What we learned, Monday 8 December
We’ll leave our live news coverage there for today. Here were Monday’s top stories:
Pauline Hanson said she was excited for a “new breed” of One Nation politicians after Barnaby Joyce confirmed he would join the minor party.
The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, announced the federal government’s energy rebates will not be extended into the new year.
The firefighter killed while battling a New South Wales blaze has been identified as a 59-year-old man.
There were more than a dozen missed opportunities to detect offences from notorious Queensland paedophile Ashley Paul Griffith, a report found.
South Australian Liberals confirmed Ashton Hurn as their new leader, 103 days out from the state election.
The federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund will lend $45m to Arnott’s to help Tim Tams go global.
NSW joined South Australia in the high court fight against a court challenge to the federal social media ban.
A pedestrian has died after a car crashed into a Melbourne medical centre.
And Australians had nearly $18.3bn in outstanding personal credit card debts in October, its second-highest level since October 2021.
Nick Visser will be back tomorrow morning to do it all again.
Updated
‘Respect’ frustrates Reynolds’s pursuit of Higgins’s cash
A former senator’s act of ‘respect’ towards Brittany Higgins might have backfired, with a bankruptcy case aimed at discovering where the former staffer’s $2.4m compensation payout went delayed further, AAP reports.
Linda Reynolds, the ex-Liberal senator, launched bankruptcy proceedings against Higgins in October to recoup costs awarded after successfully suing her over social media posts, some of which were found to be defamatory.
Federal court judge Michael Feutrill on Monday reserved his decision over Reynolds’s creditors petition to formally bankrupt Higgins after the ex-senator unusually served the documents to her lawyer and not her personally.
Reynolds’s lawyer, Martin Bennett, told reporters outside the court in Perth:
All we were trying to do was facilitate service in a manner respecting mental health and fragility and that’s proving more difficult than just blindly rushing in oblivious to the effect.
Bennett said Higgins had instructed her lawyer to accept the documents, was not fighting the proceedings and he was confident the court would accept the application.
Updated
