Elon Musk makes surprise visit to China

Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor is setting tests for the government’s coming federal budget that the Coalition never met, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones says.

Asked whether Treasurer Jim Chalmers would meet Taylor’s target of delivering a structural surplus in the budget next month, Jones told Sky News that the Coalition had promised nine budget surpluses during its time in government but failed to deliver a single one.

“They saw wages go backwards, spending going up, the two biggest budget deficits on record,” Jones said.

He told Sky News that inflation was coming back under control and that the government would continue to put downward pressure on prices by delivering a disciplined budget.

“What’s Angus Taylor’s alternative plan? He’ll have his opportunity Thursday week to set that out,” Jones said.

“What’s he going to cut? What’s his positive economic policy for the country?”

Last week the consumer price index revealed inflation had accelerated to a stronger-than-expected 1 per cent in the first three months of 2024, up from 0.6 per cent in the December quarter.

Of 20 leading economists surveyed by the Financial Review last week, nine called for a contractionary or slightly contractionary stance in next month’s budget, to avoid further stoking inflation, while eight called for a neutral stance and two fell somewhere in between.

Just one said there was an argument for spending more on households.

Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor says next month’s federal budget can only be considered a success if the government shows some spending restraint and puts downward pressure on consumer prices.

“The cost-of-living relief that every Australian wants and deserves is lower inflation. It benefits absolutely everybody,” Taylor told Sky News.

“The test for this budget is: is it going to put downward pressure on prices?”

Taylor said the Albanese government had to ensure the economy was growing faster than it was spending to ensure the upcoming budget had a structural surplus and helped tackle inflation.

But he said the government had signalled it wanted to increase spending next month despite having already spent $209 billion since coming to office.

“He’s not willing to say [by] how much more, but we’ve had lots of signals from [Treasurer Jim Chalmers] that he wants this to be a big-spending budget,” Taylor said.

Of 20 leading economists surveyed by the Financial Review last week, nine called for a contractionary or slightly contractionary federal budget to avoid further stoking inflation, while eight called for a neutral stance and two fell somewhere in between.

Just one said there was an argument for spending more on households.

Dubai/Cairo | US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will step up efforts to secure a truce in Gaza during meetings in the Middle East, in what could be a final chance to persuade Israel to call off an attack on Rafah.

The White House said on Sunday (Monday AEST) that Israel had agreed to hear out its concerns.

Israel had “assured us that they won’t go into Rafah until we’ve had a chance to really share our perspectives and our concerns with them”, John Kirby, spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council, said. “So we’ll see where that goes.”

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged US President Joe Biden to intervene, telling a special edition of the World Economic Forum in Riyadh that the US “is the only country capable” of stopping an Israeli invasion of Rafah.

Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reviewed the talks on a hostage release and a Gaza ceasefire during a call on Sunday (Monday AEST), according to a White House statement.

Biden also “reiterated his clear position” on Rafah.

“If there’s a deal, we will suspend the operation” in Rafah, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday, even as the Israeli military continued to prepare for an offensive.

A Hamas official said its delegation planned to respond to the latest Israeli truce plan today (AEST), Agence France-Presse reported, offering another glimmer of hope as the Gaza conflict grinds towards the seven-month mark.

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Australians distrust news articles that have been written by generative artificial intelligence (AI) even as media companies increasingly turn to the emerging technology.

AI technology burst into the Australian consciousness in late 2022, when Silicon Valley organisation OpenAI released its chatbot ChatGPT and the second iteration of its text-to-image generator, DALL-E.

The federal government’s latest television and media survey of about 5000 Australians during late 2023 found 61 per cent were aware of generative AI and about half had used the technology.

However, there was a strong negative sentiment towards its use in news content.

Nearly four in five respondents who knew about the technology said their trust in a news story would be negatively affected if they found out it had been written in full by generative AI.

Even if a story had only been written with assistance from AI, more than half of these Australians said their trust would still be negatively affected.

The biggest source of concern was their belief that AI models used data from unverified or untrustworthy sources, followed by worries about integrity and the understanding that humans could bring ethics and accountability to the news.

About 95 per cent of respondents aware of the technology believed people should be made aware much news they consumed was created by generative AI.

Electricity distributor AusNet will pay millions in customer compensation and to build outage back-ups after storms left millions of Victorians in the dark.

AusNet Services has entered a court enforceable undertaking to pay $12 million for its failure to provide customers with adequate information when its online outage tracker crashed under massive traffic in February.

About 255,000 AusNet customers were left without power following severe storms on February 13.

Statewide, more than 12,000km of power lines were damaged in the wild weather, cutting power to as many as 530,000 homes and businesses.

Ausnet’s outage tracker was not fully restored until a week later.

Essential Services Commissioner Kate Symons said AusNet acknowledged its failures, which breached Victorian energy laws.

“The commission has accepted a court enforceable undertaking ... for AusNet to directly contribute $12 million to provide remediation to its affected customers and to improve community energy resilience to extreme weather events,” Symons said in a statement.

Energy resilience measures include grants to councils and community groups to offer charging and communication services during outages, along with local power generation to keep businesses going during blackouts.

AusNet must also improve its systems, issue a formal apology, pay for consultant reviews and report its progress to the commission.

The total figure represents an extra $2 million on top of AusNet’s previously announced Energy Resilience Community Fund, and will go directly to charities and Financial Counsellors Australia to support consumers.

The undertaking requires AusNet to distribute the $12 million by the end of 2026.

Google has joined the growing ranks of companies in Australia offering financial reimbursements to staff for fertility treatments such as egg freezing and IVF.

The new benefit gives all of Google’s 2000-odd employees in Australia and New Zealand up to $33,200 in lifetime support, and comes as white-collar employers offer more support for parents and employees wanting to have children.

As part of the new benefits package, Google will reimburse money spent on intrauterine insemination, egg freezing, in vitro fertilisation and other family-building expenses such as adoption and surrogacy costs.

The policy puts Google in line with tech giants Apple and Facebook, which were among the first companies to offer employer-subsidised egg freezing about 10 years ago.

Similar benefits are offered by Goldman Sachs, Asana, Hubspot and Harrison.ai, among others.

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San Francisco/Beijing | Tesla’s Elon Musk made an unannounced trip to China on Sunday, seeking approval for driver-assistance software that could help arrest the carmaker’s revenue decline.

The Tesla chief executive officer met with Premier Li Qiang, who as the Chinese Communist Party secretary for Shanghai helped the company set up what is now its top global plant.

Musk was expected to meet officials about rolling out the system Tesla markets as Full Self-Driving (FSD), a person with knowledge of the matter said.

While the suite of features requires constant supervision and doesn’t make Teslas autonomous, the company generates incremental sales in the US by charging $US8000 ($12,200) to buy FSD outright, or $US99 a month for a subscription.

Getting the green light from China for FSD could be complicated by sensitivities around the cameras Tesla’s driver-assistance system relies on, as well as concerns about the safety of the company’s technology.

Tesla’s vehicles have been banned from China’s military compounds and some other government venues in the past over data-collection concerns.

The US’ top auto-safety regulator also just opened a probe into the company’s less-capable Autopilot system, citing 20 crashes since December involving vehicles that received an over-the-air software update.

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Two thirds of The Australian Financial Review’s readers have urged Treasurer Jim Chalmers to resist the urge to deliver a big-spending pre-election budget next month, to avoid exacerbating inflation.

Their warning came after the consumer price index last week revealed inflation had accelerated to a stronger-than-expected 1 per cent in the first three months of 2024, up from 0.6 per cent in the December quarter.

“We have an enormous debt to repay. If not now, when unemployment is low and the economy is overheating, resulting in inflation, when?” one reader said.

“[The budget] must have a surplus, and a sizeable surplus.”

The poll also invited readers to share their opinions on the Albanese government’s Future Made in Australia policy, the increased use of video conferencing in job interviews, and the ongoing legal fight between Australia’s eSafety Commissioner and social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

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Soaring costs are making building new homes uneconomical in many areas and will restrict home completions below demand until the end of the decade, a survey of 12 property analysts and economists has found.

Cost pressures, which have sent dozens of builders to the wall, have become the biggest obstacle to builders, and mean that even when projects are approved they are not being built. That suggests the supply shortage driving the rental crisis is set to continue for years, the experts told The Australian Financial Review’s quarterly property survey.

“Of the myriad barriers to housing supply, the spike in construction costs is the most binding constraint and has dissuaded many developers from initiating a more robust supply response over the past year despite rapidly rising rents,” Knight Frank chief economist Ben Burston said.

Jarden’s chief economist Carlos Cacho said affordability was the “biggest hurdle” to increased housing supply, the result of a “perfect storm” of surging construction costs, high historic land acquisition costs and high rates, which have reduced borrowing power by 30-plus per cent.

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