Australia politics live: Malinauskas seeks federal help on Whyalla steelworks crisis; Trump trade adviser says Australia ‘killing’ US aluminium | Australia news

Butler pushes back on private health insurers over premium hikes

Going back to health minister Mark Butler’s press conference earlier, he also confirmed private health insurers will need to come back to the government by early next week with their applications for premium increases.

Butler has sent insurers back twice to settle on a premium rise for consumers for this year.

I have written back to some of the insurers only, I think, very late last week from memory, asking them to resubmit their applications for premium rises for 2025 from memory.

I asked that response be delivered late this week or very early next week…So I think I’ll be in a position to make that decision relatively soon.

Butler says he believes a decision will be made before the government enters into caretaker mode during the election campaign.

NBN Co fails to declare airline lounge memberships on gifts register

Josh Taylor

NBN Co has failed to declare the airline lounge memberships of a number of staff on its gifts register.

The company responsible for the National Broadband Network confirmed to Guardian Australia after several days of inquiries that:

A small number of NBN employees receive lounge memberships.

These memberships are managed under the company-wide gifts or benefits policy, with appropriate governance and independent oversight by NBN’s internal audit and fraud function.

NBN Co’s gifts and benefits register has just three entries in total, none of which include the airline memberships.

Australia Post declares the group CEO’s Qantas chairman’s lounge membership on its register, while the infrastructure department overseeing the NBN declares lounge membership for key personnel, as does the eSafety commissioner.

It comes as the Greens will attempt to move amendments to cut the CEO of NBN’s salary by $2.5m in the bill to protect the NBN from being privatised.

Sarah Basford Canales

Australia ‘turning the corner’ against corruption but risks remain, transparency group says

Australia has slightly improved its anti-corruption rating on the world stage, entering the top 10 for the first time since 2016.

Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index rated Australia 77 out of 100 on the scale, alongside Iceland and Ireland at 10th position out of 180 countries and ahead of close allies the UK and US.

The group’s Australian chief executive, Clancy Moore, said the improvement showed Australia was “turning the corner in the fight against corruption” but warned corruption risks remained without key electoral reforms, needed to stamp out “dark money” and vested interests.

New foreign bribery and anti-money laundering laws were among the changes attributed to boosting the country’s anti-corruption rating.

The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, welcomed the news at the report’s launch on Wednesday morning, criticising the former government for “trashing” Australia’s reputation for being open and transparent.

Australia’s lowest rating on the index came in 2021 when it scored just 73 and fell to its lowest ranking of 18th under the former Morrison government.

Dreyfus said:

Corruption thrives in the shadows. It festers where integrity is weak, where accountability is absent and where silence prevails. We must work to prevent it, root it out and dismantle the systems that allow it to take hold.

Butler comments on unverified footage around treating Israeli medical patients

Health minister Mark Butler has held a quick press conference and responded to news reports about social media footage.

The unverified footage, shared widely online, appears to show two hospital workers in Australian hospital uniforms. They claim that they refuse to treat Israeli patients and one says they would “kill” them. Guardian Australia is working to verify the footage and we will have more on this later.

Butler says the reported claims by the workers “runs contrary” to the fundamental principles of healthcare:

You treat whoever comes before you, you do no harm, and you treat whoever comes before you, no matter what their race, their creed, their religion – that is just so core to the delivery of healthcare and the professional ethos of the wonderful doctors, nurses, health professionals that we have in this country.

The idea that a couple of health professionals would say that they refuse to treat someone because of their race or because of their religion runs contrary to the most fundamental principle of healthcare.

Sarah Basford Canales

Greens push for medical evacuations to be available to offshore detainees

The Greens are attempting to restore a pathway to allow refugees and asylum seekers held in offshore detention centres access to medical evacuations for serious health conditions.

More commonly referred to as the medevac bill, the pathway existed briefly in early 2019 after the Labor opposition and the Greens teamed up to pass it into law. It was repealed later in 2019 by the Coalition government.

There are about 100 asylum seekers and refugees in Nauru while around 40 refugees and asylum seekers remain in Papua New Guinea – some for more than a decade – as part of an agreement struck years earlier.

The Greens senator David Shoebridge was joined by independent MPs Monique Ryan and Andrew Wilkie along with spokespeople from the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and Amnesty International this morning to urge for the law’s reintroduction.

Shoebridge said:

This parliament did the right thing in early 2019, we can do it again now and show Australians how politics can be better than the anger and division offered by the likes of Peter Dutton.

The resource centre on Wednesday revealed a man with a heart condition was medically evacuated from Nauru to Brisbane last week but no further details are available.

The ASRC’s deputy chief executive, Jana Favero, said politicians came together in 2018 and should do so again to address the health crisis.

It’s hard to believe we are still having this debate when people’s lives are at risk.

MPs address women’s health

Parliament is sitting, and this morning assistant health minister Ged Kearney and deputy opposition leader Sussan Ley have given statements on women’s health.

It follows the $573m package on contraception and menopause treatment that the government announced on Sunday.

Kearney tells the house:

Again and again we hear the same stories that at most difficult times in their lives, women have had to fight to get the care they deserve. Not because they were without symptoms or pain, but because they were women.

Ley says she hopes the government’s announcement, which the Coalition has backed, will show women that they’ve been listened to.

We know what period pain feels like. We have lived through the debilitation of endometriosis. We have felt the pangs of despair when the doctor has told us that the IVF didn’t work again, and we have held our babies in maternity wards too. We have experienced the judgement of medical professionals who just have not got what we have told them.

Donald Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro has said Australia is “killing” the US aluminium market, while the president considers an exemption on tariffs for Australia.

Trump signed executive orders on Monday for a 25% tariff on steel and aluminium imports, which will take place from 12 March.

Navarro told CNN on Tuesday:

Australia is just killing our aluminum market.

And President Trump says no, no, we’re not doing that any more. We’re going back to where we were, golden age of steel and aluminum. And that’s what he’s going to do.

Navarro also accused Australia and other nations of “flooding” the US market with aluminium:

And what they do is, they just flood our markets after Biden let them, gave them an agreement that said don’t flood our markets, you could have a reasonable amount. That’s what we’re dealing with.

Our aluminum industry … is on its back.

AFP releases CCTV footage after Victorian senator’s office vandalised

Federal police have released footage of a man who they say could assist in an investigation into the vandalism of a Victorian senator’s electorate office in January.

Police say CCTV images show a man spray-painting allegedly abusive messages on the window and front door of the office in the Melbourne suburb of South Yarra on 31 January.

The man then left the area in a vehicle.

Police say the man had light coloured hair, a moustache and was dressed in an orange, high-visibility work shirt, beige coloured pants and black work boots.

AFP counter-terrorism and special investigations command assistant commissioner Stephen Nutt said Special Operation Avalite investigators were working through dozens of reports of alleged antisemitic crimes.

Josh Taylor

Sanctions placed on cybercriminals over 2022 Medibank data breach

Australia, the US and UK have put cyber sanctions on five Russian citizens and ZServers, the Russian hosting company, for allegedly providing services for the LockBit ransomware criminal group, and the cybercriminals responsible for the Medibank data breach in 2022 that affected millions of Australians.

The Australian federal police said ZServers was what was referred to as a bulletproof provider, which provided infrastructure to cybercriminals in an online space to operate and run illicit content and operations, and was harder for law enforcement to take down or request cooperation from.

The LockBit ransomware group used ZServers to sell ransomware to others to then pursue ransomware attacks on people in countries including Australia, the AFP said.

The financial sanctions and travel bans have been imposed on Aleksandr Bolshakov (owner of ZServers), Aleksandr Mishin and Ilya Sidorov (ZServers senior employees), Dimitriy Bolshakov and Igor Odintsov (ZServers employees) in relation to illicit cyber activity conducted by ZServers.

The AFP said it was the first time Australia had imposed cyber sanctions on an entity.

Under the cyber sanctions framework, it is a criminal offence for Australians or people in Australia to provide assets to ZServers or the five Russian individuals, or to use or deal with their assets, including through cryptocurrency wallets or ransomware payments, and is punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment and/or significant fines. Any assets owned by ZServers or the five individuals held in Australian institutions must be frozen.

The first cyber sanction against an individual was Aleksander Ermakov for his alleged role in the Medibank data breach.

MP Dai Le says independents’ small budgets ‘a problem’

While electoral donations reform is up in the air, independents are still criticising the proposed bill, saying they’ll effectively roadblock new independent contenders.

Dai Le, who beat high-profile Labor candidate Kristina Keneally (parachuted into Fowler after she didn’t win the top spot on the NSW senate ticket), managed to do it on a small budget.

But she told RN Breakfast earlier that’s because she was already well known in her community, and it would be really hard for other independent candidates to do the same.

For a major party, you know, they’ve got, obviously, $90 million. As an independent, I mean, I spend about $161,000 to get elected. I think I’m a unique case, but for other independents, this is going to be a problem for them.

It takes a lot to actually, you know, billboards, corflutes, mailing out, all of that costs a lot of money. So therefore … for the other independents they find that that’s a real challenge for them, and it’s a real blockage.

Le also disagrees with rules that will give parties and independents $30,000 per MP and $15,000 per senator each in administrative funding, to comply with the new disclosure requirements.

Peter Malinauskas is speaking to RN Breakfast on the embattled Whyalla steelworks in South Australia.

He says it’s a “national interest question” and his government is starting to look at contingency plans if the steelworks can’t pay back “tens of millions” of dollars owed to a number of creditors.

This is where the national sovereignty question comes to mind, because this is not an issue in Whyalla alone or South Australia alone. This is truly a national interest question, because there is no Future Made in Australia without steel being made in Australia.

Malinauskas says he’s been engaging with the federal government on the issue.

We are seeking assistance from the commonwealth … when I say assistance, [I mean] engagement from the commonwealth, and I’m very grateful with the fact that the prime minister and senior members in his cabinet are well and truly across the brief in terms of the challenges that we’ve got in Whyalla and the importance of sustaining the steelworks into the future.

We’re looking at a range of plans and contingencies in the event, in the unfortunate event that GFG enters administration.

The owner of the Whyalla steelworks said in a statement on Tuesday that GFG Alliance was in the process of “vigorously finalising new financing” with the firm that’s been beset by problems due to a series of shutdowns of its coal-fired blast furnace, which lies at the heart of the steelmaking process.