Welcome back to your weekly federal politics update, where Courtney Gould gets you up to speed on the happenings from Parliament House.
Barnaby Joyce has always been a disruptor; it’s one of the reasons Pauline Hanson wanted to woo him to One Nation.
Few have had a career quite like Joyce, who was once described by Tony Abbott as Australia’s best retail politician. The man who had two turns as Nationals leader could connect with voters. He was loved and despised (in some seats) in equal measure.
His defection to One Nation was designed to bolster the party’s legitimacy. His performance as its Treasury spokesperson this week did anything but.
Joyce struggled as he was sent out to sell the party’s superannuation policy. Under the plan, renters and mortgage borrowers would be able to divert a quarter of their super contributions to their income for up to three years.
Across a series of interviews (including one he conducted from the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge) he was asked about the proposal’s inflationary impact and what this would mean for a person’s foregone retirement savings.
“Interest rates keep rising,” Hanson had said as she announced the policy at a rare press conference in Parliament House. Economists told the ABC the policy, if ever adopted, would only tempt the Reserve Bank to push them higher.
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Joyce claimed the extra cash wouldn’t drive up inflation because the money already sits in superannuation funds, so it’s already in the economy. Economists don’t share that view, with history suggesting people would most likely spend and not invest any extra money.
Joyce snapped at the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson on 7.30 on Monday night for not providing questions on retirement savings losses ahead of time. He declared he was not Jesus Christ, as if that was ever in question.
He is, though, an accountant by trade (a fact he pointed out) and someone who has been on the policy sell many a time. It became clear One Nation never modelled the proposal. Joyce later claimed they didn’t have the staff to do so — an argument that fails to acknowledge One Nation could’ve asked the Parliamentary Budget Office to help as other parties do.
Whether the policy has merit is one thing. But inflation is already running hot. Having some idea of the inflationary impact before releasing should be the bare minimum for a Treasury spokesperson.
A subplot to this is it’s the second time in as many months the Coalition was reportedly gazumped by One Nation on policy (first being the tobacco excise). A similar proposal was said to have been drafted under Sussan Ley. The opposition downplayed the question of a leaker within their ranks, but it again begs the question of discipline.
The similarity between offerings from the Coalition and One Nation is something the government continues to leap on. It plays into the argument the government thinks it can win and is probably why a noticeable chunk of Labor’s questions to itself in QT were about super.
Hastie v Hanson
A fight between Hanson and Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie has been brewing for a while.
The spat came to a head this week over a One Nation cartoon that called the former SAS captain a “traitor” eight times across nine minutes for testifying in Ben Roberts-Smith’s failed defamation case. He was subpoenaed to do so.
“It’s a slur on me. It’s a slur on other veterans who have given under oath evidence to the federal court,” Hastie said.
Several Liberals also condemned the cartoon. As did fellow veteran Jacqui Lambie, who echoed Hastie in calling the One Nation leader a “bloody coward”.
Hastie served in Afghanistan. He’s drawn the ire of One Nation and backer Gina Rinehart for giving evidence against the Victorian Cross recipient. Hanson and Rinehart say Roberts-Smith has been unfairly targeted over war crime allegations.
Andrew Hastie is taking issue with a cartoon published on Pauline Hanson’s X account. (ABC News: Callum Flinn)
Roberts-Smith was this year charged with five counts of the war crime of murder over the alleged killings of five Afghan men between 2009 and 2012. He has not yet entered a plea but has denied the allegations.
Hastie’s seat of Canning covers a large part of the state electorate of Secret Harbour, which One Nation won in a by-election last month. It’s put a target on the seat as one the party thinks it can win at the next federal election.
Hastie’s ruled out legal action over the video. It would be too costly of an exercise, he says, thanks to Rinehart’s backing. Instead, he wants to “impose costs politically”.
Hanson, and Joyce, have insisted she hasn’t personally called Hastie a traitor despite the video. Earlier this week though, she did say she’d call him a “wanker”.
Coalition deals it itself out
While he wouldn’t agree with Hastie’s description of Hanson having a “glass jaw,” Opposition Leader Angus Taylor did back the call for the video to be pulled down.
It’s an ironic point for him to make at the press conference where he was rallying against the government’s Digital Duty of Care legislation – a bill he declared amounted to political censorship.
The government released draft legislation earlier this week. It’s designed to force social media companies to identify and mitigate harm on their platforms. It would also force platforms to provide users with choice between an algorithmic feed and a feed simply made up of people you actually follow.
But on Thursday the Coalition effectively dealt itself out of negotiations, confirming it won’t support the bill amid concerns it hands the communication minister too much power to determine what constitutes online harm.
Shadow Communications spokeswoman Sarah Henderson urged reporters to not conflate the concerns about the algorithm with the part of the bill the Coalition had problems with, ignoring the fact Matt Canavan, who was standing next to her, and others had been doing so all week.
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Albanese gets tetchy
You might think with all this going it, the prime minister’s week must have been smooth sailing.
After the ABC revealed the PM had an honorary membership with the Marrickville Golf Club, Albanese was under pressure over a $6m grant he promised the club for upgrades.
The $560 million Major and Local Community Infrastructure Fund was investigated by the Centre for Public Integrity and found 73 per cent of the funding went to notionally Labor-held seats.
Labor essentially spent the week insisting there was nothing to see here. The scheme was invitation only so the government could deliver its election promises. The crossbench labelled it pork-barrelling by design, calling for guidelines to be rewritten.
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Albanese turned the story into a bigger spectacle in a tetchy interview with the ABC, where he denied knowledge of the membership and took aim at the public broadcaster.
“I don’t have a card. I don’t go in there. I haven’t been in there for years. I used to walk my dog along the path, as lots of people do because it’s a community club,” he said.
“The ABC should do better.”
At least the prime minister can take comfort in the victory he did have in his preferred sport of tennis. Albanese defeated mortgage broker Joseph Daoud in a charity tennis match.
Daoud, a vocal critic of the government’s housing tax changes, purchased the hit-out with Albanese for $16,500 in the Mid-Winter Ball’s silent auction.
Despite telling reporters he’d been practising for months, Albanese had years on him and won in straight sets.
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