Small businesses offered tax breaks for going green in federal budget – as it happened | Australia news

What we learned, Sunday 30 April

Small businesses to get $314m in tax cuts for going green

NT police commissioner’s settlement ‘a confidential matter’: Fyles

Crime scene declared after suspicious death in far-north Queensland

A 65-year-old woman has died in suspicious circumstances at Atherton in Queensland’s far-north.

Police say at 8.30am on Sunday emergency services were called to an address on Gordon Street where a woman was found with a wound to her abdomen.

She was declared deceased at the scene.

A crime scene has been declared as detectives work to determine the circumstances leading to the woman’s death.

– AAP

Government must spend more on environment at budget

Australian Conservation Foundation director Paul Sinclair says the government could find $4bn to cover the $2bn needed to tackle the biodiversity crisis if the government ended fossil fuel subsidies.

Sinclair said axing the Fuel Tax Credit scheme, which benefits fossil fuel producers, would free up money that could be better spent tackling environmental issues.

Globally the tide is turning on these sort of subsidies … that send the wrong signal in terms of the sort of behaviour we want to see the public and private sector undertaking.

A diesel fuel rebate is one of those really poor signals we’re sending, when we should be saying get off fuels that warm the planet and help destroy nature.

A recent ACF analysis found just 53 cents of every $100 spent by the federal government goes to the environment despite about half of the nation’s economy directly depending on its health.

But at a bare minimum, Sinclair says the budget must detail funding for the cornerstone reforms Ms Plibersek has promised after last year’s shocking State of the Environment report detailed what’s at stake.

It said at least 19 Australian ecosystems have shown signs of collapse or near collapse, with overall environmental health poor and deteriorating due to climate change, land clearing, invasive species, pollution and mining.

Almost 2000 species, many found nowhere else on earth, are sliding towards extinction.

Plibersek has said she will bring key reforms recommended by a scathing review into existing laws that found they don’t protect nature.

Promised cornerstone reforms include a complete rewrite of environmental laws, the development of new national standards that will explicitly state what the laws must achieve, and a new federal watchdog to enforce them.

Sinclair said those reforms wouldn’t work if the government didn’t back them with funds.

It must have allocations to ensure that law reform occurs, and that the Environment Protection Agency is set up … it certainly needs to be in the forward estimates.

He’s also hoping that in a tight budget, with the treasurer under mounting pressure to deliver for those doing it tough, a decade-long campaign to end “perverse” subsidies for fossil fuel companies might finally succeed.

Scientists have estimated about $2 billion is needed every year just to tackle the biodiversity crisis.

– AAP

Here are a few photos from the weekend’s top stories:

How Canberra became a progressive paradise – and a housing hell

Part of what makes the ACT so ahead of the legislative curve is also partly why the government is stuck in development paralysis.

Canberra has always been one of Australia’s more divisive cities. With its cold climate and designed to encourage work, it’s a city of binaries – you either love it, or love to hate it.

But Canberra has developed a new reputation as Australia’s most progressive city.

Labor has held power in the ACT, often in coalition with the Greens, since 2001. More than two decades later, the territory is a vanguard of progressiveness for the country, with Canberra heralded as a “laboratory of democracy”.

The chief minister, Andrew Barr, the first openly gay person to lead a government in Australia, says it’s the result of governments working in lockstep with the population:

Both the progressive nature of the city and a long-term progressive government has resulted in us being the first jurisdiction in Australia to pass many pieces of landmark legislation

But with that growth has come one of the downsides of progressive politics – housing paralysis. Canberrans, in the aggregate, are more likely to work as full-time professionals and to be paid higher salaries – which they need as living in Australia’s most progressive city doesn’t come cheap.

For more on the Canberra paradox, read the full report by Guardian Australia political reporter Amy Remeikis:

Australian charged for allegedly spitting at imam in Indonesia

Stephanie Convery

Tesla models no longer available in Australia but company silent on change

Tesla’s Model S and Model X were not available for order in some Asia-Pacific countries, including Australia, Thailand, Singapore and New Zealand, the automaker’s website showed on Sunday.

Other Tesla Inc models, such as Model 3 and Model Y were available in these countries, according to the website. It was not immediately clear why these models were not available. Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker posted record deliveries in the January-March quarter but deliveries of higher-priced Model X and Model S vehicles slumped by 38%.

Tesla has been aggressively cutting prices for some of its models this year across markets to juice demand as competition among electric vehicle makers heats up around the world.

Investors have been watching Musk’s gamble that cutting prices would stimulate sales, although they worry about eroding margins.

– Reuters

NT police commissioner Jamie Chalker steps down after settlement

Weather update

Nanotechnology puts new generation of microscopes on the horizon

Scientists at the Australian National University and the University of Adelaide have engineered nanoparticles that could usher in a new generation of microscopes.

The nanotechnology uses high frequencies of light so researchers can see objects that are thousands of times smaller than a human hair, such as the structure of cells or inside viruses.

Anastasiia Zalogina, lead author on the research published in Science Advances, said the new technology, which requires only a single nanoparticle to work, could “see” at 10 times the resolution of conventional microscopes:

Scientists who want to generate a highly magnified image of an extremely small, nanoscale object can’t use a conventional optical microscope.

Instead, they must rely on either super-resolution techniques or use an electron microscope to study these tiny objects.

But such techniques are slow and the technology is very expensive, often costing more than $1m.

The more affordable ANU technology uses nanoparticles to increase the frequency of light that cameras and other technologies can see.

The researchers say there is no limit to how high the frequency of light can be increased – the higher the frequency, the smaller the object that can be seen.

Another benefit is that light-based microscopes are less likely to damage delicate samples than electron microscopy.

It is estimated that a 1% increase in yields of computer chip manufacturing translates into $2bn in savings.

– AAP