Australia news live: opposition ‘strongly’ welcomes RBA shake-up but Greens accuse major parties of ‘washing their hands’ | Australia news

Angus Taylor: biggest priority has to be getting people into work

Circling back to Angus Taylor’s interview. He’s not weighing into the question of whether the RBA governor, Philip Lowe, should be appointed for a second term, saying he’ll leave the decision to Treasury.

On whether the government has made the right call as it looks set to ignore the advice of its own independent economic committee to raise the jobseeker payment, Taylor says:

I think at the moment, look, on the one hand, it’s very clear that we’ve got to make sure that those who are seeking a job are able to make ends meet and that’s why in 2021 we increased the job seeker payment by $50.

… But right now, our biggest … priority has to be focused on getting downward pressure on inflation and interest rates and getting people into work.

We’ve got a job vacancy rate we haven’t seen in this country before. It’s almost double what it was before. It’s completely unprecedented. And so workforce participation has to be the priority.

Greens: Labor EV policy is still a roadmap without a destination

Bandt also says he wants to “toughen up” the government’s national electric vehicle strategy which he says is a roadmap without a destination. He is calling on the government to introduce targets for the uptake of electric vehicles and a fuel efficiency standards as quickly as possible, and he says the Greens stand ready to support the legislation likely required:

It’s good that we’re making a start down the road but we’re still in the slow lane … We’re far quite a far cry away from “ending the weekend” and all of that nonsense from the former government and that’s good. But what we don’t have from the current government is a target for the uptake of electric vehicles or a fuel efficiency standards.

… Legislation is likely to be required for some of these. We stand ready to pass good legislation to ensure electric vehicle uptake. And we’re worried that the government at the moment – though they’re saying they’ve got a strategy at the moment – it’s a roadmap without a destination. We want to try and toughen it up.

Here’s what our environment editor Adam Morton has to say about the announcement:

Bandt not in support of reappointing Philip Lowe as RBA governor

Bandt says he does not believe the government should re-appoint Philip Lowe for a second term after September.

The Reserve Bank governor with the support of the board was very clear about inducing people to make decisions about their mortgages on the basis of what happened with interest rates and it ended up with a lot of people are in a lot of unnecessary pain. And there has to be some accountability for that. And that should start with a reserve bank governor. That’s a minimum.

He then goes back to his “broader point” of the government outsourcing economic problems to the RBA, pointing again to the solutions for raising revenue which the Greens would like to see like making the big corporations pay more tax.

Bandt: if budget can afford stage-three tax cuts it can afford to lift Australians out of poverty.

Bandt is also highly critical of the government as it appears set to reject a call from its very own expert advisory panel to raise the jobseeker rate. He says if the budget can afford to keep stage-three tax cuts, it can afford to lift Australians out of poverty:

Everyday people are not causing inflation. They are the victims of inflation. Now, Labor has found over a quarter of a trillion dollars for tax cuts for billionaires and politicians that can’t lift people out of poverty.

Labor’s not making hard choices in this budget, they’re making everyone else make hard choices, like whether to pay for the rent or whether to put food on the table.

People are really hurting. And we need to lift people out of poverty, and if there’s quarter of a trillion dollars to spend on stage three tax cuts for the wealthy, then there’s money to lift people out of poverty.

In framing the budget, the stage three tax cuts sit like a big black hole in the centre of the budget and they are sucking everything into its gravitational field.

Bandt then repeated his claim that the Greens remains the only social democratic alternative as Labor becomes increasingly “centre right” and the Liberals become a “far right irrelevance.”

Greens less positive on RBA review

The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, follows Angus Taylor on ABC Radio, and he’s not as convinced the direction of the RBA review is as positive as the shadow treasurer was. Bandt says outsourcing responsibility for interest rate rises to the central bank is a “major party stitch up”:

We’ll have a look at all of the recommendations of the review, and the government’s response when it’s released fully but a major party stitch up isn’t going to fix the inflation problem.

We need more than just outsourcing the issue of tackling inflation to the RBA, which is what Liberal and Labor want to do. We know that it is excessive profiteering that is driving higher prices and inflation in this country. It’s not the everyday people.

… the problem with leaving the inflation issue only to the RBA is that if you give them only one tool. Then if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail and they’re going to keep on raising interest rates and inflicting pain on everyday people when what we need is a much broader approach.

Look at taxing the excessive profits the big corporations are paying, look at freezing rents and electricity bills. That’s how you get inflation under control is by using all the levers – whereas what we’re seeing it appears Labor and Liberal [are] trying to wash their hands and outsource it all to the RBA and then say it’s independent, there’s nothing we can do about it, and we don’t agree with that approach.

Shadow treasurer welcomes RBA review

The shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor, has “strongly” welcomed the review of the RBA, with a direction he says is “very positive.” Asked whether he will support the creation of two RBA boards, one that sets interest rates and another that oversees the central bank’s governance, Taylor says:

We strongly welcome the release of the review, the direction of it we want an independent, credible and capable Reserve Bank.

The structure … being proposed is common across much of the world, the US and the UK. And we’re very open to it.

On whether there are any recommendations Taylor plans to oppose, he says:

We’ll work our way through them [the recommendations] but I have to say the direction of the review we think is very positive.

… there have been real mistakes made by the RBA in recent times.

I think this review lays out an agenda to ensure there isn’t a repetition of [the RBA] making those mistakes.

Committee chair: ‘we can’t take TikTok’s denial seriously’

Paterson is asked about TikTok’s response – that the servers aren’t in China, they are in Singapore, in the United States and the company have always said that the CCP doesn’t have access to that data.

He responds:

TikTok also said – when it was reported they used their application to target users in the US to surveil them – thanks, they couldn’t do that and it wasn’t technically possible, and they had to admit two months later that it was technically possible and they had done so because they were surveying individual journalist who were writing critical articles of TikTok in an attempt to identify their sources.

We can’t take TikTok’s denial seriously. The US, France, Germany, Germany, New Zealand, Canada and the European Union and other countries have addressed this problem, we have to recognise it is a serious problem.

On platforms like TikTok, foreign state disinformation is rife. They are permissive platforms. That is dangerous in the strategic environment we are going into. We don’t want authoritarian governments to be able to undermine our social cohesion and we need to step up our defences and harden our systems against these attacks.

Public hearings for inquiry on foreign interference and social media begin today

Foreign interference through social media will come under scrutiny as a parliamentary committee inquiry today begins its public hearings.

The new coalition shadow home affairs minister, James Paterson, who chairs the committee, says Australia faces two interrelated serious threats. He’s telling ABC News Breakfast:

One is the way in which authoritarian states have weaponised western-headquartered social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

The other problem is social media platforms who are already headquartered in authoritarian states, platforms like TikTok and WeChat. We have seen the government ban TikTok from government devices because it represents a serious espionage risk.

There are many other Australians who are having their data harvested which could be accessed in mainland China and who are open to influence on that platform if the Chinese government sought to use it as a way of pumping disinformation into our political system.

Government to spend $150m on reef water quality woes

The federal government will spend $150m on a program to boost water quality on the Great Barrier Reef after a UN mission said the site should be listed as in danger, AAP reports.

The program will repair land in catchments that are dumping large amounts of fine sediment into rivers discharging water to the reef, smothering coral, killing seagrass and increasing pollution loads.

It’s part of a $1.2bn spend on reef health previously announced by the Albanese government, which has promised to fight an in-danger listing for site which was recommended late last year. The UN report took Australia to task for not doing enough to tackle the key threats of climate change, poor water quality and harmful fishing activities.

In announcing the program today, the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the $150m would fund works including fencing, revegetation, grazing management of cattle and structural works to stabilise gullies and riverbanks. Traditional owners and Indigenous groups will help identify priority projects.

The program will be carried out in collaboration with the Queensland government, which is spending $75m on its own water quality program.

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Telstra warned for breaking consumer protection rules

Martin Farrer

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