source : the age
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of national news this Tuesday, September 22. Here’s what you need to know today.
A proposal to let home buyers put up their retirement savings as collateral to access a home loan has received “qualified support” from a top-flight economist, as debate rages over how much power people should have over their superannuation.
The idea was floated by Liberal senator Andrew Bragg in a speech to the Financial Services Council on Tuesday as a way of letting Australians act as if they were drawing down their super to help purchase property, while not necessarily draining their retirement savings.
The government is clinging to maturing super to take pressure off the age pension in the coming years, as outlined in the intergenerational report yesterday.
But Senator Bragg said diverting 12 per cent of one’s income to retirement savings coupled with the impacts of demand-side housing policies meant budding property purchasers were being hamstrung in their quest for a home.
Donald Trump’s ban on several media organisations, which has sparked a lawsuit and prompted other outlets to boycott coverage in solidarity, shows the need for greater protections in Australia, a local media freedom activist says.
Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom executive director Peter Greste says Trump’s ban on CNN, MS Now and Politico strikes a familiar chord in Australia, where One Nation has booted journalists from press conferences.
The three US outlets have filed legal action.
“In Australia, that would be impossible,” Greste said. “All we have is the ‘implied right of political communication’ – a vague idea that the High Court has inferred from the Constitution and that at least one justice has said might not even exist.”
Another nurse has expressed her apologies and regret to Joe Massa’s family, as the second day of the inquest into his death continues.
Nurse Elayne Storc, who did not increase the frequency of her observations despite recording the toddler with a “red zone” heart rate of 197 beats per minute, said she wished she had moved the toddler to a bed and taken his vitals more frequently.
“I am very sorry for your loss, I’m sorry for what you guys have been through,” she told the two-year-old’s family, while visibly emotional in the witness box.
Joe Massa suffered a cardiac arrest just under four hours after presenting to the emergency department of Northern Beaches Hospital.
His life support was withdrawn two days later.
Storc said she was now “extra vigilant” in her practice: “I am very terrified of taking care of paediatrics now.”
Victoria’s opposition has dismissed the government’s new plan to regulate data centre development, as debate around the factory-sized buildings crucial to AI model training continues.
This masthead broke the story that the Carroll government has proposed new rules. These include that the centres not be built in residential areas, not use the drinking water supply to cool their machinery and that they supply their own electricity.
The rules, however, would not apply to existing data centres, or those already being assessed for approval, leading to opposition claims the proposed legislation was irrelevant.
“Right now data centres are being built in residential areas, so it actually doesn’t matter what Ben Carroll says … there are data centres being built in a way that residents are deeply concerned about,” opposition spokesperson James Newbury said.
The foreign ministers of seven of the world’s most powerful nations have called on Iran to end its arming and support of Houthis in Yemen.
The Houthis have recently stepped up strikes on Saudi Arabia and captured more territory in Yemen.
The nations said Iran’s actions constituted a dangerous pattern of escalation that risked undermining international trade and creating global instability.
“We condemn in the strongest terms the unacceptable continued strikes carried out by the Houthis in Yemen and against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” the ministers of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States said in a statement after a meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
“We call on the Houthis to immediately cease all military actions, all threats and attacks against civilian shipping, and to return to the political process in good faith.”
Reuters, Bloomberg
The vast majority of fuel arriving in Australia from a key Asian refinery has come from Russia, a new analysis has found, sparking warnings that motorists and businesses are inadvertently funding Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
A new report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) estimates that 68 per cent of oil exported to Australia from Brunei’s Hengyi refinery in the first seven months of the year was Russian-derived, up from 24 per cent two years ago.
Australia has imported a total of 2.6 million tonnes of Russian-origin oil, mostly in the form of diesel, from the Hengyi refinery since the war in Ukraine began in 2022, the Finland-based think tank estimates.
Australia banned direct imports of Russian oil after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but a loophole has allowed Russian crude oil to enter the nation after being refined in third countries such as India, China and Brunei.
Read the full story here.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has just wrapped up a press conference in Sydney during which he said people should have “choices” when it comes to their superannuation, and he hinted the Coalition would unveil its super policy soon.
“Superannuation is Australia’s money … They should have choices. That’s why we strongly support self-managed super funds,” he told reporters.
“But we’ll say more about our policy more generally over the next little while.”
Pressure on the Coalition to articulate its position on super has been ramped up in recent weeks after One Nation announced it would allow renters and mortgage holders access to a quarter of their future superannuation contributions over the next three years.
The triage nurse responsible for assessing two-year-old Joe Massa, who died after he suffered a cardiac arrest at Northern Beaches Hospital, has broken down in tears on the second day of the inquest into his death.
“I am sorry, I am human and I think about Joseph every day,” she told his family.
Registered nurse Hilary O’Neill triaged Joe as a category three patient, despite his “red zone” heart rate of 182 beats per minute.
“I feel terrible that I missed his heart rate and I think I played a role,” she said. “I think the system really let him down and let you down.”
O’Neill said nursing was a job she loved and that she was now “terrified” of it.
Britain is to send air-refuelling aircraft to Saudi Arabia to assist the country’s military against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
“We have received a request from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for military support, and on the advice of the defence secretary and the foreign secretary, last night I agreed to that request for defensive air-to-air refuelling,” Prime Minister Andy Burnham told reporters while travelling to the UN General Assembly in New York.
The decision to support the Saudi military campaign is one of Burnham’s first significant military decisions since becoming prime minister in July. Refuelling of Saudi jets on missions that the UK considers defensive will begin in the coming days, and the operation is expected to last weeks.
Houthi fighters pushed to seize strategic heights in Yemen yesterday to cut off the Red Sea coast from remaining areas held by Saudi-backed forces, after a report that US President Donald Trump had called off American strikes on the group at the last minute.
One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce insisted this morning that he was opposed to media censorship before he slammed Nine for broadcasting an interview with Thom Robb, the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, in which he praised Pauline Hanson.
During the broadcast, published by Nine News yesterday, Robb said Hanson’s rise in Australia was “heartening”.
“She’s demonised by the same people who demonise us.”
Joyce called the report “absolutely crazy” and told News24 the reporter had “pulled this stuff out of their backside”.
