LIVE

Tue 8 Apr

Australia Institute Live: Day 11 of the 2025 election campaign. As it happened.

Amy Remeikis – Chief Political Analyst

This blog is now closed.

Key posts

The Day's News

18.59 AEST

Hello and welcome to the first leaders’ debate

We are coming online again to get ready for the first leaders’ debate. This one is hosted by News Corp, where 100 undecided voters will judge the winner – and punters will also ask the questions.

These debates tend to be the ones where the leaders are on their best behaviour – they might not care about running over journalists (for anyone who remembers 2022 – you might remember how the Nine network debate completely ran away from the host) but they do care what voters think – especially if the voters are in the room with them.

16.01 AEST

See you at 7ish for the first debate!

We are going to rest the blog for a little bit – she has been working hard and needs a Bex and a lie down.

But we will be back at 7ish to get ready for the first leaders’ debate. You’ll have me and Greg Jericho to help fact check your way through that, so huzzah!

Go stare at a wall, or at least have a little chat. See you soon Ax

15.32 AEST

Cam Wilson is one of the best in the business when it comes to watching this sort of thing:

On top of lobby group ADVANCE's faux news page and two anti-Greens pages, it has now launched 2 other pages for Facebook ads: – Anthony is Weak, Woke and Sending Us Broke" featuring the Yes campaign photo- "Immigration Crisis", rebranded from being a "Save Australia Day" page

— CAMERON WILSON (@cameronwilson.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T05:30:33.000Z

15.24 AEST

Is the Coalition looking in the right directions for nuclear examples?

Frank Yuan
Postdoctoral Fellow

Peter Dutton has again touted nuclear power, a centrepiece for the Coalition’s agenda:

“We [will] bring in the best technology in the world, which is being embraced by the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, China is building 29 nuclear power stations as we speak.”

Regardless of how quickly Australia could establish a regulatory framework for nuclear energy, the two examples are misleadingly optimistic.

Currently nearly half of all the nuclear power reactors under construction are in China, and their companies have extensive expertise in constructing and safely operating in this field. On the other hand, the UK has not commissioned a new nuclear power station since the 1990s, and the ones currently being built have significant financial and technical involvement from the Chinese state-owned corporation. It’s an understandable and rational choice for the British to bring in resources from the largest civilian nuclear construction industry in the world.

Incidentally, the US has no nuclear power plant either under construction or even in the planning stage – so the alliance won’t helps us there…

But there is a whole industry behind China’s ability to build nuclear power plants so quickly, especially over the past decade, as illuminated by this interesting case study. It enjoys a vast, skilled, and often specialised labour pool; its companies have access to highly advanced and sometimes enormous machinery; its comprehensive manufacturing supply chain is geographically concentrated and highly responsive.

Can we really replicate all these in Australia, in the next few years? Or perhaps get some Chinese state-owned enterprises to help us out?

Surely we can just buy more solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries which Chinese companies are competing against each other to sell to the rest of the world.

15.14 AEST

Uni Canberra is spending big on things not needed, while cutting staff to save money

Joshua Black
Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Uni Canberra is in the news today about cutting more staff. But @joshuablackjb.bsky.social looked at their budget and sees a lot of spending on things they don't need #OffTheChartsaustraliainstitute.org.au/post/uni-can…

— The Australia Institute (@australiainstitute.org.au) 2025-04-08T05:10:44.470Z

Australia’s beleaguered university sector is never far from the headlines these days. Former Labor leader and current University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Bill Shorten probably doesn’t envy his former ministerial colleagues who are currently on the campaign trail, but nonetheless, he’s in the news today.

The Canberra Times reports that Shorten is announcing a new voluntary redundancy program for UC’s professional staff. “We are not looking to achieve certain targets nor have we identified further positions as excess to requirements,” he told reporters.

UC has saved about $30 million by letting go of 150 staff to date. But why were these cuts necessary in the first place? Like most universities, UC has spent big on discretionary things that aren’t education or research.

Its 2023 annual report shows that the university spent $16.7 million on consultants’ fees, $9 million on ‘outsource management fees’, $697,000 on ‘sponsorships’, nearly $4.4 million on travel and just shy of $3 million on advertising.

The above graph shows that those items cost more in total than the 150 jobs that UC has since cut to repair its deficit.

UC is far from the worst offender. Australia’s public universities spend hundreds of millions each year on things like consultants, promotions and sponsorships, outsourced management and travel. In some institutions, business class flights amount to a quarter of total travel costs.

All of this is to say nothing of the salaries of Australian Vice-Chancellors, who are “among the highest paid in the world” according to Australia Institute research. Shorten, who until early this year was a senior minister in Cabinet, more than doubled his salary when he commenced at UC. (And that was him negotiating downwards!)

You can read more, here.

15.10 AEST

The debate tonight will be in front of 100 undecided voters in western Sydney. At the end of the debate, those voters are asked to say who they think won the debate.

As Josh Black wrote earlier today:

But they aren’t the crucial campaign events they used to be. Whether they are worthwhile depends on the format – a scrappy and personal debate turns politics into a blood sport, and alienates voters from the political process itself.

Prime minister Robert Menzies abstained from the first ever televised election debate back in 1958, but his deputy Harold Holt and senior minister Billy McMahon faced off against Labor’s leader H. V. Evatt and deputy Arthur Calwell. Barely 18% of TV viewers bothered tuning in, according to one historian.

Prime ministers and opposition leaders didn’t start debating during elections until 1984. A lacklustre PM Bob Hawke faced off against opposition leader Andrew Peacock, who managed to win the debate but not the election. Hawke chose not to debate John Howard in 1987 but performed spectacularly in a rematch against Peacock in 1990. It was, by Hawke’s own account, the ‘highlight of the campaign’.

Since then, debates have been a fixture of election campaigns but they are by no means decisive. In 2004 John Howard was roundly bested in his TV debate against Labor’s Mark Latham in September 2004, with 67% of the audience favouring the latter. The following month Howard pulled off an historic win in both houses of parliament, and Latham was soon gone from federal parliament. More recently, Bill Shorten won most of his debates against Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison but lost both elections. The first debate in 2016 ranked 10th in the ratings (for a national broadcast, not good), and barely 93,000 people bothered watching to the end of the broadcast. The debates between the current PM and his predecessor last time round were pretty ugly, with the second debate especially full of “fraught and shouty exchanges” and plenty of yelling over the top of the moderator, Nine’s Sarah Abo. Nine won the ratings, Albanese narrowly won the debate, but the public were the losers.

Election debates need to be about more than winning ratings. They need to be contests of ideas and visions, not shouting matches between posturing men.

14.41 AEST

The Conversation has published an article from Deborah Gleeson, an Associate Professor in Public Health, La Trobe University who points out that the Trump administration has Australia’s access to generic medicines (the off brand version of medicines) in its sights:

While Australia was busy defending the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme against threats from the United States in recent weeks, another issue related to the supply and trade of medicines was flying under the radar.

Buried on page 19 of the Trump’s administration’s allegations of barriers to trade was a single paragraph related to Australia’s access to generic medicines. These are cheaper alternatives to branded medicines that are no longer under patent.

The US is concerned about how much notice their drug companies have that Australia will introduce a generic version of their product. Once a single generic version of a medicine is listed on the PBS, the price drops. The US argues that lack of advance notice is a barrier to trade.

There is pressure for Australia to emulate aspects of the US system, where drug companies can delay generic copies of their medicines by 30 months.

If the US plays hardball on this issue, perhaps in return for other concessions, this could delay Australia’s access to cheaper generic drugs.

It would also mean significant pressure on Australia’s drug budget, as the government could be forced to pay for the more expensive branded versions to ensure supply.

Gleeson writes more about that, and why it matters, here.

14.33 AEST

Sarah Hanson-Young is also calling on the RBA to reconvene and deal with the impact of the Trump tariffs:

My point is do not let the election get in the way of the RBA doing it job. The RBA has the opportunity to call a meeting this week and to cut interest rates at this week. We don’t have to wait till next month and that is why I agree with Bernie Fraser.

The RBA should get off its hands and do its job. I am suggesting they should get off their hands today and cut interest rates this week and give families the relief they need and give our economy the support it needs.

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