source : the age
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of national news this Wednesday, September 23.
Here’s what’s making news today:
- South Australia has announced a $1 million reward for any information related to the disappearance of Gus Lamont. “Our heartache only grows as time passes, and an entire year without any answers is upon us,” said the missing four-year-old’s mother in a statement this morning.
- The AFP has arrested a 65-year-old Melbourne man over allegations he pledged allegiance to Islamic State and distributed material about how to plan mass-casualty attacks.
- The Coalition has pledged to remove nearly every part of Labor’s energy and climate policy within 30 days if it wins the next election, with spokesman Dan Tehan telling a forum the nation has made energy “unnecessarily green, complicated and expensive. We need to get back to basics”.
- Coalition MPs have spent the morning denying the claim from One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce that the two parties have discussed a supply deal. So far, we’ve had deputy Liberal leader Jane Hume and Liberal MP Simon Kennedy reject Joyce’s claim.
- Joyce, meanwhile, is making some denials of his own. He’s called claims he had a formal meeting with neo-Nazis in Canberra “a lie”.
- The US government has raised serious concerns about Australia’s proposed Digital Duty of Care laws and argued the Albanese government’s attempt to tackle social media harm is likely to result in censorship and disproportionately impact American companies.
Hurricane Polo, which has grown into one of the most powerful Pacific cyclones in decades, is expected to skirt Mexico’s south-western coast as a Category 5 storm.
Polo was an “extremely dangerous” storm with maximum sustained winds of 265km/h, the Miami-based National Hurricane Centre said today.
Polo was centred 338 kilometres south of Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and was nearly stationary over the Pacific Ocean.
The hurricane centre said Polo was expected to start a slow but sharp turn north-west during the night and then travel in a generally west-north-westward direction over the next several days.
The leader of One Nation has reacted to the news that an accused member of Islamic State has been arrested in Melbourne.
Earlier today, federal police confirmed the 65-year-old was apprehended over allegations he instructed people how to plan and conduct mass-casualty attacks.
Pauline Hanson called this evidence of “radical Islamic terror … festering in Australia”.
Hanson made an unsubstantiated claim in her statement that the accused was born in Somalia, and also claimed Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has “allowed alleged IS members back into Australia while secretly facilitating the return of more alleged ISIS fighters”.
“The home affairs minister needs to front the Australian public and start telling them the truth,” she said. “The government is soft on terror.”
Responding to the arrest, Attorney-General Michelle Rowland said there was no place in Australia for “any kind of extremism, racially or religiously motivated prejudice or hate”.
President Donald Trump said US officials had “very good” talks with Iranian envoys in New York, reviving fragile hopes for a new diplomatic off-ramp hours after he again threatened to annihilate the country.
Steve Witkoff, a Trump envoy, said the talks were conducted with the Iranians through mediators shuttling between each delegation.
Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, participated on behalf of the US. They had led negotiations with Iran that preceded the US and Israeli military campaign that began in late February and has roiled the Middle East, as well as global energy markets.
Trump said the three-hour session – held on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly gathering – was “very productive” and another was being planned for the near future. Iran has yet to comment on the meeting or say who attended.
The new Coalition policy to dismantle net zero emissions is music to the ears of at least one MP.
Andrew Wallace, the member for Fisher in Queensland, appeared on News24 after his colleague Dan Tehan revealed the plan earlier today.
“We’re back baby,” is how he viewed the plan to scrap net zero targets, lift prohibitions on nuclear energy and remove an existing carbon-emissions policy for vehicles.
Wallace said the Coalition’s new education policy, announced at the weekend and with a focus on pride in the Australian flag and western culture, was further evidence of the Coalition’s return as a political force.
Sticking with the Coalition’s Dan Tehan unveiling the Coalition’s new energy priorities, he was also asked if this amounts to his party “abandoning green”.
“No, what we’re saying is we will handle emissions reduction separately, and will have a separate policy,” Tehan said. He said he couldn’t say when that emissions policy would be unveiled.
“What’s happened is we’ve tried to drive emission reduction and our climate goals though our energy system, and we’re destroying our energy system in the process.”
The Coalition’s plan announced today involves removing the “Safeguard Mechanism”, the nation’s principal policy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the country’s largest industrial facilities. The Coalition claims this has driven jobs offshore.
Asked what the opposition would do to make sure emissions would not spike in response to their policy, Tehan said the government would leave that to the polluters.
“We’ve got a lot of good corporate citizens in Australia wanting to reduce emissions. Let them set their targets, let them set their goals, and let them go about achieving it. We will provide them with a voluntary market in which they will be able to do that.”
Almost every aspect of Australia’s climate and energy policy would be ditched under a Coalition plan leaning heavily on fossil fuels.
The eight-point plan, released Wednesday, includes removing four offshore wind zones, repealing the Climate Change Act to scrap net zero targets, and lifting prohibitions on nuclear energy.
An existing carbon-emissions policy for vehicles would be canned and developers would be encouraged to invest in all energy types, including coal, gas and nuclear, rather than focusing on renewables.
A renewable-energy code of conduct to ensure companies earn social licence would also be introduced, but details are yet to be announced.
Today’s National Press Club address took an unexpected turn, when the host Corrie McLeod interrupted the event to make the following statement:
“[There is] a lot of news at the moment about journalists not being able to attend press conferences.
Just a note on behalf of the National Press Club: no journalist will ever be banned from doing their job here.”
The statement was greeted with enthusiastic applause.
The statement appeared to be apropos of nothing – the press club address was by advocacy group The Parenthood’s Georgie Dent on the soaring cost of raising children in Australia – but it came days after US President Donald Trump’s administration banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds.
As it happened, the next question at the press club fell to Politico’s Paul Karp.
“Thanks for the solidarity for my White House colleagues,” he said.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that he discussed an energy ceasefire and how to end the war with Russia during his latest meeting with US President Donald Trump.
Talking to the media after a 40-minute meeting with Trump and his team on Tuesday (US time) on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Zelensky said that Kyiv was ready for any format of the energy ceasefire with Russia, but there had been no discussion of Ukraine unilaterally halting its attacks on Russian refineries.
Zelensky reiterated that he was ready to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin at a trilateral meeting with Trump, adding that he hoped that the US would find a way to bring Moscow to any kind of negotiations.
Speaking to reporters ahead of the meeting with Zelensky, Trump says he supported the idea of a ban on diesel exports, which some US politicians are calling for as a way to curb the soaring cost of energy.
Mexico’s government says it has arrested an alleged trafficker of fentanyl into the US, in a joint operation with the US law enforcement authorities.
Jose Angel Rivera, also known by his alias, Don Flaco, was detained by Mexican authorities in a joint operation carried out alongside the FBI and the US Drug Enforcement Administration, Omar Garcia Harfuch said in a post on X.
Rivera is accused of co-ordinating and financing an organisation dedicated to transporting chemical precursors used for the production of fentanyl from China to Mexico and the United States.
He had been sanctioned by the US State Department in January 2023 for his alleged involvement in fentanyl trafficking into the US.
South Australia has announced a $1 million reward for any information related to the disappearance of Gus Lamont.
The four-year-old went missing from an Oak Park sheep station in Yunta – a three-hour drive north of Adelaide – one year ago, prompting several large-scale searches of the surrounding scrubland.
“The search for Gus has been the largest and one of the most intensive undertaken by South Australia Police in connection with a missing person,” police said in a statement.
Police said they continued to believe the most likely explanation for Gus’ disappearance and suspected death is someone being involved who knew him.
