As it happened: Thirteen women allege misconduct by former Seven reporter; CBA boss fronts inquiry

One of Australia’s top lithium miners has lashed out at first-world auto giants for refusing to accelerate the transition away from polluting cars, as a slowdown in electric vehicle sales is pummelling the price of battery metals and pushing producers to the brink.

Chris Ellison, the billionaire boss of Perth-based Mineral Resources, on Thursday declared it was the “shittiest time” to be running a mining company exposed to the plunging price of lithium – a material needed to manufacture lithium-ion batteries that will power the growing global fleet of electric cars and store renewable energy.

To ride out the protected lithium price rout that has forced other mines to close, Mineral Resources was aggressively slashing costs and would not pay a dividend to shareholders for the first time in more than 10 years, he said.

“Let’s be really, really clear … there are no lithium companies making money,” Ellison said.

“We’re throwing everything off the deck just to make sure we conserve cash.”

Read the full story here. 

Let’s stay with politics and cross to an opinion piece by Nick Bryant.

Not since Kevin Kline played the doppelgänger of a US president in the 1993 movie Dave has a politician instantly become such a beloved figure as Kamala Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz. Here in Australia, he also had the familiarity of a lookalike. “He looks like all of Australia’s last five prime ministers morphed into one,” someone joked on X.

Australian prime ministers work tirelessly to portray themselves as an Australian everyman, what with their footy-loving at weekends and Akubra hat-wearing in the bush. But whether donning his camouflage hunting cap or recalling his years as a high school football coach, Walz pulls off the American archetype with effortless authenticity. The governor of Minnesota has even turned daggy dad jokes into a political art form, a skill that eluded Scott Morrison.

It is not just the folksy aesthetics and the Friday Night Lights backstory that is so compelling. His messaging sets Walz apart. With one word – ”weird” – he captured the oddness of Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance. In doing so, he reframed the election and catapulted himself to stardom. Had it not been for his interview on MSNBC’s must-watch talkshow Morning Joe, where he first dropped the W-word, he would not have ended up on the Democratic ticket.

Read the full opinion piece here. 

Prominent backbencher Josh Burns has become the first Labor MP to publicly call for the government to reverse its call to dump new sexuality questions from the census, as more backbenchers grumble in private and three conservative coalition MPs said counting LGBT Australians would not bother them.

Burns said the gay community in his electorate of Macnamara needed better policymaking informed by proper data collection, a day after the government argued that asking about gender and sexuality would spark division.

“They deserve to be counted,” Burns told this masthead. “I believe the government should reconsider the questions that will be put forward in the next census.”

Several government sources, who requested anonymity to express frank views, said Burns was far from the only Labor MP confused by the claim, made by ministers Richard Marles and Jim Chalmers, that changing the census would have led to “nasty” and “divisive” debate.

It is the second time Labor has disappointed the LGBTQ sector having abandoned his election pledge to change religious discrimination laws earlier this year.

Read the full story here. 

The Australian sharemarket declined on Thursday, led lower by consumer discretionary stocks after Wall Street slid amid a pullback in big technology companies.

The S&P/ASX 200 lost 43.8 points, or 0.5 per cent, to 8027.6 as of 12.33pm AEST, with all but one of the 11 industry sectors declining.

Financials was the only sector to trade in the green, with all four big banks trending higher while the heads of Commonwealth Bank and Westpac faced questions from the House of Representatives economics committee inquiry.

But the banks’ gains weren’t enough to offset the drag of the mining heavyweights on the local market, with BHP, the world’s biggest miner, down 1.1 per cent and Rio Tinto down 0.5 per cent as iron ore prices softened towards the $US100 per tonne mark.

The penultimate day of reporting season prompted some of the biggest moves in the market.

Read the full ASX wrap here. 

Let’s move to an opinion piece by Matthew Knot following Albanese’s hot mic incident. 

There’s something about the Pacific Islands, Australian leaders and private conversations going public.

In 2015, Peter Dutton, then a frontbencher in Tony Abbott’s government, apologised after a boom microphone caught him joking with Abbott and then-social services minister Scott Morrison about the plight of Pacific Island nations facing rising sea levels as a result of climate change.

“Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to … have water lapping at your door,” Dutton said, responding to a comment from Abbott about meetings running late at the 2015 Pacific Islands Forum in Papua New Guinea.

The then-PNG prime minister Peter O’Neill dubbed the hot-mic remarks “most unfortunate”; then-Marshall Islands foreign minister Tony deBrum said he would ask Dutton over and see if he was laughing when king tides battered his home.

Nine years later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was having what he says he believed was a private chat with US President Joe Biden’s top Indo-Pacific adviser, Kurt Campbell, on the sidelines of this year’s edition of the forum in Tonga. It turns out a New Zealand journalist was filming the exchange.

Similar snafus have befallen other world leaders. Just ask former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who memorably called a Kiwi opposition leader an “arrogant prick” on a hot mic in 2022.

Read the full opinion piece here. 

A 23-year-old asylum seeker involved in a protest against Australia’s immigration policies has died in Melbourne after setting himself on fire.

Mano Yogalingam, who came to Australia from Sri Lanka via a boat with his family at the age of 11, died on Wednesday, prompting public mourning from activists and his community on Thursday.

He had been active in a protest encampment outside the Department of Home Affairs in Melbourne, which has urged Labor to give permanent visas to about 7300 people stuck in limbo since arriving in Australia by boat.

The Tamil Refugee Council said: “At just 23 years, Mano had his whole life ahead of him. His blood is on the hands of the Labor Party. Twelve years is too long to wait for an answer.”

A Victoria Police spokesperson confirmed emergency services had been called to a skate park in Noble Park, near Dandenong, just before 8pm on Tuesday. They said a man was taken to hospital with life-threatening injuries and died in hospital on Wednesday.

Read more here. 

Let’s head back to the parliamentary inquiry into the big banks.

Following a lunch break, the house of representatives economics committee inquiry on the big four banks has resumed and Westpac boss Peter King has taken the floor.

King said the Australian economy was well-placed for a return to stronger growth as pressures eased, with more than three-quarters of the bank’s customers ahead on their repayments and interest rates expected to come down early next year.

“Looking at the next cycle, the forecast is that the cash rate will settle in the low 3 per cent range, all else being equal,” he said.

“The resilience of the economy is mirrored in our customer base. As an example, total loan stress has increased to 1.4 per cent but is lower than expected, while more than 78 per cent of mortgage customers are ahead on their repayments.”

However, King acknowledged many Australian households were making difficult spending choices.

“Currently, around 19,000 customers are in hardship arrangements,” he said.

“For context, we have more than 3.1 million customers with a debt product, so this represents about 0.6 per cent of customers we lend to in hardship.”

Let’s move to some sport headlines this afternoon.

Matildas veteran Aivi Luik dropped out of contention for selection in the Paris Olympics squad because of a three-month suspension imposed by Italy’s anti-doping body despite not having undergone a drug test, it has been revealed.

The penalty related to a pain-killing injection Luik was administered for a back injury on March 29, 2022 when she was playing for Italian club Pomigliano. The injection contained a substance banned “in competition” by the World Anti-Doping Code – which in football means it is prohibited if it is given on the day of a match – and she was told by the doctor and a specialist that it was permitted.

However, the club reportedly made an error when it applied to Nado Italia, the country’s anti-doping authority, for a therapeutic use exemption (TUE) certificate. Luik was then an unused substitute for a match played three days after receiving the injection.

She came off the bench in another match on April 16, but on the morning of their following match, she was told by club staffers she’d been stood down for two months, and missed their remaining three matches of the season.

Read the full story here.