Australia news live: Dreyfus considering whether to release sealed section of robodebt royal commission report; stolen Bluey coins found in warehouse

Cait Kelly

Queensland LNP to await advice on pill-testing ban three weeks out from schoolies

A hardline stance on drugs might be put on hold for schoolies by the new Queensland government, with the premier balking at an immediate pill-testing ban, AAP has reported.

Pill testing at the popular end-of-year event on the Gold Coast was to be rolled out at a cost of $80,000, but the LNP said It would ditch the scheme if elected.

After ending Labor’s nine-year reign at the election on Saturday, Crisafulli said he would await advice on a pill-testing ban with the schoolies event just weeks away:

I’m going to take some advice on that and I’m going to do that in a deliberate way – that’s important.

The question was asked about schoolies, which is in three weeks’ time – we’re not talking about in the future, I’m talking about this event here and I’ve asked for some advice.

Queensland is one of only three jurisdictions in the nation to have legalised pill testing, which reduces the risks and harms associated with drug use. It is available in 28 countries across Europe, the Americas and across the ditch in NZ.

Dreyfus ‘giving consideration’ to release sealed section of robodebt report

Sarah Basford Canales

The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, is “giving consideration” to whether a restricted section of the robodebt royal commission report should be publicly released.

This morning, the National Anti-Corruption Commission announced it will reconsider its decision not to start a corruption investigation into six robodebt referrals after its watchdog found its initial refusal was “affected by apprehended bias”.

In July 2023, the commissioner, Catherine Holmes, wrote a cover letter for the report that was addressed to the governor general. It explained that the sealed chapter “recommends the referral of individuals for civil action or criminal prosecution”.

Holmes wrote that the chapter should “remain sealed and not be tabled with the rest of the report so as not to prejudice the conduct of any future civil action or criminal prosecution”.

But after the APSC released its final report into the 12 referred public servants involved in the unlawful scheme, some advocates have questioned whether the restricted section should now be released.

The NDIS minister, Bill Shorten, told the National Press Club in August he had been unsuccessful in making the case but would try to continue using his “powers of persuasion”.

On Wednesday, following the Nacc Inspector’s report, Dreyfus’ office said the matter was still being considered. A spokesperson said:

The government is giving consideration to questions relating to the release of the confidential chapter.

Read more:

Jordyn Beazley

NSW police challenge Newcastle anti-coal ‘protestival’ in court

The New South Wales police force is challenging a planned protest through the supreme court for the second time this month – this time an event in Newcastle calling for climate action.

The November protest is organised by Rising Tide and known as the “People’s Blockade of the World’s Largest Coal Port”. It would involve thousands of activists paddling into the Port of Newcastle on kayaks and rafts to stop coal exports from leaving Newcastle for 50 hours.

The event, which is also advertised as a “protestival”, includes workshops and music in the lead-up to the paddle-out.

This is the second year in a row that Rising Tide planned such an action. Last year, the police accepted the group’s form 1 to block the port for 30 hours.

NSW police later charged more than 100 people after protesters blocked the major coal port beyond the agreed deadline. Among those arrested was a 97-year-old man who was a Uniting church minister.

One of the protest organisers, Zack Schofield, said NSW police had sought a court order challenging their form 1 application. If accepted, the application protects participants from being charged by police for the disruption under obstruction and unlawful assembly offences.

Read more here:

Diseases expert says pandemic planning must put a dollar value on life

Karen Middleton

Prof Peter Collignon, a Australian National University microbiologist and infectious diseases expert, says governments need to be more “hard-nosed” about putting a price on life when planning for future pandemics and conduct cost-benefit analyses on the economic and social impact of lockdowns versus how many, and who, they might save.

Collignon told ABC radio Canberra on Wednesday that health economists generally valued a life at about $50,000 a year of good-quality life.

“So when people say you can’t put a price on life, in fact, health always does when they’re making decisions about allocating billions of dollars, and we need to look at that,” Collignon said.

If you’re going to actually put in severe restrictions, and it’s going to cost you billions of dollars in your economy, you’ve got to look at how many lives are you really going to save from that and what is the age of those lives? Saving a 15-year-old is different to saving an 85-year-old.

Now, if you’re 85 you’ll have a different attitude, but you know, you’ve got to be a bit hard-nosed about this in how you allocate resources in society and how you interfere with people’s livelihoods, as well as trying to make their health as well as you can with the resources you have.

Collignon was responding to the findings of the federal government-commissioned Covid-19 inquiry, published on Tuesday, which found lockdowns during the pandemic’s emergency phase had eroded public trust in governments, seriously damaged children’s mental health in particular and imposed a significant burden on the economy.

Peter Hannam

Cheaper energy drove drop in September quarter inflation

The September quarter inflation numbers will provide some comfort to the Reserve Bank that its interest rate hikes are doing their job. The fact that markets barely budged on the inflation news suggests investors were sanguine too, with the dollar and stocks pretty steady.

As flagged, energy prices fell in the September quarter, led by a 17.3% slide for power prices and 6.7% for automotive fuel, the ABS said.

The former will vary across the nation, since residents in Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania collected hefty rebates on 1 July (while the rest of us had to make do with $75 per household from the Albanese government that we’ll get at the start of each quarter this financial year).

The drop in petrol prices will be more widespread. Whether the drop will be sustained hinges a lot on how the Middle East conflicts fare (and also if China’s economy really does perk up).

Anyway, food and non-alcoholic drinks added 0.6 percentage points to the modest 0.2% rise in quarter-on-quarter CPI, itself the smallest increase since the June 2020 drop during the early Covid shutdowns.

Less promising, though, was services inflation. This has actually risen by 4.6% from a year ago, versus the 4.5% annual pace in the June quarter. Rents were up 6.7%, the slowest pace since the June quarter of 2023 but still uncomfortably high for many.

More than 40,000 limited edition Bluey coins have been recovered during a search in Wentworthville, NSW police have said.

Police received a report that “a large amount of currency” had been stolen from a warehouse in Wetherill Park on Monday 12 July this year.

Officers were told 63,000 unreleased limited edition $1 Bluey coins, produced by the Australian mint, had been stolen.

Two men and one woman have been charged and remain before the courts, police said in a statement.

Detectives searched a self-storage facility in Wentworthville yesterday aftenoon and found Royal Australian Mint bags containing a total of $40,061 of the stolen Bluey coins, police said.

Police also located and seized other items believed to have been stolen, including a number of power tools, clothing items and bags.

Inflation falls to 2.8%, its lowest rate in three years

Peter Hannam

Australia’s headline inflation rate retreated to its lowest in more than three years in the September quarter as petrol and electricity prices fell.

The annual consumer price index for the July-September period was 2.8%, or the lowest since the March quarter of 2021, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has just reported. That outcome compared with the 2.9% pace expected by economists and the 3.8% headline result for the June quarter.

The measure of underlying inflation – the trimmed mean gauge – came in at 3.5%, putting it back on track towards the Reserve Bank’s 2%-3% inflation target range.

More details coming shortly.

Benita Kolovos

Victoria consumer affairs minister on rental reports

As we reported earlier, the Victorian government has announced a suite of rental reforms, including a ban on no-fault evictions and landlords and real estate agents charging fees to process rent or conduct background checks.

Speaking at a rental property in Clifton Hill earlier this morning, Victoria’s consumer affairs minister, Gabrielle Williams, says the reforms will be “gradually rolled out” over the next 12 months. She said:

These are reforms that directly respond to the feedback that we’ve received from renters and renter advocates, issues that we know are playing out in our rental market right now … These are the reforms that we’re introducing to make sure that we’re getting the right balance in that marketplace, that we are, on one hand, providing the opportunities for landlords and property investors, but also that we are making sure that for those renters in our community, they have a safe, secure and fit-for-purpose place to call home and they’re not being unnecessarily and unfairly stung by charges that they should just simply not have to pay.

Benita Kolovos

Victorian health minister on Covid inquiry report

Victoria’s health minister, Mary-Anne Thomas, was also asked about the Covid-19 inquiry report when she arrived at parliament this morning. She said she was yet to read the report in full but would consider its findings and recommendations:

I welcome the commonwealth’s commitment to establish a centre for disease control here in Australia. We are one of the very few developed nations that does not have such a centre. At the time of this unprecedented event that was extremely difficult for all Australians, we took the advice of health experts and put in place a range of initiatives. We took their advice in order to protect the lives and livelihoods of all Victorians. The actions that we took during that time saved lives, and they saved businesses. We kept people employed, but I will take time to read the report in detail, to examine its findings and recommendations, to see what actions we need to take.

Benita Kolovos

Pandemic showed Victoria Liberal party ‘at its worst’, says premier

Back to the Victorian premier’s presser a short while ago.

Jacinta Allan dismissed suggestions her predecessor, Daniel Andrews, failed to communicate decisions made during the early years of the pandemic to the Victorian people. She said:

All Victorians remember so very well the daily dissemination of information from the former premier. He was singularly focused on providing information to Victorians, directly to Victorians, something like 120 daily press conferences in a row that contained significant amounts of information.

Asked about opposition leader John Pesutto’s comments on ABC News Breakfast earlier this morning, in which he said the Victorian lockdowns were “selective”, and the government picked and chose which industries it closed “for no apparent reason”, Allan replied:

During the pandemic, the Victorian Liberal party showed their worst. They were not on the side of Victorians. Their approach to the virus is to let it rip … You know what let it rip looks like? Let it rip would have looked like many, many, many people dying, many, many more people in hospitals and businesses being very, very badly affected. That is the Victorian Liberal party, in my view, at its worst, and it appears that they’re continuing that approach … They were playing politics then, and they’re playing politics now.

Peter Hannam

Today’s inflation data dump to shape RBA’s interest rate outlook

For all the recent chatter about whether the economy was running too hot (eg the latest bumper month for job creation) or if it had stalled (with per capita output still in retreat), the numbers that really matter as far as the Reserve Bank is concerned about will be revealed today.

The ABS’s quarterly inflation figures, out today at 11.30am AEDT, will comfort – or alarm – the RBA board when it meets next Monday and Tuesday to review its interest rate setting.

Economists are primed for good news, both for the headline consumer price index (CPI) and the underlying inflation rate (known as the “trimmed mean”).

The former may well have a “2” in the front of it for the first time since early 2021. The latter may ease to 3.5%, or so economists predict, resuming a retreat that was interrupted in the June quarter.

We explored the prospects that the cost-of-living crisis is abating last weekend, and we will probably get more evidence of that today. Petrol prices have been tumbling for a while (war in the Middle East notwithstanding) and electricity bills have been suppressed by generous government handouts (especially in Queensland and WA).

The RBA governor, Michele Bullock, however, said last month the central bank would likely want more proof inflation is “sustainably” within its 2%-3% target range before it would cut interest rate cuts.

Prior to today’s figures, investors were betting there was only a 10% chance of a 25 basis-points RBA rate cut to 4.1% next week and about a one-in-four chance in December. They estimated a reduction of that size was only a certainty in May next year, according to the ASX’s rate tracker.

We’ll find out in a bit over an hour if those bets are on the money.

Benita Kolovos

Victoria premier on Covid inquiry

Earlier, at Victorian premier Jacinta Allan’s press conference, she was asked about the federal Covid-19 inquiry, which handed down its long-awaited report yesterday.

She said while her focus had been on the Auburn South primary school accident, she would review the findings of the report:

It was a one-in-100-year pandemic with a deadly disease that was killing people, and so [the Victorian government response] was based on the best public health expert advice that we had … This informed the measures that we put in place here in Victoria. And so we’ll have a look at the report. But I think it’s important to reflect that this was a one-in-100-year pandemic. It was unprecedented.

ABC television news audience down 4%

Amanda Meade

Audiences for ABC news and current affairs on television are down by 4% on last financial year, according to the ABC Annual Report tabled in parliament late on Tuesday.

News programs on ABC TV and the ABC News channel reached an average of 5.2m viewers weekly across metro and regional areas.

The ABC News website, ABC News app, and current affairs websites combined recorded an average of 8.1m weekly users in 2023–24, down 7% on the previous year.

Meanwhile, audiences for ABC News on TikTok are growing significantly, with a total of 591m video views on TikTok.

A spokesperson for the ABC said audience data should be understood in the context of softening audience trends across the entire media sector.

“The ABC is actively engaged with audiences as they increasingly transition to digital platforms,” the spokesperson said.

This is clearly in evidence with the most recent Ipsos rankings where ABC News is the top news website in the country.

While news audiences were down generally, big news events brought spikes in viewers: including the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war, the voice referendum, the Optus outage, the stabbing attacks at Sydney’s Westfield Bondi Junction, the federal budget in May 2024 and the return of Julian Assange in June 2024.