What we learned today, Thursday 20 October
And that’s where we’ll leave you this evening. Here’s what we learned:
Lidia Thorpe resigned as the Greens’ deputy leader in the Senate after it emerged she had been in an undisclosed relationship with an ex-bikie.
Central and southern regions of Queensland are on flood watch as a low pressure system and trough tracks slowly eastwards this week.
The government approved up to 500 Australian defence force personnel to assist with the flood recovery in Victoria and New South Wales.
SES Victoria’s Tim Wiebusch said the flooding at Echuca was expected to reach above 1993 flood levels.
Medibank said those claiming responsibility for a data breach of the health insurer’s systems had shared a sample of information including medical data.
The Victorian government announced a series of flood recovery investments, including $6.5m for health protection services and $14m to alleviate pressure on the health system.
Australia’s jobless rate came in at 3.5% in September, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, announced a plan to deliver full-fibre NBN access to 1.5m homes and businesses by 2025.
Australia’s Covid-19 response failed the nation’s most vulnerable people and in many cases amounted to overreach, according to a report published today.
The federal treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said the stage-three tax cuts had ballooned $11bn since the last estimate.
The former Labor prime minister Paul Keating threw his support behind the NSW Coalition government proposal to reform stamp duty for first home buyers.
The Andrews government pledged to revitalise Victoria’s State Electricity Commission (SEC) under public ownership to build renewable energy projects.
Queensland will double its housing investment fund to $2bn to deliver more social and affordable housing to tackle the housing crisis gripping the state.
The Queensland rugby league player Liam Hampson was found dead on an end-of-season trip to Spain.
Updated
NSW Labor MP Tania Mihailuk quits over preselection row and accusations of ‘horrific influence’
The senior New South Wales Labor MP Tania Mihailuk has sensationally quit less than five months out from the March election, saying the decision to preselect her factional rival, the Canterbury mayor, Khal Asfour, shows the party has “not cleaned up its act” and is “not ready to govern”.
A month after Mihailuk was sacked from Labor’s shadow frontbench after a late-night speech in which she linked Asfour with the corrupt former minister Eddie Obeid and accused party leaders of ignoring the “horrific influence” of property developers, she told parliament she had been left with “no choice” but to resign.
I’m disappointed that Labor has not learned from [former Labor premier] Nathan Rees’ past warning, and I quote, that ‘NSW Labor must never again allow the circumstances to develop in which a small cabal of self-interested individuals could control the fate of a great party’.
Clearly, the NSW Labor Party has not cleaned up its act, it’s not ready to govern and as a consequence I will now be resigning from the Labor Party, I’m left with no other choice.
During her speech last month Mihailuk, the MP for Bankstown, launched a series of accusations against Asfour, who is running on the party’s upper house ticket, about the redevelopment of land in the area, including alleged links to Obeid.
Asfour denied the allegations.
But she was sacked by the Labor leader, Chris Minns, after she refused to accept his request not to raise further allegations without proof in parliament, he said.
On Thursday Mihailuk said she had learned of her sacking after receiving a phone call from a producer from radio station 2GB asking her to comment on it.
“I will not sit idly by and in silence, while the NSW Labor machine at Sussex Street are actively endorsing a candidate for the 2023 state election of the ilk of Khal Asfour,” she said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Minns said he had told Mihailuk she could have stayed in shadow cabinet “provided she took allegations of impropriety to the police or the Icac with any evidence that she had, rather tham further using parliamentary privilege to launch unsubstantiated attacks on Labor colleagues”.
In the end Ms Mihailuk was not prepared to do that.
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