In demonstration of Australia’s air combat capability, Grant Shapps travels in RAAF Super Hornet after meeting with Anthony Albanese
The UK defence secretary, Grant Shapps, has caught a ride in the back seat of an Australian air force fighter jet after meeting with the prime minister, Anthony Albanese.
The visiting dignitary met with Albanese in Canberra on Thursday before being flown to Adelaide in a FA-18 Super Hornet, according to a report by the ABC.
Continue reading...UK’s foreign secretary is in Australia alongside defence secretary Grant Shapps for high-level talks with Richard Marles and Penny Wong
The UK foreign secretary, David Cameron, has suggested the Aukus pact and Nato alliance must get into “the best possible shape” to increase their chances of surviving Donald Trump’s potential return to the White House.
Speaking after high-level talks in Australia, Cameron was careful to avoid criticising the former US president and presumptive Republican nominee for 2024, saying it was “up to America who they choose as their president”.
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As part of the latest Aukus developments, Australia will send A$4.6bn to the UK to clear bottlenecks at the Rolls-Royce nuclear reactor production line.
Richard Marles was asked why it costs so much, and why this component needs to be done in the UK. He told ABC News Breakfast:
We made clear a year ago that we wouldn’t be building the nuclear reactors in Australia. They will be built by Rolls Royce at its facility in Derby in the UK and once the sealed reactors are built, they will be taken here to the Osborne Naval ship yard and placed in the submarines which the rest of which will be built here at Osborne.
Building nuclear reactors is difficult to do and in order for this to play out, that facility in Derby, which is building nuclear reactors for Britain’s navy, that needs to be expanded and that is what this contribution is for.
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Expect to hear a lot more on this today:
Southern Australia could face gas shortages during “extreme peak demand days” from 2025 as Bass Strait supplies dwindle, the Australian Energy Market Operator has said.
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More from AAP on this:
The New South Wales government says it is working on reducing wait times and improving access to care.
We are throwing everything in our ruck sack at improving access and reducing wait times in our hospitals.
This includes boosting staff and infrastructure; but also rolling out urgent care and providing those alternate pathways to care, to treat people outside the hospital; and establishing an ED taskforce to drive improvements in wait times and access to care.
Continue reading...Australia to send delegation to NZ ‘very shortly’ to brief on second pillar of Aukus alliance after ministers meet in Melbourne
New Zealand has stepped up its interest in joining the non-nuclear pillar of Aukus, amid China’s growing presence in the Pacific and broader concerns over a “reshaped world”.
New Zealand’s foreign minister Winston Peters – also a deputy prime minister – and the defence minister, Judith Collins, travelled to Melbourne to meet with their Australian counterparts, Penny Wong and Richard Marles, for the inaugural “2+2” Australia and New Zealand foreign and defence ministers’ meeting on Thursday.
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The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, is speaking to ABC RN, and says news that the inflation rate has plunged to a two-year low of 4.1% is “welcoming, encouraging progress”.
… We know that people are still under pressure and we need to not be complacent about it. We need to continue to work as we have with our three point plan, having the surplus, making sure we deal with cost of living pressures without putting pressure on inflation, and dealing with … supply-chain issues as well.
With parliament resuming next week, this is a wake-up call that 2024 is the last chance for meaningful democratic reform ahead of the 2025 election …
Australians should go to the next election with strict political donation disclosure laws, truth in political advertising laws in force and information about who’s meeting ministers made public as a matter of course.
Continue reading...Statement signed by former foreign ministers, a Nobel laureate and academics outlines anxieties about possibility of conflict in Indo-Pacific region
Australia must step up diplomatic efforts to “avert the horror of great power conflict” and reduce the risk of being dragged into a war between the US and China, according to 50 prominent Australians.
The group, who include the former foreign ministers Bob Carr and Gareth Evans, is urging the Albanese government to play an “activist middle power” role to reduce tensions between Australia’s top security ally and its biggest trading partner.
Continue reading...The reason Anthony Albanese cited for declining sounds very familiar. Almost like the Coalition said the much the same thing
The Australian government’s decision to rebuff a US request to send a warship to the Red Sea has been greeted in some quarters as a seismic event, but it’s not really a bolt from the blue.
Australia is facing “an increasingly challenging strategic environment which is placing greater demand on ADF resources closer to home”, a senior Australian political figure said.
Continue reading...PM says: ‘Hamas can have no role in the future governance of of Gaza, and we need to work towards a political solution.’ Follow the day’s news live
Focus on mental health
The government will be injecting $456m into digital mental health services – including Lifeline and Beyond Blue – to give people to with anxiety and depression better access to mental health services.
Some people go through situational distress through a relationship breakdown or a job loss or bereavement, and they need relatively short periods of support. They might not have a diagnosable mental illness, but they’re certainly distressed and they need support and that really is what the digital investment we’re looking at today is particularly targeted that there are people who go through periods of anxiety and depression and better access.
There’s definitely a gap there for people with more complex needs, but better access which is the scheme that provides Medicare rebates for psychological therapy, the one that we’re talking about, that is not designed to pick up those people and really we need to find alternative systems of support for them.
That is really the concerning growing area of need in the country, not just here in Australia and other countries as well.
They’re now close to $100 a session on average, but there’s many that are higher than that as you indicate. So affordability is a driver of inequity as well and so we’re looking at ways in which we can put out different systems for people who just don’t have the capacity to pay those sorts of gap fees.
We’ve made clear that we will always make the ADF available to states and territories when it’s needed. But we do need to have some other options in place.
We’re a lot better prepared as a country than we were heading into black summer four years ago.
At the federal level, things have significantly changed. We’ve now got one coordinated Emergency Management Agency rather than responsibilities being split between different agencies. We’ve started building a national emergency management stockpile for the very first time, we’ve got the largest fleet of firefighting aircraft that Australia’s ever seen.
Continue reading...Legislation covering a wide range of military issues clears the way for Virginia class vessels to bolster Pacific defence
The US Congress has passed legislation allowing the country to sell Virginia class submarines to Australia under the Aukus security pact.
Sweeping legislation covering a wide range of military priorities including Aukus passed the US House of Representatives on Thursday Washington time, a day after it cleared the Senate.
Continue reading...Defence minister Richard Marles and counterparts from the UK and US say new technologies will be deployed by militaries
Artificial intelligence, drones, and deep space radar are among the technologies that will be used by Australia and its Aukus allies to counter China’s aggression in the Pacific.
Australia’s defence minister, Richard Marles, met with his counterparts from the United States and United Kingdom – Lloyd J Austin and Grant Shapps – in California on Saturday to announce the second “pillar” of the Aukus deal.
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Chalmers: ‘We are making some welcome progress in the fight against inflation’
Is Jim Chalmers confident that interest rates could fall from next year?
My job is to focus on this fight against inflation. And we saw overnight from the OECD, we saw from Deloitte Access Economics, we saw in the Bureau of Statistics data which came out yesterday, that we are making some welcome progress in the fight against inflation and that will determine the future directory trajectory of interest rates
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And here is the standard of some of the “debate” among senior parliamentarians.
Meanwhile, Australia’s sense of social cohesion is at its lowest recorded ebb.
Continue reading...Australia’s Aukus submarine deal and Japan’s discharge of Fukushima waste makes the issue a priority as leaders gather in Cook Islands
The host of this week’s Pacific Islands Forum summit says the region must “revisit” a landmark anti-nuclear treaty, citing Australia’s Aukus submarine deal and Japan’s discharge of treated Fukushima wastewater.
Mark Brown, the prime minister of the Cook Islands and chair of the region’s most important annual political talks, raised concerns about nuclear-related issues on the eve of the arrival of the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese.
Continue reading...Survey finds 47% believe Aukus locks Australia in to supporting the US in an armed conflict, while concern about conflict with China has fallen
A significant minority of Australians think the country should withdraw from the overall Anzus security alliance with the US if Donald Trump returns to the White House, while just under half of the respondents in a new poll believe the Aukus pact locks Australia in to supporting the US in any armed conflict.
The findings, to be released on Wednesday, are part of an opinion survey undertaken annually by the United States Studies Centre. YouGov surveyed 1,019 adults in Australia, 1,055 in the US and 1,015 in Japan about a range of foreign policy and security questions related to the Indo-Pacific.
Continue reading...Congressional report says sale of three to five Virginia class submarines would cut the number available to the US navy fleet
The US Congressional Budget Office has raised fresh concerns about Aukus, just one day after the US president, Joe Biden, assured the visiting Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, that the deal would ultimately be approved by congress.
Biden told Albanese after talks at the White House on Wednesday that the passage of legislation allowing for the transfer of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia was a matter of “not if, but when”.
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Pay deal averts six-day strike by dairy workers
A looming strike at one of Victoria’s major milk companies has been averted after the processor struck a pay deal with the union.
There is some concern around Mount Isa, and we are looking at what we can do to support that area being so remote in the western part of our state.
So looking at the weather we have today, still very extreme fire danger in the western part of Queensland. We are certainly looking at another challenging day.
Continue reading...Getting approval for nuclear submarine plan through legislature a question of ‘not if, but when’
Joe Biden has played down congressional jitters over the Aukus nuclear-powered submarine deal and has revealed he assured Xi Jinping that the countries involved are not aiming to “surround China”.
The US president welcomed the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, to the White House and insisted he was “confident that we’re going to be able to get the money for Aukus because it’s overwhelmingly in our interest”.
Continue reading...Ex-president lashes out at ‘fake news’ amid reports Pratt used wealth to cultivate close relationship between the pair
Donald Trump has described Anthony Pratt, one of Australia’s richest men, as a “red haired weirdo” as he lashed out at extraordinary reports about their personal conversations.
Earlier this month, reports suggested Trump had shared top-secret details of US nuclear submarines with Pratt, an Australian billionaire who runs the paper and packaging giant Visy.
In private conversation, Pratt claims Trump had told him in 2019 of ordering an airstrike on Iranian-linked militants in Iraq, before it hit the headlines, and said that Iraq’s president had called him to complain. Pratt says Trump responded: “I [Trump] said to him [Iraq’s leader], ‘OK, what are you going to do about it?’”
Pratt said Trump also told him about a phone call he made to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy asking for him to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Trump said: “You know that Ukraine phone call, that was nothing compared to what I usually do.”
Pratt also said Trump pushed the boundaries in his dealings as president and that “he knows exactly what to say and what not to say so that he avoids jail … but gets so close to it … that it looks like to everyone that he’s breaking the law”.
Pratt boasted of paying “about a million bucks” to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, to attend his birthday party. Giuliani didn’t attend but the pair spoke regularly on the phone. The recordings suggest Pratt said: “Rudy is someone I hope will be useful one day.”
Pratt had made a payment to then Prince Charles of $182,000 in 2021, according to documents cited by the Nine papers, and said: “My superpower is that I am rich. So I am useful to him [Prince Charles], right?” He also said of Charles: “What I’m trying to do is network with people who can be useful. Prince Charles said when he introduced me to Camilla, ‘He’s [Pratt] been very useful.’ And I thought, that’s an insult. And then I thought, it is better than being irrelevant” and “I see him as an undervalued political stock. It is just that he is a laughing stock now. But when he is king, [they] won’t be laughing.”
Pratt made consulting payments to former Australian prime ministers Tony Abbott and Paul Keating. Abbott was hired after losing his seat in 2019 on a retainer of $8,000 a month, the Nine newspapers reported, and Keating was receiving $25,000 a month.
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