Australia news live: Greens offer unlimited mental health sessions on Medicare; report finds schools too close to main roads | Australia news

Thousands of Australians have been swindled out of their money as the number of reported scams hits record highs.

Consumers and small businesses reported more than 10,000 scams in 2023/24 – an 81% increase from the year before, according to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority’s annual review released today

While this spike in complaints was one of the most worrying trends in the past financial year, the authority’s chief ombudsman David Locke noted there had been a downturn in the last quarter that had continued into the new period.

“This is encouraging but definitely not a cause for complacency,” he said.

Anti-scam initiatives launched by the federal government and big banks appear to have helped dampen numbers. “But there is still a long way to go,” Locke said.

Of the more than 10,000 complaints the authority helped resolve where consumers were scammed out of money, seven in 10 were dealt with in 60 days.

– via AAP

Up to 55% of schools and childcare centres are unsafely close to main roads in some Australian suburbs, exposing children to deadly car pollution, according to a new report.

A Climate Council report, released today, finds that about one in six schools and childcare centres across our capital cities are located within 100 metres of a busy road. That equates to more than 2,300 childcare centres and 827 schools.

Children are particularly at risk from air pollution, because they inhale more air per kilogram of body weight and have faster breathing rates. The closer they are, the higher the risk.

Outdoor air pollution was blamed for 4,250 premature deaths in 2021, plus a rise in asthma, heart disease and lung cancer, among other ailments.

Car crashes are the leading cause of death for children globally. Air pollution costs about $6.2bn a year in Australia.

The Climate Council CEO, Amanda McKenzie, said it was time to phase out “polluting cars”.

Let’s give more people in our cities better travel options, so it’s easier for more people to use shared and active means of getting around our cities – like walking, riding a bike, or taking public transport – more often. This will rapidly clean up our neighbourhoods, reduce air and climate pollution at the same time, and create healthier and safer spaces for our kids to thrive in.

The suburbs of Perth City in Perth and Boroondara in Melbourne were the least healthy, with 55.3% and 51.9% of schools exposed to car pollution. The Victorian capital had the worst record of any capital city, with 24% of all schools exposed.

The Victorian planning system is often criticised for forcing new development on to main roads in order to avoid opposition by incumbent landowners living in safer and more attractive neighbourhood streets.

Greens mental health policy announcement

Sarah Basford Canales

The Greens have announced an ambitious plan to offer unlimited mental health sessions on Medicare, expected to cost about $5.9bn over the next 10 years, as it narrows in on inner-city Labor seats ahead of the next federal election.

The minor party’s flagship election policy will be launched in the Melbourne seat of Macnamara, held by Labor’s Josh Burns, on Thursday and expands on its push for 1,000 free local healthcare clinics across the country.

Under the proposal, the Greens would remove the cap of 10 subsidised mental health sessions a year as part of a person’s mental health plan after it was halved from 20 in late 2022.

It would also offer free psychologist sessions at the proposed local healthcare clinics.

In addition to removing the cap, the Greens say they would lift the minimum Medicare rebate for clinical or registered psychologists to $150 and extend the subsidised sessions to provisional psychologists.

According to the Parliamentary Budget Office’s analysis, the changes would cost $5.9bn over 10 years in addition to the $31.7bn for 1000 new local healthcare clinics.

The Greens say the cost would be covered under the party’s big corporations tax, which would raise $514bn in government revenue over the decade.

The party’s leader, Adam Bandt, said:

If you’re putting off mental healthcare because you can’t afford it, you’re not alone … 1 in 3 big corporations pay no tax. The Greens will make big corporations pay their fair share of tax so you can see a psychologist for free and get unlimited mental health appointments through Medicare.”

The minor party is looking to pick up more seats in inner-city suburbs after its historic result at the 2022 federal election when it won four seats in the lower house.

With polls suggesting Labor and the Coalition could both fall short of a parliamentary majority next election, the Greens could be key to forming a minority government.

The party has said it is targeting the Labor-held electorates of Macnamara, Wills, Richmond, and Perth, and Liberal-held Sturt.

Good morning, and welcome to another Guardian Australia live blog. Here are the top overnight stories:

Customers who have suffered through Broken Hill’s mass outages are set for a temporary reprieve on their bills as locals continue to be hit with night-time power cuts in sweltering conditions. Two power companies – Origin and EnergyAustralia – have agreed to defer bills to those who have been affected by the outages that crippled the region for the better part of a week.

The inspector of the National Anti-Corruption Commission released an excoriating review of the Nacc’s decision not to investigate robodebt corruption referrals, finding it to be “affected by apprehended bias”. The federal anti-corruption watchdog’s conflict of interest is “really concerning” because it relates to “the person at the top”, Geoffrey Watson SC, a former counsel assisting to the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, has said.

New research has found people living in remote Indigenous communities are paying more than double the capital city prices for everyday groceries including flour, tasty cheese, apples and milk.

And a report by the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO has checked “vital signs of Australia’s climate” – and they show Australia becoming hotter, more dangerous, and that temperature trends will only worsen. “It is a wicked problem,” Dr Karl Braganza at BoM said.

I’ll be taking you though the day’s news – if you see anything you don’t want us to miss, shoot it my way on X @At_Raf_. Let’s get into it.