The day that was: Friday 3 March
And with that, we are going to put the blog to bed. Thank you so much for spending part of your day with us. Before we go, let’s recap the big headlines:
The foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, has urged China not to supply weapons to Russia after she met with her Chinese counterpart Qin Gang on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in India yesterday.
The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, says the government is working to restore trust with the community on national security threats. O’Neil told an ANU podcast she felt “really troubled” that the previous government’s approach involved a “reflex willingness to politicise national security issues”.
The government services minister, Bill Shorten, has called Stuart Robert’s defence “peak bizarre” after Robert yesterday admitted to the robodebt royal commission that he had said things he believed were “false” because of “cabinet solidarity”.
NAB chief executive Ross McEwan came out and supported the government’s proposed superannuation changes, saying: “I think it’s a move that probably needed to be made.”
NSW has recorded 7,163 Covid cases and 29 deaths while Victoria has recorded 3,016 cases and 23 deaths.
Hot on the heels of announcing its record $1.43bn half-year profit last week, Qantas Group has revealed plans to grow its employee numbers from 23,500 to 32,000 by 2033.
An upper house committee into alleged corruption in the Hills Shire council was scathing on Dominic Perrottet’s brothers’ failure to appear before inquiry; Charles and Jean-Claude Perrottet were among those found to have deliberately avoided the inquiry.
Sally Rugg’s case against MP Monique Ryan and the commonwealth has returned to the federal court.
The agriculture minister, Murray Watt, has announced a group of four Australians to lead a consultation process around phasing out live sheep exports.
The education minister, Jason Clare, has signed a sweeping new mutual recognition agreement of qualifications between India and Australia, the cornerstone of his trip with university delegates this week.
Australia, the US, India and Japan have announced a new Quad working group on counter-terrorism to “counter new and emerging forms of terrorism, radicalisation to violence and violent extremism”.
Updated
Residential NBN services decline in number for first time
From AAP:
The number of residential NBN services has declined for the first time, according to figures showing connections between NBN Co and retailers.
Services in operation fell by 9,000, or 0.1%, to 8.73m in the December 2022 quarter, the ACCC’s NBN Wholesale Market Indicators Report said on Friday.
A spokesperson for the NBN said:
About 20 million Australians use the NBN network each day which means there is a smaller pool of potential new users of the network.
Combine that with the completion of the build (and) you see more modest new connections.
The top three providers – Telstra, TPG and Optus – lost a total of 95,000 services to shave their market share to 77.9%.
But Vocus and other smaller providers gained about 86,000 services, to 1.9m. They now have 22.1% of the market, up from 14.6% two years earlier.
About half of all services are for 50 megabits a second while 20%, or 1.8m homes, are getting 100Mbps or more.
Updated
