Papua New Guinea will be free of its dependence on Australian aid within a decade, the new prime minister, James Marape, has said in Sydney. He said the first 44 years of PNG as a modern nation had been “filled with so many wasted opportunities and failures”, and pledged “regime shifts” in the resource industry to bring more wealth to the ...

A confidential plagiarism investigation found a report co-written by Liberal senator James Paterson breached research integrity standards. In 2015 Paterson helped write a paper critical of high pay rates, “generous” perks and union influence in the public service. Paterson, then deputy executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs, wrote the report with Aaron Lane, a lawyer and then PhD candidate at RMIT. In ...

Snow globes? More like ice globes. Australian border security agents seized a $1 million shipment of liquid methamphetamine hidden inside 15 snow globes, the Australian Border Force said in a statement Tuesday. The meth globes held picturesque winter scenes and more than 7 liters of the dangerous drug. The sinister souvenirs were spotted by agents in Sydney after the package arrived ...

One of China’s highest-placed Pacific diplomats has offered a scathing appraisal of the “political suspicion” heaped upon his nation, branding it “very negative for the image of Australia”. Wang Xining, deputy to China’s Australian ambassador, made the comments when asked about the national reaction to the controversial 99-year leasing of Darwin’s port to Chinese-owned company Landbridge in 2015. “In China, everybody, I ...

Labor now supports the Coalition’s bill to block foreign fighters from returning to Australia, but will attempt to force it to a further review and make amendments to include safeguards. On Tuesday Labor’s caucus agreed to support the temporary exclusion order bill in principle, refer it back to the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security and, if unsuccessful, move ...

The Australian Business Summit Council Inc. held an exclusive seminar entitled Housing Market Recovering: What Now for Greater Western Sydney? at the five-star Hyatt Regency Sydney on 18 July 2019. Co-hosted with Alliance Project Group, a dynamic client-focused building construction company with over $100 million dollars per year in turnover, this outstanding event featured the keynote speaker Dr Andrew Wilson, ...

The Australian federal police commissioner Andrew Colvin will quit in September, after he revealed on Monday he will not seek an extension of his contract. Colvin announced the end of his 30 years as a police officer in a statementdescribing the move as hardest of his career but “the right decision for me, for my family, and for the AFP”. Colvin nominated implementing ...

A nationwide security outage believed to be linked to Australian Border Force terminals is causing delays at airports across Australia. The outage caused delays of between 15 and 30 minutes at airports including Sydney and Brisbane on Monday morning. By 11am the outage was still affecting a number of airports, though some, including Melbourne, said the system had begun working again. In Sydney, the ...

Australian police say preliminary DNA testing has identified remains of a French backpacker who disappeared five months ago. Erwan Ferrieux, 21, went missing along with a British backpacker, Hugo Palmer, north of Sydney. Mr Palmer, 20, remains unaccounted for. Authorities believe the pair may have drowned while swimming at a beach. Bones recovered from the sea match Mr Ferrieux’s DNA, ...

Four children packed fishing rods and money into a 4×4 before illegally driving themselves more than 900km (560 miles) across Australia, police say. The three boys and a girl – all aged 10-14 – were discovered safe in the New South Wales town of Grafton on Sunday. They had left Gracemere, in Queensland, sometime earlier in the weekend. One boy ...