Wed 26 Nov
This blog is now closed
The crossbench and Greens attempted to delay it or have it struck out, but Labor and the Coalition have voted to give police powers to recommend welfare payments be cancelled – before anyone is convicted of a crime. You might not even know about the arrest warrant they use to justify the cancellation.
So now you have met Phil and Jenny, here is Jess:
I’m actually here today to talk about Jess. Jess is 38 years of age. She’s married to Matt, and together, they’re raising their two little children. One in primary school and one in kindy. And they’re doing it pretty tough right now. They rent a little 2-bedroom town house in the outer suburbs. Their girls are sharing a bedroom. And their lounge room is really more of a play room with the toys piled up all over the place. They dream of one day buying a place of their own. But every time Jess checks the online mortgage calculator, the numbers just do not add up. This is not how Jess thought life would be, and she’s angry, because if the Australian dream of homeownership is out of reach for her, well, her children will have Buckley’s chance of even having the dream in the first place. In recent years, their rent has gone up by 20%. Electricity bills – 40%. And their weekly grocery shop is now nearly $300. Jess is working her tail off and looking after the kids at the same time. But it feels futile. Mat does long hours as a bricky and does odd jobs on the side to treat the kids here and there. And if worry about the kids weren’t enough – Jess’s dad has Alzheimer’s. And her mum is struggling right now to care for him at home. This is the Australian story of 2025. We’re talking about economic policy, it’s easy to get caught up in a whole bunch of big numbers and economic detail. But strong economic management is really all about Jess.
Listening to Ted O’Brien go on and one about ‘Jess’ his Millennial catch all who he believes will win back young people to the Liberal party. This construct of a “Jess’ is not new – as Pamela Williams wrote in her book The Victory, Lynton Crosby first came up with ‘Phil and Jenny’ for the 1996 Howard election campaign. Every single policy had to be run through Phil and Jenny – you can read some of that below.
At least 90 academics have signed a statement condemning the Group of Eight (top universities) for backing the Business Council statement on the environment laws, given that the laws do not protect the environment and make it easier for mining projects to pass.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7399188564158128128
The crossbench are not letting go of the need for gambling reform
It is Ted O’Brien time – are you ready for it?
We will be dipping in and out of the speech and then doing the Q&A so bare with us. Things will be getting INCENSED
So it is firming up that Murray Watt has seen some sense and is now focusing his attentions on getting the Greens to pass his (mining friendly – at least for now) environmental laws.
It is not a bad thing that the Coalition is dealt out of this, given that his proposition for them was a lot more friendly for business and the mining industry.
But Labor have already said they will only bend so far – which defies both the science and sense.
So the question now is – how far will the ALP go to help the environment, give that it now looks like the Greens are the only serious players at the negotiating table.
Today’s media referred to our 2017 study that showed people with taxable incomes of more than half a million dollars are just 0.43% of the population but receive 51% of trust distributions.
The annual tax expenditure statement (TES) provides a list of all the tax credits or loopholes in the tax arrangements. These can be considered warps in the tax system that benefit particular types of people or business activities. Interestingly the TES takes the trust arrangements as just part of the furniture and does not treat them as a warp in the tax system, even though they are deliberately used as a device to avoid paying tax.
But the TES does give us updated figures on who uses trusts. We know that the 24 per cent of individuals who reported trust income were in the top 10% of incomes and accounted for 63 per cent of all trust income. Reflecting the use of trusts by working age people, those 35 to 59 years old accounted for 58% of all trust income. The stereotypical trust user is a professional or tradie whose income goes into a trust and so part of that income is attributed to other trust members. By splitting income in that way the taxpayer avoids paying as much tax as would an individual tax payer.
Tax office data are also interesting. The tax statistics from the tax office show that the net business income of all trusts in 2022-23 was $483.5 billion and there were 6.3% of trusts with business income of half a million dollars or more and which received 48% of all trust income worth $236.6 billion. These are big chunks of national income, 18% of GDP for all trusts and 9% for the big ones.
Apart from tax avoidance we do not think there is much of reason to go to the expense of running your business through trusts. So we have to suspect that the 18% of Australia’s national income going through trusts is designed to avoid tax and around half of that means avoiding some tax on half-a-million-dollar incomes or more.
Australian income and especially wealth are very badly distributed towards the rich. Trusts explain a lot of the maldistribution of the after-tax income in Australia.
Deepfakes are no longer niche; they’re harming everyday Australians and warping the political process, with documented cases of the technology being used in election interference worldwide.
This week, Senator David Pocock introduced a bill to protect Australians’ right to their own face and voice. Which in 2025 is apparently something we need to debate. As he put it, people “shouldn’t be able to deepfake someone without their consent”.
Right now, there are no guardrails on the use of deepfakes. Anyone can create an AI-generated deepfake of you and post it online with zero consent, zero warning and almost zero recourse. And with the explosion of realistic AI tools like OpenAI’s Sora, deepfakes are becoming increasingly difficult to detect.
The Online Safety and Other Legislation Amendment (My Face, My Rights) Bill 2025 would finally protect our voices, faces and likeness from being hijacked.
He hopes the bill will “set the avenue for civil redress” and give the eSafety Commissioner the power to act when someone’s identity is weaponised or used without consent.
And with big tech companies like OpenAI preparing to spend $770 billion to make Australia “the most important AI playground”, Australians deserve protection that isn’t shaped by industry spin.
Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) head Sven Bluemmel told The Australian today that the threat of election interference and disinformation is “very, very real” – but that “All we care about at the VEC is misinformation and disinformation about the electoral process” because “We don’t have truth in political advertising in Victoria (or anywhere else in the country”.
The Victorian Electoral Commissioner is badly mistaken.
Both South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory have truth in political advertising laws. South Australia has had them for forty years, where they “have undoubtedly changed the face of electoral campaigning”, so there is no excuse for not knowing about them. In both jurisdictions, electoral commissions are responsible for administering truth in political advertising laws.
It was surprising to read in The Australian, of all places, that truth in political advertising laws do not exist, as the paper endorsed such laws in 2016 after Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign.
It is perfectly legal to lie in a political ad in Victoria, but that is not true everywhere in Australia and it does not have to be true in Victoria. The South Australian model is constitutionally sound, respected by both sides of politics, proven to work and effective at nipping lies in the bud.
There is also, at least in principle, bipartisan support for truth in political advertising laws in Victoria. The VEC may soon be required to care about all kinds of political misinformation and disinformation, not just that relating to the electoral process. They would do well to brush up on how South Australia has done so well with its laws over four decades.