Both major parties have largely avoided the topic of climate change at this election. This might be surprising given the number of climate disasters that have hit Australia over the last 3 years. This included having to change the PMs preferred date of the election because of a cyclone striking southeast Queensland.

But the lack of direct discussion doesn’t mean their policy announcements don’t touch on the issue. Dutton has today announced that he will neuter the recently passed vehicle efficiency standards. These standards would bring us in line with almost every other developed country in the world.

Dutton has claimed that it is a car tax, but this isn’t true. It will lower the price of more fuel-efficient cars, while increasing the price of less fuel-efficient cars, like giant utes. Given Dutton has been running around the country professing concern about the cost of petrol and diesel, you might think he would be in favour of Australians being able to travel more using less fuel.

As part of the Coalition’s nuclear energy plan, they have previously said they will run Australia’s aging coal fired power stations for longer. Nuclear plants will take decades to deliver (assuming they can be built at all) and they plan to use coal to fill the gap.

But Labor do not have a stella record over the last 3 years to run on. Emissions should be going down but instead they have largely gone sideways.

For a campaign that started with a climate disaster, it has been strangely absent from discussion by the main two parties.

Have you received a postal vote application form in the mail? 

Did you wonder why it was bundled with material promoting a political party? 

Or why the return address was a political party HQ, not the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC)?

If you were confused, don’t be embarrassed: the AEC says the way political parties use postal vote applications is the number 1 source of complaints during election campaigns.

Alexandra Koster at SBS News has written a detailed explanation of the strange and somewhat sketchy world of postal vote applications.

Postal vote application forms, packaged with information about a political party, are “reportedly used by political parties to collect data about voters before forwarding to the AEC”.

“At first glance, the material could be mistaken for official AEC communications as there is no party branding, aside from the use of red and blue party colours.”

A multi-party parliamentary inquiry recommended cleaning up the postal vote application practice:

• Postal vote applications no longer allowed to be bundled with other materials (like party promotional materials)
• Postal vote applications to be sent straight to the AEC, not routed through a party HQ for data harvesting.

The Albanese Government neglected these reforms in favour of an unfair and rushed deal with the Liberal Party to change the laws around Australian elections. Hopefully they are revisited after this election.

Given James Patterson has decided to make the APS cuts a story again (masterful gambit, sir!), let’s just think about who will likely be cut or be likely to take a voluntary redundancy. Looking at the figures that are available for 2023, by FAR the biggest number of people leaving where from Services Australia. Which means CENTERLINK. Then comes Defence, the ATO, Home Affairs and the NDIA.

These are not the agencies/departments the Liberal Party like to portray as the fact lazy bureaucrats in Canberra.

And given the LNP have been pretty damn sketchy about what are a front-line services, those 41,000 cuts start hitting a lot of areas that are, let’s just say, pretty essential

Joshua Black

Independent MPs are not new to Australian politics.

There were two in the first federal parliament, and between 1980 and 2004, 56 Independent MPs were elected to parliaments across Australia.

At times, they have held the balance of power and decided the fate of governments.

Of the 151 lower house MPs elected in 2022, 10 were independent candidates, and a further 6 represented minor or micro-parties.

Recent elections in comparable democracies have returned fewer, if any, Independents.

The UK’s 2019 election returned no Independents to the House of Commons, and the 2024 election only six (out of 650 members).

Neither Canada nor New Zealand elected any Independents in their most recent elections, nor did the US House of Representatives in 2022 or 2024.

Australia’s uniqueness has several causes.

Compulsory voting means that even disaffected or apathetic citizens show up to vote.

Preferential voting benefits independent candidates because major party voters usually preference independents ahead of the other major party.

In the Senate, proportional representation increases the chances of a well-organised independent or micro-party, and at double dissolution election the reduced quota gives them even better odds, as we saw in 2016.

Local candidates with existing name recognition (or the patience to build a public profile over successive campaigns) can be highly competitive in these circumstances.

There is a bit of a kerfuffle with an Australian reporter at the end there, when someone wanted another question, Albanese tried to move on, the reporter wanted another question, Albanese asked where he was from and when told the Australian, Albanese smirked a little, but then asked the reporter (which was just for the cameras)

Why are you laughing

Q: Your key national security team, Penny Wong, Richard Marles, can you guarantee them they’ll serve a new term in their current roles?

Albanese:

Yes.

(An earlier version of this post mixed up who asked ‘why are you laughing – apologies, my feed dropped out and the transcription was confused!)

Q: Prime Minister, there’s concern in Washington about your reluctance to talk about using an attack submarines against China. I quote one of the expert there ‘ if you want to deter conflict in peacetime you need to talk about it using it in wartime and we haven’t seen a willingness on the part of the Australians’. Why won’t you talk about it?

Albanese:

I have no idea who you’re quoting.

Reporter:

I’ll tell you. It’s US Navy strategist Bryan Clark and he’s advising the Australian Defence Force on the design of the submarines.

Albanese:

We want – if people think that it’s a good idea to want anything other than security in our region, one of the things that we’re doing is investing in our assets, we’re investing in our assets so we’re more secure.

Obviously, you have assets there as deterrence. The great benefit of nuclear-powered submarines, as I have spoken about many times, the reason why the Government supports them is because of their stealth capacity, because they can stay under water for longer, they don’t have to snort, they don’t have to come up as often, they are a strategic asset of which everyone is aware. So the idea that it is in everyone’s interests to talk up war which is what you’re inviting me to do is, in my view, not the responsible thing for the Prime Minister of Australia to do.

Q: Prime Minister, on electric vehicles – Peter Dutton claimed this morning that scrapping the fines for emissions caps under the scheme that Labor proposes will reduce future price rises that you baked in for car buyers. What is your response to that?

Albanese:

This is another change in policy. He said he’d get rid of it. Now, he said that he’ll change something that is essentially the incentive for the policy to be implemented so there’s no incentive. But it’s another change in policy.

Let’s be clear – there were before this legislation was passed only two countries in the world that did not have fuel standards – Australia and Russia under Vladimir Putin.

The only countries in the world. We have not put an allocation of an expectation of any revenue from this measure in so-called fines because we expect that the conditions the way it’s been designed and we designed it, you might recall, in partnership, we sat down and went through the legislation with companies, we expect them to comply.

What it is doing is making sure that Australians get cheaper vehicles. I find it extraordinary that Peter Dutton who says he cares about the price of fuel doesn’t want people to have more fuel efficient cars which reduces the costs of filling up their car.

It’s a nonsensical policy that Mr Dutton came up with, but I await a couple of days time. He’ll probably have another one on the same thing.

Q: Prime Minister, some members of the cross bench and also the Greens believe that they can corner the Government in a minority, maybe even in the Senate in changes like capital gains tax and negative gearing. Despite the pressure they put on, will you budge?

Albanese:

No. And our position is very clear – let me make this clear – I want people to get that pencil in the ballot-paper and put a one next to their Labor candidate. That is the way that you elect a majority Labor Government. That’s my objective. That’s what we’re aiming for. That’s what I have said consistently. That’s what I have done consistently.

Labor already negotiates with the Greens – that’s the senate. The Coalition do it too. That’s how parliament works.

Q: Prime Minister, an Australian designed weapons system has been trialed by Israel’s Defence Force. Will your Government move to prevent the sale of any lethal EOS product to Israel?

Albanese:

We do not sell arms to Israel.

Q: But you sold parts to…

Albanese:

We do not sell arms to Israel. I’m aware of the report that you refer to. We looked into this matter. The company’s confirmed with the Department of Defence the particular system was not exported from Australia. Australia does not export arms to Israel.

I think what the reporter was trying to say there is Australia does sell parts to the US as part of the F-35 global supply chain and those warplanes are on-sold to Israel, who have used them to drop bombs and missiles and test weapons on Palestinian civilians.

Q: The Port of Darwin – you said you’d have more information for us. So what is your plan? How will you do that? And where will you get the money from?

Albanese:

Well, we certainly are looking for a private buyer, as I have said, and there is interest.

…We won’t go through commercial negotiations and who the interested parties are but there are interested parties here in the Port of Darwin. If we can secure an arrangement and a transfer of ownership back to Australian control in an orderly way without Commonwealth intervention and compulsory acquisition, we will do that, but we are prepared to use compulsory acquisition powers.