00:00:06
Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mamma Mia podcast.
00:00:13
Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Tamsin Rose with the latest from the Quickie Newsroom. What's actually going on with One Nation? Does it matter if we're in debt? Could someone unseat the Prime Minister? Today, you'll be hearing from me and my co-host, Charlotte Mortlock. We asked for your questions about Australian politics and you delivered. But first, here are your headlines for Friday, August 4th. Pioneering feminist activist and icon Gloria Steinem has died at the age of 92. She's being remembered as one of the trailblazers for women's equality after she died peacefully at her home in New York City on Wednesday. Announcing her death, a spokesperson said Gloria's near century on earth were years well lived and she continued working for equality until the very end. Steiner became one of the most visible symbols and potent voices of the US women's movement and a fierce advocate for women's causes throughout her life. Authorities and families hope that telecommunication data can help narrow down the locations of Australians missing following the catastrophic floods in Nepal. Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong said concerns deepen every day for the dozens of Australians still unaccounted for on Thursday evening as the death toll rose above 1,200. Nepali rescue teams are expected to search in locations where many Australians are believed to have been staying. While hopes fade for many of the thousands missing, authorities believe dozens of workers trapped in tunnels of hydropower projects hit by the Himalayan catastrophe could still be alive. Smokers could find their pack of cigarettes costing less than $ 30 under a coalition government, after Liberal leader Angus Taylor announced he wanted to slash the tobacco excise by 80% if he won at the next election. Taylor argues an estimated 80% of cigarettes smoked in Australia last year were illegal, up from just 12% in 2017, and that the illicit trade has fuelled a wave of firebombings at tobacconists in major cities. Health Minister Tanya Plibersek warns cheaper smokes means more smokers and more deaths, pointing to high prices as the reason Australia's smoking rate is one of the lowest in the world. Coming up, why roads are starting to look very different. And we're answering all your burning questions about One Nation. For the first time ever, Australians bought more electric cars than petrol ones last month. Nearly one in four new cars sold in Australia was fully electric, outselling petrol for the first time on record. The shift comes as fuel prices climb amid the Middle East conflict. Tesla's Model Y topped the overall sales charts ahead of the RAV4 and Hilux. Hi, I'm Tamsyn Rose.
00:03:20
Speaker 1: And I am Charlotte Mortlock, your host of The Quickie.
00:03:23
Speaker 2: Today, we are so excited to be answering your questions. We asked you on our Instagram what you wanted to know about Australian politics, and you absolutely delivered. So we'll have to do this again. We couldn't get to them all, but we have picked some of the ones that you asked us the most. So we were absolutely inundated with questions around one topic.
00:03:44
Speaker 1: I'll take a guess.
00:03:46
Speaker 2: No prizes for guessing this one. One Nation is right at the top of mind. So I put a couple together. Now, Jack has asked, was the Secret Harbour result a flash in the pan or was it a sign of things to come? And Meryl has asked why voters are turning to One Nation. What is the appeal there?
00:04:05
Speaker 3: It's a juicy old topic. So I think a few interesting things here. One Nation has gone through periods where it has polled really well. But then on voting day, people actually haven't voted that way. That is not what's happening now. It is translating pretty closely to the polling. And that is what we saw in Secret Harbour, a by-election in Western Australia on Saturday. I am so sick to death of hearing people saying that this is an anti-establishment vote.
00:04:36
Speaker 1: People don't want the status quo anymore.
00:04:39
Speaker 3: But I think that sometimes we're dismissing some of the reasons of the appeal for One Nation. Australia has had one of the sharpest declines in our living standards over the past few decades.
00:04:51
Speaker 1: That's a real concern.
00:04:52
Speaker 3: That is not necessarily just someone protesting because of it. they are trying to take care of themselves and there is this issue with trust of the major parties. They think that, you know, I've been struggling for years and I've lived under a Labor government, I've lived under a coalition government and neither of them have helped me. So it's kind of this third option that people are wanting to, I guess, explore. I think the other interesting thing is that we're so desensitised to chaos now and I also think this is post-COVID that people I do think that people are at a crisis point where they do want to take a chance. And I do think that the immigration debate that has occurred off the back of One Nation, while I don't think their rhetoric is helpful, there are people who are saying, I don't care where you're from, just we can't take any more people until those living standards start to improve.
00:05:47
Speaker 2: I also think this is really interesting because we're talking about this anti-establishment feeling, but Pauline Hanson's actually existed within our political establishment for a really long time now.
00:05:57
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:05:59
Speaker 3: And it's worth looking at the comparison. It is similar to what's happening in the UK with Nigel Farage. Farage is the head of the Reform Party and he has been around for a really long time. And I feel like with both Farage and Hanson, the moment has met them as opposed to them meeting the moment. And I think that is kind of an important distinction to make. Yeah. And at the moment, almost everywhere in the world, the biggest political repellent is to be a whiff of the establishment, like voters will run a mile from it. And while Farage and his party Reform outflanked the very well-established Conservative Party in the UK on the right, it's quite fascinating because they have actually now been outflanked further by Restore and Very confusing, Reform and Restore.
00:06:50
Speaker 2: That is really confusing. Very similar names. Yes.
00:06:53
Speaker 3: But Restore is a new political party outflanking Farage's Reform. And so Farage is now considered the establishment. So to be branded as establishment right now is like this massive stain in a kryptonite. And here in Australia, all politicians are scrambling to avoid that.
00:07:12
Speaker 1: 2028 is a long, long way away.
00:07:14
Speaker 3: And I think it'll be really interesting to see the One Nation movement trajectory, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw Barnaby Joyce as the leader.
00:07:24
Speaker 2: Interesting. Okay.
00:07:25
Speaker 3: Hot take.
00:07:25
Speaker 2: Hot take from Charlotte. And I think it's also interesting, we've got the Victorian election coming up this year, and we're also going to be closely watching what happens there with One Nation. So we've got a lot to discuss on that front in the next few months.
00:07:38
Speaker 1: Yes, that will be absolutely fascinating.
00:07:40
Speaker 3: Tamsin, Izzy has asked, could Hannah Ferguson realistically run for Albanese's seat?
00:07:46
Speaker 2: Yes, such an interesting question. So this question, for some context, this is about Anthony Albanese's seat of Grayndler in Sydney's Inner West. Now he holds that seat as he has since 1996, which is an incredibly long time. And Labor has held that seat since it was formed in the 1940s. So this is Labor stronghold and this is our Prime Minister's home seat that he is very comfortable in.
00:08:12
Speaker 3: He's cozy.
00:08:13
Speaker 2: He's very cozy.
00:08:14
Speaker 3: He is settled in.
00:08:15
Speaker 2: He's very cozy. And this is about Hannah Ferguson. So Hannah Ferguson started Cheek Media. You might've seen her on Instagram and she's been big in the political space for a few years.
00:08:23
Speaker 1: Massive profile.
00:08:24
Speaker 2: Massive profile, which is going to definitely come into this. So if the question is, can she realistically run?
00:08:30
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely.
00:08:31
Speaker 2: She can. The bigger question is, could she win? And that is a tricky one. So if you ask her, which many people have, of course, she says, absolutely, yes, I can win. And as she brightly points out, we're quite far away from the next federal election that has to happen by May, 2028. So she has enough time to bolster support, to get volunteers, to really start this campaign. But she'll be running against the prime minister, but it's not like we don't have precedent where high profile politicians who've been leaders have been unseated before. If you can turn your mind back to 2019, Tony Abbott had recently been ousted as the Prime Minister and he lost his seat in Warringah to Zali Stegall and she's held that seat ever since. And that was a blue ribbon Liberal seat and that was taken off him.
00:09:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was even the same with John Howard in the Kevin 07 election when he lost his seat to Maxine McHugh and he was the sitting Prime Minister.
00:09:28
Speaker 1: So it does happen.
00:09:29
Speaker 3: I mean, Peter Dutton at the last election lost his seat to Ali France. So it's not completely out of the realm of possibility. It's just going to be a lot of hard work and things will need to go in her favor.
00:09:41
Speaker 2: The question is whether or not she can galvanize enough support for that. She's not announced her full policy platform so far, but she has said that her three pillars of her policy platform are the three Gs. So she's calling them gas, gambling, and Gaza. She's got a big public profile. She's happy to do press. She's happy to walk the streets, to talk to the people, and she could have a very galvanised younger vote. The question is whether those people are all in the electorate to vote for her. People who have been voting for Labour for just so long.
00:10:13
Speaker 1: I think absolutely good honour for having a crack. I love it.
00:10:16
Speaker 3: There are so many people who sit around dinner tables complaining about politics, but I think there's fewer people that want to throw their hat in the ring. And so I do think it is a great thing when anyone wants to run.
00:10:26
Speaker 2: Yeah. I also think especially we've been hearing a lot recently about just how hard it is to stand for political office and to be a female politician. There are just different threats, different dangers and different things that they experience to their male counterparts. And so I think especially a young woman standing up, having a go, I think it's admirable and it's going to be really interesting. Charlotte Gusters asked us, Australia is nearing $ 1 trillion in debt. How does government bring that down?
00:10:55
Speaker 3: This story dropped last week about Australia hitting this $ 1 trillion mark.
00:10:59
Speaker 1: And it is obviously a concern.
00:11:01
Speaker 3: But what is the more terrifying statistic is that the state's territories and federal government debt combined by the end of the decade will actually.
00:11:11
Speaker 1: Hit $ 2 trillion.
00:11:13
Speaker 2: That's a lot of money.
00:11:13
Speaker 1: That's a lot of money.
00:11:15
Speaker 3: And so the sleeper issue in this is the state government spending. So the balance sheet in our state and territory jurisdictions is actually something we should be very, very concerned about. But back to the federal budget, that $ 1 trillion of debt is really important to be viewed with relevancy. So our economy is worth $ 2. 7 trillion and the size of our superannuation system is $ 4. 5 trillion. So that is important context to see this debt in. But the problem here is that as our debt grows, our ability to repay those loans will and to pay interest on them is going to increase. So I did some figures and every hour, Australia is paying around $ 3 million on interest.
00:12:11
Speaker 1: And that is jats crackers.
00:12:13
Speaker 2: Can I just ask a really basic question here? How does a government being in so much debt actually affect us?
00:12:19
Speaker 3: Well, they'll find more ways to tax us. So our personal income or changes to the capital gains tax and negative gearing, but then also If they try to cut spending, it's going to be changes to infrastructure or the quality of our services.
00:12:35
Speaker 2: And on that note, that is us for today. We hope you've enjoyed today's episode. We'd love to hear your feedback and we'd also love to get some more questions. So shoot us some questions, leave us some comments. And as always, thank you for listening to The Quickie. You can find us on Instagram at The Quickie or at thequickie at mamamia.com.au. We'll be back this afternoon with your headlines.
00:13:01
Speaker 3: Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast.
Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mamma Mia podcast.
00:00:13
Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Tamsin Rose with the latest from the Quickie Newsroom. What's actually going on with One Nation? Does it matter if we're in debt? Could someone unseat the Prime Minister? Today, you'll be hearing from me and my co-host, Charlotte Mortlock. We asked for your questions about Australian politics and you delivered. But first, here are your headlines for Friday, August 4th. Pioneering feminist activist and icon Gloria Steinem has died at the age of 92. She's being remembered as one of the trailblazers for women's equality after she died peacefully at her home in New York City on Wednesday. Announcing her death, a spokesperson said Gloria's near century on earth were years well lived and she continued working for equality until the very end. Steiner became one of the most visible symbols and potent voices of the US women's movement and a fierce advocate for women's causes throughout her life. Authorities and families hope that telecommunication data can help narrow down the locations of Australians missing following the catastrophic floods in Nepal. Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong said concerns deepen every day for the dozens of Australians still unaccounted for on Thursday evening as the death toll rose above 1,200. Nepali rescue teams are expected to search in locations where many Australians are believed to have been staying. While hopes fade for many of the thousands missing, authorities believe dozens of workers trapped in tunnels of hydropower projects hit by the Himalayan catastrophe could still be alive. Smokers could find their pack of cigarettes costing less than $ 30 under a coalition government, after Liberal leader Angus Taylor announced he wanted to slash the tobacco excise by 80% if he won at the next election. Taylor argues an estimated 80% of cigarettes smoked in Australia last year were illegal, up from just 12% in 2017, and that the illicit trade has fuelled a wave of firebombings at tobacconists in major cities. Health Minister Tanya Plibersek warns cheaper smokes means more smokers and more deaths, pointing to high prices as the reason Australia's smoking rate is one of the lowest in the world. Coming up, why roads are starting to look very different. And we're answering all your burning questions about One Nation. For the first time ever, Australians bought more electric cars than petrol ones last month. Nearly one in four new cars sold in Australia was fully electric, outselling petrol for the first time on record. The shift comes as fuel prices climb amid the Middle East conflict. Tesla's Model Y topped the overall sales charts ahead of the RAV4 and Hilux. Hi, I'm Tamsyn Rose.
00:03:20
Speaker 1: And I am Charlotte Mortlock, your host of The Quickie.
00:03:23
Speaker 2: Today, we are so excited to be answering your questions. We asked you on our Instagram what you wanted to know about Australian politics, and you absolutely delivered. So we'll have to do this again. We couldn't get to them all, but we have picked some of the ones that you asked us the most. So we were absolutely inundated with questions around one topic.
00:03:44
Speaker 1: I'll take a guess.
00:03:46
Speaker 2: No prizes for guessing this one. One Nation is right at the top of mind. So I put a couple together. Now, Jack has asked, was the Secret Harbour result a flash in the pan or was it a sign of things to come? And Meryl has asked why voters are turning to One Nation. What is the appeal there?
00:04:05
Speaker 3: It's a juicy old topic. So I think a few interesting things here. One Nation has gone through periods where it has polled really well. But then on voting day, people actually haven't voted that way. That is not what's happening now. It is translating pretty closely to the polling. And that is what we saw in Secret Harbour, a by-election in Western Australia on Saturday. I am so sick to death of hearing people saying that this is an anti-establishment vote.
00:04:36
Speaker 1: People don't want the status quo anymore.
00:04:39
Speaker 3: But I think that sometimes we're dismissing some of the reasons of the appeal for One Nation. Australia has had one of the sharpest declines in our living standards over the past few decades.
00:04:51
Speaker 1: That's a real concern.
00:04:52
Speaker 3: That is not necessarily just someone protesting because of it. they are trying to take care of themselves and there is this issue with trust of the major parties. They think that, you know, I've been struggling for years and I've lived under a Labor government, I've lived under a coalition government and neither of them have helped me. So it's kind of this third option that people are wanting to, I guess, explore. I think the other interesting thing is that we're so desensitised to chaos now and I also think this is post-COVID that people I do think that people are at a crisis point where they do want to take a chance. And I do think that the immigration debate that has occurred off the back of One Nation, while I don't think their rhetoric is helpful, there are people who are saying, I don't care where you're from, just we can't take any more people until those living standards start to improve.
00:05:47
Speaker 2: I also think this is really interesting because we're talking about this anti-establishment feeling, but Pauline Hanson's actually existed within our political establishment for a really long time now.
00:05:57
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:05:59
Speaker 3: And it's worth looking at the comparison. It is similar to what's happening in the UK with Nigel Farage. Farage is the head of the Reform Party and he has been around for a really long time. And I feel like with both Farage and Hanson, the moment has met them as opposed to them meeting the moment. And I think that is kind of an important distinction to make. Yeah. And at the moment, almost everywhere in the world, the biggest political repellent is to be a whiff of the establishment, like voters will run a mile from it. And while Farage and his party Reform outflanked the very well-established Conservative Party in the UK on the right, it's quite fascinating because they have actually now been outflanked further by Restore and Very confusing, Reform and Restore.
00:06:50
Speaker 2: That is really confusing. Very similar names. Yes.
00:06:53
Speaker 3: But Restore is a new political party outflanking Farage's Reform. And so Farage is now considered the establishment. So to be branded as establishment right now is like this massive stain in a kryptonite. And here in Australia, all politicians are scrambling to avoid that.
00:07:12
Speaker 1: 2028 is a long, long way away.
00:07:14
Speaker 3: And I think it'll be really interesting to see the One Nation movement trajectory, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw Barnaby Joyce as the leader.
00:07:24
Speaker 2: Interesting. Okay.
00:07:25
Speaker 3: Hot take.
00:07:25
Speaker 2: Hot take from Charlotte. And I think it's also interesting, we've got the Victorian election coming up this year, and we're also going to be closely watching what happens there with One Nation. So we've got a lot to discuss on that front in the next few months.
00:07:38
Speaker 1: Yes, that will be absolutely fascinating.
00:07:40
Speaker 3: Tamsin, Izzy has asked, could Hannah Ferguson realistically run for Albanese's seat?
00:07:46
Speaker 2: Yes, such an interesting question. So this question, for some context, this is about Anthony Albanese's seat of Grayndler in Sydney's Inner West. Now he holds that seat as he has since 1996, which is an incredibly long time. And Labor has held that seat since it was formed in the 1940s. So this is Labor stronghold and this is our Prime Minister's home seat that he is very comfortable in.
00:08:12
Speaker 3: He's cozy.
00:08:13
Speaker 2: He's very cozy.
00:08:14
Speaker 3: He is settled in.
00:08:15
Speaker 2: He's very cozy. And this is about Hannah Ferguson. So Hannah Ferguson started Cheek Media. You might've seen her on Instagram and she's been big in the political space for a few years.
00:08:23
Speaker 1: Massive profile.
00:08:24
Speaker 2: Massive profile, which is going to definitely come into this. So if the question is, can she realistically run?
00:08:30
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely.
00:08:31
Speaker 2: She can. The bigger question is, could she win? And that is a tricky one. So if you ask her, which many people have, of course, she says, absolutely, yes, I can win. And as she brightly points out, we're quite far away from the next federal election that has to happen by May, 2028. So she has enough time to bolster support, to get volunteers, to really start this campaign. But she'll be running against the prime minister, but it's not like we don't have precedent where high profile politicians who've been leaders have been unseated before. If you can turn your mind back to 2019, Tony Abbott had recently been ousted as the Prime Minister and he lost his seat in Warringah to Zali Stegall and she's held that seat ever since. And that was a blue ribbon Liberal seat and that was taken off him.
00:09:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was even the same with John Howard in the Kevin 07 election when he lost his seat to Maxine McHugh and he was the sitting Prime Minister.
00:09:28
Speaker 1: So it does happen.
00:09:29
Speaker 3: I mean, Peter Dutton at the last election lost his seat to Ali France. So it's not completely out of the realm of possibility. It's just going to be a lot of hard work and things will need to go in her favor.
00:09:41
Speaker 2: The question is whether or not she can galvanize enough support for that. She's not announced her full policy platform so far, but she has said that her three pillars of her policy platform are the three Gs. So she's calling them gas, gambling, and Gaza. She's got a big public profile. She's happy to do press. She's happy to walk the streets, to talk to the people, and she could have a very galvanised younger vote. The question is whether those people are all in the electorate to vote for her. People who have been voting for Labour for just so long.
00:10:13
Speaker 1: I think absolutely good honour for having a crack. I love it.
00:10:16
Speaker 3: There are so many people who sit around dinner tables complaining about politics, but I think there's fewer people that want to throw their hat in the ring. And so I do think it is a great thing when anyone wants to run.
00:10:26
Speaker 2: Yeah. I also think especially we've been hearing a lot recently about just how hard it is to stand for political office and to be a female politician. There are just different threats, different dangers and different things that they experience to their male counterparts. And so I think especially a young woman standing up, having a go, I think it's admirable and it's going to be really interesting. Charlotte Gusters asked us, Australia is nearing $ 1 trillion in debt. How does government bring that down?
00:10:55
Speaker 3: This story dropped last week about Australia hitting this $ 1 trillion mark.
00:10:59
Speaker 1: And it is obviously a concern.
00:11:01
Speaker 3: But what is the more terrifying statistic is that the state's territories and federal government debt combined by the end of the decade will actually.
00:11:11
Speaker 1: Hit $ 2 trillion.
00:11:13
Speaker 2: That's a lot of money.
00:11:13
Speaker 1: That's a lot of money.
00:11:15
Speaker 3: And so the sleeper issue in this is the state government spending. So the balance sheet in our state and territory jurisdictions is actually something we should be very, very concerned about. But back to the federal budget, that $ 1 trillion of debt is really important to be viewed with relevancy. So our economy is worth $ 2. 7 trillion and the size of our superannuation system is $ 4. 5 trillion. So that is important context to see this debt in. But the problem here is that as our debt grows, our ability to repay those loans will and to pay interest on them is going to increase. So I did some figures and every hour, Australia is paying around $ 3 million on interest.
00:12:11
Speaker 1: And that is jats crackers.
00:12:13
Speaker 2: Can I just ask a really basic question here? How does a government being in so much debt actually affect us?
00:12:19
Speaker 3: Well, they'll find more ways to tax us. So our personal income or changes to the capital gains tax and negative gearing, but then also If they try to cut spending, it's going to be changes to infrastructure or the quality of our services.
00:12:35
Speaker 2: And on that note, that is us for today. We hope you've enjoyed today's episode. We'd love to hear your feedback and we'd also love to get some more questions. So shoot us some questions, leave us some comments. And as always, thank you for listening to The Quickie. You can find us on Instagram at The Quickie or at thequickie at mamamia.com.au. We'll be back this afternoon with your headlines.
00:13:01
Speaker 3: Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast.
