The Guardian ·
Queensland to create outback boot camps for youth offenders – as it happened
Jane Hume says Labor ‘all over the shop on immigration’
Deputy opposition leader Jane Hume said the government has been “all over the shop on immigration”, and cannot support it’s proposal without seeing further details.
Speaking on ABC’s Afternoon Briefing, Hume said the Coalition had not seen any legislation:
The Coalition cannot respond on whether we would support legislation unless we have seen it. This government has a track record of putting together legislation that contains things that are inevitably going to wedge the Coalition, that we simply cannot support for one reason or another, and then accusing us of being uncooperative.
If the minister has legislation that he would like to bring to the parliament he would like us to consider, absolutely, go ahead, please do it. We want to see it.
Labor always tries to find a wedge and the political angle. This is too important for a political angle.
It was bad day to be a microphone in Canberra – what a hectic sitting day!
Before we go, let’s recap the top headlines:
The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, has revealed long-awaited migration changes at the National Press Club, after plans for a speech more than a month ago were derailed. The government will cut off pathways for international students to remain in Australia, and crack down on individuals living in Australia without a visa, under its new migration plan.
Net overseas migration eased to 292,000 in the year to March, from 299,000 in December, according to new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Australia has broken into the top 10 of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, ranking eighth out of 148 countries – its highest ranking ever.
Tanya Plibersek and Katy Gallagher have announced plans to close gaps that have allowed family and domestic violence perpetrators to continue causing harm through the child support system. Plibersek said the new child support legislation will enforce travel bans of child support dodgers – meaning they won’t be able to fly overseas.
Pauline Hanson has rebuked a reporter for asking about her decision to team up withFatima Payman, who previously called her racist, to demand more staff.
Queensland’s government has passed legislation allowing it to establish outback boot camps for young people convicted or accused of crimes.
And finally, here’s a tl;dr on what happened during question time.
Thanks for sticking around, we’ll see you tomorrow morning.
NSW government introduces legislation cracking down on contract crime
The NSW government on Thursday introduced to parliament legislation cracking down on contract crime.
The move came after Marco Tapia, 23, was shot inside his family’s home in Glen Alpine early on 1 September. Two teenage boys have been charged with murder after the shooting death of a university student in Sydney this month, which police say was a case of mistaken identity.
Premier Chris Minns said his thoughts remained with Mr Tapia’s family. He said.
I can only imagine to have a son who’s done absolutely nothing wrong, living his life and being [killed] in his bed
The age of the people who have been accused of these offences is worrying for everybody.”
Opposition leader Kellie Sloane labelled the arrests deeply shocking and concerning. She said:
It is no wonder that people in Sydney’s southwest and west are frightened and I don’t blame them.
Integrity body warns government algorithms risk repeating robodebt mistakes
The independent research institute the Centre for Public Integrity has warned that federal government agencies are deploying opaque automated decision-making tools as part of an opaque system, creating major accountability gaps potentially depriving people of fundamental review rights.
In a submission to the government inquiry on Artificial Intelligence, the Centre wrote that it is concerned the increasing use of algorithms is creating “significant accountability gaps” requiring new legal frameworks. The submission said:
At the most basic level, individuals may not know whether automated decision-making has been used at all in a decision affecting them.
Even where its use is known, there may be insufficient information about the particular system involved and the material upon which it operated, including relevant algorithms, code, datasets and, in the case of generative AI, prompts and other instructions.
This opacity stops meaningful scrutiny of whether government systems produce discriminatory, biased or otherwise unfair outcomes, the submission says, and this may “substantially impair an individual’s capacity to understand and challenge a decision”.
It comes as Guardian Australia has reported the government’s implementation of an algorithm to assess the entitlement of older Australians to government-funded aged care support at home could not be overridden when it made wrong decisions. It has left older Australians without the care and support they need, leading to worsening health and earlier entry into aged care.
Centre director Dr Catherine Williams said:
We have been here before.
Robodebt showed what happens when automated systems are allowed to make decisions affecting people’s lives without adequate transparency, accountability or review rights. To prevent piecemeal reform like we have seen with the Aged Care Bill, a single, principled framework must be implemented.
The submission calls for an audit and registry of all automated tools across commonwealth agencies.
Shadow health and aged care minister Anne Ruston said Freedom of Information (FoI) documents reported by Guardian Australia show the government “shut out its own staff and frontline assessors from a decision that directly affects older Australians”.
You cannot tell Australians a qualified human is in control, while designing a system where an assessor cannot override an algorithm-generated result.
The federal government stripped frontline health workers of the power to override an algorithm used by aged care assessors to determine how much government-funded home support older Australians are entitled to, forcing them to accept the algorithm’s outcome even when it under-assesses peoples needs.
FoI documents show the department’s own staff warned removing the ability of assessors to override wrong outcomes was contrary to assurances they had provided to assessors and in public statements, and would likely break the trust of the sector.
Technology can support an assessment but must never replace professional judgement or stop an assessor responding to an older Australian’s individual circumstances.
Government to face Senate scrutiny over compulsory BasicsCard scheme after broken election promise
Last week, the government broke an election promise to “scrap the discriminatory Cashless Debit Card and make the BasicsCard voluntary” by repealing a clause that would have ended the compulsory nature of the scheme in July this year.
Tomorrow, the Senate Community Affairs References Committee will be hearing from groups about the government’s changes to the policy, which blocks purchases like alcohol and tobacco until 2033,
Data from the Department of Social Services shows there are 33,061 people on income management programs, known as the BasicsCard and SmartCard. More than 82% of participants identify as First Nations, with the vast majority on the scheme living in the Northern Territory.
Ahead of the inquiry tomorrow, Accountable Income Management Network Simon Schrapel said:
The Government’s proposed changes aim to shut down future Parliamentary review of a regime that has proven to be ineffective, discriminatory, costly and harmful for many participants.
And yet here we are with a government having no road map to end compulsory income management. Instead they have pushed through legislative changes to remove self-repeal dates and the periodic review of income management by the Parliament, backtracking on their promise to end these policies.
Income management disproportionately targets Aboriginal people and communities. It undermines basic human rights, creates stigma, is fundamentally racist and has consistently shown to deliver minimal if any benefits for participants forced onto the scheme. The Accountable Income Management Network continues to call on the government to end compulsory income management.
If the Government was serious about implementing its policy commitment to ending mandated income management then this latest proposal to remove legislative self-repeal dates is a funny way to go about it. It will only serve to make the Government less accountable for a policy that has failed at every hurdle.
Labor accused of abandoning migrants and refugees to ‘appease far right’
The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre has accused the government of turning its back on migrants, international students and asylum seekers in an attempt to “appease the far right” as it announces its migration policy.
In a statement, ASRC chief executive Kon Karapanagiotidis said the government must remember that “behind all of this are human beings”.
They are our neighbours, our colleagues, our friends and our families. They are part of us.
And all of this for what?
To make Australia smaller, meaner and more divided in the hope that cruelty towards migrants and refugees will win back votes from the far right?
There is no bottom to this race. There is no amount of cruelty that will ever appease the far right. Pauline Hanson has already made that clear, and the Coalition is already demanding more. How much of its soul is the Labor Party prepared to sacrifice chasing people who will never be satisfied?
Karapanagiotidis said the organisation “will not stand by while migrants and refugees are used as political punching bags”.
Queensland passes laws to establish outback boot camps for youth criminals
The Youth Justice (Circuit Breaker) Amendment Bill 2026 passed into law this afternoon.
The Liberal-National party government made an election promise to establish two camps run by non-government organisations in rural or remote locations in the state for up to 60 children. Under the act, children can be sent to the remote prisons for up to six months either as a condition of bail or as a sentence for a conviction.
Experts compared the facilities to the boot camps created under the government of Campbell Newman. A KPMG report later found they weren’t an effective way to reduce recidivism and children should not be detained in remote locations.
The Youth Advocacy Centre warned there was a risk children could be mistreated in the camps, as the new centres will have less oversight than Queensland jails. Minister for youth justice Laura Gerber said the law would give courts “a powerful new tool to deal with repeat youth offenders by removing them from the community they have caused harm to and ordering them to Circuit Breaker Sentencing, an intensive rehabilitation program”.
The Coalition started on migration today, asking why the government hadn’t reduced its migration targets in today’s announcement. Tony Burke said cutting migration further would “trash” the economy.
Jim Chalmers then accused the Liberals of having their policy developed by One Nation “in the cockpit of a plane donated by a billionaire”
The Coalition finally got the prime minister to say that he hadn’t provided Rhys Muldoon a reference for his role as an Australia Day ambassador (on the second attempt today).
Anthony Albanese was asked about whether he would increase funding for the AI safety institute – while talking up the institute, he wouldn’t commit more money.
Milton Dick had a bit of a moment confusing two different MPs, which the Coalition took full comedic and political advantage of when he apologised for the mistake.
Failed NSW anti-abortion bill an attempt to ‘chip away’ at women’s rights, critics say
A failed New South Wales bill has been labelled “a familiar strategy from the anti-abortion playbook”.
The Libertarian upper house member John Ruddick had introduced a bill that claimed to ban sex-selective abortions. Experts say such a practice is not occurring, has already been banned within the health regulations, and that the attempt to “ban” it is part of a broader strategy to recriminalise abortion.
The bill was defeated 21-16 on Wednesday night.
Family Planning Australia’s chief executive officer, Sue Shilbury, said the decision underlined that abortion is healthcare. She said:
It is reassuring that measures which could recriminalise abortion care and undermine safe, equitable and timely access were rejected.
Criminalising any aspect of abortion care is an attack on women’s health and the doctors and nurses caring for them.
This bill was a familiar strategy from the anti-abortion playbook attempting to chip away at women’s reproductive rights bit by bit.
One Nation’s NSW leader, Mike Newman, spoke at a rally for the bill organised by controversial anti-abortion campaigner Joanna Howe, where he claimed the party wanted to “stop” abortion – a claim he later said was a mistake.
Abbott says Australians don’t want frontier wars or ‘drug wars’ in War Memorial
Tony Abbott has said the Australian War Memorial should not be dedicated to the frontier wars between Indigenous people and settlers, just as it should leave out the “drug wars” in suburban Sydney.
The former prime minister said the massacres should not be considered a war between nations, nor even a civil war, addressing the “Imperialism and Resistance” conference at the memorial today. He said:
What about the fights between First Nations which were frequent and often deadly? How could events such as the Eureka Stockade or even the apprehension of the Kelly Gang be excluded? ...
It would be a big stretch to ask the Australian people to describe as war all acts of politically motivated violence, as it were, or of violence between significant groups of people. I mean the tabloids might say there’s a drug war in western Sydney, but I don’t know whether we would want to put that into the Australian War Memorial for instance, however serious.
The Australian War Memorial has no separate gallery on colonisation but is considering more work to reflect the conflicts after the first fleet’s 1788 arrival.
Abbott said there were “lots of terrible things that undoubtedly happened” and singled out a court case over the 1838 Myall Creek massacre as a “regrettably rare show of British justice”. He accused colonial Queensland’s native mounted police of “indiscriminate killing” which went “unrecorded as a matter of policy”. But he downplayed an academic’s massacre map and their estimate of 11,000 deaths from conflict as a “guesstimate”.
Researchers this week estimated there were roughly 2.2 million Indigenous people before 1788, with fewer than a tenth thereafter. Abbott declined to comment on the study but said it was “way, way, way larger” than previously recognised estimates. He said:
Obviously, population decline from let’s say 300,000 to 100,000 is a catastrophic decline.
Milton Dick has helmed a bit of chaos in the House.
Meaning to call on the member for Hume, David Moncrieff, for a dixer, he instead accidentally calls on the member for Moncrieff, Angie Bell – an honest mistake.
Everyone laughs it off and he apologises, which leaves the Coalition roaring with laughter.
“That’s how you do it!” shouts Nationals deputy leader, DarrenChester (a nod to Anthony Albanese not apologising over melon-gate).
Dan Tehan gets up to acknowledge the apology, but Dick laughs it off and tell him to sit down and be serious:
Yes, we don’t need acknowledgement, we need you to resume your seat.
Albanese questioned on funding for AI Safety Institute
Independent Kate Chaney asks if the government will increase funding for the AI Safety Institute, after AI leaders just this week said the technology was developing faster than it can be controlled.
Anthony Albanese spends most of the answer talking about how good the institute is but doesn’t say whether he’ll give it any more money.
Chaney tries to make that point – that she asked about funding specifically – but Milton Dick says the prime minister is being relevant.
It’s just been established, it’s just been established, less than one year ago … we want to make sure this follows best practice.
Perhaps that means it’s too soon to give it a funding boost?