Australia news LIVE: Treasurer open to running budget deficits; e-Safety watchdog gets injunction against X over videos

WARNING: This story may be distressing to readers, and contains references to suicide.

The Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney said the government was committed to preventing the deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children by suicide.

It comes after a 10-year-old boy in state care in WA took his own life earlier this month.

“It is a devastating case,” Burney told RN Breakfast this morning.

She said the government was working to tackle the issue, including the standalone plan to address violence against women and children, mandatory health checks for children in out of home care and supporting families.

“We’ve also got of course a suicide prevention program in 12 communities across Australia which is going to continue,” Burney said.

The minister was asked whether it was enough to have the program running in so few communities.

“The funding is for 12 communities, but obviously that is not the only thing that we’re doing in the prevention space.

“The suicide of this little boy is such a confronting issue for everyone … and there has to be a real look at prevention, not as as I say the edge of the cliff.”

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WARNING: This story may be distressing to readers, and contains references to suicide.

Turning now to Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney, who is speaking about a 10-year-old Indigenous boy who took his own life while in state care in Western Australia.

The child, who cannot be named for legal reasons, died on April 12, while under the care of the Department of Communities.

Burney said it was a tragedy, and a confronting issue for all Australians, but she was reassured that the WA government was taking it incredibly seriously.

“The point for me is the work needs to be done particularly at the federal level in terms of keeping children safe … the number of Aboriginal children in care is growing and that must be arrested,” she said on RN Breakfast.

She said there absolutely has to be a greater focus on prevention and stopping Aboriginal children being taken from their families.

But the minister said from July 1 the government planned to appoint the country’s first-ever Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children’s Commissioner.

WA Premier Roger Cook previously said the death was concerning and a tragedy, and he would support expediting the coronial inquest.

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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said tech billionaire Elon Musk is using social media site X as a “vanity project”, as he deals with questions on how the government will handle the mogul’s response to the controversy.

Asked on Nine’s Today program whether removing X from Australian servers is the answer, Albanese said the government will look at measures to strengthen laws.

He said Australia had a pretty reasonable process through the e-Safety commission.

“We don’t want, no one wants censorship here. What we want though, is the application of a bit of common sense,” Albanese said.“So you don’t show and propagate violence online, surely that’s not too much to ask.”

He said the videos were causing great distress to people across Australia.

“I think it is causing damage to his own brand of Twitter, which has now become X, he clearly sees this as a vanity project for himself rather than about the people who are consumers.”

For the next two days, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will be walking a part of the Kokoda Track with Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea James Marape for two days and attend a dawn service ceremony for ANZAC Day.

Doing the rounds on breakfast TV this morning, Albanese was asked whether he would speak with Marape about China’s growing presence in the region by both Sky News and ABC, pointing to previous agreements as examples of Australia’s relationship with the Pacific.

“Prime Minister Marape at the official state dinner last night again, referred to Australia as Papua New Guinea’s partner of choice when it came to national security, this is an economic, social and security relationship,” Albanese told Sky.

“Of course, PNG received the independence from Australia 49 years ago … and so this relatively young nation has achieved a great deal. Australia will continue to support PNG and PNG will continue to support Australia.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says Elon Musk’s claim the Australian government is forcing censorship shows the billionaire has “chosen ego and showing violence over common sense”.

Last night, Australia’s online watchdog won an injunction to force Musk’s social platform X to hide videos of last week’s Sydney church stabbing.

Musk has responded through two posts to X, one pinned to his page saying: “I’d like to take a moment to thank the PM for informing the public that this platform is the only truthful one”.

Speaking on Sky this morning, Albanese said Musk had failed to see that Australians want the videos of the stabbing to be taken down.

“This is a bloke who’s chosen ego and showing violence over common sense,” he said.

This bloke thinks he is above the Australian law, that he’s above common decency and I’ll tell you what I say to Elon Musk, that he is so out of touch with what the Australian public want.

This has been a distressing time and I find this bloke on the other side of the world from his billionaires establishment trying to lecture Australians about free speech, well I won’t cop it and Australians won’t either.”

Australia’s online watchdog won an injunction to force Elon Musk’s social platform X to hide videos of last week’s Sydney church stabbing as a high-powered ministerial taskforce leads a bid to tackle online algorithms pushing anti-women influencers.

Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton have joined the many politicians savaging digital platforms in recent days as momentum grows for new laws to assert Australia’s sovereignty after Musk rebuffed Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant’s take-down orders, calling them “unlawful and dangerous”.

Late on Monday, Inman Grant launched a Federal Court bid to force X to comply with the order.

The court found in favour of the Australian regulator on an interim basis and decided the videos should be removed by putting them behind a notice within 24 hours.

Catch up on the full story here.

Back in Australia, Treasurer Jim Chalmers is open to running budget deficits to support the economy and make space for new cost-of-living relief aimed at university students amid more signs the nation will continue to struggle well into next year.

As Deloitte Access Economics warned economic growth would be tepid for the next four years, Chalmers on Monday said that the government’s fiscal strategy had to change due to the changed economic outlook in Australia and overseas.

Chalmers became the first treasurer in 15 years to deliver a budget surplus for the 2022-23 financial year in what he described at the time as an important step towards reducing inflation pressure in the economy.

He said a second successive surplus remained the government’s objective for the current financial year. In the mid-year budget update, Chalmers forecast a deficit of $1.1 billion for 2023-24 which was a $12.8 billion improvement on his May forecasts.

Here’s the full story.

An independent review of the neutrality of the UN agency helping Palestinian refugees found that Israel never expressed concern about anyone on the staff lists it has received annually since 2011.

The review was carried out after Israel alleged that a dozen employees of the agency known as UNRWA had participated in Hamas’ October 7 attacks.

In a wide-ranging 48-page report, the independent panel said UNRWA has “robust” procedures to uphold the UN principle of neutrality, but it cited serious gaps in implementation, including staff publicly expressing political views, textbooks used in schools the agency runs with “problematic content” and staff unions disrupting operations.

It makes 50 recommendations to improve UNRWA’s neutrality.

From 2017 to 2022, the report said, the annual number of allegations of neutrality being breached at UNRWA ranged from seven to 55. But between January 2022 and February 2024, UN investigators received 151 allegations, most related to social media posts “made public by external sources,” it said.

In a key section on the neutrality of staff, the panel, which was led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, said UNRWA shares lists of staff with host countries for its 32,000 staff, including about 13,000 in Gaza.

But it said Israeli officials never expressed concern and informed panel members it did not consider the list “a screening or vetting process” but rather a procedure to register diplomats.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry informed the panel that until March 2024 the staff lists did not include Palestinian identification numbers, the report said.

Apparently based on those numbers, “Israel made public claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees are members of terrorist organizations,” the panel said.

“However, Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of this” to the refugee agency.

Colonna stressed that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed the independent review panel to review UNRWA’s neutrality — not to investigate Israeli allegations that 12 UNRWA staffers participated in the Oct. 7 attacks.

Guterres ordered the UN internal watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, known as OIOS, to conduct a separate investigation into those Israeli allegations.

AP

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