1 month ago
Hastie says he supports Sussan Ley and denies policy campaigns amount to a leadership pitch
Dan Jervis-Bardy
Liberal MP Andrew Hastie says he supports the opposition leader, Sussan Ley, and anyone suggesting otherwise is “being mischievous”, rubbishing speculation he is preparing a tilt at the leadership.
Hastie’s personal campaigns on dumping net zero, “Australia-first” manufacturing and cutting immigration have been interpreted inside and outside the party as laying the groundwork to fulfil his long-held ambition to lead the party.
In an interview on 2GB on Thursday, Hastie said:
I support Sussan. Anyone who’s speculating otherwise is being mischievous.
I’m a team player. I’m just being a little bolder in some of the policy positions that I think we should adopt.
Hastie’s interventions have divided Liberal MPs. Some colleagues are frustrated with the distraction, while others have publicly endorsed the former soldier’s actions, including Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Price said Hastie would “make a remarkable leader one day”, suggesting his internal critics were agitating against him because they saw him as a threat.
Asked if he was a “threat” to Ley, Hastie told 2GB: “I don’t think so”.
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Star’s Queensland licence ban ruling deferred
Star Entertainment Group can operate its Gold Coast casino for at least another year after the Queensland government deferred a licence suspension, AAP reports.
The further reprieve follows a six-month deferral of The Star’s licence suspension, announced on Wednesday.
The Gold Coast suspension deferral to 30 September 2026 comes after the Sydney casino’s progress on remediation measures and was in line with a report by special manager Nicholas Weeks, the Crisafulli government said on Thursday.
The Gold Coast licence was due to be suspended for 90 days from the same date.
Weeks noted in his report that progress on remediation had been slower than anticipated, due to The Star’s recent financial challenges and uncertainty.
The acting attorney general and minister for justice and integrity, Jarrod Bleijie, said the government had set clear expectations for The Star.
The Crisafulli Government has the highest standards when it comes to the integrity of casino operations in Queensland.
We will continue to closely monitor The Star’s remediation progress to ensure key milestones are met.
Bleijie said the deferral did not prevent the government from taking immediate action should The Star fail to meet its remediation obligations.
‘Long bow’ to link immigration to house price rises, Spender says
Independent MP Allegra Spender says it is a “long bow to draw” to link house price rises to immigration in response to a social media post from Liberal MP Andrew Hastie this week.
Spender told ABC’s Afternoon Briefing that Australia was built on migrants, and political leaders had to be careful in discussions on migration. She said she had “real concerns” over the language used in Hastie’s social media post.
She said:
That’s a very negative and very, potentially very divisive language about migration, which we do not need in this country if we are going to have a thoughtful debate and avoid some of the extremes we see in many other countries around the world, including the US and the UK, [which] with that kind of migration debate, are getting quite ugly at times.
She said it was incendiary to link migration to housing prices, and the evidence for it was not there, given that the fastest housing price growth was when the Covid-19 pandemic began.
You might be able to have more of the conversation in terms of the impact on recent migration and rent, but in terms of house prices, it’s a long bow to draw.
Time to review Optus’s telecommunications licence, Greens say
The Greens communications spokesperson, Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, says Optus’s licence to operate as a telecommunications company should be reviewed after last week’s triple zero outage.
Hanson-Young told ABC’s Afternoon Briefing that Optus had been “putting profits ahead of safety for far too long” and it was now costing lives.
She said the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) was “a watchdog without any bite” in holding telcos to account and had been a passive regulator.
Hanson-Young said the minister should step in now to put conditions on Optus’s licence and consider reviewing the licence.
Given how many times Optus has failed – they failed to look after their customers; they’ve failed to deliver on the essential service of triple zero; they’ve failed to behave appropriately when it comes to their sales and consumer engagement. How many strikes does this corporation need? Maybe we should be reviewing their licence. That’s a much bigger conversation. I think it’s time we do.
Job vacancies drop by 2.7%
Job vacancies dropped by 2.7% in the three months to August 2025, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reports.
There were 327,200 job vacancies in August, similar to the number six months ago, but this was lower compared to the previous quarter.
Private sector job vacancies dropped 3.4%, while public sector vacancies went up 2.2% – the fourth increase in a row.
There were 5,000 fewer job vacancies over the year to August 2025. This is a smaller decrease than the same time last year, when there was a drop of 67,300 vacancies.
The number of unemployed people for each job vacancy rose from 1.9 to 2.0 between the May and August quarters, the highest level since February 2021.
Tasmanian politicians approve their own pay rise
Tasmania’s politicians have voted to accept a $30,000 pay rise despite the premier saying it fails to meet community expectations, AAP reports.
The 22% increase approved by the state’s upper house on Thursday takes the base rate of MPs from $140,185 to $171,527, which remains the lowest in the country.
Tasmania’s Industrial Commission determined that politicians’ pay, which has been frozen since 2018, should be increased.
The Liberal premier, Jeremy Rockliff, who was re-elected in a minority in July, pledged to move a motion in parliament to ensure the pay rise did not go ahead.
It was unsuccessful in the upper house, however, with independents and Labor voting for the pay rise to proceed.
Rockliff said he would not accept the boost, and it is understood individual MPs can knock it back.
As I have said, a pay increase of 22% is unacceptable and not in line with community expectations.
An increase of 3% – in line with public sector workers – is appropriate.
Rockliff’s pay would have increased from $68,000 to $369,000, still the second lowest of any state or territory leader.
Independents and Labor MPs in the upper house said they should not have been put in a position to vote on their own pay, and that the commission should have made the decision.
Australian household wealth rises 2.7%
Total household wealth in Australia was up 2.7% or $470.1bn in the June quarter, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has reported.
The ABS’s head of finance statistics, Dr Mish Tan, said the growth in household wealth in the quarter was driven by strong asset price growth, particularly in residential dwellings and super balances. The former was up 1.9% or $205.2bn.
House prices were up 1.4% in the quarter, after a flat March quarter. Annual house price growth has slowed to 3.5% compared to 7.4% in the previous 12 months.
Household borrowing grew 1.9%, or $57.5bn.
Minister requests meeting with Optus parent company over triple zero outage
In another round of TV interviews the communications minister, Anika Wells, did this morning from New York, she confirmed she had asked to meet Optus’s parent company, Singtel, next week in Australia.
The Singtel bosses will be in Australia next week following the triple zero outage last week that has been linked to four deaths.
Wells told ABC News Breakfast she had asked to speak to Singtel when the company visits next week, and she has been watching the investigation into the outage from New York.
Whilst we have to let the investigation play out, and we have to be considered in a government response to the results of that investigation, meeting with Singtel, I think, is an important step for us, and also for us to give Australian taxpayers confidence in our triple zero system, particularly ahead of the summer disaster season.
She said the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) investigation into the outage will look at whether there is a lack of investment in telco in Australia, as well as call centres located in Australia.
She said Optus could expect more significant fines.
When I was speaking to the chair of Acma this morning, my time, we were talking about not just how the investigation is going, but how both Acma and government can try and shift the settings so this isn’t just a reactive setting where we respond to failures. Are there more things we could be doing to shift the settings to a more preventative setting that would help give Australian taxpayers more confidence?
Andrew Messenger
Qld police union narrowly votes in favour of ‘worst ever’ pay deal
Members of Queensland’s police union have narrowly voted in favour of a state government pay deal of 8% over three years.
The Queensland Police Union of Employees general president, Shane Prior, described the pay element of the deal as the “worst ever” in July, after a backlash from many union members, but supported it based on side bonuses to general duties and rural officers.
The agreement was put to a ballot of all members, with 51.6% of members voting to take the offer.
“Members have had their say, and it is a real positive that so many have engaged in the process,” Prior said on Thursday.
This result reflects a mixed response to the proposed agreement, and while a slim majority have endorsed the offer, we have much work to do.
The state government has also struck in-principle deals with the leadership of the nurses union for an 11% pay increase and the firefighters union for an 8% increase, among others.
Nick Visser
That’s all for me. Josh Taylor will be tending the blog for the rest of the afternoon. Take care!
More on the earthquake in Tasmania this morning, the largest in the region in 20 years
As reported in the blog earlier, some Tasmanians woke up to a 4.1 magnitude earthquake this morning.
Geoscience Australia senior seismologist Hadi Ghasemi says it was the largest quake within a 100km radius of the epicentre in 20 years, AAP reports. He said:
Tasmania is not high seismicity. But this event … is testament that earthquakes can happen anywhere in Tasmania.
Ghasemi said the largest earthquake documented in Tasmania was a mid-to-high magnitude six in the late 1800s off Flinders Island.
Hydro Tasmania said no damage had been identified to its dams in the region, including Edgar Dam, which is undergoing upgrades. The dam, about 30km from the earthquake, could withstand tremors of up to 6.8 magnitude along the Lake Edgar fault line, the electricity provider said.
Sarah Basford Canales
Greens urge Labor to dump aged care shower payments
The Greens are urging the Albanese government to scrap co-payments for aged-care recipients that would require them to pay up to $50 each time they receive shower assistance.
In a letter to the aged care minister, Sam Rae, on Thursday, the Greens senator, Penny Allman-Payne, called on the federal government to dump changes that could require aged-care recipients to pay for “non-clinical” services, such as “personal care” and “domestic assistance”, which would include showering, cooking and laundry.
The letter, referring to ABC reports earlier this week, said recipients would be forced to pay up to $50 each time they need help to take a shower and up to $75 per hour for help with “everyday living”.
The aged care inspector general, Natalie Siegel-Brown, has previously warned in a major report of “genuine fears” that the government’s model – which comes into effect from November – would ask some elderly people to pay more for non-clinical care over essential services.
Allman-Payne said:
All Australians want to have faith that they will be looked after in their old age, and be able to access the care that they need at the time that they need it.
But unfortunately, these aged care reforms are taking Australia in another direction, where the worse your health is, the more you’ll pay. And many older Australians will be squeezed out of care entirely by the government’s price increases.
Read more here:
Bali hospital denies allegation of organ theft after body of Australian repatriated without heart
A Bali hospital has denied allegations it was involved in organ theft, after the body of a young Australian who died on the Indonesian resort island was repatriated without his heart, Agence France Presse reports.
Queensland man Byron Haddow was found dead in the plunge pool of his Bali villa earlier this year while on holiday.
The body of the 23-year-old was returned to Australia four weeks later, and a second autopsy found his heart was missing, prompting Australian officials to demand answers from their Indonesian counterparts.
Read more here:
Dan Jervis-Bardy
Hastie’s public support of Ley follows his comments that the Liberal party risked extinction
In his most recent intervention on Wednesday, Hastie said that the Liberal party could “die” as a political movement unless it committed to cutting net overseas migration, which he blamed for the housing crisis.
Hastie said he was concerned about the “fragmenting” on the conservative side of politics, with One Nation and micro parties peeling off Liberal voters.
He said the Coalition must “reconstitute our natural constituency” if it wanted to beat Labor.
Unless we get our act together, we’re going to be potentially in further decline and perhaps one day extinct. That’s why what we do over the next two years is so important.
A lot of people would like us to stay exactly where we are, including some people in our party, but we can’t – the world has changed.
Hastie says he supports Sussan Ley and denies policy campaigns amount to a leadership pitch
Dan Jervis-Bardy
Liberal MP Andrew Hastie says he supports the opposition leader, Sussan Ley, and anyone suggesting otherwise is “being mischievous”, rubbishing speculation he is preparing a tilt at the leadership.
Hastie’s personal campaigns on dumping net zero, “Australia-first” manufacturing and cutting immigration have been interpreted inside and outside the party as laying the groundwork to fulfil his long-held ambition to lead the party.
In an interview on 2GB on Thursday, Hastie said:
I support Sussan. Anyone who’s speculating otherwise is being mischievous.
I’m a team player. I’m just being a little bolder in some of the policy positions that I think we should adopt.
Hastie’s interventions have divided Liberal MPs. Some colleagues are frustrated with the distraction, while others have publicly endorsed the former soldier’s actions, including Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Price said Hastie would “make a remarkable leader one day”, suggesting his internal critics were agitating against him because they saw him as a threat.
Asked if he was a “threat” to Ley, Hastie told 2GB: “I don’t think so”.
Why Trump’s UN speech calling the climate crisis a ‘con job’ is wrong
Donald Trump recently used his own appearance at the UN general assembly to lambast climate science, calling the climate crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”. He said:
All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.
If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.
In fact, those claims themselves are wrong. There is broad scientific consensus that the world is warming, and humanity is the cause.
