What happened Tuesday 14 February 2023
With that we’ll end our live coverage of the day’s news.
Here’s a summary of the main developments:
Australian security agencies have disrupted a foreign interference plot by Iran that was targeting an Iranian-Australian on Australian soil, the government has said.
A new set of rules for home care packages issued by the Australian health department has limited access to allied health services and non-medical supports such as in-home heating and cooling.
The government agency investigating alleged war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan expects to hand its first brief of evidence to commonwealth prosecutors by the middle of this year.
The eight-year-old Sydney boy who was found motionless at a resort in Fiji is suspected to have died from electrocution, Fiji police have confirmed.
One of the architects of the ACT’s pill-testing program has accused the New South Wales premier, Dominic Perrottet, of “magical thinking” after he responded to a renewed push for the scheme by saying “don’t take drugs”.
New Zealand is in a national state of emergency, as Cyclone Gabrielle batters the country, with floods trapping people on roofs, thousands displaced and landslides destroying homes in what officials have described as an “unprecedented” natural disaster.
A brain cancer patient who never recovered from surgery performed by Charlie Teo thought of the star neurosurgeon as “God”, a disciplinary hearing has been told.
Thanks for following along. We’ll be back to do it all again tomorrow.
Updated
Curtin University denies union’s allegations of censorship
Western Australia’s Curtin University has been accused of censoring media articles on internal platforms in the latest fallout over stalled bargaining enterprise agreement negotiations.
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) - which has been urging staff against voting for management’s proposed wage reforms - accused the the university of restricting free speech on campus.
The union alleged staff alerted it to media coverage of the dispute having been deleted from Curtin’s internal social networking platform Yammer. It said the NTEU’s website was also temporarily blocked from Curtin University WiFi or LAN connections.
Curtin University said none of the claims made by the union were true:
The University categorically rejects the allegations of deleting social posts or restricting access to the NTEU website and is incredibly disappointed that the union would propagate such false claims. Curtin fully supports its employees and employee organisations exercising their rights in a lawful manner.”
The university’s pay negotiations with the union were abandoned 18 months in, after reaching a stalemate.
The university’s proposal, being voted on this week, would provide staff 2.2% annual pay increases over the next five years – a real wages pay cut when factoring in inflation, which was 8.3% in Perth in, the last quarter.
NTEU Curtin branch president, Professor Scott Fitzgerald, said staff had been “shocked and outraged” by the alleged suppression of information in the middle of voting.
The ballot for the proposed enterprise agreement opened on 10 February and runs until Thursday.
Updated
