In the eight long years of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, the cost of accessing health care has soared across the federal electorate of Fremantle, and now Scott Morrison is using the cover of Victoria’s COVID outbreak to sneak in hundreds of changes to Medicare Benefit Schedule items that will increase cost and decrease access.
Read more...Minister, in your speech to the Press Club, you accused your opponents, which presumably includes all Australians who rightly want to see proper protection of our environment, of being too focused on activism rather than outcomes. Isn’t it the outcomes that are the problem? Isn’t that why people are moved to activism? Minister, when are you, as the Minister for the Environment, going to exercise that responsibility rather than being an apologist for a government that has presided over serious and steepening environmental decline?
Read more...There’s no doubt that Australia has a lot further to go and so much to gain from working with First Nations Australians on the path of reconciliation. That requires effort and energy on many fronts. It’s not a task that can be usefully separated into practical and cultural measures, because they’re logically intertwined.
Read more...At the moment, people go to the supermarket and the shelves are stocked and they go to the petrol station and they fill up their cars. Or if they’re fortunate enough to be able to travel from one part of Australia to the other, they go to the airport without really thinking that if there was to be an interruption to our fuel supply, that all of that would grind to a terrible halt in very, very, very quick time. And it would affect everything – the economic and social impacts of that would be hard to anticipate. And the risks of that occurring are not small.
Read more...World Oceans Day is an opportunity to remember that the oceans are the lungs of our planet and they sustain biodiversity that is essential to life on earth.
Read more...Film-making is one of a number of creative industries that should be a foundation stone of Australia’s economic diversification and job creation in future. Screen industries – which include film & television, but also gaming – are exactly the kind of sophisticated, high-tech, and high-skill human capital dependent manufacturing that we should be looking to build.
Read more...It’s an instalment of economic mismanagement, and social and environmental neglect that is entirely consistent with the style and substance of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison, dot dot dot government, now into its eight year, now into its third term focused on nothing other than manipulating and spinning and fear mongering its way into another term. Don’t let them do it to you. Don’t let them do it to Australia.
Read more...We need to get Australia vaccinated. It is the key to our recovery. It will make us safer from the serious risk that remains; it will help Australians return home; and it will mean, in due course, that we can open up for people to go to and from Australia.
Read more...The circumstances of the pandemic have emphasised many of Australia’s strengths, and one of them is as a place where screen productions of the highest quality can safely happen. We can make more of this in future, but only if we enable it. For a long time, we’ve needed a balanced producer offset for film and television without cutting one to meet the other, and thankfully the government has abandoned its plan to cut the offset for film. We need strong and fair local content requirements both in Australia and especially for the streaming services that derive billions of dollars from Australian consumers. And there has to be proper funding for Screen Australia and for our national broadcasters, which of course this government has scandalously cut time after time despite promising that would not be the case.
Read more...All of us who get to argue in this place for environmental and heritage protection know that we do so on the foundation that is laid through community activism—local people, traditional owners, action groups, preservation societies, history buffs, bushwalkers, artists and amateur naturalists, one and all. It is local people who make the case for protecting the things we will share.
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