Peter Dutton gets standing ovation at LNP convention but says he’s ‘too old’ to make political comeback
Peter Dutton was hailed as a “great son” of the Liberal National Party after making a surprise appearance at its annual convention, AAP reports.
The former opposition leader received a standing ovation at an LNP gathering in Brisbane on Friday after being saluted by his successor, Sussan Ley, and outgoing president Lawrence Springborg.
He has been rarely seen since a devastating federal campaign, when the coalition lost the election and he was dumped from his seat of Dickson in Brisbane.
But he enjoyed the spotlight on Friday, as Springborg called him a “great son of the party”. Ley added that she often thought of Dutton while she was walking through Parliament House, saying today:
Your record is one of courage, commitment and conviction. I’m proud to have been your deputy for three years. I think about Peter often as I walk the corridors of Parliament House. What would Peter say? What would you do?
The ABC adds Dutton said he won’t return to politics again, saying: “no, mate. I’m too old for that”.
Key events
Luca Ittimani
Is Sydney’s ‘plan B’ housing solution in sight? NSW treasurer plays coy
A potential new train station and apartment blocks in Sydney’s east could still be part of the solution to the New South Wales housing shortage, with the state treasurer dodging questions on the proposal.
Labor’s Daniel Mookhey and his premier, Chris Minns, are yet to announce a promised “plan B” after the Australian Turf Club voted against selling the Rosehill racecourse site to make way for 25,000 new homes.
The opposition in budget estimates claimed the government would soon announce the redevelopment of a mothballed unfinished station in Woollahra on the eastern suburbs rail line, surrounded by apartment blocks. Read more about the proposal here:
Asked a dozen different ways over a 15-minute exchange whether Woollahra was the way ahead, Mookhey gave a series of indirect answers:
We are building infrastructure, particularly when it comes to supporting housing … I don’t have any policy announcement to make to you today … Whether it’s in Woollahra, or whether it’s elsewhere in the city or the state, the fundamental truth is this, New South Wales needs to build more homes.
Liberal MP Damien Tudehope pressed for specifics, suggesting $193m had already been set aside for the Woollahra rebuild and the train line would have to close, but Mookhey did not oblige:
You’re accusing me of a secret conspiracy to help deal with the housing crisis … There’s no conspiracy. It’s the open intent of the government to look for every available opportunity to build.
Adeshola Ore
Governor general Sam Mostyn shares lessons about diversity
Australia’s governor general, Sam Mostyn, has delivered the Diversity Council Australia’s Anna McPhee memorial oration in Melbourne.
Mostyn spoke about the lessons she has learned since she was appointed to the role last year. She says first and second generation Australians she meets tell her “please just talk about us as Australian”.
Mostyn says Anthony Albanese asked her to be a “modern, visible and optimistic” governor general:
What my first year has taught me is that modern Australia is a place where tradition and modernity sit comfortably together, where diversity is almost not a big enough word for the multitudes we contain, where people are migrants or the children or grandchildren of migrants.
McPhee, who died in 2017, was the director of the federal Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace agency.
Guzman y Gomez cracks $1bn in sales and will open 15 US stores despite losing millions on effort so far
Catie McLeod
Mexican-themed chain Guzman y Gomez plans to open at least 15 restaurants in the US to demonstrate proof of concept, despite losing $13m in the past year on its bid to expand into the competitive American market.
Despite its struggles in the US, the company has recorded more than $1bn in sales across its network – a $14.5m profit – since listing on the Australian Stock Exchange in June last year and today paid its first dividend to shareholders.
The company’s co-chief executive officers, Steven Marks and Hilton Brett, told investors they were “relentlessly focused on demonstrating proof of concept” in the US.
In a joint letter published this morning as the company released its results for the past financial year, Marks and Brett said each US restaurant would need to make at least $3m US a year to be sustainable. “That’s the bar, and while it will take time, we are seeing momentum,” they said.
The CEOs said Guzman y Gomez was “on track” to be opening 40 new restaurants in Australia per year within four years.
However, the company has had a slower-than-expected start to the new financial year which, combined with the doubling of its losses in the US in the 12 months to July compared with the year before, appears to have rattled investors.
Shares in Guzman y Gomez had tumbled 21% on the ASX as of 12.26pm, down to $22.88.
Can the government keep kids safe in childcare? – Full Story podcast
Calls for childcare reforms have become louder since revelations surfaced of multiple sexual abuse charges laid against a Victorian worker. Federal and state education ministers are set to meet on Friday in an attempt to restore faith and safety to a service few can live without – but is real change possible?
Senior reporter Kate Lyons talks to Reged Ahmad about whether the government’s next moves will give parents and carers the reassurance they desperately need:
Luca Ittimani
NSW government was not told about NDIS replacement program, treasurer says
The NSW government did not know how the Albanese government planned to reform the national disability insurance scheme until it was announced on Wednesday, the state treasurer has said.
The federal health minister announced a program to divert children with mild to moderate developmental delays or autism from the NDIS would launch by mid-2027, jointly funded with the states and territories.
Daniel Mookhey today joined other state government ministers who have said the federal government did not give them a preview of the new program, called Thriving Kids, before the announcement. He told budget estimates:
Personally, I was not consulted … The state’s first proper description of what’s now termed Thriving Kids was announced on Wednesday.
Mookhey said NSW hadn’t determined how much it would spending on the new program but he expected the state governments would have to contribute more funding for people with disabilities after the reform.
We want to see a lot more detail of what the commonwealth is asking us to do … for us to determine our position on what we can contribute to the Thriving Kids [program].
States are going to need to spend more, particularly when it comes to schools as well.
Read more about the reforms here:
Catie McLeod
More from Ultra Violette on its Lean Screen product
Here’s some more of that message from Ultra Violette, which is signed off by the company’s co-founders, Ava Chandler-Matthews and Bec Jefferd, and was emailed to customers as well as posted on Instagram and the brand’s website:
We want to make it clear that this only concerns the performance of Lean Screen.
Additional testing on all Ultra Violette products has reinforced our confidence in the rest of our line.
Unlike the majority of our range, Lean Screen was created by a third-party manufacturer and was the only sunscreen they made for us. We will no longer be making any SKINSCREENS™ with that manufacturer.
Chandler-Matthews and Jefferd said Ultra Violette would make several other changes to its manufacturing process including that it would work with a “new and wider network” of testing facilities and would test every new product at a minimum of two different independent labs prior to launch.
Customers have been offered refunds regardless of where they bought the product.
Clare signals more information for parents on childcare centre regulation
Clare has just provided some more detail about the additional information that will be available to parents about the centres they send their children to.
The big problem is parents do not know what is going on.
Today we agreed that on the Starting Blocks website, the national website for the childcare sector, there will be more information available for parents in terms of conditions that have been imposed on centres and also information about when was the last time the regulator was there? That will all go up from September.
Clare said the next step after that would be ensuring that childcare centres also have this information displayed in their foyers for parents to view. This would include regulatory actions that have been imposed. But Clare flagged legislative change may be needed to force that:
We may need legislation to do that, and so we will make a further decision about that when we meet in October.
Clare says childcare CCTV can’t become ‘honeypot for bad people’
Jason Clare says the trial of CCTV cameras in childcare centres will carefully consider the privacy implications and to make sure any regulation does not create “ a honeypot for bad people”.
Clare said ongoing reviews would consider how to ensure the CCTV footage could not be “hacked by pedophiles for all of the nefarious reasons that we talked about”.
He said the government would also carefully consider:
Who holds the data? Where is the information stored? [We need] to make sure we keep our kids safe and don’t do the opposite of what we were all intending here and create a honeypot for bad people.
That is what the assessment or the trial is all about.
More details on what the national register of childcare workers will look like
Jason Clare is now proving more information about what the national register of childcare workers will actually do.
He says to begin with, the register will include the names of everyone working in childcare and their locations along with their working with childrens checks. But it coming months, it will begin to identify red flags:
Over time, we want to build all that information … so we can see employment history and the information needed to identify red flags to tell if someone is moving quick from centre to centre to centre.
[This will help us to] be able to identify that somebody might be up to no good, that is an important part of what we want to do here.
We underline the point that … this is not a silver bullet, none of this is. None of it is a guarantee. It is essential component of what we need to do if we will keep our children safe.
Ultra Violette withdraws Lean Screen Skinscreen from market
Catie McLeod
Ultra Violette has announced it will immediately withdraw its Lean Screen Skinscreen product from the market after additional testing found a “pattern of inconsistency” in its SPF results.
Ultra Violette undertook additional testing of the Lean Screen product after consumer advocacy group Choice in June released an investigation it carried out into the SPF claims of several leading sunscreen brands.
In Choice’s test, the Ultra Violette Lean Screen SPF 50 plus Mattifying Zinc Skin Screen, a higher-end product that retails for upwards of $50, returned a result of just 4 in Choice’s test. A second test returned a result of 5, Choice said.
Ultra Violette had fiercely and publicly disputed Choice’s findings – until now.
In a social media post, Ultra Violette said:
We had multiple, independent labs conduct new tests of Lean Screen. This week, we received results from those tests that demonstrated significant and, candidly, atypical variability. Across eight different tests, Lean Screen has now returned SPF data of 4, 10, 21, 26, 33, 60, 61, and 64. That wasn’t good enough for us, and it isn’t good enough for you.
Given this pattern of inconsistency in testing, we have decided to withdraw Lean/Velvet Screen from the market, effective immediately.
We are deeply sorry that one of our products has fallen short of the standards we pride ourselves on and that you have come to expect of us.
Some more on the national register of childcare workers
Some more detail on the national register of childcare workers that was just announced by Jason Clare in agreement with all states and territories.
Work on the national register will begin immediately and, according to Clare, will “be developed from scratch”.
The register will require a change in federal legislation. The current plan is for the register to be trialed in December before being rolled out in February.
The register will allow childcare centres to better understand the employee’s previous workplace history and to increase information sharing between states and territories.
Work on the national mandatory training will also begin immediately and be delivered by the Australian Centre for Child Protection, which is based at the University of South Australia.
Here’s how Clare framed this goals of this training:
We are very conscious in everything that we do here that training people who work in our centres to be able to spot a person who might be hiding in plain sight … could be the most crucial and important thing to do here to keep our kids safe.
Jason Clare says further measures will be needed to improve the safety of children in childcare, but that these are important next steps:
Is it everything we need to do? No, of course it is not. But it is the next thing we must do and we have agreed to do today.
This is not the end… The awful truth is this work will never end because there will always be bad people who try to poke holes in the system and find vulnerabilities.
I thank again my state and territory colleagues for the work we have done together today. I think the work we have done will make a real meaningful difference.
States and territories agree to national childcare worker register and other safety measures
The education minister Jason Clare has just detailed a range of measures he and his state and territory counterparts have agreed to make children safe in childcare.
They include:
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A national register of childcare workers.
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National mandatory child safety training for all workers in early education and care centres.
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A national assessment of CCTV and a trial of cameras in up to 300 centres across the country, which will be held later this year with funding from the federal government.
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The banning of mobile phones in childcare centres from September, with proactive enforcement by state and territory regulators.
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The provision of more information for mums and dads so they know the conditions of the centres that their children are attending.
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An extra 1600 spot visits by the federal department of education.
Clare flags more changes to be announced on childcare safety
The federal education minister, Jason Clare, is speaking after a meeting with his state and territory counterparts about changes to improve safety in childcare centres across the country.
Australians have been shocked and sickened by the revelations over the last few weeks and months.
Over the course of the last few weeks, we have made some changes to keep our kids safe but not enough and not fast enough. That is obvious. We have all got to step up here if we are serious about keeping our kids safe.
Clare has flagged some changes to be announced as a result of this morning’s meeting. We will bring you those details soon.
Andrew Messenger
‘Gender ideology’, quotas and anti-discrimination laws on the agenda for Queensland LNP state conference
At this weekend’s state conference, Queensland Liberal National party members will debate banning gender-affirming care for children, repealing a ban on conversion practices and adopting a policy “whereby batteries, solar panels and wind turbines should no longer be deemed as renewables”.
Seven separate motions reference “gender ideology”, gender-affirming care or transgender people, but the word “abortion” does not appear on the agenda for the LNP’s first convention since winning last year’s state election.
Last October, party leader David Crisafulli became just the second modern Liberal elected as premier of Queensland to last longer than a week.
Read more here:
Small spill at Warragamba dam expected later today
Sydney’s Warragamba dam is expected to start spilling later today, the fourth time the reservoir has done so this year, WaterNSW said in a statement.
The agency said that heavy rainfall this week across the catchment has seen the dam “very close to capacity” with rainfall of 90mm recorded over the past few days. A spokesperson described the likely spill as a “small” event akin to three others this year, which have been “much smaller than the two larger ones last year”.
Modelling estimates the spill rate will peak at about 30 gigalitres a day. The two major spills last year were much higher in April (220GL/day) and June (240GL/day).
WaterNSW said the community should monitor advice on river levels and any flood warnings from the Bureau of Meteorology.
Smaller dams in the greater Sydney area, including Woronora, Cataract, Cordeaux, Nepean, Avon, Wingecaribee and Tallowa, continue to spill.
Postie charged on allegations he stole bank cards used for more than $1.4m in fraud
A postal worker has been charged after allegedly stealing bank cards from the mail in well-heeled suburbs before handing them off to criminal syndicates in a scheme worth nearly $1.5m, AAP reports.
Police raided the homes of the 56-year-old postie and two other men, aged 35 and 27, in southern Sydney where they found an alleged trove of stolen goods.
These allegedly included wads of Australian and US cash totalling more than $14,000, a Rolex watch, Louis Vuitton handbags, a taser, electronic items and cartons of cigarettes.
NSW police allege the postal worker rifled through mail and then supplied the stolen bank cards to two separate organised crime syndicates. It is estimated the allegedly stolen cards were used for more than $1.4m worth of fraud.
The postal worker was charged with more than 140 fraud and postal offences. The 35-year-old man has been charged with more than 60 fraud counts and one count of receiving stolen mail, and the 27-year-old was charged with 80 offences including fraud and attempted fraud.
