Good afternoon.
Anthony Albanese has recalled parliament two weeks early after the Bondi terror attack. The prime minister will push the Coalition and the Greens to support urgent legislation proposing tougher hate speech laws and gun reform, which he hopes will pass the Senate by next Tuesday night.
Sussan Ley said she wasn’t given the draft bill before Albanese’s announcement and the opposition is “deeply sceptical” of Labor’s decision to tie hate speech reforms with a gun buy-back scheme under one piece of legislation.
In New South Wales, the Minns government announced new laws that would give councils stronger powers to shut down unlawful places of worship as part of a crackdown on “factories of hate”.
Top news
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Three arrested after alleged racially motivated attack on Muslim religious leader in Victoria
In pictures
Rose Byrne, wearing Chanel, was a “refreshing twist of lime peel” on an otherwise funereal Golden Globes red carpet. Byrne was the lone Australian winner on a night dominated by Adolescence and One Battle After Another. Read the full list of winners here.
What they said …
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“This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions – or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”
The US Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, took aim at the Trump administration after a criminal investigation was launched over whether he lied to Congress about the scope of the central bank’s renovation of its Washington DC headquarters.
Full Story
Anthony Albanese bows to Bondi pressure
Over the summer break, calls for a royal commission into the Bondi beach massacre saturated headlines across parts of the media. And last week the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, launched a royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion.
Nour Haydar speaks with political correspondent Dan Jervis-Bardy on the political reverberations from the Bondi attack and the tests that lie ahead for Labor in 2026.
Before bed read
The Adelaide festival board on Thursday announced it had removed the writer and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from the program – “not because of anything she was proposing to say at the festival”, writes Peter Greste, “but because of things she said previously, reassessed in the aftermath of the Bondi attack”.
Greste has since withdrawn from the event. This is why he is stepping away.
Daily word game
Today’s starter word is: OCHE. You have five goes to get the longest word including the starter word. Play Wordiply.
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