What we learned: Monday 6 January
Many thanks for joining me on today’s blog – we’ll leave things here for today. This is what made the news:
The federal government announced a $7.2bn funding injection for the Bruce Highway in Queensland – which will fund about 80% of the upgrades needed to make the 1,600km stretch safer.
Etihad flight EY461 travelling from Melbourne to Abu Dhabi had to abort its take-off amid “technical reasons”. Melbourne airport temporarily operated with just one runway as the plane was repaired.
Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, was spotted with One Nation’s Pauline Hanson at a restaurant in Thailand.
The prime minister Anthony Albanese said there was “no tolerance for antisemitism in Australia” amid reports of antisemitic graffiti in Sydney’s east.
After three weeks, the bushfire in the Grampians national park has officially been contained. More than 76,000 hectares has been burnt.
The search for Hadi Nazari, 23, entered its 12th day after he went missing in the Kosciuszko national park on Boxing Day.
Northern Territory loses appeal against requirement to provide safe drinking water
The Northern Territory government has lost its bid to overturn a landmark court ruling which found it was legally required to provide safe drinking water to its tenants in remote Aboriginal communities.
The decision is the latest development in a five-year legal stoush between the NT government and residents of Laramba, an Aboriginal community 205km north-west of Alice Springs, who took the government to court over elevated levels of uranium in their drinking water.
The case hinged on whether a landlord’s obligation to ensure a tenant’s home was “habitable” extended to external factors such as the provision of running water.
The NT government had sought to appeal a 2023 verdict in which the NT supreme court ruled in favour of the residents, setting a precedent that could open the door for compensation for similarly affected communities.
Last month, the NT court of appeal upheld that decision, agreeing that the quality of drinking water supplied to the homes was “an issue of habitability”. The judges said in their ruling:
If the uranium levels in the water supplied to the premises posed an actual and appreciable risk to the health and/or safety of the tenants in their ordinary residential day to day use of the premises, then those premises would not be habitable.
Lawyers for the residents say they intend to seek compensation in the NT civil and administrative tribunal.
Updated
