Health News at Your Fingertips

Always handy when public entities refuse to answer questions over whether procedure was followed.

Totally worth keeping secret. Just more evidence that it was absolutely the right decision to move the AFP from the attorney-general portfolio and place it under home affairs and Peter Dutton. Never any conflict.

(all of this is sarcasm, in case it needs to be clear)

Anne Davies has another story on Frank Zumbo which you can find here

Craig Kelly spoke to Fran Kelly on ABC radio RN where he referred to allegations made against his staffer Frank Zumbo, published on Friday in the Guardian as “salacious gossip”.

The now independent member for Hughes (who again ruled out a switch to the Nationals) says he will let the Department of Finance investigation into the claims conclude before acting.

As I say, everyone is entitled to natural justice, there is an inquiry by the Department of Finance. If that inquiry finds there are some issue, I’ll act on them, but at the moment, I’m not going to throw a staff member under the bus and expose the commonwealth to a claim for unfair dismissal, just because it’s politically expedient.

Kelly says he has not spoken to the women who have made the allegations against Zumbo, and the first he heard of many of the allegations was on Friday, when they were published. He says he has gone through those “line by line” with Zumbo, who denies them.

Christopher Knaus and Katharine Murphy report Peter Dutton won’t say whether or not he was notified of Brittany Higgins’s rape allegation – as he should have been under AFP guidelines.

From their report:

Internal federal police guidelines suggest that at the time Higgins and Reynolds spoke to police, officers were compelled to alert the home affairs minister “at the earliest opportunity” to any “politically sensitive” matter – unless there was a clear conflict of interest in doing so.

Politically sensitive matters include an investigation likely to be of “particular interest” to MPs, the government, or the media. The alleged rape of a staffer by her co-worker in a minister’s office would have met this threshold.

The guidelines also apply to matters still in their early stages, which had been referred to the AFP but were not yet the subject of a full investigation.

We’ve made it to Wednesday and while these last two weeks have felt like a decade, we still a ways to go.

Linda Reynolds will deliver a speech to the National Press Club come lunch time, where she will make the case that Australia needs to build up its defence forces to respond to growing military risks in the Pacific.

It’ll also be the first time she has faced questions from journalists since her former staffer, Brittany Higgins told her story.

Reynolds had to make a correction to the Senate yesterday after saying there had been two meetings with the AFP (there had been one) and then having to review her “recollections” in order to answer properly. There will be more questions today, although Reynolds maintains she supported Higgins at all times, once she learnt of the allegations.

It won’t be a comfortable watch, but still, if you get a chance, tune in and we’ll keep you updated.

The fallout from Craig Kelly’s decision to quit the Liberal party and sit as an independent continues, with Barnaby Joyce making the case for Kelly to join the Nationals (and give him one more number for the leadership). Kelly says he won’t and has vowed to maintain supply for the government. Scott Morrison still has some questions over what he knew about allegations against Kelly’s staffer, so you can expect more questions on that today as well.

We’ll bring you all of that and more as it happens – you have the Guardian Canberra crew at your disposal, as well as Mike Bowers and me, Amy Remeikis on the blog.

It’s going to be a five-coffee day. I can feel it.

Ready? Let’s get into it.