3 weeks ago
Perth man charged with woman’s murder
A man has been charged with murder after he allegedly assaulted a woman and set their Perth home alight before fleeing.
Firefighters were called to the Warnbro home in Perth’s southern suburbs early on Friday, where the 30-year-old woman’s body was discovered.
Police allege the 35-year-old man had assaulted the woman sometime prior to 1am at the home where they both lived.
He set the house alight, fleeing the property with the woman’s three-year-old child and leaving the victim inside, police allege.
Paramedics took the toddler to Rockingham Hospital for treatment of smoke inhalation.
The home sustained minimal damage in the blaze.
The man was charged with murder and criminal damage by fire.
He is expected to appear in Perth Magistrates Court on Sunday.
- AAP
Key events
Adeshola Ore
More funding needed for family, sexual violence services, women’s advocates say
The federal attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, and the Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, have joined thousands in Melbourne to rally against gender-based violence.
Thousands of Victorians gathered outside the Melbourne State Library before marching to Federation Square.
A series of national rallies, organised by non-profit group What Were You Wearing, is calling for boosted funding for family and sexual violence service and for Anthony Albanese to declare the violence a national emergency.
This year, 26 Australian women have been killed – a rate of one death every four days – according to data compiled by advocacy group Destroy the Joint’s project Counting Dead Women.
In one of the latest cases, on Tuesday, emergency services discovered the body of Emma Bates, 49, in Cobram, in northern Victoria.
Calls for better regulation of pornography, tech to stem violence against women
A rally against domestic violence in Melbourne has heard calls for prosecution for any breach of an intervention order, demands for deep cultural change and questions about the role technology is playing in facilitating abuse.
One speaker says technology isn’t creating the problem but it is used by perpetrators of violence against women.
We are seeing sextortion, coercion. Some of our clients are talking about how their images of being sexually assaulted are being shared online. It’s illegal.
The rally heard also that innovative approaches to regulating pornography should be considered, such as age-requirements to access it.
There was also criticism of the Victorian state government for failing to roll out a state-wide sexual assault strategy, first recommended in 2021.
We need to help people who think what happened to them is their fault. Make sense that it’s because of our community and our structures that what they experienced happened to them. So we want the strategy, we want better funding to our service system so we don’t have waitlists, so we can be innovative, creative and responsive in how we respond to people who contact our service, not just 9 to 5. And not telling people will get to you in six months.
Big crowds have gathered in Melbourne to protest domestic violence:
Perth man charged with woman’s murder
A man has been charged with murder after he allegedly assaulted a woman and set their Perth home alight before fleeing.
Firefighters were called to the Warnbro home in Perth’s southern suburbs early on Friday, where the 30-year-old woman’s body was discovered.
Police allege the 35-year-old man had assaulted the woman sometime prior to 1am at the home where they both lived.
He set the house alight, fleeing the property with the woman’s three-year-old child and leaving the victim inside, police allege.
Paramedics took the toddler to Rockingham Hospital for treatment of smoke inhalation.
The home sustained minimal damage in the blaze.
The man was charged with murder and criminal damage by fire.
He is expected to appear in Perth Magistrates Court on Sunday.
- AAP
Western Australia drought could be ‘nail in the coffin’ for many farmers
Record-breaking drought conditions, soaring feed costs and plummeting confidence in the livestock export industry could be the “nail in the coffin” for many Western Australian farmers.
Large parts of the state’s fertile southwest have recorded their lowest rainfall in more than 50 years over the past eight months, depleting dams and ground feed at a time when grain and fodder supplies were already low.
WA Farmers livestock president Geoff Pearson says the situation is “critical”.
There’s no rain on the horizon for the next six to eight weeks of any substance, which is going to cause some reasonable issues.
We’ve been caught out ... and it’s putting a lot of pressure on us.
Some livestock producers “have pushed the button” and are de-stocking their properties amid soaring feed costs.
But livestock prices have fallen by up to 75% compared with previous years.
The WA government on Friday announced $8.6m to support farmers, with $2m in hardship grants and $4m in interest-free loans for those affected by drought.
A further $1.5m has been promised to bolster community water infrastructure, with $875,000 for mental health and community wellbeing programs, and $225,000 for rural assistance charities.
Primary producers can apply for short-term loans up to $25,000 per business to cover the cost of stock feed, water and transportation.
- AAP
Men must be involved in stopping violence against women, Rishworth says
Amanda Rishworth says the government is setting up its new national perpetrator risk assessment framework to encourage early intervention to “break the cycle of violence”.
She says it is a tool service providers or similar organisations can use to identify “how risky a perpetrator could be at offending” which would then lead to interventions in an effort to change that behaviour.
Asked why Australia, “an affluent, educated, progressive nation”, is “still seeing so much violence inflicted on women in this day and age”, she says:
It is incredibly frustrating and incredibly baffling so we do need to look at how we include men in this conversation. There are a lot of men marching today that would like to see the end to violence against women and children and so it is about, how do our leaders, whether they be women or men, show leadership in this area? How do we give men the confidence to call out if they see disrespectful behaviour? If they see harmful attitudes that condone violence, how do we give them the tools and the confidence to call that out?
The minister directs people to visit the Stop It At The Start website for more information .
Rishworth says she will attend the rally in Canberra on Sunday.
This is a really important moment. I hope it continues the conversation but I would say we need to keep the attention on this in a sustained way if we want to see the end goal of ending violence against women and children in a generation.
Early intervention programs won’t deliver results immediately, Rishworth says
Rishworth is pressed about whether the money spent to date is having an effect and what can be done to get state governments to do more.
She says the states and territories have signed up to the federal government’s national plan, which was formulated by various teams, including survivors.
I have to say when it comes to prevention and early intervention, some of the results of those types of programs will take some time to see. Just one example, is a program … working with adolescent men that may have come into contact with violence, particularly family and domestic violence in the past, and to support and work with them to make sure we are ending the cycle. The result of that will take some time but it doesn’t mean that urgent attention doesn’t need to be focused to deliver [those results].
Violence against women a ‘national shame’, says social services minister Rishworth
The minister for social services, Amanda Rishworth, says violence against women is “a national shame” that has “been at crisis levels for some time”.
Speaking to the ABC, Rishworth says the problem has “been pervasive throughout our community and through our society for too long”.
It has to stop. We have to all work together to put an end to violence against women and children. I would like to see both persistent and consistent attention to this and absolutely sustained effort in addressing what is a national shame.
The minister says the government has spent $3.2m in its first two budgets to address family and domestic vehicles, which includes funding for prevention, early intervention, response and healing and recovery.
Part of our response is a commitment to frontline workers. That funding is in the budget, of course; we are not as the Commonwealth, responsible for frontline workers. That money has been transferred … to states and territories to put on those workers. The numbers increase every week. And to the frontline workers being put on as a part of that, I expect we will meet our targets.
Crowds are beginning to gather in Melbourne for a rally against gender-based violence.
As hundreds of people gather, her a few photos from social media:
The demise of Twitter: How a ‘utopian vision’ for social media became a ‘toxic mess’
If anything is emblematic of the demise of Twitter, it is the rise and stall of the account of Oprah Winfrey.
Oprah joined the platform in 2009, tweeting for the first time live from her wildly popular TV show: “HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY.”
It was “a breakthrough moment” for the platform, says Axel Bruns, professor in the digital media research centre at Queensland University of Technology.
That really was the moment where numbers absolutely took off.
These days, Oprah still has an account on the now-renamed X, with 41.7m followers. But since November 2022, a month after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the site was finalised, she has posted just once – in January 2023, when she told Chelsea Clinton she was “still laughing out LoUD for real 😂” over Clinton accidentally wearing two different black shoes to an event.
Debates about X have reignited in the last week, as the Australian government has taken the platform to court in an effort to get it to remove a video of a Sydney bishop being allegedly stabbed as he officiated a church service last week.
X says it has complied with orders to remove footage of the stabbing (though ironically, the post announcing its compliance had a comment directly underneath in which someone had shared the full and graphic video) and Musk has been scathing about Australia’s requests for the footage to be taken down. X has been contacted for comment.
The disinformation hurricane surrounding the Bondi stabbing marks the end of Twitter as a breaking news destination
But as the debate has raged about what responsibility social media platforms have for stopping the spread of violent or extremist content, another question has emerged: what even is Twitter/X any more?
For more on this story read the full report by Guardian Australia reporter Kate Lyons:
Peter Dutton ‘reached out’ to Fowler community after Wakeley church stabbing, Dai Le says
Finally, Dai Le is asked about a dinner she recently had with the federal opposition leader, Peter Dutton, in her electorate, and whether they spoke about what might happen if there is a hung parliament after the next federal election.
No. Look, the opposition leader reached out following the Wakeley incident and asked us to dinner, just to check in, to see if there are issues important to our community. I think he’s the only one that reached out and came out to see us.
