Australia news LIVE: Sydney Water addresses PFAS findings; Aged care deal in sight; Final dates for William Tyrrell inquest set

Thanks for reading the national news blog. This is where we’ll end today’s coverage.

To conclude, here’s a look back at the day’s major stories:

• Australia and Indonesia have finalised negotiations on a landmark defence agreement that will allow the nations’ troops to co-operate more closely and conduct more joint military exercises.
• A deal on aged care reform is finally within sight after months of negotiations in parliament over a looming shortfall in new places for older Australians in residential aged care and nursing homes.
• In NSW, water authorities have stressed that Sydney’s water is safe to drink after Sydney Water confirmed cancer-linked “forever chemicals” have been detected across the city’s drinking-water catchments.
• The final dates of the inquest into the fate of missing toddler William Tyrrell have been set, a decade after the three-year-old went missing from his foster grandmother’s home on the NSW mid-north coast.
• In Western Australia’s Supreme Court, former foreign affairs minister Marise Payne has described watching Liberal Senator Linda Reynolds shaking, breathing heavily, and gripping her desk in the parliamentary chamber after days of being “aggressively targeted” over Brittany Higgins’ alleged rape.
• In world news, President Joe Biden appeared at the Democratic National Convention to pass the torch to Kamala Harris and make the case that democracy was at risk if Donald Trump returned to power.
• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accepted a ceasefire proposal to halt the war in Gaza and the next step was for “Hamas to say yes”, putting the onus on the group to end the 10-month conflict even as violence continues.
• In business news, the Reserve Bank has revealed how unsure it is about how quickly inflation will come down while preserving gains made in the jobs market.

Thanks again for joining us. This is Cassandra Morgan, signing off.

Victoria’s top cop says the force isn’t in discussions with the state government about measures to make policing protests easier ahead of a major rally planned for next month.

Speaking on 3AW Chief Commissioner, Shane Patton said he believes that Victoria has more protests than any other state or territory.

“There are people who protest about the opening of an envelope down here,” he said.

“Some of the things people are protesting about. you feel like saying, ‘get a life’.

“That’s not to belittle some people who have significant grievances and are really passionate about some matters, but there are some things that you go, really, you’re protesting about that?”

Victoria Police is currently preparing for a “really, really big” anti-war protest that is set to converge on the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in September.

Patton last week said it had received intel that “several thousand demonstrators” have pledged to disrupt the Land Forces 2024 International Land Defence Exposition which will be held from September 11 to 13.

Patton said the force isn’t considering advocating for a NSW-style permit-for-protest system.

“We’re very happy to support peaceful protest, but when it steps over the boundaries we will enforce,” he said.

The sharemarket edged higher on Tuesday, buoyed by stronger commodity prices and a global wave of investor bets that the US Federal Reserve is close to cutting interest rates.

With Wall Street approaching record levels yet again, the S&P/ASX 200 gained 17.20 points, or 0.2 per cent, to 7997.70 points, with six of the 11 industry sectors advancing. Miners and IT stocks led the gains, while real estate investment trusts declined.

Mining giants helped drive the market higher, with BHP shares rising 1.3 per cent, Rio Tinto gaining 0.6 per cent and Fortescue Metals rising 1.5 per cent, after iron ore prices jumped overnight.

You can read our full five-minute recap of the trading day here.

Teenagers are becoming addicted to sex chatbots, spending up to five hours a day communicating with them, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner says.

Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told ABC Afternoon Briefing her office was trying to be at the “coalface” of tackling problems with AI-generated content, and it was school teachers, principals, counsellors and nurses watching them manifest first-hand.

“Sadly, we are hearing from school nurses that young people are becoming addicted to sex chatbots, spending up to four and five hours a day engaging with these avatars in the sexual way,” the commissioner said.

“We’ve got to use all the tools at our disposal – regulatory powers, that pressure on industry to do right and do better – but also, educate the populace about what’s to come.

“Our first deepfakes brief was in 2020, which was a bit early, and we couldn’t get the mainstream media to even pick [it] up.”

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner expects a “tsunami” of complaints about AI-generated deepfake pornography once a bill to criminalise it passes the Senate.

The legislation is due to pass the Senate soon and will make it a crime for adults to share AI-generated sexually explicit content.

Speaking to ABC Afternoon Briefing, commissioner Julie Inman Grant said her office was already fielding complaints about deepfakes in almost all of its existing reporting schemes.

“We’ve seen some very high-profile cases in high schools where young men, frankly, are harvesting images of their female class workmates and using these very powerful apps that cost them nothing but cost incalculable damage to the victim-survivor,” the commissioner said.

“I’m sure there will be a tsunami [of complaints once the bill passes].”

The commissioner was particularly concerned about a rise in face swapping technology being used in videoconferencing for sexual extortion, she said.

Inman Grant’s office saw a 1300 per cent increase in sexual extortion targeting Australian men aged between 18 and 24.

“We are really just [at] the tip of the iceberg,” she said.

“I would say that while these [deepfake] apps exists and are continuing to proliferate, they have now become mainstream and this is why we need the criminal actions like we are seeing.”

The Reserve Bank has revealed how unsure it is about how quickly inflation will come down while preserving gains made in the jobs market.

In the latest minutes laying out the discussions from its meeting earlier this month, the Reserve Bank mentioned the word “uncertain” 13 times – up from four times in its previous minutes from May.

The minutes revealed that at the meeting, at which the cash rate was held steady at 4.35 per cent, the bank considered an interest rate rise but held back in large part because of its uncertainty about the outlook and what a rate rise might do to the jobs market.

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“Members observed that there was considerable uncertainty about the inflation outlook and that inflation was forecast to return to the target range even in scenarios that incorporated a stronger outlook for consumption than in the central forecast,” the minutes show.

The risk of inflation not returning to the target range of 2 to 3 per cent by late 2025 may have “risen materially”, board members mulled, meaning the cash rate might need to stay on hold for longer than expected by markets.

But the minutes also showed the bank growing uneasy about what a potential rate rise might mean for the jobs market. Figures released last week showed the unemployment rate lifting to a 2½-year high of 4.2 per cent while job ad numbers are continuing to fall.

“The case to hold the cash rate steady at this meeting was further supported by the need to balance the risks to the inflation forecast with those surrounding the outlook for full employment,” the minutes show.

Financial markets put the chance of a rate cut by the bank’s December meeting at 87 per cent.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has emerged victorious from a vote to stop him lambasting his Coalition counterpart Angus Taylor, who he said was in the “doghouse” and rolling over to Peter Dutton’s “dog whistle” in a final fiery answer during question time.

“[Taylor] sits there voiceless and clueless on the most important issue that people face right now,” Chalmers said, referring to the lack of questions, particularly about cost of living, from the shadow treasurer.

The opposition’s questions over the past four question times have all centred around Gaza.

“Whenever [Dutton] blows his little dog whistle, the shadow treasurer rolls over,” Chalmers said.

Liberal MP Sussan Ley asked the speaker of the house if Chalmers’ conduct was in order.

“Speaker, you have ruled several times on imputations about other members’ language used in descriptions of character,” she said.

The speaker asked the treasurer to “temper his language”, after which Dutton moved for Chalmers to no longer be heard.

Following a vote, which saw Bob Katter side with the opposition and Chalmers emerge victorious, the treasurer squeezed in the last word.

“That break was actually useful,” Chalmers said.

“It was a good opportunity to clean up the little shards of the opposition leader’s glass jaw.”

Labor minister Amanda Rishworth has used question time to mock the NSW Liberal Party’s failure to nominate 140 candidates across 16 local government areas before deadline.

The shambles led to the sacking of its state executive, which Rishworth described as “a comedy of errors”.

“The Liberal Party are now blaming the independent umpire, threatening legal action against the NSW Electoral Commissioner for their incompetence,” she said.

“Now, I’m sure that the NSW Liberal Party is a little disappointed that Scott Morrison is no longer prime minister, because, of course, he could have secretly appointed himself as the NSW Electoral Commissioner and overturned the decision.”

Manager of opposition business Paul Fletcher tried to have the question and answer ruled out of order but was knocked back.

Maverick independent Bob Katter has asked one of his trademark sprawling questions of Treasurer Jim Chalmers, creating near universal laughter in parliament.

Here is what Katter asked:

Treasurer, doesn’t federal government backing to the Brisbane Olympics confiscate $30 billion off north [and] central Queensland’s coal and copper miners, cane and cattle farmers, giving it to the International Olympics Committee, whose Paris opening ceremony was, quote, ‘an orgiastic pagan ritual denigrating Christianity’? Didn’t Christians abolish slavery, create from a brutal Imperium … from the Dark Ages, the Renaissance?

Didn’t communism murder 78 million people? Didn’t Christian Gorbachev, the Pope, and Charlie Wilson’s Christians abolish communism?”

He went on.

A smiling Chalmers suggested that Speaker Milton Dick may not have heard the question, which would’ve required Katter to repeat it.

Dick shut him down, prompting Chalmers to make a generic speech about the government’s investment in regional Queensland.

A furious Katter accused Chalmers of giving an “election speech in return”.