Macnamara MP Josh Burns and Victorian Animal Justice councillor Georgie Purcell share baby news
The political power couple shared the news in separate posts on social media on Sunday night.
'Georgie and I are so excited to share with you that we're expecting a baby girl in the very first few days of 2026,' Mr Burns wrote.
This will be the Macnamara MP's second child, after daughter, Tia, from a former marriage.
'Our little baby already has the most excited and loving big sister in Tia. And she'll have a home full of animals, love, and fun,' he wrote.
'Next year, my team and I will keep working hard for the community we love, but I also plan on being a present and involved dad every step of the way.
'I'm over the moon excited and can't wait for this next chapter with my beautiful partner, Georgie, who I love with all my heart.'
Mr Burns and Ms Purcell publicly announced their relationship during Canberra's Midwinter Ball in 2024, with the couple sharing opposing political views.
Ms Purcell is a prominent pro-Palestinian activist, while Mr Burns has publicly spoken about his Jewish faith and is vocally pro-Israel.
Ms Purcell said it would be a 'vegan pregnancy (and baby),' and said she's been 'feeling good' during the pregnancy.
However, she said her auto-immune condition has categorised her pregnancy as 'high-risk,' and this has required weekly hospital visits.
'This is obviously a vegan pregnancy (and baby) and I've been feeling good, which has let me keep pace with sitting weeks, late nights, international travel, community events and the general silliness of this job,' she wrote on Instagram.
'It's weekly hospital visits for the time being, and I am so grateful to the incredibly kind, reassuring and supportive medical care I've been receiving.'
She also acknowledged her past abortions, stating that she was 'more grateful than ever before to have had access to choice so that I could do this on my own terms and timeline, and will always fight for everybody to have the same'.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Australian
an hour ago
- The Australian
Anthony Albanese denies Donald Trump ‘snubbing' him amid meet worries
Anthony Albanese has denied Donald Trump is 'snubbing' him amid growing concerns in both Australia and the US that the two leaders have not yet had a face-to-face. The Prime Minister did a morning media blitz on Tuesday to champion a host of cost-of-living measures kicking in. But with Australian products still slugged with US tariffs and concerns AUKUS could be on the rocks, his relationship with the US President dominated. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has denied US President Donald Trump is 'snubbing' him. Picture: Martin Ollman / NewsWire / Nicolas Tucat / AFP Appearing on Nine's Today, host Karl Stefanovic put it to Mr Albanese that Mr Trump 'couldn't give a rat's about meeting with you'. 'I think it's so disrespectful,' Stefanovic said. 'And why don't you just tell him to bugger off?' But Mr Albanese took a different view, insisting he has a 'respectful' relationship with Mr Trump. 'No, not at all, and we've had really constructive discussions,' he said. 'I've been respectful of the President and I must say that he's been respectful of me as well when he rang to congratulate me on the election.' Mr Albanese added that he'd had 'constructive discussions with members of the US administration, as have my ministers'. 'But the President has a view about tariffs – it's different from Australia's view and it must be said that it's different from past presidents' views as well,' Mr Albanese said. 'And what most economists realise, (is) that free and fair trade is a good thing for the world and America has benefited from that.' Mr Albanese said he had 'a right to represent Australia's national interests', and Mr Trump 'has a right to adopt his America First policy, as he calls it'. Pressure has ramped up on Mr Albanese to secure a meet after his scheduled bilateral meeting with Mr Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit fell through last month. On Monday, two of the staunchest supporters of the US-Australia alliance in Washington urged Mr Albanese to visit the White House. Republican representative Michael McCaul and Democrat colleague Joe Courtney are co-chairs of a congressional working group on AUKUS. Mr McCaul said Mr Albanese going to 'the White House would be a great gesture on the Prime Minister's part, that I think would go over very well'. 'That would be very sound advice for him to do that,' he told the Australian Financial Review. Without a Washington trip, Mr Albanese's next most-likely opportunity to meet Mr Trump is at the Quad leaders summit tipped for September.
The Australian
an hour ago
- The Australian
Kerrynne Liddle Marion Scrymgour
The Coalition has renewed calls for an audit of commonwealth-funded Indigenous service providers after Labor MP Marion Scrymgour urged Anthony Albanese to audit the Northern Territory government's spending on Indigenous affairs. Ms Scrymgour, Labor's special envoy on remote communities, said on Friday it was time for the commonwealth to 'show some leadership' in order to examine where generous federal grants to successive NT governments had been spent and why the outcomes were so poor. On Sunday, opposition spokesperson on Indigenous affairs Kerrynne Liddle pointed to her own various attempts to scrutinise spending within the portfolio. In August 2024, Senator Liddle asked colleagues to support an inquiry into Aboriginal land councils and corporations, including their consultations with communities, declarations of conflicts of interest and transparency in their decision making. That proposal failed when Labor, the Greens and independents Fatima Payman, David Pocock and Tammy Tyrrell voted against it. 'The Coalition has long called on the Labor government to investigate the spending of commonwealth money to ensure the most effective application for improving lives but each time we have asked for an inquiry Labor and the Greens have rejected it,' Senator Liddle told The Australian on Sunday. 'The Coalition will continue to push for an audit into commonwealth-funded Indigenous service providers and monitor the impact of the Better, Safer Future for Central Australia Plan. Every individual relying on these services, and every taxpayer dollar, matters,' she said. 'The Albanese government must explain why it has rejected persistent Coalition calls to improve outcomes and why it has failed to demand transparency from the services it funds. 'Labor seems to have forgotten that they have been in power in the Northern Territory for eight of the past nine years, and the Country Liberals are still in their first year of government. 'Labor is hiding from its own accountability.' Senator Liddle's multiple efforts to force an inquiry into government spending in Indigenous affairs have not singled out the NT government, although she has previously said government agencies and any organisation – Indigenous or non-Indigenous – must be accountable for the services they are paid to deliver to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The NT's consistently poor results in the Closing the Gap national agreement were among key reasons why the Albanese government announced it would contribute an additional $4bn for public housing in the NT in a partnership with the then Labor Fyles government. Five months later, the Finocchiaro-led CLP won government with a mandate to crack down on crime and lower the age of criminal responsibility in an effort to intervene earlier in the lives of trouble youth. The NT has a population of just over 260,000, about 30 per cent of whom are Indigenous, and receives the highest GST share of any jurisdiction in recognition of challenges such as the poor health of many of its residents. The NT generates little income and its debt climbed above $11bn last July. Ms Scrymgour claimed last week that many more families in Central Australia should be on welfare management plans that effectively quarantine portions of their payments. She said the NT department responsible for child protection – Territory Families – was supposed to refer families to the commonwealth for welfare management orders called family responsibility agreements but the department had made 'very few' referrals. Ms Scrymgour said on Friday that Aboriginal organisations were required to submit to audits while the NT government was unaccountable for poor outcomes. 'The commonwealth needs to step up and say 'we can't continue to have a lot of the commonwealth's money being thrown into the Northern Territory and not see the outcomes that we should be getting',' Ms Scrymgour said. Read related topics: Anthony Albanese Paige Taylor Indigenous Affairs Correspondent, WA Bureau Chief Paige Taylor is from the West Australian goldmining town of Kalgoorlie and went to school all over the place including Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory and Sydney's north shore. She has been a reporter since 1996. She started as a cadet at the Albany Advertiser on WA's south coast then worked at Post Newspapers in Perth before joining The Australian in 2004. She is a three time Walkley finalist and has won more than 20 WA Media Awards including the Daily News Centenary Prize for WA Journalist of the Year three times. Nation Zempilas noted Peter Dutton's emphatic defeat in explaining why the WA parliamentary party would not be adopting the positions Indigenous An academic who said 'Blak activists' were turning Melbourne University into 'an ideological re-education camp' has been mocked for using anti-discrimination laws in a bid to save his job.
The Australian
an hour ago
- The Australian
Save Our Songlines' Raelene Cooper warns UNESCO of government ‘manipulation' Burrup Peninsula Murujuga Aboriginal Corp
The Indigenous campaigner leading the fight against the North West Shelf LNG extension has cited Environment Minister Murray Watt's decision not to publicly release the proposed conditions for the contentious project in her submission to UNESCO. Save Our Songlines founder Raelene Cooper also used her submission to the international body – which will decide in the coming days whether to admit the rock art-rich Burrup Peninsula, or Murujuga, on Western Australia's northwest coast to the World Heritage List – to accuse the WA and federal governments of manipulating and misrepresenting scientific findings from a crucial research project. Federal and WA officials as well as representatives from Murujuga Aboriginal Corp are travelling to Paris this week in an attempt to overturn a draft recommendation against the World Heritage listing of Murujuga, which is home to more than one million ancient rock carvings. The draft finding recommending deferring the listing until the heavy industry on the surrounding Burrup Peninsula, including some of Australia's largest industrial projects, was curtailed. Ms Cooper and a number of her supporters have also travelled to Paris for the meeting, with Save Our Songlines having prepared a submission for the UNESCO panel to consider. A statement prepared in recent days by Ms Cooper for UNESCO reinforces her support for the World Heritage nomination and the proposed conditions in the draft decision handed to the body by the International Council on Monuments and Sites earlier this year. That draft decision recommended referring the World Heritage application back to Australia to allow it to 'prevent any further industrial development adjacent to, and within, the Murujuga Cultural Landscape' and 'develop an appropriate decommissioning and rehabilitation plan for existing industrial activities'. At the time of the draft decision, Senator Watt criticised what he said were the 'factual inaccuracies' that had influenced the findings. Just days later, he gave conditional approval to Woodside's plans to extend the operating life of the North West Shelf out to 2070. Ms Cooper told UNESCO that the senator's decision was an example of the Australian government taking action that was contrary to the recommendations presented to UNESCO, with the decision to keep the proposed conditions from the public exacerbating the issue. 'Save our Songlines is currently unable to provide detailed comment on the adequacy of any conditions that may be attached to this approval, because the minister has refused to release the proposed conditions, and they are subject to ongoing negotiation with the proponent (Woodside Energy),' Ms Cooper wrote. 'However, Save our Songlines believes any ongoing operations of the NWS facility are likely to result in unacceptable ongoing impacts to the heritage values of Murujuga, and are contrary to the ICOMOS recommendations for decommissioning and rehabilitation of industrial development at Murujuga.' While the attempts by the state and federal governments and MAC to salvage the listing will likely centre on presenting the recent findings of a rock art monitoring program, Ms Cooper told UNESCO she questioned the validity of that research. 'Save our Songlines is further concerned that the Australian commonwealth government and West Australian state governments have engaged in manipulation and misrepresentation of scientific research in making the claim that pollution from LNG processing does not put the heritage values at risk,' she wrote. 'Save our Songlines believes this is the latest episode in an ongoing effort by the state party to enable industrial developments which are causing, and will continue to cause, profound and ongoing threats to Murujuga.' Ms Cooper is a former chair of MAC but quit the organisation's board after she established Save Our Songlines. Current MAC chair Peter Hicks has been highly critical of attempts to disrupt the listing process, warning that environmental groups had hijacked the process for their own agendas. Mr Hicks will be joined at UNESCO by WA Environment Minister Matthew Swinbourn and the lead scientist from the rock art monitoring program, Ben Mullins. Mr Swinbourn said he was travelling to Paris to stand alongside Murujuga's traditional owners as they seek to have the area's outstanding cultural and historical values recognised. 'The scientific evidence shows that industry and cultural heritage can coexist when properly managed, and that current industrial activity is not damaging the rock art. 'Ongoing monitoring, undertaken in partnership between the WA government and MAC, will continue safeguarding this irreplaceable cultural heritage,' he said. 'World Heritage listing will further help protect the ancient rock art and cultural landscapes of Murujuga for generations to come. 'This is about ensuring the unique stories and significance of Murujuga are recognised and celebrated by the international community.' Paul Garvey Senior Reporter Paul Garvey is an award-winning journalist with more than two decades' experience in newsrooms around Australia and the world. He is currently the senior reporter in The Australian's WA bureau, covering politics, courts, billionaires and everything in between. He has previously written for The Wall Street Journal in New York, The Australian Financial Review in Melbourne, and for The Australian from Hong Kong before returning to his native Perth. He was the WA Journalist of the Year in 2024 and is a two-time winner of The Beck Prize for political journalism. Nation Zempilas noted Peter Dutton's emphatic defeat in explaining why the WA parliamentary party would not be adopting the positions Indigenous An academic who said 'Blak activists' were turning Melbourne University into 'an ideological re-education camp' has been mocked for using anti-discrimination laws in a bid to save his job.
