Australia news live: ASX suffers more heavy losses as Middle East crisis spooks investors

A Liberal candidate in South Australia’s upcoming state election has dropped out of the race after “shocking and extreme” comments on abortion, same-sex marriage, gender transitioning and feminism were aired by his Labor rival.

The leader of the SA Liberals, Ashton Hurn, yesterday stood by Carston Woodhouse, running for the seat of Wright in Adelaide’s north, after his appearances on the evangelical Christian podcast ElijahFire surfaced.

Today, Hurn said Woodhouse “will no longer be the candidate”:

I stood here yesterday, and I made myself clear that I did not support the comments made by a particular candidate. That remains true today, and that person is no longer a candidate for the Liberal Party at this state election.

I still maintain very strongly that people are entitled to have their view.

In videos of the podcast conversations, Woodhouse describes feminism as “demonic”, says there is “this illusion that you can somehow change your sex” and adds “who knows what demonic realms we’ve opened up to the world … by accepting homosexuality”.

Hurn originally stood by Woodhouse, saying she did not hold the same views, but that she was “not going to stop someone from having an opinion”.

Today, she would not say whether Woodhouse was disendorsed or had resigned, adding he remained under contract with the SA Liberal party.

Why did the 2022 Optus hacker never release all the data? Singtel doesn’t know

While the alleged Optus hacker in 2022 had access to the personal information of nearly 10 million customers, it only released 10,200 records as part of ransom demands, and then apologised and deleted their posts. No further records have been released since.

The West Australian reported today that Optus’s parent company, Singtel, was suspected to have paid another ransom since the 2022 hack.

It was an allegation Singtel’s board members John Arthur and Gail Kelly strongly denied had occurred when asked during a Senate inquiry on Thursday.

Greens senator Sarah Hanson Young asked the pair about the West Australian report, and then asked why when the Optus hack occurred, the alleged hacker suddenly had a change of heart and didn’t post the data when the ransom wasn’t paid.

Kelly said:

We just don’t know. It’s clearly a question we asked ourselves … We don’t know who that was, whether the person who asked for the ransom was the same person who was the hacker … No ransom was paid. No ransom was contemplated being paid.

Dennis Richardson says interest in his resignation from royal commission will be ‘one or two-day wonder’

The former spy chief Dennis Richardson is appearing on ABC’s Afternoon Briefing after his surprise resignation from the antisemitism royal commission.

Richardson says he doesn’t think anyone “in their right mind” would attempt to convince him to return to the role and you can’t unscramble an egg that has been scrambled.

He says he didn’t advise the federal government about his exit in advance because a royal commission sits outside government and it would have been improper to tell them.

Asked why he would quit when the report was “half done”, Richardson says that would be an “exaggeration”.

My resignation, I understand the interest it arouses, but at the end of the day and in the bigger scheme of things it will be a one or two day wonder. The royal commission will move on as it should … I have no doubt they will produce a report on intelligence and law enforcement matters which go to the heart of the issue …

Once the royal commission was formed and my report was rolled in to the royal commission, it became the royal commission’s report and became a matter for the royal commissioner, advised mainly by her senior counsel, and as time went on, I felt the value I could add to all of that was fairly limited.

Asked who should replace him, Richardson raises independent national security consultant Tony Sheehan and Peter Baxter, a former deputy secretary at the Department of Defence, as top candidates.

Read more here:

Australian shares suffered heavy losses today over concerns the oil market turmoil caused by the Middle East conflict could get worse.

The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 fell 1.3% to close the day at 8629 points, wiping about $43bn in value from the market. Brent crude prices surged again today to tip over the US$100 per barrel mark.

The ASX has been pulled around by sharp moves in the oil price, with rising energy prices fuelling global inflation, which drags down equity markets.

Investor hopes of a quick resolution to the Iran conflict have evaporated in recent days amid ongoing disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz, a key transit passage for the global oil trade.

Senior Iranian officials have warned of a long “war of attrition”.

The National Australia Bank’s markets research team said today a “tense reality” had taken hold in the Middle East.

“The US-Israel Iran conflict remains tense with a low probability for a resumption of vessels travelling through the Strait of Hormuz any time soon,” NAB said.

A growing number of economists expect the Reserve Bank will increase the cash rate to 4.1% next week. Rate hikes, used to tame inflation, tend to weigh on stock markets.

Bowen says he is ‘considering’ voluntary call from IEA for oil reserve release

Bowen was also asked about the federal government’s response to the International Energy Agency’s decision to release oil from global energy reserves.

The world’s energy watchdog said its 32 members had agreed unanimously to release about 400m barrels of emergency crude, a third of the group’s total government stockpiles and more than double the IEA’s previous biggest release.

Bowen said it was “appropriate” the government took some time to “think this through”.

It is a voluntary call, and my focus and my response will be focused on Australia’s best interests … We are good members of the IEA, we are good citizens, we are taking the voluntary call very seriously but I am considering it.

Read more about the decision here:

Bowen: ‘get as much fuel as you need but not less or more’

The energy minister, Chris Bowen, is fresh out of question time and over to ABC’s Afternoon Briefing.

He told the program there was “no doubt” Australians road-tripping over Easter would be affected by the “international crisis” on petrol prices but that didn’t mean they should panic-buy now.

It is important … that we say to people [to] get as much fuel as you need but not less or more because we are seeing a doubling of demand for fuel since the bombing of Iran and that has caused real, unacceptable supply chain pressure in Australia.

Bowen said the government wasn’t considering a temporary change to the fuel excise and measures announced today should help with supply measures.

Australia’s supplies are good and secure and at this point all the ships we were expecting have arrived, our strategic reserve is in place. When we say our fuel supply is secure, we mean it because it is true.

Elizabeth Struhs inquest hears eight-year-old’s return home against objection of doctors

A coronial inquest has heard eight-year-old Elizabeth Struhs, who was killed by family in 2022, was released back to them over the objection of her paediatricians.

The court is holding a pre-inquest hearing into the case today. Struhs, a type 1 diabetic, died as a result of being denied insulin by her family, who believed that God would intervene to save her.

She was hospitalised in 2019 as a result of her illness before being returned to her family. Her mother, Kerrie, openly refused to provide her medical care.

Counsel assisting Simon Hamlyn-Harris told the court:

The decision in August 2019 to return Elizabeth to her family home was in the face of strongly expressed opposition from the consultant paediatrician at the Children’s hospital, the child protection and forensic medical service at the Queensland Children’s hospital.

He read out a contemporaneous email: “It is the opinion of the CPFMS – that is the child protection and forensic medical service – and the endocrine team at QCH that Elizabeth cannot safely be cared for in a home where her mother resides, due to the strong beliefs that she’s expressing”.

Hamlyn-Harris said child safety clearly did not agree with that assessment, perhaps because her father, Jason Struhs, committed to provide her the insulin she needed to live. He did so for two years.

The inquest continues.

Police discover bodies of mother and baby after man hit by car in Queensland’s south-east

A mother and her baby daughter have been found dead, while a man covered in blood was hit by a car close to the grisly crime scene.

The tragedy was discovered after reports of the injured man being struck by a vehicle near a supermarket in Queensland’s south-east. The man with neck wounds was hit in Logan, about 30km south of Brisbane, on Thursday morning.

Police were trying to reach the man’s next of kin when officers discovered the bodies of a 38-year-old woman and her one-year-old daughter in the family’s nearby home.

Both died from critical injuries from an edged weapon, Detective Superintendent Chris Ahearn said:

We believe the three of these people live in a family unit at that house – child, mother and father. Our investigations are focusing heavily on the nature of their relationship and living arrangements at that house.

Witnesses raised the alarm after seeing a man covered in blood running along a footpath before he was hit by a black utility about 300m from the family home. Evidence markers have been placed along the footpath, marking a trail of blood leading from the house.

The man remains in a serious condition and is under police guard in hospital. There were no domestic violence orders involving the couple, police said, adding there was no further threat to the community. The home remains a crime scene as detectives appeal for anyone with information or dashcam footage to contact police.

-Australian Associated Press

Singtel not considering divesting from Optus after triple zero outage

The Senate inquiry examining September’s Optus triple zero outage has brought before it this afternoon Singtel board members John Arthur and Gail Kelly to answer questions about its support for its Australian company, Optus.

Liberal senator Sarah Henderson asked the board members about whether Singtel remains committed to Optus, or whether it has considered divesting after the ongoing issues with the telco.

Kelly said:

We, Singtel, want Optus to thrive. We want Optus to fulfill its obligations to its customers and fulfill its obligations to the Australian people more broadly.

Arthur, who is also the chair of Optus, said “Optus will continue to be a significant part of the Singtel group” and Singtel is “committed to Australia” through continued heavy investment in Optus.

Kelly said foreign-owned companies, when there is an issue, tend to reign back in control to the parent company, but in Singtel’s case, the company has invested more in Optus and worked to strengthen the board and the company in the wake of the outage.

Arthur said Optus had changed the way it had worked in the past, trying to be as transparent as possible, noting the Dr Kerry Schott report on the outage was released “without a word redacted”.

Following Optus’s 2022 cyberattack, the company fought to keep the report on the hack a secret.

Circling back to question time, and there were a number of personal explanations after formalities wrapped up.

The member for Warringah, Zali Steggall, refuted an allegation made by the prime minister in his response to a question from Sophie Scamps that
there was no reporting of personal staff allocations to crossbenchers in the Morrison government.

That is incorrect.

The prime minister’s words were: ‘Not only did the Morrison government not report that or come to the dispatch box, they were pretty quiet about that in that corner about it too, Mr Speaker.’ Those figures are reported at Senate estimates every time. There was no non-disclosure.

The prime minister stated: ‘The greatest number of representations that I had from crossbenchers in the House and in the Senate isn’t about health policy, isn’t about education policy or housing — it’s about their staff.’ … Again, that is not correct. The largest number of representations that I have made to the prime minister and the government is to accelerate climate action and truth in political advertising.

There you have it. The foreign minister for Estonia was in the house today, so let’s hope he had a good time. Here’s a recap of what happened:

• The federal energy minister, Chris Bowen, announced a temporary downgrade in Australia’s fuel quality standards, a move designed to put an extra 100m litres per month into the system for the next 60 days.

• Labor was consistently pressed on whether Australia was in a crisis over fuel supplies and stockpiling, leading to quite a bit of conjecture in the chamber. The message from the prime minister was “don’t panic”, while Bowen acknowledged that war, by definition, is a crisis.

• The independent MP, Sophie Scamps, pressed the federal government on whether it promised extra staff for the Coalition in exchange for support on Labor’s Freedom Of Information bill. Anthony Albanese said they didn’t, while adding it was unreasonable for crossbench members to have more staff than some MPs.

• And independent MP Dr Monique Ryan questioned the treasurer on if the government would impose a windfall tax on oil and gas profits from conflicts such as in Iran. Jim Chalmers neglected to answer directly, instead saying Labor had already made some changes to the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT).