Australia news live: PM to announce clean energy projects; property market losing heat but prices still going up | Australia news

Josh Butler

Special minister of state Don Farrell has announced Jeffrey Pope as the new acting Australian Electoral Commissioner, to take on that role from mid-December.

Pope has been the deputy AEC commissioner since 2016, and made “significant contributions” to the 2023 referendum process and recent federal elections, Farrell said.

“This appointment marks the end of a successful 11-year term for the current electoral commissioner, Mr Tom Rogers,” the minister said in a statement.

Farrell thanked Rogers for his work at the 2016, 2019 and 2022 elections, as well as the 2023 referendum, and praised him for overseeing significant reforms in Australia’s electoral process.

“Mr Rogers leaves a legacy of stable leadership and a stronger democracy,” he said.

Farrell appoints Pope as parliament watchers eagerly await the final details of the government’s new electoral reforms, which will propose changes around spending caps and donations at elections. We understand that legislation is now slated to appear in mid-November, just before the parliament finished for the year.

‘I haven’t worked that out’: Robbie Katter asked about his abortion strategy in Queensland

Back to Robbie Katter on ABC RN a short while ago.

Asked whether he would amend Queensland’s abortion legislation or repeal it, Katter said he hasn’t worked it out. He said he was “pulled” into the abortion debate and that it wasn’t meant to be a priority of the campaign:

I was pushed to give a response saying that there’s backbenchers that would say, if they were given the opportunity and they would to turn things around, they would. And they said, ‘Would you entertain that?’ I said, ‘Of course I would, like, that’s what we do.’ And so I responded to a question, and then, you know, blew up from there. And everyone started hitting me up for for details on that. And they said, well, look, I don’t have, I didn’t set out to, this one isn’t one of my priorities for the new government.

But if you ask me, yes, I would try and turn things around, and to what degree, whether that’s, you know, 22 weeks thing, or 16 weeks or 22 weeks, or repeal or new bill and amendment, I haven’t worked that out, Steve, and I’m sorry I can’t give you more detail, but it wasn’t sort of front of centre of my consciousness when I entered the campaign and I got pulled into the debate.

The Katter’s Australia party leader has vowed to introduce a private member’s bill to wind back abortion rights and access that would notionally spark a conscience vote.

One person dead after car crash in Victoria

One person has died in a two-vehicle collision in Nyora around 5:20am this morning, according to a statement from Victoria police.

It is believed a male driver in a Holden sedan was travelling along the South Gippsland Highway when they collided head-on with a silver Mazda hatchback at the intersection of Nyora-St Helier Road, as put in the statement.

The driver of the sedan, yet to be formally identified, died at the scene.

The driver of the hatchback, a Poowong man in his 30s, sustained serious injuries and was airlifted to hospital for treatment.

Investigations are ongoing. The exact cause of the collision is yet to be determined.

Babies deserve representation in parliament, Robbie Katter says

Robbie Katter, the Katter’s Australia party leader, says babies deserve representation in parliament.

In the final weeks of the Queensland state election campaign, Katter vowed to introduce a private member’s bill to wind back abortion rights and access that would notionally spark a conscience vote.

He was asked on ABC RN this morning: “An argument you hear in the US, and it’s an argument you hear in Australia, that it’s always men who seem to want to change laws about women’s reproductive rights. What would you say to them?”

Katter said:

I’d say there’s a lot of babies that are males and females, and there’s 93 members of parliament in Queensland, and looks like [there will] again be four that vote against that vote for pro life. So there’s pretty strong representation for inverted commas, women, those women. And, you know, I think that the babies deserve to have some representation as well. And four is a pretty small number in the Queensland parliament, but I think those babies deserve representation. A lot of those women you speak of, they were babies once too, and I’m sure they would have preferred to have some representation when they were babies as well.

Labor decriminalised abortion in 2018 and has sought to put the issue at the forefront of the campaign, saying there is a “very real risk” that reproductive rights will be wound back if the LNP wins government. Read more from Ben Smee’s report here:

The significance of Thorpe’s royal protest

Independent senator for Victoria Lidia Thorpe’s protest before King Charles in the Great Hall of Parliament House last week caught news attention around the globe.

While it prompted a few reactions, it also started a conversation about the British monarchy’s role in the lasting legacy of colonisation for First Nations people.

For today’s Full Story podcast, Reged Ahmad speaks to political editor Karen Middleton on why Australians can’t stop talking about the royal protest and what it means for Thorpe’s role as a senator.

Listen here:

Bowen deflects question about PM’s Qantas flight upgrades

Climate and energy minister Chris Bowens says Anthony Albanese is not focused on political debates “about what conversations he may or may not have had”, after reports of the prime minister seeking free Qantas flight upgrades directly from Alan Joyce while serving as transport minister and opposition leader.

He said on ABC Radio National:

The opposition can focus on the cost of Qantas flights for their life. The Labor party and the prime minister is focused on cost of living for ordinary Australians. Whether it be the cost of housing and a housing package we want to get through cost of energy and our reforms there.

I mean, Anthony Albanese is, I can tell you, as a senior member of his cabinet, focused like the laser on these issues, not on these sort of political debates about what he may conversations he may or may not have had, you know, 10 or 15 years ago. He’s focused on issues today.

Bowen derides Coalition’s ‘nuclear fantasy’

Chris Bowen, minister for climate change and energy, is speaking on ABC Radio National this morning.

He says going “down the nuclear road” for power is not playing to Australia’s strengths:

If I was the energy minister of another country, I would consider the opportunities that I had in that country – but a country saying to Australia, with our excellent renewable resources, that we should go down the nuclear road when we have no nuclear industry, no nuclear expertise of the scale that we would need for a nuclear power industry, is like us going to Finland or Scandinavia and saying, ‘Listen, we know [you have] a lot of snow, but you should really try beach surfing.’ It just doesn’t make any sense.

We have to play to our strengths in Australia, and we have the best renewable resources in the world, and the opposition wants to stop us using them, and in turn, keep coal in the system for longer. They’re quite explicit about that while we wait for this nuclear fantasy to come on board. That would be terrible for emissions and fatal for energy reliability.

The opposition leader Peter Dutton’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants has recently been scrutinised by government agencies and department officials. Read about it here:

Benita Kolovos

Victorian Greens criticise Labor’s housing plan

The Victorian Greens leader, Ellen Sandell, has dismissed Jacinta Allan’s criticism, arguing her party has been campaigning for years for more housing:

“The difference between the Greens and Labor is that the Greens want this housing to be genuinely affordable, yet Labor’s plan will only build expensive, luxury apartments. Labor’s plan leaves things totally in the hands of profit-driven developers who have no interest in building homes for young people, nurses, teachers – the people who actually need them.”

Dr David Hayward, an emeritus professor of public policy at RMIT, welcomed the Greens’ plan, arguing the private sector undersupplied housing to maximise profits:

You can deregulate as much as you want, but unless those private actors can get their financial return, they’re not going to build what you want. The direct intervention proposed by the Greens is a way of plugging that gap. A state-owned builder wouldn’t be the main player, just an additional one. It could even be a not-for-profit that does it, it doesn’t really matter, as long as the motivation is not financial return. The main driver is the need to provide housing.

La Niña looking more unlikely for the coming summer

Peter Hannam

As we’ve flagged for a while, it’s looking unlikely that we’ll see a La Niña weather event in the Pacific this summer.

The latest Bureau of Meteorology models place just a 4% chance that La Niña thresholds will be crossed in January (and less of a chance in December and February).

The bureau will provide a fuller update of the main climate drivers this afternoon.

La Niñas tend to mean we get wetter than usual weather over much of the country, particularly in eastern Australia (and more tropical cyclones than the average).

However, conditions in the Indian Ocean are tilted towards the negative phase of the ocean’s dipole (which measures temperature differences across the basin). These indicate we might still get a relatively damp end to spring going into summer.

And that’s what the bureau’s outlooks indicate too. That summer umbrella might turn out to be handy for both the rain and the sun.

Benita Kolovos

Greens policy costings

The policy is similar to a federal Greens proposal announced in March. Based on a federal Parliamentary Budget Office costing conducted at the time, it was forecast renters could save more than $122 a week a household and first home buyers $260,157 on a home, compared with median prices.

But the costing rested on the assumption that state and territory governments would also agree to waive stamp duty, which the PBO warned was unlikely to occur.

The Victorian Greens are also calling for more homes to be sold than the federal plan, in which 75% would be rentals.

Last week Jacinta Allan made several announcements designed to stimulate development in Melbourne’s inner suburbs, with the most significant being a plan to densify 50 areas near train and tram stations.

Allan on Thursday vowed to be “the premier who gets millennials into homes” and described both the Liberals and Greens as “blockers”.

Victorian Greens call for state-owned housing developer

Benita Kolovos

The Victorian Greens are calling on the state government to enter the property development game, saying Labor’s plan to get more millennials into the housing market will not work without such an intervention.

In response to a series of housing announcements made last week by the premier, Jacinta Allan, the minor party is calling on the government to set up a “public builder” to construct affordable homes.

Under the Green’s plan, a state-owned developer would build 200,000 homes over the next 20 years and sell half for just 5% above the cost of construction. The remainder would be rented out for a maximum of 25% of household income.

Distinct from public housing, the homes would be available for the wider public to buy or rent, though the party wants households on the social housing waitlist to be prioritised for rentals.

They say the homes would be located near train stations and in regional areas and would be funded initially through “taxing big corporations”, revenue collected from the state’s vacant property and short-stay taxes, and a contribution from the commonwealth.

Rafqa Touma

Thank you Martin Farrer for kicking off the blog this morning!

I’ll be rolling your live news updates throughout the day – if you see anything you don’t want us to miss, shoot it my way on X (formerly Twitter) @At_Raf_

Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth performing better than other capital city property markets

More on that housing price story from AAP:

Domain’s Nicola Powell said apartments performing better than houses in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne was evidence of stretched affordability and buyers seeking out the less expensive options.

Inflation and wage growth – robust but not enough to keep up with the housing market – was weighing on demand, along with high interest rates clipping borrowing capacity.

She said buyers were “waiting on the sidelines” for firmer signals on interest rate moves.

In the September quarter, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth continued to do better than other capital city property markets.

House prices in Adelaide gained another 4.2%, 3.1% in Perth and 1.5% in Brisbane.

Homebuyer budgets are finding a ceiling, slowing the pace of property price growth, Australian Associated Press reports.

Domain chief of research and economics, Nicola Powell, says the housing market appears to be shifting in favour of buyers.

“Supply is rising, days on the market are lengthening, discounting is also increasing,” she told AAP.

“Everything points to a slowdown overall, and it’s very possible that we could see a dip in price even over the final quarter of this year, on that aggregate capital city level.”

However, prices were still going up in the three months to September.

Domain recorded 0.8% growth in the quarter and slightly more for units, with both finding record highs.

But prices are not rising as fast, with the pace of quarterly house prices in Sydney and Perth growing half as quickly as in the previous quarter.

Albanese to announce clean energy projects in NSW and Victoria

Karen Middleton

Anthony Albanese is due to announce two more clean energy-related projects in NSW and Victoria aimed at transitioning Australia’s energy production and workforce away from fossil fuels.

Albanese will announce federal funding for both projects under his government’s Future Made in Australia scheme and contrast them with the Coalition’s plans to develop nuclear power stations at seven sites around Australia if it wins office.

Albanese will travel to the NSW Hunter region on Tuesday to announce a new $60m “net zero manufacturing centre of excellence” at a Tafe campus in Newcastle, to be jointly funded with the NSW government. The centre will develop a new apprenticeship model focused on the skills required for modern, clean-energy manufacturing, training workers for jobs in the Hunter-Central Coast renewable energy zone.

He will then travel to Wodonga in Victoria to announce a $17m federal funding injection for the nation’s first concentrated solar thermal heat plant, expanding the application of solar power beyond electricity to heat generation.

The government says the project will involve an 18 megawatt thermal plant with up to 10 hours’ storage capacity which it says will halve the use of gas where it is installed and generate 80 jobs during construction. He will say:

Creating jobs, investing in our regions, reducing emissions and bringing down power prices – that’s what we’re delivering.

Renewable energy is bringing new jobs and new industry across our country, including regional Australia.

He is expected to demand again that opposition leader, Peter Dutton, reveal the costings for his nuclear-energy plans.

Good morning and welcome to our live news blog. I’m Martin Farrer with the best of the overnight stories before Rafqa Touma picks up the slack.

Australian schools have an “urgent need” for support services to help pupils at risk of stigma, discrimination and violence as a major survey indicates that more than 10% are LGBTQ+ or gender-diverse. More than one in 10 Australian teenagers in the survey identified as gay, bisexual, pansexual or asexual, with 3.3% of the more than 6,000 questioned identifying as gender-diverse.

The Victorian Greens are calling on the state government to enter the property development game, saying Labor’s plan to get more millennials into the housing market will not work without such an intervention. We’ll have a full post coming up and we also have an op-ed piece today from housing policy expert Peter Mares who argues that only government intervention can redirect development to the kind of “middle-density” type needed to solve the crisis.

Meanwhile, Domain’s chief economist says the property market is beginning to cool and move in favour of buyers. Research by the property company shows that prices rose in the last quarter by 0.8% but the rate of increase is slowing, with the pace in Sydney and Perth, for example, half as quick as in the previous quarter. More coming up.

Anthony Albanese is due to announce two more clean-energy-related projects in NSW and Victoria today, aimed at transitioning Australia’s energy production and workforce away from fossil fuels. Details coming up.