Oh wow. Nationals leader David Littleproud is openly saying that children who commit crimes don’t deserve civil rights.

This is the message that conservative talk back loves, but it is not borne out by the evidence, which shows that early intervention is key. And it’s not just a one-and-done approach – it has to be a whole of society approach. Former Queensland premier Steven Miles told me that midwives he spoke to in the Queensland Health system could identify which babies would run into trouble with the law, because they saw the signs of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome up close in newborns. So it’s about early intervention with children and family support from the very first developmental stages – which the evidence bears out – not just bootcamps and detention centres. And what Littleproud is not saying here, is that he is talking about Indigenous children, who are over-represented in our justice systems.

We have got to a point in society where I get all the criminologists and everybody talking about civil rights. We have hit a tipping point where the civil rights of an individual need to be put aside for the civil rights of a community.

When a community doesn’t feel safe, you have to act and you have to make sure there’s a deterrent and a consequence.

Unfortunately at the moment there’s not. In my home state again, I would encourage every state to do this, we’re going back to outback camps where we are rebuilding these young people with a life skill.

Not putting them behind barbed wire but sending them to remote places, giving them a skill and purpose in life.

They get up in the morning and they know they can achieve something. It was ripped away because of the advice from criminologists and what we have done is put them all into detention centres.

If you talk to police they’ll tell you they’re criminals. We need to give them a purpose in life and worth. Know they are valued and they can contribute to our society because we’ll invest in their skills and take them away and put them in an environment where they can be a better human being and come back to society without society worried about them.

That’s what every government should aim to do and you should have the courage to say you’ve got it wrong. What’s happening at the moment, people don’t feel safe. And our primary responsibilities, all levels of government, is to keep their citizens safe.

The Coalition is trying to walk the line that it scraped the work from home policy, that it maintains was good policy, because people didn’t like it. And they are saying that people didn’t like it not because it wasn’t good policy, but because Labor managed to snowball people about it.

Which is a bit of a an odd line to take. The Liberals official spokesperson James Paterson was asked about this on Canberra radio 2CC today and said:

Q: You’ve had to walk back a couple of policies that I actually think were good policies. But you’ve been unable to sell them. I mean, is that the answer, or do you need to get the messaging right?

Paterson:

Well, I think it’s really important, when it came to flexible working arrangements, particularly in Canberra, for the public service, that we listened and heard what people had to say. And what they told us was that in a modern economy, many families make their lives work by having that
flexibility.

It is really important for them to be able to work from home occasionally, not all the time. And they value that flexibility. And we didn’t want to take that away from people. We know how much they’ve suffered under Labor’s cost of living crisis, and we don’t want to make it any harder for
them. And that’s why we’ve listened, we heard, we’ve acted, and we’ve changed the policy.

Which then begs the question – why was the policy created in the first place? Did the Coalition just learn about the modern labour market? Or did it ignore what it was previously told? And if it were in government when it came up with this and not trying to win an election, would it have just pushed through even if the same voices were speaking up with how much they hated it?

Given the Coalition has pledged to cut 41,000 positions ( by natural attrition now, which is when you don’t replace people as they leave – but also means you can not judge the impact to service delivery, especially since the highest turn over in the public service is frontline roles in Services Australia etc) what does the Coalition consider to be a frontline service worker?

Angus Taylor:

If someone’s serving veterans, for instance, that’s a frontline position. If someone’s working in the military, that’s a frontline position.

Q: So does that mean that a worker can’t be doing a useful job if they’re not sitting in a booth or on the phone, dealing directly with the public? That is the only threshold for a valuable job in the public service?

Taylor doesn’t answer it:

Not at all and we haven’t said that. What we’ve said is we need to get the public service to the size it was when we were last in government. We need to repair budget deficits that are costing Australians dearly. We’re going to see around $125,000 of debt for every family and interest payments for every family in Australiain the next couple of years and so a responsible government would be doing everything it can to make sure the public service isn’t bigger but is better. Look, there’s incredible people working in our public service. I want to enable them to be their very, very best.

Angus Taylor spoke to ABC’s 7.30 last night where he also raised the ‘uncertain times’ Australia was facing. Asked whether he thought the RBA should be cutting the cash rate he said:

Well, I don’t get into predicting what the Reserve Bank does but I will say we are living in a deeply uncertain time. I think there’s huge challenges for the economy globally and locally. I have asked the Treasury Secretary for daily updates to the Coalition because of the gravity of the crisis we’re facing. I think there’s a real prospect of a broader global trade war and what we know is that this will, in combination, put downward pressure on the growth of the economy, which has been
sluggish at the best of times – seven consecutive quarters of negative GDP per capita – and also has the prospect of being inflationary, particularly because of our low exchange rate and this is a very dangerous time for our economy, for Australians, self-managed retirees, pensioners, people who have been saving a nest egg for their retirement, it’s clear that they’ve seen a free fall in their asset values and young Australians who are saving up for a home, for instance, a very tough time
for them. We need strong economic management at this time, a steady hand.

That is the key as we look forward

As we’ve said, tonight is the first televised debate between Albanese and Dutton. It will go out live on Sky News at 7.30pm.

Robust debate is better than mealy-mouthed bipartisanship. (Aukus anyone?) Televised leaders’ debates can be a good thing if they illustrate the choices facing voters.

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.

Peter Dutton is spending more time in petrol stations now, talking up his idea of a fuel tax cut from 51c per litre to 26c.

While your average driver might like the idea of paying less fuel tax, you know who NEVER pays fuel tax?

Gina. Clive. BHP. The rest of the mining industry.

The tax break for miners costs over $3.5 billion per year, as we pointed out in our recent report on Fossil Fuel Subsidies 2025:

Worst, this is a billion dollar per year subsidy for coal mining! Bad economics, bad climate policy.

Would be interesting to know how a Dutton minority government would negotiate fuel tax cuts with a crossbench that is keen to wind back fuel tax exemptions.

Politicians have claimed that students who come to Australia to study in person are exacerbating the housing affordability crisis. The Coalition claims that its newly-announced policy to reduce new international student enrolments will ease housing costs in “major metropolitan markets”. Having voted against Labor’s own proposal to cap student numbers last year, the Coalition is now promising to limit the number of international students to 25% of all new commencements. It claims this will reduce the number of international students by about 30,000 more than Labor’s current settings, which give the minister powers to deprioritise student visa processing and impose what higher education experts have called “a de facto cap”.

The idea that international students are responsible for rent hikes in the capital cities is nonsense. Everyone from the Business Council of Australia to the National Union of Students are on record as saying that international students make up a small proportion of the rental market (around 4% last year by most accounts).

When a Senate committee asked Treasury officials whether they had modelled the effect of international student caps on rent costs in capital cities, they acknowledged that they “haven’t specifically done any modelling on that, no”.

If political leaders were serious about improving housing affordability, they would tackle supply constraints as well as housing-related tax concessions, which exacerbate demand. Australia Institute research shows that the 50% discount on the Capital Gains Tax, as well as Australia’s generous negative gearing tax deductions, have “tilted Australia’s housing market away from homeowners and towards investors”.

Can the Coalition point to any modelling showing that international student caps would lower house prices more significantly than reforms to negative gearing and capital gains discounts? If not, they should stop punching down on a group of people who can’t punch back with their vote.

Welcome to a new series of articles from the Australia Institute, which we’re calling election entrées! Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing fun facts about Australian politics and elections – as a way of explaining how our political system works.

Over the weekend, the Liberal Party dropped one of its candidates, and replaced him with a different one. But what happens when a party disendorses a candidate when it’s too late to replace them?

Post-Doc Fellow Joshua Black has the details:

Election entrée: Not all party candidates make it to election day

Sometimes parties part ways with their candidates. This leads to messy disendorsements and a flurry of bad press. When these disendorsements happen late (after the “close of nominations”, after which no new candidates are accepted), the candidate still appears on the ballot as a member of the party that disendorsed them.

Such was the case for Pauline Hanson, who won election in 1996 while listed as a Liberal candidate. The Queensland Liberals expelled her only after nominations had closed, in response to highly controversial comments she made to local journalists about Aboriginal issues. Hanson was one of five independents elected in 1996, including others who quit or were expelled from their political party.

Other times, candidates are disendorsed before the close of nominations – which means the party can choose a replacement candidate. In 2016, the seat of Fremantle lost both its Liberal and its Labor candidates, the former for controversial statements about Indigenous politics and same-sex marriage, and the latter for failing to disclose previous criminal convictions concerning drink driving and assaulting a police officer. The replacement Labor candidate, Josh Wilson, won the seat and holds it to this day.

At the upcoming election, three former party MPs are defending their seats: Andrew Gee, who left the Nationals in protest over their opposition to the Voice; and Russell Broadbent and Ian Goodenough who quit the Liberal Party after losing pre-selection.

While a regrettably large number of disendorsements occur for racist, sexist or homophobic comments, Murray Angus has the distinction of losing his Liberal candidacy for the seat of Corio for speaking too warmly of his opponent, Labor’s Richard Marles.

Here is how AAP photographers caught the Rising Tide protesters at Albanese’s morning press conference:

Chief economist Greg Jericho spoke to ABC 24 about Donald Trump and the Australian economy, where he was asked – was Trump all bluff?

Jericho:

Normally he’s all bluff. He likes threatening these things and then someone gives him a deal that’s no deal at all and he claims victory and everything goes back to normal. That’s kind of what we are expecting here, the fact he keeps saying about trade deficits with the US rather than tariffs makes it seems like he thinks the end goal is everywhere in the world buying more stuff from America than America buys from it.

And that’s just not something that iis going to happen.

Certainly not with China or Europe or any of these other nations. If that’s his end goal, then I don’t know if he is going to sort of declare victory and pull out. Certainly the EU has already started calling his bluff and saying, OK, you want a deal, let’s have zero tariffs.

And that’s kind of not what he wants because he knows if that happens America is certainly going to not have a trade surplus with Europe.

So, they’re kind of saying if you want a deal, we’ll ready to deal. And so, I’m a bit worried at the moment because I think he’s fixated on these trade deficits and believe they’re a bad thing be, they’re not, they just mean that Americans and American companies like buying things from other places that are better quality and cheaper. Like our beef.

And that’s not a bad thing. That should be seen as a good thing for a place like America, but Trump doesn’t seem it that way. It sees it as a loss. If he keeps thinking that, maybe we’ll be stuck with these tariffs and it won’t be the usual bluff and bluster and then he declares victory and everyone just carries on as it was before.