Less than four weeks after the Christchurch mosque shootings, the New Zealand parliament has almost unanimously voted to pass new gun laws.

The bill, which bans a range of semi-automatic weapons and modifications, passed 199 votes to one on Wednesday afternoon.

In sole opposition was libertarian ACT party’s David Seymour, who acknowledged that some change was needed but rejected the legislation on the basis that it was passed too quickly.

It has been revealed that wait times for some migrant family visas are, on average, 56 years.

Senate estimates last week confirmed average wait times for certain visas, revealing the statistic.

First assistant secretary Peta Dunn said that 75 percent of partner and child applications take between 10 and 21 months to be processed.

Contributory parents, or those who can pay a $47 455 fee, wait on average 45 months for a visa, and others wait between 30 to 56 years.

Tasmania has become the first state or territory in Australia to make the inclusion of gender optional on birth certificates.

Transgender activists have hailed the reforms and have said the law will now respect and protect young transgender and gender diverse Tasmanians.

The bill, backed by Labor, the Greens and Speaker Sue Hickey who crossed the floor, passed parliament on Wednesday afternoon despite the opposition of the state’s Liberal government.

Queensland Health’s director-general has corrected a memo to Logan Hospital’s staff to turn patients away due to overcrowding.

The memo originally instructed staff to keep ambulance officers waiting outside the hospital if all nine waiting bays were full, which is a practice known as ‘ramping’.

Director-General Michael Walsh overturned the memo, reiterating that no one who arrives at emergency departments will be rejected.

New figures from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman reveal Queenslanders lodged 11,585 complaints about telco and internet services, with the Ombudsman calling the figures an improvement.

Nationally, complaints between July and December 2018 dropped 27.7 per cent over the same period in the previous year from well over 80,000 to just over 60,000.

Some of the most common complaints included lack of action from the service provider, no working phone or internet service, slow data speed and termination fees.

The latest NAPLAN results show a ‘significant’ improvement for Indigenous students and students from multicultural backgrounds in reading, writing and numeracy.

Results are proving Indigenous students are improving at a faster rate. Among year three Indigenous students, results improved by 7.4 per cent between 2008 and 2018, compared to 4.2 per cent for non-Indigenous students.

A bomb attack in central India has killed five people, including a local politician from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Bhima Mandavi was a state legislator from the Chhattisgarh state legislative assembly and was returning from an election rally when he and his security personnel were attacked in the Dantewada district of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

Police say it is suspected the attack was made by Maoist rebels.