What we learned, Sunday 26 April
Thanks for staying with our live coverage of the day’s news today. Nick Visser will be back tomorrow morning to keep you updated.
Here were Sunday’s top stories:
The opposition leader, Angus Taylor said the Coalition will preference One Nation in the Farrer byelection to stop “teal policies”.
The Nationals leader, Matt Canavan, addressed an anti-immigration rally in Canberra, saying net zero is socialism and Australia has “too much talk of diversity”.
The women and children who have left a Syrian detention camp have not bought plane tickets to Australia, Guardian Australia has been told.
A Brisbane rock band, Regurgitator, has led singing of ‘like a river to the sea’ to protest Queensland’s contentious hate speech laws.
The health minister, Mark Butler, has threatened the Queensland government, warning its agreement to his NDIS reforms are “part of the deal” for hospital funding.
And Victorian motorists will get a rebate on their vehicle registration, in the latest pre-election sweetener handed down by Labor’s Jacinta Allan.
Man rescued after spend hours swimming, then stranded, on Western Australian island
A 28-year-old man has been rescued after swimming for hours and being stranded overnight on a solo trip to an island off the Western Australian coast.
Police said they understood the man went on a solo boating and camping trip on 16 April at Picard Island, off the coast of Port Samson in the Pilbara.
He reached the island in a 3.3 metre inflatable dinghy at 5pm and checked in with his family at 9pm, telling them he planned to return to the mainland, police said.
But while snorkelling off his boat, about five kilometres from Picard Island, his boat broke anchor, leaving him stranded. He spent “several hours” in the water attempting to swim to a different nearby island, before returning to Picard Island, police said.
At 10am the next day, his family told police they were worried and hadn’t heard from him, prompting a multi‐agency search and rescue operation, assisted by volunteers and private and commercial boats.
That afternoon, police spotters on a charter flight saw the man signalling for assistance in knee‐deep water in a remote part of Picard Island. They directed a nearby commercial fishing vessel to his location and he was recovered and taken to the Point Samson boat ramp. St John WA paramedics treated him for severe dehydration but found he was not injured.
Updated
