Barnaby Joyce says Australia should assist securing Gulf fuel supplies
Tom McIlroy
Nationals turned One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce says Australia should join countries moving to shore up international fuel supplies by sending a navy ship to the Middle East.
The US president, Donald Trump, has urged countries to send warships to defend the strait of Hormuz after US strikes on Kharg Island, Iran’s largest export terminal for oil.
About 90% of the country’s oil passes through the hub.
Speaking on ABC TV on Sunday, Joyce said any assistance from Australia should be about firming up fuel supply.
“You have to be part of a global effort. If you are part of a beneficiary of it being resolved, you got to do something for it,” he said.
We’ve been asked in the past to put a frigate into the Red Sea, but Australia was unable to do it.
In the past, we weren’t able to get the one frigate into the Red Sea, and now we don’t know whether we’ve got the capacity to support the United States of America. However, in the future, we’ll be running to them straight away if we need their help.
Key events
‘Not a building’ in Daly River not under water, NT chief minister says
Authorities say little can be done to salvage flooded homes along the Top End’s swollen Daly River, AAP reports.
Everyone in the affected area, including the community of Daly River, has been safely evacuated north to Darwin but their homes are inundated.
The Northern Territory chief minister, Lia Finocchiaro, told reporters on Saturday:
There is not a building in Daly River that is not under water, many of which are under water to the roof.
We have to let that river go down before we can take any further steps.
Guardian Australia highlighted the scale of northern Australia’s record-breaking floods revealed in data and maps. Read more here:
F1 cancels Bahrain and Saudi Arabia grands prix
Formula One has cancelled the Bahrain and Saudi Arabia grands prix because of the war in the Middle East.
The races were due to take place on 12 April in Bahrain and 19 April in Saudi Arabia but the sport was approaching the point at which a decision on cancellation needed to be made to prevent more freight being sent to Bahrain.
In a statement the sport’s governing body, the FIA, and F1 conceded they had been left with no choice but to cancel the races for the safety of everyone involved.
Read more here:
Danish royals Frederik and Mary begin Australia tour in red centre
Danish royals King Frederik and Queen Mary have kicked off their first trip to Australia since taking the throne, AAP reports.
The six-day state tour, which includes visits to Canberra, Melbourne and Hobart, aims to deepen trade ties between Queen Mary’s adopted and home countries.
The royal couple exchanged handshakes with Anangu traditional owners at Uluru Kata Tjuṯa Cultural Centre after touching down late on Saturday.
The normally arid desert region was a sea of green after weeks of heavy rain soaked the outback tourist site, sending waterfalls cascading down the famous rock.
Read more here:
Tom McIlroy
Attacking Hanson doesn’t work like it did in the past, Joyce says
Barnaby Joyce says he disagrees with his leader, Pauline Hanson, over inflammatory comments about Muslims, but says parties criticising her haven’t learned the lesson of One Nation’s rise.
Hanson was censured in the Senate earlier this month for suggesting there are no “good” Muslims.
During an interview about the return of Australian women and children linked to Islamic State militants, she told Sky News: “You say, ‘Well, there’s good Muslims out there.’ How can you tell me there are good Muslims?”
On ABC TV on Sunday, Joyce, who quit the Nationals to join Hanson’s party last year, said there were good Muslims.
“I don’t want to give pastoral care, but I think attacking Pauline today does not work like people thought it might have worked 15 years ago,” he said.
[People] see Pauline as having the courage to stand behind her convictions on certain issues …
I’ll make it very clear, I do know people of the Islamic faith who are good people, without a shadow of a doubt.
He went on to cite verses of the Qur’an and argued complete and literal belief with some religious texts were incompatible with living in modern Australia.
There are people of Islamic faith who are good. And she was referring to … trying to, how do you determine people who come from an area there where there’s jihad, whether they’re a good or bad? I don’t know. Maybe you can do it by talking to them. I can’t.
Barnaby Joyce says Australia should assist securing Gulf fuel supplies
Tom McIlroy
Nationals turned One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce says Australia should join countries moving to shore up international fuel supplies by sending a navy ship to the Middle East.
The US president, Donald Trump, has urged countries to send warships to defend the strait of Hormuz after US strikes on Kharg Island, Iran’s largest export terminal for oil.
About 90% of the country’s oil passes through the hub.
Speaking on ABC TV on Sunday, Joyce said any assistance from Australia should be about firming up fuel supply.
“You have to be part of a global effort. If you are part of a beneficiary of it being resolved, you got to do something for it,” he said.
We’ve been asked in the past to put a frigate into the Red Sea, but Australia was unable to do it.
In the past, we weren’t able to get the one frigate into the Red Sea, and now we don’t know whether we’ve got the capacity to support the United States of America. However, in the future, we’ll be running to them straight away if we need their help.
NSW government to introduce penalty hike for property underquoting
The Minns government will introduce legislation this week to crack down on real estate underquoting, significantly hiking penalties.
Minister for Better Regulation and Fair Trading Anoulack Chanthivong said:
We are ensuring misconduct can no longer be written off as a cost of doing business.
Under the proposed laws, maximum fines for agents will rise from $22,000 to $110,000 – or three times the commission earned. “Dummy bidding” penalties will also double.
The reforms mandate price guides on all property ads and prohibit agents from advertising prices lower than any previously rejected written offer.
NSW Fair Trading will gain expanded powers to force agents to publicly disclose breaches or undergo independent verification of their price estimates.
Tom McIlroy
Defence to help with Top End flood clean up
The federal minister for emergency management, Kristy McBain, says the government has approved a request from the Northern Territory for Australian defence force personnel to assist in the recovery from recent serious flooding.
Crews will be on the ground from tomorrow, helping with clean-up and recovery efforts around the Katherine.
“Those logistics are being worked out, but they’ll be there to assist for the next 10 to 14 days, depending on what is required in that cleanup process,” she told ABC radio.
“A number of those ADF personnel have already been assisting in their own capacities.”
Fuel excise should be cut due to Middle East oil crisis, Canavan says
Tom McIlroy
Matt Canavan tells Sky he believes there is sufficient fuel supply in Australia, despite the growing Middle East war.
“The government has to provide confidence and assurance to people that they’ve got this in hand,” he said.
What the government should be doing is getting a lot more information on where things are at and doing what they can to deliver things.
He says the federal government should consider a cut to the fuel excise to help households with the cost-of-living.
“I think that has to be very carefully considered,” he said.
Tom McIlroy
Labor to blame for inflation problem, Canavan says
The new Nationals leader, Matt Canavan, says Treasury forecasts suggesting inflation could reach as high as 4.5% this year prove Labor has not done enough to carefully manage the economy.
Canavan told Sky on Sunday government spending had made the situation worse, even before the outbreak of war in the Middle East.
“This government, because they couldn’t control their own budget, has put Australia in a much weaker position to withstand the shocks of these kind of crises,” he said.
The government has not been saving for a rainy day, and a rainy day has arrived, and we don’t really have a roof over our head.
Canavan says Australia should do whatever it can to help bring about peace, including through support to the United States.
Chalmers: inflation could reach ‘high fours’
Tom McIlroy
Jim Chalmers has confirmed Treasury modelling suggests the war and other economic conditions could push inflation in Australia to the “mid- to high fours”.
Labor has been battling sticking inflation, but economic shocks from the Middle East will make the task much harder, putting extra pressure on the Reserve Bank to lift interest rates.
Inflation is currently at 3.8%.
Private forecasts already suggest inflation will be in the high 4% range.
We’ve run a couple of scenarios which make it clear on some realistic assumptions about global oil prices and how that would potentially flow through to inflation, and for how long you know, if we were putting pencils down on those forecasts today, we’d have inflation peaking somewhere between the mid- to high fours.
Chalmers says the 12 May budget will be “difficult” but will include reforms, likely to include changes to the capital gains tax discount and other tax settings.
Tom McIlroy
Fuel shortages not expected, Chalmers says
Jim Chalmers has told Sky the government does not expect Australia to run out of fuel amid the ongoing war in Iran. About a fifth of the world’s oil supplies travel through the strait of Hormuz and the growing conflict has already played havoc with international prices.
“We’ve got big stockpiles of fuel, whether it’s petrol or diesel or jet fuel, and we work around the clock to make sure that Australia doesn’t run out. We’re certainly not expecting that we will,” Chalmers said.
Asked if petrol prices could go beyond $3 a litre in Australia, Chalmers says it depends on the scale of the war.
We don’t have a model that has petrol prices going that high, but there’s a lot of volatility and a lot of unpredictability in the global oil market.
Chalmers says the government is working with the competition watchdog to make sure retailers are not price gouging.
Tom McIlroy
Treasurer praises officials involved with Iranian footballers
Jim Chalmers has praised officials who assisted members of the Iranian women’s football team as they considered asylum requests in Australia.
The government confirmed on Sunday that three more members of the squad had decided to return to Iran after initially seeking protection here.
Chalmers told Sky that officials from the Department of Home Affairs had worked to assist the team in extraordinarily difficult conditions.
“They are absolutely top shelf, and they’ve been working around the clock on these issues,” he said.
The way these things unfold is ultimately a matter for those officials to determine they’ve done the absolute best they can by these Iranian women under extreme and extraordinary pressure, and often that requires some pretty dramatic and unusual steps, like those which you’ve described.
Good morning
Welcome to Guardian Australia’s Sunday live news blog. My name is Ima Caldwell, I’ll be bringing you the latest news today.
First up this morning, the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, confirmed three more members of the Iranian women’s football squad have left Australia. The decision means just three of the seven squad members will remain in Australia on specially granted protection visas.
In NSW, the Minns government is introducing legislation to combat property underquoting by significantly increasing penalties. More on that soon.
And on the federal politics front, we’re expecting to hear from Jim Chalmers and Barnaby Joyce on TV interviews this morning.
Stay tuned for all of that and more.
