Australia news LIVE: Defence spending plan released today; Australian house prices soar on global debt scale

Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is speaking on ABC television this morning, pleading with social media companies to help instil calm after a church leader and several worshippers were stabbed during a service in Sydney’s west on Monday night.

The shocking incident nearly triggered a riot that required hundreds of police to bring under control.

NSW Premier Chris Minns also aired his concerns about the role of social media spreading unrest and disinformation.

But Plibersek said some people were using social media to inflame tensions in the community and said people should turn it off.

“If you have got any influence on your friends and family, ask them to switch off the social media at the moment.

“I really don’t think that the social media companies are doing as much as they ought to be, to support the police in their efforts to keep calm in the community. We know there are people deliberately trying to stoke division on social media. Deliberately lying to create that social division. Switch it off if you can. Switch it off.”

Treasurer Jim Chalmers is due to meet international economic figures in Washington DC but is keeping an eye on domestic affairs, making a strident defence of the government’s big-budget “future made in Australia” scheme.

The Albanese government has pledged to deliver an unspecified sum of many billions in financial support to kick-starting manufacturing of low-emissions technologies like solar panels and batteries while boosting processing of critical minerals.

With the federal budget due on May 14 Chalmers’ has penned an opinion piece in The Australian responding to criticism of the scheme.

“This won’t be a free-for-all of taxpayer funds,” Chalmers said, promising that under the Australian-made scheme private investment “will and should continue to do most of the heavy lifting”.

“Public investment is a key part of our focus here but not the only or biggest part,” Chalmers said.

“The May Budget will include significant new public investments, but our aim is to incentivise the private sector, not replace it. Anything the Government does will only ever be a tiny sliver of what’s needed. Private investment will and should continue to do most of the heavy lifting.”

Experts like the Productivity Commission and independent economist Saul Eslake have slammed the government’s plan, warning government was likely to waste taxpayers’ money propping up uncompetitive business that would not otherwise exist with its support.

“Maybe it’s not old-fashioned protectionism, but we’re going to see taxes and subsidies to induce resources move from one part of the economy to manufacturing, and that’s going to make us poorer,” Eslake said last week.

Chalmers will speak on RN Breakfast shortly, and we’ll bring you the latest.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil says the government has enormous confidence in people who work in security services, after a teenager was arrested after a terrorist attack at a western Sydney church on Monday night.

The teenager allegedly stabbed Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel who was preaching at Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley. Authorities declared it a terrorist attack yesterday.

O’Neil said the government and Australian people’s hearts went out to the community who were affected by the attack.

“To have an incident like this occur particularly in the context of people calmly worshipping is just something that’s so awful to see,” O’Neil said on Seven’s Sunrise this morning.

The minister was questioned about the country’s security services, and how they responded to the attack.

“I’ve got an enormous level of confidence in the people who work in this area,” she told the program.

She said they had thwarted about 21 terrorist attacks over the past decade that would have been “incredibly violent” if they weren’t uncovered.

“It is correct to say that we are seeing a trend where it is harder for us to discern when a terrorist attack like this may occur, but I would say that police and our law enforcement officials are very good at this, and I’m confident in their abilities,” O’Neil said.

“We need to let them do their investigative work. That’s progressing nicely.”

Australian defence firms are bracing for major cuts when the federal government releases its 10-year defence spending plan on Wednesday, with programs linked to the army considered especially vulnerable.

Defence Minister Richard Marles will use an address to the National Press Club today to unveil the government’s new national defence strategy and its rolling plan for military capability spending: a public version of its integrated investment program.

Marles has in recent weeks flagged cancellations, reductions and delays to defence projects, and warned “hard decisions” were required to prevent the $50 billion annual defence budget from spiralling out of control.

“We feel like the sword of Damocles is about to drop on our heads,” Australian Industry and Defence Network chief executive Brent Clark said on Tuesday.

Catch up on the full story here.

Prospective Australian home buyers are facing some of the biggest price increases in the developed world, new research shows, while evidence grows that the economy is struggling as higher interest rates force more businesses to the wall.

Data compiled by the International Monetary Fund released overnight shows that, after inflation, house prices across Australia have climbed by more than 10 per cent since 2019. Only three other nations – the United States, the United Arab Emirates and Japan – have experienced real house price growth larger than Australia’s.

Driving that growth has been Australian debt levels. According to the fund, only Norway has a higher debt servicing level than Australia at about 20 per cent of average incomes. In Britain and the United States, debt servicing levels are below 8 per cent of incomes.

Read more on this here.

The United States has provided assurances requested by the High Court in London that could finally pave the way for WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange to be extradited from Britain.

Last month, the High Court ruled that, without certain US guarantees, Assange, 52, would be allowed to launch a new appeal against being extradited to face 18 charges, all bar one under the Espionage Act, over WikiLeaks’ release of confidential US military records and diplomatic cables.

Those assurances – that in a US trial he could rely on the First Amendment right to free speech and that there was no prospect of new charges which could see the death penalty being imposed – have now been submitted by a deadline which fell on Tuesday.

The document, seen by Reuters, stated that Assange would be able to rely on First Amendment protections and says “a sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed”.

“These assurances are binding on any and all present or subsequent individuals to whom authority has been delegated to decide the matters,” it said.

There will now be a further court hearing in London on May 20, but Assange’s lawyers have previously described US assurances given in other cases as not “worth the paper they’re written on”, echoing similar criticism from human rights group Amnesty International.

Reuters

Good morning, and thanks for your company.

It’s Wednesday, April 17. I’m Caroline Schelle, and I’ll be steering our live coverage for the first half of the day.

Here’s what’s making news this morning: