The WA Attorney-General casts doubt on whether more than $600,000 worth of severance payouts, made to former Health Department employees embroiled in a decades-long corruption scandal, will be recovered.

Chrys Barker has been confined to a wheelchair and is in need of 24-hour care since being critically injured in a car accident in 2014. He's now been awarded what is believed to be the biggest single personal injury settlement in Queensland.

Sex workers say they are being harassed and intimidated by South Australian police, as figures show charges for sex-work offences have spiked in the past two years.

In a shock announcement, former minister Philip Dalidakis resigns from the Victorian Parliament, effective immediately, to take a senior position at Australia Post.

A South Australian judge has given a stark warning to a street-level drug dealer about the horrors of ice, saying it causes people to snap in bars, coward punch strangers, neglect their children and even kill.

The Victorian branch of the CFMEU threatens to immediately cease all financial support for the ALP if Labor leader Anthony Albanese's push to expel union leader John Setka goes ahead.

Police charge two brothers, aged 18 and 20, over an unprovoked attack on an off-duty senior Victorian police officer near a Melbourne train station.

The AFL's supporter crackdown is being felt by those in the stands, but without confirmation one way or another from the AFL, the supporters are filling the void with questions of their own.

Laurent Hayez, father of missing Belgian backpacker Theo Hayez, supported by his sons Godfather JP Hayez and cousin Lisa Hayez.

A former finance officer for the Summernats car festival, who stole thousands of dollars from the business to fuel a drug habit, avoids prison time.

A Queensland primary school teacher has shocked his students and jumped into a wrestling ring to live out a lifelong dream.

The crown alleges Mark Jones waterboarded Bradley Breward with a hand towel, by placing it over his face and pouring water over it, and also put a plastic shopping bag over his head twice for 40 seconds each time.

The biggest league match of the year rolling into Perth this week will inevitably trigger discussions about whether WA should have its own NRL side, but that decision depends on something far more important than crowd sizes, writes Tom Wildie.

A chemical used to control pests in agricultural crops and termites in buildings has been blamed for the death of up to 10 million bees in southern New South Wales.

"More mines, more jobs, more future," proclaims a mysterious billboard near Kingaroy. But not everyone agrees and the years of "constant fighting" are taking a massive toll.

An Indigenous boy with an intellectual impairment was stripped naked inside Brisbane's adult maximum-security police watch house after being deemed a suicide risk, documents reveal.

Police announce a $500,000 reward for information about the rape of an 18-year-old woman in Melbourne's CBD last year, as the victim speaks about the "traumatic" attack for the first time.

Ex-detective Paul Dale tells a royal commission he has waited years to expose "corruption" within Victoria Police over the use of Nicola Gobbo as an informer, and that his sexual relationship with the woman known as Lawyer X has been exaggerated.

More than two decades since Philip Nitschke set fire to the "disgusting, pathetic" bill overturning voluntary euthanasia in the Northern Territory, the region remains in a stranglehold, banned from even debating the issue.

A south-east Queensland council with more than 700 memorabilia items the bulk of which is believed to have been bought with ratepayers' money is asking the community what should be done with the haul.

The Victorian Government prepares to reintroduce a bill which would make it easier for people to alter the sex recorded on their birth certificate to male, female or any other gender descriptor of their choice.

A teenage basketball star from a celebrity family in California is set to move to Wollongong in New South Wales in one of the most intriguing signings in Australian basketball history.

When 22-year-old Jake Vincent had a stroke, he was forced to wait at the emergency department for almost seven hours. The doctor who finally saw him "went white" he hadn't been administered a time-critical medication earlier.

Two brothers charged with intentionally causing serious injury over an alleged attack on a a senior Victoria Police officer displayed aggressive and threatening behaviour and were "attempting to engage in a fight" a Melbourne court is told.

Hawthorn captain Ben Stratton is suspended for two weeks by the AFL tribunal, one week each for repeatedly pinching Essendon's Orazio Fantasia and stomping on the foot of Shaun McKernan.

Stunning footage of a security guard at Bellerive Oval attempting to enter the field of play to separate two tussling players has former players shaking their heads.

A female footballer who played in a men's South Australian country league has her suspension reduced to four weeks by an independent tribunal.

There is a "crisis of confidence" in the NSW building industry following the second emergency evacuation of an apartment block in Sydney in six months, the Insurance Council of Australia and Federal Government warns.

Craig has been threatened with a machete and separated from his daughters, but he says that is the reality of being homeless in Tasmania's capital.

Children as young as 10 have been kept in adult maximum-security watch houses in Queensland and now we know one of the main reasons why.

Feisty little Mila is more her father's daughter than anyone might guess. The one-year-old's failing liver was entirely replaced with a section of her dad's, after Victoria's first father-child organ donation.

Police release CCTV footage of a car believed to be linked to a drive-by shooting at Melbourne's Love Machine nightclub in April, which left two people dead and four others injured.

Consumers are pushing demand for alternative mushrooms to new highs as plant-based diets become increasingly popular and people seek nutritious meat substitutes.

Narooma is a haven for holidaymakers and sea-changers, but many young people are finding it impossible to rent in their own home town.