Pauline Hanson’s right-hand man, James Ashby, is enjoying generous benefits as a result of his role working for One Nation, with documents showing that a company linked to the party built a $56,000 shed on his central Queensland property.

Ashby, formerly Hanson’s chief of staff and now the party’s national director, also drives a new Ford Ranger that was “personally” gifted to One Nation by Hancock Agriculture’s chief executive, Adam Giles, in April. Hanson said the vehicle would help the party’s campaign efforts and “provides us the presence we need in the lead-up to the next federal election”.

Sources say Ashby is earning a lucrative salary in his new high-profile role. He also has regular access to the $2m Cirrus plane gifted to the party by Giles’ employer and Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart.

In May Hanson asked the Department of Finance for permission to establish a second electorate office in Yeppoon, further fuelling suggestions that Ashby was preparing a tilt at federal parliament. When asked if he would run at the next election, Ashby declines the possibility.

The federal government’s move to reopen detention centres for visa overstayers, overseen by compliance officers, has drawn comparison from the Greens and advocates to Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown in the US.

Home affairs minister Tony Burke was careful to downplay any similarities when he announced the federal government’s immigration plan on Thursday, which includes reducing the roughly 77,000 unlawful non-citizens in Australia. He said 100 new compliance officers would be hired to round up overstayers, and an additional 250 beds would be freed up, as well as potentially repurposing a 100-bed quarantine facility in Victoria; most people would be placed in detention for a matter of weeks, and encouraged to leave of their own accord.

The Greens immigration spokesperson, David Shoebridge, said Labor should make visa processes and appeals faster rather than focusing on net migration figures, and isn’t different from the same exploitative US private prison multinational that is already abusing people’s rights in immigration detention.

The CEO of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Kon Karapanagiotidis, said the federal government had demonstrated “the right to seek asylum and the right to work while seeking safety remain in danger”. Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the immigration department, downplayed the ICE comparisons, pointing out that up until 2015, compliance officers wore “shirts and a tie”, not military gear and were unarmed.

Internal Department of Health emails released under Freedom of Information laws have exposed significant turmoil over a last-minute decision to strip assessors of their power to override automated aged care recommendations.

For months, assessment staff had been reassured that human judgment could correct faulty outputs from the algorithm determining Support at Home (SaH) packages. However, just three days before the system’s scheduled rollout, health officials realized that allowing human overrides would directly violate the newly drafted Aged Care Rules 2025 legislation, which contains no legal provision for human discretion.

This unexpected legal conflict forced senior department staff into an emergency briefing with Aged Care Minister Sam Rae and Health Minister Mark Butler. In their urgent correspondence, officials warned the ministers that eliminating human override capabilities carried substantial operational risk.

Despite these warnings, the department ultimately chose to remove override powers from assessor instruction manuals rather than amend the underlying legislation to grant assessors legal flexibility. The Department of Health has yet to comment on why it opted to restrict human intervention instead of adjusting the regulatory framework.