Health News at Your Fingertips

Paul Karp

Earlier, the shadow employment minister Michaelia Cash did not fully back the Liberal leader, Peter Dutton’s call to shut the border. Cash told reporters in Canberra it was “a decision for the ALP”.

Dutton’s formulation, by contrast, was that the government should shut the border, unless there was a “significant piece of intelligence” that said not to.
The Nationals leader, David Littleproud, is speaking to Sky News repeating that it’s a decision for the government.

We should be stopping any person with foodstuff from Indonesia,” he said.

Sussan Ley, the deputy leader of the Opposition has some thoughts on Labor’s review of the manufacturing fund (the government is reviewing all of the things, and a month into that review, Ley wants commitments nothing will be changed in this area)

From Ley’s release:

Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Minister for Industry Sussan Ley is calling on the Albanese Government to rule out tearing up commitments made to Australian manufacturing businesses by the previous government and to honour investments for skills, apprenticeships and trainees in full.

Projects totalling around a billion dollars, funded through the previous government’s $1.3 billion Modern Manufacturing Initiative, are at risk of being torn up by Ed Husic alongside record investment in skills and training.

Industries include:

• Defence, space and national security
• Recycling and clean energy
• Food security and processing
• Medical Products

A month into a review of the Modern Manufacturing Initiative, grant recipients are in the dark about whether their funding will be ripped away. Companies who were promised millions of dollars in crucial funding, have been waiting since the election for direction and have received no timeframe and no clarity.

Michael McGowan

Deputy NSW Labor leader Prue Car on leave after cancer diagnosis

The New South Wales deputy Labor leader, Prue Car, has announced she will take leave after a cancer diagnosis.

Car, the shadow education minister, issued a statement on Monday revealing that after undergoing tests doctors had discovered “a large tumour on my kidney”.

She said she would take leave “over the coming weeks” for treatment, but said she still hoped to return to contest the state election in March.

Car said in the statement:

I am deeply grateful to have access to the world-class health care we are so lucky to have in Australia as I receive treatment. I would like to acknowledge our hard-working, compassionate, skilled but overworked doctors, nurses and allied health professionals who are guiding me through this process.

Over 4,300 Australian women and men are diagnosed with kidney cancer each year.

Early detection is key in the treatment of any cancer. I encourage anyone concerned about their risk or experiencing worrying symptoms to contact their doctor.

I look forward to being back out and about soon fighting for our community, contesting the 2023 NSW state election as the Labor candidate for Londonderry and, as deputy Labor leader, working hard to elect a Chris Minns Labor government.

I am buoyed by such loving support from my incredible family, friends, colleagues and my beloved local community – thank you for your support.

I have been told by Penny Wong’s office that the foreign minister injured her arm in a surfing accident while on holidays recently.

Wong is expected to recover soon, but there will be no carving up the surf for a while.

Mike Bowers, as always, is on the case.

(We have asked Penny Wong’s office for an update on the foreign minister’s injury.)

There are some images coming out of the picfac – which is a picture opportunity, no questions – with Anthony Albanese’s ministerial meeting.

The ministers and the PM are all masked up. Albanese isn’t wearing his Souths mask – he has a disposable one, as do a lot of the other ministers, so it may not have been a planned “masked up” message

George Christensen is still trying to make George Christensen happen:

Marles: important ‘Defence plays its part’ in aged care

Here was Richard Marles, the defence minister and deputy prime minister, this morning at a doorstop at parliament house, talking about the decision to extend the ADF deployment in aged care centres.

There is a massive shortage of staff in the health, aged care and disability care sectors. The ADF has been stretched rather thin covering gaps from Covid, as well as natural disasters and aged care. At some point, there needs to be a discussion about the role of the ADF in civilian care and how much they are used to plug gaps.

Q: Is this something that aged care centres were really pushing for? Give us a an idea of how much they’re struggling at the moment.

Marles:

I think there is a significant load which is on aged care centres now. This is something that was asked of me by the minister for health and the minister for aged care.

So it was something that we took very seriously, looked at very carefully, because it did involve extending the workforce beyond the 12th of August. But given the situation that we’re facing – a thousand outbreaks in aged care centres across Australia – it was important that Defence plays its part.

Q: Is fourth dose coverage still a concern? And will the ADF help with sort of bringing up those rates in aged care?

Marles:

I think now that we have, you know, greater availability or access to fourth doses, that [it] is really important that we are seeing people get their fourth dose – I got mine last week.

It’s obviously important that we’re seeing that happen in an aged care setting as well. Vaccinations are a really critical part of how we deal with the response and the outbreaks that we’ve seen, the latest omicron variant, and so it’s very important that occurs.

(A very big thank you to Paul Karp for heading to that presser – it was not played live, so he rushed out to ensure you could have it covered)

Paul Karp

Opposition commits to restoring Australian Building and Construction Commission at next election

The shadow employment minister, Michaelia Cash, has held a press conference blasting Labor for its plan to abolish the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

Cash cited the fact that even the Rudd-Gillard government had a building industry-specific industrial regulator, and high court findings that the construction union is a “recidivist offender” that treats fines as the “cost of doing business”.

The ABCC had a 91% success record in litigation, Cash said. Of course, it’s worth noting that the Fair Work Act is highly restrictive and sets such a high threshold on taking industrial action that it arguably breaches ILO conventions on collective bargaining.

Cash said the Coalition is “absolutely” committed to restore the ABCC if elected at the next election.

Asked if she was embarrassed to be a minister in a government that had compromised national security by revealing a boat interception before the operation was complete, Cash said that no caretaker conventions were breached and she was proud to have been part of a government that took responsibility for Australia’s borders. Not the question, but there you go.

Cash said Labor’s efforts to stop food-and-mouth disease were “too little too late”.

Cash revealed she holidayed in Bali and returned to Perth to find “no checks at Perth airport”, explaining the reason for the Coalition’s call to close the border is they have no faith the Australian government has the situation under control.

Aged care pay rises ‘going to take a while’

But that doesn’t solve the problem of aged care workers in the future. Wells says pay is one of the issues, with workers able to “be paid more stacking shelves at Woolies”.

Wells says the government is focussed on getting a pay rise as the first step towards recruiting more staff, but there is a process:

Well, we’re still going through the Fair Work process, our submission isn’t due until the 8th of August. The commissioner will be considering those submissions after further hearings in September, so that is why I’m saying this isn’t something we’re going to solve this fortnight, this isn’t something we’re going to solve this winter.

This is going to take a while to turn the Queen Mary around. No one is under any illusions about that.

It was a busy morning on ABC radio – Anika Wells, the minister for aged care, also spoke to ABC Radio’s AM about the extension of ADF staff in aged care “to get through the winter wave”.

The ADF had been attempting to step down and withdraw from aged care because obviously this is a desperate extreme measure, that a sector would be so neglected that the sort of last-chance opportunity was taken by the previous government in February to deploy the ADF into aged care.

So since that time, the department has been putting together a surge workforce and building that up, so that that has been going up as the ADF has been going down.

… the ADF have generously agreed to put an additional 220 general duties personnel into aged care to get us through this winter wave, alongside the clinician-led teams that will already circulating around the country.

NSW reports seven Covid deaths; Victoria records no new deaths

NSW Health has reported seven people died of Covid in the last 24 hours. Victoria reported no deaths.

Agriculture minister: expert advice on FMD says border closure ‘not needed’

Murray Watt on ABC Radio National this morning said he has asked for advice on whether Australia should close the border with Indonesia and has been told no.

This in relation to the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak.

I am relying on the best biosecurity advice I have available to me because just as we listen to the experts to get ourselves through Covid as a country, it’s important that we listen to people who know what they’re talking about here.

And the advice to me is that that measure is not needed. There’s foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks in about 70 countries around the world at the moment and we’ve never closed the borders to those countries … I don’t know where the opposition stands on this because they’ve got some people out saying close the borders, some other people say no.

Industry is united in saying that we should not close the border.

Australia is making international news again – this time for having the 9th most delayed airport in the world.

Sydney, take a bow. We did it.

Peter Dutton says Australia should shut border to Indonesia over foot-and-mouth scare

Paul Karp

After the Coalition was divided last week on whether the Albanese government should shut the border to keep foot-and-mouth disease out, the Liberal leader, Peter Dutton, has further evolved his position.

Dutton told 2GB:

I believe the borders should be closed, absent the information the government’s got … If there’s an argument why the border shouldn’t be closed, that’s for the prime minister to make. If he’s got a reason, then let him explain it.

Dutton confirmed his position is that the border should close, unless there is “some significant piece of intelligence that this is under control”.

Dutton also called on Anthony Albanese to “take the lead, not the hapless [agriculture] minister in Murray Watt, the most junior minister, who I don’t think instills anyone with confidence”.

Dutton said the government was “playing with a loaded gun” because if FMD gets into Australia, hundreds of thousands of livestock will be slaughtered, an $80bn export industry will shut down, it will take years to recover and prices of meat at the checkout will be “through the roof”.

Queensland Labor MP Graham Perrett woke up and chose violence this morning (in my experience, Canberra residents are very protective over all things Canberra, but most particularly, their bus stops).

Michaelia Cash is upset Labor plans on winding back the powers of the Australian Building and Construction Commission and will be holding a doorstop on that, as the shadow minister, in about 30 minutes.