Australia

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet and Labor leader Chris Minns have traded blows during the first televised debate of the election campaign, both accusing the other of having a "black hole" in their budgets.

The election battleground of Western Sydney will be the site of a key debate between Premier Dominic Perrottet and Opposition leader Chris Minns as NSW prepares to vote.

The leaders will appear at the Sky News/The Daily Telegraph People’s Forum on Wednesday, 22 March at 7:30 pm AEDT, hosted by Sky News Australia’s Chief News Anchor, Kieran Gilbert, live from Western Sydney.

The two men vying for the NSW premiership have faced off in the first debate of the election campaign, clashing over how each of them would pay for Sydney’s multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects.

A review that criticised the format of Channel Nine’s leaders’ debate was spiked by Tory Maguire, the executive editor of Nine Entertainment’s newspapers the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age.

RMIT ABC Fact Check has rounded up some of the key claims where the leaders got their facts straight, and where they missed the mark.

Of the three leaders' debates in this campaign, Anthony Albanese performed best in Wednesday night's less shouty, more civilised encounter.

Seven News political editor Mark Riley says he’ll use “a chair and a whip” to control Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese in the third and final leaders’ debate and avoid a repeat of Sunday night’s “spectacle”.

The Greens have proposed a new independent commission following what they say was a farcical leaders’ debate between Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese this past weekend.

The second leaders’ debate of the election campaign, hosted by Channel Nine, attracted 641,000 viewers, however the network’s own employees have criticised the format as a “shambles”.