Communications Minister Michelle Rowland was also asked why the government could move so quickly to ban social media for under 16s but can’t find common ground on a gambling advertising ban.

Rowland says both are urgent and the government is working through both issues.

“We had world leading legislation passed the parliament last week,” she says, referring to the social media ban.

“There will be an implementation timeframe for that, but we also continue to work on what we can do in other areas to protect children from harms, and that is one of the fundamental tenets for what we are examining in terms of wagering advertising.”

She says both are harms and the government needs to make sure it is acting appropriately.

Reporting with Kate Ainsworth

Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones has blasted a decision from the Commonwealth Bank that will see some customers charged more to withdraw their own money.

The changes will see Commonwealth Bank customers who have a “Complete Access” account moved to “Smart Access” accounts, starting from January 6, 2025.

The account boasts a $4 monthly fee that is waived if certain criteria are met, including a deposit of at least $2,000 per month.

However, the account also includes an “assisted withdrawal fee”, where customers taking money out at bank branches, post offices or by phone are charged $3 per withdrawal.

Jones has demanded the bank reverse the decision, which he called a “kick in the guts” and the “worst Christmas present ever”.

“This seems to me to be a tax on Australians who demand the right to use their cash, and the government won’t stand for it,” he says.

“We’re working for Australians to ensure they can continue to use cash if they choose. But if they don’t use cash and they want to use a debit card for their everyday transactions, they shouldn’t be slogged with a surcharge for doing it.

“And if they want to go in and see their bank branch, we think Australians should have access to banking services wherever they live.

“So we say to Commonwealth Bank, this is the worst Christmas present ever. It’s a kick in the guts to your customers.”

You can read the full write up from Kate in the link below.

Stephen Jones says telcos, social media platforms, banks and governments need to “lean into” taking action to stop scams.

The assistant treasurer says he wants Australia to become the toughest destination for scammers to make a buck.

“It’s really good social policy, but it’s incredibly important economic policy as well, ensuring that the way we do business is safe and secure for everyone,” he says.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland is speaking now. She’s up alongside Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones about the government’s crackdown on scam texts.

The government will develop a “Sender ID” register of approved numbers attached to certain brands and businesses.

Telcos will have to check when a text message claims to be from a brand whether that number is on the Sender ID register, and if not it will be blocked or include a warning.

Rowland says SMS is now the most common form of scam delivery in Australia.

Anthony Albanese has “no more excuses” not to act on gambling advertising following reports Sportsbet content was played between children’s songs on Spotify, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young says. 

After a father came forward with a complaint, the Guardian Australia reported the gambling agency paused advertising on the music streaming service.

An inquiry chaired by late Labor MP Peta Murphy recommended a total ban on broadcast and online gambling, to be phased in over a three year period. The government has not responded to the inquiry’s report 18 months on.

Labor had initially said it would outline its reforms by the end of the year. It’s since been pushed into 2025.

Hanson-Young says companies like Sportsbet shouldn’t be able to “dictate where they get to spend their advertising dollars and where they don’t”.

She wants the parliament to revisit the matter when it returns next year.

“It should be the law that advertising is illegal. It should be the law that children are protected,” she says.

“Clearly Sportsbet are in damage control, and a pause is good, but a ban is better.

“No more excuses, no more cowering to the gambling lobby. Stand up and do the right thing, protect families and say no to gambling ads.”

Sportsbet and Spotify were contacted for comment.

Defence Minister Richard Marles has made a renewed call for Taiwan, China and other regional players to lower the temperature on potential flare-ups across the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan’s president has this week embarked on travel across several Pacific islands, prompting fierce condemnation from Beijing.

Marles’ colleague, Labor senator Raff Ciccone, has celebrated a visit to Taipei in 2022 by then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – especially because the senator says it sent Chinese authorities “berserk”.

But speaking to ABC’s Afternoon Briefing from Singapore, Marles issued a reminder that all parties have a responsibility to remain calm and keep tensions down.

“We want to be using our voice to encourage all the parties to make sure that tension is kept at a minimum, that we do not see unilateral changes to the status quo across the Taiwan Strait,” he said.

He said Ciccone, who is also the chair of parliament’s powerful joint intelligence committee, can “speak for himself”.

“But from the point of view of the Australian government … be want to be a voice for calm and a voice for reducing tensions,” Marles said.

You can watch the full interview when it goes to air at 4pm on Afternoon Briefing on ABC iView and the ABC News channel.

Fifty people gathered at a protest in Traralgon, east of Melbourne, to hear from community members who fear the consequences of building a nuclear power plant in Gippsland.

The Coalition has identified the nearby Loy Yang A coal plant as a potential site for a nuclear power station.

It wants to build seven across the country if it wins the next federal election.

But the protesters say it poses a risk to the community and nearby farmland.

The federal parliament’s nuclear power inquiry will hear community views about the proposal at a hearing later today.

Earlier we brought you an interview with Disability Discrimination Commissioner Rosemary Kayess.

She weighed in on the newly approved lists of NDIS supports, or what can and cannot be funded by the scheme. The so-called in and out lists came into effect earlier this year amid significant contention.

The commissioner, who has a background in human rights, isn’t 100 per cent on board with the approach:

“Lists are very blunt instruments for making decisions. What’s in, what’s out, it paves the way for lazy decision making, and it questions whether decision makers are giving the choice and control and the individualised response that the NDIS was supposed to be able to provide,” she says.

“It’s very hard to see a flexible, rights-based system emanating from in and out lists.”

Outgoing NDIS Minister Bill Shorten has consistently said while the scheme has been “working really well for a lot of people” a lack of clarity over what scheme funds can be spent on has led to scams, rorts, non-evidence-based therapies and the exploitation of participants.

The government has been under pressure to ensure the now-$42-billion scheme’s financial sustainability, which has been growing faster than expected.

As a victim of a MyGov text scam I am so pleased to hear someone is getting done about it. These texts are so clever , deceiving and realistic it’s sadly easy to see more people being scammed.

– Ken Ewen

Thank God. About time. How do we get them blocked

– Eddie Botha

I’m getting a lot of comments asking how the mandatory register would work.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland is directing the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to develop a standard that would require the telcos to check when a text message claims to be from a brand whether that number is on the ‘Sender ID’ register.

If it’s not, then ACMA will block the text or include a warning.

A pilot has been running since 2023 and will continue to operate until the full register opens in late 2025.

From a long-awaited royal commission response to major changes to the NDIS, it’s been a big year for the disability community.

Disability Discrimination Commissioner Rosemary Kayess sat down with the ABC’s national disability affairs reporter Nas Campanella for a wide-ranging interview marking International Day of People with Disability today.

You can catch a cut of the interview below.

Loading…

A Liberal National Party MP told federal parliament “you cannot possibly compare” women who work in child care with men who work in construction during a debate about gender pay equity.

Colin Boyce made the comments during an address to the lower-profile Federation Chamber on the government’s Workplace Gender Equality Amendment last week, prompting Minister for Women Katy Gallagher to label it “tone-deaf, casual misogyny”.

In a statement, Mr Boyce told the ABC that women and men should be paid the same for the same work and that he sought to raise concerns about how gender pay gap reports compared industries.

The Flynn MP said legislation to encourage gender equity targets for large companies would not help achieve what women “actually want to do”.

Read the full story from Isobel Roe below.

Victoria has been labelled the worst jurisdiction in the country to open a new business because of high property taxes and a thicket of red tape that requires cafes, childcare operators and retailers to apply for more licences than in almost any other state.

The poor ranking in this year’s annual Business Council of Australia (BCA) review of taxes and regulations found the Labor-run state had the nation’s “worst business settings” and the “most work to do in improving its business fundamentals”.

Victoria’s poor showing contrasted with Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas’s South Australia, which was crowned the best place to open a business and hire workers.

Traditional rival New South Wales was in the mid-field, ranked fifth ahead of Queensland and Western Australia.

The best places to do business after South Australia are Tasmania, the ACT and the NT, according to the review.

Read the full story below.

The head of federal parliament’s intelligence committee has accused China of going “berserk” over senior US politician Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan, while arguing Australia should boost cooperation with fellow democracies to deter Beijing from launching an invasion.

Government senator Raff Ciccone, who replaced Labor MP Peter Khalil as chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security in October, has been one of Taiwan’s most staunch supporters in federal parliament.

He made the blunt remarks during an event in Melbourne with Douglas Hsu, head of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, which is Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Canberra.

You can read the full story below.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says he will spend Christmas morning in Darwin, attending a commemoration service marking 50 years since Cyclone Tracy. 

The service will reflect on the destruction caused by the storm on Christmas morning in 1974, which killed at least 66 people and injured many others.

“I’ll be heading up to Darwin because it is the 50th anniversary of that terrible event, Cyclone Tracy, when Santa never made it into Darwin,” he told Nova FM.

“I well recall as a little kid hearing that song (Santa Never Made It into Darwin by Bill and Boyd) over and over again but seeing the devastation that was there.”

You can read more about the memorial event from Felicity James below.

Anthony Albanese is anticipating there will be some pushback from the tech giants after Australia passed world-first laws banning under 16s from social media.

The prime minister spoke to Nova hosts Fitzy, Wippa and Kate Ritchie a short time ago.

Michael “Wippa” Wipfli was the co-founder of 36 Months, an advocacy group calling for the age restriction to be raised from 13 to 16.

Albanese thanked the host and the “brave parents” who lost a child and “channeled that grief into doing something really positive”.

“Social media is doing social harm, and I want to protect our young Australians, make sure that they can engage with each other face to face,” he said.

Under the laws which passed parliament last Friday, tech giants will have a year to tighten security and take “reasonable steps” to prevent under age users from access their platforms.

The PM says the $50 million fines associated will hold the platforms to account.

“There’s a bit of pushback but that is unsurprising,” he adds.

He also sought to assure listeners they would not be required to upload digital ID to verify their age.

“We’ve made that very clear,” he says.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is reportedly trying to salvage the deal she negotiated with the Greens to pass her signature environment reforms.

Asked if that’s his understanding, David Pocock replied: “That’s news to me.”

“I’m sure she is,” he told RN Breakfast.

“She’s clearly loyal to her party and is one of the government’s best performers. She absolutely wants to do a deal to get this through.”

The PM has previously insisted the government did not have the numbers to pass the reform.

Pocock says otherwise.

“There is the numbers in the Senate for reform that’s actually going to protect nature.”

David Pocock says he “certainly” thought the government had reached a deal with the Greens on its aborted environment reforms.

The prime minister shelved the so-called nature positive bill, which would establish a national environment protection authority, as negotiations soured amid concerns from the WA premier that the laws would be political poison.

Speaking with ABC’s RN Breakfast, the independent senator said there were “a lot of different stories” about what happened.

“I certainly thought we had a deal. Minister (Tanya) Plibersek was a good faith negotiator in this. I thought we landed at a point where everyone was happy,” he says.

“I think internal party politics probably got in the way at the end of the day.”

He says on one hand the Greens kept demanding more at the same time Anthony Albanese was “fielding calls from the WA Labor saying ‘don’t pass the bill'”.

Pocock adds that he doesn’t “buy” the argument the bill wasn’t popular in WA, saying polling he commissioned suggested sandgropers wanted stronger reforms.

“I think [it] doesn’t reflect what what Australians want. Big miners don’t vote. And I think the PM is misreading the electorate here,” he says.

“He’s putting seats at risk in the West, where where people want to see stronger protections for nature.”

Pocock last week tried, and failed, to make the inclusion of the nature positive laws a condition of his support for a guillotine motion to cut off debate to allow for the passage of 30 bills through the Senate last Thursday.

Chief of the Defence David Johnston says some of the criticism about the ADF’s cooperation with the royal commission was about the provision of documents.

He says an “enormous effort” was put in place to provide the commissioners with “what they needed” and insisted circumstances where the ADF was less responsive was due to “classification parametres” around information.

“In some cases, privacy matters we needed to be sure that we could deal with, but by far the majority of support that was provided was timely, it was comprehensive,” he says.

Defence support services:

• The Defence all-hours Support Line is a confidential telephone and online service for ADF members and their families 1800 628 036
• Open Arms provides 24-hour free and confidential counselling and support for current and former ADF members and their families 1800 011 046
• Soldier On is a national support services provider for Defence personnel, contemporary veterans, and their families. Contact during office hours 1300 620 380