The Point Live: Aukus in trouble with Sth Korea deal, environmental laws bring less transparency. As it happened.

Still looking at behind the scenes with the Liberal party and Scott Morrison has been out and about having chats. The Australian has reported previously that his genius idea is for the Liberal party to support net zero in theory, but not the 2050 deadline. So a whoosh whoosh of the spirit, but not the timetable.

The timeline is the most important part, given it is meant to see nations scale down their emissions over the coming years, so the planet can you know, survive.

But ever the political animal, Morrison sees the way through the ideological issues within the Liberal party is just to por qué no los dos? their way through it. Net zero for the ‘non-negotiables’ like Andrew Bragg but no need to do anything or make any changes for the ‘is this even a things’ like Tony Pasin.

The world is larger than the Liberal party, but you can see business try to work out which line to walk, as this ABC RN Breakfast interview with BCA Chief Executive Bran Black makes clear:

As you say, we support net zero, achieving that by 2050. From our perspective, the critical thing, though, is to note that we need to do that as a country affordably and reliably.

So our effort and our focus is on working to ensure that the Government’s net zero planning, which is very much underway, and particularly in the context of setting sector-specific plans, is informed with an evidence base that is, what is it that industry needs, what type of policy levers need to be pulled, and how can we do so effectively, so as to ensure, as I say, that affordable and reliable transition to net zero.

Angus Taylor is having fun running around doing things in the background, while publicly keeping himself away from any and all of the Coalition’s messes. After his decision to convince Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to leave the Nationals party room and joining Liberal party room to be his deputy on the leadership ticket failed (many within the party saw it as too cynical a move and it also overlooked Liberal women who had spent years toiling away in the party which turned them off) Taylor has taken a backseat and just kept watch. Does that mean he has no leadership ambitions? Of course not. But it does show he has maybe finally learnt the number one lesson of leadership aspirants – don’t have a single fingerprint on the mess.

So Taylor has been out and about doing other things, showing what he would do as leader, while staying out of the messy debates and attacks (at least publicly).

He got prime position on Sydney radio 2GB breakfast this morning, which is basically a direct line to the Liberal party base.

He has written to Sanjeev Gupta telling him to ‘pack up and sell his Tahmoor coal mine’ which ticks two big boxes for the base – standing up to a foreign owner and supporting coal mining. And he didn’t enter into any of the Liberal party issues while speaking to the program (and wasn’t asked) – the whole exchange was about what Taylor himself, is doing. Take note.

Taylor:

No, look, the mine has been shut since earlier this year, or not operating since earlier this year, and now we’ve seen many of the workers being put off. Ben, there’s nothing wrong with this mine, it’s a great mine. And the miners just want to what their job is, which is to mine coal. And the mine’s the heartbeat of our community. It’s hundreds of jobs, local businesses, families depend on it. And we’ve just seen, as you you said, 250 people put off now. And so Gupta needs to either get the mine back up and running or sell it. And there are others wanting to take it on. They’ve been speaking to me and others. So this really matters to a lot of people. They’re coal miners. We want to get the coal mine back up and running again.

…it’s time for him to get on and do the job here. This has gone on for too long. To be fair to him, he has been paying workers up until now, but it’s got to a point now where people are incredibly frustrated. They’ve had enough, and I’m going to stand up for them and fight for them. That’s why I’ve written to him and frankly enough is enough

The Financial Services Union has criticised Westpac’s decision to cut 134 jobs across 99 branches just two months before Christmas, as it moves more of its functions online.

Finance Sector Union National President Wendy Streets said Westpac had only just agreed to develop a $5m capability fund “to support workers and provide better opportunities to those who are displaced”.

These are tellers and personal bankers who have stood by customers during a difficult few years and they deserve respect, consultation and the time to make real decisions about their future, without being rushed out the door.

Westpac has a choice: it can pause these cuts and treat its people with fairness and decency and work with us to find solutions, or it can prove that its choosing the path of chaos and putting profits over people.
Westpac has made a big show or promising to invest in its people by setting up a fund, yet now they’re cutting the very workers this fund was supposed to support.”

Earlier this week, the CPA warned accounting and finance bodies from scraping junior roles in favour of AI, warning it would have issues down the track.

Banks are among the businesses which have been early adopters of new technologies historically, as it generally allows them to cut human wages. In August, Westpac’s results showed a net profit of $1.9bn for the quarter.

David Pocock’s attempts to have a duty of care to future generations built into Australian legislation was knocked back by both major parties this week, just as Murray Watt is about to introduce environmental protection laws that are designed to fast track coal and gas approvals.

The Climate Media Centre has thoughts on this:

The federal government’s once-in-a-generation overhaul of our national environment law risks entrenching climate destruction, with leading legal and climate experts warning the reforms fail to deal with the single biggest threat to our environment – climate change.

The Government’s draft Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act reforms will reportedly exclude any meaningful consideration of climate pollution or compatibility with Australia’s climate targets. Despite promises of stronger protections, the reforms will not consider the climate impacts of new or expanded coal and gas projects. Polluting projects would not be blocked on climate grounds, even if they breach Australia’s emissions targets or worsen climate harm.

Experts warn that by ignoring the climate impacts of projects, the laws expose Australia to domestic and international legal risk, including under obligations recently clarified by the International Court of Justice’s climate advisory opinion.

At a time when climate-fuelled disasters increasingly wreak havoc on the lives of everyday Australians, the reforms risk entrenching the very industries driving the crisis, and put future generations at risk.

Professor Jacqueline Peel – Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Australian Laureate Fellow, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne said:

Australia’s national environment law is being rewritten for the first time in 25 years, yet it fails to address the biggest environmental threat of our time: climate change. By excluding climate impacts from environmental assessments, the Government is writing a law that guarantees more harm to the very ecosystems it claims to protect.

This is a once-in-a-generation chance to build an environmental framework that’s fit for purpose in a warming world. Instead, the government’s reforms leave the door wide open for new coal and gas projects that are fundamentally incompatible with Australia’s climate targets and our international obligations.”

Chalmers also spoke about the growth in private investment, particularly in renewables, which he said was growing twice as fast as mining investment since the 2022 election. But it was his line on AI spending which caught my attention:

In the data, we also see an important shift in the nature of business investment.

Non-mining investment, particularly in renewable energy and technology, is now doing more of the heavy lifting.

In fact, it’s grown over twice as fast as mining investment since the 2022 election, averaging 9.4 per cent of GDP over the past three years.

That is the highest three-year average share of GDP since 2012.

Spending on intellectual property like software, data, and AI is now almost as large as spending on mining.

Capital expenditure in energy construction is up nearly 40 per cent since we came to office, driven by the roll-out of large-scale renewable energy projects and supported by our Future Made in Australia agenda.

More new businesses are being created each month on average than under any previous government, and the insolvency rate is now around half of what we saw during the Howard years.

This is a solid foundation from which to meet all this global uncertainty.

Jim Chalmers spoke at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry dinner overnight, where he thanked the chamber for “the chance to speak to you over dinner about three things that occupy almost all of my time as Treasurer”.

What are those things?

Building on momentum in the private sector.

Making progress on the directions we set at the reform roundtable.

Against a backdrop of serious and persistent global volatility.

He also spoke about some of the ways he watches for that ‘global volatility’:

There are a number of ways to understand this volatility but just consider, for a moment, commodity prices.

Each week Treasurers get a simple page summarising movements in eight different commodities.

So, by my count that brief has landed on my desk 179 times now.

Usually, treasurers look for the iron ore price at the top of the page first.

About 96 bucks this week, not bad.

Then it’s gas prices, about halfway down.

Other times it’s oil, particularly when conflict in the Middle East flares or tensions in the Strait of Hormuz escalate.

But there’s one commodity that until this week was missing from that weekly briefing that I’ve been watching most closely lately – and that’s gold.

Gold is up almost 50 per cent in the past year.

More than $12 billion has been funnelled into gold-backed funds in one week of this month alone.

A year ago, an ounce of gold was about US$2,800.

It took 169 days for it to climb to US$3,300, and 167 days to climb a further US$500.

The most recent US$500 price jump took just 20 days – and that progress has almost unwound with the big fall in gold over the past fortnight.

We watch this with interest because, historically, spikes in the price of gold have been a symptom of a big event or more substantial global economic shock.

In the late 2000s it was the GFC and its aftermath driving the price of gold bullion up by 50 per cent.

Three decades before that, the ‘Nixon shock’ kicked off the biggest gold bull run in history – a 19-fold price increase in just a decade.

It all started when Nixon ended the gold standard in 1971.

It was fuelled by two oil crises in the Middle East and sustained by a global battle with inflation.

Familiar signs of uncertainty and volatility are visible again across the global economy today.

Conflicts abroad.

Governments everywhere managing the aftershocks of an international spike in inflation.

Global shifts in trade.

Do you have thoughts on the 2025 election? The Electoral Matters Committee would like to hear them.

Committee Chair Jerome Laxale MP said:

Aggressive conduct at polling booths has been the biggest issue in our early submissions. The Committee wants to keep hearing from community members about their experiences participating in the 2025 Federal Election, and to use this information to shape our upcoming hearing.

…You don’t need to have put in a submission to register your interest, you just need to tell us what you want to talk about and a bit about how you participated in the election. We might not be able to hear from everyone on the day, but we want to hear from as many people as we can.’

The Committee will be holding hearings in Melbourne (12 November 2025) and Bendigo (13 November 2025). As part of these hearing members of the public will be invited to get on the record by making short verbal statements of up to 5 minutes.

To register your interest in making a statement at upcoming hearings, contact the Committee Secretariat at em@aph.gov.au.

Further information on the 2025 election inquiry can be found at the inquiry webpage. Committee details can be found at the Committee’s webpage.

Meanwhile, Labor senator for Tasmania, Richard Dowling had THOUGHTS on transparency:

When the opposition get up here and preach about spin and secrecy, Australians might recall—who hid the energy prices? Who silenced the watch dogs? Who turned public service into private property? Integrity isn’t optional; it’s the foundation of trust. We’re rebuilding what they tore down. We’re rebuilding it with sunlight, not spin. The coalition’s idea of transparency was a blackout curtain. The Albanese Labor government’s idea is daylight, and, after what we inherited, that’s not just good government; it’s a public cleansing.

That is what we need—trust in institutions, faith in democracy and keeping integrity so that our institutions respond to public need, public data and transparency. We are restoring that after a decade of cover-ups, a lack of sunlight and a lack of democratic process.
The Albanese government is investing in our democratic institutions to improve transparency for Australians

In the senate, Katy Gallagher accused non-government senators of abusing the order for production of documents measure, and said it was being used like questions on notice:

During the Keating government, there were 53 OPDs—when you say 93 per cent were complied with, there were 53. We have had nearly 100 in the last few sitting weeks.

That’s the scale of what we were dealing with. There were 336 OPDs agreed to in the 47th Parliament. Some of those were for documents that are publicly available. Some of them had a scope
that extended to thousands and thousands of pages, and some of them were required to be complied with within timeframes that are simply unreasonable.
On the question time changes, what the Senate is going to do here is rip up the convention of how question time has applied in this place, with consensus, and it will deny non-executive-government members the opportunity to answer questions. So, when everyone comes in here and says everybody has a right to ask questions, this motion seeks to deny my colleagues the right to ask questions. That is what is happening here, on a document that will be released with OPDs. That section needs to be reformed because we have complied with more OPDs than any government in the history of this chamber

Which, OK. But back in the Keating days (and indeed most goverments before Howard) there was a lot more transparency in general about the machinery of government. As governments have become more secretive, non-government MPs (which has included Labor while in opposition) use what tools they have to try and force transparency.

Reading through the Hansard from yesterday (always a fun punishment) and independent David Pocock has proved he has absolutely mastered the parliamentary game – he pulled a swiftie on the government yesterday and won a motion for an extra five non-government questions to be added to senate question time.

That will extend senate QT by at least 30 minutes. The Coalition voted with him and the crossbench, which is what won him the motion. And it wasn’t because Pocock necessarily wanted more time to ask questions – but because he wants more transparency. He’s been waiting for the government to release the Briggs ‘Jobs for Mates’ review for the last two years, with no success. So now he’s forcing Labor to deal with him, by messing up their control of the senate.

Ron Mizen from the Australian Financial Review reports that in retaliation for the Coalition voting with Pocock on the motion, it has threatened to remove Coalition from senior committee positions.

Which it could do in the house of representatives, because that is where it controls the numbers.

So we have Labor, who campaigned on more transparency, withholding a report into how it has awarded senior public servant jobs for two years, now reportedly threatening to sack Coalition MPs from the deputy positions on parliamentary committee, because the Coalition voted with David Pocock for more questions during question time, in a bid to force the government to release the report.

What’s that they say about absolute power?