China has appointed a new top international trade negotiator amid tariff tensions with the US.

The government said Li Chenggang has been appointed to replace Wang Shouwen, who took part in the trade negotiations for the 2020 trade deal between China and the US.

The world’s two largest economies have been steadily increasing tariffs on each other’s goods since the US raised tariffs on dozens of countries.

China faces 145 per cent taxes on exports to the US, while other countries were given a 90-day reprieve for most duties.

Earlier on Wednesday, China announced its economy expanded at a 5.4 per cent annual pace in January-March, supported by strong exports.

Analysts expect the world’s second-largest economy to slow significantly in coming months, however, as tariffs on US imports from China take effect.

Exports were a strong factor in China’s five per cent annual growth rate in 2024, and the official target for 2025 remains about five per cent.

Beijing has hit back at the US with 125 per cent tariffs on American exports, while also stressing its determination to keep its own markets open to trade and investment.

In the near term, the tariffs would put pressure on China’s economy, but they would not derail long-run growth, Sheng Laiyun, a spokesperson for the National Bureau of Statistics, told reporters.

It was not clear why China was changing negotiators, but the change comes as Chinese officials say the country has multiple options to respond to US actions, including relying more on its own vast market of 1.4 billion consumers, and on Europe and countries in the global south. 

But as China’s domestic consumption continues to languish, it will be difficult to replace the US consumer.

China also imposed more export controls on rare earths, which include materials used in high-tech products, aerospace manufacturing and the defence sector.

Urgent care clinics have reduced hospital wait times, the prime minister insists, despite a report saying it’s too early to tell.

Anthony Albanese has continued to spruik health measures on the campaign trail, with the issue likely to feature prominently at the second leaders’ debate on Wednesday night.

A government report said it was too soon to determine if Labor’s much-touted urgent care clinics had led to shorter wait times in emergency departments, but the prime minister maintained the centres were making a difference.

“I do (have evidence), come and talk to anyone … you can talk to people there about whether they would have ended up in an emergency department,” he told reporters in Melbourne on Wednesday.

“(The expansion of the clinics) is justified.

“It’s taking pressure off those (emergency departments), every state health minister is saying the same thing, Labor and Liberal.”

The report said 344,000 trips to the emergency department would be avoided each year if the urgent care clinics were operating.

The government would also save $368 per presentation to the clinics, the report found.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said patients should still expect to fork out for their health care despite separate promises by Labor to expand bulk billing to 90 per cent by the end of the decade.

“The bulk-billing rate … is in free fall … because the prime minister wants to pretend that people can just go to the doctors, flash their Medicare card and somehow they’re not going to have to pay an out-of-pocket fee,” he said.

“That’s just not the reality of families here in Melbourne and right across the country.”

Australian Medical Association president Danielle McMullen said the government’s $8.5 billion pledge to boost bulk billing – a promise quickly matched by the coalition – wouldn’t fix the system.

“The extra incentive doesn’t meet the cost of providing that care (for longer appointments) and we want to make sure that all Australians get a decent rebate back in their pocket,” she said.

“They really needed to reform the structure of Medicare and put more investment into those longer visits, more nurses, more allied health into general practice.”

While the prime minister was declared the victor in the first leaders’ debate, Mr Albanese was still playing the underdog card ahead of the second showdown.

“You have to take any campaign day by day and I don’t think the outcome of the last debate affects tonight’s debate at all. It’s very different,” he said.

“I was grateful for those people who put their little bit of paper in the red box rather than the blue box and that was a good thing for me. But I don’t take anything for granted.”

The debate, hosted by the ABC in western Sydney, will be the second of four head-to-head verbal jousts between the leaders ahead of the May 3 election.

ANU political scientist Jill Sheppard said while debates tended not to shift the dial for any leader or party, they could turn into massive traps for candidates who perform badly.

“It’s not so much that they say or do something particularly stupid, but that they have to be on the ball for a whole hour, and that’s really tough,” she said.

“What we find is that leaders tend to come through unscathed, but it takes a heap of preparation and a heap of co-ordination and strategy to make sure that they do come through unscathed.

“At the end of all that, you haven’t necessarily won votes, but you haven’t lost votes, and them not losing votes is the most important.”

President Donald Trump has ordered a probe into potential new tariffs on all US critical minerals imports, a major escalation in his dispute with global trade partners and an attempt to push back on industry leader China.

The order lays bare what manufacturers, industry consultants, academics and others have long warned Washington about: that the US is overly reliant on Beijing and others for processed versions of the minerals that power its entire economy.

China is a top global producer of 30 of the 50 minerals considered critical by the US Geological Survey, for example, and has been curtailing exports in recent months.

Trump signed an order on Tuesday directing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to begin a national security review under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

That is the same law Trump used in his first term to impose 25 per cent global tariffs on steel and aluminium and one he used in February to launch a probe into potential copper tariffs.

US dependency on minerals imports “raises the potential for risks to national security, defense readiness, price stability, and economic prosperity and resilience,” Trump said in the order.

Within 180 days, Lutnick is required to report his findings to the president, including whether to impose tariffs. Were Trump to then impose a tariff on a nation’s critical minerals, the rate would supersede the reciprocal tariffs Trump imposed earlier this month, according to the White House.

The review will assess US vulnerabilities for the processing of all critical minerals – including cobalt, nickel and the 17 rare earths, as well as uranium – how foreign actors could be distorting markets, and what steps could be taken to boost domestic supply and recycling, according to the order.

The US currently extracts and processes scant amounts of lithium, has only one nickel mine but no nickel smelter, and has no cobalt mine or refinery. While it has several copper mines, the US has only two copper smelters and is reliant on other nations to process that key red metal.

The order takes a broad view of processing as all the steps after rock is taken out of the ground and where they are done. It also directs a review of US capabilities to produce so-called semi-finished goods, including battery cathodes and wind turbines.

The move is the latest in Trump’s effort to jumpstart US minerals production and processing. The president last month signed an order directing federal agencies to create a list of US mines that could be quickly approved and federal lands that could be used for minerals processing.

Still, it takes years to build a new mine and processing facility, a timeline that has sparked concern about where the US could procure minerals were tariffs broadly imposed.

“Ultimately the US gets certain minerals from China because there are not alternative supplies elsewhere,” said Gracelin Baskaran, director of the critical minerals security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Beijing earlier in April placed export restrictions on rare earths in response to Trump’s tariffs, a move that further exacerbated supply concerns amongst Trump officials.

Rare earths are a group of 17 elements used across the defence, electric vehicle, energy and electronics industries. The United States has only one rare earths mine and most of its processed supply comes from China.

The restrictions from China were seen as the latest demonstration of the country’s ability to weaponise its dominance over the mining and processing of critical minerals after it put outright bans on the export of three other metals last year to the US and slapped export controls on others.

Chinese mining companies across the globe have been flooding markets with cheap supplies of many critical minerals in recent years, fuelling calls from industry and investors for Washington to support US projects.

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning off popular photo-sharing app Instagram in 2018 over concerns about the growing risk of antitrust scrutiny, according to a document shown at a trial.

The document was shown during Zuckerberg’s second day of testimony at the high-stakes trial in Washington on Tuesday, in which the US Federal Trade Commission is seeking to unwind Meta’s acquisitions of prized assets Instagram and WhatsApp.

“I wonder if we should consider the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company,” Zuckerberg said in the memo. At the time, the company was mulling plans to reorganise the social media company and link its apps together more closely.

Zuckerberg pushed back in the memo, saying consolidation was likely to yield “strong business growth” but cautioning that it also could erode the value of flagship app Facebook’s social network, with scant promise the company would get to keep its full “family of apps” in the end.

Meta ultimately did not spin off Instagram, instead proceeding with the plan to integrate its apps the following year. But the fact Zuckerberg even considered the idea is a stunning sign of how seriously he took the threat of precisely the type of antitrust trial proceeding now.

“As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway,” he wrote then, noting the possibility that the “next Democratic president” could take action to break up tech companies.

“This is one more factor that we should consider since even if we wanted to keep those apps together we may not be able to,” he said.

The commission ultimately sued Meta in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term. Trump’s antitrust enforcers sued Alphabet’s Google the same year, accusing it of monopolising search.

Zuckerberg also downplayed the impact of a spin-off on the company’s fortunes at the time in his memo, although Meta has argued publicly since then that attempts to break it up would be damaging.

“While most companies resist break ups, the corporate history is that most companies actually perform better after they’ve been split up. The synergies are usually less than people think and the strategy tax is usually greater than people think,” he wrote.

Zuckerberg’s testimony comes as Meta is defending itself years after the release of other damning statements plucked from Facebook’s own documents, like a 2008 email in which he said “it is better to buy than compete”.

The commission accuses Meta of holding a monopoly on platforms used to share content with friends and family, where its main competitors in the United States are Snap’s Snapchat and MeWe, a tiny privacy-focused social media app launched in 2016.

Zuckerberg testified earlier in the day that Meta bought Instagram because it had a “better” camera than the one his company was trying to build at the time.

The company argues that his past intentions are irrelevant because the commission has defined the social media market inaccurately and failed to account for stiff competition Meta has faced from ByteDance’s TikTok, Alphabet’s YouTube and Apple’s messaging app.

Zuckerberg also acknowledged that many of the company’s attempts at building its own apps had failed.

“Building a new app is hard and many more times than not when we have tried to build a new app, it hasn’t gotten a lot of traction,” Zuckerberg told the court.

“We probably tried building dozens of apps over the history of the company and the majority of them don’t go anywhere,” he said.

US  President Donald Trump is open to making a trade deal with China but officials in Beijing should make the first move, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says.

“The ball is in China’s court: China needs to make a deal with us, we don’t have to make a deal with them,” Leavitt told a press briefing, saying Trump had given her that statement directly in an Oval Office meeting to use.

“China wants what we have … the American consumer, or to put another way, they need our money,” Leavitt said.

China raised its tariffs on imports of US goods to 125 per cent on Friday in a retaliatory move to Trump, who effectively raised US tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 per cent while putting a pause on planned levies for other countries’ goods.

Trump has described Chinese President Xi Jinping in admiring terms but neither man has backed down in an escalating trade war between their two countries.

“The president, again, has made it quite clear that he’s open to a deal with China. But China needs to make a deal with the United States of America,” Leavitt said.

Trump has said he expects something positive to come out of the trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies. 

But, unlike multiple other countries who have responded to his plans for tariffs by seeking deals with the United States, China has raised its own levies on US goods and not sought talks.

With rents rising nearly 40 per cent in the past five years cities are becoming hubs for larger households as international students lead the charge of living together.

Housing has become a battleground for the major political parties jockeying to appeal to first-time homebuyers in particular, but renters continue to do it tough.

Advertised rental listings remain well below average, property data firm CoreLogic says in its Quarterly Rental Review released on Wednesday. 

About 99,000 rental properties were listed nationally over four weeks, more than 22 per cent less than normal for this time of year.

“With affordability stretched, many renters are adjusting by staying in shared accommodation or delaying independent living, which in turn reduces net rental demand,” CoreLogic senior economist Kaytlin Ezzy said.

Since March 2020, national rents have climbed 38.4 per cent or the equivalent of an extra $182 per week, averaging $9442 annually.

Vacancy rates have tightened to 1.6 per cent in March, down from 2.0 per cent in December.

“The renewed growth in unit rents is likely linked to the seasonal lift in demand from international students who typically favour higher-density housing,” Ms Ezzy said.

Sydney remains the most unaffordable city to live in as a renter with a median weekly rental value of $781 while in Hobart it is more than $200 less at $574, making it the cheapest capital city to sign a lease in.

Labor and the coalition say their housing policies, worth a combined $24 billion, would solve the lack of supply of homes in the market which would drive down prices.

The Greens have slammed both major parties for “burning the dreams of renters” by driving house prices up.  The party has promised to implement a cap on rent increases and limit them to every two years if voted into minority government.

The coalition has vowed to slash the number of international students by 80,000 which it claims are fuelling a housing crisis.

The Property Council of Australia has disputed that characterisation noting foreign students made up only four per cent of Australia’s rental market.

Core Logic said on Wednesday recent migration data had eased housing demand with net overseas migration in the year to September 2024 coming in at just under 380,000 people, more than 30 per cent lower than the previous year’s peak.

But Lyndall Bryant, who heads up the QUT Centre for Justice Housing Security Research Group,  is pushing for an out-of-the-box interim solution beyond the supply debate, that can be beneficial for home-owners and desperate tenants.

She has urged which ever party wins office to incentivise the use of the 13 million spare bedrooms

The census says about 3.2 million Australian homes have one spare bedroom, another 3 million have two spare rooms and 1.2 million have three spare bedrooms or more.

Most of these are older owners who are often asset rich but income poor and could do with the income that would come from renting out a room so long as it didn’t cut into their pension, she suggested.

“This would also ease cost-of-living pressures for home-owners and provide the physical and mental health benefits that come from shared living arrangements,” Dr Bryant said.

Delaying coal generator retirements under the federal coalition’s plan for adding nuclear plants to the grid risks power supply shortfalls and price spikes.

Australia’s fleet of old and unreliable coal power stations, prone to outages and extra maintenance, are already causing jumps in wholesale prices.

With age comes wear and tear and technical hiccups that lowers the average availability of close-to-retirement power stations to just 66 per cent.

Patchy reliability of aging coal stations is frequently neglected in energy policy development, including in the modelling underpinning the coalition’s nuclear energy pathway, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis research suggests.

IEEFA lead analyst Johanna Bowyer said history pointed to much lower availability of coal generation than the numbers crunched for the opposition by Frontier Economics.

“This is kind of questionable whether the coal power plants can actually operate as expected,” she told AAP.

IEEFA’s analysis reveals a generation shortfall from coal of 9300 gigawatt hours per year, on average, over 2034 to 2043. 

That is equivalent to the power consumption of two million households.

The findings suggest Australian households and businesses will be exposed to electricity price spikes as gas generation – already expensive and facing domestic shortages in the southeast – would likely be needed to make up the shortfall.

“You’ve got these coal outages, and you weren’t expecting them, so all of a sudden, you need all this extra gas,” Ms Bowyer said.

“Where’s that going to come from? And that could lead to spikes in the price of gas, it could lead to spikes in the price of electricity.”

An extra 49-93 petajoules of gas would need to be found each year to cover the coal reliability gap.

Under the federal coalition’s vision for Australia’s net zero energy system, seven nuclear plants would be built to eventually start producing electricity by 2035.

In the meantime, old coal power stations would need to be kept running longer than they would otherwise.

The plan differs from the Labor government’s transition blueprint targeting 82 per cent renewables in the main grid, backed by clean storage and gas. 

Ms Bowyer said the findings had implications for other proposals aimed at extending the lifespans of coal power stations, such as the Queensland government delaying Callide B’s retirement beyond 2028.

Green Energy Markets director Tristan Edis, co-author of the report, said the poor reliability of aging power stations was frequently left out of the conversation. 

“Proposals that extend the life of existing coal power plants need to account for the fact that such old plants are likely to be far less reliable than they used to be, but this is often neglected,” he said.

Australia’s existing coal-fired power stations will either exceed the usual retirement age or be approaching end-of-life during the 2030s.

Australians are turning their backs on travelling to the US as tourism experts point the finger at the weak dollar and President Donald Trump.

There were 74,877 Australian visitors to the US in March, compared to 81,208 for the same period in 2024, US International Trade Administration data shows.

It was a 7.8 per cent year-on-year monthly fall and the steepest decline since March 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 738,000 Australians travelled to the US in the year ending January 2025, up 9.4 per cent.

But Dean Long, boss of the peak body representing Australia’s $69 billion travel industry, said interest in the US had cooled in recent months.

“The priced product in the US is very high when compared to the value that you can get across Southeast Asia in particular and even parts of Europe,” the Australian Travel Industry Association chief executive told AAP.

“We think think currency and value are the two things that are really driving that.”

The exchange rate for the Australian dollar last week fell below 60 US cents, its lowest level since April 2020, following Mr Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.

But the dollar has recovered some ground this week and finished at 63.59 US cents on Tuesday.

Mr Long said it was too soon to tell if the “Trump effect” was flowing through to Australian travellers.

“When Trump was elected we didn’t actually see any significant change in booking patterns,” he said.

“We are starting to see some changes post Trump becoming president and some of the policies being implemented.”

A national survey of 1509 Australians aged 18 to 65 indicates fewer people were planning a trip to the US from March 15 to May 15 than the corresponding period 12 months ago.

The quarterly poll, commissioned by the Tourism and Transport Forum, had the US as the fifth most popular international destination for autumn 2024, with eight per cent of travellers headed there.

The US slid to seventh on the list for this autumn, scooping up less than six per cent of Australia’s overseas travel market.

“It’s the first time in three or four years that the US hasn’t been in the top-five destinations,” Tourism and Transport Forum chief executive Margy Osmond told AAP.

She put it down to uncertainty within the US, particularly on tariffs, cheap air fares to places such as New Zealand, Japan and Thailand, and the slumping exchange rate.

On the flip side, Ms Osmond said the exchange rate and perception of safety were keeping American visitor numbers to Australia strong at almost 80,000 a year.

Visitors numbers to the US in March were lower for every world region except the Middle East and eastern Europe.

In a briefing, Tourism Economics said policies and pronouncements from the Trump administration were contributing to a growing wave of negative international traveller sentiment toward the US.

“Heightened border security measures and visible immigration enforcement actions are amplifying concerns,” it said.

“These factors, combined with a strong US dollar, are creating additional barriers for those considering travel to the US.”

There was no doubt high-profile border security cases were grabbing headlines but it was a bigger issue for shorter-haul markets such as Canada and Mexico, Mr Long said.

“If you’re flying direct from Australia to the US, we’re seeing very, very few if any problems,” he said.

Australia’s Smartraveller website warns travellers a valid visa “doesn’t guarantee entry” into US and authorities have “broad powers” to reject admission “for any reason under US law”.

Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton will face off for the second time as the election campaign reaches its halfway point.

The ABC will host the leaders’ debate on Wednesday evening with the event to be moderated by Insiders host David Speers.

Both the prime minister and opposition leader will give opening and closing remarks and will receive equal time to respond to questions.

Debates will also be hosted by the Nine Network and Seven Network closer to the May 3 election.

ANU political scientist Jill Sheppard said while debates tended not to shift the dial for any leader or party, they could turn into massive traps for candidates who perform badly.

“It’s not so much that they say or do something particularly stupid, but that they have to be on the ball for a whole hour, and that’s really tough,” she said.

“What we find is that leaders tend to come through unscathed, but it takes a heap of preparation and a heap of co-ordination and strategy to make sure that they do come through unscathed.

“At the end of all that, you haven’t necessarily won votes, but you haven’t lost votes, and them not losing votes is the most important.”

Dr Sheppard said the most important members of the debate tended to be journalists who later disseminated what happened to a wider audience.

“If someone makes a mistake in the debate, it can derail the next couple of days of coverage,” she said.

The coalition will promise $6 million for the Alannah and Madeline Foundation to keep kids safe online if it is elected.

The foundation’s tools include age-appropriate teaching and learning resources and digital and media literacy skills for children aged four to 16.

“We need to ensure parents and children are equipped with the knowledge and skills that will help them safely navigate the online world,” Mr Dutton said.

The Liberal and Labor parties announced policies to target housing affordability at their official campaign launches.

Experts have labelled the plans inflationary and said neither tackled the supply aspect of the crisis.

Labor has pledged to allow first homebuyers the opportunity to purchase properties with a five per cent deposit.

The coalition has promised to make interest payments made by first-time buyers on new homes tax deductible for five years.

Housing Minister Clare O’Neil and her opposition counterpart Michael Sukkar will go head-to-head in a debate at the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday.

OpenAI is working on its own X-like social media network, the Verge reports, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter.

The project is still in early stages and there is an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that contains a social feed, the report said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project, according to the Verge. 

It is unclear whether the company plans to release the social network as a separate application or integrate it into ChatGPT, the report said.

The company did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The potential move could escalate tensions between Altman and billionaire Elon Musk – the owner of X and an OpenAI co-founder who left the startup in 2018 before it emerged as a front-runner in the generative artificial intelligence race.

The feud has intensified in recent months. 

In February, a consortium of investors led by Musk made an unsolicited $US97.4 billion ($A153.2 billion) bid for the control of OpenAI, only to be rejected by Altman with a swift “no thank you”.

Musk had sued the ChatGPT maker and Altman last year, alleging they had abandoned OpenAI’s original goal of developing AI for the benefit of humanity – not corporate gain.

OpenAI counter-sued Musk earlier this month, accusing him of a pattern of harassment and attempting to derail its shift to a for-profit model. 

The two parties are set to begin a jury trial next year.

An OpenAI social network could also put the company in direct competition with Facebook-owner Meta, which is reportedly working on a standalone Meta AI service. 

In February, Altman responded on X over media reports on Meta’s plans, saying “ok fine maybe we’ll do a social app”.

Both Meta and X have access to a massive amount of data – public content posted by users on their social media platforms – that they train their AI models on.