The Point Live: Coalition net zero fight looming. As it happened.

• Minister Murray Watt has never refused a project. He’s approved 38, including the North West Shelf gas export project and an extension to the Ulan coal mine.
• Since coming to power in 2022, the Albanese Government has approved 226 projects and rejected 2…a solar farm and a Clive Palmer coal mine.
• In the 5000 (exactly!) project referrals published, just five were considered “clearly unacceptable”…including a solar project and a Woolworths goods distribution hub!
• Under the current laws, the minister CANNOT intervene in a project to protect a threatened species, even when there is scientific evidence an extinction is imminent (e.g the Maugean skate threatened by salmon farming in Tasmania’s Macquarie Harbour).
• There are 334 projects classified as “under assessment” or “assessment commenced”.

Larissa Baldwin Roberts from Common Threads held a press conference a little earlier with some of the participants of the Climate Crisis summit held yesterday (which was supported by The Australia Institute) which brought together First Nations leaders, climate experts and advocates to talk about what actually needs to be done for Australia and its communities to navigate the climate crisis (which isn’t something off into the future – we are living it now)

Serena Joyner (the CEO of Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action) was one of the attendees and said:

Australia has always had bushfires, but climate change is making them worse. Climate change is making the deadly and almost impossible to defend, and that’s at 1.2 or 1.4 degrees of warming. We simply cannot afford more global warming and have safe communities.

And that’s why bushfire survivors for climate action exists. 

Because we know through Black Summer just how bad catastrophic fires can already be. And with the kind of warming we’re seeing, a black summer will be normal in the year 2040. And beyond that, it will be a cool summer.

That’s why we’re calling on the government to stop the approval of coal and gas projects. Stop the approval of coal and gas projects, and make a clear timeline to phase out coal and gas production and exports. 

Co-CEO of the Australia Institute Leanne Minshull:

We also need a plan to rapidly phase out of fossil fuels, and this is something that we can do apart from our combined and, and, apart from our shared determination to see the end of fossil fuels. We also shared some emotions after hearing from frontline communities, scientists, firefighters and unionists and those emotions that we were all feeling. 

With Australia’s environment laws back in the news, here’s a bit of context based on numbers I just pulled off the official public portal for Australia’s Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

In the last ten years, approval decisions were made on 271 projects. 269 were approved…leaving just 2 not approved!

One was a solar farm. It was refused by Tanya Plibersek due to its “unacceptable impacts on…wildlife including koalas”. Which would be fair enough…except that it is surrounded by coal seam gas wells and next to a gas processing plant.

The other was Clive Palmer’s Central Queensland Coal project that had already been rejected by the Palaszczuk Queensland Government, so was in no danger of going ahead when Tanya Plibersek “courageously” ruled it out.

The Australia Institute has documented that salmon farming in Tasmania’s Macquarie Harbour is endangering the Maugean skate and the harbour’s World Heritage value.

At Woolworths annual general meeting (AGM) on Thursday 30 October there will be two resolutions which affect the future of the skate now threatened with extinction. The resolution most directly relevant says: 

5(b) Farmed seafood reporting

Shareholders request that Woolworths identify and report on the impacts of farmed seafood it procures for its Own Brand products on endangered species under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) List of Threatened Fauna in its 2026 Sustainability Report.

Whether or not it gets up will also depend on a procedural motion that will be considered first. Last year a similar resolution was not put because a procedural motion that would have allowed the vote was defeated. But we know it would have had 30% support based on the proxy instructions.  (Proxy instructions are instructions on how to vote from shareholders who do not attend the AGM to vote in person.)

30% is not sufficient to change the company’s rules but it carries a powerful moral force, especially given that 61% of Woolworth’s shareholders with voting rights are institutional shareholders among the company’s top 20 shareholders.

A similar resolution is being put to Coles’ AGM on 11 November. Last year such a resolution received 39% of the vote as indicated by voting instructions but the vote was not put, again for technical reasons. While that vote was never put, Coles has made some positive changes. It discusses the endangered Maugean skate in its sustainability report and claims it has reduces sourcing from the Macquarie Harbour. It is also reported that Coles no longer labels its own brand Tasmanian salmon as “responsibly sourced”.

Clearly Coles could do a lot more to pressure Tasmanian fish farmers to clean up their act, and Woolies could make a start in that direction.

There is worrying news that the ATO has referred more than 355,000 taxpayers, including people on Centrelink benefits, to a private debt collector.

This is highly concerning for the health of Australia’s government capacity and broader democracy. Outsourcing basic government functions (such as the enforcement of laws, collection of taxes and formulation of government policy) leads to the hollowing out of government capacity. This means that, not only does the government become unable to perform these functions, but it loses the expertise to even assess which private provider would be best able to meet government requirements. Australia Institute research has shown how privatisation and outsourcing of services traditionally provided by the public sector have historically led to failures and scandals, and how these failures could have been predicted by basic economics.

Outsourcing tax debt collection also raises serious concerns for democracy and the rule of law. Debts owed by citizens to the government, such as tax debts and Centrelink repayments, have serious financial and legal ramifications for those involved. Pursuit of alleged debts needs to be done with care, particularly when debts are alleged against vulnerable people; failing to do so leads to horrors such as Robodebt. This is why Australia’s legal system has developed principles such as ‘procedural fairness’ to restrict public sector decision-making and help prevent injustices. Relying on profit-driven companies to collect tax debts puts these core principles in danger and risks grave injustices to individual citizens.

We will bring you some more from some of the press conferences being held in just a moment.

Mike Bowers attended the Head to the Hill event for 2025, which aims to advocated for brain cancers and this year was attended by hundreds of families, survivors and advocated, including Professor Richard Scolyer AO, a world-leading pathologist who has been diagnosed with brain cancer.

Shoes represented those who have been diagnosed and those lost to the disease, with 1896 Australians diagnosed each year, were placed at the event.

The attendees wanted urgent action from the government to fund further research and treatments.

Among the shoes was these pair belonging to star cartoonist and all round wonderful human, Jon Kudelka, who illustrated his pair for the event.

Bill Browne

The Albanese Government has copped criticism today for its culture of secrecy, including its floundering attempts to further restrict the freedom of information system.  

Labor ministers made sensational claims about criminal gangs and foreign agents abusing the FOI system, claims that they have been totally unable to back up. Nor have long-suffering public servants been able to substantiate the Government’s dark warnings about AI bots overwhelming the FOI system.

Ironically, the Albanese Government’s clumsy scaremongering will only encourage the kind of FOI requests that they are complaining about.

That’s because Albanese Government has used the eSafety Commission as its example of a government agency brought to its knees by an overwhelming number of FOI requests. According to Attorney-General Michelle Rowland:

“we’ve had cases where FOI requests have been generated, sometimes around 600 of them in one instance, going to a small agency [the eSafety Commission], which tied up the services of that agency for over two months.”

Never mind the absurd claim that a $43 million dollar a year agency could be “tied up” by 600 FOI requests. My colleague Skye Predavec’s fact check ably disproves that claim.

But as I argue in The Point today, the bigger problem is that those 600 FOI requests came from a web form called “END eSAFETY”.

The Government has handed them a major PR victory. Their mission is to bring down the eSafety Commission, and here is the Attorney-General of Australia telling them that, for two months, they succeeded.

The truth is that the eSafety Commission quickly dealt with these 600 FOI requests, using existing laws. But in their eagerness to sell its FOI changes, the Albanese Government made it look weak and vulnerable. 

The Albanese Government has done the eSafety Commission no favours by making it the face of secrecy, panic and government overreach. 

In the five years from 2020 to 2024, the Federal Government spent at least $2.3 million on shredders. That’s according to AusTender, the centralised database of Australian Government contracts. Among the 54 contracts were contracts for office machines with supplier Kobra Shredders Australia and shredders purchased from other companies. 

By contrast, government agencies reported spending just $1.3 million on FOI training in the financial years ending between 2020 and 2024. The FOI system has become much more expensive, rising from $64 million in 2020 to $86 million in 2024, but in 2024 just 0.5% of the total cost of the FOI system was for training.  

The imbalance between spending on shredders and the FOI training budget was spotted by Phil Dorling in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2012.  

There are some similarities between Labor Governments then and now. For one, Anthony Albanese is one constant, then the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, and now the Prime Minister.  

But there are stark differences. Labor in 2012 made sweeping reforms to the FOI system that underscored the role of public servants as facilitating the open and transparent release of information. Today, however, the Labor Government seemingly wants to do the opposite, their proposed bill would make it harder and more expensive for Australians to get information from the government. 

You can read the rest of Skye’s article, here.

Further to what Greg just reported on Tomago:

The party room meetings are coming to a close. The Coalition and the Greens have sent out the alert that their post-meeting briefings are ago. Caucus will soon follow.

These are off-the-record briefings of the meeting minutes, in a tradition that goes back to John Curtin giving off-the-record briefings about what Australia was doing during World War II. None of it is attributed and journalists have to do the work of finding out who said what and whether there was more not reported in the briefing, but it is always amusing to me when MPs say they don’t discuss party room, because they literally brief the media on it.