Independent MP Nicolette Boele calls out parliament's lack of ambition in her first speech
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Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Trump flags tariff hike that may impact Australia
Australian exporters may be hit with tariffs of up to 20 percent at the US border, after President Donald Trump flagged a hike in the baseline duty for all imports. Trump suggested the minimum tariff for countries that do not negotiate separate trade deals may double. Speaking at a press conference at his luxury golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland on Monday (Tuesday, AEST), the US president said the blanket tariff would affect 'the rest of the world', having secured exemption deals with major economies including Japan and the European Union. Asked what the new rate would be, he said: 'I would say it'll be somewhere in the 15 to 20 percent range. 'Probably one of those two numbers'. The baseline tariff is currently set at 10 percent and is applied to most goods sent to the US by about 200 countries including Australia. Despite mounting pressures on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, his government has been unable to secure an exemption ahead of an August 1 deadline. Shadow Finance Minister James Paterson said the latest announcement exposed the damage caused by Albanese's failure to establish a relationship with Trump, having still not met him face-to-face. The Prime Minister sought to discuss the tariffs with Trump during the G7 summit in Canada last month but the US President left ahead of schedule due to the Israel-Iran conflict. Mr Paterson added it seemed Ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd also had no meetings at the White House since Trump was sworn in in January, having previously mocked and criticized the US president. 'I suspect we would know about it if he had, I suspect it would be all over social media if he had, so I think it's a reasonable inference now that there has been no meetings.' For its part, the Albanese government has restated its opposition to the tariffs but downplayed what it said about Australia-US relations. 'We are a country that relies on trade, we are a country with a very high proportion of jobs that rely on trade,' Assistant Treasurer Dan Mulino told Sky News. 'That remains the position of this government. So, we would rather a situation in which the world doesn't go down the path of imposing tariffs. 'But what I can say is that Australia remains in a situation where we've got as good a deal as anybody, and we continue to engage with the US Government intensely on these matters.' A spokesperson for Trade Minister Don Farrell said Australia would continue to engage 'at all levels' to advocate for the removal of the tariffs. 'We, as the opposition, disagree with Trump's tariff policy, but again, it reinforces the urgency and the great disappointment that our prime minister hasn't had a face-to-face meeting with Trump,' he said. 'He needs to go over there and prosecute the case, to argue Australia's case, but also to stand up for free trade across the globe, because the importance of it for us as a trading nation, as Australia.' It comes only days after Australia lifted its ban on importing US beef - eliminating a key reason cited by the Trump administration for its tariff on Aussie goods. Mr Albanese insisted the move was the outcome of a biosecurity review that had been underway for years rather than a backdown in the face of tariffs, but US officials have celebrated it as a win for the president. 'This is yet another example of the kind of market access the president negotiates to bring America into a new golden age of prosperity, with American agriculture leading the way,' US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said.
Telegraph
11 hours ago
- Telegraph
Political censors have cynically hijacked vital child protections
Britons woke up last week to discover that their firehose of digital smut had been strangled, albeit temporarily for consenting adults. Undeniably, the introduction of age verification regulations does mark a huge change in our relationship with the internet, hitherto a pornographic free-for-all. It may feel like a shock to find a third party inserting itself between you and a website, apparently demanding to know who you are, but it shouldn't be a surprise: it's eight years since the UK Government published its online harms green paper under Theresa May, and The Telegraph launched its Duty of Care campaign the following year. After much wrangling, the result was the 2023 Online Safety Act. In March, the first part of went into effect, placing new obligations on platforms to remove content that is legal, but harmful to children: suicide advice, eating disorders or dangerous stunt challenges. The second phase went into force last week, requiring age checks for pornography sites. 'Companies have effectively been treating all users as if they're adults, leaving children potentially exposed to porn and other types of harmful content,' wrote Melanie Dawes, Ofcom's chief executive, in January. The UK is not an outlier in its desire to keep children safe, either. Texas and three other US states require age verification for adult material, and so will Australia. But critics of the law have warned of consequences for free expression from the start, and over-zealous interpretations quickly became apparent. X, previously Twitter, has already put material behind the age gate, with Benjamin Jones, director of case management at the Free Speech Union – of which I am a member – identifying a number of posts which were worryingly censored for unverified users. Some supported calls for single-sex spaces for women. One by Wuhan lab researcher Billy Bostickson (a pseudonym) fell foul too; it was part of a thread on the use of bamboo RNA in vaccines. Several posts in a thread discussing Richard the Lionheart were gated, which merely contained a reference to the crusades. Most troublingly, a post linking to a live stream of police arrests at a demonstration at a migrant hotel in Leeds was also taken down. All these bans appear to have been the work of an over-zealous algorithm. Some saw this coming. Baroness Claire Fox has written of her dismay at realising how outnumbered speech advocates were when she was in a room as the only free speech advocate, alongside dozens of groups all requesting some clause or addition. 'Only two of us [peers] consistently opposed the bill – myself and Lord Daniel Moylan. I was shocked that so many from the free speech camp of peers were silent,' Fox tells me. 'It became a Christmas tree bill with lots of other things put in it,' said Kemi Badenoch as she campaigned for the Conservative leadership last year. She also predicted 'it will go after people who aren't doing anything wrong'. That hasn't quite happened yet, but long overdue moves to enforce accountability on giant, transnational platforms, and better protect children unfortunately coincided with a renewed desire to control political speech. The good state must take an active role in removing inflammatory speech, the United Nations declared in its 2021 paper Our Common Agenda. It re-emphasised the point last year. William Perrin, one of the architects of Ofcom's approach to regulating online platforms, who was not involved in drafting the legislation, recently posted a paper for the think tank Demos called Epistemic Security 2029: Protecting the UK's information supply chains and strengthening discourse for the next political era. It explicitly calls for the policing of social media platforms. One gets the sense that as long as populists are rising, the impulse to censor will be irresistible to their political opponents. By controlling our discourse, they can control democracy. 'We have an establishment that is innately hostile to Free Speech,' Jones of the Free Speech Union tells me. There is very much wrong with this. Against a backdrop of widespread concern about street crime, shoplifting and rampant fraud, the energy devoted by police to what we say online is confounding, from enthusiasm for the category of 'non-crime hate incidents' to the creation of a special monitoring unit. The implicit idea seems to be that if we stop talking about something the underlying problem will go away. With Britain a tinderbox, and a long summer ahead, this seems a brave moment to test the proposition. It is understandable why age verification and clumsy algorithms sow suspicion of the system itself. In reality, however, online anonymity was always illusory. Your broadband operator has always known who you are and which sites you visit. So has the shady VPN provider. Google collected your pornography browsing history even while you were browsing in 'incognito' mode, for which it was sued, agreeing later to delete billions of records in a settlement. What our alarm reflects is a wholesale loss of trust in the Government. Ofcom points to polling showing the Online Safety Act is widely supported. It is highly regrettable that a bien-pensant blob has cynically hijacked child protection law to ensure it has a media landscape more in keeping with its views. But there's plenty of blame to go around. One lesson of the Online Safety Act is that free-speech advocates also needed a plausible child protection plan. They never came up with one – and were duly steamrollered. The consequences for Britain may be profound.
Telegraph
12 hours ago
- Telegraph
How Australia's liquid lunch became a ‘sombre affair'
When Phil Chronican, the chairman of Australia's second-largest bank, held a lunch with investors last month, he probably expected be asked the usual questions about National Australia Bank's interest margins or capital ratios. But one query came straight out of left-field. According to accounts from inside the room, at least one fund manager asked Chronican whether the board was planning to tackle the chief executive, Andrew Irvine, about drinking alcohol at client events. After news of the exchange leaked out, an NAB spokesman said the board backed Irvine and 'the leadership team are delivering sound financial and operational results'. The chief himself later said he 'very rarely' went to lunch with the bank's customers, but engaging with them 'helps me understand their business and helps them understand how we are supporting them – and they often give us their business as a result'. Still, the media coverage has kicked off a round of soul-searching in the executive suites and boardrooms of corporate Australia. Executives asked each other how much, if even at all, they should be boozing in or around the office. The controversy underlined how much things have changed in Australia, whose population long enjoyed a reputation as thirsty and enthusiastic consumers of wine and beer. The image of the lager-loving larrikin was embedded into the British consciousness by the likes of Crocodile Dundee star Paul Hogan and his jocular 1980s TV adverts for Foster's. One of the few facts almost every Briton knows about Australian politics is that one of the country's prime ministers, Bob Hawke, set the world record for the fastest guzzle of a yard of ale. As recently as 2021, Australia still ranked fourth for alcohol consumption among a sample of the 38 rich countries of the OECD – quaffing 10.7 litres per person per year, compared with Britain's 10 litres. But attitudes are changing fast. Liquid lunches and messy after-work drinks are now the exception rather than the norm. 'There is no question that the days of the long lunches, the boozy lunches in Australia are gone. If they happen, it's a rarity,' says Richard Basil-Jones, chief executive of the Australia-UK Chamber of Commerce. He has been in Britain about two years, and he's noticed a difference between his home town of Sydney and his adopted city of London, with its multitude of inviting pubs. 'In Sydney I'd probably have done my meetings with a coffee in the morning, or a breakfast. Maybe it would've been a lunch, but it certainly wouldn't have been a long, boozy one,' he says. 'But the one big difference in London is that here people say, 'Oh, how about we catch up after work for a pint?'' It is a trend which has accelerated owing to the growing number of younger Australians choosing to abstain. At the turn of the century, the proportion of Australians aged 18 to 24 who said they never drank was just under 10pc, a figure which has surged to almost 25pc since. 'If you look at the whole culture within Australia, we've just seen such a significant shift. There has been a fundamental change in the way people approach alcohol, and in examining the relationship with alcohol,' says Simon Strahan, chief executive of the charity DrinkWise. Staying sharp A big part of this shift is attributed to the Covid pandemic, when people socialised less and became more focused on their physical and mental health. This has survived the return to the office, and has now rippled out into the bar and restaurant trade. Jeremy Courmadias was until recently the chief executive of Fink Group, owner of some of Sydney's most A-list business lunch spots including Bennelong, which is located in the city's Opera House. Having spent more than two decades in the business, he has seen the shift first-hand. He says companies have tried to take more control of business wining and dining, both to contain the cost and to keep it private. 'If they're [companies] entertaining clients, they've got catering and dining facilities of their own. So we don't necessarily see as much at restaurants as we used to,' says Courmadias. When office groups do hit a restaurant, things seldom get as raucous as they used to. 'At the end of the week, people might still let go a little bit,' he says. 'But at dinners early on in the week, the big corporate events that you'd be doing, they would probably be a little bit more of a sombre affair.' At lunchtimes, tighter budgets and a more abstemious culture mean fewer people are ordering wine by the bottle. 'They don't want to drink because they want to stay sharp,' Courmadias adds. 'They're just not as interested in drinking as much as they can before getting back to the office.' In the run-up to Australia's recent election, Peter Dutton, the conservative opposition leader, proposed a new tax break for business lunching in order to give the hospitality trade a boost. But it gained little traction among voters focused on the cost of living, who frowned at the idea of businesses getting a tax break to wine and dine on the corporate card. Even when diners are opting to drink less during business lunches, they will still often opt for the best glass of wine available. To make that work, restaurants have embraced the Coravin – which uses a needle to extract wine without taking the cork out. 'You can pour a glass of wine from a very expensive bottle without soiling the whole bottle,' says Courmadias. 'And that bottle could last three or four weeks, so you don't need to write the bottle off in the process – and you can actually offer more at that premium end of the market.' Restaurants are also investing more in non-alcoholic drinks – such mocktails, sodas and spritzes – which require bar staff to be just as creative as if they were designing a cocktail. That is mirrored in beer sales, with almost one-third of beer sold in Australia now zero-alcohol or low- to mid-strength. 'To meet the market where it is, Australian brewers have been innovating and diversifying our product offerings for many years,' says Amanda Watson, chief executive of the Australian Brewers Association. DrinkWise's Strahan says it's now standard practice for companies to provide zero- or low-alcohol beers at functions and events, compared to 15 years ago when the only non-alcoholic version would be water. 'Most people who are choosing to have a drink are doing so in moderation, and the workplace is looking at that and saying, 'Well, that's something that we can facilitate',' he says. But he acknowledges that 'there is still a proportion of people who will look at workplace events as a chance to potentially cut loose'. However, a DrinkWise survey suggests only a quarter of Australians now choose to do so in their workplace or at work events. And almost two thirds say they don't feel self-conscious about sticking to zero- or low-alcohol drinks when others in their group are boozing. 'That sort of number really does indicate that there's a distinct cultural shift,' Strahan says.
