Tesla chair Robyn Denholm has denied a Wall Street Journal report that board members had contacted executive search firms to find a new replacement for CEO Elon Musk.

The Journal had reported on Wednesday that Tesla’s board members had reached out about a month ago to several executive search firms to find the company’s new CEO, citing people familiar with the discussions.

Denholm said on X the report was “absolutely false” and said the EV maker’s board is “highly confident” in Musk’s ability to “continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead”.

Musk also said on X the report was a “deliberately false article”.

Musk said last week he would cut back significantly on the time he devotes to the Trump administration and spend more time running Tesla.

Musk’s work at his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he has led efforts to cut federal jobs, has been one of the most controversial aspects of the Trump presidency, and his time away from Tesla has been an additional concern for investors as sales of its ageing EV line-up have been on the decline.

His embrace of far-right politics in Europe has also led to protests against Musk and the company as well as vandalism at its showrooms and charging stations across the US and Europe.

The board members met Musk and asked him to acknowledge publicly that he would spend more time at Tesla, the WSJ report said.

But it was unclear if Musk – also a member of the board – was aware of succession planning, or if his pledge to spend more time at Tesla has affected the efforts, the report added.

Some Tesla directors, including co-founder JB Straubel, have been meeting with major investors to reassure them the company is in good hands, the WSJ said.

Activist investors have long accused Tesla’s board of lacking independence and failing to rein in Musk.

Denholm, hand-picked by Musk whose controversial pay package she defended, has also drawn criticism for her own pay package along with questions about whether that compromised her oversight of Tesla and Musk.

Denholm has dismissed the allegations and a spokesperson has said her pay was fair.

In March, Denholm sold $US33.7 million in the electric vehicle maker’s stock, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The eight-person Tesla board, which also includes Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk and James Murdoch, has been looking to add an independent director, the report said.

A shortage of medications used to treat ADHD could leave more than one million Australians paying more for substitutes.

The nation’s health regulator says certain drugs used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are in short supply, and the shortage could last until the end of 2025.

“We understand it can be frustrating when you are unable to get your preferred brand of a medicine, but using other brands, including overseas-registered products, may at times be unavoidable during these shortages,” the Therapeutic Goods Administration said.

“Please note that certain medicines a pharmacist can substitute may cost you more, and in some cases you may require a new prescription.”

Several brands, including Janssen-Cilag and Teva Pharma’s Concerta and Teva-XR products and Novartis and AFT Pharmaceuticals’ Ritalin LA and Rubifen LA products were impacted, the TGA said.

They affect different doses across the brands with some being low in stock since September.

The shortages of Concerta and Ritalin LA products are put down to manufacturing issues, while the shortage of Teva-XR and Rubifen LA products is due to increased demand caused by the unavailability of other methylphenidate products.

The health regulator has urged patients and caregivers to speak to their pharmacist about supply and their prescribers early to develop a treatment plan.

To reduce the impact of shortages, it has approved a supply of overseas-registered Concerta tablets.

The Australasian ADHD Professionals Association said Australia was experiencing a “perfect storm” as it faces a shortfall in medication.

“Australia is facing an escalating shortage of ADHD medications, and while emergency alternatives like a Swiss-registered Concerta are technically available … the lack of PBS listing and long import delays make them inaccessible for most families,” it said.

The association said the active ingredient used in the drugs was produced in several countries, including China, India and the United States.

In the US, where the pharmaceutical companies make the products, the Drug Enforcement Administration imposes strict annual production quotas to prevent abuse.

“Even if demand increases legitimately or shortages loom, more (of the active ingredient) cannot be produced without a green light from the (regulator),” the association said.

ADHD is a developmental disorder that begins in early childhood and affects people’s ability to control thoughts, words, actions and emotions.

More than one million Australians live with the condition, amounting to one in every 20 people.

A crackdown on “wasteful” spending will fast-track the budget’s return to surplus if the coalition wins the election, the shadow treasurer says.

After days of speculation, the opposition on Thursday unveiled policy costings headlined by a budget bottom line improvement of $14 billion over the next four years.

Shadow treasurer Angus Taylor said the coalition would return the budget to surplus faster than Labor by paring back spending.

“This is the biggest improvement in the budget position since the current costing conventions were put in place almost 15 years ago,” he told reporters in Sydney.

“We’ve laid out a $40 billion improvement in the debt position over (the next four years).”

Labor’s costings, released on Tuesday, showed a $7 billion budget improvement, delivered through a slash in spending on consultants and labour hire as well as increasing international student visa fees.

The coalition costings said the budget deficit would increase by $5.6 billion in the 2025/26 financial year and be $2.3 billion worse off the following year, compared to pre-election forecasts.

However, the next two financial years would see improvements of $9.5 billion and $2.2 billion.

Spending cuts would come from a hiring freeze and natural attrition of 41,000 Canberra-based federal public servants, opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume said.

The plan would bring the public service “back to a sustainable level, while protecting front-line services delivery and national security positions”.

“Good economic management is about preparing for the future, not just patching up the present,” she said.

The costings also include plans to cut at least two of the Labor government’s off-budget investment funds: the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, set up to build 30,000 new homes, and the $20 billion Rewiring the Nation Fund.

Other cuts include scrapping student debt relief worth $16 billion, and unwinding Labor’s decision to lower tax concessions for superannuation accounts with balances higher than $3 million.

The coalition came under fire from the government for releasing its costings late in the campaign – however, it was released at the same point in the election as Labor did when it was in opposition at the 2022 poll.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said the costings showed the coalition had what it takes to manage the books.

“Australians know from their own experiences the economy will always be better managed under a Liberal-National government,” Mr Dutton told reporters in Brisbane.

“That lower debt means interest rates come down.”

The opposition’s controversial plan to build seven nuclear reactors would set the budget back by $118 billion through to 2050.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said on Thursday the costings from the opposition should not be taken seriously.

Decorated veteran Ben Roberts-Smith’s latest battle to clear his name hinges on a secretly recorded call involving an award-winning journalist.

Nick McKenzie wrote a series of reports for Nine newspapers in 2018 describing the former soldier as a war criminal, an allegation a judge later found was true on the balance of probabilities.

Roberts-Smith is pushing to reopen his appeal against the judge’s finding, which he said involved a miscarriage of justice because McKenzie unlawfully obtained details about the former soldier’s legal strategy.

In a taped call, the journalist tells Roberts-Smith’s ex-lover that the soldier’s ex-wife and her friend had been “actively briefing us on his legal strategy”.

“I shouldn’t tell you,” the journalist said.

“I’ve just breached my f***ing ethics in doing that, like this has put me in a s*** position now.”

The towering Roberts-Smith faced the Federal Court on Thursday alongside his parents, who have previously called McKenzie’s phone call “concerning”.

But a lawyer representing Nine and McKenzie argued the call should not be admitted to evidence because the person who sent the recording to Roberts-Smith’s lawyers may have broken the law.

The sender was aiming to inflict “maximum harm” on his clients when they sent the email titled “Secret McKenzie recording” with the 85-second audio file, Robert Yezerski SC said.

The audio had been captured without McKenzie’s knowledge and only showed a portion of a much longer conversation, the Nine lawyer noted. 

“We know at least the beginning and end of the conversation has been excised from the recording,” he said. 

“There is real reason to treat (the recording) with great caution.”

The Victoria Cross recipient claims his ex-wife, Emma Roberts, accessed his email accounts and leaked sensitive information to McKenzie, who used it to shape his approach to the defamation suit.

The former soldier’s lawyer argued the recording contained a serious admission by McKenzie and should be admitted to evidence.

There was no evidence about who had sent the email, which came from an encrypted account, the court was told.

The secret call came to light after the ex-elite soldier’s 10-day appeal was heard in early 2024 but should be considered before the judges deliver their decision, his lawyers maintain. 

If his appeal is unsuccessful, only the High Court could overturn the war criminal finding.

Roberts-Smith rose to prominence in 2011 after he was awarded Australia’s highest military honour, the Victoria Cross, for single-handedly taking out machine-gun posts to protect pinned-down colleagues in Afghanistan.

His reputation, however, was tarnished in 2018 after McKenzie’s explosive reports alleging the special forces veteran was complicit in the murder of four unarmed men during his deployment in Afghanistan.

In June 2023, Justice Anthony Besanko found the reports had been proven on the balance of probabilities – a lower standard than in a criminal proceeding. 

Instagram and Facebook parent Meta Platforms has posted better-than-expected results for the first quarter thanks to strong advertising revenue – boosted by artificial intelligence tools – on its social media platforms.

Meta’s stock climbed in extended trading on Wednesday after the results came out.

It was a “a good quarter for Meta, but it was before the economic turmoil really kicked in and before the seesaw of the tariffs began”, Sonata Insights chief analyst Debra Aho Williamson said.

“It was also before we started to see pullbacks in ad spending from China-based advertisers like Temu and Shein.”

Meta should be able to withstand any revenue shortfall from advertisers from China if it could continue to improve its AI-driven advertising tools, she said.

The company earned $US16.64 billion ($A25.95 billion), or $US6.43 a share, in the January-March period, up 35 per cent from $US12.37 billion, or $US4.71 a share, in the same period a year earlier.

Revenue rose 16 per cent to $42.31 billion from $US36.46 billion a year earlier.

Analysts, on average, were expecting earnings of $5.23 per share on revenue of $41.34 billion, according to a poll by FactSet.

For the current quarter, Meta forecast revenue between $US42.5 billion to $US45.5 billion.

Analysts are expecting $US43.84 billion.

The Menlo Park, California-based company also raised its capital expenditures estimate for 2025 to $US64 billion to $US72 billion, up from its prior outlook of $US60 billion to $US65 billion.

Meta said the new guidance “reflects additional data centre investments to support our artificial intelligence efforts as well as an increase in the expected cost of infrastructure hardware”.

“We’ve had a strong start to an important year, our community continues to grow and our business is performing very well,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

“We’re making good progress on AI glasses and Meta AI, which now has almost one billion monthly actives.”

He said in a conference call with analysts that the company was in a good position to navigate the ongoing economic “uncertainty”.

Meta said more than 3.4 billion people, on average, used at least one of its apps in March, up six per cent from a year earlier.

On Tuesday, Meta released a standalone AI app, called Meta AI, that includes a “discover” feed that lets users see how others are interacting with AI.

Meta shares jumped $US24.20, or 4.4 per cent, to $US573.20 in after-hours trading.

The stock is down about eight per cent year-to-date.

The coalition could be on track for a historic electoral wipeout as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton denies he’s resorted to sandbagging his own seat.

A dire YouGov analysis released two days before Saturday’s vote predicted the worst coalition result in nearly 80 years and an expanded Labor majority.

It came on the same day as Mr Dutton walked back another policy, this time on curriculums, while the prime minister was treated to a rockstar reception at a public school.

The opposition leader started Thursday in his home electorate of Dickson, where he’s under siege from Labor and a teal independent challenger.

Labor believes the Queensland seat, the most marginal in the state, is winnable despite being held by the Liberals for 24 years.

Mr Dutton said he wasn’t in his electorate because he was worried, but rather because of an annual Red Shield Appeal breakfast he always attended.

People used to call Dickson “the one-term curse” with members routinely having their political careers cut short, but he’d worked hard to represent his community, he added.

While the opposition leader is tipped to keep his seat in the latest tranche of polling, YouGov predicted the coalition would suffer its worst lower-house seat result since 1946 and Labor to govern with an expanded majority.

Its modelling points to an 84-seat win for the government, well above the 76 needed for an outright majority.

Under this scenario, the coalition will drop to 47 seats: a net loss of 11.

The prime minister said he didn’t put his faith in the polling, learning his lesson from Labor’s 2019 shock defeat to the Scott Morrison-led coalition in defiance of predictions.

“We take nothing for granted,” he told reporters in Perth on Thursday.

“No prime minister has been re-elected in this country having served a full term since 2004. We have a mountain to climb.”

But there was one school of thought Mr Albanese was happy to harp on at Winthrop Primary in the Perth-based electorate of Tangney, which Labor took from the coalition in 2022.

He seized on another coalition backtrack after Mr Dutton abandoned a pledge to change the school curriculum due to children being “indoctrinated”. 

“The current school curriculum was put in place by the former (coalition) government, not us, but they looked for culture wars in every corner that they can find one, every dark corner,” Mr Albanese said.

“Having said they would rail against the curriculum, that it wasn’t appropriate, now they are saying they won’t touch the curriculum.”

Mr Dutton previously mentioned the Commonwealth being able to condition school funding when asked about influencing state governments over what was being taught.

“We don’t have any proposals,” he said on Thursday when asked about changing the curriculum.

“What we’ll do is we’ll work with parents to reflect what they want to see in the education system.”

Opposition government efficiency spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price seemingly contradicted his stance just hours later.

“With the conversations I have had with our shadow cabinet minister, Sarah Henderson, there is a plan to ensure that schools are no longer ideologically indoctrinating children,” she said. 

“Peter Dutton is absolutely and utterly all about ensuring our children in this country receive an education and aren’t indoctrinated.”

It’s the latest policy ambiguity in a coalition campaign marred by walk-backs, including ditching planned changes to work-from-home arrangements for the public service.

Labor leads the coalition 52.9 per cent to 47.1 per cent on a two-party preferred basis, YouGov said.

The two-party vote is roughly in line with other polling, but the coalition’s primary vote has tracked as high as 35 per cent, according to the Resolve Political Monitor published in Nine newspapers.

About one-in-four eligible Australians have already taken advantage of early voting ahead of the election.

Tesla board members contacted several executive search firms to find a successor to CEO Elon Musk, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar with the discussions.

The status of the board’s push about a month ago, which, according to the report, was sparked by Musk’s heavy involvement with the Trump administration, could not be determined, WSJ said.

Musk last week said he would cut back significantly on the time he devoted to the Trump administration and spend more time running Tesla.

Musk’s work at his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he has led efforts to cut federal jobs, has been one of the most controversial aspects of the Trump presidency, and his time away from Tesla has been an additional concern for investors as sales of its aging EV lineup have been on the decline.

His embrace of far-right politics in Europe has also led to protests against Musk and the company as well as vandalism at its showrooms and charging stations across the U.S. and Europe.

The board members met Musk and asked him to acknowledge publicly that he would spend more time at Tesla, the report said.

But it was unclear if Musk – also a member of the board – was aware of succession planning, or if his pledge to spend more time at Tesla has affected the efforts, the report added.

Tesla and Musk did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Tesla is at a crucial juncture.

Amid rising competition globally, Musk has pivoted from his promise of making a new affordable EV platform to rolling out driverless taxis and humanoid robots, highlighting Tesla’s future as an AI and robotics company instead of an automaker.

Much of the company’s valuation is based on that vision, and some investors believe Trump will help further it. 

Last week, federal regulators eased rules for testing autonomous vehicles, boosting Tesla’s stock.

Some Tesla directors, including co-founder JB Straubel, had been meeting major investors to reassure them the company was in good hands, the WSJ said.

Activist investors have long accused Tesla’s board of lacking independence and failing to rein in Musk.

The election tea leaves for Peter Dutton are looking more wilted by the day as a new poll suggests his campaign will end with the worst coalition result in 80 years.

The opposition leader started Thursday in his home electorate of Dickson, where he’s under siege.

Labor believes the Queensland seat, which is the most marginal seat in the state, is winnable despite being held by the Liberals for 24 years.

Mr Dutton said he wasn’t in his electorate on Thursday because he was worried, but rather because he always attends a Red Shield Appeal breakfast no matter the date, which happens to fall close to election day on Saturday.

The opposition leader dodged questions about a campaign littered with missteps and controversies, saying the election was about the next three years.

“I have no doubt that there are a lot of Australians who are saying, ‘you know what, I haven’t voted Liberal before but I’m going to vote Liberal at this election because I’ve just had enough of not being able to afford to pay my bills’,” he said.

But if YouGov’s final poll before Saturday’s election is correct, this is the exact opposite of how Australians will vote, with the coalition set to suffer its worst lower house seat loss since 1946 and Labor expected to expand its majority.

YouGov’s modelling points to an 84-seat win for the government, out of 150 lower house seats, to return Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to The Lodge for a second term. The winning party needs 76 seats for a majority.

Under this scenario, the coalition will drop to 47 seats – a net loss of 11.

Liberal frontbenchers David Coleman, Michael Sukkar and Dan Tehan could all lose their seats and the coalition would lose Calare, Cowper, Wannon and Bradfield to independents, the modelling shows.

All sitting independents are tipped to retain their seats.

The Greens could lose Brisbane to Labor, dropping their lower house seat total to three.

Labor could also pick up Braddon in Tasmania, Banks in NSW, Bonner in Queensland, Menzies and Deakin in Victoria, Moore in Western Australia and Sturt in South Australia from the coalition, YouGov predicts.

However, the coalition is tipped to reclaim Aston in Melbourne, which it lost to Labor in a historic by-election in 2023.

But Mr Albanese isn’t putting his trust in the numbers, pointing to the party’s 2019 shock defeat to Scott Morrison, in defiance of the major polls.

“It’s really important to not get ahead of ourselves, on the basis of polling that just essentially answer what people think at a particular point in time, so we’re working really hard,” he told ABC radio.

Labor leads the coalition 52.9 per cent to 47.1 per cent on a two-party preferred basis, YouGov says.

The two-party vote is roughly in line with other polling, but the coalition’s primary vote has tracked as high as 35 per cent, according to the Resolve Political Monitor published in Nine newspapers.

Redbridge’s latest poll on Wednesday had the same 53-47 per cent two-party split, but also put the coalition’s primary vote higher and on par with Labor at 34 per cent.

The YouGov modelling also offers ranges for the election, with Labor scoring between 76 to 85 seats, the coalition between 45 and 53, the Greens between two to five and independents between 13 to 16.

It also predicts both major parties will get lower primary votes than in the 2022 election, with Labor down to 31.4 per cent, from 32.6 per cent, and the coalition down to 31.1 per cent, from 35.7 per cent.

Support for the Greens is steady at just over 12 per cent, while One Nation could nearly double its vote to more than nine per cent, compared to 2022.

This was similar to the Redbridge poll.

About one in four eligible Australians have already taken advantage of early voting, ahead of the election.

YouGov conducted 35,185 voter interviews between April 1 and 29, which it used to model 10,822 respondents to predict the election outcome.

Decorated veteran Ben Roberts-Smith’s bid for a second chance to clear his name is on the line as an award-winning journalist faces a judge about a taped phone call.

Nick McKenzie wrote a series of reports for Nine newspapers in 2018 describing the former soldier as a war criminal, an allegation a judge later found was true on the balance of probabilities.

Roberts-Smith is pushing to reopen his appeal against the judge’s finding that he had been complicit in the murder of four unarmed civilians while deployed in Afghanistan.

He argues there was a miscarriage of justice because McKenzie unlawfully obtained details about the former soldier’s legal strategy from his ex-wife, Emma Roberts.

The Victoria Cross recipient claims Ms Roberts accessed her ex-husband’s email accounts and leaked sensitive information to McKenzie, who used it to shape his legal strategy.

In a taped call between McKenzie and Roberts-Smith’s ex-lover, the journalist tells her Ms Roberts and her friend had been “actively briefing us on his legal strategy”.

“I shouldn’t tell you. I’ve just breached my f***ing ethics in doing that, like this has put me in a s*** position now,” the journalist said.

The towering Roberts-Smith fronted the Federal Court on Thursday alongside his parents, who have previously called McKenzie’s phone call “concerning”.

The information came to light after the ex-soldier’s 10-day appeal was heard in early 2024 but should be considered before the three appeal judges deliver their decision, his lawyers argue.

If his appeal is unsuccessful, only the High Court could overturn the war criminal finding.

Roberts-Smith rose to prominence in 2011 after being awarded Australia’s highest military honour, the Victoria Cross, for single-handedly taking out machine-gun posts to protect pinned-down colleagues in Afghanistan.

His reputation however was tarnished in 2018 after McKenzie’s explosive reports alleging the special forces veteran was complicit in the murder of four unarmed men during his deployment in Afghanistan.

In June 2023, Justice Anthony Besanko found the reports had been proven on the balance of probabilities – a lower standard than in a criminal proceeding.

Peter Dutton has pledged the coalition will shave billions of dollars off government debt by removing some of Labor’s signature policies, if the opposition wins the election.

As the coalition released its costings on Thursday, the party claimed it would reduce debt by $40 billion over the next four years.

These include plans to cut at least two of the Labor government’s off-budget investment funds, including the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund set up to build 30,000 new homes and the $20 billion Rewiring the Nation Fund.

Initial costings provided by the coalition said savings would also be achieved by stopping “unsustainable public servant increases” through natural attrition over five years.

But the costings did not reveal the dollar amount to be saved from a cut-back in government jobs.

The full costings will be unveiled by shadow treasurer Angus Taylor later on Thursday.

But the opposition leader said the full document will show a budget in better shape.

“Australians know from their own experiences the economy will always be better managed under a Liberal-National government,” Mr Dutton told reporters in Brisbane.

“That lower debt means interest rates come down.

“The detail will be there for people to see, and what they’ll see is that debt will be lower under us.”

The coalition’s goal is to add at least $10 billion to the budget – which is walking toward a decade of deficits under Labor – over the four years to 2028/29 while cutting government gross debt by $40 billion over the same period.

Other cuts include scrapping student debt relief worth $16 billion, and unwinding Labor’s decision to lower tax concessions for superannuation accounts with balances higher than $3 million.

Mr Taylor said higher debt levels under the government left Australians more exposed to global economic shocks.

“We will rebuild the nation’s fiscal buffers, reduce debt, and begin budget repair because that’s what economic responsibility looks like,” he said.

“Labor has delivered the longest per-capita recession on record and the biggest collapse in living standards in the developed world. That’s not bad luck, that’s bad management.”

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles criticised the coalition for releasing its costings two days before Saturday’s election.

However, Labor released its costings at the same point in the campaign when it was in opposition in 2022.

“The coalition, in terms of how they have spoken about the budget, have been an utter joke,” he told ABC Radio.

“They talk about economic surgery, they talk a big game. But when they are then questioned about how will this actually be done, they run for the hills, and we get absolutely no detail at all.”

The government released its costings on Tuesday, with Treasurer Jim Chalmers saying the cost of Labor’s election promises would be offset by more than $7 billion in savings.

This means the budget deficit would be reduced by $1 billion over the next four years, compared with pre-election forecasts.

Labor’s crackdown on the use of consultants and labour hire in favour of public servants would save $6.4 billion, Dr Chalmers said.