Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Tax reform dominated debate, as ministers discussed East Timor and the 2000 Olympics – and resisted climate action
On 1 July Australia’s goods and services tax will have been in place for 20 years. It is uncontroversial in concept, with no major party advocating its abolition. Every so often there are calls for it to be increased from 10% or expanded – calls that are usually rebuffed.
But just how fraught the GST was to introduce is one of the key insights from the release of cabinet papers by the National Archives of Australia, covering the years 1998 and 1999. There were other concerns: East Timor’s independence, the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the failed republican referendum, and familiar resistance to doing anything but the minimum on climate change.
Action to protect LGBT students, a payday lending crackdown and an integrity commission are among the Coalition’s lost causes
Governments should be judged not just on what they do with their time in office but also on what they don’t do.
There are only so many hours in a day, and so many parliamentary sitting weeks in a year (there were just 10 since the May election). Nevertheless it’s important to know not just what the top priorities are but also what’s been pushed to the backburner.
Scott Morrison announces cut in number of government departments as part of public service overhaul. All the day’s political news, live
Labor is moving a motion saying the government’s attempts to push the union-busting bill through without debate was “anti-democratic”.
Better still is this bit of the motion:
This is a prime ministerial tantrum, with the prime minister of Australia behaving like a juvenile schoolyard bully just because he didn’t get his way last week.
We’re now moving through the votes for the government’sunion-busting bill.
A side note - this is the 100th division to take place in the House for this sitting fortnight.
They stand at the centre of many of our political debates as we navigate the increasing influence of China in our region, its attempts to infiltrate our politics and institutions, and Australia’s increasing economic dependence.
The Pitch@Palace program – founded by the prince in 2014 – supports entrepreneurs and start-up companies and gives them the opportunity to pitch their idea to business leaders at places including Buckingham Palace.
‘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.
Backdown comes after university intervened to have its governing body sign off on Ramsay Centre degree despite it never being considered by its academic senate
The peak union for university academics and staff has been forced to drop legal action against the University of Wollongong over its approval of the controversial Ramsay Centre-funded western civilisation course.
The National Tertiary Education Union announced on Friday that it had withdrawn its action in the New South Wales supreme court over what it had described as the “unlawful” approval of the degree by the university late last year.
The income threshold for repaying university fees has dropped to just $45,881. Here’s what you need to know
On Monday, the Hecs (Higher Education Contribution Scheme) repayment threshold fell by more than 11%.
From now on, anybody earning over $45,881 a year will have to start repaying their student loans – effective immediately. It was the largest percentage drop in the threshold in more than 20 years and the second largest drop in the history of the scheme.
Adrian Cheok, who was made a member of the Order of Australia, has been censured for ‘aggressive, belittling’ language towards colleagues
A robot sex expert and former far-right candidate who was awarded a Queen’s Birthday honour for “significant service to international education” says he is setting up a graduate school with Fraser Anning which will teach classes on “Trumpism” and “Bannonism”.
Prof Adrian Cheok was also accused in an open letter by organisers of a 2017 academic conference of using “aggressive, belittling” language towards another professor. In a separate incident, he also labelled another academicas “psycho … old, fat and balding” and said he worked at a “tin pot university”, according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
In this extract from Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell, one boy’s family tell Louise Milligan the cataclysmic effect abuse had on him
This is the story of two teenage boys sent on scholarships from what were then Melbourne’s inner suburbs to a Catholic boys’ school – St Kevin’s College. St Kevin’s is in Toorak, Melbourne’s most exclusive precinct.
The school is wedged between the Kooyong Tennis Club and the Yarra River, and closed behind grand iron gates with gilded lettering. The boys wear boater hats and navy blazers, candy-striped with emerald and gold. While the area the boys came from has now gentrified, in the 1990s it might as well have been a different planet.