Australia news as it happened: RBA governor says raising rates was the right thing to do; Starmer apologises to Epstein victims over Mandelson scandal

The bodies were identified over months with fingerprints, DNA and other methods.

Families learnt the ashes they had been given, and then spread or kept at home, weren’t actually their loved ones’ remains. Many said it undid their grieving process, others had nightmares and struggled with guilt that they let their relatives down.

The owners of the funeral home also pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges after prosecutors said they cheated the government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic-era small business aid.

Jon Hallford was sentenced to 20 years in prison in that case. He told the judge he opened Return to Nature to make a positive impact in people’s lives, “then everything got completely out of control, especially me”.

“I still hate myself for what I’ve done,” he said at his sentencing last June. Carie Hallford’s federal sentencing is set for March 16. Attorneys for the Hallfords did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.

During the years they were stashing bodies, the Hallfords spent lavishly, according to court documents. That included purchasing a GMC Yukon and an Infiniti worth over $120,000 combined, along with $31,000 in cryptocurrency, luxury items from stores like Gucci and Tiffany & Co., and laser body sculpting.

One of the recovered bodies was that of a former army sergeant first class who was thought to have been buried at a veterans’ cemetery, said FBI agent Andrew Cohen.

When investigators exhumed the wooden casket at the cemetery, they found the remains of a person of a different gender inside, he said. The veteran, who was not identified in court, was later given a funeral with full military honors at Pikes Peak National Cemetery.

The corpse abuse revelations spurred changes to Colorado’s lax funeral home regulations.

AP

During that hearing at Armadale Magistrates Court the court played footage of both incidents.

Footage of the alleged attack on Picton showed the Mineral Resources director and former WA Labor secretary standing and talking calmly to a man police allege was Dewar, who raises his right arm and punches Picton in the face.

Picton can be seen falling to the floor, where he remained still.

He left politics in 2022 to work for Mineral Resources as a director, but before that worked with the Victorian and South Australian Labor parties, including as an adviser to then-Victorian premier Daniel Andrews.

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“Whether the offence is an aberration for a person who has otherwise made positive contributions to the community is, and should remain, an important consideration.”

The changes were championed for years by victim-survivor advocates, including Harrison James, a survivor of child sexual abuse and the co-founder of Your Reference Ain’t Relevant.

“This reform shifts courts from privileging offenders’ social standing to centring the lived experience and trauma of survivors,” James told AAP.

Recommendations made by the Sentencing Council of NSW stated the use of “good character” contributed to social disadvantage. Wealthy and influential criminals had much greater access to positive character references, the council’s report argued, while those with intellectual disabilities were often frozen out.

Toomey rejected that position, and said the real barrier to equal justice was the lack of funding for services such as Legal Aid and the Aboriginal Legal Service.

“Evidence of otherwise good character is used in sentencing proceedings by offenders from a wide range of backgrounds, including people experiencing disadvantage,” he said.

Bar Association members Felicity Graham and Richard Wilson, SC, were the only dissenting voices among the 21 voices in the Sentencing Council report.

They argued recognising good character, as the law has done for decades, could encourage rehabilitation in offenders.

AAP

“I certainly didn’t get a phone call from Senator Thorpe warning me or advising me so I could prepare my officers.

“If she was in a position to warn me or warn her own Aboriginal community that there was a risk, that’s probably another question I would ask. Why didn’t you?”

Blanch said police attendance and engagement with rally organisers was greater than it had ever been before, with officers carrying rifles and evacuation procedures in place following the Bondi terror attack.

Fielke said a person living at Oak Park Station was a suspect in Gus’ disappearance. Gus’ parents are not considered suspects in the investigation.

According to Gus’ family, the four-year-old was last seen playing near the Oak Park homestead about 5pm on September 27.

Several large-scale searches across thousands of square kilometres have found no sign of Gus.