Australia news live: Woodside and Santos in mega-merger talks; heatwave brings bushfire warnings

Australia news live: Woodside and Santos in mega-merger talks; heatwave brings bushfire warnings | Australia news | The Guardian

Sydney residents furious at Rozelle interchange chaos

Tensions over the bungled opening of the $3.9bn Rozelle toll road interchange have boiled over at a fiery public meeting attended by more than 300 residents of Sydney’s inner west.

The meeting was held at Balmain town hall last night after 11 days of traffic chaos on the streets near the labyrinthine “spaghetti” junction which has been called the world’s most complex underground road project.

Comprised of more than 16km of tunnels, the Rozelle interchange is part of the sprawling WestConnex private toll road system. It connects the M4-M8 link with the Anzac and Iron Cove bridges and a future western harbour tunnel.

As a result of the new junction, 10 lanes of traffic now have to merge into four lanes on the Anzac Bridge.

Good morning and welcome to our rollings news coverage on this happy Friday. I’m Martin Farrer and these are some of our top overnight and breaking news stories.

Andrew Forrest has continued his transformation from titan of carbon-heavy industry to green evangelist by launching a scathing attack on the oil and gas industry and imploring businesses to stop burning fossil fuels. Speaking at Cop28 in Dubai, where he arrived by a ship powered by green hydrogen, Forrest has told Guardian Australia about his worldwide ad campaign shaming oil and gas companies by portraying them as ostriches with their heads in the sand on climate science. And he says that if other companies don’t change they will have “blood on their hands”.
Andrew Forrest speaks during a panel discussion at the Ukraine pavilion at the Cop28 climate conference in Dubai. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The bosses of Woodside and Santos, Australia’s two biggest listed oil and gas companies, are in talks about merging to create a single company that would be worth about $80bn. But pushback against the industry and especially the difficulty companies have in obtaining community approval for large schemes such as Santos’s Barossa gas project in Northern Territory, are among the reasons the merger might make sense and give strength in numbers. We’ll have the latest.

Disability advocates have urged federal and state governments for an “ironclad commitment” that no one will be phased out of the national disability insurance scheme and on to new proposed support services before they are properly in place. This follows yesterday’s landmark review that found that the scheme supporting 600,000 Australians needs urgent fixes to ensure its ongoing financial sustainability.

And multiple states are waking up to bushfire warnings today as a heatwave spreads through Australia – more on that soon.