Australia news LIVE: Outgoing RBA boss says interest rates could climb; Joe Biden to host PM in October at White House

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has spoken about the 60-day prescriptions policy, saying the government’s measure should be funded.

“We are certainly in favour of paying less for medicines and we support that, and we support the 60-day dispensing but as the Pharmacy Guild pointed out they have over 3000 pharmacies across the country, and they’re picking the bill up for it,” he said on Nine’s Today show.

“If the government want to make medicines cheaper, which we support, it’s a measure that should be funded.”

The opposition leader said the way the legislation was structured, pharmacists would have to pick up the cost.

“If it’s possible to have a 60-day script, that’s good, less visits to the doctor, so you can free up that service, everyone agrees with that. But it’s the pharmacists picking the cost up,” he said.

Dutton said it was “another botched attempt by the government to add a policy which could have been delivered much more efficiently”.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton have also reacted to news about gas workers threatening strike action in WA.

“Obviously, we want to see the industrial issues worked out between the unions and the employers in respect of this,” Marles told Nine’s Today program this morning.

“We ... have done everything we can to put downward pressure on power prices.”

He said the Labor government believes in having workplaces where employees and employers “get on with each other”.

But Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, who was also on the Today show, said the action showed “unions are back in charge”.

“They [Labor] put a lot of support behind the union bosses, [and] forget about the workers,” he said.

“We don’t want to see a disruption to gas supply, and our trading partners would look at Australia as an unreliable partner and look elsewhere for those contracts.”

On Wednesday, members of the Offshore Alliance, a partnership between the Australian Workers’ Union and the Maritime Union of Australia that covers workers in the oil and gas industry, voted to take industrial action at three Woodside gas platforms in WA.

The three plants produce 11 per cent of the world’s liquified natural gas.

Staying with union boss Sally McManus, who has also spoken about potential industrial action at Woodside plants in Western Australia.

Business reporter Peter Milne writes the plants are capable of exporting around $43 billion of liquefied natural gas a year, and talks of potential action has hit energy markets.

The ACT secretary told RN Breakfast this morning that the workers at Woodside were fighting for a collective agreement, which they don’t have.

But she was asked whether the industrial action was reasonable, given the impact on global gas prices.

“We’ve got to remember there are people responsible for that are actually the company ... they have known for a very long time because these workers have been literally trying to negotiate them for years,” McManus said.

She hit out at Woodside, saying it was within the company’s ability to resolve the dispute.

“It wouldn’t cost them much at all, I imagine that their carrying on about this is really the negotiating tactic,” she said.

McManus said the workers could halt any action, depending on what the company offered.

“If there’s a reasonable offer, no one wants to take strike action. I mean, you lose pay when you go on strike. So it’s a big thing, these workers haven’t done that before,” she said.

Turning now to the Australia Council of Trade Union secretary Sally McManus who is speaking about the Commonwealth Bank’s record $10.2 billion profit.

The bank’s chief executive Matt Comyn defended the profits, but the union boss said he hadn’t mentioned that their customers were struggling.

“They’ve made these profits while their own customers are hurting, and you could say there is a connection between the two” McManus said.

“That is why people are angry, at the fact that they are making this money at a time when ordinary Australians are really suffering,” she said.

The union boss said while it was important for banks to do well, they were guaranteed by the Australian government.

“That increases the obligation on them ... not to behave badly at times like this,” she said.

Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe will face his final public grilling by federal MPs on Friday, with concerns about the fallout on the nation’s workers and home buyers from the institution’s rapid increase in official interest rates expected to dominate.

As one of the world’s top ratings agencies said Lowe was likely to deliver a soft landing, politicians from all sides of politics expect the governor – who will end his seven-year tenure in mid-September – to face tough questions over the threat to the economy from the RBA’s aggressive tightening of monetary policy.

The RBA governor fronts the House of Representatives’ committee twice a year to be quizzed by MPs on everything from interest rate settings to the bank’s role printing the nation’s cash supply.

In his February appearance, when the cash rate had just been increased to 3.35 per cent, Lowe conceded some parts of the community were already hurting from the tightening of monetary policy.

He said if inflation pressures eased, wage growth did not accelerate and supply chain problems across the global economy were resolved there was a chance interest rates could come down in 2024.

More on this issue here.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is set to announce a $38 million drought relief package during a trip to regional NSW.

The prime minister is due in Tamworth today for a gathering attended by numerous state and federal politicians, plus rural stakeholders.

He said the multimillion-dollar package would help support farmers with emerging agricultural practices to deal with the changing climate.

“What we need to do is to work with farmers, with communities ... and individual farmers, along with my Agriculture Minister Murray Watt about how we deal with the changing climate,” he said on ABC New England North West this morning.

He said farmers right around the country were coming out with innovating ways of dealing with climate change, and he wanted to see what was working and that they were able to replicate it.

He said some changes to the climate were already “locked in”.

“What we need to do is make sure that we minimise that by taking action on climate change. But we need to deal with the day to day as well,” he said.

with AAP

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd has warned there is a serious risk of war breaking out in the Indo-Pacific and that avoiding a catastrophic conflict in Australia’s region will require skilful judgment by today’s political leaders.

Rudd, who delivered the landmark 2008 apology to the stolen generations, also urged Australians to resist fearmongering about the consequences of establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament in a sweeping speech at the unveiling of his official prime ministerial portrait.

The playful and pensive painting by renowned artist Ralph Heimans, who also painted the late Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III when he was Prince of Wales, shows the nation’s current ambassador to the United States working at his Sunshine Coast home, surrounded by books and his collection of Chinese crockery.

Read more about his warning here. 

Australia and the United States are being urged to turbocharge the AUKUS pact by jointly producing long-range missiles and using Australia as a testing ground for hypersonic weapons as Anthony Albanese prepares to make his first prime ministerial visit to the US capital.

Albanese will be feted at a rare state dinner in Washington, DC, in late October at the invitation of US President Joe Biden, just days before he has been tipped to make an as-yet-unconfirmed visit to Beijing.

Republican congressman Mike Gallagher, considered a rising star of American politics, used a speech in Canberra on Thursday night to say the AUKUS pact had the potential to “bring this region from the brink of war” if the three member nations expanded their ambitions and put their nations on a preventative “war footing”.

Gallagher, the chair of the US House of Representatives select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said wargaming exercises conducted for Congress had found the American military would run out of munitions after just six days if a war broke out with China over Taiwan.

Read the full story here.