Australia politics live: Telstra pays CEO $6.8m for year despite nationwide outage; Victorian premier tells student protesters against Pauline Hanson to ‘stay in school’

From the publisher

Minns steps in as Albanese faces more heat on melon-gate New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, stepped in to defend the PM and deflect questions over melon-gate which have plagued Anthony Albanese all week. At the press conference in Tomago earlier, Albanese struggled to once again explain what he meant by his comments and hand gestures in the now infamous Bush Deep podcast before Minns intervened and said: Go and ask a 1000 what they care about today. This is the biggest announcement for this region in a generation. Can we just talk about it for 5 minutes? (They had spent already well over five minutes talking about the announcement).…

The source's own excerpt, unedited