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

20.18 AEST

For reasons not immediately clear to anyone except maybe contract conditions, Sky Political Editor Andrew Clennell is now asking a question.

There is a very big run up to this about deficits etc:

Your budget contains $179 billion worth of deficits over five years. Over that period, the extra cost of the cost of the NDIS will be another 33 billion. The cost of your five to $10 tax cuts will be 17 billion over four years. Your public service wages bill after you hired another 46,000 public servants will be 8 billion a year. That’s 40 billion over the five years. That’s 90 billion I’ve just spelled out of the 179 billion of deficits, and that’s before we get to other campaign promises.

You also have us heading to a trillion dollars of debt, in fact, $1.2 trillion of debt having had a go at the Coalition for the same thing. Jim Chalmers, isn’t this the opposite of your hero, Paul Keating, so called beautiful set of numbers. Given these numbers, are you prepared to rule out cuts if you are re elected and haven’t you left Australia in a weak position in terms of a fiscal buffer for a global economic crisis? Jim Chalmers, why have you left us with a decade of deficits?

Chalmers:

Well despite all of that investment in strengthening Medicare, providing tax cuts, providing energy supplements, delivering the NACC, making our economy more resilient.

The budget is $207 billion stronger than when we came to office, and that’s made room for those investments, and it’s meant that we delivered two surpluses our predecessors delivered none.

The deficit this year is half as big. We’ve made a structural difference to the budget in areas like the NDIS and aged care and also interest costs. And so we are getting the budget in much better nick, and we’re doing that without ignoring our responsibilities to people who are doing it tough.

20.15 AEST

The debate dissolves into a cacophony of noise

Greg Jericho
Chief Economist

The pair are having fights over real wages, tax reform and productivity.

The instant asset right off is quite possibly the worst way to help productivity. All it does it let small business owners buy a new ute or some new stuff, much of which does nothing to help productivity. It is purely a tax break for the people the LNP thinks they need to vote for them to win.

20.13 AEST

Let’s talk tax.

Matt Grudnoff
Senior Economist

Are taxes high?

Compared to other developed countries, Australia is a low taxing nation. We would have to collect an extra $115 billion per year just to be at the OECD average.

Australia’s taxes at the federal level are not even particularly high compared to Australia’s recent history. The graph below shows the tax to GDP ratios since 2000-01, with the blue columns being years the Coalition was in government and red column being years when Labor was in government.

20.13 AEST

Angus Taylor tries to get Jim Chalmers to apologise for the ‘biggest fall in living standards’ yadda, yadda – you know how that question ends.

First of all, I mean, Angus wrote down that question and then you asked it, and he didn’t have the ability to think up a second question.

Chalmers then goes through the economy. He asks Taylor whether he will look down the camera lens and say no cuts to health and no cuts to education and Taylor uses a lot of words to say a whole lot of nothing, but he also won’t say the words.

OK, we have now moved on to company tax and whether anyone will cut it to attract investment.

20.08 AEST

Ross Greenwood says “friends and foes” have told him that Jim Chalmers is a great communicator, but gets cranky around criticism.

K.

Ross Greenwood says that “friends and foes” say Angus Taylor is brilliant, and a future prime minister, but doesn’t put in the work.

Cool.

Both of them talk about how they are just normal, dedicated dudes, doing normal, dedicated work.

20.06 AEST

Fact Check: the Coalition’s numbers

Reupping this from Greg Jericho earlier in the day:

Today very much is the day for the Liberal Party throwing around numbers that don’t actually mesh with reality (that’s very polite way of saying they are total crap)

We’ve already dealt with the lie that grocery prices have gone up 30% under the ALP govt (they haven’t – it’s 12% on average), but we also have the line that people are paying $1,300 more for their power bills than they were under the Morrison govt.

This one is a bit tougher to work out because they are not just talking about an increase they are also throwing in some very dodgy maths.

Here’s the Liberal’s Ted O’Brien this morning on ABC:

“Instead, power bills have gone up by $1,300. If you look at the default market offer that comes out each year, what you see is increases since Labor came to office of well over $1,000 and they promised you a reduction of $275. So, what you have, including here, I’m in Sydney today, you have people in Western Sydney paying $1300 more than what Labor had promised them.”

Ok, first off, even under O’Brien’s explanation bills have not gone up by $1,300 at best they have gone up $1,025. And sure that might be $1,300 more than Labor promised, but let’s not pretend that is the same thing.

But let’s be kind and not get too worried about that clear fudging of numbers. Let’s get to the real issue – have power bills gone up by even $1,025 let alone the $1,300 extra if we include the ALPs promise of $275 cheaper bills?

Well to work out, let’s use O’Brien’s measure of “the default market offer” (or DMO)

This comes out each year by the Australian Energy Regulator and is “the maximum price an electricity retailer can charge a standing offer customer each year.”

O’Brien referred specifically to Western Sydney, so let’s just use the DMO for NSW distribution regions.  

We know what the DMO was when Labor came to office because the AER issued its price determination for the DMO in May 2022 – the very same month the ALP won the election.

We also know what the DMO is for this year because in March the AER put out its draft proposal (the final numbers will come out in May/June).

So excellent – we have the 2 numbers, so let’s compare the changes for the three distribution regions in NSW – Ausgrid, Endeavour and Essential.

And we’ll look at the price for residential with and without controlled loading (which is just separately metered tariffs used for appliances such as electric hot water storage systems, pool pumps or underfloor heating). The prices also vary from each other because of different usage levels – but they are unchanged from 2002 to 2025, so we are comparing apples with apples.

 Residential without Controlled loadResidential with Controlled load
Ausgrid (May 2022)$1,512$2,122
Ausgrid (March 2025)$1,969$2,714
Change$457$592
   
Endeavour (May 2022)$1,836$2,383
Endeavour (March 2025)$2,397$3,050
Change$561$667
   
Essential (May 2022)$2,092$2,490
Essential (March 2025)$2,713$3,174
Change$621$684

As you can see, we are nowhere near $1,000 let alone $1,300 – even if you add in the $275.

But we also can use the ABS’s number from the quarterly inflation figures. Because remember the DMO is just “the maximum price an electricity retailer can charge” that doesn’t mean it is the price you are paying. Many get better deals. Households also get the energy rebate.

So let’s assume in June 2022 your annual electricity bill in Sydney was $1,000, that same amount of electricity on average across Sydney would now cost $1,075. Or $75 more.

Not quite the $1,3000 extra that Ted O’Brien is saying.

We have clearly had high inflation over the past three year. Why the Liberal Party feel the need to make up numbers to suggest things are bad is beyond me.

20.05 AEST

Angus Taylor is now pretending the world inflation crisis has not impacted the Australia economy.

Jim will look for an excuse for everything. He will look for an excuse for everything. Labor promised 97 times that electricity prices will come down by $275 and and the excuses are across. Whether you know it’s Vladimir Putin, it’s President Xi, it’s Donald Trump, he’ll use them all. (Because um, it has had an impact?)

But the one thing he won’t do is accept the people who are promised a $275 reduction in my electorate, and in those areas we just heard from a moment ago, a $1,300 a year worse off than was promised. (We can not find how they got this number – it seems like it has been made up)

Jim Chalmers has had enough.

“He’s making up numbers, he just made that up!” he says.

Ross Greenwood has to move on.

20.02 AEST

Farrrrkkkk me. Even I can fact check this one and I am maybe the dumbest person in the room.

Angus Taylor:

You’ve got to make sure you’re not spending money that doesn’t need to be spent, and you focus on the things that are really going to help people’s lives at a difficult time…like making sure that the cost of energy is going down so that we can get our energy sector where it needs to be, and that’ll help with our food our construction sector under Labor, we’ve seen groceries go up by 30% (No we haven’t, it is 12 %) gas, electricity, insurance all up by over 30%(this is because of climate change) your home grown inflation has had this impact (it is not home grown)

There is a better way, Jim, we know how to beat inflation, we know how to beat inflation, we know how to beat inflation, and you’ve completely failed to achieve it. (inflation has fallen under the target band)

20.00 AEST

Poverty…anyone…anyone?

Greg Jericho
Chief Economist

Oddly both Taylor and Chalmers as they talk about people doing it tough are not mentioning anything about those living on Jobseeker – those who live around 38% below poverty.

And talk of increasing that? Nope. None. Even though as we saw during the pandemic, raising Jobseeker took people out of poverty.

Amazing how both the ALP and LNP forget the obvious and forget history.

19.58 AEST

OK, so it doesn’t seem like any undecided voters will ask any questions here – it is all Ross Greenwood interrupting Jim Chalmers every 30 seconds, but letting Angus Taylor speak every time he says ‘this is really important’.

So far none of what Taylor has said is important.

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