source : the age
Health Minister Mark Butler has chalked up Labor’s improved polling to a positive response to the budget, rather than backlash against One Nation.
Butler told Nine’s Today that there was always a “frenzy” after the budget, but insisted voters are actually coming back to Labor because of cost-of-living relief coming from the government.
Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Ted O’Brien brushed off Redbridge polling showing One Nation still ahead of the Coalition, saying politicians would be fools for looking too deeply into poll results.
“You don’t change the fundamentals of your business based on daily fluctuations in the stock exchange,” he said.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor says the public is not just angry with the Coalition he leads, as its support in the polls falls even further.
“The voting public’s angry. They’re angry with everything and everyone at the moment, and understandably so,” Taylor told 2GB this morning.
Support for the Coalition fell to a new low of 17 per cent in the latest polling. Taylor said the poll that matters – the election – is “a long way off”.
“But we do know that we’ve got some real work to do to rebuild trust with the Australian people, and that takes time.”
Taylor did not directly answer when asked if his colleagues will give him time, amid speculation about how long he can remain the leader after support fell below the lowest level reached by his predecessor Sussan Ley.
“Australia needs time to fix this mess that Labor is putting us in, and I am absolutely committed,” Taylor said.
Paul Hogan has responded to Pauline Hanson’s invocation of his image as an Australian ideal, saying the One Nation leader’s demand for a monoculture was racist.
“Bring back Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston … These are the essential features of Australian monoculture, and there’s nothing remotely exclusionary about them,” Hanson said last week, doubling down on her National Press Club speech the week prior.
The Australian Financial Review reports that Hogan has slammed the comments, saying Hanson was living in the past.
“She’s a pelican, yeah. Outrageous, so racist. It sounds very much like this stupid boofhead over here, Trump,” the actor told the paper from Los Angeles.
“How can it be a monoculture? We’re all migrants, except the Aboriginals, who as far as we know, have been [in Australia] for 60,000 years.”
Auction clearance rates are plummeting in Australia’s major cities, forcing Tanya Plibersek to defend the government’s tax reforms this morning.
Plibersek was asked on Sunrise if first home buyers were the winners, but home owners were the losers. Property research firm Cotality reported a preliminary clearance rate of 47.3 per cent in Sydney, the lowest since 2020. In Melbourne, the clearance rate was 50.2 per cent, the lowest since the city was in lockdown in 2021.
It comes after Domain reported house prices falling in the major cities, including Sydney, where house prices could fall by $122,000 by 2027.
When asked on Sunrise if these downturns were what Labor wanted, Plibersek said things needed to change in Australia.
“If young people feel locked out of home ownership, as they have been, that really has an impact on the cohesiveness of our nation, so we are so pleased that first home buyers are back in the market, and they’re back in a big way,” she said.
Nationals leader Matt Canavan said there were auctions where no buyers showed up on the weekend.
“If we don’t have a healthy profit in property market everybody loses, our economy loses, first home buyers lose, home owners lose, everybody goes down,” he said.
Fresh polling has revealed Pauline Hanson’s popularity has fallen after the One Nation leader’s sprawling Press Club speech in which she declared multiculturalism a “failed policy” and called for a monocultural society.
Hanson’s net favourability dropped 10 points in the past month, according to The Australian Financial Review’s Redbridge poll.
Labor retook the lead in the poll, gaining two points to 30 per cent of the primary vote, while One Nation dropped two points to 29 per cent. The Coalition did not benefit from One Nation’s slide, falling to 18 per cent, and Opposition Leader Angus Taylor’s personal rating fell five points to minus 9.
The Australian’s Newspoll showed similar gains for Labor, from 30 to 33 per cent, while One Nation dipped from 31 to 29 per cent. Again, the Coalition failed to gain any ground, sliding to 17 per cent.
Businesses that oversee $300 billion in superannuation savings invested via wealth platforms are not doing enough to monitor for potentially excessive financial advice fees being deducted from members’ accounts, the corporate watchdog warns.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) will today say it was “overwhelmingly disappointed” after it conducted a review into how well super trustees in the platforms segment are safeguarding members’ retirement savings.
Platforms, which have surged in popularity, allow members to have greater control over their super investments than traditional funds. They are technology systems that allow investors and financial advisers to manage money spread across multiple investment options.
ASIC commissioner Simone Constant warned of “stark” and “persistent” failings, including in the monitoring of fees being charged by advisers.
Australian fuel prices are back to levels not seen since before the Iran war began four months ago, delivering much-needed relief to motorists as steep cuts in global oil costs continue flowing through to local service stations.
New price data reveals that average unleaded petrol prices in Sydney and Melbourne have slid below $1.56 a litre, while diesel has dropped under $1.78 a litre. This marks the cheapest that fuel has been since late February, when Iran started blocking crude oil tankers from exiting the Persian Gulf, causing huge increases in the cost of fuel and triggering a global energy crisis.
At today’s prices, petrol and diesel are about 40 per cent cheaper than they were at the height of the conflict, when unleaded reached a record-high national average of $2.53 a litre and diesel soared to $3.19.
Prices began easing following a preliminary ceasefire and progress towards reopening the Strait of Hormuz – a vital maritime choke point off Iran’s southern coast that handles up to 20 per cent of global oil trade.
Good morning and welcome to our national news live coverage for Monday, June 29. I’m Jessica McSweeney, and I’ll be bringing you all the latest news as it happens this morning.
First, here are today’s major headlines:
