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Key events
Shadow treasurer Angus Taylor says the country is off track, and asks why Australian families are paying the price for the government’s “reckless spending”.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the Coalition gave Australia much higher public debt and student debt, while Labor is lowering those. He says:
You think lower student debt is a bad thing… this side of the house is trying to cut your student debt, that side of the house wants you to have more student debt.
Labor’s delivered two surpluses and improved the underlying cash balance, Chalmers says, so there’s much less debt than forecast by the Coalition:
When you manage the budget responsibly, when you manage the economy responsibly… you can support people who genuinely need our help.
Peter Hannam
The Reserve Bank has left its key interest rate unchanged for an eighth meeting in a row as it awaits more evidence inflation will soon return to its preferred target range.
The RBA board ended its two-day meeting on Tuesday by keeping its cash rate at 4.35%, a move widely expected by economists and financial markets.
It’s now a year since the central bank’s last rate move, the 13th increase in a series that began in May 2022. Prior to today’s verdict and related commentary, investors weren’t fully pricing in a rate cut until the middle of 2025.
More to come…
The Reserve Bank is about to hand down its decision on interest rates, so we’ll cram that in and keep an eye on Question Time as well. Fun!
Sussan Ley is up again on fee-free Tafe courses. She’s asking prime minister Anthony Albanese about courses that take six to 12-months to complete, and about the completion rates of those (earlier the PM said the free spots only started last year, and that courses can take three to four years).
Albanese says Tafe is public education, which is “a triggering word for those opposite”, and repeats the figures he used earlier about who’s taking them up.
He says 89% of them require up to three years’ full-time study.
Christopher Knaus
Earlier this year, Guardian Australia revealed whistleblower claims that McNair yellowSquares, a market research firm and frequent government contractor, had fabricated data purporting to show attitudes of Indigenous communities in regional Australia and suburban Adelaide while working on an Australian Electoral Commission project to test the effectiveness of advertising for the Voice referendum.
The whistleblower alleged he was instructed to attach false location data to face-to-face interviews he had conducted in inner-city Sydney. He alleged the fabrications were designed to cut costs while presenting research that appeared to have been conducted across the country.
Following the reporting in August, McNair engaged an investigator to probe the whistleblower’s allegations. The findings of that probe, shared with the AEC, show 13 staff were instructed to alter location coding on the survey responses and eight staff acceded to the request.
The AEC said it is now “considering its legal position” over the scandal and remained “incredibly disappointed” in the alleged behaviour of McNair yellowSquares.
McNair’s new managing director, Gillian Milne, said in a statement the company had “sought to maintain the highest standards of integrity and accountability throughout the investigation”. Milne said changes had been made immediately in response to the investigation’s findings.
Karen Middleton
Penny Wong asks Indian minister about Sikh activists allegations
Foreign minister Penny Wong has raised concerns with her visiting Indian counterpart Hon Dr S Jaishankar about allegations that India was has targeted Sikh activists in North America for assassination.
Wong confirmed she and External Affairs Minister Jaishankar discussed the Canadian allegations during talks in Canberra on Tuesday.
“People have a right to be safe and respected regardless of who they are in our country,” Wong told journalists, when asked what security assurance she could give to Australia’s Sikh community:
That’s the essence of our multicultural democracy. We’ve made clear our concerns about the allegations under investigations. We’ve said that we respect Canada’s judicial process. We convey our views to India, as you would expect us to do, and we have a principal position in relation to matters such as the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, and also, frankly, the sovereignty of all countries.
Jaishankar rejected the Canadian allegations. He said:
USCanada has developed a pattern of making allegations without providing specifics. Secondly, when we look at Canada, for us, the fact that they’re putting our diplomats under surveillance is something which is unacceptable.
The visiting minister said he was concerned that “political space” was being given to “extremists”.
Both ministers condemned the vandalism of a Hindu temple in Canada yesterday.
“People have a right to express their views peacefully,” Wong said. “We draw a line between that and violence, incitement of hatred or vandalism, and they should be dealt with by the appropriate law enforcement authorities.”
Last year, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau accused India of assassinating Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was shot dead in British Columbia, in western Canada, in June last year. The US has since accused India of involvement in a plot to kill an American Sikh activist.
Wong and Jaishankar also discussed their joint membership of the Quadrilateral, or Quad, dialogue with the US and Japan, and the two countries’ people-to-people ties, which she called “the beating heart of the relationship”.
Jaishankar echoed Wong’s view that the Quad would continue should former US president Donald Trump be elected, saying one of the few in-person global summits held during the Covid-19 pandemic was the meeting of Quad leaders in Turkey.
Independent Zali Steggall calls on Albanese for ‘ambitious’ 2035 emissions target
Zali Steggall, the independent MP for Warringah, is asking about climate change, and the government’s position. “Will you announce and commit to an ambitious 2035 emissions target?”
Anthony Albanese says he acknowledges Steggall’s genuine commitment to acting on climate change. He says:
I share the concern identified by the work that the CSIRO have done. The science tells us, has told us for some time that Australia, not only because we are part of the globe, is vulnerable to increased temperatures – actually the science is telling us the temperature rise here is higher than the international one – because we are particularly vulnerable.
This report says that there will be a decrease in rain, but more intense. So if you have drier areas, and then you have an extreme rain event, then you will have more flooding.
It’s rowdy in the chamber, and Albanese pauses for a second, while Dick tries to bring down the level of noise.
Albanese runs through the extreme weather events that have hit Australia since he has been PM.
Now we have a very strong target that is legislated. For the first time we legislated net zero by 2050. We legislated for a 43% reduction by 2030, and I thank the member for Warringah and others who supported that decision.
We will of course take advice, based upon the science, but we remain absolutely committed to acting on climate change, to not just listening to the science but also being a part of global action on this issue, because one thing that is correct is that no country in isolation can solve this. We need to work as part of the global community to make a difference for this generation, but more importantly as well for the generations to come.
PM says Labor intent on ‘matching up the jobs of the future with the skills and training of today’
Albanese goes on to say that older workers are also retraining through Tafe and it would be a shame to waste their experience:
That is a waste, to waste that experience and to say to those workers, when things like the car industry was shut down, because those opposite told them to leave … we think those people should not be left behind.
I tell you what is a waste as well, when housing projects cannot get off the ground because there aren’t the skilled workers to deal with them.
I tell you what is a waste as well, when businesses have to look overseas, as a number of business leaders have lobbied and said to have important labour, because we cannot provide the skilled workers here. What we are about is matching up the jobs of the future with the skills and training of today and the future.
Labor’s quizzed on debt reduction policy
The first Dorothy dixer was on Labor’s debt reduction policy, which has not been universally celebrated (to put it mildly). Now it’s opposition deputy leader, Sussan Ley. She says just 13% of fee-free Tafe enrolments have ended up with the qualification being completed.
(There are interjections, and speaker Milton Dick says he doesn’t care how many people he has to remove.)
Ley is back up, asking how much money has gone towards courses that were never completed.
Albanese says he thanks not just Ley, but “their entire tactics committee for that question”, and:
We have been asked why is it that four-year apprenticeships or three-year apprenticeships have not been completed … fee-free Tafe did not begin years and years ago, it began when we came in last year. As a direct result, there are more than half a million Australians that have benefited from fee-free Tafe.
He says there have been tens of thousands of enrolments:
35,000 construction sector enrolments, 36,000 early childhood educators, 49,000 technology and digital sector enrolments, 131,000 care sector enrolments, 35% of the enrolments have been in regional Australia.
Question time begins
The starting gun for question time in the House of Representatives has fired. The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, asks: “Why are Australian families paying the price for the Albanese Labor government reckless spending and when will this reckless spending stop?
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, says he’s being asked the question by the guy who was a cabinet minister and assistant treasurer and “in the entire time they were in office, they did not deliver a single surplus”, he says.
Now he’s listing a bunch of Coalition spending:
$4bn to cancel the French submarine deal. $1bn paid out to victims of robodebt. $444m to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation without a tender process or even consulting the foundation. $660m on commuter car parks where there was no train station – no train station! $420m for an offshore processing contract awarded to a firm registered to a shack on Kangaroo Island. A shack. On Kangaroo Island.
The roll call continues with the sports rorts scandals, the NBN cost blowouts, inland rail blowouts … someone got pretty happy with the bullet points here.
Albanese says:
What we’re is investing in education and training, we are investing in Australia’s future, while we are delivering responsible economic management which is why we have cut inflation in half.
New from Christopher Knaus on a market research firm engaged as part of the Australian Electoral Commission’s efforts to improve participation in the referendum. An AEC spokesperson said:
The AEC is considering its legal position. We will continue to do so as this matter evolves.
Paul Karp
Evidence presented at Senate estimates about NZYQ cohort
We’ve just been catching up on some evidence from home affairs department officials to Senate estimates last night about the NZYQ cohort – non-citizens released from immigration detention as a result of the high court’s ruling that indefinite detention is unlawful.
There are now 215 people released as a result of that decision, including: 12 people convicted of murder or attempted murder; 66 of sexual offending; 97 of assault; 15 of domestic violence; 15 of serious drug offences; five of people smuggling and five with “low or no level” of offending.
Of the 215, 143 are subject to electronic monitoring and 126 must obey a curfew. A total of 65 have been charged with state or territory offences since their release.
Officials revealed that $73.3m has been spent responding to the decision.
Clare Sharp, the general counsel of the department, said in 35 cases there was a request for information about whether they might be susceptible to an application for preventive re-detention, nine of which have gone through expert review and had advice from counsel about a possible court application. The department anticipates it will apply for the first community safety order (for preventive re-detention) “in the coming weeks”.
Some 13 people have brought habeas corpus applications relying on NZYQ, two have ongoing legal cases and the rest were released either because they were given a protection visa or because they were refused but can’t be removed from Australia.
Queensland’s truth-telling inquiry officially shut down
Joe Hinchliffe
Queensland’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander partnerships minister has shut down the state’s truth-telling and healing inquiry on her first full-day on the job.
Minister Fiona Simpson officially advised its chair, Joshua Creamer, to cease the inquiry’s work on Monday night.
Simpson was sworn into her portfolio on Friday after the Liberal National party swept to power, ending Labor’s decade-long reign in the sunshine state.
That same day, Creamer, a Waanyi and Kalkadoon man, lashed out at new premier David Crisafulli for delivering an edict via the media that the inquiry immediately shut down, saying the decision would cause “a significant amount of devastation” across Queensland’s Indigenous community.
People from the Minjerribah/Terrangerri community people on Stradbroke Island opted to push ahead with information sessions over the weekend despite losing government support.
The inquiry began on 1 July 2024 and work was under way in the Indigenous community of Cherbourg to talk with about 40 witnesses, who were preparing to share their experiences with the inquiry.
The inquiry was part of Queensland’s path to treaty.
The LNP were contacted for comment.