source : the age
Good morning and welcome to our national news live coverage for Tuesday, June 16. Here’s what’s making news today.
US-Iran peace agreement: The Strait of Hormuz will be opened toll-free for 60 days under the unreleased peace agreement between the US and Iran, but its longer-term operation will be subject to negotiations, American officials said.
Politics: Less than a third of people think the May budget will be good for them or the nation, while public assessment of Jim Chalmers’ performance as treasurer has fallen to its lowest level ever.
Business: Embattled consulting group KPMG has effectively been banned from new federal government work while the Department of Finance reviews its suitability as a contractor.
Energy: The NSW government’s $1 billion renewables fund has chosen its first project, investing $100 million in battery projects.
Workplace: Casual and part-time workers will be included in new laws protecting the rights of Victorians to work from home, with the state government set to introduce legislation into parliament this week.
Israel may represent an obstacle to the progression of the US-Iran peace agreement as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country would not withdraw from land seized in Lebanon, where Israel is fighting the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group.
Netanyahu on Monday said the agreement between the US and Iran was Trump’s decision. Israel was not party to the memorandum of understanding signed electronically over the weekend.
Netanyahu said Israel has its own interests, primarily protecting against a potential nuclear threat from Iran. He said Iran wanted Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, but he stood firm, saying Israel would remain in the buffer zone “as long as necessary”.
“I tell you, citizens of Israel, the struggle is not over. We will need to continue to be vigilant, to remain strong and determined, to defend ourselves as necessary,” he said.
with AP
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher has defended the government’s budget and vowed to keep trying to explain it to voters, more than a month on from the announcement of Labor’s proposed tax changes that incurred swift and viral backlash from business owners.
“The [housing] system wasn’t working, it needed to change, and our reforms do that,” Gallagher told Sunrise.
“We’re going to have to keep fronting up and keep explaining those changes, but we’re already seeing at auctions on the weekends first home buyers getting a better crack at the auction market, and that’s welcome.”
Gallagher said some reactions, such as entrepreneurs threatening to move overseas where taxes were lower, were “unfounded”.
“Part of that is us explaining these changes – they are big changes. This is a big tax reform. Tax reform is hard. We have to keep explaining it, but for the vast majority of people, [with] the tax cuts in this budget, the Working Australian Tax Offset, 13.3 million Australians will be better off. And we have to continue to explain the budget and the reasons why we’ve done it.”
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he would ban social media sites for under 16s and impose restrictions on gaming and live-streaming platforms.
The sweeping changes will “give kids their childhood back”, Starmer said as he outlined measures against Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and other platforms, as well as gaming sites that allow strangers to contact children.
“It will make a huge difference, it will make our children safer, it will make our children happier, it will give them more time, more security, more freedom to grow up, more opportunity.”
Social media companies, however, said a blanket ban could push young people onto riskier platforms that did not offer the protections they had introduced.
Surf Life Saving NSW chief executive Steven Pearce says a temporary exemption to fly drones for shark surveillance above Coogee Beach, on the flight path to Sydney Airport, will be made permanent for the organisation after discussions with the Civil Aviation Safety Authority.
“They’re going to change part of the regulation instruments to give us specific sole approval to fly at Coogee,” Pearce told 2GB this morning.
“We still have to talk to the flight tower when we’ve got drones there, we still need spotters with our pilots, so there’s still some regulations there, but it enables us now to fly drones consistently at Coogee Beach along with all the other parts of the eastern suburbs.”
Australians are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the state of the national finances, with just 9 per cent of people expecting the economy to improve in the next month, compared with 41 per cent who expect things to get worse and 42 per cent who expect things to stay the same.
Only a quarter of Australians expect economic conditions to improve in the next year, while 44 per cent of people expect things to get worse, findings from the latest Resolve Political Monitor survey show.
Similarly, just 23 per cent of people say the budget is good for them and their household, compared with 36 per cent of people who believe it is bad. Almost 30 per cent of people said the budget was good for the country, while 35 per cent said it was bad. Just over two-thirds of voters were undecided on both questions.
These are some of the worst numbers of any budget since Labor returned to power four years ago.
The Strait of Hormuz will be opened toll-free for 60 days under the unreleased peace agreement between the US and Iran, but its longer-term operation will be subject to negotiations, American officials said.
More than a fifth of the world’s oil usually transits through the strait.
The matter is one of many unresolved issues to be worked through over the next two months after a deal to end the conflict was signed electronically on Sunday (US time) by President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf.
It is expected to be signed in person on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland, with both Vance and Ghalibaf to attend. The text has been kept secret, but American officials said it would be made public upon signing, or before.
Good morning and welcome to our national news live coverage for Tuesday, June 16. Here’s what’s making news today.
US-Iran peace agreement: The Strait of Hormuz will be opened toll-free for 60 days under the unreleased peace agreement between the US and Iran, but its longer-term operation will be subject to negotiations, American officials said.
Politics: Less than a third of people think the May budget will be good for them or the nation, while public assessment of Jim Chalmers’ performance as treasurer has fallen to its lowest level ever.
Business: Embattled consulting group KPMG has effectively been banned from new federal government work while the Department of Finance reviews its suitability as a contractor.
Energy: The NSW government’s $1 billion renewables fund has chosen its first project, investing $100 million in battery projects.
Workplace: Casual and part-time workers will be included in new laws protecting the rights of Victorians to work from home, with the state government set to introduce legislation into parliament this week.
