Australia news live: PM announces $1bn fund to build and expand childcare centres; Mona to reopen Ladies Lounge

Coalition nuclear costing announcement ‘slowest-moving forgery’ – Tim Ayres

The assistant trade minister, Tim Ayres, has criticised the opposition for failing to release the proposed costings for its nuclear plan, claiming they are nothing more than a “mirage” ahead of their expected release before Christmas.

The Coalition revealed in June it would build seven nuclear power plants and two proposed small modular reactors in Australia if elected to achieve the country’s net zero by 2050 targets. At the time, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, declined to outline further details, including the cost of the plan.

It is widely tipped that the Coalition will finally release the figures this week.

At Parliament House today, Ayres claimed the opposition’s drawn-out announcement was the “slowest-moving forgery in Australian political history”:

Every fortnight, Peter Dutton drops it out there that he’s about to release the costings, and then nothing materialises. You have to take it from this that he’s either got the costings and he’s keeping them a secret, or he’s still figuring them out.

Making an election pitch, Anthony Albanese told the crowd that “only Labor builds for the future [and] that is the opportunity and the choice for all Australians in 2025”.

Over the next three years we can work together to build on the foundations we have laid, we can turn the meaningful progress we have made into profound and enduring change.

Taking aim at the opposition, the prime minister said “this is not a time for cutting and wrecking, this is a time for building”.

If you want to know what the next three years would look like under the Liberals and the Nationals, just look at their actions over the last three years. Every Australian would have been worse off if Peter Dutton had blocked our tax cuts, cut people’s wages, stopped energy bill relief and made it harder and more expensive for people to see a doctor.

The opposition have spent every day trying to stop us cleaning up their mess. They are arrogant enough to think they have got nothing wrong through their wasted decade government and they are reckless enough to inflict it on Australia all over again.

Continuing with his speech, Anthony Albanese announced a $1bn building early education fund – describing it as the “biggest investment by an Australian government ever in new childcare services”.

It would start with building or expanding over 160 early education and care centres where they needed most, he said.

Albanese also announced Labor would replace the Liberals’ activity test with a new three-day guarantee in early education.

Parents do not need to go through a bureaucracy or work a certain number of hours you want the best possible education for their child … Under a re-elected Labor government, every family earning up to $530,000 will have access to the childcare subsidy for three days a week, guaranteed.

Anthony Albanese has called out comments made in the past by former Liberal (now independent) senator Gerard Rennick, who suggested childcare infected children with the “woke mind virus”.

Speaking in Brisbane just now, the prime minister said:

One of the privileges of my job is visiting childcare centres all over the country … But you know what we hear from the Liberal and National parties? They said this [policy] was dodgy. Peter Dutton mocked it, to quote him, as a sugar hit. And a Queensland senator that he personally endorsed as someone who was not afraid, again, to quote him directly, Peter Dutton, to “defend the values of the LNP” said this – he said this has something to do with a ‘woke mind virus’ because, to quote him, ‘early education destroys the family unit’.

There was an audible reaction from the crowd before Albanese continued:

A step further than pretending or trying to argue that this is just childminding, because we know that it’s not. To actually put that statement out says a lot about the values of the LNP.

The prime minister is delivering a speech in Brisbane – where he is outlining Labor’s plan for universal childcare. Sarah Basford Canales had more details on this earlier:

Addressing the crowd, Anthony Albanese pointed to previous Labor initiatives – Medicare, superannuation and the NDIS – and said:

Our Labor government believes firmly that every child should have the right to quality affordable education. Simple, affordable and accessible for every family where every child is guaranteed access to at least three days of high-quality early education and care.

Let me be clear about this, universal and accessible does not mean compulsory or mandatory. The choice will always be up to parents, as always, as it should be, but we want families to have a real choice.

Peter Hannam

Continuing from our last post: the government points out it was Angus Taylor, a former Coalition energy minister, who ordered Aemo to apply the NPV approach to its integrated system plan (the $122bn source).

The energy minister, Chris Bowen, dubbed leader Peter Dutton a “hypocrite” (and presumably others in Coalition playing up the faux discrepancy) and said:

If Peter Dutton has a problem with this method, he should take it up with his own shadow treasurer [Taylor], who put it in place.

Bowen’s shadow counterpart, Ted O’Brien, who has highlighted the difference in parliament and elsewhere, isn’t ceding ground:

Last time [Bowen] was asked that question on [ABC’s] 7.30, he said $121bn but it’s since been revealed that the real cost is in fact five times higher. If he’s now claiming he was previously using a net present value figure, the least he could do is apologise to the Australian people for grossly misleading them on the real cost of his plan.

From that response, I think one of the first questions for the Coalition when they do reveal nuclear cost estimates will have to be: is that NPV or “real”?

(And the follow-up might be: are we going to apply “real” costs for everything from Aukus to inland rail projects? I suspect not, because the numbers will look even more prohibitive.)

Peter Hannam

Accounting issue may feature again when Coalition reveals nuclear energy costs

Energy costs are in the news a lot lately and the expected release later this week of the Coalition’s nuclear energy price tag will amp that up further (so to speak).

The CSIRO released its updated estimates of the costs of various electricity generation sources earlier this week (which Adam Morton covered here and Graham Readfearn analysed here.)

Last month, Frontier Economics (which is apparently doing the nuclear-number crunching for the Coalition) got a bit of political and media traction by converting the Australian Energy Market Operator’s $122bn price tag for getting the grid to net zero by 2050 to “real” dollars.

We assessed this approach and found FE was really comparing apples and oranges. In fact, there wasn’t a huge difference – nothing like a $500bn “green hole” reported by Murdoch tabloids – between Aemo or FE’s calculations of “real” costs of $642bn.

The difference comes down to a standard application of “net present value” to future costs. In short, we value something more now than in the future (think, inflation), so a dollar out the door today is worth more to us that one in 2035, say.

Rafqa Touma

Dave Sharma says government ‘demonising Israel’ is ‘not helping’ antisemitism

The NSW Liberal senator and former Australian ambassador to Israel, Dave Sharma, says the Albanese government seeking to “continually demonise Israel” is “not helping” antisemitism.

Visiting the site of anti-Israel vandalism and a torched car in Woollahra this morning, he said:

I’m shocked to see, in the space of three weeks, I think it’s been two quite menacing attacks directed at the Jewish community.

It’s designed to menace and intimidate and threaten them. Jewish Australians quite rightly feel besieged and threatened right now and honestly they feel that the government and their political leaders are letting them down.

Sharma said “the frequency and severity” with which the Albanese government “name checks Israel” is “only stirring up community sentiment about a conflict which I understand is divisive”.

I think there’s a lot of racial and religious hate directed at the Jewish community, and antisemitism is the name that’s given to it, and it’s not helped, frankly, by a government that seeks to continually demonise Israel.

Emergency services responded to reports of a vehicle on fire in Magney Street at about 1am this morning, NSW police said in a statement. The car, and another vehicle, two buildings and a footpath had been graffitied. Some graffiti was explicitly anti-Israel.

Police said the car set on fire was likely stolen, driven to Woollahra by the perpetrators who likely then torched it to destroy the evidence.