Mourners pay tribute to Bondi victims as shopping centre reopens

Thanks very much for reading Need to Know this Thursday, April 18. Here are some of today’s biggest developments:

• The Sydney shopping centre where six people were killed in a “senseless” attack has reopened for community reflection ahead of retail trade resuming.
• NSW Premier Chris Minns has urged the federal government to crack down on social media companies after he revealed “confronting” videos showing the alleged stabbing of a Sydney bishop remain online some 48 hours after the attack.
• Scentre Group boss Elliott Rusanow says rent has been waived for all stallholders at Westfield Bondi for the week after six people were killed in a stabbing attack.
• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has confirmed the government will consider a visa extension for Pakistani man Muhammad Taha, following his heroic behaviour during the Bondi knife attack.
• Anthony Albanese has likened Gary Banks to a flat-Earther as he hit back at criticism by the former productivity commissioner of the government’s Future Made in Australia Act.
• Defence Minister Richard Marles says Australia’s increased defence funding is designed to deter any future conflict between the United States and China.

A hot summer and outages triggered by severe storms pushed wholesale electricity prices higher in the first three months of the year, but there could be some relief in 2025.

A quarterly report released on Thursday showed soaring heat and humidity increased demand, and a severe storm in Victoria sparked outages as congestion in the national grid stopped states sharing supply.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said action to cap coal and gas prices has worked to keep the lid on wholesale prices, even in instances of extreme weather.

The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) said average quarterly electricity prices in Queensland and Victoria increased by 20 per cent and 9 per cent, respectively, from a year earlier.

The 2023-24 summer was Australia’s third-warmest on record, bringing higher demand for cooling, particularly in Queensland where daily demand exceeded previous records three times during January to March.

Severe storms in Victoria on February 13 felled transmission towers and hit the power supply to South Australia and Tasmania, which contributed to high price events in all three regions.

During the quarter there were 26 high-price events, when the spot market price exceeded $5000 per megawatt/hour – mostly in Queensland (11 events) and Victoria (five).

“The issue of congestion in transmission does present a greater risk of high-price events when we do have extreme weather or demand conditions,” AER board member Jarrod Ball said.

Interconnector and network constraints limited Queensland, NSW and South Australia’s ability to import lower-priced capacity, the report explained.

But Ball said government price caps on coal and gas had helped to stabilise prices in recent quarters.

“Things have generally calmed down and prices are well below where they were in 2022,” he said.

Overall, forward prices for 2024 and 2025 are well below the energy shock peaks of 2022, but were yet to return to historic levels.

Weather and international events were the “X-factors” for changes in future supply and demand, Ball said.

“And weather may be a little bit more predictable than international events,” he said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has conceded the government needs to do better among younger Australians following figures showing they will have a higher repayment burden from their university education.

Projections from the Parliamentary Library, commissioned by the Greens, showed those with higher education loans were likely to face an increase of between 4.2 per cent and 4.8 per cent when the next indexation takes place in June.

For the more than three million people with a higher-education debt, the indexation is the second-highest in the past decade, behind a rise of 7.1 per cent in 2023.

Indexation is the annual process whereby the government increases higher-education debt to keep it line with inflation. With higher inflation in recent years, the burden has increased so much many graduates are struggling to repay the loans.

The figures had prompted renewed calls for the Greens for the indexation of student debt to be removed.

Albanese said the government was considering changes to the indexation, following the release of the universities accord final report in February, which recommended an overhaul of the system. But he said dealing with student debt needed to be addressed.

“There’s a range of areas where we need to do much better with the younger generation basically, and HECS is one of them,” he said on Thursday, referring to Higher Education Contribution Scheme.

“What we’ve done is we’re developing a universities accord, essentially with all of the universities across the board, and what that has said is that the system can be made simpler and be made fairer.”

NSW Premier Chris Minns has urged the federal government to crack down on social media companies after he revealed “confronting” videos showing the alleged stabbing of a Sydney bishop remain online some 48 hours after the attack.

“This is the antithesis of what we need to bring the community together. Social media firms have a social and moral licence to take down divisive information and graphic content as soon as it becomes available,” Minns said on Thursday.

“It proves to be very difficult to foster community cohesion and harmony to calm down the community and send messages of unity in a difficult period when social media firms continue to circulate terrible pieces of information.

“Social media firms may argue that it’s difficult to take down content in the immediate aftermath of a violent incident (but) it’s pretty hard to defend it considering we’re 48 hours after the offence.“”

China has lashed federal government plans to pump billions of extra dollars into defence over the next decade, urging Australia to abandon its “Cold War mentality”.

Defence Minister Richard Marles on Wednesday unveiled the new national defence strategy and investment program, including naval upgrades, which will increase funding to 2.4 per cent of GDP by 2033/34.

“We hope Australia will correctly view China’s development and strategic intentions, abandon the Cold War mentality, do more things to keep the region peaceful and stable, and stop buzzing about China,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said.

He was responding to a question at the Foreign Ministry’s regular weekly press briefing about the National Defence Strategy and comments from Marles about China’s strategic objectives.

Marles on Wednesday quoted the strategy, which states China has employed “coercive tactics in pursuit of its strategic objectives.”

The security risks in the Indo-Pacific were coming from “major countries” outside the region, Lin said.

“They have been forming exclusive groupings, stoking bloc confrontation, and in particular, muddying the waters in the South China Sea, as if the world needed any more instability. China firmly opposes it,” he said.

Defending the initiative on Thursday morning, Marles said it was “ridiculous” to suggest Australia was trying to match the strength of China and the US in the Indo-Pacific.

Pillar two of AUKUS is a “science fiction” American invention designed to lure nations into a strategic alliance against China, former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr has argued in a foreign policy forum in Wellington.

Carr and other AUKUS critics gathered in the Kiwi capital on Thursday to rail against New Zealand’s involvement in the military pact.

Carr, Australia’s foreign minister from 2012-13, joined with former prime ministers Helen Clark, of New Zealand, and Enele Sopoaga, of Tuvalu, to argue AUKUS makes the Pacific less safe.

Under the primary AUKUS pact, Australia will receive nuclear-powered submarines from the UK and US in an attempt to shore up Australian security at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The New Zealand government is actively considering membership of pillar two of the alliance, as are like-minded countries such as Japan, South Korea and Canada.

Under pillar two, AUKUS members would develop and share advanced military capabilities such as AI, quantum and hypersonic technologies. Carr said the secondary pillar was “concocted” to “rope [others] in to an anti-Chinese alliance”.

“I don’t want to appal the diplomats present by using a vulgarism but it’s pure bullshit ... pillar two is fragrant, methane-wrapped bullshit,” he said.

“Why do I call it bullshit? Because it has been cobbled together to make it look like there is more to AUKUS than subs. There isn’t.”

The former NSW premier argues it is folly for the US to pursue a foreign policy based on securing “primacy”, and Australia is aligning itself too closely with the US in its great power rivalry with China.

The clean energy industry is urging the federal government to “hold its nerve” and deliver an ambitious and co-ordinated package of budget incentives to win back investors.

Responding to criticism of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Made in Australia Act, a group of energy and finance leaders joined forces on Thursday to call for the scale of budget support required for decarbonisation.

In a joint statement, they urged Treasurer Jim Chalmers to use the May budget to encourage investment, as rival economies throw trillions of dollars into renewable energy and clean tech to secure their national interests.

Australia could not afford to “sit out” the accelerating global transition and needed taxpayer support to unlock the private capital needed for zero-emissions economic opportunities, they said.

The Clean Energy Investor Group, representing developers and investors with a combined $38 billion renewable energy portfolio and a project pipeline of almost 50 gigawatts, said the act could unlock significant investment through the superannuation system.

The chief scientist at grassroots organisation Rewiring Australia, Saul Griffith, said the legislation would put Australia in step with other countries already investing in their own futures and ensure the profits did not flow overseas.

“It’s a great opportunity for Australian households,” Griffiths said.

“We need the government to co-ordinate Australian public and private investment in the processing of critical minerals and development of technologies from home-grown innovators in green metals,” he said.

While critics have slammed the government’s move to subsidise local industry, the Smart Energy Council said Australia could play a key role in the solar and battery manufacturing supply chains.

“For too long Australia has been a dig-and-ship country. In the future we can value-add to those minerals and export zero-carbon iron and other products to the world,” CEO John Grimes said.

“The Smart Energy Council is looking to the federal budget to lay the foundations for Australia to be a renewables and critical minerals superpower,” he said.

Climate Energy Finance think tank director Tim Buckley said the “ambitious and visionary” Made in Australia Act set the nation up for the speed and scale of investment for a place in the global net zero economy.

“We urge the government to hold its nerve and deliver an ambitious and co-ordinated package of budget incentives,” Buckley said.

This would enable Australia to pivot from the “historic over-dependence on fossil fuels” to a zero-emissions global trade and investment leader, he said.

Kane Thornton, CEO of the industry’s Clean Energy Council, said the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act had reshaped the global energy transformation in its first year. “It is time for Australia to step up and prioritise smart policy and support in this new era,” he said.

Five Australians have been arrested as part of a global sting operation into a “one-stop shop” for cybercriminals seeking to steal personal data.

Federal police made the arrests as part of a take-down of the platform LabHost, which allows for cybercriminals to impersonate websites as part of phishing scams.

The personal details of 94,000 Australians have been stolen through LabHost, which has been used by criminals to impersonate 170 websites, including banks and government websites such as MyGov.

A Melbourne man and an Adelaide man were arrested during police search warrants carried out on Wednesday, with police alleging the pair used LabHost. A further three people were arrested in Melbourne for drug-related offences during the searches.

AFP acting assistant commissioner for cyber command Chris Goldsmid said investigations into the Australian arm of LabHost had been under way since October.

“What was really insidious about LabHost is it was a one-stop shop for phishing,” he said.

“LabHost provided cybercriminals with all the tools they needed to undertake phishing attacks, including the infrastructure to host a phishing website.”

Criminals could sign up to the service for as little as $270 to obtain information such as log-ins and passwords to steal money from victims.

The arrests were made as part of a global operation into LabHost, led by police in the United Kingdom, in which officers from 19 countries conducted search warrants.

Overall, 37 people were arrested as part of the investigation.

“This is a significant disruption of the LabHost infrastructure and criminals’ ability to operate using this service,” Goldsmid said. “Global activity will continue over the coming weeks and months and further arrests are expected.”

A bishop who was stabbed during a live-streamed sermon has spoken for the first time after the alleged terrorist attack, saying he forgives his accused teenage assailant.

The attack on Assyrian church bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel took place at Christ the Good Shepherd Church at Wakeley, in western Sydney, on Monday night.

In an audio message released by the church on Thursday, the bishop said he was doing fine and recovering quickly, while calling on followers to obey the law after a riot broke out in the aftermath of the attack.

“I need you to act Christ-like, the lord Jesus never taught us to fight,” he said.

A 16-year-old has been arrested over the incident, but he is yet to be charged and remains under police guard in hospital.

“I forgive whoever has done this act, I say to him, you’re my son, I love you, and I will always pray for you,” Emmanuel said.

“And whoever sent you to do this, I forgive them as well.”

Police have seized the boy’s devices and are investigating whether he could have become radicalised in the lead-up to the attack, which senior officers say appears to have been religiously motivated.

Prominent Lebanese Muslim community leader Jamal Rifi said the teenager’s mother did not believe he was radicalised online, adding that the 16-year-old regretted the incident.

“He kept on apologising to his mum and saying sorry and all that sort of thing,” Dr Rifi told Sydney radio 2GB.

Emmanuel’s call for calm comes after western Sydney religious leaders also tried to quell community tensions after the attack.

Police declared a terrorist act because the teenager allegedly made comments in Arabic that referred to insults against “my prophet” before stabbing the bishop, who had previously publicly criticised Islam and other religions.

More law-enforcement resources have been directed to western Sydney and around places of worship following the attack.