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The government is under increasing pressure to explain its changes to freedom of information laws, which could make it harder for journalists and members of the public to gain access to documents.

Now Labor says the system is outdated, it's clogged with trivial requests, that

foreign actors can be requesting information anonymously, but critics warn the changes will come at a cost to transparency.

This comes as the latest GDP figures have landed and the Australian economy grew 0.6% in the June quarter.

That's slightly ahead of economists' expectations.

Still though, pretty sluggish.

Welcome to Politics Now.

Hi, I'm Patricia Carvellis.

And I'm David Spears.

And David, migration has continued to kick on as a huge issue.

There is a particular framing and word

association, if you like, language that's been used by Susan Lee, which is rather curious, where she says, listing all of the ways that migration and the figure the government's landed on has affected us, that our way of life is being affected by the level of migration.

What are we to make of that?

The opposition leader went on the Today Show this morning, talking to Sarah Arbo, and she said that in relation to the government's migration figures that they confirmed this week, 185,000, the permanent migration number for the year,

Susan Lee has suggested that this is putting pressures in every corner of this country on infrastructure, on housing, and on our way of life.

It's those final few words, PK, that certainly have ears pricked up around this building today.

Now, look, generously to Susan Lee, you could say she's sticking to what has been coalition mantra for years, certainly under Peter Dutton, that migration levels are too high, that this is putting pressure on housing and infrastructure, and that that is, I suppose, part of our way of life.

Whether we can get a rental or even afford to buy a home, that's part of our way of life.

But in the context of this week, Pika, and you've been talking about on this podcast all week, in the context of what we witnessed on Sunday and what we saw with the interruption of Jacinda Allen's press conference earlier in the week in Melbourne, it's this far-right message about the way of life in Australia being affected by too much migration that, you know, I think the risk for Susan Lee is just carried that sort of implication.

I'm sure this will have to be clarified one way or another because it's an unfortunate sentiment, if that's what she's saying, that migration is affecting our way of life.

I think a better form of words should probably be chosen here.

If she's simply saying, you know, the ability to get a house is part of our way of life, well, stick to the housing message.

I just think this week running into that sort of territory territory

is dangerous.

I think so too.

And, you know, the clarity that they're already kind of providing is, oh, it's about, you know, infrastructure and, you know, there's a bit of over-analysis.

Okay, let's say we accept that just for the purposes of this thought experiment.

Okay, we accept that.

But we are at a particular point in terms of where the temperature is at.

And that's very hot.

And so

we must be very careful about how we're managing managing this.

So much so that I actually put it to the Prime Minister

at his press conference a little earlier that we were both at.

And he really dead-batted it.

He didn't bite, did he?

No, and, you know, there's lots of reasons for that, I think.

But one of them is the temperature.

I reckon, you know,

he avoided...

the point scoring on this because there is a sense and I've spoken to people on background to kind of make me come to this conclusion that this is really really we are now kind of we we can see a bushfire coming, and there is a view that you want to lower that temperature.

I mean, that's certainly what the police believe, that's what security agencies believe.

You do not want to be inflaming this situation, and that's the danger.

Yeah, think about it.

What was the choice here for the PM, right?

He could have pointed to that comment from Susan Lee and Peter Dutton spending three years talking about

losing control of the borders and too much migration and said, you guys are whipping up all of this stuff that we've been witnessing over the weekend with the anti-immigration marches, but he didn't.

When you asked that question, if anyone is really interested, go back, watch the tape.

There's just that slight little intake of breath from the PM when you can see the cogs turning in his head.

And I think you're right.

That's where he's calculated.

And he's just, he said, I'm not going to have a whack.

It's a very broad statement, he said.

And then he went on to trot out the line that he's used all week that immigration has played a role in this country over a long period of time.

And with the exception of First Nations people,

we're all immigrants.

So it was just that little second of calculation and, as you say, settling on, no,

I'm not going to make this the big issue for the day or the rest of this week.

And this is, of course, after the government did reveal its permanent migration figure for 25-26 year, which is 185,000, which we discussed

the other day on the pod on one of the many days where I record a pod.

A number they should have put out.

much earlier.

Couldn't agree more.

And that's a transparency question we're about to go to because, you know, transparency is, I think, an issue with this government.

And governments generally sometimes...

Transparency, but also

give people some certainty around at least what you're aiming for with migration.

I think there is something to the criticism of the government that's leaving it too vague without a number.

But yeah, I think so.

But I also think the number, look, this is a whole other debate, but it's quite meaningless sometimes unless you're kind of quantifying.

You're in the weeds of the net oversees migration as permanent migration.

You put 185,000, okay, so how does that match with supply of housing?

And let's be honest, the number, even if it is the right number, is not going to stop some of the sentiment that we saw on the streets on Sunday.

So that's the wicked question of how you actually stop that sentiment and how you not only appear, but actually actively don't inflame that sentiment.

And that's the big question for the coalition.

Now, one thing I do want to say before we move on to other issues is that

Susan Lee says that the number should be lower than the one the government just landed on, right?

Okay, we're very early in the government's second term.

No one expects that the coalition is going to put out a sort of, you know,

actuarial study of exactly the numbers and where they're going to go and what they're going to do.

But she says it should be lower.

So they're still going into this territory.

This after the last election loss where Paul Scar has been basically given the role of

smoothing over relations with very hurt ethnic communities, the Indian community.

There are other communities to the Chinese community.

Fixing a political problem for the Liberal Party.

Hello, they lost so many seats in urban Australia.

You talk to some of those who lost those seats, like Keith Wallaghan lost the seat of Menzies in Melbourne.

And I remember talking to him the day after the election on Insiders.

And yeah, he agrees that they've got to do a whole lot better

with Chinese Australians, but with other

multicultural

electorate.

So

politically, they need to win back this territory.

And yeah, the danger, I suppose, is continuing to argue that migration is too high, must be lower.

You're going to have a political problem in those parts of the country they need to win back.

Of course, for Susan Lee, the difficulty is a lot of her party room and membership base do have very strong views that migration is still far too high and needs to be brought down.

And that pressure is going to always be there for Susan Lee.

But it's not.

This is the thing.

It's not just migration they have a problem with.

If you speak to, and this is the, like someone has to say it, so I'm about to, because this is the point of this podcast.

Some of them, I'm not saying Susan Lee, because I've never heard it from her, but some people do question the type of migration that we're talking about here.

And there are, particularly in that liberal base, views about Islamic migration.

And that's where in difficult territory because we know the history here, particularly with Howard and, you know, his big, I think, me a culper on Asian migration a long time ago.

My old colleague George Meglodinus has spent much time writing about this and educating me on the history here.

The reckoning that the Liberal Party made to be a mainstream party is you must be colourblind about migration.

It must be non-discriminatory.

They say that they believe that, but there are some people,

and that's the issue.

It's not just the number, it's the type of migration.

Yeah, look, I think you're right.

I think most

of the elected Liberals in the parliament are more careful about that.

I mean, Peter Dutton obviously ran into trouble with comments from time to time on Lebanese migrants and others.

But most of them, there are some in the membership base, however,

who do flirt more with the One Nation and Bob Catter position where you're talking about

types of migrants and so on.

And yeah, you're absolutely right.

It's straying into that area when you're talking about those protests and the good people, that language of going to that protest, because it's not just about the number.

I'm not saying some people there don't just care about the number, by the way.

I think some people, you know, inevitably are seeing it in a colourblind way, but I think there is a racial element here.

Do you think Susan Lee will have to clean this up one way or another?

I know her office is trying to do that, but I do.

I do.

But I do think she'll sort of say that it's just about pressure on infrastructure

and stuff.

It's just about whether back to the,

okay, you know, intent is different to consequence, right?

Sometimes you can can intend something.

It's back to where we started.

You know, the language matters.

Saying way of life might mean one thing in her mind, but can mean another thing to those who hear it.

Now, Attorney General Michelle Rowland is now out there defending and explaining her legislation.

They've introduced it.

This is about access to FOI, freedom of information.

I do think it was messy the way they've managed this.

Someone described it to me as politically mismanaged

because some of of the arguments for the reforms do have merit.

Yeah, and I thought it was a really interesting interview with Andrew Wilkie, the independent MP, who's all about transparency, right?

This is, you know, he was famously a whistleblower over the Iraq war.

He spoke to Sally Sarah on Radio National, and I thought took quite a nuanced position.

He acknowledged that we've got a problem if

AI bots are flooding public servants with FOI requests, right?

We can't have a situation where they're bogged down, clogged up the system.

However, he also has has a concern about the idea of charging people to make freedom of information requests.

So how do you find the right approach here?

The government's legislation, I don't think, puts a dollar figure on the amount they want to charge, but in some state and territory jurisdictions, the charges range from about 30 bucks to 58 bucks a request.

You know, you would think that would knock out the hundreds and hundreds of bots putting in requests.

The Prime Minister's, but, you know, is that going to be too steep a charge for legitimate journalistic inquiries about what the government's doing?

This, at the end of the day, comes down to transparency.

And

I do think

one of the risks of having a big majority is always going to be that you're seen to abuse that power that you have.

And I think when you do look across what the government is doing, there's a risk that on this move that will make it harder to put in freedom of information requests when you look at its use of non-disclosure agreements when negotiating legislation, when you look at the Nauru deal this week and the interview the Prime Minister did with you and the press conference today where he's asked about it, and we're getting nada in terms of their stum on what's the money for, where's it going to go?

Well, this is an agreement with Nauru, and that's all we're getting.

There is a danger, there is a risk here that they are seen to be less transparent than they promised to be.

And Anthony Albanese, you know, when he was opposition leader, was pretty clear about the importance of public interest journalism and transparency and wanting to have government open to the people.

There's a risk that we're going in the other direction.

Yeah, and that the view starts baking in.

So right now, not a huge political problem.

I suspect if you went around and did, you know, focus groups and polls of ordinary Australians, not as engaged, you know, going to Prime Minister's press conferences,

this would barely be on their radar.

But the thing about politics, and you and I know this, is things, a view gets baked in and it can become a political problem, a time bomb later, that a perception

of the current.

I mean,

there was another little thing that some of the opposition raised with me at the end of last week, before any of this FOI stuff came up, and it was to do with another acronym, MPIs, matters of public importance.

These are debates that often follow question time where the opposition can have a bit of an opportunity to make a speech about something.

And the government is making a change so that they get to move matters of public importance.

And this

typically hasn't, traditionally hasn't been the case in Parliament, cuts down on the number that the opposition crossbench can move.

Now, again, it's not something that probably even made the news, let alone registered any public interest, but it's just another little example of using the numbers that you've got, the power that you've got with this big majority, to put a little limit, extra limit on that sort of public transparency.

Yeah, I think that's right.

Look, just note this, because we'll probably get into it a bit more tomorrow on the party room, but just it looks like there might be some movement on the, there's been pressure on aged care and these home packages.

I just felt maybe I'm reading into it too much, David.

I sometimes can do that.

I'm owning it.

There might be a bit of movement on some of these home care packages.

Yeah, I feel interesting, Leon.

Standing alongside the PM in that press conference was Mark Butler.

He's the minister for...

everything related to health and the NDIS and aged care and childcare and the list goes on.

Obviously very competent minister and and he is, it sounds like, negotiating or trying to negotiate a way through this impasse where you've got the coalition, the Greens, the crossbench in the Senate demanding the government release 20,000 aged care home packages immediately.

Government's saying, no, we need to wait until November and the start of this new system because there will be a whole bunch of new categories and means testing.

And anyway, they are at an impasse.

The government needs to get this bill through by the end of this sitting week, so by the end of Thursday.

And Mark Butler said in the press conference that, you know, discussions are ongoing.

You know, I said, does that mean you're going to offer some new places?

Well, discussions are ongoing.

And your radar is right, that that usually signals some willingness to negotiate.

It's about movement, movement coming.

Now,

as, you know, we're giving you a bit of around the world because the Prime Minister stood up and talked about

money for research into brain cancer, and that was the announcement, but then took all those questions, right?

And one of the things that he was peppered with questions, again, so disciplined about his answer, is what's unfolding on your television screens or your phones at the moment, which is this wild Victory Day parade beginning in Beijing, Xi Jinping flanked by Putin and Kim Jong-un

and

our old premier.

You were living in Melbourne at the time, our Victorian Premier, Dan Andrews.

Dan Andrews.

Look, have you watched any of this military

parade?

Wow.

Wow.

This is the stuff I love to watch.

It's just, it's incredible.

What always gets me, and I've actually been there in

the Great Hall in Beijing when they put on a welcome for a prime minister, and I'm always

marveling at the ability of the Chinese to find the uniform height of the people in their parade.

No other country can do it like they do.

The precision, it's extraordinary to watch.

It is, honestly, it's mesmerising.

It is.

Donald Trump, who I think others have pointed out, is the real audience that gee, Putin, Modi are aiming at here.

He must must be thinking, geez, my military parade was pretty pathetic by comparison.

His military parade was absolutely terrible.

It was

poor things.

I mean, they're a pretty strong army, though, the U.S.

Army, to be fair to them, but like probably military parades aren't their thing.

And I think they want to stick to that.

But the Prime Minister, when asked to criticise Dan Andrews for going, wouldn't just, but he didn't even arc up.

Like he was very disciplined about nothing.

Gave nothing, gave nothing.

The U.S.

is our closest ally.

A couple of things on this.

This week, I think a real concern, uh and and mark riley asked the pm a question about this big picture how concerning is it that you've got the likes of modi putin xi um the north korean leader as well all gathering is this a consequence of trump driving them together and driving away india in particular big concern for australia pm wouldn't bite on that but the point is this is a big concern this alignment that we're seeing um you know india we've been trying the us has been trying for decades to court uh the quad is the symbol of that now it's very unclear what happens with the quad modi clearly is not happy with the tariffs that Trump's slapped on India.

Won't talk to him, won't pick up the phone.

Who knows what happens there?

That's the big concern.

The military parade, you know, amazing to watch.

I find it just a little weird is the word I would use, how we're represented there.

Why on earth is the Australian ambassador at the other end of the country in Guangzhou, as far away as he can get from Beijing?

There's a photo of Dan Andrews standing there in the photo with Xi and Putin down the front.

There's now vision running of him shaking hands with Xi.

I can't understand why wouldn't the Australian ambassador be there?

I mean, the PM just spent six days there

trying to warm up relations.

I'm not, I can't follow.

I don't know.

I get it.

The military parade is a little different to having good trade ties.

It's a different.

So we're trying to distance, but we're also sending signals with these kind of ex-leaders who are closer to China, I think it's fair to say.

Absolutely.

I've been trying to be a diplomat.

Because we're talking about diplomacy.

Yeah, no.

It's weird, man.

It's just strange.

It's weird, man.

Okay, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, did you know they have said that our gross domestic product grew 1.8% over the last year, so it's 0.6%

in the last quarter.

Now, the Treasurer is going to be on his feet soon.

We're recording before that happens, but he will no doubt say he'll be happy with this.

I mean, this is better than me.

He'll say he's absolutely.

And look, it is a bit hotter than the market was expecting.

0.6%

for the quarter.

What does that mean for interest rates?

For the economy, it's, yeah, it probably means we're not going to get one immediately, another one immediately, another rate cut.

It was household consumption and government spending that held up pretty strongly to contribute to this figure.

As I say, a little better than expected.

Yeah, the Treasurer will welcome this.

We've had pretty tepid growth for a long time.

It's bounced up and down a little bit, but this is a better result.

That will, yeah, give everyone a bit of confidence that the economy is heading in the right direction.

But as always, if it's too much of the government doing the heavy lifting and not enough of the private sector, that's a bit of an issue.

So we'll see what Jim Chalmers says about all that.

Yeah, yeah, he'll try and spin it.

Of course, the government's wonderful economic management and, you know,

we're rebuilding.

And these are, you know, look, I have heard that man speak so much.

I can do the impersonation, the press conference, but I don't.

We've got a lot to be thankful for, but we've got a lot of hard work, but we've got a fair way to go.

And the Australian people, they've done this with us.

The economy's in pretty good nick.

They've done this with us.

David, always love talking to you.

Thanks, Pico.

Tomorrow, Mel and I are recording the party room.

We're taking your questions too.

So send them along with a voice note.

I will see you tomorrow.