What we learned – Monday 3 June
The Fair Work Commission has granted minimum and award wage workers a 3.75% increase for the 2024-25 year.
The immigration minister, Andrew Giles, is facing increased pressure from the Coalition after revealing today that information he gave on the use of drones in immigration monitoring had “since been clarified”.
Independent senator David Pocok has urged Australia to cut all military ties with Israel, pointing to targeted sanctions against members of the Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces.
The former member for Kooyong, Josh Frydenberg, will not seek to return to the political arena in the next election and has publicly backed the local Liberal candidate, Amelia Hamer, amid mounting speculation.
And the journalist Antoinette Lattouf says she is “pleased” the Fair Work Commission has dismissed the ABC’s claim that she was not sacked.
Updated
Continued from previous post:
The foreign minister, Penny Wong, hit back at the Coalition’s criticism of the government’s response to the unsafe Chinese military action:
We don’t equate shouting with standing up for Australia’s national interests as Mr Dutton seemed to when in government. We will make representations and we will also speak publicly when we regard it as necessary and we regarded it as necessary in relation to this incident.
Simon Birmingham asked whether a call would be sought between the foreign ministers.
Elly Lawson, another Dfat deputy secretary, said the two countries had had “such frequent high level engagement at the political level at the past year or more” so they had had “a lot of opportunities to raise these kinds of issues at a very senior level and to go into them in a lot of detail”. She said these meetings generally spanned “a whole range of concerns and certainly behaviours in the South China Sea have been a big part of those discussions”.
(That’s in contrast to the freeze on high-level dialogue that occurred from 2020 to 2022.)
Wong added:
We’re not just talking, we’re doing. Whilst this particular incident took place in the context of UN secure council sanctions against North Korea, we’ve also had concerns about actions in the South China Sea. And you would have seen that we recently conducted joint sails with Japan, Philippines and the United States. That’s something that’s not been done before, including by your government, so my point is there is a need for all countries to ensure that they behave professionally and safety and the context of at sea and in the air.
Updated
