Summer has opened with extreme variability across Australia, with widespread hot conditions in Western Australia and extreme cold in the south-east of the country challenging early summer records across several states. In WA, Perth’s temperatures soared to 39 degrees Celsius on Monday, marking the city’s hottest start to summer on record, with temperatures still climbing. The city was one of …

Housing prices continue to climb across the country but the pace of growth is easing slightly as the Sydney and Melbourne markets lag the mid-sized capital cities. Cotality’s monthly Home Value Index increased 1 per cent nationally in November, the third month in a row of values rising by 1 per cent or more. However, it was a slight slowdown …

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has married his partner of five years, Jodie Haydon, in a secret, private ceremony at The Lodge. Mr Albanese is the first Australian prime minister to get married in office, after proposing to Ms Haydon on Valentine’s Day last year. Anthony Albanese is the first prime minister to get married while in office. The prime minister …

The two months preceding a wedding are notoriously hazardous. Many micro-disasters can cause distress. The bomboniere are unsatisfactory. The chair-hire guy turns out to be a scoundrel. The string quartet contains a drunkard. Numpty cousin X is actually planning to attend despite everyone’s assumption that she wouldn’t. Something unspeakable occurs at the stag do. These are the ordinary hiccups that …

Former Australian National University (ANU) vice-chancellor Professor Genevieve Bell received a severance payout of more than $400,000 after she resigned from the role in September, new documents have revealed. The sum included more than $362,000 in taxable income plus nearly $62,000 in superannuation. Professor Bell resigned from the top job less than two years into her tenure, following months of …

Australia’s foreign minister has used a major speech in Canberra to celebrate the government’s string of new security agreements, saying Labor has helped to build a region which is more stable and less deferential to authoritarian powers like Russia and China. The government has been buoyed by multiple foreign policy victories this year. It was crowned by last week’s announcement …

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley says she can “guarantee” voters that she will lead the Coalition into the next federal election during an appearance on 7.30, where she also said the Coalition had no plans to fund new coal-fired power stations. Ms Ley’s leadership has been under threat in recent weeks as the Liberal Party dropped its commitment to net zero …

Inflation has jumped to 3.2% in the year to September, from 2.1% in June, as waning government subsidies feed through to a spike in household power bills. Any lingering chance of a rate cut next Tuesday – or potentially this year – was squashed after the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures also confirmed the first rise in underlying inflation in …

The first “tipping point” for the Earth has been reached, according to an international report from 160 scientists in 23 countries. Tipping points occur when environmental changes and impacts become difficult to reverse. The world’s warm water coral reefs are the first of 25 vulnerable Earth systems to have reached a tipping point, according to the Global Tipping Points Report. They’ve …

The world’s warm water corals, including at the Ningaloo Reef in WA, are under pressure of dieback from global warming. In short: The latest Global Tipping Points Report suggests the world’s coral reefs are at risk of mass dieback. More than 80 per cent of coral reefs worldwide have bleached in a marine heatwave in the past two years. What’s next? …