Australian news and politics recap April 6: Labor extends lead after bumpy week for Peter Dutton

The Prime Minister will be appearing at a Labor campaign rally in the Greens-held seat of Griffith.

He’s expected to appear at around 11am AEST.

We’ll bring you all the latest as it happens.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong is now on ABC saying it’s clear the world is changing and the uncertainty ahead means Australia needs “a government and a leader who makes the right calls”.

She says the rules-based order still exists but is clearly under pressure.

“The question is how do you navigate that, and part of how you navigate that is by investing in your own economic resilience and by diversifying your economic relationships, which has been such an important part of what this government has done for the last three years,” she says.

Senator Wong doesn’t hold back in her assessment of Peter Dutton’s response to the US President’s move.

“What Australians saw is that Peter Dutton is stubborn, he’s arrogant, he always believes he knows best, and the problem is that leads him to make bad calls,” she says.

“You see that in his stubborn insistence on a deal with President Trump at whatever cost, you see that in his reckless and risky linking of defence into this trade dispute.”

She says even John Howard has said the Defence relationship shouldn’t be traded against the tariffs.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong is also pushed on what’s going on with the Port of Darwin, which is currently leased for 90 years to Chinese government-linked company Landbridge.

The Coalition announced yesterday it would seek to buy the port back, a move that was gazumped by Anthony Albanese phoning a radio station on Friday night to say the Government was in the midst of doing the same.

Senator Wong says the Government has been working for a while on a “sensible mechanism” to return it to Australian hands.

That’s despite a review of the lease by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet concluding it wasn’t necessary for the port to change hands.

Senator Wong says it’s a “political level” decision.

“The elected representatives of the country have made a clear decision that this is a critical piece of critical infrastructure that in the current circumstances, we believe should be in Australian hands,” Senator Wong says.

“In a world that is more contested, in a region which is more contested, critical infrastructure, such as ports, airports and other critical infrastructure, you would want to be in Australian hands.”

She says the Government has been talking to superannuation funds about whether it would be possible to buy the port’s lease.

David Littleproud concedes Australia’s beef industry is the most exposed to the US tariffs, but he thinks they will ultimately backfire – and might even hurt the President’s favourite meal.

“The United States doesn’t have the production system to produce the beef that’s going into their Big Macs,” Mr Littleproud says.

“This is a Big Mac tax that the people of the United States will feel in a very lived experience in the next three to six months, because they are still going to have to import beef.”

Ultimately, he thinks the world “will try to trade around the US as much as it can” and there will be perverse outcomes for US farmers in the long term.

On Friday, shadow foreign minister David Coleman was asked repeatedly in a radio interview on Friday how a Coalition government would make the Trump administration engage.

“The first thing you’ve got to do is front up. So if you don’t actually attempt to visit the President in the United States, that doesn’t send a good message,” he said.

“You can’t make a visit like that unless you’re invited,” Radio National host Sally Sara said.

Mr Coleman pointed out that Anthony Albanese had not been to the US, and Sara again pointed out that Australia couldn’t force the President to invite the Prime Minister.

“Well, Peter Dutton has said the first visit he would make as leader of the country, as Prime Minister, is to the United States,” Mr Coleman replied.

Further back in history, amid another stoush about the US wanting to impose tariffs on Australian beef, John Howard was invited to visit Bill Clinton at the White House but was then left waiting outside in the rain before a meeting that ultimately ran less than an hour.

Nationals leader David Littleproud reveals that Peter Dutton would make a trip to the US to visit Donald Trump within 60 days of becoming prime minister if he wins the election.

He is talking about his call earlier this week for Australia to reset its relationship with the US after Donald Trump imposing a blanket 10 per cent tariff on Australian goods.

He accuses the Government of being “basically placid” in its response to the US.

As Mr Dutton did, he suggests Australia should leverage its Defence relationship with the US to get the tariffs lifted – but he also says we should buy even more American weapons and equipment as a way of placating Mr Trump.

“We should be able to leverage the fact that we’ve created this partnership with the United States and UK to keep peace in our region, and that we are going to need the hardware that we don’t have here in Australia,” he tells ABC’s Insiders.

“We should be able to look at the mums and dads of our submariners in the eye and tell them that they’ve got the best technology that we’re going to keep them safe with that. And we’re also going to need missiles and F35s to be able to defend our island nation.”

The Coalition has already announced it plans to buy another squadron of the US fighter jets. At the same time, some other US allies including Canada are scaling back their purchases of the American planes.

From Caitlyn Rintoul on the campaign trail:

Opposition leader Peter Dutton said while he supports batteries to make energy more affordable, he raised concerns Labor’s policy would be elitist and only benefit higher income households.

“I’m strongly supportive of batteries but they’re very expensive,” he said during a press conference in Victoria’s seat of McEwen on Sunday.

“The point that I’d make is that for $10,000 for a battery, maybe that’s the cost after this subsidy, I think you’re talking about higher income families being in a position to pay for that.

“I just don’t know that the next-door neighbour, who can’t afford to pay for that battery, is going to subsidise the battery for me or for you on higher incomes.

“I think what it is, though, and this is a really important point, the government’s announcement today is confirmation of electricity prices are certain to go up higher under a Labor government.”

“What they’ve been doing is pursuing this ideological renewables-only policy that’s driven up the cost of electricity, and we are going to clean up this mess and help Australians have just affordability in their lives.”

Michael Sukkar is asked whether the comparisons between US President Donald Trump and Peter Dutton are hurting the Liberal campaign.

He says while “there’s no doubt that Donald Trump’s pretty omnipresent in politics” at the moment, he believes Australians are focused on bread and butter issues.

“I don’t think anyone can credibly make a case that the Liberal Party of Australia represents particularly that form of Republicanism. So I’ll leave it up to commentators,” Mr Sukkar says.

Shadow housing minister Michael Sukkar is now giving an interview to Sky News on the sidelines of that press conference Peter Dutton held just before.

He is asked about what the Coalition will set as its target for net overseas migration – which is the number of people coming into the country including international students and temporary workers less the number leaving it.

Mr Sukkar refuses to say what the level will be, promising “more to say” closer to the election.

“I think I can fairly easily say … it’s going to be significantly lower than Labor, but the precise net overseas migration number will be announced in due course,” he says.

“It’s one thing to set a target, but when you’re missing those targets by hundreds of thousands, which they have cumulatively, then those targets mean nothing… So we don’t believe Labor’s targets because they failed on every target.”

The targets he refers to are the forecasts by Treasury published in each budget and mid-year update.

The number has soared to record levels after Australia’s borders reopened after the pandemic because the amount of people leaving plummeted while backpackers and students who had been barred from the country for a few years poured back in.

Governments have few levers they can pull to get net overseas migration down, but limiting international students is in the mix.

On international students, Anika Wells points out the Coalition blocked Labor’s legislation to impose caps on universities when it came to Parliament last year.

That move has left the government to rely instead in a ministerial direction that effectively slows down the processing of visas but doesn’t actually limit them.

“This is a policy Peter Dutton said he would vote against in the Parliament only months ago. He said that he would block our legislated caps on international students, now he’s woken up today and said he’s got this great idea,” Ms Wells says.

“He is all over the place like an Easter egg hunt.”