Bob Carr urges New Zealand not to join Aukus – as it happened (2024)

With that, we are going to put the blog to bed. Before we go, let’s recap the big headlines:

• The US government has provided assurances requested by the high court in London which could finally pave the way for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be extradited from the UK, including that he would not face the death penalty in the US.

• The high court today heard the case of ASF17, an Iranian man in immigration detention who has said he “fears for his life if he is removed to Iran”. The appeal could extend the NZYQ ruling that indefinite detention is unlawful. Meanwhile, an Anglican priest has spoken out in support of an Iranian asylum seeker known as AZC20, one of the high court litigants challenging indefinite detention.

• Parliament’s joint committee on human rights has issued a report finding the Albanese government’s controversial deportation bill requires extensive amendment, saying that it “engages and limits numerous human rights”.

• The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said “the Senate hasn’t jailed anyone before and I don’t think they’re about to”, accusing the Greens of “confected outrage” after Nick McKim yesterday threatened to hold Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci in contempt during a fiery hearing.

• The NSW premier, Chris Minns, has said there is “no point pretending everything is as normal” after the two stabbings in Sydney, while the federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, has encouraged people to switch off social media during this time. The race discrimination commissioner, ​Giridharan Sivaraman, has urged unity and compassion in the wake of the Sydney attacks.

• A candlelight vigil will be held at the weekend for the people who died in the Bondi Junction stabbing, while the Westfield shopping centre where the incident occurred will reopen tomorrow for a trade-free reflection day. Six people remain in hospital after the mass stabbing.

• The federal defence minister, Richard Marles, unveiled a new national defence strategy, including an extra $50bn of spending over 10 years – an overhaul which the shadow defence minister, Andrew Hastie, claimed would amount to a spending cut.

• The federal government will offer $400m in loans to an alumina facility in Queensland and fast-track support to a graphite project in South Australia as part of its Future Made In Australia industry program.

• Environment groups have said they want overhauls of environment laws delivered in this term of government, and have responded to former ACCC head Graeme Samuel’s comments that they should “take a chill pill”.

• More than 500 horses have been found slaughtered on a property in Wagga Wagga which authorities allege to be an illegal knackery.

• The former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr has urged New Zealand not to acquiesce to American interests and join up to Aukus, saying the country has been “less gullible” than Australia.

Thank you for spending part of your day with us. We will be back tomorrow to do it all again.

Child bitten by dingo on K’gari

Rangers are searching for a dingo after a child was bitten on K’gari, AAP has reported.

The child sustained minor injuries on Wednesday after the dingo bit them on the Queensland island formerly known as Fraser Island.

Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service rangers are trying to identify the animal involved.

They say they will speak with the child’s family to understand what led to the attack and have increased patrols at Eli Creek, where the incident occurred.

Rangers have warned visitors to be vigilant around dingoes, keep children within arm’s reach, never to walk alone on K’gari and to carry a stick at all times.

NTEU says university governance needs overhauling after JCU self-reports further wage theft

The National Tertiary Education Union has called for a national overhaul of university governance after James Cook University admitted further wage theft.

James Cook University is conducting a new review after identifying “historical compliance concerns” with casual staff payments.

Early indications are that more than 7,500 current and previous staff are affected, but it is not clear how much has been underpaid.

In 2022, JCU found 2,000 staff had been underpaid superannuation benefits worth a total of $1m over an 11-year period.

University staff have suffered more than $170m in wage theft across Australia in recent years, with rampant casualisation and a broken governance model fuelling the shameful conduct.

NTEU JCU branch president, Dr Jonathan Strauss, said:

It’s essential that every cent owed to JCU staff is paid back in full.

Any underpayment is unacceptable. The NTEU will do everything in its power to ensure this money is fully recovered.

JCU is a major employer in Cairns and Townsville. It’s critical that the entire community has faith the university is paying staff, particularly their lowest paid staff, properly.

LNP in Queensland are ‘nuclear reactionaries’ who want to put off work on wind and solar, PM says

At a press conference in Queensland’s Gladstone earlier today, Anthony Albanese had the opposition’s nuclear push squarely in his sights.

The prime minister, alongside the resources minister, Madeleine King, and the Queensland premier, Steven Miles, was there to spruik a new announcement offering $400m in loans for industry projects as part of its Future Made in Australia program.

But when asked about the opposition’s criticism of relying on renewables, such as wind and power, rather than firing up nuclear reactors around the country, Albanese vowed to fight the plan at the “next election and beyond”.

“We know that [the Queensland Liberal National party’s] agenda is to put off the work that’s needed on solar and wind and renewables for this nuclear reactor plant. These people are nuclear reactionaries, [who] have taken control of the Queensland LNP and what they want is a nuclear reactor in places like here, Gladstone.”

Miles said Queensland would “not to embrace nuclear power”.

“When we have investors come to see us, they want to leverage off those renewable energy resources so that the products that they then sell to the world can have a lower carbon footprint. None of them are coming here demanding that we build nuclear reactors to deliver them nuclear power. That isn’t what these investors are looking for, and it isn’t what will attract and create jobs here.”

It follows an announcement today by Queensland’s shadow environment minister, Sam O’Connor, who announced the state Liberals would support the state Labor government’s clean economy bill, which legislates an emissions reduction target of 75% by 2035.

Analysis: is Labor’s $50bn defence overhaul in fact a spending cut as claimed by the Coalition?

Given the claims and counter-claims that are flying around today about defence funding, it might be worth taking a moment to step through the announcements.

The Labor government is saying it’ll spend $50bn extra on defence over the next decade, while the Coalition is denouncing $73bn in cuts. How can they both be true?

Well, on a big-picture level, defence spending is definitely increasing. At the moment, defence spending as a share of Australia’s entire economic output stands at 2.1%. Labor says its plans (including Aukus) will see that increase to 2.4% as a share of economic output in 10 years (2033-34).

But there is also a funding shuffle going on, partly because Labor says it is focusing on what it sees as the main priorities for defence, and partly because it is trying to rein in excessive levels of “over-programming” of the defence budget. What’s that mean? Well, Labor says the Coalition left it with a defence budget that had far more defence projects committed than funding was actually budgeted for.

So Labor is pursuing cuts, delays or scope changes to a range of defence projects (under the bland banner of “reprioritisation”) to unlock about $73bn in funding over 10 years, including $22.5bn in savings over the next four years.

These include a $10bn saving over 10 years from the previously announced decision to scale back the purchase of new infantry fighting vehicles for the Australian army; $4.1bn by not proceeding with the acquisition of two large navy support vessels; and $1.4bn from planned upgrades to Defence facilities in Canberra.

Even after these cuts are taken into account, however, the government says it has committed an extra $50.3bn for defence over the next 10 years, which includes a net increase of $5.7bn over the first four-year budget cycle.

More children and young people becoming homeless, advocates say

Australia’s housing shortage and other crises are leaving more children and young people teetering on the edge of homelessness, as campaigners call for an end to the vicious cycle, AAP has reported.

There were 122,494 people experiencing homelessness on census night in 2021, with 23% aged 12 to 24 and 14.4% under the age of 12.

Based on the figures, more than 43,000 Australian children and young people could be without a home each night.

Eamonn McCarthy, chief executive of youth homelessness charity Lighthouse Foundation, said the number of homeless youth was growing:

Mental health issues among children and young people are on the rise.

Family violence has increased and the higher cost of living, paired with the housing crisis, is pushing more children, young people and families to the brink of homelessness.

Some 268 lifesize cut-outs were placed on the steps of Victoria State Library on Wednesday to represent the most recent figure of people under 25 sleeping rough in the City of Melbourne area.

The former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr has urged New Zealand not to acquiesce to American interests and join up to Aukus as an associate member, AAP has reported.

Carr is visiting Wellington this week to be part of a foreign policy symposium at New Zealand’s Parliament House alongside former prime minister Helen Clark.

The pair are strident critics of Aukus, the military alliance between Australia, the UK and United States that will see Australia kitted out with nuclear-powered submarines.

They also oppose New Zealand’s involvement in pillar two of the pact, which aims to bring together a broader clutch of like-minded nations – like Canada, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand – with Aukus members to share advanced military technologies.

After arriving in New Zealand on Wednesday, Carr said he admired New Zealand’s free-thinking international outlook, and Kiwis should not give it up.

I think New Zealand has showed more independence and realism in its foreign policy and been less gullible about American blandishments than Australia.

Why you’d surrender that, I don’t know.

More than 500 horses have been found slaughtered on a property near Wagga Wagga in regional New South Wales.

Wagga Wagga city council, which led the joint investigation into the incident, said it had received reports that horses had been butchered at a private property and their carcasses left in a dry creek bed.

In a statement, the council said:

Once the inspection of the property commenced it became clear that the slaughtering of horses had been occurring for a long period of time.

Numerous separate dumps of carcasses were discovered at locations throughout the property.

It is estimated that there are in excess of 500 horse carcasses. Some of these carcasses were no more than skeletal remains while others were killed relatively recently.

Racing NSW, NSW police, the NSW Food Authority, Local Land Services and the department of primary industries also joined the investigation and “began collecting evidence for possible offences and regulatory actions under a range of NSW State Government legislation,” the council said.

Andrew Hastie said the Coalition was committed to more defence expenditure than the Albanese government, and claimed the ADF would be worse off under this plan.

Australia needed a big defence budget, Hastie said:

Weakness is provocative. If you want to defend Australia, you’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to make people think twice about having a crack at Australia. And, you know, Richard Marles today made the point that we are a maritime island trading nation.

A lot of our imports travel across the ocean, as do our exports. And so what happens in the Red Sea does matter. We can’t just pretend that we live in the Indo-Pacific, and the rest of the world has no impact on us. Of course it does.

Shadow defence minister says Coalition will commit to more defence spending than Labor

The shadow defence minister, Andrew Hastie, has been talking in Canberra about the government unveiling a $50bn increase to defence spending over the next decade. While some projects have been deferred or cut, the Labor government says overall defence funding will rise to be worth 2.4% of gross domestic product within 10 years.

Hastie said:

Defence funding will be higher under a Dutton-led government than under an Albanese government.

Pressed to clarify whether that meant the Coalition was now committing to match the 2.4% of GDP target within a decade, Hastie said:

Yes. We are committing to more defence expenditure than the Albanese government …

If it is true that we are living in the most dangerous times since the end of the second world war, then we need to be investing more in defence, not less. And what [Albanese] announced today was an additional $72.8bn worth of cuts.

Parliament’s joint committee on human rights has issued a report bucketing the Albanese government’s controversial deportation bill.

The committee is chaired by the Labor MP Josh Burns, and includes on its membership Labor MPs Alicia Payne, Graham Perrett and senator Jana Stewart.

The committee said that although the “intention” is to protect the integrity of the migration system “by requiring certain non-citizens to do things that would facilitate their removal from Australia, non-compliance with which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of one year imprisonment” the bill “engages and limits numerous human rights”.

Mandatory minimum sentences of a year in prison for refusing to comply with a direction are “incompatible with the rights to liberty and to a fair trial, as mandatory sentencing removes judicial discretion to take into account all of the relevant circ*mstances of a particular case and may lead to the imposition of disproportionate or unduly harsh sentences of imprisonment”.

The bill may also breach rights to privacy, assembly, association, expression and flow on to other rights including protection of family, rights of the child and risks “that some individual cases may engage the absolute prohibition against non-refoulement”.

The committee noted the bill has already passed the lower house, but is yet to be considered by the Senate.

It recommended extensive amendments to:

• Remove mandatory minimum sentences for non-compliance with a removal pathway direction.

• Remove the section qualifying what a “reasonable excuse” may constitute for the purposes of the offence of non-compliance with a removal pathway direction.

• Remove the power of the immigration minister to prescribe further visa classes for the purposes of non-citizens on a removal pathway.

• Amend proposed section 199C to further limit the things which the minister may direct a person to do (or refrain from doing) pursuant to a removal pathway direction and establish a maximum period of time a direction may be in force.

Many thanks for joining me on the blog today. Cait Kelly will be here to take you through the remainder of our rolling coverage today. Take care.

Speaking to the media, Anthony Albanese said he would travel back to Canberra this afternoon for a face-to-face national security meeting after the stabbing attack in western Sydney on Monday night.

As for what has occurred in Sydney on Monday night, violent extremism has no place in this country. Violence has no place in this country, our police need to be respected at all times, and people should allow them to go about their job. These are men and women who put themselves at risk in order to keep us safe, and we should respect them.

The prime minister said he was “very concerned about the lack of respect that we saw on Monday night in Sydney” and would continue to monitor and receive reports from police.

At a time like this my job as prime minister is to try to do my best to bring the nation together, to make sure that we concentrate on what unites us, not what divides us. Every person should be able to go about their shopping, or express their faith, without any risk being involved with that.

Albanese outlines $400m in loans for industry projects in Queensland

The prime minister has been speaking to the media from Gladstone in Queensland alongside the state’s premier, Steven Miles, about $400m in loans for industry projects.

For all of our non-early risers, Josh Butler covered the specifics of the deal earlier in the blog here.

Continued from last post:

James Trezise, director of the Biodiversity Council, countered Graeme Samuel’s position with a “dose of reality”, pointing to one example of a critically endangered fish in the Snowy River system, the yalmy Galaxias.

The species was thought to have about 2,500 individuals left before the 2019-20 bushfires. A post-fire survey detected only two individuals, one male and one female:

We don’t know if that species is still there. We don’t know if that species has gone extinct or not. It was listed as critically endangered last year.

Trezise said, theoretically, an improved set of nature laws would mean there was a threat abatement and recovery planning system “that tells us in real time and immediately what we need to be doing to stop that species disappearing off the brink”.

We don’t have that. And we don’t know when that system is going to be fixed. And that is deeply problematic.

At the hearing of the Senate’s extinctions inquiry, environment groups have responded to earlier statements by the former competition watchdog head Graeme Samuel, who said they should “take a chill pill” about the pace of the government’s changes to nature laws.

The Australian Conservation Foundation’s Brendan Sydes reminded the hearing that groups had been consulting with governments about the state of Australia’s environmental protections since 2019.

We’ve got a state of the environment report, we’ve got a nature positive plan – promise, after promise, after promise … about the urgent need for these reforms.

And yet, here we are, being told that it needs to be delayed, or it’s not happening now or in one chunk like was originally promised, it will come at some stage as part of ‘stage three’.

I think it’s completely understandable why we’d be frustrated and disappointed with the progress.

More details on vigil for Bondi Junction victims this Sunday

Local politicians are now speaking to the media from Bondi, after the announcement that a candlelight vigil will be held this Sunday.

Queen Elizabeth Drive will be closed from the Saturday night before, Waverley mayor Paula Masselos said, and there will be “quite a lot” of security:

Because we could have two or three thousand people to 20,000 people, we just don’t know how many people will want to come. But we are planning for a large number of people, and I can assure people we are working to make it as safe as possible.

All tiers of government are working together on the event, with NSW police working alongside Waverley council to ensure the event will run safely and smoothly.