Britain has approved the Jackdaw North Sea gas field, ending years of legal and political wrangling that had pitted the Labour government’s climate commitments against ‌its push to bolster energy security.

Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh said the project would start to supply gas to British homes and businesses from as early as the end of October, helping to counter soaring energy prices stoked by the Iran war.

At the same time, she said a new Energy Wealth Fund would be established by the government with ‌a Stg2 billion ($A3.8 billion) down payment ‌to reinvest oil and ⁠gas revenues into the climate transition.

Fahnbulleh said Jackdaw would increase domestic gas production ​by about six per cent at its peak and have a lifespan of up to 11 years, boosting energy security and protecting jobs.

“At a time when people are really struggling, it’s right that we look in a responsible way at maximising the existing energy reserves we have in Britain that could help,” Prime Minister Andy Burnham said on Wednesday.

Burnham, who took office in ⁠July, has been trying to strike the right balance between helping ‌voters ​with rising bills while also retaining the support of his own MPs who favour prioritising the environment.

By setting up the New ​Energy Wealth Fund, ‌he will hope to appease those who believe that approving new gas fields is at odds with Britain’s climate ​change commitments, and following Britain’s hottest summer on record.

“Our approach will ensure we can boost our energy security, back British workers, ring-fence future North Sea proceeds to speed up the green transition, hit our ambitious climate ​targets and – ​crucially – bring down bills,” Burnham said in ​a statement.

The Unite union welcomed the decision while the leader of the ‌Green Party described it as “climate vandalism”.

The government has not yet approved Rosebank, an oil field that like Jackdaw has also been in limbo for years after a 2025 court ruling temporarily blocked both developments.

In the past two years, US President Donald Trump has repeatedly urged Burnham to expand drilling in the North Sea to help lower prices, following the basin’s ​sharp decline in production since its peak in the late 1990s.

Jackdaw is run by Adura, a joint venture ​between energy giants Shell and Norway’s ⁠Equinor.

Shares of Australia’s largest listed data centre developer have plunged amid a community backlash that will cause issues for the development of its flagship site.

NextDC shares closed Wednesday at $5.35, down 41.7 per cent from Tuesday and their lowest level since 2018.

The Brisbane-based company said in a statement that it was downgrading its guidance and taking steps to reduce expenditures.

Because of community opposition, power operator Jemena in September suspended work to increase electricity grid supply to NextDC’s M3 data centre in the outskirts of Melbourne.

The work involved replacing electricity poles in parts of Yarraville and West Footscray with much larger poles capable of transmitting 66 kilovolts of power.

“Jemena has attributed the suspension to safety concerns and lack of access to work sites arising from community and stakeholder opposition to the works and to the local council, as the relevant road authority, not giving its consent while further community consultation takes place,” NextDC said in a statement.

The power company has told NextDC that it doesn’t intend to recommence work on the project before February.

As a result, NextDC has taken the affected M3 contracts out of its guidance for its 2026/27 earnings.

It had been counting on $140 million in both net revenue and underlying earnings from those contracts.

To conserve cash NextDC said it plans to reduce its capital expenditure for 2026/27 by $750 million, to between $4.5 billion and $5 billion. 

It is also exploring selling certain development sites it doesn’t need in the near term. 

The M3 site has operated since 2022 in West Footscray, about 10km from Melbourne’s CBD. 

It spans 41,000 metres of technical space, the size of eight downtown city blocks.

NextDC is also facing delays with the final stages of the expansion project at the site, which could delay its contracts for 2027/28.

Installation of new transformers at the Brooklyn Terminal Station will take longer than expected, and the Victorian government still hasn’t signed off on a planning permit that was lodged back in February.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Tom Beadle said while the delays to power supply and development approvals were out of NextDC’s control, it showed that community concerns around data centre developments presented a real risk to the timing of contracted capacity for data centre owners.

The potential sale of development sites not needed in the near term might impact the company’s longer-term ambitions, Mr Beadle added.

Founded in 2010 by tech entrepreneur Bevan Slattery, NextDC operates 17 data centres across Australia and one each in Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and Auckland.

Governments should think beyond their tenure and take greater pride in domestic innovation to lead the artificial intelligence data centre boom, an independent senator says.

The political system puts the powerful interests of a few ahead of Australian voters, ACT senator David Pocock said in an address to the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday.

“A system where, apparently, the only way to bring down inflation is for people to lose their jobs and suffer under rising interest rates,” he said.

“At the same time, over 1000 big companies including household names like Optus, Transurban and Adani pay no company tax … and worse still, some of the companies making billions extracting and selling our natural resources don’t contribute their fair share.”

Senator Pocock proposed a new five per cent tax on AI data centres’ local revenue from January 1, 2027.

“In the context of a forecast $200 billion investment and little to no corporate tax paid by foreign data centre companies in this country, it’s not much,” he said, accusing the government of being swept up by foreign tech companies.

The issue was a live debate governments needed to consider, Reserve Bank deputy governor Andrew Hauser told a conference in Sydney on Wednesday.

The Australian Academy of Science, which previously called for a 2.5 per cent levy on data centres’ local revenue, also welcomed Senator Pocock’s proposal.

Analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Office suggests the policy would bring in about $400 million within three years and scale up to $1 billion in the coming decade.

However, the budget office said the analysis was subject to a high degree of uncertainty as the future rollout of AI in Australia was largely speculative.

A parliamentary inquiry into AI has heard from Australian-based company Vault Cloud, which said it had been overlooked in the current technology boom.

“How is that possible?” Senator Pocock said.

“Here we are bending over backwards for foreign AI companies while ignoring homegrown options available to us.” 

He reiterated calls for greater transparency around lobbyists at Parliament House and a 25 per cent tax on gas exports to free up the budget for social programs.

Senator Pocock predicted a larger independent cross bench would become a permanent fixture to better represent the community and welcomed the prospect of future minority governments.

His address came just days after an alleged targeted attack on fellow independent MP Helen Haines reignited concern over tense political discourse.

“What has happened to Helen has made me more determined to stand here today and say what I have to say,” Senator Pocock said.

House prices could fall as far as 15 per cent and are unlikely to bottom out until the second half of 2027, economists predict.

Morgan Stanley’s forecasting team was among the first to predict the downturn could run to 10 per cent following curbs to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount in the May budget.

But the investment bank said the backdrop had since worsened.

Dwelling prices have already fallen 5.2 per cent since a peak in March, according to data provider Cotality, which means the slide could be only one-third complete.

The Reserve Bank’s four rate rises in 2026 have been more than expected and markets predict at least one more hike.

“As such, we now expect national house prices to fall 10-15 per cent from their peak, with a trough in the second half of 2027,” Morgan Stanley analysts said in a note to clients.

“This would be Australia’s largest nominal housing downturn in over 40 years. 

“Interest rates remain the key sensitivity of the depth of the downturn from here.”

Morgan Stanley was looking at five indicators that would signal the market was bottoming out.

Either markets would have to start pricing in rate cuts, government policy would have to ease, home sales would have to rise relative to listings, auction clearance rates would have to turn up or owning a home would have to become cheaper than renting.

“We do not expect these factors to turn before mid-2027, which is why we see a trough in the second half of 2027,” they said.

Morgan Stanley estimated budget tax changes would account for about five per cent of the expected 10-15 per cent peak-to-trough fall.

Once the downturn was finished, the recovery in prices was likely to be flatter than in previous cycles, because of falling migration levels and lower expectations for capital gains among investors, they said.

Lower house prices combined with rising construction costs are squeezing the feasibility of new residential developments.

The housing downturn would directly cause a slowdown in building activity and indirectly cause a slowdown in broader economic activity.

Because construction accounted for about nine per cent of employment, it could result in unemployment rising to 5.1 per cent, Morgan Stanley said.

It also threatened to further derail the nation’s housing supply ambitions.

Australia only completed 355,817 dwellings in the first two years of its goal of building 1.2 million new homes in five years, meaning the sector is about 124,000 homes behind schedule.

Construction costs increased 3.2 per cent in the 12 months ended September, up from 2.8 per cent in 2025/26, according to data released by Cotality on Wednesday.

It was the second consecutive quarter that construction costs grew by one per cent, following a 0.2 per cent rise in March quarter.

Elevated fuel prices were adding directly to the costs plumbers faced to get from site to site, and indirectly through delivery costs of building materials, Master Plumbers Australia and New Zealand chief executive Nathaniel Smith said.

“They’re getting hit twice,” Mr Smith told AAP.

Price movements across categories of building materials were mixed, except for plastics, which increased across the board.

Gyprock was another strong contributor to cost growth. 

But the overall pace of cost growth remains well below long-term historical averages.

While prices of PVC and HDPE pipes went up by as much as 40 per cent in March, prices had since come down as domestic manufacturers found alternative sources of plastic that did not need to travel through the Strait of Hormuz, Mr Smith said.

The Australian share market has crept higher, shaking off hawkish comments by a Reserve Bank official that gave fresh hints a Melbourne Cup day rate hike is a real possibility.

The benchmark S&P/ASX200 index finished Wednesday 14.4 points higher at 8831.3, a gain of 0.16 per cent, while the broader All Ordinaries rose 12.4 points, or 0.14 per cent, to 8956.6.

The ASX200 was down by 0.2 per cent around lunchtime, after RBA deputy governor Andrew Hauser told a Sydney investment conference the inflation outlook was “materially worse” than the central bank had forecast and businesses were beginning to view 3.5 per cent inflation as the “new normal”.

The Australian dollar climbed to a three-week high on Mr Hauser’s remarks, buying 70.13 US cents, from 69.73 US cents at 5pm on Tuesday.

Japan’s trade deficit reached 2.81 trillion yen ($A25 billion) for the first fiscal half, according to government data, as the war in Iran sent oil import prices soaring.

The finance ministry’s preliminary data showed that Japan’s exports for the April-September period in 2026 grew 18.4 per cent from the same period the previous year to 63.5 trillion yen, while imports soared to 66.3 trillion yen, up 20.4 per cent year-over-year.

Both were record highs for Japan. The soaring price of oil affects a wide range of sectors, including plastic goods and shipping costs.

Resource-poor Japan imports virtually all its oil and has relied on access to the Strait of Hormuz in the Middle East for its oil shipments.

That is now basically blocked, and Japan has had to pay more to get shipments from other routes.

Brent crude, the international standard, has soared from $US70 a barrel in February to about $US100 a barrel lately, after shooting up to above $US110 a barrel in recent months.

Analysts say prices are unlikely to ease soon.

For the month of September, Japan’s trade deficit totalled 536.6 billion yen, marking the fifth month of deficits, but down from 1.1 trillion yen in August.

Japan’s September imports grew 18.9 per cent from the previous year, while exports rose 16.7 per cent.

One sore point is the weakening yen, which drives up the cost of imports. The US dollar is lately trading at 150-yen levels.

The central bank, which kept borrowing costs at below or near zero for years to help keep a shaky economy going, has been gradually raising interest rates, in part to prop up the yen.

In September, the Bank of Japan raised the benchmark interest rate to 1.25 per cent from 1.0 per cent, a 31-year high.

Its monetary policy board meets again next week. The bank has an inflation target of about two per cent.

The Japanese government has repeatedly stressed it’s working closely with the Bank of Japan.

The government of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is promising a tax cut on food to one per cent from eight per cent to help lower-income families cope with soaring prices.

That bill is being debated in parliament.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating the online radicalisation of Australians, federal police have warned, as the country grapples with the worst attack on a politician in more than 30 years.

Australia is facing an uphill battle against a “tsunami” of youth crime on the nation’s streets, AFP’s Assistant Commissioner Sandra Booth told a government inquiry on Wednesday.

Less than a decade ago it took months or years to radicalise individuals, but AI and a rise in polarising social media accounts was making it much easier, she said.

“AFP is deeply concerned that AI is accelerating and lowering the skills required to actively manipulate and radicalise victims online, and then cause serious harm,” she said.

“The current scale and pace of radicalisation and manipulation did not exist at the time of other significant terrorism and radicalisation threats, such as the rise of Islamic State in the mid-2010s.”

Assistant Commissioner Booth warned “serious intervention” was needed into worsening youth mental health and vulnerable people burdened by “repeated victimisation” to protect Australia’s democracy.

The call came just two days after independent MP Helen Haines was mowed down in an alleged attack outside her Wangaratta electorate office. She remains in a critical condition and a 43-year-old man has been charged.

AFP had seen dozens of examples of harm or plotting from people much younger. A joint counter-terrorism team had investigated children as young as 13 for online radicalisation.

In one example, a boy of that age allegedly had plans in a notebook for how he would carry out a school shooting, Assistant Commissioner Booth said.

The national threat level sits at “probable”, but the security environment is becoming increasingly permissive of violence, ASIO deputy director general Claire McGuinness said.

“As a result, acts of political violence are becoming more likely,” she said.

“We can not simply respond to threats after they happen; we must anticipate them.”

As their parliamentary colleague Dr Haines fights for her life, the committee also heard from the eSafety Commissioner and the Home Affairs Department about what was driving radicalisation.

The government has already passed legislation banning under-16s from social media.

Labor has promised to further address social media harms by introducing a digital duty of care and mandating platforms let users “opt out” of the algorithm.

But the bill remains in legislative limbo.

The coalition has labelled it an attempt at political censorship, while the Greens are demanding tougher penalties for social media companies.

With his approval rating at record lows, President Donald Trump attempted to defy political gravity in a pep rally in North Carolina, urging voters to support his Senate candidate in a race some Republican groups have already given up on.

Trump has embarked on a campaign blitz ahead of the November 3 mid-term elections, ‌travelling around 50,000km since late September to boost Republican candidates.

His second stop in North Carolina in as many months was a signal of how much is at stake in this southern state.

Polls ‌show former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper with a commanding lead over Republican Michael Whatley, a former senior party official, in a Senate race that could help decide the balance of power in Washington.

The two are running to fill the seat of retiring Republican Thom Tillis, a one-time Trump ally, who split with the president over his landmark tax bill and defence policy.

Tillis told Politico that his fellow Republicans were headed toward “a train wreck” and a “whoop ass” in November.

But Trump, speaking in the city of Greenville on Tuesday night, predicted Whatley would prove the doubters wrong.

“I think you’re gonna see some ‌amazing results,” he told hundreds of ‌supporters who gathered on the ⁠grounds of the local airport.

“They never poll us right.”

Trump won North Carolina in each of ​his three presidential runs, but Democrats are banking on a breakthrough performance this year, with polls showing a clear majority of Americans dissatisfied with rising prices and the war in Iran.

The president’s approval rating has fallen to 31 per cent, since he ordered military strikes on Iran in February alongside US ally Israel, triggering a surge in gasoline and ​diesel ​prices.

Some 68 per cent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, the latest Reuters/Ipsos found, ​including 37 per cent of Republicans.

Towards the end of his speech, the ⁠president repeated his promise to give $US5,000 ($A7,125) to every US adult should Republicans maintain their hold on Congress.

“If we lose,” he said, “you get nothing”.

The government gagged recipients of a closed-shop $560 million funding pot that bankrolled Labor election promises, the opposition claims.

The Senate is probing the contentious Major and Local Community Infrastructure Program, including a $6 million grant to the Marrickville Golf Club in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s electorate.

The program funded dozens of projects, typically sports facilities, cycleways or park upgrades, on an invite-only basis.

Good governance groups, including the Centre for Public Integrity, say this happened without a proper merit-based assessment process.

Analysis shows the half-billion-dollar fund skewed payments toward Labor-held and marginal seats, with almost a third of Australian electorates missing out on any funding.

Three projects in Mr Albanese’s electorate of Grayndler were shoulder-tapped to apply and receive funding, including the golf club.

The Greens hoped to question the prime minister and Infrastructure Minister Catherine King about any role they might have had in selecting projects for funding, but both declined invitations.

Representatives of Marrickville Golf Club also won’t appear before the senators, with president Andrew Tighe telling AAP “the club isn’t appearing because we are too busy with other business”.

Opposition senators Bridget McKenzie and Paul Scarr said confidentiality clauses in the funding program guidelines acted as non-disclosure clauses preventing transparency on the scheme.

Centre for Public Integrity director Geoffrey Watson said if enforced, the non-disclosure clauses would be another inappropriate element of the scheme.

“If there are NDAs being requested and provided by people who are getting public money, then that is just appalling,” he said.

The government has defended the scheme as an above-board way to meet commitments made during the 2025 election campaign.

Constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey, appearing before a hearing on Wednesday, called the spending “grey corruption” which sits in between a proper process and full-blown misuse of taxpayer funding.

Professor Twomey said without a competitive process, projects appeared to be funded for “a party political purpose” and “not for the need or merit of the community”.

While ministers did not appear, bureaucrats will be grilled on Thursday, with the committee hoping to learn who decided which projects would receive funding and why.

Inner West Mayor Darcy Byrne, whose council sponsored the Marrickville Golf Club application, said the upgrade was worthy but he was not involved in its selection for federal funding.

“The club has been advocating for funding to renovate the clubhouse, which is essentially a fibro shack, for close to a decade,” he said.

“It’s, I think, the lowest cost and most accessible golf course in Australia.

“When people say Royal Marrickville, that’s a joke because it’s such a working-class institution.”

Mr Byrne could not say whether the club was on a council priority list for investment.

Mr Albanese has a history of advocacy for the par-60 course, including three times promising to fund an upgraded verandah if elected in 2013, 2016 and 2019.

While that funding didn’t transpire as Labor lost those elections, by the 2025 campaign, the pledge had morphed into a multimillion-dollar renovation of the clubhouse and grounds.

Mr Albanese defended the funding as necessary to stop sewage during flooding, however the golf course funding plans do not show this as part of the redevelopment.

The United Nations is launching a new initiative on the military uses of artificial intelligence, aimed at addressing some dire concerns about the threat the rapidly developing technology could pose to humanity.

The initiative by the UN Institute for Disarmament Research plans to launch on Thursday, establishing the first international forum for key players to try to tackle the issue.

Robin Geiss, head of the Geneva-based institute known as UNIDIR, warned at a UN press conference on Tuesday that “the margin for human judgment is increasingly narrow, including in the nuclear domain”.

It’s difficult to assess how close the world is to machines possibly acting outside of human control, Geiss said, and that uncertainty “is the issue we’re trying to resolve here”.

One problem is that AI is increasingly creeping into so many areas – early warning systems, information gathering and reconnaissance, to name a few – “and it’s quite difficult to say at which point we’re actually really losing control”, he said.

The proliferation of AI capabilities and its potential impact have led to “a growing realisation that we stand at a crossroad – that now is the time to act, including on military AI”.

Geiss said the UN recognises that global competition to lead on AI poses serious obstacles.

“But concerns about AI’s impact are already transcending geopolitical blocs, and they’re prompting action from major powers,” he said, pointing to a proposal last month for the US and China to set up an AI safety alert system for issues that could threaten national security.

On Thursday, UNIDIR will launch a new forum as part of the centre to bring together “actors from every relevant sector and all over the world” to work on AI in military uses.

The UN agency will hold consultations this week with defence technology companies, software developers, subcontractors, investors and others that will work alongside governments, civil society, academia and experts, Geiss said.

UNIDIR also is launching an initiative focused on the risks of AI misuse by armed groups, he said, warning that such actors are already using the technology to support operational planning, execution and logistics.

“The urgent issue of AI in the military domain will certainly no longer be allowed to linger in the shadows,” Geiss said.

“The time has come to pull our strengths and confront AI in the military head-on.”