As it happened: Scott Morrison, Anthony Albanese continue to clash over the economy as pre-polling opens across the country

• Labor says it will seek to legislate a religious discrimination act and remove the ability of schools to expel gay and transgender students at the same time should it win government. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has previously said his party would deal with the issues separately.
• Northern Territory Chief Minister Michael Gunner announced his resignation, saying his head and his heart are “at home” following the recent birth of his second child.

• Anti-Chinese government protesters interrupted a candidates’ forum in Chisholm, where candidates responded to questions about racist attacks on Chinese people, Australia’s deteriorating relationship with China and election attack ads.
• There were 48,034 new cases of COVID-19 and 49 deaths recorded nationally in the latest reporting period.

“The reason I stopped using WeChat was I found it was more efficient to communicate with my constituents [other ways].“

In January, Liu said: “In an election year especially, this sort of interference in our political processes is unacceptable, and this matter should be taken extremely seriously by all Australian politicians.”

Labor’s Carina Garland said that she used WeChat because so many members of the Chinese community were on WeChat, but she said if intelligence agencies gave advice not to use WeChat, Labor would follow the advice.

“But that advice has not been issued,” she said.

During questioning from the audience, Liu was also asked about her past voting on climate change issues during her three years in parliament.

Liu side-stepped the question, responding to the audience member by saying that investing in technology was the key to tackling climate change.

“Both parties have both committed to 2050 zero emission, and we don’t want to sacrifice a section of the community to have unreliable and not affordable energy and that’s why we take a very careful measure to reach this goal and we invest in technology.

“If you don’t have technology, what you have to do is to increase taxes or you have to increase energy price and that means those who are doing it tough will suffer.”

She was also asked by an audience member about the Morrison government’s failure to establish a federal corruption commission in the past three years.

She claimed that “Labor has been playing political games” and that this was why a federal ICAC had not been established.

She returned to a claim she has repeatedly made, that the Coalition had “350 pages of the policy” and that their attempt had been thwarted by Labor.

But the Coalition’s model was widely criticised by legal and transparency experts for lacking teeth and being overly secretive.

The government went to the 2019 election promising to set up the new agency, and released a draft law for public comment, but never tabled a bill in the last Parliament for a debate.

Bachelard also asked about purple signs that Liu’s team put up at 29 polling booths in Chisholm on election day in 2019.

The signs were in the same purple as AEC signage and told voters that “the correct voting method” was to put a one next to the Liberal candidate. Liu’s narrow election win was later challenged in the Federal Court but no action was taken to review it. If 545 more people had voted for Labor in the electorate of 100,000 people, Labor would have won the seat.

Liu said that this issue had been addressed. “It [the signage] wasn’t put out by me, it wasn’t authorised by me. I didn’t even know it was there on the day. The court never asked me to attend. So it is basically a grubby attack on me,” she said.

He said his bid to keep wages ahead of inflation was already being considered by the Fair Work Commission.

“What we know is that at the last increase, the Fair Work Commission made, it was 2.5 per cent even though inflation was just 1.1 [per cent]. We know that the Fair Work Commission has taken these issues into account,” he said.

“We need to make sure that we don’t create a whole section of the labour market whereby people are competing in a race to the bottom.

“Someone says they will do this job for this amount and then someone undercuts them. These are issues that need to be looked at in order to ensure we get good outcomes, not just for workers but also for the delivery of services.”