Latest Australia News
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Ford to end Australian production
Ford is expected to announce it will end vehicle production in Australia.Sky News reports the company will announce the move will come into effect from 2016.Fairfax radio is reporting that it will close its Broadmeadows and Geelong factories.Ford has not officially confirmed any closures, however a spokesperson has said that it would issue a media alert this morning.Federal Assistant Treasurer ...
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Australia shares to weaken after Wall St decline
SYDNEY | Wed May 22, 2013 7:16pm EDT SYDNEY May 23 (Reuters) - Australian shares are seen easing on Thursday after falls on Wall Street over worries that the U.S. Federal Reserve may consider winding back its economic stimulus programme. * Local share price index futures fell 0.4 percent, a 14.4-point discount to the underlying S&P/ASX 200 index close. The benchmark closed 0.3 percent ...
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Australia ‘going backwards’ on asylum policy
Australia%u2019s controversial asylum seeker policies have been slammed by a new Amnesty International report into the global state of human rights. ...
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Road Watch All fine on Adelaide streets
THERE have been no major accidents on metropolitan roads this morning with expected wild weather avoiding the city. Nick Green from the Australian Traffic Network said many roads, including the South Eastern Freeway and the Northern Expressway, were still slippery and reminded motorists to drive to the conditions. Traffic on Anzac Hwy, Main South Rd, Marion Rd and Port Wakefield roads was ...
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Making a poll win a breeze
To continue the weathervane analogy, it is not just a case of which way the wind is blowing but how strongly it is blowing. This means there are any number of positions that groups can adopt: strongly one way or another; weakly one way or another; or pretty much even-handed. Even-handed can still be an important position to take. If a group that usually supports one side is undecided, then the ...
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Path to preserving local funding a vital road to take
Illustration: Karl Hilzinger When I grew up, and some might say that would be rather recently, sealed roads around my district were still a novelty. There was always a sense of excitement as you saw the black tar approaching as you drove along the dirt road. It meant you could wind the window down, and prior to airconditioning, that was quite something. I remember the sign saying ...
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Memo all newsreaders from Macarthurs proud citizens Campbelltown and Campsie are 40km apart
Campbelltown is a part of south-western Sydney - but it no longer wants to be. As far as TV and radio news coverage is concerned, that is. Residents of Campbelltown, Camden and the Picton-based Wollondilly Shire are fed up with being thrown into the same geographic area as Lakemba, Punchbowl and Campsie in a distant, unconnected part of Sydney. So that's why the local Fairfax newspaper I ...
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No logic to cycle of abuse on roads
Illustration: Edd Aragon Here's a first. Seen tooling around Surry Hills before Easter, a tandem with a difference. The front human is lycra-clad, leaning in, pedaling hard. The other, behind, reclines. He is calm, sweatless, business suited, working the phone. Unsure whether it's micro-industry or performance art, I log it anyway as a new local life-form, Limosinius cyclus ...
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Over to public to seal the deal for fantastic four
On the big issues Australians generally do the right thing, and make the right collective judgment. They prefer positive to negative. This is why the blockbuster successes on TV in recent years have been about celebration, not humiliation. I am now counting on the Australian public to do the right thing by Miss Murphy. Miss Murphy, from a Tongan immigrant family, works for a church in western ...
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Taxing matters as GST takes centre stage again
'When the history of this Parliament, this nation and this century is written, June 30, 1999, will be recorded as a day of fundamental injustice - an injustice which is real, an injustice which is not simply conjured up by the fleeting rhetoric of politicians …'' This quaint overreach came from Kevin Rudd way back in 1999, as John Howard's ...
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Renovation and geography are worlds apart
''Art deco is Miami,'' another paint-spattered House Ruler says (if the other show's contestants are called Blockheads, what else are we to do with these?). For their part, Jane and Plinio are convinced their direction is simple to follow. Well, Jane is. Plinio does a lot of nodding. Jane obviously spends much time wondering how to define things, since she decides that ...
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Heart Victory divided on draw
It was a tale of two cities as Melbourne's A-League clubs reacted to the 2013-14 season draw released on Wednesday, with Heart happy with its lot and Victory far from impressed by the scheduling. The two meet in the opening round in a Victory home game at Etihad Stadium, but the fixture is not a stand-alone event to mark the new season's opening. That honour goes to Sydney FC, which ...
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Breaking the sheeps back with political correctness
. In this incisive historical and sociological study of Australia, Cater describes a place where ''cultural wealth'' is now afforded greater value than ''financial wealth'', where one of our most successful businesspeople, Gina Rinehart, is more often a subject of derision than celebration, and where ''the creators of common wealth are today ...
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Enough of the stupidity the kids are all right
Illustration: Michael Leunig. Imagine being the child of Lyle Shelton. It must be awful to be brought up among bigotry and intolerance. Imagine what it does to your sense of yourself and of the world around you. I just hope those kids are OK, because, in an ideal world, you wouldn't let those sorts of people be parents. There really ought to be a law. Too harsh? You're probably ...
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GST may be the answer to balancing the books
GST heading up? Will the pressure to hike the goods and services tax be irresistible for government after September's election? Tax expert Prof. John Freebairn argues for a tax ...
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Clarke happy to talk up Ashes
There is absolutely no danger that Australia will follow England's lead and ban its players from talking about the Ashes, with James Pattinson revealing the bowlers' plan to ''open up'' England by targeting the captain and best batsman, Alastair Cook. England coach Andy Flower has muzzled his players, who have been told they will face disciplinary action if they ...
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Khawaja to turn over a new leaf in Ashes series
Usman Khawaja says he is misunderstood by some in the Cricket Australia hierarchy, admitting that a casual exterior was often mistaken for a bad attitude by those that ''don't really know me well enough''. The 26-year-old has pinpointed the Ashes series in July and August as the battleground to finally confirm himself as a worthy and permanent member of Australia's ...
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Scott will master anchor ban say fellow champions
Two of his fellow Australian major winners believe Adam Scott will rise above the anchoring ban and continue to be a world force, provided he stays positive about the issue. Ian Baker-Finch and Geoff Ogilvy were quick to suggest the newly crowned Masters champion could continue his surge in world golf, despite the fact the governing bodies on Monday confirmed a ban to outlaw the putting method ...
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Goodtime gang takes a Freudian slip down to lows of biblical proportions
was a Freudian slip. It dramatised - deep breath - Freud's structural model of the human psyche. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) was the Id, the instinct become rampant, a sort of mother-hating overweight man-child, a veritable psych ward of mental illnesses with a fondness for all pharmaceuticals. Stu was the super ego, the sensible dentist, the limiter, the thinker. Bradley Cooper's ...
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Shades of jailhouse rock as Ai recalls prison stay
When the rebel artist Ai Weiwei was illegally detained in 2011, he recounts, his young paramilitary guards asked him to sing for them. He belted out decades-old Communist revolutionary tunes, and they were stunned that he knew them, he said. Now Ai has answered the guards' request in a different key. He has presented them, and the world, with his first heavy-metal music video, one with ...
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Hardy survivors of Tornado Alley take stock of losses
The scale of destruction in Moore on the fringe of Oklahoma City was so vast that during the first full day of recovery authorities could do little more for dazed survivors than clear the roads and sling a protective perimeter around them. Once the dead and injured were rushed from the shattered streets, police and national guards set up roadblocks in places as arbitrary as the twister ...
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Actors latest role - a very switched on Murdoch
indicating whether or not the specified user agent represents a smart phone. * If any of the regular expressions are updated then they should be updated in ...
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French paper makes a point ... in English
"Language of Shakespeare": The front page of left-leaning French newspaper Liberation was printed in English. A row over a proposal to allow French universities to teach some classes in English took a fresh turn ...
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Hunters fire warning shot at farmer who caught them on property
Police are looking for two men who bailed up a farmer at gunpoint and fired a warning shot near Orange after he caught them illegally hunting on his land. The 43-year-old property owner was working on his farm when he heard shots and then saw two men chasing ...
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Popes laying on of hands stirs devil of a debate
Is Pope Francis an exorcist? The question has bubbled up ever since the Pope laid his hands on the head of a young man in a wheelchair after celebrating Sunday Mass in St Peter's Square. The young man heaved deeply a half-dozen times, shook, then slumped in his wheelchair as the pontiff prayed over him. The television station of the Italian bishops' conference reported on Monday ...
Sydney Focus
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Sydney's scandalous toxic waste plan by government
A controversial waste relocation project in Sydney has created anger in a community with a lower income than the Sydney suburb from which the waste is being removed, with many suggesting a class-bias in the city government.
Hunter’s Hill is a predominantly wealthy suburb of Sydney with average house prices of around AUD $1.3 million and a harbour-side community made up predominantly of professionals, managers and other traditionally middle to high-income workers. Penrith, on the other hand, located just over 50 kilometres from Sydney’s CBD, is not as affluent, with average property values of around AUD $280,000. Read more
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