1 July changes: minimum wage, Centrelink payments, parental leave, road fines and everything else coming for the 2025-26 financial year

A wage increase for low-paid workers, changes to superannuation and significant reforms to the pension are part of sweeping changes being made on 1 July.The end of the financial year is typically when state and federal governments change a range of legislation, implementing new policies. This year there is a lot happening so let’s take a look at the big-ticket items.Good news for those on the bottom income line, the minimum wage will increase by 3.5%, to $948 per week or $24

UK food delivery firms step up checks after claims of illegal workers

The UK’s three largest food delivery companies have announced increased security checks for riders after ministers raised concerns about people working illegally for the firms.Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat have committed to increasing the use of facial verification checks and fraud detection technology in efforts to ensure only those with registered accounts can work on their platforms.The changes were announced after the firms met Home Office ministers on Monday to discuss people using the platforms to work illegally. Last week the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, claimed to have found people working illegally for the firms during a visit to a hotel used to house asylum seekers.The new checks will be rolled out in the next 90 days

Gov.uk smartphone app to launch with limited functionality

A government app intended to “cut life admin” will be free to download by millions of UK citizens from Tuesday, but its functions will be limited and the cabinet minister in charge has admitted: “The design is not as we would like it to be.”The gov.uk app will be accessible on smartphones for people aged 16 and over and is intended to be the main mobile hub for many citizen interactions with the government, although not the NHS or HM Revenue and Customs.Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, said the version launched this week would only steer users to existing government webpages, with more functionality to be added by the end of the year.A generative artificial intelligence chatbot trained on 700,000 pages of the gov

China hosts first fully autonomous AI robot football match

They think it’s all over … for human footballers at least.The pitch wasn’t the only artificial element on display at a football match on Saturday. Four teams of humanoid robots took each other on in Beijing, in games of three-a-side powered by artificial intelligence.While the modern game has faced accusations of becoming near-robotic in its obsession with tactical perfection, the games in China showed that AI won’t be taking Kylian Mbappé’s job just yet.Footage of the humanoid kickabout showed the robots struggling to kick the ball or stay upright, performing pratfalls that would have earned their flesh-and-blood counterparts a yellow card for diving

Brain fade sees basketball player dunk in his own net to trigger double-overtime defeat

Australia’s brightest men’s basketball prospects, including the younger brother of an NBA star, survived a double-overtime thriller to record their first victory 101-96 at the Fiba Under-19 World Cup in Switzerland.But the game will be remembered for the unusual help that triggered the Australians’ late comeback.Cameroonian big-man Amadou Seini – who had 15 points and 24 rebounds in a largely dominant display – received the ball from a teammate off an in-bounds underneath his own basket with his team up by six points with less than a minute left.Rather than dribble or pass towards the other end of the court as everyone expected, the teenager jumped up and dunked it into his own basket.The implications were plain

Katie Boulter rounds off Britain’s opening day in the sun at Wimbledon

Wimbledon is just not used to this kind of thing. On the hottest opening day in the history of the championships, with the temperature reaching 32.3C, British players sizzled with a record seven recording victories, the highest number on any day in the open era, beating the previous record of six.Sonay Kartal got the ball rolling with a brilliant 7-5, 2-6, 6-2 win against the former French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko, and more than seven hours later Katie Boulter set the new mark, beating that achieved on day two in 2022, with an equally impressive 6-2, 3-6, 6-4 win against the former world No 2 Paula Badosa.With 23 British players across the two singles events, the most since 1984, there was plenty of hope, if not total expectation, that several of them could progress to round two