The House is currently debating the government’s “Fair Work Amendments (Protecting Penalty and Overtime Rates) Bill.

The key point of the bill is (as the Explanatory Memorandum relates):

Penalty rates and overtime rates compensate employees for working weekends, public holidays, late nights, early mornings or overtime.

This Bill would uphold and enhance the integrity of the modern awards safety net by:

• ensuring the specified penalty or overtime rates in modern awards cannot be reduced

• closing loopholes in the modern awards safety net that allow employers to ‘roll up’ penalty and overtime rates into a single pay rate, that do not fairly compensate award-reliant employees for the penalty rates and overtime they would have otherwise received.

Now opponents of the bill (employers) hate penalty rates because they have to pay staff more for working on the weekends or public holidays. Their argument is that penalty rates are a relic of the old days when shops were shut on Sundays and after noon on Saturdays and now working on the weekends is common.

And we, yes… it is common, but most of us still don’t do it.

The latest ABS survey of when people worked was in 2023 and it found that 75% with a job with leave entitlements (ie either ongoing or a contract) ONLY worked Monday-Friday.

Casual workers are much more likely to work on the weekends, but even there only 6% worked only on the weekend.

This is why weekend work should get penalty raters – it remains the exception. And sure Monday-Friday workers like me might like that the shops and cafes are open on Sundays, but as someone who did his stint in hospitality working night shifts, every public holiday etc, the people serving you are not doing it for fun – they too would love to be able to have the weekend off because that is when kids sport is on, most other activities are scheduled for the weekend – even things as obvious as the Hottest 100 last Saturday, There’s a reason they didn’t do that on a Thursday.

Asked how co-operation was going when it came to the childcare bill Jason Clare said:

I want to thank the Coalition. I want to thank Sussan Ley. Yeah, this is a different Parliament and a different Opposition Leader. Australians, I think, want us to work together on the big things that matter to help Australians. And particularly on the child care matter where it could have been very different. The decision of Sussan and Jono [Duniam], the Shadow Minister, to work constructively with us, I take my hat off to them. This is what Australians want of us. This is what they expect of us. To be honest, it’s what they should demand of us. And the fact we can work together on these big and important things is a good thing. We’re here to represent our community and to make Australia a better and a fairer place and to make our child care centres safer. That’s what we’re doing this.

Jason Clare is also hopeful the bill to cut funding to child care centres that don’t meet national safety standards will also pass the senate today

Clare:

I’ve directed my department to be ready to act swiftly when that legislation passes and receives royal assent.

Is it the only thing we need to do? No. Not by a long shot.

This is the start. Not the finish.

The truth is, there is no end to the work that we need to do, the Commonwealth Government and state governments, to help to make sure that our children are safe in early education and care. There is a mountain of work to do to rebuild the trust and the confidence in the system that parents need to have confidence in.

The Attorney-General spoke about this earlier this week, talked about the hotchpotch of different Working with Children Check systems in different states and territories, and said this would be the first item on the agenda when attorney-generals meet in just over two weeks’ time. And I’ve also spoken about the need for a system to track workers from centre to centre and from state to state, a National Educator Register.

That’s something ministers have agreed to and our departments are working on right now. But not just that. Also having mandatory child safety training, so that the fantastic people who work in our centres, who are just as gutted and angry and upset by the revelations out of Victoria and other parts of the country as everybody else is, have the sort of skills and information they need to be able to identify somebody who might be up to no good in clear sight, working in their centres. They’re the best asset that we’ve got here, and Queensland is doing some work on what that training might look like.

They’ll be in a position to take that to the meeting of education ministers when we meet next month.

It’s just an example of the fact that this legislation, whilst it’s important, is not everything, it’s the start, not the end.

The Greens want the government to now turn to scraping the Morrison-era job-ready graduate program, which has been a spectacular failure, but also raised the cost of arts degrees to over $50,000.

Mehreen Faruqi:

Labor’s one-off 7.9% student debt cut won’t make a dent when students are graduating with $50,000 arts degrees and debts that grow every year and take a lifetime to pay off. 

The Greens want to deliver long-lasting student debt relief, so we invite the Albanese government to work with the Greens in the Senate rather than choose the lazy, uninspired path of tinkering around the edges with the help of the Coalition. 

The Greens are ready to work with Labor. The Albanese Government should show some ambition and work with us to wipe all student debt and make TAFE and uni free again, like it was for the Prime Minister.

At the bare minimum, Labor should work with us to undo Morrison’s disastrous fee hikes and end indexation, which keeps people on the hamster wheel of trying to keep up with ever swelling debts.

Labor should have dumped Morrison’s job-ready graduates fee hikes the second they came into power. The scheme is a cruel, punitive mess that does nothing except punish students with high fees.” 

Jason Clare was celebrating:

We promised it and we’ve delivered. This will cut the debt of millions of Aussies by thousands of dollars. The average HECS debt today is about 27 grand.

This will cut that debt by about $5,500. That’s a lot of money, and that’s a lot of help for a lot of Australians. It will help take a weight off their back. In particular, a lot of young Australians. Young Australians don’t always see something for them on the ballot paper, but they did this year and they voted for it in their millions.

And we’re repaying now the trust that these young Australians have placed in us. The next step is for the tax office to do the work they need to do. Now that the bill has passed, they’ve got the certainty they need to make the changes to their systems to pass this on to 3 million Australians. That will take a bit of time.

They’ve got to write about 50,000 lines of code to implement this and make sure that they get it right. But this is now going to happen. It’s guaranteed.

And it will be backdated to 1 June this year, before indexation happened. We’re doing that for a reason – to make sure that we honour the promise we made to the Australian people in full, that we would cut their student debt by 20%.

The HECS/Help legislation has passed through the senate with no amendments. The Greens and independents voted for it, the Coalition abstained and One Nation voted against it.

One of the big challenges the government will have to face this term is how to regulate AI.

Scott Farquhar, who co-founded Atlassian and is a member of the Tech Council delivered an address to the National Press Club yesterday which was basically – AI is coming, let it do good. Which seems to ignore the fact that AI has been created by humans, and more than that – Silicon Valley humans – who are not known for their love of humanity. Especially lately. And with just a few tech billionaires in control, the potential for harm – to humanity, the environment, creativity, you name it – is high.

Jim Chalmers told the Seven Network this morning he thinks it is a balancing act:

I think there’s a whole range of views about artificial intelligence. I’m optimistic that it will be transformational in a good way in our economy but only if we manage the risks right.

And so our government is doing a heap of work, including with Scott Farquhar and others who will be part of our Economic Reform Roundtable, to make sure that we maximise the opportunities of AI at the same time as we manage the risks.

The risks can be substantial in our labour market and more broadly as well. We need to manage those. But overwhelmingly, I think AI will be transformational in our economy and in our society, and we need to make it work for us, not against us

Andrew Leigh held a quick doorstop this morning (very quick press conference) where he was sent out to give the latest lines on the productivity round table:

Productivity is not a switch we can flip, but we know that there’s a serious to- do list: competition reforms, clean energy, investing in education, getting infrastructure right. All of those topics and more will be part of the discussion in the Cabinet rooms.

And in the lead-up to that discussion, I’ll be part of a range of roundtables which are looking at particular sectors, including the charity sector. This is vital as we work together to find the solutions to Australia’s productivity challenges.

Building on the work of the last term, the historic merger reforms, national competition policy, setting Net Zero targets and investing in education through measures such as free TAFE.

The Albanese Government has looked to tackle inflation while keeping unemployment low. And now, we’re looking to tackle productivity while ensuring that we have the gains from growth equitably shared across the population

My weekly column in the Guardian covers all the inflation figures.

And while obviously you should go read it all, here’s the tl;dr version

The RBA targets inflation between 2% and 3%, and Australia’s inflation in the year to June was just 2.1%.

So clearly that is low – well below even the mid-point that the RBA also says it “aims for”. But the big problem is even that overstates what is going on.

In FIVE of Australia’s capital cities inflation was BELOW 2%. In Melbourne it was exactly 2%:

The only two places where inflation was above 2% were Brisbane and Perth.

But the only reason they were that “high” was because their state-based energy rebates ended so electricity prices jumped abnormally.

In Brisbane electricity prices accounted for 37% of all the inflation in the June quarter, in Perth they made up 66%. Were it not for the end of those rebates, their inflation would have been much lower, and Australia’s CPI would have been below 2%.

And yet, 3 weeks ago the RBA decided they were still a bit unsure of whether or not inflation was under control and so did not cut rates.

Cripes.

Anyway, lots more graphs over at Guardian so go have a read and impress your friends with how much you know about the CPI!

Emma Shortis has been speaking extensively on this – that the US may have elections in 2026, but the gerrymandering means the votes will not mean as much. As a Queenslander, I know exactly how this works. People think the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government was wildly popular the whole time it was in government because of how many seats it held. It wasn’t. In 1972, Joh received just 20% of the vote, and the Liberal party just 22% of the vote – while Labor won 46% of the vote – but the Bjelkemander gave the Coalition 47 seats to Labor’s 33. That only continued to get worse as Joh kept remapping the boundaries to ensure his support.

The Republicans are no stranger to gerrymandering. The Trumpmander is going to make everything so much worse.

We should be very, very grateful for our independent electoral authority.