News update for Tue 3 June 2025

Your trusted guide to the top independent news and views of the day...

Jun 03, 2025

Welcome to your TrueNorth news update where every weekday afternoon we share curated articles from Australia’s independent news media sector.

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TODAY’S BREAKING NEWS UPDATES: See all the breaking news of the day through The Guardian here - and through 6 News here

BREAKING NEWS: One in three Australian men say they have committed intimate partner abuse, world-first research finds - The Guardian

Parkinson Report: John Howard’s toxic legacy, and why Albanese also needs to look out the window - Renew Economy

1999 was a big year for Australia, and for the fossil fuel industry’s single-minded destruction of the environment. It was the year that the Howard government finalised the EPBC Act. (It came into effect in 2000). It was supposed to do what it said on the tin – Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation – but the deliberate exclusion of climate and greenhouse emissions has, of course, rendered it all but useless. 1999 was also the year climate issues and greenhouse gas emissions were deliberately excluded from the National Electricity Rules (NER), at the behest of the fossil fuel industry.

Australia has suffered ever since. Dumb decisions have been made, from power station approvals, network choices and now the extension of the North-West Shelf gas project

Also read >

Forget climate denial, Labor’s tactical fatalism will burn us all - Ketan Joshi for Crikey (paywall)
The Donald deals Albo all the trump cards - David Hardaker for The Politics

How Advance ‘siphoned’ funds and helped the Liberals lose - 7am Podcast

As the search to explain the Coalition’s disastrous election results continues, there’s one group being singled out inside Liberal campaign headquarters: the right-wing lobby, Advance. Flush with a multi-million dollar war chest, Advance promised to “take back” the country – yet Labor won 17 new seats and the Greens vote barely moved. As Advance and the Liberals blame each other for the failures, there are questions about whether the two will ever work together again. Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Jason Koutsoukis, on how Advance “siphoned” Liberal funds, muddied its message, and yet is still claiming victory.

Listen to the 7am Podcast

Australia’s latest emissions data reveal we still have a giant fossil fuel problem - The Conversation

According to Australia’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, the latest emissions data show “we are on track to reach our 2030 targets” under the Paris Agreement. In 2024, Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions were “27% below 2005 levels”. That’s great news, right?

Well, yes and no. Australia continues to rely on changes in land use to compensate for emissions released into the atmosphere.

If Australia is serious about reducing emissions and tracking towards net zero by 2050, we need to tackle a series of inconvenient truths about fossil fuels. Fossil fuels feed into almost every aspect of our lives, not just cars and power plants. There are substitutes, but they are not easy to source – and they don’t come cheap.

Australia to lobby Unesco over barring of ancient rock site from world heritage list due to Woodside emissions - The Guardian

The Albanese government will launch a lobbying campaign in a bid to reverse a Unesco recommendation that an ancient rock art site in Western Australia can’t go on the world heritage list until damaging industrial emissions linked to a controversial Woodside gas development are stopped.

Government officials were aiming to meet Unesco next week after its advisers said the nomination of the Murujuga Cultural Landscape in north-west WA – home to more than a million petroglyphs, some almost 50,000 years old – should be referred back to Australia until nearby “degrading acidic emissions” were halted.

The dark lord of Silicon Valley - Peter Thiel enters the chat - Carole Cadwalladr

There’s one key rule to remember when considering all things Thiel: never underestimate him. He’s a master chess player who thinks strategically and long term. One of his most famous acts - destroying the media site, Gawker, was planned over years. JD Vance, the vice president, is a wholly owned Peter Thiel project that has been 15 years in the making. He first met Thiel when a student and he owes his entire career, first in finance and then politics, to him.

But Peter Thiel’s most consequential enterprise may be Palantir, the data analytics company and military contractor, which the Times reported is now being used to process and combine these datasets.

Wilson’s Goldstein Win: No Blueprint, Just Bad Faith - Sue Barrett

Wilson’s two-year crusade to reclaim Goldstein from ‘teal’ community independent Zoe Daniel was dogged. After his 2022 loss, he hit the ground early, funding focus groups with personal debt and hosting community town halls (The Age, 7 May 2025). His postal vote strategy was a masterstroke, with 24,299 issued, 13,982 counted by 6 May, favouring him 64.5% to Daniel’s 35.5% (ABC News, 6 May 2025). On the surface, it was grassroots grit. But the campaign’s underbelly, marked by proxy-driven division, left Goldstein’s diverse community fractured.

On the ground, the atmosphere was toxic.

Bradfield was a draw, for a moment there - The Tally Room Podcast

For this podcast Ben interviews two scrutineers about their experience in the recounts: Adelaide, a Liberal scrutineer from Bradfield, and KJ, an independent scrutineer from Goldstein. Ben also discusses the recount procedures he saw in Bradfield last week and the latest count updates from Monday afternoon.

Listen to The Tally Room Podcast

Israeli strikes on Gaza schools used as civilian shelters are part of deliberate strategy, say sources - The Guardian

A series of recent deadly airstrikes on school buildings sheltering displaced people in Gaza were part of a deliberate Israeli military bombing strategy, with further schools identified as targets, the Guardian has learned.

At least six school buildings have been struck, reportedly killing more than 120 people, in recent months as part of a targeting effort by the Israeli military.

This followed a loosening of controls on actions targeting Hamas operatives at sites with large numbers of civilians present, according to sources familiar with the strategy.

Hegseth’s Heroes lurch into action, but Australia’s capability gap isn’t weapons - Crikey

The US defense secretary wants Australia to bloat its defence warchest with 3.5% of GDP funding. Where will that money come from? Hegseth and his supporters don’t bother to say.

Australia’s defence hawks have chosen to overlook US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s sabre-rattling and inconvenient omission of AUKUS in his weekend speech in Singapore, instead focusing on his call for Australia to lift defence spending to 3.5% of GDP “as soon as possible“.

That would be $91 billion a year at the moment, compared to the $50-odd billion currently committed, which is expected to rise to $60 billion by the end of the decade.

The Labor government’s quiet betrayal of the Commonwealth - New Politics

During the recent federal election campaign, climate change barely rated a mention – and it seems that this omission suited the Labor government perfectly, as any meaningful discussion would have exposed the uncomfortable reality of Australia’s weak environmental credentials: despite a legislated target to cut emissions by 43 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, the country is not on track to meet this goal, and there’s less than five years to go.

The omission also meant the government could avoid questions about its approvals for a wave of new coal and gas projects during the last term, quietly enabling the fossil fuel industry to expand while presenting itself as a supposedly responsible climate actor.