Indonesia’s president has sacked his finance minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa and replaced him with his deputy Suahasil Nazara as he battles to win back investor ‌confidence amid long-festering concerns about policy-making and fiscal profligacy.

Suahasil, a former academic and a deputy finance minister since 2019, is the third person to take the role under President Prabowo ‌Subianto.

He was among a number of senior officials who arrived at the state palace for a swearing-in ceremony while Purbaya was earlier seen leaving in the middle of a parliamentary hearing.

“The priority is to run a credible state budget,” Suahasil said after his inauguration, adding he would commit to keeping the fiscal deficit below the legislated limit of three per cent of GDP.

“I will continue to run a trustworthy state budget, ensure trustworthy public communication and also ensure that what the state budget does supports the government’s priority programs.”

Prabowo’s sacking ‌of Purbaya came just ⁠days after the former economist marked one year as finance minister, with Southeast Asia’s largest economy suffering a crisis ​of confidence among investors and analysts.

Prabowo’s fiscal policies have been under scrutiny since he came to power in October 2024, especially after his government increased the fuel subsidy budget following a spike in global crude prices, raising further questions about how his costly flagship programs – including a troubled free school meals scheme – could be funded.

The straight-talking Purbaya was the second finance minister to be axed.

He was brought in to replace the widely respected Sri Mulyani Indrawati in September last year, as Prabowo sought aggressive pro-growth policies over fiscal prudence.

Purbaya did not ⁠immediately respond to a request for comment.

Purbaya’s time in office was marked by economic shocks, including ‌a plummeting rupiah ​currency and a ballooning fiscal deficit.

His policy of injecting quick liquidity into banks to spur growth also created friction with the central bank.

Fitch and Moody’s both downgraded ​Indonesia’s credit rating outlook ‌from stable to negative this year, citing policy uncertainty and fiscal spending plans, battering sentiment on the G20 economy.

Purbaya in an interview with Reuters ​six months ago – his first with foreign media – admitted that his unconventional policies, which have broken from the country’s fiscally conservative approach, were at the centre of growing concerns about how the economy is being run.

He expressed confidence that the concerns would not linger and said during the interview that he had ​given ​himself a tight timeline of six months, saying that if the economy ​was not moving in the right direction by then “you can lambast me as much as ‌you like”.

King Charles will host the leaders of major artificial intelligence companies this week to discuss whether a shared set ‌of principles is needed to guide a technology that has sparked growing warnings about its threat to humanity.

With the ‌biggest names in AI calling for a slowdown in its development, Charles will host executives from Nvidia, Google DeepMind, ‌OpenAI, Anthropic and the United Kingdom minister for AI to discuss how the technology can be harnessed to benefit society and uphold human dignity.

The debate about AI was thrust back into the spotlight when two Anthropic researchers issued warnings that the rapidly progressing technology could lead to the extinction of the human race in the not-too-distant future.

Anthropic chief executive Dario ⁠Amodei said on Saturday that companies must slow the pace of advance ​of AI models.

Attendees at the King’s summit will include Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang, Google DeepMind founder and chairman Demis Hassabis and Paolo Benanti, an adviser to the Vatican on AI, according to the Sunday Times.

UK Minister for Artificial Intelligence Kanishka Narayan will also attend.

San Francisco-based Anthropic released a threat intelligence report last week detailing how ⁠several actors had used its Claude AI models for activities ‌ranging ​from weapons development and cyber operations to surveillance and fraud.

However, securing a global stance could be difficult: ​US President Donald Trump ‌rejected any talk of a slowdown on Sunday while the Chinese Global Times tabloid said it was really ​a “Cold War playbook” targeting China.

Charles, both as king and when he was the Prince of Wales, has used his position to convene meetings to discuss a range of topics, most notably on ​the ​environment.

Buckingham Palace said the gathering would discuss ​how AI could be harnessed in ways that benefit ‌society and contribute “to the flourishing of both people and the planet”.

The UK, the European leader in AI funding and startups, has favoured a light-touch approach to AI regulation, aligning more closely with the United States than the European Union.

The UK’s AI Security Institute, established after the AI Safety Summit in 2023, receives pre-deployment access to ​AI models under voluntary agreements with the major AI companies, enabling it to assess their capabilities and ​risks, and giving it a window ⁠into frontier AI development.

Pubs, cafes, hotels, aged care homes, farmers, builders and miners would suffer if a One Nation plan to cut three-quarters of a million migrants comes to pass, business groups warn. 

The anti-immigration party’s proposal to temporarily institute “net-negative” migration would cripple Australia’s ability to raise its citizens’ quality of life and build its way out of a housing crisis, the peak bodies say.

“Major cuts that reduce skilled migration would damage our economy, hit the budget and weaken our capacity to provide services for, and lift, living standards,” Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Andrew McKellar said in a statement on Monday.

“Business is asking all decision-makers in Canberra to ensure migration policy settings are designed from what Australia needs up, not to chase an arbitrary (net overseas migration) figure.”

Two-thirds of student visas would disappear under One Nation’s plan, with leader Pauline Hanson saying universities would still be able to enrol more than 100,000 international students per year.

The senator said the cut would not affect regional worker schemes.

The party would install a ceiling of 130,000 net overseas migrants a year, about 100,000 fewer than Labor’s long-term forecasts and well below the coalition’s housing-dependent figure of about 170,000.

The slashes to international student numbers, which have made education Australia’s third-largest export, drew staunch criticism from the business leaders. 

“Australia has built a global reputation for excellence and we should not allow that to be traded away in a race to the bottom on migration,” Mr McKellar said.

The policy faced similar rebukes from the Business Council of Australia and the National Farmers Federation.

Labor and the opposition have propped the economy up through “mass migration”, according to Senator Hanson, who is also facing heat for saying Indigenous Australians were “the most primitive race on Earth” in a 2025 podcast interview that resurfaced on Monday.

Critics said the populist party was too fixated on lowering the much talked-about net overseas migration figure, which sits at 301,000, and had a scant regard for costs.

“If Pauline Hanson thinks this is a good policy, where’s the modelling on what it will do to the economy, what it will do to housing?” Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek told News24 on Monday. 

“We’ve tripled the number of skilled visas of people who work in construction. We’ve already reduced immigration numbers by 45 per cent, we’re going to bring down those numbers further.”

It’s expected Labor is preparing to announce its revamped migration policy, after false starts including a last-minute cancellation of a National Press Club address by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke in August following cabinet divisions.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his counterpart Angus Taylor met multiple times in the week to September 11 to discuss cracking down on phoney asylum claims and student visa appeals.

Nationals leader Matt Canavan accused One Nation of misunderstanding migration policy after spokespeople dithered for weeks over policy and used statistics interchangeably.

“There’s a reason One Nation have had four policies in four weeks, is they’ve gone off half-cocked a number of times, they haven’t quite understood the complexities,” he told ABC TV on Monday.

“We want to see substantive cuts to migration. Our policy is that it should be much lower than what (Labor) are projecting.”

Greens senator David Shoebridge said the idea of giving Australia’s roughly 80,000 visa overstayers three months to leave under threat of permanent re-entry bans indicated a callous policy.

“Behind One Nation’s statement is the threat of detention camps, the threat of putting people in even more cruel prison systems … they want to put them on a plane to Iran, they want to put them on a plane to Russia,” he told reporters on Monday.

An ageing blast furnace will be permanently shut down, but state and federal leaders are vowing to keep the fire burning on Australian steelmaking.

The Whyalla steelworks’ blast furnace has been offline since April, with workers at the South Australian site told on Monday it would soon go completely cold.

The furnace, commissioned in the 1960s and used to melt iron ore for making steel, has had repeated shutdowns in recent years and undergone unscheduled maintenance. 

About 500 employees are expected to lose their jobs, plus another 100 labour hire workers.

“At the end of the day, the blast furnace made the decision itself,” said Sebastian Hams of the steelworks’ administrator KordaMentha.

“We’ve got to the point where it’s simply unsustainable to continue the blast furnace recovery and the failure of the blast furnace is inevitable.”

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas announced a $10.2 million transition and support package, jointly funded by state and federal governments.

Mr Malinauskas said the furnace’s life span ended sooner than anticipated and blamed its deterioration on the steelworks’ former owner GFG Alliance, headed by Indian-born British businessman Sanjeev Gupta.

“The reason that the blast furnace is closing today is because it’s over 60 years old,” he said.

“It hasn’t had a re-line in over 20 years and the previous owner ran it into the ground.”

Redundancies are expected to be voluntary and forced, but all workers will have their entitlements paid out in full.

Whyalla is one of only two Australian primary steelworks and the only local manufacturer of long products, including hot rolled structural steel sections and rail.

The South Australian government forced the steelworks into administration in February 2025 over the mounting debts of GFG Alliance.

A joint state-federal $2.4 billion rescue package was unveiled to keep the steelworks afloat under KordaMentha.

KordaMentha and the state government have been working to sell the business, with coal magnate Matt Latimore’s M Resources and India’s third-largest steelmaker Jindal Steel revealed as the final remaining bidders. 

A consortium led by BlueScope Steel, which has been advising KordaMentha since March 2025, retains the right of final offer.

The sale is expected to be finalised by the end of 2026.

Mr Malinauskas said the blast furnace was always turning off because it had “no value” to the new buyer.

“It is incongruous to me the idea that Australia could be the world’s biggest iron ore exporter and then not know how to use the stuff,” he said.

The Albanese government has been under pressure from the minerals processing industry to prop up loss-making facilities or risk further eroding Australia’s industrial workforce.

“Our focus is on supporting workers now while creating the conditions for a new owner to invest in a stronger, more sustainable future for Whyalla and Australian steelmaking,” federal Industry Minister Tim Ayres said.

Rescue packages have previously been doled out to Nyrstar’s lead smelters in South Australia and Tasmania and the nation’s largest aluminium smelter at Tomago in NSW’s Hunter region.

Whyalla mayor Phill Stone said it was a sad day but the local community would “breathe a sigh of relief” in some respects.

Australian Workers’ Union SA organiser Shane Karger pointed out the end of the blast furnace did not spell the end for Whyalla.

“Today is day one of moving towards a new future for Whyalla,” he said.

Federal opposition industry spokesman Andrew Hastie described it as a “brutal blow” for workers, the local community and sovereign capability.

“What we’ve seen is now the closure of 75 per cent of Australia’s capacity of structural steelmaking,” he told reporters in Canberra.

“It’s a future made overseas, not a future made in Australia.”

Australian shares have handed back early gains to end the session flat, as wary investors mulled fresh Middle East attacks and likely incoming interest rate hikes from two major central banks.

The S&P/ASX200 inched 8.7 points higher on Monday, up 0.1 per cent, to 8,749.9, as the broader All Ordinaries gained 3.7 points, or 0.04 per cent, to 8,923.9.

Easing metals prices weighed on local mining stocks, made worse by elevated crude prices amid persistent attacks on oil tankers and a Houthi drone strike on a Saudi oil pipeline.

It is a huge week for central banking, with markets bracing for the US Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan to increase their funding and policy rates in the face of stubborn inflation and, in Japan’s case, a soft yen.

The Australian dollar is buying 71.44 US cents, down from 71.73 US cents on Friday at 5pm as bets narrowed on a US rate hike.

The rising cost of oil and iPhones is concerning the Reserve Bank of Australia as it approaches a crucial interest rate decision, the central bank’s chief economist says.

With rising inflation pressures from the Middle East and more broadly around the globe, the Reserve Bank faced a “challenging” situation, its chief economist Sarah Hunter told a Regional Australia Institute summit in Canberra.

Dr Hunter said inflation risks were skewed to the upside as higher petrol and diesel costs were set to flow through to households and businesses.

But the Reserve Bank was also concerned the broader global environment was more inflationary.

The scramble for tech components as a result of the AI boom was one example.

“Anyone who’s bought a new iPhone recently might have noticed that the price went up quite a bit,” Dr Hunter said on Monday.

“That’s actually true for consumer electronics more generally, and that’s directly related to the AI boom; those chips that are in all of our electronic products are in high demand right now. 

“The price is going up as a result.”

At a starting price of $3499, Apple’s latest effort – the iPhone Duo – is commanding a significant mark-up to previous models at launch.

The escalating conflict in the Middle East was also “concerning”, with energy cost pressures pushing up inflation in Australia’s economy, Dr Hunter said.

Oil prices broke the psychologically significant $US100 a barrel barrier last week as Iranian attacks on tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz ramped up.

Saudi Arabia has shut its east-west pipeline following a drone attack, shutting a key Hormuz bypass, with the oil-rich nation’s crude production tumbling by 1.9 million barrels a day in August to the lowest level since the conflict began, economists at ANZ bank said.

The increased attacks have already impacted exports of crude oil and refined fuel products from the Persian Gulf, but further pressure on prices was likely to come from the advance of Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen.

“Riyadh has now lost the option to use western exports if the Strait of Hormuz deteriorates again,” ANZ analysts said on Monday.

“This is likely to put further upward pressure on oil prices this week.”

The federal government has not ruled out cutting the fuel excise again as petrol and diesel prices rise.

Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock has previously said the board might have to raise interest rates further if upside risks to inflation materialised.

Money markets are pricing the chance for another rate rise at the Reserve Bank’s September 28-29 board meeting at about three in four.

But with traders fully pricing in at least two rate hikes by mid-2027, it is more a matter of when, rather than if.

US regulators have approved a Melbourne biotech company’s imaging agent that should help doctors determine whether a patient’s brain cancer is being treated successfully.

The US Food and Drug Administration over the weekend approved Telix Pharmaceutical’s Pixclara, a radioactive intravenous infusion that binds to brain cancer cells so they are highlighted on PET scans.

Physicians currently find it challenging to determine whether a patient’s glioma is worsening or whether changes on a scan are the result of treatment, doctors say.

Chemotherapy can cause dead cells to accumulate around brain tumours, making it appear on standard imaging scans that they are still growing, a phenomenon known as “pseudoprogression.”

“The approval of Pixclara will advance glioma care by enabling more precise monitoring, complementing the role of MRI,” said Kelly Sitkin, the president and chief executive of the American Brain Tumor Association.

The imaging agent will provide US physicians with more certainty in their diagnoses and greater confidence in their treatment planning for patients, said Kevin Richardson, chief executive of Telix’s precision medicine arm.

There are 24,000 new glioma cases diagnosed each year in the United States, making them the most common type of malignant brain tumour in adults.

The US authority had knocked back Telix’s initial submission for Pixclara in April 2025, asking for more clinical evidence to support the drug application.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Craig Wong-Pan said the approval demonstrated Telix’s ability to overcome the setback of the initial rejection.

Telix currently has two approved products on the market, Illuccix and Gozellix, which are similar radioactive imaging agents used to highlight prostate cancer tumours on PET scans.

The company made $US477 million ($677 million) in sales in the six months to June 30, up from $US390 million a year ago.

Telix shares were changing hands at $16.24, up 3.6 per cent, just after noon, after rising above six per cent earlier in the day.

An Australian man and two children have been found dead in Bali in what local police are treating as a possible murder-suicide.  

The trio were reportedly found at a bungalow in Kuta, a resort town on the Indonesian island’s southwest coast, on Sunday morning.

They have been identified in multiple media reports as Western Australian man Damien John Shaw, 56, his six-year-old daughter and four-year-old son.

WA Premier Roger Cook said the incident was horrific, stressing investigations were ongoing. 

“This is a very sad, sad situation and our hearts go out to everyone involved,” he told reporters on Monday.

“We hope that we can get to the bottom of what’s gone on here as soon as possible.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it was providing assistance to the family. 

“We send our deepest condolences to the family at this difficult time,” a DFAT spokesperson told AAP. 

“Owing to our privacy obligations we are unable to provide further comment.”

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WA’s advantageous GST deal defies logic, one state treasurer has argued as the revolt against the beneficial arrangement continues.

NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey fronted the Productivity Commission on Monday, a month after the organisation released a scathing interim report that found the “perverse” carve-up was costing federal taxpayers $6 billion a year to line WA’s pockets.

That prompted WA Premier Roger Cook to lash the commission and call the report’s authors “east coast clowns”.

Mr Mookhey said states were being asked to accept conflicting propositions – that WA is the powerhouse of the national economy, and also requires permanent protection from Australia’s equalisation system.

“Both cannot be true,” he told the commission.

“There is nothing wrong from WA benefiting from its natural endowment, but a powerhouse economy should not require a privileged place in the national federation.”

Mr Mookhey said the current system essentially allowed WA to operate by one set of rules while all other states were governed by another, arguing that when WA experienced a boom, it kept its money, but states such as Queensland and NSW were forced to share.

“We accept that NSW … will always be a donor state and support the smaller states, and we’re happy to do so … that is something that we accept we have to do,” Mr Mookhey said.

“I would only argue that it shouldn’t just be us.”

Mr Mookhey claimed WA was on track to be one of the richest governments in the world – a privilege that would continue to compound, resulting in the state experiencing a higher quality of services and life than the rest of the country.

He said WA’s position allowed it to try to lure activity from other states, citing the state government’s bid to host the NRL grand final as an example, despite it being a game “they don’t even play”.

NSW Premier Chris Minns has previously criticised the state’s grand final bid, comparing it to the actions of oil-rich Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The federal government has affirmed its commitment to maintaining the existing system despite growing concern from the states and the commission’s findings, which recommended a return to the pre-2018 system.

“There will be no change to WA’s GST arrangements whilst I’m prime minister,” Anthony Albanese said in August.

Proposed digital duty-of-care laws have been labelled “Big Brother” political censorship by the coalition in a disagreement over social media reform.

Labor is hoping to garner multi-party support for the contentious social media changes, which have been overshadowed in recent days by simmering feuds centred on One Nation’s Pauline Hanson.

Under the proposed laws, tech companies could face fines of more than $100 million for failing to identify and prevent potentially harmful content being shown to users younger than 18.

The banned content includes material encouraging disordered eating, promoting misogyny or online bullying.

While Labor does not plan to legislate the reforms before the end of the year, it is seeking feedback and suggestions for the bill in the hope of achieving broad support.

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor said the drafting of the digital duty of care legislation was a blank cheque on political censorship due to ministerial discretion to define harmful content.

“This is the Big Brother bill, frankly … they should put forward an alternative. But right now, that’s what we’re seeing, and we can’t support that,” he told reporters on Monday.

Communications Minister Anika Wells said she was willing to alter the proposed legislation to ensure it passed.

“I would be prepared to work with the coalition on the wording to make that work that meets the urgency requirement of the intent of that measure,” she told the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday.

Liberal senator Sarah Henderson said the draft laws were a “backdoor way” to reintroduce Labor’s failed disinformation and misinformation bill.

“This is abhorrent legislation … we are going to fight it every step of the way,” she told News24.

The proposed laws include measures to force social media companies to offer users the option of algorithm-free feeds that show them posts from friends and other accounts they follow.

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