As it happened: Three Virginia-class submarines bound for Australia in historic AUKUS agreement; Silicon Valley Bank collapse spooks investors

From floods to hot weather now, and Sydney is set to endure yet another heatwave which will send temperatures soaring across the state until midway through next week.

The event comes shortly after a major heatwave hit the city last week, causing more than 290 bush and grass fires across the state and bringing Sydney its hottest day in two years.

Almost 19,000 hectares of land were burnt in the state’s Central West during last week’s heatwave and hundreds of homes were put at risk.

A spokeswoman for the NSW Rural Fire Service said the organisation had firefighters “ready to go”.

Floodwaters stretched “as far as the eye can see” in Queensland’s northwest are delaying residents returning to their homes amid calls for the army to be deployed to kick-start the recovery.

Three-quarters of the homes in Burketown, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, have water over their floorboards while the Barkley Highway, the major road link between Queensland and the Northern Territory, is set to be shut for repairs for at least a week.

Food and other essentials are being flown into Burketown, Gregory, Doomadgee, Karumba, Normanton and outlying cattle stations by helicopter or shipped by barge.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk says the deluge is slowly receding, but some communities will remain isolated indefinitely.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers will have to find up to $31 billion in budget savings over the coming decade to offset the medium-term cost of the government’s planned fleet of nuclear-powered submarines while also making space for the surging expense of other programs.

The headline total cost of the 32-year plan, at between $268 billion and $368 billion, dwarfs the size of most spending programs or major infrastructure projects. The initial shock of this huge figure, however, abates once you consider the long period over which the submarines are to be built.

The government estimates that over the budget forward estimates – between 2023-24 and 2026-27 – the project will cost $9 billion. Of that, it says it has already offset $6 billion, as it is not proceeding with the abandoned French Attack-class submarine project.

The remaining $3 billion, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles confirmed on Tuesday, will come out of the Defence Department’s long-term investment program.

The Australian share market sank again today as the ripple effects of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse continued to be felt across global markets and the federal government sought to calm investor nerves.

The S&P/ASX 200 dropped by 1.4 per cent or 99.9 points to 7008.9 at the end of Tuesday’s session, narrowing losses of more than 2 per cent earlier in the day but setting a new 20-day low for the major bourse.

Every sector was in the red but tech stocks suffered the most, sliding 3.4 per cent, followed by energy players, down 2.8 per cent.

Returning to the AUKUS agreement, Defence Minister Richard Marles says Australia won’t need to deal with nuclear waste from its new submarines until the 2050s at earliest, but the country will require a purpose-built facility in a remote place that is geologically stable.

Speaking on the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing, Marles said it was a “significant undertaking” to deal with the submarines’ nuclear reactors at the end of their life and further details about that process would be announced by the end of the year.

“This will require a purpose-built facility in order to do that, so that people are clear. And we’re talking about the first reactor needing to be dealt with in the 2050s. So this is a long way into the future. But we need to be planning for that,” he said.

“What we’ve made clear today is, within the year, we will announce a process by which that place will be identified ... and what that facility would look like.“