Australia politics live: ‘surely a better way’ to reduce inflation, Pocock says, ahead of possible 10th consecutive interest rate rise | Australia news

There are a bunch of ‘parliamentary friends’ groups in the parliament, which is when politicians from across the political divide come together to learn more and support causes they all have an interest in.

Independent MP Zoe Daniel, Labor’s Susan Templeman and former Nationals turned independent Andrew Wallace have come together to form the parliamentary friends of eating disorder awareness.

It’s estimated that 2000 Australians die every year from medical complications arising from eating disorders.

Anyone who has had any experience with disordered eating knows it is a lifetime affliction and recovery is not linear.

The MPs hope that having an official parliamentary group looking at the disorders will help with advocacy and support for those affected, as well as give stakeholder groups a direct line to parliamentarians.

‘People’s view of me, I think, has changed and softened’: Dutton

And finally, Peter Dutton says his mum tells him he needs to smile more (in the context of a question of whether or not he has a negative perception of himself he needs to overcome in the public):

Well look, you know, my mum says to me, you know, you should smile more. When you’re in front of a camera, fair point. But if you are the home affairs minister and you’re talking about the levels of sexual abuse against kids, if you’re talking as defence minister, about an evacuation from a particular, you know, village or a particular town or airport, they’re not issues that you can just sort of, you know, crack a joke over.

… But I think as leader now, and when you see the polling you refer to, the people’s view of me, I think, has changed and softened just over the last 12 months. And I think that’ll continue because people can see in a more holistic way who you are, your background, you know, the reason given your life experiences, particularly around my time as a police officer.

You know, people I think can put into perspective how they see you. And I think even in relation to the voice, I think our position in relation to the voice has been perfectly reasonable, reflective of the views of literally millions of Australians.

And I think people can reconsider you when you’re in this role, as no doubt they’ve done with Anthony Albanese when he was infrastructure minister. People had a very different view of him than they do now.

… The opportunity in this job is to show the whole product, who you are and what you’ve done in your life and the way that’s influenced you. And I hope that people can reconsider on that basis.

Dutton: PM ‘can’t rule out’ any area of policy that would not be affected by Indigenous voice

On the Indigenous voice to parliament, Peter Dutton says he supports it in legislation: “There is no question about that.”

He says there is still no decision about how the Liberals will answer the question about it being in the constitution (although Dutton has been campaigning on a soft no for months).

Dutton again raises his issues with “detail” and Tom Crowley raises that Dutton, as a member of parliament, could actually work out that detail in the parliament.

Dutton:

Tom, it’s a huge issue because it’s open to the interpretation of the courts and the high court can interpret a form of words in a way that you and I can’t, I mean …

Q: But a number of high court justices and former high court justices have made assurances that there’s no particular issue with that wording. What specifically is the concern?

Dutton:

Well, that there are high court justices who have made the opposite case as well. And this is why people like Frank Brennan who’s an adjunct professor, I think law, and many others … [and] the prime minister himself has said that, you know, the crafting of the words is incredibly important. And a different set of words can deliver a very different outcome than what you thought would be the desired outcome.

So … I just think we’ve got to take a step back and look at the question, for example, of when the prime minister says the voice will only be concerned with issues relating to Indigenous Australians.

Now, I mean, do you think that that includes health and education? Of course. Does it include law and order and policies around those areas and communities? Of course it does, but it’s actually a racist statement to say that an Indigenous person is impacted differently than a non-Indigenous person in relation to any area of public policy. Defence affects Indigenous people in exactly the same way as it does non-indigenous people, and that’s been ruled out by the prime minister. But he can’t rule that out.

So I think there are just questions that are reasonably asked, but do I want to hear from Indigenous Australians about how we can improve the situation? Absolutely.

And in East Arnhem Land where I was the other day in Nhulunbuy and Gove, they have a 90% attendance rate of kids at school. They’ve got employment programs, they have a huge housing initiative and many of the problems that we see in other Indigenous communities don’t exist in some of those communities. They’ve got a dialogue which is basically the four clans coming together and almost a government, sort of a small government or a cabinet, I suppose, that’s set up there. Now, in their situation, … they want their voice to be heard and they want their voice to dictate the local policy.

‘There are always global factors’ affecting rate changes: Dutton

What would Peter Dutton do to lower the cost of living if he was prime minister?

Dutton says:

Well, I think if you look at the industrial relations system, everybody wants a system where people are paid fairly, uh, and, and get proper remuneration for their work.

But if you’ve got a system which is inflationary, and it’s not just in the area of industrial relations, but some of the … policy decisions that they’re making otherwise, and that they made in the October budget, they’re fuelling inflation.

And so the Reserve Bank governor gets all the blame, but he has to deal with the economic settings that are a result of the government’s policies. And at the time when he’s trying to increase interest rates to get above inflation, the government’s driving inflation further.

And it’s no mistake that during the Coalition’s time in government in nine years, out of 100 meetings of the Reserve Bank, they increased interest rates on one occasion. Labor’s been in power, they’ve had eight meetings, they’ve increased interest rates eight times, but you go back to the Keating years as well, and compare that to the Howard times, again, much higher interest rates in Labor’s time than now.

Tom Crowley asks what specifically he would do, pointing out that there are global factors to what is happening. Dutton says:

So you’re right to point out that there are global factors, but there are always global factors. There was the avian bird flu, there was the collapse of Ansett – if you go back over the last 20 or 30 years, there have been different economic circumstances, both domestic and international, that Liberal and Labor governments have had to deal with.

But interest rates have always been higher under Labor governments over the last 30 or 40 years. Not just because of the international factors which always exist – the war in the Middle East, the situation in Asia where there was a financial collapse. There have been all sorts of international factors.

Peter Dutton asked why Liberal party is so unpopular with younger voters

The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has spoken to social news site the Daily Aus (which has also done an interview with Anthony Albanese according to its socials) for its podcast.

It’s an … interesting listen. Here are some titbits from Tom Crowley’s in-person chat with the opposition leader.

Why is the Coalition so unpopular with younger voters?

Dutton says:

I think a few things. I think we’ve allowed the Liberal party to be defined by our opponents as opposed to making it very clear as to who we are.

I mean, we stand for aspiration. We stand for rewarding effort. And for young people, there’s a particular focus at, you know, a different stage in life maybe than right now on home ownership and how you’re gonna balance a budget once kids come along [or] how you can save money for retirement. I mean, they’re all the things that we believe in, supporting people on that journey and helping them through those different stages of.

So I think it’s important for us to recognise what we did on the environment when we were in government. The incentivising of renewables. We’ve got probably the biggest take-up on a per-capita basis of solar anywhere in the world. And that aspiration, I think, is a really important piece to talk about because parents want the best for their children, you want the best for your children, and it’s how we can give people the best start in life.

When I left school, I mean, unemployment was very high. There were for-lease signs all over, closed down shops, and it was hard to get work. And we’ve been in a different environment for some time.

But hopefully we can demonstrate to people the true value of the Liberal party’s being able to manage the economy well so that you can do well in your own life.

And also, I mean, final point, is if the government’s doing well and the economy is being run well, then you can afford to put money into all sorts of projects, social projects, environmental projects that otherwise couldn’t be.

Activity test restricting families’ access to early childhood education and care, says Thrive by Five director

The Thrive by Five campaign, run by the Forrests’ Minderoo Foundation, has looked in to the activity test (which measures how many hours of paid work a parent does to work out the amount of early childhood education subsidy available) and found that all it does is act as a barrier for parents (mostly mothers) who want to return to the work. (Impact Economics was commissioned to do the analysis)

Thrive by Five’s director, Jay Weatherill, says it should be scrapped.

Most concerning is that the activity test is forcing more than 126,000 children from low-income households in Australia to miss out on early childhood education and care.

This means that a single policy measure is restricting hundreds of thousands of Australian children from accessing the lifelong benefits of high-quality early learning which is simply unacceptable.

By continuing to utilise the activity test as a precondition for childcare subsidy allocation, the Australian economy is losing out on more than $4.5bn in GDP contributions from parents who would otherwise be active workforce participants.

Instead of incentivising a return to work for parents resulting in more economic activity, as was its original purpose, the activity test has done the exact opposite and has restricted economic participation for far too many.

Abolishing the test would increase the workforce participation for about 40,000 women in low income households, the campaign has found.

‘Surely a better way’ to reduce inflation than rate rises: Pocock

The RBA board will meet tomorrow to make its decision about raising interest rates (which, if it does so, will be the 10th increase in a row). The board has said it won’t hesitate to raise interest rates again and again to get inflation down to its target band (between 2 and 3%), but the data shows whatever savings buffer some people had after the pandemic is diminishing.

David Pocock told ABC Breakfast TV it might be time to look at how we deal with inflation:

I mean, this is a big question. There’s so many Australians doing it tough. My understanding is that they are simply implementing the rules. I’d like to maybe see some discussion about the rules.

If – you know, to reduce inflation, is the best way just to give money to the banks? You know, there’s surely a better way of locking up some of the cash in the economy, whether it’s putting it into super, raising the GST, I don’t know – but to have politicians criticise what seems to be just the process that has been set up by politicians is one thing.

What I do know is that there are so many Australians doing it tough and cost of living has to be a focus. We have to find ways to look after people in our communities who need the support.

Most Australians support changes to super tax concessions, polling shows

Also on the super changes – the latest Newspoll, first published in the Australian, has found that the majority of Australians support it.

64% of those polled approved of Labor’s proposal, with just 29% saying they did not.

On the party breakdown, 80% of Labor voters were in favour (no surprise there) but 54% of Coalition voters polled were also in support – despite the Coalition’s stance that this was “an attack on middle Australia” and the Coalition saying it would appeal it if it won the next election.

Pocock points out contradiction of stage-three tax cuts versus unchanged jobseeker rate

Meanwhile, David Pocock is in support of the super concession changes, although he thinks they could go further.

And he also thinks it is time to revisit the stage-three tax cuts – and concessions as a whole.

I think they have to be revisited … We get told that raising jobseeker for people who do desperately need that support who are living in poverty, one in six children growing up in poverty at the moment, we’re told, well, we need to be really careful about lifting the rate of jobseeker because that could be inflationary.

Yet that $250bn of tax cuts – most of that’s going to the, you know, the wealthier Australians – are somehow exempt from being inflationary, and that, in that conversation, I just don’t get it.

You know, if we wanted to deal with bracket creep for people at the low end, there’s better ways of doing that than the stage-three tax cuts.

Safeguard mechanism lumping ‘industries of the future’ together with fossil fuel projects: Pocock

Chris Bowen could make some changes to the regulations and thereby bypass the Senate with the safeguards mechanism, if it comes to that.

What does David Pocock think of that?

He could; it would mean that we don’t have these safeguard mechanism credits, which companies and facilities will earn for reducing the emissions on site – they can then trade those with what they’re calling SMCs with other companies. That’s clearly not … a great way to go about it.

This is something that we should get right and one of the big concerns with this policy is that we’re lumping together a whole bunch of industries that we desperately need and we know are going to be industries of the future: steel, aluminium, cement. We’re lumping them together with fossil fuels, which we know aren’t the future.

And we’re designing it in a way in that those steel, aluminium and cement [producers] are going to have to be competing with potentially new fossil fuel projects, new gas projects that are going to want to offset their emissions. So there’s there’s no acknowledgment of that.

And I think, while in principle, this is something that we need. We’ve got to get it right. And so, so far, I think there’s been some really good faith discussions about this, and that’ll obviously continue this week.

‘Some limits’ needed on carbon offsetting, David Pocock says

Independent ACT senator David Pocock is one of the votes the government needs for its safeguard legislation. He is still not across the line.

He tells Patricia Kavelas:

Well, as it as it stands, we will join Kazakhstan as the only two countries in the world that will allow 100% of emissions to be offset using carbon credits.

We are allowing heavy industries and things like coal and gas to offset their emissions in the land sector. I think there needs to be some limits on that to ensure that we’re actually incentivising onsite abatement, that people are avoiding emissions rather than just offsetting them and that there are a range of other issues that have been raised.

The price cap is also fairly unique in that if we hit the $75 price cap and the government doesn’t hold any more [of] these carbon credit units, then the commonwealth is on the hook for whatever the differences in price between $75 and the price of carbon.

I think there’s a lot to get through, having some really good discussions with government. It’s an important piece of policy. I’m not approaching this with red lines. I want to make sure that this policy is as good as it can be and that it will deliver the reductions that we need.

Burke: ‘Incredibly important’ for state and federal governments to address deaths in custody in tandem

Labor senator Pat Dodson wants the government to urgently implement recommendations from the Deaths in Custody report. Dodson says the government does not need to wait for a voice to act – there is a royal commission report from 1991 which has recommendations which have still not been implemented.

And deaths in custody continue to rise.

Tony Burke says:

Obviously, I’m not the one with carriage of this, but it’s incredibly important [that] anything about custody involves the states. And what Pat Dodson is really calling for is for the federal government to provide leadership in bringing the states with us. One of the things that has to happen nationally is for there to be a national register.

We did at the election make a commitment to be able to deliver on the National Register. So that part of it we’re already committed to bringing. The states’ law on this is something that that hasn’t happened. That should have happened and I’m, I’m certainly hopeful that we’re able to get there.

And so therefore, it’s a case of the extent of bringing them together. Ultimately, the decision on state laws is still going to rest with them. It’s not something where we can simply force that, but the part of it that we are asked to do with the National Register is something we’ve committed to just on a very key decision that will be made this week.

Tony Burke is then asked about this story by Henry Belot:

He says:

The general principle, I think, that everyone needs to always bear in mind is: even when a government enterprise is functioning on commercial terms, people do have an expectation that ultimately taxpayers own it.

More and more people ‘having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet’: Tony Burke

Tony Burke, who is the minister in charge of government business, is on ABC radio RN Breakfast.

He is asked about the ABS’s latest labour force figures, which showed the number of people with multiple jobs increased by 1.7%.

Is he concerned about that?

I’ve been concerned about it my whole career. That was one of the issues that I went through in my first speech. And ever since. When I actually worked as an organiser for retail workers, and I discovered that the person who I would have met at a night fill meeting at midnight the night before was then serving me a coffee at 8am, the next morning, in a completely different role.

There are always going to be some people who choose multiple jobs, students in particular; there’ll be times where people move in and out of a series of different jobs and have more than one on the go. And that’ll always be the case.

Increasingly, though, it’s people who are trying to hold a household together, who are having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet.

And some of the problem here is where full-time jobs or part-time jobs are available with regular decent hours and people are only being offered very short shifts and insecure work.

If you look at last year, a whole lot of the secure jobs, better pay bill, the focus was on the ‘better pay’ part. The ‘secure jobs’ part of that bill was a critical first step in being able to get a better deal for people to get more hours at their main job, rather than having to juggle two or three all the time to make ends meet.

Good morning