Census to include questions on gender and sexuality
Speers finishes up by asking Chalmers about the ongoing census questions palaver.
He says there will be a new question covering both sexual orientation and gender for the first time (first there were going to be no questions, then there was going to be one on sexual orientation but gender was going to be left out, now it looks like it’s in):
We have listened to the community. We worked very closely with the Australian Bureau of Statistics. LGBTIQ+ Australians matter. They have been heard and they will count in the 2026 census.
Chalmers says the treasury assistant minister, Andrew Leigh, will make a statement about this later today. And he says:
Really the message that we want to ensure that Australians hear from us today is that we understand the feedback that we got, we listened to that, we took it very seriously, we listened very genuinely.
We said we would find the best way to do this and I believe that we have and we will and the ABS will continue to refine the actual wording of the questions now that this additional topic has been add.
Key events
Chalmers has been asked about commodity prices again, and his startling warning that a potential scenario could see $4.5 billion come off. He says:
A lot of global economic uncertainty which is combining with persistent price pressures here in our own economy and the impact of higher interest rates to slow our own economy quite considerably. It also has an impact on the budget. When commodity prices weaken, it has an impact on our economy but also on our budget.
And he’s repeating his claim that the government’s critics would have liked to see Australia plunge into a recession. And that’s it for now!
Government wants to do the right things ‘for the right reasons’ on census: Chalmers
The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is up again. He’s holding a press conference about that move mentioned below to introduce a new topic in the 2026 census. He says the government has listened to the community and worked with the ABS to “get it right” and that it wants to do the right thing “for the right reasons”. He says:
The government provides the topics to the ABS and the ABS writes the questions. And that’s what we expect to see here.
More details on new census sexuality question
Here are some more details on that new question in the census, which has caused somewhat of a brouhaha. Treasury assistant minister, Andrew Leigh, has just put out a statement confirming there will be a new topic of “sexual orientation and gender” in the 2026 census. According to the statement:
These questions will only be asked of people aged 16 and over, and the ABS has told the government that people will have the option not to answer.
The new topic reflects consultation with the ABS’s LGBTIQ+ expert advisory committee, including key peak bodies in the sector.
The ABS did not recommend a topic on variations of sex characteristics (intersex status) in the Census, and it will not be included.
Leigh says the government will continue working with the intersex community on gathering information through other ABS surveys. He says:
We value every Australian, regardless of their faith, race, gender or LGBTIQ+ status. The government’s position follows further engagement with the community and additional discussions with the ABS.
The government will make a legislative instrument to implement these changes, and will introduce this instrument before the end of the year.
Here’s a fascinating story from AAP about robots “spraying lava-like mud for a landing pad and base camp” on the moon or Mars:
Space architect Melodie Yashar, from American technology firm Icon, will soon visit Australia to showcase off-planet habitats that are 3D-printed from local “soil”.
But rather than a “plan B” for a damaged planet, she sees space as the ultimate frontier to explore technologies and bring back tips for better ways of living on Earth.
“Space exploration is an intrinsic part of what it means to be human,” she says
Icon is working with Nasa on space projects. Yashar said:
The reason why it’s so appealing to NASA and other space agencies is that you can send up one construction robot and use the local materials that are already on the planet.
Moon dust, or regolith, on the surface could be used as feedstock to create structures, instead of shipping in tonnes of materials from Earth.
“Essentially we’re fusing the material onto itself and it creates a lava consistency and once it’s hardened it becomes a ceramic material,” she explained.
She said exploration would be an essential part of any long-term settlement on the Moon, first setting up a base camp and supporting short stays.
Eventually, there could be habitats that are certified for human occupancy and the possible use of underground cavities, such as the Moon’s lava tubes, to protect against deep-space radiation.
A guard assaults a prisoner, and private prison operator Serco responded by locking all 175 inmates in a section of the northern NSW prison. That’s led to calls for sanctions, Catie McLeod reports:
Emily Wind
ABC’s Green predicts swing away from teal independent in Kooyong
Continuing from our previous post: The lineup does not include the former deputy Liberal leader and treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who previously said he would not recontest Kooyong – the seat he held from 2010 to 2022.
Teal independent Dr Monique Ryan currently holds the seat of Kooyong and when she won it in 2022, this marked the first time since federation the seat had not been held by the conservative side of politics.
As ABC election analyst Antony Green reports on his personal blog, the strongest Liberal voting parts of Higgins have now been transferred to Kooyong. He predicts that Ryan’s margin will be reduced from 2.9% to 1.8% with the changes. Green also estimates that Labor’s margin in Chisholm will halve from 6.4% to 3.2% amid the transfer of strong Labor voting areas to Menzies.
Emily Wind
Liberals reopen nominations for Melbourne seats of Kooyong and Chisholm
The Liberals have reopened nominations in the federal seats of Kooyong and Chisholm in Melbourne, Sky News reported on Saturday evening.
This comes after Victoria’s new federal electoral boundaries were released on Thursday, decreasing the number of divisions from 39 to 38 after Higgins was abolished. Sky reported that during an administration committee meeting scheduled for Sunday in Victoria, the Liberal party would be looking to speak with three candidates about two seats.
They are Amelia Hamer, who has already been endorsed as the candidate for Kooyong, and Katie Allen, the Liberals’ endorsed candidate for now-abolished Higgins. The third is Theo Zographos, the Liberal’s endorsed candidate for Chisholm – currently held by Labor MP Carina Garland.
Sky reported that Allen would be focusing her efforts on the seat of Chisholm.
Karen Middleton
Labor launches attack ad on nuclear energy
Labor has launched a new attack advertisement targeting the Coalition’s plan to build nuclear reactors, alleging it would cost $600bn and push up power bills by $1,000 a year.
Education minister, Jason Clare, said as the next election approached, Australians needed to focus on what the opposition is offering as well as what the government is doing.
“This is going to take forever to build,” Clare said of the coalition’s proposed nuclear reactors at seven identified sites around Australia:
It’s going to cost a bomb, and then it’ll only produce less than 4% of the energy that we need as a country. It shows that this is not a serious outfit with a serious set of policies to put to the Australian people at the next election means they’re not ready to govern.
Shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor, dismissed the argument, saying Labor had “no credibility” on energy policy issues.
“This is the Labor party that promised $275 [in energy] price reduction, and there’s no sign of that,” Taylor told Sky News Sunday Agenda program. “… So their energy policies have failed. There is a better pathway, and that is exactly what we’re pursuing.”
Taylor said the coalition’s nuclear-power-focused policy would cost less than Labor’s renewable-focused policy, which he alleged would cost $1.2tn. He accused prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and the government of acting more like an opposition.
“That’s where Albanese is happy – fighting Tories,” he said. “But frankly, we’re focused on policies that will bring down prices and make sure that we have a reliable grid, not just in the short term, but over the long term as well.”
He said the coalition would unveil its energy policy costings before the next federal election.
Census to include questions on gender and sexuality
Speers finishes up by asking Chalmers about the ongoing census questions palaver.
He says there will be a new question covering both sexual orientation and gender for the first time (first there were going to be no questions, then there was going to be one on sexual orientation but gender was going to be left out, now it looks like it’s in):
We have listened to the community. We worked very closely with the Australian Bureau of Statistics. LGBTIQ+ Australians matter. They have been heard and they will count in the 2026 census.
Chalmers says the treasury assistant minister, Andrew Leigh, will make a statement about this later today. And he says:
Really the message that we want to ensure that Australians hear from us today is that we understand the feedback that we got, we listened to that, we took it very seriously, we listened very genuinely.
We said we would find the best way to do this and I believe that we have and we will and the ABS will continue to refine the actual wording of the questions now that this additional topic has been add.
‘A lot at stake and a lot to gain’ with China: Chalmers
The treasurer is off to Beijing in the last week of September, the first visit by an Australian treasurer in seven years. He says it’s about recognising there is “a lot at stake and a lot to gain” from the relationship:
We want to make sure that we are maximising this really important economic relationship with our key trading partner. It’s a relationship which is full of complexity, but also full of opportunity and I want to help the government maximise that opportunity for the Australian people, workers, businesses, employers, investors.
Drop in commodity prices could cost $4.5bn: Chalmers
Speers moves from spending to the other side of the budget – revenue – and in this case commodity prices and the billions dropping off there. It could be $4.5bn coming off, Chalmers says:
One of the scenarios that Treasury has provided us is, if we continue to see that kind of drop in some of our key commodities, it could cost the budget something like $4.5bn. So that’s one scenario that we’re looking at.
The oil price has also been “quite incredibly volatile”, he says, and “this is a real sign of weakness in the global economy, uncertainty and volatility and risk in a global economy and we’re not immune from it”.
Chalmers calls for bipartisan solution to aged care funding
Chalmers says they’ll have more to say on aged care reforms “quite soon”. He says they want to provide “better services for more people in a more sustainable way without introducing a new tax or changing the treatment of the family home”:
We need to change the way that aged care is funded because it’s a huge medium-term and long-term pressure on the budget. We have said we like to do that in a bipartisan way given the long time frames that we’re talking about here.
‘We need to be realistic’: Chalmers on Medicare including dental
There were reports this week that some Labor MPs are agitating for Medicare to be extended to dental care. “It’s not something we’re announcing today,” Chalmers says, but it doesn’t sound hopeful:
We’ve got pretty severe budget constraints, we made that clear privately and publicly. There’s way more good ideas than there are capacity to fund them. As the architects of Medicare, we have spent billions of dollars already this parliamentary term strengthening Medicare for the future.
We get all kinds of suggestions from colleagues and others about how we might be able to do more of that … we will work with the states and territories on dental care to see if more can be done. But we need to be realistic about that in the context of these pretty serious budget constraints.
‘It’s better to avoid a recession rather than clean up after one’: Chalmers
Speers asks about the government’s plan to spur on productivity and growth. Chalmers says there are three phases – cost-of-living relief in the short term, “building more houses … boosting renewables … training people for the jobs and opportunities where we can adapt and better adopt technology” in the medium term, and “making the economy more competitive and dynamic with our competition policy reforms”.
On the mid-year budget update, he says they’ll “factor in challenges as they find them”. He says:
We think it’s better to avoid a recession rather than clean up after one and that’s where we differ from our political opponents.
Inflation needs to come down more: Chalmers
Chalmers says inflation has come down considerably, but needs to come down more. He says if the government had cut harder in the last budget, Australia would be in a recession. He says the government’s critics “desperately want us to be in recession for political reasons”. He also says it’s “self-evident” why the economy is slowing:
And it’s just self-evident and not specially controversial to say that the reasons why our economy is slowing considerably including in those numbers that we got last Wednesday is a combination of global economic uncertainty, persistent price pressures and inflation and higher interest rates. That’s not a specially controversial point.
‘We’ve got slightly different responsiblities’: Chalmers on government and RBA
Chalmers says his and Bullock’s interests are “aligned”. “We’ve got the same objectives, we got slightly different responsibilities,” he says:
But we’re making good progress together. When we came to office, when I came to office, inflation had a six in front of it under the Liberals. It’s now got a three in front of it and we expect it to moderate further.
‘I don’t second-guess the Reserve Bank’: Chalmers
The sluggish economy, reinforced by this week’s GDP figures, sparked a blame game between the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, and Reserve Bank governor, Michelle Bullock. Chalmers said high interest rates were smashing the economy, while Bullock says a cut is not on the cards in the context of persistently high inflation.
Insiders host, David Speers, starts this morning’s interview with Chalmers asking about the former treasurer Wayne Swan’s comments (he said he was disappointed in the RBA’s approach).
Chalmers says Swan went further than he had. He says:
I choose my own words … on my own views. I’ve got my own priorities, my own focus and that’s working with the governor of the Reserve Bank in this fight against inflation and we’re making progress.
You know, I was making a factual point this time last week and it’s a fact – borne out in the national accounts that higher interest rates are slowing the economy considerably. I have been making a similar point for some months. Now, Wayne went much further than I have. I’m making a factual point borne out by the national accounts. I don’t second-guess the Reserve Bank in the way that Wayne has.
Welcome
Good morning, regulars and irregulars! Welcome to your Sunday on the blog. It’s Tory here trying to fire up the grey cells and bring you today’s news.
There’s a slightly alarming story from AAP about the fight against bird flu: Australia’s ability to fight off a deadly strain of avian influenza will be put to the test in a bid to keep a global outbreak ripping through animal populations overseas at bay, the report says.
There have been no cases of H5N1 in Australia yet – we’re the only continent without an outbreak. But there are fears it could cause significant damage to native wildlife and poultry.
On Sunday, leaders in emergency management, health, the environment, animal welfare and poultry producers are joining forces for a series of exercises examining how the nation would act on a rush of local cases.
The agriculture minister, Julie Collins, described the situation as “dynamic” as she highlighted concerns about the impact to wildlife, threatened species and agriculture.
“While we can’t stop the natural migration patterns of wild birds that may be sick, we can prepare ourselves if that does occur by ensuring we are working together in this national effort to protect Australia,” she said.
We’ll bring you more details on this story later.
If you want to kick off with something a little chirpier, Graham Readfearn has some turtles with cute grins and some quolls for you.
The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is coming up on Insiders. It’s been a biggish week in economics – read this thorough take by Peter Hannam if you need to catch up.
