Australia news live: PM to visit flood areas; Ardern heads to Sydney; first international arrivals with no Covid checks

Host Hamish Macdonald says:

Clearly the situation that you face now in government is challenging as far as the economy is concerned. Why not reconsider some of the stuff to actually genuinely tackle inflation?

Chalmers:

Well, first of all the facts [you refer to are a] couple of years away. So changing anything on that front would not materially impact the inflation challenge that we have right now. That’s the first point.

The second point is our commitments that we went to the election with are more important now than ever. Some of those things that I ran through, we anticipated some of these challenges, whether it’s inflation, whether it’s falling real wages, some of these issues have been around even rising interest rates. They started to go up before the election.

So some of these issues have been around for a little while now. We geared our economic plan towards them and so they are whether it’s skills, childcare, energy, investment in industry, these are more pressing more urgent needs no moment, even before the election when we committed to some of those policies. So it’s more important that we implement that.

Government will outline budget pressures when parliament is back – Chalmers

Chalmers says the beginning of this will happen in the October budget:

I didn’t want to wait till May, which would have been the usual timeframe for a budget. I would have thought this task is more urgent than that. But you can’t just do it in a couple of weeks. You’ve got to make sure you’re doing it methodically and responsibly. And so decided in October will be a good opportunity.

But before that, at the end of this month in the first week of the new parliament, I will also update the Australian people on our expectations for the economy – some of the pressures in the budget, including unnecessary spending on luxury construction in flood-affected areas in New South Wales.

Jim Chalmers says the budget should have a ‘more productive purpose’

The federal treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is on ABC RN this morning. I missed the top of it but he’s now talking about fixing the budget – he says they haven’t had a chance in the mere six weeks they’ve been in government to fix the problems left to them by the previous one. (That’s a rough tonal paraphrase.)

He says they want to eliminate spending on things like “slush funds”:

… and redirect it to a more productive purpose because that is the best chance of making sure as we emerge [out of what] will be an incredibly difficult period with high and rising inflation and rising interest rates. When we get to the other side, we want to have dealt with or began to deal with some of the other pressures in the economy which have been building so much longer than Covid.

It’s raining in NSW, and it’s frosty and below freezing in Victoria.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and the New South Wales premier, Dominic Perrottet, will visit flood-affected areas of southern and western Sydney today – some of which have been inundated four times over the past 18 months. The prime minister has just arrived back in the country after a week-long trip to Europe for the Nato summit and to Ukraine.

There are fears the Hunter Valley and mid-north coast will be the next to be hit with flooding as the rain moves slowly north. Major flooding is still occurring in greater Sydney, with more rain expected early Wednesday morning. About 50,000 people have been given evacuation orders or warnings across NSW.

We’ll be keeping an eye on the developments there throughout the day.

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s diplomatic visit to Australia continues in NSW today ahead of her meeting with Albanese later this week. After meeting with the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, yesterday, she’s heading to Sydney for some tourism and business events.

And as of today, people arriving in Australia no longer have to declare their Covid vaccination status or obtain a travel exemption to enter the country. Travellers still need comply with Covid requirements of airlines and shipping operators, as well as those imposed by other countries, states and territories.

And that’s just the headlines. There’ll be heaps more throughout the day so stay tuned. I’m Stephanie Convery and I’ll be with you until about lunchtime. As always, if you see anything you think needs to come to my attention, you can catch me at stephanie.convery@theguardian.com or ping me on Twitter: @gingerandhoney.

Grab a coffee and we’ll get stuck in.