A daily 5 minute news wrap for English learners and people with disability.
Welcome to SBS News in Easy English... I'm Catriona Stirrat.
Defence Minister Richard Marles says it's now clear that there is no longer hope of finding the four missing soldiers whose helicopter crashed near Queensland's Whitsundays Islands alive.
The Defence Minister says the length of time since the crash paired with the discovery of significant wreckage from the helicopter appears to confirm that the soldiers died in the incident.
Search and rescue teams have now switched their objective to recovering the bodies of the soldiers.
The helicopter crew were conducting training as a part of a joint international military exercise when a catastrophic incident occurred.
Mr Marles cautions people against speculating on the cause of the incident, assuring that a full investigation will determine exactly what happened.
"We are all obviously left wondering - naturally - 'what happened?' Foremost in our minds in this moment must be the families of these four men and these teammates and, with them in mind, idle speculation is obviously harmful. But there will be a full investigation and we will come to understand exactly what happened and learn the lessons from it."
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The Liberal Party will support the Government's bill to increase the rate of Jobseeker to 40 dollars a fortnight.
The government will introduce an 40 dollars a week increase to welfare payments this week, previously announced in the federal budget.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton says the party will introduce its own amendments to allow welfare recipients to work more without losing Jobseeker payments.
The amendments are likely to fail without the support of the government but Mr Dutton says the party will still vote for the increase regardless.
"At a time where you wanted to increase participation, you wanted to get more people out into a tight labor market, it would be better to spend that money or to apply that to a model where you can allow people to work more hours. Now we'll move that by way of amendment, the amendment won't get up because we don't have the numbers and ultimately, if that goes down as we suspect it will unfortunately because I think it's good policy, then we will support the government's increase to $40."
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A new report examining the backlog of more than 137,000 parent visa applications has described the system as "dysfunctional".
Commissioned by the Scanlon Foundation, the report found the waiting period of between 30 and 50 years means the probability of successful migration is "virtually non-existent for many applicants".
A major Migration Review led by former public service boss Martin Parkinson, earlier this year, found Australia’s migration system was broadly "not fit for purpose", and recommended "a new and fairer approach" to parent visas.
Report author Peter Mares says the current system is in urgent need of reform.
He says the substantial wait times, cost and uncertainty of the current system are having a major emotional impact on families.
"The key issue here is a clash between the heartfelt and legitimate desire of families to bring parents to live with them in Australia, on the one hand and on the other Australia's migration program which is biased towards skills and youth. And so what's happened is we now have a terrible backlog of visas and visas that take 40 years or so to get processed."
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The first national scorecard assessing deforestation across Australian states and territories has been released.
The scorecard, by the World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia WWF-Australia, assesses which states are leading the way in protecting and restoring trees, and which are falling behind.
New South Wales and Queensland have both been given the status of ‘Very Poor’ on the scorecard, securing a position as Australia’s worst clearers of trees.
Dr Stuart Blanch is a conservation scientist with WWF-Australia.
He says the scorecard brings attention to the positive work being done by some states and territories, as well as the urgent need for improvement in some locations if Australia is to reach set targets.
"It shows a bag of mixed results no government gets good or let alone very good and we have a couple at very poor so we all have a long way to go particularly if we're going to achieve the Australian government's commitment to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030."
I'm Catriona Stirrat, this is SBS News in Easy English.
