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.
Jim Chalmers would not say this morning whether the government would consider nationalising Triple Zero after a Senate inquiry recommended the system be taken out of the hands of major telcos.
“We’ll go through the committee’s recommendations in the usual way,” the treasurer told ABC’s News Breakfast.
“We have taken some very substantial steps when it comes to Triple Zero. You know, we legislated the Triple Zero custodian. We’ve got the ACMA investigation, which has become a court process when it comes to the Optus outage. We’ve increased the penalties for telcos who don’t follow the rules in the Triple Zero system. So we have already taken extremely serious action.”
He said the government would consider any steps that would strengthen the system.
“The most important thing here is that Australians can access Triple Zero when they need it … .”
The government is not considering acting on growing calls for a royal commission into Australia’s domestic and family violence deaths, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has said, as pressure mounts on it to address increasing rates of violence against women and children.
“We’ve chosen instead to increase the resourcing for child and family violence, domestic violence. We do acknowledge that this has a number of sources, and we’re trying to deal with the sources of all of this violence,” he told ABC’s News Breakfast this morning.
“Whether it be more security in the housing system, whether it be the monetised misogyny that we see online, there are a whole range of factors feeding in here, and so I work very closely with [Social Services Minister] Tanya Plibersek and [Finance Minister] Katy Gallagher and other colleagues, the prime minister, of course, to make sure that we’re doing the best we can. We do acknowledge that all of this violence is obviously entirely unacceptable. It’s horrific in every way.”
More than 160,000 people have signed a petition calling on the federal government to hold a royal commission into the killing of women and girls.
The killing of four people in separate alleged domestic violence incidents in NSW over the weekend prompted renewed calls for the government to take action on what advocates say is a national crisis.
If you or anyone you know needs support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, or 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has said One Nation’s migration proposal would be “diabolical” for the Australian economy, both in the long term.
“I think what One Nation is proposing would be devastating for the economy in the near term and absolutely diabolical in the longer term, in the context of a population which is ageing and fertility rates which are falling faster than we anticipated even a few years ago because people are taking the decision to have smaller families later in life,” he told the ABC’s 7.30 program last night.
“Migration is a force for good in our economy and in our society so long as it’s well managed, robustly and transparently managed, and that’s why I think the changes that Tony Burke announced Thursday of last week are just so important, because they are about normalising net overseas migration down to more appropriate levels.”
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said during his address to the National Press Club last week that the government would seek to cut net overseas migration (the difference between migrant departures and migrant arrivals) to 245,000 a year for the 2026-27 financial year and 225,000 per year from 2027-28 onwards.
One Nation’s migration plan would enforce a net overseas migration number of 130,000 a year.
California: British Columbia has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it could have used ChatGPT logs to warn police and avert a mass shooting in the Canadian province earlier this year.
On February 10, suspect Jesse van Rootselaar allegedly killed five students and a teacher at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in northern BC, as well as her mother, half-brother and finally herself.
Van Rootselaar used ChatGPT before the massacre, which was one of Canada’s worst-ever shootings.
OpenAI internally flagged and banned one of van Rootselaar’s accounts for concerning activity in 2025, but didn’t escalate a warning to police. The company later disclosed van Rootselaar also had a second account that wasn’t detected or stopped.
Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek said she was “heartbroken” by the spate of alleged family and domestic violence incidents in NSW over the weekend, but that they were proof the warning signs of violence were still too often ignored.
The stabbing death of a preschool-aged child in the Blue Mountains capped a brutal spate of domestic violence-related deaths in NSW over the weekend, when four people were killed in separate incidents.
The deaths have prompted fresh pressure on governments to address what advocates say is a national crisis of violence against women and children.
“In all but one of these cases authorities said the alleged perpetrators weren’t known to police,” Plibersek wrote on Instagram last night.
“That underscores something critical – which is that across society, the warning signs of family and domestic violence are too often missed or ignored until the worst happens.”
If you or anyone you know needs support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, or 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732.
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of national news this Tuesday, September 22. Here’s what you need to know today.
