Welcome back to Gamamari’s Newslist for 2026!
Here, we cover and note some major events that have taken place both nationally and internationally over the past week. Feel free to follow the hyperlinks for greater depth and detail.
Australia has officially led the world in moguls skiing as the Winter Olympic season in Milano Cortina comes to an end. Victorious mogul skiers Matt Graham, Cooper Woods and Jakara Anthony have secured three gold medals for the Australian team, leaving just about everyone stunned by their success.
Part-time coach Peter NcNiel, a mathematical and statistics graduate from the University of Melbourne recently shared a slice of how they achieved their success.
An offer came in to coach in Canada and, and with it, a chance to work with the great Canadian freestyle skier, Mikaël Kingsbury. McNiel passed it up though, acknowledging it was a tough decision to make, but ultimately deciding he wanted to create more opportunities in Australia and carve a proper pathway for young aspiring Australian athletes to make it to the Olympic level. That, and a dedicated small team, pushed Australia into the top zone in the Olympics.
Onto Australian politics this week, Anthony Albanese has slammed One Nation’s Pauline Hanson for her “disgraceful” anti-Muslim comments following her suggestion that “there are no good Muslims”. When asked on ABC Radio whether he thought there was a direct link between Hanson’s commentary and the threat of violence within the community, Albanese said, “of course there is”.
New data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reveals Australians’ pay are not keeping pace with the ever-rising cost of living, meaning household budgets are being tightly squeezed. The Wage Price Index since last year rose 3.4 per cent – lower than inflation with a rise of 3.8 per cent.
Onto some more grim news, independent UN experts have spoken out on the ‘grave nature’ regarding the crimes against humanity committed against women and girls in the Epstein files. The experts continued to say that the crimes were committed against a backdrop of corruption, extreme misogyny and supremacist beliefs.
“A number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity,” they said in a statement.
Experts further pushed that the allegations found in the files require an impartial and thorough investigation and said inquiries must also be conducted into how it was possible for these crimes to have been committed for so long. The world is still awaiting consequences following the UN recognition of this news.
Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s latest visit to Australia has divided the community, with widespread allegations of police brutality coming after a rally outside Sydney’s Town Hall on 9 February. Police were granted the controversial power to halt protests for up to 90 days when the Minns government rushed laws through parliament last year in light of the Bondi beach terror attack. On Tuesday, Mal Lanyon, the New South Wales police commissioner, announced an end to that restriction, meaning protest organisers can once again initiate marches without the risk of being arrested. According to Lanyon, the use of pepper sprays and kettling in the recent protests played a “very little” role in the decision to end the restriction, but rather was in the interest of the safety of the community at the time.
Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fatah is to headline Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026 after her removal from the Adelaide Writers’ Week line-up this year which sparked a mass boycott by speakers and authors. The high-profile author was removed from the event after her comments on Israel and Zionism, including a post in which she said Zionists had “no right to cultural safety”. Sydney Writers’ Festival have since confirmed in a statement that they were “not in the business of cancelling or censoring writers”.
And that’s a wrap for the first week of news! We hope everyone is settling well into Term 1, and we’ll be back next week with more news, updates, and everything in between.