Treasurer says CBA had ‘change of heart’ on plans to charge customers $3 withdrawal fees
Jim Chalmers has confirmed the Commonwealth Bank has accepted that their plans to charge customers a $3 fee to withdraw money at bank branches “are not acceptable or appropriate,” he said at a presser.
Late this morning I spoke to the CEO of the Commonwealth Bank, Matt Comyn, about the decision announced yesterday by the Commonwealth Bank. As you know, we consider the changes flagged yesterday to be unacceptable, we made our views very clear in the course of the day yesterday. The changes that were flagged and that were announced are not acceptable or appropriate.
The Commonwealth Bank has released a statement in the last few minutes which make it very clear that they accept that those changes were not acceptable or appropriate. They will have another look at those changes to make sure that people are not worse off, we are talking and lots of instances about some of the most vulnerable people in the banking system. I welcome the change of heart.
Key events
Meanwhile, author, actor and disability advocate Hannah Diviney has been appearing at the National Press Club to mark the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
Among her many accolades was encouraging Lizzo and Beyonce to remove ableist slurs from their lyrics.
She notes very few members of the disabled and neurodivergent community have graced the stage in the press club’s history, “which says a lot about the pathways to and construction opportunities for power in this country”.
Hi, everyone. I’m Hannah, and when I was born, doctors warned my first time parents … that in the worst-case scenario, I would never walk, feed myself or talk.
If this forum is reflective of the powerful and influential here in Australia, the ones given the capacity to make decisions, shape laws and policy as well as the stories we tell as a nation, the lack of disabled voices included here makes a sad sort of sense. While you were building this, we, as a community, were collectively silenced.
Hidden from view. Institutionalised and erased – in fact, in some ways, we still are.
Christopher Knaus
Social services minister Amanda Rishworth has urged six sporting and religious organisations to reverse their decision to not join the redress scheme “as a priority”.
As we reported earlier, the government has named six institutions that have declined to join the national redress scheme, which provides capped compensation and other forms of redress to survivors of abuse.
Those organisations are the Darwin Cycling Club, New Norfolk District Football Club, Townsville Indoor Sports, Crown Coaches, Christian Youth Camps, and Knox Basketball Incorporated.
Rishworth said:
I call on each of these institutions to do the right thing by survivors of institutional child sexual abuse, reverse their decision and join the Scheme as a priority.
Joining the Scheme demonstrates an institution’s commitment to survivors at a time when the community is calling for action to end the widespread and unchecked exploitation to children and ongoing trauma for survivors. Survivors have waited too long.
I hope each institution reconsiders their decision. If this does occur, their name will be removed from the Scheme’s website.
Christopher Knaus
Government names six sporting and religious organisations that refused to join abuse redress scheme
Six sporting and religious organisations that have refused to join the National Redress Scheme have been publicly named by the federal government.
Earlier this morning, the redress scheme’s website named Christian Youth Camps in Western Australia, Darwin Cycling Club, the New Norfolk District Football Club, Townsville Indoor Sports, Knox Basketball Incorporated and Crown Coaches as the latest organisations to decline to join the redress scheme.
The redress scheme was set up after the royal commission to provide capped compensation to abuse survivors. It also facilitates apologies and other forms of redress. The scheme relies heavily on institutions agreeing to sign up, punishing bodies that refuse to do so, including by naming them and barring them from government funding.
But a wide range of sporting organisations are yet to sign on to the redress scheme, including the Australian Rugby League Commission.
The social services minister, Amanda Rishworth, is meeting with her state and territory counterparts on the redress ministers board later today. The board will discuss the refusal of sporting organisations to join the redress scheme and the need for states and territories to step in as “funders of last resort” for such bodies.
Without a funder of last resort for the sporting organisations, survivors are unable to have their claims for redress progressed.
Treasurer says CBA had ‘change of heart’ on plans to charge customers $3 withdrawal fees
Jim Chalmers has confirmed the Commonwealth Bank has accepted that their plans to charge customers a $3 fee to withdraw money at bank branches “are not acceptable or appropriate,” he said at a presser.
Late this morning I spoke to the CEO of the Commonwealth Bank, Matt Comyn, about the decision announced yesterday by the Commonwealth Bank. As you know, we consider the changes flagged yesterday to be unacceptable, we made our views very clear in the course of the day yesterday. The changes that were flagged and that were announced are not acceptable or appropriate.
The Commonwealth Bank has released a statement in the last few minutes which make it very clear that they accept that those changes were not acceptable or appropriate. They will have another look at those changes to make sure that people are not worse off, we are talking and lots of instances about some of the most vulnerable people in the banking system. I welcome the change of heart.
Chalmers concedes ‘weak’ economy but welcomes real income growth
The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, says “the growth in the Australian economy continues to be positive but it is weak”. He is addressing press:
Our economy is still growing but very slowly. It is weighed down by interest rates and cost-of-living pressures and global economic uncertainty as well. Growth at just 0.3% in the quarter and 0.8% through the year is below historical averages and it is below market expectations as well.
He says the growth in real incomes is “the most encouraging aspect of the data”:
The most encouraging aspect and the most important aspect of today’s national accounts is what it says about real incomes growth …
Growth in real incomes reflects the progress we are making when it comes to moderating inflation but also solid wages growth and very importantly the government’s cost of living tax cuts. At the intersection of those three things, a moderating inflation, tax cuts and wages growth, that is why we are seeing a real income per capita growing in today’s national accounts, but is very welcome and it is very important as well.
The government has updated their Smartraveller advice for South Korea today, urging Australians to “avoid protests and demonstrations”.
The website says:
The situation in South Korea is evolving due to developments in domestic politics. Avoid protests and demonstrations.
Sites like Gwanghwamun Square and Yeouido in Seoul may have larger crowds and more protest activity than usual. Transport and other essential services may be disrupted. Monitor the media for updates and follow the advice of local authorities. The Australian Embassy in Seoul remains open but is not offering in-person services.
This comes after South Korea’s rightwing president was forced to back down after he unexpectedly declared martial law only to face unanimous opposition from the national assembly, in the most serious challenge to the country’s democracy since the 1980s.
Josh Taylor
Apple offers US$1m bounty to researchers who find privacy or security vulnerabilities in AI system
One of the big concerns about embedding AI into everything is the potential privacy concerns over what it learns from what people ask AI to do.
Apple, which has long set itself as a differentiator based on increased privacy on devices, has tried to put these concerns to rest over its Apple Intelligence in a number of ways. Firstly, it does a fair amount of its processing on-device, meaning it stays on your device and never goes anywhere else.
The second part is where it does need to process a request off the device, they’ve introduced Private Cloud Compute, which the company says never stores the data being processed, never trains their AI model from that data, and that data is deleted once no longer required.
You can read more about that from the June announcement.
The company is now putting its money where its mouth is, and has offered bounties of up to US$1m for researchers – who will have access to components of the source code for the scheme – if they find any privacy or security vulnerabilities in the system. The lowest bounty is set at US$50,000 if a researcher finds accidental or unexpected data disclosure due to a configuration issue.
Apple has indicated it is confident that if any such vulnerability was found, it would be publicised quite quickly by researchers who would then get the bounty.
High court rules aggregate sentences count for visa cancellation
Paul Karp
The high court has ruled that aggregate sentences do count towards automatic visa cancellation on character grounds, reversing a full federal court decision that resulted in the release of more than 100 people from immigration detention in December 2022.
In the Pearson case, the full federal court ruled that aggregate sentences do not trigger automatic visa cancellation, prompting the release of people who had previously served aggregate sentences of 12 months or more in prison. An aggregate sentence refers to when a person is given one sentence for multiple offences.
In February 2023 Labor and the Coalition passed an extraordinary law stating that aggregate sentences do qualify for automatic visa cancellation, and that previous cancellations were all taken to be valid.
In October 2023, the full federal court upheld the legality of the new law in two cases: JZQQ, a man who was sentenced to 15 months in prison for offences of intentionally causing injury and threats to kill; and Kingston Tapiki, a New Zealander sentenced to an aggregate term of 12 months’ imprisonment for offences of affray and assault.
In October the high court heard a challenge by those two and the original plaintiff, Kate Pearson, a New Zealander whose visa was automatically cancelled because she was sentenced to a maximum term of imprisonment of four years and three months in respect of 10 offences.
On Wednesday the high court held unanimously that the full federal court got the original decision wrong. As a result, it did not need to judge the validity of the retrospective law.
Peter Hannam
RBA rate cut may be more likely as growth below expectations
The quarter-on-quarter figures are more closely watched by economists and the “miss” of 0.3% growth, versus the half percentage point expansion they expected, sent the Australian dollar down against the US counterpart.
Investors would now see the RBA as more inclined to cut its cash rate soon (and hence, making it less attractive to hold $A on the margin) after these numbers.
The 0.3% pace was the most, though, since the September quarter a year ago, when it grew 0.5%.
The year-on-year numbers, too, weren’t flash. At 0.8%, it’s the slowest since the rebound from Covid began, and likely to be the nadir in this part of the cycle (barring some nasty surprise).
Australia’s economy quickened in September quarter, though growth weaker than expected
Peter Hannam
Australia’s economy quickened in the September quarter, thanks largely to additional government spending, stoking labour demand. Growth, though, was a bit weaker than expected, which may make an early RBA rate cut more likely.
Gross domestic product (GDP) expanded 0.3% in the July-September months, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported on Wednesday. That pace compared with the 0.5% rate expected by economists and the 0.2% growth previously reported for the June quarter by the ABS.
GDP was 0.8% larger than for the September quarter a year earlier. Economists had expected annual GDP growth to come in at 1.1% or similar to the 1% rate the ABS had stated for the June quarter.
With the swelling population, though, GDP as measured on a per capita basis continued to retreat, easing 0.3%, for a record seventh consecutive quarter.
As we noted in the blog yesterday, public demand alone contributed 0.7 percentage points to quarterly GDP growth.
Still, those outlays have helped kept the unemployment rate to about 4% for all of 2024, a figure not far above the lowest in half a century. Employment in seasonally adjusted terms rose by 156,600 in the September quarter alone.
More soon.
Jordyn Beazley
Drug summit told decriminalisation ‘can be done poorly’ as Portland mayor to speak about recriminalisation
More from today’s NSW drug summit.
The mayor of the US city of Portland, Ted Wheeler, is due to speak at the summit today after the state of Oregon embarked on a three-year plan to recriminalise drugs after an increase in overdose deaths after they were decriminalised.
Madden foreshadowed this by saying there is no “one way to do decriminalisation” and that it can be done well and “it can be done poorly”.
Madden also called for a “strong recommendation” on pill testing from the summit, and an end to “harmful policing practices”.
She said:
We simply cannot go through another summer festival season without access to pill testing, and while we’re at it, without ending the harmful and ineffective policing practices, including strip-searching and the use of drug detection dogs.
‘Clear end goal’ is to fully decriminalise and regulate all drugs, Harm Reduction Australia director says
Jordyn Beazley
An advocate at the NSW government’s drug summit has called for decriminalisation of small quantities of drugs for personal use with a “clear end goal” of legal regulation of all drugs.
Dr Annie Madden, the executive director of Harm Reduction Australia, was the only speaker at the state’s first drug summit 25 years ago that was an active drug user.
This morning, at the state’s second drug summit, she told the audience that in over three decades, the main outcome in drug harm reduction has been that the “best advice” becomes the “best compromise”.
“We wonder why we can’t get the results we need,” she said.
Madden later added:
It is only reasonable that we give decriminalisation a proper chance to do what decades of prohibition has failed to do.
But beware, because doing decriminalisation in incremental steps can quickly lead to unintended and unforeseen outcomes as a result of too many compromises.
I began with the term full decriminalisation, and for me that includes a clear end goal of full legal regulation of all drugs.
More to come in the next blog post.
Natasha May
Jacinta Allan says new vaccine facility makes Victoria world-leading centre of medical research
The Victorian government has also hailed the opening as marking the state as a leader in medical research.
With Moderna and also BioNTech establishing major hubs in the state, the government says it is the only place in the world where both mRNA leaders host research and development, as well as manufacturing operations.
The premier, Jacinta Allan, said:
There are now three world-leading centres of medical research – Boston, London and Victoria.
Natasha May
Moderna mRNA vaccine facility opens in Victoria
Australia has become the only country in the southern hemisphere with an mRNA vaccines manufacturing capability after a new facility opened in Victoria, which the health minister hailed as protecting against future pandemics.
Early on in the Covid-19 pandemic, experts urged the government to develop domestic mRNA manufacturing capabilities warning Australia would be vulnerable to supply limitations without the ability to produce mRNA vaccines.
After those predictions came to pass, the federal and Victorian governments and pharmaceutical giant Moderna struck an agreement in December 2021 to manufacture mRNA vaccines in Australia.
The health minister, Mark Butler, and Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, this morning opened Moderna’s facility at Monash University’s Clayton campus which will allow for the growth of Australia’s sovereign mRNA manufacturing industry.
The facility will have the capacity to produce up to 100m vaccine doses each year for respiratory diseases including influenza, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and Covid-19. Butler:
This is a major step forward in helping protect Australians against future pandemics, while creating highly skilled jobs, supporting local industry and promoting research collaboration.
The state’s acting minister for economic growth, Danny Pearson, said:
We’ll never have to fight to get our fair share of vaccines again because the southern hemisphere’s first end-to-end mRNA vaccine facility has opened in Victoria – setting a new benchmark in innovation and economic growth.
Jordyn Beazley
Minns says no ‘magic solution’ to drugs but ‘more needs to be done’
The NSW premier, Chris Minns, has opened the Sydney leg of the state’s drug summit by acknowledging there is no “magic solution” to drug use, but that the goal of the summit is to reduce “the number of Australians whose lives have been “destroyed or diminished.
He added the government’s “goal is a recognition that society has not got there yet, and more needs to be done.”
The summit is the second in the state after one was held in 1999 by then premier Bob Carr. Minns said the summit helped the state recognise drug abuse as a health issue and redirect people away from the justice system towards rehabilitation.
This summit, which is on its third day after the first two were held in Griffith and Lismore, has brought together experts from across various fields that intersect with the issue, including medical experts, police, people with lived and living experience, drug user organisations, families, service providers and other stakeholders.
The government has said the goal is to hear a range of perspectives and “build consensus on the way NSW deals with drug use and harms”.
Minns said:
Drugs are a health issue. They’re also a justice issue. They’re a police issue. They can be a child protection and social services issue. They are an education issue. They’re an issue for people that want a safe and sociable neighbourhood.
The best hope of lasting change on any question that particularly affects the question like drug policy, is finding points where we agree, and that we can share a common ground.
Australia votes for end of Israel’s ‘unlawful presence in Occupied Palestinian territory’ at UN for first time in two decades
Sarah Basford Canales
Australia has voted with 156 other countries at the United Nations to demand the end of Israel’s “unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible”, marking a return to the position for the first time in more than two decades.
A total of 157 members, including Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, voted to support the resolution, while eight, including Argentina, Israel and the US, voted against it. Seven others abstained.
Australia’s ambassador to the UN, James Larsen, explained Australia would be supporting the resolution, titled the ‘Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine’, to reflect a desire for the international community “to build momentum towards” achieving a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
Larsen said:
A two-state solution remains the only hope of breaking the endless cycle of violence, the only hope to see a secure and prosperous future for both peoples.
The resolution demands Israel “comply strictly with its obligations under international law”, referring to the ICJ ruling in July this year. It also rejects any attempt at “demographic or territorial change” in the Gaza strip.
It also supports a 2025 high-level international conference aimed at devising and implementing a two-state solution.
A spokesperson for the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, said while Australia was a “constructive middle power”, it looked to achieve the best outcomes possible at the UN.
Wong’s spokesperson said:
We don’t always get everything we want. But if, on balance, we believe the resolution will contribute to peace and a two-state solution, we will vote for it.
On our own, Australia has few ways to move the dial in the Middle East. Our only hope is working within the international community to push for an end to the cycle of violence and work toward a two-state solution.
See more:
Daisy Dumas
Two-thirds of over-25s say they feel better about saying no to alcohol than a decade ago
Almost two-thirds of Australians over the age of 25 feel more empowered to say no to alcohol than they did 10 years ago, according to new data.
Research by Drinkwise points to a shift in attitudes around drinking – the same number, 62%, said they would not feel self-conscious if they chose not to drink when others were drinking.
But the data also showed drinkers tend to drink more when they’re not footing the bill – a nod to the Christmas party season that Simon Strahan, CEO at DrinkWise, says highlights the need for workplaces to be mindful of a changing drinking culture, especially given 53% of Australians want to cut back on alcohol.
He said the research demonstrates that workers increasingly expect alternatives to alcohol at work functions.
We continue to see positive shifts in attitudes and behaviours towards alcohol, with parties and celebrations the main occasion where people alternate between full and lower or zero strength alcohol (71%). This demonstrates a growing awareness of the benefits of more responsible drinking habits.
