Source : the age
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has refused to say whether he wants house prices to fall, instead saying housing needs to be “more affordable” as he accused the government of mismanaging the economy.
“I want to see housing being more affordable, and you know how you do that? You have lower interest rates, lower inflation, and higher incomes, higher real incomes, higher purchasing power of your pay packet, that’s how you get affordability up,” Taylor told a Canberra press conference.
“This government has completely failed on affordability. It’s got harder and harder for young Australians to buy a home. They told us, they told us before the last election, they’d beaten inflation. They told us they’d beaten high interest rates,” he said.
“Well, inflation and high interest rates have beaten this government, and affordability has collapsed under this government, and we want to see that turned around, and that’s what we’ll do.”
House prices have dropped since the announcement of the government’s budget last month, and last week auction clearance rates fell to a six-year low of 47 per cent.
Robert Irwin and Sam Pang will go head-to-head in the Gold Logie race, with the pair among the seven personalities nominated for Gold on Monday morning, along with Ally Langdon, Julia Morris, Lisa Millar, Poh Ling Yeow – who were all nominated last year – and Todd Woodbridge.
It is the second time that Irwin, who will host the ceremony on Sunday, August 16, has been nominated for a Gold Logie, while it marks the first Logie nomination full stop for Pang, who has hosted the Logies for the past three years but declined to return this year.
The Gold nomination will be bittersweet for Irwin as well as Morris, who has been nominated for the fifth time, as their hit reality show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! has been “rested” by Network 10 and is now looking for a new home. The two have also been nominated for most popular presenter, along with Amanda Keller, Hamish Blake, Larry Emdur and Millar.
The ABC and Prime Video dominated the 66th Logie Award nominations, with the public broadcaster receiving 33 nods across the “best” categories, while Prime Video’s moving World War II drama The Narrow Road to the Deep North was the most nominated show overall.
Read more here.
Liberal senator Maria Kovacic has accused the government of having failed in its budgetary goal of getting more young people into housing, saying the falling auction clearance rate was a sign that the policies weren’t working.
“If this was actually going to free up the market for owner occupiers, why haven’t they purchased those homes at these auctions? Properties haven’t been purchased because people can’t afford them,” Kovacic told Sky News this morning.
“This is not about intergenerational equity. This is actually about this government taxing more because they have spent too much. You don’t tax a young person on their pathway to saving for their home to help them buy a home,” she said.
Auction clearance rates fell to 47 per cent over the past week, their lowest level since the early days of the COVID pandemic.
The government will attempt to pass changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount in the Senate this week. The Coalition has vowed to oppose the bill, meaning that the government will be reliant on the Greens to have them pass.
The minor party has refused to share details publicly about their negotiations on the matter.
Deputy Liberal leader Jane Hume has demanded the government “axe” contentious tax changes in its budget, as Labor seeks to have alterations to the NDIS, negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount pass parliament in the next fortnight.
“There is only one solution here: axe the tax. These are terrible, toxic taxes that are an assault on aspiration, and the carve-outs simply make it worse. They’re not tax reform,” Hume told Sky News this morning.
“Tax reform grows the economy, reduces the tax burden on ordinary Australians, and simplifies the tax system. These tax changes do none of those things. Instead, they target the very people that we rely on to grow the economy, and particularly small businesses.”
The government is reliant on the Greens to pass tax changes in the Senate after the Coalition ruled out any support for them. Conversely, it will be reliant on the Coalition to pass significant cuts to the NDIS, which the Greens have opposed.
Hume singled out negative gearing as a policy that had created wealth “for generations”, and that Labor and Greens MPs should be quizzed on whether they had benefited from the policy.
Labor has vowed to pass the budget bills before the end of next week, when parliament rises for a five-week midwinter break.
More than 2½ tonnes of cocaine has been found in underground bunkers at a western Sydney property in what police allege is the largest seizure of the drug in Australia.
The discovery at a Londonderry property came amid investigations into a shipment of drugs totalling more than three tonnes.
Three shipping containers at the property, with false floors, covered underground bunkers packed with storage tubs full of the drug.
Police say it is the biggest cocaine bust in Australian history.
Two men, aged 21 and 25, allegedly tried to run from the Londonderry property when police arrived on Friday.
Read more here.
Environment Minister Murray Watt has said a second bird appears to have tested positive for the highly infectious H5 bird flu, after the disease arrived on Australian shores last week.
“This is not an unexpected development. As disappointing as it is, we are the only continent in the world that has not yet had this most deadly strain of bird flu, and that’s why, for the last two years, we’ve been intensively preparing for this to make sure that we’ve got our systems in place,” Watt told the ABC this morning.
“In terms of the geographic spread, it’s important to remember that at this point we only have one officially confirmed case of the deadly strain, and that involved a bird that was found around Esperance on the southern coast of Western Australia. Of course, there is a second bird that looks like it has tested positive, but we’re waiting for official confirmation of that to come through,” he said.
Watt said there was no evidence of a “widespread outbreak”, but he encouraged Australians to continue reporting sightings of dead birds, saying: “What we want people to do [is] report any suspicious deaths, particularly of birds or mammals. But at this point, there’s no need for alarm that this has become a more widespread incident beyond those two birds.”
The minister said the government has held meetings with stakeholders in the agricultural sector, including in the chicken meat and egg sectors, and that Labor was taking the risk of the disease’s impact on industry seriously.
Independent MP Monique Ryan has once again dismissed claims that she would join a teal party, after reporting in The Australian Financial Review this morning that some independents were on the cusp of party formation.
“I think Australians are understandably really fed up with political parties, and that’s why they’re looking for other alternatives. I don’t have any intention of joining a party. I’m very, very happy as an independent,” Ryan told Nine’s Today this morning.
Ryan said that Labor had passed laws in the last term “which makes life much easier for the parties, and much more difficult, much more challenging for independents and for small parties”.
“But I continue to take them on as an independent in the House. That’s what Kooyong has elected me to do. That’s what I intend to continue to do,” she said.
This masthead first reported last month that teal independents were in advanced talks to form a new political party, with the push being led by Sydney MPs Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall.
After news of the secret deliberations became public, Ryan and West Australian independent Kate Chaney ruled themselves out, while Sydney-based teals Nicolette Boele and Sophie Scamps said they would consult their communities before making a decision.
In Victoria, public schools are suspending about 150 students each school day, Nicole Precel and Bridie Smith report.
New data, obtained by The Age through freedom-of-information laws, shows the number of students suspended last year climbed to almost 30,000. In the past three years, there were 87,073 suspensions in the state’s public schools.
There was an increase of 1029 suspensions in 2025 from the previous year, rising to 29,709 and representing almost 4.5 per cent of the student cohort.
University of Melbourne associate professor Lisa McKay-Brown said the problematic figure showed that “what we’re doing isn’t as effective as we would hope it would be”.
Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek has defended drops in house prices, saying the government’s modelling shows they will return to moderate increases in the future, as the majority of voters said they supported lower house prices.
“What we anticipate over time is not that house prices will continue to fall, but that they will grow more slowly. House prices have been growing too fast, and that’s meant that young Australians haven’t been able to afford a home of their own,” Plibersek told Seven’s Sunrise this morning.
“It used to be that the average house cost about four years of the average wage. Now it’s about 8½ years of the average wage. People just can’t keep up with that because they’ve been competing with property investors for those houses.”
In an exclusive poll commissioned by this masthead, 54 per cent of voters supported lower house prices, compared with just 11 per cent who were opposed. Another 35 per cent said they were unsure or neutral.
Appearing alongside Plibersek, Nationals leader Matt Canavan said the government’s most recent budget, which tweaked the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing, “has effectively driven our economy, like Thelma and Louise, over a cliff”.
“Jim Chalmers’ budget is a total flop. The prime minister should sack him. Get someone in there who actually can come up with an economic plan for our country. Because the biggest problem with what’s going on in the last few months is that confidence is now cratering, and that hurts our entire economy,” Canavan said.
A Sydney private school is accused of checking students’ underwear, ordering them to share bedrooms with teachers, forbidding them from dating and telling them what they must study at university, Emily Kowal reveals in an investigation today.
When Alexandra Garth was in primary school, she was punished by her teachers for not wearing the mandated black underwear. Teachers would conduct uniform inspections and, if flashes of colour were spotted, students would be reprimanded. The rule remains – though checks have been abandoned – at Redeemer Baptist School in North Parramatta.
Redeemer Baptist School – run entirely by volunteers, who are members of the ministry order of the Redeemer Baptist Church – denies any wrongdoing.
But former students have shared numerous allegations of authoritarian control. Read more here.
