Health News at Your Fingertips

It doesn’t seem like the Coalition is backing down from its criticisms of the NSW Independent Commission against Corruption anytime soon.

Via AAP:

The federal government has repeated its criticism of the NSW independent anti-corruption watchdog after its commissioner called its detractors “buffoons”.

Two NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption commissioners launched thinly veiled attacks on the prime minister during a parliamentary hearing, saying descriptions of the commission as a “kangaroo court” were misleading and untrue.

Finance minister Simon Birmingham stood by prime minister Scott Morrison’s comments, calling the commission a “Star Chamber” designed to grab headlines.

“I’m not interested in name calling,” Mr Birmingham told ABC TV on Tuesday.

“What we don’t want is the type of Star Chamber model that brings down people like (former NSW premier) Gladys Berejiklian before even findings are made.

“We want to make sure that it’s a model that provides procedural fairness.

“Those types of (ICAC) models, that are all about Star Chamber models, headline-grabbing type approaches – they’re not about integrity.

“They seem to be about grabbing headlines.”

(Berejiklian voluntarily resigned. Icac does have closed hearings. Icac does not make findings, but gives a brief to the department of public prosecutions which decides whether or not to take it to court.)

Mostafa Rachwani

Members of the Chinese-Australian community have expressed disappointment after the Liberal MP for the seat of Chisholm, Gladys Liu, cancelled an appearance at a community forum.

Liu, who holds the Victorian seat by just 0.5%, was invited to the event hosted by the Chinese Interpreters and Translators Association of Australia on Sunday.

It was supposed to be a chance for the local Chinese-Australian community to question both Liu and the Labor candidate, Carina Garland, with translations provided.

Prof Charles Qin, president of the CITAA, told the Guardian that Liu’s manager “apologised profusely”, but said she had an urgent meeting that meant she couldn’t attend.

“When we started the event, I explained to the audience members what happened, and some people did express their disappointment.”

Qin said up to 80 people turned up and questioned Garland for an hour about a wide variety of topics. He said the event provided an opportunity for first generation migrants to engage with the candidates.

“It’s very important that the Chinese community and people who are interested in this are exposed to their policies and opinions as much as possible, so people can make an informed decision when they vote,” Qin said.

Prof Haiqing Yu, who attended the event, said Liu’s failure to appear at this and other events, such as one organised by the Chisholm Climate Forum, had been discussed on WeChat and “the overwhelming response has been disappointment”.

Liu did not respond to a request for comment.

There’s better news from Queensland today, with the state recording no Covid deaths overnight and 5,207 new cases.

A Sydney man has been sentenced to more than 12 years’ jail, three decades after murdering a US mathematician at a Sydney gay beat, AAP reports.

The jail sentence was handed down Tuesday by justice Helen Wilson, who found that in a hostile act Scott White had punched Scott Johnson at North Head in Manly, causing the doctor to fall to his death.

“[White] did a violent act and that act is the direct cause of Dr Johnson leaving the clifftop in terror,” the judge said.

The fatal assault was done with reckless indifference to human life, with White throwing the punch near the unguarded edge of a high coastal cliff and then fleeing the scene without notifying the police after Johnson disappeared over the edge.

Justice Wilson found there was not enough evidence to show that the murder was a gay hate crime, however, because White had met Johnson at the Brighton Hotel and the pair had willingly gone to the gay beat together.

The outcome ends a long-running ordeal for Johnson’s family who pursued justice for more than three decades, refusing to believe an initial police inquest which found the death was a suicide.

White’s sentence follows an emotional NSW supreme court hearing on Monday where Johnson’s family members described the tragedy and heartbreak that the death and following 33 years had brought.

After the hearing, brother Steve Johnson told reporters that speaking in court was a chance to look White right in the eyes.

“I got to tell [White] what my brother was like. I got to tell him how it felt to hear that he was dead … I have to think it sunk in. He watched and listened,” he said.

An appeal of White’s conviction has already been filed after his defence team failed to overturn his guilty plea in January.

White was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in jail, and will be eligible for parole after eight years and three months.

While the initial 1989 inquest found Johnson’s death was a suicide, the case was reopened in 2012. Another inquest returned an open finding in 2012, but a third in 2017 found Johnson fell from Manly’s North Head clifftops because of violence by an unidentified attacker who perceived him to be gay.

#Auspol

This is happening in Melbourne at the moment:

Q: Prime minister, do you think that a rate rise today would have been a bit of a blow to your campaign, interesting you are campaigning on economic management? And considering the last rate rise in 2007 saw John Howard lose?

Scott Morrison:

Well, I’ve made this point a couple of times. At that time in 2007, the cash rate was 6.5%. Today, it’s 0.1%. At that time, there was not a war in Europe.

At that time, we had not just been through a global pandemic. And we weren’t seeing the massive supply chain disruptions that we’re seeing and continue to this day including up in China, which has significantly locked down which is putting further pressure on prices. And the transport and logistics issues in terms of international sea freight which is pushing up prices, and of course the impact of floods and natural disasters which has a particular impact on fruit and vegetable prices.

So I think those situations are very different. So what are these pressures about that are impacting on interest rates? The Labor party’s argument seems to be that it has been the government. Well, what is the spending that they disagree with that is putting pressure on interest rates?

Do they think we shouldn’t have cut the petrol tax by half? Do they think would shouldn’t have given pensioners $250? Do they think we shouldn’t have allowed Australians to keep $420 more of what they earn in tax cuts?

Do they think we shouldn’t have tax rates that mean if you’re on $90,000 a day, that you’re paying $50 a week less tax than you would have been on Labor’s? Do they think we shouldn’t have done jobkeeper? Or shouldn’t have had the cashflow boost? Or the instant asset write-off which kept all these businesses in place?

If they think those policies were wrong and have put pressure on interest rates, they should say so. They should be honest with Australians, because Australians know the pressures that we’re facing here in Australia are real.

They are overwhelmingly being determined by things beyond Australia. And what they do know is our government has put up an economic shield for Australians, Australian businesses, Australian jobs, Australian incomes, to get us through one of the worst crises we’ve seen in generations. Thanks very much, everyone.

(Labor has been pointing to the lack of wage rises, not the pandemic spending).

Q: Do you acknowledge there are pressures that will be coming to bear on households as a result of even a small rise in the cash rate today? What do you say to those people? The government has policy levers. Haven’t you failed to use them appropriately to make sure people aren’t under pressure?

Scott Morrison:

Yes, I do acknowledge that any movement in rates is of covers going to put pressure on those who are paying extra. For an average mortgage, for a 25 basis point increase, what you’re looking at there is just over 80 bucks a month. But what I’m encouraged by is Australians have been aware of the pressures and that’s why they have switched from variable mortgages to fixed-rate mortgages.

Q: Not everyone, though.

Morrison:

No, but it’s gone from 20% to 40%. The other thing they’ve done is, if they’ve been on variable rates, is the amount of getting ahead of their mortgage has also doubled during the pandemic. My point about that is Australians have been taking wise decisions as the government has.

We’ve been doing what they have been doing.

Now, on top of that, the other thing we did working with Apra was to ensure that the lending practices of banks was making decisions on loans where they had to be sure that they could be meeting mortgage payments 300 basis points higher than the rate they were being offered. So there’s been prudent lending practices.

Australians, I think, have prepared themselves as best as they can for the pressures that are real and that we will face, the inflation pressures which, while strong here, are far greater in other advanced economies where that shield has not worked for them in the same way as it worked here.

So yes, it is real, and what I’m saying is we need to do everything we can, and are, to continue to shield Australia from these increasing pressures and there’s a very real question. Do you think Mr Albanese, who has never done a budget, who has never held a finance portfolio, is going to be more effective in doing that? Or myself and Josh Frydenberg and our team? I’ve done eight budgets and our economic plan has seen Australia through one of the worst if not the worst economic crisis we have seen since the great depression.

Q: Are you happy to leave this issue with AGL’s demerger to the market, given Mike Cannon-Brookes’ recent acquisition of shares in the company? Or do you favour AGL being able to proceed with its plan and decouple the retail and generation parts of the business?

Scott Morrison:

Well, firstly, that will be in the first instance, a matter for the company to resolve. It’s a matter for the company. But what we have been very clear about in how we’ve been managing these issues is we want to ensure that there is a reliable and affordable energy in the market.

And where we’ve had to make interventions like the Koori Koori gas plant, we have. And we ensure that we take those actions. Why do we do that? Because if you allow electricity prices to rise by having unbalanced emissions reduction targets, then the price of all of this goes up. It just all goes up. I mean that’s the very conversation we’re having.

We’re talking about the cost of living and if you don’t support reliable, affordable energy and don’t have balanced targets on these things, then you’re going to put more pressure on families and households and small businesses.

Now, we’re doing the opposite. We’ve actually seen electricity prices fall under our … under my government in particular, fall by around 10%, because we did take on the big electricity retailers and big companies. We did put the big-stick regulations in place. We did get rid of those sneaky default deals that forced up people’s prices when they went to the default market offer.

We did do all these things and that happened keep prices down and with the gas security mechanism we ensured we had a memorandum of understanding which guaranteed the supply of gas in Australia, which means that we’re paying about a third to a quarter of the international price on gas now, which is also keeping electricity prices down. Now, these are the things we can do about price increases and it’s the same when it comes to managing the pressures on interest rates.

It’s ensuring you manage your finances well, you keep a strong economy, you maintain your AAA credit rating, you get people off welfare and into work and you have the right tax environment to see businesses grow and prosper as is happening right here.

Prices have dropped – largely because renewables came into the grid.

Q: On the RBA, everyone knows the Reserve Bank is independent but you’ve made a virtue of interest rates being lower under a Coalition government. So why shouldn’t you equally be held responsible if interest rates go up?

Scott Morrison:

Well, I do know that interest rates have fallen to 0.1% …

… You asked me a question. I’m saying what the facts are. I wasn’t making any conclusions about them. Interest rates are at historic lows. In the last 30 years, the average interest rate is 4.5%, so it’s obviously at a level that is well below what has been conventional and orthodox and we’ve seen that all around the world. I don’t make any great claim about that.

I remember when rates were falling back in 2019, the Labor party attacked us for rates falling and they said that was because of a weak economy. Now they want to make the argument that if rates rise that it’s because of economic management. Well, they can’t have it both ways.

We had the Labor shadow housing minister today saying rates needed to rise to improve housing affordability, so Labor is all over the place. I’m just simply saying this – I’m just saying there is serious pressure on interest rates around the world. I mean in the last 12 months, the IMF has more than doubled their estimates forecast for this year on inflation to well over 7% for this year from about the mid-3s. That’s what’s changed in the last 12 months.

That has changed massively and we know all the reasons why – war in Europe, supply chain disruptions and here for fruit and veg, we will continue to see the impacts of recent floods. We saw a bit of that in the latest inflation data but I suspect we will see more.

There is more pressure than we have seen. Those pressures are coming from those events. So the question is who do you think will be better able to manage those pressures? A government that has had an economic plan, that has taken us through the worst economic challenges since the great depression? Or Mr Albanese, who’s never had a finance portfolio in his entire time in parliament, has never done a Bbdget, and an inexperienced Labor team?

Who is going to be better able to manage those serious, significant pressures that families, households and businesses will face? That’s what this election is about.