Category Archives: Anthony Albanese

Albanese’s visits to key allies have borne early fruits of fuel and fertiliser but ‘resilience’ is on the budget agenda

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The prime minister has weathered the crises – for now – and there is a growing recognition that Australia is too vulnerable to world events

Anthony Albanese’s fuel diplomacy tour of Asia has already started paying dividends, but the real test could still be to come.

After last week’s rush to Singapore and pulling forward a planned visit, the prime minister dashed back to Australia from Malaysia on Thursday, to survey the damage at one of the nation’s only remaining fuel refineries. The hastily arranged trips, were to show a leader on the job; to demonstrate Albanese’s attention to the fuel crisis.

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Anthony Albanese urges Israel to stop Lebanon attacks that intensified during Middle East ceasefire

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PM tells Guardian Australia Hezbollah should cease reprisals and confirms Australia’s military surveillance aircraft will remain in region

Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has urged Israel to stop its attacks on Lebanon and raised concern over its intensified military campaign on Beirut and the country’s south after the ceasefire in the Middle East.

Albanese also called on Hezbollah to cease attacks on Israel, reiterating his government’s belief that the Middle East ceasefire must include Lebanon. The prime minister also confirmed Australia’s military surveillance aircraft would remain in the region for at least another month beyond its initial deployment.

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Albanese didn’t return with shiploads of diesel. That doesn’t mean his Singapore visit wasn’t a success

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Having received assurances from Singapore over refined fuels, diesel supply will surely be next on the prime minister’s agenda

Anthony Albanese isn’t coming back from Singapore with a shipload of diesel in his checked baggage. That doesn’t mean his whistle-stop visit wasn’t a success, or that it won’t be seen in future as a pivotal moment if fuel stocks continue to be choked by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

The government never expected that the quick whip to Singapore, with just one full day on the ground, would elicit a new supply of petrol or diesel. Singapore already supplies 55% of Australia’s unleaded, 22% of jet fuel and 15% of diesel.

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Cutting fuel to Australia ‘won’t happen’, says Singapore PM, as Albanese secures pledge from our largest petrol source

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Australia and Singapore will ‘make maximum efforts to meet each other’s energy security needs’ in refined fuels and LNG, according to new agreement

Australia’s largest petrol source has pledged not to cut supplies, with Singapore’s prime minister telling Anthony Albanese that fuel will keep flowing despite the international crisis.

Albanese’s whistle-stop visit with his Singaporean counterpart, Lawrence Wong, culminated in a new agreement that the two countries would keep sending one another fuel and liquefied natural gas, amid the “acute energy crisis” caused by the war in the Middle East. Australia and Singapore will also add a legally binding addendum to their free trade agreement on essential supplies like energy.

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Labor to underwrite Australian fuel imports under new security powers to ensure supply

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Albanese announces forthcoming legislation to guarantee private sector purchases of fuel and fertiliser

The Australian government will take on the financial risk of importing essential products affected by the war in the Middle East to get additional supplies of petrol, diesel, and fertiliser into the country.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, announced the new fuel security powers on Saturday after a month of soaring diesel and petrol prices and widespread shortages at service stations, particularly in regional Australia.

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Albanese government says fuel supply ‘same, if not higher’ in coming weeks as Coalition calls for halving of excise

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Latest figures from ACCC show diesel and unleaded petrol prices across the five largest cities up 10% and 8% respectively

The prime minister and energy minister moved to reassure the public about normal or even higher levels of fuel supply in the coming weeks, as the Coalition escalated calls for a cut to the fuel excise and the government downplayed the prospect of any major restrictions on petrol sales.

It comes as the latest figures from the consumer watchdog showed diesel prices across Australia’s five largest cities have risen by an average of 10% over the last week, while unleaded petrol was up 8%.

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Albanese urged to help Australians struggling with fuel crisis, as NZ offers first-of-its-kind cash relief

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David Pocock says a flat 25% export levy on gas producers could redirect ‘wartime profits’ to struggling Australians

Pressure is mounting on the Albanese government to help households struggling with fuel prices, with working from home and free public transport posited as possible solutions.

Nearly 150,000 New Zealand families will soon receive a weekly cash payment to help them afford petrol, believed to be the world’s first fuel relief package that directly pays citizens since the Israel-US war on Iran began.

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Hundreds of petrol stations across Australia run out of fuel as Albanese inks supply deal with Singapore

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Energy minister, Chris Bowen, says ‘we’re a long way’ from further action like fuel rationing despite shortages

Hundreds of service stations across Australia have run out of fuel, with the federal government inking a deal with Singapore, one of the country’s biggest sources of refined petroleum, to keep supplies of diesel and petrol flowing.

Concerns are now broadening to supplies of fertiliser and other chemicals, heaping more pressure on the Albanese government’s leveraging of overseas exports of coal and gas in a bid to handle of the crisis.

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‘We’re living in an Orwellian nightmare’: Grace Tame calls Anthony Albanese a ‘coward’ in scathing critique

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In an essay for Crikey, the former Australian of the Year says the PM is a ‘turncoat’ who is ‘capitulating to foreign powers’ amid the US-Israel war on Iran

Grace Tame has said “we’re living in an Orwellian nightmare” in a scathing critique of the prime minister and his government’s position on the war in the Middle East.

In an essay published in Crikey on Friday, the advocate for sexual abuse survivors and human rights activist accused Anthony Albanese of being a “coward” and a “turncoat” for refusing to condemn the US-Israel strikes on Iran.

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Flights from Australia to Middle East cancelled – as it happened

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This blog is now closed

The foreign minister, Penny Wong, says Australia was not told in advance about the bombing of Iran but won’t say whether intelligence facilities here were used.

“We weren’t told advance. You wouldn’t expect us to be but you would see there’s obviously been a lot of discussion,” she said.

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‘People have lost all sense of shame’: three threats against federal politicians reported to police every day

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At least 21 charges have been laid against individuals since October, Australian federal police say, following 951 reports to June

Nearly three violent or menacing threats against federal politicians are being reported to police daily, according to Australian federal police data, with rates almost doubling in two years.

The soaring danger for elected officials and their staff reached new heights this week when Anthony Albanese was evacuated from The Lodge in Canberra over a bomb threat.

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Boss of theatre hosting Chinese dance group Shen Yun in Sydney won’t be intimidated by ‘outrageous’ threats

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Graeme Kearns, chief executive of Foundation Theatres, says: ‘Our job in theatre is to absolutely defend the right to tell stories about culture’

The head of the theatre hosting the Shen Yun dance troupe in Sydney says the company would not be intimidated to pull the shows by any “outrageous” anonymous threats and that the publicity had increased interest in the show.

On Monday, the Gold Coast venue for the Shen Yun performances was forced to evacuate after a bomb threat, with a similar threat forcing the evacuation of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s official residence, The Lodge, in Canberra the next day.

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Grace Tame says ‘spare me the condescension, old man’ after Albanese defends ‘difficult’ comment

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PM clarifies remark but says he disagrees with some language the 2021 Australian of the Year has used

Former Australian of the Year Grace Tame has said “we all know what you meant” after the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, claimed he meant to describe her “difficult life” when he labelled her “difficult”.

Speaking in Melbourne on Thursday morning, the prime minister said he had not meant to describe Tame as “difficult” at a News Corp event on Wednesday, when he was asked to describe public figures in one word. Instead he meant that her life had been “difficult”, he said.

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Tony Burke ‘taking advice’ from security agencies about Australian women and children in Syria seeking to return

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Temporary Exclusion Orders allow the home affairs minister to stop a person entering for up to two years, but there is a high bar for the powers

Home affairs minister Tony Burke is “taking advice” from security agencies on whether Australian women and children in a Syrian detention camp should be temporarily banned from returning, but it is unclear how many in the cohort such an order would apply to.

On Monday night, 34 Australian women and children – the wives, widows and children of dead or jailed Islamic State fighters – left from the al-Roj camp, in north-eastern Syria, after being released by Kurdish authorities for their expected repatriation to Australia.

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Australia’s heaviest betters undeterred by key gambling reform, research shows

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Exclusive: Report finds ban on credit card use for online wagering results in most gamblers switching to transaction account payments

One of the Albanese government’s flagship gambling reforms, a ban on using credit cards for online wagering, had the least impact on Australia’s heaviest betters, new research shows.

The ban saw most gamblers swap their form of payment to transaction accounts and left open a range of loopholes dedicated wagerers could exploit, according to a report by the e61 Institute.

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Australia news live: grounded Jetstar flights resume; foreign couple arrested over alleged $1m Sydney casino fraud

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Follow all the day’s news live

Welcome to Guardian Australia’s Sunday live blog.

The Jetstar Airbus A320 planes that were recalled yesterday (leading to more than 90 domestic flights being cancelled) have all received the necessary software update and services have resumed as normal this morning.

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‘Now is the hour’: Labor urged to speed up fossil fuel phase-out to justify Cop30 pledge

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Despite Australia signing the Belém declaration, Albanese rejected suggestion Labor shouldn’t develop new gas fields

The Albanese government is being urged to explain how it will drive a fossil fuel phase-out, after it joined dozens of countries at a UN climate summit to back a declaration that the world should quickly wean off coal, gas and oil.

Australia signed up to the declaration on a just transition away from fossil fuels at a side event at the Cop30 conference in the Brazilian city of Belém, which finished on Saturday night local time, more than 24 hours after the scheduled close.

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Australia news live: Nationals set to formalise position after vote to ditch net zero; more rain forecast after storms and hail lash Queensland and northern NSW

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Meanwhile PM says he’d like ‘more cooperation’ between China and US on artificial intelligence. Follow updates live

Watt says Labor doesn’t have a policy to end native forest logging

Asked if he wanted native forest logging to continue (it’s not banned in the legislation, despite the significant negative environmental impact that it has), Watt dodges the question by saying the party doesn’t have a specific policy of ending native forest logging.

What we have said, though, is that we will follow the recommendation from Graeme Samuel to apply national environmental standards to the regional forestry agreements that are used for native forestry, so what that means in practice is that native forestry would need to meet higher environmental standards than are currently required under the legislation. That’s a big step forward in terms of the environmental management of native forestry. But it doesn’t go as far as what the Greens party is seeking in being an all-out ban.

Not in its own right. We haven’t taken the approach of saying that particular projects are altogether banned. Every project will be assessed on its merits whether it be a coal and gas project, whether it be a housing and renewable project, they have all got to demonstrate they’re not having a significant impact on one of the nine matters of national environmental significance under the act.

If a coal or gas development was seeking approval, then it would need to meet the national environmental standards. It would need to avoid and minimise its environmental impacts and offset them to achieve a net gain. So they would be improvements compared to the criteria that apply to a project at the moment. If it was considered to have an unacceptable impact on the environment then it would get knocked back as would a housing development or a renewable project.

We’re not trying to sort of put in particular criteria for particular sectors. What we’re trying to do is put in a balanced package for all sorts of projects, for all industries, that deliver environmental and business gains.

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Donald Trump praises ‘great’ Washington meeting with Anthony Albanese as leaders dine at Apec

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US president tells reporters he and Australian PM ‘working on a lot of things together’

After waiting a long time to meet Donald Trump, Anthony Albanese has now done so twice in 10 days, as his US counterpart talks up cooperation on rare earths and other issues.

Albanese followed last week’s trip to Washington by sitting next to the US president on Wednesday evening at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit dinner in Gyeongju, South Korea.

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Expanded state powers on fossil fuel projects and water ‘betrayal’ of Australians, nature law critics say

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Extracts of planned changes to the EPBC Act prompt ‘anger’ from conservation organisations that fear nature protection will be weakened

State governments could be given expanded powers to make decisions on fossil fuel developments under Labor’s proposed overhaul of environment law, prompting “shock and anger” from community-based conservation organisations that fear nature protection would be weakened.

The Albanese government plans to introduce its planned changes to the national law – the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act – to parliament later this week, and has been briefing interest groups on its plans.

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