WA announces $1.45m for tourism industry damaged by Tropical Cyclone Narelle

Tourism operators ravaged by Tropical Cyclone Narelle will receive one-off relief payments as part of a $1.45m tourism support package announced by the WA Labor government on Sunday, AAP reports.

Businesses across northwest Western Australia are still reeling after the cyclone left a trail of destruction when it struck days before the peak Easter tourism season.

The weather system caused flooding, cut off towns, destroyed homes and devastated marine wildlife across the World Heritage-listed Ningaloo Reef in WA’s Gascoyne region.

Locals have been working hard to get towns such as Exmouth, one of the hardest hit by Narelle, back up and running for tourists.

Payments of $10,000 and $20,000 will be available to tour operators, attractions and accommodation providers affected by access closures to Carnarvon, Exmouth, Ashburton and Upper Gascoyne.

The package will include 50% discounts on select tours and experiences to incentivise visitors to the region.

The WA tourism minister, Reece Whitby, said tourism was crucial to the local economy for communities across the Coral Coast and remained one of the region’s biggest employers.

We encourage all West Australians to support tourism businesses by visiting the region and helping this iconic part of the state get back to what it does best, which is offering an incredible tourism experience.

Queensland boy charged with weapons offences

Queensland police say they have charged a 12-year-old boy with weapons offences after people in Dalby, a rural town in the state’s west, reported hearing gunshots on Saturday night.

The boy, who will face the state’s children’s court on Monday, was allegedly found by police in possession of two firearms.

The offences do not attract Queensland’s controversial “adult time” penalties, which courts can impose for some charges.

Full report: New relief for households being considered

We brought you comments about the fuel crisis and government measures to address its impact in Australia from the federal transport and infrastructure minister, Catherine King, earlier this morning.

Here’s the full report on those comments from Guardian Australia political reporter Sarah Basford Canales:

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:

Our plan will get more cops on the beat, reopen closed police stations and restore community safety across Victoria.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.