Australia news live: jury chosen in Greg Lynn murder trial; concern over plan to cap international student numbers | Australia news

Josh Taylor

UniSuper still working to restore account balances after week-long outage

UniSuper is still working to restore its superannuation account balances days after a week-long outage of the service came to an end after Google Cloud accidentally deleted the fund’s cloud account.

We reported on Thursday that balances being restored last week were outdated due to the fund needing to restore a backup of the platform. The UniSuper CEO, Peter Chun, told members in an email on Monday that online services had been restored including viewing balance, request investment switches, view performance and request withdrawals.

But he indicated more work needed to be done:

We’re still restoring functionality of our retirement calculators, but this will be back soon.

Please note that account balances shown may not reflect transactions which have not yet been processed due to our recent system outage. We are processing transactions as quickly as we can, and additional resources have been put on to minimise delays.

Google Cloud described the outage as a “one-of-a-kind” misconfiguration that had never happened before.

Caitlin Cassidy

Ministers emerge from ‘constructive’ talks with education sector on international student cap

Ministers have emerged from a “positive and constructive” meeting with the Council of International Education after the body sounded the alarm over a proposed cap on international students.

The reforms, announced on Saturday, would allow the commonwealth to determine the number of international students to be admitted to individual institutions, determined in large part on their ability to build additional student housing.

The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, said the federal government noted the size of the changes:

The meeting was positive and constructive. Our government is implementing big changes. We understand that. And we will work collaboratively with the sector to manage them.

The leadership of this sector also understand that things could not continue with the lazy policy settings left to us. No plan for migration, no plan for population, no plan for housing, no plan to ensure the sector meets skills shortages. For a sector this big and this important, it’s just not good enough.

The education minister, Jason Clare, reiterated international education was a “valuable national asset”, adding the reforms would help to set the sector up for the future:

Today we kicked off detailed consultation with leaders from the international education sector to make sure we get the design and implementation of these critical reforms right.

Jury chosen in Greg Lynn murder trial

Nino Bucci

A jury has been empanelled in the double murder trial of Gregory Lynn in the Victorian supreme court.

Lynn, 57, has pleaded not guilty to murdering Russell Hill and Carol Clay in the state’s alpine region in March 2020.

Fifteen jurors, eight men and seven women, were empanelled on Monday afternoon.

Three of the jurors will be reserve jurors, which Justice Michael Croucher explained were considered necessary given the trial was expected to take four to six weeks.

Croucher earlier told the court that Lynn was accused of killing Hill and Clay at Buck’s Camp, in the Wonnangatta Valley, on or about 20 March 2020.

Croucher said Lynn was a Jetstar airline captain at the time of the alleged murders. He is alleged to have shot Clay, 73, in the head and to have killed Hill, 74, Croucher said.

The jury pool was earlier given a list of dozens of potential witnesses or other people allegedly connected to the case, including police, court staff, scientists and park rangers.

Should the 15 jurors still be available at the end of the trial, Croucher said three would be balloted off, aside from the foreperson, before deciding on a verdict.

The trial is expected to hear openings from the prosecutor, Daniel Porceddu, and Lynn’s lawyer, Dermot Dann KC, on Tuesday, and to then start hearing from witnesses.

Plane makes emergency landing at Newcastle airport after circling for hours

Elias Visontay

A small plane has performed an emergency landing at Newcastle airport after its landing gear failed.

The plane had been circling in the air above Newcastle in New South Wales for almost four hours, after discovering the mechanical issue almost immediately after departing the city for its planned flight to Port Macquarie.

Emergency services have been on the scene for hours, as have onlookers expecting the landing. The flight was also the most tracked flight on Monday morning as observers tracked it online around the globe.

The Beechcraft B200 Super King Air small turboprop plane, which is normally configured to seat about 13 passengers, flies private charter routes out of Eastern Air Services’ base in Port Macquarie.

Three people were understood to be onboard, including the pilot.

The extent of damage is unclear.

Read more here:

Academics and uni staff back pro-Palestine encampments in open letter

Caitlin Cassidy

More than 250 Australian academics and professional university staff have signed an open letter in support of pro-Palestine student encampments established around the nation.

The letter, drafted by Monash Staff 4 Palestine, upholds free speech on campuses and rejects media and political characterisations of the protests as antisemitic.

We are proud of our students who have established peaceful encampments across Australia. These camps are open spaces of learning, solidarity, and support for everyone, with many organisers and leading activists being Jewish themselves – they are not a threat.

The letter calls on vice-chancellors to meet with the students and work to uphold their “reasonable and urgent political demands”.

It comes as footage circulated overnight of an encampment at the University of Melbourne that was allegedly attacked with people carrying glass bottles, bats and fire extinguishers. It is understood there were no injuries.

A University of Melbourne spokeswoman confirmed a “small group” of “unidentifiable people on scooters” wearing masks and hooded shirts entered the Parkville campus and “aggressively harassed” a group of students who were exercising their right to peaceful protest on the University’s South Lawn.

Police attended after being called by university security.

In a statement yesterday, the University of Melbourne 4 Palestine said it would no longer be addressing traditional media as a result of the “purposeful misappropriation of interviews provided in good faith”.

Daniel Hurst

(continued from previous post)

The draft resolution was watered down from the version that was originally circulated, to make clear that Palestine has no voting rights and emphasising UN membership can only be achieved in conformity with the UN charter (meaning both the security council and general assembly have to agree). So that means there is no real practical impact at the current time beyond symbolism, and a gauge of international frustration about a lack of progress towards a two-state solution.

So how did Australia line up compared with its allies and partners?

The “yes” vote on Palestinian membership of the UN clearly put Australia at odds with the US and Israel (they were among just nine countries to oppose the resolution outright).

But the 143 supporters of the general assembly resolution included a number of like-minded countries, including New Zealand, France and South Korea.

Three of the four members of the Quad – Australia, Japan and India – voted yes.

The 25 countries that abstained rather than taking an explicit position included the UK, Canada and Germany.

The Australian government has been at pains to emphasise that voting for Palestinian membership of the UN was not the same as bilaterally recognising Palestine as a state. That step does not appear to be imminent. Crucially, however, the foreign minister, Penny Wong, confirmed on Saturday that the Australia government will recognise Palestine “when we think the time is right” and “no longer believes that recognition can only come at the end of a peace process”.

Australian governments have traditionally held that such recognition can only happen at the end of a bilaterally negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestine, but many countries are now seeing that that approach has failed and are looking to different ways to build momentum.

Analysis: Australia’s UN vote

Daniel Hurst

There has been a lot of reaction – opposing and supporting – the Australian government’s decision to vote yes on UN membership for Palestine at the general assembly in New York over the weekend, so it might be worth taking a moment to step through exactly what the resolution does and doesn’t do.

A clear majority of the much smaller and more powerful grouping – the 15-member UN security council – last month supported giving Palestine full membership status at the UN, but the US used its veto rights to scuttle the idea.

The UN general assembly – where all UN member states have a vote – then considered the issue (on Friday New York time, Saturday Australian time). The resolution backed by 143 member states, including Australia, expressed the view “that the State of Palestine is qualified for membership in the United Nations” and “recommends” that the UN security council “reconsider the matter favourably”.

But there is no immediate prospect of that happening, because the US is likely to wield its veto on the security council again, holding to the position that statehood can only be achieved through direct negotiations with Israel. That means the Palestinian delegation will continue to hold its existing status as a “non-member observer state”, akin to the Holy See.

In the meantime, then, the general assembly decided “on an exceptional basis and without setting a precedent” to extend some “additional rights and privileges of participation” to the Palestinian delegation while it remained an observer. These include things like the right to be seated among member states in alphabetical order, the right to submit proposals and amendments, and the right to raise procedural motions. But, crucially, the resolution makes clear that Palestine “does not have the right to vote in the general assembly or to put forward its candidature to United Nations organs”.

(continued in next post)

Plane moves off coast of Newcastle as it continues in holding pattern

Elias Visontay

The small regional plane which has been circling above Newcastle airport for about three hours with a reported non-operational landing gear has moved off the coast of Newcastle as it continues in a holding pattern.

The Beechcraft B200 Super King Air had circled a repeated loop for the past three hours, but in the last 10 minutes or so it has flown eastwards, and is now performing a holding pattern above Nelson Bay.

Fire trucks, police, the State Emergency Service and ambulances are on scene at Newcastle airport. An operations room has been set up at a nearby defence base at Williamtown.

Various reports suggest there are three people on board the plane, however, this has not yet been confirmed.

Peter Hannam

NAB business survey finds price pressure is easing and confidence remains steady

While many eyes are on budget matters, there’s a bit of economic information out today too. NAB’s monthly business survey is one item, and it tells a story the Reserve Bank will want to hear.

In short, business conditions eased last month, bringing the survey’s main groups back to their long-run averages. Confidence remained steady but slightly below the norm.

Importantly, the employment index eased back too. While not pointing to a decline in jobs at least it was outperforming as much as it was earlier in the year.

NAB said:

In terms of costs, there was some moderation across both labour and input purchases, and retail price growth slowed to 0.9% in quarterly equivalent terms.

Overall, these signs of slowing activity and easing costs support the outlook for gradual improvement in inflation from here, but how quickly this occurs remains to be seen.

April is, of course, just one of the three months that will make up this quarter. Still, the apparent absence of strong pricing pressure might suggest headline inflation might not perk up that much – if at all – during the current quarter. (Remember that prior to the March “upside surprise”, economists had underestimated how fast inflation was slowing for the previous five months. Perhaps that trend will return.)

Anyway, we’re not quite in Panglossian territory. As the NAB’s chief economist, Alan Oster, notes, we don’t actually want the economy to tank either:

Retail and wholesale forward orders are also quite negative, so that is a worrying sign for the outlook.

Cap on international students will cost jobs, education council warns

Paul Karp

The Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia (Iteca) is concerned about the Albanese government’s plan to cap international student numbers, warning it will cost jobs.

An Iteca spokesperson said:

Although there are some positive approaches regarding quality that Iteca members support, the draft framework sets out a policy direction driven by short-term populism over concerns about overseas migration and tenuous links between the cost of housing in urban centres.

Iteca members have problems with the government’s command-and-control approach to international education set out in the draft framework. It seeks to tell independent tertiary education institutions what they should and shouldn’t offer international students. For international students, the Australian government’s approach is even more profound as it suggests that the government tell students what they will study and where.

On balance, Iteca members believe the framework is a collection of ordinary policy options lumped together with a series of bad ones. It reflects a chaotic approach to international education, where there is little relationship between tertiary education reform, the migration strategy, and a non-existent population strategy.

The advice from Iteca members is clear. The Australian government’s proposed strategy will cost jobs across more than one thousand international skills training and higher education providers committed to providing quality student outcomes.

We’ll bring you a full explainer on how caps will work shortly.

Elias Visontay

Aviation professor on likely conversation between Newcastle pilot and authorities

An aviation professor has shed some light on the conversations likely taking place between authorities and the pilot of a small turboprop regional plane circling above Newcastle airport reportedly without a functioning landing gear.

Doug Drury, a professor of aviation at Central Queensland University, says the pilot of the plane – a Beechcraft B200 Super King Air small turboprop 10-13 seater plane that flies private charter routes out of Eastern Air Services’ base in Port Macquarie – would likely be in constant contact with maintenance teams troubleshooting solutions.

My guess would be it’s not so much burning off fuel as it is trying to figure out what the problem is and if there is anything they can do to fix it prior to having put it on the ground.

If you’re landing without your landing gear, you’re going to do quite a bit of damage to the engines as well as the belly of the aircraft.

I would imagine they would also attempt to do a grass landing if possible, but with all the rain we’ve experienced lately that might make it difficult.

If there are fire crews on ground waiting for this to land, I’d imagine they could also put in on a runway.

They would be in contact with a maintenance team to go through as many trials as they can, like pull this circuit breaker, pull this switch, try this this, try that.

Elias Visontay

Some more on the incident above Newcastle airport, where a plane without a functioning landing gear is circling.

NSW police released a statement saying:

About 9.30am today (Monday 13 May 2024), emergency services were called to Newcastle Airport following reports of an aircraft with mechanical issues.

Officers attached Port Stephens Hunter Police District are on scene.

No further details are known at this stage.