Australian news and politics recap: All the big news stories from February 21, 2025

And what a day it’s been!

Scroll down to catch up on all the big news events from Australia and around the world.

Stay tuned to The Nightly over the weekend for all the latest and we’ll return with our live coverage first thing Monday morning.

Thanks for joining us.

The West Australian’s federal political editor Katina Curtis reports there may be more tax cuts for Aussies to come:

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has left the door tantalisingly open to further tax cuts in the election as Cabinet’s razor gang considers what should go in Labor’s planned next budget.

The expenditure review committee met for multiple lengthy discussions earlier this week, ahead of the Reserve Bank cutting interest rates and the release of encouraging new data on wages growth and jobs numbers.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher have spent the week hinting there will be more cost-of-living relief for households in the near future – whether in a March 25 budget or during an election campaign before that.

Read the full story here.

Reading between the lines of Penny Wong’s comments, it sounds like any danger to passengers on the Qantas 787 plane was averted - but at the last minute.

As she said, it’s not actually illegal for foreign powers to conduct live exercises in international waters.

But the issue here is transparency.

By law, they’re required to give advance notice. Sounds to us like the word “advance” was dropped from that action when the PLA let Australia know.

There’s also the matter of three Chinese warships conducting live fire exercises in between Australa and New Zealand.

Regardless of the fact that it’s legal, we’re talking about a very deliberate choice of location. And that in itself will be of concern to the ADF.

From The Nightly’s Ellen Ransley:

The Australian Defence Force have confirmed Chinese navy ships were conducting military exercises on Friday in waters between Australia and New Zealand.

The three ships are the same task group the ADF last week revealed they were keeping tabs on.

Defence officials say the Chinese navy had given them advance notice, as they’re obliged to do under international law, but the last minute nature of that had meant air traffic was disrupted.

From Katina Curtis:

Foreign Minister Penny Wong is going to raise the warships’ military exercises with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi when they meet on the sidelines of a G20 meeting in Johannesburg on Friday.

Senator Wong described it as an evolving situation.

“The practice is that countries, including Australia and others, can conduct military exercises in international waters. The advice to me is this is what China is doing,” she told the ABC.

“We have concerns about the transparency associated with this and the notice and I will be having a discussion with Foreign Minister Wang about that.”

She noted the Chinese ships were operating in international waters, but reiterated that all countries should comply with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

“That is what we will always be articulating to China and to all others who utilise the maritime commons,” Senator Wong said.

This incident is the second between the Chinese military and Australia in just over a week.

On Thursday last week, The Australian Defence Force reported that just two days earlier, a Chinese fighter jet released flares that came within 30 metres of a RAAF P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane in the South China Sea.

It prompted swift action from the Australian side, lodging a formal protest through embassies in Canberra and Beijing.

Here’s the report on that previous incident.

We’re hearing reports that Chinese warships in waters in between Australia and New Zealand are forcing flights to be diverted from the area after a live fire incident.

A Qantas 787 plane flying from Brisbane to Auckland was reportedly harassed by a Chinese exercise that involved firing live ammunition into the air.

The Department of Defence has called a briefing on the topic. We’ll bring you all the latest as it comes to hand.

Now to Western Australia, where Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers popped in for a visit today.

And he was full of praise for one organisation in particular that he hasn’t been too fond of the past few years - the Reserve Bank.

From The West Australian’s state political editor Jess Page:

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says he won’t “second-guess” the decisions made by the Reserve Bank of Australia despite previously saying they were “hammering” working families.

Dr Chalmers made the comments in Perth on Friday during a whistle-stop visit, hours after Ms Bullock told a parliamentary committee the RBA’s board was “arguably late raising interest rates on the way up, we didn’t respond as quickly as we should have to rising inflation.”

The RBA this week cut the cash rate for the first time since November 2020, from 4.35 per cent to 4.1 per cent.

When asked whether the Reserve Bank moved too late to help families, Dr Chalmers said: “I don’t second guess the decisions taken by the Reserve Bank Governor and her board.”

Read more on Dr Chalmers’ sudden change of heart here.

The Nightly’s Jackson Hewett has filed his full report on Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock’s grilling by the parliamentary Standing Committee on Economics.

He writes that Ms Bullock knocked back suggestions the board felt pressured into cutting interest rates:

Following the 0.25 per cent cut on Tuesday, many commentators leapt on the RBA’s “hawkish” tone as a sign it was cutting rates sooner than necessary, pointing to the forward estimates of inflation at the top of the bank’s target band and Ms Bullock’s statement that market forecasts for further rate cuts were overly optimistic.

Rejecting that conclusion, Ms Bullock said the bank’s board was instead highly attuned to the timing effect of interest rate cuts, pointing to the fact the RBA was one of the last central banks to raise rates in response to inflation driven by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

Read the full report here.

From The Nightly’s Peta Rasdien:

A double murderer has been spared deportation after it was determined he had reformed and no longer posed a risk to the community in one of the first tests of Labor’s revised ministerial directions on migration and visas.

In June 2024, then-immigration minister Andrew Giles signed Direction 110 ordering that the protection of the Australian community be given greater weight in visa decisions.

It came after a string of decisions by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to overturn visa cancellations based on criminals’ “ties to the community” resulted in a firestorm for the Government, with the Coalition repeatedly calling for Mr Giles to be sacked.

Read the story in full here.