A daily five minute news wrap for English learners and people with disability.
Welcome to SBS News in Easy English. I'm Greg Dyett.
Almost 10,000 people have been infected with COVID-19 in more than 1,000 aged care homes.
Aged care providers say despite the use of Australia Defence Force personnel to fill staff shortages, many spots remain unfilled.
Aged Care Minister Anika Wells says the government is taking action.
”And we also have the health surge workforce, which is filling approximately 2,000 shifts a week. So that doesn’t fill all the shifts by any means. You only need to talk to a single person working in aged care that there are shifts going empty."
Australia's house prices are falling at the fastest rate since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.
Values have dropped in five of the eight capital cities.
Despite the monthly declines, capital city house prices were up 5.4 per cent over the past year while regional prices were 17 per cent higher.
Homelessness Australia has released a plan it says will end homelessness within a decade.
The group says that could be achieved if 25,000 social housing properties were built every year, and a housing guarantee is provided for women and children fleeing family violence.
They are the biggest group seeking help, accounting for nearly two thirds of people experiencing homelessness.
Homelessness Australia chairman Jenny Smith says the situation is very serious.
"Seven-and-a-half thousand women every year return home to the perpetrator because they find they just can't afford to be anywhere else and we know that 45-thousand other women would like to be able to leave, but just can't see a pathway forward to be able to afford to do that."
An alliance of 23 aid groups in Australia is urging the federal government to take up a greater role in responding to the global hunger crisis.
Almost 50 million people in 45 countries are on the brink of famine, which is exacerbated by Ukraine conflict, COVID-19 and climate change.
The Help Fight Famine alliance is proposing Australia increase its spending on foreign aid in the October federal budget to include measures such as a 150 million dollar package to prevent famine in the worst-hit regions of the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen.
New laws are being proposed by the Greens that would assess the impact of emissions from polluting projects, before the environment minister would be able to approve a project.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young says the step is needed to help deal with rising emissions.
"It is crazy that our current environment laws don’t include this assessment. It is the very least the government can do to make sure that their stopping climate change getting worse - and they are doing everything they can to reduce pollution.”
Two Labor MPs will introduce a bill to allow the Northern Territory and A-C-T to legislate on Voluntary Assisted Dying laws.
Alicia Payne and Luke Gosling are hoping to overturn a 25-year-old law which banned the territories from being able to make those changes.
That law was established after the Northern Territory introduced laws in 1995 to allow a doctor to end the life of a terminally ill patient, at their request.
The then federal Liberal government used its powers over the territories to overrule the legislation - a situation that remains.
I'm Greg Dyett and that's SBS News in Easy English.
