Bushland search begins for missing woman Jessica Zrinski
Homicide detectives have begun a three-day bushland search after the disappearance of Jessica Zrinski.
The search will take place in the NSW central tablelands region in the Jenolan state forest, police said in a statement.
Zrinski, 30, was last seen in the Bossley Park area of Sydney about 10pm on 27 November 2022. Police were alerted on 3 December when family members could not locate or contact her.
Local officers made extensive inquiries at the time before detectives with the state crime command’s homicide squad took carriage of the investigation.
Inquiries revealed she was in the car park of a hotel on Mimosa Road at Greenfield Park about 10pm on 28 November 2022, before leaving in a blue Holden Commodore station wagon about 10 minutes later.
That same vehicle is believed to have travelled west on the M4 motorway and Great Western Highway towards the Blue Mountains.
Investigators have today launched a land search in the Jenolan state forest, about 13km north of Jenolan Caves. The search is expected to continue for three days with assistance from the dog squad, rescue and bomb disposal unit, and other volunteers.
Key events
Smoke may be visible in parts of Sydney amid hazard reduction burn
The NSW Rural Fire Service has flagged that smoke may be visible over Greater Sydney in the coming days, as hazard reduction burns take place in the Blue Mountains.
The hazard reduction burns are being conducted by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, it said, south of Faulconbridge.
Smoke will be visible locally and may be experienced across Greater Sydney over coming days.
NSW Police backs state government on registrar changes
NSW Police will back the state government to stop court registrars from making bail decisions in domestic violence-related cases, AAP reports.
The NSW government this week announced a formal review of bail laws following the alleged domestic violence murder of Molly Ticehurst. You can read the full story below:
Asked if she’d like to see a change where court registrars don’t make decisions on serious matters like sexual assault or stalking, NSW Police commissioner Karen Webb said “certainly”. She told Sydney radio 2GB:
When I saw the attorney’s announcement (about the review), he was clear that one of those suggestions being considered was that a prosecutor or a magistrate consider bail, rather than a registrar.
I support that if that’s where the government lands.
Webb noted that an executive member of the force has been sitting in on a bail monitoring group for many years, and added:
We’ve been lobbying for some time to make amendments to the bail acts particularly around protecting women… We’ve got a seat at that table and it’s important that we do.
We’re not obviously the only seat and there’s many moving parts, but certainly we’ve been a member for many years and domestic violence … has been one of my priorities since I started.
I call it one of those silent crimes along with child abuse and sexual abuse.
Sussan Ley clarifies earlier comments on X and eSafety commissioner
The deputy Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, has clarified earlier comments she made backing the eSafety commissioner, stating it was “patently obvious” Australian laws could not apply internationally.
Yesterday, Ley said she was “disappointed” in the X boss, Elon Musk, and backed the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, “100%” in ordering footage of the Wakeley church stabbing to be removed from social media. She told Sky News at the time:
I’m for X obeying the law, and I’m not for the actions and the statements of our eSafety commissioner being ignored.
Host Peter Stefanovic said: “But he [Musk] argues that’s fine if you want to mute it here, but we should have no rights to be able to tell X what to do in its own country or other countries beyond our borders.”
Ley responded: “That’s patently ridiculous, of course we should.”
She was at odds with the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, who labelled the eSafety commissioner’s demands for a global takedown of the footage as “silly”. You can read the full story below:
This morning, speaking to Sunrise, Ley had seemingly changed her tune and said Australia “can’t be the internet police for the whole world”.
Whether you’re a mum or dad in Uzbekistan, China, New Zealand or the UK, you don’t want to see a live stabbing or your kids to see it. We all support the eSafety commissioner keeping Australians safe online but we recognise that we can’t be the internet police for the whole world.
– with AAP
Paul Karp
Pocock responds to poverty report: ‘We have a social safety net that is not keeping people safe’
The independent senator David Pocock has responded to the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee report (see previous post). He said:
What this expert committee has found is that we have a social safety net that is not keeping people safe. People reliant on income support payments won’t benefit from the tax cuts that the rest of us will receive.
What the Committee is challenging all of us to do is decide what kind of country we want Australia to be.
The government talks a lot about not leaving anyone behind – this report and especially the new Economic Inclusion Framework it proposes – gives them a blueprint to achieve this.
Having our leaders saying we can’t afford to lift people out of poverty while they are still giving 50% capital gains discounts to property investors and refusing to fairly tax companies making multi-billion dollar profits from exploiting our natural resources is unacceptable.
Jobseeker should be lifted to 90% of pension, government poverty experts say
Paul Karp
The Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, the government’s official advisers on the adequacy of income support, has once again called for jobseeker unemployment benefits to be raised to 90% of the age pension.
In its report, released today, it said:
The current rates for the JobSeeker and related working age payments … are too low. Despite the $40 base rate increase delivered in last year’s federal budget, people receiving these payments told the Committee that they regularly go without life’s essentials because they simply cannot afford them. This is in part the result of unsatisfactory indexation arrangements over many years. Without change to indexation arrangements, the living standards of recipients of these payments will continue to fall – whether measured relative to average or national minimum wages, pensions, or income poverty measures.
The government should at least “commit to a timeframe for the full increases of jobseeker and related payments to be implemented, if increases are to be staged”, it said.
The EIAC also called for:
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An increase in commonwealth rent assistance.
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Comprehensive employment services reform.
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Abolishing the activity test for the childcare subsidy to guarantee all children access to a minimum three days of high quality early childhood education and care.
Earlier in April Guardian Australia exclusively revealed the government will lift early childhood educators’ wages as part of the May budget, but it is unclear whether it will agree to requests to remove the activity test.
Polling shows Crisafulli ‘very likely to be premier’ after state election, Miles says
The Queensland premier, Steven Miles, says that now the opposition leader, David Crisafulli, is leading the polls, it is time he announced his vision for Queensland.
As was reported earlier, the LNP opposition is on track for election victory in Queensland as support for the incumbent government falls, according to a new poll.
Miles told reporters in Mackay today:
He still has not detailed a single, actual plan for our state.
I know he wants to be a small target. I know he wants to stay as tiny as he can so that Queenslanders don’t know what his plans are.
So you can’t just say you have one, without telling Queenslanders what’s in it, especially when you have the kind of polling results today that say it is more likely, very likely, that he will be the premier come October.
– from AAP
eSafety commissioner says X must do ‘everything practical and reasonable’ to hide dangerous content
The eSafety commissioner has stood by previous comments when asked about videos of the Wakeley church stabbing that remain on X.
As we reported earlier, social media platform X said overnight it had complied with a notice to remove content relating to the stabbing from its platform. X’s global government affairs account issued a statement saying:
X believes it has complied with the notice issued by eSafety, and with Australian law, by restricting all the posts at issue in Australia.
The notice had referred to specific posts containing video of the stabbing. However, new posts continue to appear. Directly below X’s overnight post was at least one reply featuring the video, which could be viewed in Australia.
We contacted the eSafety commissioner for a response, who referred to its most recent statement:
The removal notice identified specific URLs where the material was located.
The commissioner also referred to another previous statement:
While it may be difficult to eradicate damaging content from the internet entirely, particularly as users continue to repost it, eSafety requires platforms to do everything practical and reasonable to minimise the harm it may cause to Australians and the Australian community.
– with Stephanie Convery
Hotel detention is lawful, full federal court upholds
Paul Karp
The full federal court has upheld an earlier ruling that the use of Alternative Places of Detention (APODs) – immigration detention in hotels – is lawful.
In July, Justice Bernard Murphy said that detention of a refugee in Melbourne hotels for more than 14 months “lacked ordinary human decency” but did not breach federal laws.
Today a full court consisting of justices Rangiah, Anderson and Button dismissed the appeal brought by Mostafa “Moz” Azimitabar, who was detained in two Melbourne hotels.
The judges said the Migration Act “impliedly conferred power on the minister to approve in writing ‘another place’ of immigration detention”.
In the earlier decision, Murphy had said:
I can only wonder of the lack of thought, indeed the lack of care and humanity, in detaining a person with psychiatric and psychological problems in the hotels [for] 14 months. Primarily, in hotel rooms with windows that only opened 10 centimetres and for most of the time, without access to an outdoor area or to breathe fresh air or feel the sun on his face.
Anyone who endured even two weeks of hotel quarantine during the Covid-19 pandemic would surely understand how difficult it must have been. As a matter of ordinary human decency, the applicant should not have been detained for such a period of time in those conditions.
The decision in this case does not turn on the humanity of the applicant’s detention, it is about whether the minister had power under the act to approve hotels as places of immigration detention. The minister had, and has, the power to do so.
Peter Hannam
Australia’s tax take increased the most among OECD nations in 2023 – but remains near the bottom
It wasn’t great timing, but the average tax take of Australians (well, single workers) had the biggest increase among the 38 economies that make up the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2023.
With the cost of living increasing, having to fork out more to the taxperson – 2.14 percentage points more, to be precise – didn’t help Australians under the pump. (Canadians managed to pay about the same, or 0.01 percentage points less, as one comparison.)
The Albanese government’s decision not to extend the $1,500 low- and middle-income tax offset was one culprit, with the lack of indexation for tax brackets the other main one. Had the government not let the offset lapse, though, the RBA would have had to lift its interest rates higher to curb inflation, so it’s a bit swings-and-roundabouts.
And for a wider context, Australia ranks 30th out of the 38 OECD members in the tax take.
OECD finds Australia had the largest increase in the % of wages paid as tax in 2023, with a 2.14 percentage point gain. The jump was in part the result of the low- and middle-income tax offset not being extended. Still, among the 38 nations, Australia’s ‘tax wedge’ ranked 30th. pic.twitter.com/pjkSV0wmmz
— @phannam@mastodon.green (@p_hannam) April 25, 2024
But, of course, single workers are only one measure. On the score for benefits, Australia is a bit more middle of the pack. The agency said in its Taxing Wages 2024 report:
Taking into account child related benefits and tax provisions, the employee net average tax rate for an average married worker with two children in Australia was 18.0% in 2023, which is the 13th highest in the OECD, and compares with 14.2% for the OECD average.
Atlassian co-founder Cannon-Brookes ‘couldn’t be prouder’ as Farquhar announces plans to step down
As Jonathan Barrett reported earlier, the co-CEO of Australian software company Atlassian, Scott Farquhar, will step down from his role at the end of August.
(You can read more about this earlier in the blog here.)
His co-CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes, has shared a post on social media following the announcement, posting a number of photos and writing:
Mate. Thank you. It’s been one hell of a ride. Couldn’t be prouder.