We will revisit this tomorrow as well, but research director Rod Campbell made some more excellent points about the latest gas project approval:

The export gas project that was just approved is Santos’ Barossa project. If it sounds familiar, that’s because of Barossa’s many, many scandals:

• Long–running legal battles with Tiwi Islands traditional owners.
• It is particularly polluting. Barossa has more CO2 in its gas than any other gas field in Australia, 6x worse than Woodside’s North West Shelf.

Because of its battles with traditional owners and massive pollution, international investors have been pulling out of it, notably South Korea’s government-backed bank. The legends over at Market Forces keep a tally on which banks have ruled out lending money to Barossa.

Here’s the most pathetic bit – in order to help Barossa look a little bit cleaner to foreign banks, the Australian Government changed environmental rules as a favour for Santos (here’s our sub). The change meant Santos can send Barossa’s pollution to the Timor Sea for dumping, aka “Carbon Capture and Storage” (CCS).

CCS is, of course, a scam that has failed for decades.

As usual, this gas will be given to Santos for free. Barossa will pay no royalties and no gas exporter has ever paid petroleum resource rent tax.

Free gas, massive pollution, conflict with TOs.

Big Gas is taking the piss, particularly Santos.

We have Greg Jericho and Matt Grudnoff at the ready, with Amy Remeikis at the helm.

Ready for the third leaders’ debate?

Nope, me either. Let’s suffer through this together then,

Gadzooks, in the middle of an election campaign featuring a major focus on gas exports, Australia has just…approved a new massive gas export project!

NOPSEMA, the offshore oil and gas regulator posted today its acceptance of Santos’ proposal for the super-polluting Barossa Project.

If Peter Dutton is serious about Australian gas for Australians first, Barossa should be made to supply the Northern Territory first. This would mean there was no need to frack the NT, something that could win a lot of votes in Solomon and Lingiari.  

Barossa would be entirely for export, pay zero royalties and would be unlikely to pay petroleum resource rent tax anytime soon. It’s the project that Labor bent over backwards to support.

Sound familiar? Big Gas is taking the piss.

Given that both campaigns are on pause out of respect for the Pope, we are going to put the blog on pause.

So we will do some work on the back end and a bit of research (and some other work that has banked up) but we will let you know of anything major.

And we will be covering the third leaders’ debate (which still seems to be on)

See you soon x

One of the unseen issues of this election is thanks to social media algorithms, we don’t see all the ads and posts that candidates and campaigns are putting out across the different social media platforms. But one of the things the Liberals have liked, is using…muppets.

Which seems a call back to Scott Morrison in 2018, when he said “the curtain has come down on the muppet show” in response to the leadership spill where he toppled Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader and prime minister.

Much like Tony Abbott’s ‘good government starts today’ the description eventually came back to haunt Morrison. Not sure why the Liberal campaign would want to remind people of the muppet show that was the Liberal leadership mess, but here we are.

AAP has covered some of the Pacific Island tributes for Pope Francis:

Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape says the death of Pope Francis is a loss for “all humanity” as the deeply faithful Pacific mourns.

The pope leaves a meaningful legacy to the region, visiting in 2024 and canonising the first Papua New Guinean to become a saint, Peter To Rot.

Christianity is the dominant religion in PNG, and Catholicism is the largest denomination, with more than two million followers.

Tens of thousands of people turned out to see Francis in September on the first papal visit to PNG for three decades, and the longest trip he took from the Vatican during his 12-year tenure.

“Pope Francis led with grace and courage, and his voice for the voiceless resonated around the world,” Mr Marape said.

“The death of Pope Francis is not only a loss to the Catholic faithful, but to all humanity.

“His legacy will endure in the hearts of millions, including the people of Papua New Guinea.”

Pope Francis celebrated mass in the capital, Port Moresby, and the tony Sandaun town of Vanimo, close to the border with Indonesia’s West Papua region, in September.

He told worshippers that despite the 800 languages spoken in PNG, they “share a common language, that of love and service”.

After his visit, he approved the historic canonisation of To Rot, now known as Blessed Peter, who led a Catholic mission in East New Britain during the World War II occupation by Japan.

According to the Vatican, Blessed Peter continued his religious leadership, including marrying couples, against the occupying forces’ orders, before he died in custody from poisoning.

Blessed Peter was beatified by St John Paul II in Port Moresby in 1995, the previous papal visit to Melanesia.

PNG bishop Rozario Menezes told the ABC he was distraught by Pope Francis’ death.

“We are very much saddened, because just a few months ago, he visited us here. But we are very thankful to God for giving us a leader who led from his heart,” he said.

“It’s not only that Pope Francis appointed the first Cardinal of Papua New Guinea, but also he has given the church of Papua New Guinea (and) he has given us a saint in the person of Blessed Peter To Rot.” 

Mr Marape met Pope Francis before the three-hour mass at Sir John Guise Stadium, where he told the prime minister his impressions of locals were they were “a smiling people”. 

Christianity is the dominant religion across all three of Oceania’s regions – Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia – following the arrival of missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries.

So who is representing Australia at the Pope’s funeral?

The Governor-General, Sam Mostyn, was on her way to Türkiye for Anzac Day commemorations, but is considered to be “an appropriate representative”.

Former LNP MP Keith Pitt, who is the new ambassador to the Holy See, hasn’t been able to present his credentials to the Vatican because of the Pope’s illness, but he is helping with logistics.

Details are still being finalised by DFAT.

Government ministers are saying that Labor has done more than any other government to break Australia’s addiction to gambling after a story in the SMH alleged that Prime Minister Albanese intervened to stop a restriction on gambling ads.

That’s not saying much, and Australia Institute polling shows that the public is hungry for ambitious reforms. According to the SMH article, the Labor party had a proposal for policies that would have blocked gambling ads online, limited TV ads for gambling to two per hour until 10pm, and banned ads for gambling an hour before and after live sport.

Australia Institute polling shows that three in four Australians (76%) support a total ban on gambling ads phased in over three years.

Given the public’s appetite, and the fact that Australian teenagers are more likely to gamble than to play any of the most popular sports, introducing meaningful reforms should be a no-brainer.

The Australian has published the results of modelling on the Green’s policy of phasing out negative gearing and the capital gains tax (CGT) discount. The modelling claims that rents will increase because the tax changes will lead to many landlords selling their properties, reducing the number of rental properties.

But a reduction in rental properties is not going to push up rents. Why? Because those houses are not being destroyed or abandoned, they’re being sold.

Who is buying those properties? They are not being sold to landlords because the tax changes are driving them to sell. If they are not selling to people who already own properties (landlords), then they must be selling to people wanting a property to live in (first home buyers).

Landlords are selling their properties to people who currently rent. After this happens there will be fewer rental properties but their will also be fewer people wanting to rent. Supply may fall but so will demand, which will not material impact rental prices.

The result of cracking down on these tax concessions will be higher home ownership rates, as renters who are currently trying to break into home ownership buy rental properties being sold by landlords.

Sky Predavec

A cornerstone of the Australian election experience is tucking into a democracy sausage after casting your ballot on election day.

But in recent years more and more Australians have abandoned voting on polling day, missing out on sausage sandwiches and – more importantly – the final days of the election campaign.

There are six categories of voting in Australian elections:

• Ordinary polling day: a vote cast in the voter’s home electorate on the day
• Absent: a vote cast outside of the voter’s home electorate (but in the same state or territory) on the day
• Ordinary pre-poll: a vote cast in the weeks leading up to polling day, and without a specific reason for doing so.
• Declaration pre-poll votes: a vote cast in the weeks leading up to polling day, and with the voter having a specific reason for doing so (such as being unable to vote on polling day, serious illness, or religious reasons).
• Postal votes: a vote issued, and generally returned, by mail (requires a reason like declaration pre-poll votes).
• Provisional: a vote cast where a voter’s name cannot be found on the roll, is already marked off, or by a silent elector. They make up a very small share of the vote (0.3% in 2022), so have not been included in Figure 1.

Prior to 2010, pre-poll votes all required a declaration with a specific reason that the voter could not cast their ballot on polling day. From 2010 onwards pre-poll voters have not needed to provide a reason. That has coincided with a dramatic rise in early voting: half of all votes cast at the 2022 election were filled in before polling day.

Pre-poll voting opens a little later in the 2025 election than it did in 2022 – 11 days rather than 12. In 2019, Pre-poll voting was open a full 19 days before election day. While pre-poll voting increased despite the shorter window in 2022, time will tell if that will happen again.

It can be more convenient for someone to vote according to their own schedule rather than on a specific Saturday. However, individual convenience may be hampering Australians’ collective democracy.

A key aspect of an election campaign is hearing the parties’ full list of policies, seeing how their leaders perform under the stresses of a long campaign, and then coming together as a country to make a choice about who should represent Australians in the next parliament. As more and more Australians vote early, are they really coming together?

Early voting can have real political consequences too, when issues surface late in an election cycle. At last year’s Queensland election, Labor lost government with a 7.0% swing against them – taking only 46.2% of the two-party-preferred vote. However, Labor narrowly won votes cast on election day itself with 50.6% two-party-preferred. To some extent, this reflects that early voters are generally more conservative than the electorate as a whole. However, it is also the case that those who voted on the day would have seen more of the election campaign than other voters – particularly on the question of abortion rights in the case of the recent Queensland election.

When voters go into the polling booth, they should do so with the knowledge that they’re making a choice, part of a decision that all Australians are making. Is that really the case if most of that choice has already been made?