The former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has called British shipbuilding an “industry in disarray” and predicted it will produce few, if any, of the nuclear-powered submarines promised under the Aukus agreement in the foreseeable future.

Speaking at an independent inquiry into the implications and viability of the tri-nation submarine deal, which will cost Australia the equivalent of nearly £200 billion, the former Liberal Party leader described the pact as “a colossal mistake”.

“If the goal of this project is to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, every indication is that we won’t get them,” he claimed. “The Americans are not producing enough of their own, let alone ours.”

He added: “The British shipbuilding industry is in disarray and the British are more aware of that than anyone. So we are sending billions and billions of dollars over to the United States, over to the UK, and there is every prospect that we will end up with no submarines, certainly no American ones, and potentially none of the British ones for a very, very long time.”

Turnbull, 71, who served as prime minister between 2015 and 2018, claimed it would take well into the middle, or past the middle of this century, for the British submarines to appear.

“This is a colossal mistake,” he declared.

He argued that Aukus would involve a huge “sacrifice of sovereignty” for Australia.

“Everything points to the fact that we will be less secure, not simply because we won’t have the same ability to defend ourselves as we had before, not because we will be reliant, even more reliant on the United States than we have been before. And what exquisite timing … Right at that time in history when the United States, not by accident, not by carelessness, but by design, has become less dependable under Donald Trump and that trend shows every sign of continuing.”

Turnbull’s criticism reflects growing public unease about the cost of Aukus, which was signed last year and allows for the Royal Australian Navy to operate and maintain eight nuclear-powered attack submarines by the mid-2040s.

Under the agreement the United States will sell Australia up to three Virginia-class submarines.

But Britain will also play a key role in the construction of future Australian SSN-Aukus submarines, which will be based on the UK’s next-generation nuclear attack boats to be built at Barrow-in-Furness.

HMS Anson, the fifth Astute class submarine from BAE Systems, as it departed the company’s shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness

The Australian partnership will also offer the UK a significant military presence in the Indo-Pacific, at a time of increased Chinese naval activity.

Maintenance and construction facilities in Western Australia and South Australia have already involved a considerable investment.

While Aukus is backed by both the Labor and Liberal parties, the crowd-funded public inquiry, which is currently touring Australia, has revealed deep reservations among community groups and the political class.

Turnbull’s latest criticism also reflects his long-standing tensions with Britain.

Before entering politics he made his name as a lawyer representing Peter Wright, the retired MI5 employee who wrote a book about his work for the spy agency. The British government tried to ban publication of Spycatcher in Australia, but Turnbull successfully appealed an injunction to stop the book’s sale, making him something of a national hero.

He went on to become a founder of the Australian republican movement, helping to further cement his popularity among those who favoured axing constitutional ties with Britain and removing the monarch as head of state.

In 1999 a referendum proposed that a president be elected by a two-thirds majority of parliament, but failed to win the necessary support.

Has anyone has any luck in being able to watch Netflix (with your own account) using a VPN to watch another countries Netflix content? I hear that it isnt possible. I tried recently but the Netflix content that appeared was my usual content, so it appears that using a VPN/Firestick to watch another countries content isnt possible. Thanks

The problem is that I use my Firestick sparingly and really for domestic TV stations that are not accessible where I reside at the moment. To do this I can access these sites using a VPN and for the most part it works fine. The issue is when it comes to movie sites ie streaming sites. I use Bing as the search engine however the sites really dont load that well and sometimes simply cant be located using Bing. I can however access the sites on my desktop. Can I send/drop the website from my desktop to my firestick? Thanks

Can anyone recommend a free service/database that I can access to check how property prices have performed within a specific development over the years? Thankyou

Thankyou…please advise how to get the bus from Hong Kong to Macau. I understand that there are a few options available but would like some advice / recommendations. Thankyou

Does anyone know who runs the sub ADVChina?

The moderators have banned me foe 28 days and also banned me from messaging the moderators for the same period, for saying that a post about the recent small plane flying into aa Beijing building and it being compared to 9/11 was stupid….Is it run by the South African and the guy from the US?

Hi, as the title, I have a mouse connected to my firestick via bluetooth, it however has started to disconnect randomly, i can connect again, it then disconnects again etc…..am ideas how to fix this issue? Thankyou

There is a movie about a group of friends who gather at a persons house for a party, they all know each other. Its a contemporary movie, I have only seen a small snippet of it so I dont have alot of information other than what I post here.

Its a suspense movie, at some point throughout the night one of the guest asks where a person is, the others claim that he never attended, however the person is adamant that he did attend and is now missing. The others claim that he is mistaken of course, but without knowing the full movie the person is being gaslighted for a reason. I think that the missing person is played by an Asian actor (if this helps). Thankyou

Her social accounts have been closed down, I thought that something was off when she claimed that she was going travelling again and renting out her home. I think she has sold, or been forced to. I think that the law is finally catching up with her.

Brittany Higgins says in a new documentary that she contemplated suicide in the wake of Bruce Lehrmann’s rape trial and that she has since been subjected to “AI deep fake porn” and relentlessly hounded by the media, even when she left to live in France.

On Wednesday night, Ms Higgins walked the red carpet at the Australian premiere for Selina Miles’ documentary, Silenced – which was selected to open the 73rd Sydney Film Festival – but did not speak to waiting media.

She smiled as she posed for photos with the film’s cast and crew, embracing Miles in front of the cameras.

Journalist Lisa Wilkinson, who was sued for defamation over publishing Ms Higgins’ rape allegations against Bruce Lehrmann in 2021, also walked the red carpet ahead of the film’s screening.

Silenced is billed as an “eye-opening documentary” that “reveals how defamation laws are weaponised to silence survivors” just as the #MeToo movement was encouraging them to speak up.

It follows Australian-born barrister Jennifer Robinson, who represented actor Amber Heard in the defamation suit brought by her allegedly abusive ex-husband, Johnny Depp.

Ms Higgins, a central figure in the film, is one of the women it says “face a new kind of silencing” under defamation laws.

It is her first major interview since her appearance on The Project in 2021, which sparked the defamation lawsuit from Mr Lehrmann.

Lisa Wilkinson walks the red carpet for the #MeToo documentary Silenced. Pic: Jane Dempster/The Australian.

Ms Higgins says she was viciously attacked by trolls on social media, made the subject of “AI deep fake porn” and hounded by the media even after going to live in France with husband David Sharaz.

“I had incredible death threats; they threatened to kill my dog,” Ms Higgins says in the documentary.

“I’m just really tired,” she says. “I’ve gone through four government reviews, a criminal trial, civil trial, countless civil suits. I wouldn’t even know how many.”

Ms Higgins says she thought of taking her own life during the stress of the aborted rape trial against Mr Lehrmann, but “the police, luckily, intervened”.

In the defamation case brought by Mr Lehrmann against the Ten Network and Ms Wilkinson, Federal Court judge Michael Lee found that, on the balance of probabilities, Ms Higgins was raped by Mr Lehrmann.

Justice Lee rejected Ms Higgins’ claims that former minister Linda Reynolds and chief of staff Fiona Brown had participated in a cover up but that finding is not mentioned in the film. Nor is the $2.4 million compensation payout Ms Higgins received from the commonwealth.

Ms Reynolds successfully sued Ms Higgins for defamation in the WA Supreme Court last year over the claims of a cover-up.

Ms Reynolds’s lawyers wrote to the producers of Silenced in January saying it was “unfortunate that the message of this film has been undermined by the inclusion of Ms Higgins”. A legal letter from Bennett Law noted that “two Australian courts have found Ms Higgins was not ‘silenced’ and in fact was ‘dishonest’ in making allegations of a political cover-up”.

Linda Reynolds. Pic: Jane Dempster/The Australian

Fiona Brown. Pic: NCA NewsWire / Nikki Short

The Reynolds case is not mentioned in the film, nor is Ms Higgins’ filing for bankruptcy after the resulting costs order.

On the red carpet, Ms Miles refused to discuss Ms Reynolds’ lawsuit due to the “legal risk in telling these types of stories”.

She and producer Blayke Hoffman would not comment on whether Ms Reynolds was one of the people who tried to “silence” Ms Higgins.

Ms Hoffman said “the film is about the use of defamation by perpetrators to silence victims and journalists from speaking out”, and referred to Mr Lehrmann’s failed lawsuit against Channel 10 and Ms Wilkinson as an example.

The AUKUS submarine project has passed the point of no return and will be delivered successfully, says Australia’s recently departed ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd.

“There is zero possibility of this coming unstuck,” Rudd said in his first Australian interview since leaving government service last month. It is the most emphatic expression of confidence yet by any of the high-level architects of AUKUS.

Kevin Rudd leaves the White House after a meeting in October.AAP

He confessed that he had harboured doubts about the joint Australian-UK-US undertaking, announced nearly five years ago, until the moment in October when US President Donald Trump declared publicly that AUKUS was “full steam ahead”.

The former Australian prime minister said: “I have a high degree of confidence – beyond the normal political chutzpah and the normal defence-of-record stuff – that, by the time we hit 2032, you’re going to have the first Virginia-class boat delivered” by the US to Australia on time.

At the same time, Rudd – who is an expert on China, a Mandarin speaker, and the author of a book on Chinese President Xi Jinping – said that China had not surpassed the US as the dominant world power “yet”. But, he said, it continued to move towards forcibly seizing control of Taiwan.

“Irrespective of President Trump’s posture and policy, I think you’d have to say that the risks of Chinese military action against Taiwan continue to increase,” he said.

“It would be foolhardy publicly to speculate on any timetable around that, but it’s not going in reverse.”

Rudd resigned from the ambassador’s post after three years – a year before his full term – at the end of March to resume his former job as head of the New York-based Asia Society, a 70-year-old cultural institute with an affiliated think tank, the Asia Society Policy Institute.

His “galvanising interest”, he said, was that “I don’t want us to end up in crisis, conflict and war over Taiwan”. He said he didn’t want to overestimate his influence but that “I’ve worked on this for decades” and would do what he could to avert war. A clash between the US and China would be “unbelievably catastrophic”.

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Asked about Trump’s recent visit to Beijing, Rudd said he was not bothered by the US president discussing arms sales to Taiwan with Xi, as Trump had made no changes to US policy.

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Beijing, he argued, would be deeply uncertain about how Trump would respond to any unilateral military action against Taiwan, because of the priority he places on showing strength.

Rudd also acknowledged challenges ahead for the Albanese government in managing the Trump administration’s expectations on digital governance.

The US has criticised Australia’s local content requirements for streaming platforms, and says it is monitoring Australia’s News Bargaining Incentive for any disproportionate effects on American companies.

“Obviously, there are complex negotiations to be had here,” Rudd said. “The disagreements … in my judgment would be relatively minor, and I think manageable. But I don’t want to underestimate some of the challenges.”

There were differing views within the administration about Australia’s social media ban for children under 16, he added.

0:43

Trump confronts Rudd in awkward exchange

The White House meeting was briefly soured by an awkward moment when Donald Trump was asked about disparaging tweets Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, had made about him in the past.

Explaining his confidence in the success of AUKUS, Rudd noted that it was legislated by the US Congress, where it enjoys bipartisan support, and had now been endorsed by presidents from both sides of politics. Rudd helped steer the enabling legislation through Congress.

Significant work had already taken place on readying Australian shipyards for AUKUS, he noted.

“Operationally, on the ground, both in terms of the massive investments in preparatory work being undertaken at Fleet Base West for the submarine home-porting facility for our future fleet, together with supporting visiting American and British vessels, plus the massive investment unfolding in Osborne in South Australia, I see negligible risk of this coming unstuck,” he said.

“Had you asked me before last October when the PM was in town with the president, I would have said there was perhaps some risk.”

Greg Moriarty, pictured with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has replaced Kevin Rudd as Australia’s ambassador to the US.

Rudd described the US-Australia relationship as being well-placed for the future. He said it was now supported by three pillars, with a fourth under construction. First was AUKUS; second, rare earths and critical minerals co-operation; third, finance based on Australian superannuation investment; and fourth, co-operation on critical tech, including AI.

The “most complex challenge”, he said, was navigating the respective China relationships of the US and Australia, implying that the two allies have diverging priorities.

Rudd has been replaced as ambassador by Greg Moriarty, a long-time diplomat and public servant who was most recently the secretary of Australia’s Defence Department.

He served as ambassador to Iran from 2005 to 2008, and in that capacity briefed then US president George W. Bush on Iranian politics – a rare event for an Australian diplomat. He was later posted to Jakarta, and was also chief of staff to then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Moriarty presented his credentials to Trump at a White House ceremony on Thursday (US time), along with 11 other new ambassadors to the US.

He was greeted at the West Wing by Monica Crowley, the US chief of protocol. Press were not invited to the credentialing ceremony.

The Aboriginal corporation funded to support Alice Springs town camps and provide broader Indigenous safety and community programs spends more on employee costs than the entire Alice Springs council, which serves about 30,000 people in the Central Australian town.

As further evidence of dire town camp living conditions is published today, and demands grow for greater accountability on funding arrangements, The Australian can reveal the Tangentyere Council Aboriginal Corporation spent $24m on staff costs, its 2025 financial statement shows, while the Alice Springs Town Council, which services about 11,000 households, outlaid $22m in the same period. Both have a similar number of employees.

Tangentyere is funded to provide a range of employment, youth and domestic violence services as well as repairs and maintenance to the town camps, which contain about 256 homes for 1055 residents recorded in the 2021 Census. This figure is likely to be conservative and does not account for the fluctuating number of people travelling in from remote communities, which can lead to severe overcrowding.

Conditions across the estimated 16 town camps range from basic to unsanitary and some community leaders and residents are ­demanding to know where the $27m in government grants to Tangentyere last financial year is being spent.

Rhonda Bob says the cooktop hasn’t worked in years. at her Picture: Liam Mendes

In the Karnte town camp, about five kilometres south of Alice Springs, resident Rhonda Bob, 37, told The Australian on Sunday that the shower and cooktop in the house she shared with her brother hadn’t worked for years, but her main worry was safety. She requires renal dialysis and is concerned an intruder may enter the house at night because the door cannot be locked.

“I don’t want anyone to come in … I need safety,” she said. “I’m worrying about this one,” she said as she pointed at a door with a non-existent latch.

Ms Rob said calls to Tangentyere had gone unanswered.

“When we called Tangentyere, they didn’t come and fix this,” she said as she pointed at the door. “I was waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting.”

She said they agreed they would attend: “But nothing, we didn’t see that Tangentyere mob come.”

Rhonda Bob with her non-operational shower. Picture: Liam Mendes

In the bathroom, she held up the handle of a tap that was detached from the wall.

“I told them many years (ago) for this one. I was helping my brother, too, telling (them) to put new stove in, but that’s from long, long time.”

A senior Alice Springs elder, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was “concerning for everyone” that payroll costs for Tangentyere were $2m higher than the town council’s while the conditions in many of the overcrowded town camp homes were “unliveable”.

The elder, who branded Tangentyere “really secretive”, called for a change in leadership.

“It fell apart because there’s a lack of accountability, lack of responsibility. It needs a changing of guard. They’ve had the same cohort of people in there in charge since forever, and they’re not winning the game,” the elder said.

He said he “wouldn’t have a clue” where the millions of dollars in funding poured into the organisation were going.

The dire living standards in town camps have been in the national spotlight following the alleged abduction and murder of five-year-old ­Kumanjayi Little Baby, who was living in the Old Timers settlement on the edge of Alice Springs.

Federal Liberal senators Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Kerrynne Liddle, both Aboriginal women who grew up in Alice Springs, have been demanding greater clarity on the opaque funding streams and more accountability from service providers, with calls for full external audits.

Senator Liddle said she had been unable to get detailed performance breakdowns from Tangentyere despite persistent probing.

“The problem is that all the money goes in there for programs, but if you look at their reporting of outcomes, it is rubbish; it’s all glossy pictures,” she said.

“They are supposed to be there for the community but then don’t provide any information to the community on what they are doing. The money just keeps pouring in and nothing comes out.”

Tangentyere, which has not published an annual report on its website since 2018, could not be contacted for comment on Sunday. Its financial statements are available through the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations and the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission.

Tangentyere says on its website that it offers services to more than 10,000 people across Central Australia, but many people who spoke to The Australian said they understood its primary functions were town camp services and community programs in Alice Springs.

The Northern Territory government is responsible for funding the town camps’ infrastructure and housing.

The National Indigenous Australians Agency, which leads commonwealth programs for Aboriginal communities, said in a statement that Tangentyere had met all its reporting requirements.

It said funding was distributed to the organisation for a range of services, including skills training and job opportunities, child and youth activities and community safety and wellbeing programs, including night and youth patrols. The Tangentyere website says it is also responsible for municipal and essential services, repairs and maintenance in town camps.

“For more than 40 years we have been a proud Aboriginal community-controlled organisation working with every household in the Alice Springs Town Camps,’’ it states.

Senators Liddle and Price said the issue wasn’t about building more houses. However, the National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People,

Sue-Anne Hunter, is leading calls for more funding for housing. She said there needed to be an “immediate investment into safe and secure housing delivered through Aboriginal community-controlled housing organisations”.

“Appropriate housing isn’t just a support service that aids in child safety; it’s a human right,” she said.

A Deloitte report into the Territory’s town camps in 2017 found that continuing to invest in town camps that offered “impossible economic integration” was pointless. “Quite simply this is investing in continued disadvantage,’’ it said.

It recommended incentivising and enabling town camp residents to transition, over time, to economic centres with employment opportunities.

Tangentyere criticised the findings. In its last published annual report it said the Deloitte report had portrayed Aboriginal community-controlled organisations in a negative light.

“TCAC disagrees with many of the qualitative assertions of the report which are heavily premised on the economic assumptions of the reviewer. In some cases, the assertions of the reviewer reflect a lack of context and a perspective that demonstrates non-Indigenous cultural relativism,’’ it said.

In a shock twist no one saw coming, sacked ABC fill-in radio host Antoinette Lattouf has returned to the airwaves at the public broadcaster after being invited on to spruik her new book – and duly savaged the media organisation over its decision to axe her.

The former commercial television reporter, who famously received almost a quarter of a million dollars in taxpayer-funded dam­ages after being dumped halfway through a week of casual presenting shifts on ABC Radio Sydney in the lead-up to Christmas in 2023, received almost 15 minutes of airtime on the ABC’s Melbourne radio outlet on Saturday morning to dissect the evils of the state-owned media empire.

Proving, if anything, that smashing the ABC is so much fun even its own staff want to get in on the action, the station’s Saturday mornings host, Jacinta Parsons, quizzed Lattouf at length about what it felt like “to walk into the ABC again”.

ABC Melbourne radio presenter Jacinta Parsons.

Intriguingly, Lattouf claimed she had been shunned by many of the ABC’s more “defensive” staff in the wake of her successful lawsuit, particularly in Sydney.

“I have to say, walking into this building, I was looking at your body language and your tone,” Lattouf said.

“I was like, ‘What kind of welcome am I gonna be given?’ Because there are some ABC staff who are a bit defensive … who don’t like how much the ABC has been interrogated and exposed in some ways. And so, I look for signs. ‘Oh, am I safe?’

“(But) this is ABC Melbourne, not ABC Sydney, the scene of the unlawful crime. And so, in a way, I didn’t spend a lot of time here.

“So it doesn’t feel as jarring. Although I did have a moment walking in, going, I’m pretty sure this building was vandalised after I got sacked. Like, there’s so much that happened and so much buy-in by the public that it’s almost a bit too much. Like your mind, because of the level of trauma. Like, I’ve got tears in my eyes. The level of trauma suppresses certain information, so I had to Google it.

“I’m, like, I’m not imagining it. Somebody came and vandalised ABC Melbourne, I’m pretty sure. And ABC Perth. And somebody, wrote ‘Justice for Antoinette’ on one of the buildings, and it’s those sorts of details that sometimes I forget, because so much has happened, and so many people were invested in this court case for a myriad of reasons.”

Justice Darryl Rangiah.

During their not-so-wide-ranging discussion, Lattouf rarely strayed too far from the subject of her lawsuit, accusing the ABC of racism and hitting out against suggestions – by the ABC – that she had profited in any way from the publicity surrounding her case.

“On the stand, even the ABC’s barristers at one point tried to insinuate, well, not insinuate, suggest that I had benefited from this, because I had gained more Instagram followings,” Lattouf said.

“I was like, I’ve had to have a guy prosecuted for threatening to kill me. I’ve lost work for two years. I’ve been trolled and harassed relentlessly and defamed in newspapers. (So what if) a few more thousand people have followed me to the point that the judge jumped in and said, ‘Well, do you want Antoinette to thank you for some extra Instagram followers?’ ”

Of course, Diary is clearly getting a bit on in years because we can’t recall Justice Darryl Rangiah saying that, but we could have been on another call at the time.

Either way, we tried to contact the ABC’s managing director, Hugh Marks, to ask what he made of the ABC’s bizarre decision to engage in a little ABC bashing of its own, but sadly didn’t hear back.

Not the first time to Vietnam but we are heading back for about 5 nights

1. Is it better stay in Danang or Hoi An? We would like to visit both Hoi An and Hue

2, As a UK passport holder can I simply arrive in Vietnam and obtain a visa on arrival

Thanks