As it happened: Labor lifts migration cap to 195,000; COVID isolation period review questioned by AMA

The NSW government has backed away from its threat to wage war against rail unions, despite an ultimatum being ignored to cease all industrial activity on Sydney’s public transport network by Friday.

Following a legal manoeuvre by unions early on Friday, the government put on hold its threats to tear up a $1 billion deal to modify the state’s intercity trains and launch action to terminate existing enterprise agreements covering thousands of workers.

The unions had successfully applied to the Fair Work Commission to force the government to continue bargaining.

In its application, Unions NSW said the bargaining had been “characterised by widespread and highly publicised disputation”.

Welcome to your five-minute recap of the trading day and how the experts saw it.

The numbers: The Australian sharemarket finished down on Friday to notch its worst week since mid-June as mining stocks continued to fall in value.

The ASX 200 closed down 16.90 points, or 0.25 per cent, to 6828.7, taking total losses for the week to 3.9 per cent.

The lifters: Family tracking app Life360 was up 5.56 per cent; Clinuvel Pharmaceuticals recovered 2.4 per cent after falling on Thursday; and A2 Milk was up 2.28 per cent to cap a strong week of gains.

The laggards: Payments provider Tyro dived 9.68 per cent as investors cashed in on recent gains; Mineral Resources (6.5 per cent), Ampol (5 per cent) and travel agent Hello World (6.13 per cent) all closed lower after going ex-dividend on Friday.

An extra 35,000 immigrants and thousands of aged pensioners will be used to help deal with worker shortages as the federal government aims to overhaul the nation’s migration program to focus on permanent rather than temporary residents.

During its two-day jobs and skills summit, the government revealed this year’s permanent overseas migration intake would be increased by more than 20 per cent to a record 195,000. Beyond that, the intake – cut by the Turnbull government to 160,000 – is likely to remain close to the new figure.

To offset concerns in some parts of the community that the lift in migration will put pressure on the housing market, the government will pump up to $575 million more into the National Housing Infrastructure Facility. It will be used to attract more outside investment, including from superannuation funds, into affordable housing.

Tokyo: Japan’s digital minister, who has vowed to rid the bureaucracy of outdated tools from the hanko stamp to the fax machine, has now declared war on a technology many haven’t seen for decades – the floppy disk.

The hand-sized, square-shaped data storage item, along with similar devices including the CD or even lesser-known mini disk, are still required for some 1900 government procedures and must go, Digital Minister Taro Kono wrote in a Twitter post.

“We will be reviewing these practices swiftly,” Kono told reporters, adding that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had offered his full support. “Where does one even buy a floppy disk these days?”

Japan isn’t the only nation that has struggled to phase out the outdated technology. The US Defence Department only announced in 2019 that it had stopped using floppy disks in a control system for its nuclear arsenal. The disks were first developed in the 1960s.

Marriages in China have plunged to their lowest levels on record in an alarming sign of the deepening population crisis facing the world’s second-largest economy.

Official data revealed marriage registrations slumped 6.1 per cent to 7.6 million in China last year amid warnings that the economic consequences of an ageing population are beginning to emerge.

It is the fewest marriages since public records began in 1986 and the rate has almost halved in the last decade to 5.4 marriages per 1000 people.

Almost half of those getting married were aged above 30 as people are forced to delay plans to start a family.

The corporate watchdog has raised concerns about the methods insurance companies use when investigating people who made have mental health claims, after a review found surveillance of some customers may have been unwarranted.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) also said some insurers still appeared to be trying to avoid paying legitimate claims by going “fishing” for information that a customer may not have disclosed.

ASIC on Friday released the findings of a review into how insurance companies dealt with claims for disability income insurance, which provides cover to people who can no longer work because of illness or injury.

The 2018 royal commission into financial services misconduct highlighted cases of insurers spying on their customers who had made mental health claims, and a key topic in ASIC’s review was the “physical surveillance” of customers.