Jacqui Lambie seems to be having a very fun time in this election campaign. She has just spoken to ABC’s Afternoon Briefing about the need for a parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s strategic arrangement with the United States (AUKUS) and why she isn’t worried if it would up set the US:

Why should we not have an inquiry? With all the stuff going on, it doesn’t matter if we upset them, quite frankly they don’t care about that. It’s a good way to – what does our friendship look like? What does mateship look like? These are broad terms of reference. I don’t want to miss anything out. For people to put their opinion forward and see – especially those experts, where they think – what do they think the relationship looks like in a year’s time?

Let’s have a shot at it.

Right now we’re going through quite a rough patch because of what’s happened with Trump, they’re not with the people themselves, of course. We need to put this under a magnifying glass and see where do we sit, where does it look like. We need to do something. Let’s have a good look at our relationship with the USA and get it out on the table.

Sue asked:

What is missing from the campaign is any discussion about the urgency of climate change action (not just “yes, we are doing the bare minimum, and slowly’) and also funding of universities  and research (especially if overseas students will be reduced and funding support from the USA will be removed).

Sue points out that the campaign is missing discussion on:

• the urgency of climate action, and
• funding of universities and research (given overseas student numbers will be reduced and funding support from the USA may be removed).

Climate change

This is absolutely true. While the 2022 election has been dubbed ‘the climate election’, discussion of this global emergency has been muted this time around. Instead, the election has been dominated by the ‘cost-of-living’, failing to acknowledge that climate change is already driving up the cost-of-living and this is only likely to get worse. While Labor’s climate policies are better than the Coalition’s nuclear fantasies, even the Albanese Government’s own predictions don’t see emissions falling until 2028, “at which point they brilliantly drop at a constant rate to 43% below 2005 levels by 2030”. 

University funding

This is also true. The university sector continues to have a vacuum of responsibility. The federal government provides funding to universities, but most regulation is left to the states, which have mostly also not taken responsibility. This has created a general governance crisis in the sector, a crisis which is now being exacerbated by Trump and scaremongering about international students.

The Trump White House is threatening funding for important research in Australia by quizzing universities on whether projects accord with the administration’s extreme views on things such as climate change and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), we’ve written more about this here. The Albanese Government is creating further financial issues for universities by trying to cap international student places, the Coalition promises an even harsher cap. This is a misguided attempt to fix the housing crisis, which is not caused by international students or migrants in general. However, it will also cause major financial issues for public universities as about a quarter of their revenue currently comes from international student fees.

The university sector is in desperate need of accountability and responsibility, it’s time for the federal government to take this role. It could start by implementing a range of reforms recommended by the Australia Institute, including measures to make university management more transparent and accountable, boosting public funding, and generally reorienting public universities towards the public good.

We are going to just rest the blog for a little bit, although we will be covering the debate tonight, so we will be back before 8pm.

If you’re not – we understand! Greg Jericho and I will battle on for you.

We’ll pop in anything major that happens – but go and have some you time. Ax

Housing, housing, housing – today was all about housing.

AAP has also covered Peter Dutton’s response to PNG Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko telling the ABC earlier today he would prefer to work with a Labor government:

The opposition leader says he’ll be able to work with the Papua New Guinea government despite its public preference for Labor.

Peter Dutton was asked about the rare foreign endorsement made during the  Australian election campaign from PNG Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko, who openly admitted he’d prefer to work with Anthony Albanese’s government after the May 3 poll.

“Our relationship with Australia has never been stronger,” he told the ABC.

“Why would you want to change something that is working well?

“I can clearly state that we would, I’m sure, love to see the current Australian government continue and to continue our good work.”

The comments are unusual for an overseas politician.

While foreign governments might have their preferences for which side of Australian politics they hope to work with, they are usually guarded about revealing it in public.

Asked by AAP for his response to the comments while campaigning in Melbourne on Wednesday, Mr Dutton downplayed the significance.

“I’ve known Justin for about 20 years and he’s doing a great job as foreign affairs minister in PNG,” he said.

So glad we are so heavily allied with the United States, with whom we are told we have so many “shared values”.

As AAP reports:

Wire services including Reuters and Bloomberg News will no longer hold a permanent slot in the small pool of reporters who cover President Donald Trump, the White House says as it moves to exert greater control over who gets to ask him questions and report on his statements in real time.

The decision announced on Tuesday comes after the Trump administration last week lost a court challenge brought by another wire service, the Associated Press, over its earlier exclusion from the press pool.

The pool typically consists of around 10 outlets that follow the president wherever he goes, whether it is a meeting in the Oval Office where he makes statements or answers questions, or trips at home or abroad.

Under the new policy, wire services will lose their customary spot in the pool and will instead be part of a larger rotation with about 30 other newspaper and print outlets.

Sky News says community independent MP Allegra Spender supports more Coalition motions than Greens motions. 

But They Vote for You says Spender votes with Greens MPs more often than Coalition MPs. 

That both those claims are made about the same person is proof that voting comparisons are fraught.  

It is just as confusing when it comes to the major parties.  

We know that most legislation is non-controversial and bipartisan, so how is it possible that Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese only votes with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton 1% of the time? 

And earlier this year the Liberal and Labor parties did a deal this year to change Australia’s election laws – so why are most Liberal senators not recorded as voting for the deal? And why on that bill are community independents recorded as voting against 61 Labor MPs but only against four Coalition MPs? 

The full story is more complicated 

Nick Evershed at The Guardian today has a very good article asking what the data shows about politicians’ voting records. For example, does the voting record of the community independents lean towards the Greens, towards Labor or towards the Coalition? And how often do the major parties vote together?  

The real story is that the answer depends on what question you are asking – and Evershed has made the data available so you can play around with it yourself.  

Voting comparisons are a poor measure of political position 

The broad problem with vote comparisons is that they don’t track what does matter, and do track what doesn’t matter.  

• Most votes aren’t recorded. The majority of legislation passes “on the voices”, meaning no votes are recorded.  

• Many party MPs skip votes – their colleagues represent the party position. Even when votes are recorded, only a few MPs may show up to represent their party’s position.  

• If there are only a few crossbenchers on one side, the division isn’t fully recorded. 

• MPs may vote the same way but for different reasons. How do you capture when two MPs vote the same way, but for different reasons? Are they really “voting together”? What if someone votes against legislation because it’s been rushed and poorly drafted, not because they disagree with the principle?  

• A single vote may be on several things at once, like an omnibus bill covering several topics at once – an MP that opposes one part counts as opposing the lot. 

• A principled stand – like never gagging debate – can look like supporting one party. Many votes are on questions like who gets to speak. An MP who votes against the government censoring debate on principle will vote “against Labor” during a Labor Government and “against Liberal” during a Liberal–National Coalition Government.  

• “Who votes with whom” comparisons give equal weight to important and trivial votes. But sometimes, a vote is purely symbolic or procedural.  

• Other times, a vote that looks procedural actually has a substantive effect. For years, same-sex marriage was blocked through procedural votes.  

• An MP who takes a stand can stop legislation before it’s introduced, so their influence is never recorded in the Hansard voting record. 

• Sometimes, an MP not turning up to vote at all has the same effect as voting for or against the topic. But they escape being recorded as voting one way or the other.  

For these reasons, I’d caution anyone against relying too heavily on supposed “voting records” – without looking at the context behind those votes and how the data has been interpreted.  

Well that was uninspiring in terms of a policy debate. The questions were around the narrow reflective strip Australia’s policy has been reduced to by the major parties, but there are no big ideas in there, no structural reforms.

There was a lot of talk about tinkering though. As an old neighbour used to say, it’s two cheeks of the same arse.

As we reach the middle of the campaign there has been a decide lack of focus the most vulnerable in society – those children living in poverty.

The lack of debate on the topic does not reflect a lack of a problem. ACOSS has noted that “there are 3.3 million people (13.4%) living below the poverty line of 50% of median income, including 761,000 children (16.6%).”

Back in the 1987 election campaign Prime Minister Bob Hawke rather famously set the goal: “By 1990 no Australian child will be living in poverty”. He was often ridiculed for that statement afterwards, and yet it is undeniable that his setting the goal did have an impact. IN the 1970s and 1980s a family of 4 living on government benefits was very much living below the poverty line. After Hawke set the ambition, that was reversed.

The Hawke Government achieved an increase in payments for an unemployed family that put it above the Henderson poverty line in 1990.

Alas it did not last for long, and from the peak of over 10% above the poverty line, that figure gradually declined until around 2002 when that family was back on the poverty line and it kept getting worse.  

That was dramatically changed during the pandemic when the Coalition Government doubled the single rate of Jobseeker. The income of our family of 4 did not increase quite as much as the payments for children and rent assistance were not changed so that a family’s income went up much less than a single beneficiary, but it still massively lifted families out of poverty.

And then the boost ended.

The most recent figures suggest poverty is again a major problem for a high proportion of the Australian population – with those families on government benefits living around 9% below the poverty line

Unfortunately, the problem in reality is likely worse than that. The Henderson poverty line uses GDP per capita as its base, but that has been falling of late, whereas inflation and cost of living has been rising. If we instead adjusted the poverty line to take into account the recent inflation, the family of 4 would be nearly 18% below the poverty line.

Can child poverty be addressed again?

Australia is a much wealthier nation than it was in 1987 when Bob Hawke set his anti-child poverty target. Real GDP per capital is now around 75% higher. Yet Australia has experienced a long period with the poverty gap much higher than in the lead up to the Hawke Government’s no-child-in-poverty target.

If we could do it by 1990 Australia can do it again in 2025. Unlike the pandemic measures, this time the emphasis should be on improving payments for parents with children – just like Bob Hawke did with the emphasis on payments called “Family Allowance Supplements” at the time. 

Unfortunately, in tonight’s leaders debate the problems of poverty will likely be brushed over. They should not be.

Q: The maths on the Labor side says that you’ll put forward $10 billion. It will build 100,000 homes. That’s basically $100,000 per home. On the Coalition side, the claim is that you’ll put $5 billion into infrastructure. That maginically unlocks 500,000 homes, which is $10,000 per home. I’ll leave it to voters to decide whether $100,000 per home or $10,000 per home is more convincing. But the key question is – for the sceptical journalists here. Will you put forward and tell us who told you the number of homes that you will build. And will you release the information, the treasury or PBO or somebody else so we can verify that you’ll build the homes that you claim?

Michael Sukkar:

It is a good question and good to be cynical about this. What we’re proposing with the housing infrastructure program, not that we’re building homes. And the important word you used quite rightly is “unlock”. We’re going to unlock those homes because at the moment, we have projects where the projects stack up. But there’s no funding for that. If you talk to the NBA, the Property Council, who are the real experts here, a rough figure of civil works of about $10,000 to unlock that is pretty well, I can assure you, without housing of the structural program which we think is going to unlock 500,000 homes, it is not modelling.

We have literally met with hundreds of councils. We have the projects, line by line, the number of houses that will be unlocked from that funding. Really well thought through projects. It is a very big spreadsheet, and can I say the 500,000 number we deliberately chose a conservative figure. It is actually higher than that but to deal with the cynicism and to building a little bit of leeway, we have been very conservative when we said 500,000.

Clare O’Neil:

The Coalition’s estimates are totally fanciful, absolutely ridiculous. If it was that easy to fix the problem we wouldn’t be in a crisis. We know that because this is something the Coalition tried last time they were in office and I would love for you to go back and have a look at what was achieved through that. They set up a fund of $1 billion that was supposed to fund investor exactly they described. It 5000 homes. There is no way these numbers will stack up. Our numbers come from Treasury. It is a policy we have been working on for a long time with Treasury officials. $10 million, you have talked about the 100,000. I want to explain this as clearly as I can. We are not paying for the entire cost of building a new home. What we are doing is assisting state development agencies and in some in answers private developers making projects that do not stack up today stack up and the reason that the government will intervene is because in exchange they will give us those homes for first home buyers at entry-level prices. I say to you again, this is something that is really working in South Australia. We want to build on it and make it national.