Former Australian prime minister posted a photograph with himself, his wife Jenny and Donald and Melania Trump on X
Former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison has spent New Year’s Eve with US president-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Morrison posted a photo on X featuring himself and his wife, Jenny, alongside Trump and his wife, Melania, at the Palm Beach, Florida club.
Continue reading...The Howard government sent military personnel to the Middle East well before officially authorising Australia’s involvement
The Howard government avoided disclosing that it had sent military forces to the Middle East months before authorising Australia’s official involvement in the Iraq war in 2003, cabinet records show.
Cabinet documents from 2003 and 2004 released by the National Archives contain the first confirmation of what has been widely discussed in the decades since: the government deployed forces well before officially authorising Australia’s involvement in the war on 18 March 2003.
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Continue reading...John Howard’s government legislated that marriage must be ‘the union of a man and a woman’, but excluded any reference to birth gender
John Howard was given the option of adding extra words to his 2004 Marriage Act amendment that would have limited transgender people’s ability to marry by making eligibility based on gender at birth, but chose not to pursue it.
Cabinet papers from 2004, released by the National Archives, show the Howard government was advised it could go beyond the formal definition of marriage it ultimately enshrined in law, and stipulate that a couple must have been born male and female respectively to be allowed to marry.
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Continue reading...‘Providing an opportunity for people to apply for a visa that will probably never come seems both cruel and unnecessary’, review says
Wait times for visas to bring parents to Australia are so long that nearly 2,300 applicants died before receiving a visa in the last three years, according to the home affairs department.
The department released the data to Senate estimates, revealing that 2,297 parent visa applicants and 87 other family members, such as aged dependent relatives or carers, had died while waiting for a visa.
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Continue reading...Finance, women’s and public services minister says Coalition’s promised cuts means ‘failures of systems’
Katy Gallagher has denied running a scare campaign against the Liberals on the possibility the public service would be gutted if the opposition was elected next year, while warning she has “no doubts” the slash-and-burn would lead to another robodebt-style saga.
Several Coalition frontbenchers have ramped up their attacks on federal bureaucracy in recent months, accusing the Albanese government of mismanaging the budget by hiring more than 30,000 people to undertake key service delivery jobs, including in Centrelink and the NDIS.
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Detectives investigating four separate incidents of children being approached by drivers in white vans in Melbourne
Victoria police detectives are investigating four separate incidents in Melbourne in the last month of children being approached by drivers in white vans.
People like Mr Rogan prey on people’s vulnerabilities: they prey on fear, they prey on anxiety, they prey on all of the elements that contribute to uncertainty in society.
They entrepreneur fantasy outcomes and conspiracy outcomes as being a normal part of social narrative – I personally find it deeply repulsive.
Continue reading...Exclusive: the 17-month-old department has lost a senior leader and ranked second worst for staff wellbeing in the annual public service census
The agency overseeing Australia’s almost $400bn acquisition of nuclear submarines is facing a staff morale crisis and the threat of an external review of its operations, with a key deputy director leaving after just a year.
The Australian Submarine Agency, or ASA, was established 17 months ago to oversee submarine purchases under the Aukus pact but Guardian Australia understands it has become the subject of growing government concern about its priorities, governance and leadership.
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More on the new Malaysia-based maritime institute:
The government is contributing $1.78m over four years to support the institute, which will train regional government officials on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, broader maritime law and ocean governance, awareness of maritime domains and environmental protection.
We don’t want to see any unilateral changes to the status quo across the Taiwan straits, and our focus is on doing everything we can in terms of exercising our international voice around promoting stability and peace in and around the Taiwan straits, in and around Taiwan.
Rules and norms are vital for our shared maritime region and the countries of our region make an ongoing contribution to maintaining and promoting them.
The institute will deliver training to officials from across the region on complex maritime legal and policy topics. It will nurture leaders and help further our collective contribution to a peaceful, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.
Continue reading...Vote marks a change to the nation’s official stance held for more than two decades
Australia has split with the US and voted with 156 other countries at the UN to demand the end of Israel’s “unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible”.
The vote marks Australia’s return to the position for the first time in more than two decades.
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Continue reading...Survey finds 25 percentage point gender gap across all age brackets on whether nuclear power would be positive for the country, with majority of men saying it would
New data points to a stark gender split in attitudes towards nuclear energy, with women much more likely to say they don’t support it or think the risks are too great.
Research company DemosAu surveyed 6,000 people on behalf of the Australian Conservation Foundation and found 26% of women thought nuclear energy would be good for Australia, compared with 51% of men.
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Continue reading...ANU study finds Albanese ‘significantly’ more favourable as PM than Dutton and more women undecided on voting intention than men
Just 38% of Australian voters have confidence in the federal government, a level approaching the lows before Scott Morrison was voted out of office in May 2022.
That is one of the key results of an Australian National University study, which nevertheless found the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, had “significantly higher” favourability than Peter Dutton leading into the 2025 election.
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Continue reading...The Victorian premier has defended the state’s business credentials saying there’s key data missing from the Business Council of Australia’s report. Follow today’s news headlines live
Weather check shows mixed conditions forecast across Australian cities
It’s a mixed, if warm, bag in capital cities today, with the Bureau of Meteorology forecasting storms in Melbourne, sunny skies in Brisbane and Adelaide and showers across all other major cities.
Continue reading...Man says gambling ads ‘potentially damaging’ for his children who regularly listen to Disney and the Wiggles on his account on music streaming app
The Australian gambling agency Sportsbet has paused advertising with the music streaming company Spotify, after its content was allegedly played between children’s songs.
The pause comes after Guardian Australia reported on a complaint by a father who alleged the “potentially damaging” ads were inserted between Disney songs.
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Continue reading...But survey finds strong support for under-16s social media ban, despite concerns about how to enforce it
Voters have given the Albanese government an F on containing housing costs and surprisingly little credit for increasing wages in two troubling signs for Labor heading into a cost-of-living election.
Those are the results of the latest Guardian Essential poll of 1,123 voters, which found strong support for social media regulation, including two-thirds in favour of the under-16 age ban.
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Continue reading...Organisation asked supporters if they ‘want to feel different on our election night’ in an ad with half of Trump’s face and half of Dutton’s
Climate 200 has reported a surge in first-time donors in November off the back of a donation-matching campaign comparing the Coalition and Peter Dutton to the politics of Donald Trump.
The funding aggregator claims to have raised $377,000 from 3,900 donations including 1,373 people who donated to it for the first time, the biggest wave of first-time supporters since it was launched in 2021.
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Continue reading...Independent senator clarifies she was mistaken about civil finding of racial discrimination against One Nation leader
Senator Lidia Thorpe has apologised to Pauline Hanson for describing her as a “convicted” racist, clarifying she was mistaken about a civil finding of racial discrimination.
Last week Hanson threatened to sue Thorpe for defamation after Thorpe described the One Nation leader as a “convicted racist” in an interview with Channel Nine’s Today.
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The health minister, Mark Butler, is holding a press conference in Adelaide to announce the endometriosis drug Visanne will be added to the pharmaceutical benefits scheme. It’s the first listing of an endo treatment in three decades.
This is a condition that impacts more than 1 million women – one in seven women and teenage girls – and for too long, too many women have been made to suffer in silence.
[They’ve] been told by many healthcare professionals, it has to be said, that this is “normal”. That it is a normal part of period pain or many other explanations for debilitating, crippling pain.
This is all about providing cheaper medicines and cutting-edge treatment to Australian patients generally, but [particularly] in the area of endometriosis, which has attracted such inadequate support for hundreds of thousands of Australian women.
This listing is beyond time.
The major contributor to the record has been the minimum temperatures, which averaged 17.2ºC over the spring season for the site, and were elevated by cloud cover, precipitation, and most notably, humidity.
Continue reading...PM overruled negotiations between environment minister and the Greens after speaking with WA premier last week
Anthony Albanese insists Labor’s plans to establish a national environmental watchdog are still on the table after he quashed a deal with the Greens in parliament’s final sitting week.
Last-minute negotiations between the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, and the Greens senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, were overruled by the prime minister on Tuesday after he spoke with the Western Australian premier, Roger Cook.
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Continue reading...Special envoy needed to help free citizens subjected to ‘hostage diplomacy’ by authoritarian regimes, senate committee finds
Australia needs a specialist envoy dedicated to freeing its citizens arbitrarily detained by rogue nations, a senate committee inquiry has recommended.
The practice of “hostage diplomacy” is an increasing threat, the senate committee found, and Australians should be specifically warned that authoritarian regimes in some countries – naming China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, Mali and Myanmar – arbitrarily detain Australian citizens.
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Continue reading...Services Australia tests found about 64% of employment income-related debts may be affected by the unlawful calculation practice
About 3 million Australians charged debts totalling $4.3bn by the Australian government may have been affected by an unlawful debt calculation practice.
The commonwealth ombudsman has said an “extremely large number of Australians [are] potentially significantly impacted” in response to the latest estimate released by the Department of Social Services.
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