DONALD TRUMP, US PRESIDENT: The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it. 

LAURA TINGLE, CHIEF POLITIAL CORRESPONDENT:  Politics has a habit of being swamped by events. In the Trump 2.0 era that is particularly the case. Sometimes involving what seem completely shocking assertions by the US President.

ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER:  I don’t intend to have a running commentary on the President of the United States’ statements. 

Australia’s position is the same as it was this morning, as it was last year, and it was 10 years ago. 

JULIAN LEESER, SHADOW ASSISTANT MIN. FOREIGN AFFAIRS:  President Trump’s put forward an idea today. It’s not an idea that we’ve put forward, and I don’t intend to provide a running commentary on it. 

LAURA TINGLE:  Given how much time both sides of politics spend reasserting our foreign policy positions remain so closely aligned to those of the United States, voters might think such a confronting intervention in Middle East politics might rate some sort of serious response but…

ANTHONY ALBANESE:  My job here today, I tell you what Australians will be concerned about, they’re concerned about Medicare, they’re concerned about education, they’re concerned about whether they have access to free TAFE.

LAURA TINGLE:  The Prime Minister was in the PM’s courtyard today to announce a major new hospital funding deal. 

ANTHONY ALBANESE: Under this new agreement, the Commonwealth contribution to state-run hospitals will increase by 12 per cent to a record almost $34 billion in 2025-2026.

LAURA TINGLE:  The philosophical and spending gap between the major parties has been growing apace since the beginning of the year. There’s spending commitments on the government side and culture wars on the other. 

The priorities seem a long way apart – a rift which the government is particularly keen to highlight when it comes to the Coalition’s policy on tax deductible small business lunches – what has become known as its schnitty plan.

JIM CHALMERS, TREASURER: This is the only kind of policy that could have been agreed at the tail end of a very long lunch, Mr Speaker and either they didn’t know how much it cost when they announced the policy, or they didn’t want Australians to know. 

SUSSAN LEY, DEPUTY OPPOSITION LEADER:  Our numbers were costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office, and that’s the protocol, and that’s what always happens and all costings are released in the lead up to an election, which the Prime Minister tells us is quite some distance away. 

ZOE DANIEL, MEMBER FOR GOLDSTEIN:  I’m all for small business support, but while Peter Dutton’s deductible dinners may be popular with some, they aren’t going to help our kids buy a house and they won’t alleviate the red tape for those businesses either. 

LAURA TINGLE:  Which brings us to the other major players in the political debate these days: the crossbench independents.

Goldstein MP Zoe Daniel fronted the National Press Club today to make the case for the era of independence, as she called it, to continue and grow. 

ZOE DANIEL:  Mr Dutton recently said wage rises for low paid largely female early childhood education workers were a sugar hit for inflation and tax-deductible lunches aren’t? And while I’m at it, Labor, find your guts. You are so cowed by your own fear of failure that you were causing your own demise

LAURA TINGLE:  Minor parties and independents collected around one third of the vote at the last election and have become major players and advocates in many of our political debates.

But they are being conspicuously cut out of one that favours the major parties and acts against the interests of voters.

KATE CHANEY, MEMBER FOR CURTAIN:  We heard back from the government saying, we’re ready to talk now, but it became, it was pretty clear to me that the only reason this was back on the agenda in February was because a deal with the Liberal Party was shaping up to be likely, and they wanted to go through the exercise of ticking the boxes on consultation. 

DON FARRELL, SPECIAL MINISTER OF STATE:  Well, I’m talking to everybody, Sabra, as I have been for the last couple of years. And I’m hopeful that this Senate, this week will see the merit in putting downward pressure on the amount of money that’s being spent in Australian elections.

SALLY SARA:  What safeguards are you wanting to protect the independents?

JANE HUME, SHADOW FINANCE MINISTER:  I am seriously not going to speak to you about government legislation, this is the governments legislation, and they can speak to you about what it is that they want to see and what it is that they want us to agree to. 

LAURA TINGLE:  Kate Chaney who is facing a tough contest from a Liberal Party candidate in her seat says the current laws give considerable latitude to the way major parties can spend funds. 

KATE CHANEY:  There’s an individual cap of $800,000 per electorate but if a party is doing advertising that says the party name and not the individual candidate name that doesn’t count within that cap. 

So, if the party uses its $90 million strategically, it could outspend an independent candidate many times over if it saw that seat as being really pivotal.

LAURA TINGLE:  The expectation is that the major parties will do a deal to ensure new funding arrangements which benefit them, spurred on by the likelihood that the next parliament could see a minority government that relies on the independents.

And it’s not just the money flowing into political parties that isn’t being reformed but the stalling of changes to establish some better laws on truth in advertising

DAVID POCOCK, INDEPENDENT SENATOR:  The whole of the ACT was letterboxed with me basically saying I was actually a Greens candidate, and you laugh it off, but talking to people, that stuff works. 

And we’re seeing Alex Dyson, who’s running as independent in Wannon, the exact same thing is happening to him, but it’s outside of the election campaign, so he has no recourse, and it’s unacceptable that it is currently totally fine that you can lie in election ads.

LAURA TINGLE:  The crossbench are also ardent supporters of gambling reform but in a move which has caused particular bitterness across the political divide, the government has shelved plans for reform, even after an historic cross parliamentary committee made 31 unanimous recommendations for change.

The Greens put forward a modified proposal for a partial ban today in the Senate in an effort to shame its parliamentary colleagues. 

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG, GREENS SENATOR:  You would think that in a year you were meant to implement gambling reform, you promised to do it, you promised the electorate you would and then you take $350,000 worth of gambling donations, I mean people can draw the dots why Labor and Liberal are going weak. 

DAVID POCOCK:  All the evidence says that partial bans don’t work. We have this landmark report, the Murphy report, that says exactly that, partial bans don’t work. Here are the 31 things that we need to do to deal with this public health issue and protect young Australians. Let’s do that. 

All we need is some courage from the major parties to actually take on the big gambling companies and do it.