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44m ago‘Up to the Coalition’ to team up with Labor on immigration, Chris Bowen says
49m agoCampuses would shut down under One Nation immigration plan, university peak body warns
2h agoHanson should apologise for ‘deeply hurtful’ comments, says minister for Indigenous Australians
2h agoMalinauskas still optimistic about steel making in South Australia
3h ago‘She’s been transparent’: O’Neil defends transport minister’s top-tier Qantas membership
3h agoBarnaby Joyce says One Nation will pursue immigration policy ‘no matter the cost’
3h agoAndrew Hastie says Pauline Hanson hasn’t ‘had the courage’ to front media
3h agoChris Bowen downplays reintroduction of fuel excise relief amid renewed surge in oil prices
3h agoAlbanese speaks with King Charles
‘No plans’ for further fuel excise cut, says Marles
The calls for another cut to the fuel excise are again growing as petrol prices continue growing, but the government is hosing down speculation of price relief.
Labor said the previous cuts to the excise were always designed to be temporary.
The deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, told News24 earlier:
We don’t have plans for it. We are watching what’s playing out in the Middle East, clearly … Our focus has been in respect of ensuring fuel supply in Australia, and we’ve been able to do that from the moment that this conflict broke out.
One Nation under fire for abandoning gas reservation plan in favour of policy benefiting Gina Rinehart
One Nation has come under fire for quietly shelving support for a new domestic gas reservation policy in preference for a policy that favours the party’s billionaire patron, Gina Rinehart.
The Albanese government has announced it will establish a new reservation policy for Australia’s east coast, requiring gas exporters to supply a portion of the gas they produce to the domestic market. The policy is aimed at “modestly” supplying the domestic market to put downward pressure on prices for consumers.
Pauline Hanson moved a Senate motion as recently as March in support of a domestic gas reserve, saying it would “increase the supply of gas and lower the price of electricity directly”.
But the reservation plan has been vehemently opposed by Senex, a $900m company that is 49% owned by Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting, and 51% owned by the Korean company Posco.
In June, One Nation abandoned its longstanding support when it unveiled its gas plans after “consultation with industry and stakeholders”, saying the policy risked “killing domestic Australian gas companies”.
Read the full story here:
Chris Bowen says that Labor is willing to work with the opposition to bring down immigration levels, while adding it was “up to the Coalition” to pass legislation on it.
The energy minister was asked on Monday’s 7.30 program about reports that the prime minister and opposition leader, Angus Taylor, had met last week to discuss a Coalition proposal to link net overseas migration to housing completion.
Immigration has been a hotly contested issue within the Labor party, which culminated late last month when the prime minister announced a backflip on proposed cuts to Australia’s refugee intake.
Bowen said if the Coalition wanted to see immigration settings “brought down and improved, we are happy to work with them”.
We need the legislative pathway through the Senate in particular to get that done … Ultimately, the Coalition has to decide. Do they really just want to talk about immigration or do they want to actually vote for improvements to immigration? … If you want to be a party of government, it does need coming together from time to time to work on difficult issues.
Pressed on whether Labor backed the housing idea, Bowen maintained “what we need to do is get immigration down” after post-Covid peaks and said there was “more work to do”.
Universities Australia warns One Nation’s plan to drastically cut down international students will lead to campuses shutting down, and domestic students missing out.
Pauline Hanson’s plan, released yesterday, suggested cutting the international student intake down to 100,000 visas per year and graduate visas down to 20,000 – a cut of more than 200,000 on current levels.
The Universities Australia boss, Luke Sheehy, accused One Nation of “joining the conga line in this furphy” and blaming international students in the migration debate.
If numbers actually materialised as One Nation proposed … you would see university campuses shut down, Australian students unable to get a place at university and thousands of university workers have their jobs put at risk.
We do want to see our country take this opportunity. It’s a historic opportunity for our nation, but we need to be doing it in a way which protects rights holders – and that means news organisations, it means creatives. But actually, I think you can do both.
Asked if that language used was “threatening” the government, Marles replies:
Defence recruitment goes online and reaches a 16-year high in Australia
Recruit smarter, not harder, says the deputy PM and defence minister, Richard Marles, announcing the highest defence recruitment intake in 16 years.
He credits a lot of it to meeting young people where they’re at – which is of course, online.
(I guess the release of Top Gun: Maverick itself in 2022 didn’t do enough to cajole people to join the air force.)
It’s the largest defence force we’ve now operated in a quarter of a century, and recruiting 8,100 people in a year as the largest intake in 16 years. And when we came to government, the defence force was shrinking – in the last year of the Coalition government it actually shrank by 1,400 people. So it is a big turnaround. We are recruiting much smarter, we are doing our advertisements where young people actually are online – so we’re doing less on TV, but more online, very much targeting young people where they are.
It’s the largest defence force we’ve now operated in a quarter of a century, and recruiting 8,100 people in a year as the largest intake in 16 years. And when we came to government, the defence force was shrinking – in the last year of the Coalition government it actually shrank by 1,400 people. So it is a big turnaround.
We are recruiting much smarter, we are doing our advertisements where young people actually are online – so we’re doing less on TV, but more online, very much targeting young people where they are.
Marles adds that the time it takes to be recruited – between expressing interest and putting on a uniform – is also decreasing, though he says it’s still too long.
Malarndirri McCarthy says Pauline Hanson should apologise for resurfaced comments calling First Nations Australians “primitive”.
The minister for Indigenous Australians says the condemnation of Hanson from across the political spectrum – including Indigenous Coalition senators Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Kerrynne Liddle, as well as independent Lidia Thorpe shows the breadth of hurt.
Asked whether the Senate would censure Hanson for the comments (something it has done previously), McCarthy says the One Nation leader should be upfront and apologise.
I want to put it on the record that for the first time you have seen all four Indigenous senators from across the aisles come together united on this, and I think that speaks volumes as to why Senator Hanson should apologise. Clearly the Senate can act, but I am personally calling out to Senator Hanson saying this is important. What you said is deeply hurtful. It’s completely wrong. We have First Nations people right across Australia who have achieved tremendous skills, who have run for Australia, fought for Australia in the wars, who have excelled in the arts, in the music, in all sorts of spheres … Those comments were completely baseless. They harm. They dehumanise First Nations people in Australia.
I want to put it on the record that for the first time you have seen all four Indigenous senators from across the aisles come together united on this, and I think that speaks volumes as to why Senator Hanson should apologise.
Clearly the Senate can act, but I am personally calling out to Senator Hanson saying this is important. What you said is deeply hurtful. It’s completely wrong. We have First Nations people right across Australia who have achieved tremendous skills, who have run for Australia, fought for Australia in the wars, who have excelled in the arts, in the music, in all sorts of spheres …
Those comments were completely baseless. They harm. They dehumanise First Nations people in Australia.
Whyalla blast furnace closure ‘nothing to do with energy prices’, says Ayres
The industry minister, Tim Ayres has defended the government’s energy transition, and swatted away criticisms from the opposition that the blast furnace failure at Whyalla is a result of high electricity prices.
He tells ABC’s RN Breakfast:
Yesterday Matt Canavan and Andrew Hastie pointing to energy prices as a problem with the blast furnace, it’s got nothing to do with that, it’s got nothing to do with the regulatory framework. It’s got everything to do with the previous owner who has underinvested in that facility.
Ayres is also asked how much money was spent to fix the blast furnace whose closure was announced yesterday – resulting in the loss of more than 500 jobs. He doesn’t have an answer but says it would be in the “many millions”.
Ayres says it’s hard to separate at this point how much taxpayer money was spent to keep it afloat against the money supporting the rest of the operation.
In terms of fixing the old furnace, it would be many millions of dollars have gone into … I don’t have the number pulled out of the funding for the administration, because of course, the administration supports all of the workers’ wages as well. And it’s pretty hard, I think, today to disaggregate that expenditure. There have been hundreds of safety and engineering failures as a consequence of the previous owners’ maladministration and underinvestment. It has been all hands to the pump here since February, and in particular over the last six months or so, these efforts around the blast furnace, when everybody knew that there wasn’t a forever future for the blast furnace, this has been a heroic effort.
In terms of fixing the old furnace, it would be many millions of dollars have gone into … I don’t have the number pulled out of the funding for the administration, because of course, the administration supports all of the workers’ wages as well. And it’s pretty hard, I think, today to disaggregate that expenditure.
There have been hundreds of safety and engineering failures as a consequence of the previous owners’ maladministration and underinvestment. It has been all hands to the pump here since February, and in particular over the last six months or so, these efforts around the blast furnace, when everybody knew that there wasn’t a forever future for the blast furnace, this has been a heroic effort.
Pauline Hanson comments about Indigenous Australians ‘appalling’, says Duniam
Jonno Duniam has also been asked to weigh in on resurfaced comments by Pauline Hanson about Indigenous Australians.
Duniam tells RN Breakfast the comments are “appalling”.
What an appalling comment to make, frankly, to lump an entire group of people together and just cast them in that way. I don’t know who in a leadership position in this country thinks that’s okay … But Pauline Hanson, in one fell swoop, has decided to say everyone who is of Indigenous heritage is primitive. I don’t see how that is a conclusion you can reach. And I think it says more about Pauline than we had previously realised.
What an appalling comment to make, frankly, to lump an entire group of people together and just cast them in that way. I don’t know who in a leadership position in this country thinks that’s okay … But Pauline Hanson, in one fell swoop, has decided to say everyone who is of Indigenous heritage is primitive.
I don’t see how that is a conclusion you can reach. And I think it says more about Pauline than we had previously realised.
Duniam says One Nation immigration provides no answers and no details
The shadow home affairs minister, Jonno Duniam, says One Nation lobbed its policy out into the public yesterday with no detail and then refused to answer any detailed questions about it – noting Pauline Hanson didn’t even do a press conference for the announcement.
In contrast, he says the Coalition’s migration plan, which is still being worked on in the background, will be properly costed. He says it’s now just “weeks” away.
MPs yesterday said One Nation’s plan for net-negative overseas migration over three years would punt the country into a recession.
Speaking to RN Breakfast a little earlier this morning, Duniam said:
When you don’t have costings, like One Nation don’t, when you don’t have economic modelling about what impacts this will have on our economy, like One Nation don’t, when you can’t tell us exactly what sort of numbers will be delivered out of their policy like One Nation’s doesn’t, then people need to ask questions. Now, when ours is out, when our policy is out, it will be fully costed. The economic and human impacts will be there for all to see and it will be a robust policy, not just a press release.
When you don’t have costings, like One Nation don’t, when you don’t have economic modelling about what impacts this will have on our economy, like One Nation don’t, when you can’t tell us exactly what sort of numbers will be delivered out of their policy like One Nation’s doesn’t, then people need to ask questions.
Now, when ours is out, when our policy is out, it will be fully costed. The economic and human impacts will be there for all to see and it will be a robust policy, not just a press release.
