HOUSING AND SOCIAL MEDIA
With so many bills before Parliament still waiting to be passed, scrapped or delayed before the end of this week there’s no shortage of angles this morning, although two measures in particular are attracting significant attention.
The government’s housing bills and its rushed attempts to get the teen social media ban agreed upon have been dominating coverage overnight. Yesterday, the Greens agreed to pass the Albanese government’s Help to Buy and Build to Rent schemes after failing to win any of the concessions the party had held out so long for.
As mentioned in yesterday’s Worm, it had been reported the prime minister went into this final sitting week planning on not conceding to any Greens amendments. On Monday afternoon his housing reforms managed just that.
Guardian Australia flags Greens leader Adam Bandt and housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather claimed in a press conference they had pushed Labor “as hard” as they could without success. “The Greens can announce that we’ll be waving through Labor’s two housing bills after accepting that Labor doesn’t care enough about renters to do anything meaningful for them,” Chandler-Mather said.
Earlier in the day Housing Minister Clare O’Neil had continued the government’s line that the Greens were deliberately blocking housing legislation during a housing crisis. “For two-and-a-half years now, the Australian Greens have done nothing but block and delay the action the government has attempted to take on housing,” she told ABC’s Radio National.
Chandler-Mather countered at his press conference by saying his party had “passed every single piece of Labor’s housing legislation”, adding: “And if we come to the next election and there’s still a housing crisis — well, that’s a question Labor has to answer.”
The Greens housing spokesperson is up again at the National Press Club later today for the Housing Policy Debate. AAP reports opposition housing spokesperson Michael Sukkar will “hint at ‘a comprehensive package’ of reforms aimed at freeing up access to finance” at the event.
“If there’s one message I want Australians to take away from my remarks today, it’s that the Coalition will not accept a generation of Australians not having the same opportunities that previous generations have enjoyed for home ownership,” Sukkar is expected to say.
The other planned reform grabbing a lot of headlines this morning is the government’s pitch to ban children under 16 from social media.
The Senate committee’s remarkable one-day hearing is due to report back today with plenty of opposition voiced to the government’s attempts to get the legislation passed before Parliament rises at the end of the week.
AAP has compiled the objections from the social media platforms and says the Coalition has said it will reserve its final decision on the bill until it has received answers from the government. Meanwhile, Guardian Australia flags the Greens and One Nation have accused the government of trying to “ram” the legislation through Parliament.
Meta said in its submission to the Senate inquiry there had been “minimal consultation or engagement” and called on the government to wait for the results of the age verification trial, which is not set to report back until the middle of next year.
Snap Inc meanwhile expressed concern at “the extremely compressed timeline”, X criticised the “unreasonably short time-frame of one day”, and TikTok had a range of “serious, unresolved problems” with the proposals, AAP flags.
The bill is set to be debated later this week. Capital Brief reported yesterday the government is also this week finalising its package of media reforms, which the social media platforms and search companies will no doubt have plenty to say about too.
ECONOMIC SHOCKS
As the government tries to get as much of its agenda passed this week as it can, it is also dropping pledges it knows it has no hope of getting done before election day.
The Australian Financial Review reports the plan to increase the tax on superannuation accounts worth more than $3 million is unlikely to pass Parliament before the federal election. The paper says the legislation has been left off the bills the Albanese government is trying to pass this week and even if Parliament does return in February (which many reckon it won’t) it stands little chance of passing without major changes “with every Senate party and crossbencher opposed to it”.
With so much government legislation still up in the air, the AFR also flags the Senate’s sitting hours have been extended this week.
Elsewhere in its coverage, the paper says it has had internal analysis by the Reserve Bank of Australia about the impact of a Donald Trump presidency released to it under freedom of information laws. The analysis, which was conducted three weeks before the US election, found that under an “extreme” scenario of Trump imposing massive tariffs on Chinese goods, China’s economic growth would slow.
That decline would have “relatively strong negative implications for Australia given the strength of export trade links”, the RBA analysis reportedly said. “In the extreme scenario, weaker export demand, and slower growth would be disinflationary, putting downward pressure on policy rate expectations, government bond yields and the Australian dollar. Equity prices would likely decline as earnings expectations are revised down.”
The Australian carries the same analysis, which it also said it obtained under freedom of information laws.
Elsewhere, AAP reports “Australia is waving goodbye to budget surpluses and returning abruptly to deficit”. The newswire flags the Deloitte Access Economics’ (DAE) prediction of a $33.5 billion deficit in 2024/25. During the last financial year a $15.8 billion surplus was recorded, so if the prediction proved correct it would “amount to the largest nominal contraction in the underlying cash balance on record, outside the pandemic”, AAP said.
DAE partner and report co-author Stephen Smith also expressed concern about the impact on the Australian economy of Trump’s threatened tariffs.
Back to Canberra to finish, Guardian Australia reports the government and the Coalition are close to a deal on passing all three of the migration bills up for debate tomorrow. The AFR says today’s focus will be on legislation related to multinational tax, education measures, and wage rises for childcare staff.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
It’s almost Christmas and Jude Law has taken it upon himself to remind people that movies aren’t real life.
Apparently, fans of the 2006 festive film The Holiday were upset this week to learn the picturesque cottage that Kate Winslet’s character swaps for an LA pad belonging to Cameron Diaz’s is in fact not real.
(Which is not new news, as MyLondon put it back in 2020: “The exterior was built especially for the movie on a hill outside [the village of] Shere.”)
Appearing on BBC Radio 2, last week, Law was asked by a fellow guest, actress and comedian Kerry Godliman, if it was possible to Airbnb the famous cottage from the film.
Cue Jude ruining everyone’s fun by, as reported by Yahoo, saying: “That cottage doesn’t exist. Ooh yeah. So, the director [Nancy Meyers], she’s a bit of a perfectionist — toured that whole area and didn’t quite find the chocolate box cottage she was looking for. So she just hired a field and drew [what she wanted] and had someone build it. But here’s the funny thing, if you watch it, so, we were shooting it in the winter here and every time I’d go in that door, we cut, and we shot the interiors in LA, about three months later.”
So if you didn’t know before, now you do, films aren’t real life folks.
Say What?
Look, I remind myself that very many people didn’t vote Labour at the last election. I’m not surprised that many of them want a rerun. That isn’t how our system works.
Sir Keir Starmer
The UK Prime Minister has responded to an online petition signed by two million people calling for another election. The petition has been promoted by the likes of Elon Musk and Nigel Farage. As The Guardian puts it, calling for an election less than six months after the last one “and when the government has a working majority of 163 is clearly bonkers”.
CRIKEY RECAP
The snap inquiry into Labor’s bill to ban under-16s from social media has generated a huge interest from the public, receiving about 15,000 submissions in just over a day, Crikey understands.
The first and only hearing in the inquiry kicked off at 9am on Monday and was due to finish at midday. When the hearing was halfway done, at 11am, just 28 submissions had been uploaded on the committee website.
The keen interest in the inquiry was boosted by a viral post from Elon Musk, who helped give the bill global media attention when he responded to a post on X by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with the message: “Seems like a backdoor way to control access to the internet by all Australians.”
Despite this extensive in-service training of career diplomats, Australian governments frequently appoint politicians with scant special diplomacy skills to represent the nation overseas. Critics argue that elected members and senators representing either the Liberals or the ALP are not necessarily familiar with world affairs, and many would doubt their capacity to be diplomatic.
Government leaders often make ambassadorial appointments when rewarding former ministers. These appointments are criticised as “jobs for the boys” — and indeed very few women have been anointed with this benefit. (We have yet to see a minor party or independent political appointment, so the partisan nature of this process reinforces the view that diplomacy should be about more than mateship.)
Such political appointments can take advantage of the particular skills or experience of former parliamentarians, particularly in the case of former treasurers, ministers or prime ministers. However, it must be frustrating for career diplomats to be overlooked when their political masters prefer familiar former parliamentarians instead of professionals with years of experience in diplomacy and international relations.
The relative calm in Trumpworld since the withdrawal last week of Matt Gaetz — the former Florida congressman initially tapped to be attorney-general — has given America-watchers the chance to ask broader questions about a second Trump administration. Questions like “Just how practical are the policies being promised?” and “Wait, how many of his cabinet choices have been accused of sexual misconduct?”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Netanyahu nears decision on ceasefire with Hezbollah, officials say (The New York Times) ($)
Sixteen missing after Red Sea tourist boat sinks (BBC)
University vice-chancellor pay to mirror top public service jobs (The Australian) ($)
Trump Pentagon pick attacks UN and NATO and urges US to ignore Geneva Conventions (The Guardian)
Barbara Taylor Bradford, the ‘grand dame of blockbusters’, dies aged 91 (Sky News)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Federal election 2025 will be the first vote where gen Z and millennials outnumber baby boomers at the ballot box — Patricia Karvelas (ABC): The era of baby boomers as the dominant voting force in Australian politics is at an end and the impact will play out at the next federal election, due by May.
If you listen carefully, you can already hear that politicians know the power and numbers have shifted to younger people.
We are already seeing political parties shift demographic focus and it’s something that will differentiate this next election from others in recent times, with a noticeable focus on young people.
The 2025 federal election will be the first election where gen Z and millennials will outnumber boomers in every state and territory, dramatically changing the way political parties campaign and target voters. This is no small thing. Policy and political announcements designed around the perceived needs of boomers have been at the heart of Australian politics. Changing voter demographics will introduce a seismic shift.
I used to think Australia was best served by a majority government. Now I’m not so sure — George Megalogenis (Guardian Australia): A comparison with Britain’s July 2024 election shows the Australian difference. The British people followed our lead by electing a Labour government with just a third of the primary vote, and sent a record number of women to the House of Commons (40.5%, compared with the 39.1% elected to our House of Representatives in 2022). The UK’s voluntary first-past-the-post voting system secured a landslide victory for Keir Starmer’s Labour; under our compulsory preferential voting system, Albanese’s Labor squeaked in with a majority of two seats.
The revelation is in the splintering of the conservative vote. The majority of those who turned against Scott Morrison’s blokey government created a new independent female centre in the cities; by contrast, in the UK the Tories lost ground to the nationalist right. Where former Liberal voters elected Zoe Daniel and Allegra Spender to the House of Representatives, their counterparts in the UK sent Brexit town crier and Trump supporter Nigel Farage to the House of Commons.
Australia’s protest vote sits in a global category of its own at the moment because it aims to force change on the system, not disrupt it. This tells us something about our underlying trust in the idea of government, and our willingness to be led from the centre, not the fringe. Whether it achieves its ambition will depend on the long-term significance of the last election. Did it signal a realignment which transferred power from the conservative regions to the progressive cities? Or was it just another version of the stalemate we have endured since 2010, in which no major party is able to govern with authority because each represents only a fraction of a divided nation?
