LABOR’S CHILDCARE SUBSIDY
As we inch towards the end of an exhausting 2024, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is set to deliver one of his final speeches of the year today in which he will pledge to give families earning less than $530,000 a year access to at least three days of subsidised childcare a week if Labor is reelected next year.
Guardian Australia led overnight on the childcare pledge and said it represents another step towards Labor achieving “its long-term goal of universal childcare as it ramps up efforts to stave off becoming a one-term government at the next election”. The site says the pre-election announcement today will also promise to do away with the activity test which determines subsidies based on the number of hours parents work in a fortnight.
In a speech in Brisbane later, the PM will declare: “In the 21st century, every child has the right to go to early education, to help get them ready for school — and our Labor government is going to make this possible.”
Yesterday we got the very expected news that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) was once again holding the cash rate at 4.35%. Many places have picked up on the perceived softening of the language from the RBA, with Capital Brief saying the central bank’s “dovish tone has reignited speculation of early rate cuts, with February now back in play for some economists”.
The AAP, and everyone else, jumped on the RBA’s announcement that it was “gaining some confidence that inflation is moving sustainably towards target”. The newswire also flags Commonwealth Bank economist Gareth Aird highlighting the removal of the line “the board is not ruling anything in or out” from Tuesday’s statement as a sign another rate hike is unlikely.
A February rate cut would be very gratefully received by the Albanese government as the PM ponders when to call the election. Guardian Australia flags Treasurer Jim Chalmers told ABC radio yesterday there was a “possibility” Labor could lose government after just one term, but voters would be shown the party offers a “sense of stability, a sense that we’ve got an economic plan”.
AAP flags Albanese’s childcare announcement today is being made in the electorate of Griffith, where Labor hopes to beat a certain Greens MP by the name of Max Chandler-Mather. As we all know, there’s no love lost there.
Elsewhere, the newswire also flags that Albanese was heckled during a visit to the Adass Israel Synagogue in Ripponlea, Melbourne on Tuesday. The synagogue was set alight in a pre-dawn attack with people inside last Friday. While the PM visited yesterday, a woman shouted: “Your words are cheap and late” and “You are late. You let this happen, buddy”. AAP said another person asked if Albanese was “going to the Australian Open” referring to the game of tennis he played in Perth on Saturday (see yesterday’s Worm). Guardian Australia said those shouting were silenced by community leaders, adding: “The hecklers were isolated, but their anger was shared by others who quietly listened to the prime minister.”
Albanese has written for the Nine newspapers about the synagogue attack, saying: “The firebombing of the Adass Israel synagogue was a vile act of cruelty against a tight-knit community. It was crime of cowardice and prejudice. Above all, it was an act of terrorism. I join with other Australians in my total and unequivocal condemnation of this crime and everything it represents.”
ANYONE GOT SOME NUCLEAR COSTINGS?
Any day now we’re going to get Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s nuclear power costings. I know, I know, you’ve heard that before, many times (ICYMI my colleague Anton Nilsson earlier this week produced a helpful, non-exhaustive list of the many, many Coalition nuclear non-announcements from the past few years).
Anyway, it’s coming this week — for real, apparently. In the meantime, the arguing over the CSIRO’s reporting on the likely costs of nuclear reactors continues, with Professor Glenn Platt from the University of Sydney (and formerly CSIRO) calling Dutton’s criticism of the national science agency “absurd”.
“It’s incredibly disappointing. It’s lazy just to say that you must have been politicised because the answer isn’t what you like,” he told Guardian Australia. The site recalls how Dutton criticised a CSIRO report that found nuclear power would be “about 50% more expensive than renewables”, even after it changed its modelling after complaints from the Coalition.
Dutton’s claim this week that he will not stand in front of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags at press conferences if he becomes prime minister has been widely criticised, with The Australian reporting Uluru Dialogue co-chair Pat Anderson AO said of the opposition leader’s vow: “This is yet another remark from a man who’s made a career of using First Nations matters to not only invoke hatred but as a deliberate and inflammatory political move in his quest for the top job.”
Former human rights commissioner Mick Gooda told the ABC: “It’s a level of pettiness I didn’t think we would ever reach in this country. And here we are, the opposition leader saying he seeks to stop dividing the country — well, this is a path of division he is heading down.”
Elsewhere, the national broadcaster flags that Telstra has been fined $3 million for failing to comply with emergency call rules during a triple-0 network disruption in March. The fine follows an investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority which found 473 breaches of Telstra’s obligations as the national operator of the emergency service.
AAP says contingency plans were initiated during the outage but 127 calls were not transferred to emergency services as several numbers on a list of backup phone numbers were wrong. Another 346 calls were successfully transferred but lacked key location information.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
It’s that magical time of year when Christmas experiences go viral for being absolutely truly awful.
One of the first off the rank is the Santa’s Grotto at the Great Hall in Winchester, England, which has seen organisers offer refunds because… Santa didn’t look convincing enough.
The Guardian quotes Matthew Fernandez, who visited with his three children, as saying: “This was just a guy dressed up in a cheap red suit with a blatantly fake beard and he wasn’t very talkative at all — he didn’t seem very jovial. It ruined the experience.”
At which point one does have to ask what exactly Matthew thought his family were going to see, but apparently they weren’t alone in thinking this year’s version wasn’t as good as the previous one.
Fellow visitor Lisa Catherine declared: “Honestly I wanted to laugh, I’ve seen better Santas rolling around town on their way to Christmas parties.”
Hampshire Cultural Trust said it was aware some customers had expressed disappointment that the Santa’s Grotto was a different experience to the one offered last year, “particularly that the Father Christmas is not the same one who has greeted children previously”. Refunds have been offered to those who had booked expecting the same experience as 2023, it added.
Say What?
It was about the fact that they are openly cheerleading now and not even pretending to be balanced. Every little thing is being blown up into epic proportions.
An unnamed government minister
The Nine newspapers report Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told cabinet this week News Corp was “working together” with the Coalition to try and remove Labor from power. The papers quoted another government minister as saying Albanese had a habit of blaming media coverage after missteps.
CRIKEY RECAP
When Rupert dies, his votes effectively expire, and his four oldest children have an equal say in the management of the empire. This created the possibility that the three more politically moderate siblings Prudence, Elisabeth and James might gang up to roll Lachlan. As one share market analyst told me when I wrote The Successor, my 2022 biography of Lachlan, “fair to assume Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies”.
The court ruling obtained by the Times reveals that Rupert and Lachlan considered a number of ways to forestall that possibility, including severing James’ “sub-trust” from the family trust, and giving voting rights to Grace and Chloe. In the end they decided to try to amend the trust, as part of Project Family Harmony. Rupert and Lachlan feared that Prudence, Elisabeth and James, if they did gain control, would destroy the economic value of Fox News, in particular, by seeking to moderate its conservative editorial line.
In the Nevada hearings, the three siblings “disavowed any plan to oust their brother” Lachlan after Rupert died, and Commissioner Gorman sided with them, finding that they did not share “any singleness of purpose” in changing the management of Fox News or other Murdoch media outlets.
For the Coalition under Dutton, there are evidently two classes of Australians: ordinary people, and Muslims. The latter are automatically security threats, should not be allowed to enter the country, and should be deported if they criticise Israel. The attacks on their schools and their claims of being threatened, abused and vilified should be dismissed as fabricated.
These are the sentiments of people who place Australia’s social cohesion a distant second to enthusiastically endorsing a government engaged in — according to the International Criminal Court and Human Rights Watch — war crimes, crimes against humanity and — according to Amnesty International — genocide.
For the Coalition and commercial media, Muslim Australians are second-class citizens. Their pain is mocked as fabricated. Their grief is derided as innately racist. Their fears are denied as fictitious. Their protests are automatically illegitimate. They matter less than the rest of us, because they’re not really us at all. They’re foreign, Others, to be kept out, kicked out and kept in line.
In that, we’re different in degree, but not in kind, from Netanyahu’s Israel.
Over the weekend it was reported that Sydney comedian Steph Broadbridge had cancelled her show, Raygun: The Musical, just hours before it was set to debut, following legal threats from representatives of Olympic breakdancer Dr Rachael Gunn. The legal team for the Australian breakdancer, who went spectacularly viral after losing all three of her battles at the Paris Olympics, reportedly contacted the venue claiming Broadbridge was “damaging” the Raygun brand and that Gunn “owns the kangaroo dance”.
So, does Raygun have a leg to stand on? Crikey clarifies.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Israel says it destroyed Syria’s navy, part of wave of post-Assad attacks (The New York Times) ($)
Syria’s new PM meets old gov’t officials to aid transition (al-Jazeera)
Family of suspect in health CEO’s killing reported him missing after back surgery (The Guardian)
PinkNews bosses accused of sexual misconduct (BBC)
BP cuts stake in wind farms as it focuses on fossil fuels (The Telegraph)
Webb telescope confirms the universe is expanding at an unexpected rate (Reuters)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Dutton thinks he’s a hard man stoking culture wars — but where is the plan for winning the election? — Paul Karp (Guardian Australia): Facing a largely conservative media, Labor’s choice is either to allow Dutton to continue angry monologues, or to elevate the Coalition’s talking points further by clapping back.
The observation that Dutton is always trying to divide Australians is correct but does not seem to have done anything to dent his long march to a winnable position in the polls.
The better line is that all this bandwidth Dutton has dedicated to thumping Labor with simplistic lines of attack could be better spent on actually developing his alternative cost of living policies.
Labor thinks it can win the next election by asking who can be trusted to help voters most in the next three years.
Why CEO’s New York killing was met with such dark glee — Jenna Price (The Age): It’s clear we need kinder and more civilised capitalism in this country — in all countries — and we need leadership from the very top down. We must all remember banking royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne, who underscored for all of us that companies needed a social license to operate. Companies — and governments — need to do more than make a profit. And we, together, must hold them all to account. Murder doesn’t do that.
How should companies respond? I asked Macquarie’s [Ben] Spies-Butcher. “By ensuring ethical practice and doing as much as they can to ensure that those in precarious situations are helped,” he said. “That’s an obligation for everyone.”
