A plan to give households access to free electricity, and the truth behind toxic toys

If you don't own your home or if you live in an apartment and can't put panels on the roof, you've largely been locked out of the benefits of rooftop solar energy. In a small way, that changed this week when the government announced plans to give households access to free electricity for three hours every day ... in an effort to encourage energy use when excess solar power is being fed into the grid. Dr Saul Griffith is Chief Scientist at Rewiring Australia and Davood Dehestani is CEO and founder of energy start-up Smartizer.

We're told it's getting harder to raise kids, amid a cost of living crunch. But that isn't what the numbers show. New research shows having kids is no more costly than it was a few decades ago ... so why does it feel that way?  And if you need to be frugal - where should you put your pennies? What's the best thing you can invest in Associate Professor Ben Phillips is a Principal Research Fellow at the ANU's Centre for Social Research and Methods and Robyn Titmus is the mother of Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus.

A new report out of Europe has shown that a few big name companies are creating children's toys that have harmful levels of chemicals on them. It's obviously not good news, but at this point is it even possible to avoid nasty chemicals that are already out there in the world, for us and our kids? Dr Rachael Wakefield-Rann is research principal at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at Univeristy of Technology Sydney