Source : the age
Hello and welcome to our national news live blog for Friday, June 5.
I’m Alexander Darling in our Melbourne newsroom, and here’s the story so far today:
- Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has addressed an economic summit in Sydney, where he has been fielding questions about perceived broken promises over negative gearing and capital gains tax changes, and defending the government’s “changed position” each time.
- One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce was caught short on Sky News last night when Andrew Bolt pressed him for details of the party’s call to outlaw foreign ownership of housing in Australia. Bolt revealed that Joyce made calls after the interview to check the housing policy and then asked to re-record his answer.
- The minor party’s challenges continued when Senator Sean Bell attempted unsuccessfully to clarify the policy on Sydney radio this morning: “You know what I’m going to do Sean,” said 2GB host Mark Levy, “I’m going to cut the interview short. I’m going to let you go and make a couple of phone calls, like Barnaby did last night on Sky News, and you call back through when you can give me a definitive answer.”
- And there are no signs a new ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon will hold. Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah has rejected a peace agreement with Israel and demanded a complete Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to press ahead with the offensive until Hezbollah no longer poses a threat.
The government chose to limit negative gearing to new builds, instead of setting a cap of properties an individual could negatively gear, so as not to allow investors to “stack up their debt”, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said.
“We very consciously have a policy of new builds, because that’s what drives supply,” Albanese told an economic summit in Sydney.
“If you had negative gearing on two properties, and what people could do, essentially, is stack up, if they had 10 properties, stack up their debt onto the highest one, improve their deductions, and that it would distort the market towards basically the allocation of debt,” he said.
“[That’s] The nature of negative gearing and how it works, so Treasury did modelling of various of these measures. I was determined that for those two reasons, one of stopping a distortion in the market, but secondly, as well, that the measures that we’re putting forward will boost supply, that that is why we chose that model [of new builds] rather than the one or two or five homes,” he said.
Albanese highlighted that One Nation’s policy for negative gearing is capped at two properties.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has explained further why his government changed direction on tax policies brought to the budget, saying leaders have to be agile to meet the challenge of rising populism.
“If government stands still, the world will go past them, and if you look at some of the issues, which [are] being confronted by mainstream political parties in Western democracies, what you are seeing is the rise of populism,” Albanese said.
“If people think the economy isn’t working for them and they’re working their guts out and they’re not getting opportunity, I tell you what, they will turn to more simplistic grievance-based politics,” he said.
“That is the context in which my government is saying: ‘No, no, we’re going to deliver real change for the better’. This is what we’re doing. This is why we’re doing it, because it is real, the frustration that people [have] are out there.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been asked whether he is able to win an election “by telling the truth”, after the government “changed its position” on changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax after last May’s vote.
Sky host Andrew Clennell, hosting an interview at an economic forum in Sydney, asked Albanese: “Why can’t you win an election by telling the truth?”
“We did win an election … I reckon I could dig up 50 editorials over my time as prime minister and leader of the Labor Party, that calls for tax reform, that calls for government to get serious about it,” Albanese responded.
“We couldn’t continue to kick the can down the road, and we’ve made a difficult decision. We’ve changed our position, but that’s a difficult thing to do, and we understood that there would be criticism of that, but what we couldn’t afford to do is to sit back and say: ‘Well, you know, we’re in a position to do something about this, we know that it’s an issue, but we’re going to just stand still’,” he said.
Albanese said others didn’t have “the ticker” for major economic reform, but he and his government do.
The government’s budget measures were designed, in part, to fight back against crumbling social cohesion and political dissatisfaction, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has told a Sydney economic summit.
“Australians feel like the economy is not working for them, that their hard work is simply not adding up to fair reward, that they’re worried that their children or grandchildren will have less security and fewer opportunities than they did. This sentiment hasn’t come out of nowhere,” Albanese said.
“It is pressure that has built up, and it’s built up over years, and it’s not just a vague feeling. It is a reality that working Australians are up against. It’s something they can see for themselves from their own experience. It is a logical response, not just an emotional one. And it deserves practical solutions, not just slogans,” he said.
The speech comes after the first major opinion poll following the budget, conducted by The Australian Financial Review, found that populist party One Nation had overtaken Labor as the most popular party in the country.
“You might be able to build a brand of politics out of amplifying frustration and seeking to harvest it, but that doesn’t take our country forward. What counts, what matters, what makes a difference is whether you have a plan to do something about it,” Albanese said.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has taken a swipe at the critics of capital gains tax discount measures in his government’s latest budget who have claimed that entrepreneurs will move to foreign nations like Singapore and New Zealand where tax settings are more lenient.
“There is a reason that young expats come home to start a family, or people who come here to study want to come back as citizens to live and work and give their children an Australian education. There’s a reason that so many members of the Singaporean diaspora call Australia home, or that one in eight of all New Zealanders live here in Australia,” Albanese told an economic summit in Sydney.
“Whenever I meet with investors in New York or Abu Dhabi or Jakarta or the EU, they want to do business here in Australia, because when they’re building a data centre or opening a retail chain, they recognise that investing in this country means buying into a stable democracy with a stable legal system and a skilled workforce with an abundance of clean, cheap energy, every natural resource that will shape the future of the global economy in this century,” Albanese said.
New Zealand’s finance minister Nicola Wills last month encouraged Australians to move to her country, which does not have a capital gains tax. One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce has repeatedly used Singapore as a model of a low-tax environment that encouraged innovation.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposed peace talks to Russian leader Vladimir Putin in a rare and combative open letter on Thursday, as efforts to end more than four years of war gained momentum.
“Ukraine is ready for a full ceasefire for the duration of the negotiations,” Zelensky wrote.
“We in Ukraine do not want a permanent war. We know very well that life without war is infinitely better. And we want to achieve that.”
Putin has so far rejected all calls for a truce while peace talks take place, arguing Ukraine would use the ceasefire to rearm and improve its defences.
China has surged past Japan to become the biggest car supplier to Australia, with imports from companies such as BYD accelerating to a record high, powered by demand for electric vehicles.
Almost 36,000 passenger cars from China landed in Australia in April, according to government data released on Thursday, well ahead of the 29,000 from Japan. That took the number of Chinese cars arriving in Australia in the first four months to above 100,000, a 51 per cent increase on the same period last year.
More than 40,000 of the passenger vehicles were EVs, with imports soaring in March and April as consumers responded to an Iran war-driven jump in fuel prices by opting for more fuel-efficient cars.
EVs and hybrids made up almost half of the cars sold in Australia in May, according to earlier data from the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, with BYD the second-largest seller, having more than doubled its market share in a year.
Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit North Korea this month, marking his first trip to the country in more than six years.
He will visit North Korea on June 8 and depart on June 9, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
The trip will allow Xi to cast China as one of the few world powers still able to engage all sides in an increasingly fractured world. The visit, Xi’s first outside China this year, comes after he hosted US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Beijing last month.
A Pyongyang trip and meeting with Kim will remind both Trump and Putin of the influence Beijing holds over the North Korean regime, though that leverage has limits. Despite years of Chinese pressure, North Korea has accelerated its nuclear program and deepened its military ties with Russia since the invasion of Ukraine.
A teenager showed no signs of radicalisation before carrying out a religiously motivated killing outside police headquarters, a coroner has found.
NSW Police civilian employee Curtis Cheng was gunned down while leaving work in October 2015 by 15-year-old Farhad Khalil Mohammad Jabar in an act of religious extremism.
Farhad was then killed by a special constable after he fired more shots at the police headquarters.
Despite his association with persons of interest to terrorist investigators in the months leading up to the shooting, there was no evidence Farhad held violent extremist beliefs before the attack, Deputy State Coroner Derek Lee found today.
Up to $200,000 worth of exotic cockroaches will be euthanised after the largest ever seizure of illegal invertebrates in Australia.
The raid of a commercial breeder in Bathurst in the NSW Central West led to the seizure of more than 100,000 insects, the federal government said.
That included dubia cockroaches, usually bred as feedstock for reptiles, amphibians and tarantulas, and Madagascar hissing cockroaches, which are often kept as pets.
The Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water said exotic cockroaches cannot be legally imported into Australia, kept, bred or sold because they might spread disease and harm native wildlife and agriculture.
The NSW Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development will manage the euthanasia and disposal of the insects.
