Australia news LIVE: Oil prices hit $100 for first time in months; Trump hikes tariffs on Australian products to 12.5 per cent

Thank you for reading our rolling news coverage for Friday, July 24. Here’s what’s making headlines this afternoon.

Trade: The United States will increase tariffs on Australian products to 12.5 per cent – up from 10 per cent – under the guise of human rights.

Middle East at War: Oil is trading at above $US100 ($143) for the first time since the last phase of the Iran war after Houthi rebels fired at two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. The US military also said it has completed its 13th consecutive night of strikes against Iran.

Politics: The government has scrapped its Climate Active certification scheme after it was labelled “greenwashing” for big polluters by lobby groups.

AUKUS: Billions of dollars of additional funding for the US defence industrial base have not improved the production rate of Virginia-class submarines, a top Pentagon official says, casting further doubt on whether Australia will receive its AUKUS subs on schedule.

Bird flu: A dead seabird discovered on an island on the eastern end of Moreton Bay in Queensland has tested positive for bird flu. The CSIRO will undertake further testing to confirm the case.

International: More than 20,000 people are fleeing a wildfire in southern France after flames spread rapidly through a bayside area busy with families on school holidays, in the latest emergency of a European summer marked by intense heat and dry conditions.

Commonwealth Games: The 2026 Games have officially started in Glasgow. The opening ceremony was held this morning, and featured King Charles and Queen Camilla emerging from a Dr Who Tardis. Look back at our rolling coverage here.

Kyiv: Ukraine’s fired defence minister says he rejected President Volodymyr Zelensky’s efforts to persuade him to rejoin the government in a different role where he could continue fighting Russia.

Mykhailo Fedorov, who was dismissed last week after just six months in the job, is a youthful and popular public figure due to his success in modernising the armed forces and giving Ukraine an edge in the war through innovative use of drones and technology. He has also cracked down on corruption in military procurement.

His departure triggered street protests across Ukraine that have put pressure on Zelensky.

Fedorov said in a statement that leading the Defence Ministry was one of only three jobs that “actually shape the course of the war”, along with the presidency and chief of the armed forces.

All this week, the antisemitism royal commission has been picking away at an apparently-hard-to-answer question – whether Victoria Police’s reporting mechanisms are picking up incidents of antisemitism that are reported.

It’s an important question in trying to measure how big a problem it is.

Earlier in the week we heard from a VicPol witness that the LEAP system, which records crimes, does not have hate crimes as a box to tick for the officer making the report.

To interrogate these figures, you’d need to look in the subheadings to see if the “prejudice motivated crime” box had been ticked, and then a “deep dive” into the “narrative” of the report to try to find out what kind of crime.

The government has scrapped its Climate Active certification scheme after it was labelled “greenwashing” for big polluters by lobby groups.

It enabled high-polluting companies to register their emissions, and claim carbon neutrality, by purchasing carbon offsets gained by paying for projects like tree planting to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

Climate Active, which was established by Opposition Leader Angus Taylor in 2019 (when he was minister for energy and emissions reductions), permitted companies to source up to 80 per cent of their credits from international projects.

Several large companies had already quit the scheme, including Telstra, Australia Post and PwC.

The move was welcomed by the Climate Council.

“Climate Active gave the green tick of approval to everything from polluting gas corporations to petrol at the bowser,” said the council’s Ben McLeod.

A spokesperson for the assistant minister for climate change Josh Wilson said the government had reviewed the scheme and decided to “move on from government certification” for polluters.

NSW detectives have released new details hoping to identify a suspected victim in its investigation into the nation’s most prolific alleged daycare abuser Hamish Tait.

Tait, 35, faces 329 charges alleging he abused more than 150 children by filming them in toilets at five Sydney centres between 2009 and 2025.

The Australian Federal Police on Friday said they hope to soon identify a boy allegedly pictured in images on the alleged predator’s electronic devices.

The images, believed to have been taken between March 2020 and July 2025, show the child wearing Bluey-branded underwear. He appears to have a distinctive freckle or mole, the AFP said.

The US military said it has completed its 13th consecutive night of strikes against Iran.

Central Command said it wrapped up its latest wave of attacks at 11am on Friday (AEST). The operation began at 8.45am (AEST).

Central Command said it targeted Iranian military command centres, drone-storage facilities, communication networks, coastal surveillance sites and maritime capabilities “to further diminish the threat Iran poses to civilian mariners and commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz”.

More than 50,000 US service members are operating across the Middle East.

Australian businesses started Friday with degraded access to Microsoft software, after a global outage that began overnight left Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Outlook faltering and remained unresolved into the morning.

The fault began about 12.44am AEST on July 24 and was traced to networking and traffic-routing problems in Microsoft’s West US region. Any customer whose traffic crosses the affected infrastructure can be caught, regardless of where they are.

A wide range of local businesses and users are reporting issues, with outage detector website Downdetector recording more than 2000 reports at the peak. Australian users are reporting login failures and app problems for Teams, Microsoft 365 and Outlook in particular.

The issues remain ongoing, and the tech giant has yet to provide a definitive timeline for full-service restoration.

The first witness at the antisemitism royal commission is Tahli Blicblau – she works for a Jewish community non-profit, the Dor Foundation, and is a former counter-terrorism practitioner.

She said the threat to her community came from four different directions: Islamic extremism, the far right, the far left and the conspiratorial movement. All this was augmented, she said, by transnational organised crime groups and hostile state actors.

ASIO, for example, has declared that the Iranian government and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps directed and funded the December 2024 arson attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue, and an organised crime group in Melbourne carried it out.

These threats against the Jewish community were “unprecedented and therefore demands an unprecedented level of sophistication and integration in its response,” Blicblau told the commission.

She used the analogy of a wall and a garden – the garden being the enjoyment by Jewish people of their social and cultural life, the wall being the defence system and advocacy she said they had been forced to erect around them.

Trade Minister Don Farrell has repeatedly dodged questions about whether it was appropriate for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to dine with a 25-year-old whose billionaire father was accused of funnelling huge sums of money from China into Australian bank accounts and mansions.

The accusations are detailed in a damning 189-page Australian Taxation Office affidavit about the Lee family patriarch, which this masthead fought for months to obtain and describes red flags about the sources of the Lee family’s wealth.

Asked by reporters at the Labor Party’s 50th national conference in Adelaide today whether it was a bad look for Labor to be fundraising with the Lee family, Farrell said it was a matter for the party’s administration.

“All of the issues in relation to donations are matters that are held by and dealt with by the party administration,” he said.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney says that the country is intensifying negotiations with the United States to reach a comprehensive trade deal but is prepared to respond, should Trump’s threat of 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods go into effect.

The new tariffs, announced by Trump on Monday, are scheduled to come into effect on August 19.

“If these tariffs, or other measures come into force, there’s a full range of things that we can do in that regard,” Carney said after meeting with Canada’s premiers and territorial leaders in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

Carney said, “everything is on the table” if an agreement could not be reached before the tariffs kick in.