Australia news live: government ad campaign urges lower fuel use; woman charged with attempted poisoning murder of girl, 10 | Australian politics
Government ad campaign urges drivers to minimise fuel use
The Australian government is launching a new advertising campaign to encourage the public to minimise their use of fuel amid the global crisis caused by the US-Israel war on Iran.
The TV, digital and billboard campaign, which will begin rolling out on Monday, is called “Every little bit helps” and is part of the second level of the government’s four-tier fuel security plan.
Communication from the government overnight explains the plan as “a practical guide aimed at managing fuel supply chain pressures driven by the conflict in the Middle East”, and that level two, titled “keep Australia moving”:
double quotation mark … lays the groundwork for Australians to understand what to do now as fuel supplies hold up. It also signals that instructions will be communicated if and when we move to future levels.
The transport and infrastructure minister, Catherine King, said in a statement:
double quotation mark This campaign will help communicate the Government’s plan to the public and outline what actions they can take to help.The global fuel shortage is affecting us all and every little bit helps. From running errands in fewer trips to only filling up with the fuel you need, this will help us keep essential services moving.
The rollout of this campaign and National Fuel Security Plan ensures that we can get the public the information they need, and keep them updated if and when the situation may change.
Key events
Victorian Liberals pledge to recruit another 3,000 police officers
The Victorian opposition has pledged to recruit another 3,000 police officers if it wins the state election in November, AAP reports.
The state opposition leader, Jess Wilson, said the Liberals would also reopen 40 police stations that are either closed or operating on reduced hours. The election promise is reportedly set to cost $1.5bn.
The plan includes relocation allowances and fast-tracked applications to entice police officers from the UK, Ireland and New Zealand to emigrate to the state. Relocation allowances of $5,000 per successful applicant would be available, and recruitment teams would be created to fast-track applicant checks.
The announcement follows a recent RACV Home Safety Pulse survey of 5,000 Victorians that found 17% of respondents felt somewhat or completely unsafe at home. Victoria’s latest crime statistics showed criminal offences rose 4.2% in 2025.
Wilson said:
double quotation mark Our plan will get more cops on the beat, reopen closed police stations and restore community safety across Victoria.
Melissa Davey
Australia’s new CDC chief on trust, misinformation and never being surprised by a health threat
In 1987 when the HIV pandemic was at its peak, the doctor and epidemiologist Prof Robert Douglas wrote a report for the Medical Journal of Australia describing how disease control was “fragmented, inadequate and poorly coordinated”, lamenting a lack of national coordination.
“Now is the time to begin to plan for a national system of disease control,” he wrote, calling for state and federal governments to share a strategy and “play their proper roles in the prevention of disease and the minimisation of its effects”.
Almost 40 years later, and after numerous pandemics including swine flu, mpox and seasonal influenza during which peak medical and health bodies and experts repeatedly called for a centre for disease control, Australia finally has one.
In January, the Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC) was established as a statutory, independent commonwealth authority to oversee national health surveillance, pandemic preparedness and public health advice, with Prof Zoe Wainer at its helm as director general.
After decades of pressure and debate over what an Australian CDC should be, Wainer says she “absolutely jumped at” the opportunity to lead it.
Read the full story here:
Woman charged with attempted poisoning murder of 10-year-old girl
Ben Smee
Queensland police have charged a woman from Logan with the attempted poisoning murder of a 10-year-old girl.
In a statement, police say they will allege that on 12 March, a 43-year-old woman administered poison to herself and the girl, causing them both to become sick and vomit.
The girl was taken to the Logan hospital but was discharged later the same day. Police were notified four days later and began “Operation Yankee Streethawk” to investigate.
The woman, who has been in hospital since March, was discharged into police custody on Saturday and later charged with attempted murder.
Police say the girl was known to the woman, and the charge is classified as a domestic violence allegation.
Sarah Collard
How Australia’s remote communities are experiencing the fuel crisis
Annalisa Young’s weekly shopping trip starts with an hour-long drive to the nearest supermarket, with a close eye on the fuel bowser and the cash register at all times.
Fuel prices are surging across Australia as the US-Israel war on Iran disrupts oil supplies through the strait of Hormuz.
It’s putting pressure on households across the country. But in remote communities, where the costs of fuel and other essentials were already sky-high, the pain is even greater.
Young lives in Ltyentye Apurte, also known as Santa Teresa. It’s a small town of 600 people about 85km south-east of Alice Springs in the vast Northern Territory outback. Local prices for both fuel and food have soared in recent weeks, she says.
The cost of that weekly shop and drive into Alice Springs, to ensure there’s enough food in the refrigerator and pantry to feed her family – including four children aged 25, 20, 16 and five – and enough fuel in their vehicles, has risen by almost 50%.
Read the full story here:
Seven-year-old girl drowns at swimming spot on Brisbane River
A seven-year-old girl has drowned at a popular swimming spot on the Brisbane River in the south-west of the city, AAP reports.
The alarm was raised at about 5pm at Colleges Crossing, Chuwar, on Saturday evening. Emergency services, helicopters and divers scrambled to find the missing swimmer.
Queensland police said the girl’s body was retrieved from the river at about 10.30pm and she was declared dead at the scene.
Police are now preparing a report for the coroner.
There were 81 drowning deaths in Australia over the 2025-26 summer, according to Royal Life Saving Australia.
‘Why would they want to do it’: wife in shock as police appeal for information after farmer killed
The wife of a 65-year-old man shot dead and buried in a shallow grave on his farm says she is in shock, as police appeal for information about the man’s killing, AAP reports.
The last confirmed sighting of Richard Wills was of him leaving home in Ouyen, north-western Victoria, last Sunday 5 April.
His body was discovered on Tuesday, two days after he failed to return home.
Police say Wills went to work on his rural property on Victoria’s Mallee Highway about 8am as part of his normal routine. However, he was a no-show for lunch, prompting family members to scour the 650-hectare share-cropping and livestock farm to no avail.
His wife of 32 years, Donna, reported him missing on Monday morning when he still hadn’t returned. Wills’ body was found in a police search about 1.30pm the following afternoon. He had been fatally shot.
Wills said on Saturday her kind-hearted, workaholic husband was up, had eaten breakfast and left the house while she was still in bed.
During an appeal for information at Ouyen on Saturday, she told reporters:
double quotation mark He just kissed me goodbye. I thought I’d see him at lunchtime.
When he had not returned that night, she thought he might have gone driving with a mate and they had broken down or had a flat tyre.
double quotation mark Why would they want to do it to him?
Det Sen Sgt Steve Trewavas of the missing persons squad said Wills had clearly met with foul play and there was evidence suggesting he had been dragged behind a vehicle.
double quotation mark What is still unclear is exactly who was involved and why. This is a vicious killing.
Police suspect Wills knew the person who killed him. Anyone who saw the father of five on 5 April or has information concerning his death is being urged to come forward.
King says any road user charge must not disincentivise EV take-up
Electric vehicle users currently don’t pay fuel excise. An alternative that has been floated is a road user charge; Catherine King said her department has been investigating what a road user charge might look like but said the government is keen not to disincentivise the take-up of electric vehicles.
She said:
double quotation mark We’ve been working within my department on the model for what a road user charge might look like. That’s no surprise to anyone. That was in the financial midyear outlook. Since December, my department has been working on that.Obviously at the moment, we’re trying to encourage as much electric vehicle uptake as we can. We don’t want to disincentivise this. So there’s a balance to be struck with the benefit, tax potential of road user charging. But we’re making our way through that.
King wouldn’t be drawn on the future of the fringe benefits tax exemption that currently benefits buyers of electric vehicles, saying it was a matter for the budget.
King takes swipe at Canavan over Australia’s resilience to energy shocks
Catherine King has taken a swipe at the Nationals leader, Matt Canavan, while talking about shoring up Australia’s resilience to energy shocks.
double quotation mark Whilst we talk about the need for electrification as part of the energy security, it’s also part of our economic security. I do find it passing strange, Matt Canavan, trying to take us back to the 1990s or 1980s, not understanding that the world has moved on. The world has moved on in terms of energy security.
King said the move to electrification would also require efficiency manoeuvres for some sectors that are more difficult to electrify:
double quotation mark Where there are hard-to-abate sectors, like aviation and like some of the heavy haulage, which would take a little bit longer to electrify, low-carbon liquid fuels. The fact that we basically grow canola here and ship it overseas and turn it into sustainable aviation fuel and then buy it back is nuts, in our view. We should actually be having that low-carbon liquid renewable diesel. We should be able to generate that here.
Labor to consider additional cost-of-living relief in budget, King says
Catherine King would not be drawn on how long the federal government thinks the fuel crisis might continue, but said the government was open to considering other kinds of cost-of-living relief for the public.
King said:
double quotation mark Obviously, as we head into the budget and we get more indication of where this is going in the next months to come, whether there’s a need for additional measures. We’ve obviously got the tax cuts coming in on July 1. But whether there’s a need for additional measures for households and businesses – they’re all the things that we’re contemplating as part of the budget process.
Government is providing fuel information ‘as quickly as we can’, King says
Asked by the Insiders host, David Speers, if the forthcoming “Every little bit helps” advertising campaign was a good use of taxpayer money in this crisis, King said:
double quotation mark I think that what the government is trying to do is to provide as much information to people as possible. There’s a lot of anxiety, understandably, and a lot of uncertainty in the community because of what has happened with this global conflict that we are dealing with.And I think people are wanting to have information. And of course, they get that information from a range of sources, whether it’s from the media, whether it’s from social media.
So the government is building a communications platform, really, to try to provide that information to people as quickly as we can as we deal with what is, as I said, a global fuel crisis.
Fuel crisis may continue long after Middle East conflict, King says
The federal transport and infrastructure minister, Catherine King, this morning has reiterated warnings that the fuel crisis may continue long after any conflict in the Middle East ceases.
Speaking to ABC’s Insiders, King said the ceasefire in the Middle East at the moment is “fragile” and the government hopes it will hold, given the strait of Hormuz “has proven to be pretty critical to the global fuel supply, but also to global economies”.
King said:
double quotation mark We hope diplomacy works. It’s a fragile ceasefire. It’s our best chance. Even if that is the case, what we have to prepare for as a country here is even if the strait opens tomorrow, there’s a long tail to this.We don’t know what damage has been done to infrastructure. We don’t know how quickly shipping can resume as normal … So we have to plan, really, to make sure that we understand there’s a long tail to this.
We’ve been doing everything we can to shore up fuel supply, deal with issues of distribution, try to soften the blow of the fuel price hikes, which are happening globally. And we’re not party to the decisions that were made, but we are having to deal with them.
Fuel crisis ‘will take a long time to recover from’, Bowen says
The federal energy minister, Chris Bowen, has warned of a “long tail” of fuel shortages even if the US-Israel war on Iran were to end tomorrow.
He told reporters on Saturday:
double quotation mark Even if it opened today, there’s a big backlog of ships, there’s been gas plants bombed out of existence.The international energy situation will take a long time to recover from this. This is not over.
Guardian Australia’s Josh Butler was in Singapore with Anthony Albanese, and said while the prime minister wasn’t coming back from Singapore with a shipload of diesel in his checked baggage, that didn’t mean his whistle-stop visit wasn’t a success, or that it won’t be seen in future as a pivotal moment if fuel stocks continue to be choked by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Read his full analysis here:
Government ad campaign urges drivers to minimise fuel use
The Australian government is launching a new advertising campaign to encourage the public to minimise their use of fuel amid the global crisis caused by the US-Israel war on Iran.
The TV, digital and billboard campaign, which will begin rolling out on Monday, is called “Every little bit helps” and is part of the second level of the government’s four-tier fuel security plan.
Communication from the government overnight explains the plan as “a practical guide aimed at managing fuel supply chain pressures driven by the conflict in the Middle East”, and that level two, titled “keep Australia moving”:
double quotation mark … lays the groundwork for Australians to understand what to do now as fuel supplies hold up. It also signals that instructions will be communicated if and when we move to future levels.
The transport and infrastructure minister, Catherine King, said in a statement:
double quotation mark This campaign will help communicate the Government’s plan to the public and outline what actions they can take to help.The global fuel shortage is affecting us all and every little bit helps. From running errands in fewer trips to only filling up with the fuel you need, this will help us keep essential services moving.
The rollout of this campaign and National Fuel Security Plan ensures that we can get the public the information they need, and keep them updated if and when the situation may change.
Welcome
Good morning, welcome to the Australian news live blog for this Sunday 12 April. My name is Stephanie Convery and I’ll be with you until this afternoon.
First up, the Australian government has launched an advertising campaign with the aim of encouraging the public to minimise their use of fuel amid the shortages caused by global supply chain disruption.
The transport and infrastructure minister, Catherine King, said the campaign would “help communicate the government’s plan to the public and outline what actions they can take to help”. More on that shortly.
And while the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has inked a deal with Singapore to maintain mutual fuel supplies between the nations, the federal energy minister, Chris Bowen, has warned of the “long tail” of fuel supply disruptions even if the conflict in the Middle East were to end soon.
Grab yourself a coffee and let’s get stuck into it.
