News and politics live updates: Pauline Hanson bans ABC, The Guardian as Victorian candidates revealed

Aussie motorists have been urged to “shop smarter” and retailers warned not to price gouge after the Albanese government wound back its fuel excise relief on Monday — making $2-a-litre the new normal.

The excise cut and discounts for the heavy vehicle road user charge both lapsed on Monday following the Federal Government decision not to extend their support into August.

The government had introduced a temporary excise cut of 32 cents per litre from April 1 and then halved the discount to wholesale fuel prices to 16 cpl at the end of June.

Price data from motoring group NRMA revealed that retailers had been steadily increasing their prices at the pump over the past month ahead of the excise cut’s expiry on August 2.

The price creep over the past month was also reflected on state-level monitoring sites, such as New South Wales’ FuelCheck, West Australia’s FuelWatch and the Northern Territory’s MyFuel.

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Over the weekend the Prime Minister broke another political commitment and managed to do it while he was not even at work.

Anthony Albanese is enjoying a rare period of leave in the top job, meaning he was unable to attend the annual Garma festival in the Northern Territory outback as he’d promised to do.

Just 12 months ago at the event in north-east Arnhem Land he had declared: “I commit here that every single year that I have the great honour to be Australia’s Prime Minister, I will be here and engaged with you”.

“This is a journey that has a long way to go,” he told Indigenous leaders gathered for Garma in 2025. But just weeks before this year’s event he confirmed he was pulling out.

“I will be on leave at that time, but I will be at another festival in the Northern Territory in the coming days,” he told ABC Radio in July.

Only three months after the alleged abduction and murder of Kumanjayi Little Baby near Alice Springs, it was a notable promise to break for a PM strongly committed to “reconciliation and working in genuine partnership with First Nations people”.

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One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has been confronted by protestors as she entered the Tower Hotel in Melbourne on Monday night.

Despite a police blockade, reports suggest at least 12 protestors were heard shouting, and up to 100 more people had gathered behind the blockade.

Former NRL star Luke Bateman has alleged he was offered drugs and alcohol by gambling company employees while he was battling a problem gambling addiction.

Bateman, 31, appeared at a Senate inquiry and described losses of “tens of thousands of dollars” a month at the depths of his addiction while gambling companies would use tactics to create a “sense of trust” to keep him wagering.

The two-day inquiry is examining the Federal Government’s legislation to limit gambling advertising, the Interactive Gambling Amaen, where medical and welfare experts are campaigning for the legislation to be strengthened as recommended by the 2023 Murphy Report.

The former Canberra Raiders player revealed he had been flown to races across Australia by the gambling company, describing incidents where he would be plied with drugs and alcohol at racing events.

“Before getting there, the VIP manager would offer: hey mate, what drugs do you want? Do you want a couple of bags for this weekend? We’ll organise that for you. We’ll have that ready for you when you get here,” Bateman described.

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Pauline Hanson kicked off One Nation’s campaign for the Victorian election, which elections expert Antony Green said “could bring down the two-party system”, by banning two media organisations she sees as among her greatest enemies, the ABC and The Guardian, from a press conference.

“I’m not putting up with their rubbish,” Senator Hanson said at a media briefing with new state leader Warren Pickering and several upper house candidates. “I’m not putting up with their spin; their lies, whatever. I want truth and honesty.”

The ABC declined to comment but a spokesperson for The Guardian, a left-wing British newspaper, said: “Our journalists should be able to ask questions in the public interest and not be deterred from doing their job.”

Amplifying the combative approach, Mr Pickering said One Nation welcomed scrutiny but would sue media outlets that launched unfair attacks before the election on November 28.

“Any blatant character assassination attempts based on fabrication of our candidates will be met with swift legal action,” he said.

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Former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet’s two brothers and his office pressured a conservative Liberal Party member to avoid giving evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into illegal donations from a fugitive developer, an anti-corruption hearing has been told.

In his third day of evidence to the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s Operation Rosny inquiry, Robert Assaf revealed that an adviser to Mr Perrottet, Angus McCaffrey, had attempted to dissuade him by phone from appearing as a witness before an Upper House committee, that held public hearings in February and early March 2023 ahead of the State election that would end 12 years of Coalition rule.

“I remember being in contact with someone from the premier’s office, more being an intermediary between other people, it seemed, or that’s what I was told,” Mr Assaf said.

“Angus wasn’t part of it, he was just passing on what he heard to me and basically it was, when I told him about my view, ‘Why don’t I just go down and say this? Tell them what I know’, he wasn’t a fan of it primarily because others had said, ‘This can’t happen, basically your career will be over if this happens’.”

Mr McCaffrey was acting as an intermediary for Charles Perrottet, a brother of the then-premier.

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Two spots have been shed from the Victorian government’s frontbench as the new premier tries to show a shrewdness with taxpayer dollars.

Premier Ben Carroll on Monday announced the size of the state government’s cabinet would shrink from 22 ministers to 20, following the departure of former Labor leader Jacinta Allan and two of her allies.

Mordialloc MP Tim Richardson has been elevated to the ministry, but the other two spots will not be filled.

Mr Carroll said he was slimming down the ministry as a demonstration of his commitment to not wasting taxpayer funding.

“It doesn’t pass the pub test getting multiple ministers signed in 12 weeks out before a campaign begins,” the premier told reporters.

“Every dollar should be spent wisely, considerately, and where it delivers the best value for money.”

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New Victorian Premier Ben Carroll could choose to be an Andy Burnham, but only a Peter Beattie approach guarantees victory for Labor in November.

Carroll is succeeding a deeply unpopular leader in Jacinta Allan the way Burnham has in the UK after Sir Keir Starmer.

Former Queensland premier Beattie is the only Labor leader to stare down a royal commission into his own party and deliver a landslide victory only months later.

The approaches couldn’t be more contrasting.

Mr Burnham has been about embracing the zeitgeist and is all style over substance.

Mr Burnham is a walking, talking human meme.

Mr Beattie instead leaned into the storm of electoral rorts by his own MPs, fully endorsed the commission and became his own agent of change.

Mr Burnham has announced cheaper bus fares, opened a satellite office of 10 Downing Street in Manchester and called for the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino to stand down. Popular yes, a plan to tackle cost of living and rebuild the UK economy it’s not.

Even Mr Burnham’s much vaunted “re-opening of the North Sea for oil and gas” that Trump has hailed is fraught with caveats and will do no more than what Starmer already had underway.

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Joe Hockey is on board with secret plans to create a Pilbara iron ore cartel to combat China’s intensifying market squeeze and believes Jim Chalmers should have more veto powers over critical minerals deals.

Mr Hockey, a former Federal treasurer and current whisperer to Donald Trump, also warned that the Iran War has “a long way to go” given the US President “doesn’t mind” Strait of Hormuz chaos.

After opening the 2026 Diggers & Dealers conference, Mr Hockey weighed in on closed-door plans being concocted in Canberra, revealed by The West Australian last week, to give WA’s iron ore giants special dispensation from antitrust laws so they can negotiate prices as a bloc.

The Albanese Government’s covert move is in response to the formation of the China Minerals Resources Group — a Beijing-owned centralised buying agent acting for many of the country’s steel mills — which is increasingly putting pressure on WA’s iron ore miners to lower their prices, jeopardising Australia’s most lucrative export income stream.

Fortescue last week said CRMG was acting against fair market practice.

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Treasurer Jim Chalmers is vowing that Australian house prices will continue to grow but at a slower pace despite home values plunging at the steepest pace in almost four years, sparking negative equity concerns.

Across Australia, house and unit values in July dived by 0.7 per cent, marking the biggest monthly drop since December 2022 during the Reserve Bank’s last aggressive rate rise cycle, new Cotality data showed.

National dwelling values have been falling for four straight months, and a sustained downturn could see the steepest fall since 2019, when the banking regulator cracked down on interest-only loans.

“Well, the Budget assumptions were that over the course of the next couple of years we will see prices continue to grow, but a bit more modestly than they have been,” Dr Chalmers told ABC Radio National on Monday.

“And obviously this is only the first couple of months of that two-year period. But we also need to maintain a sense of perspective in other ways as well.

“Housing is a long-term investment, and we continue to expect over the course of the coming years that prices will continue to rise, but more modestly than before.”

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