Australia politics live: doctors rally in Canberra against NT gas fracking and processing expansion

The Labor government is facing pressure from the crossbench and the Greens to drop its funding of the NT Beetaloo Basin and Middle Arm projects. Follow the day’s news live

Murray Watt says the conversations with China over other trade tariffs continue.

What happened with barley was that the WTO handed down a draft decision provided that to both countries and China at that point so that they were willing to talk. At this point we haven’t seen a draft decision from the WTO. That’s expected expected sometime later this year.

But we’d like China to remove those tariffs. today. We’d like China to remove the trade impediments that remain in place on seafood and some beef processing establishments today as well. That’s the position we’ve always put in. That’s certainly the position we’ll keep putting.

We would need to see some positive indications from China that they are similarly prepared to negotiate and to lift the tariffs on wine before we would consider that.

We obviously wouldn’t walk away from the WTO action until we had seen any positive sign like that. That’s what led us to suspend the case in the barley matter. [Then] China came to us and said that they were willing to talk and until we see something like that happen for wine then of course we’ll press on with the WTO action.”