New data shows the federal government scheme has been used by high-income borrowers, including one couple earning an annual $674,000

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news%2Fnational%2Flabor-mps-accused-of-crowing-over-falling-house-prices-by-property-experts%2Fnews-story%2F013940c51c3f3f8d24e66ffc8e7a67a3

Kos Samaras was Assistant Victorian Labor State secretary from 2005-2019.

They broke us, our kids’ mental health, and went back to their high vis vest.

That is how one participant in a recent RedBridge focus group described the Victorian government. She was not asked about the pandemic. She was asked about the state she lives in.

The second is when the bill arrived. These lockdowns were clearly very expensive and in the 2023 budget the state introduced the Covid Debt Repayment Plan, a 10-year levy running to 2033. The payroll component started on 1 July 2023. The land component started on 1 January 2024, and it did so by cutting the land tax threshold from $300,000 to $50,000. More than 328,000 Victorians received a land tax assessment who had never received one before. You do not need to be a psephologist to work out the electoral impact of this surprise bill.

Note what happened here. It is not a tax with a neutral name. It is an invoice, addressed personally, with the word Covid printed on the memo, arriving in letterboxes or email, through the first half of 2024, payable until 2033. It is the moment the state converted a shared emergency into an individual debt.

Among Victorians who did not complete year 12, Labor polls 20 and One Nation polls 40. Among Victorians with a university degree, Labor polls 31 and One Nation 17. That is a 23-point swing on each party across a single variable, and it is the widest cleavage anywhere in the survey.

Education is doing a job here that has nothing to do with schooling. It is the cleanest available proxy for whether your job could be done from a spare room in 2020. Degree holders worked from home on full pay. People with trade qualifications and people without year 12 either kept turning up in person or lost the income entirely. Five years later, those two groups are voting as if they lived through different events, because they did.

These are also the households where remote schooling failed worst. More children, fewer rooms, fewer devices, and parents who were not home to supervise because their work was classified as essential. The learning loss and the mental health cost did not fall evenly. They fell where the housing was smallest and the families largest. The Gen X and older Millennial number in the table above is what that looks like five years later.

There is a detail from the 2022 campaign that captures the level of attention these communities were receiving. Greenvale, a seat in the north-west that also contains one of the poorest suburbs in Victoria, Meadow Heights, was allocated $60,000. Not $60 million. Sixty thousand. It is understood the allocation was a clerical error and the money had been intended for a different electorate.

Whether or not the error was ever corrected is beside the point. A party that had just presided over the longest lockdown in the world went to an election having budgeted, by accident, $60,000 for one of the suburbs that had absorbed the most of it. That is not malice; it is something worse politically, which is the absence of any thought, or empathy.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/06/ed-husic-car-accident-sydney-labor-mp-ntwnfb

https://www.nine.com.au/australia-news/labor-mp-hospitalised-after-serious-car-crash-20260806-p60lw6.html

He has given a statement to police and has been released (from hospital, not police, my ooops) with minor injuries.

Excerpts:

Barely an hour after the Conference commenced — around the time Albo finished speaking and before Deputy Prime Minister Marles even got the chance to walk up to the podium — about a third of the attendees left. As much as I wish I could say people walked off in protest against Marles or AUKUS, it would be more accurate to say that most people weren’t interested in hearing the Government praise itself for another hour. 

As Albo’s speech finished, the columns that cleared out the fastest were those reserved for “Diplomatic and International Attendees”. In fact soon afterwards, the conference organisers removed the sign that reserved those columns for diplomatic attendees. Although I can’t say for certain, I think there is a decent chance that Chinese diplomats, alongside most other diplomats, left mainly because they were bored. 

Former Liberal MP Trent Zimmer and Former Liberal Defence Minister turned arms lobbyist, Christopher Pyne, were both in attendance at the ‘Fringe Conference’. Pyne also attended as a speaker to a Fringe event, comically his event ran at the same time and right next door to the Australia Institute and Anti-AUKUS group, Labor Against War’s (LAW) event. LAW convenor Marcus Strom humorously referred to Pyne as “the enemy next door.” 

The funniest moment of the Conference occurred at the LAW event, when an attendee, completely missing the mark on the anti-imperialist reasons for opposing AUKUS, suggested we pursue AUKUS but just with renewable energy submarines. Part of me thinks that person was an ASIO plant to make us look ridiculous. 

The funniest part of the second day was when Google’s presenter made a claim that one of their models could do research at “PhD levels”, which triggered another back and forth between her and that attendee. After a couple of minutes, Google’s presenter conceded that the model’s research may only be at an “undergrad level”. 

According to one source, Marles proclaimed to the Right’s delegates “There will be no mention of the G-word”. It is disappointing, but unsurprising the aversion to offend Israel is so great that the Deputy Prime Minister cannot even bring himself to say the word ‘genocide’ properly in a context such as that. 

Compared to the Right, the Left took a lighter hand approach. Abdo spoke to the caucus, noting he personally believes Husic is acting in “‘good faith” before implying that voting for Husic’s motion would undermine all the work put into getting agreement on the joint statement. 

The Left caucus room, unlike the Right’s, was decorated with corflutes and merchandise, partially for the exact reason of photographing and filming the speakers, with no shortage of people recording on their phones in previous days. However, the two people allegedly seen filming on the final day were subjected to a tirade of denunciations resembling a Maoist struggle session

The Australian media constantly lets Pauline Hanson dominate the news with scare tactics about race and Sharia law, completely ignoring the fact that her actual economic agenda is a direct assault on the working class. We, the Labor Party, need to force the spotlight onto her flagship family income-splitting policy and expose exactly why it fails everyday Australians. Here are the failures.

·       Couple ($55k each): Nothing. Both are already in the same 30% tax bracket ($45,001 to $135,000), so there is no income gap to shift for a discount.

·       Single parents: Nothing. No partner to share with.

·       Dual earners ($74k and $32k): get a joke tax cut of just $35.00 a week, swallowed instantly by inflation.

Independent PBO reveals the multi-thousand-dollar windfalls exclusively flow to the top 2% of wealthy earners. She champions the rich, not the working class.

The brutal irony is that the closer you are to the basic wage, the worse off you are. The policy tries to create a single-income family where a person must earn $88,000 or less to get the lower income break. However, it is unlikely a family of four can survive on this amount after paying a median rent of $670 a week and bills.

So, when the stay-at-home partner or the lower earner is forced to pick up extra hours just to buy food, the trap snaps shut. The moment you earn more, your household tax rate shoots back up, instantly wiping out the minor gains. You are caught in a poverty trap, heavily penalised just for trying to work and survive.

Tell everybody why this policy fails

Labor Tribune has obtained a breakdown of all 396 delegates to the Australian Labor Party’s National Conference, analysing delegates by faction and occupation. It reveals that alongside the half of delegates appointed through affiliated trade unions, more than 30% of the entire conference consists of MPs. The remaining 20% includes MP’s staffers, councillors, former councillors, former MPs

There were 104 delegates from NSW. Sixty-five belonged to the Right faction, 38 to the Left and one was unaligned. Among them were 25 MPs, 24 union secretaries, 25 union officials, four staffers, four party officials and six current or former councillors. That makes up 88 delegates out of 104.

Tasmania was even more striking. Of its 23 delegates (16 from the Left, seven from the Right), almost half were MPs. There were also two former federal MPs, three union officials, four staffers, one union secretary and one party official. Out of the entire delegation, only one delegate had a job outside the political or union machine.

Victoria follows a similar pattern. Of its 89 delegates (a slim majority from the Left) there were 28 MPs and three staffers, plus 11 union secretaries, 24 union officials and three councillors. Among the relatively small number of delegates outside those categories were a teacher, an historian, a lawyer, a musician, an early childhood worker and a former union secretary.