An anti-immigration protest called March for Australia is planned to take place in cities across the country on Sunday.
The march has been condemned as hateful by the Albanese government, and is being promoted by a grab-bag of neo-Nazis, so-called freedom fighters – who gained prominence during the pandemic – and other fringe groups.
The Australian government has signed a $400m deal with the government of Nauru allowing it to deport hundreds of foreign-born criminals whose visas were cancelled on character grounds.
The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, travelled to Nauru on Friday to sign a memorandum of understanding with president David Adeang, which states Australia will pay around $70m a year in addition to an upfront fee.
The deal relates to about 280 non-citizens in the Australian community who are known as the NZYQ cohort, who previously faced indefinite immigration detention. These people could not be deported to their home countries because they faced persecution, or because those countries refused to accept them.
The beautiful community support for Priya and Nades led the Government to do the right thing in their case. I am giving everything I can to my community – I worked in aged care, and volunteered for the Red Cross – but I have had to become an activist to fight for my family and everyone failed by the broken Fast Track system. Still, the Government expects us to leave.
The government is seeking to bolster its new powers to deport non-citizens to third countries by removing the obligation to provide people subject to such decisions procedural fairness.
If passed, the laws would apply to three men released as a result of the landmark "NZYQ" High Court decision who are currently slated to be sent to Nauru under a deal.
Government moves to bolster powers to deport non-citizens to Nauru. By Maani Truu, ABC News
Australia has pressed Nauru for more detail about a claimed billion-dollar investment agreement that it has signed with a mysterious Chinese company, as federal government officials scramble to ensure the Pacific nation is not breaching a landmark treaty it signed with Australia just nine months ago.
Late last year, Australia signed a sweeping new treaty with Nauru, promising to provide ongoing budget and security support in return for effective veto power of decisions on national security.
Melbourne nurse Jean-Philippe Miller has spent years working in some of the world's most dangerous conflict zones — from Sudan to Myanmar and Syria.
Now on his fourth rotation in Gaza, the 41-year-old is treating the sick and injured in a Red Cross Field Hospital in the southern Gaza city of Rafah — a deployment he says is unlike anything he has faced before.
"I have been deployed 14 times over the last 10 years with Australian Red Cross to different kinds of crises, refugee settings and conflict areas," he told SBS News.
In Britain former Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage told The Times he would end the right to claim asylum or to challenge deportation for those who arrived by small boats by replacing existing human rights legislation and opting Britain out of refugee treaties, citing a national emergency.
Farage's plan echoes Australia's offshore processing system, which has been heavily criticised by human rights advocates.
Australia's Operation Sovereign Borders policy initiative — established in 2013, pledging to "stop the boats" — is a military-led border security operation that takes a hard-line, zero-tolerance stance towards unapproved sea arrivals.
Those suspected of attempting such arrivals into Australia are typically either intercepted and turned back or placed in offshore detention facilities in places such as Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus Island.
I am a lecturer in education at University of Technology Sydney. My colleagues are outstanding, the students dedicated. And yet, despite newly developed and accredited teacher education courses and courses that have been delivered for 35 years, our education programs are being “temporarily” suspended from autumn 2026.
Beyond the numbers, it is worth remembering who these programs serve. For years UTS has been a pipeline for teachers equipped to work with refugee-background students, newly arrived migrants, learners from linguistically diverse communities, and “second chance” adult learners with basic literacy and numeracy needs. As an English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D) teacher and researcher, I have seen the difference that skilled, culturally responsive teachers can make. Suspending these courses doesn’t just threaten teacher numbers – it threatens the right of some of our most vulnerable students to an equitable education.
A passenger bus carrying Afghan returnees from Iran struck a motorcycle and a fuel truck, triggering a huge fire.
The bus was transporting Afghans recently expelled from Iran to the capital, Kabul, provincial spokesman Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi said. The central government has ordered an investigation.
Afghanistan bus crash death toll rises to 79, including 19 children. Al Jazeera News
Rathy Barthlote and her family are caught up in a tricky situation.
Her 11-year-old daughter Lolitta, born in Australia, became a citizen with full rights at the age of 10.
But Ms Barthlote, her husband and 16-year-old daughter Logitha are all asylum seekers with few rights. They've been living in Australia since 2014 while their refugee claims go through the system.
"Their friendships, schooling and sense of belonging are all here," Ms Barthlote said.
"One child has everything, the other child is worried about her future."
MSF’s frontline medical testimony on systematic mass casualties from GHF sites in Gaza.
Over a seven-week period from early June to late July 2025, MSF’s two primary healthcare centres in Rafah received 1,380 casualties, including 28 dead bodies, coming from GHF sites. Among the injured were 174 people with gunshot wounds, including women and children. As part of our response to mass casualties from GHF-run distribution sites, MSF teams treated 71 children with gunshot wounds, 25 of them under 15 years old. We triaged an eight-year-old girl with a gunshot wound to the chest and a five-year-old boy with severe head trauma, both of them injured near the GHF sites. We worked to stabilise injured children who arrived from the distribution sites alone, dazed and with little chance of survival.
When Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Ms Alsammak was in the first week of a business degree.
In the months following, she went on to look after young children in Gaza and Egypt who had lost their families in the war.
Now in Sydney on a humanitarian visa, Ms Alsammak is among approximately 35 Palestinian students being supported to study at Western Sydney University (WSU) on a scholarship program for students fleeing conflict.
The former pro-democracy Hong Kong legislator Ted Hui, who is wanted by authorities in the Chinese city, has been granted asylum in Australia, he said in a social media post, calling on Canberra to do more for those who remain jailed.
The special administrative region, handed back to China by the UK in 1997, has seen dissent quashed since Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law following huge and at times violent pro-democracy protests that erupted in 2019.
Hui, a high-profile participant at the time who has since resettled in Adelaide where he works as a solicitor, said the Australian government had granted him a protection visa, with asylum also extending to his wife, children and parents.
As international aid dwindles, refugees worldwide face worsening food insecurity. Among thousands displaced by ongoing conflict in Myanmar, experts warn a humanitarian crisis is looming. Those who’ve found refuge in Australia are working to keep culture alive.
Advocates in Australia are calling on the federal government to expedite and conclude the outstanding visa applications filed by Afghans who were employed with Australia's mission in Afghanistan.
Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah among those to boycott Bendigo writers’ festival, arguing she cannot appear ‘as a Palestinian’ due to speaker code.
A number of authors and academics have withdrawn from this weekend’s Bendigo writers’ festival over a speaker code that one says requires “complete self-censorship” over Israel’s war in Gaza.
Former Coalition immigration minister Alex Hawke has joined calls for the government to resolve the status of thousands of asylum seekers on bridging visas.
A group of around 8,000 asylum seekers who arrived between 2012 and 2013 and whose claims were rejected under a now abolished system remain in legal limbo.
The Department of Home Affairs says people with new, credible claims relating to their asylum applications may request ministerial intervention.
They were once the most famous refugee family in Australia. But where are they now? Checking in with the Nadesalingams – the Tamil family from the small Queensland town of Biloela who were at the centre of one of the country’s biggest people-power movements of recent years.
What happened to the Biloela asylum-seeker family? | Australian Story, ABC News In-Depth
Groups of Australians are planning to demonstrate on 31 August for the controversial 'March For Australia' protests, which call for an end to what organisers describe as reclamation of Australia's identity and "mass migration".
Supporters argue the protests represent concerns about Australia's future and immigration levels.
But experts have warned that the "anti-immigration protests" stem from misinformation and fear, rather than evidence that migrants are responsible for the country's social and economic challenges.
Home affairs wrongfully detained an Australian citizen because of an administration error, the commonwealth ombudsman has revealed, while another person with a valid visa was incorrectly held for 18 months in immigration detention.
The ombudsman’s report (Righting Wrongful Detention), released on Wednesday, also found home affairs wrongfully detained 11 people last financial year due to mistakes that could have been avoided, amid a culture of “act first, check later”.
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