As it happened: Tributes continue to flow after Olivia Newton-John’s death; peak union demands radical reforms

Thanks for reading our live news coverage today. Here’s a summary of the main stories:

• China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, says his country’s military drills in the Taiwan Strait are “legitimate” and “justified”. Addressing the National Press Club, he said a lot of work has to be done to improve Australia-China relations.
• Despite the Liberal leadership calling the September Jobs and Skills Summit, which aims to bring together unions and businesses, a stunt, the Nationals’ leader will attend.
• Taxpayers have forked out more than $80,000 on the NSW government’s review of former deputy premier John Barilaro’s posting to a plum US trade role. The report is now five days late.
• Australian cricket captain Meg Lanning will take an indefinite break from cricket.
• China says it plans to turn Taiwan into Hong Kong but says it will use force as a last resort.
• Animal welfare activists lost their High Court challenge over hidden camera laws.
• Victorian Liberal media director Lee Anderson has quit, a week after leader Matthew Guy’s former chief of staff, Mitch Catlin, was forced to resign.

We’ll be back online tomorrow morning from 7am. Have a great night.

Greens senator Jordon Steele-John says not being elected to be the new deputy chair of the NDIS Senate Committee shows the government is failing to centre disabled voices in a vital area of need.

“We still don’t know who the new NDIA CEO or chair will be,” Steele-John tweeted. “And with that uncertainty comes so much opportunity to call for what we want: true representation and authentic leadership. Nothing about us without us!”

Greens WA senator Jordon Steele-John, who uses a wheelchair, says the major parties are not centring disabled voices.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The WA senator is still on the committee but said the major parties were working to uphold the status quo by electing Liberal senator Hollie Hughes, “instead of centring the lived experience of a disabled person”.

“I know this news will be frustrating for so many members of our community who were expecting better from a government who told us how committed they were to centring disabled voices in the new parliament,” Steele-John tweeted.

Hughes, who has an autistic son, established the Country Autism Network and said she is a “huge believer” in the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

The government has invited Nationals leader David Littleproud to its upcoming Jobs and Skills Summit in Canberra, which the Liberal leadership team today has labelled a stunt.

It comes as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton ruled out attending the summit, set to be held over two days in September.

Nationals leader David Littleproud during question time at Parliament House on Monday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Littleproud said earlier on Wednesday he would go to the summit if invited to represent rural Australians.

The invitation to Littleproud from Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the Nationals leader was more than welcome to attend.

“I offered the opportunity to [Peter Dutton] or another opposition member to participate in the summit,” the letter said.

“I note Mr Dutton has said publicly that the opposition won’t accept the invitation but you have said publicly you want to attend.”

Dutton dismissed the summit today, saying the Liberals will “support all sorts of good policy from the government; we’ve demonstrated that”.

“But we’re not going to support stunts,” he said.

Deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley also said the summit was “just a stunt”.

“All this is going to be is a talkfest designed to look after union mates,” Ley said.

“The Labor Party dropped the invitation to the media ... they briefed out the story first, which just goes to show their level of insincerity about it.

“The CFMEU [will be the first] priority, ACTU second priority, every other union the third priority.”

With AAP

Singapore: Ansell is being sued in a US court by a group of former migrant workers in Malaysia who claim the Australian personal protective equipment giant “knowingly profited” from alleged forced labour in the disposable glove manufacturing industry.

The 13 Bangladeshi workers say they were trafficked to Malaysia and made to live and work in shocking conditions at single-use glove producer Brightway Holdings, a supplier to Ansell.

Malaysia is the world’s largest single-use glove producer but labour practices at some factories in the south-east Asian nation have come under scrutiny.

They have filed a lawsuit against the ASX-listed company and US firm Kimberly-Clark Corporation (KCC) in the US Federal District Court for the District of Columbia in which they are seeking damages and to represent thousands of other workers in a class action.

Malaysia is a global hub for glove manufacturing, but the industry there has been dogged by revelations of migrant workers being subjected to forced labour.

In December, Brightway became the fifth Malaysian glove maker to have imports banned by the US Customs and Border Protection after it emerged that 781 employees had been living inside three shipping containers at its facility near Kuala Lumpur. A Malaysian minister labelled the conditions there as akin to “modern slavery”.

In their lawsuit against Ansell, the Bangladeshi migrant workers complained of atrocious conditions at Brightway, saying they were forced to work for more than 12 hours a day, often with restricted access to food, water and restrooms, had their passports seized and were physically and verbally abused.

Read more here.

Welcome to your five-minute recap of the trading day and how the experts saw it.

The numbers: The ASX 200 snapped a four-day winning streak on Wednesday, dipping below the 7000 point mark it surpassed on Friday as the market was dragged down by a tech plunge.

The benchmark index closed 0.5 per cent lower. Tech stocks dropped 3.8 per cent led by losses for sector heavyweights REA, which fell by 3.8 per cent to $127.30, and Block Inc, which dropped 6 per cent to $116.58.

The benchmark S&P 500 declined for a fourth-straight session.Credit: AP

A2 Milk was among the market’s biggest losers after the FDA held up its approval application to export baby formula to the US. The company’s shares dropped 6.9 per cent to $4.76.

All other sectors were in the red bar financials, which advanced 0.7 per cent, and utilities, which put on 0.6 per cent.

ANZ jumped 3.4 per cent to a two-month high of $23.46. NAB and Westpac both put on 1.4 per cent, to $30.22 and $22.20 respectively.

Commonwealth Bank trimmed intraday losses of 1 per cent but still closed in the red, losing 0.3 per cent to finish at $101.00 after the release of its full-year results on Wednesday morning.

The lifters: Imugene 9.3%, Whitehaven Coal 5.1%. GrainCorp 5.1%

The laggards: St Barbara -11.6%, Life360 -7%, a2 Milk -6.9%

The lowdown: The sharemarket recovered from an opening plunge but couldn’t withstand the weight of a tumbling tech sector and broad losses across all sectors, bar financials and utilities.

The negative session saw the impact of Australia’s biggest bank’s full-year earnings. Despite posting a $9.6 billion profit, up 11 per cent and ahead of market expectations, shares in Commonwealth Bank dipped.

Read more here.

Singapore/Jakarta: An Indonesian police general has been charged with the murder of a junior officer at his house in a dramatic development to a high-profile case that threatens to erode trust in law enforcement in South-East Asia’s most populous nation.

Police in south Jakarta initially said 27-year-old Brigadier Nopryansyah Yosua Hutabarat had died on July 8 in a shootout with another junior officer at the home of his boss – Inspector General Ferdy Sambo, the head of internal affairs at the National Police – after sexually harassing Sambo’s wife.

Inspector General Ferdy Sambo, Indonesian police’s internal affairs chief, has been charged with the murder of a junior officer at his house in Jakarta.

But after Hutabarat’s family claimed he had been tortured and his body was exhumed for a second autopsy, that narrative has been ripped up and replaced by a far more sinister version of events.

Hours after President Joko Widodo again weighed into the episode urging a thorough probe to protect the reputation of police, the country’s top police officer said investigators now believed Sambo, 49, had ordered the killing of his bodyguard and driver and attempted to cover it up.

General Listyo Sigit Prabowo, the national police chief, told reporters that an investigation involving ballistic and forensic examination, CCTV footage and phone records had determined that Hutabarat had been shot at the direction of Sambo.

“After the fatal shooting [Sambo] fired [Hutabarat’s] gun into the wall of his house in an attempt to simulate a shootout,” Prabowo said.

Read more here.

Business leaders are pressing the federal government to use its jobs summit to quickly boost the number of workers in the country and ramp up skills levels, pushing back at union calls for the meeting to canvass sweeping changes to the nation’s economic pillars.

As shadow treasurer Angus Taylor said the ACTU’s plans for the summit would amount to a “wrecking ball” through the economy, business organisations said there needed to be short and long-term policies agreed upon at the September meeting.

Business groups want the upcoming jobs summit to find ways to get more people into the jobs market.Credit: Sydney Morning Herald

The government is bringing 100 people from the public and private sectors to its September jobs and skills summit to canvass ways to keep unemployment low, boost productivity and increase real incomes.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions on Wednesday revealed it wanted the summit to canvass a radical agenda, stretching from changes to the Reserve Bank’s operational strategy to government control of prices for goods and services in particular sectors such as energy and telecommunications.

The ACTU is pressing for the government to abandon the already legislated stage-three tax cuts and introduce an excess profits tax on businesses enjoying windfall gains due to current high inflation.

Read more here.

Australia’s captain Meg Lanning is taking a break from cricket for personal reasons, with no timeline set for her return.

The 30-year-old has withdrawn from The Hundred tournament in England and the announcement comes after her team won gold at the Commonwealth Games.

Australian cricket captain Meg Lanning is taking an indefinite break.Credit: Getty Images

Lanning has been the national team captain since 2014, in recent years overseeing a run of unsurpassed success including two Twenty20 World Cups, this year’s 50-over World Cup in New Zealand and the gold medal in Birmingham.

“After a busy couple of years, I’ve made the decision to take a step back to enable me to spend time focusing on myself,” Lanning said.

“I’m grateful for the support of [Cricket Australia] and my teammates and ask that my privacy is respected during this time.”

Read more here.

Elon Musk offloaded $US6.9 billion ($9.9 billion) of stock in Tesla, the billionaire’s biggest sale on record, saying he wanted to avoid a last-minute sell-off of the electric car maker’s shares in the event he is forced to go ahead with his aborted deal to buy Twitter.

Tesla’s chief executive officer sold about 7.92 million shares on August 5, according to a series of regulatory filings that landed after US markets closed on Tuesday.

As speculation mounted over the reason for the disposal, Musk responded in a series of late night tweets, saying he wanted to avert an emergency sale of stock if he is compelled to complete the $US44 billion takeover of Twitter, which he walked away from last month.

It’s Elon Musks’s biggest sale of Tesla shares so far.Credit: AP

Asked by followers if he was done selling Tesla shares and would buy the stock again if the deal doesn’t close, Musk responded: “Yes.”

The sale comes just four months after Musk, the world’s richest person, said he had no further plans to sell shares in the car maker he’s built into a global force after disposing of $US8.5 billion of stock in the wake of his initial offer to buy Twitter.

Since then, Tesla’s shares have rebounded from lows reached in May, benefiting from broader gains in US equities.

“He certainly is clarifying that he is cashing up for Twitter,” said Charu Chanana, strategist at Saxo Capital Markets in Singapore.

“The timing of the sale – just ahead of the US CPI release – does say something, though. The bear market rally has started to falter, and further repricing of Fed expectations could mean more pain for equities ahead, especially in tech.”

Read more here.

World Rowing has submitted a bid for coastal rowing and beach sprints to be included in the program for the 2026 Commonwealth Games in regional Victoria, rejecting traditional events where Australia is ranked No.2 in the world.

The decision has drawn a strong reaction from rowing’s former champions, including Peter Antonie, an Olympic and Commonwealth Games gold medallist and former world champion, who said: “Why is World Rowing ignoring and not growing rowing? They are destroying lightweight rowing, the core of the sport’s universality, and going down other pathways that include fiddling with race distances and looking to promote other sports such as coastal rowing.”

Rowing was last on a Commonwealth Games program in 1986, when Adair Ferguson won gold in the lightweight sculls.Credit: Kenneth Stevens

Coastal rowing is a contest using a broader craft than the traditional rowing shell and involves a head-to-head beach sprint of two crews over 10-15 metres followed by a 250-metre race to a buoy, a return leg of the same distance and then a final 10-15 metre sprint to the finish line.

Rowing was last on a Commonwealth Games program at Edinburgh in 1986 when the men’s VIII included future stars of global rowing such as triple Olympic gold medallist James Tomkins and double gold medallist Mike McKay.

However, World Rowing is now using the 2026 Games in regional Victoria to convince the International Olympic Committee to include beach sprints coastal rowing at the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 2028, having failed to have it added to the Paris 2024 program.

Read more here.