Turns out you can have housing policies that don’t put “upwards pressure” on prices. Greg Jericho names five:
Peter Hannam
While the attention has been on Australia’s housing market and what campaign promises might do for prices (the more “effective”, the bigger the demand boost), China has been sending out fresh warning signs.
China is Australia’s biggest trading partner and the dynamo for most of the world’s growth for the past couple of decades. A whole bunch of April stats show China’s zero Covid policy is becoming a big drag on growth.
Retail sales in April were 11.1% lower than a year ago, and industrial output was off 3%, reversing a 5% expansion in March, Westpac said:
Concerns over China’s economy are playing a role in the fall in the prices of base metals that Australia exports. Iron ore prices are also trending lower, slipping under US$130 a tonne for the first time since January.
The Australia dollar has dutifully slumped towards two-year lows of about 68 US cents.
That said, the signs probably aren’t all bad, including the fact that China’s energy mix shifted a bit last month, with a drop-off in coal use while renewables jumped.
Fewer emissions from the world’s biggest polluter are to be welcomed.
Huge drop in coal-fired power generation in China in April: thermal power (mainly coal) -12% on year. The industrial & construction slowdown continued, COVID lockdowns hit electricity demand, wind&solar had strong growth at 15% and 25%, and hydropower conditions were good (+17%).
— Lauri Myllyvirta (@laurimyllyvirta) May 16, 2022
And China’s car industry (not much bigger in units than the US) is also shifting gears … or rather charging faster into electric vehicles, which don’t have gears at all.
Electric vehicles continue to soar. Output more than doubled, again, in Jan-Apr on year, while overall auto production fell. EVs made up a record 21% of all vehicles produced!
— Lauri Myllyvirta (@laurimyllyvirta) May 16, 2022
A Chinese car industry advisor told me years ago that his advice to local automakers was that they should be prepared to phase out internal combustion-engined cars by 2025. That’s probably a bit ambitious given we’re at 2022 but the direction of travel is clearly going one way.
Kenny is now suggesting former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has to be expelled from the party over his support for teal independents. He needs to think about his membership, Ruston says, then segues into a spiel about the independents in a time of global insecurity.
“They want to destabilise,” she says.
Liberal senator Anne Ruston is on Sky News. She says the Coalition has a “really comprehensive suite of measures” to get young people into housing.
Host Chris Kenny asks her if it will push up house prices. She says their policies deal with the supply side as well, and points to the policy to give people incentives to downsize from the family home.
“We would hope to see a number of properties come on to the market,” she says.
Fair Work Commission decision on domestic violence leave ‘a historic win’: ACTU
Elias Visontay
Australian workers should be able to access 10 days of paid domestic violence leave, according to an in principle decision from the Fair Work Commission.
Monday afternoon’s decision from the full bench of the commission covers the roughly one in four Australian workers covered by modern award provisions.
According to the commission’s provisional view, the 10 days of family and domestic violence (FDV) leave would accrue progressively, but would be subject to a cap whereby the total entitlement does not exceed 10 days at any given time.
The commissioners found: “10 days paid FDV leave is an emerging industrial standard in bargaining and over-award arrangements. We find that such an entitlement, where provided, provides significant assistance to those experiencing FDV in that it helps individuals to maintain their economic security, to access relevant services and to safely exit to a life free from violence”.
We also find that the introduction of paid FDV leave is likely to be of some, albeit difficult to quantify, benefit to employers through reducing absenteeism and lost productivity caused by FDV.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions, which filed the claim for the 10 days of FDV leave, welcomed the decision, and called on the Morrison government to extend the leave to everyone covered by the National Employment Standards (NES) – which is about 11 million workers. The Labor party has already committed to this.
ACTU president, Michele O’Neill, called Monday’s decision “a historic win and a generational achievement for millions of women”.
Already this year 18 women have been killed by their current or previous partner. Access to paid family and domestic violence leave saves lives. No worker should ever have to choose between their income and their safety.
The difference between this entitlement being in the award system and the NES cannot be overstated. Failing to include it in the NES would deny access to millions of working people.
There have been 7,807 Covid deaths recorded in Australia since the start of the pandemic:
Paul Karp
Scott Morrison has wrapped up his flying visit to Cairns.
Because the Association of Independent Retirees division meets in the Cairns District Darts Association hall, Morrison initially appeared to think he was visiting a sporting club, asking a pair of retirees if they were members of the club and “how’s their aim”.
Liberal MP Warren Entsch set him straight that he was meeting the retirees who he called the “circle of wisdom” who “helped create what we have here in beautiful Cairns”.
Entsch also said it was good Morrison brought his wife, Jenny, along, telling her that she looks “way better than your husband”. Jenny has been a fixture in this last week – at the Hindu Council on Saturday, the launch on Sunday and all his events today.
Morrison addressed the group by talking about a number of changes to help retirees including extending the commonwealth seniors health card to 50,000 more people, freezing deeming rates and ensuring they don’t limit eligibility for the pension, and extending relief on minimum draw-down rates from super.
Morrison boosted Entsch, saying he has a “long list” of things to do for Cairns and “his job is not done yet”.
It will be up to voters on Saturday to decide if Entsch will join the retirees and find more time for darts.
Is the Coalition’s housing policy super? Sarah Martin and Jane Lee discuss the announcement dominating the debate (for now):
On Morrison saying he’s been a bulldozer and will change, Pyne says people like it when leaders admit they could do better:
I think he’s admitting that he hasn’t always got it right. I think Australians like that.
Adeshola Ore
Controversial Victorian Liberal MP Bernie Finn will face a move to expel him from the parliamentary party, forcing him to sit on the crossbench ahead of the state election in November.
Finn came under fire this month after he said he was “praying” for abortion to be banned in Australia. Last week he resigned as the opposition’s whip in the state’s upper house last week days after posting the comments on social media.
Guardian Australia understands the motion to expel him from the parliamentary Liberal party has the support of senior MPs and is expected to pass.
Opposition leader Matthew Guy said it was “imperative” that Liberal MPs were “solely focused on recovering and rebuilding Victoria”. He said:
A continued lack of discipline and repeated actions detrimental to the party’s ability to stand up for the interests of Victorians has left no other option but to consider Mr Finn’s eligibility to represent the Liberal party.
And former minister Christopher Pyne himself is up now. He says the policy is “clever” (he was very disparaging of the idea of using super savings for housing in 2017).
But he says people are conflating two Coalition policies – the super part, and the part that helps older people downsize. One “cancels out the other”, he says.
ABC host Greg Jennett suggests to Bragg that their policy will only be helpful for higher income earners or older people who have more in their super accounts. Bragg says their policy is a “reasonable starting point” and that the deposit needed in Sydney will be different to that needed in Tasmania.
Burns says the policy is a “brainfart” from Scott Morrison:
It’s not the Labor party who have opposed this policy. It’s been Peter Dutton, Malcolm Turnbull, Sussan Ley, a whole cavalry of Liberal party members who think it’s an absurd idea. Christopher Pyne rubbished it in the past as well. The Liberal party knows it’s a bad idea.
Liberal senator Andrew Bragg is next in line on the ABC. He’s a longterm supporter of letting people use their super to buy a home:
I’ve been an advocate for using super for housing and many models that have been bandied around and there are many ways you can deploy super to ensure people can get access to a first home. This is one good model.
He’s pretty critical of the superannuation industry.
Labor’s Josh Burns says it will “run a bulldozer through people’s retirement savings:
If this was a good idea, Scott Morrison would have done it in the first decade he had in office. But he didn’t. He’s doing it in the last week of an election campaign.
He says Labor’s policy is different because they’re planning to build thousands of homes for social housing, for women fleeing domestic violence, and it’s aimed at low and middle income earners.
If the Liberal party moved to the centre, Ryan says, she’d vote for it:
If it represented my values in the way I wished it to, in ways that it did when I was a child.