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ABC News
3 hours ago
- Business
- ABC News
The tax office traded people for programs and is still grappling with the consequences
A decade ago the Australian Tax Office (ATO) management faced a tough choice. Confronting government demands to cut costs, they made a simple trade-off: people for programs. The ATO would slash staff numbers and instead rely on automated systems and slick computer algorithms to process returns and pick up tax fraud. The cost of that decision is only now being revealed, in half a dozen scathing reports by the auditor-general, the inspector-general of taxation, the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) and others which provide a sweeping account of how the ATO is failing. The ATO has long been one of the most opaque agencies in the government. Its critics accuse it of a lack of accountability, and using taxpayer secrecy as an invisibility cloak to prevent scrutiny of its shortcomings. The external reports by the auditor general and others provide glimpses behind that cloak that can be used to build a picture of the ATO's troubled inner workings. That picture shows a tax system teetering on the edge, and an agency culture that ignores red flags. The saga began back in 2013, when prime minister Tony Abbott's incoming government was demanding an efficiency dividend. By this it meant the government should pay less money to run the ATO, even as the amounts raised by the office were soaring. Under Commissioner Chris Jordan, the ATO's response was to cut staff and throw resources into new technology that could do the work to process returns, to run the checks and detect fraud. Jordan, who stepped down from the ATO last year, spoke of modernising how the office works "as part of the digital revolution to make 'tax just happen'." Which is to say, tax collection without human intervention. The ATO isn't alone in this dilemma. Adapting to new technology is a universal challenge that tax agencies around the world are struggling with. But the ATO's trade-off has had serious consequences. Between 2013 and 2019, the ATO shed close to 6000 people — almost a quarter of its staff. Some of the hardest hit were those sections that detect fraud and chase up debt. The cuts were already beginning when Jordan became commissioner in January 2013, the first outsider in the top job in the agency's history. From 2011 to 2019, the indirect tax division, which collects GST and Customs excise, lost half its staff — more than 1000 tax officers gone. At the same time Jordan was bringing in more outsiders — partners from his old firm KPMG and top tier law firms, who typically would parachute in as deputy legal counsel and speedily be appointed deputy commissioners or higher. By 2021 the top four executives at the ATO all came from outside, though the incoming commissioner, Ron Heferen, has reversed that. In the new look ATO, law degrees were a minimal requirement for advancement, preferably with a history of working outside the office. Tax officers with training as police officers and experienced investigators ranked low on the totem pole. Most of the new ATO senior management had little or no experience in full scale audits of businesses, so it's not surprising that tax officers say the ATO moved largely to desk audits, a top-down process that doesn't get into the long grass of checking physical details. Reliance on technology extended to reliance on systems like the tax gap, a hypothetical estimate of how much tax the ATO is failing to collect. It's a small percentage number, which the ATO points to as a measure of its effectiveness. What happened with GST offers a stark example of what can happen when all of these things come together badly. Last year the ATO raised $85 billion in GST. That's a net figure that represents more than $2 trillion in underlying transactions. Monitoring this process has to be a mixture of clever algorithms (called risk models) to highlight suspicious transactions, and some form of manual follow up. In March 2018, the then inspector-general of taxation, Ali Noroozi, issued a report warning that checks on GST fraud were inadequate. He cited a 2015 ATO study which showed that its risk models were little better than random selection. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this was that the random selection study found that one in four GST payouts needed to be adjusted. The ATO brushes off the criticism. It says it was already aware of the problem and had begun to upgrade its systems. Through to early 2021, the ATO had just 150 staff involved in vetting suspicious GST claims before payment. It would be another year after Noroozi's 2018 warning before it began developing a new suite of monitoring tools "leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence, and forensic analytics", which were due to be ready from late 2020. But the program ran a year late. Meanwhile an ATO spokesperson says the office had stopped a GST scam involving gold trading, which tax officers believed was the only major fraud threat. Each year, the ATO has a critical measure for external fraud risk. In both 2018 and 2019 it concluded the risk of fraud occurring was "almost certain" and the consequences for that would be "very high". But in May 2021 it revised this assessment, concluding that the fraud risk was "rare" and rated the possible consequences as "medium". Who made this momentous decision that the fraud risk was rare? The auditor-general said the ATO could not find any written record for who was responsible. At the same time, the ATO's calculations of the tax gap for GST was also indicating that the situation was completely under control. The ATO estimated that in 2019 it collected all but 7.6 per cent of the total amount of GST that should have been paid. By 2021, the ATO decided that the tax gap for GST had been slashed to just 2.7 per cent. It was another triumph for the regulator. Just two months after the risk assessment was downgraded and the tax gap was cut, the first signs of a growing wave of GST fraud hit the ATO. This was a different kind of fraud for the ATO. More than half the claimants were on welfare and while it seemed inevitable that they would eventually be caught, they didn't understand or didn't care. And there were tens of thousands of them. By year's end the ATO's systems would be overwhelmed. Both warning measures — the risk rating and the tax gap – had failed spectacularly. And the new software that could have detected the rise of bogus GST claims was 12 months late. Two new risk models to detect suspicious GST claims — one to target incorrect reporting, the other aimed at identity crime — were only plugged in on January 8 2022. It was only then, the auditor-general says, that the scale of the fraud wave became "clearly apparent". "The ATO did not have a procedure to respond to a large-scale external fraud event," such as it faced, the auditor-general's report says. In all, more than $2 billion in fraudulent GST claims were paid out to more than 57,000 people before the ATO got on top of it, in part by sheer numbers. It played whack-a-mole. While the ATO would attribute its success to its artificial intelligence and algorithms, a major part seems to have been throwing people at the problem. By May 2022 the ATO had moved an extra 470 staff to work on GST. The auditor-general says in 2023 total GST staff had been lifted to 2,144 — the highest level it has ever been. The tax gap for GST for 2021 has since been revised from 2.7 per cent to 4.3 per cent, and the gap for 2023 has jumped to 9 per cent. It's one of the biggest tax gaps the ATO faces. The risk rating for external fraud occurring has been upgraded from "rare" to "even chance", and the consequence of it happening from "medium" to "extreme". Remarkably, the auditor-general's report appears to suggest the ATO misled the finance minister when it asked for more funding for this, because it told the minister that this was the first time its fraud risk had been out of tolerance. The report says the figure had been out of tolerance in 2018 and 2019 — it's just that the ATO hadn't done much about it. Even with its new systems, the auditor-general concluded that the ATO's "framework for assessing and managing GST fraud risk is not fit for purpose". The ATO spokesperson told Four Corners that within six weeks of launching Operation Protego in April 2022, "almost all fraud attempts were being stopped". It was a dramatic recovery, which over 15 months blocked further fraud claims of $2.6 billion. But how could the ATO know the threat was over? Fraud experts say the only real way to test if a scam has been licked is to conduct a sample of random audits. The ATO was in the process of doing this last year when the auditor-general wrote his report, but the test was running eight months late. The results were due to arrive two years after it declared victory. The $2 billion GST debacle is a reminder how much dependence the ATO has riding on getting its technology right. And that's where a capability rating by the APSC says the ATO's biggest problems lie — in technology and in its senior management. The report released last March notes that the ATO has 130 committees, which are forums for consensus rather than making decisions. Staff saw its tech systems as "outdated, clunky and … affecting productivity". One tax officer said that "we have nine critical systems coming to end of life or out of support, we are having to make trade-offs to keep some on their last legs and invest in others". Another staff member described how they needed to use 14 different computer systems just to process one case. While banks can automatically compile lists of suspicious accounts, a report on identity fraud by the former inspector-general of taxation, Karen Payne, last year described how tax officers once a week manually compile a list of suspect bank accounts used for ID fraud, on a spreadsheet. Other staff members told the APSC they did not believe the ATO had "the skills to manage the complex relations required to collaborate with and influence multinational software companies". Overhanging this is the ATO's failed efforts to oversee a mammoth new business registry for companies, directors and other records which was supposed to cost $500 million. The government took the project away from the ATO in August 2023 after the projected cost blew out past $2.5 billion. In another report the auditor-general raises concerns over how ATO personnel handle perceived conflicts of interest in negotiating for major new software systems. Ballooning costs for tech upgrades mean "this will continue to be a major risk to the organisation into the future", the APSC concluded. The more immediate problem that the ATO is struggling with is the mountain of collectable debt — that's tax that is undisputed and should have been collected by the ATO, but wasn't. It's a cumulative total, which from 2014 to 2016 was almost static, at $19 billion. But from 2017 collectable debt took off. By 2024 it had reached $52.8 billion, and almost three quarters of the increase has come from one area, activity statements, which mainly covers GST and Pay As You Go tax payments. The rise coincides with the ATO's move to make tax payments easier, through the MyGov app and other automation. Perhaps the unkindest cut was another auditor-general report this year, which took on one of the ATO's most revered performance measures, the tax gap. While the ATO's target is to reduce the tax gap, the AG concluded it was "inappropriate" to link its estimates to reported results. For the four chief tax gap measures the audit office "was unable to obtain sufficient appropriate evidence of whether the dollar value of the tax gap reported represents good performance relative to the reported target", it said. In short, we don't really know how the ATO is performing. And it suggests the ATO doesn't know either.
Sky News AU
3 hours ago
- Politics
- Sky News AU
WA Liberals leading revolt against 'hollow, ritualistic' Welcome to Country dogma as Michaelia Cash, Andrew Hastie work to make their party relevant again
The rise of social media has changed the way campaigns are run. Fewer people are watching free-to-air TV or reading the newspaper. Most of us now get our news updates on our phones, whether we go looking for them or not. Before the smartphone became part of everyday life in 2007, politics was something you had to go out of your way to follow. These days, political memes and videos pop up uninvited into everyone's feeds. Even folks who've never voted in their life end up seeing political content and forming opinions. In that sense, the line between politically engaged and disengaged Australians has completely blurred. Once a meme hits your inbox, you're in the debate whether you like it or not. That shift has made society more polarised and it cuts across both sides of politics. It also explains why swings in elections have become bigger and harder to predict. The old playbook doesn't work like it used to. That's bad news for pollsters and worse news for major parties that are naturally cautious and don't like rocking the boat. Into this vacuum have stepped third-party campaign groups. They don't carry the same baggage as political parties and can push messages in a more direct and unapologetic way. GetUp on the left and Advance on the right are two good examples. In 2019, GetUp successfully campaigned to unseat Tony Abbott in Warringah and helped elect Zali Steggall. In 2023, Advance under the banner of Fair Australia ran the No campaign in the Voice referendum with a resounding win. Even though the Coalition backed No and Labor backed Yes, it wasn't the major parties doing the heavy lifting. The No vote went from 60% support in January to 43% by July. That drop wasn't an accident. It was smart, targeted, persuasive messaging and it worked. Yet that referendum result didn't translate into an election win for the Coalition in 2025. Labor's landslide was powered in large part by progressive social media influencers. Their messaging was relentless, emotional and effective. In the same election cycle, groups like Better Australia ran highly effective campaigns that helped win back Goldstein from the Teals and cut the Greens down from four to just one seat in the House of Reps. If the Liberal Party is to be competitive again, it has to accept this new reality. That means knowing what we stand for and having the ability to put it plainly and persuasively. It means running smart, grassroots campaigns based on values that reach people when they're on their phones. That's the kind of leadership we're seeing from Senate Opposition Leader Michaelia Cash and Andrew Hastie MP. The Liberals in their home state of Western Australia just passed a set of common-sense policies that reflect where mainstream Australians are on Welcome to Country, the national flag and Net Zero. The proposal includes reducing Welcome to Country ceremonies and excluding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags from press conferences. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging Indigenous heritage. But Welcome to Country has gone well beyond that. It's become a hollow ritual that is performative, tokenistic and divisive. A recent Institute of Public Affairs survey found that 56 per cent of Australian respondents were opposed to it. After all, we are one people, equal under one law, united under one flag. The Australian flag is the only one worn by our troops in every war. It's the only one flying over Parliament. It's the only one Andrew Hastie, a former SAS soldier, was willing to risk his life for. Having multiple flags at official events undermines that unity. We can honour our heritage without forgetting who we are as a nation. It's the same with energy policy. No one's saying we shouldn't care about the environment. But there's a big difference between responsible action and blind submission to foreign targets never designed for us. Australia literally only makes up 1.1 per cent of global emissions. By contrast, China (30.7 per cent), the United States (12.5 per cent) and India (eight per cent) are responsible for over half the world's total emissions. Yet none of them are on track to meet Net Zero by 2050. America has officially pulled out of the Paris Agreement. China's target is 2060. India's is 2070. Yet here we are, tearing down our industries, driving up our power bills and jeopardising our energy security to meet a target that won't shift the global needle in the least little bit. Worse yet, we're still exporting our coal and LNG to countries who won't meet their own targets. This makes zero sense. Australia supplies 25.2 per cent of the world's coal exports and nearly 20 per cent of the world's LNG. If we disappear from the market, that won't stop global emissions. It'll just send more demand to suppliers with even lower standards. Suffice it to say, this isn't climate leadership. It's economic self-harm. Australians want lower emissions but not if it means losing their jobs, paying more for electricity or watching our manufacturing base collapse. We need a smarter approach. One that balances emissions reduction with energy reliability, cost of living and national security. We should be backing our strengths: clean coal, gas, uranium and the development of advanced nuclear power. We should be investing in energy that's both affordable and reliable, not making ourselves weaker just to look virtuous on the world stage. Remember, the political landscape has changed. The way we campaign must change with it. If the Liberal Party stands firm in its values, uses modern platforms effectively and puts its message to everyday Australians plainly, not only will it become relevant again it will lead the future. We don't just need slogans. We need spine and proper leadership. That's what Senator the Hon Michaelia Cash and Andrew Hastie MP are providing at a time when Australia needs it most. Dr Sherry Sufi is Chairman of the WA Liberal Party's Policy Committee. The views expressed in this article are his own.
News.com.au
6 days ago
- Business
- News.com.au
Questions raised after ATO wiped $1m bill from Paul Keating's company
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is under pressure to explain why it wrote off almost $1 million in interest and late penalties owed by one of Paul Keating's companies. An ABC Four Corners investigation has revealed that over a decade ago the ATO wrote off the debt in 2015 after years of negotiations. The debt was owed by one of Paul Keating's companies but wiped after negotiations with the former prime minister and his financial advisers. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Mr Keating or his advisers. Instead, the focus of the investigation is on why the ATO took the steps it did, given the fact that for most taxpayers formally challenging such a decision would require them to contest the matter in the Federal Court. However, the ABC reports in this instance, a payment notice was cancelled after a negotiation, raising questions about how the ATO chose to handle the matter. At the time, the Liberal Government was led by Tony Abbott and the Treasurer was Joe Hockey. There's no suggestion however that the Abbott Government was briefed on the decision to wipe the tax cut given the sensitivities around privacy and the ATO. The ATO and Mr Keating's office have been contacted for comment. The ABC's report states that the investigation raises 'questions about a lack of transparency in how the tax office conducts confidential settlements.' According to the ABC, an interest and penalties bill was issued after the ATO discovered in 2012 that Mr Keating's company, Brenlex Pty Ltd, had not reported profits from an earlier share sale. After Mr Keating was audited by the ATO in 2010 an agreement was struck according to the ABC for Mr Keating to settle tax liabilities of more than $3 million involving another of his companies, Verenna Pty Ltd. According to the ABC, Mr Keating was questioned about his other companies, including Brenlex, and his advisers confirmed it had paid a significant amount of tax relating to the sale of shares and was up to date with its tax liabilities. However, two years later the ATO discovered in 2012 that Paul Keating's company had not reported profits from a 2004 share sale. While Brenlex agreed to pay the tax debt, the ATO demanded the company pay more than $600,000 in interest and penalties which had accrued in the years since Mr Keating sold the shares. Mr Keating's advisers asked the ATO to write off this debt entirely via an ATO rule known as a 'commissioner's discretion'. The ATO commissioner at the time was Chris Jordan AO, who was appointed as the 12th Commissioner of Taxation on 1 January 2013. Mr Jordan led the ATO during the tumultuous pandemic period and during scrutiny of the ATO's role in the PwC tax leak scandal. does not suggest he was involved or aware of the decision to cancel the debt. According to the ABC, the argument over the tax debt went back and forth until the debt had grown to $904,000, at which point the ATO sent a formal notice to not waive the interest and penalties charge. 'Your request has been fully considered and it has been decided that on this occasion the circumstances detailed do not warrant remission of the GIC,' the notice said according to the ABC. 'There is a clear acknowledgment that the Company should have accounted for the disposal of shares in the relevant financial years returns and did not.' In 2015, Mr Keating's advisers became involved in the correspondence arguing the ATO should waive the bill because it was an honest mistake. As a result, 'the lodgement and payment of the Company returns were overlooked' but the tax office said 'This is not a valid justification'. In July 2015, 'a last-ditch letter from Brenlex was sent to the ATO requesting a meeting' Ten days later, the tax office sent a four-line email writing off the almost $1 million debt. 'I am able to confirm that the GIC and Late Lodgement Penalties … have been remitted in full,' the email said. 'Consequently the balance of the account has been reduced to nil and the amount payable as stated in the Creditors Statutory Demand is no longer owed.' Accounting experts have told the ABC that such negotiations are unfair because the only recourse available to taxpayers to challenge this kind of decision was an appeal to the Federal Court. This is a 'lengthy and complex process that is out of reach of most taxpayers'. The ATO's own website states 'Taxpayers should be aware that remission requests are carefully assessed to ensure a level playing field for those taxpayers who pay on time.' In a statement, the ABC told Four Corners that 'inadvertently overlooking' the need to pay tax was generally not valid grounds on which to cancel GIC. 'However, there may be instances where GIC is remitted when a taxpayer inadvertently overlooks the requirement to lodge a form or make a payment, depending on the individual circumstances of the taxpayer,' the ATO said.
The Guardian
18-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Liberal party hardliners are on the back foot – but while Tony Abbott is around, the right will fight
Four days on from the Liberal party's worst federal election defeat in its 80-year history, Tony Abbott sought to explain the wreckage. Peter Dutton, Abbott argued, put the Coalition in the 'box seat' to beat Labor with his opposition to the Indigenous voice to parliament, nuclear power ambitions, refusal to stand in front of the Aboriginal flag and warnings about 'indoctrination' in schools. That was at the end of 2024. Then something changed. 'This year, really from January on, we failed to pick fights,' the former Liberal prime minister told a podcast by the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), the rightwing thinktank of which he is a distinguished fellow. 'And when we did pick fights on, for argument's sake, trying to get public servants back into the office, as soon as we came under a bit of pressure, we pulled back. We kind of lost our mojo a bit; we lost direction a bit.' The explanation from Abbott – who was close to Dutton – reflected a popular counter-narrative pushed by hardline conservatives in the election postmortem. The Coalition didn't lose, and lose badly, because Dutton had dragged it too far to the right, as most commentators concluded. It lost, Abbott was suggesting, because Dutton pulled back. As Sussan Ley tries to reposition the Liberals to the political centre in response to Dutton's catastrophic defeat, the new leader will face resistance from conservatives, inside and outside the party, who are adamant it must remain on the right. This latest chapter in the party's enduring internal conflict is expected to flare during debates over whether to dump the target of net zero emissions by 2050, adopt gender quotas and embrace or shun culture wars. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Conversations with Liberal MPs and insiders suggest that more than six years after losing his seat in federal parliament, Abbott remains arguably the most powerful conservative in Australian politics. One senior Liberal source said Abbott was as influential as he has been since he was dumped as prime minister in 2015. The 67-year-old is entrenched in the ecosystem of rightwing media, thinktanks and lobby groups that shape conservative thinking. He sits on the board in charge of Fox News (Donald Trump's favoured cable news channel), appears regularly on Sky News, often with his former chief-of-staff Peta Credlin, and has ties to the IPA and the rightwing campaign group Advance. Overseas, Abbott advises the rightwing political forum Alliance for Responsible Citizenship and is a senior visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, a Hungary-based thinktank supportive of the country's far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán. In a revealing insight into his worldview, Abbott used a recent speech to the Hungarian Conservative Political Action Conference to urge western countries to have the 'cultural self-confidence' to resist the 'the politics of climate and identity' and the 'false doctrine of multiculturalism'. One Liberal source suggested Abbott's endgame was to transform the Liberals – the supposed 'broad church' accomodating moderates and conservatives – into a rightwing party. 'He [Abbott] wants to be the major power behind the throne. He's not driven by money; he's driven by power,' a Liberal source said. Abbott helped orchestrate Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's post-election defection from the Nationals to the Liberals to run as Angus Taylor's deputy, two sources familiar with the covert plot confirmed. He actively campaigned for fellow anti-voice campaigner Warren Mundine in his preselection tilt for Bradfield. He publicly put pressure on Ley to extend the Dutton-backed intervention into the troubled NSW Liberal division. The three cases are evidence of Abbott as an active player internally. But they are instructive for another reason: in each, he failed to achieve his ultimate outcome. The Taylor-Price leadership team never materialised while Mundine lost preselection in Bradfield to Gisele Kapterian. The NSW intervention was ultimately extended but in a vastly different form after Ley secured support for an all-NSW administrative committee to run the branch, effectively sacking the two controversial Victorian figures installed under Dutton with Abbott's support. An 11th-hour push from right faction powerbrokers to secure Abbott a seat on the new committee failed. Some Liberals view the sequence of setbacks, each at the hands of Ley and her allies, as signs of the waning influence of Abbott and the conservatives over the party. Others aren't so sure. Under Dutton, the conservatives ruled the Liberal party in Canberra. After the teal independents all but wiped out the Liberal moderates in 2022 and Scott Morrison's exit diminished the centre-right group that had expanded around him, Dutton and the right faction assumed both numerical and ideological control of the federal party. Dutton's dramatic downfall at the 3 May federal election set in train a realignment of the internal power dynamics. With more than 20 members, the right is still clearly the largest faction in the 52-member federal Liberal party room. Yet it was unable to install Taylor as Dutton's successor after surviving moderates, centre-right and unaligned MPs combined to make Ley the federal party's first female leader. Taylor and senior rightwingers Michaelia Cash, James Paterson and Andrew Hastie have retained senior roles, but other conservatives were dumped or demoted, including Sarah Henderson, Claire Chandler, Tony Pasin and Price, who abandoned plans to run for deputy leader after Taylor lost the ballot. The right was surprised and concerned at how far Ley went in rewarding backers and punishing internal rivals in her shadow ministry, particularly given she won the leadership by just 29 votes to 25. 'She overextended in the reshuffle and that could come back to haunt her,' one Liberal insider says. For now, senior conservatives are supporting Ley after a tumultuous first two months in the role, which included navigating the brief split with the Nationals while grieving over her mother's death. Taylor, now the shadow defence minister, has not been agitating behind the scenes and has been dissuading others from doing so, sources say. The open hostilities in the run-up to the leadership vote, which included the distribution of a scorecard mocking Ley's closeness to centre-right numbers man Alex Hawke, her past support for Palestine and her alleged faith in 'numerology', have stopped. There is a widely held view among Liberal MPs that Ley's fledging leadership is not under threat and undermining her serves no one's interest. Sign up to Five Great Reads Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning after newsletter promotion Conservatives are wary, though, of the new leader's early, deliberate steps to distance herself from Dutton, such as opening her speech to the National Press Club with an acknowledgment of country to traditional owners. '[Sussan] is a completely different leader to Dutton and that is a good thing,' a senior Liberal source says. 'She does need to be careful in navigating her way. Her acknowledgment to country at the Press Club and standing in front of three flags during her press conference did not go down well with the base. 'The Liberal party is the main centre-right party in Australia and we cannot forget that. If we do, we will lose our base.' The right secured a small win ahead of parliament's return, with the faction's pick, Slade Brockman, defeating the Ley-backed candidate, Andrew McLachlan, in an internal ballot for the role of deputy Senate president. Liberal MPs acknowledge conflict is inevitable and even necessary after internal contest was sacrificed for discipline under Dutton, a trade-off many MPs blame for the threadbare agenda it offered on 3 May. But some fights are expected to extend well beyond the bounds of robust debate, descending instead into open political warfare. 'Everyone will behave themselves in the short term, but whenever something comes up, people will seek to use that to litigate their personal grievances,' one MP said. 'Things like net zero, for example, will really ramp up.' Climate change is ground zero for the Liberal party's internecine conflicts. The latest battle – whether to abandon a commitment to net zero emissions by 2050 – shapes as a defining contest for Ley's leadership and the future of the Liberal-National Coalition. The hard-won but fragile consensus that allowed Morrison to sign up the Coalition to the emissions target in 2021 has fractured, exposing deep divisions over what has become a totemic issue for the political right. Ley immediately put net zero up for debate after agreeing to review the opposition's entire policy agenda. The shadow energy minister, Dan Tehan, is leading an internal policy working group that will report to Ley and the Nationals leader, David Littleproud. The Nationals will conduct a separate review, to be jointly led by parliament's loudest net zero critic, Matt Canavan. Liberal MPs are not optimistic a consensus position can be achieved as they brace for a divisive and damaging brawl. 'I'm a bit worried about it,' one says. 'The issue was settled at enormous cost [under Morrison]. No person in their right mind should open it up again.' One option discussed among some Liberal MPs would involve abandoning 2030 and 2035 targets – a position that would be incompatible with the Paris agreement – but retaining the 2050 ambition. Even that compromise would struggle to placate a growing number of sceptical colleagues, who believe net zero proponents have failed to explain the case for climate targets to rightwing voters. 'The mods say we need net zero to win,' one such MP says. 'That is the most facile, self-serving reason – it's exactly why people hate politicians.' Pressure to dump net zero is also coming from the party's state branches and grassroots members. Alex Antic's SA Liberal division, Price's NT Country Liberal party and the NSW Nationals division have all passed motions since the federal election rejecting net zero. The branch members, who are responsible for selecting election candidates, tend to skew older and more conservative than the average Liberal supporter. They tend to get their news and opinions from Sky News, Liberals say, making the conservative figures who appear on the channel's evening programs hugely influential over the 'base'. Figures such as Tony Abbott.
The Age
16-07-2025
- Politics
- The Age
Tony, Peta and the gang gather for solidarity supper at Israeli restaurant
A crack squad of political operatives were spotted at newsworthy Miznon restaurant on Tuesday night. The gang consisted of ex-prime minister Tony Abbott, former Labor MP Michael Danby, Abbott's former chief of staff and Sky News host Peta Credlin, ex-Liberal Party federal director and Credlin husbo Brian Loughnane and former Victorian Liberal president and man about Melbourne Michael Kroger. The diners were seated upstairs at a big table near the balcony, which is pretty much top desk. The Israeli restaurant has been at the centre of a new storm in recent weeks. As this newspaper has reported, the Hardware Lane venue is part-owned by Shahar Segal, who until recently was spokesman for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The foundation, an Israel and US-backed aid distributor in Gaza, has been widely criticised after hundreds of Gazans have died while trying to collect food. On July 4 the restaurant was stormed by activists who turned over tables, scuffled with staff and caused alarmed diners to flee. This led to four arrests and widespread condemnation, not least as it happened on the same night as an arson attack on a synagogue and cars being torched at a company that forms part of the supply chain for Israeli fighter jets. Loading Since that night, it appears bookings for Miznon have swelled. 'The restaurant was buzzing, it's full,' one source told us. Danby, who's spent much time lately whacking Labor over its treatment of Israel, organised the shindig as a show of solidarity with the restaurant. At one point he proposed a toast, while the conversation – no prizes for guessing here – ranged from Israel to the Middle East and the Orange One.
