Australia politics live: Labor defends Catherine King’s top-tier Qantas membership gift; defence recruitment reaches 16-year high | Australia news
Key events
Marles downplays reports of OpenAI copyright ultimatum
Richard Marles says reporting that OpenAI has issued an ultimatum to Australia – that the government must water down copyright protections or the company will refuse to invest in domestic AI training or renewable energy – is overstated.
Marles says he recently met OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei in San Francisco and the fact that they want copyright protection for creatives watered down is “not news”.
I think that’s overstating, actually, the comments that have been made … It’s not new that there are challenges in respect of copyright, which has been raised by those companies. All of this was articulated by the prime minister in his speech in July.
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:
Well, I actually don’t think it’s at the level that you’ve described it. I mean, I think the person in question was making the point that copyright is an issue which needs to be looked at in the context of OpenAI doing training in Australia. That’s not news.
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.)
Marles tells News24:
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.
Hanson should apologise for ‘deeply hurtful’ comments, says minister for Indigenous Australians
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.
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.
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.
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.
Malinauskas still optimistic about steel making in South Australia
The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, says there is optimism that steel making will continue in his state, after the closure of a major blast furnace at Whyalla was announced yesterday.
Speaking to ABC News Breakfast from Whyalla and donned in some hi-vis, Malinauskas says there was disappointment, heartbreak, but also a sense of inevitability when the announcement was made.
He says the plan is to keep all of the remaining workers to continue making steel out of the plant, and that the operation is on track to be sold by the end of the year.
[Whyalla] has the capacity to be a viable operation but it hasn’t been recapitalised. The blast furnace is over 60 years old. It was first built in 1965 and blast furnaces of this age not to be realigned on a frequent basis. This hasn’t been done in 20 years. The fact it’s still going is a miracle.
We need to have the plant recapitalised and that’s exactly the plan we have in conjunction with the federal government … if we lose this capacity behind me, this country doesn’t have structural steel-making capacity and we can’t afford that.
‘Rotten, awful, ugly’: MPs condemn Hanson’s comments on Indigenous Australians
The housing minister says Pauline Hanson punches down on people and her language is rotten and ugly, after comments resurfaced of the One Nation leader saying Indigenous Australians were the “most primitive race”.
Speaking on Sunrise this morning alongside Liberal frontbencher Michaelia Cash, Clare O’Neil warned Hanson was dividing the country.
O’Neil said:
If Pauline Hanson wants to take us down the road of Americanising our politics, so people in a family who disagree on political issues can’t speak to each other any longer, this is the pathway to do it …
We’ve got lots of challenges facing Australia, but we’re not going to solve them by punching down on things that are brilliant about our country. So I think it’s rotten. I think it’s awful. I think it’s ugly.
Cash said she doesn’t agree with Hanson’s comments, but then attacked Labor for not doing more to protect Indigenous children and close the gap, and said the focus should be on action, not Hanson’s comments.
I just don’t agree with those comments. But I actually do agree with Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price when she says that there are serious issues that do need to be discussed. And these comments shouldn’t be a distraction from them. I mean, why aren’t we closing the gap?
‘She’s been transparent’: O’Neil defends transport minister’s top-tier Qantas membership
Clare O’Neil has defended her colleague, transport minister Catherine King, after it was revealed the latter had accepted a lifetime membership to Qantas’s top-tier membership, the platinum Frequent Flyer rewards.
The status means free entry to Qantas’s first and business class lounges, access to the airline’s VIP team, upgrade priority, extra Qantas points and more. King listed the status on her register of interests on Monday afternoon.
Quizzed on whether the move passes the pub test, O’Neil said “federal politicians … travel an unbelievable amount”.
Catherine King has probably been away from her family for a third of the last 25 years. And that’s kind of the extent of this. The important thing is … she made a declaration of it, and she’s been transparent about it.
King attracted scrutiny in 2022 over her decision to reject Qatar Airways’ request to bring extra flights into Australia in a move widely seen as benefiting Qantas.
Barnaby Joyce says One Nation will pursue immigration policy ‘no matter the cost’
Caitlin Cassidy
One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce has been unable to confirm how his party’s sweeping new immigration policy would affect the budget or jobs while declaring they would “deal with it no matter the cost”.
The former deputy PM appeared on the ABC’s second National Forum on Monday evening, which focused on immigration and multiculturalism. He faced backlash from panellists, with journalist and political commentator George Megalogenis claiming One Nation’s plan to cut migration in net terms over three years had never happened in Australian public policy and would “tank the economy” on the scale of the “depression of the 1890s”.
Joyce said “the issue of what it’s going to cost … is contentious” and rejected questioning over why One Nation didn’t consult the parliamentary budget office.
“The Australian people are sort of tired of the fact that you have to go to an economist to come up with policy to help us all better understand what it costs to us,” he claimed, adding it “has to be dealt with” and “we will deal with it no matter the cost”.
Asked if he was worried about what the parliamentary budget office might produce, he replied: “No, I’m not really – because they’re not elected, I am.”
Krishani Dhanji
Good morning, Krishani Dhanji here with you. Thanks to Martin Farrer for getting us started.
Migration will dominate parliament again today, after One Nation yesterday announced its policy to cut 750,000 temporary visas over three years – which the major parties said would send the country into a recession.
There’ll also be more reaction to the Whyalla steelworks shutting down a major operation, cutting more than 500 jobs.
It’s going to be a busy one, let’s get stuck in!
Caitlin Cassidy
‘Multiculturalism is who we are’: Anne Aly
The multicultural affairs minister, Anne Aly, was also on the ABC’s National Forum panel. She said Labor was committed to bringing immigration numbers down in a “manageable way” while ensuring the system both met the needs of Australia and was “fair for those who come here”.
She pushed back at claims immigrants were harming social cohesion, pointing to an Australia she grew up in where “nobody cared what language your mum spoke”.
That’s the Australia that I know. And I fear that that is the Australia that we’re losing … Every time we talk about immigration, multiculturalism, it comes from a deficit point of view.
Social cohesion becomes the burden of people from different countries who have come here and it is their fault, it is their responsibility to socially cohere. The fact is that multiculturalism is who we are. It is part of our identity. It’s who we are as Australia.
Andrew Hastie says Pauline Hanson hasn’t ‘had the courage’ to front media
Caitlin Cassidy
Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie has questioned why Pauline Hanson announced One Nation’s immigration policy via a prerecorded video on social media instead of fronting the media.
Appearing alongside Barnaby Joyce on the ABC’s National Forum, he said he backed parts of One Nation’s immigration plan but was concerned about the lack of detail and Hanson’s silence:
We haven’t seen her at all today. And this is someone who wants to be the prime minister of Australia. And she hasn’t had the courage to front the media today and explain the budgetary, the economic and the human impact of these policy changes that she’s suggesting.
His ongoing battle with One Nation appeared to be tempered, however, with him and Joyce largely exchanging niceties, including Joyce claiming in jest, at one point, that they were “back in bed together”.
Chris Bowen downplays reintroduction of fuel excise relief amid renewed surge in oil prices
Caitlin Cassidy
Chris Bowen has watered down any expectations that a renewed rise in oil prices will lead to the reintroduction of the federal government’s fuel excise relief.
He said Labor was continuing to look “very closely” at the spike, which was prompted after a series of drone attacks forced Saudi Arabia to close its east-west crude pipeline. But he said the federal government had been “very clear” that cutting the fuel excise was a temporary measure.
Bowen said:
It’s not the only cost of living measure that we put in place … At the same time, I’m very much focused on ensuring our ongoing fuel supply in this very difficult international circumstance … We’re not going to respond to every daily movement on the world oil price.
Bowen said the situation in the Middle East was “deeply concerning” and confirmed he would be travelling to Saudi Arabia next week to meet with his counterpart, Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud.
He was also asked about the appointment of the former opposition leader Sussan Ley to the board of Snowy Hydro, given the Coalition abandoned its commitment to net zero under her leadership and she had blamed Labor’s renewable energy rollout on high energy prices.
Bowen said when he saw an Australian who was “well credentialled, I don’t care how they vote”, and described her as a person of “talent and ability”.
Albanese speaks with King Charles
Tom McIlroy
Anthony Albanese spoke to King Charles last night, the prime minister revealed.
Albanese last saw the monarch during a visit to Britain in September last year.
“A privilege to speak with His Majesty King Charles III this evening,” Albanese wrote on social media.
“His affection for the Australian people remains strong. I extended Australia’s best wishes to His Majesty and the Royal Family.”
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Welcome
Good morning and welcome to our live news blog. I’m Martin Farrer with the top overnight stories and then it will be Krishani Dhanji with the main action.
Let’s begin.
