Budget to include $10bn package to ensure fuel and fertiliser security, including permanent reserve of 1bn litres
Anthony Albanese is speaking now in Sydney, saying the government is continuing its work to tackle the ongoing fuel crisis.
Albanese said the budget will include a more than $10bn package to ensure fuel and fertiliser security, including a permanent, government-owned fuel security reserve of about 1bn litres.
This will support an overall expansion of Australia’s onshore fuel reserves to ensure at least 50 days of fuel supply and storage of diesel and aviation fuel.
Albanese added:
We have worked relentlessly to secure our fuel supply lines. So far we are faring well.
Tory Shepherd
As we’re hearing from witnesses at the Bondi royal commission about their experiences with antisemitism, there has been an incident outside.
In a statement, the commission said an “individual wearing an antisemitic shirt” was moved on by police from out the front of the building where the hearings are taking place.
It added:
The royal commission is appalled that such an item of clothing was worn in the vicinity of our hearing venue.
Safety of witnesses is paramount to the royal commission. We want to reassure witnesses and those wishing to engage with the royal commission that safety protocols are in place.
The royal commission is determined to investigate antisemitism in Australia without fear or intimidation.
Benita Kolovos
Victoria premier says new lottery deal not the reason for budget surplus
The Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, denied a new deal with the Lottery Corporation announced the same day as the budget is why the state posted a surplus.
The operator of Powerball and Oz Lotto told the ASX yesterday it received an unprecedented $1.14bn 40-year extension to its Victorian licence, allowing them to keep operating until 2068.
She denied this was the reason the state posted a $700m surplus this year and is forecasting a $1bn surplus next year:
No, we’ve delivered a surplus because we’ve worked hard to take the decisions through this budget process that has prioritised delivery that surplus, prioritised driving down debt as a percentage of the economy.
Asked whether it would’ve been possible to deliver a surplus without the deal, she said:
Yes. Because we’ve made a set of decisions that focused on delivering a surplus, whilst at the same time recognising that families continue to need to see investment in schools and hospitals.
The Victorian community wants to see more police on the streets. We need to also continue to look at ways to provide real help right now when families are doing it tough.
She said there was a “full and open process” surrounding the deal and that while the licence is much longer than the usual 10-year length, it was in line with other states:
New South Wales has a 40 year term. South Australia has a 40 year term Queensland interestingly has a 65 year term. So based on advice through Treasury processes and within the requirements of the existing contract, there was a review process that was required. It went through a tender process, and we’ve got the best value out of this process for Victorians.
Canva pays $571,000 in infringement notices over delay in filing results
Australia’s corporate regulator said on Wednesday that it issued infringement notices worth A$792,000 to four firms within Australian graphic design platform Canva Group for allegedly failing to lodge financial reports for fiscal 2024.
Canva Pty, Canva Operations Pty, Canva Trading Pty and Fusion Books Pty were the four firms that paid an infringement notice of A$198,000 each for not lodging their financial reports by the due date of 30 April 2025.
Canva Pty lodged its FY24 consolidated report covering the four companies on March 27, 2026, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) said in its statement. In a statement, a Canva spokesperson said:
We take our reporting obligations seriously and regularly share public updates on our business and growth. We are now fully up to date on all lodgements and have strong processes in place to maintain this going forward.
Canva has been reportedly preparing to go public, with the firm launching an employee stock sale in August 2025 that valued the company at $42bn at the time.
– Reuters.
Tory Shepherd
Continued from previous post:
The mother, (AAE), also says she is thinking about moving back to Israel because she feels her daughters would be safer there.
AAF says she didn’t “advertise” that she was Jewish when she was at school. She commonly saw swastikas scratched into trees and graffitied in bathrooms, and knew of a student who added another Jewish student into a group chat called “the Hitler support group”.
She felt as though she’d lost the support of friends after 7 October because of their position on the war on Gaza.
She also says she felt “free” on a recent trip to Israel, whereas in Australia she feels she can’t wear Jewish symbols publicly. And she says antisemitism “is a lot more in your face” at university.
Tory Shepherd
‘Being Jewish is … having a target on your back,’ inquiry hears
A mother (AAE) and her elder daughter, a university student (AAF), and younger daughter, a year 10 student (AAG), have given emotional evidence to the antisemitism royal commission.
AAG says she gets taunted all the time for being Jewish, including being sent Snapchats with a specific filter that is offensive to Jewish people, having swastikas put on an assignment, and students doing Hitler salutes behind a teacher’s back.
She says the day she returned to school after the Bondi terrorism attack, a student did a Hitler salute at her and laughed. “Being Jewish is … having a target on your back,” she says.
Students have thrown coins at her and asked if she was going to pick them up, she says. She tells the inquiry:
They normally say ‘I hate juice’ … (they’re saying) they hate Jews. Sometimes they rile me up by pretending to sneeze, and instead of saying ‘ah choo’, they say ‘a Jew’.
Teachers usually tell her to ignore it, she says, while the deputy principal called her parents but “didn’t really do much from it”.
Her upset mother, AAE, says she didn’t realise “how systemic and prolific” the treatment of her daughter was. She says talking to the deputy principal was “like talking to a brick wall”:
I eventually confronted him and I was like ‘I’m very aware that you seem to actually be unwilling to use the word antisemitism’.
She says he used the umbrella term of racism, which made her feel as though he didn’t understand the distinct nature of antisemitism.
“You can’t fix what you won’t even name,” she says. Teachers are motivated by political activism and blind to their “moral duty”, she says.
Sarah Basford Canales
High court dismisses appeal by Iranian man against being sent to Nauru
It’s a busy day in politics but earlier this morning the high court dismissed an appeal by an Iranian man against being sent to Nauru for 30 years.
The man, in his early 60s, was one of the first announced to be removed to the tiny Pacific island after a deal struck between the Albanese government and Nauru, estimated to cost more than $2.5bn over its lifetime.
The man, known only as TCXM in the courts, arrived in Australia in 1990 and was granted a protection visa five years later. In 1999, he was convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to 22 years in prison. After the high court’s 2023 ruling against indefinite detention, he was released into the community until February 2025 when Nauru granted him a 30-year visa under the deal.
Since then, he has been back in immigration detention awaiting the outcome of his appeals against the decision through the courts. Today’s high court decision means he is soon likely to be sent to Nauru.
The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said:
I welcome the decision of the court, a cancelled visa must have consequences in our migration system.
Read more here:
Patrick Commins
Emergency fuel rationing a ‘small but distinct possibility’, S&P says
Australia could be pressed within a matter of weeks to invoke emergency powers to ration fuel should our key overseas suppliers decide to hold back exports for their own use, according to S&P Global Ratings.
As Anthony Albanese announces a new, multi-billion plan to boost fuel security, S&P analysts Martin Foo and Anthony Walker in a new report said Australia was “unusually exposed” to the global oil shock triggered by the US-Israel war on Iran.
Foo said that he believed that Australia would be able to get the fuel it needs, “albeit at elevated prices”.
“Its (Australia’s) relative wealth means it can outbid most other buyers for spot cargoes,” he said, adding that the government had also shown a “readiness … to remind trading partners of their co-dependence on Australian coal and liquefied natural gas”.
But with only a “thin” 43 days worth of petrol consumption in reserves, and 33 days of diesel and 28 days of jet fuel, “outright shortages (are) a small but distinct possibility”.
In a downside scenario, countries could begin enacting beggar-thy-neighbour export controls. This could force Australia to ration fuel, as occurred during World War II and after the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Diesel and jet fuel appear to be at greatest risk – unless China relaxes its export ban, as it hinted at doing in late April.
Angus Taylor accuses federal government of helping with IS-linked families’ repatriation
Circling back to the opposition leader’s press conference and Angus Taylor said he didn’t have faith in the government to handle the return of four Australian women and nine children from Syria who had ties to the former Islamic State fighters to home soil.
The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, earlier said the federal government was aware of their return and was not assisting with their repatriation, adding “if they have committed crimes, they can expect to face the full force of the law without exception”.
Taylor disputed this claim, alleging they had “clearly assisted with the issue and distribution of passports” as well as with DNA tests.
I think the question now is – what’s going to happen when these people arrive? What’s it going to cost Australian taxpayers? . … I don’t have faith in this government when it comes to these Isis supporters.
Australian citizens cannot legally be prevented from returning to the country unless a formal exclusion order is in place. Burke has issued a single order to prevent one woman in Syria from returning, based on Asio advice about a national security risk.
Read more about the story here:
Alleged Bondi terror attacker to face 19 extra charges
Jordyn Beazley
Naveed Akram faces fresh charges for his alleged role as a gunman in the Bondi terror attack, taking the total number of charges against him to 78.
Akram, 24, and his father, 50-year-old Sajid Akram, allegedly murdered 15 people after opening fire at a Hanukah festival at Bondi beach on 14 December.
Akram, who survived a shootout with police, was charged in December with 59 offences, including 15 counts of murder and one count of committing a terrorist act that investigators allege may have been “inspired by Isis”. Sajid Akram was shot and killed by police at the scene.
Tory Shepherd
First witness at antisemitism royal commission shares testimony
The first witness on the stand at today’s antisemitism royal commission is using the pseudonym AAQ.
She’s a public high school teacher in Tasmania who is concerned the curriculum does not focus enough on the Holocaust, antisemitism and Nazi ideology, and about the use of the book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which she says is ”historically inaccurate” and centres on Germans’ suffering rather than Jewish victims.
She also said students graffitied swastikas around the school, showed a “fascination” with Hitler, and bullied a Jewish student and their sibling to the point they left the state. She says:
They’d be performing a Nazi salute to each other in classrooms or hallways or in the schoolyard, you would see fingers under their noses to emulate Hitler’s moustache.
She said students would gaslight her if she called them out and claim not to know what it meant.
“Nothing was done,” she says, when she raised the issue with leaders. The principal spoke to the students once after antisemitic comments. “The implication was that I was being emotional,” she said.
Students also parroted tropes they had seen online about Israel and about Jewish people, she says, and it got worse after the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.
A Holocaust survivor who had been well received when he previously spoke at the school was met with “boorish” behaviour from students when he returned in 2024.
“They were essentially blaming him for what was happening over there (in Israel),” she said, adding that some parents were “irate” that a Jewish person spoke at the school.
Angus Taylor says fuel reserve announcement ‘too little, too late’
Angus Taylor, the opposition leader, says the new announcement about a 1bn litre, government-owned fuel reserve is “too little, too late”.
He said:
We need more fuel stocks, I’ve said that very plainly. … The government needs to get on with it.
Taylor said the Coalition wants to see fuel reserves at 60 days of supply, on the way towards “90 days that we want to see”.
Duniam says government should do ‘everything’ it can to stop Islamic State-linked Australians from coming back
Jonathon Duniam, the shadow home affairs minister, said earlier the government has “one last chance” to revoke the travel documents of the Australians in Syria with links to Islamic State fighters.
Burke has maintained today the government has extreme limits to what it can do aside from temporary exclusion orders, which have a very high threshold. Only one person in the cohort has been subject to such an order.
Still, Duniam said:
I say this government has one last chance before these people board planes back to Australia to revoke their travel documents, to apply temporary exclusion orders. Australians are not feeling safe now, we know that.
If there is a chance to stop them, we should do everything we can to stop it.
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