March 18, 2013 Pensioners will get a super-sized pay rise, while Australians living on Newstart get a comparative pittance. From Wednesday, the take-home pay for single pensioners will jump by an extraordinary $35.80 per fortnight. Couples will get an extra $54.

March 18, 2013 The senior official running Customs' biggest procurement, a $350 million purchase of eight patrol boats, leaked government-in-confidence information to a shipbuilder interested in bidding on the project.

March 18, 2013 In early 2010, a customs official trying to cheer himself up at work entered an external competition to find the ''worst job in Australia''. Unwisely, he attached a photo of himself in customs uniform.

March 18, 2013 Australia is wasting more than a billion dollars a year by paying up to 64 times too much for some prescription drugs, a former top federal health bureaucrat says.

March 18, 2013 Loredana Alessio-Mulhall is not ready to die. But NSW Greens MP Cate Faehrmann wants to help her when she is.

March 18, 2013 Labor ministers are pushing to amend the government's week-old media reform bill to ''clarify'' that the new public interest advocate will not allow the government to effectively control content.

March 18, 2013 Getting too attached to a chook is risky. That's one of the lessons learnt by students at Muirfield High School in Sydney's north-west who for the first time are entering the Royal Easter Show's egg-laying and chicken-meat competitions for schools. Of the eight egg-laying pullets they received in November as eight-week-old chicks, only five remain: Comet, Cupid, Blixen, Prancer and Rudolph.

March 18, 2013 Deputy Premier Andrew Stoner said the federal government's attacks on 457 visas had ''not been clever''.

March 18, 2013 Julia Gillard is entering a politically dangerous last sitting week before the budget, with support for her government stuck in the basement.

March 18, 2013 Perceptions of prescription medication as the first line of treatment - or a 'safer' way to party - open the door to addiction.