About 50 fires still burning around Queensland and 60 across NSW, 21 of them uncontained
Queensland and New South Wales fire crews are still battling difficult conditions.
There are 57 fires burning around Queensland on Sunday but one at the border towns of Applethorpe and Stanthorpe and another in the Gold Coast hinterland are causing the most concern.
Continue reading...Bell UH1 helicopter dropped off radar near Anna Bay, north of Newcastle
Four men and a woman are feared dead after the wreckage of the helicopter they were in was seen sinking off the coast of New South Wales.
The Bell UH1 helicopter dropped off the radar near Anna Bay, north of Newcastle, about 6.30pm on Friday.
Continue reading...Fifty-two refugees and asylum seekers in offshore detention have received temporary protection visas or safe haven enterprise visas
Some 52 refugees and asylum seekers in offshore detention have received temporary protection visas or safe haven enterprise visas, according to new statistics that fly in the face of the Morrison government’s refusal to allow the Biloela Tamil family to stay.
The home affairs department has revealed to a Senate inquiry that of the 3,127 people classified as “illegal maritime arrivals” who have been taken to a regional processing country since 2011, some 52 have received visas and now face legal limbo if banned from permanent settlement in Australia.
Continue reading...Inquest agrees that family’s advocacy and public interest outweighs concerns about privacy and dignity
The family of Aboriginal woman Tanya Day has persuaded the coroners court to release footage of her final conscious hours, saying that not releasing it would render her suffering – like the suffering of so many Indigenous people – invisible.
Coroner Caitlin English announced on Friday that she would release selected footage of Day’s time in the cells of Castlemaine police station. She said the public interest and the possibility that it could prevent further deaths in custody outweighed her earlier concerns about protecting the 55-year-old’s privacy and dignity.
Continue reading...Hungarian PM invokes far-right ‘great replacement’ theory at Budapest demography summit
Procreate or face extinction: that’s the message from central European leaders to their shrinking populations, as across the region rightwing governments implement so-called “family first” policies to incentivise childbearing.
Hungary’s government is holding an international summit on demography in Budapest this week, being attended by several regional leaders and delegations from dozens of countries in an attempt to trumpet their investment in family policies.
Continue reading...New South Wales government fails in bid to keep the notorious paedophile behind bars
The notorious paedophile Michael Guider, who killed schoolgirl Samantha Knight decades ago, has walked free from a Sydney prison.
Guider was released from Long Bay jail on Thursday after the supreme court rejected a New South Wales government bid to keep him behind bars for another year.
Continue reading...Steve Tong says his name was falsely put on donation records by his superiors at Wu International
A key witness to an anti-corruption probe received a night-time home visit from his former boss to deliver “festive greetings” the same day he was summonsed to give evidence, despite the Chinese festival taking place two months earlier, an inquiry has heard.
Steve Tong, an engineer who says he has no interest in politics, has given evidence to the Independent Commission Against Corruption that his name was falsely put on donation records by his superiors at a property development firm, Wu International, which has links to the former state Labor MP Ernest Wong.
Continue reading...Federal court in Melbourne extends injunction preventing the removal of the family from Christmas Island to Sri Lanka
Two Tamil asylum seekers and their Australian-born daughters will remain on Christmas Island until at least Friday afternoon after the federal court extended the injunction preventing the Australian government from deporting them back to Sri Lanka.
Priya, Nadesalingam and their two Australian-born children Kopika, 4, and Tharunicaa, 2, were sent to Christmas Island over the weekend after the court granted an injunction until 4pm on Wednesday preventing the government from deporting Tharunicaa until the application had been heard.
Continue reading...If followed through, the move would push the Liberal party into minority government just months after the election
Two New South Wales Liberal party MPs have reportedly threatened to move to the crossbench if the premier, Gladys Berejiklian, refuses to cave to their demands for amendments on a bill to decriminalise abortion.
The conservative Liberal MPs Tanya Davies and Kevin Conolly have reportedly told Berejiklian they will no longer sit in the party room if amendments to the bill are not passed.
Continue reading...Hills Shire council said it had received 40 complaints over three years about the magpie, and several people had been injured
A local council in Sydney’s north west has said a decision to shoot dead a “particularly aggressive magpie” that had allegedly swooped and injured people for years was “not taken lightly”.
The Hills Shire council had received 40 complaints over the past three years, with confirmed injuries, including people sent to hospital as a result of being swooped by the magpie on Old Windsor Road in Bella Vista.
Continue reading...Judge sentences Jaymes Todd to a non-parole period of 35 years for crimes described as crimes as ‘sadistic’ and ‘categorically evil’
Eurydice Dixon’s father said he hoped the man who raped and killed his daughter “gets better,” shortly after the killer was sentenced to to life in prison with a minimum non-parole period of 35 years.
Jaymes Todd stalked Dixon, 22, for more than an hour before attacking her as she walked through Princes Park following a comedy gig on 12 June last year.
Continue reading...‘I knew nothing about this,’ opposition leader says as he pledges a comprehensive review of the party’s structures
The federal opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, says Labor in New South Wales is in a “diabolical situation” as he braces for further revelations from the state’s corruption hearings and pledges a “comprehensive” review of the party’s structures.
Saying the work of Icac needed to proceed “unencumbered” over the next six weeks, Albanese said the party would overhaul its procedures in NSW to ensure the “damaging” alleged conduct could not be repeated.
Continue reading...Nadesalingam, Priya, Kopiga and Tharunicaa were given a five-day reprieve – then moved to Christmas Island
The officers came in the early morning.
On 5 March last year, Australian Border Force officers accompanied by Serco guards stormed the modest Biloela home of Tamil husband and wife Nadesalingam and Priya, and their two Australia-born daughters Kopiga, 2, and Tharunicaa, then just nine months old.
Continue reading...Its general secretary is gone but the question remains: how do you fix a party branch synonymous with sleaze and scandal?
One of Labor’s favourite Chinatown eateries was packed as Kaila Murnain readied herself to speak. It was 2014, the year before the fateful Labor fundraiser at the centre of this week’s explosive anti-corruption hearings.
But the scene was largely the same. The Eight Restaurant in Haymarket was at capacity, the room full of wealthy donors cosying up to some of the most powerful Labor figures in the state.
Continue reading...Some day, I hope to visit the country with my grandparents, whose belief in independence was always unshakable
In my family, the thought of Timor always lingered in the air.
At birthday dinners, or Easter or Christmas with the cousins (like all Timorese, cousins is an imprecise term), we would talk about the football or our jobs or studies.
Continue reading...The Indigenous massacres project produced in collaboration with the University of Newcastle wins digital history prize
Guardian Australia has won the digital history prize in the New South Wales premier’s history awards for its Indigenous massacres project, The Killing Times.
The collaborative series with the University of Newcastle’s colonial massacres research team found there were at least 270 frontier massacres over 140 years as part of a state-sanctioned and organised attempt to eradicate Aboriginal people.
Continue reading...We will never understand the impact of colonial oppression if we underestimate white women’s role in it, writes Ruby Hamad
On 21 September 2018, at the peak of the #MeToo movement that had supposedly shattered the silence around the sexual assault and harassment of women, 75 women, most of them white, convened in Washington DC to profess their support for the embattled supreme court justice nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.
A psychology professor, Christine Blasey Ford, had claimed Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her decades earlier when she was just 15. Ford’s testimony was buttressed by two other women with similar allegations, but this was not enough to stop Kavanaugh being confirmed.
Continue reading...Peter Dutton says family of four ‘not owed protection’ after they were removed from deportation flight in Darwin thanks to court injunction
A Tamil asylum-seeker family whose deportation was halted in mid-air on Thursday night do not deserve protection from Australia, Peter Dutton has said.
The family of four were put on a non-commercial flight from Melbourne bound for Sri Lanka about 11pm on Thursday.
Continue reading...Former judge also asked to report on whether NSW gambling laws need to be overhauled
A public inquiry into allegations of wrongdoing at casinos run by Crown Resorts will decide whether the James Packer-dominated group is fit to hold a licence in New South Wales and whether the state’s gambling laws need to be overhauled.
Terms of reference, released by the NSW Independent Liquor & Gaming Authority on Thursday, show the inquiry, to be headed by former judge Patricia Bergin, will also investigate whether Packer’s decision to sell almost 20% of Crown to Hong Kong billionaire Lawrence Ho breached the gambling group’s licence to build a high-roller casino at Barangaroo in Sydney.
Continue reading...Adrian was held in seclusion 99% of the time between 24 September 2012 and 18 June 2018
Disability advocates have expressed outrage at revelations an intellectually disabled man judged unfit to face criminal charges was effectively detained in permanent solitary confinement for six years.
The case of Adrian, whose real name has been suppressed to protect his identity, is contained in a scathing report by the Queensland ombudsman into the state’s forensic disability services system.
Continue reading...