2 hours ago
'Women, we make up our own minds, it's a thing': Spender
Wrapping up her press club appearance, Allegra Spender was asked about a recent article in the Financial Review stating she had asked them to remove a reference to Simon Holmes à Court from the powerbroking list. Was that true?
Spender said “I did”, and then rephrased:
I had heard that Simon Holmes à Court was on the covert power list and I have a problem with this idea that women like myself get here and there is someone covertly hiding behind us pulling the strings.
I am a woman of my middle ages, I spent ten or fifteen years running companies, I’ve got three kids and a life I’m trying to run here and this … insinuation someone out there is pulling the strings is insulting to me and it is insulting to women around Australia who are saying ‘we make up our own minds’.
That for me was the big learning from the 2022 election, is that we make up our own minds. Since we are talking about women, and we talk about Peter Dutton and the Libs, one of the things that concerns me on so many different levels – including the abortion debate that we are somehow now having again – is we need women in the rooms of power and across our parliament and if the Liberal party is serious about women, I cannot understand how they have managed to preselect 17 men in Queensland out of the 18 seats that they currently hold. That to me is absolutely remarkable.
You can see that it’s an issue. Women, we make up our own minds, it’s a thing.
She received a loud applause from the room after her response.
Key events Show key events only Please turn on JavaScript to use this feature
What happened on Wednesday 23 October 2024
With that, we’ll end our live coverage of the day’s news.
Here’s a summary of the main developments:
The Australian Catholic University will reimburse attenders of a graduation ceremony where Joe de Bruyn sparked a walkout with a speech denouncing abortion and same-sex marriage.
The media union has called Peter Dutton’s behaviour towards two ABC reporters “unnecessarily aggressive” as the public broadcaster vowed to continue to ask the opposition leader and others tough questions.
A woman accused of displaying the Hezbollah flag at a pro-Palestine protest in Sydney will contest the allegations in court.
The lawyer for Victorian opposition leader John Pesutto has rejected claims the Liberal leader created a “false narrative” in order to expel Moira Deeming, telling a court he acted to “cauterise the damage” after neo-Nazis gatecrashed a rally the MP helped organised.
The federal court has granted Bruce Lehrmann a stay of the $2m costs order made by Justice Michael Lee, allowing an appeal against the dismissal of his defamation suit against Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson to go ahead.
At least seven people were killed and more than a dozen remain missing after gunmen ambushed a public bus and shot passengers in Papua New Guinea’s Enga province.
Thanks for reading. Have a pleasant evening
Benita Kolovos
Moira Deeming created ‘extreme’ political problem akin to ‘lobster with a mobster’ incident, defamation trial told
John Pesutto’s lawyer has rejected claims the Victorian Liberal leader created a “false narrative” in order to expel Moira Deeming, telling a court he acted to “cauterise the damage” after neo-Nazis gatecrashed a rally the MP helped organised.
Deeming, who now sits on the crossbench after her expulsion from the state parliamentary Liberal party, is suing Pesutto for allegedly falsely portraying her as a Nazi sympathiser after she spoke at the Let Women Speak rally held on 18 March 2023, which was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis. Pesutto has denied the claim.
In her closing arguments, Deeming’s barrister, Sue Chrysanthou SC, asserted that Pesutto’s push to expel her from the party had “nothing to do” with the rally.
“The decision to expel was so irrational and clearly not based on the reasons he put forward to the press,” Chrysanthou told the federal court in Melbourne.
“Mrs Deeming was expelled because Mr Pesutto found it annoying to have to answer press questions about her whenever she made a statement about sex-based rights.”
Read more:
UAE agrees to trade pact on Australian minerals but China dominance sparks market angst
Billions of dollars in Emirati money could soon flow into the critical mineral sector but concerns persist over whether Australia is too far behind China in the battery race.
Australia and the United Arab Emirates have agreed to a trade pact that will be officially inked at the start of November and while it cuts trade tariffs, the centrepiece revolves around access to a multitrillion-dollar investment fund.
Trade Minister Don Farrell expects investment to flow before the end of 2024 after he handed over a list of 55 “shovel-ready” projects in Australia.
“As soon as the agreement is signed, that’s the signal to the UAE officials, Australia is open for business,” Senator Farrell told AAP.
“I think before Christmas we will see significant investment.”
While the fund was built on petrodollars, the Emiratis wanted to invest in clean energy, which required critical minerals for technologies such as batteries, Senator Farrell said.
One of the 55 proposals is the Kookaburra Gully graphite project in South Australia run by Lincoln Minerals.
While Australia was rich with critical mineral deposits, Prof John Mavrogenes questioned how much money they could bring into the nation given Chinese dominance in processing.
Australia can’t process the minerals and turn them into batteries or magnets as cheaply or as well as China and Beijing effectively set wholesale prices, the critical mineral expert said.
– via AAP
Glasgow model would have worked in Victoria: Commonwealth Games boss
Victoria could have hosted the same pared-back program as Glasgow for the same cost but the government never considered the option, Commonwealth Games Australia boss Craig Phillips says.
Glasgow announced its 2026 program on Tuesday after it stepped in to host the next event following Victoria’s withdrawal last year.
Using just four venues, only 10 sports will be contested at a projected cost of 114m pounds ($A221.51m).
Victoria cited a budget blow-out to $6bn which Phillips said was “outrageous and overestimated”. Instead of hosting, Victoria paid $380m in compensation to the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF), of which $200m has been directed to Scotland.
Phillips said the Victorian government withdrew without considering scaling back the multi-sport event.
“We were happy to talk to the Victorian government about finding ways of saving the costs of the Games and if eliminating sports from the program was part of that, we certainly would have had that conversation,” Phillips said on Wednesday. “I’ve been on record as saying before, we really didn’t get that opportunity to have that conversation.
– via AAP
Thorpe rebuffs Indigenous leaders’ criticism of protest against king: 'I don’t listen to the noise'
The independent senator Lidia Thorpe has played down criticism from Indigenous leaders of her protest against King Charles on Monday when she shouted “you are not out king” at him.
Thorpe, speaking to ABC News’ Greg Jennett, said she had received positive feedback from some elders who told her that her protest had “lit a fire back in their belly”, but dismissed other Indigenous leaders who had criticised her.
“I don’t listen to the noise of those who have chosen to assimilate into the colonial system. That’s their decision. I’ve decided to be a black sovereign woman and continue our fight against the colony and for justice for our people.”
Asked about whether her oath of allegiance when becoming a senator – in which she claims she deliberately mispronounced the word “heirs” as “hairs” – was valid, Thorpe said “why would I, with my hand on my heart, kneel to an oppressor?”.
“Look, it’s no it’s no secret I don’t like the colony. I don’t like the king and what he represents, and I don’t like the fact that I’ve got to swear to an oppressor to do my job to get justice for my people.
“I am there for one reason and one reason only, and it’s not to make friends, it’s not to get re-elected. It is to get justice for my people.”
Human remains found in Queensland near where teenager swept away in 2022 floods
Joe Hinchliffe
Police have found human remains in an area west of Gympie in which a 14-year-old girl was swept away in floodwaters almost three years ago.
Krystal Cain was last seen by her father on the night of 8 January 2022 after they abandoned their flooded car near the Burnett Highway at Booubyjan, before she was swept away by raging flood waters in the aftermath of ex-tropical cyclone Seth.
Despite a widespread search involving water police, divers, volunteers and helicopters scouring the flood plain upon which the teenager went missing, she was never found.
Police found several human bones on a property at Booubyjan on Sunday.
On Tuesday, a spokesperson said Queensland police were conducting forensic examinations upon the bones yet-to-be identified remains and that the investigation was expected to be protracted.
Land in outer Melbourne to be unlocked under 10-year plan
Swathes of land in Melbourne’s outer suburbs will be unlocked over the next decade in a bid to build 180,000 new homes, AAP reports.
Ploughing ahead with a week-long housing policy blitz, premier Jacinta Allan unveiled a 10-year plan to release land across 27 Melbourne greenfield areas.
She said the pipeline plan for land releases across the city’s outer southeast, north and west was unprecedented.
“(It’s) the most significant commitment in history in greenfield areas to building new homes, new backyards,” she told reporters on Wednesday.
The first three greenfield sites will be released in Cardinia, Whittlesea and Kororoit as early as 2024 and 2025.
However, there is no timeline for when building will get under way on the expected 180,000 new homes.
You can read more on this here:
Miles calls out Crisafulli’s last-minute change of heart on abortion
Andrew Messenger
The Queensland premier, Steven Miles, has slammed the opposition leader for an unexplained backflip on abortion.
At the third leaders’ debate last night, David Crisafulli said he was pro-choice. But he didn’t explain at a press conference this morning why he’d changed his mind since last year, when he said that he did not believe in “late-term” abortion.
“I can’t think of a single time that a candidate, let alone a leader, three days before an election, changes such a fundamental belief,” Miles said.
“How do you go from staunchly pro-life to suddenly pro-choice just a few days before the election. I think Queensland women will be rightly skeptical about the motivations behind this, but it really generates more questions than it answers.
“You know, he’s been able to hold his other 92 candidates to just parroting his lines, but now that he’s broken ranks and told Queenslanders that he’s pro-choice now all of his other 92 candidates should be allowed to give their views to and what we know is that all, bar three of them, Tim Nichols, Steve Mini can and now David Crisafulli, every single other one of them is pro life.
“And that would mean that a majority, if they had a majority, then there would be a majority in favour of laws that would force women to stay pregnant.”
Miles said Crisafulli had made the commitment because the Courier Mail/Sky News audience “laughed at him” for not answering questions about his beliefs.
Several LNP MPs and candidates have publicly revealed themselves as opponents of abortion in recent weeks.
Millions of people in NSW charged illegal merchant fees by state agencies, government says
New South Wales government agencies have illegally charged people about $144m in merchant fees on an estimated 92m credit card transactions for services such as licence renewals, car registrations and fine repayments since 2016.
The finance minister, Courtney Houssos, on Wednesday said the government had referred the issue to the NSW ombudsman for an investigation into “possible serious maladministration” after the state auditor general alerted it to the issue in July.
The state’s corruption watchdog has also been informed.
Houssos said the surcharges had been passed on to tens of millions of customers despite “repeated legal advice” during the former Coalition government’s term that Revenue NSW and Service NSW could not lawfully charge merchant fees.
“I find these revelations extremely concerning, and I can’t see how there is an excuse for a government [agency] that was repeatedly advised that activity was unlawful and to continue to do that,” she said.
She said that due to a longstanding practice of new governments not being given access to advice provided to previous governments, it was impossible at this stage to say who within the previous government was informed of the issue and when.
Read more from Catie McLeod and Tamsin Rose:
Caitlin Cassidy
ACU to reimburse attendees after Joe de Bruyn’s anti-same-sex marriage speech
The Australian Catholic University will reimburse attendees of a graduation ceremony where Joe de Bruyn sparked a walkout with a speech denouncing abortion and same-sex marriage, as the university also revealed it had urged the former union boss to reconsider his remarks before he delivered them.
De Bruyn’s address, delivered on Monday evening, prompted major backlash after he compared abortion to the “human toll of world war two” and alleged same-sex marriage went against “every society on Earth”.
The vice chancellor of the ACU, Professor Zlatko Skrbis, wrote to staff on Tuesday afternoon confirming the university was aware of the contents of the address ahead of time and had allowed the speech to go ahead despite “strongly encouraging” De Bruyn to reconsider his remarks.
Read more:
Emily Wind
Many thanks for joining me on the blog today, Elias Visontay will be here to take you through the rest of our rolling coverage. Take care.
