Former Coalition minister Christopher Pyne is having a great time with his column in the Ninefax papers it seems.

Fresh from saying the quiet part out loud regarding the Peter Dutton’s nuclear ‘policy’ (Pyne effectively said ‘it’s never going to happen, but it’s given the Coalition a great distraction tool – 10/10 politics!’)

Pyne is back today with an ode to imperialism, in which he argues that Greenland should be sold to the United States because…reasons. Pyne, who is now officially a lobbyist with an interest in defence (a popular pathway for former defence industry ministers) thinks imperialism would mean the “56,000 cold but proud residents would see their future much more brightly under the umbrella of the US, rather than remaining with the aloof Danes”. He doesn’t give many reasons other than he thinks it would be a good idea, and it’s been done in the past.

The comments under the op-ed are asking if it’s satire.

Given that the public service is one of the battlegrounds of this election campaign, it might also be worth taking a look at the Services Australia capability review. The Coalition says more staff in the APS doesn’t result in better service (apparently outsourcing those jobs to the private sector for three times the cost is much more effective!) but the capability review found:

“With the support of short-term government funding, the agency recently recruited over 5,100 APS 3 and 4 level staff between November 2023 and March 2024, to address excess demand in the system. The additional resourcing reduced claims on-hand by more than half (from a peak of 1.35 million), and over one million phone calls were answered, reducing call wait times.”

Now, it is not perfect and people are still having issues reaching Services Australia. But will cutting the number of staff help address that? Logic would say…no.

In unsurprising news, ACT senator David Pocock is not a fan of the Coalition’s attacks on the public service:

Given the Coalition are pretty stuck on that ‘36,000 extra public servants’ number, it might be a good time to remind you that in the last year of the Morrison government, the Coalition spent $20.8 BILLION on consultants – which is the equivalent of about 54,000 full-time public servants.

So that’s about a third of the public service in private hands.

For some added context, the most recent data shows there are 185,343 employees in the public service – and that is across service delivery, research, regulation, project management and policy development.

So before the Coalition goes even more wild on the APS, let’s look at federal public servants as a percentage of the working population.

In June 2008 the APS made up 0.75% of the population. In 2012, it was 0.74%. In 2016 that dropped to 0.64%. That dropped further in 2020 to 0.59% (and remember the short fall was made up by contracting the private sector)

So what is it now? In June 2024, APS employees as a percentage of the population made up….0.68%.

Shadow treasurer and the reason Jim Chalmers gets up in the morning, Angus Taylor, is very, very upset at Chalmers using Treasury to rubbish the Coalition’s Snitty and Chips tax write off plan.

He told Sky News:

This is an egregious politicisation of the public service to get the Treasury to do this analysis. It is absolutely at odds, in our view, with the Australian Public Service Code of Conduct. I’ll be writing to Stephen Kennedy today, the Secretary of Treasury, asking for a full explanation as to why he has done this. And it is clear that Labor’s 36,000 additional public servants is at least partly about the politicisation of the public service and using them to attack, in pure political terms, the opposition. This is not what a public service is for. But this is how the public service is being used by a bad Labor government that is more focused on politics than it is on beating the cost of living crisis, the standard of living crisis that has been engineered by this Treasurer who is out of his depth and out of touch. This is a modest tax cut for small businesses where we’re seeing record levels of insolvencies. We have a Treasurer here who has never run a business and he doesn’t want to see any businesses existing in this country.

While north Queensland is flooding, parts of Western Australia and Victoria are burning.

The situation in Victoria’s Grampians National Park is serious, with authorities issuing an Emergency Warning for Mirranatwa

This Emergency Warning is being issued for . 

• There is a bushfire at Grampians National Park – Victoria Range (Bullawin) that is not yet under control. 

That sort of alert means ‘leave immediately’:

What you should do: Travel to: 

• Hamilton Emergency Relief Centre – Hamilton Performing Arts Centre, 113 Brown Street, Hamilton. Open daily from 9:00am to 7:00pm, If you require the relief centre outside of these hours, there is a phone number you can call at the centre and a staff member will be with you promptly. OR
• The home of family or friends that is away from the warning area.
• When you leave remember to take your pets, medications, mobile phone and charger.

In WA, there is a Watch and Act alert in place “for people in an area bounded by Somerville Drive, Robertson Drive, Halifax Drive, South Western Highway, Bunbury Outer Ring Road and Lilydale Drive in parts of DAVENPORT, COLLEGE GROVE, and NORTH BOYANUP in the SHIRE OF CAPEL and CITY OF BUNBURY.”

That has thankfully been downgraded after fire authorities judged the fire which started last night to be no longer a threat (to houses/people)

Back to housing and workplace minister Murray Watt and housing minister Clare O’Neil are reupping last year’s budget announcement that the process for builders to receive their accreditation will be fast tracked. From their release:

As more workers are skilled up, the Albanese Government has made it simpler and quicker for builders to get on with the job. The application process has been streamlined to prioritise builders aiming to work on Housing Australia projects, with greater support and guidance from expert WHS auditors.

…“The changes we made after last year’s Budget have resulted in newly accredited residential builders gaining accreditation in an average of four months, compared to the previous average application period of 12 months,” Minister Watt said.

Given the flood news in Queensland (where a 57 year old flood record looks like being broken in north Queensland) it is probably a good time to remind you of the Australia Institute’s Climate Summit where David Pocock, Craig Foster and Jennifer Robinson are among speakers the speakers:

With the United States pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, experts say Australia’s role in transitioning away from fossil fuels is more important than ever. Next Wednesday several experts and speakers will appear at the Climate Integrity Summit at Parliament House, to talk about how Australia can influence the international context and how the 2025 federal election outcome will shape global climate action. Tickets are sold out – but there is a waitlist! https://australiainstitute.org.au/event/climate_integrity_summit_2025/

Assistant minister to the prime minister Patrick Gorman’s staff are continuing their tradition of long subject lines in their transcript releases, which dictate the vibe of how they’d like you to view the transcript. Today’s:

Subjects: The Albanese Government is back to Parliament for 2025, packing Australia’s lunch box with nutritious policies; Peter Dutton’s ‘lunch tax write-offs for bosses’ policy will cost Australian taxpayers $1.6 billion on their bosses’ long lunches, movie tickets, footy tickets and rounds of golf.

‘Possum’ (his middle name and how he is known in Labor caucus) managed to keep the lunch theme going:

Our government packs the nation’s lunch box full of nutritious policies. Full of nutritious policies like fibre broadband, making sure that you’ve got the fibre you need to get the work done that you need to get done. We make sure we pack the nation’s lunch box for those who are hungry to learn with be Fee-Free TAFE, and we make sure that for those who’ve got a little bit too much HECS debt, that we cut the crusts off. Because we know that we can do more to support families across Australia and support those who want to learn.

And then he stretches it further than a roll up in the hands of a prep student with:

And then – what’s in Peter Dutton’s lunch box? What was his big idea to bring back to Parliament for 2025? We had nine weeks off. Nine weeks, and all that Peter Dutton could find was an absolute stinker of a policy, like a lunch box that had been left in the bottom of a bag since Term 4, 2024. Mr. Dutton’s ‘lunch tax write-offs for bosses’ policy absolutely stinks. Why would you give people tax write-offs for movie tickets, footy tickets, golf games, Wagyu beef? Why is Mr. Dutton’s only idea that he’s had over the last nine weeks to give us an absolute stinker of a policy?

There were no questions, apparently.

For those looking for an update on how the US-Canada trade kerfuffle is going: