Auckland’s Harbour Bridge is under a severe wind warning.

Australian rock royalty Cold Chisel will reunite for a massive national tour later this year.

The tour will celebrate 50 years since the band first formed, with the first show kicking off in Armidale where they were based back in 1974.

It comes just months after frontman Jimmy Barnes underwent open-heart surgery.

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The Big Five-0 tour will see the beloved rockers perform in major cities along with select regional areas.

Fans of all ages will have the rare chance to hear the band perform their iconic songs one last time.

The Cold Chisel frontman, 67-year-old Barnes, the tour was a priority following a near-death experience last December.

He underwent emergency surgery to replace an infected valve in his heart after a serious blood infection.

"The Big Five-0 is a landmark moment," Barnes said.

"There have been plenty of times where I never thought I'd live to see this day so I'm going to make the most of it.

"I can't wait to celebrate with my mates and with all the fans who have been such a big part of our story. We're gonna smash it!"

Cold Chisel's national tour starts in October, with the band set to promote a best-of album that will drop in August.

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Cold Chisel tour dates

• October 5 – Petersons Winery, Armidale, NSW (Red Hot Summer tour)
• October 8 – Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre
• October 11 – The Entertainment Quarter, Moore Park, Sydney
• October 15 – WIN Entertainment Centre, Wollongong
• October 19 – Sandalford Wines, Swan Valley, WA (Red Hot Summer Tour)
• October 25 – Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne
• November 2 – Victoria Park, Brisbane
• November 6 – Newcastle Entertainment Centre)
• November 9 – Victoria Park, Ballarat (Red Hot Summer tour
• November 13 – MyState Bank Arena, Hobart
• November 17 – VAILO Adelaide 500, Post Race Concert, Adelaide (Tickets via Ticketmaster)

Fan Presale will begin from 12pm on Friday. General Public will go on sale from 12pm on June 4.

Peters was responding to Te Pāti Māori’s promotion of the nationwide protests.

One of the inmates needed medical treatment outside the prison following the attack.

Police recovered more than 2000 bone fragments in their search for the remains of missing campers Russell Hill and Carol Clay, a jury has been told.

Photos of the bones were shown to the Supreme Court in Melbourne on Wednesday, as airline pilot Greg Lynn stands trial for the couple's murders.

He is accused of killing Hill andClay in March 2020 while they were camping in Victoria's Wonnangatta Valley and then burning their remains in the bush.

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The 57-year-old has pleaded not guilty to both counts of murder.

More than 2100 bone fragments were recovered by police across two sites in Victoria's High Country, forensic anthropologist Dr Soren Blau told the jury.

One of the sites was Bucks Camp where the couple disappeared from, while the second site was at the Union Spur track, east of the valley.

Dr Blau analysed the fragments and was able to confirm the original skeletal position of about 600 bones.

They included skull fragments found at Bucks Camp, which Dr Blau said showed signs of trauma around the time of death.

READ MORE: Item found near dam in search for Samantha Murphy

When asked if that trauma could have come from a gunshot, Dr Blau told the jury she did not have the expertise to make that finding.

But she said the skull fragments showed "radio opaqueness" when examined under X-ray, which was a sign metal could be present.

Defence barrister Dermot Dann told the jury a scuffle broke out at Bucks Camp after Hill took a gun from Lynn's vehicle.

He claimed Mrs Clay was accidentally shot by Hill and the older man then came at Lynn with a knife and was accidentally stabbed in the chest as Lynn defended himself.

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Prosecutors dispute those claims, alleging Lynn intentionally killed the couple after Hill threatened to send drone footage to police of Lynn deer hunting near the camp.

Lynn admits later dumping and burning the couple's bodies at Union Spur in what Dann described as a "series of terrible choices".

Dr Blau told the jury most of the bone fragments were located at Union Spur inside a fallen tree trunk.

The majority of fragments had been burnt and were extremely deteriorated so she was unable to determine the person's age, sex or when they had died.

But the anthropologist could confirm there were the remains of two people as two fragments came from the same part of a person's forearm.

The trial continues.

Police have concluded their search of a dam beside where they earlier discovered a phone in their investigation into the disappearance of Victorian mother Samantha Murphy

The 51-year-old mother was last seen leaving her home on Eureka Street in Ballarat East to go for a run in the Canadian State Forest on the morning of February 4.

She has not yet been found, but on March 8, 22-year-old Patrick Orren Stephenson was charged with her alleged murder.

READ MORE: How the investigation into the disappearance of Samantha Murphy unfolded

Detectives from the Missing Persons Squad, together with a range of specialist resources including federal police, have spent the day performing a "targeted search" south of Buninyong, about five kilometres south of where Samantha's phone last pinged to a mobile phone tower.

9News has footage of police seizing a phone inside a wallet-like phone cover with identification cards inside from beside the dam about 12.25pm.

Aerial footage showed police celebrating after sniffer dogs made the discovery on a private property, not far from a roadside.

Police have confirmed they "located some items of interest", which will be forensically tested.

"At this stage we are not providing further information about the items until that testing has been completed," a police spokesperson has said.

Police divers spent the late afternoon searching the dam.

Metal detectors were also used to scour the water.

The owner of the property told 9News the water level in the dam hadn't been as low in at least six months.

Investigators have said they initially planned to set aside three days to search the dam and area, but have moved more quickly than anticipated, and will not be returning to the farm tomorrow.

Detectives have said they will regroup tonight and decide where to continue searching for the mother's body.

An excavator digger was also seen clearing bushes beside the dirt road.

A resident who lives along the road where police are searching has told 9News they were warned a couple of weeks ago that police would be searching the area over this period of time for any links to this missing Ballarat mother.

Victoria Police have asked members of the public not to attend the search.

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"Police are undertaking a targeted search in the Ballarat area today as part of the investigation into the disappearance of Samantha Murphy," police said this morning.

"We are not in a position to supply further specific details of today's operational activity at this time."

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Detectives said they "have been regularly undertaking a range of enquiries and small-scale searches as part of the current investigation" since Murphy went missing.

Samantha's family has also been advised of the search.

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Qantas workers unlawfully retrenched as COVID-19 gripped Australia in 2020 would have lost their jobs anyway as the virulent Delta strain reared its head a year later, a judge has heard.

The airline is being sued by the Transport Workers' Union in the Federal Court after the firm laid off almost 1700 ground staff in November 2020.

In July 2021, Justice Michael Lee found the move was designed to deprive workers of being able to bargain for a new enterprise agreement and, as such, contravened employment law.

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Qantas and the union returned to court today, when the judge heard further submissions about how much compensation should be paid to three workers who lost their jobs and were being used as test cases.

The airline previously argued that the workers would have been retrenched anyway in November 2020 and should receive no payout.

There were other, lawful reasons for the outsourcing decision such as cutting the costs of the company during the pandemic, it has said.

Today, Qantas barrister Michael Dalton SC argued that staff would have been made redundant in August 2021 as the Delta strain further stifled domestic and international flying activity.

This situation mirrored the "unusual concatenation of events" that Justice Lee found occurred in 2020 regarding COVID-19, lockdowns and border closures, Dalton said.

Given there were no other ways to cut costs, Qantas would have moved to outsource in August 2021, he argued.

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"Are you effectively saying I should find that essentially a certainty?" Justice Lee asked.

"Close to it – we say it's very likely," Dalton replied.

In 2021, the airline had already stood down 10,000 employees, retrenched thousands more staff and sold its land-holding in the Sydney suburb of Mascot, the court heard.

"Everything was on the table at that time," Dalton said.

Justice Lee said that everything he had seen in the case showed a company focused on cutting costs as quickly as possible in a catastrophic set of circumstances.

"Qantas was intent on doing everything it could to save as much money as it could in this process, irrespective of how it affected the employees," he said.

TWU barrister Mark Gibian SC previously suggested there was a chance the staff could still be employed now if they were not retrenched in 2020.

Justice Lee called that claim "unrealistic" given what had happened during the pandemic.

Once the judge makes findings for the three test-case employees, it is hoped the union and airline can work out how much compensation is owed to all retrenched staff.

The TWU is also seeking penalties against Qantas, although these will be determined at a later date.

In December 2021, Justice Lee rejected a bid by the union to have the workers reinstated at Qantas after finding that proposal was impractical.

The judge's findings that the terminations were unlawful were unsuccessfully appealed by Qantas in both the Full Court and the High Court.

The hearing continues.

Torrential rain and powerful gusts are expected to lash the east coast over the weekend following days of rainfall across the country.

An east coast low will bring heavy rainfall, strong winds and freezing cold temperatures when it forms off New South Wales on Sunday afternoon, according to Weatherzone.

It is anticipated to quickly intensify that same night and continue into Tuesday.

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Some areas are forecast to cop more than 250mm of rainfall and gusts of up to 200km/h, which may spark flash flooding and erosive surf conditions.

Sydney, Gosford, Batemans Bay and Coolah are in firing line to feel the worst of the low.

Residents are urged to be on alert this weekend and regularly check weather warnings from the Bureau of Meteorology.

The impending weather system comes after wet conditions were forecast for every state and territory for the rest of the week, which will see 80 per cent of the country soaked.

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Perth residents have already woken up to a blanket of hail today after a night of heavy rain and gusts of up to 100km/hr.

Brisbane will also see showers from today, followed by Melbourne, Hobart and Adelaide from tomorrow.

Sydney will see rainfall from Friday while Darwin is lucky to escape the lashing with clear or sunny conditions for the week.

The showers comes as a "stubborn" high-pressure system, which has kept parts of the country dry the past two months, breaks down into a low-pressure system combined with tropical moisture, Weatherzone earlier said.

The US-built temporary pier that has been taking humanitarian aid to starving Palestinians for less than two weeks will be removed from the coast of Gaza to be repaired after getting damaged in rough seas and weather.

Over the next two days, the pier will be pulled from the beach and sent to the southern Israeli city of Ashdod, where US Central Command will repair it, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters.

She said the fixes will take "at least over a week" and then the pier will need to be anchored back into the beach in Gaza.

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"From when it was operational, it was working, and we just had sort of an unfortunate confluence of weather storms that made it inoperable for a bit," Singh said.

"Hopefully just a little over a week, we should be back up and running."

The pier, used to carry in humanitarian aid arriving by sea, is one of the few ways that free food and other supplies are getting to Palestinians who the UN says are on the brink of famine amid the nearly eight-month-old war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

The two main crossings in southern Gaza, Rafah from Egypt and Kerem Shalom from Israel, are either not operating or are largely inaccessible for the UN because of fighting nearby as Israel pushes into Rafah.

The pier and two crossings from Israel in northern Gaza are where most of the incoming humanitarian aid has entered in the past three weeks.

The setback is the latest for the $320 million pier, which only began operations in the past two weeks and has already had three US service members injured and had four vessels beached due to heavy seas.

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Two of the service members received minor injuries but the third is still in critical condition, Singh said.

Deliveries also were halted for two days last week after crowds rushed aid trucks coming from the pier and one Palestinian man was shot dead.

The pier was fully functional as late as Saturday when heavy seas unmoored four of the Army boats that were being used to ferry pallets of aid from commercial vessels to the pier.

The system is anchored into the beach in Gaza and provided a long causeway for trucks to drive that aid onto the shore.

Two of the vessels got stuck on the coast of Israel.

One has already been recovered and the other will be in the next 24 hours with the help of the Israeli military, Singh said.

The other two boats were stranded on the beach in Gaza and were expected to be recovered in the next two days, she said.

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The suspension of the pier comes after the new sea route had begun to pick up steam, with more than 1000 metric tons of food aid delivered.

US officials have repeatedly emphasised that the pier cannot provide the amount of aid that starving Gazans need and said that more checkpoints for humanitarian trucks need to be opened.

At maximum capacity, the pier would bring in enough food for 500,000 of Gaza's people, and US officials have stressed the need for open land crossings for the remaining 1.8 million.

The US also has planned to continue to provide airdrops of food, which likewise cannot meet all the needs.

A deepening Israeli offensive in the southern city of Rafah has made it impossible for aid shipments to get through the crossing there, which is a key source for fuel and food coming into Gaza.

Israel says it is bringing aid in through another border crossing, Kerem Shalom, but humanitarian organisations say Israeli military operations make it difficult for them to retrieve the aid there for distribution.

Construction work on nearly 40,000 homes across Australia has yet to start despite them being given building approvals, new research shows.

The analysis from KPMG Australia reveals Sydney and Melbourne account for almost half of approved but not yet commenced apartments, townhouses and houses.

High costs in building materials over recent years and the interest rate spikes have been blamed for the construction lag.

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In Sydney up to last December, building work was yet to start on 11,170 dwellings with approval, while Melbourne had 6840 that had not broken ground.

Compared with the five-year December average, the amount of stalled housing is 7.7 per cent higher in Sydney. Melbourne recorded am 11 per cent spike.

KPMG urban economist Terry Rawnsley says nearly 80 per cent of the "approved but not yet commenced" projects were apartments and townhouses.

"There is always a lag between housing being approved and construction commencing, but current estimates show an abnormal number of dwellings sitting in this category, suggesting other market factors are stalling the pipeline of new builds," he said.

Bigger costs of materials and finance were making it harder for developers to build larger projects profitably, he said.

Potential buyers' purchasing capacities were also impacted by increases in interest rates. 

Brisbane recorded an 8 per cent increase in stalled housing over the five-year trend, according to the KPMG figures.

The ACT set a record for dwellings approved but not begun, nearly doubling from 864 to 1772.

Adelaide and Perth remained stable.

A long list of constructions businesses have fallen into administration or collapsed entirely since the pandemic.

This week Stevens Construction, a New South Wales company that has completed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of building projects, entered voluntary administration.