Category Archives: Aukus

Gas lobby plans ‘national public awareness campaign’ – as it happened

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‘Good women’s policy is good economic policy’: Sussan Ley convening women’s economic security roundtable

The deputy opposition leader and shadow minister for women, Sussan Ley, is convening a women’s economic security roundtable today.

Restarting the Career Revive program for older women to retrain and re-enter the workforce.

Greater flexibility in childcare arrangements (for which there are no details, but the rhetoric is consistent with allowing women to use subsidies on alternatives such as nannies).

Paying superannuation on paid parental leave.

Helping older women who face relationship breakdown achieve financial security, including through access to superannuation.

The Liberal party can be the party of choice for women – we must be – and that is why we are going to meet them where they are in life with new ideas and real solutions that help them.

I want the women of Australia to know that the Liberal party that Peter Dutton and I lead will be back in your corner – we will support your career choices, we will look at ways to help you as you manage your work-life balance and we will help you secure your financial independence.

I don’t think anyone would question when you’ve got something like the debt ceiling being negotiated in the United States …

In terms of the relationship between the countries and the strength of the relationship, as allies, that’s all there; and I think anyone who knows what negotiations with the debt ceiling are like in the United States understands exactly why President Biden’s been in a situation to make a decision like this.

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MP questions referendum wording – as it happened

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Quad still a priority, White House says

Despite the postponement of Joe Biden’s visit, the White House says that partnerships like the Quad remain a priority.

Revitalizing and reinvigorating our alliances and advancing partnerships like the Quad remains a key priority for the President. This is vital to our ability to advance our foreign policy goals and better promote global stability and prosperity. We look forward to finding other ways to engage with Australia, the Quad, Papua New Guinea and the leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum in the coming year.

I think he will obviously be working very hard for this not to happen. We’ve danced this dance before, as the phrase goes …

I think we’ll get to a good place and I think that’s why he’s wanting to stay there, to focus on just that.

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Joe Biden cancels Australian visit amid US domestic debt deadlock

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President had been due to address parliament next week, the first US leader in 10 years to do so, as part of Asia tour

President Joe Biden has cancelled a visit to Australia, the second leg of his upcoming Asia trip, due to the slow-motion crisis building in Washington over the US debt ceiling.

Biden is to attend a three-day summit of G7 leaders that starts on Friday in Hiroshima, Japan, and will return to the US on Sunday.

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Joe Biden to address Australian parliament as Richard Marles warns of Aukus ‘barriers’

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Anthony Albanese pleased Biden has taken up invitation, an honour also afforded to Barack Obama in 2014

Joe Biden will address the Australian parliament next week, the first US president in nearly 10 years to speak to a joint session of MPs and senators in Canberra.

Officials have confirmed that Biden will make the speech on Tuesday 23 May, the day before he attends the Quad summit in Sydney with the prime ministers of Australia, Japan and India.

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Canada hopes to join Aukus defence pact, says report

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Ottawa ‘highly interested’ in joining group amid fears country could be shut out of intelligence and tech sharing

Canada’s defence minister has said the country is “highly interested” working closer on defence technology with Australia, Britain and the US, after reports that the country wants to join the Aukus defence pact.

The Globe and Mail reported on Monday that Canada was making efforts to join the group, amid fears that the country could be excluded from valuable intelligence and technology sharing between a smaller circle of nations. Both the foreign affairs ministry and Privy Council are working to have Canada included, the Globe reported.

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Singapore backs Aukus and says Australia could play ‘bigger role’ in regional security

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South-east Asia must not become ‘an arena for proxy wars’, the nation state’s foreign minister said

Singapore has strongly backed the Aukus defence pact, with ministers saying they trust Australia to play a bigger role in regional security and don’t want south-east Asia to become “an arena for proxy wars”.

After talks with Australian counterparts in Canberra on Monday, Singaporean ministers reaffirmed Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines would be welcome to visit once in service.

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Australia news live: defence strategic review ‘a cannibalisation of army mobility’, Hastie says; Victorian jockey dies after race fall

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Review calls for ADF to develop ability to precisely strike targets at longer range and to develop stronger network. Follow the day’s news live

Plibersek v Joyce on Newspoll

In their regular spot on Sunrise, environment minister Tanya Plibersek and Coalition frontbencher Barnaby Joyce weighed in on those Newspoll results.

They’re very strong support numbers, and I tell you the reason is not based on polling but what people tell me when I’m out around the country.

People tell me that they’re pleased to see a government that is just getting on with the job, doing what we promised and they’re impressed that the prime minister is just sticking with what he said he’d do.

We don’t have an election tomorrow and that’s a good thing.

A lot of people are starting to focus now on issues such as the voice and saying, “I don’t feel comfortable with this.”

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War of words: Australia can expect a hostile response from China to strategic defence review

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Experts say Australia should look beyond criticism that is largely for domestic Chinese consumption and engage on a broader level

Australia’s strategic defence review, to be made public on Monday, is likely to spark a hostile response from China and set off a new round of claim and counterclaim about the precarious relationship between the two countries.

Sir Angus Houston, the former head of the Australian military who led the review with the former defence minister Stephen Smith, said when it was launched last year the strategic circumstances were “the worst I have ever seen in my career and lifetime”.

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Australia to dramatically scale back spending on infantry fighting vehicles in major defence overhaul

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The move aims to free up funding for the government to accelerate and expand other projects

Australia is set to dramatically scale back the number of infantry fighting vehicles it buys for the army as part of a defence overhaul to be announced on Monday.

The army had planned to acquire up to 450 infantry fighting vehicles, at a cost of up to $27bn, to replace Australia’s Vietnam war-era armoured personnel carriers.

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Foreign spies are aggressively seeking ‘disloyal’ insiders with access to Australia’s secrets, Asio warns

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Intelligence agency wants government security clearance system ‘hardened’ to protect sensitive information

Foreign spies are “aggressively seeking secrets across all parts of Australian society”, including trying to recruit “disloyal” government insiders to access classified information, Asio has warned.

The intelligence agency said “hostile foreign powers and their proxies” were seeking to test the Australian government’s security clearance system.

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Penny Wong dismisses Paul Keating’s claim that the military has taken over Australian foreign policy

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Minister says foreign and defence policies are both essential for making the country stronger and more influential

Penny Wong will dismiss Paul Keating’s claim that the military has taken over foreign policy in Australia, as she insists the defence department and diplomats are working together to “keep the peace”.

In a speech on Monday, the foreign affairs minister will say countries across the Indo-Pacific region want to “choose their own destiny” and not have the rules “dictated by a single major power to suit its own interests”.

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Liberal senator insists Australia must be ‘ruthless’ in pursuit of US military technology

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James Paterson says regulatory barriers in US could imperil access to AI, hypersonic weapons and other advanced systems

Australia needs to be “ruthless” about prioritising which technologies it pursues under the second pillar of the Aukus pact to overcome “regulatory barriers” in the US, the shadow minister for cybersecurity and countering foreign interference, James Paterson, has said.

The Liberal senator made the comments on the Guardian’s Australian politics podcast, warning that an “absence of consensus” in the US and a “clear plan” in Australia could see it miss out.

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Vast Aukus spending sparks calls to boost Australia’s aid budget

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Country gives just $1 in assistance for every $10 that goes to defence, humanitarian groups say

The huge Aukus price tag has sparked calls to boost aid funding, with the sector lobbying the Australian government not to dismiss such measures as an optional “luxury”.

The nuclear-powered submarine program is forecast to cost between $268bn and $368bn by the mid 2050s, most of it beyond the first four-year budget period.

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New Zealand may join Aukus pact’s non-nuclear component

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Defence minister says government ‘willing to explore’ participating in ‘pillar two’ of defence deal founded by Australia, UK and US

New Zealand’s government has confirmed it is discussing joining the non-nuclear part of the Aukus alliance founded by Australia, the UK and US.

“We have been offered the opportunity to talk about whether we could or wish to participate in that pillar two [non-nuclear] aspect of it,” said Andrew Little, the New Zealand defence minister. “I’ve indicated we will be willing to explore it.”

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Greens attack Albanese government’s ‘deeply unsettling’ secrecy on submarine nuclear waste plans

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Radiation Health and Safety Advisory Council also warned against cloak of national security to ‘mask inadequate radiation safety protection’

Labor and the Coalition have been accused of taking a “deeply unsettling approach” to transparency around Aukus after the major parties blocked the publication of documents about nuclear safety and waste issues.

The government cited national security concerns when it rejected a Senate order to produce documents, including those about options to manage operational waste from the nuclear-powered submarine program.

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Australian military looks to build crucial space capabilities that will support Aukus nuclear subs

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Defence department puts out call for satellites that can talk to each other and to the ground, are ‘scalable, rapidly deployable and re-constitutable’

Defence is looking for a mesh of military space satellites that can talk to each other as well as to the ground, and is “scalable, rapidly deployable and re-constitutable”.

The system, in other words, would need to be able to be made bigger, to be quickly put into action, and to be repaired in case of attack or accident.

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Australia politics live: government and opposition strike agreement over voice referendum machinery changes

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Bipartisan approach likely as Senate addresses changes to the rules governing referendums. Follow the day’s news live

Voice negotiations

The referendum machinery legislation will set up how the voice referendum will run – the machinery surruounding the vote, if you will.

We’re negotiating in good faith in the Senate that’s being led by Jane Hume who is doing an outstanding job. What we said to the government in the beginning is what we’re saying to them now and that is that we are not prepared to trash decades of referendum precedent, and not do this in a way that Australians expect us to, in their interests, for their information.

We’re asking for a pamphlet to outline the yes and no case, and we’ve talked about that. We’re asking for equal funding of the yes or no case, not the millions of dollars that may go into a public campaign on either side of this debate, but just the administration funding.

Fifty-seven per cent of the population does not want to open new coal and gas mines and I think there’s a very clear message coming through there. Secondly, no, I have got a lot of time for Jacqui Lambie, but we had an emissions trading scheme in this country and she was part of a party that voted to repeal it so let’s let’s not get too carried away with the spin here.

We’re in a climate crisis, as the UN secretary general has made clear. The decisions that we make now will reverberate for generations to come and the big decisions that we’ve got to make, do we open new coal and gas mines or not?

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Australia politics live: Albanese condemns Nazi salutes at anti-trans rally after Dutton and Dreyfus clash in question time

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Jacqui Lambie expresses concerns over housing fund costing

Over on ABC RN Breakfast, Jacqui Lambie is speaking about what it would take for her and Tammy Tyrrell to vote for the housing fund.

We are worried about the $500m annual cap on disbursements to the fund because the way that we’re working out if you look at the next five years is that that that is only going to build it the amount of houses that you need to and I’m sorry, the house that you need to build is only is gonna end up about $80,000 per house. That’s the first problem that they have right now.

We are worried also with the inflation on what that $500m looks like in the next nine or 10 years. That’s your other issue. So we are concerned about that.

Yeah, I think obviously we’ve got to take the advice of our intelligence agencies. And that advice is becoming stronger and stronger. I think it’s unwise to have a TikTok account on your government held phone. We’ve got to understand the world we live in and the risk of having these phones as members of parliament, the privileged position we have, does pose to our national security. So I think it is important that the government takes that advice and if that’s the advice we should act swiftly on it. I would be very disappointed if any members of my National party didn’t adhere to any advice given by a security agency on social media, particularly TikTok.

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Guardian Essential poll: support for Aukus and Indigenous voice declines

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Anthony Albanese improves in personal measures, including honesty and vision, despite waning support for major policies

Public support for the Aukus nuclear submarine acquisition and the Indigenous voice to parliament have both declined, according to the latest Guardian Essential poll.

The poll of 1,124 voters, released on Tuesday, suggests Australians are at odds with the Aukus deal, with just one in five voters labelling China a “threat to be confronted” and only one quarter happy to pay the price tag of up to $368bn to acquire nuclear submarines.

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Star pleads guilty to new charges of breaching Queensland casino law – as it happened

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Half of all school principals at risk of serious mental health issues

One in two principals risk serious mental health concerns amid escalating threats, violence and staff shortages in the sector, new research shows.

Our research shows abuse and intimidation towards principals and the associated health risks suffered by school leaders continues to grow and it must stop. Such a significant shift in red flag warnings in a short space of time suggests the situation is more serious than first thought. For the past 12 years we have looked at trends and this year they are stark – the scale and the rate has intensified, and we are seeing a severe escalation in stress levels.

There is an urgency in our call for action as the time to redress these concerns diminishes. We may see a mass exodus from the profession, and the implication for Australian education would be devastating.”

My amendments will require all new, expanded, or extended fossil fuel facilities to have net zero carbon emissions at commencement, and for the life of the facility. In this scenario:

A new gas project would be required to enter the safeguard mechanism at net zero, and stay there for its operational life.

A coalmine seeking to expand the area of its mining operations would need to ensure the expanded area operates carbon neutrally and remain that way for its operational life.

A company seeking to extend the life of a coal seam gas project would need to ensure the project is net zero from the day of the project’s extension and stay there for its operational life.

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