Penny Wong says Australia and Pacific security ‘interlinked’ on Solomon Islands visit – as it happened

We are going to put this liveblog to bed now. Thanks all for your company and contributions. Thanks also to my fellow bloggers, Cait and Mostafa, for their patience, good humour, and wise counsel.

A summary as I leave:

• National cabinet agreed to continue Covid-era health funding, which the NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, called “a great start”.
• Electricity reserves across the National Energy Market have improved, meaning blackouts are not expected over the weekend.
• The ASX plunged to its lowest level since November 2020.
• Australia recorded 51 Covid deaths, down from Thursday.
• Pauline Hanson was re-elected to the Senate.

“When I board the long-haul back over the Pacific for a birthday or for Christmas, Qantas is a big part of the whole nostalgic ritual,” Eleanor Gordon-Smith writes.

“I do still call Australia home, I like hearing accents from home when I board, I like having decent tea with breakfast. I like gluing my nose to the window for the view of Sydney that Clive James described so beautifully, ‘yachts racing on the crushed diamond water under a sky the texture of powdered sapphires’. In a more homesick moment, I hung a Qantas calendar in my office because it reminded me I’d get to go home. Qantas is the only brand that’s ever been able to elicit this kind of saccharine loyalty from me. Until today, I thought it was deserved.”

Read more here:

The New Zealand versus Australia match at Carisbrook in 1922 offered so many sporting contest firsts that its claim as an important milestone in the history of international football has been overlooked.

This was the first full international match featuring two national teams wearing numbered shirts.

ASX200 falls for sixth straight session as analysts predict more drops to come

AAP’s Derek Rose has filed from Sydney on the stock exchange’s dreadful week.

(Liam Byrne, the chief secretary to the Treasury under the last Labour government in the UK, infamously left a note to his successor which said, simply: “I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left”. He says he was joking. Regardless, there are strong “no money left” vibes in this piece. “Extended period of pain” is an unhappy quote in any circumstance.)

The local stock exchange has suffered its sixth straight losing session and worst week since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 – and analysts are expecting more carnage to come.

After falling by as much as 2.7% in morning trade, the ASX200 on Friday managed to claw back some of its losses in the afternoon but still finished down 116.3 points, or 1.76%, at a 19-month low of 6,474.8. The broader All Ordinaries fell 1.77% to 6,663.3.

The index followed last week’s 4.2% drop, its worst weekly loss since October 2020, with an even bigger 6.6% fall. It’s now down 10.2% for the month, 13.0% for the year and 15.2% from last year’s all-time high.

“We’ve broken some big levels in the ASX200, we broke below the bottom of its nine-month range,” City Index analyst Tony Sycamore told AAP.

“My thought now from here is that this is going be an extended period of pain.”

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Sycamore said he expects the ASX200 to fall further, to 6,000, and that a recession in the first half of next year was “basically locked in, in my opinion” as central banks combat high inflation with economy-wrecking aggressive rate hikes.

The Bank of Japan became an outlier on Friday by sticking with its ultra-low rates, but the Bank of England and the Swiss National Bank both raised them overnight.

The surprise 50 basis point rate hike in Switzerland was the country’s first in nearly 15 years, while England’s central bank warned that inflation could top 11% by October.

AMP chief economist Shane Oliver was more optimistic than Sycamore about the odds of a global recession, writing that it could still be avoided, although with central banks hiking rates so aggressively the risk of it was close to 50/50.

“Either way it’s still too early to say that shares have bottomed,” he wrote in his weekly update.

Cryptocurrencies were also tumbling, with Bitcoin trading just a few hundred dollars above a crucial support level of US$20,000, down 5.5% from Thursday and by more than 30% in the past seven days.

As for the ASX, among the companies whose shares hit their lowest levels in over a year on Friday were retail banks Commonwealth, ANZ, Westpac and Bank of Queensland; tech companies Xero and Megaport; retailers Breville, JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman, Kogan.com, Super Retail Group, Temple & Webster; City Chic Collective, Nick Scali, Collins Foods and Adairs; help-wanted site Seek; glovemaker Ansell; Bluescope Steel; building products companies CSR and James Hardie; and property groups Goodman, GPT and Dexus.

Airtasker, non-bank lender Pepper Money, wealth manager Magellan Global, United Malt Group and tech company Nuix all fell to all-time nadirs.

The heavyweight mining sector was the worst-performing, falling 2.8% as iron ore prices retreated for a sixth straight day.

BHP dropped 3.4% to $42.52, Rio Tinto fell 4.2% to $107.01 and Fortescue retreated 5.3% to $18.60.

Tech dropped by 2.4% with Xero down by 5.6% and Afterpay owner Block falling by 7.8%.

The financial sector was down by 2.2% to hit its lowest level since January 2021.

CBA fell 3.6% to a 14-month low of $87.26, Westpac dipped 0.7% to 19-month low of $19.19, NAB dropped 1.7% to an 11-month low of $25.92 and ANZ fell 1.6% to a 19-month low of $21.16.

Consumer staples was the only sector to eke out gains, rising 0.6%

Goldminers were another rare bright spot on the market.

Meanwhile the Australian dollar was buying 69.75 US cents, up from 69.57 US cents when the ASX closed on Thursday.

Pauline Hanson issues statement after re-election

Pauline Hanson has been re-elected as a senator for Queensland. After a month of counting she ended up in the fifth slot.

She has a statement. There are congratulations for the new prime minister, Anthony Albanese, but also a sledge on the way through: “I’ve said in the past he probably wouldn’t make a good prime minister however I sincerely hope he proves me wrong.”

It feels like “sincerely” is doing a lot of work in that sentence ...

17 Jun 202203.31 EDT

Joe Hinchliffe

Gold Coast beach bar approval opens ‘Pandora’s box’, critic says

The Gold Coast mayor denies his council’s decision to greenlight a bar on a beach is un-Australian or sets a precedent that could see public space privatised.

Broadbeach’s Kurrawa Beach Club, given the go-ahead on a trial basis late last year, will now be allowed to open for six months every year for the next three years.

Wildlife Queensland’s Gold Coast and hinterland branch president, Sally Spain, told the ABC the decision opened a “Pandora’s box” and was the “slippery path downwards for shops on the beach”.

“The Australian icon of our free and open, non-paying, non-excluding beaches has been breached,” she said.

Read the full story here:

17 Jun 202203.17 EDT

Daniel Hurst

Penny Wong stresses importance of climate action during Solomon Islands visit

The foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, speaking in Honiara, stresses the importance of climate action to the Pacific.

As she has done on her visits to Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, Wong mentions her previous role as climate change minister in the Rudd government (her message tends to be that she’s been pushing for stronger action for a while now, and understands the Pacific island countries’ voices have been consistent in long calling on the world to act).

In broader remarks, Wong tells a reporter:

We [Australia] may not have been perfect, but we are family. We live in the same region. Your security and our security are interlinked and that’s how we will approach our relationship with you.

Wong thanks the reporters for their questions and alludes to another visit down the track:

I’ll see you next time.

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An update/correction from the AEC ... Pauline Hanson has come up the batting order, looking for some hitting in the middle overs apparently.

Aemo doesn’t expect power shortages this weekend

As noted earlier, the Australian Energy Market Operator (soon to be a household name) says conditions in the electricity market have improved ‘markedly’ and they don’t foresee supply shortfalls (ie blackouts) this weekend.
That there remains ‘trouble at mill’, though, is suggested by the activation again of the system that pays big users to reduce their load, this evening for Victoria.

(The tab for the RERT - Reliability and Emergency Reserve and Trader is not likely to be a small one.)

Meanwhile, international ratings agency, Moody’s, has chimed in, saying Aemo’s suspension of the wholesales market is “credit negative” or AGL and Origin “because their dispatch prices are now capped”. (At $300/megawatt-hour, as it happens. That’s another way of saying AGL’s debt (now rated as Baa2 negative) and Origin (at Baa2 stable) might come under review.

“The price capping means that generators are at risk of being directed by Aemo to dispatch uneconomically, particularly those generators that need to source fuel at prevailing elevated prices,” Moody’s said.

“However, we understand that Aemo has instituted a compensation regime that allows eligible generators to recoup their costs of production (above the administered prices) and, as such, is likely to mitigate the risk of generation assets running at a loss.”

Perhaps, but we’ll have to wait to see how easy it is to “recoup” any losses. Anyway, to the extent Australian coal-fired power plants have to dip into markets to get more coal, here’s a graph from Moody’s on how prices have fared lately:

17 Jun 202202.53 EDT

Penny Wong says she’s had ‘constructive’ talks with Solomon Islands PM

Daniel Hurst

The foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, is speaking in Honiara.

She says she had a “constructive” and wide-ranging meeting with met with the Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Sogavare.

Wong says they did discuss regional security as part of the meeting (the security agreement between China and Solomon Islands was a contentious issue during the Australian election campaign).

Wong says Australia’s view remains that the Pacific family should be responsible for its security:

I welcome prime minister Sogavare’s reassurances that there will not be a military base, nor a persistent foreign military presence here in Solomon Islands. And I welcome his assurance that Australia remains Solomon Islands’ first security partner of choice and first development partner of choice.

Wong says the government of Solomon Islands is aware of Australia’s concerns and views, but most importantly is also aware that “our regional security is a joint responsibility and it is a responsibility of the Pacific family”.

She notes that the assurances she received were the same that Sogavare had made publicly in the past.

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Measles case recorded in Victoria for first time since 2020

The Victorian government’s department of health has issued the following alert:

Victoria has recorded a new confirmed measles case in a returned overseas traveler.

The woman, aged in her 30s, developed symptoms on 12 June while in New South Wales and immediately sought medical attention.

Measles is a highly infectious viral disease that can cause serious illness. Those most at risk of serious illness include very young children and adults with weakened immune systems.

This is the first case of measles in Victoria since March 2020, with previous cases seen in people who are not fully immunised and who have travelled overseas or been in contact with returned overseas travellers

The illness usually begins with common cold symptoms such as runny nose, red eyes and a cough, followed by fever and a rash. The characteristic measles rash usually begins three to seven days after the first symptoms, generally starting on the face and then spreading to the rest of the body.

As a precaution, there are four public exposure sites in Victoria and New South Wales. Those who attended these sites are urged to seek medical care if they develop symptoms, and to wear a mask. The sites are:

Culcairn Ampol Station, Olympic Highway, NSW
Sunday 12 June 12pm – 12.35pm
Monitor symptoms to Thursday 30 June

Astor Hotel, 641 Young St, Albury NSW
Sunday, 12 June 12.30pm – 3.00pm
Monitor symptoms to: Thursday, 30 June 2022

Justin Lane restaurant, 57-59 Brougham St, Geelong, VIC
Monday, 13 June 12.30pm – 3.00 pm
Monitor symptoms to: Friday, 1 July 2022
DFO South Wharf – Rice Work Shop, food court, South Wharf, VIC
Tuesday, 14 June 12.20pm – 1.05pm
Monitor symptoms to: Saturday, 2 July 2022

One Nation party leader Pauline Hanson has retained her Senate seat for another term, meaning the Liberal National party’s Amanda Stoker has lost her seat.