Foreign minister Penny Wong (who has been a little quieter than usual lately) has released a statement on the “difficult and dark time” Australian academic Dr Yang Jun has been through, one year on from receiving a suspended death sentence:

“Today marks one year since Australian citizen, Dr Yang Jun, received a suspended death sentence in Beijing. The past year, and the five years of detention before his sentencing, have been a difficult and dark time for Dr Yang. Throughout, he has demonstrated his inner strength and remarkable resilience.

Today, my thoughts are with Dr Yang, his family and his many loved ones. The Australian Government has made clear to China that we remain appalled by Dr Yang’s suspended death sentence. We hold serious concerns about Dr Yang’s health and conditions. We continue to press to ensure his needs are met and he receives appropriate medical care.

Dr Yang is entitled to basic standards of justice, procedural fairness and humane treatment, in accordance with international norms and China’s legal obligations. In his communication with the Government, Dr Yang has made clear he knows he has the support of his country. We want to see him reunited with his family. The Government will continue to advocate for Dr Yang at every opportunity.”

Checking in on the climate disaster in north Queensland – a second life has been lost.

AAP reports:

Flood-hit communities starting to return to their homes are being warned to brace for more heavy downpours, which have already claimed the lives of two people, in the coming days.

Record-breaking rain has lashed north Queensland during the past week, sparking floods that have cut power, damaged roads and forced hundreds of people to flee.

There has been some relief with heavy rainfall easing, providing hope a massive clean-up facing the inundated region is set to finally begin.

However, the Bureau of Meteorology has warned major flooding is ongoing in multiple catchments despite the isolated and less widespread showers.

Major flood warnings were still in place for the Herbert and Haughton River catchments late on Tuesday after the region was lashed by rain.

Andrew Charlton was asked by ABC News Breakfast to put on his former-self hat (before entering parliament, Charlton ran several successful businesses and amassed quite the property holding) and think about whether or not he would have liked the Coalition’s Schnitty and Sanga tax write off plan. He says:

“There are existing proposals in, frameworks within the tax system that enable people to claim some entitlements, for example for light lunches in office are available to small and large businesses. I don’t think extending that to golf days and long lunches is the right priority for Australia’s tax system right now. We have a lot of important challenges that require resources in Australia and I think most fair-minded Australians would look at our priorities and think they would be at the bottom, not the top, of that list at a time when we have big draws on resources for health, education, supporting people with cost of living and many other issues the Government is facing.”

What exactly is that risk?

Andrew Charlton tells ABC News Breakfast:

“There are three risks that are posed by generative AI in general. The first is that information that you upload might not be private. So we’d encourage anybody using generative AI – it’s a wonderful tool and very helpful for many applications in our lives but you need to be aware that the information you upload may not be private, so our advice is that we wouldn’t want people to upload anything that they wouldn’t want to ultimately become public.

The second risk is that information you get back from generative AI might not be accurate. It may contain misinformation, be biased or not cover certain topics. And the second other risk is malware. Don’t click on links and be careful where and when you download applications.”

Does the government need to do an education campaign?

Charlton:

“The Government is providing information to people about what they should and should not be doing online and how to keep themselves safe. We do that work every day helping businesses, individuals, small groups and community groups to understand the risks online and making sure they’re aware of how best to mitigate the risks. Cybersecurity is a challenge facing all of us in Australia. It’s increasing. We have a cybersecurity attack in Australia every 6 minutes. And so it is very important, as you say, not just that we get the regulatory settings right, but that we make sure Australians are best prepared to harden their own targets and ward off any security risks they can.”

The government’s special envoy for cybersecurity (special envoys are used by leaders as a reward (or a bone) to MPs who they can’t fit in the ministry) Andrew Charlton has had a few moments in the sun this morning in light of the DeepSeek ban from government devices.

Charlton said its about taking the advice of security agencies seriously:

“It’s absolutely not a symbolic move. It’s a very important distinction that has to be made here. The distinction is that you cannot use these applications on your government devices. Those are devices where other sensitive government information is found, you can use TikTok or indeed DeepSeek on personal devices, which are not connected to government systems and that distinction is really important. We don’t want to expose government systems to these applications. That’s the main source of the risk and that’s why this ban is [happening].”

Meanwhile, in other ‘what are they doing’ news, Anthony Albanese is renting out his recently purchased $4m Central Coast house. News.com reports the house will be rented for $1,500 a week. The news would have given Labor election strategists an even stronger eye twitch given that the purchase of the house in a cost of living crisis is still being brought up by voters, particularly women. (It shouldn’t be a surprise that women remember it, given research shows women usually run the household budget and therefore would be very finely attuned to cost of living pressures).

Turns out that yes, yes this is the hill Sussan Ley is dying on.

She also appeared on Sky where she repeated her press release in what is no doubt a stunning preview of an upcoming question time performance.

She was also asked about Jim Chalmers’ costings of the Coalition’s Schnitty and Sanga plan (small businesses will be able to write off up to $20,000 in lunches (no alcohol) which she has declared are…FAKE.

Ley:

“These are clearly, these are clearly fake costings. And you know why I think they’re throwing them at us, because they have nothing else for small businesses, nothing at all, and to laugh at something like this that helps those businesses, who, as I said, are really struggling. You would go into those businesses to get your morning coffee. Australians love them. They’re in the High Street. They’re working incredibly hard. They always have a smile on their face. I’m talking about this on your program every week, because I’m passionate about it.”

As a former barista, I can attest that no, we do not always have a smile on our face.

While we are still on the topic of what passes for ‘debate’ in Australian politics at the moment, Sussan Ley’s big media push this morning is based around the release of the Albanese government ‘national small business strategy’ which Ley calls “an insult to millions of small businesses across Australia”.

“There is not a single new policy or measure in Labor’s new so-called “National Small Business Strategy”. A third of the strategy is made up of cover pages, artwork and photos, with another third taken up by small business statistics and case studies of existing policies already being delivered by state governments,” Ley says in the release.

But wait – Ley has them on the ropes!

“The document does not even use images of Australian small businesses. It includes multiple images sourced from stock files of a New Jersey bakery in the United States of America, two carpenters that featured in a Bank of America innovation campaign and a stock image of chef featured on Pew’s Demographic Overview of Illinois Secure Choice Program Population.“

Ok, yes it is dumb to use stock photos of American businesses in a document based around Australian small businesses. But they are used because they are much cheaper than hiring a photographer and getting originals. Stock photos are those sold by agencies on a subscription service (usually). You type in ‘small business’ and a bunch of photos of people smiling behind counters etc pop up, and you just slot them in to whatever you’re using, with the licensing taken care of through the subscription (when used for commercial reasons). Or they can be free. It is one of the rules of modelling that you never sell or pose for photos for someone who plans on selling them as stock images, because you never know what your image will end up being used to sell (or where).

But is this really the quality of debate we should be accepting?

Ley is demanding Small Business Minister, Julie Collins, “come clean on how much this “strategy” cost the taxpayer and why it is filled with stock photos of Americans”.

Given *gestures at everything* is this the hill we’re dying on?

Jane Hume is also very exercised over the government’s costing and rubbishing of the Coalition’s Scnitty plan. Jim Chalmers release Treasury costings yesterday saying it would cost at least $1.6bn. The Coalition has scoffed at that but won’t release their own costings.

Hume was asked about the whole kerfuffle and told the ABC:

“What absolute nonsense the government has come out with! I mean, let’s put aside the fact that they have plenty to do themselves, but somehow they’re concentrating on a Coalition policy announcement. More importantly, they then went and asked the public service, politicised the public service, asking them to cost a Coalition policy.

Now the Treasury Secretary has come out and said that he hasn’t costed a Coalition policy, that it was simply the parameters that Jim Chalmers gave him, that that’s what they costed.

Well, again, what’s Jim Chalmers doing? Shouldn’t he be concentrating on his own policies? Shouldn’t he be concentrating on lowering inflation, improving economic growth, restoring the standard of livings that we have now lost or gone backwards?

We have costed this policy. Of course, we costed this policy by convention. Oppositions use the Parliamentary Budget Office, and we trust the Parliamentary Budget Office. Indeed, it was something that was introduced by a Labor government to stop this very behaviour.”

Well, Chalmers would probably say that he has worked on lowering inflation, because despite how many commentators complain that it has been “artificially lowered” (a term economic commentators use when they are forced to admit that fiscal policy has helped lower inflation, but they don’t want to give the government credit) by things like the energy rebates (which were deliberately designed to lower CPI and therefore lower the price rises of everything attached to CPI and therefore help to lower inflation), inflation has come down and is sitting in the RBA’s target band. Which means the RBA is out of excuses not to cut rates.

It is also worth noting that Hume has said she would be focusing on ‘getting the budget back on track’ if in government, and cut the ‘big spending’. What is that big spending? Well in a recent op-ed in the AFR, Hume said:

“Every decision is a choice – from spending $500 million on a divisive referendum, or $40 million on advertising automatic tax cuts, or 36,000 new public servants in Canberra.”

So that’s $540m and then cutting the public service to replace with the private sector at three times the cost.

Whenever the Coalition needs someone serious to discuss policy, they send in Jane Hume. Hume’s workload has doubled since Simon Birmingham’s retirement (he was the other ‘serious and sensible voice’ the Coalition sent in when it needed serious and sensible responses) and Hume was already doing double time trying to explain the Coalition’s finance policies given Angus Taylor is the lead shadow minister.

Hume was sent out this morning to talk about the hate laws which the parliament will debate is debating in earnest. In a nutshell, both major parties are in agreement the law needs to be strengthened. The government wants to apply criminal penalties for urging or threatening violence against a target group, rather than having civil penalties apply, while also reducing the threshold for prosecution to recklessness, rather than intention to incite or threaten violence. The Coalition wants to go further and specifically mention places of worship with Peter Dutton entirely focused on anti-Semitism.

Given it wasn’t that long ago (politically speaking) that the Coalition wanted to scrape 18C and the racial discrimination laws altogether, the ABC’s Sally Sara asks Hume whether that was a mistake by the Coalition, given it now wants to strengthen the hate laws.

Hume:

“That was a debate of some time ago, and the issue was around the wording around at what racial discrimination looked like. I think that what we’ve seen here is a specific rise in anti-Semitism, and that’s something that we need to deal with in the strongest possible terms. Peter Dutton has been very clear and very strong on this. We have to respond to the weak responses that we’ve seen so far in order to protect our own communities.”