Tom McIlroy
Former prime minister John Howard and former foreign minister Alexander Downer have issued a joint statement saying they are “appalled” by the Albanese government’s decision to recognise Palestinian statehood.
They accused the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, of undermining the enduring trust between Australia and Israel.
Albanese plans to recognise Palestine as a state at this month’s United Nation’s general assembly in New York.
The question of recognising Palestine as a sovereign state is not a matter of empty symbolism. It strikes at the heart of whether international law is to be respected or discarded whenever political expediency is deemed more convenient.
Some argue that recognition would “advance” the peace process. In reality, it entrenches division. It teaches the Palestinian leadership that peace is unnecessary for statehood and it signals to Israel that international institutions cannot be relied upon to uphold agreements or protect its security concerns. Far from building confidence between the parties, premature recognition would only deepen mistrust.
The pair say the federal government has damaged Labor’s standing on leadership in the Middle East.
We all want to see peace in the Middle East: a lasting two-state solution that guarantees Israel’s security and offers dignity and self-determination to the Palestinians. But such a peace cannot be imposed from abroad, nor achieved by unilateral recognition. It must be built painstakingly by the parties themselves, through negotiation, compromise, and responsibility. And it must be grounded in the framework of international law, not a bypass of it.
Updated at 23.41 EDT
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Bill to deport noncitizens to Nauru passes Senate
Sarah Basford Canales
A bill to strip basic legal protections from the noncitizens it plans to deport to Nauru and retrospectively validate visa decisions made before the high court’s NZYQ ruling has passed the Senate.
Shortly before it was passed with Coalition support, Greens and crossbench senators spoke against the changes, labelling it “racist” and “rushed”.
The Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi accused Labor of creating a bill that would make US president Donald Trump “proud”:
You praise migrants for what they bring to this country. You eat our food, you enjoy our festivals, but then you stitch up dirty deals with the Coalition to demonise us.
The independent Victorian senator Lidia Thorpe said: “It is bills like these that normalise racism and white supremacy in the highest places of power in the colony.”
The ACT senator David Pocock pointed out the major parties both labelled the cohort “violent” but were willing to send them to a tiny Pacific nation for an expected $2.5bn over a three-decade period.
Updated at 23.49 EDT
John Howard and Alexander Downer ‘appalled’ at decision to recognise Palestinian statehood
Tom McIlroy
Former prime minister John Howard and former foreign minister Alexander Downer have issued a joint statement saying they are “appalled” by the Albanese government’s decision to recognise Palestinian statehood.
They accused the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, of undermining the enduring trust between Australia and Israel.
Albanese plans to recognise Palestine as a state at this month’s United Nation’s general assembly in New York.
The question of recognising Palestine as a sovereign state is not a matter of empty symbolism. It strikes at the heart of whether international law is to be respected or discarded whenever political expediency is deemed more convenient.
Some argue that recognition would “advance” the peace process. In reality, it entrenches division. It teaches the Palestinian leadership that peace is unnecessary for statehood and it signals to Israel that international institutions cannot be relied upon to uphold agreements or protect its security concerns. Far from building confidence between the parties, premature recognition would only deepen mistrust.
The pair say the federal government has damaged Labor’s standing on leadership in the Middle East.
We all want to see peace in the Middle East: a lasting two-state solution that guarantees Israel’s security and offers dignity and self-determination to the Palestinians. But such a peace cannot be imposed from abroad, nor achieved by unilateral recognition. It must be built painstakingly by the parties themselves, through negotiation, compromise, and responsibility. And it must be grounded in the framework of international law, not a bypass of it.
Updated at 23.41 EDT
President Trump being ‘played’ by Putin, former PM says
The former prime minister Tony Abbott has penned his inaugural blog post on the popular platform Substack titled: The World is Even More Dangerous than You Think.
The musings are focused on Donald Trump’s presidency which he describes as “even more transactional and unpredictable than the first”.
Like most conservatives, I was elated when Donald Trump returned to the US presidency. I thought he’d been a pretty good president the first time round, at least until the pandemic struck … In fact, Trump 2.0 has been Trump unleashed. I still think it’s better to have Donald Trump than Kamala Harris as “leader of the free world”; but, if anything, this Trump presidency is even more transactional and unpredictable than the first.
Abbott said Trump seemed “genuinely fascinated by dictators who can murder their opponents, invade their enemies, and stay in office forever”, representing a split from “usual courtesies” about shared values and historical ties.
The post-war global order has endured largely because of the assumption that America would fight for its allies and vice versa. What’s so currently unsettling is that this can no longer be taken for granted.
Perhaps, at some point, President Trump will work out that he’s being “played” by Putin; and that he’s needlessly alienating those normally bound to America through common values and interests. But rather than assume the best, the more the world’s democracies can do for themselves, individually and collectively, without relying on American leadership or even help, the better for all of us.
Updated at 23.37 EDT
Penry Buckley
Planned Sydney Harbour Bridge march linked to anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists
As we reported yesterday, NSW police are considering an application by a group for a march across Sydney’s Harbour Bridge.
The group, which has come together under the name “Australia Unites Against Government Corruption”, have lodged a form 1 notifying police about a planned public assembly on Saturday 13 September.
As the ABC has reported, the group includes My Place Australia – whose mission statement invites members to “celebrate our sovereignty” – and MMAMV, whose Facebook page calls for access to “unvaccinated breastmilk”. Both groups have campaigned against vaccine mandates.
The ABC has reported organisers plan to march via Milsons Point across the Harbour Bridge to Hyde Park, and are expecting 10,000 people to attend.
A spokesperson for MMAMV told Guardian Australia the march had been planned for some time but would now also be a “stand” against neo-Nazis attending an anti-immigration rally in Melbourne on Sunday.
A spokesperson for another group involved in the protest, The People’s Revolution, said they were also calling for “robust discussion around migration reform”.
In a statement, NSW police has said it is aware of “planned assembly in Sydney on Saturday 13 September 2025”.
Officers from North West Metropolitan Region have received a Form 1 and are consulting relevant stakeholders.
If police accept the application, protesters can be protected from being charged for offences like blocking traffic. If police reject it, the protest is not considered illegal, but protesters do not have the same protections.
Updated at 23.24 EDT
Wilkie to press government on whistleblower protections after Boyle case
The independent member for Clark, Andrew Wilkie, will use today’s question time to press the attorney general on Australia’s whistleblower protections.
As the minutes tick down to showtime, Wilkie has disrupted a copy of his question, which will raise the case of whistleblower Richard Boyle, who was last week spared jail after exposing unethical debt collection practices at the Australian Taxation Office.
Andrew Wilkie in August. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
Judge Liesl Kudelka sentenced Boyle, 49, in the South Australian district court on Thursday, seven years after the former debt collection officer went public with allegations that led to reforms within the ATO.
In a plea deal with prosecutors, the Adelaide man admitted four criminal charges, reduced from the original 66 laid after he appeared on the ABC’s Four Corners program. Wilkie will ask:
Attorney general, last week ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle was sentenced after facing a lengthy prosecution for blowing the whistle on egregious wrongdoing in the ATO.
His case was of course yet another demonstration that our whistleblower protections are deeply inadequate.
Minister, exactly when will the government table the necessary amendments to the Public Interest Disclosure Act, and the Corporations Act, so the whistleblowers aren’t the ones being punished?
You can read about the issue here:
Updated at 23.18 EDT
Fact check: are all members of the NZYQ cohort criminals who have reoffended since being released from immigration detention?
Sarah Basford Canales
The Senate is debating a home affairs bill to strip natural justice from noncitizens within the NZYQ cohort in an effort to expedite their deportation to Nauru.
But just who is within the NZYQ cohort? And are they all violent criminals, as some politicians have claimed?
Well, according to the home affairs department’s evidence in March 2025, around nine of the 300 or so person group have been previously charged with a low-level crime, or have no criminal history at all.
Officials said 13 within the group had a murder or attempted murder conviction, 95 had a criminal history of sex-based offending, and for assault and violent offending, kidnapping and armed robbery, the total was 133.
Other criminal histories within the cohort include:
But remember, these are convictions that have been served already.
In March, the department also said around a third of the group had been charged with a breach of visa conditions or migration laws since being released from indefinite detention as a result of the high court’s ruling in November 2023.
As a result of the concern for community safety, some of the released cohort were placed under strict monitoring conditions, including ankle bracelets and curfews. More than two-thirds of the group were not subject to curfews or electronic monitoring as of February.
Updated at 23.11 EDT
Long road ahead for defence suicide inquiry reforms
A mountain of work is needed to deliver more than 100 recommendations from a damning veteran suicide royal commission, the government concedes.
Nine recommendations have been fully implemented and a further 110 are under way, the veterans’ affairs minister, Matt Keogh, told parliament on Thursday.
The limited progress comes almost a year after the inquiry’s final report was handed down, but the minister said a suite of reforms would ensure members of the defence force, veterans and their families received the care they needed:
We will continue to do what’s right to take action on the royal commission as quickly as we can. It’s the least we can do.
Labor provided its response in December, accepting the overwhelming majority of the 122 recommendations. A defence and veterans’ service commission will be operational by the end of September as the government recruits a commissioner to head the body.
Measures that will allow defence force personnel convicted of sexual crimes to be booted from the military would be in place by the end of 2025, Keogh said.
The opposition veterans’ affairs spokesperson, Darren Chester, accused Keogh of “putting lipstick on a pig”:
It was extraordinary that the minister came in here and endeavoured to pretend this is a good reform when it actually disenfranchises our veterans and their families.
The opposition was given less than a day’s notice about Keogh’s progress report, which Chester claimed had been worked on for weeks.
-AAP.
Updated at 22.53 EDT
Tom McIlroy
Greens push for five-year restriction on RBA members moving into corporate sector
Green Nick McKim is pushing legislative amendments that would impose a five-year restriction on outgoing Reserve Bank of Australia board members taking corporate directorships.
Like former government ministers, McKim says exiting RBA board members and governors should be subject to rules limiting their private sector work for a set period, describing the restrictions as “a cooling-off period”.
The Reserve Bank should serve the public interest, not the interests of big corporations. Our amendment would shut the revolving door between RBA board members and the banks and corporations.
For too long, former governors and board members have walked straight into cushy jobs with major banks and ASX-listed companies, fuelling public distrust.
Greens Senator Nick McKim in 2023. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
McKim is seeking support for the plan in the Senate.
We’re pushing for a five-year cooling-off period and new conflict of interest rules to make sure board members can’t cash in on their time at the RBA.
These reforms are about protecting the integrity of the RBA and restoring public confidence that decisions are made in the interests of people, not profit.
Updated at 22.52 EDT
Greens back student calls for university divestment from weapons manufacturers
Deputy Greens leader and higher education spokesperson, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, has called on universities to “end dirty partnerships” with weapons companies after thousands of students voted for divestment in a referendum on Palestine.
More than 5,000 students voted in the first National Union of Students (NUS) referendum in the union’s four-decade history, passing two motions to censure the Australian government for its “complicity in the genocide in Gaza”, and demanding universities cut ties with weapons manufacturers.
In February, Faruqi introduced a bill that would require universities to disclose and divest from any partnerships with “dirty industries”, including weapons manufacturers, gambling, fossil fuel and tobacco companies.
Faruqi said “for the first time in decades, thousands of students have spoken with one voice, demanding that their universities stop profiting from war, militarism and the machinery of genocide”.
University leadership cannot ignore this. Students have given their universities a clear, democratic instruction: end the dirty partnerships with the weapons companies profiting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. History will not be kind to those who ignored this moment — university vice-chancellors must cut the bloody ties now or forever wear the shame.
‘We don’t want them in this country’, Sussan Ley says of deal to send foreign-born former detainees to Nauru
Circling back to Ley, she was also asked about findings at a parliamentary inquiry that a proposed resettlement deal with Nauru could cost $2.5bn over three decades.
The group of noncitizens set to be banished for 30 years face a potentially hostile reception because they have been described as “violent” and “appalling” by the Australian government.
The forcible transfer of the so-called NZYQ group – and potentially thousands more under legislation currently before parliament – to the tiny island is being quietly resented by Nauruans.
Ley said it was a “massive expenditure by the government to fix up a mess of their own making”.
They committed crimes, they were locked up, they were let out, they committed more crimes, so we don’t want them in the country. But we really do want Labor to get this right because their first duty is to keep Australians safe.
The minister should step up and use his own preventive detention regime that we helped him pass. We’ve had to help the government fix up these laws a few times. We stand ready to do the same thing, and of course, we need to interrogate what this spender actually achieves.
You can listen to more on the deal here:
Updated at 22.17 EDT
Lead applicant says she hopes robodebt class action outcome sends message to government
One of the lead applicants in the robodebt scheme, nurse Felicity Button, takes the microphone.
She says she hopes today sends a message to the government that “it doesn’t matter how vulnerable a population is, and it doesn’t matter where you come from or what your circumstances are, there is no room in Australia for unethical and illegal conduct”.
For me today, it is the first step forward to rebuild that trust with the government … We didn’t need to march the streets, and we didn’t need to inflict violence on anybody. Even though what happened to us was unfair, unjust, cruel, torturous and inhumane, we didn’t retaliate in kind. We used the legal system for what it’s there for.
And justice prevailed, and for the first time, I think in my whole life, I can say that there was a bit of fairness – not just justice in our system. Often you can’t leave those two terms together when it comes to the law. But today felt fair.
Updated at 22.16 EDT
Gordon is asked whether the fact the federal government was not going to fight this in court tells you.
He says “they knew that the result in court was going to be even worse than the massive amount that they’ve paid out today”.
Pointed to the royal commission’s scathing report which said robodebt had led to suicides, he says:
Whilst in legal terms and in other terms, this is a spectacular result, for some, there are wounds that will never heal and we can never do justice to those people, and the system can’t.
But what we do hope and feel is that people today feel that their voices have been heard. That there’s been some serious vindication … some kind of compensation for the pain, the suffering, the distress, the consequential economic loss … to punish the government for what it’s done.
The court approval process for the settlement will take six months to roll out.
Updated at 22.15 EDT
‘For some, there are wounds that will never heal’: Peter Gordon
Gordon says more than 450,000 Australians have or will benefit from this settlement.
It is, of course, far and away the largest class action settlement in Australia’s history … And while it is satisfying for lawyers to achieve a local result of $2.4bn, it is, frankly, infuriating to know that our own commonwealth government caused so much suffering to its own people, and that it arose out of wilful misconduct.
We at Gordon Legal are deeply grateful to our clients who kept faith in us, and that the class action system found a way. We hope that most will feel at least some sense of vindication in today’s announcement. We understand that for some, there are wounds that will never heal.
He pays tribute to politicians including Bill Shorten who “took courageous stands” and journalists who “asked relentless questions of those in power”.
And finally, as the senior partner and founder of Gordon Legal, I want to acknowledge the extraordinary work of the lawyers seated behind me and led, of course, by my partner, Andrew Greg … in the 47 years of my legal career, theirs is the finest work, and the most extraordinary work ethic that I’ve ever seen.
Updated at 22.14 EDT
Lawyer Peter Gordon outlines history of robodebt saga and class actions
Peter Gordon goes over the history of the robodebt saga, starting with the final report of the robodebt royal commission handed down in July 2023, almost two years after Gordon Legal had settled the first class action for $112m.
He says that was almost a decade after the “evil automated robodebt system began to inflict its damage on ordinary Australians”.
The royal commission report demonstrated an extraordinary diaspora of dishonesty, bad faith and misconduct at high levels of the Australian government. The biggest revelation was that most of the damning evidence was never handed over in the original class action which Gordon Legal began in 2019.
We were outraged to learn this in 2023 in July, and we wrote to the prime minister, suggesting that his government work with us to revisit the question of robodebt victims’ rights. Clearly, if those damning documents had been handed over, we would never have settled the first class action on those terms.
When we received no satisfactory response from the government in 2023 to our request, we issued fresh legal proceedings to appeal the previous robodebt settlement.
Gordon says the new case first went to court in October last year, with a full hearing due to be heard by the full court of the federal court on 28 July.
The week before that hearing and arising from mediation talks, which had been ordered by the federal court, the commonwealth government has today agreed to pay victims a further $548,500,000.
Updated at 22.11 EDT
Australia a nation ‘ruled by laws and not by kings’, robodebt lawyer says
In Melbourne, Peter Gordon of Gordon Legal who ran the class action for the victims of robodebt is addressing the media after the commonwealth agreed to pay $475m in additional compensation, in the largest class action settlement in Australian history.
He said today was a day of “vindication and validation for hundreds of thousands of Australians afflicted by the robodebt scandal”.
Today, they know that their voices have been heard. Today is a day of warning not to attack the people who elected them or who they were hired to protect.
Today is also one more vindication of the principle that Australia remains a nation ruled by laws and not by kings. Laws which even hold the government accountable. Long may that be the Australian way.
Updated at 21.46 EDT
Opposition leader distances herself from Nampijinpa Price’s immigration claim
The leader of the opposition, Sussan Ley, has rejected claims from Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price that federal Labor was promoting migration by specific ethnic groups, including Indians, to grow its electoral support.
Singling out Indians coming to Australia, the outspoken Northern Territory senator said sections of the community were concerned at “the core number, or the type of migrants that are coming in”.
I think Labor like to be able to ensure that they’re going to allow those in that would ultimately support their policies, their views, and vote for them as well.
Speaking on Sky News earlier, Ley was asked about Price’s claims that migrants were being “brought in from India to boost the Labor vote”.
She said Price had corrected her comments and Australia’s migration policy was “non-discriminatory”.
Every day that I’m opposition leader, I’m fighting for every single Australian, no matter where you came from. And our Australian Indian community is amazing, you contribute as Australian Indians so much to our country. We know how hard you work, your family values, and the contribution you make across this country. And as opposition leader, I value that incredibly.
It doesn’t matter how you vote, we’re here for everyone because we know that the values of the Liberal party; aspiration, hard work, reward for effort and building this community in this country are something that will resonate in a serious, credible, compelling agenda.
Updated at 22.01 EDT
Perhaps it is inevitable that the two most persistent evils in human societies – racism and misogyny – can be at times difficult to define and pin down.
It’s like the elephant in the archetypal parable about the blind men who each touch one part of the beast and assume they know its nature.
One touches the tail, and conceives a snake-like creature. Another the flank, and thinks of pillows and comfort. Another the tusk, and perceives danger.
Read the Margaret Simons’s take on media coverage of the anti-immigration protests here: