‘Women, we make up our own minds, it’s a thing’: Spender
Wrapping up her press club appearance, Allegra Spender was asked about a recent article in the Financial Review stating she had asked them to remove a reference to Simon Holmes à Court from the powerbroking list. Was that true?
Spender said “I did”, and then rephrased:
I had heard that Simon Holmes à Court was on the covert power list and I have a problem with this idea that women like myself get here and there is someone covertly hiding behind us pulling the strings.
I am a woman of my middle ages, I spent ten or fifteen years running companies, I’ve got three kids and a life I’m trying to run here and this … insinuation someone out there is pulling the strings is insulting to me and it is insulting to women around Australia who are saying ‘we make up our own minds’.
That for me was the big learning from the 2022 election, is that we make up our own minds. Since we are talking about women, and we talk about Peter Dutton and the Libs, one of the things that concerns me on so many different levels – including the abortion debate that we are somehow now having again – is we need women in the rooms of power and across our parliament and if the Liberal party is serious about women, I cannot understand how they have managed to preselect 17 men in Queensland out of the 18 seats that they currently hold. That to me is absolutely remarkable.
You can see that it’s an issue. Women, we make up our own minds, it’s a thing.
She received a loud applause from the room after her response.
Key events
Victoria could have hosted the same pared-back program as Glasgow for the same cost but the government never considered the option, Commonwealth Games Australia boss Craig Phillips says.
Glasgow announced its 2026 program on Tuesday after it stepped in to host the next event following Victoria’s withdrawal last year.
Using just four venues, only 10 sports will be contested at a projected cost of 114 million pounds ($A221.51 million).
Victoria cited a budget blow-out to $6 billion which Phillips said was “outrageous and overestimated”. Instead of hosting, Victoria paid $380 million in compensation to the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF), of which $200 million has been directed to Scotland.
Phillips said the Victorian government withdrew without considering scaling back the multi-sport event.
“We were happy to talk to the Victorian government about finding ways of saving the costs of the Games and if eliminating sports from the program was part of that, we certainly would have had that conversation,” Phillips said on Wednesday. “I’ve been on record as saying before, we really didn’t get that opportunity to have that conversation.
AAP
Independent senator Lidia Thorpe has played down criticism from Indigenous leaders of her protest against King Charles on Monday when she shouted “you are not out king” at him.
Thorpe, speaking to ABC News’ Greg Jennett, said she had received positive feedback from some elders who told her that her protest had “lit a fire back in their belly”, but dismissed other Indigenous leaders who had criticised her.
“I don’t listen to the noise of those who have chosen to assimilate into the colonial system. That’s their decision. I’ve decided to be a black sovereign woman and continue our fight against the colony and for justice for our people.”
Asked about whether her oath of allegiance when becoming a senator – in which she claims she deliberately mispronounced the word “heirs” as “hairs” – was valid, Thorpe said “why would I, with my hand on my heart, kneel to an oppressor?”.
“Look, it’s no it’s no secret I don’t like the colony. I don’t like the King and what he represents, and I don’t like the fact that I’ve got to swear to an oppressor to do my job to get justice for my people. Now I am there for one reason and one reason only, and it’s not to make friends, it’s not to get re-elected. It is to get justice for my people.”
Human remains found in Queensland near where teenager swept away in 2022 floods
Joe Hinchliffe
Police have found human remains in an area west of Gympie in which a 14-year-old girl was swept away in floodwaters almost three years ago.
Krystal Cain was last seen by her father on the night of 8 January 2022 after they abandoned their flooded car near the Burnett Highway at Booubyjan, before she was swept away by raging flood waters in the aftermath of ex-tropical cyclone Seth.
Despite a widespread search involving water police, divers, volunteers and helicopters scouring the flood plain upon which the teenager went missing, she was never found.
Police found several human bones on a property at Booubyjan on Sunday.
On Tuesday, a spokesperson said Queensland police were conducting forensic examinations upon the bones yet-to-be identified remains and that the investigation was expected to be protracted.
Land in outer Melbourne to be unlocked under 10-year plan
Swathes of land in Melbourne’s outer suburbs will be unlocked over the next decade in a bid to build 180,000 new homes, AAP reports.
Ploughing ahead with a week-long housing policy blitz, premier Jacinta Allan unveiled a 10-year plan to release land across 27 Melbourne greenfield areas.
She said the pipeline plan for land releases across the city’s outer southeast, north and west was unprecedented.
“(It’s) the most significant commitment in history in greenfield areas to building new homes, new backyards,” she told reporters on Wednesday.
The first three greenfield sites will be released in Cardinia, Whittlesea and Kororoit as early as 2024 and 2025.
However, there is no timeline for when building will get under way on the expected 180,000 new homes.
You can read more on this here:
Miles calls out Crisafulli’s last-minute change of heart on abortion
Andrew Messenger
The Queensland premier, Steven Miles, has slammed the opposition leader for an unexplained backflip on abortion.
At the third leaders’ debate last night, David Crisafulli said he was pro-choice. But he didn’t explain at a press conference this morning why he’d changed his mind since last year, when he said that he did not believe in “late-term” abortion.
“I can’t think of a single time that a candidate, let alone a leader, three days before an election, changes such a fundamental belief,” Miles said.
“How do you go from staunchly pro-life to suddenly pro-choice just a few days before the election. I think Queensland women will be rightly skeptical about the motivations behind this, but it really generates more questions than it answers.
“You know, he’s been able to hold his other 92 candidates to just parroting his lines, but now that he’s broken ranks and told Queenslanders that he’s pro-choice now all of his other 92 candidates should be allowed to give their views to and what we know is that all, bar three of them, Tim Nichols, Steve Mini can and now David Crisafulli, every single other one of them is pro life.
“And that would mean that a majority, if they had a majority, then there would be a majority in favour of laws that would force women to stay pregnant.”
Miles said Crisafulli had made the commitment because the Courier Mail/Sky News audience “laughed at him” for not answering questions about his beliefs.
Several LNP MPs and candidates have publicly revealed themselves as opponents of abortion in recent weeks.
Millions of people in NSW charged illegal merchant fees by state agencies, government says
New South Wales government agencies have illegally charged people about $144m in merchant fees on an estimated 92m credit card transactions for services such as licence renewals, car registrations and fine repayments since 2016.
The finance minister, Courtney Houssos, on Wednesday said the government had referred the issue to the NSW ombudsman for an investigation into “possible serious maladministration” after the state auditor general alerted it to the issue in July.
The state’s corruption watchdog has also been informed.
Houssos said the surcharges had been passed on to tens of millions of customers despite “repeated legal advice” during the former Coalition government’s term that Revenue NSW and Service NSW could not lawfully charge merchant fees.
“I find these revelations extremely concerning, and I can’t see how there is an excuse for a government [agency] that was repeatedly advised that activity was unlawful and to continue to do that,” she said.
She said that due to a longstanding practice of new governments not being given access to advice provided to previous governments, it was impossible at this stage to say who within the previous government was informed of the issue and when.
Read more from Catie McLeod and Tamsin Rose:
Caitlin Cassidy
ACU to reimburse attendees after Joe de Bruyn’s anti-same-sex marriage speech
The Australian Catholic University will reimburse attendees of a graduation ceremony where Joe de Bruyn sparked a walkout with a speech denouncing abortion and same-sex marriage, as the university also revealed it had urged the former union boss to reconsider his remarks before he delivered them.
De Bruyn’s address, delivered on Monday evening, prompted major backlash after he compared abortion to the “human toll of world war two” and alleged same-sex marriage went against “every society on Earth”.
The vice chancellor of the ACU, Professor Zlatko Skrbis, wrote to staff on Tuesday afternoon confirming the university was aware of the contents of the address ahead of time and had allowed the speech to go ahead despite “strongly encouraging” De Bruyn to reconsider his remarks.
Read more:
Emily Wind
Many thanks for joining me on the blog today, Elias Visontay will be here to take you through the rest of our rolling coverage. Take care.
More details on clash between police and suspected neo-Nazis
AAP has more details on the clash between police and suspected neo-Nazis seeking to gatecrash a peaceful refugee rally in Melbourne last night.
Roughly 300 refugee supporters were outside the Department of Home Affairs to mark 100 days of protests calling for asylum seekers to be granted permanent visas, when it was disrupted by about 20 men wearing black and covering their faces.
Aran Mylvaganam from the Tamil Refugee Council said the men marched towards their encampment with an offensive banner and shouted other slogans such as “Hail victory”, “White power” and “Australia for the white man”. He labelled it “quite a terrifying scene.”
Mylvaganam said asylum-seeker advocates initially chased the men away before police formed a line to separate the groups. Video shows police using capsicum spray to push back the suspected neo-Nazis.
Victoria police said the groups dispersed and “there were no arrests or reports of injuries”. Police would assess the circumstances surrounding the demonstration and review vision and people involved, it said.
Mylvaganam criticised the police response, saying some advocates were subjected to the same treatment as the masked men:
They pepper-sprayed some of our supporters well before they pepper-sprayed the [suspected] neo-Nazis who were delivering hate speech. One of our speakers … who is a Palestinian activist, she was pepper sprayed.
Unplanned coal plant outages at highest level in years, energy regulator says
Peter Hannam
Clare Savage, the chair of the Australian Energy Regulator, is before the Senate inquiry into energy this afternoon (along with a big team), and she isn’t holding back about the unreliability of coal plants in the grid.
There were some 54 so-called high price periods during the quarter, when spot prices topped $5,000 per megawatt hour. Yes, the wind was particularly variable but so, it turns out, was coal.
The quarter had the highest number of unplanned coal plant outages since the national electricity market introduced five-minute trading intervals in October 2021, Savage said.
Spot prices are one thing, but since coal-fired plants are a major supplier of future contracts, that effect flows (so to speak) to market expectations. Hence, prices are bid up. Savage said:
The [coal] plants are becoming increasingly unreliable, and the owners of many of these plants are now more reluctant to sell the same volume of contracts in case one of their units fails.
“The exposure of our electricity system to international fossil fuel prices through the linking of our coal and gas markets to exports is a further source of volatility,” she added, noting the lingering impacts from overseas, including Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Asked by the SA Labor senator Karen Grogan how long it would take to set up a regulatory framework for a nuclear power industry, Savage said it would be drawn out. There’s the removal of the industry’s “current prohibition” (an accidental pun, we suspect), to start with.
I don’t have any expert view on how long it would then take to build a power station but I would have thought the regulatory framework itself would take eight to 10 years.
Woman in custody after allegedly assaulting child at Perth shopping centre
A 21-year-old woman has been taking into custody after allegedly assaulting a child while in its mother’s arms at a Perth shopping centre yesterday.
Police said a woman approached a mother holding her child yesterday afternoon at the shopping centre in East Victoria Park before allegedly assaulting the child and leaving the area. Police said the child received facial injuries.
The woman is not known to the mother and child, police said.
Today, police said a 21-year-old female was taken into custody at Mirrabooka Shopping Centre around 11am. Further updates would be provided when available, police added.
Pilot survives light plane crash in Queensland
A pilot has managed to escape from a light aircraft crash near Gladstone in Queensland, before the plane caught alight.
The Queensland Ambulance Service said a light aircraft went down and caught alight around 9.30am this morning on Duaringa Baralaba Road.
The pilot, aged in his 30s, removed himself from the plane and was transported to hospital “in a stable condition with spinal precautions”, QAS said.
The Courier Mail reported the man was flying a crop dusting plane, when it crashed and flipped over.
Jordyn Beazley
Second staff member working for NSW prison charged
A second staff member working for a NSW prison has been charged after she allegedly intimidated a witness who gave evidence before a special commission of inquiry into the prison system.
Guardian Australia understands it was in relation to the inquiry into former prison guard Wayne Astill, who was convicted of abusing female inmates while he was a guard at a NSW prison.
In September, a woman – who was an employee of Corrective Services NSW – was charged with two counts of stalk/intimidate to intend fear/physical harm, and public office misconduct after reports she allegedly intimidated a witness, according to NSW police.
Yesterday, NSW police arrested a second woman who is also charged with stalk/intimidate to intend fear/ physical harm and public office misconduct. A Corrective NSW spokesperson confirmed the woman is also alleged to have intimidated a witness that gave evidence before an inquiry.
Both women were charged under a NSW police operation known as Strike Force Pylane. Police said the operation was set up last July to investigate misconduct by prison staff, and attempts by prison staff to cover up information about that misconduct.
Both women charged under Strike Force Pylane have been granted bail, with one set to appear before court on 29 November, and another to appear on 20 November.
NSW police said, “Investigations under Strike Force Pylane continue.”
First passengers enter Australia without incoming passenger card
The first passengers have begun entering Australia without an incoming passenger card this week.
Qantas has begun a pilot of the Australia Digital Travel Declaration (ATD), a digital replacement to the incoming passenger card. This is available for eligible passengers travelling from Aukland to Brisbane, initially on flight QF126.
It will be expanded to include customers travelling from other New Zealand cities to Brisbane “in the coming days”, Qantas said, ahead of additional Australian destinations joining the program early next year.
Qantas said it is looking to expand the program to other international destinations in the coming months. In a statement, the Australian Border Force said the pilot program commenced on Monday.
DAFF’s deputy secretary of biosecurity, Justine Saunders, said:
We are pleased to see the biosecurity process becoming more integrated and streamlined while still effectively protecting Australia from harmful biosecurity pests and diseases.
The success of this pilot program is a step in the right direction towards our shared end goal of achieving streamlined border clearances.
As Mostafa Rachwani reported earlier this year, the change to digital could bring in an additional $50bn a year:
‘Women, we make up our own minds, it’s a thing’: Spender
Wrapping up her press club appearance, Allegra Spender was asked about a recent article in the Financial Review stating she had asked them to remove a reference to Simon Holmes à Court from the powerbroking list. Was that true?
Spender said “I did”, and then rephrased:
I had heard that Simon Holmes à Court was on the covert power list and I have a problem with this idea that women like myself get here and there is someone covertly hiding behind us pulling the strings.
I am a woman of my middle ages, I spent ten or fifteen years running companies, I’ve got three kids and a life I’m trying to run here and this … insinuation someone out there is pulling the strings is insulting to me and it is insulting to women around Australia who are saying ‘we make up our own minds’.
That for me was the big learning from the 2022 election, is that we make up our own minds. Since we are talking about women, and we talk about Peter Dutton and the Libs, one of the things that concerns me on so many different levels – including the abortion debate that we are somehow now having again – is we need women in the rooms of power and across our parliament and if the Liberal party is serious about women, I cannot understand how they have managed to preselect 17 men in Queensland out of the 18 seats that they currently hold. That to me is absolutely remarkable.
You can see that it’s an issue. Women, we make up our own minds, it’s a thing.
She received a loud applause from the room after her response.
‘Gas a small part of energy transition’, Spender says
Allegra Spender was also questioned on the role of nuclear in the energy transition, as well as gas, once coal is phased out.
She said she is “tech-agnostic” and the question is about “how do we transition in a way that is right for the environment and the economy”:
Coal is exiting in the next 10 years, what will we do to replace that? The energy bosses said yesterday [that] nuclear is not what is going to solve the problem by 2035.
Many people are sceptical we will be here before the 2040s. We need to deal with the next 10 years.
I keep an open mind in terms of how nuclear as a technology evolves. Right now, the cheapest and reliable option for us in terms of dealing with the coal closure will be renewables backed by batteries but also gas.
Gas is a part of the transition. Aemo has gas in part of the transition. It is a small part of the transition, but it is important … it is a fossil fuel, I’d love to avoid it as much as you can, but right now it has an important role to play.
Spender says Coalition stance on climate ‘unacceptable’ and says numbers ‘crucial’ in minority government discussions
At the National Press Club, Allegra Spender was asked a number of times about the prospect of a minority government and said the numbers would be crucial.
A reporter asked if she would consider supporting the Coalition forming government, “even when Peter Dutton has said they would dump the 2030 net zero target and that within the Coalition ranks, there are members who deny the very existence of climate change”.
Spender said the numbers matter because “there could be a scenario where there is 65 and 75” rather than a seat or two difference.
Then it is a negotiation, and that matters. Climate is incredibly important to me and my community … and frankly it is unacceptable that the Coalition pretends that they care about climate action, when they are saying they won’t have a 2030 target. That is unacceptable and it is ridiculous. Let’s see what actually comes out of any negotiations.
Caitlin Cassidy
Education minister meeting with Indian counterpart in Melbourne
The education minister, Jason Clare, is entertaining his Indian counterpart in Melbourne today as part of a ministerial visit aiming to shore up transnational links in higher education and skills.
It comes amid a deteriorating relationship between Canada and India, with allegations of the potential involvement of the Indian government in crimes against dissidents.
Onshore, though, it’s all smiles between Clare and Dharmendra Pradhan, who today toured RMIT, which has a partnership with the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani.
Tomorrow, Pradhan will attend his second Australia-India Education and Skills Council (AIESC) meeting to be held in Sydney, with discussions to focus on Australia’s research strength and industry engagement, as well as the potential for further partnerships to deliver education in India.
The AIESC meeting coincides with Deakin and Wollongong universities opening in India this year, with more Australian universities expected to follow. Clare said:
It is an honour to welcome Minister Pradhan back to Australia for his second visit since 2022. This is the fourth time we have caught up here or in India in the last two years. I look forward to showcasing Australia’s education system and working together to further strengthen Australia’s education links with India.