1 month ago
Key events
Royal comission into robodebt scheme resumes
Good morning, Jordyn Beazley on deck with you this morning. Thanks to Martin for kicking things off today.
Senior welfare officials will be grilled over their involvement with robodebt when a royal commission into the unlawful scheme resumes, AAP reports.
The latest evidence centres on what department officials knew about the potential illegality of the scheme and how they communicated that information with the government, other staff and independent watchdogs.
Government solicitor James Carter will appear before the commission on Friday along with three senior officials from the Department of Social Services, which delivered the scheme.
Among them will be Allysson Essex and Kristin Lumley, two former officials involved with payment integrity within the department, as well as the department’s former principal legal officer Anna Fredericks.
The voice and the media
Guardian Australia’s editor, Lenore Taylor, takes a look today at the growing clamour around the voice debate to make a plea for responsible media reporting on what is a very complex matter.
Lenore writes:
This is a discussion where different views need to be heard, not just from politicians and pundits but in particular from the Indigenous communities who have the most at stake.
In this discussion the media has a particular responsibility to help readers understand the facts and the historical, political and legal context, to call out falsehoods and to avoid fuelling an ideological outrage cycle. It’s just too important for that. Every Australian needs to engage with the details over the next six months, and it’s our job to help them.
Here’s her full article:
Welcome
Good morning and welcome to our rolling coverage of the day’s news. I’m Martin Farrer bringing you the main overnight developments before Jordyn Beazely takes to the keyboard.
Our top story this morning concerns the voice to parliament and a dilemma for the Greens. The party’s Indigenous spokesperson, Lidia Thorpe, used rallies yesterday to push her position that she will vote no unless First Nations sovereignty is not ceded. That stance will be further complicated after it emerged that she initially backed an inquiry into Indigenous bodies that has been driven by anti-voice Coalition senators. The Guardian’s Paul Karp writes that she withdrew support after an intervention by party’s leader, Adam Bandt, but her support for a sovereignty settlement rather than voice has been criticised as conflating two separate matters.
Meanwhile, Adani Group has held meetings with bond investors overnight to reassure them in the wake of an analysts’ report that accused the Indian conglomerate of “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud”. The company, whose assets include its controversial coalmine in Queensland, hit back at the report by Hindenburg, calling it bogus and saying it will give a detailed response on Friday.
