Key events
Australian aid to Ukraine to surpass $1.5bn as embassy reopens
Australia’s support for Ukraine will surpass $1.5bn as it offers more aid and reveals an embassy will reopen in the war-torn country for the first time since 2022, Australian Associated Press reports
The ambassador to Ukraine, Paul Lehmann, and the deputy head of mission will return to Kyiv in January, the foreign minister, Penny Wong, said from the nation’s capital on Thursday.
Wong visited Australia’s embassy in Kyiv, which was closed by the former Morrison government in 2022 at the outbreak of war against Russia.
“The Albanese government has always said we would reopen our embassy in Kyiv when it is safe to do so,” she said.
A cross-party parliamentary inquiry in November said there was a “strong case” for a return of a physical diplomatic presence, pointing to 70 other nations that have reopened their embassies.
Wong met Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, her counterpart, Andrii Sybiha, and the energy minister, Herman Halushchenko.
From the ground in Vanuatu
More from AAP:
Tim Cutler, the Sydney-raised boss of Vanuatu Cricket, was having lunch in the downtown Coffee Tree cafe when the mighty tremor shook the buildings around him.
“The first shake was not an alien feeling to anyone that has spent much time in Vanuatu. You get frequent tremors,” he told AAP.
“But it just got stronger and stronger so I went from a moment of ‘oh’ to ‘oh no’.
“Things were just flying around and I was lucky not to be hit by anything. A couple of people I was with had a few bruises, some people were screaming, some were quiet, a few people were running around.
“A water tank fell over and rolled on to a lady hiding under a table … it was just surreal, slow-motion (that felt) somewhere between a dream or a movie or at a theme park.”
Gallagher says Labor has done a lot to address ‘structural pressures’ on budget
The finance minister, Katy Gallagher, has defended the government’s approach to aged care, health, the NDIS, defence and paying interest on debt after accusations from the opposition of high spending ahead of next year’s federal election.
Asked why the government has failed to bring in enough reform to pay for spending on ABC Radio National, Gallagher said:
I think we have … We’ve got some big pressures coming on to the budget. We’ve been talking about that those for a while, aged care, health care, NDIS, defense and paying interest on the government’s debt, and I think we’ve made progress in all of those areas. They are the big five structural pressures on the budget.
We’ve put in reforms the NDIS, we’ve put in reforms to aged care, and both of those are showing improvements in MYEFO [the mid year economic financial outlook]. In Defence, Richard Miles has done an extraordinary amount of work to make sure that defence can live within their funding envelope, and we’ve lowered the debt burden and reduced the interest on that debt in the order of $70bn.
Each budget update and budgets are a set of decisions and balances, but on the structural side of the budget, I don’t think you would have found a government that’s done more to try and address those big structural spends than we’ve done in the last two years.
The MYFEO handed down yesterday indicated Australia’s federal budget is on track for a deficit of $26.9bn this financial year and is not projected to return to balance until 2034-35. Read more:
Gallagher defends budget after criticism from EY economist
Katy Gallagher, the minister for finance, has responded to a statement from Cherelle Murphy, EY’s chief economist, on ABC Radio National.
Murphy said the government – and other governments before it – have not been willing to match up revenue and expenditure, passing debts across generations. Gallagher:
I think it’s easy to commentate on a budget. It’s harder to put one together.
And we when you look at what we’ve done with this budget since coming to government, the budget is $200bn better off since we inherited it. We’ve also paid down debt. We’ve paid lowered the interest bill on that debt. We’ve delivered two surpluses, and we’ve managed to find investments to go into all of those key areas that people care about, whether it be cost of living or essential services. And we’ve done all of that.
It’s a balancing act. There’s more work to do. A budget is an ongoing project, in a sense, because the demands of government never stop.
Australian rescuers arrive in Vanuatu
Australian rescue and medical teams have arrived in Port Vila as Vanuatu races to respond to Tuesday’s 7.3-magnitude earthquake. The death toll stood at 14 late on Wednesday with at least 200 injured, according to the Red Cross, Australian Associated Press reports.
Anthony Albanese said the crews would be on the ground from last night and the people of Vanuatu had a long road to recovery ahead.
“Australia stands ready to provide further assistance to our Pacific family in their time of need,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
No Australians have been confirmed dead in the quake, but one case in particular shows the ties between the two Pacific neighbours.
Rodney Prestia, chief executive of labour hire business iComply, told AAP that a 26-year-old woman who he identified only as Valerie was crushed in a collapsed building.
“It’s an absolute tragedy and our team’s been really rattled by it,” he said.
With the airport reopening on Wednesday afternoon, relief and support from Australia was able to touch down, including a C17 Globemaster and C130 Hercules with personnel from Queensland and NSW Fire and Rescue.
Australian federal police, a foreign affairs department crisis response team and a medical assistance team were also deployed.
The taskforce leader and chief superintendent, Douglas May, said their first priority was to help people trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings.
“Ultimately we know there are lives to be saved there right now,” he said.
Adam Morton
Labor gives go ahead to electricity transmission link in southern NSW
The Albanese government has given the greenlight to a major electricity transmission link in southern New South Wales that could allow three gigawatts of large-scale renewable energy projects to connect the Australian east coast power grid.
The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said she had approved the $4.8bn HumeLink – a long-promised 365km, 500-kilovolt high-voltage connection that would link Wagga Wagga, Bannaby and Maragle and is needed to connect the troubled Snowy 2.0 development.
Plibersek said the approval came with conditions to protect nature, including limits on land clearing and that most of the new transmission lines would be within existing transmission corridors.
In a statement, Plibersek said Labor was “getting on with the job of transforming Australia into a renewable energy superpower” while the Coalition was proposing a “risky nuclear plan”:
The renewable energy transition is real, it’s happening right now, and it’s the only plan supported by experts and business to deliver clean, affordable and reliable power for homes.
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, last week announced further details of the Coalition’s nuclear policy. It would involve significantly slowing the rollout of renewable energy and attempting to extend the life of old coal-fired plants until after 2040. You can read more about it here, here and here.
Rafqa Touma
Thank you Martin Farrer for kicking off the blog this morning. I’ll be rolling your news updates through the day – let’s get into it
Welcome
Good morning and welcome to our live news blog. I’m Martin Farrer with the top overnight stories and then it will be Rafqa Touma who takes over.
Penny Wong has pledged another $1.5bn in aid to Ukraine and announced that the Australian embassy in Kyiv will be reopened. On a visit to the Ukrainian capital on Wednesday, the foreign minister said the ambassador to Ukraine, Paul Lehmann, and the deputy head of mission will return to Kyiv in January. More coming up.
The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has announced this morning that tech companies will have two extra months to finalise plans to restrict children from accessing adult websites. She said the industry needed time to consider the rushed under-16s social media ban legislation and how it might intersect with restrictions on adult content.
Vanuatu’s capital was still without water last night, a day after reservoirs were destroyed by the magnitude 7.3 earthquake that wrought havoc on the South Pacific island nation. The death toll of 14 is expected to climb as rescue workers dig through collapsed buildings and includes a woman who recently finished a nine-month work stint in Queensland. More coming up.
