Key events
What we learned, Tuesday 5 May
Adeshola Ore
Thanks for joining us today. Here’s a reminder of the day’s top stories:
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The Reserve Bank has increased its official interest rate to 4.35%, as prices rise at their fastest pace since 2023.
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The Reserve Bank of Australian governor, Michele Bullock, says “Australians are poorer” because of the energy crisis linked to the Middle East conflict.
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The federal treasurer, Jim Chalmers, says the RBA’s decision to raise the cash rate will “make it tougher” for Australians already paying a “hefty price” for the war in the Middle East.
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The antisemitism royal commission has continued, with the inquiry hearing from a witness about children “saying heil Hitler and putting up their arm in a salute”.
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Victoria has recorded a surplus for the first time since the pandemic but the state’s financial recovery remains uncertain with debt forecast to near $200bn in coming years amid global uncertainty.
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NSW police have confirmed the deaths of three people including two Marine Rescue volunteers, as the search operation after a boating incident in waters off Ballina overnight is suspended.
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Four Australians are stuck on a luxury cruise ship stranded off the coast of Cape Verde after a suspected outbreak of a rare respiratory virus killed three people, left three others seriously ill and forced nearly 150 people from across the world to isolate onboard.
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The search for a missing Australian hiker in the Canadian wilderness has been suspended with no further search activity planned after authorities spent six days scouring the region from air and ground to no avail.
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Days out from Farrer byelection, Pauline Hanson has suggested she may step down from the Senate and run for the House of Representatives at the next election.
Graham Readfearn
Northern Great Barrier Reef had a summer of coral bleaching and cyclone damage, says agency
The Great Barrier Reef’s northern area between Cairns and Cooktown suffered a region-wide coral bleaching event this summer as well as impacts from two tropical cyclones.
In a “summer snapshot“ report released this afternoon by the Great Barrier Reef Management Authority, the agency said 28 of 79 reefs surveyed in the northern region had recorded “prevalent bleaching” that was “likely a cumulative effect of heat stress and freshwater impacts from flood plumes, particularly on inshore and mid-shelf reefs”.
Physical damage from Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle, which crossed Queensland’s far north coast in March as a category four system, had been observed as far south as Cairns more than 400km to the south.
Cyclone Narelle and Cyclone Koji, a weak category one system that crossed north of Bowen in January, had also sent flood plumes into the reefs lagoons. Fresh water and nutrients can both be damaging for coral reefs.
The agency said it was still assessing the impacts from the summer.
Graham Readfearn
Electric truck fleet to deliver appliances across Sydney and Melbourne
A fleet of 30 electric trucks will be delivering appliances across Sydney and Melbourne after a $3.5m government grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (Arena).
Fleet electrification company Zenobē announced a deal with appliance business Winnings to supply the trucks and the charging infrastructure using the Arena money.
Winnings, which said it was aiming to “move from port to door with zero emissions”, will deploy 10 4.5-tonne trucks in Sydney and 20 8.5-tonne trucks in Melbourne. Arena chief executive Darren Miller said:
What sets this project apart is the focus on real world operations – heavy payloads, managed from active depots, running on real delivery routes in New South Wales and Victoria. That’s where electric trucks need to prove themselves if they’re going to scale.
Zenobē is delivering the trucks under a model known as Electric Vehicle as a Service, where vehicle financing and maintenance are provided as a package.
Tory Shepherd
Ecaj co-CEO tells antisemitism inquiry pro-Palestine protests after 7 October were ‘shocking’
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (Ecaj) co-chief executive Peter Wertheim spoke to the antisemitism royal commission today about the impact of the Holocaust on his family.
He said there was only “low-level” antisemitism when he was young and that it used to just come from the far right. Now, though, it also comes from the far left and from Islamist movements, he said, and added that after 7 October, reports of antisemitism more than tripled.
The pro-Palestine protests in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel were “shocking”, he said.
He said Jewish people felt an “emotional reaction, the triggering of historical and family memories” when they heard antisemitic chants and when there were attacks such as those in the “summer of terror”.
Antisemitic incidents led people in the Jewish community to wonder whether it was “still safe” to live in Australia, he said.
Wertheim said creatives in a WhatsApp group chat that was publicly released had been feeling pressure to “publicly recant their Jewish identity” and so sought comfort in the group. He said people in the group, even if they were passive members, had been “doxed”, and sent hate messages and threats.
He said there was “a lot of sympathy for Palestinians as a people” in the Jewish community. He said:
I don’t want anyone to think that we’re impervious to human suffering wherever it occurs.
But let’s just take a step backwards and understand that this was an attack that had been initiated by Hamas, which happens to be the most powerful organisation still in the Palestinian community.
They are a very powerful element of Palestinian society, if not the most powerful element.
Wertheim also said the “wrong call” was made by police in allowing a neo-Nazi gathering outside NSW parliament to go ahead.
Accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is an attempt to “re-stigmatise Jews collectively”, he said, adding that Ecaj had received threats, hate mail and a “torrent of abuse” on social media and that even their lawyers needed security during a court case involving a Muslim cleric.
Douglas Smith
Jefferson Lewis excused from first court appearance after being charged with murder of Kumanjayi Little Baby
The man accused of murdering five-year-old Kumanjayi Little Baby near a town camp on the outskirts of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory last week has been excused from his first court appearance.
Jefferson Lewis, 47, was expected to appear in the Alice Springs Local Court via video link on Tuesday morning, charged with murder and two other charges that cannot be published for legal reasons.
Instead, he was excused from appearing at the request of his lawyer, Mitchell Donaldson from Legal Aid NT.
Donaldson did not apply for bail for his client.
Lewis was arrested on Thursday night last week, after a five-day manhunt following the alleged murder of Warlpiri girl Kumanjayi Little Baby, whose body was found 5km from the Old Timers town camp where she was taken.
Kumanjayi Little Baby, the name used after her death at her family’s request in line with cultural protocols, went missing on Saturday 25 April from a bed at the town camp, 5km south of Alice Springs.
After her disappearance, hundreds of volunteers searched for five days through kilometres of buffel grass near the town camp, before her body was found just before noon on Thursday.
Lewis was charged over the weekend with her murder.
The case will return to court on 30 July.
Labor frontbencher rejects accusations government spending was inflationary
Federal Labor frontbencher Julian Hill has rejected accusations the government the country’s inflationary pressures are homegrown:
Speaking to the ABC, Hill said:
Multiple statements that the Reserve Banks put out make no mention of government spending, but the treasurer has been clear. The government’s been clear that inflation was too high before the war started.
Hill says Australia’s economy is not immune from energy shocks caused by the conflict in the Middle East.
Deputy opposition leader says Labor’s spending partly responsible for inflation
Jane Hume, deputy leader of the federal opposition, say the federal government’s spending is one reason inflation is “too high”.
Speaking to the ABC, Hume said Australia was a more “vulnerable economy” because of decisions the government had made:
Unless you can get inflation under control, you are leaving our economy and every single citizen exposed to shocks from overseas and that’s what’s happening right now.
Luca Ittimani
RBA warns government spending must be targeted ahead of budget
A week out from the federal budget, the RBA governor has warned the government to be “careful” its spending doesn’t add to inflation.
Michele Bullock has repeatedly avoided commenting on government spending in recent years. But when asked today, she told reporters the private sector and the public sector would both need to cut their spending to avoiding locking in higher prices set by businesses.
During her press conference, Bullock suggested that extended to cost-of-living relief:
The extent to which government make up the shortfalls for households by giving them more money, it makes it harder to dampen demand …
Fiscal policy has many more things that it can do but it has to be careful, I guess, in the sense that it needs to be targeting where it’s most needed … You can’t just go out there and add to demand.
Bullock said there was a role for governments specifically to cut back on spending.
When governments are spending a lot of money and we’re running up against capacity constraints, then they do need to think about whether or not there’s ways they can help the inflation problem by looking for ways to constrain demand.
However, Bullock was quick to say the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, was on the same page, adding she was not calling for fiscal settings to take the lead on fighting inflation and state government spending also played a role.
Tory Shepherd
‘Jews get abused and that’s just the way it is,’ witness tells antisemitism inquiry
Kovi Paneth told the royal commission he was worried about the “normalisation” of antisemitism after he was abused on a train and nobody intervened:
In Australia, Jews get abused and that’s just the way it is. And that’s the part that was very, very upsetting to me, in that it’s just … normalised in society and quite acceptable.
He said his daughter was asked if she was a “dirty effing Jew” while in a bar. She tried to record the man, then his friend grabbed the phone and said “ignore him, he’s drunk, I’m sure not all Jews are dirty effing dogs”.
He said he wouldn’t let his wife or children walk alone at night now:
Since October 7, antisemitism has gotten real … it’s gotten violent.
AAO’s relative was killed in 7 October attacks on Israel, and since then she hasn’t worn anything that publicly identifies her as a Jew.
She told the inquiry she had been at the Australian Open at Rod Laver Arena, when a woman they didn’t know said to them that “the job that they did in Bondi wasn’t good enough, and that Jews are the worst, and they kill babies”. “It was very deep-seated, the hatred,” she said.
The woman would not have known she was Jewish, she said. She gave a statement to the police, who removed the woman from the tennis.
Tory Shepherd
Vic Alhadeff tells royal commission antisemitism is ‘front and centre in our ecosystem’
Returning to the antisemitisim royal commission, Dr Vic Alhadeff (you can see his impressive achievements here) posed this question to the inquiry: “Is it too late to repair the fracturing of the social fabric in this country?”
He listed a range of ways in which Jewish people have been vilified or made to feel unsafe.
Antisemitism, he said, had morphed from being “at the edges” of society to “front and centre in our ecosystem”.
He said he had met with three high school students who had posted on Twitter that it was time to “burn the Jews” and to “gas the Jews”, and had “posted a photograph of themselves with their arms in the form … of a swastika”.
He took along a photo of his grandparents, who were murdered in the Holocaust, in order to educate them.
He also confronted a priest who told a school congregation that Jews were “a jealous people”, referred a driver whose number plate had Nazi connotations to the police, and experienced road rage from a man who called him an “effing South African Jew”.
He also told the commission about going to the Sydney Writers’ festival last year and hearing an audience member asking about the “elephant in the room … the Jewish tentacles”, with no one rebutting that trope.
He also talked about his work campaigning for tougher anti-hate laws, and his disappointment in the “silence” and indifference from an interfaith group on the Bondi attack. One member, he said, held him responsible for Israel’s actions in Gaza:
This issue goes to one of the issues which is information a lot of the antisemitism which has been rocking this country … for the last two and a half years, holding Jewish Australians accountable for what is taking place on the other side of the world.
Jewish Australians feared there would be “another Bondi”, he said.
The royal commission was an opportunity to push antisemitism “back to the margin” and repair “social cohesion”, he said.
Luca Ittimani
RBA governor says ‘we still have no idea’ when Middle East war will be over
Asked by Guardian Australia’s Patrick Commins about the chance the RBA’s prediction is too optimistic, Michele Bullock said:
It may well be, certainly. When I stood here at March, I think the war was maybe a week or two old and everyone was thinking it’ll be over in a couple of weeks. It isn’t. We’re still here. We still have no idea.
The bank was alert to the chance of a bigger rise in unemployment and would “wait and see” as it considered another interest rate rise, Bullock said.
She said:
We don’t know one reason for deciding to increase interest rates, to give ourselves space now to sit and see what happens, whether the baseline turns out or it’s an adverse scenario. That was part of the thinking, I think, in terms of increase now and then give yourself space.
Bullock stressed that low-income Australians are the ones most affected by inflation:
She said:
The people who are most impacted by inflation are the most vulnerable. The people on the lowest incomes, they’re the ones who they don’t have savings, they don’t have earnings from interest or anything like that … they’re just getting hit by inflation.
Luca Ittimani
Price rises due to global fuel price shock ‘completely out of our control’: Bullock
Bullock says prices will rise regardless of what the central bank does with interest rates.
She says Australia’s economy has been irreparably hit by the global fuel price shock, caused by the US-Israel war on Iran. She added:
These interest rate rises are not going to do anything for inflation in the next six months. That’s done and dusted. We know that prices are coming through.
Bullock said the rate rises aimed to prevent further secondary price rises and offer households and businesses certainty that inflation would slow. But she went on:
It’s not something we can offer in the next 12 months. This is a shock completely out of our control.
Bullock says Australians are ‘poorer’ after RBA rate hike
Speaking about the impact of the Middle East conflict, Bullock says:
Australians are poorer because of this shock to oil prices and energy prices and all the other commodity prices that are being impacted. So we are poorer, and there is no way out of that. The trade-off is much worse.
Luca Ittimani
RBA governor warns more interest rate rises could come
Bullock says more interest rate rises may be needed after today’s, which was the third rise this year.
She says rate hikes to date won’t be able to stop fuel prices from driving up inflation. They’re instead aimed at cutting spending to stop broader prices from rising after the oil price spike ends.
Bullock says:
In many firms that are facing cost pressures, they’re looking to increase prices of their goods and services. If left unchecked, higher costs get embedded into price and wage setting decisions. These second round effects could lead to even higher and persistent inflation, and if so, would require even more tightening in monetary policy to get inflation under control.
However, she suggested there may not be a rush to raise rates again and the RBA had time to see how the economy handles the oil shock:
The board now judges the level of the cash rate to be a bit restrictive, which will help to address the risk that inflation will be higher and more persistent once the current prices shock passes through the economy. This gives the board space to see how the conflict plays out and the response of Australian households and businesses to the shock.
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