Health News at Your Fingertips

The publicly owned Future Fund is investing billions into major polluting companies, Senate estimates questioning has revealed.

Answers to Questions on Notice to Greens Senator Barbara Pocock found the fund is investing a total $3.4 billion into the top 50 fossil fuel emitting companies in the world.

Pocock said there was a deep irony in the government relying on dividends from polluters to pay for infrastructure to deal with the damage the same companies were causing by investing in fossil fuels.

The federal government’s Disaster Ready Bill, currently before the Senate, will use proceeds from the Future Fund to pay for infrastructure to mitigate climate damage.

The Future Fund is invested in companies that have absolutely no intention to diversify away from coal and gas, with $549 million directly invested in Woodside, $190 million in Santos and $83 million in Whitehaven.

While Australia is attending COP27 to mitigate against climate disaster, and is asking the world to let us host a climate summit, our government is sinking money into the world’s biggest polluters.

If the Future Fund is entrusted with paying for the public works needed to keep Australian communities safe from floods, fires, storm surges and cyclones moving south – then it needs to stop profiting from those companies making these natural disasters worse.

Amy Remeikis has had to unexpectedly dash off today, so it’s Caitlin Cassidy here to keep the good times rolling. I’ll be with you for the next little while.

We reported it a little earlier this morning, but here is Labor’s Stephen Jones’ whole comment on the criminals who have released some of the data they stole from Medibank:

They’re scumbags, they’re crooks, they’re criminals, and we shouldn’t be paying ransom. We shouldn’t be giving in to these fraudsters and criminals. The moment we fold, it sends a green light to scumbags like them throughout the world that Australia is a soft target.

We cannot give in. We won’t give in. All the more important that we lift our protection against cyber-threats and lift our protection against scams and fraudsters. That’s why we made our announcement earlier in this week about following through on our election commitment to set up an anti-scam centre. The best protection is ensuring that the data doesn’t get stolen in the first place.

If that fails, we want to ensure that consumers are protected. So establishing an anti-scam centre inside the ACCC will provide consumers with the information and the protection they need and enable us to move quickly if some of these cyber-breaches lead to frauds and theft and scams going on in our economy.

Daniel Hurst

Coalition will support changes to laws governing ex-ADF personnel to safeguard national secrets, opposition says

The Coalition has offered to support legal changes if required to safeguard Australia’s national secrets after the government announced a review of China’s alleged attempts to recruit former Australian defence force personnel.

The opposition’s defence spokesperson, Andrew Hastie, has issued the following statement:

Reports that ex-Australian fighter pilots were approached by Chinese interests to provide military training to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are deeply concerning.

Such conduct, if these allegations are verified, is highly improper and contrary to the Australian national interest.

Our national military secrets – including tactics, techniques and procedures for our elite fighter pilots – must be safeguarded by serving defence members and our veterans. They are not for sale to another country.

The opposition therefore welcomes the Department of Defence examining current policies and procedures governing ex-ADF personnel who have served in classified and sensitive capabilities.

The responsibility for protecting these national secrets does not cease when personnel separate from the ADF. It is a continuing obligation on our veterans and the ADF must ensure that this obligation has both moral and legal foundations.

Hastie said the Coalition would welcome the opportunity to receive further information from the government on this matter. He added:

Three weeks ago, the opposition stated that if legislation is required to deal with this matter, we will work closely with the government to further safeguard our sensitive national capabilities.

Our position remains unchanged, and we trust the government is making this an urgent priority.

Government to look at improving access to IUDs and other long-acting reversible contraception, Ged Kearney says

The push for greater recognition of endometriosis and womens’ health more generally has come from female MPs from all sides of politics, which is why Labor, the Coalition and the Greens are happy to come together today to talk about the results of that push.

The previous government had committed funding, and this government is continuing that commitment and is now starting the process to establish the clinics.

Also good news – Ged Kearney says the government is looking at pain relief for IUD insertion. It is one of the most painful things you can go through, in terms of voluntary medical procedures – and most women are only told to take two Panadol for it, which is like handing someone who has lost a finger a Band-Aid and a pat on the stump.

Kearney:

We are looking at all of the barriers that women face, particularly accessing long acting reversible contraceptives, like IUDs. And we’re trying to get to the bottom of that – pain is certainly one that I’m hearing loud and clear.

And it’s anything that we know from this issue that we’ve raised today, too often women’s experiences of pain are absolutely, well, not ignored, exactly, sometimes ignored, but dismissed and something that I really want to get to the bottom of.

But there’s a lot of other barriers right now to women accessing LARCs, that’s one of them. Certainly, the number of doctors and general practitioners that actually … do it – people in rural and regional areas simply don’t have access to clinics that are available.

So, who knows, maybe with this pelvic pain clinic, this is something that we can actually expand on and have these clinics actually deliver very specialty care. So yes, it’s something that we are very much looking at.

Ged Kearney, the assistant health minister and Anne Ruston, the shadow health minister, have joined together for a bipartisan announcement of clinics for endometriosis and pelvic pain.

Kearney:

Today, we are finally on the hunt for clinics that will provide specific services to women with endometriosis and, I’m pleased to say, the broader issue of pelvic pain.

As you would know, endometriosis affects one in nine women in Australia. And their diagnosis often is very long, takes far too long, is painful, because … all too often, women with pelvic pain are ignored. They’re told to just live with it, it’s just part of being a woman, when actually there are very serious issues that can be treated and we could do so much more for women with pelvic pain and endometriosis.

So we have launched today the process to find 16 specific clinics right around Australia, who will provide very special services to women with pelvic pain, who may well have endometriosis. And if they do, they will be able to refer them on to specific services.

We think that this will revolutionise care for women with endometriosis and we are really excited about it. In the hunt for the clinics, we will be taking into consideration things like geographical location – we know that women in rural and regional areas particularly have a great deal of trouble accessing services like this.

We will make sure that clinics are able to scale up and provide care for extra patients coming from outside their area. We’ll make sure that they have an absolute commitment to upskilling their staff and providing special services around the area of endometriosis and pelvic pain. We’ll make sure that they are prepared to be culturally appropriate.

So there’ll be a range of things that we will be looking at in this tender process for clinics to provide the service.

Also, from 1 November we are very pleased to say that women who are having difficulty conceiving will be able to, on the MBS, get an MRI. This will also be life-changing for a lot of women who have tried to conceive for many, many years and have not been able to do so. It will also, of course, help diagnose those conditions which we know are a barrier to fertility like endometriosis and other conditions.

Sarah Martin

Greens continue grilling Treasury on government’s housing accord

The Greens are back to grilling Treasury on the housing accord and the government’s social housing policy.

Senator Nick McKim asked about what definition of “affordable” will be used, and how many of the promised 1m homes under the accord would meet this definition.

Laura Berger-Thomson from Treasury said that while no definition had been agreed to by all parties of the accord, this would be worked through.

She said that the government had pledged 30,000 social and affordable homes under the Housing Affordability Fund, with an extra 10,000 promised by the government and another 10,000 from the states. Berger-Thomson said:

There is general consensus around what is affordable in a broad sense and I think it is really is down to the specifics of whether … it will include just rental stock or whether affordable homes to purchase will be included.

She said an affordable rental would typically have rent at 80% of market rent.

McKim asked whether any of the $350m pledged under the accord would go to private developers and investors. The finance minister, Katy Gallagher, said the government’s preference was to go to community housing providers, but she would not play the “rule in, rule out” game.

She said it was “unlikely” any government funds would go to private developers, but left the option open. Gallagher said:

We are working with investors and I don’t want to … lock down options to deliver the policy outcome.

Big business has no incentive to fix recycling problem, Greens senator says

The Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson isn’t impressed with Tanya Plibersek’s response to the revelations Coles and Woolworths soft plastics recycling programs aren’t happening:

It’s unacceptable that once big packaging corporations whack a recycling label on packaging, the government thinks it can wipe its hands clean of responsibility.

The government can’t keep passing the buck on recycling. Minister Plibersek today said it shouldn’t be beyond big companies like Coles and Woolworths to come up with a viable solution to soft plastic recycling.

I’m disappointed with Minister Plibersek’s comments. The attitude and culture of governments leaving this problem to big business to sort out is why we’re in this mess. Big businesses have no incentive to fix the problem, they’re only interested in their bottom line.

Australia’s recycling industry has been crying out for the government to introduce mandatory national packaging targets in order to have the confidence to invest in the infrastructure and technology necessary to recycle things like soft plastics right across the country.

An export ban on sending plastics overseas for recycling should’ve provided a welcome boost for Australia’s recycling industry but successive governments have failed to take the most basic of steps to make us self-sufficient waste and recycling managers. If recycled content in packaging and government procurement of recycled content were mandated, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Every day the government fails to take meaningful action on recycling is another day our environment suffers and another day that Australians miss out on thousands of job opportunities that could be created in a true circular economy.

The Greens have announced they will vote for the IR bill in the house (where the party’s vote isn’t needed to pass it) but will have more to say about it when it reaches the Senate (where the Greens vote does matter).

Supermarkets need to ‘step up’ on plastics recycling: Tanya Plibersek

Lisa Cox

The environment and water minister, Tanya Plibersek, says Coles and Woolworths need to “step up” and explain how they will deal with recycling soft plastics in the wake of the collapse of Australia’s biggest soft plastics recycler, REDCycle.

Plibersek said:

It shouldn’t be beyond these big supermarkets to come up with a viable solution to allow Australians to continue to recycle.

I expect Coles and Woolworths to step up and indicate how they will deal with soft plastic recycling. We’re happy to work with them to achieve this.

Their customers want to do the right thing, Coles and Woolworths should too.

REDCycle announced the suspension of its programs on Tuesday night after the Age reported soft plastic items customers had dropped off at Coles and Woolworths supermarkets were being stockpiled in warehouses and not recycled.

At last month’s meeting of environment ministers, there was agreement to work with the private sector on phasing out waste and pollution like ice cream wrappers and pasta packets by 2030.

Plibersek said on Wednesday almost a billion pieces of soft plastic had been recovered by the REDCycle program since 2011 and the problems it was now facing were “unfortunate”:

Like many Australians, I feel bad when I am forced to put soft plastics in landfill and I do my bit to take them down to my local supermarket to be recycled. I want to ensure Australians will be able to keep recycling their bread bags and plastic sachets.

She said soft plastics were worth money, including to Coles and Woolworths, given plastics collected by REDCycle had been recycled into items such as Coles trolleys. They had also been used for roads, footpaths and garden edging.

Plibersek said the government had set aside $60m to increase soft plastic recycling and provided $1m to the Australian Food and Grocery Council to work with industry to develop more sustainable solutions for their soft plastics.

Ministers ‘have talked about it being important to have targets’ for national domestic violence plan: social services secretary

Over in department of social services estimates, there seems to be some hint towards a target within the national plan to end violence against women and children.

That came from questioning from the Greens senator Larissa Waters, who was asking questions of the deputy secretary of families and communities, Liz Hefren-Webb.

Waters:

Okay. Thank you. Is it the government’s aspiration to ensure that no one who seeks help from a frontline domestic family or sexual violence service is turned away for lack of resourcing?

Hefren-Webb:

So obviously the government’s expressed its aspiration to end violence against women and their children. But I think a target that’s around ensuring people have access to services and support when they need it is something that I think would be central to an action plan.

Waters:

So, okay, because obviously one of the key criticisms of the National Plan was the lack of measurable targets. So is that – you’ve just hinted – is that a target that could be in scope for either of the First Nations or the non-First Nations action plan?

Hefren-Webb:

It’s certainly an area where the government and ministers have talked about it being important to have targets, not only overall targets about prevalence, but targets about services and support and people being able to access what they need.

Sarah Martin

Greens senator questions whether federal housing accord’s ‘aspirational target’ of 1m new homes is a ‘meaningless figure’

The Greens senator Nick McKim is asking Treasury about the government’s new housing accord, which has an “aspirational target” to build a million new homes in the five years from 2024-25.

McKim is asking how many of the million would be built by the private sector regardless of the accord, pointing to the 995,000 homes built over the past five years.

Laura Berger-Thomson from Treasury said that while the forecast over the next two years was for 180,000 housing starts a year, beyond that the number was expected to decline.

Although we have the 180,000 completions over the next three years, given the rise in interest rates, we would expect that there’d be a decrease in homebuilding activity subsequent to that, as the effects of those interest rate rises kind of flow through to the construction sector, which we know is sensitive to interest rates.

So I think our best guess … given the economic situation, that there would actually be if there wasn’t kind of policies in place, there would actually be substantially less than the 1 million built … We’re confident that the one million homes is a target which actually does genuinely increase the supply of dwellings.

McKim is questioning what the difference in housing stock would be without the accord.

“It is a meaningless figure, isn’t it? McKim says.

The finance minister, Katy Gallagher, emphasises that it is an aspirational target.

It’s an aspirational target informed by the delivery of what’s happened over the past five years, and extra effort going in by the commonwealth states and the territories.

The Liberal senator Anne Ruston is also asking whether the Treasury has done any modelling to show how many extra homes would be built under the accord.

Somebody can’t live in an aspirational target, can they?

The Greens senator David Shoebridge has also tried to push Treasury on the deductible gift recipient status granted by the former Coalition government to the Future Leaders Foundation charity of the governor general, David Hurley, but received few answers about the specific listing.

Sarah Martin

Liberal senator accused of ‘inappropriate’ characterisation of social housing

The Liberal senator Jane Hume has had a crack at the government’s focus on social housing amid discussion about the former Coalition’s Homebuilder program.

Treasury officials have explained that the pandemic program, which was designed to boost demand and confidence in the market, had been budgeted to be worth $680m but blew out to $2.7bn. The program was uncapped and demand-driven.

The program provided 24,000 grants to assist with renovations, of a total of about 105,247 grants. Laura Berger-Thomson from Treasury said the renovations “needed to be substantial”.

Vera Holenstein, an assistant secretary at the Treasury, said the amount for the renovation needed to be between $150,000 and $750,000 for people to be eligible, with the aim to stimulate the construction industry.

Labor senator Deb O’Neill asked whether there were any restrictions on what the money could be spent on, asking whether gold taps, bidets and swimming pools were allowed.

Holenstein said an applicant needed to have an income under a certain amount, but was unable to provide the figure. She said swimming pools and granny flats were excluded, and the value of the property needed to be less than $1.5m.

At this point, Hume interjected, saying:

Put them in little boxes, little boxes of social housing, would be so much better

The remark prompted O’Neill to call for Hume to withdraw the remark.

[It] is an inappropriate way to characterise social housing and all Australians who grew up in it and rely on it and need that roof over their head.

PM aims to emphasise commitment to net zero and regional stability at upcoming summits in Asia

Anthony Albanese is about to hit the skies again. The prime minister is headed to international and regional summits in Cambodia, Indonesia and Thailand from 11–19 November, including Asean, G20 and Apec.

In a statement, Albanese said:

Australia has always been an outward facing nation and we have never shied away from facing up to global challenges.

The global economic outlook is stark, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated the challenges of food insecurity, rising energy prices, rising inflation and cost of living pressures globally.

Australia strongly supports Asean’s central role in the region and its vision for the region is closely aligned with our own.

My role at these summits will be one of advocacy for not only Australians, but also for … our Pacific neighbours who face many of the same pressures that we do.

At each summit I will emphasise Australia’s commitment to the global transition to net zero, and our vision for a stable, peaceful, resilient and prosperous region.

I will remain, on behalf of the Australian people, a fierce opponent to Russia’s immoral and illegal invasion of Ukraine.

I look forward to engaging my counterparts in Phnom Penh, Bali and Bangkok in the next week.”

AFP Operation Guardian to be expanded to protect exposed Medibank customers

Josh Taylor

In the wake of a ransomware group beginning to publish Medibank customer data on the dark web overnight, the Australian federal police has announced that it will expand Operation Guardian – which was set up to protect the 10,000 Optus customers who had their personal information posted online earlier this year – to those Medibank customers exposed.

AFP assistant commissioner cyber command, Justine Gough, said in a statement:

Operation Guardian will be actively monitoring the clear, dark and deep web for the sale and distribution of Medibank Private and Optus data.

Law enforcement will take swift action against anyone attempting to benefit, exploit or commit criminal offences using stolen Medibank Private data.

Gough also said people should not try to download or access the data themselves, saying it may constitute a criminal offence.

We use the powers and authorities of all of our agencies to disrupt the sale and distribution of the unlawfully-obtained data.

Operation Pallidus is the investigation into the Medibank cyberattack itself. It is the other AFP operation in partnership with federal government agencies, and Five Eyes law enforcement including the FBI.

Paul Karp

Meeting with Chinese leaders would be ‘a positive thing moving forward’, PM says

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has been asked if he will be meeting the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, or president, Xi Jinping, at the forthcoming G20 and East Asia summit.

Albanese said his trip will be a “very busy nine days” and the government is still finalising the program – but he left open the possibility.

Albanese told reporters in Canberra:

I’ve made very clear that dialogue is a good thing. And so if a meeting is arranged with Xi, then that’s a positive thing moving forward. We are organising a range of meetings – but they haven’t been finalised … We’ll make an announcement if and when meetings with various leaders are locked in.

Daniel Hurst

Back to defence estimates and there has been an exchange concerning the basis for predictions by the former government that a guided weapons enterprise would eventually create more than 2,000 jobs across the supply chain.

Greg Moriarty, the secretary of the department, said drily: “You’d need to ask the former prime minister. It was his press release.”