As it happened: Dutton attacks Labor on energy reform; Australia to import US apples; Warning on teacher shortages

Thank you for joining me on the blog this afternoon. I can see lots of discussion in the comments about apple imports and teacher shortages, as well as other issues.

I’m signing off for the evening and leave you with this summary of the headlines:

• A body was found in the search for two Sydney fathers swept away by floodwaters in southern NSW. The names of the two men were revealed earlier to be Bob Chahine and Ghosn Ghosn.
• Agriculture Minister Murray Watt defended a decision to import apples from the United States.
• Education Minister Jason Clare launched the draft National Teacher Workforce Action Plan, and warned the teacher shortages would take time to fix.
• Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull backed calls for a cap on gas exports, as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton warned of “dire consequences” if the Albanese government gets it wrong on energy policy.

That’s all, folks.

The Department of Social Services did not pass on advice about the unlawfulness of the robodebt scheme, which allowed the illegal debt collection scheme to go ahead.

In 2015, the Department of Human Services – advised by the Department of Social Services – rolled out a debt collection program that falsely accused welfare recipients of owing the government money.

The robodebt program recovered more than $750 million from nearly 400,000 people by issuing debt notices through an illegal process called income averaging.

The program came into question as early as 2014, when the DSS sought internal legal counsel on the DHS’s robodebt proposal.

Former social services director Cameron Brown told a royal commission hearing today the legal advice they received was “black and white”.

“It was as definitive as I’ve ever seen. The proposal needed to change substantially in order to proceed,” Brown said.

Brown said the decisiveness of the DSS’s internal legal advice, and government checks and balances, should have ended the robodebt proposal there and then.

However, DSS lawyer Lisa Keeling revealed this information was not shared with the proposal’s originator, the DHS.

In her review she noted, “There is no evidence that DSS shared this advice with the department at any point prior to the implementation of the program.”

The DHS sought legal consultation on three separate occasions in 2015, but its requests never explicitly questioned the lawfulness of income averaging.

Commissioner Catherine Holmes yesterday said she was “appalled” by the admission that government departments often pay external consultants for legal advice but then ignore it.

AAP

In breaking news, police have found a body believed to be one of two men who were swept away in floodwater in the NSW Southern Tablelands on Monday night.

Search efforts for the second man continued this afternoon at Bevendale, about 50 kilometres east of Boorowa.

Sydney fathers Bob Chahine and Ghosn Ghosn have been identified as the men washed away.

NSW Police said this afternoon that the body located by police divers was yet to be formally identified, and the search was continuing for the second man.

Read the full story.

The sharemarket tumbled today after a three-day winning streak.

The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 fell by 128.8 points, or 1.8 per cent, to 6857.9 at the end of today’s trading session.

The materials sector dropped just short of 3 per cent at market close, consumer discretionary stocks fell 2.5 per cent, and utilities slipped 2.2 per cent.

The sharemarket falls are attributed to comments from the US Federal Reserve about further rate rises.

One of the winners was A2 Milk. Shares in the dairy company jumped 4.2 per cent to $5.50 after announcing it had received FDA approval to export its infant baby formula to the US.

Here’s the full market cap.

Staying on national news, an interesting study has come out showing the differences between the states and territories in terms of how many people are in prison.

People living in the Northern Territory are more than eight times more likely to be in jail than residents of the Australian Capital Territory.

The imprisonment rate in the NT is so high that it’s 41 per cent higher than the imprisonment rate in Louisiana, the state with the highest imprisonment rate for the United States.

The imprisonment rate is a measure of the number of people in prison per 100,000 population,

The study, written by UNSW Professor Don Weatherburn and published in the Journal of Criminology, also shows that Victoria’s imprisonment rates are particularly low.

All the other states have an imprisonment rate between 1.5 and 2.4 times higher than Victoria.

Weatherburn said this was not because Victoria had more lenient judges, but because the state arrested far fewer people per capita. The reason for Victoria’s lower arrest rate is partly to do with lower crime and partly to do with policing policy.

He said the differences between the prison populations in Victoria and the NT were also partly attributable to the arrest rates of Indigenous people, who were much more likely to be arrested and were grossly over-represented in custody.

The NT had the highest proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people relative to its total population size (30.8 per cent), while Victoria had the lowest (1.2 per cent).

The first graph shows the imprisonment rates of all states and territories. The second graph removes the territories to better show the differences between the states.

In the blog this morning, we reported on federal Industry Minister Ed Husic’s comments branding gas companies as “tone-deaf” for not offering cheaper prices to the Australian market amid a projected 20 per cent increase in domestic gas prices next year.

Now, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has backed calls for export controls on gas to help curb power prices – and for investment in renewable energy as the longer-term solution.

Here’s what he had to say at an Australia Institute event in Sydney earlier today:

“It is crazy that the largest or second-largest exporter of liquefied natural gas is not able to control gas at affordable prices for its own population.

The government should use its power to control gas exports to ensure that there is enough gas available in Australia to keep that price at or around the pre-crisis level.

The long-term solution is very clear – it is renewables plus storage, that is not even an arguable or debatable issue, it’s just a question of how quickly you can roll it out.”

Turnbull also said it was a mistake for the east coast to not implement a domestic gas reserve, similar to that in Western Australia.

It comes after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission released a report in August warning against allowing exporters to sell all of their uncontracted gas overseas next year.

“In the current environment of high international energy prices (including gas and LNG), tight LNG markets, broader supply chain problems, geopolitical instability, inflation and uncertain demand for gas powered generation domestically, we support the Australian government placing greater focus on energy security,” the report read.

As energy prices heat up, David Crowe reports on a debate brewing along state lines about whether states such as Queensland and Western Australian should ramp up gas supply to NSW and Victoria.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said on Monday that Australians wanted their gas to go to the domestic market first before meeting demand from customers overseas.

NSW Treasurer Matt Kean has also suggested liquefied natural gas from Western Australia could be shipped to NSW and pumped into the eastern gas pipelines.

The South Australian Chamber of Mines and Energy and the Queensland Resources Council are among those criticising proposals they say would see their states pay for the failure of NSW and Victoria in developing their own resources.

With AAP

Staying on the topic of teacher shortages, a new study has revealed Australian educators face a higher risk of being attacked at work or suffering mental health conditions than any other profession.

Monash University academics analysed 1.5 million worker compensation claims from 2009 to 2015 and found 4.5 per cent of teachers’ cases related to assault, compared to 2 per cent for non-educators.

Secondary schoolteachers, specialist educators and aides experienced the highest rate of assault-related injuries and mental health conditions.

Overall, educators still had a lower rate of claims than other professions and spent less time away from work.

Co-author Dr Tyler Lane, from the Monash University’s School of Public Health and Preventative Medicine, said there could be a link between violence and the students educators worked with.

“There might be some elevated risk, at least in terms of assault, for those who are working with students who have special needs and there may be outbursts that are unintentional, but nevertheless could injure someone,” Lane said.

Commonly reported conditions included injuries due to student-inflicted violence, psychological distress and musculoskeletal pain.

Researchers suggested the real rates of injury could be even higher because educators might be discouraged from submitting worker compensation claims due to their workplace culture, attitudes from leadership and using school holidays to recuperate.

With AAP

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has warned teachers of tough times ahead as the government tries to fix the workforce shortages hitting the education sector.

Clare, speaking to hundreds of principals earlier today to launch the draft National Teacher Workforce Action Plan, said there was a 16 per cent drop in students enrolling in teaching courses over the past decade and only 50 per cent completed their degrees.

He said teachers had borne the brunt of COVID-19 pandemic disruptions, which had contributed to burnout and people leaving the profession.

This is a taste of his remarks:

Fixing this isn’t easy.

It took 10 years to create this crisis, and it will take time to fix.

The next few years are going to be tough.

The $328 million action plan was created through discussions with education ministers, teachers, principals, unions and the higher education sector.

It includes about $160 million to train more teachers, $70 million to encourage mid-career professionals to move into the industry and $25 million to trial new ways to reduce workloads.

Australian Education Union deputy federal president Meredith Peace welcomed the opportunity to provide feedback on the plan but called for full funding of public schools from state and commonwealth governments.

“A draft national plan alone will not fix the shortages being experienced in public schools across the nation,” she said in a statement.

With AAP

Staying on international news, readers of the blog will know that the next round of United Nations climate meetings start on Monday in Egypt.

Ahead of COP27, Australian start-up Zero Co has built a giant pyramid of plastic waste in the Egyptian desert.

The pyramid is three storeys high and constructed from rubbish collected from the Nile River.

Australian Mike Smith is camping on top of a giant pyramid made of rubbish in the Egyptian desert ahead of COP27.

Zero Co founder Mike Smith is camping on top of the pyramid for three days to raise awareness about the issue of plastic waste.

The pyramid was built over five days in collaboration with the environmental organisation VeryNile and Egyptian artist Bahia Shehab.

The structure is 10 metres tall, 12 metres wide, and made from 18,000 kilograms of rubbish – the equivalent of a million plastic bottles.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is attending COP27 on behalf of Australia. At the meeting, world leaders will report on their countries’ progress in achieving their emissions-reductions targets.

To international news, one of the saddest stories this week was the Halloween crush in Seoul on October 29, in which more than 150 people died.

My colleague Eryk Bagshaw, the North Asia correspondent, and Seoul-based reporter Sean Na have written a compelling piece about how the Halloween crowd crush unfolded.

The beautifully written piece contains moving details about the victims, mostly young people out for a good time dressed as zombies and anime characters.

In hard news, they report that Korean authorities are scrambling to explain how police ignored at least 11 phone calls in the lead-up to the disaster warning them that a 50-metre-long alleyway in the capital’s vibrant Itaewon neighbourhood was dangerously overcrowded.

Logs show the first call came in at 6.34pm. Nine more would follow before 10pm, when the fatal crush began pushing revellers down the alleyway.

The first emergency message telling people to avoid the area was not sent until close to midnight.

Police have also put some responsibility on the Seoul Metro after claiming that they had asked the train operator to suspend services to Itaewon station. The metro said it received a request only after 130,000 people had already passed through its gates.

Here’s a graphic that explains the geography and timing of how the crush happened.