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New Pacific minister ‘here to listen’ after region ‘frustrated’ by former government

Daniel Hurst

The new minister for international development and the Pacific, Pat Conroy, has told Pacific countries that Australia “is here to listen” and “will be a leader, not a laggard” on climate change.

Conroy has also acknowledged Pacific island countries had been “frustrated by the former Australian government’s approach to climate change” and says being family means respecting and listening to the concerns of each member.

He is addressing an event – Pacific Update – co-hosted by the University of the South Pacific in Fiji and the Australian National University’s Development Policy Centre.

Joining the event by video link, Conroy said:

We meet at a time when the complexity of issues we face is growing. In particular the triple challenges of climate, Covid and strategic contest will test us in new ways.

I will touch on some of those challenges today, but my central message is this: Australia is here to listen. We are here to work together with our Pacific family and we are here to make a difference. All the nations of the world face significant global challenges but we don’t have to face them alone.

Conroy acknowledged for the Pacific, climate change is not an abstract threat but an existential one, an argument the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, has made during her travels to the region too.

He assured his audience that the new Australian government “will join with our Pacific family in constructive ways” to deal with climate change:

I know that Pacific family was frustrated by the former Australian government’s approach to climate change in recent years. A new government has been elected and we are absolutely committed to acting on climate change. A true family respects each member, listens to the concerns of family members and acts upon those concerns.

He said the former Australian government “disrespected” Pacific countries by not taking adequate action on climate change.

I mentioned climate change first because the Australian government knows that the issue of security is inseparable from the issue of climate change.

Conroy then turned his attention to strategic challenges. He said Australia deeply respects regional institutions. He cited Labor’s election promises on Pacific security, including stepping maritime surveillance to tackle illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and better coordinating defence engagement with the region.

There were 7,758 new cases recorded and 35 people in intensive care over the past 24 hours.

There were 8,623 cases recorded over the past 24 hours, and 49 people are in intensive care.

On those deaths, NSW Health said:

The 40 deaths notified to NSW Health in the 24 hours to 4pm on Monday includes 26 deaths notified through the NSW Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages.

COVID-19 related deaths are notified to NSW Health from a range of sources and not all deaths reported by NSW Health occurred in the week in which they are reported as there is sometimes a delay between a death occurring and it being notified to NSW Health.

1m vacant dwellings in a country struggling with chronic housing insecurity and a rental crisis. Good times.

This is unconfirmed as yet but likely to be from today’s Blockade Australia action in Sydney.

The climate activist group released a statement about half an hour ago, confirming they had continued their actions today.

The census shows that Christianity remains the country’s most common religion, AAP reports, with 43.9% of Australians identifying as Christian. But the number of followers continues to decline, dropping from 61.1% in 2011 and 52.1% in 2016.

Catholicism is the largest denomination, followed by Anglicanism. Other religions are growing: Hinduism was listed by 2.75% of respondents and Islam grew to 3.2%.

And close to 40% (38.9) have no religious affiliation, up from 22.3% in 2011 and 30.1% in 2016.

Questions on religion are one of the few voluntary questions in the census, AAP points out; however, 93% of respondents still gave an answer.

Some 8 million people reported having a long-term health condition in the 2021 census, 2 million of whom suffer mental health problems, arthritis or asthma, AAP reports.

Women are more likely to report having a long-term health condition, with 34% suffering at least one, compared with 30% of men.

Mental illness is one of the most commonly reported conditions across the population, while women more commonly reported arthritis and men asthma.

Almost 63% of people over the age of 65 reported at least one long-term health condition, compared with 22% of those aged 15 to 34 years old.

More than 2.2 million Australians experience long-term mental health issues, more than 2.1m live with arthritis and just over 2m live with asthma. Australians under 14 were the most likely to have asthma.

Australia’s millennial generation is becoming the nation’s largest, displacing the postwar baby boomers, census data shows.

Both demographic groups comprise 5.4 million people but the 2021 statistics reflect a diminishing number of “boomers” compared with the 2016 survey.

Defined as the generation of people born between 1946 and 1964, the number of baby boomers fell from 25.4% to 21.5% of the overall population between 2016 and 2021.

Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, increased from 20.4% to 21.5%.

In 1966, baby boomers made up nearly 40% of all Australians.

There are 812,728 people who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander in Australia, equal to 3.2% of the population, reflecting an increase of more than 25% since census data was last collected in 2016.

Nearly 48,000 are aged 65 years and older, more than doubling those in the 2011 census.

The statistics also report for the first time on the number of Indigenous Australians who have served in the defence force. More than 3,000 serving members identify as Indigenous, totalling 3.7%. There are 11,000 former ADF members who identify as having Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander heritage.

Language remains an important part of many Indigenous households, with more than 78,000 people speaking traditional language at home.

Of the 167 traditional languages spoken at home in 2021, the most widely reported were Arnhem Land and Daly River region languages, Torres Strait Island languages, Western Desert languages, Yolngu Matha and Arandic.

Of the Indigenous population, 91.4% identified as Aboriginal, 4.2% identified as Torres Strait Islander, and 4.4% identified as both.

We’ll get into the nitty gritty of the census data over the course of the day, but here are some fast facts:

• The national population in 2021 grew by about 2 million people since the last census in 2016 to 25.4 million.

• Due to the impacts of the pandemic, 2 million more people were at home on census night in 2021 compared with in 2016. Of those who completed the census, 96% did so at their own address.

• Covid led to an 80% decrease in the number of overseas visitors, with 61,860 in 2021 compared with more than 315,000 in 2016.

• More than a million new migrants arrived in Australia since 2017, according to the census, but about 80% of them arrived before the pandemic.

Blockade Australia protests set to continue today

Activists protesting climate inaction by blocking Sydney streets this week plan to continue, even as 10 protesters were arrested on Monday, including a 22-year-old woman who chained herself to the steering wheel of her car at the entrance to the Sydney Harbour Tunnel.

Blockade Australia spokesman Jonah Shabtay told AAP the protests were designed to demonstrate the effects of the collapse of the climate:

[The protests are] really for making it quite known and unavoidable that disruption is going to come from climate collapse, in which Sydney’s economy is largely responsible. In order to respond to that we’re choosing to disrupt the city.

Shabtay said the group had moved away from its previous tactic of targeting ports and was focusing on roads in Sydney’s CBD:

It’s essentially going to be traffic disruptions that we’ll see throughout the week.

The NSW police minister, Paul Toole, has labelled them “professional pests”. Speaking to Nine on Tuesday, Toole said:

I’m furious. The public are furious. These are professional pests. These people say that they are out there trying to actually protect the climate but yesterday what they were doing was littering all over Sydney.

Seven of the activists were refused bail. They face multiple obstruction and disruption charges and will appear in court on Tuesday.

Federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek says Australia has had a “fantastic” reception at the UN Ocean Conference in Portugal, which she addressed yesterday, heralding the announcement of five new “blue carbon” projects this week.

She was asked her opinion of the Blockade Australia climate crisis protests in New South Wales this week, and the widely criticised, very punitive anti-protest legislation that came into force in that state earlier this year.

Plibersek said she understood people felt strongly about climate crisis but that they needed to obey the law:

I support the right to protest. I think people need to protest within the bounds of the law … I have been part of organising a lot of rallies in my life and it was always pretty standard practice to negotiate with police on the route of the march …

You have a right to make your views known, you don’t have the right to break the law to do that.

She also spoke briefly about abortion rights in Australia, in the wake of those rights being rolled back in the United States, saying it was important for the government to be supporting “the full suite reproductive health [measures] for Australian women”, including sex education, contraception, and safe, legal abortion.

2021 census: first wave of data released today

Caitlin Cassidy

Cast your mind back to last August and you probably remember filling out the census, alongside millions of other Australians.

The first and biggest release of this year’s census is out today. It’s the first time since 2016 that Australians will have up-to-date data on where we live, who we are and what we do. It’s a mammoth task to wade through, and takes months to collate.

The 2021 census was completed during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many Australians were in lockdown and working from home and overseas migration had largely halted.

Questions were asked about two new topics – long-term health conditions and service in the Australian defence force.

It’s also the first time “non-binary”was offered as an option to report a person’s gender.

The question directly feeds into the official estimates of Australia’s population, making it one of the questionnaire’s most important questions.

While it should provide a more accurate snapshot of Australia’s LGBTQ+ community than in the past, when “other” was the only option apart from male or female, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has been criticised for neglecting to provide additional categories for people who are transgender or intersex.

An official count won’t be published in the first release. An ABS spokesperson said in a statement:

Later this year, the ABS will be doing more analysis on non-binary sex responses and … working in consultation with key stakeholders in the LGBTQ+ community to understand the complexities, data quality and usefulness of the data.

At this time, the ABS will be publishing our findings and looking ahead to the next Census.

Most topics will be released on Tuesday. Almost all geographic data will be published, as will the answers to questions about ancestry, religion, unpaid work, income, birthrates, family relationship makeups and residence details.

In October the answers to employment questions will be released, while in early to mid-2023 the ABS will release “complex topics” that required additional processing, including socioeconomic indexes and homelessness estimates.

Good morning, folks, welcome to this chilly Tuesday.

Prime minister Anthony Albanese is in Madrid, Spain, for the Nato summit which will focus on the Russian war on Ukraine and its relationship with China.

Albanese confirmed on landing that he had also spoken with the Solomon Islands prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare, and had a “very constructive” conversation. We’ll hear more about both of those things over the course of the day.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released the first tranche of data from the 2021 census. It covers topics such as housing, languages spoken, Indigenous health and education, employment, religion and paid and unpaid work. We’ve got stacks of analysis on that to bring you this morning.

Industrial action will sweep New South Wales this week beginning with the Rail, Tram and Bus Union who are kicking off today with a “go-slow”, which means train drivers will limit their speeds to 60km/h or under, likely reducing services up to 50% in peak times. It’s the first of four days of rolling action against what they say are unsafe trains.

Nurses and midwives will also take action this week, with a planned walk-off for between one and 24 hours on Tuesday and a mass meeting held in Sydney’s CBD from 2pm. It will be the second time they have gone on strike in recent months.

We’ve got heaps more to bring you over the day. If you see something newsworthy or interesting over the day, send me an email at stephanie.convery@theguardian.com or ping me on Twitter @gingerandhoney.

Ready? Let’s get stuck in.