Senate inquiry finds Peter Dutton mislead Parliament on au pairs

Christian Woods
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Senate inquiry finds Peter Dutton mislead Parliament on au pairs

A majority Labor/Greens Senate inquiry has found that Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton did mislead parliament regarding the au pairs scandal.

This comes despite Mr Dutton insisting that he did not mislead Parliament in any way.

However, Prime Minister Scott Morrison is standing behind Mr Dutton, saying that he has total confidence in his Home Affairs Minister despite calls from Labor for him to be sacked.

In a TV interview, Mr Morrison said that while Labor was “about stopping au pairs” that his Government was about “stopping boats, criminals and bikie gangs”.

He then proceeded to mock Labor’s concern regarding the au pairs scandal, saying that the worst an au pair would do to Australians is read them a bedtime story. He added that “that tells you everything you need to know about their views on national security”.

The Senate inquiry examined two incidents where Mr Dutton used his authority as the Home Affairs Minister to intervene on behalf of two au pairs who were on a tourist visa but wanted to work in Australia.

The first case, in June 2015, involved one of Mr Dutton’s former colleagues from the Queensland Police Force asking the Home Affairs Minister for assistance with an Italian au pair that was being detained at Brisbane airport.

A similar case occurred in November 2015, where Mr Dutton was contacted by AFL boss Gillon McLachlan for assistance regarding a French au pair detained at Adelaide airport.

The Senate committee’s report found that Mr Dutton “had a clear personal connection and existing relationship” with the former police officer who was intending to employ the Brisbane au pair.

It also found that “given his definitive answer in the House of Representatives” that “the Minister misled Parliament”.

The Greens are expected to raise a vote of no confidence in Mr Dutton during Parliament question time today.

Labor promises superannuation boost for parents and low-paid workers

Christian Woods
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Labor promises superannuation boost for parents and low-paid workers

If they win the election, Labor has promised to pay superannuation to parents on government parental leave and to those who earn less than $450 a month.

The Labor party has announced a long list of changes to superannuation as part of a plan to help prevent women from entering “abject poverty” upon retirement.

The new policy would cost around $409 million over a 4 year period and would apply to both women on maternity leave and men on paternity leave.

Labor has also said it would also get rid of the $450 earning threshold at which super payments begin to be made.

Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen criticised Australia’s current superannuation system, saying that it wasn’t working “as well as it should for Australia’s women”.

Under the plan, Mr Bowen said that a mother-of-three who took maternity leave 3 separate times would be $30,000 better off upon retirement. He also said that women would benefit from changes to the minimum earning amount at which super payments start.

He said that the policy was needed especially because of an “increase in casualization” as well as “people working more low-paid jobs” and that these people need more money in their superannuation accounts.

He said that it was an “anomaly that had got to be fixed” and that it was a “matter of fairness”.

If enacted, the new policy is expected to help hundreds of thousands of Australians, including 200,000 using paid parental leave.

Labor leader Bill Shorten said that the plan used compound interest to boost retirement savings and that it would mean women would no longer have to pay a “motherhood penalty”.

He said that “Australian women deserve to be treated equally” and that “a husband is not a retirement plan”.

He said that the plan was not discriminatory, and that it was meant to ensure women “have some independence in their retirement”.

Is augmented reality the future of online shopping?

Victoria Tran
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Is augmented reality the future of online shopping?

What is augmented reality?

Augmented reality is an enhanced version of reality in which computer-generated images are placed within a physical real-world environment. The best way to experience AR is through a compatible device such as a mobile smartphone. It is in many ways similar to virtual reality, however with far fewer virtual elements and more “real” ones.

Once you fire an AR-based app, you will be able to view the real world through your smartphone, the same way you view things through the camera app. However, AR makes it possible to drop a 3D object into the environment that you are currently viewing. That object will be able to be viewed the same way you would view a real object of its size and nature.

You can walk around the object and view it from different angles. This will allow you to experience the item as if it were physically in your room. This simple concept combined with mobile technology is beginning to turn AR into a powerful online shopping tool.

How is AR being used today?

One of the most common uses of augmented reality is in the Google Map app. The app allows you to see a real-life view of a street with directions, arrows, and other information located within the images. This is among the most basic implementation of AR.

As mentioned earlier, modern smartphones with AR capabilities offer a wonderful experience for users who wish to introduce computer-generated imagery into real-world settings. Fun apps and games make it possible to chase down dinosaurs in your living room. You can also stack up computer-generated blocks on your kitchen table.

Social Media apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger are currently popularising AR within mobile devices. Snapchat was one of the pioneering platforms to host AR. Almost the entire premise of the Snapchat platform is based around placing items within your phones camera feed using advanced AR capabilities.

Things are beginning to get a bit more interesting in the world of e-commerce. AR now allows you to place items from an online store within your home. In doing so, you will be able to preview store items such as lounge suites and frames within your own living room setting.

What does this mean for online stores?

Online stores are restricted to just a few means of presentation as well as just a few ways of persuasion. This means that shoppers must make a purchase decision based on a picture and a description. Innovative stores have moved further by customising their experience by using unique pictures of products as well as re-writing product descriptions.

Now, augmented reality allows online stores to offer its customers a tactile shopping experience that could possibly rival physical stores. Sure it won’t be the same as actually touching real products inside a real store. However, with AR, you can place these products within your house to see if they are a good match for your living room.

Apart from just pictures and descriptions, stores can now make use of AR to further entice their customers to purchase products. Offering customers the ability to place computer-generated images within their home can lead to an immersive and realistic experience for them.

Where is AR today?

Last year Apple announced ARKit for its mobile operating system iOS. The kit allows you to experience AR in Apple smartphones starting from the iPhone 6s until current smartphones. There are also a few iPads that support AR, like the latest iPad and iPad Pro.

Apple is making a major push into the world of augmented reality in the hopes of becoming a pioneer of the industry. There are already plenty of games and apps available on the Apple App Store that make use of AR technology.

Apple plans to take AR further by allowing two users on separate phones to interact with the same AR object together. This means that you and your partner can shop online at home and inspect the same item together within the comfort of your lounge. Google is also working on a similar concept for its Android smartphones.

Google also released its very own ARCore kit recently. This makes AR on Android smartphones a reality. However, there are just a few devices from Samsung and Google that currently support AR. Google does plan to compete with Apple in the race to AR and VR mastery. This means that there will be many new Android devices with the ability to experience AR.

Stores that feature AR

The two most popular stores at the moment that are taking full advantage of AR are Amazon and Ikea. Ikea is one of the earliest adopters of the technology. The Ikea app allows you to use AR to overlay virtual models of Ikea items within a real-time camera feed from your phone or tablet.

The Amazon shopping app is similar to Ikea as it allows you to place 3D rendered products from Amazon’s lineup into your home setting. The Amazon app added AR to its iOS version of the app last year and has recently included AR in its Android app.

There are more manufacturers, brands, and stores that have been utilizing AR for years now. Converse and Lego were on board in 2010 with apps that featured basic AR capabilities. The Converse app allows its users to simply point their smartphone camera to their feet and select overlays of various converse shoes.

More stores and brands that feature AR:-

  • Lacoste
  • Timberland
  • Toys R Us
  • Uniqlo
  • Jordan

2017 was a big step for augmented reality. 2018 is proving to be a big step for online retailers who are beginning to embrace AR. The platform can only get stronger because smartphone manufacturers and developers are currently on a mission to push AR to the masses. Maybe now is the time that your store got on board as well.

Cool paints: how heat-reflective coating can help you in summer

George Papdan
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Cool paints: how heat-reflective coating can help you in summer

No matter where your political opinions lie, rising heat levels is probably one of the biggest issues affecting humanity right now. In neighbouring India and Pakistan, temperatures reach upwards of 50 degrees Celsius, and earlier this year, a stretch of road in central Victoria melted due to heat. There’s not much we can do about the outside heat but when it comes to indoor temperatures, slathering your roof with a heat-reflective coating might just be enough to make the intolerable, tolerable.

While as a solution it might seem a tad too simplistic, heat-reflective paints are actually a very effective solution that it was very widely used across the Australian outbacks. While using heat-reflective paints can be cheaper, not to mention more environmentally friendly, than installing air conditioners, it can still be quite expensive. As such, you should try to not apply them not more than necessary, using paint thickness devices to make sure you’re not slathering them too thick.

Climate change, rising heat levels, droughts and heat waves

In late August of this year, then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull caved to pressure from his party and dropped plans within the government’s new energy policy to include more stringent carbon emission reduction targets. Somewhat ironically, he announced this turnabout a day after he committed $1.8 billion in relief fund for farmers that has been hit by this year’s devastating drought. Essentially, Australia has now followed the United States dubious lead in backing off from the Paris Agreement.

Again with the ironies, air conditioner makes up a part of that carbon emission due to their use of hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs for short. The cycle goes like this, due to rising heat levels, more and more members of the population have started to use air conditioners and those that have been regularly using them are now using them for a longer period of time. Ironically, this rise of air conditioners has also contributed to the rising heat levels, thereby forcing more and more people to use air conditioners.

At some point, that cycle has to be broken and one of the way we could do that is by using heat-reflective paints to reduce indoor temperatures which could in turn, reduce our dependence on air conditioners. In countries like India and Pakistan for example where air conditioners are still considered a luxury, forgoing them can be a boon to parts of the population that can’t afford them in the first place.

How heat-reflective coatings work

While it’s true that simply using white paint is enough to reflect the majority of solar radiation from your roof, using white paint might not always be an option. For one, the highly reflective nature of the color white can be dangerous when there are taller buildings around. The reflection, but not necessarily the heat, might shine directly into the windows of adjacent building, which if not dangerous, are at least annoying.

The above reason is also why buildings around airports might not be allowed to use white as the color of their roof, since at certain angles, the reflection might negatively affect aircraft pilots. The solution then is to use similarly light colors that will be able to reflect heat but won’t blind tenants from adjacent buildings or aircraft pilots. The problem of course is that none of these colors will be able to reflect heat as well as a ‘flat’ white.

To remedy this, the paint itself contain infrared and mixed metal oxide pigments, which were much more efficient at reflecting the sun’s radiation, on which energy is mostly contained in the infrared spectrum. While it’s true that UV light is more damaging than infrared, most of them dissipate when it hits the atmosphere. Other than to simply reflect heat, this type of paint also dissipates heat that does get through into the substrate material instead of directly to the room inside.

It should be noted however that there’s a limit to what heat-reflective paints can do. Simply adding more layers of paint won’t reduce indoor temperatures any further and would do nothing more than to add to your costs, since you’re applying more paint. Other things to keep in mind is that they might work against you in the winter, where heat turns into a commodity and using heat-reflective paints might lead you to rely more on space heaters.

The advantages of heat-reflective paints

All they do is reflect heat but that one simple act could lead to more benefits that you might not be aware of. First of all, the less heat that hits your building, the better it is for your building’s durability. Extreme heat may damage roof materials and the paint itself and using heat-reflective paints could help extend the durability of your roof and the life-cycle of the paint itself, allowing you to spend less time re-coating your roof.

One other advantage is that it would severely cut your electrical bills by saving you from having to use air conditioners, or at least by limiting their usage only when it’s extremely hot outside. It won’t be as financially beneficial as putting up solar panels on your roof, which can convert solar energy into electricity but at the same time, using heat-reflective paints won’t cost you an arm and a leg either.

Since it was announced that Dulux was fined $400,000 for using misleading claims about their heat-reflective paints, it’s easy to dismiss these heat-reflective paints as snake oil. The truth is, even though Dulux’s claims were overly exaggerated, heat-reflective paints do work. In India for example, simply adding white tarps on roof is enough to reduce indoor temperature by at least two degrees and white tarps are nowhere near as comprehensive as heat-reflective paints.

Can oral health affect fertility?

Sasha Duncan
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Can oral health affect fertility?

Infertility is a serious problem in the modern world and many people trying to expand their family face it. The exact reasons are not always easy to find but are necessary to identify in order to approach the treatment in the proper way. Although you may never thought it possible, oral health can affect the whole process and cause trouble.

Based on this study from the University of Helsinki in Finland, the periodontal pathogen can cause problems for young women who are trying to conceive. Also, men experience problems with their fertility due to gum disease and poor oral hygiene. So, here is how you can change these negative odds and improve oral health and thus your fertility.

Brush your teeth after a meal

Even the smallest amount of bacteria can cause problems and be the reason for infertility. “Our study does not answer the question on possible reasons for infertility but it shows that periodontal bacteria may have a systemic effect even in lower amounts, and even before clear clinical signs of gum disease can be seen,“ explained Dr. Susanna Paju from the University of Helsinki.

That is why you should brush your teeth after every meal and even carry a toothbrush and paste with you so you can do it outside your home. There is a variety of non-aggressive toothpaste today that will help you maintain your oral health in the tip-top condition.

Don’t avoid flossing

Periodontal disease is when gums and supporting tissue get infected and inflamed. Food stays stuck in our mouth which is already full of bacteria and thus create plaque.

Flossing may not be the most subtle action, but it’s the one that will help you keep food remains out of your teeth. Use those portable flosses and inter-dental cleaners you can carry with you to work or anywhere else you may need them. Food remains will stick between your teeth and allow bacteria to form thus causing cavities and gum disease.

Regular visits to the dental clinic

“Periodontal disease is silent and asymptomatic. This means that the disease progresses without the patient having any pain or discomfort,” according to dental professionals. “Periodontal treatment is relatively simple. It usually involves two to four sessions of thorough scaling and polishing of the teeth under local anaesthesia. ”

Basically, regular visits to your dentist, every six months, will help you keep your oral health in check. Taking care of any problem as soon as possible can save your teeth and prevent any serious damage from happening. Not to mention the discomfort from untreated conditions like pain, bad breath and even losing the tooth.

Use mouthwash

Unfortunately, the bacteria and destructive agents from your teeth can enter your bloodstream and cause serious problems. The most known one is a cardiovascular disease which can have serious consequences for a person, and even be life-threatening. Additionally, they can also cause type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, miscarriage, and respiratory condition.

Mouthwash shouldn’t replace regular brushing and you should use it afterwards to disinfect the complete oral cavity. Also, use mouthwash between teeth brushing to refresh your breath or remove the residues from a snack. You can use a natural mouthwash like sage tea or make one from tea tree oil, peppermint oil, and baking soda.

Check your blood regularly

Having your blood analysed regularly will show you if there is any problem in your body that needs attention. Namely, high white cell count points out to an infection which can easily be caused by the bacteria in your mouth.

Bacteriospermia is one of the conditions occurring when bacteria from the mouth get into the bloodstream and ends up in the semen, thus affecting its count. Also, tooth decay will cause an immunological response where the immune system will attack healthy cells, such as sperm. In order to keep this in check, men who have cavities or gum disease should get their blood and semen checked.

Final word

Oral hygiene is important for many health reasons, and fertility is one of them according to new studies and research. Regular care and visits to the dentist will keep your teeth and gums healthy, and thus prevent bacteria to spread and cause problems. Just make sure that you adopt proper habits for oral hygiene and you will have a dazzling smile and preserve your body’s health.

What is an email verifier and why should you care?

Deb Dey
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What is an email verifier and why should you care?

Email marketing is an indispensable part of nurturing your relationship with your customers. Let’s see how an email verifier facilitates email marketing and eventually boosts sales and revenue.

An email verifier is a system that removes invalid and fake email addresses from your email list. By doing so, it boosts your sender score and your email deliverability. Here is a detailed description of what it does and how it can help your business.

Helps discard dormant email addresses

An email verifier skims through your contact list and marks those addresses that are defunct or no longer valid. The causes can vary, such as a person changing their email address or switching their job or position, or the domain/provider closing down. This helps you do away with addresses that are inoperative. At the same time, you can focus on leads you could re-engage with.

Helps correct human typo errors

Typos in email addresses can keep you from reaching potential customers, adversely impacting your business’s sales and revenue. An email verifier comes to your rescue by identifying these misspelled addresses.

Helps you steer clear of spam traps

Your IP address could be marked as a spam or added to a blacklist if you accidentally deliver emails to a spamtrap. An email verifier helps you identify and strike off such contacts from your list.

Enhances sender reputation

If too many of your emails bounce, your sender score deteriorates and wrecks your sender reputation. An email verifier helps you discard invalid email leads, making sure your campaigns end up in customers’ inboxes. Your sender score and reputation improve.

Saves resources

Sending out newsletters to invalid email addresses is a loss of resources and budget. An email verifier helps you get rid of inactive addresses. It enables you to focus on the valid ones, ensuring higher response rates to ads and campaigns.

Facilitates better campaigning

Eliminating inoperative email addresses from your contact list gives you a more pragmatic view of your open rates (percentage of opened mails out of the delivered mails), clicks and conversions.

Averts hard bounces

Hard bounces increase your bounce rate and impact your open rate adversely. This dooms your email id to be blacklisted and marked as a junk mail by customers. An email verifier helps eradicate this problem by marking those addresses on your list that are expected to bounce.

Helps achieve steady leads

Inactive, defunct, and bad email addresses in your contact list might wrongly reflect customers’ demographic data. They might even result in you missing out on credible leads. An email verifier assists you in focusing on only convertible steady leads by eliminating bad email addresses altogether.

Furnishes better data insights

Email verification helps you focus on potential leads and their critical demographic data. It assists you in drawing better conclusions and make improved marketing decisions with accurate insights into the customer’s behaviour.

Enhances cross-channel marketing

An email verifier enables you to hone in on loyal subscribers. This results in better brand promotion across multiple channels, and not just e-mail. It helps you gain coherent insight into your customer’s statistics that could help you campaign across all channels.

There are various email verifiers you can use to determine invalid email addresses on your contact list. The different types of email addresses that need to be stricken off of your contact list are as follows:

Defunct email addresses

These include abandoned email addresses that no longer exist.

Misspelled email addresses

These are a result of typos in the e-mail IDs owing to human errors. For example: [email protected] or xyz@domaincom

Role account addresses

There are some email addresses related to a certain department or division within an organisation. They are meant to receive emails related to the activities and responsibilities of that division. For example: [email protected] or [email protected] are not for marketing emails.

Spam traps

Used as a honeypot to lure spams, such email addresses can creep into your contact list accidentally. Using a double opt-in method to get your customers acknowledge their subscription, can help avert these accidents.

Robots

If you are a business owner and own a website, make sure you do not display your email address conspicuously on your home page. Instead, hide it behind a phrase such as “Contact Us”, using a hyperlink. Spam robots tend to scan websites to extract visible email addresses and make way into their inboxes.

Sending emails to invalid addresses brings down your sender score. It may result in your emails getting blacklisted and marked as spam. This could damage your sender reputation, adversely impacting your sales and revenues. Hence, using an email verifier is a recommended measure for a reputable and profitable business.

How to make harmonious social media and content marketing strategies

George Papdan
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How to make harmonious social media and content marketing strategies

In the business world, there are many aspects that can make a better business plan, starting from marketing, finance, employees, social media, even to content marketing. Two out of these aspects are the most influential ones that can deliver the best marketing strategy – social media and content marketing. Are both of them different? Yes, they are different, but both have a strong connection with each other. Why? That’s because in order for you to have well-established social media, you have to make sure you have strong content marketing. For that reason, a business’ social media account has to be harmonious with content marketing plan. So, what makes these two aspects special in a business? Keep reading to find out!

Content marketing

Before we go further into discussion, let’s start with the definition of content marketing itself. Content marketing is the process of building and sharing valuable, relevant, and engaging content in order to attract target audience, which aims at generating more new customers or improving business. Content marketing is all about the process of creating content and how you promote your content.

Content marketing and its connection with social media

Now in this part, let’s talk about how content marketing is connected with social media. Content marketing plays a big role for social media marketing, because of these connecting elements that help in shaping content marketing strategy for social media:

  1. Goals
  2. Target audience
  3. Product preview
  4. Communication
  5. Plans

In order to succeed in social media campaigns or marketing, the first thing you have to do is to set your goals or objectives. What do you want to achieve? Who is your target audience? How many people are you targeting? When is your deadline? When you have set your goals and targeted audience, from there, social media starts taking place. On social media, you can start taking notes of those people who seem to be your perfect criteria for your target audience. Once you get the perfect idea about who your target audience will be, you can start previewing your products and categorising them into some parts that depend on your target audience’s age, gender, or locations. From that, you can plan strategies on how to approach your target audience and communicate with them. Yes, even communication needs strategies, because how you deliver a message to your target audience will define what their response will be. With social media combined with strategic planning, you can communicate better with your target audience, your existing customers and even with your potential customers. Now after maintaining good communication with your audience, you can start making marketing plans.

Marketing plan here means that you create a content plan and test it first. In case it does not work out, you try to create solutions based on the problems or things that lack in that content plan. Then re-create the whole plan with new strategies, before executing it on social media. Good combination between content marketing and social media can be the key to great marketing strategies for the future.

Arranging the objectives

When you combine content marketing with social media, you have to be focused on these objectives in mind:

  • Help your target audience understand your products or services better
  • Entertain your target audience with your interesting content
  • Educate your target audience on new trends and best practices
  • Tell your target audience about the challenge of the current situation
  • Convince your target audience to buy your products or use your services and tell them why they need it

When your objectives are well-arranged, you can execute your content marketing plan on social media effectively, and that’s what makes your content marketing work well with social media in harmony. The bottom line is that social media is the marketing tool that can be the bridge of communication between business and consumer in a way that is more interesting with the use of content marketing. For that reason, the harmony in content marketing and social media is important to achieve.

Prime Minister announces tough stance on fruit tampering

Christian Woods
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Prime Minister announces tough stance on fruit tampering

In response to a recent scare, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced tougher penalties for those caught tampering with fruit.

The Prime Minister has used the words “grub” and “coward” to describe people who have hidden needles inside strawberries. He went on to urge people to continue supporting Australian farmers by buying strawberries with caution.

Contaminated strawberries have been detected across 5 states with several investigations still active. A $100,000 reward has been offered by the West Australian Government for information on the matter.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said that around 100 people had called in about contaminated strawberries, but added that many of them may be false alarms.

Mr Morrison has said that tougher laws are needed to deter other would-be offenders, including an increase of the maximum jail sentence for contaminating food from 10 to 15 years.

He also said he would introduce a new offence of ‘recklessly contaminating fruit’ which would carry similar penalties.

The Prime Minister said that the new laws were being drafted and that he wanted them to be passed through Parliament within the week.

Joel Fitzgibbon, the Shadow Agriculture Minister, has said Labor would support the new laws, saying “it looks reasonable”.

Both NRL finals decided by a single point

Christian Woods
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Both NRL finals decided by a single point

Both NRL finals matches on the weekend were decided by single point – in each case a drop goal late in a deadlocked game. The games were incredibly gripping, and in each case featured a number of twists on the way to the eventual result.

The first match of the NRL finals, between the Sharks and Panthers on Friday night, saw Cronulla take an early lead due to their forward dominance and some brilliant play from Matt Moylan. However, in the second half Penrith came back.

With the scores locked at 20 all, Sharks halfback Chad Townsend sent over a penalty goal in the 73rd minute for what would ultimately be the winning score. Panthers half Nathan Cleary had his own last minute goal attempt to tie the scores, but his attempt missed the uprights. The Sharks will have trouble this week against Melbourne, however, as they look to have picked up injuries to inspirational captain Paul Gallen and Luke Lewis to go with Wade Graham being out for the season.

The second match was a gripping affair between the St George Illawarra Dragons and South Sydney Rabbitohs. St George looked to have continued their form from last week, but 3 stunning drop goals from Adam Reynolds (who scored all 13 of Souths’ points) sunk them at the end.

The St George pack performed admirably in keeping the Burgess brothers (who managed to all keep their pants on this week) under control, but Reynolds stole the show and the game after yet another meltdown at a crucial moment from Ben Hunt. Hunt inexplicably decided to run the ball on the last play rather than kicking in the 78th minute, resulting in a turnover on halfway with scores level rather than the Rabbitohs trying to run the ball from their own half.

The Bunnies forward pack looked dead on their feet during the game after a brutal encounter against the Storm the week before. Their outside backs got them through on the weekend, but they will need to recover well to beat the Roosters – especially with the ongoing distraction of the Sam Burgess sexting scandal.

Scott Morrison cancels Council of Australian Governments meeting

Christian Woods
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Scott Morrison cancels Council of Australian Governments meeting

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has cancelled the upcoming Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting, focusing on dealing with internal party matters.

The COAG meeting, set for the 4th of October, was expected to address issues such as funding for Catholic School and public hospitals.

However, the Coalition Government is still in rough shape as it attempts to establish its core agenda following the leadership spill that saw Scott Morrison replace Malcolm Turnbull.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s office said that meeting that was planned in October will now be folded into another COAG meeting later in 2018.

They said that this was “consistent with the usual approach” of two COAG meetings annually. The last COAG meeting was held in February.

The Prime Minister personally called the relevant premiers and chief ministers to inform them of the cancellation.

A spokesperson for Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk expressed disappointment in the meeting being delayed. They cited wanting to negotiate “a better deal for Queensland”.

One major issue for the Government has been a funding dispute around the Catholic school sector, where the new Education Minister Dan Tehan is attempting to broker an agreement. Because of his own background with Catholic education, it is assumed Mr Tehan will have an easier time than his predecessor, Simon Birmingham, in reaching a deal.

The Catholic schools sector has voiced concerns about reviews into its funding instrument, which assesses the income of parents when calculating how much federal funding to give to a school. The Government is also seeking a new energy policy to replace the National Energy Guarantee that was canned in the lead up to Malcolm Turnbull’s political downfall.

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