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On national matters now, and the Coalition is criticising the government for a perceived delay in the public announcement of an international incident between Australia and China.

Read more about the incident, off the Queensland coast, here.

This morning Defence Minister Richard Marles is explaining the reason for the two-day wait for the encounter to be made public.

Asked by ABC News Breakfast why the incident on Tuesday, when a Chinese fighter jet dropped flares close to an Australian military patrol plane, was only revealed to the public yesterday, Marles said there was a process to observe.

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“The incident happened on Tuesday at about 1am Australian time. When an incident of this kind happens, we go through a process, firstly of assessing all that occurred, to really make a judgment as to whether we regard the interaction as being unsafe,” Marles said.

“That is a process in and of itself and, on this occasion, we did deem it to be unsafe, and I can explain that to you, but we then go through a process of raising our objections with the Chinese government, which we did during the course of Wednesday and Thursday.”

Marles said the public was alerted as soon as the process was complete, suggesting a two-day delay was “relatively swift” for an international incident.

“It’s important that you get your facts straight when you make an attribution of this kind, and we don’t do it lightly,” Marles continued.

“But we do do it when Australian personnel are put in danger. And that is what has occurred here, because these flares were released, as you said, at a very close distance to our P-8 aircraft in international airspace.”