It’s been a week of surprise announcements, own goals, election madness and really bad communication.
It’s been a week in which a good man farewelled a flawed system only to join another flawed system, election-minded politicians lost their collective mind, and the private health brouhaha took us back to the bad old days of Roland Garros when Arancha Sanchez-Vicario and Monica Seles moon-balled their way to the most boring tennis matches in history.
Back and forth, back and forth, lob after lob. Get on with it, people.
Bye-bye Bill
Bill Shorten is leaving parliament on his own terms, and to be fair, he’s probably earned the right.
From his union days standing in the rain at Beaconsfield waiting for the rescue of two of his members, to leading the ALP to two federal election losses, to helping create the NDIS and then pushing through some truly gnarly reforms – Mr Shorten has seemingly been one of those rare creatures, a politician who really cares.
I’m not the first to wonder what things might have been like had we not fallen for the ScoMo hype back in 2019 and Mr Shorten had won the prime ministership.
Such a pity. We could have had Bill Shorten as our PM and instead we got Scott Morrison.
— Julie Williams (@JulieWilliams81) September 5, 2024
The man who wanted to be PM, Bill Shorten, to announce retirement https://t.co/9hcHqF6Wpq
The disability community was a bit conflicted about how to react to the news yesterday. River Night, spokesperson at the National Disability Leadership Organisation, summed it up:
“A politician’s life and career is very much about popularity and re-election. Take any stance too strongly and risk ratings in some way.
“Mr Shorten has been involved in some major changes and responses to huge events and sector issues, like a Disability Royal Commission and NDIS review.”
“His work with legislation change and sector responses to the Royal Commission has been extremely divisive with some behaviour and announcements extremely distressing for a large population in Australia,” said Mr Night.
“It is easy to consider that an outgoing minister is best suited to making such huge changes and taking such major, hard stances, as it is certainly going to damage the popular vote.
“I, for one, will say I have never seen a federal minster so willing as Mr Shorten, to attend events, talk to people at the grassroots level in public and have personal, authentic conversations. I will forever be grateful for his authentic approach.
“Regardless of politics, belief in codesign really occurring or not, disagreements about legislation change and process, when it comes to his grassroots, face-to-face works with people, Mr Shorten is the most human federal minister we have seen in the NDIS to date and we thank him for that.”
His move to the vice chancellorship of the University of Canberra in February next year seems benign enough. Then again …
The Chancellor of University of Canberra is Lisa Paul, who Bill Shorten hired to co-author the NDIS review. Now he’s about to be Vice-Chancellor, hired by panel led by the Chancellor Lisa Paul.
— Rick Morton (@SquigglyRick) September 5, 2024
Indeed.
Election madness
Queensland is 49 days – seven interminable weeks, for those of us living in the Sunshine State – away from a state election and the madness is bubbling away.
In a world where the budget is dominated by the most accurately named program in the country – Queensland’s Big Build – bricks and mortar hospitals are having their day in the sun.
Health infrastructure projects worth more than $14 billion – that’s “b” for “blowout” – are in various stages of development and are arguably Premier Steven Miles and health minister Shannon Fentiman’s biggest hope for re-election.
Capacity expansion – 15 projects including four new hospitals (Coomera, Toowoomba, Bundaberg and the Queensland Cancer Centre) and 11 expansions; satellite hospitals – seven built, seven more promised; accelerated infrastructure delivery; and a billion buckaroos for 21 rural and regional projects; plus staff accommodation – it’s a long, long, expensive list.
But who is going to build them? We reported last week on the Infrastructure Partnerships Australia report which pointed out that “at its peak in late 2026, the projected volume of labour required to deliver the hospital pipeline will be two and a half times today’s level”.
“To meet this peak, compound annual growth would need to increase eightfold from the growth achieved in the last decade.”
Hmmm.
That didn’t stop the Property Council of Australia announcing that southeast Queensland alone would need “at least” 20 new hospitals by 2046 to meet the demands of a growing population.
That includes 11 new public hospitals, 17 new private hospitals, 27 more day hospitals, 11 more residential mental healthcare facilities, and 70-80 more medical centres.
I don’t know where they’re going to put ‘em, personally. I’ve got a spare bedroom they can have for a fair price.
Private hospitals
We’ve been banging on about this all week, and now it seems the DoHAC’s review of private hospitals is turning into a pretty pointless exercise in asking a question you don’t really want the answer to.
For one thing, Mark Butler doesn’t want to release the full report to the public because the hospitals have given the review a lot of information they wouldn’t want people to know. Oh dear.
For another, Mr Butler doesn’t want to do much about whatever the review has found, anyway.
As we reported yesterday, when asked about what the government would do to prevent hospital closures, Mr Butler said it would “assist” but there was no “silver bullet” for alleviating “private pressures” and no “bail out”.
“This has always been a sector where these operators, many of them quite big, pretty influential, powerful operators, play it hard and they negotiate hard,” he said.
“It just goes again to reinforce the fact that the nature of this system, which was contemplated very deliberately by Bob Hawke and others in developing Medicare, is a fundamentally important part of our healthcare system that requires these operators to work together in the interest not just to their own organisations, but the interests of patients.”
As that guru of getting stuff done, Miranda Priestly said: “Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.”
Postscript
Whoever is contracted to teach state revenue offices to communicate with actual humans about the details of payroll tax liabilities, they need a swift kick up the clacker.
Never has a complicated situation been made exponentially worse by dint of horrendous communication skills.
Lift your games.