Australia news live: Labor vows to support working from home as Coalition touts public servants cuts; investigation into man’s death after falling into silo
Labor vows to keep work-from-home entitlements as Coalition touts public servants cuts
More than 36,000 public servants will be axed if the opposition takes power, while Labor vows to keep work-from-home entitlements, saying they save people $5000.
The Liberals have attacked Labor for expanding the public service by 36,000 people as it cut costs on consultants, with opposition finance spokesperson Jane Hume confirming they’d be gone under a Coalition government.
“We think we can bring down the number of public servants to where it was at the end of Covid,” she told Sky News on Sunday.
We think that the 36,000 public servants that have been brought on haven’t demonstrated that the improvements to the services, to the public, have been corresponding.
Hume said frontline services would not be cut. The Coalition has not outlined the source of the cuts.
– Australian Associated Press
Key events
Graham Readfearn
Australia’s two world heritage-listed reefs – Ningaloo on the west coast and the Great Barrier Reef on the east – have been hit simultaneously by coral bleaching that reef experts have called “heartbreaking” and “a profoundly distressing moment”.
Teams of scientists on both coasts have been monitoring and tracking the heat stress and bleaching extending across thousands of kilometres of marine habitat, which is likely to have been driven by global heating.
Watch the video here:
‘Mundane’ objects reveal confronting legacy of violence
A child’s toy, a filing cabinet drawer, a disc-operated musical instrument and a series of 30 bronze plaques may seem innocuous and mundane, but on closer inspection, they tell a story of violence, racism and injustice.
In his exhibition ‘Shadow and Substance’, Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall uses these items to examine the ethics of how Indigenous cultural property and information were acquired and displayed in institutions.
“I try to use very mundane symbols and materials of the archive that people are familiar with but slightly alter them so it encourages people to think about those things differently,” Weatherall told AAP.
When American anthropologist and eugenicist Charles Davenport went to Brewarrina Mission in NSW in the 1920s, he measured and recorded the dimensions of the limbs and skin colour of Weatherall’s family. This information was published without their permission.
Weatherall found these anatomical records from institutional collections and used them to inform his new commission for the exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
Called ‘Trace’, the work features a series of paint swatches relating to a skin colour chart used by anthropologists and eugenicists in the 19th and 20th centuries and a large sculptural spinning top.
Rather than seeing the collections of ancestral remains, cultural property, and documented information on First Nations people as benign materials, they were signifiers of contemporary violence, Weatherall said.
“We can’t divorce ourselves from those histories,” he said.
All of those things have led up to this point where they’re influencing social and political realities for Aboriginal people, and they’re also shaping non-Indigenous people’s perspectives of us.
Australia was ground zero for a lot of those knowledges, planned, premeditated killing of Aboriginal people and taking bodies over to different institutions around the world just to study us.
– Australian Associated Press
Climate fight here and now, and linked to living costs
The federal election looms as a pivotal opportunity for advocates seeking to mobilise voters on climate change action.
Joseph Sikulu, the Pacific director for 350.org, views it as a chance to push Australia to achieve its ambition of being a “big brother nation” to the climate-vulnerable Pacific region.
But the Pacific Climate Warriors, as they are also known, face fresh challenges as they try to engage diaspora communities before they head to the polls in May.
Anti-climate science rhetoric originating in the US had been spilling over into Australian social media feeds and broader discourse, Sydney-based Sikulu said. He told AAP:
A lot of misinformation and disinformation is already making its way into our communities.
The financial squeeze of higher prices for groceries, housing and bills had also, understandably, made it harder to engage people on climate. But Sikulu said action to decarbonise and adapt to climate change would ease hip-pocket pain.
The CSIRO consistently ranks wind and solar as the cheapest forms of new electricity generation, and modelling by the Clean Energy Investor Group suggests household power bills would be nearly $420 more annually if the grid was reliant solely on coal and gas. Insurance is another pressure point as insurers price in the increased risk of natural disasters due to climate change.
The overlap between economic security and rising global temperatures had become increasingly hard to ignore, Tomorrow Movement national director Desiree Cai said.
The best solutions tick more than one box at once, she said, such as adapting homes to be more resilient to floods, fires and storms and reducing the long-term financial burden of repairs and expensive insurance.
– Australian Associated Press
Workplace safety regulator investigating man’s death after falling into silo
A man in his 50s has died after falling into a silo on Canterbury Road, Montrose, Victoria police understand.
It is believed the man fell into a silo about 4:30pm yesterday, police said in a statement.
A spokesperson from WorkSafe, the state’s workplace safety regulator, confirmed it was investigating the death.
Police are preparing a report for the coroner.
Jonathan Barrett
Living costs hit Australians’ petrol station impulse buying
When Australians pay for petrol, they are exposed to an assortment of chips, chocolates, lollies and drinks designed to trigger an impulse purchase. But business owners have noticed that an increasing number of motorists are no longer buying snacks, as cost-of-living pressures spark a change in consumer behaviour that is denting sales of traditionally popular items.
“When consumer sentiment is off, and people are not feeling good about the economy, our non-fuel sales drop; we’ve certainly seen that over the last 18 to 24 months,” says Mark McKenzie, the chief executive of the Australasian Convenience and Petroleum Marketers Association.
Fuel is an essential product, but coffee, muffins, chips, chocs and drinks that go with it aren’t.
Read the full story here:
More Aussies seeking help for sex and porn addiction
More Australians are seeking support for sex and pornography addiction as private, paid content platforms rise in popularity.
In 2023, the number of users and creators accessing OnlyFans, a subscription and pay-per-view platform, increased by nearly 30%, showing the growing demand for private pornographic content.
The site also reported a 19% increase in gross payments processed to $6.63bn.
The Banyans Healthcare, a rehabilitation centre located in Brisbane’s Bowen Hills, reported a 184% increase in inquiries for pornography or sex addiction support in the past six months.
Porn addiction was something that needed to be talked about “a whole lot more”, particularly its impact on younger generations, psychologist Gavin Brown told AAP.
It’s important to understand the harms of online pornography, which is manifestly different to the old version of magazine pornography.
The difference with the internet is that you can literally be looking at a new image every second, which affects the brain circuitry and becomes much more reinforcing than old print forms.
Experts suspect platforms like OnlyFans could increase the risk of a user developing a porn addiction because it provides a never-ending stream of explicit content tailored to their own desires.
Some of the warning signs of a developing addiction include loss of interest in a partner, withdrawing from other activities to spend time watching porn and looking for more and more explicit content.
– Australian Associated Press
Australians paying $1052 more for car insurance a year on average, finds insurance council report
Australians are paying hundreds of dollars more for comprehensive car insurance as costs across the sector soar.
Insurance premiums have risen 42% since 2019 to an annual average of $1052, according to a report by the Insurance Council of Australia.
But the council insists profit margins are “not the main culprit”.
It says insurers’ motor insurance costs as a proportion of premiums collected have increased by 5% over the same period.
Lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic kept average premium prices flat from 2019 to 2021 due to lower claim frequency. Since then, premiums have risen substantially, with the council attributing that to inflation.
Premiums vary substantially across the nation. The average NSW driver pays $1176 per policy, about $400 more than those in Tasmania.
In 2019, Australians spent an average of 43.6% of one week’s income on annual comprehensive motor insurance. That figure had risen to 53.7% by June 2024.
The rising costs were unsustainable for Australian motorists, the council’s chief executive, Andrew Hall, said.
Insurers are doing their bit to reduce costs – such as streamlining operations, negotiating better repair arrangements, and investing in the repair workforce – but the reality is many cost drivers are outside the industry’s control.
We need governments to step up with targeted reforms.
– Australian Associated Press
Labor vows to keep work-from-home entitlements as Coalition touts public servants cuts
More than 36,000 public servants will be axed if the opposition takes power, while Labor vows to keep work-from-home entitlements, saying they save people $5000.
The Liberals have attacked Labor for expanding the public service by 36,000 people as it cut costs on consultants, with opposition finance spokesperson Jane Hume confirming they’d be gone under a Coalition government.
“We think we can bring down the number of public servants to where it was at the end of Covid,” she told Sky News on Sunday.
We think that the 36,000 public servants that have been brought on haven’t demonstrated that the improvements to the services, to the public, have been corresponding.
Hume said frontline services would not be cut. The Coalition has not outlined the source of the cuts.
– Australian Associated Press
Dutton’s suggested referendum on deporting criminals not in Coalition’s ‘core plans’, says Taylor
Angus Taylor said Peter Dutton’s suggested referendum on deporting criminals is “a last resort” and “not part of our core plans right now”.
Speers asked the shadow minister if money was being set aside for a referendum. Taylor said:
Well, it’s a last resort and it’s not part of our core plans right now. But let’s be clear – we will do it as a brake last option because one thing we’re not going to do, which this government has done, is be weak on national security issues and keeping Australians safe.
Dutton floated the idea of a referendum on giving the federal government more powers to deport criminals with dual citizenship despite declaring 18 months ago that the Indigenous voice vote was a waste of money and Australians were “over the referendum process”.
Coalition’s nuclear power generators to cost under $20bn each, Taylor pledges
David Speers pushed Angus Taylor on the cost of the coalition’s nuclear power plan.
Taylor said it would cost “44% less than the alternative,” with Speers clarifying, “So is it $360bn?”
After a back-and-forth, Taylor said the proposed seven nuclear generators would cost under $20bn each.
Coalition against coal and gas price caps, confirms shadow treasurer
Taylor confirmed the Coalition is against price caps on coal and gas.
The shadow treasurer said:
I won’t announce our policy ahead of time but we were against it from the start.
We’ll have more to say about our shorter-term energy policy in the coming weeks. But what is clear about it – and I think you can guess where we’re going here – we need to get more gas into the system.
You’ve got to get more gas into the system to put downward pressure on prices. Labor didn’t bother with that because they don’t like the gas industry. They don’t think natural gas has a role to play. So they imposed price caps. Well, supply dries up. That happens and you see the investment moving overseas and Australians don’t get access to the affordable energy they want and deserve.
