Australia news as it happened: Greens elect new leader, recount in Bradfield, Goldstein, on the cards

Thanks for following our live news blog. That wraps up our coverage for today. We will have more for you in the next live news coverage.

Here’s a quick recap of the key stories:

• The Greens elected Queensland senator Larissa Waters as leader, with NSW senator Mehreen Faruqi as deputy.
• PM Anthony Albanese and Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto issued a joint statement after their bilateral meeting in Jakarta.
• Independent senator Lidia Thorpe said she has no intention of returning to the Greens, following her 2023 departure over disagreements with the party on the Voice to Parliament.
• Deputy PM Richard Marles backed the new ministry but dodged questions about his role in the factional reshuffle that ousted Ed Husic and Mark Dreyfus.
• In the Victorian seat of Goldstein, Liberal Tim Wilson’s lead has narrowed to 292 votes, with teal independent Zoe Daniel still in the race with 736 votes left to count.
• In the Sydney electorate of Bradfield, Liberal Gisele Kapterian leads teal challenger Nicolette Boele by just 43 votes, with 303 ballots left to count.
• Jailed Chinese-Australian writer Yang Hengjun wrote to PM Anthony Albanese from his Beijing cell, describing this as “the hardest and darkest chapter” of his life. Albanese praised the letter as a display of “profound courage and resilience”.
• Zoe McKenzie has won the seat of Flinders for the Liberals after a tight race with independent candidate Ben Smith.
• Unemployment held steady at 4.1 per cent in April, with 89,000 jobs added – far exceeding forecasts.

Thanks again for joining us. Good night!

There is a fundamental contradiction in the Trump administration’s energy policy. It wants a boom in US oil production, but it also wants lower prices. There’s conflict between those ambitions, writes Stephen Bartholomeusz.

That tension between the desire to pump more oil and also have lower prices shows up in the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) latest monthly assessment of the outlook for the oil market, issued on Wednesday.

It is projecting an increase of 800,000 barrels a day in non-OPEC+ supply for both this year and next, reducing its forecasts of a month ago by 100,000 barrels a day for each year. US production is expected to rise by 130,000 barrels a day this year – about 100,000 barrels less than OPEC was forecasting last month – but by only 44,000 barrels a day in 2026.

Non-OPEC+ investment on exploration and production is expected to fall by 5 per cent this year and 2 per cent next year, with US investment declining 9 per cent this year and another 7 per cent in 2026.

Those projections suggest that the boom the Trump administration envisages in oil production – “drill, baby, drill” – isn’t going to eventuate. The increase in output this year may be the tail end of the boom that actually occurred under the Biden administration, when drilling and production in the US reached record levels.

Read more of Stephen Bartholomeusz’s opinion piece here.

Independent senator Lidia Thorpe has shut down any rumours of her making a return to the Greens after she quit the party in 2023 over disagreements on the Voice to parliament.

“Even if my daughter became the leader of the Greens, I would not join the Greens. Absolutely not,” she told the ABC.

“I left the Greens for very, very, good reasons and I have no intention on returning. Good luck to them in all honesty.

“I love being an independent. I get to decide what is best based on the Blak Sovereign Movement guiding me, and sometimes that doesn’t sit well with the Greens.”

The glass-cliff phenomenon has been brought up again. This time it’s Liberal MP Zoe McKenzie who is asked whether Sussan Ley has been set up to fail after being elected as the Liberal Party’s first female leader following the party’s heavy election defeat.

“The Liberal Party has been around for 81 years, and we have never had a female leader. I am very proud to be part of that party room now that is led by a woman,” she said.

“Sussan has all the accomplishments needed. She’s not there because of quotas or anything else. She’s there because of … talent.”

McKenzie is asked about the challenge her party faces now to attract and retain women.

“Look, I think all options need to be on the table. I’ve always been nervous about quotas only because I couldn’t bear to be somebody about whom it was said, ‘she only got there because of a quota’,” she said.

“That’s the terrible potential consequence of implementing them in a cack-handed way, so we must look at how we bring more women into the party.”

New Greens leader Larissa Waters said her party intended to work constructively with the re-elected Albanese government but rejected that she was making a veiled criticism of former leader Adam Bandt.

Speaking moments after a party room meeting in Melbourne, the Queensland senator said her team was elected to “get shit done, and that’s what we intend to do”.

“It’s definitely not a reflection of anything that’s come before. It’s, I think, a reflection of what people want from their parliamentarians. They’re sick of the arguments, they’re sick of the navel-gazing,” Waters said.

She said she had nothing but positive things to say about Bandt, but acknowledged her leadership came with a new approach.

“I’m a different person to Adam, I’ll take a different approach.

“I lead a really strong team, and we are committed to delivering ... We will be firm but constructive under this government and any future government.”