Bill Shorten appears on Q&A; after Scott Morrison's 7.30 interview – as it happened

So that’s it. I’ll end with this.

Tonight you could see Bill Shorten growing into the role. We are seeing a more feisty, confident leader who is prepared to take people on. Perhaps it is all those town hall meetings he has done over the past five years. He is showing a greater propensity to challenge people’s views and not pander to views he disagrees with. An example was him pushing back – albeit gently – against Les with his franking credits, arguing Australia had to choose its priorities.

His point on his lesson from Kevin Rudd’s capitulation on the greatest moral challenge of our time – known as climate change – was very telling.

Stand for something or fall for everything.

With the election just two weeks away, Shorten has the bit between his teeth and knows this is it. If he fails on 18 May, his own chance is over.

The campaign just got sharper and this will be a fascinating campaign to the end.

Thanks for your company and goodnight.

A question on the gig economy: “100,000 people are now working on gig economy platforms in the personalised transport sector. They are underpaid, they work between 60 and 80 hours a week for an average of under $10 an hour. They don’t receive any WorkCover or any superannuation and don’t get any expenses for their vehicles. What will you and the Labor Party be doing to outlaw these shared employment practices which are largely carried out by an overseasc orporation using an offshore tax haven to collect and distribute incomes? Good paying jobs and sustainable tax paying small businesses are being destroyed in what has become a free for all race to the bottom?”

Shorten says while people have a right to have a say on how their property (Airbnb) or their car (Uber) is used, companies have to pay taxes. He will work with business and unions to ensure the system is fair.

Q: Both Labor and Liberal governments have promised to put money into suicide prevention. However, past records show that throwing money at something can be pointless. Tracey Westerman, the 2018 West Australian of the Year, is a respected clinical psychologist and a Njamal woman. How will your government ensure that families like those in the Kimberley can keep their children safe from harm?

Shorten says it’s a massive issue and that mental health issues intersect with inequality experienced by Indigenous Australians. He says respected Indigenous senator and longstanding community leader Pat Dodson will be the Indigenous affairs minister.

He makes the point that while suicide is the “cutting edge” of the question, the wider issues effecting quality of life cannot be ignored.

It’s all connected. If you don’t feel you have stable housing, if you don’t feel you have access to a job, if you’re split up from your family, if you lose connection to country, it all works on each other. So we’ve got the suicide projects but I’d also want to put to you that reconciliation in Australia and Closing the Gap is everything. It’s putting our First Australians and recognising them in the nation’s birth certificate.

He references the Uluru Statement from the Heart:

I think we can create a national body and I think we can put it into the Constitution to consult. It will not be a third chamber of parliament.

Q: Will your Labor government actually repeal the changes to the Medicare bulk billing system that have seen many Australians simply not see a doctor because they can’t afford the gap fees?

Shorten says he will repeal the Medicare rebate freeze, which will increase the rebate to patients.

He says Labor will index the rebate on a regular basis and put new money into the system on top of indexing.

Shorten goes through his promise to provide cancer services.

If I can do one thing as PM, but help make sure when you get cancer it may make you sick but it shouldn’t make you poor. If I can honour my commitment that anyone who gets diagnosed with cancer has a lot more access to bulk billing, they don’t have to feel they’ve got to fill in their superannuation form to spend all the money so if they pass away their family, they don’t die in debt. This to me is why you want to be PM.

Jones: Are you worried if you say anything definitive about Adani the CFMEU could give Scott Morrison the kind of photo opportunity they handed John Howard back in 2014, which effectively undid Mark Latham?

Shorten:

I’m not worried about that, no.

Why not?

Shorten says:

Because I’m not. Because there’s other issues. I’ve got plenty to put to the people of Australia.

Shorten is asked, if you are serious about climate change, rule out Adani no matter what it does to the Labor vote in Queensland.

Shorten says he accepts things are changing but he will adhere to the science.

No. What I’m going to do is adhere to the science. Adhere to the law. I’m going to make sure we don’t have sovereign risk. There is no doubt in my mind that we’re moving to more renewables. There’s no doubt in my mind that coal-fired power is getting more expensive and renewables are getting cheaper. But at the end of the day we have to have a framework of laws. We have to have a framework for investment.

Q: Recent studies show irreversible climate change effects by 2030. How would a Shorten government expand domestic policy as well as work internationally to ensure our future is not threatened by the prospect of the world becoming uninhabitable?

Shorten:

That is such a dumb question to say what does it cost without looking at the cost of inaction. You can’t have a debate about climate change without talking about the cost of inaction.

And then to the Coalition’s record:

Climate change is costing and if anything shows you how broken the last six years, maybe 10 years of Australian politics is, is that whenever someone wants to have a crack at doing something on climate change, the knuckle draggers and the cave dwellers drag them down. If this government was serious on climate change, Malcolm Bligh Turnbull would still be PM of Australia.

Shorten repeats that he did not agree with Paul Keating on his view of security agencies, that they had not discussed those particular views.

He’s an elder statesman of Australian politics. He’s a grown up. And in my party you’re allowed to have an opinion. Not a hope that I’ll disown Paul Keating. But on that particular view I don’t agree with him.

Shorten is asked whether he values the US or China more.

Shorten says he is loyal to the US relationship but thinks Australia should be independent.

I do not look at our relationship with China through one prism of strategic risk. Of course we want to maintain our national security and our cybersecurity, our national interests.

But I tell you what – whatever this government has accomplished in the last six years in terms of economic growth has been written on the back of exports to north Asia and China. I think it’s a great thing we have so many Chinese Australians, so many people of Chinese ethnicity have joined their story to the Australian story.

What you won’t get from me is the crude oversimplification that somehow there’s, it’s a bipolar world and you’re for one and not the other.