Australia news live: jobseeker ‘incredibly difficult if not impossible’ to live on, David Pocock says | Australia news

The Albanese government has to decide if it wants people to think it is taking the climate crisis seriously, or whether it wants to continue supporting new oil and gas developments, writes environment editor Adam Morton.

Adam writes that while the Albanese government has made some progress in its first 100 days in government – passing legislation to enshrine a 43% emissions reduction target, supporting the offshore wind industry, encouraging the uptake of electric cars – it has also repeated the actions of previous governments in supporting new fossil fuel exploration.

He says the language from the government in supporting new oil and gas exploration permits, and a reference to the as yet unrealised promise of carbon capture and storage technology, “sounds a lot like climate denial”.

It was on display last week when the resources minister, Madeleine King, announced the release of new areas along the Australian coast for the oil and gas industry to explore and potentially exploit.

You can read Adam’s full column here:

Comanchero charged with murder

Comanchero bikie boss Tarek Zahed has been arrested and charged with the alleged murder of a man in Sydney’s west eight years ago, AAP reports.

Police arrested the 42-year-old during a vehicle stop on New South Head Road in Edgecliff at 4.50pm yesteray, after shooting out his car windows with rubber bullets.

He was taken to Surry Hills police station and later charged with the murder of 29-year-old Youssef Assoum on 11 December 2014.

Homicide squad commander Detective Superintendent Danny Doherty said Zahed was one of several Taskforce Erebus targets allegedly linked to serious crime:

We will be alleging this person is responsible for the killing of Mr Assoum in 2014 and that his senior position in the Comanchero OMCG links him to a number of other matters relevant to police.

Zahed – the Comanchero national sergeant-at-arms – was also charged with kidnap in company with intent to commit serious indictable offence (special aggravated kidnap).

He was refused bail and is set to appear at Downing Centre local court today.

Victoria paying more than $1.1m a day to imprison people on remand

The Victorian government is paying more than $1.1m a day to keep people on remand in prisons, Benita Kovolos reports.

The remand population in Victoria – that is, people who have not been sentenced and in many cases are awaiting trial, meaning they have not pleaded or been found guilty – has grown 140% in a decade, thanks in large part to a tightening of the state’s bail laws.

At the same time, the sentenced prisoner population has fallen, thanks in part to a reduction in jail terms due to the risk of Covid-19 in prisons.

You can read Benita’s full piece here:

NSW minister offers olive branch to rail unions

An olive branch has been offered to the NSW rail unions in a bid to end the long-running industrial stoush with the state government and avert another strike this week, AAP reports.

Employee relations minister Damien Tudehope says the government has withdrawn its requirement that a new enterprise agreement be reached before it begins modifications the union wants on the New Intercity Fleet (NIF). The sticking point in the protracted negotiations has been the government’s insistence the agreement be locked in before the modifications begin.

Tudehope said:

After appropriate testing and warranty confirmation, the government will immediately authorise the commencement of work to make the alterations to the NIF. The offer is conditional upon the rail unions agreeing that, pending the finalisation of the new enterprise agreement, all unions will call off any further industrial action.

The mothballed NIF has been at the centre of negotiations with the Rail, Tram and Bus Union, which maintains the trains are not yet safe to operate in NSW.

Transport minister David Elliott has put the price of modifications to the fleet at $1.1bn, or $264m “depending on how you account for the cost”.

The union has been conducting extensive industrial action including targeted, rolling stoppages throughout August. The action is due to culminate with workers refusing to operate foreign-made trains on Wednesday, which would affect about 70% of the fleet.

The offer will be discussed at a meeting between rail unions and government officials today.

The government statement said:

The NSW government urges the rail unions to accept this offer, and put a stop to its industrial action, today.

Push for full employment

Acoss, the ACTU and the Business Council of Australia have released a joint policy paper saying that achieving and sustaining full employment should be the “guiding framework” of the jobs and skills summit.

That would include “reducing inequity and removing barriers to participation in the labour market”.

Which, according to Acoss acting CEO Edwina MacDonald, would mean raising the jobseeker rate.

In a joint statement with the ACTU and BCA, MacDonald said:

If the hundreds of thousands of people who are looking for paid work are supported to join the workforce, that will be a win for those currently left out, a win for employers, and a big step towards Full Employment in Australia.

We proudly stand with unions and business ready to work together with Government to find less brutal ways to contain inflation and address labour shortages, so that our incomes can grow again, the quality of jobs – including in essential care services – improves, and no one is left behind.

Jobseeker rate lobbying

As mentioned earlier, the jobseeker rate will be among reforms discussed at the jobs and skills summit this week.

The Australian Council of Social Skills has said it will lobby the government to make the reform a “core goal” in a bid to reduce the social harm of joblessness, particularly for 750,000 long-term unemployed people.

Acting Acoss CEO Edwina MacDonald said:

With ambition and commitment we can create an economy where people secure the jobs and paid working hours they need, wages and other incomes – including jobseeker payment – are growing again, and no one is left behind.

You can read Peter Hannam’s article on this here:

Australia announces $31.5m in medical research grants

Hamilton bound for Brisbane

Hamilton is coming to Brisbane, and creator Lin-Manuel Miranda spoke to ABC News Breakfast this morning from inside what appeared to be a space capsule.

Hamilton has already opened in Melbourne and Sydney.

Miranda told the ABC:

Hamilton always kind of surpasses every hope I had for it. I remember thinking as I was writing it, ‘I hope there are enough history teachers that will take their classes that we’ll hopefully run for a few years and make our money back for our investors’ … it just continues to resonate with people and I can’t explain that.

He said he was proud the show had supported and promoted hundreds of non-white actors around the world:

That’s one of the things I think I’m proudest of is that so often Hamilton is the first entry in an incredibly talented actor’s CV. And I know that from anecdotal evidence, that the Australian cast are like rockstars in Australia and I can’t wait to see what they do next and I’m thrilled that we get to be a footnote in their journey as artists.

John Farnham in intensive care after cancer surgery

The singer remains in a stable condition in intensive care, according to a statement released by his family this morning.

The Farnham family said they wanted to acknowledge and thank everyone for their ongoing messages and well wishes that have been shared throughout the last week:

It really lifts our spirits knowing that everyone is thinking of John.

Jill Farnham said:

John remains in a stable condition in ICU following the removal of a cancerous tumour in his mouth on Tuesday. He is awake and responding well to the care he’s receiving.

Pocock pushes for scrapping of stage-three tax cuts

Independent senator David Pocock was on RN speaking about the stage-three tax cuts, which he says should be “resisted” – no matter what was promised before the election.

What I’ve said is that they should be revisited … [Anthony Albanese] has a really strong case to relook at these these tax cuts and see what what else that could actually be spent on, given the you know the huge amount of money that they represent.

Pocock said the money could instead be spent on raising the Medicare rebate, fully electrifying homes or any number of reforms. (If you want to see how you would spend the $243bn that would be saved by scrapping the cuts, try out our interactive here.)

Pocock said Australia “should have a sensible discussion about this”:

Things have changed a lot since these were where they decided. We’ve had bushfires, a global pandemic. We’ve had flooding and stagnant wages, and now people are in a cost-of-living crisis across the country. And so I just don’t think that we can justify handing out $240bn over the next 10 years to the wealthiest Australians.

Will jobseeker be raised?

Lifting jobseeker from $46 to $70 a day will be raised at the jobs and skills summit – it has already been raised in submissions – but employment minister Tony Burke has poured cold water on hopes that it will be implemented at this stage:

Ultimately, when we hit the budget in October – which is where these issues get reviewed every year – when you look at the budget, there will be things that we want to do that we can’t do. And that’s the reality of a trillion dollars of Liberal debt, particularly as inflation goes up. That debt now costs a lot more than it costs even a year ago.

So there will be things that that we would want to do that people would like us to do that aren’t going to be possible as an example. It’s basically saying, ‘Yeah, this is just too too expensive.’

Asked by Patricia Karvelas whether the low rate of the jobseeker payment creates an “inability to get yourself job ready”, Burke said there were employment programs designed to provide support to people.

He referred to the Workforce Australia jobs program which has had teething issues:

We’re only in the second month of that new system. A lot of it was designed before we came to office and the contracts had all been signed before we came into office. So I’m still very mindful of what we can do. But the the challenges of the people who are in the system right now are exactly as you’ve described.

Incidentally, independent senator for the ACT David Pocock, who will be at the first day of the summit, does support an increase to the jobseeker rate.

He told Radio National:

I think to live on $46 a day is incredibly difficult if not impossible.

Burke signals he’s open to change on better-off-overall test

Tony Burke also said he may be open to a change to the better-off-overall test (Boot), a change he has previously resisted:

Up until the summit I’ve been pretty hardline on the better-off-overall test. And I took the view that if I was expecting everybody else, to come forward with compromises and to try to find a way together at the summit, that I should be willing to do the same.

So while I’m very careful and wary of changes to the better-off-overall test, I’m not ruling out that we might be able to find compromises that that makes the whole system work more effectively.

Link to closing gender pay gap

Tony Burke said even if the reform were adopted, “the main form of bargaining will continue to be enterprise bargaining”:

Directly between workers and employers will, I think, always be the agreements that are most common.

But particularly in small businesses, the agreements that hadn’t been possible had been agreements in industries like childcare, like aged care, like smaller retail, and when you look at those industries, in pretty much every case you’re looking at workplaces where the majority of people working there women. [They] are the ones that have tended to miss out on bargaining. There’s a direct link between this conversation and some of the things we need to do to close the gender pay gap.

Minister welcomes multi-employer collective bargaining deal

Employment minister Tony Burke is speaking on Radio National about the agreement between unions and small business to work on multi-employer collective bargaining.

(We have an explainer on multi-employer collective bargaining here.)

Burke said this agreement was “exactly the sort of cooperation we’ve been hoping to achieve with the summit”:

When the concept of multi-employer bargaining was first flagged by the ACLU last week, I leant in saying I was very interested in it. And one of the areas that really caused me to be interested is small business, effectively for both employers and for workers.

If you’re in small business right now, you are cut out of any of the benefits of enterprise bargaining … a small business doesn’t have an HR department. They don’t have the resources to do this. I grew up in a small business family myself, I’ve run my own small business. I know that you’re you’re spending your day on the fundamentals of the business and something like bargaining is something that you’re not going to have the opportunity to be engaged with.

Multi-employer is the only way that you’re going to have a chance to significantly open this up to the small business sector.

‘The current bargaining system was not built for us’

Alexi Boyd, the CEO of the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia, said small business had been “looking for a way forward” on workplace reform, and particularly workplace bargaining, “for a long time”:

We do not have resources that are available to big business with lawyers and HR departments. The current bargaining system was not built for us, it is not efficient and is too complicated. We welcome the opportunity to explore new flexible single or multi-employer options that can be customised to our circumstances. The one size fits all approach doesn’t work … Small business is seeking an environment that is conducive to employ more people and that reduces the complexity of compliance.

ACTU secretary Sally McManus said unions were committed to working with small business “to put in place bespoke and modern agreements that are easy to administer and suit the needs of employees and business owners”:

The current enterprise focused system was built for an economy of 30 years ago, it needs to be upgraded and work for the economy of today. The employees of small businesses, and their owners, should be able to access the same benefits from bargaining that bigger businesses have enjoyed.

Unions and small business agree to workplace reform principles

Jobs and skills summit explainer

Lifting wages and productivity and easing skill shortages will be at the top of the agenda at the jobs and skills summit this week, Paul Karp explains

The guest list is tight and has not yet been released in full. It will comprise of 30% employers and their representatives, 30% workers and unions, 30% subject matter experts and representatives from the community, education, employment services and social services sectors, and 10% from government.

You can read Paul’s full explainer here:

Construction of Australia’s new warship fleet to begin in May

Tory Shepherd

Good morning