As it happened: Ley avoids leadership challenge, formally dumps net zero target; Nvidia-backed Firmus raises $500m for AI data centres

Thanks for joining us, here’s a quick wrap of the day.

• Critics are questioning how the Liberals can promise to bring more coal and gas into the system while pledging to reduce emissions as the party tries to paper over climate policy divisions. After announcing yesterday the party was abandoning net zero, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has also tried to quell concerns the party is moving away from environmental protection, especially with younger voters. “If energy is unaffordable, everything is unaffordable,” she said today.

• Australians who commit a crime could have their working with children check revoked as soon as they’re found guilty by the end of 2026, as part of a set of reforms aimed at better protecting young people from predators.

  Federal Attorney-General Michelle Rowland used a meeting of her state and territory counterparts on Friday to announce $37 million in funding towards enhanced national monitoring of working with children checks.

• The prime minister said he supported Australia’s Border Force in protecting the country’s borders after footage exposed the force’s purchasing of old boats to give to illegal fishers and people smugglers who sail into Australian waters in unseaworthy craft.
• The Australian sharemarket has slumped after Wall Street sank to its second-worst day since April, amid questions over whether AI stocks are overvalued and whether cuts to interest rates will actually happen.

• The BBC has apologised to Donald Trump over edits it made to a 2021 speech that appeared to show him directly inciting his supporters to riot at the US Capitol, but says it will not pay compensation.

  The corporation also said it will not air the 2024 edition of its Panorama program again. Earlier, it emerged that another BBC program, Newsnight, showed a similar edit of Trump’s speech in 2022.

• ANZ Bank’s culture suffered from problems including complacency, a lack of curiosity and a reluctance to deliver bad news, a new analysis released by the bank says.
• In other bank news, Westpac has paid back more than $50 million to almost 47,000 staff who were underpaid by the banking giant over 11 years due to a series of failures in its systems.

With AAP

Thunderstorms have begun across Australia’s eastern edge, but much of the country will be at risk as the weekend continues.

The Bureau of Meteorology is reporting severe thunderstorms will be possible for much of south-eastern NSW, northern NSW and south-east Queensland and the red centre on Saturday.

While on Sunday, an area from Port Macquarie, NSW, to Brisbane will remain at risk of severe thunderstorms.

Sussan Ley has pre-empted a new conservative Liberal threat to the stability of her leadership by opening a debate on lower migration on the same day her party’s conservative flank triumphed in its anti-net zero push.

The opposition leader put migration on the agenda at the annual John Howard Lecture on Thursday night, just hours after settling her party’s internal debate over net zero by siding with the Nationals over her moderate colleagues, preserving her leadership for the immediate future.

Read more here.