As it happened: Labor strikes industrial relations bill deal; Albanese confirms Morrison will face censure motion

Thank you for joining me on the blog this afternoon. Here are the main headlines of the day:

• ASIO downgraded the national terrorism threat from probable to possible, but Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said there was an alarming surge of radicalised minors.
• New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she had asked Twitter to abide by its obligations to remove video footage of the Christchurch mosque terror attack from 2019.
• The Clean Energy Finance Corporation announced Australians will be able to access discounted loans for electric vehicles.
• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed parliament will move a censure motion against former prime minister Scott Morrison over his multiple ministries.
• The Nationals have declared they will oppose the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

To Victoria briefly, and all four of the candidates who have so far put up their hand to be the next Liberal Party leader say they would reverse Matthew Guy’s party room ban on Renee Heath, an ultra-conservative church member and newly elected upper house MP.

The contest to be the next leader of the opposition widened on Monday with four men – John Pesutto, Brad Battin, Ryan Smith and Richard Riordan – all confirming they would nominate for the top job when a ballot is held next month.

Guy – who resigned as party leader on Sunday after the Coalition’s election defeat – made the decision to exclude Heath after this masthead published a story exposing fresh evidence of disturbing conduct within the City Builders church. The church is opposed to gay, transgender and reproductive rights.

Labor is edging closer to the 55 seats it held in the last parliament with the party confident of winning Hastings and Preston, despite a statewide swing of 3.5 per cent to the Coalition on a two-party preferred measure.

Read the full story.

Staying with the press conference on the national terror threat, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said she was committed to stripping citizenship from suspected terrorists, but she needed to wait for two pending cases in the High Court.

I’m very committed to creating a regime that would seek citizenship being taken away from people who act in a way that is incomprehensible alongside their Australian citizenship.

The question is how can we make a law that the High Court will believe is constitutional? There are two High Court cases in train at the moment that will allow the High Court to speak a bit more about what it sees as the constitutional limitations on such a scheme.

What I don’t want to do is legislate for a scheme and have it knocked out again, because I have to tell you that does create problems for us. What it means is that citizenship has been taken from a number of people who were dual citizens. And now that that citizenship is inevitably restored by the High Court’s decision. So I don’t want to go through that a third time.

We need to wait till the High Court has given us a better indication of what the constitutional limits are, and then we will legislate again for that.

O’Neil also said the government had not yet made any decisions about repatriating further groups of Australians from camps in Syria.

However, she said Australians needed to understand that the women and children in the camps were Australian citizens and would be allowed to return at some stage.

“Do we in a planned manner bring back groups of Australians from these camps or do we do this in an unplanned way where at some point these people will be allowed to leave the camp, they will be allowed to return to the country, and I cannot constitutionally do anything to stop them?” O’Neil said.

“The argument here is that in some instances, the better thing for us to do is to manage the return so those children can live something of a life that resembles an Australian upbringing around Australian values.”

O’Neil said there had been misinformation about where the repatriated Australians were resettling they were returning to their communities of origin, and it was not exclusively south-west Sydney.

In case you missed it, the businesswoman who defrauded National Australia Bank of millions of dollars will avoid jail for another week, but a judge said it’s “effectively inevitable” she will be imprisoned for her crimes.

A jury last week found Helen Rosamond, owner of North Sydney-based event management company Human Group, guilty of 59 charges of paying kickbacks to a former NAB staffer and 31 charges of obtaining or attempting to obtain a financial advantage by deception.

She was found not guilty of one charge of giving a corrupt benefit, and one charge of obtaining a financial advantage by deception.

The Crown has applied for Rosamond’s bail to be revoked pending her sentencing early next year. Judge Robert Sutherland said today he would continue her bail pending the hearing of the detention application next Tuesday, when more details would be provided to the court about her caring responsibilities for a family member.

“It would be difficult to conceive of any fraud case of this proportion resulting in other than full-time custody,” Sutherland said.

Michaela Whitbourn has the full story.

Circling back to the Reserve Bank governor’s apology for ordinary Australians listening to his predictions on interest rates, senior economics correspondent Shane Wright has this analysis.

Wright says it was more “apology-adjacent” than an actual apology, and that it was notable that Lowe accepted only partial responsibility for the way people interpreted his words.

In October 2021, Lowe said: “[We] will not increase the cash rate until actual inflation is sustainably within the 2 to 3 per cent target range. The central scenario for the economy is that this condition will not be met before 2024. Meeting this condition will require the labour market to be tight enough to generate wages growth that is materially higher than it is currently.”

This was widely interpreted as a signal that rates would not increase until 2024.