What we learned: Sunday 23 March
That is all for today’s live blog. Here is a wrap up, in case you missed anything:
Prime minister Anthony Albanese said the government’s additional $150 in energy bill relief, announced last night as part of Labor’s pre-election budget on Tuesday, will put downward pressure on inflation. “We wanted to make sure that this energy bill relief was extended through this calendar year to the end of 2025,” he said.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the rebate was not an election bribe, as the Coalition accused, but a “hip-pocket relief for households”.
The Coalition immediately matched the $150 energy bill rebate, with shadow finance minister Jane Hume saying the need for relief from high electricity and gas prices is “caused by Labor’s failed policies”.
Albanese criticised opposition leader Peter Dutton’s push to end work-from-home entitlements for public servants and “sack 36,000 public servants”.
The US cut research funding from seven Australian universities after the Trump administration told Australian university researchers a push to promote its priorities and avoid “DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal” was behind a “temporary pause” of funding.
Thank you for joining us on the live blog – we will see you back here tomorrow.
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Video: ‘Heartbreaking’ simultaneous coral bleaching events hit Ningaloo and Great Barrier Reef
Australia’s two world heritage-listed reefs – Ningaloo on the west coast and the Great Barrier Reef on the east – have been hit simultaneously by coral bleaching that reef experts have called “heartbreaking” and “a profoundly distressing moment”.
Teams of scientists on both coasts have been monitoring and tracking the heat stress and bleaching extending across thousands of kilometres of marine habitat, likely to have been driven by global heating.
Watch the video here:
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‘Mundane’ objects reveal confronting legacy of violence
A child’s toy, a filing cabinet drawer, a disc-operated musical instrument and a series of 30 bronze plaques may seem innocuous and mundane, but on closer inspection, they tell a story of violence, racism and injustice.
In his exhibition ‘Shadow and Substance’, Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall uses these items to examine the ethics of how Indigenous cultural property and information were acquired and displayed in institutions.
“I try to use very mundane symbols and materials of the archive that people are familiar with but slightly alter them so it encourages people to think about those things differently,” Weatherall told AAP.
When American anthropologist and eugenicist Charles Davenport went to Brewarrina Mission in NSW in the 1920s, he measured and recorded the dimensions of the limbs and skin colour of Weatherall’s family. This information was published without their permission.
Weatherall found these anatomical records from institutional collections and used them to inform his new commission for the exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
Called ‘Trace’, the work features a series of paint swatches relating to a skin colour chart used by anthropologists and eugenicists in the 19th and 20th centuries and a large sculptural spinning top.
Rather than seeing the collections of ancestral remains, cultural property, and documented information on First Nations people as benign materials, they were signifiers of contemporary violence, Weatherall said.
“We can’t divorce ourselves from those histories,” he said.
All of those things have led up to this point where they’re influencing social and political realities for Aboriginal people, and they’re also shaping non-Indigenous people’s perspectives of us.
Australia was ground zero for a lot of those knowledges, planned, premeditated killing of Aboriginal people and taking bodies over to different institutions around the world just to study us.
– Australian Associated Press
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Climate fight here and now, and linked to living costs
The federal election looms as a pivotal opportunity for advocates seeking to mobilise voters on climate change action.
Joseph Sikulu, the Pacific director for 350.org, views it as a chance to push Australia to achieve its ambition of being a “big brother nation” to the climate-vulnerable Pacific region.
But the Pacific Climate Warriors, as they are also known, face fresh challenges as they try to engage diaspora communities before they head to the polls in May.
Anti-climate science rhetoric originating in the US had been spilling over into Australian social media feeds and broader discourse, Sydney-based Sikulu said. He told AAP:
A lot of misinformation and disinformation is already making its way into our communities.
The financial squeeze of higher prices for groceries, housing and bills had also, understandably, made it harder to engage people on climate. But Sikulu said action to decarbonise and adapt to climate change would ease hip-pocket pain.
The CSIRO consistently ranks wind and solar as the cheapest forms of new electricity generation, and modelling by the Clean Energy Investor Group suggests household power bills would be nearly $420 more annually if the grid was reliant solely on coal and gas. Insurance is another pressure point as insurers price in the increased risk of natural disasters due to climate change.
The overlap between economic security and rising global temperatures had become increasingly hard to ignore, Tomorrow Movement national director Desiree Cai said.
The best solutions tick more than one box at once, she said, such as adapting homes to be more resilient to floods, fires and storms and reducing the long-term financial burden of repairs and expensive insurance.
– Australian Associated Press
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Workplace safety regulator investigating man’s death after falling into silo
A man in his 50s has died after falling into a silo on Canterbury Road, Montrose, Victoria police understand.
It is believed the man fell into a silo about 4:30pm yesterday, police said in a statement.
A spokesperson from WorkSafe, the state’s workplace safety regulator, confirmed it was investigating the death.
Police are preparing a report for the coroner.
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Living costs hit Australians’ petrol station impulse buying
When Australians pay for petrol, they are exposed to an assortment of chips, chocolates, lollies and drinks designed to trigger an impulse purchase. But business owners have noticed that an increasing number of motorists are no longer buying snacks, as cost-of-living pressures spark a change in consumer behaviour that is denting sales of traditionally popular items.
“When consumer sentiment is off, and people are not feeling good about the economy, our non-fuel sales drop; we’ve certainly seen that over the last 18 to 24 months,” says Mark McKenzie, the chief executive of the Australasian Convenience and Petroleum Marketers Association.
Fuel is an essential product, but coffee, muffins, chips, chocs and drinks that go with it aren’t.
Read the full story here:
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More Aussies seeking help for sex and porn addiction
More Australians are seeking support for sex and pornography addiction as private, paid content platforms rise in popularity.
In 2023, the number of users and creators accessing OnlyFans, a subscription and pay-per-view platform, increased by nearly 30%, showing the growing demand for private pornographic content.
The site also reported a 19% increase in gross payments processed to $6.63bn.
The Banyans Healthcare, a rehabilitation centre located in Brisbane’s Bowen Hills, reported a 184% increase in inquiries for pornography or sex addiction support in the past six months.
Porn addiction was something that needed to be talked about “a whole lot more”, particularly its impact on younger generations, psychologist Gavin Brown told AAP.
It’s important to understand the harms of online pornography, which is manifestly different to the old version of magazine pornography.
The difference with the internet is that you can literally be looking at a new image every second, which affects the brain circuitry and becomes much more reinforcing than old print forms.
Experts suspect platforms like OnlyFans could increase the risk of a user developing a porn addiction because it provides a never-ending stream of explicit content tailored to their own desires.
Some of the warning signs of a developing addiction include loss of interest in a partner, withdrawing from other activities to spend time watching porn and looking for more and more explicit content.
– Australian Associated Press
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Australians paying $1052 more for car insurance a year on average, finds insurance council report
Australians are paying hundreds of dollars more for comprehensive car insurance as costs across the sector soar.
Insurance premiums have risen 42% since 2019 to an annual average of $1052, according to a report by the Insurance Council of Australia.
But the council insists profit margins are “not the main culprit”.
It says insurers’ motor insurance costs as a proportion of premiums collected have increased by 5% over the same period.
Lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic kept average premium prices flat from 2019 to 2021 due to lower claim frequency. Since then, premiums have risen substantially, with the council attributing that to inflation.
Premiums vary substantially across the nation. The average NSW driver pays $1176 per policy, about $400 more than those in Tasmania.
In 2019, Australians spent an average of 43.6% of one week’s income on annual comprehensive motor insurance. That figure had risen to 53.7% by June 2024.
The rising costs were unsustainable for Australian motorists, the council’s chief executive, Andrew Hall, said.
Insurers are doing their bit to reduce costs – such as streamlining operations, negotiating better repair arrangements, and investing in the repair workforce – but the reality is many cost drivers are outside the industry’s control.
We need governments to step up with targeted reforms.
- Australian Associated Press
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Labor vows to keep work-from-home entitlements as Coalition touts public servants cuts
More than 36,000 public servants will be axed if the opposition takes power, while Labor vows to keep work-from-home entitlements, saying they save people $5000.
The Liberals have attacked Labor for expanding the public service by 36,000 people as it cut costs on consultants, with opposition finance spokesperson Jane Hume confirming they’d be gone under a Coalition government.
“We think we can bring down the number of public servants to where it was at the end of Covid,” she told Sky News on Sunday.
We think that the 36,000 public servants that have been brought on haven’t demonstrated that the improvements to the services, to the public, have been corresponding.
Hume said frontline services would not be cut. The Coalition has not outlined the source of the cuts.
– Australian Associated Press
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Dutton’s suggested referendum on deporting criminals not in Coalition’s ‘core plans’, says Taylor
Angus Taylor said Peter Dutton’s suggested referendum on deporting criminals is “a last resort” and “not part of our core plans right now”.
Speers asked the shadow minister if money was being set aside for a referendum. Taylor said:
Well, it’s a last resort and it’s not part of our core plans right now. But let’s be clear – we will do it as a brake last option because one thing we’re not going to do, which this government has done, is be weak on national security issues and keeping Australians safe.
Dutton floated the idea of a referendum on giving the federal government more powers to deport criminals with dual citizenship despite declaring 18 months ago that the Indigenous voice vote was a waste of money and Australians were “over the referendum process”.
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Coalition’s nuclear power generators to cost under $20bn each, Taylor pledges
David Speers pushed Angus Taylor on the cost of the coalition’s nuclear power plan.
Taylor said it would cost “44% less than the alternative,” with Speers clarifying, “So is it $360bn?”
After a back-and-forth, Taylor said the proposed seven nuclear generators would cost under $20bn each.
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Coalition against coal and gas price caps, confirms shadow treasurer
Taylor confirmed the Coalition is against price caps on coal and gas.
The shadow treasurer said:
I won’t announce our policy ahead of time but we were against it from the start.
We’ll have more to say about our shorter-term energy policy in the coming weeks. But what is clear about it – and I think you can guess where we’re going here – we need to get more gas into the system.
You’ve got to get more gas into the system to put downward pressure on prices. Labor didn’t bother with that because they don’t like the gas industry. They don’t think natural gas has a role to play. So they imposed price caps. Well, supply dries up. That happens and you see the investment moving overseas and Australians don’t get access to the affordable energy they want and deserve.
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Angus Taylor calls Labor’s energy bill rebate ‘Band-Aid on a bullet wound’
The shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor, also says the Coalition will not “get in the way” of the government’s $150 energy rebate, announced last night.
He spoke with David Speers on the ABC earlier this morning:
We’re not going to get in the way of it. The starting point here though is very clear which is Labor’s failed on delivering its promise of a $275 power price reduction.
We’re not going to stand in the way of Labor cleaning up their own mess. This is putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. The solution here is to get a structural outcome which is a reduction in underlying electricity prices, which has not been achieved, of course. It’s gone the other way.
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Greens announce plan to divert $4bn defence spending to domestic, ‘defensive’ missiles
The Greens have unveiled announced a plan to divert billions of defence spending on American technology to the domestic production of “defensive” missiles and vehicles.
The party has outlined $4bn in savings to fund its plan, arguing the Australian Defence Force is designed to “work interoperably with the US military, not to defend Australia”.
Its defence spokesperson, David Shoebridge, said the party would seek to cancel Australia’s $368bn Aukus submarine deal with the United States and United Kingdom – which the party has long been opposed to. It would also stop the $2.4bn acquisition of M1A2 Abrams tanks and Black Hawk helicopters from the US.
They are both supplied by the US with little to no sovereign input, are expensive and outdated. Like Aukus, this equipment is much more about signalling our loyalty to the US than defending Australia.
Under the Greens’ plan, the billions in funds would instead go towards manufacturing “capabilities of uncrewed naval and aerial vehicles as well as medium-range and intermediate-range missiles, for strictly defensive purposes only,” a statement said.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, insisted Aukus’ future was safe in February after president Donald Trump appeared not to know what it meant. The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, also backed Aukus this week, saying the need for the agreement was greater than ever.
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Greens propose new ‘Climate Response Service’ to reduce reliance on ADF in natural disasters
The Greens have launched their pitch for a “Climate Response Service” to respond to natural disasters before the ADF is called in.
Parliamentary inquiries, reviews and a royal commission into the 2019-2020 black summer bushfire response have all found relying on the ADF for natural disasters is “unsustainable”.
ADF support for the black summer bushfires in 2019-2020 and the 2022 floods in NSW and Queensland cost more than $90m, according to the Australian National Audit Office.
The party launched the plan yesterday in the NSW Northern Rivers region, which is still recovering from the 2022 floods.
It would commit $1bn a year over three years to create a service managed by the National Emergency Management Authority and work with local communities to prepare for disasters and assist with clean up, taking pressure off the ADF.
Greens Leader Adam Bandt said ending fossil fuel subsidies would help pay for the service.
A national Climate Response Service would help coordinate the thousands of volunteers who already do this life-saving work across the country, and we’ll make the coal and gas corporations pay for it.
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US cuts research funding from seven Australian universities
The education department has confirmed that the US has cut research funding from seven Australian universities.
As we reported last week, the Trump administration told Australian university researchers a push to promote administration priorities and avoid “DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal” was behind a “temporary pause” of funding.
Yesterday afternoon, our education department confirmed the funding cuts and named the affected universities: the Australian National University, Monash University, University of Technology Sydney, University of New South Wales, Charles Darwin University, Macquarie University and University of Western Australia.
In a statement, the education minister, Jason Clare, said:
Australia and United States research institutions have a long history of cooperation that has helped develop new technologies and solutions to global challenges.
Australian universities punch above their weight in research. Australia is only 0.3 per cent of the world’s population, but we do 3 per cent of the world’s research.
International partners want to work with our universities because they are the best.
Ultimately, the US will fund the research it wants to fund, but we will continue to make the case to the US that collaborative research benefits both US and Australia’s interests.
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$150 energy bill rebates not ‘election bribe’, Chalmers says
Also appearing on Sky News, the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, dismissed suggestions the $150 rebates were an “election bribe” or an attempt to make up for its failure to deliver a promised $275 cut to power bills.
Chalmers said:
I would describe it as hip-pocket relief for households. I would describe it as a government responding to the pressures that people still feel despite this progress that we’ve made on inflation.
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PM calls Dutton ‘out of touch’ over work from home push
Back to the prime minister’s presser earlier this morning.
Asked about government analysis in the Telegraph suggesting that workers could spend up to $5,000 to start going back into the office, Albanese condemned the Coalition’s push to end work from home for public servants. He said:
We know that working from home has had a range of advantages. One of those is less time travelling, whether that be in a private motor vehicle or on public transport to and from home. It’s also enabled people to overcome the tyranny of distance in this great country.
It has also meant for working families, where both parents are working … working from home has enabled them to work full-time, and therefore it has increased workforce participation, particularly for women.
Peter Dutton has said that firstly, he has questioned working from home … And he has said that, oh, well, women in particular can just go out and job share. Well people want to work full-time in order to make sure they can look after their families. This just shows how out of touch Peter Dutton is – flexibility in workplaces has brought substantial benefits.
He’s also said, I want you to be at home seven days a week, 24 hours a day, because he’s going to sack 36,000 public servants. He couldn’t even rule out sacking people who work for the National Emergency Management Agency … The idea that there are people sitting around in Canberra doing nothing just shows how out of touch Peter Dutton is.
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Coalition keeping rebate because government’s ‘lost control’ of power bills, Littleproud says
The Nationals leader, David Littleproud, was a little blunter when explaining why the Coalition couldn’t afford to oppose the $150 energy rebates.
Littleproud told Nine’s Weekend Today:
Well, we’ll have to back this, otherwise there’ll be Australian families that go broke. This is the last desperate act of a government that has lost control of your power bill and your food bill, they’re intertwined.
Your grocery bills are higher because your energy bills are higher, and this all-renewables approach has a consequence.
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Coalition 'won't stand in the way' of $150 energy rebates
The Coalition has immediately matched the $150 energy bill rebate to be included in Labor’s pre-election budget on Tuesday.
In an interview on Sky News on Sunday, the shadow finance minister, Jane Hume, said:
The Coalition will not stand in the way of much-needed energy relief from these high electricity prices, high gas prices that are caused by Labor’s failed policies.
The government announced on Sunday the new cost-of-living relief, which extends energy rebates for all households until the end of 2025 at a cost of $1.8bn.
The $300 rebates announced in the 2024 budget were due to expire on 30 June.
As we reported last week, Peter Dutton was facing internal pressure to match any cost-of-living measures in next week’s budget to neutralise potentially damaging Labor attacks during the election campaign.
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PM says cost-of-living support will put downward pressure on inflation
Prime minister Anthony Albanese spoke earlier this morning about the additional $150 in energy bill relief announced last night.
“We wanted to make sure that this energy bill relief was extended through this calendar year to the end of 2025,” he said.
The cost-of-living support would put downward pressure on inflation, Albanese said when asked whether power bills would start to fall on their own by 2026. He continued:
What we’ve seen is that in 2024 power prices fell 25.2%. They would have fallen just 1.6% without rebate. So this is energy bill relief, cost-of-living support that will also have an effect of putting downward pressure on inflation.
From 1 July, every household and about 1 million small businesses would have another $150 in rebates “automatically applied to their electricity bills in quarterly instalments”, the government announced on Saturday night.
Read more from Emily Wind here:
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Good Morning
And welcome to the Sunday live news blog.
Overnight, the Albanese government announced another $150 in energy bill relief before Tuesday’s budget, which is tipped to include more cost-of-living support for households.
We reported that the expenses watchdog launched an investigation into then home affairs minister Peter Dutton’s use of a taxpayer-funded flight to attend a “long lunch” on a luxury island on the Noosa River in 2019, internal documents reveal.
Research found proposed nuclear power plants in Queensland would not have access to enough water to stop a nuclear meltdown and could strain capacity on drinking water and irrigation supplies even under normal operations.
And Australia’s two world heritage-listed reefs – Ningaloo on the west coast and the Great Barrier Reef on the east – have been hit simultaneously by coral bleaching that reef experts have called “heartbreaking” and “a profoundly distressing moment”.
Let’s get into the news of the day.
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