The Daily Newsstand · Free, Always
Wednesday, August 19, 2026

Australia politics live: Hastie says fight for his seat against One Nation is already ‘dirty and nasty’; NDIS reforms to pass parliament today

Translate

Good morning, Krishani Dhanji with you here, thanks to Martin Farrer for getting us started.

It’s been a big 24 hours for the government, having secured support for its gambling bill and as Martin brought you a moment ago, passing the NDIS reforms with the Coalition through the Senate.

The health and NDIS minister, Mark Butler is doing the morning media rounds to celebrate – we’ll be following along closely.

Let’s get stuck in!

Pauline Hanson is targeting superannuation. Should it be easier to access your savings?

The debate over whether people should be allowed easier early access to their super balances to make ends meet continues to rage, with Pauline Hanson accusing Jim Chalmers of being “full of shit”.

She wants to let people take more of their cash and said the treasurer was misrepresenting her as being in favour of scrapping the whole scheme.

Our economics editor Patrick Commins has been looking at whether allowing earlier access would work and if it’s a good idea.

NDIS bill passes Senate after Labor deal with Coalition

The government’s controversial NDIS bill will pass the lower house today after it went through the Senate last night with “substantial” amendments (63 in total) after a deal between Labor and the Coalition. We’ll have the latest reaction soon, but in the meantime you can catch up on how the vote unfolded:

Good morning and welcome to our live news blog. I’m Martin Farrer with the top overnight stories and then it’ll be Krishani Dhanji with the main action.

The government’s controversial NDIS bill will pass the lower house today after it went through the Senate last night. The health minister, Mark Butler, said 63 government amendments across both houses were introduced to win the Coalition’s support for the government’s changes, aimed at reining in spending.

There will doubtless be more to come on this today, so stay tuned.

View the original on The Guardian Australia

KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.