Australia news LIVE: Police probe CFMEU ‘inside job’ leak; Moira Deeming launches legal action; UNSW ordered to pay back staff

Good morning and welcome to our national news live coverage for Friday, July 3. I’m Ellie Busby, and I will be bringing you the news from around Australia and the world as it happens this morning.

Here are our top stories so far today:

• Police have launched urgent inquiries into a suspected “inside job” leak from the CFMEU’s Melbourne headquarters to the criminal underworld designed to encourage violent or other reprisals against a former union organiser.
• Moira Deeming has launched legal action against the Liberal state president in a bid to prevent the party from disendorsing her as a candidate at November’s state election. She will face the Supreme Court on Friday morning.
• NSW is facing a massive shortfall in its five-year housing target, tracking about 40 per cent behind the rate required to meet the state government’s commitments under the National Housing Accord.

One Nation senator Sean Bell said Coalition frontbencher Andrew Hastie should “touch grass” after accusing the minor party of propelling an online campaign against him.

Hastie is being issued security upgrades because of the attacks on him over his testimony in accused war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation case against this masthead, and his role as a potential witness in the upcoming trial.

“No one in One Nation is particularly focused on Mr Hastie,” Bell told Sky News. “Mr Hastie appears to have received a lot of negative feedback for some of his positions, and instead of reflecting on things he may have said or done, he’s decided to blame some kind of bizarre conspiracy of international influence.”

“My advice to him would be… touch grass and stop engaging with what appears to be a coordinated misinformation campaign with the Labor Party to go after One Nation,” he said.

Andrew Hastie has claimed that a senior One Nation official warned him he would be subject to an online campaign for his role as a potential witness in the Ben Roberts-Smith war crimes trial.

“I think there is something orchestrated online in the background. I think there’s money behind it. I don’t know about the source of that money,” the opposition industry spokesman told Sky News late last night.

“I knew this was coming, though. I had a call from a senior One Nation official, who I won’t name for legal reasons, in the middle of April, who effectively told me that this was going to happen,” he said.

“It was in response to some of the campaigning in Farrer, and sure enough, a deluge of personal attacks followed online. So this wasn’t a surprise to me, but there are consequences to this.”

This masthead revealed that Hastie has been identified as needing extra security amid increased threats.

The unnamed official told Sky News that a conversation took place but denied issuing a warning or that the minor party was mobilising the campaign.

Health Minister Mark Butler said the government was discussing with the Coalition ways to improve the integrity of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

A parliamentary committee yesterday recommended a suite of changes, including creating stronger whistleblower protections to combat fraud in the scheme.

“[The Coalition is] very keen on making sure we maximise our ability to clamp down on fraud and integrity issues in the scheme, as certainly we are,” Butler told Radio National.

“[The report has] got some very good suggestions, many of them, as I said, we were working on anyway.”

Butler said that more than 30 amendments had been made to the government’s sweeping NDIS overhaul legislation announced earlier this year, and it would consider further changes when the bill hits the Senate in a couple of months’ time.

Asked about a long-called-for NDIS worker registration scheme, Butler said he was “very keen” to establish registrations for workers across the care economy, but the government’s priority was getting providers registered first.

Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy has refused to apologise after he labelled the country’s longest serving prime minister, Robert Menzies, a “Nazi appeaser” at the National Press Club on Thursday.

Conroy told the Today show that he would “absolutely not” apologise for the remark, calling it a “historical fact”.

“I made a simple fact: [Menzies] had a policy of appeasement. The liberals’ argument isn’t with me, it’s with history,” he said.

“Anyone can see the documents in the National Archives. The Nine newspapers have put them up on your own website.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has defended his government’s bill on gambling advertising and criticised an “outrageous” delay to additional powers for the eSafety Commissioner.

Additional powers for eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, which would double the available fines and allow more information to be sought from social media platforms, are headed for an eight-week Senate inquiry.

“It is outrageous, the delay,” Albanese told ABC Radio Sydney this morning.

“That will allow the platforms to go and just delete a whole lot of material, whereas if it was passed yesterday, that would have been the date from which these demands could be made by the commissioner, so then fines can be issued.”

Deputy Liberal leader Jane Hume has rejected the government’s attack on the Coalition for sending the expansion of the teen social media ban to a Senate inquiry as playing into the hands of big tech.

“The legislation was introduced yesterday at the end of the last sitting fortnight … Now we’re not in parliament for the next six weeks,” Hume told Sunrise. “Why not use that time to make sure that this legislation is right, that it’s going to work this time?

“[Communications Minister Anika Wells] has been sloppy from go to woah and has put children at risk because the legislation wasn’t right the first time.”

Health Minister Mark Butler, appearing alongside Hume on Sunrise, invoked a grieving father whose child died by suicide, who labelled the Coalition’s move as “absolutely pathetic”.

The Fair Work Ombudsman has ordered the University of NSW to pay $33 million to staff for almost a decade of underpayments to casual academics.

The university paid casual academics and others, including professional staff, the wrong rates between 2014 and 2023, and also breached record-keeping and payslip requirements.

“UNSW self-reported the underpayments to FWO in 2020, which prompted the FWO to begin its investigation. FWO found that UNSW’s record-keeping failures were so extensive that they hindered the investigation into the underpayments,” it said in a statement.

UNSW must now make a contrition payment of $500,000 to Commonwealth Consolidated Revenue.

It comes weeks after UNSW was named Australia’s highest-ranking university in the prestigious QS worldwide rankings.

Washington: An Olympian was indicted on a felony charge in what US President Donald Trump has called vandalism of the Reflecting Pool.

David Hearn, a former canoe racer, was indicted on a single count of property destruction in a Washington, DC court.

District of Columbia US Attorney Jeanine Pirro said Hearn ripped up recently installed sealant on the pool in “a deliberate act” that caused more than $1000 in damage. She accused him of “forcefully and violently” pulling up the bottom liner “with both hands” and acting belligerently towards an employee who told him to stop.

“This is a case with tremendous evidence,” she said, adding that authorities had made about six other misdemeanour arrests. Hearn, 67, didn’t immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

Good morning and welcome to our national news live coverage for Friday, July 3. I’m Ellie Busby, and I will be bringing you the news from around Australia and the world as it happens this morning.

Here are our top stories so far today:

• Police have launched urgent inquiries into a suspected “inside job” leak from the CFMEU’s Melbourne headquarters to the criminal underworld designed to encourage violent or other reprisals against a former union organiser.
• Moira Deeming has launched legal action against the Liberal state president in a bid to prevent the party from disendorsing her as a candidate at November’s state election. She will face the Supreme Court on Friday morning.
• NSW is facing a massive shortfall in its five-year housing target, tracking about 40 per cent behind the rate required to meet the state government’s commitments under the National Housing Accord.