Australian Politics: Submarine Deal, Housing Market Woes, and Tony Abbott's Return
Welcome back to your weekly federal politics update, where Courtney Gould gets you up to speed on the happenings from Parliament House.
Raff Ciccone was ready to call it. The chair of the defence and foreign affairs committee had the task of sitting in a windowless room for hours on end trying to keep senators and bureaucrats on track as they went back and forth.
The clock had just ticked past the lunchtime cut off. Jacqui Lambie was still pushing defence officials about a "s**t" deal personnel were offered on home loans. She finally finished.
"Excellent … I'll see everyone back here in one hour," Ciccone said before moving to pack up, but the mic was still hot.
"Did he just swear?"
Ciccone's committee had taken a starring role in the news cycle after Defence Minister Richard Marles soft-launched the idea Australia would acquire three second-hand submarines, rather than one new, two old, under the AUKUS security pact.
In a bit of "nothing to see here" the news was confirmed via a readout and background note following Marles's talks with Pete Hegseth and John Healey on the sidelines of a defence and security conference in Singapore. Marles did not make mention of it until he was asked by reporters.
He argued this was all about simplicity and would save Australia money. What was less clear was the reason for the switch. Was this pushed on us by the United States? Or what we wanted all along?
It was an issue backbencher Ed Husic took up when parliament resumed two days later. In caucus, and the media, he openly questioned if the AUKUS security pact should be re-negotiated. A rethink of Labor's commitment wouldn't go astray either.
Husic, a member of Labor's right, who called Marles a factional assassin after his post-election demotion, continues to be a thorn in the government's side. Caucus has been unusually quiet this past year. MPs prefer to raise questions in side committees rather than the big love-in every week because it gets briefed out to the media post-meeting. The perception of disunity is to be avoided at all costs.
A clean-up operation ensued. Australia had preferred this option all along, Marles told another defence conference (this time in Canberra) while the newly installed defence secretary, Meghan Quinn, also fended off questions in estimates.
Come Wednesday morning, as my colleague Tom Lowrey wrote, there was an acknowledgement within the government the messaging had not been great. Junior minister Pat Conroy laid it out best — the US was now comfortable with giving up a third "in-service" rather than forcing us to buy a new one.
Marles wouldn't say just how old the boats would be when Australia got its hands on them but Conroy confirmed we'd get the subs six years into their lifespan.
Government under pressure
It wasn't just the argument around the AUKUS submarines the government struggled to articulate this week. Aged Care Minister Sam Rae also tied himself in knots during an interview on Radio National this morning as he refused to admit there was no human override in the final step of the government’s algorithm of assessing older people for at-home care.
A softening housing market also came to the forefront. Ministers were asked if they were okay if house prices fell in the wake of the budget. Treasurer Jim Chalmers did his best, brushing off concerns people could fall into negative equity in the short-term because property is a long-term investment.
The outcome of more first-home buyers, rather than investors, in the market was a good thing. And anyway, it isn't the budget's fault but rather the Middle East war and the rising interest rates, the government argued.
Chalmers was also dealing with reports of a slowdown in economic growth, spinning it in the same manner you'd celebrate a good AFL player in a bad team: "solid in the circumstances".
Over in the chamber, the government's big old tax wedge passed as expected. A two-day inquiry will start the week after next before heading to the Senate with the aim of passing before parliament rises for the mid-winter break.
It all hinges on what the Greens decide to do. Will the minor party stand by their concern about the treasurer's powers to change some asset definitions by legislative instrument? Or will it fold and pass it anyway?
For what it's worth, the Greens' only lower house MP, Elizabeth Watson-Brown, voted for the changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount in the chamber. The Coalition, as expected, did not.
Abbott says he hasn't taken a 'vow of silence'
Much like a peplum top, everything that is old is new again in politics. Tony Abbott is now Liberal Party president, armed with the task of re-energising the base and winning them back from One Nation.
Abbott lasted all of three days before he popped up on the morning media rounds. He wasn't concerned by the suggestion he could pull focus from Opposition Leader Angus Taylor. "I don't think there's ever been a party president who's taken a vow of silence, and I'm certainly not going to start," he told the ABC.
His re-emergence came on the tails of a Australian Financial Review/Redbridge poll, which suggested One Nation had pulled ahead of Labor as the most popular political party.
Pauline Hanson downplayed its significance, even as she welcomed her first ever elected lower house MP to parliament.
As the leader of an anti-establishment party who pitches herself as the outsider, Hanson can't afford to get too head of herself. Even as One Nation seeks to become… more established.
But after she was repeatedly asked, she admitted she thought she'd have the ability to be PM. She wouldn't even need to gamble her Senate spot, Hanson noted; she could be PM from the upper house. She's technically not wrong.
Hanson's recruit Barnaby Joyce gave a sly smile when asked about his leader's ambition.
"Everybody in this building wants to be prime minister," he told Afternoon Briefing.
What about him? Does he want his old job as deputy prime minister back?
"That is you trying to lead me into a trap which I am too cunning to get into," he said.
