Australia news LIVE: Vigils to mark October 7; High Court overturns NSW coal mine expansion; Andrew Denton’s message to Albanese on VAD

Hello and welcome to our national news live coverage for Wednesday, October 7. Here’s what is making headlines:

• Vigils across Australian capital cities will mark the third anniversary of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel when 1200 people were killed and 250 taken, sparking a devastating war in Gaza that brought on a humanitarian crisis. A vigil was held at Bondi Beach, where 15 people were killed in a terror attack targeting the Jewish community in December, ahead of pro-Palestine vigils later today.
• Paramount Skydance has closed its $US110 billion ($158 billion) acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, completing one of the biggest media mergers of all time after engaging in a bruising battle for control with Netflix and fending off antitrust lawsuits. The new company, called Skydance, combines two of the five largest Hollywood film studios, and be home to dozens of TV networks, from CBS to TNT, and streaming services Paramount+ and HBO Max.
• US President Donald Trump said he has a call scheduled with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss a possible case of plague at a Siberian research institute. Speaking to reporters at the White House this morning, Trump said he would be talking to Putin about the case “very soon”. Asked what the US intelligence community was saying about the case, Trump said the US was in “very deep discussions” on the topic.

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The boss of a taxpayer-backed Australian cloud company says the federal government is “not a credible investment partner”, even as about 98 per cent of his pipeline comes from offshore.

Vault Systems chief executive Rupert Taylor-Price told parliament’s joint select committee on artificial intelligence in Sydney on Wednesday that Commonwealth investment in sovereign AI capability was orders of magnitude behind Canada, Britain, Singapore and South Korea.

“It’s in millions and hundreds of millions when other countries are doing billions and hundreds of billions,” he said.

The National Reconstruction Fund is a Vault investor. Taylor-Price said foreign customers rated the company’s services as world-class while the government assumed it had to buy from overseas.

Australia’s highest court has upheld a first-of-its-kind climate change bid to overturn a major coal mine expansion.

MACH Energy sought to extend the life of Mount Pleasant coal mine in NSW by 22 years and nearly double its yearly output.

The state planning commission in 2022 approved the plans before Hunter Valley residents launched a legal challenge. In the first bid to block the expansion, the NSW Court of Appeal unanimously ruled the approval unlawful in 2025.

The appeal court found planning authorities are legally required to consider the climate impact of Scope 3 emissions – caused when the coal is eventually burnt, including when exported overseas – on local communities. MACH Energy took the finding to the High Court, which struck down the appeal this morning.

Mining giant BHP has struck a surprise deal to sell part of its mothballed Australian nickel operations and a package of exploration tenements to Gold Fields, a major South African miner seeking to aggressively expand its local footprint.

Melbourne-based BHP, the largest Australian mining company, today said it had agreed to offload its Kambalda nickel-concentrator plant and surrounding land in Western Australia to Johannesburg-listed Gold Fields for an undisclosed sum.

“Gold Fields will evaluate options for the long-term use of the concentrator and offer employment to people directly supporting the asset,” BHP said in a statement.

BHP shut down its WA nickel operations in 2024 as a global oversupply of the metal caused prices to collapse.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has defended the turnout at the Pacific Pre-COP summit being held in Tuvalu and Fiji, saying the event has lifted global attention on issues facing Pacific nations and small island developing states.

Bowen has come under fire for the cost and value of the summit, which ends tomorrow and was organised after Australia failed to win hosting rights to COP31, to be held in Turkey in November. The Pre-COP event was touted as an opportunity to build momentum in climate negotiations before world leaders converge on Antalya later this year.

Bowen told reporters that Pacific leaders “couldn’t be more pleased” with the outcomes struck at the summit, rejecting suggestions it had been a disappointment.

“They were delighted with the lifting of the focus on their issues,” he said today. “This is about COP and about focusing the attention of COP on issues of the Pacific. Key decision-makers at COP31 were there yesterday, that’s a good thing.”

The Australian delegation was led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who leaves the event this morning after urging support for a finance mechanism that assists Pacific nations confronting severe impacts from climate change.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has rejected reports that he and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese offended Tuvalu officials when they declined to wear the fau headdress offered by the hosts of the Pacific Pre-COP summit on yesterday.

A Tuvalu government adviser told AFP it felt that the Australian delegation had “taken over” the tiny country’s sovereignty during the summit, accusing Albanese of disrespect over his decision not to wear the fau, a floral headpiece offered to leaders at the event’s welcome ceremony.

Bowen sidestepped questions about his decision, telling reporters today that accusations against the Australian delegation’s conduct hadn’t been raised with him.

“Certainly, the government of Tuvalu and everyone I’ve spoken to were very delighted with the effort that we took,” Bowen said. “I accepted [the fau], I’m advised it’s perfectly acceptable to do so, and we focused on issues of sea level rise and impacts to Tuvalu, which is what I’m focused on.”

Russia should share more information about the death of a plague laboratory worker last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said, an incident Washington was watching “very closely”.

A laboratory worker at Siberia’s plague research institute fell ill and died in undisclosed circumstances on Friday, prompting authorities to quarantine dozens of ‌people and sparking public health fears on social media. Russian authorities have said the situation is under control.

“I think it’s incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world,” Rubio told reporters in Iceland. “We’re watching it very closely, hour by hour.”

Rubio said the US has measures available to help Russia if the situation turned out to be more serious than has so far been acknowledged, but needed to know more before it could step in.

Nashville: Christa Pike, a Tennessee inmate who survived an attempt to execute her, is awake and speaking as she receives treatment at a hospital, her lawyers said.

“Against all odds, Christa Pike is conscious, speaking, and continues to receive critical medical care,” attorneys for Pike said today.

“Despite the severe damage she endured to her arms, she is still handcuffed and shackled to the bed. Her recovery is medically unprecedented.”

Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital as they attempted to put her to death for the 1995 beating and stabbing death of classmate Colleen Slemmer. The lethal injection drug didn’t kill her, but her lawyers said her arms were left burnt and blistered.

Read the full story here.

AP

Washington: US President Donald Trump said he has a call scheduled with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss a possible case of plague at a Siberian research institute.

Speaking to reporters at the White House this morning, Trump said he would be talking to Putin about the case “very soon”.

Health authorities are investigating after the death of an employee at an anti-plague institute, which authorities attributed to pneumonia with an unknown cause.

Asked what the US intelligence community was saying about the case, Trump said the US was in “very deep discussions” on the topic.

“We’ll be able to report about it, probably tomorrow,” Trump said.

AP

About 700 people gathered in the courtyard of Bondi Pavilion at 6.29am today to mark the third anniversary of Hamas’ attacks on Israel.

NSW Opposition Leader Kellie Sloane, federal Liberal senator Dave Sharma and Israel’s ambassador to Australia Hillel Newman attended the event, speaking metres from the site of the Bondi Beach attack on December 14.

Among the speakers was 11-year-old Ben Carasso, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor who became a child influencer on social media after the father of a friend went missing from the Nova festival in Israel and was later found to have been killed.

“I’m very glad [we’ve] began the connection in Bondi with the Israel children and the Jewish children. They’ve both suffered since October 7,” said Carasso, who lives in Tel Aviv but has travelled widely among the global Jewish diaspora.

“We don’t have a normal childhood for three years now. I want to get to speak for the children. We didn’t get a chance to grow up,” he said.

“Since October 7, I saw what the children of Israel were going through. My friend lost his father, they didn’t know where he was for months, he was at the Nova festival.

“Israeli children are forced to learn what to do in a rocket attack. It’s a side that is not talked about. For three years we have had this, and I want the world to know.”

Sloane said vision of the attacks moved her deeply.

“Little boys running from a shelter after their father was attacked, a woman on the back of a ute, kids slaughtered. It was brutality at its worst,” she said.

“What was done to them deserved to be seen, and it can never been denied.”

Sloane said people who chose today to protest Israel’s action in Gaza should be ashamed of themselves.

“On this day, can I just say ‘shame on you’ to the people who have held protests.”

Another commemoration event is to be held at an undisclosed location in Sydney’s eastern suburbs tonight.

More than 1200 people were killed and 250 taken captive on October 7, 2023, when militants crossed the Israeli border from Gaza to attack on a Jewish holiday.

Israel responded with attacks on Gaza that are estimated to have killed more than 74,000 people.

Nadi, Fiji: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has offered Turkish Climate Minister Murat Kurum, a “particular shout out” at the start of talks on climate finance at the Pacific Pre-COP event in Fiji.

He said the fact that two countries as far apart in distance, history and culture were working so closely together on climate was symbolic of global efforts to tackle the climate crisis.

He urged donors, the private sector and world governments to support a Pacific finance mechanism to ensure that those nations that had done the least to cause climate change but were suffering some of the worst impacts were properly supported.

Albanese returns to Australia this morning, leaving Climate Minister Chris Bowen to continue the talks, which conclude tomorrow.