United Nations human rights inspectors will have “completely unfettered access to all places of detention” when they visit Australia in coming months. This week the UN subcommittee on prevention of torture announced it would visit six countries to inspect places of detention, including Australia and Nauru. It will be the first time Australia is subject to the inspections, which it is ...

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies raises $71,000 (NZ)   When news of the terrorist attacks on the Al Noor and Linwood mosques in Christchurch broke on March 15, it left New Zealand reeling. But the impact resonated throughout the Jewish world and as a result over $1 million will be handed over from the Jewish communities of Pittsburgh, Sydney and ...

Labor is considering backing a Senate inquiry into compliance with ministerial standards which is being pursued by the Centre Alliance after controversy over Christopher Pyne’s decision to join a major consultancy firm. Pyne, the former defence minister, announced last week he had taken up a job with EY to help the consulting group expand its defence business. The current federal ministerial standards ...

Iron ore exports from Australia are set to drop for the first time in almost two decades following bad weather and output setbacks, worsening a global shortage and bolstering prices that have already surged to a five-year high. The world’s top shipper cut its 2019 forecast to 814 million tons from 867 million in March and boosted its estimate for ...

Being a former police officer, Lou Haslam knew his family’s story about breaking Australian law to get medicinal cannabis for his son was powerful. It helped lead to a change in the law but, as Gary Nunn reports from Sydney, the family remains unhappy with the result. Working undercover for the police drugs squad, Mr Haslam, now 66, arrested “a ...

The federal election is history, and those who had counted on a Labor government to focus on reducing inequality and easing poverty were disappointed. Scott Morrison’s government has made clear it has no intention of increasing the base rate of the Newstart payment for unemployed Australians – the most intense welfare campaign of the election – even though it has ...

More than three months after New South Wales Labor’s bruising state election defeat, the party has regrouped to appoint Jodi McKay its new opposition leader. State Labor MPs cast their secret votes for the contenders Chris Minns and Jodi McKay, both from the party’s right faction, at a tense meeting on Saturday. McKay secured 29 votes in the caucus room to ...

Abdullah Zalghani fled Syria with his wife and children in 2011, but left them in Lebanon while he tried to reach Australia. His boat from Indonesia was stopped on the way to Australia in 2013, and he was detained on Christmas Island and Nauru. In 2016, Mr Zalghani agreed to be resettled in Cambodia. In exchange he was to receive ...

Restaurant owner Nicole Ha is a mother of three girls aged 14-24. The eldest two help to run the family’s busy Vietnamese restaurant in St Leonards, Sydney. Ms Ha bought the business in 2010 with the financial support of her relatives, and regularly uses Microsoft Excel to process wages and tax for her 10 employees. But from Monday she – ...

United States President Donald Trump has found the one immigration policy more controversial than his own, and endorsed it. Amid heightened media scrutiny over the tragic fate of a father and daughter who died on the US-Mexico border, Trump tweeted pictures of four fliers distributed by the Australian government warning migrants away from attempting to come to the country, adding ...