Health News at Your Fingertips

Peter Hannam

Retention is key, federal nurses union says amidst NSW strikes

Achieving safe workloads for nurses is more important than higher wages when it comes to stopping health workers from cutting back hours or leaving the sector altogether, the nurses union has said, as the jobs and skills summit begins in Canberra.

Annie Butler, the national secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, said governments needed to pay more attention to keeping registered nurses in the profession, rather than training new recruits or scouring overseas markets for them.

Members of the New South Wales Nursing and Midwifery Association are taking action today to push for mandated nurse-to-patient ratios. Butler said before the two-day summit:

There is little point recruiting more and more and more nurses if you don’t fix the conditions in which those people are going to work

Retention is key.

Covid-19 hospitalisations trending down

Our data journalist Josh Nicholas says that with fewer than 3000 Covid-19 patients in hospitals across Australia, numbers are trending down.

You can check out the full Covid-19 data tracker here:

Peter Hannam

Childcare subsidies ‘sound investments with tangible economic benefits’: KPMG

More experts are adding to the workplace discussion at the jobs summit, including Alison Kitchen, the national chair of KPMG.

Kitchen said women’s greater share of unpaid work contributed to their entrenched disadvantage. She said:

Policies to reform childcare subsidies in the childcare sector are sound investments with tangible economic benefits. They’re not welfare.

For every dollar invested in those policies, the nation’s GDP is boosted by almost $2.

(Not sure how that sits with reports that the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, has ceased receiving requests for new spending even if the economic benefits stack up. Let’s see.)

Kitchen concludes by urging that the new Women’s Economic Taskforce “thinks deeply” about the value of unpaid work “so that we can work towards a society where that work is more equally shared, and women are no longer punished economically for doing more than their share of caring in our community”.

(KPMG will “be happy to work” with the taskforce, she adds, without hinting at whether the help will be pro bono.)

Traffic flowing in Suez Canal after ship run aground earlier

Reuters reported earlier that a ship had ran aground in Egypt’s Suez Canal late on Wednesday and tug boats were working to release it, according to two navigational sources.

The sources said at the time the vessel was blocking navigation in the canal, but the latest data shows that traffic is starting to flow through the Suez canal again.

Paul Karp

Michaelia Cash critical of union proposals

The shadow employment minister, Michaelia Cash, is speaking at a Kingston Reid employment conference on the jobs and skills summit sidelines.

Cash argued that the summit is a “PR exercise [for the Albanese government] to pretend they are listening to the employers” which she predicts will become “merely a rubber stamp for the union movement’s demands”.

In particular, Cash said that industry-wide bargaining “would be devastating for the Australian economy, leading to widespread strike action”. Cash noted although the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia had given in-principle support, it had also acknowledged the devil would be in the detail.

She said:

We will await that detail but my warning stands – small businesses may suddenly find they have invited something into their workplaces that they don’t want to deal with – like staff being pressured to go on strike. It is very clear to me that the ACTU is going to stand over this government and make demands at the jobs summit and beyond.

Cash also took aim at union-run inductions of migrant workers:

We also saw the ACTU’s outrageous demand that migrant workers are given an automatic trade union induction upon arrival in Australia. That induction would – in the words of the ACTU – “give them the opportunity to join the union”. This is massive overreach by the ACTU and the Albanese government should have immediately ruled out considering any such proposal – but of course they didn’t.

The ACTU effectively wants to gain control at our borders to indoctrinate migrant workers before they start a new working life in Australia. This has some of the sinister overtones of the regimes that many of those migrant workers are choosing to leave.

Kyrgios wins second round US open clash

Australian Nick Kyrgios is through to the third round after a win over Frenchman Benjamin Bonzi at the US Open.

He dropped the third set but came back to win in four, 6-4 in the final set.

You can read more from Guardian’s correspondent at Flushing Meadows:

Mike Hytner

Kyrgios asks the umpire to remind US Open crown not to smoke marijuana before dropping third set

In what is quite possibly a first for a grand slam tennis tournament, the chair umpire officiating Nick Kyrgios’ second-round US Open match against Benjamin Bonzi has felt compelled to ask the crowd to refrain from smoking after the Australian player complained of a whiff of marijuana inside the stadium.

Midway through the second set at Louis Armstrong Stadium, Kyrgios asked the umpire if he wanted to remind people not to smoke. The official appeared to think Kyrgios was complaining about the smell of food, but the 23rd seed said:

It was fucking marijuana.

Obviously I’m not going to be complaining about food stuff. Obviously not. Obviously when athletes are running side-to-side and they have asthma already it’s probably not ideal.

Kyrgios was a set up and 4-3 ahead in the second at the time of the incident. He went on to take a two-set lead but dropped the third to his French opponent. Play continues.

You can also follow Serena William’s match live here:

Peter Hannam

Boost in women’s participation in the workforce too slow: ACTU

Michele O’Neil, the president of the ACTU, has used her session on the workforce participation panel to note how women continue to lag that of men.

Here’s the latest ABS data from July on that spread, and how it’s changed over the past decade. (The good news is that’s narrowed, but still got a long way to go.)

Progress has been “glacially slow”, O’Neil says, adding that women are more likely to “work fewer hours, are more likely to be casual or part time, have unpredictable hours and rosters, are more likely to work multiple jobs, less likely to have paid leave, more likely to be discriminated against harassed and assaulted at work” than men.

For First Nations women, those living with a disability from a culturally and linguistically diverse background, or those who are LGBTQI+, the problems are likely to be worse again.

“Australians have the second-worst paid parental leave scheme in the developed world,” O’Neil said, with childcare costs also among the highest anywhere.

Multi-employer and sector collective bargaining will go some way to improving the ledger, O’Neil says. So far, that’s not a call most business groups appear to be rallying to (with the Cosboa, a small business group, an exception).

UK submarines open to Australian sailors for training

Josh Butler

The defence minister, Richard Marles, has confirmed Australian sailors will get to train on British nuclear submarines as the federal government continues efforts to acquire our own nuclear-powered subs under the Aukus pact.

Marles is in Europe meeting his ministerial counterparts and overnight announced, with the British defence secretary, Ben Wallace, that Royal Australian Navy submariners would be allowed to train on the new HMS Anson, an Astute-Class submarine. The defence department said in a statement:

Having Royal Australian Navy submariners train alongside Royal Navy crews, is an important step, taken with our partners in the United Kingdom to further strengthen our defence ties.

Australia is embarking on the next generation of submarines and in doing so, ensuring we have Royal Australian Navy personnel training with our partners under the Aukus partnership.

Marles said Australia was “eager to learn from our counterparts”. He said:

Today‘s announcement of Australian submariners training aboard HMS Anson says everything about our future plans of building the Aukus partnership.

The technology, capability and lethality on show is truly impressive and Australia looks forward to progressing our talks.

Under the Aukus deal, Australia will get access to nuclear technology from the United States and United Kingdom. However, decisions are still to be made on whether Australia will acquire submarine types built by the UK or US. Marles’ visit was to a British shipyard where the UK subs are being made.

He told Radio National yesterday:

We’ve made it really clear that not only do we need to make the choice as to exactly which platform we run with, but we need to be finding options which are sooner rather than later.

The former government left us with … a situation of not having a prospective boat in the water until the 2040s. This is a long way into the future and we are trying to examine, with both the United Kingdom and the United States, about whether there is any way in which we can get that date brought forward, and to the extent that there is any capability gap that arises as a result of whenever that date is, ways in which we can fill that capability.

Women in focus at jobs and skills summit

This year’s jobs summit has certainly come a long way in terms of women’s representation from the all-male business and unions delegates of the 1983 summit. Within the first hour we’ve already heard from the female finance minister, as well as other leading economists like Danielle Wood.

However, the issue of women’s participation in the workforce more broadly remains pressing, with Michele O’Neil, the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, saying that “keeping bargaining to the single enterprise … will lock women out of pay rises for generations”.

Peter Hannam

Women’s economic equality is a ‘core economic imperative’, Gallagher says

The second main session of the jobs and skills summit has begun, extending a theme that was a major theme of the first one: women’s workforce participation.

Katy Gallagher, the minister for finance, women and the public Service, notes the importance of the public sector in setting the standards for women’s role in the economy more generally. The minister said:

The summit represents a huge opportunity to agree that women’s economic equality is a core economic imperative that is crucial to our economic resilience and prosperity.

The country can’t simply leave women’s talent on the shelf.

If women’s participation in the workforce matched men’s, the economy would be more than 8% larger by 2050, and more than $350bn in activity generated over the period.

The gender pay gap also remains at 14.1%, a key focus of the subsequent panel that is now under way.

Josh Butler

Who’s got the prime spots in the jobs summit seating plan?

It’s been described as “Canberra Coachella” and the seating arrangements likened to a wedding plan, and from our vantage point above the jobs summit in the rafters of Parliament House’s Great Hall, it’s been interesting to see who got the prime spots.

All the national cabinet members, the premiers and chief ministers, are seated right up front – in the spiral arrangement of seating, they’re at the centre, right opposite the major federal ministers like the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, the finance minister, Katy Gallagher, and the workplace minister, Tony Burke.

Behind the premiers are a few union leaders, with the Nurses Federation’s secretary, Annie Butler, sitting next to Australian of the Year and disability advocate Dylan Alcott. Right behind them, in turn, is the Greens leader, Adam Bandt, seated just a chair apart from Australia’s richest man, Fortescue Metals’s chief executive, Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest – we imagine they might have some interesting conversations over the next few days.

A bit further back is Toll’s head, Christine Holgate (formerly of Australia Post), next to the tourism forum’s chief executive, Margy Osmond. Right in the middle, AI Group’s head, Innes Willox, and the ACTU’s leaders Sally McManus and Michelle O’Neil are a few seats apart but within shouting distance.

A couple rows back, new independent politicians David Pocock and Allegra Spender are seated together, a few chairs up from Qantas’ boss, Alan Joyce. He’s a bit further up the back than you might expect the airline chief to be, but at least he’s closer than Visy Recycling’s head, Anthony Pratt – Australia’s second-richest man seated in the back row.

The nationals leader, David Littleproud – the Coalition’s sole representative to accept an invitation – is up the back next to Alison Barnes, from the tertiary education union.