As it happened: Ley holds on to leadership as rivals fail to reach agreement on who should challenge; PM pledges extra $160m for fire recovery

Thanks for reading the national news blog. This is where we’ll leave today’s coverage but we will be back with more live news coverage on Monday.

Here’s a look back at the day’s major stories:

• Liberal MP Andrew Hastie has pulled out of the Liberal leadership race a day after meeting with rival Angus Taylor in Melbourne to try work out which one of them would challenge Sussan Ley for her job. Chief Political Correspondent Paul Sakkal broke the story.
• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan announced an additional $160 million in funding for communities impacted by bushfires in Victoria this summer.
• It came after state and territory governments squeezed an extra $2 billion out of the prime minister to strike a $25 billion deal to fund hospitals for the next five years, ending a long-running stalemate in negotiations.
• Four people are dead in what police are treating as a murder-suicide in the western Perth suburb of Mosman Park. Officers were called to the scene on Friday morning and found a man, 50, woman, 49, and two boys aged 14 and 16 dead.
• Nine Entertainment struck a deal to sell Australia’s top-rating conservative talkback stations 2GB, 3AW, 4BC and 6PR to publican and pokies billionaire Arthur Laundy and his family for $56 million, marking a major transition in Australia’s media landscape.
• Australians John Peers and Olivia Gadecki claimed back-to-back Australian Open mixed doubles titles, beating French pair Kristina Mladenovic and Manuel Guinard 4-6, 6-3, (10-8).

Thanks again for joining us. This is Rachael Ward, signing off.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has declared himself and the government open to tax reform to address intergenerational unfairness driven by the nation’s dysfunctional property market, saying the inability of young people to buy a home is one of Australia’s defining issues.

In an interview with Nobel Prize economics winner Joseph Stiglitz for The Monthly magazine published on Friday, Chalmers said the government was “impatient but not impetuous” for reform.

He opened the door to tax changes, while signalling any measures would have to be explained methodically so they could be locked in permanently.

More details here.

Health authorities in NSW are urging recent travellers with symptoms such as fevers and sore eyes to seek medical care after a person returned from South-East Asia with measles.

The exposure locations include Sydney’s T8 and T1 train lines, Sydney International Airport, and a Cebu flight from Manila that arrived in Sydney on Tuesday morning. These locations do not pose an ongoing threat.

NSW Health’s Dr Vicky Sheppeard said anyone with symptoms who had visited the locations on that day should see their GP or visit an emergency department.

“Call ahead to let them know that you may have come into contact with measles, so you don’t spend time in waiting rooms with other patients,” she said.

“Symptoms to watch out for include fever, runny nose, sore eyes and a cough, usually followed three or four days later by a red, blotchy rash that spreads from the head to the rest of the body.”

There have been 14 confirmed cases of measles in NSW in the last two months, mostly from travellers returning from overseas. Many parts of South-East Asia are experiencing ongoing outbreaks of the airborne disease.

Washington: US President Donald Trump is suing the IRS and Treasury Department for $US10 billion ($14.3 billion), as he accuses the federal agencies of a failure to prevent a leak of his tax information to news outlets between 2018 and 2020.

The suit, filed in a Florida federal court, includes the president’s sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr and the Trump organisation as plaintiffs.

The filing alleges that the leak of Trump and the Trump Organisation’s confidential tax records caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other plaintiffs’ public standing”.

In 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn of Washington, DC — who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defence and national security tech firm — was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking tax information about Trump and others to news outlets.

The disclosure violated IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal statute.

AP

Anthony Albanese and Jacinta Allan unveiled an additional $160 million in funding for fire-affected communities at the State Control Centre in Melbourne.