Category Archives: Coalition

National party tensions test Coalition as Scott Morrison reshuffles cabinet – politics live

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Prime minister must deal with the National party turmoil as the parliamentary year gets under way in earnest. All the day’s events, live

So what can we expect today, given that parliament is officially back and the climate fires have been acknowledged?

Well, probably an end to what has been described as the “sombre bipartisanship” between Labor and the Coalition.

Awwwwww. I bet he still believes in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and that the Great Barrier Reef can be saved too!

Here’s Scott Morrison on Barnaby Joyce and the Nationals on the Nine Network this morning:

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Matt Canavan quits cabinet to back Barnaby Joyce for National party leadership

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Joyce says he will challenge Nationals leader Michael McCormack for the top job when a party room spill is called on Tuesday

Barnaby Joyce will challenge Michael McCormack for the leadership of the Nationals when a party room spill is called on Tuesday, saying he has learned from his past mistakes and is the best person to lead the party to the next election.

The former leader’s tilt at a comeback won support from the cabinet minister Matt Canavan on Monday night, with the Queensland senator resigning his position to back Joyce in the leadership ballot.

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Jacqui Lambie says people scared and confused by Coalition’s cashless welfare card plan

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Senator says after visiting remote Indigenous communities that many there feel they have not been properly consulted over new card

Independent senator Jacquie Lambie says “the government has a problem” with the rollout of its controversial cashless debit card, after her fact-finding visit to the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Lambie visited several remote Aboriginal communities to “get a view from the ground on how the card is functioning, before voting on the government’s proposed changes for its future”, she said. Most of the people she spoke to “didn’t know any change was being proposed at all”.

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‘New underclass’: Labor warns on Australia’s reliance on short-term migration

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Large numbers of easily exploited temporary migrants could have a ‘corrosive’ effect, says Kristina Keneally

Australia’s reliance on temporary migration is creating a new economic underclass that risks having a “corrosive” effect on the nation’s society, Labor’s shadow home affairs minister, Kristina Keneally, says.

In a major speech to the Curtin institute on Thursday night, Keneally will step up Labor’s attack on the government for its reliance on temporary migration, saying current trends could see as many as 3 million people – or 12% of the population – living in Australia on a temporary basis.

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Ken Wyatt says Australia Day should stay on 26 January

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Minister says that instead of rallying to move the date, Australians should engage in a new generation of ‘truth telling’

The federal government frontbencher Ken Wyatt says Australia Day should remain on 26 January but commemorations around the country should mark both the “good and the bad” of the nation’s history.

Wyatt, the first Indigenous man to be minister for Indigenous Australians, told Nine newspapers “dark beginnings” must be recognised in communities across the country.

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Christian Porter defends Bridget McKenzie over $36,000 grant to sport club she belongs to

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Attorney general claims being a ‘paper member’ of the shooting club raises no issue for the minister

Christian Porter has defended Bridget McKenzie after the revelation she approved a $36,000 grant to a shooting club of which she is a member, claiming being a “paper member” of a club raises no probity issue.

The attorney general made the comment to 6PR Radio on Wednesday, continuing the government’s defence of the Nationals deputy leader and former sport minister after a scathing auditor general’s report found she had skewed the $100m sports grant program towards marginal seats.

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Former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull says Trump is the world’s ‘leading climate denier’

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Turnbull says US president is ‘actively working against global action to reduce emissions’

Donald Trump is the world’s “leading climate denier”, the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has said.

Turnbull, who lost the prime ministership in August 2018 in part because of his own party’s opposition to his plans to do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, made the comments to BBC Newsnight on Tuesday (Wednesday morning, Australian time).

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Coalition awarded $500,000 sports grant to rejected project after Andrew Broad quit

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Seat became hotly contested once the then National MP quit after allegations of improper conduct on a work trip

The Morrison government awarded a $500,000 sports grant in the rural Victorian seat of Mallee a year and a half after it was first rejected – when the seat became hotly contested due to the resignation of Nationals MP Andrew Broad.

The Northern Grampians shire council applied for the grant in September 2018 and was rejected in the first round of the controversial community sport infrastructure grant program, only to see the $500,000 Lord Nelson Park project in St Arnaud approved in April 2019, just weeks out from the election.

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Explainer: Bridget McKenzie is digging in over calls to resign but does her defence stack up?

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Labor’s Ros Kelly was forced to quit over a sports grant scandal but Nationals deputy says she is going nowhere. So what’s the difference?

In 1994, at the height of an eerily familiar sports rorts scandal, John Howard stood up in parliament and fired a question at besieged Labor sports minister Ros Kelly.

Does the minister agree that, whatever debate there may be concerning the principle of ministerial responsibility, the practice has almost invariably been that a minister resigns when his or her continued presence is causing damage and embarrassment to that government?

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Emergency payments for people affected by Australia’s bushfires ‘seriously inadequate’

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Acoss calls on government to boost the Disaster Recovery Payment after fires destroy more than 2,000 homes

Australia’s peak welfare body is calling on the federal government to immediately boost emergency payments for those affected by bushfires, saying it is concerned the current amount is “seriously inadequate”.

The Australian Council of Social Service chief executive, Cassandra Goldie, has written to the prime minister, Scott Morrison, with a range of recommendations the organisation says are urgently needed to help provide relief to those affected by the bushfire crisis that has destroyed more than 2,000 homes.

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Scott Morrison looks for wriggle room on climate as he detects the whiff of backlash | Sarah Martin

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The prime minister is clearly under pressure as the bushfire crisis lays bare the consequences of a warmer planet

It’s too early to say whether the prime minister, Scott Morrison, is speaking with a forked tongue when he says the government will “evolve” its climate change policy.

What appeared on Sunday to be a shift in rhetoric on the government’s emission reduction targets may be meaningful – or it may yet prove to be deliberately duplicitous.

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Scott Morrison flags bushfires royal commission and says Coalition could bolster emissions reduction

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Prime minister acknowledges he could have handled things better in the ‘strained’ emotional environment on the ground

Scott Morrison has indicated the government could bolster its carbon emission reduction efforts as he flagged a royal commission into Australia’s horror bushfire season and warned of a “new normal” that will require a greater role for the commonwealth.

Speaking at length about the government’s response to the bushfires which have claimed 28 lives and more than 2,000 homes, the prime minister also acknowledged for the first time that he could have done better in the “strained” emotional environment on the ground, despite visiting affected communities “in good faith”.

“There are things I could have handled on the ground much better,” Morrison told ABC Insiders’ host David Speers on Sunday.

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Blazes flare amid extreme conditions in Australia – as it happened

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This blog is now closed. Our live coverage will continue tomorrow morning

We are wrapping up the live blog now, but we will be back at 7am AEDT for the latest on the fires.

As of 9pm, this is what we know.

There’s now what media (but not RFS) refer to as a megablaze in the Kosciuszko national park with three fires at emergency level in that area of southern NSW, just near the Victorian border.

There’s also concern that a fire at watch-and-act level in Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains could worsen around midnight once the southerly reaches there. People in the Wentworth Falls and Leura areas are being advised to stay alert.

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Australia fires live: NSW and Victoria bushfires insurance bill tops $700m – latest updates

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Rain falls on some NSW, Victorian and South Australian bushfire-affected areas, but worse fire conditions are forecast to return. Follow all today’s latest news and live updates

Andrew Crisp:

Speaking with the incident controller here at Bairnsdale a short time ago, some of our concern is the fires up in the alpine area, around Omeo, and the potential for them to travel south with the northerly and join the fires down in this part of the world.

We saw, only a few days ago, where there were more than 300 people on the oval at Omeo where some helicopters were there to take people out.

The Victorian emergency commissioner, Andrew Crisp, has an update:

There are three communities we haven’t been able to drive in. When I say ‘drive’ even with those other communities it is basically bushtracks and emergency vehicles to get in, it is where there is no real road access.

We’ve been able to get helicopters and sat phones in to make sure people have supplies.

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NSW, Victoria fires live: Australia bushfires cause tens of thousands to flee in mass evacuation – latest updates

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Victorian premier Daniel Andrews declares state of disaster for East Gippsland, urging people to flee bushfire zones, while Scott Morrison is abused by fire victims in Cobargo. Follow today’s live news and latest updates

Pity the poor #Australians, their country ablaze, and their rotten @ScottMorrisonMP saying, “This is not the time to talk about Climate Change. We have to grow our economy.” What an idiot. What good is an economy in an uninhabitable country? Lead, you fuckwit!!

Greg Mullins says he has never seen a bushfire situation this serious. He was in Batemans Bay on New Year’s Eve in charge of an RFS crew and, “I’m still shocked.”

This is what 29 other fire and emergency chiefs, former chiefs, and I, tried to warn the prime minister about back in April and May. And we weren’t listened to.

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Cabinet papers 1998-99: Coalition’s campaign to unleash the GST laid bare

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Tax reform dominated debate, as ministers discussed East Timor and the 2000 Olympics – and resisted climate action

On 1 July Australia’s goods and services tax will have been in place for 20 years. It is uncontroversial in concept, with no major party advocating its abolition. Every so often there are calls for it to be increased from 10% or expanded – calls that are usually rebuffed.

But just how fraught the GST was to introduce is one of the key insights from the release of cabinet papers by the National Archives of Australia, covering the years 1998 and 1999. There were other concerns: East Timor’s independence, the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the failed republican referendum, and familiar resistance to doing anything but the minimum on climate change.

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What happened? The policies Scott Morrison’s government appears to have abandoned

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Action to protect LGBT students, a payday lending crackdown and an integrity commission are among the Coalition’s lost causes

Governments should be judged not just on what they do with their time in office but also on what they don’t do.

There are only so many hours in a day, and so many parliamentary sitting weeks in a year (there were just 10 since the May election). Nevertheless it’s important to know not just what the top priorities are but also what’s been pushed to the backburner.

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New Zealand would be honoured to take Behrouz Boochani. Australia be damned | Morgan Godfery

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The moral case for the former Manus island detainee becoming a citizen is as simple as ‘asylum is a human right’

I wonder if it winds up Peter Dutton to know that Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish-Iranian journalist, award-winning author and former Manus Island detainee, is a free man in the continent’s orbit. Boochani, the best-known witness, critic and victim of Australia’s offshore “processing centres”, remains in New Zealand after his 30-day visa came to an end. No one quite knows what the No Friend But the Mountains author is planning next, but it seems safe to assume that sooner or later he’ll lodge an application for asylum in New Zealand. A permanent reminder to Dutton, his predecessors and the country’s immigration detention system that they are not as close to vanishing the “boat people” problem as they might have thought.

For their part New Zealand’s policymakers fear as much with headlines suggesting if Boochani’s hypothetical asylum application is successful it could “fuel tensions with Australia”. The problem is Behrouz Boochani, New Zealander, would enjoy free movement between his new home and his old incarcerators, unless Dutton and the gang insert new exceptions in the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement. This is the “back door” the Coalition government in Canberra is so afraid of, and the political problem preventing Scott Morrison from taking up Jacinda Ardern’s invitation to resettle the last remaining detainees on Manus.

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I lived through Aids denialism in South Africa. Morrison’s slippery climate stance is doomed | Sisonke Msimang

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Using tactics straight out of the Trump playbook, the PM has mocked those who are outspoken

It is painful to watch political denial in action. Believe me, I’ve been down this road before. I lived through Aids denialism in South Africa and I’m witnessing denial again in Australia.

In the last few weeks, as fires have raged across New South Wales, and as the nation has grown increasingly furious about Scott Morrison’s lack of leadership, I have felt like I am in a time warp.

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Coalition rejects code of conduct for ministerial advisers

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Scott Morrison resists Thodey review recommendations for increased accountability and mandated public-sector experience

The Morrison government has rebuffed a recommendation that it establish a legislated code of conduct for ministerial advisers, professing itself happy with the status quo.

The recommendation to bring ministerial advisers into a clearer accountability framework is contained in the long awaited Thodey review of the public service, which was released by the prime minister, Scott Morrison, on Friday. The review also recommended that the government set guidance for ministerial offices to have at least half of ministerial policy advisers with public service experience.

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