As it happened: PM visits NSW flood zone and announces extended disaster relief payments; Healthscope enters receivership

Thanks for reading the national news blog. This is where we’ll end today’s coverage. We will have more for you in the next live news coverage.

To conclude, here’s a look back at the day’s major stories:

• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced extended disaster relief payments as he toured flood-hit Taree on the NSW Mid North Coast today.
• Treasurer Jim Chalmers has been accused of not knowing how the government’s new super tax will work.
• Senator Jacqui Lambie has won another term in Australia’s upper house, the Australian Electoral Commission revealed today as it announced the six elected Tasmanian senators.
• In NSW, plans to transform Rosehill Gardens racecourse into a massive new housing development were dealt a fatal blow this afternoon as the Australian Turf Club narrowly rejected the proposal.
• In Victoria, a court heard today that alleged killer mushroom cook Erin Patterson asked who had died when a homicide detective explained that he was raiding her home in relation to the deaths of two people.
• In Queensland, thousands of nurses and midwives have voted to strike for the first time in 20 years.
• In Western Australia, a state-based redress scheme was announced today to give members of the stolen generations $85,000 each.
• In business news, the Australian sharemarket gained 0.6 per cent today after a lacklustre morning, following US market futures higher after Donald Trump extended a deadline on his European tariffs.

• In world news, an Australian man facing execution if found guilty of running drugs in Bali was so distressed after being deceived by a friend and arrested that he threw himself against the walls of the police station and cried, his lawyer said today.

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Liberal senator for Tasmania Jonathon Duniam says his party suffered a disastrous result in Australia’s smallest state, but believed Senate voting showed opposition to the controversial salmon farming industry hurt candidates.

It was confirmed today that Tasmanian Jacqui Lambie has retained her Senate seat after holding off a challenge from Lee Hanson, the daughter of One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.

Senator Jonathon Duniam during a doorstop at Parliament House in November last year.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Liberal senator Richard Colbeck was also re-elected, but Duniam told the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing that the result was still not good enough.

“It was a disastrous result in Tasmania I make no excuses. There is a lot we need to learn from here,” Duniam said

He said that he’d called Lambie to congratulate her, but added: “I think based on some of the polling data we saw out of the salmon communities on the west coast, they punished her for not supporting them.”

Read more about the salmon farming issue in Tasmania here.

Ken Wyatt, the Indigenous Australians minister in the last Coalition government, says the Liberals and Nationals need to get back together again but warned against any deal to ditch a target for net-zero emissions by 2050.

Wyatt, who resigned from the Liberal Party in 2023 over its stance on the Voice to parliament, appeared on the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing today and said his former party needed to move away from a reliance on Baby Boomers for support. Instead, he said the Liberals needed to address the concerns of young Australians.

Former Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

“Now we have a very assertive younger population that views the political parties in a different way,” he said.

“They are more self-determining, they are social justice-conscious, and they strive to look at fairness and equality … and for them, climate is one of the issues. Parties have to take note of that.”

Wyatt also welcomed the WA government’s announcement of a redress scheme for stolen generations earlier today and urged the federal government to pursue truth-telling about Australia’s Indigenous history.

“They have an opportunity to be bold and to take those steps,” he said.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price – who has kept a low profile since defecting from the Nationals to the Liberals two weeks ago – has released a statement to Sky News confirming reports she had been approached about running in a lower house seat at the next election.

The only two House of Representatives seats in the NT are Lingiari or Solomon. Labor holds both.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price speaks alongside Peter Dutton during the Coalition’s ill-fated recent election campaign.Credit: James Brickwood

In her statement, Price mentioned she ran for Lingiari at the 2019 election.

“I did receive suggestions from various individuals, including supporters, colleagues and friends, who would have liked me to run for a lower house seat,” Price said.

“I remain content with that decision and look forward to continue a big task that lies ahead for the Liberal Party in holding the Albanese government to account in the Senate.”

Asked two weeks ago on Sky if she would switch to the lower house so she could one day be prime minister, Price said: “I know there’s a lot of Australians who’d love to see that.”

Northern Territory Police say a 24-year-old Indigenous man has died after police restrained him in central Australia today.

Police received reports around 1.10pm (ACST) that a man was involved in a fight with a security guard at the Coles supermarket in the Alice Springs CBD.

The centre of Alice Springs in January 2023.Credit: Kate Geraghty

“Two police officers were in the store at the time of the incident and restrained the adult male,” NT Police said in a statement.

“A short time later, the man stopped breathing and CPR was commenced. St John Ambulance attended the scene, and the man was conveyed to Alice Springs Hospital where he was pronounced deceased shortly after 2.20pm.”

In a press conference within the last hour, Assistant Commissioner Travis Wurst said security guards initially confronted the now-deceased man as he allegedly was placing items down the front of his clothes.

Wurst said one of the guards was assaulted before two plain-clothed police tried to help.

“The male behaved rather aggressively and was placed onto the ground by those police officers. He was later identified as losing consciousness,” Wurst said.

The assistant commissioner was unable to say if the man indicated he was struggling – or how long he was on the ground for – as the investigation was “still in its nascent phase”.

Wurst said police believed the deceased was a 24-year-old Aboriginal man from Alice Springs.

Greens leader Larissa Waters has expressed disdain for Woodside chief executive Meg O’Neill’s suggestion that young people have a hypocritical opposition to fossil fuels.

At a gas industry conference in Brisbane today, O’Neill said during a panel discussion that young people had an “almost zealous view” that fossil fuels were bad, but were “happily plugging in their devices, ordering things from Shein and Temu” which were then shipped without individuals realising the carbon impact of their actions.

Woodside chief executive Meg O’Neill recently faced shareholder AGM backlash over the oil and gas group’s climate policies.Credit: Trevor Collens

“You can’t make something like that up,” Waters said on the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing today.

“Here is a very well-paid, wealthy fossil fuel executive trying to claim with a straight face that the climate crisis is the fault of young people shopping online for goods they can afford in a cost-of-living crisis.

“So I’m afraid I take her comments with a massive grain of salt. You can’t be the head of a massive dirty gas company and point the finger at other people about the climate crisis.”

Larissa Waters, the newly elected leader of the Greens, has urged Environment Minister Murray Watt to reject energy giant Woodside’s controversial expansion of its North West Shelf project in WA.

Speaking on the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing, Waters said she was “an eternal optimist” and hoped the comprehensively re-elected Labor government would knock back the 50-year project, which she claimed was the country’s “biggest dirty gas project” that would add to climate change.

Greens leader Larissa Waters.Credit: Penny Stephens

“This is really the first climate test for the re-elected Albanese government,” she said. “Is this really how they want to start the term?”

Waters warned that approval from Watt could harm possible future negotiations with the crossbench as Labor seeks to reform Australia’s environment laws.

“If he is going to send that signal that actually he is perfectly fine with climate destruction, then it will be hard to then legitimately say that he wants our environmental laws to work better, because those two are very inconsistent,” Waters said today.

Richard Marles has reiterated Australia’s opposition to the death penalty, as the federal government provides consular support for a Cairns-born man accused of accepting a 1.7-kilogram haul of cocaine in Bali.

Lamar Ahchee, 43, could face Indonesia’s death penalty if convicted over the alleged drug deal after he was arrested last Thursday and presented to a press conference yesterday.

Asked on 3AW about the Australian’s arrest, the deputy prime minister said he was limited in what he could say as he thought it was important that consular matters were not conducted in public.

“We will continue to advocate on his behalf in the circumstances in which he finds himself,” Marles said.

Asked separately what his view on the death penalty was, he added: “I definitely do not support the death penalty. We as a nation advocate against the death penalty around the world.

“Countries obviously have their own system of laws, and it’s to state the obvious that Australians need to be really well aware of that when they travel.”

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has defended the federal government’s plan to raise taxes on superannuation accounts with balances of more than $3 million.

During the last parliamentary term, Labor announced plans to double the concessional tax rate from 15 per cent to 30 per cent on earnings in these multi-million dollar accounts from July 1 in a move expected to raise $2.7 billion in its first full year of operation.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

A controversial element of the reform is that the super tax would also apply to “unrealised gains”, which refers to the growth in the value of an asset or investment that an investor holds but hasn’t yet cashed in.

“It does apply to a very small number of people. And it is not to say that those people don’t get a tax break, it is just not to the same extent that it was,” Marles told Melbourne radio station 3AW. “It is about making sure that our superannuation system is fair.”

Host Jacqui Felgate later asked Marles: “Is it fair to ask people to pay money on something they haven’t actually received a gain for yet?”

He responded: “We believe that it is fair in this circumstance.”

Alleged killer mushroom cook Erin Patterson asked who had died when a homicide detective explained that he was raiding her home in relation to the deaths of two people.

Detective Sergeant Luke Farrell also said he found a food-spattered recipe page for beef Wellington inside a RecipeTin Eats cookbook in Patterson’s kitchen during the search of her Leongatha home on August 5, 2023, in the aftermath of her deadly lunch.

Detective Sergeant Luke Farrell was present at the raid on Erin Patterson’s home in the aftermath of the fatal lunch.Credit: Jason South

During his evidence for Patterson’s triple-murder trial in Morwell on Tuesday, Farrell said the accused and her children were home the morning of the raid as officers began photographing and documenting items of interest.

The court heard the witness introduced himself at one point, telling Patterson police were there investigating the death of two people.

Her response, the court heard, was: “Who died?”

Read more from the high-profile mushroom trial here.