Federal politics live: Minister wants return to ‘sensible’ number of UK backpackers

Community Strong MP Allegra Spender is calling on the government to provide a 40 per cent capital gains discount for productive Australian businesses.

Earlier this year, the Albanese government announced carve outs for businesses and startups from its tax changes previously unveiled in the May budget.

Under the current proposal, the Innovative Business CGT Concession (IBCC) would protect investors, founders, and early employees of startup businesses from the controversial CGT changes.

But Spender says the legislation unfairly favours “innovative” businesses, and leaves others in the dust.

“I don’t think it’s fair that the tech sector gets one deal, and other parts of the economy — people running events companies, people running healthcare companies, people running local businesses — that they should get a different deal,” she said.

“Those businesses are also taking risk, those Australians are also giving up certainty, good jobs to take risks to start businesses”.

Under Spender’s proposal, the inflation-based CGT discount would still apply to passive assets like investment properties, but a blanket 40 per cent discount would apply to active assets including businesses and shares.

Her plan has the support of  the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. 

A review into the definition of a terrorist act by the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor was handed back to government last month.

Reports emerged this week the review was expected to recommend violent religious extremism to be covered by a broader category of “ideology”.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke says the PM has already made clear a change like that wouldn’t be pursued by the government.

“In terms of terrorism, my main priority is making sure that we get prosecutions,” he says.

“There is a challenge over the horizon in terms of mixed ideology as to whether we ever might get court decisions that find because an ideology is incoherent and self-contradictory, that it’s not an ideology.”

Burke says the courts have not found that yet, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has been asked whether Australians need to diversify their reliance on Microsoft.

Microsoft says a major outage is affecting several Microsoft Suite platforms, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot.

The home affairs minister says the relationship Australia has with Microsoft is an important one, particularly their partnership on security.

Burke says the government has activated a digital resilience agreement with Microsoft today to ensure Australia gets priority.

“That agreement has in fact been activated today to make sure that we get appropriate prioritisation of Australian interests in this across everything,” Burke says.

“The concept of diversity, it’s a relevant issue in trade. It’s a relevant issue across software. It’s a relevant issue across everything, but I would not want to allow that general statement to undermine the fact that there is very significant good work that is done between Australia and Microsoft.”

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke is asked whether the government would reconsider revisiting a proposed federal criminal vilification offence to deter hate preachers.

The government had proposed legislation targeting hate preaching as part of its response to the Bondi terror attack, but it failed to get the support required to pass parliament.

Burke points the finger directly at the Coalition.

“The only reason why we are in a situation where the federal police haven’t been able to bring charges is because the Coalition went to water on doing something about hate preachers,” he says.

“We had the … absolutely bizarre situation of there being bipartisan agreement that we should have stronger laws and then the moment we get to the moment of implementing them, the bipartisanship collapsed.

“That is an entirely a question for the opposition.”

The home affairs minister has been asked if he can provide an update on when ISIS-linked woman Hodan Abby will return to Australia.

The Sydney woman is believed to be the final Australian, who went to Syria to join ISIS, remaining in a Syrian camp.

Tony Burke says all citizens are legally able to return to their own countries, and that it is a principle he uses to Australia’s benefit.

“The concept that people will return to their own countries, even when their own countries often don’t want them back, is something where it is a principle that overwhelmingly works in Australia’s interest,” Burke says.

“That said, if this particular individual never came back to Australia, I would not object to that one bit.”

A review of Australia’s terror warning system is underway amid concerns the current settings underestimate the dangers the nation faces.

ASIO chief Mike Burgess says he plans to brief Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke next week on a new system.

“I’m pretty confident we’ve got something,” he says, but it’s up to the minister and the states and territories to sign off first.

Burke says the review is looking at how to provide the “simplest, most targeted” method of informing the community with information that’s easily digestible.

“The challenge we have at the moment is this: you go from possible to probable when you’re … colloquially, across the 50 per cent threshold but anywhere from 50 per cent up to where you have specific information of an imminent threat,” he says.

“You don’t have an [easy] communication method at the moment of how we basically ratchet up. That’s the weakness that is being worked through.”

The home affairs minister has been asked why no members of the federal government cabinet have faced the antisemitism royal commission, given it will be handing down its final report soon.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke says if the royal commission wanted to hear evidence from a minister, they would have been called.

He says he thinks all Australians should have full confidence in the work of commissioner Virginia Bell.

“If at any point the royal commission wanted any evidence to be given by any minister, it would have been provided and provided immediately,” Burke says.

“The whole concept of a royal commission is that you have an independent commissioner make the decision as to which evidence they believe is going to provide what they need to give recommendations to keep Australians safe.”

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke does not believe the Microsoft outage is a result of a cybersecurity incident.

Burke was briefed by Australia’s national cyber security coordinator Michelle McGuinness and Microsoft this morning.

“They do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event,” Burke says.

Burke compares it to the CrowdStrike outage in 2024, when an update went awry.

“The impact they are dealing with very much is .. on email systems,” he says.

ASIO boss Mike Burgess is up next, saying extremists are engaging with each other behind the walls of encrypted chat groups.

He says the opening of the counterterrorism online centre is a “major milestone” in the spy agency’s mission to protect Australians.

Burgess shares an example of a group that brought together neo-Nazis and fascists from across the globe. He says they identified an Australian in that group who was asking how to undertake an attack.

“The investigation put together the online digital breadcrumbs that enabled them to identify this user. This Australian user, a member of a neo-Nazi chat group who praised mass killers and used violent extremist rhetoric, was a 15-year-old,” he says.

The information was passed on to the police, who closed the case. The teenager was referred to a counter violent extremism program.

Tony Burke has stepped up for a press conference in Sydney to announce the opening of a $76 million counterterrorism hub targeting online youth extremism.

The home affairs minister is accompanied by ASIO chief Mike Burgess and AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett at today’s press conference.

Burke says the multi-million-dollar facility will provide a space for ASIO and federal police to be co-located.

He says the space, the location of which is not disclosed, provides an opportunity for authorities to stop violence before it happens.

“The work that our agencies will be doing in the new online centre … where we have professionals who’ve dedicated their lives to national security working in the online space to find where there is a risk so that we can then make sure where people are being pushed towards extremism have the best opportunity to intervene before harm outside the online world becomes real,” Burke says.

COP31 might be all about how the world can transition to green energy, but there’s another important source that has been powering the UN climate talks: coffee.

The Coalition is calling the free coffee cart at the Australian pavilion at the summit a “nonsense” waste of money, but Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen (who is also leading COP negotiations this year) has now returned serve.

Bowen says Opposition Leader Angus Taylor should recall he was energy minister when the cart and pavilion were both conceived five years ago.

“Does he want one lump of hypocrisy or two with his coffee?” Bowen told the ABC in an interview on the sidelines of COP31 in Türkiye.

There’s a serious side to all this too, with Bowen insisting Australia has an important role to play on the world stage — one that he thinks is worth the price of a few cups of coffee.

Read the full wrap from COP31 from chief digital political correspondent Clare Armstrong in the link below.

For the second time in as many weeks, Anthony Albanese has raised the issue of British backpackers with his UK counterpart Andy Burnham.

The pair met on the sidelines of the COP31 summit in Türkiye, following talks at CHOGM last week, with working holiday visas again on the agenda.

Under the Australia-UK free trade agreement, British backpackers no longer have to complete regional work to extend their stay in Australia.

As a result, their numbers have surged to almost 80,000 current visa holders — more than double the pre-pandemic peak of about 35,000.

The government wants to rein in the rapid growth, but any changes to the agreements need to be negotiated with the UK.

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has accused the prime minister of being “allergic to accountability” over a $6 million grant to the Marrickville Golf Club.

The club, which is in the prime minister’s electorate, received the grant while Anthony Albanese was an undisclosed honorary member.

Albanese initially told the House of Representatives the grant was to fix sewerage, but had to clarify later it wasn’t for that.

The PM also claimed the value of his honorary membership, which he has since rescinded, was $5 a year.

Yesterday, golf club representatives told the inquiry that the value of the membership was actually $1,100 per year.

“He’s allergic to accountability on the Marrickville Golf Club. He’s allergic to accountability on the economy, on five interest rate increases over the course of this year,” Taylor tells News24.

“If you can’t admit to a mistake, you can’t fix it. This prime minister has a deep character flaw which is now affecting, in a serious way, his ability to govern this country.”

Shadow Technology Minister Aaron Violi has urged the government to move quickly and act on the recommendations of a rapid review into an OpenAI data breach.

The government announced a new set of safety and security standards for artificial intelligence along with a new regulator who can impose penalties.

The Coalition has backed the recommendations of the rapid reviews and the action the government has flagged.

Speaking to ABC Radio National Breakfast, Violi says the government needs to move at pace to implement the reforms.

He says the opposition would likely not support retrospective laws.

“The government have dragged their feet on this. AI as a technology has advanced rapidly in the last four years, and the government have been slow to act and the OpenAI breach has shown that,” Violi says.

“We welcome the recommendations, and now the government needs to move with speed to ensure that people are held to account if they are looking to do the wrong thing and that’s the balance we need to strike here because AI agents have a level of independence.

“Ultimately, no-one should be hiding behind the actions of an agent if they have directed it to do illegal things. They need to be held to account as a human.”

The federal government has confirmed OpenAI didn’t break the law when it gained unauthorised access to Medicare data earlier this year.

The incident, which the artificial intelligence company has apologised for, has sparked conversation about the need for law reform.

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland says any changes to the law around authorised access by AI to data would require knowledge or intention on the part of a responsible person to be able to point to an offence.

Rowland has told ABC Radio National Breakfast it’s a complex area of law that has never been tested in court before.

“If the question is, ‘Had these actions been undertaken by a human or had a human directed the AI agent?’, we would probably be in a position to point to an offence in our criminal laws,” Rowland says.

“But here, I think the rapid review has pointed to something really important, and that is that we need to be not only ready for future attacks and make sure that we’ve got that resilience in place, but also the right laws.”

The attorney-general says she expects a national criminal history tracker to be up and running by 2028 despite delays.

From Monday, South Australia is set to become the first state to connect to a pilot of the long-awaited national criminal history tracker.

The national system was set up following a series of horrific cases of child abuse in childcare centres across Australia.

Michelle Rowland has told ABC Radio National Breakfast she would like for all jurisdictions to be connected to the database by the end of the year.

“We expect that state and territory agencies will be on board with police forces by 2027 and that it should be up and running by 2028,” Rowland says.

“We are being ambitious. They are timeframes that are not goals. They are timeframes that we want to beat and my key message today is that we’ve achieved a lot so far.”

Deputy Liberal leader Jane Hume has taken aim the the federal government’s $32,000 coffee cart at the COP31 conference in Türkiye.

The Coalition has been critical of the decision despite the pavilion dating to Opposition Leader Angus Taylor’s time as energy minister.

But asked on Channel Seven how the opposition can criticise the move given it was the Coalition’s idea originally, Hume has deflected and says the Coalition didn’t spend that much.

“We didn’t spend $30,000 on a coffee cart during a cost-of-living crisis. We didn’t send 200 bureaucrats at a cost of $2 million,” Hume says.

“When we have energy bills going up by 40 per cent, and hundreds of thousands of Australians in energy hardship programs, this is crazy stuff.”

Health Minister Mark Butler has defended the cart, saying COP31 is one of the largest expos in the world and the pavilion provides an opportunity for attendees to have a discussion with Australians.

 “Governments for a long time have known that one of the best ways to bait the hook, to get people to stop by the Australian pavilion, is the fact we have the best coffee in the world,” Butler says.

“I mean, you won’t see that in the British pavilion unless they happen to have an Australian barista doing it.”

Hello and welcome to our federal politics live blog! It’s great to have you here for another day of federal politics news.

I’m Josh Boscaini, joining you live from Parliament House in Canberra, here and ready to bring you all of today’s federal politics news.

The home affairs minister is considering backing down on changes to backpacker visas just months after announcing them at the National Press Club.

And my colleague Clare Armstrong will have all the latest from the COP31 summit in Türkiye throughout the morning.

It’s nearly the end of the working week, so let’s get right into the day’s news and see what it brings us!