Will Tanya Plibersek remain in environment if he wins the election?

Albanese:

Well, you asked me that yesterday, and I gave the same answer yesterday that I’ll give today, which is – I expect Tanya Plibersek will be a senior cabinet minister. She’s an important member of my team. But I’m not getting ahead of myself and naming all 22 or all – actually, all 42 portfolios – on the frontbench. I’m not getting into that. She’ll be treated exactly as everyone else. But, Tanya Plibersek will play an important role in my government. She’ll be a senior cabinet minister, as she’s continued to be.

This is what leaders say when they are planning a re-shuffle, which is normal for all parties. If the Coalition won the election, the shadows wouldn’t all become ministers in the portfolios they are holding.

Q: One – who do you think will be Australia’s next female prime minister? And my second question is – beyond watching Star Wars on May 4, if you are re-elected, have you thought about which foreign leader you’ll be paying a visit to first?

Albanese:

I’m not getting ahead of myself. On the second question on the first one – I’m not getting ahead of the Australian people. I would say this – chances are, it will be a Labor MP, given our gender balance and that we’re majority female. And the coalition are going backwards. They’re replacing, at this election, seats like McPherson, Forrest – what were considered to be safe coalition seats – with men they have selected in those seats. In Leichhardt, they had an opportunity to select a woman. They selected a bloke. And across the board, I think that they’re not moving forward. I think my team is diverse, is representative of the Australian public, and that’s a good thing.

Early press conference from Anthony Albanese this morning.

He is asked if he will serve a full term if he is elected (there was a rumour floating around that he was planning on peacing out half way through a second term, not helped by buying a Central Coast beach house)

Albanese says:

If elected, I’ll serve a full term. I think that’s what the Australian people would expect of me. And that is the context of that answer. I’ll tell you what – I don’t take anything for granted on May 3 and I don’t know what I’ll be doing on May 4. As I’ve said – I think yesterday – I know, hopefully. I have a bit of a tradition of watching a Star Wars movie on May the 4th because I quite appreciate the, ah, sense of history there.

And I’m an old Star Wars guy, to get that out of the way – the first three movies are the best. That’s all I know about the evening of May the Fourth. But I’m trying to climb the mountain here. I’m trying to be the first prime minister (re-elected) since John Howard in 2004 – it’s been 21 years, we’ve had a revolving door. I don’t think, objectively, that’s in the interests of Australia.

You can tell the campaigns know no one is paying attention to at the moment because of all the breakfast radio and breakfast TV the leaders are doing.

Last night during his debate with Jim Chalmers, shadow treasurer Angus Taylor said that fixing the construction sector was a key part of the Coalition’s strategy for solving Australia’s housing affordability crisis. That specifically means deregistering the CFMEU.

When the Coalition talks about construction there’s a giant elephant in the room: the Australian Building and Construction Commission, a political football now two decades old.

The Coalition’s policy offering includes a promise to “reintroduce a tougher Australian Building and Construction Commission”. In times past, that Commission has been set up conversative governments to tackle productivity and “law and order” in the construction sector. Set up in the mid-2000s under John Howard and abolished by Labor, the ABCC was resuscitated in 2016 before wearing out its welcome again in 2022.

Why doesn’t the Coalition want to talk about its plan to ride the ABCC merry-go-round again? I can think of a few reasons.

First, it would not do a thing to help productivity in construction, especially in the housing sector. The Australia Institute has previously shown that the ABCC is more likely a dampener on labour productivity in the building and construction industry, especially in heavy and civil construction sector where its oversight was most concentrated.

Second, the Coalition promised in 2016 that the revived ABCC (defunct between 2012 and 2016) would help make housing more affordable. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. This is not surprising because the ABCC was not concerned at all with residential building.

Third, Taylor and Dutton would have to defend the ABCC from the government’s criticism that it became a vehicle for outright political lawfare. For much of its second stint, the ABCC was more focused on banning Eureka flags and censoring workers’ political views than on promoting productivity on Commonwealth-funded construction sites.

Can the Coalition explain how the ABCC will help with affordable housing?

One of the things which has been underestimated in the battle for the Greens electorate of Griffith is that Max Chandler-Mather is a popular figure in his community, because of things like the free school meals programs he has created.

Since his election in 2022, MCM has served 40,000 free breakfasts across four local schools in the electorate. He has funded it from his own salary (which is one of the reasons he is still a renter – his partner has recently had a baby and they have been living on one salary, with MCM using the excess of his salary to fund community programs)

MCM has been in politics from the time he was a baby adult – first in the Labor party and then as part of the Greens campaign team (he and I butted heads a few times when I was covering Qldpol so believe me when I say that professionally, we go way back) and because of those experiences, he understands local politics in a way not many first term MPs do.

And so while Labor and the LNP are putting a huge amount of resources to winning back the three Queensland Greens seats, they might be underestimating the personal popularity of members like MCM. The major party campaigns are fairly focused on what the Greens have been doing nationally and what they think national voters (mostly their own) have been frustrated by, and not what local voters are seeing.

Today, the Greens are announcing a plan to take MCM’s free school meals’ program nationally:

The Greens have put forward a costed plan that would see every public school funded to provide a nutritious lunch  to every student. To achieve this aim, the PBO has estimated it would be a cost to the budget of $11.6b over the forward estimates which is less than the budget currently spends on fossil fuel subsidies. The Greens will also invest $85m annually to expand existing free breakfast programs in schools across the country.

This is on top of school policies previously announced, including an annual back-to-school payment of $800 made to families at the start of the school year for each child attending a public school; abolishing public school fees and charges to make public schools genuinely free; and fully-funding public schools to 100% Schooling Resource Standard in 2026.

This massive boost for families would be funded by making big corporations pay their fair share of tax. The previously announced Big Corporations Tax frees up $514 billion across the decade to help fund dental into Medicare, free and universal childcare and free school lunches

So the day starts with Labor in Hobart (Tasmania is a bit of a problem state for Labor. WONDER WHY) and the Liberals in Melbourne (which will probably end up being its best state this election and also the reason Labor will fall short of majority government)

Asked about economists criticising both Labor and the Coalition’s housing plans (the criticism is that they will just drive up house prices, which they will) Albanese told ABC this morning:

What we’re doing is dealing with supply as well as demand. The Coalition’s plan will push up prices. Our plan will ensure that more homes are built. And what we’ve seen under my Government is 28,000 of those social housing, through the Housing Australia Future Fund, are either under construction or under planning.

What we’ve seen now is housing approvals up, they were going down when we were elected. There were 26,000 in the latest monthly figures compared with what was occurring before. And we’re also seeing housing construction costs fall to just over one percent.

They were above 20 per cent, the increases when we were elected. So, we’re seeing a transformation.

We’re determined to make sure there’s more social housing built, more private rentals through our Build to Rent scheme and more homes built specifically for first home buyers, which will make a difference as well. And by stopping the competition between a first home buyer and an investor, what that will do is ensure that housing is more affordable for those young Australians who want to get into home ownership.

As Grogs and Matt Grudnoff said yesterday, making mortgage interest payments tax deductible (the Coalition’s plan) is a bad idea – because it will just juice demand. 5% deposits with the rest guaranteed by the government (Labor’s plan) is a bad idea – because it will juice demand. Building 100,000 homes (Labor’s plan) is a good idea, because it tackles supply.

The Treasurers’ debate on ABC’s 7.30 last night was a much more sane affair (not having to factcheck the moderator was a giant improvement) and we have Greg Jericho and Matt Grudnoff going over the claims for you to bring you any clangers.

One of the reasons it was better was because Jim Chalmers was actually able to answer some of the guff Angus Taylor was spilling out.

At the last debate (hosted by Sky) Taylor could just say ‘this is really important’ and then say whatever he wanted for the next three minutes without being pulled up. (it was never important) At least here, Chalmers was given equal time.

Taylor: The deficit has gone up substantially over the last 12 months. Labor inherited monthly surpluses after we came out of COVID, and the truth of the matter is that they’ve taken the budget off a cliff. Now we’ve opposed over $100 billion of Labor spending since Labor came to power, a whole range of initiatives that we think are not appropriate at this time and we will deliver a stronger budget bottom line than Labor’s.  
 
Q: Have you taken the budget off a cliff?  
 
Chalmers:

Of course not. I mean what Angus has just said then, respectfully, was rubbish.  
 
You can look in the Budget papers, you compare the pre-election outlook from the election in 2022 to the progress that we’ve made together as Australians ever since then, and the budget is substantially stronger.  
 
And the reason that’s so important is because this is an uncertain world, and our efforts to help people with the cost of living and strengthen incomes make our economy more resilient.  
 
That couldn’t be more important. There’s always a premium on responsible and stable economic management, but particularly now. The alternative is a coalition of cuts and chaos, which will make Australians worse off and make Australia more vulnerable at a time when there’s all this volatility in the global economy.  

Asked about the Donald Trump announcement that he will be putting a tariff on pharmaceutical drugs “in the not too distant future” because “we want to make a war on drugs” (when really, it just makes the black market stronger) Peter Dutton deflects and blames Anthony Albanese:

I’ve always said that we will stand up for our pharmaceutical sector and our beef sector and every other sector.

We’ll do what’s in our country’s best interest.

And then:

This election is about whether or not you want three more years of Anthony Albanese.

Anthony Albanese has, I think, done great damage to the economy.

Australians have really struggled.

We’ve been living through two years of a household recession in this country. Seven consecutive quarters. That hasn’t happened anywhere else in the world*.

So this election is about – can you afford three more years of a Labor government, particularly if it’s a Labor-Greens government**, which would be big-spending, it would drive up inflation which ultimately drives up interest rates***, and that’s a disaster for young families who have the mortgages that we were just talking about.

Where to begin.

*Grogs has already looked at this and as soon as he is in, I will get him to tell me it again.

**Putting aside whether it would be good or not, Labor has said a million times it won’t go into coalition with the Greens. Engaged people know this. Because Dutton keeps assuming he’s speaking to voters who emerge every day with a blank memory slate and he can spend every day filling their heads with nonsense and they won’t know any better. If you are going to make things up, maybe it should be on things that aren’t able to be fact checked instantly!

***Treasury, the RBA etc – everyone has said the budget Labor has handed down is basically neutral when it comes to being inflationary. As for the election promises, the Coalition has largely matched them or come up with programs which are equally as big. So is that also a disaster for young families?

Peter Dutton is pressed on his comment about wanting house prices to continue to rise. Does he mean in line with inflation?

Dutton:

We want sustainable growth. Bridget. If you’re buying a house today, if you can find one and if you can afford one under this government – you don’t want to wake up in two years’ time and find that the value of that house has gone down.

We don’t want that situation for Australians.

We want a home to be an asset where you can raise a family, where you can use it as security to the bank if you want to start a small business in a back bedroom or the garage.

We want it to be an asset that increases in value as you get toward retirement and ultimately, one day, you can leave to your children as an asset that will help them in their lives.

So, home ownership is absolutely integral to our culture and to who we are.

Putting aside that Dutton is not a relative political newcomer and has been in the parliament for the last 24 years and in government for about 15 of those 24 years, and therefore directly involved in policy and none of this situation was created in a bubble and it is not the creation of the last three years.

During the 1990s house prices only went up around 0.3% more than household income each year. Since 2000 (and the intro of the CGT discount) house prices have gone up on nearly 9% more each year than household income.

That is not sustainable.

A house in Melbourne costs 8 years of average wages. Twenty years ago, it was five years, and if we keep going at the same rate, a house in Melbourne will end up costing 13 years’ worth of average wages in twenty years’ time.

That is not sustainable.

If you were on average full time male earnings in Sydney at the end of 2014 and started saving 15% towards a deposit, you needed around $154,000 for a median priced house. Now 10 years later you would have saved $126,000 but guess what? You now need an extra $156,000 more to get a deposit. So after 10 years of saving you are $1,000 further away from your target.

That is not sustainable.

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