The Point Live: Government pushes for mining friendly environment law pass, Coalition wants tax cuts. As it happened

Has the horse bolted when it comes to Barnaby? (Not an image anyone who has seen him play football on the parliament oval needs)

Matt Canavan:

Well, that may very well may be the case. I don’t know, you can only ask Barnaby that, but I’ll do my best to keep him part of the team.

Q: And if he’s not?

Canavan: Well, he’s he’s a political opponent. So on the football field. Got to make the tackles.

Over on the Nine network, LNP senator Matt Canavan is making a public appeal for his mentor and ally Barnaby Joyce to stay with the Nationals (there is a whole thing about how Pauline Hanson cooked the steak for Joyce on a sandwich press – it was Wagyu so everyone is losing their minds)

But on Joyce moving to One Nation, Canavan says:

I want Barnaby to stay in the team. I think it’s much more effective to be in our team. We’ve seen this week what a circus act One Nation is. And it might entertain, but it doesn’t change anything. Ultimately, One Nation are much more about the outrage and much less about the outcome. And that’s what I’m here for. To make real change, make a real difference. I think Barnaby has done that in his career as part of the Nationals party. I’m not so sure it’ll be so rosy if he goes over to One Nation.

Forecasts of soaring temperatures and damaging wind gusts have prompted authorities to raise bushfire alerts to their highest levels in more than two years.

More than 20 public schools across central NSW will close on Wednesday after the state’s Rural Fire Service issued a warning for catastrophic fire danger.

The Lower Central West Plains – including the regional hubs of Dubbo, Parkes and Forbes – is bracing for the highest level of bushfire conditions, meaning people there should consider leaving fire risk areas and stay out of paddocks and bushland.

No region of NSW has had a catastrophic fire danger forecast since September 2023.

Extreme danger warnings and total fire bans have also been declared for millions of residents, including those in metropolitan Sydney, as wind gusts of more than 90km/h are expected on Wednesday in southern NSW and Victoria.

“(Winds are) combining with warm to hot temperatures and really dry air and that is elevating fire dangers across the region,” the Bureau of Meteorology’s Sarah Scully said.

Temperatures up to 37 degrees are forecast for Dubbo on Wednesday after maximums of 38 degrees took their toll on Tuesday.

Total fire bans are in place for a further 10 regions of NSW, including greater Sydney, Illawarra and the Hunter.

An elevated fire danger is also forecast in the southern interior of Queensland.

The warnings of increased bushfire danger come as the country is still reeling from a deadly start to bushfire season.

Country Fire Service member and 30-year firefighter Peter Curtis died on Sunday while battling a scrub fire on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia.

Another bushfire in northeast Tasmania has burned since Saturday, with authorities advising people in the Curries River Reservoir area to monitor conditions.

Australia Institute research into 20 of Australia’s largest corporations has found that over half the value of their reported contributions to the community were dubious, leading to overinflated claims of generosity in the private sector.

A corporation’s social licence to operate depends partly on its contribution to the community, however information on philanthropic donations by big business is limited and confusing.

While companies claim they give tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to the community each year, only a fraction comes in the form of charitable donations.

The Australia Institute analysed the philanthropic donations of Australia’s 20 largest publicly listed companies:

• Twelve counted dubious contributions towards their overall community contribution.
• Combined expenditure amounted to $1.8 billion, however $1.1 billion were identified as dubious claims ($905 million) or had too little information to categorise ($204 million).
• Examples of dubious claims include counting sponsorship deals, employee support and donations from customers as part of the company’s contributions to the community.
• The report recommends that the ASX should require the largest publicly listed companies in Australia to follow a standard method of disclosing philanthropic expenditure to shareholders and the public.

Examples:

• Banks claim the fees they waive to some customers as part of their corporate giving. The Commonwealth Bank listed $274 million in forgone revenue (like fees waived for benefit recipients and not for profit organisations) as “community investment”.
• Westpac provides just a tiny fraction of the funding for the beach rescue helicopter which carries its name and logo, but counts sponsorships against its overall “community investment” figures. 
• Of the $143 million Woolworths calls “direct community contributions”, just $15 million is identified as financial support from the company. $81 million is donated surplus food. However, it’s unlikely it could sell that food and the company may actually save on disposal costs by giving it away. 
• Wesfarmers appears to claim money paid by customers at charity sausage sizzles outside their Bunnings stores as part of its own charitable contribution. This is neither Bunnings’ money nor Bunnings’ fundraising.  

Hello and welcome back to The Point Live. I am hoping that the technical issues that have plagued my computer all week are over (please Dolly, let them be over) and we can continue descending into the abyss together.

Ted O’Brien is at the press club today – who is that? Good question – he’s an answer no one has ever asked for. O’Brien has some very big feelings about himself and his ability, which has seen him become deputy leader of the least popular Liberal party in decades.

He also thinks he knows a lot about how to win back voters, which is very funny to me as someone from Queensland who has seen him try and interact with humans at events. His big pitch is tax cuts, which is what he will make at the press club today, which is going back to the bracket creep argument that the Coalition was making some time ago.

But tax cuts won’t matter on a burning planet and the Coalition still haven’t worked out that young people care about having an actual future. So that seems like a fun time.

Murray Watt is still the busiest person in parliament as he tries to make a deal to pass the mining friendly environment laws which are more about providing investment certainty for resource companies, than anything else. That is why there is the big rush – they want those laws locked in so they can start providing certainty for critical mineral exploration etc (it’s not about the environment). They are terrible laws and we have to remember that Tanya Plibersek did get a deal to pass better laws, that Anthony Albanese scraped in the last parliament, so everytime you hear about this ‘five year delay’ -well, Labor had a deal, it’s just not the one the prime minister wanted.

The crossbench is getting increasingly frustrated with the government’s refusal to act on gambling ad regulation and so is the Labor caucus (not that they’ll say anything too loudly in public – and currently it is just furrowed brows and ‘we really should be doing something on this’ in private. As political commentator Sean Kelly said last night at his essay launch in Canberra, people really should be talking about how quiet this caucus is more). We are coming to the end of another parliamentary year with no action on the Peta Murphy report into gambling regulation, because the government won’t get out of its own way.

So that’s the day so far. Mike Bowers is back with us (huzzah!) and I have coffee number two on, with coffee number three to follow closely behind it. We are together until the end of the week now, with Labor wanting the Friday for the environment legislation, so make sure you are pacing yourself, and not adding the liquor cabinet to the mix just yet (or you do you – I try not to judge)

Ready? Let’s get into it.