NSW police allegedly pepper-spray child at Palestine-Lebanon rallyJordyn BeazleyNSW police allegedly pepper-sprayed a 13-year-old child and two others after officers attempted to pull a Hezbollah flag off a protester at the Palestine-Lebanon rally in Sydney, according to legal observers.Legal observers at the rally on Sunday said police deployed pepper spray “indiscriminately” on the crowd after the protester did not surrender the flag.Waving a Hezbollah flag at a protest did not necessarily meet the threshold for arrest, according to the Australian federal police.“The mere public display of a prohibited symbol on its own does not meet the threshold of a commonwealth offence,” a spokesperson said, adding that the symbol must also be displayed alongside conduct considered to insult or intimate people to be considered an offence.The spokesperson said police have the power to direct a person to remove a prohibited symbol from public display, but they do not have the power to remove the prohibited symbol from public display themselves. However, a person can be charged for failing to comply with police officers’ directions to follow an order to remove a symbol.A number of people at the Sunday rally were holding pictures of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike the day before the rally.Hundreds of demonstrators hold flags and pictures of Hassan Nasrallah, late leader of the Lebanese group Hezbollah, at a protest rally in Sydney on Sunday. Photograph: Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty ImagesThe flag is considered a prohibited symbol given Australia has designated Hezbollah a terrorist organisation. A protester who spoke to Guardian Australia on condition of anonymity said the flag is viewed by some as a symbol of the liberation of southern Lebanon from the occupation of Israel.A volunteer medic who attended to the 13-year-old after they were allegedly pepper-sprayed said “the child is OK, but was definitely shaken by police violence”.“We strongly discourage the use of pepper spray by police … during protest as it’s far too easy to cause harm to attendees or bystanders,” the medic said.Adam al-Hayek, a member of Legal Observers NSW (LONSW), said:
The use of OC spray at yesterday’s protest was not only harmful to children and other protesters, but was also unreasonable and without lawful justification.
This pattern of unnecessary and unwarranted weapon use is reckless and a risk to public safety. Dangerous weapons have no place at protests.
Guardian Australia contacted NSW police for comment.ShareUpdated at 09.19 CESTKey eventsShow key events onlyPlease turn on JavaScript to use this featureWhat we learned, Monday 30 SeptemberAs we draw to the end of our live news stream this Monday, here’s a look at what’s been keeping us busy:

Qantas engineers went on strike for two hours as part of their push for a 15% pay rise – the action delayed some flights, but not many.

NSW police allegedly pepper-sprayed a 13-year-old child at a Palestine-Lebanon rally in Sydney, according to legal observers.

The foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, condemned the actions of protesters who waved Hezbollah flags at a pro-Palestine protest in Melbourne at the weekend.

It was a big day for treasurer Jim Chalmers, who delivered a $15.8bn budget surplus – and said the bumper figure was down to low expenditure, not high taxes, and did not come at the expense of cost-of-living relief.

LNP leader David Crisafulli kicked off the Queensland election campaign a day early, unsurprisingly focusing on youth crime.

The federal government was accused of throwing “small change” at the looming bird flu threat.

Confidence that the Reserve Bank may soon be cutting interest rates seemed to be spreading.

Brisbane’s thumping grand final triumph over Sydney was the most-watched AFL decider since 2021, we learned.

The Australian share market ended the month with a fresh all-time high while the local currency is also near a 19-month high.

And, with October comes the official start of the bushfire season.
That’s all for now. Thank you for joining us – we’ll be back bright and early tomorrow.ShareUpdated at 10.25 CESTThe Australia Palestine Advocacy Network said it is “dismayed” by the attention politicians and the media is giving to a “handful of flags” at the weekend’s Palestine and Lebanon solidarity protests, “rather than confronting Israel’s expansion of violence across the region.”APAN president Nasser Mashni said:
This obsession with flags serves as a convenient distraction, allowing our leaders to continue to ignore the massacre of the people of Lebanon and Palestine, and other Arabs, and sidestep the urgent conversations about our complicity in genocide.
Share‘Proper regulations’ needed to protect telco customers during crises, Hanson-Young saysGreens senator Sarah Hanson-Young says “proper regulations” are needed to protect telco customers in the event of crises.Speaking with the ABC about the Optus outage last November, she said “millions of Australians, thousands and thousands of small businesses” were failed that day.
We need to make sure there’s some proper regulations about communicating where there’s a crisis. We’re asking for … requirements for telecommunication companies to share roaming ability, so if a big telco goes down, actually it’s not the consumer or the user, the member of the public, that’s left in the lurch.
Transitioning between providers was possible, she said, but required regulation, direction “and some proper rules put in place”.Unrelatedly, she said she did not see any Hezbollah support at a pro-Palestinian protest in Adelaide over the weekend.“It was a very peaceful event. But it was a very sombre event,” she said.Referring to Hezbollah support seen at protests in Melbourne and Sydney over the weekend, she said distractions from well-meaning events expressing community “heartache” over the Middle East were “always frustrating”.
From what I saw in Adelaide, people just want peace. They want peace and they want our government to be stronger in bringing that about.
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAPShareUpdated at 10.06 CEST‘Results are clear’: Sydney’s queer community does not want police to march in Mardi Gras paradeSydney’s queer community does not want the police to participate in the Mardi Gras parade, according to a report released today.Pride in Protest said that after putting pressure on Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, its organisers agreed to seek direction from the queer community earlier this year on whether the NSW police should be allowed to participate.Mardi Gras organisers ran a series of town hall meetings in August and September, with the results showing a majority of participants not wanting the police to participate in the Mardi Gras Parade, Pride in Protest said.The Mardi Gras board will now put a motion to Mardi Gras members at the 2024 AGM in December to disallow a police float in the annual parade, Pride in Protest said.Luc Velez, Pride in Protest member and Mardi Gras board director said:
The qualitative and quantitative results of the consultation are clear – our community doesn’t want the police to march.
The community town halls heard story after story about how queer people feel unsafe around police. People spoke about police using slurs, of them not taking sexual assault victim-survivors seriously because they were queer, and of police deliberately misgendering and deadnaming people in custody.
Read more below:ShareUpdated at 10.08 CESTDriver fined after going more than 50km over speed limit in roadworks zoneA Tasmanian driver has been handed a $1,161.50 infringement notice and had his vehicle seized after being caught speeding at 96km/h in a 40km/h roadworks zone.The 42-year-old man from Newstead also faces a four-month disqualification from driving after police stopped the Nissan X-Trail he was driving on the East Tamar Highway at Long Reach this afternoon.Tasmania police inspector Aleena Crack said:
By targeting motorists travelling through roadworks we’re making sure the employees at those work sites get to go about their jobs in a safe environment.
In many cases, speeding in these sorts of areas is due to driver inattention.
ShareUpdated at 09.44 CESTAustralia third-biggest market for child exploitation material from the PhilippinesAmy RemeikisAustralia is one of the biggest markets for child exploitation material from the Philippines, with experts pushing for the government to legislate a social media duty of care to protect children from growing harm.Data from the Philippines anti-money laundering council tracing the financial origin of money paid to view child exploitation material or live streams of children being abused, placed Australia behind only the United States and United Kingdom.That backs an Australian Institute of Criminology study from 2020 which found 256 Australians had spent $1.3m over 13 years to access child abuse material from the Philippines.The Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society has spent the day hearing about the dangers of social media, and the need for regulations to protect children, in particular, from danger.That included the sexual exploitation of children, including on live streams.International Justice Mission Australia CEO, David Braga, said social media platforms remained the “easiest platform people can get access to” and more needed to be done to force the social media companies to take action.“It’s the right time to take this action,” he said.
There may be other places that we then have to act again in future, but right now, people are being harmed today, easily, through these platforms. That has to stop.
Braga said social media companies could use AI technology to block material before it was shown from the broadcasting end, as well as blocking it from reaching the receiver (he used the example of existing technology known as Harm Block).“We’re talking about some of the most sophisticated technology companies on the planet,” he said.
It shouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility for them to also put in place these types of controls and increasingly improve it, using the AI capability to increase the level of precision around detection and blocking it.
Braga said putting a legal duty of care on social media companies (and tech companies which create devices) would move the companies to ensure their products protected children from harm.
We would love to see that legal duty of care and increased penalties. And if you combine that with what I’ve already mentioned about the fact that the technology exists, they can do this.
ShareUpdated at 09.38 CESTNSW police allegedly pepper-spray child at Palestine-Lebanon rallyJordyn BeazleyNSW police allegedly pepper-sprayed a 13-year-old child and two others after officers attempted to pull a Hezbollah flag off a protester at the Palestine-Lebanon rally in Sydney, according to legal observers.Legal observers at the rally on Sunday said police deployed pepper spray “indiscriminately” on the crowd after the protester did not surrender the flag.Waving a Hezbollah flag at a protest did not necessarily meet the threshold for arrest, according to the Australian federal police.“The mere public display of a prohibited symbol on its own does not meet the threshold of a commonwealth offence,” a spokesperson said, adding that the symbol must also be displayed alongside conduct considered to insult or intimate people to be considered an offence.The spokesperson said police have the power to direct a person to remove a prohibited symbol from public display, but they do not have the power to remove the prohibited symbol from public display themselves. However, a person can be charged for failing to comply with police officers’ directions to follow an order to remove a symbol.A number of people at the Sunday rally were holding pictures of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike the day before the rally.Hundreds of demonstrators hold flags and pictures of Hassan Nasrallah, late leader of the Lebanese group Hezbollah, at a protest rally in Sydney on Sunday. Photograph: Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty ImagesThe flag is considered a prohibited symbol given Australia has designated Hezbollah a terrorist organisation. A protester who spoke to Guardian Australia on condition of anonymity said the flag is viewed by some as a symbol of the liberation of southern Lebanon from the occupation of Israel.A volunteer medic who attended to the 13-year-old after they were allegedly pepper-sprayed said “the child is OK, but was definitely shaken by police violence”.“We strongly discourage the use of pepper spray by police … during protest as it’s far too easy to cause harm to attendees or bystanders,” the medic said.Adam al-Hayek, a member of Legal Observers NSW (LONSW), said:
The use of OC spray at yesterday’s protest was not only harmful to children and other protesters, but was also unreasonable and without lawful justification.
This pattern of unnecessary and unwarranted weapon use is reckless and a risk to public safety. Dangerous weapons have no place at protests.
Guardian Australia contacted NSW police for comment.ShareUpdated at 09.19 CESTPeter HannamBoM model still downplays La Niña prospect but outlook looks relatively wetWhether a La Niña will form later this year in the Pacific has been a contentious matter for much of the year. Judging by the Bureau of Meteorology’s latest model run, conditions don’t point to one forming this year:@BOM_au’s latest model runs point to conditions in the Pacific remaining neutral – with La Nina thresholds (at least according to historic levels) not being reached. (Other agencies, eg NOAA, are still forecasting a La Nina forming by November.) pic.twitter.com/8T8QbezZE2— @[email protected] (@p_hannam) September 30, 2024To be sure, BoM has been an outlier for a while, with the US counterparts NOAA still rating the chance of a La Niña forming by November as almost a three-in-four chance (though they do have a lower bar to clear).BoM will release its fortnightly climate drivers update tomorrow, and we’ll see how those other models compare. (It’s likely the agency will retain its “La Niña Watch” status.)Meanwhile, in the Indian Ocean, BoM sees conditions tilting towards the negative dipole phase (measuring relative sea surface temperatures in that basin’s west and east), which usually means wetter than usual conditions for much of Australia.Meanwhile out west, the Indian Ocean Dipole will approach its negative threshold by November, @Bom_au’s main model forecasts. That’s the “wetter than normal” phase for Australia – and help explain why BoM is forecasting for a relatively damp October-January period. pic.twitter.com/d3CnGVHzEn— @[email protected] (@p_hannam) September 30, 2024As our esteemed colleague Graham Readfearn recently reported in this article, climate change – particularly hotter seas almost everywhere – makes it harder to link, say, La Niñas with wetter than typical weather for eastern Australia.That’s why BoM prefers people heed its seasonal outlooks instead. The October-January period looks like being unusually damp, La Niña or not.That beach umbrella, in other words, may end up being dual use this summer.ShareUpdated at 08.50 CESTMiddle East conflict inflaming tensions in Australian communitiesStaying with finance minister Katy Gallagher’s conversation with Greg Jennett on Afternoon Briefing in which the finance minister said that the escalation of conflict in the Middle East had raised tensions within Australia – and that the opposition was adding to community divides.“Things are obviously very tense in the Middle East at the moment. And we’re a large multicultural community here in Australia, with large populations of people who come from those countries or have family who live there … I think you can see that rising tension here that we’ve been seeing really for the past year, since the conflict started from October 7 onwards,” she said.
I think the job for government is to continue to work on calls for unity and calm. We’re a successful multicultural nation for a reason. And, you know, we don’t need division … It’s no surprise we’ve seen Peter Dutton out again today, stoking it with calls around visa status, he’s all about stoking division and raising tensions and I guess from our point of view we want to calm tensions down.
A Hezbollah flag is waved during a Pro-Palestine rally for Gaza and Lebanon at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne on Sunday. Photograph: James Ross/AAPShareUpdated at 08.47 CESTCoalition running ‘scare campaign’ over negative gearing, Gallagher saysWhen asked about the Albanese government’s stance on negative gearing, Katy Gallagher told the ABC that she didn’t know what the opposition was “on about” in its mounting of what she called a “scare campaign”.
Our policy is clear. [Jim Chalmers] said that today. It’s around supply. It is focused 100% on supply.
How do we build more houses, how do we get more properties available for renting, more affordable and social housing, and our help to buy scheme, [get] more people out of renting into home ownership?
That is the problem in the economy at the moment. In housing. It’s around supply of it. And you know, that’s 100% of our focus. So I don’t know what the opposition is going on about. You know, trying to run a scare campaign, essentially, around our policy which is focused on supply.
ShareUpdated at 08.25 CESTOver to Afternoon Briefing, where back-to-back budget surpluses are on the agenda.A big contribution, the ABC’s Greg Jennett said, was $10bn in underspends. He asked finance minister Katy Gallagher how much of that would slide to the next year.“Some of it will be moved into the next year. And we were clear about that today,” she said.
But really, the story behind the two surpluses is the work over two years. We found $80bn worth of savings in our three budgets handed down.
We have returned revenue to the budget when revenue is coming in, and all of those things matter to the numbers that we delivered today … Yes, there’s some movement of funding around. And some will go into this financial year. But the two surpluses is a story of our responsible economic management.
ShareUpdated at 08.36 CESTNAB brings forward its expectation of when the Reserve Bank will start rate cutsPeter HannamConfidence that the Reserve Bank may soon be cutting interest rates seems to be spreading (even if RBA governor Michele Bullock likes to downplay hopes lest they fan a pickup in inflation).NAB, one of the big four banks, today brought forward the timing when they think the central bank will begin easing monetary policy to February. (They had been the most pessimistic, reckoning the RBA would wait until May. NAB is now in line with ANZ and Westpac while the upbeat economists at CBA have pencilled in December – just two RBA meets away.)“[T]he balance of risks has likely shifted sufficiently for the RBA to feel comfortable cutting a little sooner than we earlier expected,” NAB said. “It remains our view that RBA cuts will be later and shallower than many peer central banks.”The US Federal Reserve slashed its key interest rate by 50 basis points a couple of weeks ago, joining counterparts in New Zealand, the UK and the European Central Bank in lowering rates in recent months.One reason for the relative slowness in Australia is that inflation didn’t rise as much here as in many other regions, and the RBA has been trying to retain job gains in the local economy since the start of the Covid pandemic.September quarter inflation figures, due out on 30 October, will probably determine when the RBA actually starts cutting interest rates. Its next board meeting follows a few days later, wrapping up on 5 November (with US presidential elections later that day, Australia time, potentially making redundant any number of predictions on interest rates or anything else).ShareUpdated at 08.04 CESTGender pay gap in focus of feminised workforce reviewDisability workers, early childhood educators and health staff could be in line for a pay rise to narrow the gender pay gap, which is sitting at 11.5%, AAP reports.But any move to lift the wages in highly feminised industries would have to be gradually phased in to manage workforce and economic risks, the federal government says.The Fair Work Commission is reviewing undervalued award wages in industries with a high female workforce such as health, social work, pharmacies, disability and early childhood care.Any decision to increase award wages would have “broader implications” for workplaces and the economy, the federal government said in its submission to the commission.While the submission did not say how much the government would want wages to rise, an “orderly transition” would be needed.“Any wage increases arising from the gender-based undervaluation identified by the commission should be implemented in a measured and responsible manner that manages workforce, fiscal and macroeconomic risks,” the submission said.“If the commission concludes that pay increases are warranted, the commonwealth is likely to support a staged or phased process for implementation, particularly for any significant increases.”ShareUpdated at 07.51 CEST