Australia news live: Sydney drenched with a month of rain in a day; search for woman continues after townhouse explosion | Australia news

Wild winds batter south-west WA

In south-west coastal WA, emergency services received more than 200 calls for help since 10am on Saturday after roofs were ripped off and trees fell on homes and cars.

Wind gusts of more than 100km/h were recorded in North Island and Rottnest Island, while Wilyabrup, in Busselton, recorded almost 30mm of rain in 30 minutes.

An evacuation centre has been set up at South West Sports Centre in Bunbury, and take action warnings are in place for South West, South Coastal and Lower West districts, particularly Albany, Bunbury, Busselton, Mandurah, Margaret River and Walpole.

“A gusty west to southwesterly airstream is expected to persist about the coastal strip south of Mandurah and the South West and South Coastal districts into this evening,” Emergency WA said in a statement.

Dangerous winds are expected to ease in most districts by mid-morning on Sunday, but, damaging wind gusts along the coastal strip south of Mandurah and in the south-west and south coastal districts could persist into the evening.

“This weather is not unusual for this time of year, but could damage homes and make travel dangerous,” Emergency WA said.

– AAP

Sydney has been inundated with more than a month’s rain in less than a day while storms along Australia’s west coast have sparked hundreds of emergency calls.

Persistent, moderate-to-heavy rain on Saturday drenched Sydney with 143mm of rain, topping the city’s June average of 132mm on the first day of winter, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

Rose Bay recorded more than 170mm.

“A lot of our eastern suburbs of Sydney saw a month’s worth of rain in just 12-to-18 hours,” senior meteorologist Dean Narramore said.

The rain was largely localised to eastern Sydney, with western suburbs of Penrith and Richmond receiving between 20mm and 30mm, while falls in the Hunter region ranged between 25mm and 50mm.

Showers are expected to continue in the Hunter on Sunday, but was expected to clear by Sunday night.

A hazardous surf warning remains in place for Sydney Coast, Illawarra Coast, Batemans Coast and Eden Coast.

– AAP

Queensland government announces $500m for early childhood programs

Ben Smee

The Queensland government will set aside more than $500m for a series of new early childhood health and education initiatives, but advocates say kids from regional and remote communities will continue to fall through the cracks until the state addresses a critical shortage of care and support workers.

The premier, Steven Miles, says the state’s strategy, Putting Queensland Kids First, aims to better coordinate support for children in their early years.

Funding will go towards hearing checks for children aged under five, developmental support services in priority areas, family support coordinators in about 200 primary schools, and a partnership fund for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community organisations.

Miles said:

Health outcomes start to be determined from the moment of conception, so we will increase efforts directed at keeping mums and bubs healthy during pregnancy.

Once babies are born, we will make sure they get the support and healthcare they need by sending dedicated nurses to their homes.

The measures were broadly welcomed by Thrive by Five, an alliance of child developmental and support groups backed by Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo foundation, but came with warnings that funding might be ineffective without measures to bolster the regional and remote workforce.

Tom Allsop, the alliance spokesman and CEO of PeakCare, said the announcement was a “massive day” for campaigners who had called for a dedicated state plan “for years”.

“However, if the … plan is to be successfully implemented, it must include a dedicated workforce plan to assist in the delivery of these programs,” Allsop said.

Too many families – particularly those in regional and remote Queensland – are missing out on vital early learning and allied health services due to severe workforce shortages.

We look forward to continuing to work with the government on ways to address these workforce shortages in the lead-up to this year’s state budget and the October election, ensuring we can guarantee the best possible outcomes for children, families, educators and other critical sector workers.

Additionally, we urge all other political parties in Queensland to come to the table and commit to an early years plan ahead of October’s state election to ensure all children are provided with the best possible opportunity to thrive.

Josh Butler

Drones being used to ensure released detainees are not living near schools, Watt says

Watt went on to say again that drones are being used to monitor immigration detainees released under the NZYQ high court verdict. There had been confusion last week after the immigration minister, Andrew Giles, said drones were being used in the government’s response to that court judgement, but police and security agencies told SBS that they weren’t the ones operating the drones.

Watt said:

My understanding is that drones are being used as part of this operation, but more in the sense of monitoring the accommodation people are living in, for example, ensuring that it’s not too close to schools or other areas that they’re not supposed to be living close to.

So drones do form part of the operation that’s involved in monitoring these offenders, but more being done in an operational sense like that.”

The Insiders host, David Speers, questioned this activity, saying “you can use Google Maps to find if someone’s house is too close to a school.”

Watt responded by repeating his understanding that drones were being used in that way. He didn’t note which department or agency was operating those drones.

Watt’s name has been whispered as a potential new minister for home affairs, if there was to be a ministerial reshuffle. He shrugged off a question about whether he would like to switch jobs, saying he was happy in his current role as agriculture and emergency management minister, and supported the work of his colleagues.

“I think that Andrew Giles and [home affairs minister] Clare O’Neil have both performed incredibly strongly in a really difficult portfolio area,” Watt said.

“We need to remember the mess they inherited when we came to office. I mean, basically, they inherited a massive battleship that was off-course and had been torpedoed full of holes. They had to patch that up over the time they have been ministers.”

Josh Butler

Rewritten ministerial direction 99 to make community safety priority ‘absolutely crystal clear’, Murray Watt says

A rewritten ministerial direction on deporting foreign-born criminals will prioritise “community safety” over their ties to Australia, cabinet minister Murray Watt has said.

The agriculture minister was on the ABC’s Insiders this morning, explaining more about the government’s moves to rewrite ministerial direction 99, the immigration rules at the heart of recent controversies where criminals have been allowed to stay in Australia.

Watt said the administrative appeals tribunal had interpreted direction 99 in a way the government hadn’t intended, and that a criminal’s ties to Australia had been considered highly. He said the government didn’t mean for “for community safety to be relegated below that as a priority. It was always our intention that community safety would be a primary consideration.”

What we’re doing now is making it absolutely crystal clear for the AAT and departmental officials interpreting it that community safety is to be the number one priority, more than anything else.

What would have been a mistake is if the government had said that we want to put duration of stay above community safety, and we didn’t do that.

The new direction is yet to be shared publicly.

Authorities are searching for a missing person among the rubble of an explosion at a home in Whalan in Sydney’s west.

The blast on Waikanda Crescent levelled most of the two-storey home just before 1pm on Saturday, blowing out windows and damaging a neighbouring townhouse.

Rescue teams are still sifting through the remains, with one woman feared to be in the rubble.

NSW Fire and Rescue commissioner Jeremy Fewtrell said crews were hopeful to safely retrieve the person trapped.

“This is still well within the window for someone to survive,” he told reporters on Sunday morning.

The focus of effort is to really be exploring the building as thoroughly as we can try and make access to either physically inspect or, with the use of our tools, to inspect each possible area.

Fewtrell also said the rescue teams were hampered by a series of setbacks as the search continued through the night.

He said:

There’s been a range of complications throughout the operation.

The job of rescue (teams) is to work their way through and try and find spaces in that collapse area where someone might have been caught.

And so part of that work involves this sort of very manual labour of piece by piece, picking up the debris and moving that away.

Complications included a gas leak, safety concerns about how much work could happen at the site and fire underneath the rubble in the collapsed area.

Firefighters have been unable to directly reach the fire because of the debris, according to Fewtrell.

“But we are able to apply water onto that, the water obviously then drains down and suppresses the fire,” he said.

– with AAP

Good morning. Mostafa Rachwani with you to take you through the news this Sunday – let’s dive in.