source : the age
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining today’s rolling news coverage. I’m Gemma Grant, and I’ll be helming the blog for the rest of afternoon.
Here is what’s been making news.
Nation signs largest-ever defence export deal: The federal government has signed the country’s largest-ever defence export contract, worth about $2.5 billion, making a deal with Canada to import Australian radar technology to guard the Arctic.
Public supports house price falls: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s bid to make housing more affordable for young Australians has widespread support despite the pushback against his overhaul of the tax system. Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has refused to answer questions on whether house prices should fall.
Second bird appears to have tested positive for H5N1: The bird tested positive in a primary screening for the highly infectious H5 bird flu, after the disease arrived on Australian shores last week. Results of a confirming second test are yet to be returned.
WiseTech boss probed over sex, trafficking claims: Federal police are investigating billionaire businessman Richard White over claims he exploited a woman’s immigration status and financial insecurity for sex and that he provided false information on a visa application.
Starmer looks set to resign: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer appears set to resign after cabinet ministers urged him to make way for rival leader Andy Burnham in a transition that could be announced as soon as Monday (London time).
Labor senator Deborah O’Neill, who triggered the scandal engulfing consulting giant KPMG when she revealed whistleblower allegations, questioned whether the firm’s current leadership team can clean up a culture where certain senior partners used confidential client information to win new business.
She slammed KPMG chairman Martin Sheppard – a former partner at the firm – for continuing to defend the group at Friday’s public Senate hearings and saying the firm has yet to get to grips with the scale of their failure.
“You’d have to look at the performance of the leadership team there the other day and wonder what on earth they think they’re doing,” she said.
“I don’t think KPMG fully understand the problems that they have generated, and I don’t know that the team to clean up this mess is there.”
We’ve just had quite a dramatic moment in question time as independent MP Dai Le asked the prime minister whether any Labor MPs had used tax changes in the budget for “private financial benefit”.
“The capital gains tax and negative gearing changes announced in the May budget were significant and market sensitive measures, so significant your government has already walked part of them back in recent days,” the member for Fowler said.
“Can the prime minister give the House a strong assurance that no government MP or their close relations used prior knowledge of those changes for private financial benefit before they are made public?”
In theory, an MP, or someone with knowledge of the budget, could have bought an asset before budget night to have been exempt from capital gains tax discount changes or maintain negative gearing rights on certain assets. There is no suggestion any MPs did so.
We’ve just had an MP ejected from question time before he could even get an answer to his question, after he accused Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of being a liar. Here’s what happened.
Liberal backbencher Ben Small rose to ask Albanese the following question: “The prime minister has said time and time again that he has changed his position on his toxic taxes, and yet those taxes on savings, investments, housing, and businesses continue to rise. Will the prime minister just cut to the chase and, like Julia Gillard before him, just admit he is another Labor liar on taxes?”
This is not the first time Albanese has been called a liar since Speaker Milton Dick said the term was out of order. As Dick gathered his thoughts, another Liberal backbencher, Rick Wilson, called out: “Everyone in Australia is saying it, except in here.”
Leader of the House Tony Burke rose to say every MP had been put “on notice for a long time” on the issue of calling someone a liar.
Small was ejected and the question was dismissed, with Dick saying: “We’re not having that disruption of question time.”
New hairstyles and $10 million hairdressers have made an odd appearance in question time, as the Coalition attacks the government’s budget.
Nationals MP Llew O’Brien asked the prime minister: “Can the prime minister advise whether a bricklayer who comes up with a faster way to lay bricks, a farmer who comes up with a more efficient way to harvest his crops, or a hairdresser who comes up with a new hairstyle will be eligible for the innovative business CGT concession?”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers took the question, saying that “in almost every case” O’Brien brought up, the businesses would fall under the small business turnover threshold which would allow them to apply for CGT concessions.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor began heckling the Treasurer, who responded: “The hairdresser isn’t going to be turning over more than 10 million bucks, is it, mate? Yeah, it might be where you get your haircut.”
The comment received a big laugh from the Labor benches, as Taylor jokingly smoothed out his hair.
A CGT discount of 50 per cent will apply for “innovative and active” businesses, the government announced last week after backlash from the start-up community. The measure is currently before public consultation.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has described his opposition counterpart as “a bit slow on the uptake”, after shadow treasurer Tim Wilson asked about the capital gains tax discount changes the government is bringing forward.
Wilson asked Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to confirm “that businesses of all sizes will lose the existing 50 per cent capital gains tax discount across all assets”.
Chalmers began his response by saying “he’s a bit slow on the uptake”, before saying the CGT would be calculated on a real gains measure, as announced on budget night.
“I think it says everything about the shadow treasurer that he is trying to weaponise a scare campaign against the types of changes that he called for in this parliament and in his book,” Chalmers said.
“This is a shadow treasurer [who] time and time again called on the government to make changes of this kind, and then when we do it, he tries to weaponise a scare campaign against it.”
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has been asked to withdraw a comment after he yelled at the prime minister, saying “he lied”, as Anthony Albanese answered a question on tax.
Nationals frontbencher Kevin Hogan asked Albanese to confirm whether his government was the “highest taxing government in Australia’s history”.
Albanese responded by saying the Howard government was the highest taxing government, before reminding the chamber that the Coalition went to the last election with a policy of marginally higher income taxes than Labor.
At this point, Taylor began shouting out, saying “he lied” to Albanese. When Speaker Milton Dick asked Taylor to withdraw, the opposition leader said, “he did, he did, it’s a statement of fact” regarding the accusation of lying.
Taylor then withdrew the comment. There has been a lot of back and forth since the budget over whether it is parliamentary to accuse someone of lying, which Dick has argued has precedent of being out of order.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has once again risen to ask the prime minister whether another country had higher capital gains taxes than Australia.
Anthony Albanese passed the question over to Treasurer Jim Chalmers, after responding to the first version.
After some back and forth over bad behaviour, Chalmers said the question was “deliberately disingenuous”.
“What they don’t understand, or don’t concede, Mr Speaker, is that there will still be a discount for capital gains, but it will be a fair reflection of inflation rather than the Howard approach, which has distorted investment in our economy for a quarter of a century now,” Chalmers said.
Question time has opened for the first day of this sitting fortnight with Opposition Leader Angus Taylor slamming the government’s budget and taxation platform. Here’s what he asked:
“The prime minister was humiliated into changing his position on his toxic taxes, just 38 days after his budget of broken promises. Despite this Olympic-level backflip, can the prime minister name a single country that will have a higher tax rate on real capital gains than Australia?”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese began his response by accusing the opposition of “hyperventilating” over the budget, before outlining a number of measures in the document.
Taylor intervened with a point of order, asking Albanese to name a single country with lower capital gains taxes. The interjection was dismissed. However, Taylor continued yelling across the table for Albanese to “name just one”.
Albanese sledged Taylor by suggesting he had failed to “restore faith” in the Coalition, ending his response by saying: “The worse he goes, the more he interjects.”
Question time happened earlier today at Parliament House in Canberra. You can take a look back at what happened below.
Agriculture Minister Julie Collins has said any future impact on the country’s poultry industry due to H5 bird flu is a hypothetical, adding that focus is on the initial investigation of the two known cases.
When asked whether the confirmed cases would have an impact on egg or chicken prices, Collins said it was too soon to call.
“We’ll be doing everything that we can do, working with industry and working with the sector to try and get this H5 bird flu out of our poultry system,” the minister said.
“Can we do that forever? We don’t know. The answer to that is a hypothetical. But we certainly have … done a lot of work, working pre-emptively with both the eggs and the chicken meat industry.”
Reporters were told that one poultry facility in Western Australia has strengthened its biosecurity systems in response to the confirmed cases, but Collins rejected the assertion the site had pre-emptively closed.
She said the nearest chicken farm is 300 kilometres away from where the confirmed cases have been located in Western Australia.
