Woman found dead in North Bondi – as it happened | Australia news

Destruction of woodlands that are habitat for hundreds of bird species, including the endangered gouldian finch, has commenced at the site of a planned defence housing development at Lee Point/Binybara in Darwin.

Footage released by the Environment Centre NT shows bulldozers knocking down trees at the much-loved site that a community campaign had fought to protect.

Darwin community members who arrived at the site this morning were met by police and security guards:

Amy Remeikis

Second academic questioned over racism impacts during Faruqi-Hanson court case

The federal court hearing Mehreen Faruqi’s racial discrimination case against Pauline Hanson has just finished hearing from the University of Melbourne academic, ProfKate Reynolds.

Reynolds also prepared a report which forms part of Faruqi’s evidence on the impacts of racism on health and wellbeing. Reynolds has a PhD in psychology and told the court:

I come from a discipline of social psychology, where we spend a lot of time trying to understand the role that people’s group memberships play in shaping their attitudes, their behaviour, and their wellbeing.

Reynolds says people can experience things as part of a group, or as an individual.

Hanson’s counsel, Sue Chrysanthou led most of the questioning of Reynolds, which centres around whether there was enough information to assess whether people experienced the Hanson tweet as racism. Reynolds:

What this expert opinion says based on the evidence that is available and discussed is that is that marginalised group members are likely to experience a tweet such as this as racist. And when that occurs, there’s a flow on effect to poorer physical and mental outcomes.

Reynolds had also reviewed the body of work around the health and wellbeing impacts of racism, which included international and domestic studies. Chrysanthou’s questions centre around whether negative outcomes are “possible” or “likely”. The difference, as Chrysanthou lays out is “likely is more probable than not. And possible is something less than that”.

Reynolds says in the expert opinion provided to the court, it is “likely”.

Reynolds says she has not interviewed, studied closely or examined the individuals involved in the case – and that she is showcasing the “high quality” evidence which is available, which “speaks to the relationship between experiences of racism and negative outcomes”. Reynolds:

I think likely is the word I would use to describe my assessment of this literature in the context of these kinds of instances.

Reynolds is excused from the court, which is now on break until 2.15pm. Hanson is expected to give evidence later this afternoon, once the court resumes.

Luca Ittimani

Australia’s public service commission introduces CALD targets for public service

People from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds hold only one in ten senior executive positions in the federal public service, despite making up one in four Australians.

Now the government has promised to lift representation from the current average of 11% across the senior ranks of the public service to 17% by 2030 and subsequently to 24%, approximately in line with the national population.

The industry, science and resources department has the lowest CALD representation at the senior executive level at 4%. Three other leading government departments have only 5% of senior positions filled by CALD employees, while even the most representative department (foreign affairs and trade) has only 19%.

The targets are for the public service on average, and individual agencies will set their own benchmarks and plans to support the sector-wide target.

The Australian public service commission has announced the targets as part of a CALD employment strategy, which also includes improved training, recruitment and promotion processes to reduce discrimination within the public service.

A teenager has been arrested following an alleged stabbing in St Albans this morning, in Melbourne’s north-west.

Emergency services were called to reports a 37-year-old man was located injured in a fast food outlet car park on St Albans Road about 6am. It is alleged a dispute occurred between the victim and another man before the victim was stabbed.

A 16-year-old boy was arrested at a Keilor Downs address today. It is further alleged he was involved in a stabbing at St Albans railway station yesterday.

It is alleged the victim was chased by three males before being stabbed. The 21-year-old Tarneit man was taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Investigations into the incident remain ongoing.

Natasha May

Queensland health warns of record-breaking Ross River detections

A spike in Ross River virus cases has coincided with a record-breaking number of detections in mosquito traps this summer season in Queensland.

Acting chief health officer Dr Catherine McDougall said in the year to date 2,065 people have had Ross River virus, which is the highest number of cases since the last significant outbreak of the virus.

Half of those cases were in south-east Queensland, which has seen case numbers between six to eight times higher than average this summer season (from November to April), McDougall said.

Cases peaked during the second week of March with 333 weekly cases recorded, she said.

Hospital and health service regions with the largest increases in Ross River virus cases compared to previous years were Sunshine Coast, Metro North, Metro South, Gold Coast, and Wide Bay.

Ross River virus is spread by the bite of infected mosquitoes, with symptoms including fever, rash and joint pain. There is no treatment available but most people feel better in a few weeks.

The last time there was a significant Ross River virus outbreak in Queensland was in 2020, when 3,381 annual cases were recorded.

The health department’s collecting and testing mosquito samples helps assess risk. They say the highest number of mosquito trap tests returned a positive result this summer since the surveillance program started in 2016.

Out of more than 1,225 mosquito traps tested for Ross River virus a record 116 traps have returned a positive result McDougall said. It is the latest warning from health authorities following previous notices of rising cases:

Daniel Hurst

Parliamentary group call for nuclear ban

A cross-party group has renewed calls for Australia to join a treaty that imposes a blanket ban on nuclear weapons, saying “history is calling”.

In a video message released today, members of the Parliamentary Friends of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons say Australia should join the 93 countries that have already signed up to the relatively new treaty.

The treaty, known as the TPNW, is opposed by all of the countries that have nuclear weapons, including the US.

But the treaty “has given countries, and citizens, across the world hope, and a new and promising pathway towards the abolition of these weapons”, according to MPs and senators including Labor government backbenchers Josh Wilson, Susan Templeman, Sam Lim, Louise Pratt, Sharon Claydon and Josh Burns.

Others to appear in the video are Russell Broadbent (former Liberal now independent), Jordon Steele-John (Greens), Lidia Thorpe (independent) and Monique Ryan (independent). The group says:

As members of the Parliamentary Friends of TPNW, we’re working together to see the nuclear weapons ban treaty signed and ratified.

We are proud of our country’s commitment to getting rid of other inhumane weapons, like landmines, cluster munitions, biological and chemical weapons.

We welcome Australia’s engagement with the TPNW under the Albanese government, and we pay tribute to the community activism being undertaken in support of Australia joining this treaty.

The acting director for International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Australia, Jemila Rushton, welcomed the video as as a “joint message of hope” at a time of “incredible global insecurity”. Rushton called on Labor to sign the treaty “without delay”.

Amy Remeikis

Faruqi-Hanson court case continues

Sue Chrysanthou SC has finished her questioning of Prof Yin Paradies, so Mehreen Faruqi’s counsel Saul Holt KC has taken the opportunity to ask Paradies about Britishness as an ethnicity and whether criticising the colonial empire could be considered being racist to British people.

Holt is re-examining Paradies after Chrysanthou’s questioning yesterday in the first day of the hearing about whether it was possible to be racist against white people.

Paradies says from the research, “racism experienced when you’re white, has a weaker association between a weaker association with health outcomes. So you have to map it differently”.

Paradies then turns to another issue:

There is also of course, the issue of what is sometimes called white fragility.

And in these cases people who experience racism can be particularly perturbed by the experience as they don’t really have much history of being subjected to the experiences themselves.

On the idea of Britishness as an ethnicity, Holt asks about the idea of Britishness including a colonial history and whether “to criticise a colonial history is to criticise the ethnicity of modern British folk”.

Paradies:

There were many nation states that engaged in colonisation, Britain was certainly one of those. And yes, some people certainly feel people of British descent certainly feel a kind of a guilt over that coloniality but in the end, people are not institutions.

And so to critique the British Empire is not to critique any particular British person.
… So I think there’s a difference between critiquing colonisation and being racist to British people.

Paradies is excused by the court.

See the full background to the case and yesterday’s hearings here:

Luca Ittimani

Retail trade falls 0.4% from February to March as consumers continue to feel cost-of-living pressures

Australian shoppers cut back a little more than expected in March, with retail trade falling 0.4% from February.

The figures surprised markets, which had expected trade to pick up 0.2% over the month, a little below February’s monthly increase of 0.2% (which itself was revised below its previous 0.3% estimate). Today’s data from the Australian Bureau of statistics also showed NSW shoppers cut back the most, by 1.1%.

A key indicator of cost-of-living pressure on Australian customers, household goods trade, has now resumed its downward slide, falling to $5.61bn in the month compared to a $5.8bn trend at the end of 2023.

The figure has been slipping since the end of 2022, as steeper prices and interest rate rises ate away at the savings households would have spent on fridges and furniture.

Expect the sector to keep sliding as price rises prove hard to curb, after Australia’s inflation rate slowed less than expected in the March quarter. That led markets to fear the Reserve Bank could still hike interest rates further before the end of 2024.

But Sean Langcake, head of macroeconomic forecasting for Oxford Economics Australia, said today’s data confirmed rising costs were “still putting the squeeze on household budgets”.

Last week’s CPI data spurred concerns that the RBA may yet need to raise rates again to rein in inflation. But these data are a further confirmation that consumer demand is very restrained at present.

We’ll get a better sense of how the RBA views the data after its meeting next week.