What we learned: Wednesday, 13 November
We are going to wrap up the live blog here for the day.
This is what made the news:
Striking nurses have rejected an offer to fund their requested pay rise in return for delaying the rollout of their “big ask” for more staff, NSW’s health minister says, with emergency wait times expected to get longer.
Girls are now seeing porn for the first time at 13.6 years, on average – two years younger than they were in 2018.
The Australian federal police raided multiple locations in Melbourne’s western suburbs last night as part of an investigation into alleged fraud against the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
Tabcorp was fined over $260,000 for accepting bets on live tennis.
The Greens announced a $100m per year plan to ensure public hospitals can provide abortion services.
The treasurer, Jim Chalmers announced funding of $900m for states and territories through a new national productivity fund to boost competition and productivity across the economy.
Peter Dutton says he supports the right of women to access legal abortion but will not require the Queensland Nationals senator Matt Canavan and the South Australian Liberal senator Alex Antic to withdraw a sponsored bill to change abortion law.
Australia’s biggest lender, Commonwealth Bank, recorded a quarterly $2.5bn cash net profit backed by “strong momentum” in home lending.
A senior Trump adviser has posted a gif of an hourglass in response to Kevin Rudd’s congratulation message to the incoming president, but former prime minister Tony Abbott, defended Rudd.
The Catholic church won a landmark case limiting its liability for the abuse of children by priests not under its direct employment.
The wage price index for the September quarter has come in at 3.5% compared with a year earlier, the ABS reported. That figure compared with the 3.6% pace expected by economists and the 4.1% clip reported by the ABS for the June quarter.
Independent senator David Pocock says he will be opposing the government’s misinformation and disinformation bill “unless major changes are made to the legislation”.
Sydney trains will run 24 hours for the next three days amid an industrial dispute.
Nacc releases fact sheet to dispel misinformation
Earlier today, the National Anti-Corruption Commission put out its “corrections to misinformation” factsheet.
In its weekly update, the federal integrity body said a “significant amount of misinformation” circulates about the Nacc.
While it could not “correct everything”, it wanted to address some of the primary issues it had by countering it with “facts and evidence”.
Interestingly, one of the points related to a recent finding about the Nacc commissioner, Paul Brereton. The Nacc inspector, the watchdog’s watchdog, found his involvement in a decision not to start a corruption investigation into robodebt referrals resulted in the process being “affected by apprehended bias”.
Read more:
The Nacc says media references saying Brereton submitted a conflict of interest declaration because one of the persons referred to the Nacc was a ‘close personal friend’ are misinformation.
The Nacc helpfully supplied this correction:
The commissioner declared immediately and repeatedly that he had a perceived (not actual) conflict of interest, arising from a prior professional, not personal, relationship with one of the referred persons. The commissioner and that individual have never socialised other than at official functions, nor visited each other’s homes.
So, what did the inspector’s report say? In its executive summary, it referenced Brereton’s own words about “person one”. That included that Brereton said he had a “close association” with person one, that they were someone he “knows well”, and “who is well known to me”.
The language changed when the Nacc provided a submission to the inspector in August 2024. Brereton said his relationship with person one was a “prior professional association, and not a close personal relationship”.
In a report prepared by Alan Robertson SC, the former federal court judge said the change in the Nacc’s language was “gloss” and the conflict existed in “the terms it was disclosed”.
Updated
