Australia news as it happened: PM apologises for describing Grace Tame as ‘difficult’; Qantas makes major change to loyalty program

Thanks for reading the national news blog. This is where we’ll end today’s coverage. We will be back tomorrow with the latest news.

To conclude, here’s a look back at some of the day’s major stories:

• Defence Minister Richard Marles said Australia will not facilitate the return of Australian children held in a Syrian detention camp, even as some of their mothers plead for them to be brought home alone. Some women detained in the al-Roj camp in northern Syria have indicated they would accept their children being repatriated at any cost – even if it meant permanent separation.
• US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran was attempting to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles as the Trump administration ramped up pressure on the regime over its nuclear program ahead of critical talks in Geneva.

• The families of Australian officials in the Middle East have been told to leave as experts warn of a high likelihood of military action in the region. The federal government has ordered the evacuation of dependents of diplomatic staff in Israel and Lebanon. Voluntary departures were also offered to diplomats’ dependents in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Qatar.

• Dramatic vision released by the Northern Territory Police Force showed the moment a police car is rammed as officers open fire. NT Police confirmed a man was arrested after allegedly targeting officers with a vehicle in Alice Springs overnight.

• West Australian tech billionaire Laurence Escalante has been hit with more drug-related offences, meaning he now faces 17 criminal charges, including the alleged assault of his ex-partner.

• Optus chairman John Arthur conceded the telco had “lost its way”, and has told senators the company’s board already knew it had a deep cultural problem before the September Triple Zero outage that left two people dead and hundreds unable to reach emergency services.

Thanks again for joining us. This is Isabel McMillan signing off.

The Minns government took a “sledgehammer” to protests after the Bondi terror attack, and laws rushed through parliament to bolster police powers should be declared invalid, the state’s top court has heard.

A trio of activist organisations, including the Palestine Action Group, asked the NSW Court of Appeal on Thursday to strike down laws giving the police commissioner the power to make a declaration restricting all protests in a geographical area for a specific time after a suspected terrorist act.

The restrictions covering the Sydney CBD and eastern suburbs were in place during Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia.

David Hume, SC, acting for the protest groups, told the court the laws were “fundamentally over-broad” and “they use a sledgehammer to seek to crack a nut”.

He argued the laws fell foul of the implied freedom of political communication in the Commonwealth Constitution, and all protests were restricted irrespective of the risk they posed.

Read the full story from legal affairs reporter Michaela Whitbourn here.

Optus chairman John Arthur concedes the telco had “lost its way”, and has told senators the company’s board already knew it had a deep cultural problem before the September Triple Zero outage that left two people dead and hundreds unable to reach emergency services.

Appearing before the Senate environment and communications references committee in Canberra on Thursday, Arthur, who also sits on the Singtel board, was pressed on board-level accountability for the outage and on Optus’ wider record of scandals and service failures.

“Dr Schott’s report, for me, was confirmatory. It wasn’t revelatory. We knew. We knew we had a risk-culture challenge at Optus,” Arthur told senators, referring to the independent review by Kerry Schott into the telco’s fatal outage.

“A sad truth is that good companies can lose their way in important respects, and they can lose their way in areas that can take years to fix. People like me, when that happens, ask themselves, ‘Should I have spotted the warning signs earlier? Should I have seen this earlier?’ Well, sadly, that milk has been spilt at Optus.”

The admission came during a gruelling day of evidence at Parliament House that also featured evidence from Schott, who described a “culture of lack of care” at Optus and called the chain of failures behind the outage “astounding”.

Representatives from tech giants Apple and Google are set to appear before the committee on Thursday afternoon.

A young boy missing for hours in a remote part of northern Victorian has been found safe and well, police say.

Police said a two-year-old boy went missing from a property on Beechworth-Wodonga Road in Wooragee – about almost 300 kilometres north-east of Melbourne – just before 11am on Thursday.

Police said they believed the boy was “in the company of two Jack Russell dogs”.

“The boy was reported missing to police shortly before 1pm,” police said. “A large-scale search commenced involving resources from local uniform police, police air wing and drone unit, SES, Ambulance Victoria and CFA.”

Police confirmed the boy was found “safe and well” shortly after 3pm.