Morrison scrapes through to 2019



The final sitting day of 2018 has been a wild ride. It seems the Morrison Government has avoided an historic defeat on the floor of Parliament that would have resulted in more refugees being transferred from Manus Island and Nauru.



To catch you up, the Prime Minister was facing a cross-party push to amend Government legislation. It passed the Senate and needed to go back to House of Representatives. If it got there, the Government would have been defeated.



So, the vote was delayed in the Senate for hours and the House of Representatives adjourned before it could come to a final vote. Both sides of politics are blaming each other for cheap political point-scoring.

On top of all that, a last-minute backdown from Labor has allowed the Federal Government to pass its beefed-up surveillance legislation, after a *lot* of to-ing and fro-ing. It means security agencies will gain greater access to people's encrypted messages.