Australia news LIVE: Japan earthquake kills three, destroys buildings on island of Kyushu; AI job losses poised to upend Labor’s electoral map

Hello and welcome to our national news blog. It’s Wednesday, July 29. Here’s what is making headlines.

• A 7.1-magnitude earthquake has struck Japan’s southwestern island of Kyushu, about 900 kilometres from central Tokyo, killing at least three people, injuring dozens and damaging buildings.

• Ben Carroll will begin his first full day as Victorian premier today after Jacinta Allan announced her resignation. Follow along on our live blog as Carroll names his cabinet and outlines the terms of reference for a royal commission into the construction industry – his first pledge as leader.
• The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption enters its third day. The commission is investigating claims of secret donations allegedly flowing to right-wing Liberal Party activists.
• Australia has continued to dominate at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Seventeen-year-old Sienna Toohey won silver in the 50m women’s breaststroke final earlier this morning, while Lachlan Kennedy has become Australia’s fastest ever man after he finished the 100m final in 9.85 seconds. You can read all the updates on our live blog here.

Shadow treasurer Tim Wilson has batted off suggestions of a coalition alliance between the Liberal Party and One Nation, despite his party’s apparent internal division over the matter.

“My focus is making sure that we have a majority Liberal-led government,” he told Sky News this morning.

“Every time we have this speculation, it’s prejudging arrogantly the will of the Australian people and what they are going to do after the poll. The focus should be on how we maximise the number of Liberal MPs elected, so we do not need to govern with anybody else.”

He said recent news of Jacinta Allan’s resignation demonstrated “the problems of what happens when you have the corrupt Labor model.”

Former federal Labor leader Bill Shorten has backed the installation of Right faction colleague Ben Carroll as Victorian premier instead of Jacinta Allan.

“As much as people don’t want to hear this in Labor, I think they were facing extinction-level results worse than 1992 when Jeff Kennett wiped out Labor then,” Shorten told the ABC’s 7.30 last night.

He said Carroll could move Labor’s primary vote from the low-20s to the mid-30s, and warned the rise of One Nation showed some Victorians were tired of the major parties.

“In particular, the ghost of Dan Andrews politically looms pretty large,” Shorten said.

A 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit Japan’s southern Kumamoto Prefecture on Tuesday, killing at least three people and damaging buildings including a shopping mall where many people were feared trapped after an explosion.

Local authorities said early on Wednesday that rescuers working at the scene overnight had taken eight people out of the Aeon Mall shopping centre, where the blast occurred following the quake.

Of those eight, two women in their 20s were confirmed dead, while one other person was reported to be in cardiopulmonary arrest. The five others were injured, but officials said their condition was not life-threatening.

Emergency fire rescue teams, police and the military were working together at the scene overnight, concentrating search operations on areas of the building where calls for help had been received.

A short time ago, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched multiple ballistic missiles towards US forces based in the Middle East, the US military says.

“All Iranian missiles were successfully intercepted,” US Central Command said, describing it as an “attempted surprise attack”.

“US forces remain vigilant and at a high state of readiness.”

It marks a flare-up in activity after a few days of relative calm in the region, with the US suspending nightly strikes.

Employment Minister Amanda Rishworth says reports of the images of teachers and students being exploited through sexualised AI apps are “incredibly concerning,” as schools and childcare centres move to restrict school photos.

The government is taking action to ban such apps, Rishworth told Sunrise this morning, with the eSafety Commissioner also providing advice.

“Ultimately, the responsibility needs to be on these companies,” she said, pointing to her government’s digital duty of care legislation which puts the onus on tech companies to prevent online harm.

“There needs to be a big step-up in responsibility of these technology companies to do the right thing,” Rishworth said. “There will be fines if they don’t comply.”

“Placing this responsibility on parents and schools is a very difficult one,” she said, but acknowledged that schools and childcare centres will also have to take steps.

“It really shows the very challenging times we’re in when it comes to abuse online.”

Australian-made submarine grade steel will be used in the build of US Navy Virginia-class submarines for the first time, a move defence industry minister Pat Conroy said demonstrates the growing contribution of Australian industry to AUKUS security alliance.

“The message is, AUKUS is full steam ahead,” he told the Today show this morning. “Aussie workers producing Aussie steel to go into US submarines, so this is another milestone for AUKUS.”

He said he was “very confident” that the US will provide Australia with at least three of these Virginia-class submarines in the early 2030s. “They’ve hit every milestone. They’ve passed legislation through their Congress, putting in place that process” which would authorise the transfers.

Conroy said the “legislation passed with an 80 per cent yes vote. Anything that gets an 80 per cent yes vote in the US Congress, as divided as it is, is a really powerful symbol.”

“Obviously, the president of the day will make the final decision, but I’m very confident that will occur because it’s not just in our national interest; it’s in the national interest of the United States.”

The rogue agent that escaped from OpenAI and went on a days-long hacking spree at the AI firm Hugging Face also compromised a customer at a second tech company - New York-based Modal Labs - according to a Modal executive and two other sources familiar with the matter.

According to a timeline published by Hugging Face on Tuesday (US time), the rogue agent broke into a sandbox, or an isolating testing environment, “hosted on a third-party provider’s infrastructure” before turning it into a launchpad for the broader hack.

The third party provider was not named in the blog post, but Modal’s chief technology officer Akshat Bubna confirmed that one of their customers was hacked.

“We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution,” Bubna said in a statement. “This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform or isolation were not compromised in anyway.”

OpenAI did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Reuters

Coalition frontbencher Bridget McKenzie has accused the government of failing to have an economic plan to tackle inflation, after Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock warned more rate hikes could be on the way.

“You’re not cutting spending. You’re taxing Australians, and small businesses are going under. So you don’t have an economic plan to address this, and that’s leaving it to the Reserve Bank to use a very blunt instrument for an interest rate rise,” McKenzie told Employment Minister Amanda Rishworth on Sunrise.

“We would be cutting wasteful spending, getting tax changes to make sure Australians can keep more of what they want,” McKenzie said.

Rishworth asked whether that meant cuts to Medicare.

A Qantas plane completed a marathon 24 hour flight from Melbourne to France yesterday, marking a key step in the airline’s Project Sunrise, which aims to launch the world’s longest commercial passenger services and reshape long-haul travel by eliminating stopovers between Australia and Europe.

The test triggered a surge in online tracking: Flightradar24 said the trip was the second-most-tracked flight ever on its channels – behind only a 2024 flight carrying Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin – with more than 3.6 million people following the plane’s progress northwards via Canada.

The specially adapted A350-1000ULR airliner is due to debut with Qantas’s nonstop Sydney-London route from 2027. Airbus has been conducting a two-month test campaign on the aircraft since June.

Airbus said the aircraft, which boasts a specially designed extra fuel tank, remained in the air for 24 hours and 24 minutes, covering 23,075 km without stopping, before landing at the plane’s factory in Toulouse, France.

With Reuters.

Artificial intelligence disruption to white-collar jobs in the cities risks fuelling the same political upheaval as the decline of manufacturing and coal that contributed to One Nation’s rise.

New research from the University of Sydney warns that after waves of economic change in industrial and regional communities, known particularly in the US as the “rust belt”, a “wired belt” is emerging in well-heeled parts of Australia.

Report authors professor Clinton Free and former adviser to Kevin Rudd, Lachlan Harris, find the Albanese government holds nearly 80 per cent of the 60 seats most exposed to AI, showing that Labor’s modern, highly educated voting coalition faces new-found economic uncertainty.

A fortnight after Albanese vowed to protect jobs from the technological transformation, Free and Harris say this “wired belt” enjoyed decades of economic growth but residents now “face a form of economic upheaval [they] have not experienced for decades, and for which they possess neither a familiar political language nor an established political response”.