Benita Kolovos
Allan questions Peter Dutton’s ‘creeping influence’ on Victorian Liberals
Circling back to the press conference of the Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan.
Allan is asked about a report in the Age that the opposition leader, John Pesutto, ignored repeated requests to engage with the co-chairs of Victoria’s First Peoples’ Assembly and did not meet with them in the months leading up to the Coalition withdrawing support for a treaty.
She responds:
John Pesutto deliberately concealed this decision from First Peoples, didn’t consult with First Peoples, didn’t consult with the government and deliberately concealed this decision, not just from First Peoples here in Victoria, but indeed from the entire Victorian community …
You’ve got to question … what was the influence on John Pesutto in making this decision? Was it Peter Dutton, and his creeping influence into the Victorian branch of the Liberal party? What are the factors at play? These are really issues for John Pesutto to answer.
Key events
After a bit of back-and-forth about the government breaking an election promise (it’s much of the same that we’ve already heard), Richard Dennis put the decision into an economic context.
(This was after he made a joke about saying no to a different event today, so he could speak at the Press Club – “I rang the event organisers and I said, ‘I lied, I broke a promise’, and they said, ‘I understand the context in which you broke that promise, Richard. I think that’s a great opportunity and you should take it.’ That’s what grown-ups do.”)
Anyways, here was what Dennis had to say about the decision to change stage-three:
In the lead-up to the last election, the Reserve Bank governor said that he didn’t expect to increase interest rates until 2024. You know what? He did! 13 times. And everyone’s mortgages went up while they were waiting for the tax cuts, and people’s rents went up.
Promises are contextual. I don’t think Labor should have gone to the last election promising to support the stage-three tax cuts because they were a bad idea. But even if they’d promised to do them and I thought it was a good idea at the time… and then interest rates went up 13 times, and energy prices went up, and real wages fell, and they turned around and said, ‘I think we should break our promise’, I’d still be sitting here today saying good call. That’s what grown-ups do.
Spender on possibility of hung parliament and tax reform
Taking questions, Allegra Spender is asked by a reporter:
If we end up with the situation of a hung parliament, would you make genuine tax reform a condition of your support for either prime minister Anthony Albanese or opposition leader Peter Dutton to become prime minister?
Spender said she hopes we don’t get to that phase because the government and the opposition will have “significant political pressure” to bring real tax reform to the next election.
[The government has] broken a promise on what they were going to do. They said they weren’t going to make any changes to tax, [but they have]. I don’t think they can go to the next election and say we’re not going to make any changes to tax, they will not be believed.
So this is their choice now, this is the opportunity the government has to say, ‘OK, there are some really significant issues with our tax system. This is the time to change it, to look that in the face, and to go the election with that.’
And ditto from an opposition point of view – they can say, no, no, no, they can criticise all they like, but until they’re serious about putting a policy forward I think a lot of people will say, ‘What is your plan instead?’
I hope very much we won’t get to that place. If it comes to that, I would certainly say that should be a negotiation point if we come to a hung parliament.
Stage-three tax cuts a ‘good start’ but we ‘need to go further’: Denniss
Speaking on the stage-three tax cut changes, Richard Denniss said these are a “good start” but “we need to go a lot further”.
He proposes collecting more revenue from the PRRT and using it to boost rent assistance for low-income earners struggling with their utility bills:
If we collect more tax and lower the price of energy, lower the price of medicine, lower the price of childcare, lower the price of going to the doctor, you know it will do – it will lower inflation.
This is not complicated stuff. And we would reduce inequality, and we would increase the wellbeing of millions of Australians.
‘Australia is a low-taxed country’: Denniss
Richard Denniss argued that Australia’s tax system does need reform, and the decision to redesign the stage-three tax cuts was right, but said:
… you can’t even start a proper conversation about tax until our business community will stop telling lies about the tax system.
To be clear, according to the pinko leftie communists at the World Bank, and the IMF and the OECD, which is now run by that well-known socialist, Mathias Cormann, Australia is a low-taxed country. And anyone who can’t say that out loud should be excluded from a debate about tax in Australia.
So, what needs to be done to fix Australia’s tax system? Dennis argued Australia needs to stop subsidising “things that do harm”, noting that Australia spends $11bn a year subsidising fossil fuel use and extraction.
He added:
The easy way to reduce our reliance on personal income tax would be to increase the petroleum resource rent tax. Let’s do that. Let’s collect billions of dollars of extra revenue and if the consequence of that is [it] discourages some investment in fossil fuels, as luck would have it, that’s exactly what the climate scientists tell us needs to happen.
Tax debate in Australia ‘dishonest’, Richard Denniss says
Executive director of the Australia Institute, Dr Richard Denniss, is making the argument that Australia does not over rely on income tax.
We under rely, we under collect on taxes on pollution, and taxes on wealth.
He argued that the “so-called tax debate” in Australia is “dishonest”:
[Because] the same business leaders who brag about the destruction of a carbon tax, and who brag about the destruction of a resource rent tax … the same businesses groups who brag about the destruction of the broadening of our tax base are the ones complaining that our tax system relies too heavily on personal income taxes.
This is outrageous. If Australia were to expand its tax base by taxing pollution, by taxing wealth, then it wouldn’t look like we were over relying on personal income tax.
This is not complicated. The lobby groups, the business groups, are having a bob each way. Having fended off carbon taxes and fended of resource profit taxes they’re combining we’re too reliant on personal income tax.
Allegra Spender proposes tax reform ideas at press club
We’ll go across to the National Press Club now, where the independent member for Wentworth, Allegra Spender, and the executive director of the Australia Institute, Dr Richard Dennis, have been speaking.
At the end of Spender’s speech, she flagged she would be putting forward a number of ideas around tax reform to her community that are not a “finalised policy”, but an opportunity for robust discussion.
[These ideas] will naturally evolve as I try to build consensus, and I look forward to the scare campaigns that no doubt, my opponents will dream up. But this is the challenge that I put to the major parties – I challenge major parties to deny that we have long-term problems. They know that this is true, and they feel it and we feel it in the community. I challenge them to pretend that tax isn’t one of the solutions to the major problems this country faces. And I challenge them to be part of the solution, rather than wedging each other from the side.
Benita Kolovos
Allan questions Peter Dutton’s ‘creeping influence’ on Victorian Liberals
Circling back to the press conference of the Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan.
Allan is asked about a report in the Age that the opposition leader, John Pesutto, ignored repeated requests to engage with the co-chairs of Victoria’s First Peoples’ Assembly and did not meet with them in the months leading up to the Coalition withdrawing support for a treaty.
She responds:
John Pesutto deliberately concealed this decision from First Peoples, didn’t consult with First Peoples, didn’t consult with the government and deliberately concealed this decision, not just from First Peoples here in Victoria, but indeed from the entire Victorian community …
You’ve got to question … what was the influence on John Pesutto in making this decision? Was it Peter Dutton, and his creeping influence into the Victorian branch of the Liberal party? What are the factors at play? These are really issues for John Pesutto to answer.
Peter Hannam
Stickiness in inflation mostly in services and things we can’t do without
Most of the inflation numbers are cheery, such as the December month alone posting an increase of 3.4%, well shy of the economists’ tip of 3.7%, and getting with Coo-ee of the RBA’s 2%-3% target range.
Monthly numbers, though, aren’t as comprehensive as the quarterly ones, and that will be the central bank’s focus.
Slicing and dicing the figures, non-discretionary goods and services were up 4.8% from a year earlier for the December quarter (and up 0.6%) in the quarter itself. Baring in mind wages were probably rising at about a 4% clip, many households will still be getting squeezed in real terms.
Discretionary goods and services, meanwhile, were rising at only a 3% pace in the December quarter from a year earlier, suggesting perhaps retailers were having to paring their price increases to keep customers going through their doors.
There’s also quite a difference between tradable goods and services and non-tradeable ones. Perhaps because China is busy exporting deflation because of its own weak demand, tradeables were only 1.5% more expensive than a year earlier (and the lowest in almost three years). Non-tradeables by contrast were up 5.4%.
There’s increasing expectation that electricity prices will be lower after 1 July given the fall in wholesale prices in 2023 (as reported here last week). Power prices in the December quarter were up 1.4%, or a third of the pace of increases in the September quarter, the ABS said.
From a year earlier, electricity prices were up 6.9% (or less than the half the increase we saw in the September quarter. The timing of the government’s energy bill rebates made a difference. Since the June quarter, power prices are up 5.7% but without the rebates the increase would have showed up as a 17.6% hike, the ABS said.
CPI data is only gathered in the city (sorry regional and rural consumers). Hobart’s 3.3% annual increase was the least among the cities, with Adelaide’s 4.8% pace the highest.
Budget ‘pressure on all levels’: Chalmers
Back to Jim Chalmers’ press conference, where he was just asked about Victoria’s financial position and its upcoming budget.
He responded:
When it comes to the position of the Victorian budget, I think it is worth recognising that all of our budgets are under pressure. The Victorian budget is and the national budget is.
We have made some good progress when it comes to budget repair, first surplus in 15 years and another one in prospect, but there is still a lot of pressure on the commonwealth budget as there is on the Victorian budget.
We will work together with [the Victorian treasurer, Tim Pallas] where we can to try to get the best outcomes for the people that we both represent. We need to recognise it is not just pressure on one level of governments budgets, there’s pressure on all levels and we need to be responsible and realistic about that.
Benita Kolovos
Victoria pushes for 25% federal education funding
The Victorian government says it is pushing for the federal government’s share of education funding to increase to 25%, despite Western Australia accepting a deal that will see the commonwealth increase its share from 20% to 22.5%.
Speaking from Wyndham Park primary school, the deputy premier and education minister, Ben Carroll, told reporters:
I spoke with [federal education minister] Jason Clare last night, to say we want more than 2.5%. We’re advocating for 5%. I’m also talking with all my colleagues around Australia on this matter … We want to make sure that the commonwealth – which 80% of their funding is going to independent private schools – lifts beyond 22.5%, that they get to 25%. We think that’s the interest of Victoria and more broadly, that’s in the interest of all of Australia.
He said he was hoping to meet with Clare in person to strike a deal:
We are working cooperatively with the minister, we’d discussed this matter last night and we’ve agreed it’d be ideal if we could sit down minister to minister with our two secretaries, to try and see how we can get the best deal for Victorian school students.
The premier, Jacinta Allan, added:
As the deputy premier has indicated there are negotiations that are ongoing. Western Australia, for their own reasons, have struck their own arrangements with the federal government … Other states are continuing to have those discussions with the federal government and Victoria’s position is very, very clear. We expect our fair share of support for Victorian families and for Victorian schools, we expect that 5% difference to be funded by the commonwealth government as part of these negotiations.
Chalmers flags ‘genuine economic strength’
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said that despite the challenges and “pressure coming at us from around the world [and] country”, we are moving forward from a position of “genuine economic strength”.
If you think about 2024, what we are seeing here is inflation is slowing, real wages are growing, and from 1 July we will see tax cuts flowing.
We have had two consecutive quarters of real wages growth, we are seeing encouraging moderation in inflation and from 1 July … 84% of Australians will get a bigger tax cut to deal with the cost-of-living pressures we still see in our economy.
Fight against inflation not ‘mission accomplished’: Chalmers
The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is speaking to the media after the release of the December quarter CPI figures, that dropped just earlier.
He said the numbers are encouraging but Australians are still “under pressure”, pointing to the stage-three tax cuts as providing cost of living relief.
These figures show we are making more welcome and encouraging progress in the fight against inflation, but it is not ‘mission accomplished’ because we know people are still under the pump.
He said inflation has come down “really substantially” since 2022, but it needs to moderate “further and even faster”.
It is worth noting that today’s figures are better than the market expected. Annual inflation moderated 1.3 percentage points in the December quarter, the fastest pace of moderation since annual inflation peaked at 7.8% in the December quarter of 2022.
Sarah Basford Canales
Phone calls become focus of Shane Drumgold’s legal action
Shane Drumgold’s legal team are seeking to use 10 hours of phone calls to journalists to show Walter Sofronoff had an “apprehension of bias” against him during his inquiry.
The former ACT director of public prosecution is taking legal action against Sofronoff and the ACT government in an effort to quash the inquiry’s findings that he had mishandled the prosecution of Bruce Lehrmann.
At a directions hearing at the ACT supreme court this morning, Drumgold’s counsel, Dan O’Gorman, said he would seek to use phone records indicating Sofronoff had 65 phone calls to journalists between 9 February and 31 July to support his argument.
Of those 65 phone calls, he said 55 were made to The Australian and 10 were made to other media outlets. According to Gorman the 55 phone calls to The Australian, which he said were mostly to the columnist Janet Albrechtsen, spanned 7.5 hours.
He said that emails and text messages between Sofronoff and Albrechtsen have also been submitted as evidence.
O’Gorman told the court that Albrechtsen over the months of the inquiry had expressed an “adverse attitude” toward Drumgold through her articles, and alleged that Sofronoff’s relationship with the columnist was not in line with the media rules he put in place.
Sofronoff, in his affidavit, argued that it was his job as inquiry chair to speak with journalists, and his communications were above board.
Lawyers for the ACT government and Sofronoff are challenging admissibility of the phone records and other communications between the inquiry chair and journalists, arguing much of it is not relevant.
Justice Stephen Kaye told the parties the case wasn’t “an inquiry into an inquiry” and would be “strictly” a judicial review on very confined administrative law grounds.
Kaye is yet to rule on whether the phone records and Sofronoff’s other communications with journalists would be admissible when the trial begins on 13 February.
Lisa Cox
Australia’s biggest groundwater licence allowed to go ahead by NT court
The Northern Territory supreme court has dismissed two legal challenges to the granting of a groundwater licence at Singleton Station.
The cases were brought by the Arid Lands Environment Centre (ALEC) and traditional owners against the Northern Territory government and Fortune Agribusiness.
The licence is Australia’s biggest groundwater licence and will allow for the extraction of up to 40bn litres of groundwater a year for 30 years.
The cases had sought a judicial review of whether the licence had been properly granted in accordance with the territory’s water laws.
The case was the first legal challenge pursued by ALEC in the NT supreme court and its chief executive, Adrian Tomlinson, said the decision to go to court was not taken lightly:
This action was taken because the enormous groundwater licence enables water to be taken from a shallow aquifer that supports groundwater dependent trees, soaks, springs, swamps, sacred sites and cultural values across the landscape.
Australia and US to cooperate on tackling serious crime
The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, is in Washington DC today and has announced a “landmark agreement” with his US counterpart, Merrick Garland, boosting international cooperation when addressing serious crime.
According to a statement from the two AGs, the agreement will help tackle serious criminal activity, including terrorism and child sexual abuse, when the information law enforcement needs is held by overseas providers.
Dreyfus said:
This agreement means Australian law enforcement agencies will be able to prevent, detect, investigate and prosecute serious crime, while ensuring robust safeguards are in place to protect the rights and privacy of individuals and organisations and ensure accountability.
Today in Washington DC I joined US Attorney General Merrick Garland to announce a landmark agreement to tackle serious criminal activity when information our law enforcement agencies need is held by overseas providers.https://t.co/ya8i0bwsuI 👇 pic.twitter.com/CpfWQSp00D
— Mark Dreyfus (@MarkDreyfusKCMP) January 31, 2024
The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, has responded to the December quarter CPI figures that dropped just earlier.
You can read all the details from Peter Hannam below:
Writing on X, Chalmers said:
New data from the [ABS] shows we are making very welcome and encouraging progress in the fight against inflation, Government policies are helping, but this is not mission accomplished because we know people are still under pressure.
Today’s very welcome results are even better than market expectations, but we know people are still under pressure, which is why [Labor’s] cost of living tax cuts for middle Australia are so important.
BoM says severe thunderstorms possible for Queensland and NSW
As the clean-up efforts continue in Queensland, the Bureau of Meteorology said severe thunderstorms are still possible in western, central and northern parts of the state today.
Thunderstorms are possible across “most of the state”, it said, apart from the south-east or far south-west.
⛈️Today’s forecast: severe thunderstorms with heavy rainfall possible in western, central, and northern #Qld, also with damaging wind gusts in the west. Thunderstorms possible across most of the state apart from the southeast or far southwest. Warnings: https://t.co/FBmpsInT9o pic.twitter.com/xQQYvASHtc
— Bureau of Meteorology, Queensland (@BOM_Qld) January 30, 2024
Meanwhile in NSW, storms are possible along the central and northern ranges, western slopes and across the northern inland this afternoon:
Rock concert scheduled for Sydney CBD on Anzac Day forced to move
A controversial rock concert set to play out in the centre of Sydney on Anzac Day has prompted furore from a veterans’ group as promoters look for another venue, AAP report.
The Pandemonium concert in the Domain, headlined by rockers Alice Cooper and Placebo, was scheduled to take place near the annual Anzac Day march through the city centre.
RSL NSW’s president and former commando Mick Bainbridge said the concert had been approved without any consultation with the organisation and the event was inappropriate on a “day for respect and quiet contemplation”.
Gates were due to open for the event at 11.30am on April 25 and the festival was due to finish about 11pm, according to concert organisers.
“Pandemonium is a rock fans (sic) dream come true, with an unparalleled line-up of rock legends,” the event’s website reads.
The premier, Chris Minns, today confirmed the concert would not be going ahead as planned.
There’s not going to be a rock concert in the middle of the city on Anzac Day.