New South Wales public schools are failing to spend $1.3 billion of funds accumulated from NSW and federal governments, and from fundraising by schools and parents.

New figures show that that each school has $600,000 of unspent money. 

The NSW Teachers Federation and Greens MP David Shoebridge says principals are not receiving the right support to spend the money allocated to their schools, and they feel they are expected to be financial managers as well as educators.

Twenty-one elected members to the First Peoples’ Assembly, a group charged with being the voice of Indigenous Victorians during the Victoria Treaty process, have now been announced.

Treaties between Indigenous people and governments will essentially act as contracts, and can be used to acknowledge sacred sites, names, historic sovereignty and historical wrongs.

The badly eroded Mary River on Mount Ubi Station at Kenilworth, whose sediment flows into the Great Barrier Reef, has been transformed with the help of federal government funding.

Station owner Stephen Carter says “We've certainly lost a lot of land, we're told something like 600,000 tonnes has disappeared, probably over the past 70 years, from floods and from erosion”.

Alluvium Consulting organised $500,000 worth of works that are calculated to reduce future sediment loss by 90 percent.

Thousands of hectares of native forest north of Noosa have been opened to the timber industry in a Labour decision to save logging jobs.

The harvesting permits have been extended to 2026, with the previous expiration date of 2024 threatening up to 500 workers.

The land was going to be turned into a national park, but Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk says “This announcement will help secure the employment of 500 Maryborough and Wide Bay locals working in the industry.” 

A man decorated his house and garden with a million Christmas lights and raised more than £55,000 for charity. This year he unplugged the plug and claimed that it was too big to cope.

Since 2014, Robert Dempsey and his wife have been making the Cambridgeshire Turves a glistening village.

However, due to the lack of volunteers to guide the tourists, and some “nearly missed” on the narrow road, it meant that he decided to name it “a day trip”.

He said that he felt "very sad" about this.

As WhatsApp confirms that its software has been used to install spyware on mobile phones, many people are considering removing popular messaging applications. However, experts say this is not the answer.

WhatsApp has confirmed that some of its users have been attacked by spyware, causing considerable anger and concern in many countries, including India.

Firefighters are now demanding to know the details of toxic chemicals they were exposed to while battling a week-long industrial fire in West Footscray last year, as several-dozen firefighters have reported falling ill since the blaze.

Affected firefighters now suffer a number of different conditions, including lasting headaches, memory loss, respiratory illnesses and nose bleeds.