Follow live as we bring you all the news from the election campaign trail.
Follow live as we bring you all the news from the election campaign trail.
The Greens have announced a plan to lower the retirement age from 67 to 65 and increase the age pension above the poverty line.
Greens leader Adam Bandt, who made the announcement in the party’s target seat of Richmond in northern NSW, said lowering the pension age would – on average – boost the average amount received by those affected by $18,000 a year. That includes the currently 54,000 JobSeeker recipients aged over 65 who would move onto the age pension.
“In a wealthy country like ours, no one should retire into poverty,” he said. “The Greens will fight for the right to retire earlier at 65, with an income that will actually pay the bills and support older Australians to enjoy the retirement they deserve.”
Bandt said the commitment would largely benefit older women who are more likely than men to face poverty in old age.
With just a week until polling day, more than half of Australians can’t name a policy from either major party they believe will improve their lives.
Despite the campaign frenzy, 62 per cent of their audience can’t think of a policy they believe would improve their lot, polling commissioned by AAP and modelled by YouGov reveals.
Of the 38 per cent of survey recipients who could name a life-improving policy, most nominated Medicare and bulk-billing, followed by energy relief and general cost-of-living measures.
YouGov director of public data Paul Smith said Labor-led promises were getting more traction than the coalition’s offerings.
“The public perceived one campaign to be doing satisfactorily and one to be doing very badly,” he told AAP. “And they’re having to choose between them.”
Australia is in a Truman Show election campaign. Both major parties are carefully, wilfully myopic. They direct our attention to details of domestic affairs as if Australia can carry on undisturbed. It’s an artificial reality in a contained environment.
The leaders occasionally acknowledge the larger world outside. Like the directors of The Truman Show, they can’t conceal that there is a reality beyond the sound stage of Truman Burbank’s idyllic village, but they prefer to avoid the fact that a historic upheaval is under way.
One consequence is that many of the programs and promises of the campaign will be unaffordable or irrelevant once the ads stop and the corflutes are packed away.
Read more here.
We’re on the campaign trail with the prime minister, who has been campaigning in Wheelers Hill this morning. Here are some pictures.
Dutton has seemingly decided he has had enough of the prickly inquisitions that had begun to characterise his daily press conferences.
Several media events earlier in the week featured tense long and exchanges with reporters. He received repeat questions from individual reporters on his views on trans women, immigration numbers, public service cuts, and other tricky topics.
Today, Dutton took a leaf from Albanese’s playbook and said journalists would get one question each. He often ignored follow-ups by moving around the circle of assembled reporters to the next question. One or two follow-ups were acknowledged by Dutton, but it was an overall more controlled affair than earlier in the week.
Dutton will be relieved to have enforced such a rule without appearing overly domineering in telling a journalist they could not further question. The stricter approach is bad for transparency but a positive sign for the Dutton campaign heading into the final week – if it lasts.
We’re in Cairns, where Peter Dutton is campaigning this morning. Here are some pictures.
Johnson Mirzai is an Australian citizen with opinions, and whether they reflect a bigger story is unknown a week before the May 3 election. He’s 66, has four children and five grandchildren, and before he retired he was a machine operator. He’s in T-shirt and jeans, chatting over a flat white with mates in the Macquarie Mall in Liverpool, a 50-minute drive from the postcard Sydney of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge.
At one end of the mall is an imposing Westfield shopping centre, and to the side is the historic St Luke’s Liverpool church, where elderly men, many on walkers and mobility scooters, play chess outside and chat in the sun. The strip of shops indicates that this area, in the federal seat of Werriwa in south-west Sydney, is what’s known as diverse: Long Phuong beauty salon, Vietnam food and bubble tea, a discount store (“Never Pay Full Price Again”), Al Afrah Jewellery.
Mirzai lives in a community housing project, but nonetheless his rent has risen to about $240 a week, up more than $100 in recent years, he says. He knows that inflation and high prices are international phenomena, and gets that governments can’t solve everything (although he wishes the government would do something about Coles and Woolworths: “They are ripping people off left, right and centre.“)
Read the full Good Weekend feature on waning support for Labor in its heartland here.
In the final moments of his press conference in Melbourne this morning, Albanese said he would bring together media outlets after the election to determine how the government could support their campaign against hate.
“The fact that media organisations have come together to speak out against hate is fantastic,” he said.
“I’ve spoken to media organisations about convening them after the election, if I’m successful, and what way the government can play a role in supporting the campaign that’s supported by Nine, Seven, that all the media organisations have joined in.”
Albanese said it was “really important” for this to occur, and that he would want the ABC to be part of the campaign as well.
“Obviously, at the moment, that would be difficult during an election campaign, but I just think we as a society have got to come together,” he said.
“We live in a multicultural community, we have a great society Australia,” he said. “We need to cherish it, nurture it, not take it for granted.”
Earlier this morning, Dutton was asked whether he had miscalculated his pledge to reduce migration in light of the Redbridge poll out today, showing more than 60 per cent support for Labor among young Australians and diverse communities.
The opposition leader said that in seats around the country, a very different conversation was going on.
“The conversation is – how do we put food on the table? How do we afford to make our mortgage repayments? How can we afford three more years of Labor? And that’s what this election contest will come down to.
“For young Australians, we’re the only party with a plan to allow you to get into home ownership.”
Dutton said the Labor Party’s flagship housing program had not produced one home.
Earlier, Dutton spruiked the Coalition’s energy policy in Cairns, repeating the pledge power and petrol prices would come down if he became prime minister.
Asked about a longer-term climate policy, he said:
“… We will announce our targets once we get into government, get the advice from the agencies. But if you’re concerned about the environment, you’re concerned about climate, then your only choice at this election is to vote for the Coalition because Anthony Albanese has a plan that has failed.
“We’re now talking about blackouts and brownouts in our country. Power bills haven’t come down by $275, they’ve gone up by $1300 – that’s the reality.”