Australia election 2022 live news: Morrison announces mental health funding boost; 38 Covid deaths recorded | Australian election 2022

Seven’s The Great Debate: The Final Showdown had an average audience of 527,000 metro viewers, building a significant audience after Big Brother despite finishing after 10.10pm.

The audience was lower than Channel Nine’s 641,000 on Sunday night which had a stronger lead-in from Lego Masters.
But Seven’s leaders’ debate built on the small Big Brother audience of 379,000 and ensured Seven won the night.

Aired on Wednesday at 9.10pm, Seven’s debate format with Mark Riley as a single moderator was more sober and controlled than the one on Sunday night on Nine.
Anthony Albanese was declared the winner of the final leaders’ debate by about 150 undecided voters watching the debate live from pubs in seven marginal seats.

Scott Morrison is announcing a $55m mental health partnership with the Tasmanian government in the marginal seat of Bass:

When I became Prime Minister, about 3.5 years ago, ensuring that mental health was getting the support it needed and that we would make greater strides across the country with people living with mental health challenges every day, those challenges that come from the disruptive things that can happen in your life or those who have just struggled with it from a very young age. It’s real. It’s debilitating.

It can rob people of their quality of life. And this is one of the most tangible things we can do to help people improve their quality of life, is by ensuring that they have mental health services that they can access, that we’re destigmatising issues of mental health. Our government has been on a mission for this for many years, as we sought to continue and build support services available.

We know Scott Morrison is not keen on the minimum wage keeping pace with inflation and Anthony Albanese is wavering a bit too by not saying it would be in a post-election submission by his government to the Fair Work Commission.

But some things do get indexed to consumer price inflation, such as student loans under the higher education contribution scheme (Hecs).

No wonder, then, that the National Union of Students president Georgie Beatty senses “just plain hypocrisy” in the government’s argument that wage increases at the pace of inflation would be “reckless”.

Many students, of course, hold down those one-in-four jobs paid the minimum (now at $20.33 an hour) in retailing and hospo.

Beatty, who was speaking after the first of two days of strike action by staff at the University of Sydney over poor pay and conditions, said student debt itself was ballooning even before the higher CPI-linked repayments kicked in.

“It’s not just that our fees are based on a much higher rate of inflation than our wages,” Georgie Beatty, NUS president, says. “Students are really feeling the brunt” of higher prices, as the cost of rents, food and other costs increase.

“It’s that Scott Morrison’s ‘job-ready graduates’ fees meant we also saw unprecedented fee hikes with arts degrees going up by 113%.”

“Students are questioning how we are going to pay off these increased fees when we are facing increased cost of living, insecure work and we haven’t seen major wage growth in most of our lifetimes,” Beatty tells us.

A spokesperson for employment minister Stuart Robert says the current HECS-HELP arrangements were “working to support a record number of Australian students participate in university and ensure that tertiary education does not have a cost barrier at the point of entry”.

“HECS-HELP loans are only paid back when individuals meet the income threshold and these loans are free of real interest.”

(‘Real’ interest is an interesting point because many loans are – so far – rates lower than the headline if not underlying inflation rate. When they turn positive, which they must eventually, nominal repayments will soar.)

The Greens, who are campaigning to “wipe student debt”, said the discrepancy between how student debt and wage rises was treated demonstrates the government’s priorities.

“If student debt can be automatically lifted with inflation then wages can too,” Greens leader Adam Bandt said. “The Greens want to change the law to lift the minimum wage to 60% of the median wage and to guarantee wages in female-dominated industries rise at least 0.5% faster than CPI to close the gender pay gap.”

Data from the Oecd shows the minimum wage as a proportion of median pay packets has been on a long-term declined since at least 2000. The average for Oecd member has increased over that time.

“It’s disappointing Labor won’t make a submission to the Fair Work Commission to require a lift to the minimum wage, something the Greens have done and will push for in the next Parliament,” Bandt said. “We need a full-court press on lifting wages now.”

Josh Taylor

The prime minister’s office has missed deadlines to hand over text messages between Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce during Joyce’s time as drought envy, and for documents related to the Angus Taylor City of Sydney doctored document scandal.

The Office of the Australian Information Commission ruled in April that PMO must process both freedom of information requests from 2019, rejecting claims by Morrison’s office that the PM’s duties meant he was too busy to handle such requests.

The deadline for those requests was last week but neither applicant has received a response so far.

A similar request for texts between Morrison and his prominent QAnon conspiracy theory-promoting friend Tim Stewart was rejected by PMO again last month on the grounds that the texts were not documents of a minister.

Unfortunately there is no way to quickly force a decision to be made in the next nine days. Under FOI law, when a deadline is missed, a request is “deemed refused” and then it can go back to the OAIC for appeal.

Which, based on the timing of the first review, could take two more years. That’s if Morrison wins the election. If he loses, the request would then fall to the next PMO to cover, and the documents are very unlikely to be retained for the incoming government.

Federal court dismisses James Ashby’s legal costs request

Paul Karp

The full federal court has dismissed Pauline Hanson chief of staff James Ashby’s appeal seeking a $4.5m act-of-grace payment from the commonwealth for his legal costs in his dispute with former speaker Peter Slipper.

Ashby had argued that a decision to refuse the payment constituted “adverse action” in breach of the Fair Work Act, and was unfair because Slipper’s costs were paid by the commonwealth and his were not.

After two decisions going against him in January and July 2021, Ashby appealed.

On Thursday, Justices Anna Katzmann, Wendy Abraham and Scott Goodman dismissed the appeal with costs.

They found that Ashby had sought to re-argue his case that a delegate of the finance minister did not have authority to refuse the payment but had not shown error by the primary judge.

They said there was nothing that required the decision on the act-of-grace payment to be made subject to constraints in the Fair Work Act, and that Ashby’s argument was “circular” in that it assumed the correctness of his own construction of the laws:

In summary, there is no merit in either ground of appeal.

Josh Frydenberg and Simon Birmingham are holding a press conference in Melbourne to talk about what the government has done with the economy over the last three years.

Frydenberg is speaking very slowly and deliberately and is using his soft voice – which is how you can tell he is being serious.

It seems like the point of this press conference is just to say this:

A weak Labor leader who doesn’t know the cash rate, who doesn’t know the unemployment rate and who now seems to want to run a $2.1tn economy from one press conference to another.