Philip Ruddock ousted as Hornsby mayor
Last night, Philip Ruddock was ousted as Hornsby mayor after councillor Warren Waddell won a Liberal preselection 164 votes to 104, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
Ruddock was a cabinet minister in the Howard government from 1998 to 2007, and has been labelled Australia’s longest-serving politician, first elected in a 1973 byelection.
The 81-year-old has been mayor since 2017 and ran for council less than a year after quitting federal parliament.
Key events
Uber teaming up with electric car importer for program to offer secondhand EVs
More rides and deliveries could take place in secondhand electric vehicles if a pilot program launched by Uber takes off in Australia, AAP reports.
The tech company announced its vehicle trial today after partnering with Queensland firm Car Empire to offer discounted access to used electric cars from Japan. The Nissan Leaf models, which will cost about $22,000, will be offered to delivery as well as rideshare drivers for the first time.
Uber Australia and New Zealand managing director Emma Foley said despite these and other efforts to help professional drivers adopt electric cars, their high initial cost remained a speed bump.
New electric vehicle purchase numbers are coming up – in 2023, 8.5% of new vehicles in Australia were EVs – but the secondhand market is still less than one per cent. We hope that, long-term, this becomes a catalyst for the wider market because ride-share drivers might have these cars for a few years and on-sell them.
Uber’s secondhand EV trial will extend to drivers in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast, and will give them access to used Nissan Leaf vehicles from 2017 to 2019.
The vehicles, which will be packaged with three-year warranties and roadside assistance, will be available on five-year loans for $124 a week.
Car Empire director David Cosgrove said the company had 20 EVs ready and could import up to 200 models a week, depending on demand.
Australia to join United States Global Entry program from next year
Australia will join the US Global Entry program in 2025, creating an easier pathway for the hundreds of thousands of Australians who visit the country each year.
Eligible Australians who sign up for the program would benefit from streamlined and expedited immigration and customs clearance channels on arrival into the US, a statement from the foreign minister, Penny Wong, says.
The program will be available from January 2025 to a limited number of Australians who travel most frequently to the US, with plans to expand the program later in 2025. Wong said:
Joining the Global Entry program is a mark of the closeness and the strength of the relationship between our two countries.
The foundation of the friendship between Australia and United States is the friendship between our people. This program will deepen these links and make it easier to foster greater commercial ties.
Philip Ruddock ousted as Hornsby mayor
Last night, Philip Ruddock was ousted as Hornsby mayor after councillor Warren Waddell won a Liberal preselection 164 votes to 104, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
Ruddock was a cabinet minister in the Howard government from 1998 to 2007, and has been labelled Australia’s longest-serving politician, first elected in a 1973 byelection.
The 81-year-old has been mayor since 2017 and ran for council less than a year after quitting federal parliament.
Eraring extension benefits outweigh costs, new modelling argues
Wholesale energy prices could be reduced by billions of dollars under a controversial plan to keep Australia’s largest coal-fired power station operating until 2027.
As AAP reports, NSW government-commissioned modelling to be published today shows delaying the closure of Eraring will slash wholesale prices by up to a third in the first year.
It also predicts negligible impacts on new renewable and storage investments as a result of keeping the 40-year-old generator running. But extra carbon emissions from the ageing plant are forecast to cause harm valued in the high hundreds of millions of dollars.
Advice to Treasury, also released today, showed the benefits of keeping Eraring open outweighed the costs by a potential factor of four, predominantly through pushing down wholesale energy costs.
Energy consultants ICA Partners advised the government should proceed with the deal “given it is a viable and cost-effective source of insurance against the risk of supply interruptions”.
State officials were also advised the extension would not impact the state achieving its 2030 emissions reduction target. That’s despite modelling predicting carbon emissions being 9m tonnes higher over two years.
The modelling came with caveats including that it modelled a three-year extension, rather than the later-approved two-year deal. Under the three-year model, wholesale prices were down $4.4bn and increased reliability and savings delivered an extra $500m benefit. That was weighed against costs of $1.7bn, including $1.1bn for higher emissions.
Australian Conservation Foundation has X account reinstated
On yesterday’s blog, we brought you news that the Australian Conservation Foundation had had its X account suspended for the second time – with little explanation.
The account was suspended for “breaking” the X rules, but was not told which tweets in question did so. ACF’s engagement director, Jane Gardner, said she believed they were being report-bombed by pro-nuclear groups.
(“Report-bombing” is the practice of submitting large volumes of user-based reports to a platform saying a particular user’s content should be removed. It is often weaponised to try to remove content.)
Last night, the account was reinstated by X. While pleased with the decision, the ACF said there “remains no word from X about why we were suspended”.
The environment and energy minister, Chris Bowen, weighed in on the situation last night and said:
This is another outrageous example of social media trying to shut down voices for climate action. I don’t agree with [the ACF] about everything but they are an important and credible voice in the climate debate …
Universities rally against international student caps
Universities and businesses are lobbying against laws to give the education minister the power to cap the number of international students, AAP reports.
They argue it will stifle financial viability and put thousands of jobs at risk, but the government says the laws are necessary to better manage a migration system where people are using student visas as a backdoor into Australia.
The proposed changes would add extra repercussions for dodgy education providers found to flout visa rules and take advantage of international students.
The laws were rushed and “designed to deal with a political issue around migration ahead of the next federal election,” Universities Australia said in its submission to an inquiry into the bill.
International student revenue was crucial for research efforts, the Business Council said as it opposed caps.
The Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi called the proposal “a migration policy disguised as an education policy” as the government worked to reform immigration levels.
Labor is crushing universities in a bid to look tough on borders.
The home affairs department said there had been a growth in “non-genuine students and unscrupulous providers” using the sector as a back door to enter Australia.
The universities, business groups, unions, legal experts and the department will on Tuesday give evidence to a parliamentary committee scrutinising the bill. The committee will report by 15 August.
Good morning
Emily Wind
And happy Tuesday – Emily Wind here, signing on for blogging duty. Thanks to Martin for kicking things off!
As always, you can get in touch via X, @emilywindwrites, or via email, emily.wind@theguardian.com, with any thoughts, questions or feedback.
Let’s get started.
Mostafa Rachwani
Finally, Mike Burgess was asked about foreign interference and espionage, where he revealed that Asio has caught Iranians “surveilling individuals” in Australia.
Burgess said Asio was concerned that Iran was a “country who is capable of dealing with threats to their country as they see them, including through surveillance or potentially worse”.
Asked what “potentially worse” looks like, Burgess said it included potential assassinations:
Up to and including lethal operations, as in killing someone.
Asked if that meant assassinations, Burgess said “yes”.
We keep an open investigation but, of course, I would not disclose what we know because obviously it may stop us from doing our job well.
Mostafa Rachwani
More from Mike Burgess on the ABC last night
Burgess was asked about the war in Gaza and its influence on the decision to raise the threat level, saying that it did not have a direct impact on the decision.
He said the war had an “indirect impact” on threat levels, saying it had created its own “weather system” that drives “strong emotions and strong reactions”:
We did not raise the threat level in direct response to the conflict in Gaza. But of course, it has an indirect impact.
It has driven protests, it has driven division, and those protests are getting very emotional and there has been spontaneous violence. It becomes a bit of its own weather system and the wrong thing happens and it fires up the wrong things and is driving strong emotions and strong reactions and again, that’s our concern.
He added that politicians have an “exceptional role” in diffusing tensions, pointing to a statement he released in October that called for political leaders to be “careful” in how they speak on the issue.
Asio chief details decision to increase terror threat level
Mostafa Rachwani
Asio boss Mike Burgess was on ABC’s 7.30 Report last night, where he discussed the increased threat of terrorism, after his agency raised the risk level to probable yesterday.
Burgess said the decision to raise the threat level was after a series of violent incidents in Australia reflected “what we are seeing in society”. He said of the eight incidents that contributed to the decision, there was an “equal mix” of religious motivation, nationalism, racism and in one case a “mixed ideology that goes to the left and right”.
This is the new thing, people will go to violence with no warning and will not be known to us with little or no planning in the cases of some of these I’ve talked about. They are symptomatic of what we are seeing in society: increased temperature, violence is more permissible and a range of ideologies. Minors are also in the mix, youth are particularly vulnerable, driven by social media.
Less than half of the examples were religiously motivated, he said, adding that Sunni Islamic extremism was not much a driver to the raised threat level. He also said neo-nazism was a “big portion of the mix” which has “long been a thing in this country”.
Welcome
Good morning and welcome to our rolling news coverage. I’m Martin Farrer and I’ll be running through some of our top stories and looking out for what’s coming up later today.
Our top story this morning is a new Guardian investigation. A 15-year-old boy was charged with murder and spent almost a year in custody after Victoria police used a process described by a judge as “corrupted” to gather identification evidence against him. The case then collapsed during a pre-trial hearing in which the judge said she was “incredulous” that the prosecution was pushing ahead with it despite flaws in the evidence used to identify the boy as the murderer.
Victoria police have denied the investigation into the alleged murder of 17-year-old Aguer Akech was improperly conducted. Read the full story here.
Shares in New York and London have fallen heavily amid a global stock market rout triggered by fears of a recession in the US, where Wall Street suffered its worst day in nearly two years.
It points to more potential losses when the ASX opens later today. Australia’s share market had its worst day yesterday since the onset of the pandemic as fears of a US recession prompted investors to exit their positions, erasing more than $100bn in value from local stocks. It’s expected to shed 2.6% when trading opens and some pundits think that makes it more likely that the Reserve Bank will cut rates when it completes its monetary policy meeting at 2.30pm. We’ll have more on this over the morning.
Australia’s spy chief, Mike Burgess, has been explaining why the country’s terror threat was increased yesterday from “possible” to “probable”. Burgess was on the ABC last night to outline how eight attacks or disruptions that involved alleged terrorism had been investigated in the past four months fuelled by a volatile and unpredictable mix of issues such as the war in Gaza amplified by divisive social media. More coming up.