Australian news and politics recap: Federal politicians, partners attend black-tie Midwinter Ball in Canberra

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Politicians from all sides of politics arrived at the Midwinter Ball in Canberra on Wednesday evening.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has arrived at the Midwinter Ball in Canberra, alongside wife Jodie Haydon, for the annual black-tie event attended by federal politicians.

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has also arrived alongside wife Louise Clegg, while Jim Chalmers and wife Laura and a group of women from the Labor Caucus have also been pictured.

Holocaust jokes and denial have been normalised on social media but policing tech giants failing to take down anti-Semitic content remains impossible under Australia law, says online hate experts.

Increasingly “toxic” apps had made the hatred of Jews the “new normal” for users, according to Online Hate Prevention Institute chief executive Andre Oboler.

He was one of four expert witnesses who called for stronger protections during their testimonies to the Royal Commission into anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion on Wednesday.

Mr Oboler said he believed the app was “dismissing” harmful content as “political speech without recognising that it’s crossed that line”.

His research institute collated 500 pieces of anti-Semitic evidence obtained from both X and Meta, and 250 each from five other platforms, to present to the commission.

Several experts insisted tackling dangerous algorithms and swiftly removing anti-Semitism content was key to reducing the issue after multiple reports that apps were lacking when hatred was flagged.

Read the full story.

Greens senator Barbara Pocock says Labor must move immediately to tighten regulation of Australia’s big four accounting and consulting firms following fresh proposals from the Government to rein in the industry.

Senator Pocock is calling for stronger oversight and “serious penalties” to deter misconduct, arguing that repeated scandals across the sector show existing rules are no longer fit for purpose.

She also backed the idea of capping the size of large partnerships, one of the options currently under consideration by the Government.

“We need to cap the big partnerships, we need to make sure they pay the same tax as big corporations and that they have the same obligations to the whistleblowers who have brought forward the misdemeanours in these big four firms,” she said.

Senator Pocock also criticised EY after it dismissed two graduate employees for accessing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s personal banking details while on secondment at the Commonwealth Bank.

“First PwC, then KPMG, now EY. The big four have lost their social licence. Australians have had enough of the repeated scandals. It’s time for Labor to regulate the big four,” she said.

Anthony Anthony has declined to guarantee that Australian house prices won’t continue to fall following Labor’s tax changes in the May budget.

During Question Time the Opposition Leader has seized on new figures from property data firm Cotality, showing dwelling values fell 0.4 per cent nationally in June.

“Our housing policies are aimed at giving young people a fair crack,” Mr Albanese told Parliament in response to a question from Opposition Leader Angus Taylor.

“We have changed the system so that this Saturday, if a young people -- young couple turn up at an auction they’re not competing versus an investor who has taxpayer support”.

Victorian Moira Deeming’s future as a Liberal candidate will be decided tomorrow, with the Liberal Party’s State executive to meet after she refused to apologise over assault allegations against colleague Matthew Guy that were dismissed by police.

Opposition Leader Jess Wilson confirmed that the meeting would consider Ms Deeming’s candidacy for the upcoming State election, saying she would not comment further until the matter was resolved.

Senior frontbencher James Newbury said the process was moving quickly and described it as the appropriate way to determine Ms Deeming’s future.

Ms Wilson, who sits on the State executive, is expected to be involved in the decision.

The meeting comes after Ms Wilson cancelled planned talks with Ms Deeming when the MP rejected a request to apologise to Mr Guy.

In a statement, Ms Deeming’s lawyer said that she would not apologise because she had done nothing wrong, insisting she had not made a false complaint to police and had merely misunderstood the technical meaning of the term “headlock”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has defended Labor’s latest tax cuts after the Coalition dismissed them as being worth just 70¢ a day to the average Australian.

The Opposition argued inflation had already wiped out the benefit but Mr Albanese said the cuts were part of Labor’s long-term plan to reduce personal income taxes.

He pointed to the government’s staged changes, which have cut the lowest income tax rate from 19¢ to 15¢ from today, with a further reduction to 14¢ due next year.

Mr Albanese then turned his fire on the Coalition, accusing it of repeatedly opposing Labor’s tax cuts while backing higher taxes under former Opposition leader Sussan Ley.

“They were opposed to the tax cuts that came in today,” he said, that adding the Coalition had also voted against the Working Australians Tax Offset in Parliament.

Outgoing UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has backed nuclear deterrence as Britain’s key military capability, allocating a whopping $120 billion to nuclear submarines in a move endorsed as “reassuring” for Australia’s future AUKUS boats.

But Sir Keir’s final act in the job, unveiling his defence investment plan ahead of next week’s NATO summit in Turkey, fell well short of US President Donald Trump’s demands.

And he will leave office with defence spending at a lower level than Australia’s when measured as a proportion of GDP.

Spending $576 billion on defence over the next four years but with just $29 billion of that constituting newly allocated spending, Sir Keir’s legacy will be a spending target that hits only 2.7 per cent of GDP in 2028.

It falls well short of comparable NATO allies, which are ramping up spending to meet the agreed goal of 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035.

​Read the full story here​.

Australia’s Islamophobia envoy says the political debate around the return of ISIS-linked Australians is fuelling a “palpable” rise in hostility towards Muslims across the country.

The comments come after two groups of Australian families with alleged links to ISIS fighters returned from Syria in May, after years spent in detention camps following the militant group’s defeat in 2019.

Many of those returning are women and children, and peak Islamic organisations, including the Australian National Imams Council, have repeatedly condemned ISIS as an “evil organisation” that does not represent Islam.

Despite this, envoy Aftab Malik told the ABC that Muslim women — particularly those wearing visible religious clothing — are increasingly being targeted in public including being accused of carrying bombs or labelled as “ISIS brides”.

He said the abuse was often witnessed by children and had become widespread in everyday settings such as public transport, schools and shopping centres, warning that anti-Muslim sentiment had become both “unrestricted” and increasingly invisible in public discourse.

Mr Malik also urged political leaders to be careful with their language, warning that rhetoric could embolden discrimination and lead to real-world consequences for Muslim communities.

with agencies