Key events
The New South Wales health minister, Ryan Park, has said Healthscope’s private hospital model should never have been established, after the medical operator fell into receivership on Monday.
Park said the indebted private healthcare provider, operator of 37 hospitals including Sydney’s embattled Northern Beaches hospital, did not work as a model. He told the ABC :
This is not a model of healthcare that we should be doing in New South Wales. This is not a model that works, because the public health system is designed to deliver those acute public health services. … This model shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
The NSW government was still hoping to take back the Northern Beaches hospital, which has faced criticism amid concerns over patient care, Park said:
We need to make sure that services are delivered effectively, but also, most importantly, safely … and will continue that during what we hope to really transition [the hospital] back in to the public fold.
You can read more about the business’s collapse here:
Queensland nurses to strike this week over enterprise bargaining negotiations
Andrew Messenger
Queensland nurses are set to walk off the job after 96.5% of union members voted to strike this week.
The Queensland Nurses and Midwives’ Union has been locked in negotiations with the state government for a new enterprise bargaining agreement for months. Sticking points include the wage offer, but also over what the union says are moves to eliminate clauses guaranteeing parental leave arrangements, flexible working arrangements, and consultation rights – among others.
The state government threatened to strip nurses and midwives of eight weeks’ backpay if they took part in the ballot for protected industrial action.
The Queensland Nurses and Midwives’ Union secretary, Sarah Beaman, said almost all members who voted in the ballot voted yes:
This overwhelming yes vote for protective industrial action in the face of threats and the removal of rights highlights the collective strength of public nurses and midwives state-wide.
The union said it will meet with Queensland health this week to continue negotiations.
It’s the first enterprise agreement negotiated by the new Liberal National party government since it won power last October. The matter is being seen by many as setting a precedent for public sector relations broadly – the last LNP government, under then premier Campbell Newman, sacked thousands of nurses and other public servants.
Norweigan princess to study at University of Sydney
Norway’s Princess Ingrid Alexandra will move to Australia to study at the University of Sydney, the Norwegian royal house has announced.
The 21-year-old is second in line to Norway’s throne after her father, the crown prince and heir apparent. She will live in a student residence at the university’s inner-Sydney campus, studying a three-year Bachelor of Arts focusing on international relations and political economy.
Ingrid Alexander, who is the niece of high-profile Norwegian princess Märtha Louise, is excited for the move, the royal house said in a statement:
Her Royal Highness looks forward to dedicating herself to her studies in the years to come.
Ed Husic calls for government to move beyond words on Israel
Former Labor minister Ed Husic has called for the government to move beyond words to action, and said sanctions on Israel are “probably under consideration”.
After Anthony Albanese on Monday said Israel’s blockade of aid into Gaza was “an outrage”, Husic said the prime minister’s comments were important but the government should do “whatever we can”. He told ABC Radio National:
We’ve got to the threshold where there’s an expectation we move beyond words … We should be speaking up, but beyond speaking up, I think it’s important that we act, and I certainly think it’s vital our government joins with others to be able to do that.
Husic repeated his calls for the government to call in Israel’s ambassador to Australia and emphasise expectations Israel cease limits on the provision of aid. He also speculated the government may also be drafting a list of targeted sanctions after the United Kingdom, France and Canada threatened to act against Israel over its military action in Gaza.:
The third area I think we should be actively considering, and I suspect it’s probably under consideration, is drawing up a list of targeted sanctions where we can join with others … we should be ready to move when others move as well, to be able to exert maximum international pressure to stop this blockade and to help people in Gaza.
Rural aid CEO warns it will be ‘weeks or months’ before food production in flooded NSW can return to full production
It will be months or more before farmers in the flooded mid-north coast of New South Wales will return to full operations, the Rural Aid chief executive has warned.
John Warlters said people working across agriculture had been badly hit by the floods and it would take more than just weeks to see oyster farmers, livestock owners and dairy farms get back on their feet. He told the ABC:
Getting dairy backs and productive is important. Getting them back to pre-flood is not about days and weeks. This is months and longer to really see these enterprises back where they want to be.
Warlters also warned droughts were hitting primary producers just as hard across South Australia, Western Australia and western Victoria:
Floods come along and they’re devastating but they capture attention and we respond to that. Drought is different but the pain those people are experiencing is just as great as on the mid-north Coast and other places. …
The key thing is they need the short-term help but they really need to be able to hear from our industry and government and leaders that support will be ongoing. It shouldn’t just run out when the headlines fade, but be there for the long time.
Emergency services minister will ‘work with’ Disaster Relief Australia as alternative to ADF
The government will “work with” the veteran-led organisation on the frontline of disaster recovery on funding bids, the emergency services minister, Kristy McBain, has said.
Disaster Relief Australia (DRA) is pushing for a new funding deal as it positions itself as an alternative to the Australian Defence Force in the aftermath of major floods, fires and cyclones.
McBain refused to confirm whether DRA would be given a new injection of funds to secure its future and grow a 10,000-strong volunteer arm. Speaking to ABC News from Port Macquarie, she said:
We’ll continue to work with them on what that looks like but we see Disaster Relief Australia as having a big part in the clean-up in disasters going forward.
Guardian Australia’s Dan Jervis-Bardy has revealed DRA has written to the government seeking a four-year, $87.5m funding plan to grow its numbers to 10,000, up from more than 5,500. You can read more about that here:
McBain was speaking after visiting areas of the New South Wales mid-north coast, which is still recovering from severe flooding last week that killed five and left 50,000 isolated for days.
The priority was to provide direct support to the community immediately, after months of rain had “taken its toll” on the area, McBain said. She committed to listening to community concerns including over evacuation notices and unprepared infrastructure in coming weeks:
We’ll get a picture of the overall cost and overall damage across this region as the [State Emergency Service] completes those assessments. … It’s really important, I think, that we keep our eyes on the task at hand at this point in time and that’s assisting people with clean-up and that those direct supports that they’re going to need now …
But after any disaster, there’s going to be some lessons learned and it’s really important, I think, to hear directly from lived experience on those lessons so we’ll search those out in the coming days, weeks and months.
Luca Ittimani
Good morning! Thank you Martin Farrer for kicking off our live updates for today. I’ll take you through the rest of the day.
Police crackdown to stop looting in flood-hit NSW
Police are pouring resources into Australia’s flood-ravaged towns to prevent a breakdown in law and order after two men were arrested for alleged looting, Australian Associated Press reports.
NSW police deputy commissioner, Peter Thurtell, said extra officers were on the beat in NSW’s mid-north coast and Hunter regions after the men, both aged 20, were arrested for allegedly stealing property amid flood clean up.
“If we find anyone taking advantage of this community we’ll throw the book at them,” Thurtell said in a statement yesterday.
“The impact of this weather event has been unimaginable and to think they now have to be concerned about hanging on to whatever property they have left is a disgrace.
“Stealing from people vulnerable during hard times like these is un-Australian.”
For more on the flood recovery we have the latest:
Stephanie Convery
Coalition policies ‘buried’ by ‘campaign headquarters’, Liberal senators say
Andrew Hastie has blamed the poor handling of policy issues for the Liberal debacle.
Since the election, Liberal party candidates have placed a certain proportion of blame for the Coalition’s loss on certain mysterious failures from campaign headquarters that saw their policies disappear into a black hole.
This narrative arose again on Four Corners last night, with MP Andrew Hastie, and senators Sarah Henderson and Jonathon Duniam all suggesting that something was going wrong from that quarter.
Hastie, who had previously spoken about the lack of defence policy, said “there was a level of frustration” with the increasing delays to the policy, which “hasn’t been explained yet”.
Henderson said she was “very proud of the education policy that we delivered” but it was “buried” and “we only had the opportunity to announce a few measures”. Asked who buried it, she said:
I don’t know. It was done by campaign headquarters the Thursday night before the election. My media release was withdrawn and a lot of incredible hard work by my team and many others right across the Coalition, unfortunately, didn’t see the light of day. There were too many policies that were left on the cutting-room floor, and I think that was a really big problem, not just in education, despite the very good work of many shadow ministers – too many taxation policies that were not pushed forward, housing policy delivered on the run, a defence policy looking like an afterthought.
Meanwhile, Duniam suggested someone, though it’s not clear exactly who, should perhaps consider falling on their sword:
Something went off the rails, and I think it was centred in campaign headquarters. We were, frankly, in a very competitive position … and that completely evaporated to the point where we are at an historic low as an opposition. And I think there are some people who might want to consider their futures as a result of that.
Culture war cost us seats, senior Liberals tell Four Corners
Stephanie Convery
Current and former Liberal party MPs and senators have said the party’s focus on culture war has seen their inner-city constituencies abandon them and contributed to their election loss in what one called “fairy floss politics”.
Speaking to ABC’s Four Corners on Monday night, former NSW Liberal president Jason Falinski, former senator George Brandis and NSW senator Maria Kovacic criticised their party’s focus on small, hard-right constituencies and culture wars.
The party alienated women, especially those who wanted to work from home, offended public servants, multicultural communities, people in the inner cities, students and “other minority groups as well”, Brandis said:
It was almost as if we were running out of new people to offend.
People who felt the party needed to lean harder into the culture wars were “nuts”, Brandis said:
The people you have to persuade are the people who didn’t vote for you last time but are open to persuasion. And those people live in the centre ground of Australian politics. And if you spend your time drinking your own political bathwater and only living in an echo chamber of far-rightwing opinion, you’re never going to get them.
Falinski said that “fairy floss politics” – that is, “high-calorie, low-nutrition politics” such as copying Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, concept – was “not healthy for us”.
Kovacic said:
I don’t think that everyday Australians are particularly interested in culture wars. People have abandoned us in the cities because our messaging doesn’t resonate with them, and they haven’t gone to the right. They voted for Labor and the teals because what we’re selling them isn’t aligned with them.
Coalition wanted to erase Aboriginal people from national memory: Dodson
Pat Dodson has also decried what he called the “new assimilation” policies pushed by the Coalition during the election campaign, saying it is another way of trying to erase Aboriginal people from national memory.
Speaking to 7.30 on Monday night, Dodson said:
If you looked at what they were talking about in the opposition at the last election, getting rid of land councils, revising a whole range of symbolism, throw out the welcome to country, get rid of the flags, rescind the ambassador. Anything that indicates the presence of Aboriginal people would have gone. That’s what the new assimilation’s about, is completing the obliteration of Aboriginal people from the landscape.
Cultural heritage is another very important aspect of that. The more you smash and destroy the cultural heritage of Aboriginal people, the greater it is to say that there is a substantive argument to say that they had a substantive presence here, because there’s no evidence – you’ve blown it up.
Stephanie Convery
Labor should return to ‘treaty-making process’, Pat Dodson says
Yaruwu elder and former Labor senator Pat Dodson has urged the Albanese government to “go back to the treaty-making process” in order to continue the project of reconciliation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, arguing the “resounding victory” of Labor at the election gave them a new opportunity.
Speaking to ABC’s 7.30 on Monday night, Dodson said he was “very confident” Albanese could lead that process, but it would require going back to the Uluru statement from the heart.
Dodson said:
That doesn’t mean they have to go down the constitutional path for a voice. But it does mean that they’ve got to honour the two aspects of the Makarrata commission. That wasn’t voted on by the people. That wasn’t part of the provision that we voted on, to vote down. So they have to go back to the treaty-making process and the truth-telling process. And they can do that, because it doesn’t require constitutional referendum. That can be done by way of legislation.
Truth-telling needed to be a two-way street, Dodson said, and it needed to result in a “national narrative” that was not simply “Captain Cook came here and no one was here”.
Dodson continued:
I think that the government’s come back with a resounding victory. The horror that they anticipated [of electoral defeat] passed by. They’ve now got the confidence of the Australian people. The Australian people want to see unity. They don’t want to see hatred. And they want to live with a national sense of Australian pride.
The time has come. We can’t keep kicking it down the road, and even the prime minister was saying during the referendum – if not now, when? So, OK, the referendum went up and it went down. That doesn’t mean that that is the end of reconciliation. Reconciliation is about the substantive issues.
Welcome
Good morning and welcome to our live news blog. I’m Martin Farrer with the top overnight stories and then it’ll be Luca Ittimani with the main action.
Current and former Liberal party MPs and senators have said the party’s focus on culture war and a failure to properly develop and present policies cost the party the election. Speaking on Four Corner last night, former NSW Liberal president Jason Falinski said “high-calorie, low-nutrition politics” – so-called “fairy floss politics” – had proved costly. More details coming up.
We have an exclusive story this morning from the veteran-led organisation on the frontline of disaster recovery calling for federal government support to help establish a 10,000-strong volunteer army. It comes as police are pouring resources into flood-ravaged towns in NSW to prevent a breakdown in law and order after two men were arrested for alleged looting. More coming up.
In another exclusive, one of the architects of the Indigenous voice to parliament, Megan Davis, who says Aboriginal Australians increasingly feel the government is not listening to their views on laws and policy design, warns against closed-shop public consultations in the wake of the referendum defeat.
