Australia news live: Dutton flags free trade deals with Israel and EU in major foreign policy speech; PM vows to defend PBS against potential US tariffs
Coalition would pursue free trade agreement with Israel and EU, Dutton says
Peter Dutton said that under the previous Coalition government between 2013 and 2022, 11 free trade agreements were finalised.
He said whereas under the Albanese government only one has been finalised, with the UAE.
I can announce today that one of our priorities will be taking forward a robust free trade agenda.
Dutton said the Coalition would “reinvigorate negotiating a high-quality, free trade agreement with the European Union that’s stalled under Labor”. He continued:
We will revitalise discussions on a free trade agreement with our trusted partner, Israel, building on a strong economic relationship and looking to harness Israel’s strengths in technology … We will [also] seek to expand opportunities for trade and investment with Canada and other like minded countries …
Key events
Dutton outlines how he plans to work with Trump, if elected
Peter Dutton was asked about his intention to visit the United States first, if elected, and how he would seek to manage interactions with Donald Trump?
The opposition leader said “the best indicator is past performance, and I have had a consistency in the way that I’ve approached relationships with world leaders.”
President Trump has been elected to put America first. My job is to put Australia first, and I will stand up firmly against president Trump or anyone else in our country’s best interests …
There are great areas of mutual interest and benefit to a productive relationship, and I think we can achieve that in a way that the government hasn’t been able to achieve.
Dutton said he doesn’t think Labor were expecting Trump to win the election, “or surely Ambassador [Kevin] Rudd would have deleted [his] tweets before president Trump was elected.”
Dutton concludes Lowy Institute speech with focus on defence
Here is how Peter Dutton wrapped up his speech at the Lowy Institute:
My true belief, my honest belief, is that we live in the best country in the world … and the time now is for us to take seriously the threats, the unknowns, and to provide support to defence industry, to every asset we have at our disposal – including the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade – our international relationships, and to leverage that to the maximum benefit for every Australian, and that’s the commitment we make in this election to the Australian people.
He’s just started taking questions from the Lowy Institute’s executive director Dr Michael Fullilove – we’ll bring you all the highlights.
Dutton would meet Trump in Washington soon after winning election
Back to Peter Dutton’s speech: he reiterated the Coalition’s stance that it is against Donald Trump’s tariffs on Australian aluminium and steel.
They’re not just unjustified, they benefit neither Australia nor the United States, and we will continue to offer the Albanese government bipartisan support for the removal of these tariffs and exemption from future tariffs, because that is in Australia’s best interests.
Dutton was critical of Anthony Albanese’s handling of Australia’s relationship with the US, and said:
I will seek to meet President Trump in Washington in the early days of the Dutton Coalition government. I will talk to him about how our national interests are our mutual interests.
Unemployment unchanged at 4.1% in February
Patrick Commins
The unemployment rate has held steady at 4.1% in February, despite a surprise 53,000 drop in the number of employed Australians in the month.
Ahead of Labor’s fourth budget next week and an election likely to be defined by cost of living, the key jobless rate has hovered around 4% since the start of 2024 despite rate hikes and a weak economy.
It remains well below the pre-Covid level of more than 5%.
Speaking this morning on ABC radio ahead of the employment numbers, the employment minister, Murray Watt, spruiked the government’s job creation record.
It’s a real credit to the workers and employers of Australia that we continue to keep these sort of job numbers happening despite the challenging conditions we’ve been facing.
Peter Dutton says if elected he will axe 36,000 public service jobs.
Josh Butler
Anti-nuclear protesters interrupt Dutton’s speech
As Emily brought you a moment ago, what appeared to be an anti-nuclear protest interrupted Peter Dutton’s speech at the Lowy Institute, with two protesters ejected from the room.
“Mr Dutton,” called out a young man who stood up from the audience, brandishing a blue piece of fabric with words including “nuclear” written on it.
“Why are you lying to the Australian people about the cost of nuclear?” he continued, as two security staff quickly escorted him out of the room.
The full text of the handwritten sign couldn’t be immediately seen on the TV broadcast of the speech.
Dutton continued on with his speech for a few seconds, before another man stood up in the crowd and began calling out to the opposition leader about nuclear energy. Again we couldn’t hear all of what he was saying, as security quickly pounced to eject him from the room, but the man appeared to describe nuclear power as a “stupid idea”.
A security staff member grabbed the man, who appeared to stumble and fall, colliding with a few people seated next to him.
China live firing incident ‘failure of diplomacy and defence’
Peter Dutton has been speaking about China, and accused the government of failing to call out “military aggression”.
He spoke about the recent live firing exercise incident and labelled this an “unacceptable” “failure of diplomacy and defence at the highest levels”.
Red lines need to be made clear, especially in a period of tension, because if they’re not, we end up with a situation like the one in recent weeks – the situation where the Chinese navy provided no notice of its live fire exercise whilst it circumnavigated Australia, a situation where our national maritime surveillance was outsourced to a Virgin airline pilot.
Dutton criticises government’s stance on Israel
Peter Dutton also argued that “one of the Albanese government’s most egregious foreign policy failures has been the treatment of Israel”.
He criticised the government’s decision to change Australia’s position on recognising West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and refer to the West Bank and Gaza as occupied territories.
Following Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel, the government should have sent a strong and clear message that it stood with our ally. Instead … we began to hear unreasonable calls for immediate restraint, calls for Israel to not look back in anger, calls for Israel to de-escalate and to pause its military response.
Dutton accused Labor of adoption “adversarial positions towards Israel” to boost Labor’s vote in certain seats, and continued:
If I become prime minister, one of my first orders of business will be to call prime minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu to build on the one-on-one meeting I had with him during my recent visit, and to help rebuild the relationship Labor has trashed. Israel will be able to count on our support again in the United Nations.
Albanese ‘inexperienced’ and ‘weak’ on national security
The opposition leader took aim at the prime minister, arguing he is “inexperienced” and “weak” when it comes to defence and national security. Peter Dutton said:
The government is the most leftwing since the Whitlam government of the 70s, and we are less safe because of it today.
He took aim at Anthony Albanese for refusing to donate out-of-service Taipan helicopters to Ukraine, “which they dismantled and instead buried”.
[The government] ignored repeated requests from Ukraine for more thermal coal, and it hasn’t delivered the M1 Abrams tanks that it promised. And while other countries reopened their embassies in Kyiv in a matter of months, the Albanese government kept the Australian embassy closed for almost three years now.
Further defence investment needed to become resilient – Dutton
On foreign policy and national security, Peter Dutton said he believes there is “right and wrong, and good and evil in the world”.
He argued some democracies had “lost their resolve and their confidence because we’ve become susceptible to the false arguments of advocates of keyboard warriors and conspiracy theorists who distort morality for political ends”.
The Coalition government will always stand with our friends and our allies in their darkest hours when they face tyranny and terrorism, and if we don’t stand with other democracies when their security, their sovereignty and their freedom is imperilled, who will stand with us when our freedom, our sovereignty and our security is imperilled?
Dutton said because Australia is a middle power, there “must be limits to the support that we provide”, and spoke of the need to invest further in defence.
We need to develop our defence capabilities at speed and scale so we can become a more credible partner to contribute to the objectives of deterrence and peace. Most importantly, we need to become a more self-reliant and resilient country. If we don’t, Australia could be flat-footed in any uncertain time over the course of this century.
Dutton says Coalition would oppose any tariffs on PBS
Like the prime minister earlier today, Peter Dutton said he would fight against any efforts to impose tariffs on Australia’s PBS.
The PBS, just like Medicare, is the fundamental basis of our healthcare system, and we’re an aging population.
Coalition would pursue free trade agreement with Israel and EU, Dutton says
Peter Dutton said that under the previous Coalition government between 2013 and 2022, 11 free trade agreements were finalised.
He said whereas under the Albanese government only one has been finalised, with the UAE.
I can announce today that one of our priorities will be taking forward a robust free trade agenda.
Dutton said the Coalition would “reinvigorate negotiating a high-quality, free trade agreement with the European Union that’s stalled under Labor”. He continued:
We will revitalise discussions on a free trade agreement with our trusted partner, Israel, building on a strong economic relationship and looking to harness Israel’s strengths in technology … We will [also] seek to expand opportunities for trade and investment with Canada and other like minded countries …
Dutton underlines security in Lowy Institute address
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, is giving a speech at the Lowy Institute in Sydney.
He said many issues would be at the centre of the upcoming election – cost of living, the economy, housing, migration, health and energy – but defence and national security would also “weigh heavily on the minds of Australians, too”.
Australians know that we face a far more uncertain and dangerous world today than at any time in recent memory. The imperialistic Putin seems to be determined to swallow up Ukraine, the Iranian regime and its sponsored terrorist proxies, the Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi terrorist groups, want to exterminate Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, and the Chinese Communist party is asserting [itself] militarily in our region and indeed across the world, often in aggressive ways that have endangered our men and women in uniform.
Only a few minutes into his speech, two hecklers have been heard interrupting from the crowd.
Benita Kolovos
Victorian Greens to oppose ‘draconian’ bail laws in upper house
The Greens also spoke at parliament this morning, with the leader, Ellen Sandell, confirming the party would oppose the “draconian” bail laws in the upper house.
The last time we had laws like this in Victoria, we saw a doubling of First Nations women in our prisons for non-violent crimes. We saw more kids in our prisons. The community wasn’t any safer and we saw deaths in custody.
Sandell said the premier is “committed to this erroneous course of action just to save her political scalp”. Instead, she said, there should be more funding for community-based crime prevention initiatives “that actually work”.
It’s been revealed that at the same time the Allan Labor government has been ramming through these draconian bail laws, there has been a 46% reduction in crime prevention programs for youth. This just underlines that [for] the premier, this issue is all about saving her own political scalp. It’s not about following the evidence of what works. It’s not about making our communities safer.
Benita Kolovos
Victoriam government’s main concern is repeat offenders – premier
Jacinta Allan also spoke about a Guardian Australia report this morning that showed the government has slashed resources for community crime prevention programs in recent years, with only $12.9m allocated in 2024-25 – a 46% reduction from the previous financial year.
She said the government has given police funding to do prevention work instead, adding that her government’s particular concern was with repeat offenders:
We’ll continue to look at what further preventive measures need to be taken. But right now we have a particular issue with a group of offenders who are engaging in a repeat pattern or behaviour with some of the worst of offences, and that’s what our tough new bail laws are focused on.
Benita Kolovos
Allan reiterates parliament will sit until ‘tough bail bill’ passed
Jacinta Allan also had a crack at the opposition, who is planning to move an amendment in the Victorian upper house today to remove the word “tough” from the government’s “tough bail bill”.
She said this “says it all about the political games that the Liberal party is focused on, not community safety”.
This is a tough bail bill that brings in the toughest bail laws in the country. The question for the Liberal party is: why are they focused on semantics and not outcomes? …
Seriously, focus on the substance of the issue here. Get this bill passed through the parliament. Don’t keep shifting the goalpost. Don’t get out in your liquid paper pen and cross out words. Get up and do the work. Do the hard work. Sit in the parliament, pass the bill. That’s my expectation. That’s the community’s expectation.
She said parliament would continue to sit this week until the bill passes.
Benita Kolovos
West Gate Tunnel cost blowout one that builders ‘need to sort out’ – Allan
Jacinta Allan was also asked about another project – the West Gate Tunnel – which the Herald Sun this morning reported will need an extra $1bn to get finished in time.
According to the report, the builders of the tunnel – which will link the West Gate Freeway to CityLink – have faced soaring costs due to construction price pressures and will request extra funds from Transburban.
Allan said she expected Transurban and its builders to foot the bill for any additional costs.
That sounds like something that the contractors and Transurban need to sort out. We have an agreement signed, a contract signed between the government, Transurban and its contractors, CPB and John Holland. If there are any issues to be worked through, that’s to be worked through by Transurban and its builders, consistent with the contract that has been signed with the government.
Asked if she could guarantee there would be no further blowouts on the project, Allan said:
My expectation is that the project be delivered consistent with that agreement that was signed.
