Kevin Rudd will use his visit to the United States to meet a variety of economic officials, which he believes will be crucial in helping Australia deal with the fallout from the US turmoil. The prime minister has come in for criticism for his decision to head off on the three-day visit when the Australian economy is on a rollercoaster of its own.
Labor’s substitute for WorkChoices, which it calls Forward With Fairness, is no counter-revolution. In a way, it’s more an attempt to make WorkChoices more efficient, the sort of prescription that John Howard might have gone for had he not been overwhelmed by the desire to leave behind a profound ideological mark.
A Melbourne jury had that morning acquitted four people of terrorism charges but convicted six others after a trial spread over seven months. Now the Attorney-General was calling the Canberra press gallery together to crow about the convictions. They were, he said, “the most successful terrorist prosecution this country has seen”.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said his Government’s mission was “for Australia to be the most Asian literate nation in the western world”. Mr. Rudd told the OzAsia symposium in Adelaide that the future of Australia was “tied to the most dynamic region in the world”.
The Rudd Government is concerned that taxpayer-funded relief from the Exceptional Circumstances scheme is being collected by farmers who had saved money in Farm Management Deposit accounts. The accounts, introduced by the Howard government, give farmers tax breaks if they put money aside in good times ready for later use.
The income-tax-free club now covers 42.2 per cent of the nation’s 9.754 million families. But middle earners just outside the tax-free zone are caught in a new personal tax pincer, with 134,000 breadwinners being pushed up the scales from 30c to 40c despite Labor claiming it would “increase the take-home pay of all taxpayers”.
Some Liberal MPs this week pointed to Labor’s Crean leadership experience and say they just wanted to “end the agony”. Some who changed their support from the original safe option of Brendan Nelson as leader said they did so at the last minute because they realised a vote in his favour now would only be tested again in a month or two.
No industrial-scale integrated carbon capture projects yet exist, intensifying debate over whether it is too uncertain and far in the future to answer the immediate threat of climate change. But Mr Rudd said he saw opportunities in mining and energy areas from Queensland to Victoria to introduce the technology.
The Prime Minister will unveil a strategy to put Australia at the forefront of the technology, which captures emissions from coal-fired power plants and permanently stores them deep underground. The critical importance of carbon capture and storage to Australia’s climate change response has become increasingly evident.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has accused Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull of irresponsibility for contradicting the Reserve Bank governor about the financial crisis. Mr Turnbull today appeared to criticise Glenn Stevens’s choice of the words when describing Australian banks’ position in relation to troubled overseas institutions.