PM dividing Australia like Hanson: Abbott

OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott has likened Julia Gillard to Pauline Hanson, the anti-immigrant founder of One Nation.

Mr Abbott on Thursday told parliament the prime minister of Australia should be a leader for all Australians.

But he said Ms Gillard would use class, gender, and now country of birth, to score political points.

Speaking in the increasingly rancorous debate on Labor's plan to tighten up 457 visas for temporary foreign workers, Mr Abbott referred to a former member of parliament who set out to divide Australia about 15 years ago.

"We saw a member of this parliament set out to make perfectly decent Australians feel like strangers in their own country," he said.

Mr Abbott said he never thought he would see the day when it was not just be an independent member of parliament but the prime minister setting out to deliberately divide Australian from Australian to serve a political purpose.

"It is an embarrassment," he said.

In her first speech to parliament in 1998, Ms Hanson, a disendorsed Liberal candidate, warned that Australia risked being swamped with Asian immigrants.

The government claims there has been widespread rorting of the 457 visa scheme.

Its legislation will require employers to conduct market testing and only hire foreign workers if no Australian is available.

Mr Abbott said the government should be tackling the real problem of illegal boat arrivals.

"Instead they have decided to raise a false problem," he said.

"They can't get tough on illegal arrivals by boat, so they have decided to get tough on legal arrivals by plane."

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Qld hospital concealed fatal death: union

THE Queensland Nurses Union is calling for an independent investigation into the Wesley Hospital manager who did not disclose a previous legionnaires' disease death at the facility.

The Brisbane hospital is dealing with a deadly outbreak of legionnaires', which killed one patient and put another in intensive care this month.

Its management has previously told reporters there were no past cases.

However, Queensland Health this week told reporters it is now including a 2011 legionnaires' death at the private hospital in its investigation.

UnitingCare Health executive director Richard Royle on Wednesday admitted he knew of the 2011 death; a fortnight ago he denied any knowledge of past cases.

The Queensland Nurses Union's acting secretary, Des Elder, says withholding information and making false statements are serious offences.

"There absolutely has been a cover-up," Mr Elder said.

"I don't think there's any question that the hospital management has tried to conceal that there had in fact been a previous occurrence of legionella previous years ago when they made statements to the press quite openly that there had not been."

He said had the Wesley been a public hospital, Mr Royle would be held accountable for making false statements.

"It would be a breach of the code of conduct in Queensland Health for a CEO to lie," he said.

Mr Elder suggested a public hospital chief executive would face disciplinary action under the same circumstances, but declined to say whether he believed Mr Royle should be sacked.

However, he called for an independent investigation into the false statement and the delay in passing relevant information to Queensland Health.

"For too long the private sector has been treated with kid gloves by both the state and federal governments, and this crosses party political lines," he said.

"There's a reluctance to take strong action to ensure that accountability that everyone requires of a public health system is there in the private health system."

Premier Campbell Newman told reporters earlier on Thursday he was disturbed to hear the 2011 death was never made public.

"I believe the hospital had the duty back then to reveal what went on, but of course Queensland Health had a duty to reveal," he said.

"It's not clear to me why the previous government failed to tell Queenslanders what was going on."

He said private hospitals were required to comply with the same accountability standards as the public sector.

The Wesley withheld information about the 2011 death from media, but it was reported to health authorities at the time.

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WorleyParsons shares rise on Nigeria deal

SHARES in mining engineer WorleyParsons are up three per cent after a South Korean shipbuilding giant awarded it a $US100 million ($A105.97 million) offshore oil and gas contract in Nigeria.

The news comes a month after a profit downgrade saw its shares plunge to a four-year low.

Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) awarded WorleyParsons a design and engineering contract for a floating production, storage and offloading vessel, which will operate at an offshore deepwater oil field in Nigeria.

WorleyParsons chief executive Andrew Wood said the contract to design topside process modules for the floating vessel was significant and represented "a strong development of our ability to locally support the offshore oil and gas business in West Africa".

WorleyParsons shares rose by 3.2 per cent, or 62 cents, to $19.92 on Tuesday.

They hit a four-year low of $19.50 on May 17, after the company blamed a slowdown in the West Australian mining industry for a profit downgrade.

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Freed Ohio mum, daughter 'doing well'

A MENTALLY disabled woman and her daughter are doing well after they were freed in October following two years in captivity and after police investigated an abuse allegation one of the suspects made against her, authorities say.

"The victim in this case is slowly recovering," US Attorney Steve Dettelbach said.

Jordie Callahan, 26, Jessica Hunt, 31, and Daniel J. "DJ" Brown, 33, were charged with forced labour. Callahan also was charged with tampering with a witness in the investigation.

The suspects had an initial appearance in US District Court in Cleveland and were ordered jailed until a bond hearing on Monday.

Callahan's mother, Becky Callahan of Ashland, said in a phone interview that the allegations were "all lies".

She said the alleged victim was friends with her son and Hunt, her son's girlfriend, and that they tried to help the woman out by offering her a place to live because she didn't have a home.

Andrew Hyde, who represented Callahan on related state kidnapping charges that were dismissed on Tuesday as the federal case was announced, called the charges ludicrous and said the woman at the centre of the alleged forced-labour plot moved in and out as she pleased.

"There was never any forced labour, any forced cohabitation. She was never forced to do anything. She used this story to get out of trouble she was in" with regard to a child-abuse allegation, Hyde said.

Hyde said county social service workers placed the girl with her mother when the woman was living with the three suspects.

A federal court lawyer for Callahan declined to comment. A second defence lawyer, Ed Bryan, said Hunt will plead not guilty and said there are credibility issues with the mother.

There was no immediate response to phone and email messages left for the lawyer representing Brown.

Police first got involved when the woman was charged with shoplifting a chocolate bar and asked to be jailed because the three suspects "had been mean to her".

Police checking into her "mean" claim went to the apartment after one of the suspects said it was the woman who was abusive. Authorities said the allegation was a ruse complete with a video staged by the suspects. They said the suspects forced the woman to act as if she were mistreating her child.

Defence lawyer Hyde said police told the woman they would help if she felt she had been framed with an incriminating video. According to Hyde, she bought that argument and made up the enslavement allegation.

"I think the feds just failed to fully investigate this before they jumped to some conclusions," Hyde said.

A woman in the Ashland neighbourhood said Tuesday she was surprised by the allegations, saying that Callahan sometimes helped her husband with yard work and other chores and that she never saw signs someone was being held captive in the house.

Tara Williams, 51, said she occasionally saw Callahan walking down an alley with a large yellow-and-white snake draped around his neck, but never saw him threaten anyone with it. She said three pit bulls also lived in the apartment, along with a pot-bellied pig that once got loose.

The white, two-storey house of three apartments, including the defendants' apartment, is set back from the road with a "no trespassing" sign near the front.

Williams said she occasionally saw the presumed victim walking by quickly and sometimes underdressed for cold weather. The woman never spoke or looked at others, Williams said. Williams never saw a child, she said.

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China warned on cyber-hacking: Obama

US President Barack Obama says China has understood his "blunt" warnings against cyber-hacking as he credited new leader Xi Jinping with accepting more global responsibility for Beijing.

"We've had very blunt conversations about this. They understand, I think, that this can adversely affect the fundamentals of the US-China relationship," Obama told The Charlie Rose Show on Monday.

Obama raised charges of a vast Chinese cyber-hacking campaign when he met Xi on June 7-8 at a desert resort in California. Xi insisted that the Asian power was also a victim of cyber theft.

"I don't think you ever expect a Chinese leader to say, 'You know what, you're right, you've caught us red-handed. We're stealing all your stuff, and every day we figure out how we can get into Apple," Obama said.

Obama, who has faced criticism at home for disclosures of US surveillance, said that every nation gathered intelligence but that China went beyond "standard fare" such as trying to "find out what my talking points are when I'm meeting the Japanese."

"There's a big difference between that and a hacker directly connected with the Chinese government or the Chinese military breaking into Apple's software systems to see if they can obtain the designs for the latest Apple product.

"That's theft. And we can't tolerate that," Obama said.

Obama, calling the United States "the world's innovator" of products, said: "If countries like China are stealing that, that affects our long-term prosperity in a serious way."

A private US report earlier this year said that hacking by China cost the US economy hundreds of billions of dollars per year through the theft of intellectual property.

The Pentagon has charged that Chinese hackers have broken into both US companies and government agencies, including secret designs for sophisticated weapons systems.

But Obama had favourable words for Xi, the 60-year-old son of a founding revolutionary who assumed the presidency in March.

"My impression of President Xi is that he has consolidated his position fairly rapidly inside of China, that he is younger and more forceful and more robust and more confident, perhaps, than some leaders in the past," Obama said.

Xi's ascent offers a second chance for Obama to shape his relationship with a rising China after he grew frustrated during his first term by what US officials saw as a stilted, formal style by then president Hu Jintao.

After initial outreach, the Obama administration took a harder tone on China following concerns by Southeast Asian nations and Japan over Beijing's claims to territories in the South China Sea and East China Sea.

"We've got to get this relationship right and China does need to be a stakeholder. And I think that they recognise that," Obama said.

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Chinese supercomputer world's fastest

A CHINESE university has built the world's fastest supercomputer, almost doubling the speed of the US machine that previously claimed the top spot and underlining China's rise as a science and technology powerhouse.

The semiannual TOP500 listing of the world's fastest supercomputers released on Monday says the Tianhe-2 developed by the National University of Defence Technology in central China's Changsha city is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second. That's the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second.

The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocks the US Energy Department's Titan machine off the No. 1 spot. It achieved 17.59 petaflops per second.

Supercomputers are used for complex work such as modelling weather systems, simulating nuclear explosions and designing jetliners.

It's the second time a Chinese computer has been named the world's fastest. In November 2010, the Tianhe-2's predecessor, Tianhe-1A, had that honour before Japan's K computer overtook it a few months later on the TOP500 list, a ranking curated by three computer scientists at universities in the US and Germany.

The Tianhe-2 shows how China is leveraging rapid economic growth and sharp increases in research spending to join the United States, Europe and Japan in the global technology elite.

"Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part," TOP500 editor Jack Dongarra, who toured the Tianhe-2 facility in May, said in a news release.

"That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese."

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WA drug supplier avoids jail term

A 25-YEAR-OLD Perth man who admitted offering to supply ecstasy to teenager Gemma Thoms has avoided jail because he has turned his life around in the four years since the girl's death.

Gemma was aged 17 when she died from a drug overdose at a Big Day Out concert in February 2009.

Patrick Willem Coetzer pleaded guilty in the Perth District Court to four charges of offering to supply ecstasy to three teenagers, including Gemma.

It was not alleged that Coetzer supplied the pills that caused Gemma's overdose.

In sentencing on Thursday, Judge Ronald Birmingham said the ordeal had been a "wake up call" for Coetzer who had matured in the past four years and was remorseful.

"You have seemingly, at the time to be sentenced, gained the maturity that was not apparent when you were 21 and engaged in this activity," he said.

Judge Birmingham said people often did not think about their drug use beyond the initial fun of it.

"If they understood the consequences, they might reflect further in their behaviour," he said.

The judge said drug users placed their trust in the manufacturers, who were only criminals wanting to make money.

He said the users had no idea about how much MDMA was actually in each tablet and they had an "optimistic expectation" that the makers knew what they were doing.

"Drugs of this type have the great capacity to cause harm in the community," he said.

Judge Birmingham noted that the tragic event had had a "striking" and "remarkable" impact on Coetzer.

He said the young man was a low risk of re-offending, had stopped consuming drugs and alcohol, and had ceased associating with people who did.

Several reference letters described Coetzer as a "reliable, trustworthy young man" who worked hard and had a good attitude, Judge Birmingham said.

Coetzer was sentenced to 14 months prison, suspended for 15 months, with a supervision order and program requirements.

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