There is no doubt the hate crimes bill, with the amendments for mandatory sentencing will pass the senate, given the Coalition are in support.

But the inclusion of mandatory sentencing, which goes against the Labor party platform is continuing to cause ripples:

Anthony Albanese will miss question time today because he is in Queensland visiting the flood zones.

In the meantime, the government has announced financial support and a pause to mutual obligatations for those impacted by the climate disaster:

The Albanese Government is activating additional financial support for communities directly affected by the recent floods in North Queensland through the Australian Government Disaster Recovery Payment (AGDRP).
 
The AGDRP offers residents $1,000 per eligible adult and $400 per eligible child for people who suffered serious damage or injury as a result of the floods, to help with the costs of recovery.
 
Applications for the AGDRP will open at 2pm local time on Thursday, 6 February for affected people in the localities of Cardwell and Giru and the Local Government Area (LGA) of Hinchinbrook.
 
Before they claim, people can check their eligibility on the Services Australia website at: servicesaustralia.gov.au/disastersupport
 
The easiest way to claim is online through myGov. If people need help to claim, they can call the Australian Government Emergency Information Line on 180 22 66.
 
People impacted by the floods can also pause or change their Centrelink debt repayments using the Money You Owe service online in either their Centrelink online account, or Express Plus Centrelink mobile app. Alternatively, they can call 1800 076 072.

Peter Dutton says “I’ve been clear, we’re not having 36,000 additional public servants in Canberra”.

Again those ‘additional’ public servants were largely in place of consultants hired by the Morrison government which cost about three times as much to do the same job.

Asked if he would limit spending on consultants, Dutton says:

“We’ve said clearly that we will cut back on wasteful spending and if there is wasteful spending taking place, it should be cut and that’s what’s going to get our economy back on track. It’s what’s going to allow us to pay for the services in the NDIS, in defence, in veterans and many other portfolios that people expect and there’s no sense pretending that you can continue to jack up government expenditure to give people the cuts they desire, to have a downward pressure on inflation.” “

So that is no commitment there.

He then goes on about wanting to bring inflation down. Inflation is falling. It’s within the RBA’s target range. The rest is just political guffe.

Peter Dutton then moves on to a favoured conservative talking point, where he says he won’t cut ‘front line positions’ when it comes to the public service.

“We’re not cutting front-line positions. I want more money to front-line services. I want more money to health and education. I want to make sure that we can get the GPs into areas at the moment where they’re not practising. They’re small businesses that have been crushed by the costs of running a practice and it’s why we’ve made announcements in relation to putting more money into GP training. I want more… GPs to access money that otherwise, in a finite budget can be spent on public servants or on providing support through Medicare item numbers to make it more attractive to get them into regions“

Campbell Newman who put a razor through the Queensland public service also used this line ‘frontline positions’ and by that, the Coalition mean doctors, police, firefighters, paramedics, nurses and teachers, etc.

But all of those positions are supported by the public service behind them. Education policy, bulk billing, emergency service preparedness, equipment purchasing, claim forwarding – all of it – is done by those working behind the front facing roles.

Bulkbilling is still well behind where it needs to be, but rates have begun to increase again after the Albanese government tripled the bulkbilling incentive rates.

On his plans to cut the public service, Peter Dutton won’t say by how much but keeps pointing to the 36,000 figure hired by the Labor government.

“We’ll make announcements in relation to our policies in due course but I do note that with 36,000 additional, that brings the public service up to over 200,000. That’s much higher than in the Rudd-Gillard years. It adds significantly and I just don’t find any Australians who say that it’s easier to deal with the Government as a result of employing 36,000 more public servants.“

This is not true.

In terms of the public service, the APS’s own public reports shows that in June 2008 (when Rudd was PM) , there were 159,299 federal public servants, which was 0.75% of the Australian population and 1.52% of the working age population. In 2012 (when Gillard was prime minister) the records show there were 167,343 employed APS workers which was 0.74% of the population and 1.53% of the working population.

The most recent data shows in June 2024 there were 185,343 APS workers, which is 0.68% of the population (lower than Rudd or Gillard years) and 1.36% of the working age population (which is again, lower).

And yes, this is higher than the Morrison government (150,360 APS workers, which was 0.59% of the population and 1.28% of the working age population) but that doesn’t mean money was saved.

In the final year of the Morrison government, the Coalition paid consultants $20.8bn, which is the equivalent of 54,000 full time public servants. That’s $20.8bn to the private sector to do the job the public service was already doing.

The royal commission into veteran affairs found that the time to process claims made my veterans for some much needed help was made worse by the department not having enough staff to handle the workload. That has been a finding echoed across Services Australia and other departments where wait times for claim processing ballooned.

Ok, let’s go on to the first claim:

“We look like a credible alternative government. We’ve put pressure on a bad government. We’ve come up with policies and worked very hard over the course of the last 2.5 years to put policies together and we’ll disclose those as we get closer to the election.“

The Coalition has not ‘come up with policies’ in the way Dutton is implying here. Scratch beneath the surface and there is very little detail, or even intent, on putting them into practice.

The nuclear policy is a pamphlet, with Coalition insiders privately admitting it will never happen. Dutton himself was in knots to explain in during his most recent Insiders interview where he admitted that the first nuclear reactor would not be operating for at least a decade (if all went perfectly to plan) and the claimed 44% reduction in electricity bills is a fundamental misunderstanding of how electricity prices work.

Dutton’s other hallmark election policy was to cut migration. But after Angus Taylor became muddied on the detail and the Business Council of Australia lobbied against the plan (because the BCA knows Australia’s labour force operates on migration) Dutton said he would then announce those plans after the election.

So we have a policy to announce policies after the election for two of the fundamental policies the Coalition have been talking about. The others are allegedly coming during the election campaign, but the detail, as Dutton said on Insiders on Sunday, would be coming after the election.

We are going to need just a little minute to bring you more from Peter Dutton because there is A LOT to be fact checked there. A lot. And just presenting the information without the context or being able to point out where he is deliberately muddying the issues or just straight up lying is not doing anyone any good.

It was just this morning that Peter Dutton excused Donald Trump’s illegal and immoral ethnic cleansing plan for the Palestinians (which includes the US take over of a sovereign state) as “big thinking”.

Dutton is now applying his own ‘big thinking’ into demanding an inquiry into when the prime minister was told of an investigation that the police are still conducting, and have not raised issues over in terms of resources, or the investigation itself, because that is apparently the big security issue at hand here. Not the investigation. Which he has declined to receive a briefing about.

“Was it a political reason, did Mark Dreyfus know, was the prime minister’s chief-of-staff informed? Did the Prime Minister’s National Security Advisor get a briefing? My recollection in government was the federal police would call up and speak to advisers or my chief-of-staff or me as Minister with raw intelligence because they were worried, probably, about covering their own backsides if an event happened and the minister had been notified.

How can we conceive of a position where the prime minister of our country is not aware of a landmass terrorist attack that could have resulted in a 40 metre blast zone and hundreds of people losing their lives? I think they are reasonable questions, not politically based. This is a matter of national security and it can’t be repeated and I’m not aware of any precedent for it before.

You may also remember that police have said that they had to go public before they wanted to because of a leak to News Corp’s Daily Telegraph. The NSW police commissioner has since said that journalists were just doing their job, but a week later the leader of the Coalition has turned this into an issue of when the prime minister was advised.

To give an idea of how ridiculous this ‘inquiry into when the prime minister was told the date of a police investigation’ is, from the same political party who could not disclose when the prime minister’s office was made aware of rape allegations from a government staffer, Peter Dutton is not concerned with what security details are made public.

“It should be made public and there should be transparency around it because it is without precedent. There is no way in the world that the Prime Minister would be kept in the dark for 10 days about an alleged terrorist plot that could kill hundreds of Australians. Why was the Premier of New South Wales notified about it if there was a national security imperative to keep it from political leaders? It just doesn’t add up. If there are elements that need to be redacted, if they need to be kept secret for national security reasons I’m sure that can be facilitated in the report. The Prime Minister’s arguments, again, he has had a number of different positions, but this argument that somehow it’s a breach of national security if he declares what date he was advised by the police – that it just doesn’t wash and no-one should accept that.”

This from the party of ‘on-water matters’. From the man, who, when minister, said that women being held in detention on Nauru were “trying it on” with rape claims so they could come to Australia to receive abortion healthcare. Who won’t release any policy detail until AFTER the election. Who leads a party that won’t even release the figures on how much it costs tax breaks for small business lunches.

Continuing his political strategy of contest for the sake of it, Peter Dutton is continuing to push the line that Anthony Albanese wasn’t told of the police investigation into the caravan of explosives in NSW, which investigators say was part of planned mass casualty attack against Sydney’s Jewish community for 10 days as the biggest issue in Australia.

He has now written demanding an “independent inquiry” into it.

Can we all just take a small step back here and think about what the point of all of this is? What Dutton is actually trying to achieve? Is there anything that aids the police investigation through this, or helps keep people safe? Is there any point to any of this other than political goal scoring from the opposition leader?

Dutton is trying to make the date the prime minister was told of a thwarted planned attack a national security issue, but won’t take a briefing with national security agencies about what they know.