What we learned, Thursday 11 December
Thanks for staying with us this afternoon. We’ll leave the live blog there for today. These were the day’s top stories:
Perth residents were urged to evacuate amid bushfires in the city’s outer suburbs.
Four French nationals faced court over what police described as a “movie-like” alleged burglary of $10m in luxury goods.
A Senate inquiry in university governance handed down its report, with senator David Pocock criticising the sector’s “corporatised, broken model”.
The number of recalls involving coloured sand products due to asbestos fearsrose to 11.
The Queensland government said its bill to overturn ban on developer donations would “level the playing field” with trade unions. The state also repealed its renewables targets.
Westpac’s shareholders voted against new rules on fossil fuel lending.
The Bureau of Meteorology rolled out updates to its website after community feedback.
The head of the national anti-corruption commission has told an inquiry he has acted appropriately in defence matters.
Australia’s jobless rate remained steady despite a surprise drop in employment.
The Coalition’s shadow home affairs minister questioned Donald Trump’s new tourist visa rules.
Households would need an income of $112,000 a year to afford the median rental house, a report has found.
Updated
Labor ‘not good enough’ if it fails to act on deaths in custody, Patrick Dodson says
The former Labor senator Patrick Dodson has called on the Albanese government to act after a damning report revealed that more Indigenous people died in custody last year than any year since 1980.
Dodson, a former commissioner of the 1991 royal commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, urged the federal government to hold state and territory governments to account for their “disgraceful performance”. He told the ABC:
There’s been no one keeping the states accountable for their activities. … The states and the commonwealth have got to get their heads together, get on the fast train and move this from where we are all disgraced.
Dodson served as Labor senator for Western Austalia for 2016 to 2024. Asked whether he felt he had been able to impact Labor policy, Dodson said:
I’d put my proposals up and the end result you can judge for yourself. They never got taken up but, you know, that’s how politics works.
But this is beyond politics. This is a national disgrace. This is about the nation. These are human beings. And that includes the whitefellas as well as the Aboriginal people that die in custody.
He said the responsibility fell on the entire Labor cabinet, who he urged to read the report by the Australian Institute of Criminology.
They’re very genuine people and they’re very good people. But this is not good enough if there’s no courage and if there’s no commitment. And that’s what the opportunity is here … take the step to make the transformation.
Read more about the report here:
Updated
