Evening News Bulletin 12 November 2024

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TRANSCRIPT
In this bulletin;
A long-awaited inquest to be held into the Westfield Bondi Junction stabbing rampage;
The New South Wales Upper Hunter shaken by a magnitude 4.1 earthquake;
And in sport, Cricket Australia to raise awareness for gender equality during the Women’s Ashes.
The man behind the Westfield Bondi Junction stabbing rampage stopped receiving treatment for serious mental health issues years before the terrifying attack, a court has been told.
Joel Cauchi fatally stabbed six people and wounded about a dozen others during the violent rampage in Sydney’s eastern suburbs in April.
A long-awaited inquest will now examine the circumstances of the attack with the aim of stopping a similar tragedy from happening again.
It will look at issues including whether any intervention could have prevented Cauchi’s mental health deteriorating to the extent that it did before the attack, which ended when he was shot dead.
The inquest is due to be held in April and May next year.
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A magnitude 4.1 earthquake has shaken the New South Wales Upper Hunter causing thousands of properties to lose power.
Geoscience Australia’s monitoring website shows the quake’s epicentre was near B-H-P’s Mount Arthur mine site, southwest of Muswellbrook.
The Upper Hunter has experienced more than 50 earthquakes since a major 4.7 magnitude shook the region in August.
Senior seismologist Dr Hadi Ghasemi from GeoScience Australia told the ABC the ongoing activity could be labelled as an earthquake swarm.
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New research has found three in five Australian renters expect to never own their own home – however, that’s not to say they don’t want to.
The research from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute also found four out of five renters aspire to be homeowners.
Though 51 per cent of tenants say they are renting because they don’t have enough money for a home deposit and 41 per cent say they can’t afford to buy anything appropriate.
Lead researcher, Professor Emma Baker of the University of Adelaide, says Australia is going through a significant social shift.
“I think now what we’ve got in Australia is this tipping point where we were once a nation of homeowners and everyone assumed that they would rent for a bit after they left home and then move into mortgage and own their own home. We’ve just really shifted to being a nation where there’s people with mortgages and there’s people who are renters and then there are outright homeowners. So we’ve kind of flipped over from being a home owning nation to a renting nation.”
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New research has emerged on the critical role of cultural burning and traditional land management in combatting high-intensity fires.
The study, from the Australian National University and the University of Nottingham, highlights how over thousands of years the intensity of forest fires decreased where there were higher Indigenous populations.
Through novel data collection and testing, evidence suggests that cultural burning historically reduced shrub cover by 50 per cent.
The researchers hope it will inspire action for rekindling traditional land management, not just in Australia but globally.
Wiradjuri academic, Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher says the data supports what’s long been known anecdotally.
“Aboriginal people have been advocating for decades that Country is getting sick, that we need to care for Country, we need to return to Country, and we’re often pushed aside as having no influence whatsoever on the landscape. So this puts a set of data behind that argument that can’t be argued against and for me that’s the most powerful thing that has come out of this.”
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Cricket Australia has partnered with UNICEF to raise awareness for gender equality during the Women’s Ashes.
The Until Every Girl Can Play campaign, aims to highlight the plight of girls around the world who are denied basic rights.
The governing body says it will continue to support female cricketers from Afghanistan that moved to Australia following the Taliban takeover in 2021.
The campaign will feature prominently during the Women’s Ashes Day Night Test at the MCG in January.