Category Archives: Victoria

Australia news live: landmark report confirms wage theft by universities; treasurer calls for changes to super laws

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Staff underpaid more than $80m in past three years. Follow the day’s news live

Fresh push to ban ‘asbestos of the 2020s’

There’s a fresh push to ban engineered stone commonly used in kitchen benchtops and linked to an incurable lung disease likened to asbestosis, AAP reports.

Instead of planning a family, we’re planning my funeral. I used to install kitchen benches. People liked engineered stone because it was cheap. But the dust got into my lungs causing deadly, incurable silicosis.

That’s too high a price for anyone to pay. Nothing will save my life but if you join the campaign to stop the importation and manufacture of engineered stone, you can help save someone else’s. Please.

Australian workers like Kyle are dying because of engineered stone.

The companies flooding our markets with this cheap and nasty material know that, but to them profits are more important than people’s lives.

It is incredibly distressing … when we hear about these horrific murders and we have to do more to prevent [them from] happening.

I often say we have to start responding to the red flags before more blue police tape surrounds the family home.

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‘It’s worrying’: Victoria’s affordable rental housing to be allocated by ballot rather than need

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Homes Victoria says ballot helps create ‘fair and transparent’ process but advocate fears those most in need may miss out

The Victorian government’s new affordable rental housing will be allocated to tenants by random ballot rather than need, with applications to be processed by a company already under scrutiny for what advocates have called a “troubling” use of renters’ data.

The first tranche of 34 houses from the 2,400 promised in the affordable housing rental scheme – part of the Andrews government’s “big build” construction blitz – were advertised in January.

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Australia news live: back safeguard mechanism to ‘put climate wars behind us’, Labor urges Coalition and Greens – as it happened

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‘The onus is on Labor’ to explain why it needs more coal and gas: Bandt

There’s some discussion about possible alternatives – one suggestion is to pause new developments on gas and coal developments while reforms to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 have been hammered out.

We are up for good-faith discussions and proposals like that are coming from people like the Climate Council, from The Australia Institute. I’ve seen the Australia Conservation Foundation out saying there are serious problems with the government’s proposal.

You can’t put the fire out while pouring petrol on it.

I don’t think the penny has quite dropped with the government how much things are have moved on. 66% of people between 18 and 34 back our position – don’t want new coal and gas mines opened. 57% of the general population. Things have moved on.

I know Labor talks a lot about history, but the students who are marching in the streets at the moment, behind banners saying, “No new coal and gas” were in primary school in 2009. They do not want it, no one can understand why we are coming up to the year anniversary of the floods in Lismore, people cannot understand why Labor says they want to open up new projects.

Why does Labor want to go to the wall to open new coal and gas projects? These are huge climate bombs. They’ve got a very – I think it is an untenable task...

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WA’s Pilbara hits 45C as large swathes of Australia swelter in heatwave

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Extreme conditions in the north of the state with Victoria, NSW and Queensland also experiencing high temperatures

Large swathes of Australia sweltered amid a heatwave on Friday, including in the Pilbara, where temperatures reached 45C.

Sumaoa Bayliss, the manager at the Red Sands Tavern in the northern Western Australian town of Newman – where it reached 44C – said life goes on in the dangerous conditions, albeit under air conditioning.

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Tanya Plibersek urged to intervene to stop stockpiled soft plastics from being dumped

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Environmentalist alliance says plastic waste from failed supermarket-backed recycling scheme can be safely warehoused until it can be recycled

Environment groups are urging federal and state governments to ensure thousands of tonnes of soft plastic that could end up in landfill are safely warehoused by supermarket chains until recycling facilities become available, even if that takes years.

The Boomerang Alliance – a coalition of 55 conservation groups – has accused the packaging industry of using a failed scheme run by REDcycle which led to more than 12,000 tonnes of plastic collected by the public being stockpiled since 2018 as a marketing ploy to mask how little is being done to improve recycling rates.

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Fines against WA climate protester ‘absurdly excessive’, Human Rights Watch says; refund for Myki charges during outage – As it happened

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Activist pleaded guilty on Friday to criminal damage. This blog is now closed

Productivity commission report will be released in March

Chalmers says he has received a five-year review from the productivity commission about how Australia can respond to flagging productivity across the Australian economy.

I’d like to do that sooner, ideally in May, so that we can have this national debate about our productivity performance and some of the recommendations in there. Now, inevitably, a government won’t pick up and run with every single one of the recommendations from the Productivity Commission, but there may be some that we can run with. There will be some that align with the government’s economic plan and our policy objectives.

No doubt people will want to ask him about that and he can explain it. I think there’s a broader issue here about how the bank communicates the context for its decisions. This is one of the things that I have been discussing with the RBA Review Panel. I actually discussed it with them on Friday in one of the regular meetings that I have with the review panel, how they communicate their decisions and the context behind their decisions is one of the key focuses of that review.

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NSW Labor pledges to improve ageing regional trains after ‘botched’ rollout of new fleet

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Opposition says it will step into vacuum left by NSW government’s lack of interim solutions to improve experience for passengers

Labor has promised to improve the ageing trains that run from Sydney to Melbourne and Brisbane if it wins the New South Wales election, as the Coalition’s delayed replacement fleet leaves passengers in carriages without phone reception for most of this decade.

The pledge follows revelations from an advisory report that the NSW government’s contract for new regional trains is set to blow out by more than $1bn, with the first of the rolling stock that was meant to enter service this January now delayed to as late as December 2025.

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Victorian government must overhaul bail laws to create ‘meaningful’ change, legal groups say

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Advocates concerned after Daniel Andrews suggested looking at offence types rather than scrapping controversial 2018 changes

Changes to Victoria’s bail laws would be nothing more than cosmetic if the government does not scrap the “reverse onus” bail provisions that have led to a near doubling of Aboriginal women in custody, legal groups have warned.

The Victorian government has committed to reforming the Bail Act after a damning coroner’s report into the death in custody of Veronica Nelson found it was “incompatible” with the state’s charter of human rights and discriminatory towards First Nations people.

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Coles and Woolworths ordered to dump more than 5,200 tonnes of soft plastic into landfill – as it happened

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The government has been accused of deliberately withholding detail on its push to enshrine an Indigenous voice in the constitution for political reasons.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton and shadow attorney-general Julian Leeser were briefed by the referendum working group after calling for more information on the proposed voice’s make-up and function.

Like all Australians, we want to see a better outcome for the Indigenous people of our country.

We are willing to look at any measure to do that. There are lots of questions around the voice and lots of detail that hasn’t yet been provided.

It’s not the airlines that do the turn backs that you should be worried about. It’s the airlines that keep on going to the destination and don’t make that turn back.

This is what happens with aviation across the world. And it’s an important part of the safety management system. I would rather there be not, but again I encourage our pilots to do this. I applaud them when they do it.

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Australia news live: voice working group says Dutton committed to ‘further talks’; Alice Springs report may not be made public until next week

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Australian batter Usman Khawaja has been cleared to join his teammates in India after his visa issues were sorted, AAP reports.

Pakistan-born Khawaja will fly out of Melbourne today, more than a day later than planned, after an anxious wait for his visa to be approved.

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Summer pause: cold weather forecast for south-east Australia to bring snow across Alps

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Sharp temperature drops expected in SA, Victoria, NSW and Tasmania on Friday while north-east faces heatwave conditions

Break out the winter woolies. Temperatures across Australia’s south-east are set to plummet with some areas expected to experience their coldest February days in two decades on Friday.

A strong cold front is pushing up from southern Australia and is forecast to sweep across South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania on Friday.

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Unsentenced prisoners make up a third of Australia’s prison population as bail refusals boom

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Advocates urge overhaul of strict bail laws in Victoria and elsewhere to ensure people aren’t needlessly funnelled into jail

The number of unsentenced people in Australian jails has risen more than 120% over 10 years, to account for more than a third of the total prison population, as human rights advocates urge reforms to ensure people aren’t needlessly funnelled into the criminal justice system.

More than 15,000 prisoners, or about 35% of the nation’s prison population, were unsentenced – awaiting trial, sentencing or deportation – in 2021. In 2011, when there were 6,723 unsentenced prisoners, that cohort accounted for less than 25% of the prison population.

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‘Complete, unmitigated disaster’: inquest into Veronica Nelson’s death urges overhaul of ‘discriminatory’ Victorian bail laws

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Coroner refers prison health contractor to Director of Public Prosecutions over death in custody

A Victorian coroner has declared the state’s controversial bail laws discriminatory and a “complete, unmitigated disaster”, using landmark findings into the 2020 death in custody of First Nations woman Veronica Nelson to recommend urgent reforms.

Coroner Simon McGregor on Monday handed down the highly anticipated findings into the death of Nelson, a 37-year-old Gunditjmara, Dja Dja Wurrung, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta woman who was in prison after being arrested for shoplifting and refused bail.

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‘Holding cell’: Melbourne family with disabled son stuck in ‘transitional’ housing for a decade

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Rosalie Dow asked department for modifications to home but was told the policy was to transfer dwellings – which is yet to occur

When Rosalie Dow moved into transitional housing in Melbourne with her two young children in 2013, she thought it would only be for a few months.

Dow’s son, Mayer, was two, and showing signs of what would soon be diagnosed as Coffin-Lowry syndrome, a rare and often debilitating genetic condition with complications including intellectual disability, seizures, hearing impairment, sensory and behavioural issues, and an inability to walk.

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Australia Day 2023 honours for elder abuse law trailblazer, Indigenous activist and a fossil hunter

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Most of the 1,047 Australians honoured are not famous but many of them have changed lives, if not the country

Most of the 1,047 names on the 2023 Australia Day honours list are not as recognisable as Archie Roach, Norman Swan or David Wenham.

But many of them have changed lives, if not the country. Take the solicitor Rodney Lewis, appointed to the Order of Australia for his “life-long contribution to human rights and civil liberties both in Australia and more broadly across our region”.

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Senator may go against party room on voice – as it happened

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Should governments have acted sooner on alcohol restrictions in Alice Springs?

The Northern Territory chief minister Natasha Fyles and the minister for Indigenous affairs Linda Burney have appeared on ABC Radio after the announcements in Alice Springs yesterday.

It was the previous coalition government that walked away and left the Northern Territory with no measures.

I had expressed that there needs to be some very, very real thoughts put into our alcohol restrictions.

Do you think it took too long?

Look, I’m not going to get into whether they’ve taken too long, If you ask the people in Alice Springs, the answer might be yes.

I went to Stuart Park last night and met with local people living in town camps ... many of who had obviously experienced violence. And one of the things that really shocked me is, I was talking to the local member Marion Scrymgour who had visited the hospital and there are 16 beds in ICU, 14 of those were taken by Aboriginal women who had been beaten ... I think alcohol is one of the major contributors to some of the problems.

It’s about balance – but being able to drink is not more important than being safe, in my view.

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Former pilot Greg Lynn to stand trial for alleged murders of Victorian campers Russell Hill and Carol Clay

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Lynn has pleaded not guilty to murdering the pair, who went missing in 2020 while camping in the Wonnangatta Valley, north-east of Melbourne

The former airline pilot accused of the murder of two elderly campers in Victoria has been committed to stand trial.

Greg Lynn, 56, pleaded not guilty to murdering Russell Hill, 74, and Carol Clay, 73, who went missing in March 2020 while camping in the Wonnangatta Valley, north-east of Melbourne.

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Melbourne’s injecting room delay puts lives at risk as heroin overdoses spike in CBD

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Stalled progress on the city’s second safe-injecting facility is heaping pressure on community health professionals

The return to regular trading in Melbourne’s CBD has coincided with a spike in heroin-related overdoses, with drug experts warning that stalling the city’s second safe-injecting room is putting lives at risk.

Former police commissioner Ken Lay is still finalising a report, which was meant to be handed down in 2020, that will recommend the best site for the second safe-injecting room – believed to be the former Yooralla building on Flinders Street.

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Queensland public schools to join NSW in banning students from ChatGPT

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Exclusive: Artificial intelligence expert questions firewall strategy, as Victoria opts to wait and see

Queensland will join New South Wales in banning access to ChatGPT in state schools, though artificial intelligence experts have questioned how effective such a strategy is.

Nine newspapers revealed on Sunday morning the NSW Department of Education would ban the technology using a firewall, as concern mounts over the use of bots to cheat in assessments.

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Court to rule on release of ‘explosive’ evidence in accused Victoria campsite killer case

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Lawyers for Greg Lynn seek to suppress contents of all interviews and statements he gave to Victorian police

A man accused of murdering two campers in a remote part of alpine Victoria returns to court on Monday, with a decision set to be made on the release of “explosive” material and evidence likely from the detective in charge of the investigation.

Greg Lynn, a former airline pilot, is charged with murdering Russell Hill, 74, and Carol Clay, 73, who went missing in March 2020 while camping in the Wonnangatta Valley, east of Melbourne.

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