LIVE

Wed 9 Apr

Australia Institute Live: Day 12 of the 2025 election campaign. As it happened.

Amy Remeikis – Chief Political Analyst

This blog is now closed.

Key posts

The Day's News

20.48 AEST

Good night – see you tomorrow? (After we all scrub our eyes and ears of that debate)

Ok, so fact checking a moderator is now ticked off my bucket list – a very big thank you to Matt Grudnoff and Greg Jericho (two nights in a row) for helping me through that.

The work support meeting will be in the wellness room. Bring a plate.

I will be back very early tomorrow morning for Day 13 of the election campaign, which hopefully will be a lucky number, and by lucky I mean that the campaign will end and we will all be freed.

Please have a very lovely sleep and take care of yourself. That was a pretty blah way to spend 90 minutes on a Wednesday, but your emails and social media comments made it easier.

Thank you again for joining us – we will hopefully see you back again tomorrow. Until then, take care of you. Ax

20.41 AEST

The winner is – anyone who never has to ever see a moment of that debate

Good God. That was perhaps a bigger waste of time than filling up a leaky bucket. I don’t think there has been a debate where I have had to get experts to fact check the MODERATOR.

In 1873, William Shanks sat down and decided to start calculating Pi to 707 places. By hand. It took him 15 years and he made a mistake that made the last 180 or so of his calculations incorrect, which wasn’t discovered until 1944. And even THAT was less painful than watching that debate.

Scott’s South Pole expedition would have been less painful.

I would rather watch someone sit and paint cheese as it slowly decomposed than ever experience something like that again.

Goodness me what a waste of time.

20.31 AEST

WTF even was that?

The pair give closing statements which are pretty much their press releases and campaign speeches.

We are all dumber for having watched that. Actually, not even dumber – we are all closer to being like Angus Taylor and that’s even worse.

20.28 AEST

Productivity and interest rates explained for Ross Greenwood

Matt Grudnoff
Senior Economist

Last 2 questions from voters. Since no one is going to try and answer these questions I’ll have a go.

How can we make housing more affordable?

We need to reform the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing to stop investors bidding up the price of housing. This will also raise billions of dollars that could be used to build more housing.

Why haven’t interest rates come down?

Because the RBA is failing to understand where inflation is at. When the March quarter CPI comes out at the end of this month, it is more likely to be below 2% than above 3%. The RBA should already have cut. They haven’t because they wrongly believe that a wage price spiral is about to break out.

20.27 AEST

Greg Jericho
Chief Economist

It is worth noting given Ross Greenwood has decided that we need to cut company tax to be “competitive”.

Firstly, that is laughable. Companies invest here because of access to markets in SE Asia, our educated workforce, our stable government, and because we have a SHIRT TONNE of iron ore, coal, and gas

And the problem is especially on gas we don’t tax companies at all.

eg INPEX who are exporting a stack of Gas from NT

20.27 AEST

WHAT THE F*CK IS THIS DEBATE?

This is maybe the worst moderated political debate I have ever seen and I had to sit through the mess that was the Nine debate in 2022.

Does Ross Greenwood think he is at a dinner party? Is he imaging this is just a chat over a bottle of God Knows What (something out of my pay packet)

Is he hearing what we are hearing? Is he even present in this debate? Is he aware of the questions coming out of his mouth?

20.22 AEST

I can not with these questions.

Angus Taylor was just asked if it would be bad if Labor and the Greens went into a coalition after Jim Chalmers just said that Labor and the Greens would not be going into a coalition.

20.21 AEST

Let Matt know if you need any of this explained:

This is insane. From the moderators we have had:

  • Deficits are bad
  • The Treasurer and shadow Treasurer should commit to no cuts
  • They need to cut taxes

Do I need to explain the problem with this?

20.20 AEST

Both were having a bit of a fight over productivity growth, and well the story is not good for either

Greg Jericho
Chief Economist

Under Howard/Costello it fell, When Rudd and Gillard ditched WorkChoices it rose, then it fell before rising abnormally due to the pandemic, and since then it has fallen again.

20.19 AEST

Q: A decision was made by you as energy minister. We’ve heard about it from Jim Chalmers tonight in 2022 before the last federal election, to delay a decision on electricity price rises past election day rises which were 11% and 12% so you effectively hid that power price rise from the Australian people.

Now you’re promising or releasing modeling claiming your gas reservation policy will cut power prices by a meager 3% and your only other power price solution is 15 years away in nuclear.

Why in 2022 did you hide that price rise from the Australian people? And given you did, why can we believe your policy promising this 3% reduction in power price?

Angus Taylor:

Well, I absolutely didn’t. And in fact, what we saw in my time as energy minister is a cut in electricity prices of between eight and 10% depending on whether you’re a small business, large business, or a household. We also saw big reductions in gas prices. Hear me out. They’ve got up to close to $20 and we got them down to closer to five to $7 over my final time in the role. And we saw as a result of that, we saw as a result of that, lower electricity prices and lower lower costs right across the economy. This is the key. If you can get gas prices down, it’s not just gas prices that come down for consumers, they clearly do, but also the price of food, the price of building materials. So much of our economy is energy. Energy is everywhere through our economy.

If we can get those costs down, and we can, by getting more Australian gas working for Australians, we can have a lower cost of living for all Australians,

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