Wong urged to raise human rights concerns on Beijing trip – as it happened

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• Penny Wong to travel to China this week for 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations
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It's officially a week before Christmas, which means the forecasters at the Bureau of Meteorology are fairly confident they can tell us what whether we can set up for an al fresco Christmas lunch or not.

For some parts of the country, there is a chance of showers:

Particularly in the south, we can get some volatile weather but all the patterns really starting to change as we move into later part of this week.

So we'll see a weather system move through southern parts of the country, Thursday and Friday. Then a big high-pressure system behind it will quickly move into the Tasman Sea and then kind of sit there over the Christmas weekend into early the following week and normally that drives a lot of warm weather across much of southern parts of the country and our guidance is showing a similar pattern with that as well.