Let’s start today with a game: how would you rather spend $1bn?
Labor has announced it will spend an extra $1bn on the national broadband network, which will apparently double the number of homes connected as fibre-to-the-home, rather than fibre-to-the-node, and meet the Coalition’s timeline of finishing the project by 2022.
Meanwhile the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is in Townsville and will promise $1bn of the $10bn Clean Energy Finance Corporation account to protect the Great Barrier Reef.
The big picture
The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, is expected to announce a plan today to connect 2m more houses and businesses to the NBN through fibre-to-the-premises connections, rather than fibre-to-the-node.
The promise appears to be to MacGyver a faster NBN out of the work already done under the Coalition. It will bring the cost up from $56bn, which is the Coalition’s current projected spend, to $57bn, but rely on the same public equity contribution and deliver the project on the same timeline.
Gareth Hutchens has more:
Labor would scale up the rollout of fibre-to-the-premises, Shorten said, and phase out the rollout of the Coalition’s favoured fibre-to-the-node technology.
Construction of fibre-to-the-node will stop when the current pipeline of construction work is completed and construction of fibre-to-the-premises is scaled back up, Shorten said.
Labor would also commission Infrastructure Australia to manage the development of a plan that helps parts of Australia “left with Mr Turnbull’s second-rate NBN” to transition to fibre-to-the-premises.
While Shorten talks NBN, Turnbull and Greg Hunt will promise to dedicate $1bn of the $10bn Clean Energy Finance Corporation Fund towards protecting the Great Barrier Reef. That funding will be spent over 10 years.
Up to 93% of the reef has been affected by a mass coral bleaching event this year, and 22% of it has been killed. (You can see the scale of the damage in this report by my colleague, Michael Slezak.)
This is what Turnbull had to say:
Climate change is the greatest long-term threat to the Great Barrier Reef and to all coral reefs around the world.
Australia is playing its part in the global climate change effort through signing the Paris agreement and implementing policies to reduce Australia’s emission.
According to Mikey’s report, that’s not enough.
On the campaign trail
Malcolm Turnbull is with the environment minister, Greg Hunt, and the MP for Herbert, Ewen Jones, in Townsville this morning. They will jump in a boat and head out to the Great Barrier Reef this morning, before Turnbull flies to Perth.
Bill Shorten is in Sydney.
The campaign you should be watching
A push by the Greens to pick up two additional inner-city Melbourne electorates has reportedly been stymied by a preference deal between Labor and the Liberal party, which I’ll explain a bit more below.
But there is still a fierce battle in the seats of Batman, held by Labor’s David Feeney, and Wills, now held by the retiring Labor MP Kelvin Thomson. Labor has apparently peppered both electorates with anti-Greens campaign material. If you have spotted any, do send it in.
And another thing(s)
There has been a bit of wheeling and dealing on preferences at the weekend. Labor has pledged to preference the Liberal party over the Nationals in the rural seats of O’Connor and Durack in Western Australia and Murray in Victoria in exchange for Liberal preferences in inner-city seats.
The Greens have accused Labor for selling out their principles by making the deal, but it fits the narrative from the two major parties that the only valid vote is a vote for one of them.
From the report by Lenore Taylor and Gareth Hutchens:
On Sunday Turnbull promised to preference Labor ahead of the Greens in every House of Representatives seat, making the decision part of his pitch to voters that they should avoid voting for minor parties in the interests of political stability.
“This is a call that I have made in the national interest,” he said. “Let us be quite clear about this. The big risk at this election is that we would end up with an unstable, chaotic, minority Labor-Green-independent government as we have seen before.”
Meanwhile, Gareth reports that the Greens will preference Labor over the Coalition in 139 of 150 seats. The remaining 11 will issue an open ticket.
Fairfax Media’s James Massola described the Greens leader Richard Di Natale’s response to the preference deal as an “unedifying” and “hypocritical” dummy spit.
He writes:
In reality, Senator Di Natale’s sad Sunday jeremiad was an exercise in hypocrisy; the Greens leader condemned a deal that just days earlier his party had hoped to break their way, not Labor’s.
Looking west, the Canning MP, Andrew Hastie, has merited his fourth (or is it fifth?) Politics Live mention for neglecting to declare his $870,000 house on the register of parliamentary interests.
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