Headline inflation forecast to peak lower than anticipated at 4.25%, treasurer says

On to inflation. The budget forecast that headline inflation would peak at 5% this year. As the war in the Middle East drags on, is that still the federal government’s assumption?

Chalmers says with additional progress than expected, it is now expected that inflation around the middle of the year will peak “more like four and a quarter rather than five”.

That is very, very welcome progress. It does show, I think, it does illustrate the progress that we’re making together in this fight against inflation. Now there’s still a lot of uncertainty in the Middle East and elsewhere. There’s still more inflation than we would like in our economy as a consequence, but we are making more progress than we anticipated.

Key to that, Chalmers concedes, is that ships will be able to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, that you’re confident, more ships will be able to pass through.

We desperately need the ceasefire to stick. You know, we can’t have another false dawn when it comes to the Middle East, and particularly the Strait of Hormuz.

There’ve been some really welcome developments on this front, and we’ve seen the oil price come down quite substantially as a consequence. It wasn’t that long ago that a barrel of oil was in the 120s. This morning when I looked, it was in the low ‘70s. So that’s welcome progress.

There’s inflationary pressures elsewhere in the economy still as well. But if you look at the progress we made on inflation during the week, the welcome developments in the Middle East, and a number of other factors. What we actually saw through the course of the last week is that the market expectations for an interest rate hike actually went substantially down.

Chalmers grilled on ‘widow’s tax’

Chalmers has also been pressed on what has been dubbed a “widow’s tax” and was removed by Labor’s budget after questioning from the independent senator David Pocock.

David Speers:

You talk about certainty, but with that haste comes the risk of unintended consequences, and one of those was this issue of negatively geared properties that are jointly held, when a couple divorce or a partner dies. It’s been dubbed the widow tax. What is gonna happen there?

Chalmers says that will be addressed in “subsequent pieces of legislation” and the federal government had been “working through it” to address it in the interim.

When the amendments were put before the Senate, we had to make clear that we were working through that issue, and we intend to address it in subsequent pieces of legislation, and that’s the case …

Asked what would happen in the next week if someone lost their partner and had to rearrange their affairs, Chalmers again said “we intend to address that issue”.

I don’t want to pre-empt the outcome, but in saying that we’re going to address it, I think we’re making it incredibly clear, that we understand that this is an issue that has been raised with us, we intend to address it.

Labor has to get into an ‘arm wrestle’ with One Nation, Chris Minns says

Chris Minns was also asked about how Labor should respond to the surging poll numbers of One Nation. The NSW premier told Sky “we’ve got to get into the arm wrestle”.

People have got every right to vote for One Nation if they want to. And if they feel that they’re the best antidote or the best medicine for what’s ailing the state or the country, that’s exactly what they’ll do. Our job is to convince them otherwise and to say, well, this is our plan for the future.

Minns said Australians were “going through an incredibly tough time” and there were “concerns” about the level of immigration after the pandemic lockdowns. But he pushed back on her unexplained calls for a “monoculture” in place of multiculturalism.

The populist right or far-right movement has swept through Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Hungary, Italy, perhaps France, maybe the UK. So we’d be pretty naive not to think that it could affect us here too.

One of my biggest gripes with what Hanson has been saying … is that she seems to be saying, if you support multiculturalism, then you’re also for sharia law, multiple marriages … that’s utter garbage. That’s not the view or the lived experience of people that live in Sydney, who grew up in Sydney … I wouldn’t support sharia law or any of these insane ideologies in a place like Australia, but I do believe multiculturalism’s worked.

Drone technology won’t be ‘foolproof’ but should ‘mitigate the risk’, NSW premier says

The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, says the state government’s expansion of shark surveillance came in response to a reduction in the number of people visiting beaches amid a spate of shark attacks.

Appearing on Sky News on Sunday, he said people had been rattled by the recent attacks.

We now are in a situation where … we seen a reduction in the number of people who are enjoying our beaches and enjoying the Pacific Ocean, even in the winter period. So we know we want to take action … It’s not going to be foolproof. We can’t promise it won’t lead to further shark attacks in the future, but we think it’ll mitigate the risk.

Minns also reiterated his opposition to culling great white sharks to prevent future incidents, which some sectors of the community had called for following the attack on Leah Stewart at Coogee.

They’re a protected species. They’ve been a protected species since the 90s, and I’m not convinced it would work. I mean, the distances these sharks travel are massive. It’s not like we can knock a few off and send a message to the rest of them …

I think it’s a different situation for bull sharks. Generally they’re in our estuaries … We’re looking particularly at an audit of the number of sharks in Sydney Harbour. We want to keep people safe, particularly when there’s a higher number of people in the water.