Australia news LIVE: One Nation slides in poll; mass casualties in Thai pub fire

Good morning, and welcome to our live national news coverage for Monday, July 13. Here’s what’s making headlines today.

One Nation slips in poll: Support for Pauline Hanson’s party has fallen for the first time in four months and shifted to the Coalition as women and immigrants turn their backs on One Nation.

Thai restaurant fire: A huge fire engulfed a pub in Bangkok early on Monday morning, killing at least 27 people before firefighters brought the blaze under control, officials said.

US-Iran war: US and Iranian forces have exchanged heavy missile and drone assaults, with Tehran targeting US facilities in states across ​the Gulf and saying it had again closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Project manager’s side hustle: In Victoria, a high-ranking project manager on Big Build projects used his position to promote a new workwear company headed by his wife that he part-owned via a family trust.

Bureaucrats’ perks kept secret: In NSW, a government department is refusing to say how much taxpayers will spend for hundreds of bureaucrats to attend a three-night “gold, grit and greatness” conference in Bathurst.

Sinner wins Wimbledon: Jannik Sinner has defended his men’s Wimbledon title to end a run of grand slam heartache and match great rival Carlos Alcaraz’s feat as a back-to-back champion on the hallowed grass.

More details are emerging about the Bangkok pub fire that has left 27 dead and 63 people in hospital.

Footage shared online by first responders shows a huge blaze raging and plumes coming out of the front door of the Na Ladprao pub – also known as Rong Beer Na Lat Phrao, according to Thai media – in the Chatuchak district in the northern part of the capital.

A band member at the venue told local media that smoke suddenly filled the room after the lights briefly went out, followed by a massive explosion and fire.

“After the explosion I didn’t see anybody trying to run, most of them were on the floor asking for help,” he told reporters, his head still bandaged, without giving his name.

“I ran towards the door from the stage, about five metres. It was dark and there was smoke, no oxygen.”

Read more here.

Pauline Hanson’s debut at the National Press Club can take some of the blame for her fall in recent polling, according to former One Nation party director David Oldfield.

“I don’t think it won a vote,” David Oldfield told Sydney’s 2GB radio station this morning. “A fundamental thing to understand about voting in the first place [is] to know who it is that isn’t voting for you, who is voting for you, and who you might be able to swing.

“You mustn’t play to your own cheer squad and kick the people that you hate … that’ll just put off the people in the middle.”

Oldfield said Hanson’s call for a “monoculture” was not widely understood.

Israel is set to hold a national election on October 27, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, its first since Hamas’ 2023 attack and the wars that ensued in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

The precise ballot date had been unclear since the Israeli parliament voted in May to disband.

However, coalition head Ofir Katz told a parliamentary committee on Sunday that the original October 27 date set by law would be kept.

Successive surveys have suggested Netanyahu’s coalition of nationalist and religious parties would lose the ballot, though his political rivals still have no clear path to power and the political landscape may still shift.

Netanyahu’s security credentials were left in tatters by Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7, 2023. Polls show many Israelis are unhappy with Netanyahu over the outcome of the Iran war.

Australian lawyer Samuel Monkivitch went viral for running away from a Hong Kong restaurant without paying in March, but there’s much more to his story, North Asia Correspondent Lisa Visentin reports.

Back in Australia, the family of the late bricklayer George Nemet had entrusted Monkivitch with managing his estate of $372,507.37.

But when the Nemet family checked the bank account Monkivitch had advised them to put the money in – and which he had joint access to – it had just 20¢ in it.

Monkivitch had transferred about $300,000 over 149 transactions into his personal bank account between February 2025 and February 2026, while claiming he was using the funds to pay legal fees and for unsubstantiated investments.

Read the full story here.

One Nation’s dip in the polls may be because Pauline Hanson has made some major miscalculations in the past few months, writes Chief Political Correspondent Paul Sakkal.

Consider the events from the start of June. Barnaby Joyce joined that anti-abortion movement Peter Dutton knew was a dead-end. Hanson called employees, a core part of her suburban base, lazy in a National Press Club address on June 17. In the same speech, she railed against paid parental leave and argued for a monoculture that she kept having to redefine.

Hardline comments on childcare, abortion and wages are still reverberating online, according to major party hardheads tracking public sentiment.

In July, instead of sticking around over winter to regain faith, Joyce and then Hanson jetted off to London for a Euro summer. Their travel has Coalition MPs wondering if Hanson and company are high on their own supply.

Read Sakkal’s full analysis here.

Pauline Hanson’s dip in popularity is a sign the One Nation leader doesn’t try to “gild the lily”, MP Barnaby Joyce says.

The latest Resolve Political Monitor shows support for Pauline Hanson’s party has fallen for the first time in four months and shifted to the Coalition.

Support for One Nation slipped three points in July, to 26 per cent, while support for the Coalition rose by the same amount over the same period to 23 per cent. Labor’s support was steady at 28 per cent, according to the poll.

Here’s what Joyce had to say on Seven’s Sunrise program when asked about those results this morning:

The scramble for a pen on a packed flight will soon become a thing of the past as millions of travellers are set to ditch paper passenger cards under a $56.1 million push to modernise Australia’s borders.

The federal government will begin a nationwide rollout of the Australia Travel Declaration, a digital replacement for the orange incoming passenger card, after a trial involving more than 450,000 passengers on Qantas international flights.

The system will be expanded to all international airports and seaports over the next 12 to 18 months. Passengers will eventually be able to complete declarations online before arriving in Australia.

The rollout follows years of failed attempts to replace paper forms, including the abandoned Digital Passenger Declaration app launched in 2022 and the earlier Seamless Traveller initiative announced in 2016.

Read more here.

Australia’s intelligence agencies are aware of the location of the last-known Australian woman in Syria with links to Islamic State, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has confirmed.

Regular readers of this blog would know that Sydney woman Hodan Abby’s temporary exclusion order was revoked last month. However, she has not yet returned to Australia.

The ABC is this morning reporting that Abby was an “enforcer” of Sharia law, according to a security source at the al-Roj detention camp.

Abby’s lawyers have not responded to the claims aired by the public broadcaster.

“Our agencies are aware of her location,” Burke told ABC TV earlier this morning. “She may well, having seen some people returned be arrested on arrival at the airport … be weighing up the different things she has done. And would be making a decision as to whether or not she, in fact, ever returns.”

In NSW, a government department is refusing to say how much taxpayers will spend for hundreds of bureaucrats to attend a three-night “gold, grit and greatness” conference in Bathurst, which is taking place as some staff at the agency fear they may lose their jobs in a looming restructure.

Value NSW, an agency within the NSW Department of Planning responsible for setting land values, will next month send almost 300 staff west of the Great Dividing Range for an annual conference that doubles as an internal awards night and a knees-up.

The all-staff conference is treated with significant anticipation within Value NSW. The staff intranet contains a countdown clock for the event, the theme of which is “gold, grit and greatness”, and staff have been told to expect it to be “bigger, bolder and more exciting than ever this year”.

But when this masthead requested information on how much taxpayer money was being spent on the event, a spokesman said cost figures “would not be provided”. The agency ignored questions about whether a “change management plan” being circulated within the agency could lead to staff facing the axe.

Read more here.

The Prime Minister will address the State Memorial Service for Professor Richard Scolyer AO today in Sydney.

Professor Scolyer, a pathologist and former Australian of the Year, died on June 7, aged 59.

He died at the peak of an exceptional career as a world-leading pathologist, medical co-director of Melanoma Institute Australia, joint author of more than 900 research papers, speaker at 400-plus conferences and seminars, conjoint professor at the University of Sydney and senior staff specialist at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Garry Maddox reports.

Professor Scolyer’s state funeral takes place at Sydney Opera House at 11am.