WHAT NEXT?
After all the madness in Canberra last week, attention is now turning to what Australia’s political leaders have planned for the remainder of 2024 and into the new year.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is considering a January reshuffle as he prepares for life after the retiring Bill Shorten.
With Shorten leaving politics in February to become vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra, the paper reports Albanese will “unveil a refreshed frontbench line-up” next month. The SMH cites senior government sources as claiming two options are being considered for Shorten’s portfolios of Government Services and the NDIS. One is that Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth and Health Minister Mark Butler take one each, with Rishworth seen as the better fit for the NDIS. The other option is promoting a member of the outer ministry, with Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh and Aged Care and Sports Minister Anika Wells seen as the frontrunners. Both, like Shorten, are from the Labor Right faction, the paper flags.
The Nine papers remind us that Coalition leader Peter Dutton will also need to replace a senior shadow minister on his frontbench after opposition spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Simon Birmingham announced he was quitting politics last week (you can read Rachel Withers’ thoughts on Birmingham’s legacy below…)
Albanese and Dutton are both expected to take short breaks over Christmas and be back at work in early January. The SMH says both are “planning, at this stage, to make major policy announcements in the second half of January”. Albanese is also said to be set for an appearance at the National Press Club around Australia Day.
With the government managing to get 32 bills through the Senate on the last sitting day of the year, focus is being put on the legislation abandoned in the chaos. Albanese has of course said Parliament will sit again in February to work on the rest of his agenda. We’ll just have to wait and see if that actually happens.
Guardian Australia reports Albanese claimed on Sunday that Labor’s plans to establish a national environmental watchdog are still on the table, despite the fact that last week he killed the deal being worked on by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek and the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young.
“It’s our intention to proceed with them, but we’ll proceed with them on the basis of our values that we put forward,” the PM told ABC’s Insiders. “We will hold to our values. We won’t allow any tail to wag the dog.”
The Australian reckons the relationship between Albanese and Plibersek is again set to be challenged amid party concerns over the impact on Tasmania’s salmon industry of two environmental reviews into endangered fish. The paper says the prime minister is expected to travel to Tasmania next month “to allay concerns of hundreds of salmon workers who fear their jobs are at risk”.
Elsewhere the broadsheet flags Albanese told Insiders on Sunday he appreciated the world’s richest person, and the owner of the social media platform X, Elon Musk “had an agenda” when it comes to the government’s social media ban for under-16s but said he would still “engage” with the billionaire.
“With regard to Elon Musk, he has an agenda. He’s entitled to push that,” Albanese said, adding he was “determined to get this [the ban] done”.
On the theme of Musk, in the same article, The Australian flags Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic has appointed Tesla chair Robyn Denholm to lead a major review into Australia’s research and development sector.
HOUSING BOOM OVER?
This morning most publications are giving prominence to the home value index compiled by data group CoreLogic which shows house prices falling in Sydney and Melbourne as the market “loses steam”.
Guardian Australia reports “Australian housing prices have increased for the 22nd month in a row but the market appears to be losing steam after its weakest result since the run of consecutive monthly growth began.” Meanwhile, The Age states: “Sydney and Melbourne house values are showing a downturn and other capitals face similar patterns as high interest rates and an increase in properties for sale combine to take the heat out of the housing market.”
The latter reports the data shows house values in Sydney fell by 0.4% last month and 0.5% in Melbourne. CoreLogic research director Tim Lawless is quoted as saying the slowdown is being driven by a rise in the number of properties coming on the market while purchases are falling, partly due to the high cost of housing.
“The downturn is gathering momentum in Melbourne and Sydney, while the mid-sized capitals, which have dominated the growth cycle of late, are also losing steam,” he said.
The annual change in rents was the lowest since April 2021, with Guardian Australia highlighting the national rental index rose 0.2% in November. The price of rental properties has increased by 5.3% over the past 12 months — a year ago rents were increasing at an annual rate of 8.1%.
“It will be interesting to see if the rate of rental growth rebounds through the seasonally strong first quarter of the year in 2025. But beyond any seasonality, it looks increasingly like the rental boom is over,” Lawless is quoted as saying.
The challenges of the housing market and cost of living will once again be put into sharp focus when the Reserve Bank of Australia board meets again next week, with the timing of the federal election seemingly closely tied to the central bank’s thoughts on the state of the economy and any impending rate cuts (or rises).
Finally, the ABC and AAP flag Health Minister Mark Butler yesterday announced that endometriosis drug Visanne will become the first endo treatment in three decades to be subsidised by the federal government.
Butler said on Sunday the tablet will be listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).
“This is a condition that impacts more than a million women — maybe one in seven women and teenage girls, and for too long too many women have been made to suffer in silence,” he said.
“It’s responsible for as many as 40,000 hospitalisations every year, and that number has increased by about 40% just in the last decade — this is a condition becoming more widespread and more debilitating. It is extraordinary to me that the last listing on the PBS for a new treatment for endometriosis was 30 years ago.”
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
Academy Award-winning actress Dame Judi Dench has revealed her pet parrot isn’t always the most polite company.
Speaking to The Sunday Times, Dench, who turns 90 this week, said: “We had a long chat just now. You shouldn’t ask what she says. She says: ‘You’re a slut’, ‘you’re a slag’.
“She listens to the radio. My god, she’s funny though. She’s very, very funny. Everybody should have a parrot, or a myna bird. Their voices are absolutely incredible.”
The Guardian reports earlier this year Dench said her rescue African grey parrot, Sweetie, had exclaimed “slut” when her grandson’s girlfriend said she was wearing thermal underwear.
“Honest to God, it’s true. I don’t know where she learned the timing,” she said.
Say What?
There were about a million people filming. I’m just not used to doing it in front of such a big audience, to be honest.
Tim Nanninga
The Melbourne Snake Control employee was called to deal with one of the world’s most venomous snakes, a tiger snake, which had slithered up a woman’s leg while she was driving along the Monash Freeway on Saturday.
CRIKEY RECAP
Australia has passed the teen social media ban. Now, the hard part — making sure it helps, not hurts
What will be the impact when children are suddenly cut off from the online accounts and communities they’ve leaned on? If social media companies don’t need to design their platforms for use by children, only to keep them out, what happens to the children who continue to use these platforms as we all expect they will? What happens to the kids who get into trouble online, as they have before, but feel like they can’t reach out for help because they weren’t supposed to be using social media? What about the diffuse impact of all the people who lose this connectedness that isn’t or can’t be solved by the prime minister’s repeated urging to go play footy or netball?
It’s much harder to show the impact of the absence of something — you can never really say for sure that someone’s life would have been better, perhaps even saved, if a counterfactual doesn’t exist — but it’s not impossible. There needs to be a serious commitment to understanding the impact of a policy that the government has stressed is a “world-first”. It’s a much nicer way to say that we’ve made Australian children into guinea pigs.
This is why the bill’s passing is not the end, but the start of the process. The Albanese government has stared down all the opposition to the policy and stayed steadfast in its claims that this is the best thing for young Australians. It is now its responsibility to prove it.
Anyone hoping for a moderate Liberal Party should be “delighted to see the back of” Birmingham, who leaves a legacy of rolling over and letting the right win. He is not unlike the squeamish Republicans who stood by as Donald Trump took over their party in 2016, putting self-interest above their mild distaste for the bigotry he brought. “Birmo”, with his South Australian manners, has put a genteel face on the increasingly Trumpian party, often trotted out to persuade journalists and voters that it does care about climate, that it isn’t actually nasty and intolerant — that’s just how it appears.
It may, of course, be too late for the moderates to pull themselves together, to find a leader who will actually fight for the “broad church” — between Archer and Paul Fletcher (for now) in the House, and Jane Hume, Andrew Bragg, and Dave Sharma in the Senate, there’s few left to mount a serious defence for the soul of the party. They all bear some responsibility for letting things get to this point.
But Birmingham, as their so-called leader, bears the biggest burden for the death of the moderates, putting his commercial interests first until the very end.
On Thursday, the Senate braced itself for a frantic attempt by the government to ram 36 bills through the upper house on the final scheduled sitting day of the parliamentary calendar ahead of a looming federal election.
All the while, the federal parliamentary press gallery had its own electoral matters to worry about — the election for the 2025 press gallery committee. Crikey happened to be in Parliament House to witness voting for the committee, which took place by a physical ballot in the News Corp offices. With the press gallery itself located in the Senate wing of Parliament House, Thursday was a hive of activity between federal politicians and reporters hawking for votes in the hallways, gossiping about who was voting for who.
The ABC’s Jane Norman, who continued unopposed as president, told Crikey that while we wouldn’t receive a vote count, the election had “strong voter turnout and the result was very close”.
Plastered across the hallways of the Senate wing were memes spruiking various candidates, including ABC federal bureau head of digital and social media Elise Scott, who featured in memes ranging from Charli XCX’s Brat to Barbie alongside Sky News Australia chief election analyst Tom Connell.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Syrian and Russian jets step up strikes on rebels after opposition seize much of Aleppo (CNN)
Belgium’s sex workers get maternity leave and pensions under world-first law (BBC)
Former Test cricketer and Australian Hall of Fame hero Ian Redpath dies age 83 (Guardian Australia)
‘Deep State corruption’ in the sights of Trump’s FBI director pick Kash Patel (Sky News)
Is Elon Musk planning to make a ‘f*** you Starmer’ $100m donation to reform UK? (HuffPost UK)
Oh! Darling: Harry Potter star Rupert Grint owes taxman £1.8m thanks to Beatles clause (City AM)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Demonising Dutton will backfire for Labor, just as it did for Harris with Trump — George Brandis (The Age): Anthony Albanese and his ministers give every indication that they have forgotten that rule. From the very start, they have comforted themselves with the idea that Peter Dutton was so unappealing to the electorate that he was “unelectable” (remember Tanya Plibersek’s Voldemort jibe?). As was evident from their attacks on Dutton in the final fortnight of Parliament, they have not moved on.
But the electorate has. Sure, Dutton initially had a very high negative rating in the polls — as do all new opposition leaders following a change of government. Albanese’s honeymoon was an unusually long one; Dutton’s numbers stayed low for a very long time.
That is no longer the case — and hasn’t been for more than a year. Today, Dutton’s net favourabilities are better than Albanese’s, while most polls have them neck and neck as preferred prime minister. Even many left-wing journalists score 2024 as Dutton’s year. Yet Labor seems still determined to make the same mistake as the Democrats did with Trump — making their despised opponent the issue as they cling stubbornly to the idea that he is unelectable.
Hand over your ID or your facial data? The would-you-rather buried in the teen social media ban — Ange Lavoipierre (ABC): The privacy commissioner’s recent findings against Bunnings over its use of facial recognition technology in stores is a reminder that our faces are no joke — biometrics are considered one of the most sensitive types of personal data.
While on the face of it, so to speak, blocking social media companies from insisting on ID might seem like a privacy win, some policy experts are worried it’s leaping from one frying pan into yet another frying pan.
“Perhaps more likely, is a situation where platforms opt for privacy-invasive technologies … including the use of biometrics, as they have few other viable options”, said Lizzie O’Shea, the Chair of Digital Rights Watch.
