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Chalmers fact checks Wilson’s ‘clanger’ over fuel excise claim
Jim Chalmers’ office is sending a fact check around on shadow treasurer Tim Wilson’s earlier comments to Sky News, that as petrol prices increase, the government will claim more money through the fuel excise.
Chalmers calls Wilson’s comments a “clanger”.
The fuel excise isn’t a percentage tied to price, but a set amount per litre sold, and currently sits at 52.6 cents per litre. The excise is increased every six months for inflation.
This means the government would get more money through the excise if more petrol is sold, but the excise does not increase just because the price goes up.
Wilson wouldn’t say whether the excise should be cut as fuel prices go up, but that it’s something that Chalmers could consider.
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‘We are really well placed, to deal with what’s coming at us’, says Chalmers
Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the latest national accounts figures for the December quarter show growth has been stronger than any major advanced economy.
Speaking to reporters at Parliament House, Chalmers says the economy is well placed as the war in the Middle East escalates.
These are really encouraging numbers because they provide a robust foundation to confront the intense global volatility, which has been dialled up in recent days by the dramatic escalation of hostilities in Iran and the Middle East more broadly. we have very substantial challenges in our economy, but these numbers show that we’ve got very substantial advantages as well. We are really well placed, to deal with what’s coming at us from around the world.
Chalmers says private demand is growing faster while a key driver of public demand in the December quarter was defence spending.
Labor and opposition vote to establish ‘secret’ defence committee
A bill to establish a new ‘secret’ defence committee, with only Labor and Coalition members, has passed the Senate.
The new committee will consider the Aukus agreement and Australia’s involvement in military conflicts.
The Greens, who will not be allowed to join the committee, say it will be made up of “pro-Trump, pro-Aukus and pro-war” members, who won’t challenge government policy.
The Greens senator, David Shoebridge, said:
If you want a better example of why Australia’s defence and foreign policy should not be made behind closed doors between the war parties, look at Albanese backing in the US and Israeli illegal war on Iran. The decision to follow Donald Trump into the next US forever war will be decided in this committee full of only the war parties.
Australia’s economic growth surges in late 2025
Patrick Commins
Economic growth accelerated at the end of 2025, as GDP in the December quarter rose by 0.8% and lifted the annual pace to 2.6%, from 2.1% in the year to September.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics said “there was broad-based economic growth in the quarter, with rises observed in a large majority of industries”.
Amid a churning public debate about whether the government is spending too much, the ABS reported that public and private demand each added 0.3 percentage points to growth over the quarter.
The good news in this morning’s national accounts will be tempered by fears the economy is operating beyond its capacity to meet all the extra demand without adding to inflationary pressures.
The Reserve Bank judges the economy’s speed limit in this regard is only about 2% a year, and Michele Bullock, the RBA’s governor, on Tuesday warned that there was a “live” chance of an interest rate hike at the meeting later this month.
Jim Chalmers said in a statement that “these really encouraging numbers are a very robust foundation from which we confront intense global economic volatility, made worse by the dramatic escalation of hostilities in Iran and across the Middle East”.
Labor and Liberal parties accused of creating new ‘secret defence committee’
The Greens have accused the Labor and Liberal parties of teaming up to create a new “secret defence committee” which will hold closed-door hearings on Aukus to the exclusion of the Greens and cross-benchers.
The Defence Amendment Bill establishes a new committee that gives the prime minister an effective veto over who sits on it, and will only allocate spots for the Liberal and Labor parties, the Greens have said.
Greens spokesperson for foreign affairs and defence, senator David Shoebridge, said “now more than ever we need to have critical voices in the room when looking at Australia’s defence policy”.
Committees should reflect the makeup of parliament and the community. The Liberal and Labor unity ticket is not reflective of the community, which is increasingly moving away from these two parties.
Over the next decade, three-quarters of a trillion dollars in public funds will be poured into Defence. The major parties want that to be a black box, so you cannot see where that money is going, that’s what this secret committee is all about.
Australian people ‘don’t like any of us’, says Littleproud
The s leader, David Littleproud, says voters “don’t like any of us” after facing questioning over shrinking support for his party.
Appearing on Sky News earlier, Littleproud was asked about a leaked New South Wales s review which found once safe seats were becoming more vulnerable, with support shrinking to male voters over 55.
He replied, “every seat’s becoming vulnerable”.
We’ve seen the conservative centre-right of politics split three or four ways, and we’re now seeing some of the left side of politics split with the Teals and the Greens and the Labor party. The reality is we have a different society than what we did 10, 20 years ago.
So they pose different challenges that we have to be alive to … I think the polls demonstrate that the Australian people don’t like any of us. There’s no one sitting there with a vast majority. So what we’ve got to do is see the opportunity and articulate our message better and sell our message better.
Cigarettes get more expensive as tobacco excise increases
Patrick Commins
The world’s most expensive (legal) cigarettes just got a bit pricier, after Australia’s tobacco excise lifted by another 2% as part of regular six-monthly increases that track wages growth.
The excise has climbed by 60% since 2020 and now accounts for three-quarters of the roughly $40 or more legal cost of a 20-pack of smokes.
Higher prices have been an effective strategy to reduce smoking over the years, particularly among younger people.
But now there are concerns high taxes may be having a perverse effect, as more Australians are getting their hands on black market cigarettes that reportedly cost only about $10 to $15 a packet.
From a standing start five years ago, illegal ciggies now account for about half of all tobacco consumed in Australia, according to estimates by the illicit tobacco and e-cigarette commissioner (Itec).
The flight to illegal smokes has also blown a mult-billion dollar hole in the budget, as the more the government lifts the excise, the less they collect in revenue.
Economists and health experts have argued the case for at least a freeze on the tobacco excise, but the government has so far refused to countenance any change, even as they commit hundreds of millions of dollars to fight the illegal trade.
There are signs policymakers may be considering their options, however, after Treasury officials recently said they were re-examining how the demand for cigarettes changes with the movement in prices.
‘What’s next’ for Iran conflict, asks Canavan
Speaking to Sunrise earlier this morning, s senator Matt Canavan said he was concerned the US administration’s reasoning for the war in Iran is “shifting by the day”.
He adds that wars to change regimes through his lifetime haven’t worked as intended, and have significant consequences.
Unlike the rest of the Coalition, and the government, who have supported the strikes on Iran (though left questions about the legality of them to the US and Israel), Canavan says he’s against them.
I’m concerned that the Trump administration’s reasons for this conflict seem to be shifting by the day. Yesterday, the secretary of state suggested they went in because Israel was going to go first. Look, I’ve been against these attacks. I don’t see these regime change wars that we’ve gone through in my lifetime ever working out well … All we can do is hope and pray this turns out better than Iraq, than Libya, than Syria, than Afghanistan. All these conflicts have ended up making the world worse. And it’s great to see the Ayatollah no more, but I’m still asking, what’s next?
Chalmers fact checks Wilson’s ‘clanger’ over fuel excise claim
Jim Chalmers’ office is sending a fact check around on shadow treasurer Tim Wilson’s earlier comments to Sky News, that as petrol prices increase, the government will claim more money through the fuel excise.
Chalmers calls Wilson’s comments a “clanger”.
The fuel excise isn’t a percentage tied to price, but a set amount per litre sold, and currently sits at 52.6 cents per litre. The excise is increased every six months for inflation.
This means the government would get more money through the excise if more petrol is sold, but the excise does not increase just because the price goes up.
Wilson wouldn’t say whether the excise should be cut as fuel prices go up, but that it’s something that Chalmers could consider.
Tom McIlroy
Labor should have acted sooner to help Australians stuck in Middle East, says shadow foreign minister
The Coalition says Labor should have done more, and acted sooner, to help Australians stuck in the Middle East amid the growing war with Iran.
The shadow foreign minister, Ted O’Brien, said on Wednesday the government should be looking to evacuate as many of the 115,000 Australians in the region as possible.
Labor wants stranded Australians to seek to return on commercial flights, but has contingency planning in place for government repatriation flights.
“There has been double standards by the government in how they have treated the Australian people on this and that is unacceptable,” O’Brien said.
On the 25th of February, the government decided that the risk was so high that diplomats, their dependents, should be evacuated from the region. But it took three more days and over 100 ballistic missiles before the government treated the everyday Australian public in the same way.
O’Brien said it took too long for the government to issue “do not travel” warnings for the region.
That is not acceptable. The obligation now is on the government to ensure they do everything possible to ensure that Australians are, first and foremost, safe, but secondly, there’s an option there for them to be evacuated.
Minns admits to ‘strained’ relationship with Muslim community after Iftar dinner cancelled
Penry Buckley
The NSW premier, Chris Minns, has admitted to a strained relationship with the state’s Muslim community after he cancelled the annual premier’s Iftar dinner following the ongoing fallout from protests against the visit by Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, last month.
The Daily Telegraph has reported that Minns cancelled the dinner after consultation with Muslim community leaders amid ongoing tension, including over an incident in which a group of people praying during the protest at Sydney’s Town Hall were aggressively moved on by police. The police commissioner, Mal Lanyon, has apologised in private meetings and letters with Muslim community leaders.
Minns confirmed he had cancelled the Iftar dinner on ABC Radio Sydney this morning. Asked if he too should apologise over the prayer incident, Minns said:
Look, [the relationship] is strained, I’m not going to be flippant about it, and we want to rebuild the relationship, not just with me personally or the government or the Labor party, but with the civic institutions, the important civic institutions that keep our community safe, Multicultural NSW and NSW Police … I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m antagonising the Muslim community, particularly during Ramadan.
But my view hasn’t changed. It was a difficult, impossible situation that everybody found themselves in on that night.
The mayor of Liverpool, Ned Mannoun, has told the News Corp papers Minns has a “fetish” for attacking the Muslim community, after the premier described vigils by a small number of Sydney mosques to mourn the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as “atrocious”.
Minns joined Victoria in cancelling annual Iftar dinners in 2024 in the wake of peak Muslim groups announcing boycotts due to Labor’s position on the war in Gaza.
First flight from Dubai to Sydney departs since Iran war broke out
Nick Visser
An Emirates flight from Dubai to Sydney has departed the UAE, the first since Saturday when turmoil in the Middle East began.
The flight, EK414, left at 2.23am local time in Dubai and is expected to arrive in Sydney in 13 hours and 30 minutes, just after 10.30pm local time.
Emirates had suspended almost all flights to and from Dubai until 11.59pm on Tuesday local time, aside from a limited number of passenger repatriation and freighter flights. Passengers with earlier bookings are being accommodated as a priority on those planes.
Customers travelling to or from Dubai have been told not to go to the airport unless they have been notified directly by the airline, or if they hold a confirmed booking for one of those repatriation flights.
All scheduled Emirates flights to and from Dubai remain suspended until 2359hrs UAE time on 4 March, due to airspace closures across the region.
Emirates continues to operate a limited number of passenger repatriation and freighter flights on 3 and 4 March. We are accommodating… pic.twitter.com/rNFG3mDovl
Victoria’s WFH legislation to include dispute resolution pathway
The Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, is holding a press conference to announce her plans to introduce legislation to enshrine the right to work from home two days a week.
Allan says the bill – amending the Equal Opportunity Act – will be introduced in July and if passed will come into effect on 1 September.
But following backlash to her announcement that small businesses won’t be exempted, Allan says there will be a delayed commencement of 1 July 2027 for workplaces with fewer than 15 employees. She says this will allow them more time to get their HR policies and procedures in place – the main criticism business groups had of the policy yesterday.
The Victorian treasurer, Jaclyn Symes, explains the legislation will include a “clear pathway” for disputes between employers and employees.
The legislative vehicle for the changes would be the Equal Opportunity Act, not dissimilar to what we did over a decade ago in terms of the right to request flexible working arrangements if you have caring responsibilities, broadening that type of request out to reasonable requests for everyone.
She says disputes will go to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commision (VEOHRC) for conciliation. If that fails, disputes will then go the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. Symes says “additional funding” will be provided to VEOHRC to do this work.
Symes says she’s received legal advice that using the Equal Opportunity Act avoids the “risk” of a constitutional challenge.
‘Embarrassing’ that Liberal election review released by Labor government, says former MP
Former Liberal MP Jenny Ware, who lost her seat of Hughes in the 2025 election, has welcomed the release of the party’s post election review, but says it’s “embarrassing” that the government had to do it.
Ware had met with the authors of the report Nick Minchin and Pru Goward last June, but said she hadn’t heard back from either of them since.
She told Guardian Australia the party owes it to its members, supporters and donors to be transparent about the shock election result.
Of course it is embarrassing that the Labor government released the report rather than the federal Liberal party taking ownership and making it publicly accessible.
Fundamentally the party owes it to its thousands of members, supporters, donors and former members to expose the reasons why we had the worst campaign in our history. We also had many candidates who put their lives on hold to run as Liberals in the election and they were hung out to dry.
Ware added that she wants to see the party better engage with women – as voters, candidates and structurally within the party.
ASX to drop as Middle East conflict raises inflation fears
Jonathan Barrett
Australian shares are poised to drop sharply when the markets open this morning over fears a prolonged conflict in the Middle East will fuel inflation.
Futures pricing indicates the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 will open down more than 1.3%, taking the index to around the 8,940-point mark.
The conflict has continued to widen across the Middle East, with hundreds of people killed across the region, the vast majority in Iran. At the same time, oil prices have recorded sharp gains.
The anticipated move on the ASX would track US stocks, which recorded steep declines overnight, although Wall Street did pare some of the losses late in the trading session.
ANZ said in a research note this morning that financial markets continued to assess inflation risks from energy market disruptions.
While significant uncertainty remains over the duration of the conflict in the Middle East, financial markets are pricing in the risk of extended disruption.
Rising oil prices drive inflation by increasing the cost of energy and raising production and transportation expenses for almost all economic goods and services.
Jim’s economy a ‘house of credit cards’, Wilson says
Folks, I think we have a new slogan, with shadow treasurer, Tim Wilson, pushing this one on Sky News this morning.
We know he’s [Jim Chalmers] built an economy on a house of credit cards, and he is always looking for more money as a way to address his spending addiction and his credit card.
Wilson, talking about the fuel excise, and threats to the economy from the war in the Middle East, won’t say whether the government should consider cutting the fuel tax, as prices are tipped to rise.
He says he’ll watch the situation closely but notes that when the fuel price does increase, so does the share of excise, which goes towards the budget.
Again, he won’t say what the Liberals would do in this situation.
We’re going through our processes to address how we’re going to confront these realities, but it seems pretty clear to me that the treasurer could take that action [to cut the fuel excise] if he chose to take that action. At this point, he’s quite happy to take extra money from tax revenue from Australians because he’s got a credit card addiction that he needs to pay off.
I counted at least 12 mentions of “credit card” in the interview.
Hastie digs in on claim international rules based order is over
Andrew Hastie says the world is in a “new stage” of history and that the rules based order, and United Nations are now “defunct” constructs.
He calls Donald Trump – as he did yesterday – an “apex opportunist”, pointing to the US’s actions in Venezuela, Nigeria and now Iran.
Hastie says his concern is that Australia needs to be more self-sufficient, and “stand up on its own two feet” militarily.
I think that that construct is defunct in a sense. We’ve got a different president who is mercantilist when it comes to his sort of economics. I think he’s an apex opportunist.
And my concern foremost by making those comments is to wake Australia up. We’ve only got 30-odd days worth of fuel. If our shipping lines are cut, then our whole economy could grind to a halt very quickly. Never mind the fact that our industrial base is also shrinking. And that makes us vulnerable to world events. So, my concern is for our country and making sure that we’re resilient and self-sufficient.
Here is a reminder of what Hastie said yesterday …
And for those (like me) who don’t know what a “mercantilist” is, a quick Google search says mercantilism is an economic theory developed between the 16th and 18th centuries that says a government should control the economy and a nation should increase its wealth by exporting more than importing.
‘Boss move’ from PM to table Liberal review, says Hastie
Shadow minister for industry and sovereign capability, Andrew Hastie, joins RN Breakfast next, and says it was a “boss move” for Anthony Albanese to table the Liberals post election review.
The Liberal party had tried to shelve the review, but it was already leaking out to the media before landing in the prime minister’s hands.
Hastie says the party and the new leaders have already acknowledged some of the things they got wrong in the election.
[Albanese] likes theatre. He had a twinkle in his eye when he did that. Obviously, it was leaked, and there was a bit of stagecraft from him … But we’re not going to live in the past, we’re going to live in the future, and our mission is to restore Australian’s standard of living. We’re going backwards under Labor and also to protect our way of life. And that’s why we’ve been pursuing the Isis sympathiser case this week, because our way of life is being challenged.
Host, Sally Sara, asks Hastie why the party is targeting the women and children stuck in a Syrian detention camp, rather than focusing on the economy. He says the issue goes to the two core pillars of the party’s platform, to “restore our standard of living and protect our way of life,” and that just because commentators might not like the question time strategy, it “doesn’t mean it’s wrong”.
‘Alarming parallels’ with Iraq 2003, says Wilkie
Andrew Wilkie, an independent MP and former senior intelligence analyst with the Office of Assessments, says the US and Israel have “exaggerated” justifications for the strikes on Iran, and has accused Donald Trump of using “political tricks” to increase the Republicans’ polling ahead of the midterms.
On RN Breakfast, Wilkie says there are “alarming parallels” between the situation now and when the US invaded Iraq in 2003, which had followed the 2002 US midterm elections.
Wilkie also points out that the US talking about nuclear possibility in Iran 18 months away is “completely inconsistent” with what Trump said after the 12-day war, that they had crushed Iran’s nuclear capability.
In both cases there was a failure to secure the approval of the United Nations. In fact, this time around, the United States hasn’t even attempted to get the approval of the United Nations.
Back in 2003, that was just after the 2002 congressional midterm elections when the Republicans had really beaten the drums of war and they did well in those congressional midterms. But by that stage they were on an inevitable course to have the conflict. Same this time around. The Republicans are doing poorly at the moment, their polling is poor, president Trump’s polling is poor, so they start to beat the drums of war again. It’s a political trick as old as countries themselves.
