Reserve Bank boss Michele Bullock to appear at parliamentary committee hearing. Follow today’s news headlines live
Reserve Bank to face parliamentary questioning today
The Reserve Bank governor will shed new light on her board’s decision to cut interest rates for the first time in more than four years when she faces a parliamentary grilling today.
It’s a hot topic and I think people are hungry for reform. Debit is the new cash and should be treated the same.
The government’s state wages policy falls significantly short of what is necessary to uphold the LNP government’s commitment to maintain nation-leading wages and conditions for Queensland Health nurses and midwives.
We are seeking urgent clarification from the government on how they will deliver on their commitment to the QNMU.
We would consider that that’s an early offer from the government, which we will consider as unions, but there’s still a way to go.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
02/20/2025 - 16:07
02/20/2025 - 14:37
Residents in Topanga Canyon – an area of Indigenous heritage and artists – mobilized against the state’s decision to bring in hazardous materials after wildfires
Twenty years ago, it was called Rodeo Grounds – an eclectic neighborhood of artists, musicians and surfers living in beach shacks where Topanga Canyon meets the Pacific Ocean. In a bizarre agreement with the former owner some paid as little as $100 a month for rent, raising multiple generations of their families here since the 1950s. But that was before the state purchased the property and started evicting residents in 2001. Julie Howell, who once owned Howell-Green Fine Art Gallery further up in the canyon, says the bohemians were kicked out.
“I actually had a show in my gallery 20 years ago for the group of artists who lived there at Rodeo Grounds, who they kicked out of that spot because it was so environmentally sensitive,” says Howell.
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02/20/2025 - 14:01
Velvet worms have rows of pudgy legs, skin speckled like a galaxy and dissolve their prey with sticky goo
An ancient gummy-looking worm-like creature with a vicious hunting method that involves projecting sticky goo from its head has been crowned New Zealand’s bug of the year.
The Peripatoides novaezealandiae is from the family of velvet worms, or Ngāokeoke in the Māori language. The invertebrates have rows of pudgy legs and skin speckled like a galaxy, and are considered “living fossils”, having remained virtually unchanged for 500m years.
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02/20/2025 - 11:00
The condition of the state’s system was already precarious when the US president ordered billions of gallons be let out
First, there was Donald Trump’s executive order to release billions of gallons of water from two reservoirs in California’s Central valley, a move the feds walked back after farmers and water experts decried it as wasteful, ill-conceived – and an unnecessary risk factor for levees in the region.
The mandate, said Nicholas Pinter, a professor of applied geoscience at the University of California at Davis who studies California’s levees, amounted to “hydrologic insanity”.
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02/20/2025 - 07:00
Experts warn victory for Energy Transfer, whose CEO is a Trump donor, could have a ‘chilling’ effect on free speech
A fossil fuel company’s $300m lawsuit against Greenpeace opens in rural North Dakota on Monday, in a case that has been widely condemned by constitutional rights experts as baseless, bad faith litigation that threatens free speech.
Energy Transfer Partners, a Dallas-based oil and gas company worth almost $70bn, accuses Greenpeace of defamation and orchestrating criminal behavior by protesters at the Dakota Access pipeline (Dapl).
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02/20/2025 - 04:00
In Grimsby, locals have created a society focused on the environmental and health benefits more trees provide, planting thousands in schools, parks and hedgerows
Billy Dasein was born on Rutland Street, Grimsby, in the front room of the house where he still lives. His father was a fitter, and his mother a housewife who also worked in the Tickler’s jam factory. He left school at 16 and wound up working at Courtauld’s synthetic textiles factory.
Rows of terrace houses, constructed for workers in the booming fish industry, are set out in a grid structure by the docks. Life was similar on all these streets: doors left unlocked, kids out playing. Everyone knew everyone.
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02/20/2025 - 00:00
Greenpeace argues European-backed projects hamper countries’ ability to decarbonise their own economies
European countries are extracting renewable energy from Morocco and Egypt to “greenwash” their own economies, while leaving north Africans reliant on dirty imported fuels and paying the environmental costs, a Greenpeace report says.
Both Morocco and Egypt are aiming to leverage their strategic locations south of the Mediterranean, and their solar and wind power potential, to position themselves as pivotal to Europe’s quest to diversify its energy supply.
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02/19/2025 - 17:04
Groups from Sierra Club to Greenpeace take aim at Trump’s drilling orders in term’s first environmental legal battles
Green advocacy groups filed two lawsuits against the Trump administration on Wednesday, marking the first environmental legal challenges against the president’s second administration.
Both focus on the Trump administration’s moves to open up more of US waters to oil and gas drilling, which the plaintiffs say are illegal.
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02/19/2025 - 13:37
Experts raise fears for England’s largest colony at Blakeney Point as they conduct tests to identify source of infection
Experts have raised fears for the seals at England’s largest colony after four were found to have died after having been infected with bird flu.
Government scientists are investigating to find out whether the seals died after scavenging from the corpses of infected birds.
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02/19/2025 - 13:36
Activists warn new designation for projects such as pipelines threatens US wetlands and waters
Environmentalists were outraged on Wednesday after the Trump administration moved to fast-track fossil fuel projects through the permitting process, with activists describing it as an attempt to sidestep environmental laws that could harm waterways and wetlands.
In recent days, the US Army Corps of Engineers created a new designation of “emergency” permits for infrastructure projects, citing a day one executive order signed by Donald Trump which claims the US is facing an “energy emergency” and must “unleash” already booming energy production.
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