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Rolf Harris, a mainstay of family entertainment in the United Kingdom and Australia for more than 50 years before his career collapsed into disgrace with his conviction for indecently assaulting young girls, has died aged 93.

The Australian-born Harris died of neck cancer and "frailty of old age" on May 10, according to a death certificate filed at Maidenhead Town Hall and seen by the PA news agency.

Harris died peacefully surrounded by family and friends and has been laid to rest, his family said in a statement.

An artist and musician who first earned fame in the 1950s with the top 10 hit novelty song Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport, Harris went on to present prime-time TV shows mostly aimed at children.

He performed with the Beatles, painted Queen Elizabeth's portrait and presented himself as the affable inventor of the novelty musical instrument, the wobble board.

His song Two Little Boys spent six weeks at number one in the UK, the last chart-topper of the 1960s and the first of the 1970s.

In 1993, his wobble board cover of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven also charted in the UK.

But as his star faded, the veteran entertainer became one of the highest-profile celebrities to be embroiled in a massive British police investigation which followed revelations that the late BBC TV host Jimmy Savile had been a prolific child abuser.

In 2014, Harris was found guilty of 12 counts of assaulting four girls, some as young as seven or eight, between 1968 and 1986 and jailed for nearly six years, although one conviction was later overturned on appeal.

He faced further charges in 2017 but the jury was unable to reach verdicts and he was released from jail that year.

During the 2014 trial, the prosecution portrayed the bearded, bespectacled entertainer as a predator who groomed and abused one woman for her entire teenage and young-adult life.

Harris denied all the charges and said the allegations against him were "laughable".

The sentencing judge said he had shown no remorse for the harm he had caused.

In 2015, Queen Elizabeth, whose portrait he once painted, stripped Harris of a royal honour she herself had awarded him.

Australia also stripped him of numerous honours it had bestowed on Harris.

Born in Perth, Australia, in 1930, Harris was a prolific artist from childhood, given to silly noises and voices to mask shyness, a trait he said he learned from his father.

He moved to London at 22 to attend art school with hopes of becoming a portrait painter like his grandfather.

A year later, he got a job sketching cartoons on children's television, work that continued through the 1950s while he performed nights, singing comedy songs with a piano accordion, in a club for Australian and New Zealander expatriates.

It was for that crowd in 1957 he wrote what would be his breakout hit, Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport, which he said was an attempt to localise Harry Belafonte's calypso classic The Jack-Ass Song.

With his relentlessly cheery persona, Harris toured and performed on TV for decades with his unusual act of rapid, performative painting - his catchphrase was "can you tell what it is yet?" - and singing children's songs like Jake the Peg.

It was his embrace by the British establishment that finally brought his downfall.

A woman who was assaulted by Harris decades earlier, when she was friends with his daughter, watched his televised 2012 performance at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Concert.

"That's when I decided I wasn't going to have any more of it" and would go to the police, she later testified.

with PA

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NSW prop Junior Paulo says fellow front-rower Payne Haas' best is still ahead, with Queensland admitting they are already at a loss trying to work out how to stop the Brisbane star.

Haas will come up against two Broncos teammates in the Maroons pack next Wednesday night, with Tom Flegler recalled at prop and Pat Carrigan at lock.

At age 23, Haas is already the undisputed best front-rower in the world.

The Newcastle junior leads this year's Dally M by three points, and has been named in the NRL's team of the year in three of the past four seasons.

But as far as Paulo is concerned, the scary thing is his "alpha-dog" NSW teammate Haas is still well off his prime.

"Since he came on the scene he had been able to do freakish stuff as a front-rower," Paulo said.

"There has been talk about him being a once-in-a-generation front-rower, and that's the kind of player he is.

"He is only going to get better the more he comes of age. The more mature he is, he is only going to get better.

"To see how young he was when he came on the scene and be doing it for a number of years, you can see the player he is going to mount himself to be."

Paulo's comments came after Carrigan and Flegler conceded there was little they could do to blunt Haas' impact in Adelaide.

In a monster year the hulking 117kg figure has increased his workload from last year considerably, averaging the most metres per game of all forwards in the NRL with 190.

Something Carrigan and Flegler are fully aware of headed into next week, after spending the year alongside him and rolling through the middle off the back of his momentum.

"Has anyone worked that out?" Carrigan said, when asked how to stop Haas.

"I just ride on his coat tails.

"You can't focus too much on one person but there's never going to be another Payne Haas.

"What he's doing is remarkable and he's leading the Dally M for a reason."

Flegler said he too did not have an answer for his teammate, with Haas having publicly backed him to return to the Maroons team this year.

"He's fit as. Does not stop, both sides of the ball. And such a big body," Flegler said.

"Anyone that size that runs as quick as him is going to be hard to stop."

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The number of Australians needing emergency accommodation or living on the streets and in cars is surging, with governments being urged to act to help cut homelessness rates.

A Safe Place to Call Home, Mission Australia's Homelessness and Stable Housing Impact Report 2023, released on Tuesday, found a 26 per cent increase in demand for services over the past three years.

Soaring rents, a shortage of affordable housing and a slowing construction sector have resulted in demand for help to find somewhere to live jump to levels never seen before.

The report used information from 63 of the charity's homelessness and housing support services.

Mission Australia's chief executive Sharon Callister said there had been a 50 per cent jump in people seeking help after becoming homeless, instead of when they were at risk.

The charity is calling on state and federal governments to act.

"Without a significant boost of social and affordable housing across the country, homelessness cannot be eradicated," Ms Callister said.

"Mission Australia is calling on governments for greater investment to build the one million new social and affordable homes that will be needed over the next 20 years to ensure that everyone who seeks help is connected to a safe place to call home."

Homelessness NSW CEO Trina Jones said solutions to the crisis were easy to implement and relatively affordable, calling on the state government to increase the amount of social housing.

"The state government must act by urgently building more social housing and better supporting homelessness services which are under pressure with soaring demand," she said.

"Ensuring that everyone has a safe place to call home should be among the first priorities of any government."

There was an 103 per cent increase in the number of people sleeping rough, in tents or in improvised homes from 2020 to 2022.

Ms Callister said frontline staff were reporting an "influx" of requests, with 300 turned away every day.

"They're telling us the housing situation is the worst they've ever seen it," she said.

"Australia needs to be doing so much more to be on the front foot to prevent and end homelessness in our country."

The report highlighted the growing trend of rough sleeping as one of the biggest concerns, with more than 20 per cent of those who accessed Mission Australia's services having spent more than a year without a stable home.

The highest number of people impacted by homelessness are women, at 57 per cent, while 27 per cent are Indigenous or Torres Strait Islander.

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Aboriginal Counselling Services 0410 539 905

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Portuguese police are to search a reservoir inland from where British three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared in 2007, authorities say, in the first formal development in the case in Portugal in several years.

A fire brigade spokesperson said police were preparing to start searches on Tuesday at a dam in the southern region of Algarve about 50 km inland from a beach resort where Madeleine went missing from a rented apartment while on a family holiday.

Police erected two tents beside the dam on Monday, Reuters TV footage showed.

A source familiar with the investigation told Reuters the operation in Silves municipality was being carried out at the request of German authorities, who last year formally identified German man Christian Brueckner as an official suspect in the disappearance of McCann.

German officials had no immediate comment.

Portugal's investigative Judicial Police in charge of the operation declined to comment.

A separate source familiar with the investigation was not optimistic about the chances of a breakthrough in the long-running case, adding: "It will come to nothing".

Brueckner, a convicted child abuser and drug dealer, is behind bars in Germany for raping a 72-year-old woman in the same area of the Algarve from where Madeleine went missing.

German police said in June 2020 that Madeleine was assumed dead and that Brueckner was likely responsible for it. Brueckner has denied any involvement and has not been charged with any crime related to it.

A German court last month threw out additional charges against him related to other Portuguese child rape and sexual assault cases that meant the German prosecutors investigating the disappearance of "Maddie" no longer had jurisdiction to investigate it.

Maddie's parents Kate and Gerry McCann were questioned by Portuguese police as formal suspects in 2007, but police dropped their investigation the following year, citing a lack of evidence, and cleared them of any involvement.

The parents have since campaigned to draw attention to their daughter's disappearance, and British public figures from business tycoons to authors and soccer stars have made appeals for information.

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