What we learned – Thursday 3 November
And with that, we are going to put the blog to bed. Before we go, let’s recap the big stories:
The education minister, Jason Clare, unveiled a $328m teacher workforce plan, which included $56m for scholarships worth up to $40,000 each to encourage the best and brightest to become teachers.
The New South Wales town of Forbes is bracing for its biggest flood in 70 years as the Lachlan River rises, and the flooding threat is now spilling over into Victoria with flows into the Murray River.
The industry and science minister, Ed Husic, said the government must intervene on energy prices because gas companies are “tone deaf”. The minister also confirmed the ACCC is looking at a mandatory code of conduct for gas companies.
Independent ACT senator David Pocock backed taxing fossil fuel companies’ super profits.
A report from the Australian Tax Office found that one-third of large corporations pay no income tax.
The social services minister, Amanda Rishworth, spoke at the National Press Club on the government’s national domestic violence plan. Answering questions from journalists after her speech, Rishworth said the government was ‘not ignoring the issue’ of raising jobseeker, but would not say whether she thought it should.
Tassal salmon shareholders backed $1.1bn foreign takeover of Australia’s largest salmon producer.
Malcom Turnbull said the Liberal party had ‘lost its way’ on climate as it continues to push against renewables.
Thank you for spending part of your day with us, we will be back tomorrow to do it all again.
Updated
Whistleblowing groups ‘deeply concerned’ about prosecution of Richard Boyle and David McBride
An international alliance of whistleblowing groups has expressed “deep concern” at the ongoing prosecution of Richard Boyle and David McBride in a letter to the attorney general Mark Dreyfus.
The Whistleblowing International Network (WIN) and its 15 member organisations signed a letter to Dreyfus urging him to improve Australia’s whistleblowing protections and ask Commonwealth prosecutors to explain the public interest in pursuing Boyle and McBride.
Boyle is facing court over charges related to disclosures made about the tax office’s aggressive pursuit of debts and McBride over the leak of documents relating to Australia’s operations in Afghanistan.
The WIN letter says:
Urgent intervention is needed to address the injustice caused by these criminal prosecutions, to minimise the chilling effect of these cases and to fix Australia’s whistleblowing law to ensure such cases can never happen again.
As new whistleblower protection legislation has swept the globe in the last decade, Australia’s law has fallen dramatically behind international best practices.
It is deeply unfair that the Australian government continues to condemn these whistleblowers to their fate, relying on a law that all agree is not fit for purpose.
The group said the cases were equally exceptional and important to the prosecution of Bernard Collaery, which Dreyfus intervened in earlier this year.
Updated
