Category Archives: Australia news

NSW town Bungendore to ‘heal’ after it finally gets a high school eight years after John Barilaro promised it

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The then deputy premier announced $71m Bungendore project in 2019 but it was found to breach crown land law. Now Labor is proceeding with its own

The regional New South Wales town of Bungendore will finally get a high school after four years of legal headaches after the announcement of the $71m project by the then state deputy premier and member for Monaro, John Barilaro.

The new high school was a 2019 election commitment and due to be built by January 2023 in the middle of Bungendore’s heritage precinct, requiring the demolition of its pool, community centre and council offices. It caused immediate division and outrage among residents.

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Ex-Manus Island detainees stranded in PNG threatened with eviction over unpaid rent

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Exclusive: About 70 people who sought asylum in Australia remain in Port Moresby, having been previously held in immigration detention

Asylum seekers stranded in Papua New Guinea have been threatened with eviction if an alleged $110,000 rental arrears debt is not paid, leading to urgent calls for the Australian government to intervene to prevent them becoming “homeless”.

The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) wrote to the home affairs department revealing that refugee families with 10 children at Latitude apartments in Port Moresby face eviction on Friday unless the bill is paid by Thursday.

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Australia to ban life insurance companies from discriminating based on genetic testing results

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Albanese government says people have been reluctant to get life-saving early testing because of the risk of being refused insurance

Life insurance companies will be banned from discriminating against people based on genetic testing under federal government moves designed to encourage greater use of predictive technology in preventative health.

The assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, will announce on Wednesday that life insurers will be banned from using the results of predictive genetic testing in their underwriting assessments.

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Father of youngest Hunter Valley bus crash victim grieves loss of son who had rare second chance at life

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Newcastle district court hears emotional victim impact statement during sentence hearing for bus driver Brett Button

The grieving father of the youngest victim of the Hunter Valley wedding bus crash which claimed 10 lives and injured 25 has told how his loss has caused “an irreparable void that will never be filled”.

Steven Symons, reading from his victim impact statement on Tuesday in Newcastle district court during the sentence hearing for the bus driver, Brett Button, said the impact of his son Kane’s death had been far-reaching and devastating.

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Australia politics live: Littleproud heckled at Canberra farmers protest; Greens senator urges Chalmers to override RBA and cut interest rates

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Peter Dutton and David Littleproud addressed the crowd of hundreds from as far as Western Australia. Follow today’s news live

PM speaks on social media ban for kids

Anthony Albanese is doing the media rounds this morning, speaking on the government’s announcement it will ban children from social media platforms. This came after the South Australian announcement yesterday it would be moving to ban children under 14.

Well, we want to work with the states and territories. What we didn’t want to develop is eight different systems. We know this is a national issue and it’s pretty simple. We want to get kids off their devices and on to the footy fields, on to the netball courts, into the swimming pools.

We want them to have real experiences with real people, and we know that social media is causing social harm, which is why we put funding in the budget to have a trial to make sure that we get it right.

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NSW nurses and midwives strike: hospital wait times up and surgery delays expected

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Premier says agreeing to 15% pay rise this year would lead other workers to ‘knock on my door’ demanding the same

A New South Wales nurses’ strike has prompted warnings to keep ambulances and emergency departments clear of minor cases as Labor feels the heat from public sector unions.

Nurses and midwives are walking off the job across NSW for 12 hours on Tuesday after demands for a 15% pay rise this year were rebuffed.

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Australia backs UK decision to curb arms sales to Israel

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Exclusive: Foreign minister Penny Wong says she ‘welcomes’ the British move and Palestinian civilians ‘cannot pay the price’ of defeating Hamas

Australia is coordinating with the UK and other allies to “pressure” Israel to alleviate the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and to stop the erosion of longstanding norms protecting aid workers.

The Australian government has also explicitly backed the UK’s decision to curb arms exports to Israel, putting it at odds with the US, which is reported to have privately warned Britain against the move.

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Guardian Essential poll: more voters blaming Albanese government for interest rate rises

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However poll shows majority back Labor’s plan to cap international students enrolments in tertiary education

More voters are blaming the Albanese government for interest rate rises but Labor appears to have hit the electoral sweet spot with its proposed cap on international student enrolments.

Those are the conclusions of the latest Guardian Essential poll of 1,132 voters conducted after a week of debate about whether the Reserve Bank should begin cutting interest rates due to extremely soft growth.

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‘It’s okay to poo at work’: Australian health department praised for tackling taboo with humorous campaign

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Queensland Health lauded for social media campaign raising awareness of the dangers of ‘holding it in’

An Australian health department has been praised for breaking a taboo with a novel health campaign telling people: “It’s okay to poo at work.”

Health and marketing experts are hailing as “world-leading” the social media campaign released this month by the Queensland health department for normalising a healthy human behaviour.

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Social media age limits to go before parliament ahead of next election, Albanese says

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Draft bill requires social media platforms to stop children in the restricted age range from accessing their services

The Albanese government plans to impose a minimum age for teenagers accessing social media and gaming platforms, with legislation to be introduced into parliament before the next election.

The prime minister will announce the nationwide move on Tuesday but will stop short of specifying the age, arguing the government wants to wait for the conclusion of an age-verification trial which begins its final phase this week.

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‘Don’t run away’: Labor urged to collaborate with Greens and crossbenchers on environmental reforms

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Support for government’s environmental legislation offered in exchange for protections that deliver ‘immediate, tangible impacts’

Greens and crossbench senators have told the government not to “hide behind” Peter Dutton and Gina Rinehart and instead work with them on a better deal for the environment.

The Greens environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, and independent senators David Pocock and Lidia Thorpe offered to support legislation to establish a new environment protection authority (EPA) and a separate new agency to manage environmental information, if the government agreed to a series of proposals to strengthen environmental protections.

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Commissioner condemns ‘failure of leadership’ in Australian defence force, urges greater focus on wellbeing of personnel

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After three years and more than 5,000 submissions, royal commission into veteran suicide hands down its full report. Here are its key points

Australian defence force personnel and veterans have suffered “a catastrophic failure of leadership at all levels” to prioritise their health and wellbeing, according to the head of a long-running royal commission into veteran suicide.

Nick Kaldas, the former New South Wales police deputy commissioner, made the comment on Monday shortly before the royal commission he chaired provided its final report to the federal government.

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Bridget McKenzie forced to deny her oped on aviation divestiture signals support for breaking up Qantas

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Just hours after opinion appears in AFR, shadow minister clarifies divestiture as ‘one of the various tools the treasurer needs to look at’ but not Coalition policy

The shadow transport minister, Bridget McKenzie, was forced to clarify the Coalition does not support breaking up Qantas just hours after floating the possibility of forced divestiture powers in the aviation sector.

McKenzie warned the competition watchdog’s review of the aviation sector “will be a failure if it does not address the role of divestiture” in an opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review on Monday.

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‘Like waking up in a nightmare’: Hunter Valley bus crash survivor tells court of grief over wife and daughter’s deaths

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Bus driver Brett Button faces lengthy jail term as ‘accountability, deterrence and punishment’, NSW judge says

A wedding guest on a Hunter Valley bus which crashed, killing 10 people, has told how he woke in hospital five days later with a gut feeling his wife and daughter had died.

Graham McBride, who lost his wife, Nadene, and their only daughter Kyah, 22, in the crash, addressed the Newcastle district court on Monday during an expected three-day sentence hearing for bus driver Brett Button.

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Helen Garner, Virginia Woolf and Max Porter headline Belvoir St theatre’s 2025 program

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‘Electrifying’ Judy Davis will star in adaptation of The Spare Room, with Colin Friels as King Lear later in the season

An adaptation of Helen Garner’s award-winning novel The Spare Room will debut at Sydney’s Belvoir St theatre in 2025, starring Judy Davis as a fictionalised version of the author in her first on stage role in almost 15 years.

The announcement caps a banner year for Garner’s work on stage, with an operatic adaptation of The Spare Room in development with the Melbourne company Monstrous Theatre, as well as a remount of the 2008 opera The Children’s Bach.

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Australian pregnancy drugs shortage sparks call to include pregnant women in clinical trials

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Experts call for more research into ‘off-label’ medications, and supply chain alternatives not driven by profit motive

Several crucial medicines for pregnant women are in shortage in Australia because of a “perfect storm”, experts warn, whereby the only drugs registered as safe for pregnancy are old and less profitable to pharmaceutical companies discontinuing their distribution amid manufacturing disruptions since the pandemic.

An editorial published in the Medical Journal of Australia on Monday called on the government to create a body responsible for registering, importing and manufacturing critical medications for use during pregnancy, independent of the need to obtain a profit.

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Julia Gillard urges Labor to retain 50% female quota, warning women still at risk of being dragged back

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Australia’s only female prime minister marks 30th anniversary of ALP’s affirmative action rule by advocating for its adoption across federal parliament

Julia Gillard is urging the Labor party never to remove its 50% female quota for parliamentary candidates despite surpassing it federally, warning there are forces – especially in the “toxic sewer” of social media – which can still drag women back.

In an interview to mark this month’s 30th anniversary of Labor’s controversial affirmative action rule, Australia’s first and, so far, only female prime minister reflected on the hope she expressed the day she left office in 2013, that it would be easier for the next woman who runs the country.

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Company linked to Angus Taylor offered ‘generous’ offset calculation after illegal land clearing, FoI letters reveal

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Exclusive: Experts say legislation is ‘broken’ when it’s cheaper for landholders to break the law than it is to apply for permits

A company connected to former federal energy minister Angus Taylor that was ordered to restore critically endangered grasslands was asked to do less than would have been required if it had sought approval before it poisoned them.

The federal environment department’s efforts to reach an agreement with Jam Land to compensate for the 28.5 hectares of clearing on a property in the New South Wales Monaro region are revealed in new documents released to Guardian Australia after a four-year freedom of information battle.

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Almost 68% of Australia’s tourism sites at major risk if climate crisis continues, report says

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Uluru, the Daintree and Bondi beach among iconic Australian locations that could be impacted if planet hits even 2C of warming by 2050

South Australia’s wine regions shrouded in bushfire smoke, the Daintree rainforest cut off by flooding and tourists marooned at major airports because of violent storms. This snapshot is the potential chaotic future for Australia’s tourism industry, a new report has warned.

At least half of 178 tourism assets around the country – from national parks to city attractions and airports – are already facing major climate risks, the analysis showed. And as the heat rises, so do the disruptions. Many of the country’s 620,000 tourism jobs will be under threat, according to the report from insurance group Zurich and economic analysts Mandala.

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Tanya Plibersek accuses Peter Dutton of intent to ignore Indigenous heritage for mining projects

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Environment minister lambasts opposition leader over vow to overturn her rejection of tailings dam at McPhillamys goldmine

Tanya Plibersek has accused Peter Dutton of planning to ignore evidence of historical Indigenous cultural practice and trash heritage protection laws to greenlight certain mining projects and companies based on “the vibe”.

The environment minister told Guardian Australia that Dutton’s vow to overturn her determination rejecting the proposed site of a tailings dam at the $900m McPhillamys goldmine development in central-western New South Wales showed he had no respect for research or official advice.

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