Peter Dutton:

Well, I think it’s an incredibly important question, and it’s important because parents have a choice to make, and whether that’s for the public system or for the private system, we have supported both, and we support increased funding going into this election as well, and there’s a position which is identical between the two parties in relation to funding for public schools and for private schools as well.

I think it is important that parents are able to have that choice, and that we can fund the infrastructure, and that we can support teacher development and make sure that we’ve got an education system which is fit for purpose. We live in an incredibly competitive environment, and we need to make sure that the outcomes in our schools are meeting the standards and expectations of students and parents and teachers and educators more generally. And that requires money. It requires commitment. And I thank you very much for the great work you do.

Anthony Albanese:

I admire anyone who’s a public school teacher, you do incredible work. And one of the things we’ve had to deal with is the last time government changed in Australia in 2013 in the 2014 budget, $30 billion was ripped out of public schools. In that budget, $50 billion was ripped out of hospitals, and we’ve had to deal with that for a long time. You’d be aware way back now, more than a decade ago, there was the gods key reforms, which were about giving, put simply, every child, to get free, fair funding so they if they fall behind, they can get that assistance. Now we’ve delivered that in a deal negotiated with every single state and territory in the country, $14.6 billion of additional dollars so that every student, whether they’re going to a public school or a private school, can get the funding that they deserve. And that includes the deal so that they get proper, proper support.

So if a child falls behind, at the moment, NAPLAN is a bit too late. We want to do testing in year one, so if a child falls behind, they can get that specialist, one on one, tutoring or small group to make sure that they don’t fall behind, because if you address that really early, then every child can have the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations.

Dutton is not happy:

Kieran, I just want to follow up, yes, sure, if I could just very quickly. The fact is that there were no cuts. The Prime Minister goes out with this Medicare campaign and education scare campaign. It is not a truthful statement. Now what the Prime Minister is saying is that the funding didn’t go up by as much as he would want each year, but there was no year where funding was cut from hospitals or from education. When I was health minister, we increased hospital funding by 16% now the prime minister might say it should have gone up by more. That’s fine for him to say that, but to say that the funding was cut, and you can go and have a look at the Budget papers. That is not a factually correct statement. It’s misleading. It’s designed to scare people, and I think it’s dishonest from a man who wants to be re elected as the prime minister of our country.

Albanese isn’t backing away:

Well, Kieran, it is a fact. It is in the 2014 Budget papers, there’s line items really explicitly, $50 billion savings in health, $30 billion savings in education go down each year, Prime Minister or not, $30 billion from the funding that was in the budget before the change of government occurred

The ‘Trump pandemic’ line from the questioner is a good one.

On to the next question, which is from Monica who works for the department of education.

I’ve seen that there’s quite a big difference between public versus private and I was wondering if we’re getting any sort of funding towards public education in the near future

Peter Dutton:

Well, Michael, thank you for your question. I sat around the Cabinet table when we negotiated with Trump mark one presidency, and we negotiated an outcome for Australia which is much better than what we had today, and it meant that Australia was excluded from the first round of tariffs imposed by President Trump. (That was a very different time – these are global tariffs, which the last ones were not)

I also sat around the table, Cabinet table and the National Security Committee when we went through COVID and the support that we provided to families, to employees, to employers, kept our economy going through a very rough period, and I know that we can deal with whatever comes our way.

One of the great things about living in the greatest country in the world is that whatever is thrown at us, the Prime Minister of the day should have the ability and the strength of character to be able to stand up against bullies, against those that would seek to do us harm, to keep our country safe and to make sure that we can make the right economic decisions for our country as well. And that’s exactly what I would seek to do as prime minister.

Anthony Albanese:

Indeed, Australians did show extraordinary resilience during the global pandemic, and we came through that – that had a long tail, that’s still having an impact today, and straight up to us, followed by inflation. Now President Trump has made a decision that I’ve called that an act of economic self harm for the United States, when you impose tariffs, it’s a tax on the country that is imposing it, so Americans will pay more for the goods that they purchase from overseas, and that will have an impact here, because we know that as the world’s largest economy, it’s expected to dampen global economic growth, so it does present a challenge.

But last Thursday, we were prepared.

Australia got the best deal of any country on the planet. 10% is 10% more than we would like. But no one got a better deal than us, in part, because of the representations that we’ve made, but we’re prepared as well.

No country is better positioned to take advantage of the trade opportunities. And it’s important to remember this, 80% of global trade doesn’t involve the United States, so in our region in particular, there will be opportunities for Australia that we want to seize.

We will have more global trade missions, following the missions that I’ve led to Indonesia, to India and China, looking for opportunities for businesses. We’ll create a fund, through our national reconstruction fund of a billion dollars to help businesses adjust here. We’ll continue to negotiate, of course, with the United States looking for a better deal for Australia, because reciprocal tariffs would, of course, be zero, because we don’t impose tariffs on US goods.

The first question comes from Michael.

Michael wants to know from both Albanese and Dutton:

We came out of COVID, and the economy did really well after that, we’re still going well at the moment. How are we going to cope with the Trump pandemic that we’re going through right now? And what? What’s your strategy around getting Australia on the right foot going forward?

Peter Dutton then gets to give his statement:

I think your stories tonight will reflect the realities and the stories of millions of Australians, and it has been a tough year, a tough three years, in fact, for Australians.

People have seen the government make mistakes, starting with the voice and priorities, but just haven’t accorded with your own priorities.

Almost 30,000 small businesses have gone broke and behind each one of those stories, there is somebody who’s lost their house or lost their life savings, people have gone backwards, because when you go to the supermarket now, you’re now paying 30% more for groceries, paying about 32% more for your electricity.

And the prime minister promised at one of these debates at the last election that your power bills would go down by $275 instead, they’re up by $1,300.

I want to provide support to Australians from the first day that we’re elected, and that is through a 25 cent a liter cut to fuel, both diesel and unleaded. It’ll help families, it’ll help businesses, it’ll help pensioners, and it will help the economy.

In addition to that, we want to make sure that we can get gas for Australians, so that we can fix up the energy system, which is driving up the cost of everything, and if we can do that, we can get our country back on track. That’s a positive plan that I want to talk about.

Anthony Albanese gets the opening statement.

The world has thrown a lot of challenges at Australia. In the last few years, we’ve had the COVID pandemic, followed by the biggest inflation spike since the 1980s and the biggest energy crisis since the 1970s but what matters is how you respond, and we’ve responded the Australian way.

What is the Australian way?

Thanks to the hard work of Australians, including the people in this room, inflation is down to 2.4%, wages, real wages are up. They’ve been up five quarters in a row. Unemployment is low at 4.1% we’ve created 1 million jobs, and importantly, interest rates have started to fall.

What this election is about, though, is what happens next, whether we continue to build on those foundations with a tax cut for all 14 million Australians, strengthen Medicare, including those bulk billing rates getting up to 90% and making sure we have urgent care clinics free TAFE, the 20% of student debt and making more things here in Australia through a future major in Australia.

Now, you can’t control everything that happens, and we know in the world it’s uncertain, but I’m absolutely certain of this, now is not the time to cut now is not the time to look backwards. Now is the time to look forward and seize the opportunities and build Australia’s future.

Meanwhile, the Australian’s Ben Packham is reporting that Andrew Hastie, the shadow defence minister “has refused to walk away from past comments in which he said women should not serve in combat roles in the Australian Defence Force”.

As we reported earlier, in 2018 Hastie, a former SAS officer, said that his personal view was that women should not be in the ADF as “the fighting DNA of a close combat unit is best preserved when it’s exclusively male”.

The Liberals dumped their Whitlam candidate Ben Britton after the Guardian’s Sarah Basford Canales exposed similar comments Britton had made in a podcast interview. Dutton told media today that Hastie had the same view as himself – that women should be allowed to serve in the ADF, but the Australia is reporting that’s not exactly the case.

It’s all going fine.

News Corp is reporting that Peter Dutton’s father, Bruce, suffered a “medical episode” a short while ago.

He has been rushed to hospital, but there is no more information.

We know that when things like this happen, politics doesn’t matter. We hope there is good news.

We have all received a psychic shock from seeing Andrew Bolt on our screens.

Apparently Peta Credlin was before this.

Bolt was described as the “perfect” lead in for this debate by some poor Sky hack who must know the secret to remaining on the payroll is to just reflect back what Bolt says to himself in the mirror every afternoon.