Key events
What we learned today, Thursday 22 May
That’s where we’ll wrap up this evening. Here’s a snippet of what happened today:
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More than 488,000 people were isolated and 600 rescues have been performed amid disastrous flooding as intense rainfall continued in New South Wales. Emergency services expected flooding to continue into the weekend.
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The Liberals and Nationals have agreed to delay announcing their frontbench lineups after Sussan Ley and David Littleproud held crisis talks to reunite the Coalition just two days after the dramatic split.
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Senior Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie has accused the Liberals of breaching trust inside the Coalition, in a spectacular swipe after a letter to Michaelia Cash was leaked to media.
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The Erin Patterson trial has heard evidence from a digital forensics expert about data recovered from electronic devices provided to police by Patterson.
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Children as young as 10 will face adult jail time for a range of new offences after Queensland passed its second tranche of controversial youth crime laws.
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Organising bosses of the 2032 Brisbane Olympics have welcomed the Queensland government’s plan to override more than a dozen planning laws to build Games venues.
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Mobile telco Circles.Life has paid a $413,160 fine for breaching identity verification rules.
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Australia is seeing a surge in respiratory illnesses, with record-breaking interseasonal flu cases since the start of the year.
We’ll be back with you bright and early tomorrow with more news, so look after yourselves until then.
Tom McIlroy
Murray Watt knocks back objections to North West Shelf extension
The environment minister, Murray Watt, has knocked back two last-minute objections to Woodside’s North West Shelf extension, clearing the way for a final decision on the controversial development.
Greenpeace and the Conservation Council of Western Australia were among groups opposing the expansion who were denied reconsideration related to the project, communicated to them via Watt’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water on Thursday.
Officials said the request did not meet the requirements for reconsideration and did not include “any substantial new information about the impacts” of the project.
Watt is set to meet with members of the Labor Environment Action Network, an influential grassroots organisation within the Labor party, on Thursday night, following his visit to Western Australia this week.
The deadline on a decision on Woodside’s plan to extend its gas processing plant in WA’s remote north-west out to 2070 is due by the end of the month, one of the first major political challenges for Watt in his new portfolio. His decision follows a six-year assessment process involving state and federal authorities.
Read the full story here:
Josh Butler
Will the Ross and Rachel of Australian politics patch things up?
Take the Taylor Swift songs off your Spotify queue, put the ice-cream back in the freezer and hold fire on the angry diary entries: the Liberals and Nationals might not be breaking up after all.
The extraordinary conscious uncoupling of the Liberals and Nationals, their plans to go their separate ways and work on themselves, lasted exactly 48 hours and 30 minutes – the time between 11.45am on Tuesday, when David Littleproud said he needed time to think, and 12.15pm on Thursday, when he told a hastily-convened press conference that he was willing to give things another go.
The Liberals and Nationals, the Ross and Rachel of Auspol, are still on a break, but they’re talking about patching things up. It remains … messy.
Read the full analysis here:
Andrew Wilkie asks could the crossbench be the opposition
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie has been speaking to Afternoon Briefing about the possibility of the minor parties forming the official opposition, if they outnumbered the Liberals.
Noting that it wasn’t necessarily “a firm proposition” but rather “a suggestion that we need to think about this”, Wilkie said if the Coalition’s separation becomes a divorce, and the Nationals sit on the crossbench, then:
Depending on what happens in Caldwell and Bradfield, the crossbench and the Liberal party might have the same number of members, or the crossbench could even have won more than the Liberal party, and I think that does raise the question, you know, by what right does the Liberal party become the opposition?
It sounds like a very unlikely turn of events, given the diversity that would be on the crossbench, that we would be able to operate collectively, but I reckon that would be no more surprising than what we’ve had in the previous parliament, where you have the Nationals with people like Matt Canavan, form a coalition with the Liberal party with people like Richard Archer.
Diversity is a fact of life and you deal with it. It’s an interesting question I put to the government, why would the Liberal party be made to be the opposition? Why couldn’t the crossbenchers be the opposition? So it is something to talk about.
‘More emergency warnings likely,’ NSW SES says
The NSW State Emergency Service has performed 600 flood rescues and recorded more than 4,600 calls for assistance since the flooding began in the Hunter and Mid North Coast.
The SES’s regular floods update this afternoon says there are 149 active warnings for the region, 37 of which are at Emergency level and 86 at Watch and Act. More than 48,000 people are currently isolated due to flood waters.
There are 500 rescue boats and nine helicopters active between the Hunter and Coffs Harbour, and they say more resources are on the way.
Major flooding is occurring on the Manning, Paterson, Hastings, Williams, Nambucca and Macleay rivers, and renewed river rises were likely into the weekend as forecast rainfall totals exceed 150mm to 200mm in a 24-hour period. With intense rainfall moving south towards Sydney, the Hawkesbury Nepean Valley can expect minor to moderate flooding from Friday, and people in the area should stay alert to warnings.
NSW SES assistant commissioner Dean Storey said:
Although rainfall may be reprieving in some areas, we haven’t seen the end of renewed river rises in northern NSW and people should not become complacent.
More emergency warnings will likely be issued, and if you are asked to leave, please do so. Our volunteers and partner agencies are working around the clock, prioritising rescues and getting help to those who need it most, but we want people to leave if they’re asked to do so.
We are likely to see major riverine flooding continue on several catchments into the weekend, and flash flooding remains a significant risk.
Here is the latest list of evacuation centres:
Adeshola Ore
Erin Patterson trial: jury is told four factory resets were performed on mobile
A digital forensics expert says four factory resets had been performed on a mobile phone Erin Patterson provided to police after the beef Wellington lunch.
Shamen Fox-Henry, from Victoria police’s cybercrime unit, has told the jury no data could be retrieved from the phone due to the factory reset.
Prosecutor Jane Warren shows the jury a table which Fox-Henry says shows four factory resets that occurred on the device.
The first is dated 12 February 2023. The three others occurred in the week after the lunch on 2 August 2023, 5 August 2023 and 6 August 2023.
The factory reset was performed locally the first three times and remotely the last time, the table shows.
The trial has adjourned for the day. We’ll bring you more live updates tomorrow from 10.30am.
Cait Kelly
Greens councillors say decision to move homeless kitchen for Vivid is ‘cruel’ and ‘could have been avoided’
In Sydney, Greens councillors are now calling out as “cruel” the decision to move along a community homeless kitchen out of Martin Place to make way for Vivid.
Guardian Australia broke the story today that the soup kitchen, which serves hundreds of meals each week to Sydney’s homeless community, has been told at the last minute that they will not be able to set up during Vivid, leaving them nowhere else to go.
Greens councillor Matthew Thompson said:
Someone’s screwed this up. This is a cruel outcome that could’ve been avoided. Pushing aside a community kitchen that has operated for 15 years in Martin Place for a state sponsored commercial festival? With only a couple days’ notice? It’s not good enough.
Sydney’s homeless deserve support and dignity – instead, their community kitchen is being moved on to make way for some flashy lights and hordes of tourists.
We’ve got thousands sleeping rough, countless more unable to afford food, and instead of doing more we’re moving on a key lifeline for them.
The Greens will be moving at our next council meeting to review how we protect public space for community services and the increasing number of rough sleepers and ensure this never happens again.
Disaster recovery allowance activated for flood-affected areas in Hunter and mid north coast
The federal government’s disaster recovery allowance (DRA) has been activated for areas in the Hunter and mid north coast of New South Wales that have been affected by recent floods.
The payments – up to 13 weeks of income support for workers and sole traders who have lost income as a direct result of these floods – will be available from 2pm AEST this coming Monday 26 May, for those who live or work in the Kempsey, Port Macquarie-Hastings, Mid-Coast and Dungog LGAs.
The payments are separate and in addition to the joint commonwealth-state Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements (DRFA).
DRFA is administered by the NSW government and people can check their eligibility for DRA on the Services Australia website, and make a claim through MyGov.
Lisa Cox
‘It’s just constant, there’s no break from it,’ resident of NSW mid north coast says of rain
Clancy Barnard is a resident of Valla Beach near Nambucca Heads. He says there had been unprecedented rainfall and by Thursday morning the water table was “already really high”:
The rain is so loud on the roof, we’ve locked everything up and I’m putting headphones in.
It’s just constant, there’s no break from it.
It’s not windy – it’s moving really slowly. It means you’re not getting those cyclonic winds that can be really scary.
But it also means that because it’s moving so slowly there’s just so much water in the system.
Barnard has worked as nature campaigner in the environment movement and as a campaigner for the independent candidate Caz Heise in the seat of Cowper during the federal election campaign.
He expresses anger at what he says was a lack of action to help communities adapt to climate change:
This is climate change and it’s outrageous that both our [local] state and federal MPs when in government didn’t invest in climate preparedness.
People are losing their properties … and they’re uninsurable.
Littleproud says decision to split not made ‘out of vengeance or anger’
David Littleproud says of decision to split from Liberals:
What I want to see is that we continue to work together because I think that is in the nation’s best interest. And I’m committed to that – I was committed to that on Tuesday, which was a tough day and a sombre day, a day where we made a decision not out of vengeance or anger but out of the fact that we had got to this juncture. And the fact that we have now got to the point where the Liberal party room is going to meet to determine those challenges that we had in accepting the Coalition agreement, I think, is a positive move. And it shows leadership, and strength of leadership, that we will have that meeting and we will be able to have a determination of where the Liberal party gets to out of that.
Adeshola Ore
Erin Patterson trial: jury shown mushroom and dehydrator photos on tablet seized by police
Back to Erin Patterson’s trial.
The jury has been shown photos of a dehydrator and mushrooms on a plastic tray found on a tablet seized by police from Patterson’s house.
The jury is shown the photos extracted from the Samsung tablet by police.
The modified date for the dehydrator photo is 30 April 2023 – just under three months before the beef Wellington lunch.
Shamen Fox-Henry, from Victoria police’s cybercrime unit, says this means the photo was found in a Google photos application on the device.
The jury has also been shown photos which include text about cancer.
One photo, modified on 4 May 2023, includes information about ovarian cancer.
Another photo shown to the jury includes information about brain lymphoma.
Littleproud on decision to split from Liberals: ‘we couldn’t wait for months’
Nationals leader David Littleproud has been speaking to the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing after the announcement today that both the Liberal and Nationals leaders have delayed announcements of frontbench line-ups to make space for further negotiations over the Coalition.
Littleproud said at the time the split was announced, the only process that was put to the Nationals was “in terms of what Sussan said would take place with a long-term process of policy review that could take months”.
Littleproud said:
Unfortunately we couldn’t wait for months and when a shadow cabinet needed to be appointed before we came back to parliament it was going to be beyond the return of parliament, so we were in a decision process that we had to make in terms of the time that was provided to us.
Lisa Cox
‘Areas have flooded that have never flooded before,’ says resident of Tinonee, NSW
Clare Rourke lives on the Manning River at Tinonee, near Wingham and Taree.
Her house is on higher ground and had not been affected by flood waters but she had watched the river rise quickly this week:
The river level is normally about 11.5m below our house. It got to about 1.5m.
She said what stood out about the current flood, compared with flooding that hit the area in 2021, was the pace at which the river had risen:
I think that’s why people have been so stranded. Areas have flooded that have never flooded before and it was just so fast.
The combination of the rapid river rise and the flash flooding caught people off guard.
