Two more cases of antisemitic vandalism in Sydney’s east – as it happened
Voters should ‘vote for nature’ at next election: Greens
The federal Labor government’s retreat on its long-promised Nature Positive reforms is a capitulation to vested interests, South Australian Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young says.
Speaking in parliament house on Sunday, the Senator criticised the government for shelving its Nature Positive reforms for a second time.
The prime minister doesn’t have what it takes to protect Australia’s forest and to protect our wildlife. Gina Reinhardt, Roger Cook, the WA mining industry said, boo, and the prime minister jumped.
The Senator rubbished claims the Greens were making “increasingly extreme demands”, saying this was a convenient excuse by the prime minister, who did not want to negotiate.
The mining industry and the fossil fuel industry are going to take every inch they can to stop environmental regulation. I mean, you give these bastards an inch and they take a mile.
The Senator also described the opposition leader, Peter Dutton’s, performance on ABC Insiders earlier this morning as “sinister”, saying a Coalition government would be a re-run of Tony Abbott’s government upon his election in 2024.
What a sinister performance to tell Australians that you’re going to cut services, but you won’t tell Australians which services or by how much. And who does this bloke think he is? Does he really believe that Australians are going to appreciate being treated like mugs? Australians are not idiots.
Key events
What we learned, 2 February 2025
With that, we’re wrapping up the blog. Before we go, here are the major stories from Sunday:
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The Labor government has shelved a plan to overhaul the country’s environmental laws for the second time;
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Flood evacuation warnings have been issued for six suburbs around Townsville as monsoon rain has drenched parts of northern Queensland;
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Opposition leader Peter Dutton has linked pro-Palestine protests that took place on university campuses to the spate of anti-Jewish graffiti across Sydney in recent weeks;
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New South Wales police are investigating another incident of anti-Jewish graffiti scrawled across cars, garages and homes in eastern Sydney;
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A community near the Grampians in Victoria have been ordered to evacuate as a fire burns out of control in the national park;
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One person was killed in flood waters in Ingham when an SES boat they were travelling on capsized during a rescue operation.
We’ll pick things up again tomorrow.
Auction activity dips
Auction activity has dropped this weekend with 1,399 auctions held.
This is a sharp increase on the 429 held last week after the holiday break but a fall compared with the 1,712 auctions at the same time last year.
Based on results collected so far, CoreLogic’s summary found that the preliminary clearance rate was 65% across the country, which is higher than the 64.5% preliminary rate recorded last week but below the 68.3% actual rate on final numbers.
Across the capital cities:
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Sydney: 289 of 461 auctions with a preliminary clearance rate of 67.5%
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Melbourne: 344 of 479 auctions with a preliminary clearance rate of 65.4%
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Brisbane: 109 of 161 auctions with a preliminary clearance rate of 58.7%
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Adelaide: 94 of 156 auctions with a preliminary clearance rate of 61.7%
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Canberra: 67 of 131 auctions with a preliminary clearance rate of 68.7%
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Tasmania: No auctions held.
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Perth: Five of 11 auctions held.
Fresh data to shed light on retail, housing strength
Australians are expected to have pulled back on retail spending after major sales, with the latest data unlikely to shift the dial for the Reserve Bank.
Stronger-than-expected retail sales figures could weaken the case for a central bank interest rate cut, but little can shake the market’s conviction that mortgage relief is around the corner.
Traders were pricing in more than a 90% chance the Reserve Bank of Australia would cut rates by 25 basis points on 18 February after a surprisingly soft inflation report at the end of January.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics will reveal another gauge of the economy’s strength on Monday when it releases retail spending data for December.
Some sense of what has been happening with the housing market in January will be revealed when property data firm CoreLogic releases its monthly home value index.
The statistics bureau will also release building approval figures for December on Monday.
Employment data will be in focus on Friday when non-farm payroll jobs figures are released, with the world’s strongest economy’s labour market still relatively tight at 4.1%.
– AAP
Police investigating potential link between jerry can found in abandoned crashed car and east Sydney anti-Jewish graffiti
Just to come back to the update from Strikeforce Pearl, Det Supt Darren Newman says 20 officers are investigating the anti-Jewish graffiti spray painted on cars, houses and a garage in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
The officers had no updates on the graffiti but Newman said police were investigating a motor vehicle collision in Rose Bay on Saturday night.
Newman said three men abandoned a silver Mazda they were travelling in when it crashed into a kerb, leaving the keys in the ignition and the engine running about 10pm.
Police found a carton full of eggs and an empty jerry can inside.
Police also received reports from a group of young women who said a group of young men threw eggs at them near Bondi Beach about half an hour before police were alerted to the abandoned car.
Police said the presence of the jerry can was concerning, and the relationship between these events and the anti-Jewish vandalism would form part of any investigation.
Dry conditions, strong winds and lightning with no rain making Grampians fire hard to contain, says chief fire officer
Forest Fire Management Victoria’s chief fire officer is giving an update on a bushfire burning out of control in the Grampians national park.
Chris Hardman said there were two active fires, including one in the Little Desert national park, north of the Grampians national park. Earlier today, the fire was considered contained, but he said dry conditions and strong winds had caused it to breach containment lines, and it was now burning south towards the McDonald Highway.
The other fire in the Grampians national park, the bigger of the two, is putting communities around the Victoria Valley at risk.
Hardman said the fires were coming out of dry, forested areas with steep rocky outcrops, making it difficult to access. Aerial assets were being used in an attempt to bring them under control.
The situation worsened with 8000 dry lightning strikes, and “none of that with rain”.
What we see is instability in the atmosphere, which causes thunderstorm activity, and quite often in conditions like we’re seeing with the heatwave conditions, that lightning can come out of those storms without any rain.
Latest antisemitic graffiti in Sydney’s east not linked to caravan plot, police say
Det Supt Darren Newman, commander of Strike Force Pearl, says New South Wales police are investigating the latest antisemitic graffiti, this time spray painted on homes and cars in Sydney’s east.
Newman said police do not believe the graffiti was linked to previous reports of vandalism in recent days, notably, a separate investigation involving a caravan filled with explosives.
That said, New South Wales police confirmed that “some of the incidents we are investigating under Strike Force Pearl are linked” but declined to provide more details. Newman said police were looking at timing and methods.
At this point in time, we have certainly been able to identify … and even as of Friday there was some antisemitic graffiti in Kingsford, and we made an arrest of a person while they were doing it.
Officers are out 24-7 looking for the individuals who may responsible for that type of offending.
Voters should ‘vote for nature’ at next election: Greens
The federal Labor government’s retreat on its long-promised Nature Positive reforms is a capitulation to vested interests, South Australian Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young says.
Speaking in parliament house on Sunday, the Senator criticised the government for shelving its Nature Positive reforms for a second time.
The prime minister doesn’t have what it takes to protect Australia’s forest and to protect our wildlife. Gina Reinhardt, Roger Cook, the WA mining industry said, boo, and the prime minister jumped.
The Senator rubbished claims the Greens were making “increasingly extreme demands”, saying this was a convenient excuse by the prime minister, who did not want to negotiate.
The mining industry and the fossil fuel industry are going to take every inch they can to stop environmental regulation. I mean, you give these bastards an inch and they take a mile.
The Senator also described the opposition leader, Peter Dutton’s, performance on ABC Insiders earlier this morning as “sinister”, saying a Coalition government would be a re-run of Tony Abbott’s government upon his election in 2024.
What a sinister performance to tell Australians that you’re going to cut services, but you won’t tell Australians which services or by how much. And who does this bloke think he is? Does he really believe that Australians are going to appreciate being treated like mugs? Australians are not idiots.
More and more tourists are being attacked by dingoes on Queensland’s K’gari. Can it be stopped?
Four people were reportedly attacked by dingoes in separate encounters on the same Australian island in recent weeks – including a toddler who was flown to hospital after being bitten on the leg.
And this is just the latest spate of violent dingo-human interactions on the popular tourist island of K’gari, which last year saw a pack of three rush and bite a woman who was jogging along a beach, a dingo shot and killed with a spear gun and several others put down after attacking people.
David Crisafulli’s government has announced it will scrap the previous government’s move to cap visitor numbers during peak periods, a plan designed to help ease human interaction with the animals.
So what happens now?
For the answer to that question, read the full explainer by Guardian Australia’s Joe Hinchliffe:
Heatwave puts pressure on fire-ravaged Victoria
Sweltering, dry weather in February could spell a longer fire season in a state already ravaged by blazes, as a three-day heatwave is set to test firefighters.
An extended heatwave could worsen bushfires in two national parks that have destroyed property and burnt more than 100,000 hectares.
The mercury is predicted to reach the high 30s and low 40s across Victoria from Sunday to Tuesday as part of a three-day heatwave.
The high temperatures also bring the chance of dry thunderstorms and lightning, increasing the risk of fires in western and central districts, including metropolitan Melbourne.
Fires continue to burn in the Grampians National Park, while the threat in the Little Desert National Park has reduced after crews were able to contain the blaze.
Firefighters are working to manage hazardous trees, set up containment lines and extinguish hotspots as those living nearby are warned to enact their bushfire plan as conditions worsen.
High levels of smoke and ash have been reported in the area, with a smoke haze from the Grampians fire blanketing Adelaide on Sunday morning.
It comes as fire crews ready for a longer-than-usual fire season, with little rain predicted for Victoria in February.
Elsewhere, vast parts of WA have high and extreme fire danger ratings on Sunday as North Queenslanders brace for historic rainfall leading to life-threatening flooding.
– AAP
People with insufficient home insurance more likely to risk their lives in bushfires, experts say
People are more likely to risk their lives in bushfires if they are uninsured or underinsured, experts have said.
In the chaos of an approaching fire, most people struggle to make rational decisions; having no house insurance could feed into making the dangerous decision to stay and protect a home, bushfire behaviour and management professor at the University of Melbourne, Trent Penman, said.
Last year, 1.6m Australian households struggled to pay for home insurance, a 30% increase on the year before, according to the Actuaries Institute. Some areas also are becoming uninsurable.
A 2024 Compare the Market survey found more than one in four Australians did not have home or contents insurance.
It’s also the first essential item people stopped paying for “when things got tough”, the Australian Council of Social Service (Acoss) has found.
“Insurance premiums have surged by an average of 11% and as high as 30% in disaster-prone regions over the past year,” chief executive officer Dr Cassandra Goldie said.
For more on this story, read the full report by Guardian Australia reporter Tory Shepherd:
BoM: heavy rain likely to continue in north Queensland
Rainfall up to 620mm has fallen in 24 hours on some parts of northern Queensland in the latest Bureau of Meteorology update.
Dean Narramore, senior BoM meteorologist, said these falls have led to major flash and riverine flooding along the Herbert River, the Ross River, the Boley River and the Hortern River in the Townsville area.
Unfortunately, that rain is likely to continue in the coming days.
Narramore said a slow-moving tropical low sliding west-southwest across the state is driving moderate to heavy rainfall, with intense rainfall in some areas, conditions that will continue into Monday before it starts to ease.
The BoM was current warnings for heavy to locally-intense rainfall and damaging winds in the region with the potential for 400mm of rainfall in some areas.
Woman’s death in Queensland flood waters ‘heartbreaking’, says PM
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has described reports of a death in a community outside Townsville as “heartbreaking”.
Heartbreaking news out of Queensland today, with police confirming a woman has died in flood waters in Ingham.
My thoughts are with the family and the entire community at this awful time.
The full support of the Queensland and federal governments is being deployed to assist with these floods.
I have spoken with premier Crisafulli and reiterated we will supply whatever resources are required to deal with this event.
Papers, polls, PR and politics: meet the powerful lobby firm with a finger in every Tasmanian pie
Tasmania’s Derwent Valley Gazette is not the kind of publication that generally springs to mind as part of a powerful media empire. For 72 years, it has quietly served the local news needs of the region west of Hobart.
But some in the island state are concerned that ownership of a string of local publications and a polling company has passed to owners that also operate a powerful lobby firm, present political commentary on their podcast and have worked on campaigns for the incumbent Liberal government.
Font Public Relations, based in Hobart, represents clients with a high profile in the state, including Airbnb and Salmon Tasmania.
“No one knows their way around Tasmanian state and federal politics better,” its website says.
Until 2019, there was nothing very unusual about its work. But then the company saw an opportunity to move into the newspaper business, buying a handful of struggling local papers – including the Gazette and the Sorell Times.
Questions about media diversity at the time were met with assurances the titles would be independently edited.
In 2020, it added two more, and now Font Publishing manages eight titles across the state. None are large publications, but a bit of local coverage can go a long way in a market the size of Tasmania.
For more on this story, read the full feature from Guardian Australia investigative reporter Ariel Bogle:
Ben Smee
Almost six years to the day since last major Townsville flood
Residents in parts of Townsville will have woken this morning with a sense of deja vu – it is almost six years to the day that the last major flood prompted evacuations of low-lying areas of north Queensland’s largest city.
Authorities have ordered a “black zone” be evacuated by midday. That includes mostly low-lying areas by the banks of the Ross River. They include Hermit Park, Railway Estate and Rosslea – all older city suburbs on the northern bank – and parts of the southern side with newer suburban areas, including Idalia, Oonoonba and Cluden.
More than 300mm is expected to hit parts of north Queensland in about six hours. The Ross River Dam, which flows down through Townsville, is already at 142% capacity.
That is still well below historical highs and the level from 2019. But if there is a huge dump of rain today, authorities will need to begin the fraught discussions about how and when water is released into the river system to ease pressure. Doing so can create flooding problems downstream.
Police respond to latest anti-Jewish vandalism in Sydney’s east
New South Wales police are investigating after homes and cars have been vandalised with anti-Jewish graffiti, the latest in a string of such incidents.
Police officers were called to See Lane, Kingsford and King Lane, Randwick on Sunday morning after reports of cars, garages and properties had been spray painted.
Crime scenes have been established at both locations and Strike Force Pearl, which has been set up to tackle hate crimes, is conducting an investigation.
New South Wales police has encouraged anyone with information to contact crime stoppers.
