Category Archives: Australian politics

NSW fires: authorities warn of ‘very dangerous day’ for bushfires as Sydney shrouded in smoke

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Almost 3,000 firefighters across New South Wales will be deployed as more than 80 bushfires continue to burn and temperatures are expected to hit 40C. Follow all the latest updates

• ‘National security issue’: Turnbull tells Q&A Morrison must step up response to bushfires
• Greg Jericho: the Coalition isn’t being honest about the climate crisis. But neither is Labor

Thick “hazardous” smoke back in Sydney this morning pic.twitter.com/HyBxweEFYZ

#Sydney barely visible through the bushfire smoke. Temperatures forecast to reach 36C in the city, 42C in the west. #NSWfires pic.twitter.com/kqAnlDmSLB

I think this is the worst I've seen. #sydneysmoke pic.twitter.com/u3fpI7ZosY

The Bureau of Meteorology says a southerly wind later this afternoon will help ease the smoke choking Sydney this morning, though it may not help firefighters battling blazes across the rest of the state.

A smoky start for #Sydney, with #smoke from nearby fires trapped overnight in a low-layer of the atmosphere, causing it to become concentrated. A southerly buster this afternoon will help reduce the smoke, especially nearer the coast. Health info re smoke: https://t.co/I3gS1GMBVA pic.twitter.com/WJCrmDHsrv

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Australia fires: heatwave forecast amid calls for emergency meeting

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Conditions ease but Labor urges emergency Coag meeting before extreme heat in NSW and Victoria

Firefighters have taken advantage of less extreme conditions to try to contain blazes burning across New South Wales ahead of worsening conditions and soaring temperatures expected on Tuesday.

More than 100 fires were still burning across NSW on Sunday, including the massive Gospers Mountain blaze, which is expected to burn for weeks.

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Queensland fires: ‘firenado’ forms as Australia blazes continue – video

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Aerial footage captured a 'firenado' forming on Saturday in the Bundamba suburb of Ipswich, Queensland, as a huge fire rapidly advanced across dry grassland, threatening homes. Queensland state authorities have issued an emergency warning as the east coast of Australia works to tackle more than 100 bushfires

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Australia fires: helicopter crashes as 140 bushfires rage in NSW and Queensland – live

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RFS says Gospers Mountain blaze, which has merged with neighbouring fires, will take many weeks to put out

A shipping container full of fireworks? Really?

This is from AAP:

A shipping container loaded with fireworks has exploded and residents have been warned to flee as an unpredictable fire closes in on homes in south-east Queensland.

The fast-moving blaze is burning in bushland at Bundamba, west of Brisbane, and travelling in a northerly direction from White Street towards the Warrego highway.

This, I fear, will be the trend for the afternoon. Across the east coast of Australia, fires worsening with strengthening winds, no respite in temperatures.

Watch & Act - Blue Gum Road (Tenterfield LGA)
Fire is burning SW of Urbenville. Spot fires are starting ahead of the main fire front. If you are in the Wallaby Creek area, seek shelter as the fire approaches. Protect yourself from the heat of the fire. #nswrfs #nswfires pic.twitter.com/Fw0wlqMgOE

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‘Atrocity of the century’: Uighur activist urges Australia to take tougher stance against China

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Rushan Abbas says countries doing business with China are enabling its mass detention of 3 million people, including her sister

A leading Uighur activist, Rushan Abbas, has urged Australian MPs to take a stronger stance against the Chinese regime, while backing controversial comparisons between the state’s authoritarianism and Nazi Germany.

Abbas, who met with MPs in Canberra on Thursday and held a roundtable at the US Embassy on the plight of the Uighur Muslim minority in western China’s Xinjiang province, said that “modern day” concentration camps holding as many as 3 million Uighurs were a case of “history repeating itself”.

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Chaos in parliament over Coalition’s union-busting bill – politics live

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Scott Morrison announces cut in number of government departments as part of public service overhaul. All the day’s political news, live

Labor is moving a motion saying the government’s attempts to push the union-busting bill through without debate was “anti-democratic”.

Better still is this bit of the motion:

This is a prime ministerial tantrum, with the prime minister of Australia behaving like a juvenile schoolyard bully just because he didn’t get his way last week.

We’re now moving through the votes for the government’s union-busting bill.

A side note - this is the 100th division to take place in the House for this sitting fortnight.

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Police ask Clover Moore for statement on Angus Taylor – politics live

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Sydney lord mayor approached by police investigating accusations the emissions reduction minister relied on a falsified document to attack her. Follow all the day’s political news live

That’s where we’ll leave the live blog for the day. Thanks for following along.

It’s been another messy day. Many say the medevac repeal has made it one of parliament’s darkest.

Another development on the Angus Taylor front.

The City of Sydney’s lord mayor, Clover Moore, has been approached by police to provide a statement for their investigation into accusations Taylor relied on a falsified document to attack her travel-related emissions. The council said in a statement:

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Senate calls on government to expedite asylum claim of two gay Saudi journalists in ‘arbitrary’ detention

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Multiple global news organisations call for release of men, who fled their country only to become embroiled in Australia’s detention system

The Senate has passed a motion calling on the government to recognise the increased risk it has placed on two gay Saudi journalists by keeping them in detention after they claimed asylum last month.

Guardian Australia can reveal that multiple news organisations around the world have called for the release of the men, warning the Australian government they are watching the case closely.

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Gold Coast Young LNP leader suspended over Schoolies video denigrating Indigenous culture

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Young Liberal National party leader Barclay McGain filmed laughing after teenager he interviewed says Australia shouldn’t celebrate ‘a culture that couldn’t even invent the bloody wheel’

A Young Liberal National party leader has been suspended from the party after he was filmed laughing at a teenager saying Australia should “stop celebrating a culture that couldn’t even invent the bloody wheel”.

Barclay McGain, chairman of the Gold Coast Young LNP, is under investigation by his own party over what the state’s Labor government has called disturbing, racist comments about Australian Aboriginal culture.

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Labor calls for royal commission into defence veteran suicide – politics live

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The opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, says there have been more than 400 ‘senseless loss of life’ since 2001. Follow all the day’s politics – live

Cormann’s full response to the order to produce the Morrison-Fuller transcript has been tabled. The full text of the letter is below.

Dear President

I refer to the motion moved by the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Senator the Hon Penny Wong, and agreed by the Senate on 2 December 2019, requesting documents associated with phone call between the Prime Minister and the Commissioner of the New South Wales Police Force that took place on Tuesday, 26 November 2019.

Labor is furious at the government’s response to an order to produce the transcript of the Morrison-Fuller phone call about the Angus Taylor police investigation.

The Labor leader in the Senate, Penny Wong, read the government’s response to the Senate after it was provided to her at the outset of Senate proceedings by the finance minister, Mathias Cormann. The letter simply referred the Senate to previous answers and said the documents would be subject to a public interest immunity claim because they relate to a police investigation.

This is transparency from the Morrison government. This is the transparency and integrity, or lack thereof from the Morrison government.”

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Naomi Wolf accuses Angus Taylor of ‘antisemitic dogwhistle’ and false claim about Oxford University

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Author says she was not at Oxford with Australia’s energy minister, and his implication she was part of an ‘elite’ attacking Christmas is an ‘antisemitic dogwhistle’

The American author Naomi Wolf has accused Australia’s embattled energy minister, Angus Taylor, of an “antisemitic dogwhistle”, and of falsely claiming they were at Oxford University together.

In his maiden speech to parliament in 2013, Taylor told a story about “political correctness” and a dispute over a Christmas tree at Oxford in 1991, when he was a Rhodes scholar at the university, mentioning that Wolf lived on the same corridor.

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Coalition’s ‘narrow’ path to electoral victory helped by Labor’s ‘missteps’, review finds

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Liberal party warned against complacency and told not to ‘overlook that the margin of victory was very small’

Scott Morrison navigated the government through a “narrow” path to victory but was aided by Labor’s “many missteps” and a strong contrast with Bill Shorten and Labor’s policies, the Liberal party review has found.

A summary of the review of the 2019 election, released on Friday, warned against “complacency”, suggesting the Liberal party must improve its candidate selection and rebuild in Victoria and New South Wales or risk defeat at the next election.

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Scott Morrison still under pressure over Angus Taylor response – politics live

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PM concedes a misstep in his defence of minister as Labor continues its attack. All the day’s events, live

From Peter Dutton’s office:

The Australian Government has declared three terrorist attacks for the purposes of the Australian Victim of Terrorism Overseas Payment (AVTOP) scheme.

The Senate is finishing up its divisions on the ensuring integrity bill. That’s brought on the second reading debate, where we go into the amendments.

We’ll be in amendment hell until about 11.45am. Then it’s usual Senate business for a bit, and then straight back into the IR bill. The only thing that will interrupt it then, is question time.

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Reserve Bank may create money to boost economy when rates drop to 0.25%

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Governor Philip Lowe says quantitative easing ‘could help’ but it is ‘not on our agenda at this time’

The Reserve Bank may create money to buy government bonds if it runs out of levers to boost the economy when it drops the official interest rates to 0.25%, its governor, Philip Lowe, has said.

Lowe told the Australian Business Economists dinner in Sydney on Tuesday that quantitative easing “could help” if further interest rate cuts and fiscal stimulus failed to boost the economy although it was “not on our agenda at this point in time”.

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Labor condemns ‘disgraceful’ Westpac as Hartzer stands down – politics live

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Westpac chief executive’s resignation draws little sympathy on all sides of politics. All the day’s events, live

And here is another indication of where question time is headed:

Last week, a bank broke money laundering laws 23 million times.

But instead of going after them, the Liberals are going after unions – trying to take away their right to exist.

This Government hates working people. We'll fight them every step of the way. pic.twitter.com/9vMhFquk4W

A group of north Queensland dairy farmers are on their way to Canberra to express their frustrations at what is happening within their industry.

That’s at the same time the Nationals are trying to get ahead of Pauline Hanson, who may have come late to the issues, but certainly has been running full steam ahead since becoming aware of it.

David Littleproud, the drought minister, some time ago said he fixed the supermarket [milk price] problem. He said he thumped his chest, waved his fists at them, and demanded they put their milk prices up.

Well, we know that solution lasted about five minutes.

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Stuart Robert on robodebt: ‘This government does not apologise’ – politics live

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Aged-care package ‘falls well short’ of what is required, Labor says; Morrison responds to Chinese spy plot allegations; and Jacqui Lambie ‘not supporting a repeal’ of medevac, Rex Patrick says. All the day’s events, live

And on that note, we are going to ground this plane - but we will be back tomorrow morning for more fun and games.

There are officially seven sitting days left. Medevac and ensuring integrity are still high on the government’s wish list, but, as always the crossbench is the key. It looks like the government has agreed to Pauline Hanson’s amendments for the union bill, but she is still holding out. Jacqui Lambie has a diary full of meetings when it comes to medevac. Keep a close eye on that one.

Something to watch out for, tomorrow

Our 2019 Mapping #SocialCohesionReport launches tomorrow, 26 November. The report produced in partnership with @MonashUni researchers uses a comprehensive survey to gauge a nuanced understanding of shifts in public opinion on social cohesion and population issues.

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Claim of Chinese spy plot in Australia ‘deeply disturbing’, Scott Morrison says

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‘Australia is not naive’ to threats of foreign interference, PM says, but cautions against ‘leaping to conclusions’

Prime minister Scott Morrison says Australia is “not naive” to the threat of foreign interference amid explosive claims that the Chinese communist party wanted to infiltrate Australia’s parliament.

Describing the alleged plot as “deeply disturbing and troubling”, Morrison said the government was determined to protect Australians from foreign interference and had bolstered laws to strengthen the powers of intelligence agencies.

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Scott Morrison can’t attack Australia’s political circus and pretend he isn’t its ringmaster | Katharine Murphy

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The prime minister is relentlessly pursuing the politics of panic, but validating voter anxiety can only go so far

It’s possible I have Harold Bloom lodged in my head lately because he loomed large in my youth, and he died recently, but when I listen to Scott Morrison, increasingly I think of Bloom, and The Anxiety of Influence.

If you are too young or productively educated to have encountered Bloom, he is the literary critic who held that all writers have to confront the writers who came before them, in the process creating imaginative space for themselves. Bloom’s theory is more complex than my simple rendering, but that’s the primary idea.

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Eddie Obeid to be released from prison on parole after three years in jail

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Former Labor NSW MP and powerbroker will have served three years of his five-year sentence for misconduct in public office

The disgraced former New South Wales Labor MP Eddie Obeid has been granted parole after serving three years in prison for his conviction over misconduct in public office.

Obeid was convicted and sentenced in December 2016 to five years in prison with a non-parole period of three years.

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Paul Keating’s speech on Australia’s China policy – full text | Paul Keating

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Australia can’t go on downplaying the largest economic shift in world history. Read the former PM’s speech in full

Taking some longer view of the strategic scenery, I have come to some key beliefs about the changes that are taking place globally.

The international system is fundamentally anarchic in structure. Two world wars in a century and Vietnam, Iraq, Syria gives the evidence of that. We should not confuse the relative peace of the last 30 years with the anarchy which lies latent.

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