Julia Gillard admits she gave Kevin Rudd “false hope” about allowing him more time as leader at their fateful meeting in 2010. Mr Rudd’s then-deputy confirmed she would stand for the party’s leadership at the meeting in his office, witnessed by Labor stalwart John Faulkner. About two hours into the meeting, Mr Rudd proposed a compromise. “If come the time ...

Cash payments have been made to members of Indonesian people-smuggling rings by Australian intelligence officials for at least the past four years – including under the former Labor government, Fairfax Media has learnt. Multiple sources have said that such payments have been part of successive governments’ tactics, though not always as part of boat turnbacks, which were not used by the ...

AS Tony Abbott’s conservative colleagues today demand harsher anti-terrorism laws, their Republican cousins in the US Congress are allowing tough provisions to disappear. At around 2pm today Canberra time it was midnight in Washington, when contested measures in the post-9/11 Patriot Act were allowed to expire after a tactical battle in the US Senate. An important casualty was the National ...

It is a club where membership is a “privilege that offers enormous rewards”, but Australia is planning to strip membership from alleged terrorists who hold dual nationality. New legislation proposed by Australia’s Coalition government, expected to be introduced within weeks, will enable the government to remove Australian citizenship from dual nationals who take up arms or support militant groups at ...

Australian customs turned back 65 people, including a pregnant woman, after their boat reached Australian waters last Tuesday, according to an Indonesian police chief. The 65 people from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, who reportedly claimed to be asylum seekers, are in detention on the Indonesian island of Rote. Fishermen spotted two boats floating near an island in the West ...

Jasmina Milovanov, 26, abandoned her two children, aged five and seven, with a babysitter earlier this month before telling friends she was in “Sham” — Arabic slang for Syria. The Muslim convert or “revert” told the babysitter she was going to pick up a new car when she left her Western Sydney home but she never returned. She sent a ...

A self-styled sheikh behind a deadly siege at an Australian cafe had “grandiose delusions” and was kicked out of a motorcycle gang because he was deemed too weird, an inquest heard Monday. Man Haron Monis shot and killed 34-year-old cafe manager Tori Johnson with a sawn-off shotgun following a 17-hour standoff at the Lindt Chocolate Cafe in central Sydney last ...

For the first time in 24 years more Australians have moved to New Zealand to live and work than the other way around. The latest New Zealand government figures show that last month it had a net inflow of 100 Australian migrants. New Zealanders traditionally flocked to Australia which had a booming economy and offered higher wages. But Australia’s mining-reliant ...

A group of Vietnamese asylum seekers were held secretly at sea for more than a month before being sent back to their home country, the commander in charge of Australia’s border operations has revealed. Operation Sovereign Borders head Major General Andrew Bottrell told a Senate estimates hearing the group of 46 asylum seekers was intercepted on March 20, 2015. The ...

A bipartisan deal on a pared-back renewable energy target has been struck after the Abbott government ditched plans for two-yearly reviews. The government on Monday backed down on plans to impose the reviews that had threatened to derail an in-principle agreement to slash the 2020 target from 41,000 gigawatt hours to 33,000GWh. The government-funded Clean Energy Regulator will monitor progress ...