On the topic of the private members bill that Barnaby Joyce wants to introduce, calling to scrap net zero, which is just designed to put pressure on Littleproud’s leadership and cause a ruckus, Littleproud says he is feeling quite relaxed over it all.

Joyce’s bill will go nowhere, but the government probably will get it to run to get all the Nationals (and any Liberals) on the record complaining about climate action, because that works for them politically. They’ll draggggg that bill on for as long as possible, but there is zero chance of it getting through, or having any impact.

What Joyce’s bill WILL do is keep all the leadership tensions running strong and help build the case to change leaders. Which is a pincer movement he is starting with the help of his former rival, Michael McCormack. The enemy of my enemy, you know?

Littleproud said he’s not bothered (which means he is bothered)

That’s the entitlement of every member. As a backbencher you can do it at your will. Is that a bad thing that we have a democracy that you come to this place and you put in a private members’ bill? We’ve got a process that our party room has agreed to.

We’re going to stick to that.

Individuals have every right and I celebrate diversity of ideas and those that want to take up the parliamentary processes that are here.

I have nothing to fear. I’m very comfortable in my own skin in terms of what I’ve achieved.

I tell you what, over the last three years, let me tell you, who set the national agenda and the first political party to say no to The Voice? The political party that finally got divestiture in Coalition party? Who got nuclear energy as part of the Coalition policy? Who was the party that stood up when those were going to be eroded and taken away from us to say we’re out of the Coalition? Who stood up to it and made the Liberal Party agree to those conditions? Who got an extra Treasury portfolio for the first type for the National Party? *

I think the Nats bat highly above their weight. When we say we’ll negotiate, we mean it. I’m comfortable of putting faith in the party room. Individuals that are on the backbench have the right to go and be able to put private members’ bills. But I lead a party room and I work on the collective and the majority of the collective. The majority of the collective have got it right. The Coalition got it right on nuclear and The Voice. Our track record as a party room over the last three years is far superior to any other political party in this House whatsoever.

*All of these are reasons the Coalition have lost more seats and will lose more seats in the coming election.

Independent Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie is appealing for the major parties in his home state to embrace power sharing to form government. Both parties are having conniptions over making deals with the crossbench. Labor is further behind on seats (nine to 14 I think) and hasn’t conceded, but is also making it clear it doesn’t want to govern with the Greens or crossbench, so probably should concede.

Wilkie says the major parties need to accept that voters are exploring new ways of forming government and they should get with the program:

“Last Saturday Tasmanians returned to the polls for the second time in 16 months. It was an election nobody wanted, and an outcome nobody thinks was worth the disruption and cost.

“Hanging over the fiasco was of course the State’s dire financial situation, because there are less than 600,000 people in Tasmania and we’re facing a debt of roughly $13 billion by 2028. And that’s despite the chronic underinvestment in our busted health and education systems, not to mention the appalling housing crisis and choking traffic congestion.

“But at least one thing’s clear after the poll, where the independents enjoyed a surge in their vote and no major party secured even close to a majority. And that’s that the community expects all of those elected to grow up and this time make the Parliament work.

“So Liberal and Labor must stop insisting that only majority government is OK, and that the crossbenchers are just wreckers and road blocks. It’s simply not the case. Indeed it’s a lie, because the crossbench vote shows they are not fringe players, but central to the operation of the Parliament.

“In other words it’s time for Liberal and Labor to pull their heads out of the sand and face the reality of power-sharing. Anything less will show contempt for the Tasmanian community.”

Why does David Littleproud want an industry approved independent panel to look at the US beef imports decision and not the scientists and experts in the department of agriculture (which he used to lead as minister?)

Littleproud:

They won’t be transparent and they won’t provide the protocols on which the scientific basis of their decision has been made and would give us the mitt to protect the Australian industry and consumers. What we’ve said and as a precedent I undertook as agriculture minister, if you wanted to make sure you could provide that certainty. In prawns we couldn’t. I backed the industry to have an independent scientific panel formed to actually review that science that was, that gave me that advice for that decision. That’s a sensible thing to do.

When you see that this decision has been made, and yet none of the details are put out, it raises suspicion. It raises suspicion because of the fact that Anthony Albanese is trying to get a meeting with Donald Trump and trying to trade away our commodities, potentially for a deal on aluminium worth $400 million. The cattle exports to the US are worth $4 billion. I want to make sure we got it right. It’s beholdant on the government to provide that information and they should be transparent and upfront about it. If they’re getting to make such a monumental announcement to the industry and this country, wouldn’t you have thought good governance meant you provided those scientific reasonings and protocols that show scientific rigour has taken place?

They haven’t been able to do that. We think we understand it potentially could be some time next week. That says to me the department is scrambling to catch up to a political decision made in Washington.

It is always interesting when former ministers are in opposition. Because suddenly, all the things they relied upon to keep decisions opaque and shift responsibility on (and deny was happening) are suddenly just facts which can be spoken openly about.

Meanwhile, the house has moved to statements, which means we are in the downhill slide into question time.

It’s the last one of the week, so brace yourself.

Nationals leader David Littleproud is using the decision to drop restrictions on US beef imports to try and claw back a little bit of authority over his party room. He is holding a press conference in the Mural Hall to discuss the Nationals response – which is, ‘not happy, Albanese’.

Littleproud:

Look, earlier today I was given a briefing on the changes of protocols with respect to importing US beef. Unfortunately, that has raised more questions than provided answers. It has raised my suspicion about the speed and timing of this decision.

A decision that apparently was one that has been taken over a long period of time, yet the government has not provided or released the protocols on which the beef from the US could be imported into this country.

Those are the legal requirements that an importer would have to meet to bring beef from the US into Australia. That was from Mexico or Canada.

The fact they haven’t done that raises serious concerns to me around how this decision has been made and the timing of it. If it was well planned, the department would be able to provide me with those details. They have not.

I think the prudent way forward is to have an independent scientific panel review the department’s decision and the protocols when they come out. There is a precedent for this and that precedent was one that I put in place when I was agriculture minister, around importing of prawns back into Australia, after the white spot outbreak.

I think it would be prudent for this government to have an independent panel that industry could hand select the scientific rigour that is required and the personnel on that panel to review the decision. We need to give confidence to the Australian public, not just the agricultural sector.

The government says this decision is the result of a review which was started before all the trade tariff stuff, but it seems very sus on its timing.

Australia’s environment groups are taking a very long look at the ICJ ruling on states having responsibilities to cut emissions or face reparations – and that includes the Environment Centre of the Northern Territory.

That group says the ruling “casts doubt over the $1.5bn federal subsidy for a toxic gas and petrochemical hub planned for the Darwin Harbour”.

You might know it as Middle Arm.

From the group’s statement:

The Court held that states could be liable under international law for failing to address “fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licences or theprovision of fossil fuel subsidies”, which could include the Albanese Government’s $1.5 billion subsidy for the Middle Arm gas and petrochemical hub.

Middle Arm will use gas from fracking in the Beetaloo Basin (which could increase Australia’s national emissions by up to 20%) and will establish a range of high-risk and high-emission industries right on the banks of our great Darwin Harbour.

These developments directly contradict urgent warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency that no new fossil fuel projects can proceed if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change.

A leaked government report from last year forecast that fracking in the Beetaloo Basin and LNG expansions could potentially increase emissions by up to 150%.

Over in literature land, the Miles Franklin winner will be announced tonight. On the shortlist are Brian Castro, Winnie Dunn, Michelle de Kretser, Fiona McFarlane, Siang Lu and Julie Janson. If one of those authors bet they would win and received the prize, they wouldn’t pay tax on the windfall – but they would pay tax on the prize itself. Unlike the winner of The Block or a TV game show, a literary prize  is taxed by the ATO.

And this doesn’t just affect writers. If you win the Archibald or the Wynne prize for painting, if you win a prize for a play or for music, you pay tax.

The Federal Government seems to see this problem with this state of affairs: The only literary prize in Australia that is tax free is the Prime Minister’s Literary Award.

Artists around Australia are having a rough time. Funding bodies are policing artists’ speech, living standards are falling and the median income for an Australian writer is below the poverty line.

As 2019 Miles Franklin winner, Melissa Lucashenko says,

“I’m very happy to pay tax – to contribute to a decent society – but at the same time, I belong to an extremely impoverished community. I am regularly called on to give money to people who buy their food on credit. Who can’t bury their dead, or who need petrol to get to funerals, or who can’t get out of jail to attend the funeral of a parent because that means paying the prison system the astronomical cost of guards to accompany them. $15,000 fills a lot of grocery carts, and a lot of petrol tanks.”

Meanwhile Australia continues to provide fossil fuel subsidies, the latest calculation from the Australia Institute is this amounts to $14.9 billion. Basic economics holds that you subsidise things you want more of and tax things you want less of. So, we’re making the choice to have less art and more fossil fuels in Australia.

There is an easy fix. The Federal Government can choose to make art prizes tax free, and that would mean artists can spend more time making the work we love.

The Albanese government has been branded more secretive than the administration led by Scott Morrison, who infamously hid his five ministries.

Labor came to power on the back of a promise to be a more accountable and transparent government.

But fewer Freedom of Information applications, through which people can request access to documents held by ministers and departments, are being fully granted and refusals have double

“The Albanese government is more secretive than a government where the prime minister had five secret ministries,” independent senator David Pocock told reporters in Canberra on Thursday.

Only a quarter of requests were fully granted in 2023/24, down significantly from 59 per cent in 2011/12, and refusals jumped from 12 to 23 per cent during the same time frame, research by the Centre for Public Transparency showed.

The average processing time for Office of the Australian Information Commissioner reviews nearly tripled from six months in 2016/17 to 15.5 months in 2023/24.

“We don’t have a pro-disclosure culture within the federal parliament, within the federal government, and that overall is what we really need to see happen,” the centre’s research director Catherine Williams said.

Independent MP Helen Haines branded more secrecy “deeply suspicious”, while her crossbench colleague Monique Ryan questioned why a request for one brief to government on health and disability was redacted.

“This is what the government wants us to know about its reform agenda for a really important issue like health, we are struggling to understand what the government is planning,” Dr Ryan said, holding up blank pages of redactions.

“We’re looking for transparency, we’re looking for integrity in government, it shouldn’t be too much to ask.”

The Albanese government complied with less than a third of orders to produce documents, compared to nearly half under the Morrison government, the centre found.

That represents the second-worst rate of compliance with Senate orders since 1993, and contrasts starkly with a 92 per cent compliance rate in the 1993-96 period.

Greens senator Steph Hodgins-May said the production orders weren’t a political stunt but a key tool for accountability to understand why decisions were made, who impacted decisions and how public money was spent.

The centre recommended improving transparency by establishing independent oversight of Senate rejections to contest when governments make a public interest immunity claim.

It also called for an emphasis on transparency from departments and reduced processing times.

A spokesperson for Attorney-General Michelle Rowland said more than $100 million has been put towards resourcing the information commissioner.

Today is very quiet – for a reason. After yesterday, the government would like a bit of a quiet time.

It is also going to be a bit of an indication of the term – international issues are going to dominate anything happening domestically for some time and we have all been trained to see anything happening in America as global news anyway – which will provide some cover for the government as well.

We are STILL in the address-in-reply stage, with MPs responding to the Governor-general’s speech.

This is going to dominate the next week as well.

Over in the senate there is a motion to try and have the finance and public administration committee look into MP staffing arrangements and whether it is appropriate for the prime minister to determine how many staff parliamentarians get.