The decision not to press for criminal charges against corrupt officials involved in the robodebt scheme is “grossly disappointing”, a victim of the unlawful program says. 

A National Anti-Corruption Commission inquiry on Wednesday found two of six people referred to it for investigation engaged in corrupt conduct but ruled out referring them to face criminal charges. 

The remaining four were cleared of corruption, including former prime minister Scott Morrison, who initiated the scheme while social services minister. 

The outcome came as no surprise to Melbourne mother Felicity de Somerville, who had $11,500 drained by Centrelink from her bank account without warning under the scheme in 2017.

“Grossly disappointing but not surprising,” she said when asked by AAP what she made of the decision not to push for criminal charges.

“I don’t think any Australian should be surprised they’re not going to take accountability for this and that no one’s going to get in trouble, because that’s the culture we’re breeding.”

The former nurse had just finished maternity leave when she found her account had been debited the equivalent of six months wages overnight despite having agreed to a payment plan. 

It left her unable to afford medical care for her daughter, who was unwell at the time and caused immense distress for her and her husband, a welder then earning $45,000 a year. 

“It really was horrible but I count myself lucky compared to what some others went through,” Ms de Somerville said. 

The watchdog found ex-departmental general manager of business integrity Mark Withnell carried out corrupt conduct by intentionally misleading the Department of Social Services during the preparation of a cabinet submission in 2015.

It also found department deputy secretary Serena Wilson carried out corrupt conduct by misleading the Commonwealth Ombudsman during an investigation in 2017.

But the watchdog said the findings would not be referred to the Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions to consider criminal charges.

“There was insufficient admissible evidence to establish the alleged offences against either Mr Withnell or Ms Wilson beyond reasonable doubt,” the report said.

“Key admissions and statements made during this investigation are not admissible in criminal proceedings.”

Mr Morrison was found not to be corrupt.

His failure to realise that bureaucratic advice was misleading was put down to shortcomings by federal departments.

He welcomed the findings in a lengthy statement on Wednesday, sympathising with those affected by the scheme and insisting department officials were to blame. 

“The NACC has rightly concluded that ministers must be able to rely on the accuracy of the advice provided by their departments, especially on matters of technical expertise, and receive that advice in good faith,” he said.

“Whether they follow that advice is a matter for those ministers. In this case, I relied upon, and followed, that advice. 

“The departmental advice and warranties provided to ministers were wrong.”

The corruption watchdog did not make recommendations in its final report, which followed referrals from the royal commission into the robodebt scheme.

Between 2016 and 2019, the former coalition government’s robodebt scheme recovered more than $750 million from almost 400,000 people.

Many welfare recipients were falsely accused of owing the government money and the program was linked to several suicides.

The Albanese government has promised it will release a sealed section of the robodebt royal commission’s final report when the investigation ends.

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Former ASIO chief Dennis Richardson has resigned from his position as special adviser to the anti-Semitism royal commission.

Commissioner Virginia Bell announced Mr Richardson’s sudden departure on Wednesday night, as her inquiry prepares for its initial report by the end of April.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the royal commission following the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, in which 15 people were killed on December 14 when a father and son opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration.

“As I noted at the commission’s initial hearing, Mr Richardson was uniquely well placed to advise on the material to be sought from our intelligence and security agencies in order to assess the effectiveness of their preparedness for, and response to, a terrorist attack,” Ms Bell said in a statement.

“Thanks to Mr Richardson and the senior members of his team, Tony Sheehan, the former Commonwealth counter-terrorism co-ordinator and deputy director-general of ASIO, and Peter Baxter, a former deputy secretary at the Department of Defence and director-general of AusAID, work on the interim report is well advanced.”

Ms Bell thanked Mr Richardson “for the valuable contribution he has made to the commission”.

Her statement did not provide reasons for Mr Richardson’s resignation.

Mr Albanese’s government initially refused to call a royal commission into the Bondi massacre, instead tapping Mr Richardson to head a review of the adequacy of intelligence and law enforcement agencies before the attack.

Following weeks of political pressure, Mr Albanese relented and announced broader inquiry to be headed by Ms Bell, a former High Court judge, to investigate anti-Semitism and any failures in the nation’s intelligence services.

Mr Richardson’s review was folded into the new royal commission.

The inquiry is due to deliver its interim report to the government by April 30.

German sports car maker Porsche says it plans to cut further jobs after posting a 91 per cent drop in 2025 profits.

Porsche chief executive Michael Leiters said a process to streamline the firm had already been “put in place” before he took the job earlier this year.

This process would now be “tightened even further” and include “further job cuts,” he said during the presentation of Porsche’s 2025 figures in Stuttgart.

Leiters did not give a specific number of positions to be slashed, citing planned talks with all parties involved.

On Wednesday, Leiters also announced plans to streamline the management structure in an effort to alleviate the car maker’s woes.

Under a previous agreement between the company and employee representatives, 1900 jobs are to be cut in the Stuttgart region, where the company is based, by 2029.

Porsche reported on Wednesday that its net profit slumped in 2025 as billions of euros in costs linked to a shift back towards combustion-engine models weighed on earnings.

Net profit fell 91.4 per cent to 310 million euro ($A503 million), the DAX-listed sports car maker said, compared with nearly 3.6 billion euro a year earlier.

Revenue dropped by almost a 10th to about 36.3 billion euro.

The company faced several headwinds last year: sales in China slowed, US tariffs added significant costs and demand for Porsche’s electric models came in well below expectations.

Former chief executive Oliver Blume revised the company’s strategy before stepping down, expanding the range of combustion-engine vehicles to support sales.

The shift has proved costly.

Porsche booked about 2.4 billion euro in expenses linked to the strategy change.

The wind-down of a battery subsidiary added about 700 million euro in charges while US tariffs had a similar financial impact.

Total special charges therefore amounted to roughly 3.9 billion euro.

Operating profit fell 92.7 per cent to 413 million euro.

In the core car business, excluding financial services, operating profit dropped to 90 million euro from about 5.3 billion euro a year earlier, according to figures from parent company Volkswagen.

Porsche expects business to improve in the current year but warned market conditions would remain challenging.

New chief executive Leiters said geopolitical uncertainty persists and potential effects of the latest developments in the Middle East had not been factored into the outlook.

Leiters took over from Blume at the start of the year, after Blume shifted his focus to leading Volkswagen.

Teachers and politicians have railed against NAPLAN testing after a widespread outage caused chaos across thousands of schools.

Testing was halted suddenly on Wednesday morning after students and teachers were unable to access the writing component of the annual assessment online.

Teachers are calling for the assessment to be scrapped altogether, after many schools were forced to postpone the re-taking of tests. 

NAPLAN was riddled with problems and should be replaced with assessments led by teachers in the classroom, a national teachers’ union said.

“Today’s outages coupled with the high-stakes nature of the assessment risks increasing student anxiety and will add to teachers’ increasing workloads,” Australian Education Union federal president Correna Haythorpe said.

“There will also be questions about the accuracy of the NAPLAN results once these assessments finally take place.”

The federal opposition’s education spokesman questioned the validity of the data collected on Wednesday and said the minister responsible should explain how the problems will be rectified.

“Tonight there will be 1.4 million young people asking their parents questions about today’s abandoned NAPLAN tests and what it means for them,” Julian Leeser said.

“This also creates deep systemic problems. This failure could skew the entire dataset.”

The Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA) confirmed the outage affected students trying to log in to the online test portal.

Grade 3 students were not impacted because their assessment is completed by hand.

“This issue is being urgently investigated by our technology provider, Education Services Australia, who run the platform,” ACARA said in a statement.

More than 1.3 million students in grades 3, 5, 7 and 9 were set to begin testing on Wednesday, although the full extent of the outage is not yet clear.

An authority spokesperson confirmed testing had resumed after 12pm on Wednesday after issues relating to the online portal were fixed. 

“We apologise for the disruption to students and schools, and thank them for their patience,” the spokesperson said.

“The issue has now been resolved and schools have been informed they can resume testing.”

Educators took to social media to describe the confusion and interruptions following the widespread outage. 

A Victorian secondary school teacher told AAP the disruption was difficult to manage, with students left nervous and unsettled by the outage. 

They hope NAPLAN would return to pen and paper.

The national assessment – which tests reading, writing and language conventions, along with numeracy – transitioned to a fully online format in 2022.

NSW’s education standards authority Paul Martin confirmed students across the state had reported the online portal being slow.

“Some students were able to log on and some weren’t. It reached a point where ACARA provided advice to all schools to pause the test,” he said. 

NSW Education Minister Prue Car asked students and parents not to panic, confirming there was a wide window to undertake the testing.

Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority chief executive Andrew Smith reported many students had been experiencing difficulty on Wednesday morning. 

Schools that did not experience troubles continued testing as planned. 

“We don’t have actual numbers yet, but it would seem that there’s enough schools for us to be concerned,” Mr Smith told ABC Melbourne. 

Victorian exams have been plagued by blunders in recent years. 

In 2024, a mistake allowed pupils to access questions in advance from instructional cover sheets at the front of online booklets. 

The debacle affected 65 of 116 Victorian Certificate of Education exams and led to the sacking of the state curriculum and assessment authority’s entire board following a review.

Fossil fuel zealotry, not economics, fuels the anti-climate views of a number of Malcolm Turnbull’s former coalition colleagues, he says, including the newly elected Nationals leader.

The former prime minister says an increasing proportion of Liberals and Nationals are living in a “right-wing, fact-free, culture war bubble of anger-tainment”.

During his time in politics, Mr Turnbull was unable to persuade a group of mostly Nationals politicians it was unfeasible to build multiple state-funded coal power stations when the economics favoured renewables. 

The group, including newly installed Nationals leader Matt Canavan and now-One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce, were not interested in the financials, he said.

“It’s religion for them,” Mr Turnbull said at Sydney Climate Action Week.

“That’s basically the problem, they are unshackled from reality.”

Senator Canavan, a vocal critic of net zero, has taken on the leadership of the Nationals following David Littleproud’s shock resignation on Tuesday.

Laying out his energy policy position in a press conference, Senator Canavan said lower power prices should always take precedence over climate or renewables targets.

“That is not the goal of this government. Their goal is to meet arbitrary emissions or renewable energy targets which are not delivering for the Australian people,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

Australia is transitioning away from a grid powered by coal-fired electricity generation to a network dominated by renewables and storage.

The federal government is pursuing clean energy to meet its climate goals and to replace ageing coal stations with the cheapest sources of new generation.

Communications expert Ed Coper, CEO of marketing agency Populares, says the energy transition has become a target of online misinformation campaigns – the “new front” of the climate wars.

On social media platforms, the biggest beneficiaries are those able to weaponise algorithms that reward outrage.

The risk was fringe views gaining undue dominance, Mr Coper said during the panel discussion.

“That is the real danger, that the support and the social license that the energy transition is experiencing in Australia is softer than we realise.”

Kate Hook, co-convenor of Climate 200 and former independent candidate for Calare, described the 2025 federal election as Australia’s biggest-ever co-ordinated disinformation campaign.

Fossil fuel-aligned organisations deployed millions to sway the outcome of the election away from climate action, she said, often under the guise of third-party organisations.

What’s in a name?

For international pop star Katy Perry and Australian fashion designer Katie Perry, the answer can be found in a slight variation in spelling and more than six years of litigation.

The fight over the rights to the Katie/Katy Perry name began when the designer – legally known as Katie Taylor – sued the performer behind Firework and Roar for trademark infringement.

The US singer, whose real name is Katheryn Hudson, hit back with a bid to cancel the designer’s trademark, arguing it was likely to harm her reputation or deceive shoppers.

The dispute dragged on for over six years after the pop star successfully overturned an initial Federal Court ruling that the designer’s trademark had been infringed.

But it came to a decisive end on Wednesday when the nation’s highest court decided the David-and-Goliath battle in favour of the Australian.

The designer’s mark was not in breach of trademark law and was not likely to harm the Dark Horse singer’s reputation or cause confusion, the High Court ruled in a majority decision.

Ms Taylor’s lawyers argued during the hearing that shoppers were savvy enough to distinguish between the two spellings and wouldn’t connect the label to the pop star.

She claimed she didn’t know of the singer’s existence when she first sought the clothing trademark in 2007.

But by the time Ms Taylor applied to trademark the name Katie Perry, she had heard I Kissed a Girl on the radio and bought the song on iTunes.

There was no way she could have known how famous Ms Hudson would become, her lawyer told the High Court in September.

But the pop star’s lawyers contended Ms Taylor should have made a complaint earlier instead of waiting 10 years after the sale of Katy Perry-branded merchandise began.

The designer faced the possibility of having her designer’s mark de-registered after her 2023 win in the Federal Court was overturned on appeal.

The appeal judges found the Katie Perry trademark was deceptively similar to the pop star’s brand and was likely to cause confusion. 

But the appeal judges made a mistake in concluding there were grounds to cancel the trademark, the High Court determined in its majority ruling.

The decision marks the end of a tug-of-war that has been running since 2009, when Ms Hudson became aware the designer had applied to register the Katie Perry trademark.

According to court documents, the superstar told her talent agent Steven Jensen to “keep me outta it entirely”.

“I wouldn’t have even bothered with this (if) mtv hadn’t picked up this silliness,” she wrote in an email.

“Dumb b****! Rawr!”

The singer has been ordered to pay Ms Taylor’s legal bill, with the figure to be determined at a later date.

The designer has been contacted for comment.

Ahead of their departure for the world’s most prestigious art fair, a visual artist and a curator have no time to hold grudges against detractors who waged a campaign to cancel them.

Khaled Sabsabi has been given the rare honour of exhibiting at Venice Biennale’s main exhibition and in the Australia Pavilion.

It comes after he and collaborator Michael Dagostino were axed in February 2025 as the country’s official entry.

Sabsabi explained how seeing his spiritual guide recently in Lebanon rooted him after the debacle.

“When I sat with my sheikh, we talked about what does it mean to love someone that may have hurt you or disrespected you,” he said.

“In the end, it came back to: if the divine and the creator are built on mercy and empathy, then why can’t a human aspire to those attributes?”

He described his upcoming installations “as one body with two limbs”.

The duo were ditched after two of Sabsabi’s early artworks, one showing slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and another depicting the 9/11 attacks, were criticised by conservative MPs in federal parliament.

That set off a chain reaction.

Days after glowingly announcing them as the country’s Venice representatives, the national arts funding body, Creative Australia, cancelled their selection and tore up a sizeable contract.

The board’s decision was made on the grounds Sabsabi and Dagostino’s selection would cause a “prolonged and divisive debate”, chief executive Adrian Collette said at the time.

Arts Minister Tony Burke distanced himself from the decision, denying any political interference, while admitting he spoke with the CEO hours before the board meeting that sealed the artists’ fate.

The cancellation spectacularly backfired with more than 4000 people, including some of Australia’s most respected artists, calling for the pair to be reinstated.

Creative Australia chair Robert Morgan has since retired, replaced by Indigenous playwright Wesley Enoch, who apologised and reinstated the pair after an independent review.

“We don’t have time for grudges – life is too short,” Dagostino told AAP.

The pair have been buoyed by community support and solidarity from the arts sector in a galvanising watershed moment.

“If it wasn’t for the support of the people, we wouldn’t be in the position to present two works and it’s a first,” Sabsabi said.

Mr Burke described the rare Venice Biennale plaudit in February as a huge win and “another example of global recognition of Australian art”.

Delving into spirituality and migration, Sabsabi said his work titled “conference of one’s self” encourages the audience to come in with an open mind and heart.

“I brought it back to the individual, it’s about being emotionally inspired and to be able to have moments of reflection and pause,” he said.

The pair emphasised their artistic experiences had been shaped and were grounded in the cultural diversity of western Sydney, which will be displayed to an international audience.

The biennale attracts about 700,000 visitors annually and artists from 99 countries are represented in the 2026 edition.

Artworks are housed in pavilions across expansive gardens. Australia is one of 30 nations with a permanent pavilion.

Dagostino, who also heads up the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, said Sabsabi’s latest work was about “what joins us rather than what divides us”.

“Khaled’s work doesn’t have a fixed position … all art is read through the time it is created and 50 years later it’s read differently,” he said.

The 61st Venice Biennale begins on May 9.

Investors are tipping the Reserve Bank to raise interest rates for the second month running after hawkish commentary from the central bank’s second-in-command.

RBA deputy governor Andrew Hauser struck a pessimistic tone about the impact of the war in Iran on inflation in a podcast interview with The Conversation’s Michelle Grattan.

That prompted a sharp re-pricing in money markets for the RBA’s next board meeting on March 17.

Ahead of the podcast, released on Tuesday, market pricing implied the chance of the RBA lifting the cash rate to 4.1 per cent was less than one-third.

Afterwards, it surged to almost two-thirds.

Speaking just before RBA board members enter their pre-meeting media blackout period, Mr Hauser’s comments were viewed by some economists as laying the groundwork for a hike.

Economists at Bank of America, UBS and Capital Economics brought forward their rate rise forecast to March, while TD Securities views an increase then as an even bet.

“There is a credible case to hike next week,’ TD senior rates strategist Prashant Newnaha said.

Compared to remarks by governor Michele Bullock the week prior, Mr Hauser painted a more dire picture of how conflict in the Middle East could cause oil prices to surge and entrench inflation.

The cost of oil whipsawed on the back of contradictory commentary by US President Donald Trump, from a high of $US118 a barrel to around $US90, in one of the most chaotic 24 hours commodities traders have witnessed.

“If we fail to act decisively enough to prevent inflation staying high or even rising  … it will be bad for everyone and it’s worth us continuously reminding ourselves just how toxic inflation is,” Mr Hauser said.

IFM Investors chief economist Alex Joiner noted a change in tone that suggested the board would be more comfortable with hiking rates, even if it caused unemployment to rise.

“(Mr Hauser) interestingly omitted any mention of the board’s strategy of ‘preserving gains’ in the labour market, only saying he’d be ‘happy’ if full employment was maintained,” Mr Joiner wrote in a post on X.

The deputy governor noted risks to both sides, with the war in the Middle East likely to cause higher inflation and to put downward pressure on growth.

“I think there will be a very genuine debate,” Mr Hauser said.

It poses a dilemma for the RBA, which will be mindful of being squeezed between its dual mandates of keeping inflation low and targeting full employment.

How the conflict played out was highly uncertain, which could be seen as emphasising the need to stay on hold, NAB economists said.

But Mr Hauser also concluded recent data confirmed even more decisively that the economy was constrained on the supply side.

“All up, we take Hauser’s comments as putting the market on notice that it should not be surprised if the RBA decides to raise rates next week,” NAB economists said in a research note.

Two people involved in the former coalition government’s unlawful robodebt scheme have been found to be corrupt.

A National Anti-Corruption Commission inquiry on Wednesday found two of six people referred to it for investigation engaged in corrupt conduct, while it cleared the remaining four.

Those cleared included former Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison, who initiated the scheme while in the role of social services minister.

The watchdog found ex-departmental general manager of business integrity Mark Withnail carried out corrupt conduct by intentionally misleading the Department of Social Services during the preparation of a cabinet submission in 2015.

It also found department deputy secretary Serena Wilson carried out corrupt conduct by misleading the Commonwealth Ombudsman during an investigation in 2017.

Mr Morrison was not found to be corrupt, with his failure to realise bureaucratic advice was misleading put down to shortcomings by federal departments.

The corruption watchdog did not make recommendations in its final report, which followed referrals from the royal commission into the robodebt scheme.

The watchdog initially chose not to investigate the referrals before the controversial decision was overturned.

The over-ruling came after National Anti-Corruption Commission Inspector Gail Furness found commission head Paul Brereton engaged in misconduct as he had ties with one of the six officials but did not adequately recuse himself from decisions.

Between 2016 and 2019, the former coalition government’s robodebt scheme recovered more than $750 million from almost 400,000 people.

Many welfare recipients were falsely accused of owing the government money and the program was linked to several suicides.

The Albanese government has promised it will release a sealed section of the robodebt royal commission’s final report after the conclusion of the investigation.

“The illegal robodebt scheme was a betrayal of everyday Australians, resulting in human tragedy and untold misery,” Attorney-General Michelle Rowland said.

“The royal commission was clear in its findings and we must work to ensure this can never occur again.”

The US and Israel have pounded Iran with what the Pentagon and Iranians on the ground called the most intense airstrikes of the ‌war, despite global markets betting President Donald Trump will seek to end the conflict soon.

Raising the stakes for the global economy, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they would block oil shipments from the Gulf unless US and Israeli attacks cease.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also said it launched missiles at Qatar’s ‌US-operated Al Udeid base and the Al Harir base in Iraq’s Kurdistan.

But the White House reiterated Trump’s threat to hit Iran hard over moves to stop the flow of energy supplies through the Strait of Hormuz, where the war has effectively halted one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas shipments.

“Today will be yet again, our most intense day of strikes inside Iran: the most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes, intelligence more refined and better than ever,” US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Pentagon briefing on Tuesday, US time.

In a message posted to his Truth Social platform later in the day, Trump said, “Within the last few hours, we have hit, and completely destroyed” 10 of Iran’s “inactive” mine-laying vessels. 

US Central Command later said on social media platform X its forces had eliminated 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels near the Strait of Hormuz and posted footage of vessels being blown up.

Tehran residents reached by Reuters described the war’s most intense night of bombardment.

“It was like hell. They were bombing everywhere, every part of Tehran,” a resident said by phone, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “My children are afraid to sleep now.”

A historic surge in crude oil prices on ​Monday to nearly $US120 ($A168) a barrel was reversed as Brent crude settled back down below $US90 ($A126) on Tuesday. 

A source familiar with Israel’s war plans told Reuters the Israeli military wanted to inflict as much damage as possible before the window for further strikes closes, under the assumption Trump could end the war at any time.

Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said the war would proceed until his country and the US determine the time had come to cease hostilities, but that Israel was not seeking an “endless war”.

Trump at a Monday press conference said the US had already inflicted serious damage and predicted the conflict would end before the four weeks he ​initially set out.

Several congressional aides have said they expect the White House to soon request as much as $US50 billion ($A70 billion) in additional funding for the war.

Several senior Iranian officials voiced defiance.

“Certainly, we are not seeking a ceasefire; we believe the aggressor must be struck in the mouth so that they learn a lesson,” Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, posted on X.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told PBS that Tehran was unlikely to resume negotiations with the US.

A spokesperson for the Revolutionary Guards said Tehran would not allow “one litre” ‌of Middle Eastern oil to reach America or its allies while US and Israeli attacks continue.

“We are the ones who will determine the end of the war,” the spokesperson said.

More than 1300 Iranian civilians have been killed since the US and Israeli air strikes began on February 28, according to Iran’s UN ambassador, Amir Saeid Iravani. 

Scores have also been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon to root out the Iran-backed group Hezbollah, which has fired into Israel in solidarity with Iran.

Iranian strikes on Israel have killed 12 people. Iran has struck US military bases and diplomatic missions in Arab Gulf states but also hit hotels, closed ​airports and damaged oil infrastructure.

In addition to the six US soldiers killed at the ⁠outset of the conflict, the Pentagon on Tuesday estimated about 140 American troops have been wounded, the vast majority of them characterised as minor.