendering, but that’s the primary idea.
Former Labor NSW MP and powerbroker will have served three years of his five-year sentence for misconduct in public office
The disgraced former New South Wales Labor MP Eddie Obeid has been granted parole after serving three years in prison for his conviction over misconduct in public office.
Obeid was convicted and sentenced in December 2016 to five years in prison with a non-parole period of three years.
Australia can’t go on downplaying the largest economic shift in world history. Read the former PM’s speech in full
Taking some longer view of the strategic scenery, I have come to some key beliefs about the changes that are taking place globally.
The international system is fundamentally anarchic in structure. Two world wars in a century and Vietnam, Iraq, Syria gives the evidence of that. We should not confuse the relative peace of the last 30 years with the anarchy which lies latent.
Deputy leader says he does not regret linking the government’s climate change policy to the bushfires
The Greens MP Adam Bandt has defended his party colleague labelling politicians from the major parties “arsonists” while bushfires swept through swathes of New South Wales and Queensland last week.
Bandt noted that the Greens senator Jordon Steele-John was among the generation of young people “terrified” about the impact of climate change, and said the point of the remarks was to highlight Australia’s inaction on reducing fossil fuel emissions.
Labor leader denies non-attendance at Victoria’s Labor party conference sparked by threats of a union walkout
Controversial union boss John Setka has told the federal Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, to “grow some balls”, amid the latter’s no-show at Victoria’s Labor party conference.
Albanese denied his non-attendance at the annual meeting in Melbourne this weekend was sparked by threats of a union walkout.
US reportedly offering to rescue Australian families of Isis fighters trapped in Syria
Australia may be forced to accept three Islamic State fighters in Turkish custody as Ankara begins repatriating foreign fighters to their homelands.
Turkey has so far sent up to 10 fighters back to Britain, the US and Germany, saying it cannot continue to house them, even as the governments have rejected taking their fighters back and have cancelled passports.
Exclusive: IMF Bentham says several class actions against mining sector companies are for corporate breaches, not environmental
Australia’s biggest litigation funder, IMF Bentham, has rejected the attorney general’s suggestion the industry is engaging in “lawfare” against mining companies.
The company also hit back at claims by the chief executive of employer body AI Group, Innes Willox, that the industry is out of control, costing Australian business billions of dollars and needs urgent regulation.
Kurdish Iranian refugee and journalist – a multiple award-winner for documenting life in Australia’s offshore detention system – has left Papua New Guinea
Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish Iranian refugee and journalist who became the voice of those incarcerated on Manus Island, has landed in New Zealand and says he will never return to Papua New Guinea or Australia’s immigration regime.
“I will never go back to that place,” he told the Guardian, shortly after leaving PNG. “I just want to be free of the system, of the process. I just want to be somewhere where I am a person, not just a number, not just a label ‘refugee’.”
‘Do we simply get gagged?,’ asks Greg Mullins as NSW and Queensland bushfires rage on. All the day’s events, live
Greg Mullins continued:
This is very frustrating for this group of emergency chiefs, because had we spoken back in April, one of the things we would have said was try to get more aircraft on lease from the northern hemisphere, this is going to be a horror fire season.
We are only going to have seven of those large air tankers you saw at Turramurra saving homes the other day. They can be a decisive weapon. I have just come back from California - they had about 30 on one fire. But because the fire seasons are overlapping with the northern hemisphere, they are not available when we need them most.
On the meeting the former fire and emergency chiefs have been seeking with the prime minister and other responsible ministers about Australia’s fire preparations since April, Greg Mullins said:
I wrote to the prime minister on two occasions. I didn’t expect a response to the first letter in April, because of the election in May. I wrote a couple of months later, or a few months later, there was a response, saying he was unable to meet and a message saying minister Taylor would be in touch.
When I was able to speak to minister Taylor’s office, I did point out that he was probably not the right minister to speak to, with minister Littleproud, maybe the finance minister, but definitely the PM – he was unable to assist with that.
This government fundamentally doesn’t like talking about climate change.
I will probably say ... that is all I will say about that.
Catastrophic fire conditions in New South Wales ease, but dozens of Australian bushfires remain burning. In Queensland, 60 fires are burning, with strong winds and temperatures in mid-30s forecast to make for hazardous conditions on Australia’s east coast
Residents of Pechey (near Hampton) have been told to leave now, and head towards the New England highway.
“There is a bushfire in Pechey and Hampton and conditions are getting worse,” QFES says. “A fast moving fire is travelling from Grapetree Road towards Deeth Road, Sewell Road, Parker Road, Bush Road and Misty Mountain Road. It is currently impacting Parker Road and Sewell Road. The fire could have on the significant impact on the community.”
Images of Walkers Point, which is also at “leave now”.
Residents at Walkers Point, south of Bundaberg, are being told to evacuate to Woodgate with firefighters battling a large bushfire @abcnewspic.twitter.com/pffLy1elsV
Exclusive: email from government directs attendees at conference on climate adaptation to stay quiet on bushfire-climate link
As bushfire conditions were declared “catastrophic” on Tuesday, New South Wales bureaucrats attending a conference on adaption to climate change were directed not discuss the link between climate change and bushfires.
Bureaucrats from the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment were sent an email soon after the AdaptNSW 2019 Forum began, causing consternation among some attendees who saw it as tantamount to gagging them.
More than 575 NSW schools to close as conditions forecast to worsen on Tuesday, while dozens of bushfires continue to burn across Australia’s east coast. This blog is now closed
This is where we’ll leave our rolling coverage today. Guardian Australia will be covering all the developments tomorrow. Here’s what’s happened so far:
ABC Weather has published an explanation of why Tuesday is looking so bad: it’s a cold front.
“Tomorrow with the winds you’ll be seeing a more south-easterly direction,” Grace Legge, senior forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology, told the ABC.
There is no definitive roadmap from the reviewers, but a couple of dangerous ideas are floated
The forward sizzle about the release of Labor’s campaign review was focused on the obvious conflict point – how Bill Shorten would absorb the post-mortem. Would the review be scathing about the former leader’s lack of popularity, attributing the lion’s share of the blame for the election loss to him? Would Shorten then strike back, setting the framework for a contested term, and another election loss?
The reviewers met with Shorten privately early on Thursday, before the review went to the national executive, so the former leader was briefed ahead of the public unveiling. Shorten then responded publicly to the review before it was released, framing it on his own terms, and his own terms were clear as a bell. In the world of second chances, “were the universe to grant re-runs” the former leader would do things differently and, by the way, he’d be around for the next 20 years.
National security adviser Robert O’Brien says Beijing has bullied smaller nations by militarising resource-rich waters
The US has condemned Chinese “intimidation” in the South China Sea, alleging it has bullied smaller south-east Asian nations by militarising the resource-rich waters and seeking to control the global trade route.
Speaking at an Asean-US summit in Bangkok, the US national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, said China’s sweeping exclusive claims in the South China Sea – already rejected by the court of arbitration – were illegitimate and a form of realist imperialism.
Health minister Greg Hunt promises ‘significant package’ for aged care but won’t commit to figure
Labor has launched a new campaign targeting the government over aged care funding, as the health minister, Greg Hunt, commits to delivering a “significant package” for the sector before Christmas.
Setting a deadline of 11 November when parliament returns, opposition leader Anthony Albanese said the “aged care, action now” campaign would gather signatures from across the country calling for immediate funding to address a crisis in the sector.
Family appeals to immigration minister David Coleman to stop their deportation to Bangladesh
A five-year-old boy born in Australia is facing deportation to Bangladesh with his family after their visa applications were refused because his “mild disability” would be a burden on the medical system.
Dr Mahedi Hasan Bhuiyan arrived in Australia on a student visa in 2011. He and Rebaka Sultana married the next year in Bangladesh and she joined him in Australia in 2013. Later that year their son, Adyan, was born at a Geelong hospital.
The deficiencies in the mental health and aged care systems are distressing realities that need to be confronted
The facts on suicide in Australia, the Productivity Commission informs us, are stark. Every year, 3,000 people end their own lives, more than eight people every day. It is the leading cause of death for young adults, and suicide rates in Indigenous communities are more than double the rest of the community. This picture has been static for a decade.
Some people with mental illness are plagued with suicidal ideations, and for some that ends in tragedy, but as Scott Morrison’s suicide prevention adviser, Christine Morgan, told me earlier this year, a substantial proportion of people who take their lives in Australia never present to clinicians with depression or another illness.
The Labor leader wants blue-collar workers to know he knows they exist, isn’t ashamed of them and has them front of mind
Anthony Albanese would be better off if he could wave a cheery goodbye and retreat from the political fray until budget time next year, re-emerging after Labor as a collective has finished absorbing the May election loss, written all the books and all the blogs and the think pieces, completed the close inspection of the navel, and worked out where it wants to reposition itself.
Authorities believed Mimi Mefo, an award-winning journalist who works for Deutsche Welle in Berlin, might try to stay
A Berlin-based journalist who was due to speak at a press freedom conference in Brisbane has said she was denied a visa by the Australian government because they believed she might try to stay.
Mimi Mefo, an award-winning Cameroonian journalist who currently works for Deutsche Welle, was scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the Integrity 20 conference on Friday.