What we learned, Friday 1 December
And that’s where we’ll wrap up. Thanks for sticking with us this Friday. Here’s a short snapshot of what we learned:
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has refused to apologise to Peter Dutton over suggestions by senior ministers that he had protected paedophiles.
The shadow home affairs minister, James Paterson, said the prime minister should force the home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, to apologise for comments she made in parliament yesterday.
The foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, has condemned a North Korean satellite launch last month as “reckless”, and issued sanctions in response.
The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, has flagged that he will ask the federal government to reconsider its GST arrangements at next week’s national cabinet meeting.
Floods are threatening to cut off a second Victorian town after a landslide isolated a community after a deluge across eastern Australia. Eastern Victoria and southern New South Wales were bracing for further rain on Friday after some areas recorded more than 150mm of rain in a day.
Victorian government ministers will now have to publish their diaries, following an overhaul of their code of conduct that comes into effect today.
The NSW Australian Paramedics Association conducted a 12-hour strike today, from 7am to 7pm, despite the threat of legal action. The NSW state government has said it wants to reach a deal and will continue to negotiate with the union.
The ancestral remains of 14 Indigenous people have been returned to Australia from the Smithsonian natural history museum in Washington DC.
The federal, state and territory governments have agreed to a national framework for generative AI in schools.
A record number of marriages were registered last year, according the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. Until then, look after yourselves.
Updated
GST dispute drives wedge between commonwealth and states
A dispute over GST and infrastructure funding has driven a wedge between the commonwealth and the states at a meeting of the nation’s treasurers in Brisbane.
The council on federal financial relations – which includes the federal treasurer, Jim Chalmers, and all of his state and territory counterparts – met in the Sunshine State today.
Typically, all members put out a unanimous press release at the end of the quarterly meeting. But in an unusual move, the states issued their own communique due to lack of consensus on two issues.
The main sticking point: demands the five-year-old guarantee that no jurisdiction will be worse off by changes to GST allocations, be made permanent.
The communique reads:
Without the guarantee, the Commonwealth will be fully responsible if states and territories are forced to consider a new tax or levy to ensure essential services are not compromised or reduced.
They welcomed the short-term fix but pointed to “windfall company tax receipts” levied by the commonwealth, arguing that “it seems only fair to share our nation’s prosperity”. Next year’s federal budget is expected to be in the black to the tune of about $10bn.
The communique continued:
Without permanently honouring the no-worse-off guarantee, the Commonwealth will leave most states and territories with a significant decrease in ongoing revenue.
The collective loss to states and territories is estimated by the Commonwealth to be around $4.9bn per annum, and is expected to grow over time. This equates to the salaries of over 30,000 nurses or teachers each year.
To add insult to injury, all but one of the authors of the communique are Chalmers’ fellow party members. Tasmania’s Michael Ferguson is the only Liberal treasurer in the country.
The group also continued a chorus of complaints about the process behind the federal government’s infrastructure investment program review, released last month. According to the communique:
State and Territory Treasurers were unanimous in rejecting the proposal to reduce Commonwealth funding for vital regional roads from 80 per cent to 50 per cent, an unacceptable outcome for Australians who need these roads each day.
Updated
