Kumanjayi Little Baby murder trial delayed until December – as it happened

That’s where we’ll leave our live coverage for today.

Before we go, here’s a recap of the day’s top headlines:

• The special envoy to combat antisemitism made another appearance in the royal commission’s hot seat today.

• One of the 19 Closing the Gap targets has officially been reached after early childhood education enrolment for First Nations children hit 95% across the country.

• The government announced the second stage of its mandatory safety training for childcare workers will begin Friday, focused on preventing child safety concerns and detecting grooming.

• Victoria pushed for a national crackdown on hidden ticketing fees and deceptive dynamic pricing practices when Australian consumer affairs state ministers met with the commonwealth’s assistant minister for productivity, competition, charities and Treasury, Andrew Leigh, in Darwin today.

• The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has taken messaging service Telegram to court over its alleged failure to detect and remove pro-terror material from its platform, including videos of terrorist executions and mass shootings.

• Luke Gosling, the federal member for Solomon, was arrested this morning over an alleged assault earlier this month, Northern Territory police said in a statement.

• The Australian Communications and Media Authority has taken Optus to court over the September 2025 triple-zero outage.

• The number of suspected deadly bird flu cases continues to grow in South Australia, with 13 more in greater crested terns, the state government said. Victoria has also confirmed its first case of the disease in a greater crested tern – a common local seabird – found at Portland.

• Neil the seal has racked up a bill of more than $36,000 for his most-recent stay in Tasmania.

• The drugmaker AstraZeneca will continue to provide women with breast cancer and endometriosis free access to the vital medicine Zoladex, which the company said last month would be removed from the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

• The court process following the alleged murder of Kumanjayi Little Baby will be delayed for months, due to a “significant volume” of forensic evidence that had yet to be processed.

Thanks for joining us, see you tomorrow!

Teacher wearing ‘Free Palestine’ badge made student feel ‘very unsafe in the classroom’, royal commission told

She said the school made efforts to ensure the safety of her son and spoke to the offending students.

But she said education needed to apply to teachers as well, referring to one occasion where her son removed himself from a classroom when a teacher wore a “Free Palestine” badge featuring a fist of resistance.

“Words and symbols can mean different things to different people and, to him, that badge made him feel very unsafe in the classroom,” the mother said.

“Even a badge promoting peace between Israel or Palestine, from my perspective, shouldn’t be worn into a classroom. It’s not the place for it.”

– AAP

James Patterson says the Coalition is open to working with One Nation on proposed terror plans

The shadow minister for defence, James Paterson, says the Coalition is “willing to work” with One Nation on plans to introduce new laws to block the return of Australian citizens with links to terror groups, including Islamic State.

Pauline Hanson has appealed to the Coalition, which rebuffed her, and told media outlets on Thursday she would seek to introduce her own legislation to make it easier to cancel passports and block returns.

Speaking to ABC’s Afternoon Briefing, Paterson said:

We are willing to work with anyone who wants to stop these Isis fighters coming to Australia, and Tony Burke’s answer … gives me no comfort and should give the Australian people no comfort that this government is doing everything they can to protect us from someone who left our country to join one of the most reprehensible terrorist organisations the planet has ever seen.

Antisemitism at schools underreported because students believe ‘nothing would happen’, royal commission hears

Students at Australia’s largest Jewish day school have given up reporting incidents of antisemitism due to their frequency and the lack of consequences for perpetrators, the royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion has heard, as reported by AAP.

John Hamey was head of Sydney’s Moriah College from 2011 until 2018 and appeared at the royal commission earlier today.

He shared frequent incidents of Jewish students being targeted by pupils from other schools and members of the public. Hamey told the inquiry:

There were often taunts that invoked the gas chamber and statements along the lines of ‘Hitler should have finished the job’.

Students were being worn down by frequent traumatic incidents, which got brushed off as “just something that they had to deal with and they had to get on with”, the former principal said:

It was not necessarily something they would report because they would say, ‘well, nothing would happen’, or there’d be no serious outcome or consequence for the perpetrators of that antisemitism.

Hamey said most teachers outside Jewish institutions were not well informed about Jewish cultural life or equipped to identify antisemitism. He said:

They really lack the language.

Because it’s too politically contentious, they will minimise those actions and just deal with them as … one-off incidences or just a simple form of bullying.

The court process following the alleged murder of Kumanjayi Little Baby will be delayed for months, due to a “significant volume” of forensic evidence that had yet to be processed.

The five-year-old Warlpiri girl was found dead in April after a five-day search following her sudden disappearance from an Alice Springs town camp. A 47-year-old man, Jefferson Lewis, was later charged with murder.

On Thursday, the Alice Springs local court heard there was a “significant volume” of evidence that had not yet been fully examined or collected as part of the investigation, including 100 different forensic requests and 20 outstanding police witness statements.

The court heard a “very substantial brief” of evidence had already been served in the matter, including 76 statements from different witnesses, 48 pieces of police body-worn footage, drone footage, CCTV footage, and a preliminary postmortem report. A full autopsy report was expected to be handed over in the near future.

The matter returns to court on 3 December.

– Samantha Jonscher in Alice Springs

ACTU backs royal commission into Victoria’s construction sector

The outgoing ACTU national secretary, Sally McManus, has cautiously welcomed a royal commission into Victoria’s construction sector, saying the union movement has long believed there needed to be “way more done to completely rid that sector of organised crime”.

Speaking to ABC’s Afternoon Briefing, McManus said:

The union movement is allergic to royal commissions because we have been through three or four and seen them as just focusing on workers and the unions and used in that way.

However, in the case of Victoria it is very clear there is a whole ecosystem of criminality. I think it is both organised crime and probably disorganised crime.

I don’t think there is any one person who could say this is perfectly what this ecosystem looks like and that any royal commission needs to focus on all of it.

‘Not good enough’: pleas to act on Closing the Gap targets

Authorities are being urged to work more closely with Indigenous groups as Closing the Gap targets fall badly behind expectations, AAP reports.

Out of 19 targets towards the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, five areas are improving but are not on track to be met and four are worsening. Just three areas targeting socioeconomic disparity are likely to be met on time, a Productivity Commission report found.

First Nations preschool enrolments are the sole target being met nationally, more than halfway through the 2031 agreement period.

Achieving that milestone was important, Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy told ABC RN on Thursday. She said.

That is because of the work of the Aboriginal and community-controlled sector and those involved in the preschool sector.

But it was clear “challenges remain” in addressing all other targets, including ones to do with incarceration rates.

The outlook is so bleak national commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children Sue-Anne Hunter warned officials should be stood down for the lack of progress. She told the ABC.

If this was any other national agreement that was going backwards or just staying still, someone would actually lose their job.

We can’t have an agreement that we’re not adhering to ... it’s not good enough.

Coalition of Peaks lead convener, Donnella Mills, added her voice to the growing concern, saying federal, state and territory governments needed to work more collaboratively with Indigenous groups. She said:

Governments need to do more to embed the priority reforms in their work to close the gap and achieve the outcomes our people have fought for over decades, especially those governments where targets are going backwards or have stalled.

Dominic Perrottet’s brother allegedly said he paid for new Liberal party memberships, Icac hears

Reformers member Robert Assaf is giving evidence again, as NSW Icac hearings resume after a break for lunch.

This morning, the commission heard from Assaf that despite an agreement between the Reformers that they would not pay for the memberships of new members they were signing up in alleged branch-stacking efforts, he had “suspicions from conversations” that some people working with the Reformers were in fact paying for memberships.

Under Liberal party rules, if a person discloses that their membership had been paid for, their local branch could be frozen. Counsel assisting, Peggy Dwyer SC, resumes this line of questioning about which prominent Reformers he was concerned were paying for membership, but Assaf says:

They didn’t like didn’t confess it to me, but I got enough of a rumour. I had to tell them be careful in case that is happening.

Dwyer reads to Assaf from an interview he gave to Icac before public hearings in which he claimed that Jean-Claude Perrottet, younger brother of former Liberal premier Dominic Perrottet, had paid for memberships in the Hills Shire.

Dwyer: “You told the commission, didn’t you, that Jean-Claude Perrottet told you that he had to pay or that he would pay for memberships because he was relying on a lot of his friends doing it, and there needed to be some incentive?”

Assaf: “Correct.”

Today, Assaf says he never witnessed Jean-Claude Perrottet paying for memberships, but understands that he would reimburse the cost of signing up or buy a new member dinner to cover the cost. Jean-Claude Perrottet has previously denied any wrongdoing.

Victorian government ministers Lily D’Ambrosio and Harriet Shing have announced they will step down from cabinet and quit politics at the election.

The duo are among the closest supporters of Jacinta Allan, who resigned as premier on Tuesday before a leadership spill brought on by Ben Carroll.

In a statement this afternoon, Carroll said both D’Ambrosio and Shing have “brought compassion, determination and a strong sense of purpose to their roles, delivering outcomes that have improved the lives of Victorians and strengthened the communities they represent”.

D’Ambrosio has been the MP for Mill Park for 24 years and is the longest-serving energy minister in Australia. She said:

Back in 2014 not a lot of people thought about energy too much. Of course, the decade that followed changed all that. Under Labor, Victoria has led the nation, paving the way for Australia’s transition to renewable energy. Where Victoria has gone, the rest of country has followed.

Shing was recently promoted to health minister. She has also previously served as minister for equality, housing, the Suburban Rail Loop and water. She told Carroll of her plans to step down on Tuesday afternoon, after his elevation to premier. Shing said:

This chapter has been the honour of my life. I have worked hard, with and for the communities and people I have represented. And it has been a labour of love and determination.

Carroll said the Labor caucus will meet on Monday morning to elevate new ministers and then he will announce his cabinet “shortly following”. Expect a lot of jostling by MPs and their respective factions over the weekend.

That’s all for me. Achol Arok will take things from here. Enjoy your arvo!

Extra precautions for threatened species at Zoos Victoria

Victoria’s chief biodiversity officer, James Todd, has said the state government has been working with Zoos Victoria over the past two years to improve biosecurity measures in response to H5 bird flu for threatened species held at Victorian facilities, including captive insurance populations of helmeted honeyeater, orange-bellied parrot, plains wanderer and regent honeyeater.

He said:

Zoos Victoria has been doing a range of work around increasing the biosecurity of the facilities that hold those species, so they’re not at risk from visits from either wild birds or the public, but also enhancing biosecurity processes and arrangements to adequately protect those captive populations.

Otherwise, he said, there had been no change to zoo operations in Victoria.

Since the arrival of H5 bird flu in Australia, Perth zoo has installed precautions including additional barriers, hand sanitizer stations and signage, while Adelaide zoo has temporarily closed its walk-through aviaries and suspended its bird show.

Dwelling approvals rise, but not fast enough to meet target

Dwelling approvals jumped to more than 205,000 in 2025-26, reaching the highest level in five years but still well short of what’s needed to meet the government’s ambitious homebuilding target.

The latest figures from the ABS showed 17,305 more approvals in the last financial year versus the previous, an increase of 9%.

House approvals were at their highest since 2021-22, and approvals to build non-house dwellings (apartments and townhouses and so forth) were at the highest since 2017-18, the ABS said.

Labor has set a target of 1.2m homes being built over five financial years to mid-2029, but few expect it to be achieved.

Master Builders Australia said there needed to be 253,000 approvals in 2025-26 to catch up to the Housing Accord target, and that the industry was being held back by high costs, low productivity and a shortage of workers.

The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council estimates the 1.2m new homes target will be met by September 2030 – so about 15 months late.

Denita Wawn, Master Builders CEO, noted that building a home costs 50% more now than it did before the pandemic. This year’s global oil crisis has also sent the price of some building materials soaring.

A Productivity Commission interim report this week found that regulation has become “a handbrake” on new housing supply. Among the PC’s interim recommendations was sweeping land-use reform to allow higher density dwellings in our cities.

Public reports to Victorian bird flu hotline go from 10 a week to more than 100 a day

Continuing the update on Victoria’s first H5N1 detection, the state’s chief veterinary officer, Dr Graeme Cooke, said bird flu reports from members of the public had gone from about 10 a week to “well over 100 some days”, with about 10% being tested.

He said there was now “clear evidence of transmission” in South Australia, with the disease moving from one bird to another.

Victoria’s chief biodiversity officer, James Todd, said:

We know from elsewhere in the world that if the virus were to be established in Victoria, then – particularly in wildlife – there’d be little we could do to actually minimise the spread or the impact on wildlife. If it were to establish, our focus would be on surveillance, ensuring public safety, ensuring communications with the public, but also looking to protect at-risk species where that’s possible.

“Establishment” means the disease has taken hold. But Cooke said that threshold required more evidence of the disease spreading between multiple types of birds and native species, and evidence of the disease mixing and changing within native populations.

On Wednesday, a national group of federal, state and territory officials enacted a national agreement for responding to H5 bird flu incursions, based on advice that: “H5 bird flu in wildlife is not technically feasible to eradicate following recent detections and evidence of local transmission of H5 bird flu in a small number of wild seabirds”.

Members of the public are urged to avoid contact with any dead or sick birds or animals showing signs of bird flu. Report sightings to the emergency animal disease hotline 1800 675 888 or birdflu.gov.au.

Labor unimpressed with Hanson’s terror plan

The federal government has dismissed Pauline Hanson’s plans to introduce new laws to block the return of Australian citizens with links to terror groups including Islamic State.

After the One Nation leader’s appeal to work with the Coalition on the plans to block people found to have worked with or assisted terror groups was rebuffed, Hanson told media outlets on Thursday she would seek to introduce her own legislation that would make it easier to cancel passports and block returns.

But the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, is less than impressed.

He said Labor was using laws introduced by the former Coalition government, describing them as going “right to the limit of what you could do constitutionally”.

“Every Australian, me included, doesn’t want these individuals back,” Burke said in Queensland.

You know, when people have made a decision to join something as horrific as that, you don’t want them back.

The reality is every country in the world has to take back its own citizens. And I would just say people should be very wary of letting go of the principle that countries have to take their citizens back.

Burke said it was in Australia’s national interest that countries took back their own citizens, even if they’re accused of terror offences overseas.

Anyone who wants to depart from that principle needs to explain why they think it would be OK for the 750 people every year who I make leave, for them to have to stay here because I don’t think Australians would cop it.