Australia news LIVE: Energy chief says crisis boosts case for renewables; Russia sanctions 121 Australians; National cabinet meets

We’ve got some more detail about what state and territory leaders discussed this morning at national cabinet with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Dialogue ranged from skills shortages, the backlog in visa processing, the economic position and potential microeconomic and productivity reforms, national security, the energy crisis, and disaster recovery funding arrangements.

The state and territory leaders supported the federal government’s commitment to a referendum to enshrine the Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the constitution as a matter of priority.

National cabinet will meet again before the federal budget is handed down in late October.

“I’ve known most of these people for quite a while,” Albanese said.

“Everyone came to this meeting with a great spirit of cooperation, with a determination to put the national interest first while representing appropriately their state and territory interests.”

On the skills shortage, Albanese says he has directed the Department of Home Affairs to move people from other duties into clearing the visa backlog.

He says he foreshadowed to departmental heads in the week before the election that’s what he would be asking for, in recognition of the urgent need to act.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is speaking after his first national cabinet meeting with state and territory leaders in Canberra.

The group agreed to extend a national partnership on health funding until the end of the year, which will cost about $760 million.

But state leaders agreed to look at ways to improve their health systems, specifically links between GPs and hospitals, and ways to get aged care residents and NDIS participants out of hospital beds into more appropriate settings. To this end, the heads of the leaders’ departments will work together to come up with options before the next meeting.

“What that is about isn’t necessarily additional dollars,” Albanese said.

“What it’s about is a recognition that our hospital system at the moment has people who should be being looked after by their local GP but GPs are just unavailable.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is speaking to the media following the meeting of national cabinet this morning.

You can watch the press conference live below.

The Australian sharemarket has fallen by 2.3 per cent in early trade after continued concerns about the global economy sparked steep declines on Wall Street overnight.

The ASX 200 sits at 6442 points as of 10.15am AEST, with the tech sector suffering the biggest losses, falling by 3.8 per cent. The big miners are also falling, with BHP dropping by more than 2 per cent and Rio Tinto recording a 3.5 per cent fall.

The local sharemarket is now set for its sixth consecutive day of losses. It fell by 0.2 per cent on Thursday.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has arrived on Friday at his first-ever national cabinet meeting alongside state and territory leaders.

As we mentioned earlier, the split of hospital funding will be part of the discussion today, as well as the cost of living crisis and rising electricity and gas bills.

In May, all states and territories wrote to the then-federal Health Minister Greg Hunt seeking a 50/50 split in hospital funding.

Currently, each year the Commonwealth pays what it paid the previous year plus 45 per cent of the growth in state and territory hospital costs, capped at 6.5 per cent growth. States and territory also want to see the cap abolished, a change that would cost the states a combined $5 billion and the Commonwealth an extra $20.5 billion.

Speaking to reporters ahead of the meeting on Friday Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said the desired change was “not for its own sake, but for patients’ sake”.

“It’s about putting patients first, and there’s nothing more important than that,” he said.

Federal Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic says a domestic gas reserve and windfall profits tax should be considered as means to address the ongoing gas crisis.

Husic told RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas he was “absolutely agitated” with the gas companies, and he said the government needed to send a signal the businesses could no longer place the burden of the crisis on the public and the national economy.

“I’ve got a great deal of sympathy for the view in the broader public that these are Australian resources that should be made available for use by households,” he said.

“If we’re shipping out of some of our ports seven times the level of supply that is used by the Australian market in one year, it’s not an issue of supply here. This is not an issue that we don’t have the gas. It’s the supply that is available locally at a price that works for industry.”

Husic said the situation was putting pressure on businesses and manufacturers, who struggled to lock in contracts for longer than two to three years.

“If interest rates were falling and banks were holding on to that and not passing on the interest rate cut to the wider community, one of the arguments we’d be putting is that that’s having an impact on the commercial environment for a lot of other businesses. And we’d be putting pressure on the banks to play ball,” he said.

“I think we’re in similar sort of territory here with gas companies, and I think they do need to recognise the social licence that exists”

Husic said it was imperative that the government reformed the ‘gas trigger’ system to react to price issues as well as supply shortages. He advocated for greater involvement of states and territories in solving the crisis.

He said gas would continue to play an important role in sustaining Australia’s industry in the medium term since technology wasn’t advancing fast enough to replace fossil fuel use with alternative forms of energy such as hydrogen in the short term.

“Being able to find other sources of gas in the interim that that’s going to be important … while still conscious that we do want to get to net zero,” he said.

More than eight million Australians will have access to 10 days of paid family and domestic violence leave by the end of the year as the government pledges to make workplace equality reforms a priority.

Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke said legislating the paid leave as a universal right would be his first parliamentary act, adding he wouldn’t delay implementing all recommendations from the landmark Respect@Work report, including creating a positive duty to prevent workplace sexual harassment.

He made clear mandating paid domestic violence leave under the national employment standards was urgent. That would cover about 8.5 million Australians. The Fair Work Commission had already made a similar, preliminary decision granting the right to 2.7 million workers on industry awards.

“Any piece of legislation changes people’s lives. This legislation changes people’s safety immediately ... as soon as I can get it through, I intend to, and so I’m hoping to get it drafted in time for the first couple of [parliamentary sitting] weeks.”

In a wide-ranging interview, Burke said his two priorities in the portfolio would be to bolster Australians’ job security and boost wages, a day after the industrial umpire vindicated Labor’s stance towards the low-paid by increasing the minimum wage above the rate of inflation.

Hundreds of lives could be saved and tens of thousands of COVID-19 infections avoided if more people wore masks indoors and took other measures to reduce the spread of the virus.

This is the view of Professor Margaret Hellard, of the Burnet Institute, who led a team of disease modellers whose work influenced decisions made by the Victorian and NSW governments last year.

She is urging the public not to give up on trying to limit transmission of the disease, arguing that many COVID-19 deaths could be avoided by delaying some infections this year.

“I often think the biggest trick we do … is to make people think that there is nothing that they can do; that they’ve got no agency, they’ve got no power,” Hellard said.

“But we all do have some ability to change things still.”

A recent research piece by Hellard and her colleagues at the Burnet, including director Brendan Crabb, forecast that reducing spread by 20 per cent could save up to 2000 lives nationally, or more than 500 in Victoria, where more than a million infections could also be avoided.