As it happened: Dutton attacks Labor on energy reform; Australia to import US apples; Warning on teacher shortages

“It was as definitive as I’ve ever seen. The proposal needed to change substantially in order to proceed,” Brown said.

Brown said the decisiveness of the DSS’s internal legal advice, and government checks and balances, should have ended the robodebt proposal there and then.

However, DSS lawyer Lisa Keeling revealed this information was not shared with the proposal’s originator, the DHS.

In her review she noted, “There is no evidence that DSS shared this advice with the department at any point prior to the implementation of the program.”

The DHS sought legal consultation on three separate occasions in 2015, but its requests never explicitly questioned the lawfulness of income averaging.

Commissioner Catherine Holmes yesterday said she was “appalled” by the admission that government departments often pay external consultants for legal advice but then ignore it.

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All the other states have an imprisonment rate between 1.5 and 2.4 times higher than Victoria.

Weatherburn said this was not because Victoria had more lenient judges, but because the state arrested far fewer people per capita. The reason for Victoria’s lower arrest rate is partly to do with lower crime and partly to do with policing policy.

He said the differences between the prison populations in Victoria and the NT were also partly attributable to the arrest rates of Indigenous people, who were much more likely to be arrested and were grossly over-represented in custody.

The NT had the highest proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people relative to its total population size (30.8 per cent), while Victoria had the lowest (1.2 per cent).

The first graph shows the imprisonment rates of all states and territories. The second graph removes the territories to better show the differences between the states.

It comes after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission released a report in August warning against allowing exporters to sell all of their uncontracted gas overseas next year.

“In the current environment of high international energy prices (including gas and LNG), tight LNG markets, broader supply chain problems, geopolitical instability, inflation and uncertain demand for gas powered generation domestically, we support the Australian government placing greater focus on energy security,” the report read.

As energy prices heat up, David Crowe reports on a debate brewing along state lines about whether states such as Queensland and Western Australian should ramp up gas supply to NSW and Victoria.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said on Monday that Australians wanted their gas to go to the domestic market first before meeting demand from customers overseas.

NSW Treasurer Matt Kean has also suggested liquefied natural gas from Western Australia could be shipped to NSW and pumped into the eastern gas pipelines.

The South Australian Chamber of Mines and Energy and the Queensland Resources Council are among those criticising proposals they say would see their states pay for the failure of NSW and Victoria in developing their own resources.

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The $328 million action plan was created through discussions with education ministers, teachers, principals, unions and the higher education sector.

It includes about $160 million to train more teachers, $70 million to encourage mid-career professionals to move into the industry and $25 million to trial new ways to reduce workloads.

Australian Education Union deputy federal president Meredith Peace welcomed the opportunity to provide feedback on the plan but called for full funding of public schools from state and commonwealth governments.

“A draft national plan alone will not fix the shortages being experienced in public schools across the nation,” she said in a statement.

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The pyramid was built over five days in collaboration with the environmental organisation VeryNile and Egyptian artist Bahia Shehab.

The structure is 10 metres tall, 12 metres wide, and made from 18,000 kilograms of rubbish – the equivalent of a million plastic bottles.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is attending COP27 on behalf of Australia. At the meeting, world leaders will report on their countries’ progress in achieving their emissions-reductions targets.