Breaking news, politics, business, economy, and current events from Australia.
The once-quashed plan to block Hobart property owners from converting their entire home into a short-stay accommodation has been resurrected by the local council. At its planning committee meeting on Wednesday, the Hobart City Council (HCC) tabled a fresh proposal to restrict the creation of short-stay accommodation in the city. The tweak to planning rules…
When Peter Taylor’s nephew took his own life three years ago, the Portland resident knew he needed to change the way he thought about mental health. Portland is in Glenelg Shire, in the far south-west of Victoria, a region where the suicide rate between 2020 and 2024 was 45 per cent higher than the state…
Hundreds of thousands of new homes are currently being built in priority development areas across south-east Queensland, but residents say there is one crucial thing missing in these outer suburbs: adequate public transport. Disability pensioner Maria Feige lives on the outskirts of Logan at Flagstone, soon to be home to 50,000 new dwellings and 138,000…
As tens of thousands of Australians line up to buy shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX blockbuster public offering, Australian government officials are privately flagging the risks of the country’s growing reliance on its satellite internet service, Starlink. These concerns were made explicit in a little-noticed official spy agency notice describing satellite internet providers as a…
To come across a “whale fall” — the decomposing body of the marine mammal that has fallen to the sea floor — is a rare occurrence in the deep ocean. So when a Chinese-led research expedition discovered a graveyard comprising five of these whale falls, along with hundreds of cetacean fossils from past falls, they…
The race is on for at least one Tasmanian Senate seat at the next election with Liberal incumbent Wendy Askew deciding to retire after a term and a half. Senator Askew’s decision to not recontest leaves a seat open for a new Liberal, as One Nation’s surge in popularity puts it in contention for up…
It is illegal to operate a commercial solarium across most of the country, but finding one online and booking a session takes only minutes. Jess* has been using solariums through the underground market for about eight years. “I spend a lot of time on my appearance, whether that’s at the gym, botox, all of those…
In calmer times, a World Cup fixture might have offered Anthony Albanese a useful piece of informal diplomacy. These are not calmer times. Barring an unlikely last-minute invitation from Donald Trump, the prime minister won’t be zipping across the Pacific next week to cheer on the Socceroos against the United States. The sports-loving prime minister…
Gout Gout has finished sixth in the men’s 200 metres at the Oslo Diamond League meet, with Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo claiming victory. Gout, making his Diamond League debut, stopped the clock in 20.60, well outside his personal best of 19.67. Botswana’s Tebogo, who won the 200m gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics, ran 19.84…
Young men in black hoodies and balaclavas throwing stones and firebombs and targeting cars and homes. It’s all so depressing familiar, particularly in Belfast, where these scenes are playing out after disturbing footage emerged of a man, identified by police as a Sudanese asylum seeker, attacking another man with a kitchen knife in the north…