for the Top End, a Manhattan-sized solar farm and years of construction work if it goes ahead; for Australia, a test of whether the country can export sunshine like it exports LNG.

for the Bega and Eden community, the family held his funeral yesterday; today the woman accused of killing him faces court.

for renters who have already moved somewhere cheaper or into a share house to make this work, prices are stuck at record highs with no path back down.

Five stories to know before the day starts.

variable mortgage holders face the possibility of another hike before Christmas; if November follows through, repayments would climb further from a rate already at a 15-year high.

Australians paid $20 million for a summit meant to put major polluters in the room with a drowning Pacific. Without them there, the government arrives at COP with less than it promised.

Saunders is in prison but has not been defrocked. For Kimberley communities whose faith sat alongside the mission era, this is a bishop convicted of what he did to people in his own church.

the figures are out, the costings are not. Voters sizing up the Coalition's immigration policy are doing it on the opposition's word.

The ten stories Australia talked about today, in the order you put them.

cafe customers at one in six venues now pay 50 cents more for a flat white whether they use card or cash, because the cost is in the price, not on the receipt.

in Victoria the state election is next month, and this is the ad One Nation is running at voters there; in Tasmania, a cafe owner has turned her takings from a Senate candidate into a Greens donation.

suppliers absorb what they can and pass on the rest, which lands at the checkout; experts say the hit to shelf prices won't be one-for-one, but it won't be nothing either.

every new or expanded coal mine in NSW now has to be approved on terms that count overseas emissions, which no mine has had to clear before.

if you own the Anko glasses, the probe centres on the company's security and privacy practices, and the regulator has formally told retailers to think again about stocking them.

small business owners who used credit card payments to the ATO as a cash flow tool lose that from November 30, while absorbing the same fees the tax office says it cannot.

Australian homeowners and businesses watching for rate relief are facing a global bond market that says the cheap-money era is over, with yields near heights not seen in a generation.

Five stories to know before the day starts.

If you lost someone poor in NSW, you may not have been told where they went; the state will now review and may move to the Victorian $3,000 plot-and-marker model.

WA residents are paying $11.5m extra for a three-day trade fair, and a facial-recognition exclusion trial is now running in central Perth.

for officers in Wadeye and the next hot spots, the useable range of a less-than-lethal weapon just doubled, following the Queensland rollout that first flagged tracking issues.

if you catch the route 1 at midday on a weekday, this is now the kind of attack to think about: a stranger, a kitchen knife, nowhere to go on a moving tram.

The ten stories Australia talked about today, in the order you put them.

four rate rises this year, rates at their highest since 2011, and the group feeling it most is the one still paying off a mortgage. Renters, oddly, feel the best.

this is what the state buys for your beach confidence: more eyes in the air, more tags under the water, no cull.

if an AI agent your clinic uses can read your Medicare record without consent, this is the week the rule gets written.

if your daughter had him in class this year, the letter asks you to tell her yourself. The school is offering support services to students who were in his classes.

the rebuild sits with an assistant coach who was still at Fremantle a week ago, not with Buckley, not with the Hawthorn pair, and not with North's own Xavier Clarke.

Jervis Bay in May, the Whitsundays in July, Mount Bundey now. Five families are at Royal Darwin tonight and one has been told the worst, with the sixth training death of the year.

International students, working holidaymakers, and anyone hoping to bring family into Australia face tighter rules whichever side wins; all three major parties have now committed to cuts.

if you are a veteran and you ever clicked on a VBA ad, your DVA entitlements may have been billed by people you never met, for care you never received.

Said , 29 September 2026, in our post : "OpenAI's chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon.

Five stories to know before the day starts.

Albanese's climate pitch to the Pacific is being judged on who turned up today, and the headline count is two. The real deals land next month in Turkey.

if you shop at Coles or Woolies, this is the Greens asking what you'd pay to turn a fifth of them into a public option.

The ten stories Australia talked about today, in the order you put them.

a party campaigning against the big end of town will now rent its headquarters from the biggest end of it, and the only check on the price is the party's own say-so.

the money sitting on Wall Street takes the first hit if US rates grind higher, which means retirees drawing down see the move in their monthly balance before anyone else does.

If you need to sell now, you are competing with 276,000 other listings, with clearance rates showing fewer than half will find a buyer at auction.

for veterans whose PTSD, chronic pain or substance abuse is DVA-covered, "free" cannabis can mean cold calls, nurse check-ins and 5-kilogram bags from doctors you never see.

for your fruit and veg aisle, local lines keep thinning; for a small grower, the choice is a wholesaler who can be cut tomorrow, or no shelf at all.

voters who wanted the opposition to keep Labor honest are getting parties that can't win enough seats to do it, betting again on the strategies that shrank them in 2025.

Five stories to know before the day starts.

two families have lost their houses, not forever but long enough that a long weekend turned into a scramble for insurance assessors and a spare bedroom.

a two-year-old is among the injured and a five-year-old girl is still critical; families in Wallsend are measuring the recovery in weeks of hospital, not days off work.

The ten stories Australia talked about today, in the order you put them.

Roosters fans got the revenge they wanted and Elliott and Baxter the send-off they deserved: one undefeated season ends with the title.

West Australians with MS, many in wheelchairs, now choose between finding $1,000 more a month or moving into residential aged care.

Thousands of Knights fans will head to Sunday's grand final with a girl, a 67-year-old man and a grandfather still in hospital at home; Wallsend fundraisers for them are already running.

Households relying on Medicare, income tax cuts, or other federal cost-of-living relief face uncertainty: Chalmers needs to find fresh savings but won't say yet what's on the table.

If you're on the south coast or near a river catchment, Sunday is still wet. If you've got outside furniture, bring it in before the next cell comes through.