What we learned today, Tuesday 20 June
With that, we’ll wrap up our live coverage of the day’s news.
Here’s a summary of the main news developments:
In the Senate, Jacqui Lambie claimed there was a “culture of cover-up” at the highest levels of the Australian defence force and said she had referred senior commanders to the international criminal court.
During a Labor caucus meeting this morning, PM Anthony Albanese took aim at the Greens and Coalition for blocking the $10bn Housing Australia Future Fund bill, accusing them of a “juvenile student politics approach”.
The Greens’ Mehreen Faruqi said the delay was “not about playing political games” but about ensuring those living rough could “be assured a roof over their head”.
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews has refused to apologise to Liberal MP Cindy McLeish for calling her a “halfwit grub” in state parliament, arguing he was defending a female colleague at the time.
The Reserve Bank of Australia says its decision to increase the official interest rate in June rather than pause was “finely balanced” and further increases would hinge on how developments at home and abroad affected the inflation outlook.
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On housing, Albanese was asked whether bringing almost 400,000 migrants into Australia last year is making the housing crisis worse.
The prime minister said:
Let’s be clear about what happened last year. Whereas what normally happens is people leave the country and people come back to the country. What happened post-pandemic, of course, was that instead of students who finish their degree – for example, leaving, and the same number coming, just people came; no one was leaving because they weren’t here beforehand.
And indeed, the population that will be reached in 2025 was expected to be the population under the former government projections already in 2022. So this is a product, really, of what has happened with the opening up of our borders. And when you close your borders completely, as we did, you’ve got to expect a short-term bounceback.
We have a migration strategy. We expect that by targeting migration to Australia’s need, the numbers in future will actually be lower than what was projected.
To read more on this, we brought you this last week:
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