Wednesday's news in under 5 minutes.

We’ve rounded up all the latest stories from Australia and around the world – so you don’t have to go searching.

1. Bill Shorten has refused to say if authorities bribed people smugglers while Labor was in power.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten says that Labor did not pay people smugglers to turn back boats, but has refused to comment on allegations that payments may have been made by spy agencies.

“Labor has never paid people smugglers to turn back boats as it appears the government has done,” he told reporters on Tuesday morning.

The questions came after the Coalition government was accused of giving bribes to crew members and passengers on an asylum boat, which was intercepted last month.

When asked if Labor may have authorised similar payments while in government Shorten was evasive and cited national security concerns to avoid answering the question.

“You know it doesn’t matter what party the politician is from, when it comes to security matters, we simply don’t comment,” Mr Shorten said.

Yesterday afternoon, Green Senator Sarah Hanson-Young moved a motion calling on the Government to produce any documents pertaining to the matter.

Senate has just ordered the Govt to table docs relating to payments made to ppl smugglers. They have 24hours to comply.

— Sarah Hanson-Young (@sarahinthesen8) June 16, 2015

“If the Government wants to work with the Senate on other topics, other issues, they’re going to have to start playing ball on this,” Senator Hanson-Young said. “The public want to know what’s happened, they want to know if Australian taxpayer money was spent paying for bribes to traffic people back to Indonesia.” Meanwhile, Fairfax Media has released an image of an Indonesian police chief with photo evidence of the money allegedly paid to the smugglers.

Indonesian officials say wads of cash were paid to send asylum seekers on a ‘suicide mission’ http://t.co/JjcLypuG0n — smh.com.au (@smh) June 16, 2015

2. The Killing Season: Julia Gillard may have given approval for coup against Rudd.

The second instalment of Sarah Furguson’s political documentary The Killing Season has revealed that Julia Gillard may have had a bigger hand in the unseating of Kevin Rudd than she had previously admitted.

Gillard has consistently painted herself as an unwilling leader, but interviews with former Labor staffers and front benchers, indicate she may have understated her ambitions.

“She listened to what people were saying and obviously she was in a position to rule it out categorically and she didn’t, and so events moved forward as a consequence of that,” her former adviser Gerry Kitchener said on the program.

“I think that’s sort of different to [saying] she was agitating, because she wasn’t agitating at all. Other people were agitating, but she didn’t say no.”

Coming up on #KillingSeason pic.twitter.com/CUrnY3K3qB — Matt Burke (@matttburke) June 16, 2015

Labor MP and long-time Rudd supported Anthony Albanese went further, saying Gillard’s leadership tilt was calculated.

Referring to a Sydney Morning Herald articled published at the time Albanese had this to say:

“You don’t make a decision to challenge for the leadership of the Labor Party against a first-term sitting prime minister because an article suggests that the chief of staff is supporting his boss to remain as prime minister.”

Gillard refused to be drawn and consistently stated that she had made no plan to depose Rudd.

3. A paedophile has preyed on Victorian high school students via a chat site.

Victorian police are investigating a disturbing incident of a sexual predator using a webcam to masturbate in front of a group of year 7 students at a state high school.

The Age reports that two 12-year-old students from Lilydale Heights College were using a live camera chat site during a class in the library when they were exposed to the sexual act.

The site, Omegle, describes itself as a place to “talk to strangers” and is known to police.

One of the parents who reported the incident said the man could see the students in their uniforms.

“There were lots of different people, all men, and this one put the camera down … and started masturbating. All of this was happening in the library during class,” she told Fairfax.

She also said she was disappointed that school had failed to protect the children.

Prinicipal Greg Hancock said the school was offering counselling services but could not control what students accessed on their laptops.

“While internet filtering software provides a technical barrier, the strongest tool we have available to us as a community is education and setting clear expectations about online behaviour at school and at home,” he said.

4. Report: Nearly half of Australian jobs may be replaced by robots by 2025.

Technology could replace almost 40 per cent of Australian workers — including in highly skilled roles — within a decade, according to a new report from the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA).

The report states that Australia and the world are on the cusp of a “new but very different industrial revolution” due to computerisation and automation of the workforce.

CEDA chief executive Professor Stephen Martin said job losses may be as high as 60 per cent in some parts of rural and regional Australia, but it was not just low-paying manual jobs that are at risk.

“What we’ve found is that going right through to dentists, and clergy and chemical engineers — and, dare I say, even editors or newspaper proprietors and, heaven forbid, even economists — all of these are in grave danger of perhaps outliving their usefulness,” Professor Martin told ABC News.

Professor Martin said that new jobs and industries will emerge but if Australia is not planning and investing in the right areas we will get left behind.

“The pace of technological advancement in the last 20 years has been unprecedented and that pace is likely to continue for the next 20 years,” he said.

5. White supremacists look to take over small town.

A cult of white supremacists are attempting to take over a small US town on the Canadian border.

News Corp reports that the leader of the Pioneer Little Europe group, Craig Cobb, was once imprisoned for storming a town in North Dakota — marching through the streets with his gang of racists in an attempt to terrorise residents.

Now, the PLE has set its sights on a new town — Antler, North Dakota.

The PLE paints itself as a peaceful and harmonious group of pale flower children, while simultaneously spewing racial hate speech.

“Anti-Whites are hypocrites and cowards, and they all need to disappear,” states a post on their Facebook page.

The group is using attractive young women to lure people to their cult and encourage them to co-opt the North Dakota town.

6. Accused paedophile Peter Gerard Scully has appeared in court.

Trigger warning: This post deals with child sexual assault.

Notorious accused paedophile Peter Gerard Scully has pleaded not guilty to rape and trafficking crimes in a Philippines court.

Scully, an Australian national, is accused of raping two teenage girls who were found chained in his home last year.

The 51-year-old was puffing on a cigarette in court before entering his plea, The Guardian reports.

While Scully is not currently in court over these charges, he is also under investigation for raping an 18-month-old baby and for murdering a 12-year-old girl.

He is suspected of filming himself having sex with his victims before selling the footage.

7. Donald Trump to run for President.

American billionaire Donald Trump has announced his bid for the Republican candidacy in the next US Presidential election.

“So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,” he announced.

“Sadly the American dream is dead, but if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”

His campaign slogan is “Making America Great Again.”

He is currently one of 12 republican candidates vying for the party’s top spot.

Whomever is elected to represent the Republican party will run for President in 2016.

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