What we learned today, Friday 31 January
We are closing the live blog for this evening, but here’s what made the news today:
The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission was notified of more than 1.7m incidents of unauthorised restrictive practices used against people with disability last financial year.
The health minister, Mark Butler, announced a review of the Australian standards of care and treatment guidelines for trans and gender diverse children and adolescents. He also said Queensland should not run its own review while the federal review was ongoing.
The main public sector union lashed the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, after he foreshadowed the axing of culture, diversity and inclusion advisers as part of wider cuts to the commonwealth bureaucracy.
Eight Western Australian police officers were found not to have performed their duty in relation to interactions with the family of Perth murderer Mark Bombara, a report has found.
Aussie shares hit a record high amid expectations of an interest rate cut when the RBA meets in February.
Liberal senator Sarah Henderson called for round-the-clock police patrols of Jewish schools in the wake of antisemitic attacks.
Vaping rates for people between 15 and 29 dropped from 15% to 10.8% between 2023 and 2024, following the ban on vapes.
More than 5,000 Australians could be victims of romance scammers allegedly using popular online dating apps to trick victims into a fake online relationship before deceiving them into transferring funds, the AFP has said.
Music festival Groovin the Moo announced it would not run this year, for the second year in a row.
Until next time, enjoy your evening.
Updated
Federal election threats are local, AEC warns
“Sovereign citizens, conspiracy theorists and keyboard warriors” are among the domestic threats being monitored ahead of the upcoming federal election, the electoral authority has warned.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), deep into its preparations for the yet-to-be announced polling day, said the mis- and disinformation threats to the 2025 federal election were coming from within the country, rather than from overseas actors.
“We’re doing this to ourselves … which is one of the sort of sad things about how this thing’s playing out,” the AEC’s acting electoral commissioner, Jeff Pope, told a media briefing in Canberra on Friday.
We’re seeing sovereign citizens and conspiracy theorists and keyboard warriors, who don’t want to reveal their identity. They do want to stir the pot and cause problems.
Updated
