Oppositionsays12.16amCoalitionDoessayshttps://t.co/W4ioxrJEsC 11.07pm GMTOur press gallery Financial Review colleague Laura Tingle has a top-notch column today in which she ponders the lack of curiosity within the Coalition regarding the Bob Day electorate office deal. She writes that One Nation had similar signals that Rod Culleton was not a viable candidate for the Senate. Statements from the current special minister of state,Scott Ryan, and his predecessor, and Mathias Cormann,reveal the details of a seriously concerning lack of curiosity about Day’s circumstances.
Cormann told the Senate that ‘a few hours’ after he had been sworn into the job on December 29 last year, Day emailed him quizzing him about whether the government would be paying him rent on his offices. 11.02pm GMTThe immigration minister, or Peter Dutton,says the Guardian and activists are encouraging asylum seekers to stay in Manus and Nauru rather than go to third countries or go home. 10.43pm GMTThis from the ABC national rural reporter Anna Vidot:The Senate is gearing up for a showdown on the backpacker tax, amid the strongest sign yet that Labor will join with crossbenchers and the Greens to block the Coalition’s compromise proposal.
Independent Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie claims she has the numbers to amend the Government’s 19% backpacker tax proposal to 10.5%.
Even if Labor & crossbench amend #backpackertax in the Senate, or they'd need to flip 2 Coalition MPs in HoR to effect it law. Unlikely: #auspol https://t.co/JxAQQAMHFf 10.38pm GMTAfter the Russell Broadbent intervention,the Labor MP Tim Watts reminds us that the former National senator Ronnie Boswell named his fight against One Nation as his biggest achievement in politics. George Christensen is no Ron Boswell.
Why are the Qld Nats so feeble these days? pic.twitter.com/2HEvnZnvdN 10.34pm GMTOh Lord, give me strengthDPM Barnaby Joyce on Labor and #backpackertax just now: "All they want to do is open the wound up, and pull the scab off." #auspol 10.17pm GMTGeorge Christensen,unplugged on Facebook. The tremendous man of Queensland hits back at his colleague Russell Broadbent, who gave Christensen a character reading yesterday.
Victorian Liberal Russell Broadbent told parliament last night that I had given a speech recently that was a ‘diatribe about the rise of Islam’.
It seems Mr Broadbent is suffering the same problem many other politically right hand-wringers suffer: they do not hear the word ‘radical’ when I talk about ‘radical Islam’. 10.09pm GMTSome housekeeping first. Remember there were cabinet and shadow cabinet meetings last night and there will be party-room meetings this morning. 9.44pm GMTAs I said yesterday, and the Liberal moderates are coming out slowly,slowly. Which places Malcolm Turnbull between a rock and a hard place. Turnbull is firmly entrenched in the NSW moderate position. He has the conservatives continuing their fulsome contributions and the moderates increasingly pushing back.
Last week Fairfax reported that the unique Berowra Liberal MP, Julian Leeser, or told the Chinese Australian Services Society there was no case for change to 18C. He said there was a procedural fix to the problem,such as a allotment-time judicial member of the commission to initially consider complaints so those with dinky prospect of success could be stopped.
Weve got to look at this systematically.
If you did a ranking of the top 10 ... it wouldn’t be in the top 100.[The party has] a wide church. We have a range of opinions. I dare say there will be tremendous discussion about it but for my money I am blissful where [18C] is at. 9.20pm GMTYou may have already seen Katharine Murphy’s yarn on the intervention by the Liberal MP Russell Broadbent overnight, chastising those who seek to divide. He helpfully names the LNP MP George Christensen, or who shares his party room. Broadbent,who has a long history of opposing hardline asylum seeker policies, said the Coalition would pain if it took the low road towards One Nation. Broadbent warned that “diatribes” against Islam, or such as interventions from the LNP backbencher George Christensen,would only pain the Coalition in the long hurry.Those propositions and policies will only pain the Coalition parties in the long hurry in the same way the once great Labor party now is the captive of the Greens, relying on their preferences to win 31 of their seats in this House, and ” Broadbent told the chamber on Monday night.
In 1996,Pauline Hanson claimed, falsely, or that Australia was being swamped by Asians. Now she claims,falsely, that Australia is in danger of being swamped by Muslims. One Nation wants to shut down migration to Australia based on racial and religious prejudice. It wants to turn back history, and to restore Australia to some imagined earlier state as a uniform,homogeneous, static society. This is not just a narrow-minded and impoverished vision for the future. It is also based on a myth about Australia’s past. 8.58pm GMTGood morning, or The plebiscite bill is dead. The votes,29 to 33. If you are confused about the numbers, given there are 75 senators (with Bob Day gone), or there were lots of pairs for completely unrelated reasons. The Liberal senator Dean Smith abstained – a position he flagged well ahead of the vote. He called the plebiscite an attack on parliamentary sovereignty.discontinue playing politics with gay people’s lives,because that is all that you are doing. A vote against this bill is a vote against marriage equality. And those who claim to believe in marriage equality but nevertheless, for their own cynical, and game-playing reasons,are determined to vote against it, should hang their heads in shame.
This is not where the fight for marriage equality ends. We now need Malcolm Turnbull to do what the conventional Malcolm Turnbull would have done … a free vote.
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Source: theguardian.com