Opposition Leader Angus Taylor is giving his first major speech as opposition leader to the Centre for Independent Studies. Follow along with our livestream.
Barnaby Joyce has left the door open to recontesting his lower house seat of New England at the next election as One Nation continues to surge in the polls.
“The plan is to stand for the Senate, but I’ll put a caveat on that: that if we get closer to the day and the party says that they want me to do another job, of course, I’ve got to consider that,” Joyce told Sky News.
Joyce defected from the Nationals in December and said he would switch to run for the Senate in NSW for One Nation. Lower house seats need a much higher vote to win and One Nation have never secured a spot in the House of Representatives at an election. Joyce sits in the House but was voted in as a National. He has been the New England MP since 2013.
Joyce said he was confident he could win the seat again but “I’ve to be part of [One Nation’s] process and not start predetermining… I’ve got to also do what’s best for One Nation”.
Thank you for following our national news live blog for Monday, February 16. Here’s what we have covered so far today.
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Coles is facing Federal Court this week over claims it misled shoppers with “illusory” discounts on a range of household goods on hundreds of products. The high-profile case, which will serve as a key test on practices across the industry, will put the microscope on whether promotions on hundreds of products were genuine or misleading, and could leave the supermarket facing hefty fines.
- Police have returned to the South Australian outback to continue their search for evidence in the case of missing four-year-old Gus Lamont, who has not been seen since last year. Officers from Task Force Horizon will continue to search for evidence at Oak Park Station, a remote area in the north-east outback and the site of the property where Gus was last seen.
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One Nation’s primary vote continues to surge in the polls, and has now drawn level with the Coalition, the most recent polling by this masthead shows. In the first published poll since Taylor deposed Ley as leader, support for One Nation has surged to 23 per cent of the primary vote – although voters appear willing to give Taylor an opportunity to turn things around, backing the Coalition under Taylor by three more percentage points than under Ley.
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Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has avoided committing to make public the internal election review into the Coalition’s 2025 wipeout. Former leader Sussan Ley had promised transparency about what went wrong for the Coalition last year, which won 42 lower house seats to Labor’s 94. Taylor this morning declined to commit to the review’s release, repeatedly saying “that’s a matter for the party organisation”.
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Treasurer Jim Chalmers is being urged by the International Monetary Fund in its annual examination of the economy and interest rates to use his May budget to embrace far-reaching tax reform, including an increase in the GST, overhauling the capital gains tax and cutting company tax to lift living standards and get the economy growing faster.
Stay with us as we continue to bring you the latest live news updates from Australia and beyond. My name is Emily Kaine, handing over now to my colleague Rachael Dexter who will take you through the news of the afternoon.
Liberal senator Sarah Henderson has backed Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, agreeing colleagues threw the outspoken backbencher “under the bus” after she suggested Labor was bringing Indian migrants into the country to secure their votes.
“I was quite critical of Sussan [Ley] at the time. I felt that Sussan did need to defend Jacinta,” Henderson told Sky News. “It’s appropriate that Jacinta stands up when she’s called a racist.”
Henderson said Price was a “great friend to the conservative cause” and called for her to be reinstated to a portfolio under new opposition leader Angus Taylor.
“There were many people trying to target her, bring her down. It was completely improper. And I hope and expect Jacinta will play a very important role on the frontbench in Angus’ team.”
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor is giving his first major speech as opposition leader to the Centre for Independent Studies. Follow along with our livestream.
Coles’ ear-worm “down down” TV ads have been played before the federal court as evidence in a landmark legal case brought by the consumer watchdog alleging some of the discounts were illusory.
Lawyers for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and Coles gathered at the Federal Court in Melbourne for the beginning of the case, as the watchdog argues the supermarket artificially spiked prices for hundreds of products before lowering them to prices either higher than or equal to what they were previously sold as, but labelled these third prices as “down down” suggesting a discount.
Coles rejects that this constituted misleading conduct, and that the “down down” prices were a genuine discount after suppliers had increased the cost of the products.
Barrister Garry Rich SC, leading the ACCC’s case, said the TV ads were relevant because they demonstrated that alleged misleading conduct on ticket prices were just part of the broader messaging context to consumers that discounts were genuine.
Chuckles broke out in the court as the ads were first mentioned.
Rich told the court:
The jingle that sticks in one’s ears for longer than is healthy. Your honour will notice the large red hand, and that their (prices) are not only down, but staying down.
Initially, Coles’ “down down” campaign jingle had been performed by rock band Status Quo, reworking their own track of the same name to include the lyrics “down down, prices are down”. In subsequent years, Coles continued to use the jingle without the band performing it. Justice Michael O’Bryan joked that in the second “down down” ad screened before the court, from 2021, “Status Quo was retired at this stage, it seems”.
Reminding the court of the relevance of the screenings, Rich noted “consumers are not viewing those (‘down down’ price) tickets on their own in isolation.”
Nationals leader David Littleproud has voiced his support for the Liberal Party’s new leaders, following a spill on Friday that saw Sussan Ley ousted and replaced by key conservative Angus Taylor.
“I think Angus and Jane have hit the ground running,” Littleproud told Sky this morning.
He lauded their return to conservatism, saying it would help crack down on migration numbers and ensure only the “right people” were allowed into the country.
“I think they’ve got back to the core principles of conservatism. Angus Taylor wants to restore your standard of living and protect our way of life. We’ve had too high immigration and too low a standard in bringing people to this country.
“We should have a migration policy that works for our country, bringing the right people with the right skills and the right values to our country, but attack the cost of living through a proper energy policy and not taxing our way out of this. Just getting back to some common-sense basics, and I think Angus Taylor has proved those values and principles. He’s articulated them well,” Littleproud said.
He did not elaborate on what the “right” values might look like, or who the “right” people might be, maintaining insistence that the numbers were too high.
Independent senator David Pocock has challenged the testimony of Meta’s public policy vice president, who denied the tech giant’s algorithm was “juiced” to garner attention on outrage and misinformation.
“I’m concerned that your evidence just does not square with what we hear from experts,” Pocock said in a bipartisan committee hearing on information integrity.
“Meta are very good at telling us that you are this outstanding global citizen, that we don’t actually have an algorithm that is just prioritising eyeballs, outrage – which leads to money. [Meta says] that it’s not actually about the money.
“It’s just so hard to cop when we’ve seen that repeatedly, your inability to address things like bots has allowed individuals and bad actors to weaponise these armies of bots and amplify misinformation to skew public perception, to influence elections. This is very well documented around the world,” he said.
Meta’s representative, Simon Milner, said the tech giant worked with electoral commissions around the world to ensure election integrity.
“I really would like to be in a position where I feel I’ve reassured the committee that we take these issues seriously, that we do have policies, technologies, people, partnerships in place to try and address – and these are complex issues,” he said.
Committee chair Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson thanked Milner for his time, but chastised Meta for not appearing voluntarily.
“[Information integrity is] a significant matter of public interest, especially on climate change, and I do say respectfully, next time the committee asks you to appear to explain these things publicly, we shouldn’t have to compel you to appear,” he said.
Senators have compelled Meta to appear before a parliamentary committee where they challenged the tech giant over its management of mis- and disinformation on its platforms, including Instagram and Facebook.
Labor senator Michelle Ananda-Rajah cited a report from not-for-profit Reset Tech, which alleged Meta was not doing all it could to remove troll and bot farms, known as “co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour”.
“This report… looked at two areas, scams and political interference,” she said. “It said that you are only removing basically a fraction of the accounts … why is that?”
“We reject those findings,” Simon Milner, Meta’s public policy vice president, told the climate change and energy information integrity committee in Canberra.
“As I’ve reported to you, we removed almost 700 million accounts in one quarter. So our assessment is their report is wrong. It’s factually wrong.”
Milner said he did not know how many fact-checkers Meta employed in Australia, and that the company did not track how many fake accounts were estimated to be on its platforms.
“It’s not about counting them. It’s removing them and then telling the world about how many we’ve removed,” he said.
Coles advertised dog food prices as “down down” despite being 13 per cent more expensive than they were sold for eight days earlier, the Federal Court has heard, as a blockbuster case between the consumer watchdog and the supermarket giant gets under way.
Lawyers for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and Coles gathered at the Federal Court in Melbourne this morning for the beginning of the case, which alleges illusory discounts on a range of household goods.
The ACCC is arguing that Coles artificially spiked prices on 45 products before lowering them to prices either higher than or equal to what they were previously sold as, but labelled these third prices as “down down” suggesting a discount. Coles rejects that this constituted misleading conduct, and that the “down down” prices were a genuine discount after suppliers had increased the cost of the products.
Barrister Garry Rich SC, leading the ACCC’s case, opened with the example of Nature’s Gift Wet Dog Food, which the watchdog is alleging was priced at $4 between 18 April 2022 and 7 February 2023. It increased to $6 for a seven-day period – its second price – before Coles introduced its third price, $4.50, advertising it as a discount from $6.
“Despite this, Coles proceeded to tell its customers that … the price was down down,” Rich said. “A reasonable consumer who knew the real facts would not think the price of the dog food had gone down.”
“What our friends did was not just increase prices but then proceeded to tell customers that prices were down,” he said.
Rich argued that before Coles introduced its second, higher price, it had a promotional plan ready to discount it days later, and that it wasn’t related to true price signals from the supplier. “We don’t think that’s fair dinkum,” Rich said.
Australian steelmaker Bluescope reports an 81 per cent jump in December half earnings to $558 million after President Trump’s hike in US steel tariffs led to “stronger US steel spreads” for its products manufactured in the US.
This offset a softer performance in Australia and Asia for its locally manufactured steel which competes against China’s steel glut.
The steelmaker, which is the target of a takeover bid by Kerry Stokes’ SGH and US-based Steel Dynamics also announced it will deliver $3 a share to investors this calendar year via a $1 per share special dividend, $1.30 per share on ongoing dividends and a $310 million market buyback worth around 70¢ per share.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
