TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to SBS News in Easy English. I'm Sam Dover.
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The federal opposition has criticised the government's energy plans after one of the largest power outages in Victorian history.
Wild storms caused the Loy Yang coal-fired power station to go offline, after hundreds of power poles and lines were knocked down and six transmission towers collapsed on Tuesday.
The Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action has warned it could take "days, if not weeks" to fully restore electricity, with as many as 260,000 properties still out of power today.
Nationals Senator Matt Canavan says the outage shows that our national electricity networks are inadequate.
"Our engineering plans have always factored in the fact that multiple faults should be allowed to happen and we can ride through - we're obviously not doing that right now. And that shouldn't be news - our energy regulator a few months ago said that we could expect blackouts over the summer, because we don't have enough redundancy in the system."
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Negotiators from the United States, Egypt, Israel and Qatar have failed to reach a breakthrough on cease-fire talks concerning Israel's war in Gaza.
This comes as the international community including Israel's closest ally the US have called on Israel to pause its assault on the southern city of Rafah where nearly 1.5 million people are sheltering from the conflict.
Israel says its military is making plans to evacuate them.
But no plan has been offered yet and aid agencies say the displaced have nowhere else to go in the territory.
Meanwhile, the head of Lebanon's Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah says his armed group's cross-border shelling of Israel would only end when Israel's war on Gaza stops.
"We are fighting in southern Lebanon with our eyes on Gaza. When the aggression stops against Gaza and when the shooting stops in Gaza, we will stop the shooting in the south. The Israeli minister came out and said, 'No, even if we stop in Gaza, we will continue in the south- Alright, you're welcome, it is not a problem. You continue in the south of Lebanon, we will continue in the south."
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More than one million claims made to Services Australia remain outstanding, despite thousands of new staff hired to reduce the backlog.
Services Australia's new chief executive David Hazlehurst has told a Senate estimates committee more than 1.1 million claims remained unprocessed as of December 2023.
Meanwhile, Services Australia has reached its recruitment target of 3,000 extra staff members for the department.
Mr Hazlehurst says he is optimistic the agency can reduce the outstanding claim levels to between 400,000 and 500,000 by April.
"I would expect that by the middle of the year, particularly in relations to new claims on hand, we'd expect to see things back more towards what we would expect to be a reasonable standard. If we can get it below that. That would be terrific. We're going to continue to monitor it and continue to provide advice to the government."
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In cricket,
Mitch Marsh says he will happily slot back to Number 3 ahead of the T20 World Cup to allow Travis Head to return to the top of the batting order.
Marsh was promoted to opener for the series finale against the West Indies in Perth last night.
The skipper made 17 runs off 13 balls before he was caught out.
The West Indies won the match by 37 runs, but Australia claimed the series 2-1.
Head, who was rested from the series, will return for this month's three-match T20 tour of New Zealand, starting on the 21st of February.
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I'm Sam Dover. This has been SBS News in Easy English.
