On that very stupid note, we will leave you because tomorrow is going to be one of those very long days that no one needs, or wants – but we will cover it all off for you.

The second debate is tomorrow (a third has been set down for the last week of the campaign which the Seven network will host) which means that the campaigns will be back in Western Sydney tomorrow for the debate at the ABC’s Parramatta studios.

We will cover off the day’s events (as well as bring you some of Richard Denniss’s appearance on Q&A – we will also watch that for you, so you don’t have to sit through the whole show if it all gets a bit much)

Big thank you to everyone who came by – honestly, we are so humbled and grateful for your support. So until tomorrow, take care of you. Ax

The analysis that Albanese was referencing there was this one from Steven Hamilton which had the headline: Dutton is pursuing a housing subsidy so bad, even Trump killed it. The policy is highly regressive, and will simply boost house prices and blow a huge hole in the personal income tax base that will never be recovered.

Then comes maybe one of the stupidest questions of this campaign:

You point out the headline about Peter Dutton’s policy being abandoned by Donald Trump, but doesn’t that actually prove that Peter Dutton is not the Trump lookalike that you and your ministers have been trying to paint him as this entire campaign?

Albanese manages to hold back a laugh:

Oh, people will make their own conclusion, but people can have a look at the caps that my team wear and the caps that the other team wear and draw their own conclusions.

(The caps in question being the ‘Make America Great Again’ that Jacinta Price was wearing in a social media post)

Q: The Liberals rap diss track. Have you heard it? Do you have any response?

(The diss track takes inspiration from Drake, which is….problematic for a number of reasons. But Drake also famously LOST his battle against Kendrick Lamar so again – wtf is the message here?)

Anthony Albanese:

Look, the Liberal Party can explain their own campaign. Some of it’s way beyond my comprehension. Some of the things they’re doing in this campaign, I’ve got to say, you know, there’s lots of really good Australian music around.

We heard one of those at my campaign launch yesterday.

Sounds of then by the Great Ganggajang. We can all sing This is Australia. We are a different country. I’m running as an Australian Prime Minister on Australian values. I’ll leave it to others to see why they consistently just borrow cultures and ideas and policies from other places as well.

Albanese was also asked about the Liberal’s housing policy and said:

On housing, can I say that you know, this is a policy that was in the Fin review. I read today in the paper. I read the analysis. I read the paper, which is much preferable from my perspective, maybe showing my age, perhaps, but the analysis, speaking about how even that policy was abandoned under the Trump administration the first time around.

This is a policy that has never been supported, wasn’t supported by them the entire time that they were in government. They did nothing about housing.

They helped create the problem for a decade. And you saw the people who created the problem all lined up at Peter Dutton’s launch yesterday, all clapping, someone saying, we need to do something about housing, but nothing about housing supply. If you don’t do something about housing supply, you’re not serious and they’re not serious.

The Labor Party’s plan to build 100,000 new homes in 10 years has had some wondering if we have the capacity – after all where are the builders to do all that work?

Well one place to look is new coal and gas mines. The government keeps approving new (sorry extensions) gas and coal mines and that takes construction workers away from the building homes and commercial buildings.

In the last financial year as much was spent constructing new mines than was on new apartments and flats.

This is a poor use of our resources. Not only is it taking workers away from the residential construction sector and thus causing supply constraints and increasing the cost of building new homes, but coal and gas contribute to climate change.

So we’re heating up the planet and the housing market. Dumb, both ways.

Q: Prime Minister three years ago. You said that you felt the weight of removing the Morrison government this time around, you don’t have the Morrison factor working in Labor’s favour. What weighs you down now? You know, why is Peter Dutton still so competitive with you?

Anthony Albanese:

Well, what weighs me down is that the Morrison government, I think, was a bad government. I think the fact that they replaced Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull and then replaced Malcolm Turnbull with Tony Abbott and then wanted to replace Morrison with Josh Frydenberg, says a lot about the wasted ten years, ten years where they had 23 different energy policies and didn’t deliver.

One, didn’t deliver one. And so you had that uncertainty for business.

What weighs me down now is I feel a responsibility to ensure that we’re able to continue to govern, that you continue to have the investment that we’re seeing from companies like this, that you have a government that strengthens Medicare, that looks after people, doesn’t leave people behind, and that creates opportunity. I want that to continue to occur.

And what we’re left with now is the leftovers of the Morrison government.

Some of the best people have all gone. They’ve left and the remaining moderates, one by one. Karen Andrews, are you have Paul Fletcher, you have had Senator Birmingham, Christopher Pyne’s gone. You’re now left with a more and more right wing rump in the Liberal Party. And when you look at their candidates, some of the views that they have are just not consistent, you know, not consistent with Australian values that we have that we hold dear here.

We look after each other in Australia, we don’t have a dog eat dog attitude towards the economy. We look after people, we make sure that we have a culture here of the fair go. That’s what my government represents and that’s what I want to continue with.

And Penny Wong on how to handle Trump:

Well, I think it’s pretty clear that Mr Dutton and certainly Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price have looked to the US for a lot of inspiration for their policies and even some of their slogans. But I think this is a challenging time internationally. We know there’s a lot of change, a lot of strategic competition and economic competition and one of the reasons that I would say to people, it’s important to vote for a majority Labor government is because that will give us the stability and certainty to navigate uncertain times.

Here was Penny Wong on the costings of Labor policies (speaking to Sky News)

Look, these policies have been worked through, and I think they are really sound policies, and that’s adding to the strength of the offer that we’re putting to the Australian people. In addition, we’ve got really good candidates like Claire Clutterham here in Sturt. What I would say is I think people are waking up to Peter Dutton and understanding that he’s negative, he’s aggro, and he has $600 billion of secret cuts he won’t talk about to fund his nuclear reactors.

While today has been dominated by housing policy, it is worth remembering that the Liberal Party’s gas policy has a few holes in it due to our extremely uncompetitive gas retail sector. It’s not just gas miners who are taking the piss.

Dutton’s plan for a gas reservation is finally a recognition that Australia does not have a gas shortage problem—it’s a gas export problem. More gas should be allocated to domestic users.

But Dutton’s estimate that retail consumers will benefit is problematic.

Under the Dutton policy, gas is reserved domestic consumption until “the price of wholesale gas out of Queensland” falls from $14/GJ to $10/GJ. He claims that will save residential customers 7% of their retail gas bill.

Here is the problem, Dutton assumes Australia’s retailers pay the price of wholesale gas. But AGL, the biggest retailer, pays just $8.20/GJ for the gas it supplies its 4 million gas customers. Dutton’s plan to lower gas prices to $10GJ won’t matter a hoot.

That’s too bad because AGL’s gas customers have been paying an average of $38.8/GJ plus GST. But 7% would represent a saving of around $3/GJ were it to materialise.

Origin’s figures are roughly similar.

In the 6 months to 31 Dec 2024 AGL’s wholesale gas costs were $11.5/GJ of which $8.2/GJ was AGL’s cost for gas purchases. The rest ($3.3/GJ) was “haulage, storage and other.”

AGL’s rip offs need addressing. AGL charges consumer customers $38.8/GJ (before GST) which is more than three times what it charges big business at $12.4/GJ. The difference cannot be justified.

The Coalition has a new ‘First Home Buyer Mortgage Deductibility Scheme’ that will allow interest paid on mortgages for ‘first home buyers’ to be tax deductible up to certain limits. This will only add fuel to the fire of the housing crisis, pushing up house prices even further while diverting money away from public purposes and toward high-income earners, entrenching inequality.
Firstly, the policy only applies to newly built dwellings, these are generally more expensive and more likely to be bought by the already well-off. Secondly, tax deductions are more valuable to people on higher incomes, while the Coalition has announced a ‘means-test’ which limits the system only to “earning up to $175,000 for individuals, and $250,000 for joint applicants”, this likely won’t stop the system from mainly benefiting high-income earners. The Coalition announcement gives the example of someone with “taxable income of $120,000 [an interesting choice of example as it’s more than most Australians earn] with a $650,000 mortgage at 6.1 per cent will receive a benefit of around $12,000 a year” (this benefit is about $60,000 over five years). Using the Coalition’s assumptions, someone with an income of $175,000 will receive about $15,000 in benefits each year or $74,000 over five years (about $13,000 more).
To make matters worse, this system appears to be easily ‘gamed’ by high-income earners because the means-testing only applies for the first year to be eligible. For instance, self-employed high-income people could manipulate their income to be lower in one year, thus making themselves eligible for the scheme, and then higher in the next (to take advantage of the tax deduction). This could lead to a maximum benefit for these households of about $88,000, or $28,000 more than the Coalition’s example.
Rather than providing high-income households with a tax giveaway and costing the budget $1.25 billion, Australia could choose solutions that would stop housing speculation and raise billions, such as clamping down on the Capital Gains Tax discount and negative gearing.

Well, what a difference the desperation comes from polls so bad that you are worried you will not only lose an election, but lose your leadership as well.

Here’s was Peter Dutton on ABC730 after delivering his Budget Reply speech less than 3 weeks ago:

“I would love to introduce tax reform and tax cuts, but the Labor Party has racked up what we now see in the Budget papers of about $1.2 trillion of debt. Our plan is to reduce tax in another part of the family budget and that, of course, is in relation to the halving of the fuel excise.”

Ahhh gotta love those plans and worries about debt now.

On the weekend, the Liberal Party announced that it was resurrecting the old Low-Middle Income Tax Offset rebadged as the Cost-of-Living Tax Offset. It would be worth up to $1,200 a year and would cost $10bn.

This is more than the government’s proposed tax cuts, but crucially the LNP’s tax cut are only for one year, and then it is gone.  

This is the weird part because up till 2 days ago, the LNP was nagging on about the government’s spending causing interest rates to rise. Would not the LNP’s tax offset do that even more so? Well apparently, according the Liberal Party’s website no:

“Why is it a temporary measure? 

The Cost of Living Tax Offset will provide targeted and timely support for household budgets while we implement our positive plan to get inflation down and our economy back on track.”

Huh? Apparently because the new offset is temporary it won’t drive inflation. Sorry but this is not how inflation works. People don’t not spend more money now because they know a $1,200 tax cut is only for one year. At best they can say it won’t cause inflation now, however this gets us to the next part – the “targeted and timely support” bit. Because it is an offset, taxpayers will only get it at the end of next financial year – at which point the market is expecting there will have been 5 more interest rate cuts. Is that all that timely?

There is nothing wrong with the offset. It is targeted. The biggest tax cut in percentage terms goes to someone on $48,000. That is good. But why only temporary? Is the Liberal Party going to try the trick it did with the LMITO and cut it thus handing everyone a tax increase? And is it going to do that at the same time is end its “temporary” fuel excise cut?

In his budget in reply speech Peter Dutton said “Tuesday’s budget was one for the next five weeks, not one for the next five years.” Alas, the further the LNP seems to be looking is 12 months.