Source : the age
Hello and welcome to our national news live blog for Tuesday, June 2. Here’s what is making headlines today.
- Reserve Bank officials judged that Labor’s first-term housing agenda did little to improve supply and possibly raised prices, according to internal notes from the bank’s policy experts.
- Opposition frontbencher Andrew Hastie said yesterday Australia was getting the short end of the stick in a downgraded version of the AUKUS deal, and told the ABC the US does not take Australia seriously because “our defence policy lacks seriousness”. A public inquiry into AUKUS is set to kick off today in federal parliament.
- Health Minister Mark Butler says Australia is not considering any travel restrictions for visitors from the African nations at the centre of the Ebola outbreak, and will not be quarantining people on arrival.
- Donald Trump said Israel was halting planned attacks on the Lebanese capital Beirut, which were threatening to derail the ceasefire between the US and Iran, after he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The US president also claimed Hezbollah had agreed to a total ceasefire and insisted talks with Iran were continuing “at a rapid pace” – despite reports from Iran’s state-affiliated media that suggested Tehran was suspending negotiations.
- New polling places One Nation as the most popular party in Australia. In the poll, published by The Australian Financial Review on Sunday, One Nation received primary support of 31 per cent, above Labor at 28 and the Coalition at 20. The polls bolstered the confidence of party leader Pauline Hanson, who said she believed she could lead the country.
Treasury secretary Jenny Wilkinson has been forced to make an embarrassing correction to a speech she gave on key budget changes to property taxes after underestimating by thousands of dollars their value to middle income earners.
Last week, Wilkinson told business economists that current negative gearing, capital gains tax concessions and trusts delivered $700,000 worth of tax benefits over the lifetimes of the top 1 per cent of income earners.
She said by contrast, a median income earner gained just $5700 worth of tax benefits.
But the Daily Telegraph this morning revealed that the $5700 claim was incorrect.
Australia’s population officially passed 28 million this morning, just before 6am.
We’re seeing a new Australian born every two minutes and 16 seconds, one death every three and a half minutes, and one person arriving to live in Australia every 59 seconds on average, a net increase of one person every 75 seconds.
It has taken just over two years for the nation to add another million people – we passed 27 million in March 2024 – which is a bit longer than it took to get from 26 to 27 million (21 months).
That 28 million includes 8.8 million people born overseas, or 32 per cent of all Australians.
Opposition home affairs spokesman Jonno Duniam has taken a swipe at the government for blaming inflation rates on external factors, as the Fair Work Commission prepares to announce a minimum wage decision later this morning.
Appearing in a regular Sky News panel alongside Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino, Duniam said the government was to blame for high spending.
“…The problem is this government, who say that inflation has nothing to do with it, like that was one of the most extraordinary contributions to our morning panel debate I’ve ever heard, but it’s all international factors, nothing to do with us, nothing to do with government spending or poor energy policy, or the like.
“All of this is driving up cost of living, which is now what we’re treading through, trying to bring up wages rather than dealing with these increased costs of living.”
Mulino hit back at Duniam, and said the opposition had a “shocking record” of fiscal management.
“I think it’s remarkable for an opposition that achieved literally $0 in saves in their last budget. Compare that to the government, who has achieved $64 billion in saves and reprioritisation in this most recent budget … We’ve got the track record,” Mulino said.
Former Labor environment minister and rock musician Peter Garrett will lead an independent, crowdfunded inquiry into the AUKUS deal.
The full group of commissioners and plans for the inquiry are set to be announced at Parliament House in Canberra this morning.
Speaking to ABC Radio National this morning, Garrett said the inquiry would “properly ventilate everything around AUKUS”.
“I’ll be launching this actual public inquiry in Parliament House, and yet in Parliament House they haven’t had a full, vigorous and open debate about AUKUS, and yet it is the most significant decision by far, apart from going to war, that any Australian government in the modern era has made.”
First home buyers who purchased recently but have seen house prices fall following the government’s most recent budget should not worry, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has said, arguing that house prices are forecast to increase in the long term.
“Housing is a long-term investment, and you don’t make decisions about housing based on short-term fluctuations in prices or even in auction clearance rates, and the assumption in the Treasury documents provided with the budget is that house prices will continue to grow, but a bit more slowly,” Chalmers told journalists at Parliament House in Canberra.
“What this is all about is making sure that there are more affordable options available, particularly for first home buyers,” Chalmers said.
Treasury forecasting of budget measures showed a slowing of price growth of about 2 per cent per year, however independent modelling by firms Westpac and Morgan Stanley showed a 3 to 10 per cent drop in house prices in the capital cities.
Property values in the capital cities last month were static, but in Sydney overall values fell by 0.9 per cent to be down by 2.1 per cent over the past three months.
In Melbourne, total dwelling values slipped another 0.8 per cent to be down by 2.3 per cent during the quarter.
“For too long, we’ve had this broken status quo in this country, where the intersection of the tax system and the housing market has locked too many Australians, and particularly young Australians, out of housing, and so we are changing that, and it’s not the only thing that we’re doing,” Chalmers said.
The treasurer has responded to judgement from the Reserve Bank of Australia that found Labor’s first-term housing agenda did little to improve supply and possibly raised prices, as first reported by this masthead.
“We’ve taken additional substantial steps since then. In our first term, we’re playing catch up on housing because our predecessors had neglected housing for the best part of a decade,” Jim Chalmers told journalists in Canberra this morning.
“We’ve got this primary focus on supply. You can’t build 1.2 million homes overnight, it takes time. But we’re investing now $47 billion in housing, and we’re making the tax system and the housing market fairer for first home buyers,” the treasurer said.
“So, I’ve seen those stories … But we have taken very substantial additional steps since then.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has continued to defend the government’s budget, almost a month after it was handed down, as he said critics of the package were spreading misinformation to fight against contentious changes to the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing.
“I’m confident that we’ve made the right decisions for the right reasons … there will always be, accompanying major economic reform or tax reform, there will always be scare campaigns full of lies,” Chalmers told Nine’s Today this morning.
“Our tax changes are all about making it easier for people to buy their first home. They’re all about cutting income taxes again and again for working people, and that will, when you’re trying to make these sorts of changes, there will always be the usual scare campaigns,” he said.
“Of course, there are people who would prefer the current arrangements stay in place exactly as they are, but the current arrangements are locking too many people, and especially too many young Australians out of housing, and that’s why we’re acting decisively to change them.”
Sticking with Farley on ABC radio this morning, the One Nation MP would not comment on party leader Pauline Hanson’s patchy Senate attendance record.
The Australian reported yesterday that the senator had been absent from 88 per cent of Senate estimate hearing days over the past decade, according to a parliamentary library analysis.
Asked whether Hanson should be attending more often, Farley said, “I’m not exactly sure if, besides reading the press on the weekend, Pauline’s attendance record and understanding it, but it’s up to Pauline to see where she’s more effective, and I’ll leave that to [her].”
Farley committed to attending sessions of parliament “as much as [he] can”.
Newly elected One Nation MP David Farley has responded to polling this week showing his party surging in popularity, and said it was indicative of “a powerful amount of discontent across Australia at the moment”.
New polling places One Nation as the most popular party in Australia. In the poll, published by The Australian Financial Review, One Nation received primary support of 31 per cent, above Labor at 28 and the Coalition at 20.
Farley was elected to the seat of Farrer during a byelection last month. His election marks the first seat the party has ever held in the House of Representatives.
“It’s quite humbling to be the first One Nation member to enter into the lower house … It’s also quite exciting that we’ve been able to achieve this,” he told ABC Radio National this morning.
“What we learnt in Farrer was, first of all, the art of listening to actually understand what’s going on within your electorate,” he said.
The Trump administration said it would comply with a court ruling temporarily blocking a nearly $US1.8 billion ($2.5 billion) fund meant to compensate allies of US President Donald Trump.
It has effectively agreed to pause the plan for at least two weeks after setbacks in the courts and a fierce backlash from Republicans who objected to potential payouts to participants in the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
The announcement from the Justice Department came in response to a Friday court ruling by a federal judge in Virginia who ordered plans for the fund halted pending additional arguments later this month. The department said in a statement that it “disagrees strongly” with the ruling but would abide by it.
The Trump administration had defended the $US1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponisation Fund,” established to resolve Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns, as an appropriate corrective measure to make up for what officials insist was weaponised law enforcement during the Biden administration.
Though some Trump supporters, including participants in the Capitol riot, celebrated the announcement of the fund, the reaction among Republicans in Congress has been decidedly more hostile.
AP
