Australian Politics
Wednesday, January 03, 2024
Unions warn the government not to allow religious schools to hire based on faith
A clear attack on freedom of religion. Wars were once fought to achieve it. This amounts to a call to abandon religious teaching -- precisely what many parents enroll their kids for. One wonders what Muslim parents will make of it
Union leaders have raised concern over signals from Labor that it will introduce religious discrimination laws in the first half of this year, arguing the focus should be on cost of living and not on rules that could allow bosses to hire staff based on their faith.
Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has told faith leaders he is working on a draft bill that will be ready before July as part of the government’s promise to deliver on legislating against religious discrimination, which the Coalition failed to do before the 2022 election.
Health Services Union national secretary Lloyd Williams said his union’s membership – nearly 50,000 people – would stand against any legislation that allowed an employer to preference hiring someone of faith.
“The Coalition’s bill would have allowed discrimination towards workers of a particular faith, and certainly people of a different sexual orientation,” he told The Australian.
“We would hope that this government, when it goes forward with any bill, will put protections in there for workers so they can’t be discriminated against based on what religion they do or do not follow.”
CFMEU national secretary Zach Smith also declared his union stood for the clear principle that “no one should be discriminated against at work”.
Mr Smith cautioned Labor not to lose focus on addressing the cost of living and housing crisis in 2024, declaring his union would push the government hard on a more ambitious housing plan.
“Alongside delivering on its promises from the last election, the federal government must use 2024 to tackle the two biggest issues facing working people today,” he said.
Electrical Trades Union secretary Michael Wright said he was “confident” the government could address both the cost-of-living crisis and legislate the religious discrimination laws at the same time.
The debate over faith protections came as the Coalition accused Labor of “mounting an attack” on religious charities and non-government schools after a draft Productivity Commission report recommended changes to the tax treatment of charity donations. The report called for deductible gift recipient status to be scrapped for non-government primary, secondary, childcare, aged care and other religious organisations.
Opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson said the PC’s recommendation to scrap the “basic religious charity status” would also increase red tape and reporting requirements for almost one in five charities.
“This proposed school building tax is a direct, ideological attack on independent and faith-based schools and must immediately be ruled out by the Albanese government,” she said.
Assistant Minister for Charities Andrew Leigh said the Coalition knew the Productivity Commission was independent and its recommendations were “not government policy”.
“When we ask an independent body like the Productivity Commission to conduct an inquiry, it’s important that we respect their independence and let them complete the process,” Mr Leigh said.
“The Productivity Commission has not made any final recommendations as it is midway through its work.”
After winning government, Labor tasked the Australian Law Reform Commission with providing advice on designing religious discrimination legislation.
However, an alliance of faith leaders raised alarm with a draft proposal from the ALRC released early last year, which recommended the government allow religious preference only where “the teaching, observance or practice of religion is a genuine occupational requirement”.
In response to the criticism, the government extended the ALRC’s reporting deadline to December 2023, with Mr Dreyfus confirming he had received the ALRC’s report.
When asked if the legislation would allow institutions to take staff’s faith into account when hiring, a spokesman for Mr Dreyfus said: “The government is now considering the ALRC review of anti-discrimination law.”
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Farmers grow tired of Pacific Islander worker visa scheme
A growing number of Pacific Islanders are abandoning a key agricultural worker scheme and seeking asylum in Australia, as farmers warn the program addressing workforce shortages was being undermined by Labor’s pro-union rule changes.
The peak farmers body warned employers were being short-changed when workers left the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme and sought asylum, while agricultural businesses were considering leaving the program because they were now required to pay each worker at least 30 hours a week even if there was a downturn in production.
In the past six months, more than 1050 Pacific Islanders defected from the PALM scheme and applied for permanent protection visas. This is on track to overtake 1698 permanent visa applications from Pacific Island workers in 2022-23 – the first full year PALM was operating after the consolidation of the Pacific Labour Scheme and the Seasonal Worker Program.
Under PALM, regional and rural businesses can hire workers from nine Pacific Island countries and East Timor for up to four years when there are local workforce shortages.
Obtaining a protection visa would give the Pacific Islanders unrestricted work rights and some social security benefits.
There were 1002 Pacific Island farm workers who applied for asylum in 2021-22 and just 171 in 2019-20, according to figures from the Department of Home Affairs.
National Farmers Federation chief executive Tony Mahar said PALM workers leaving farm employers was “one of the biggest challenges” facing the program.
He said each defection left farmers in the lurch as they were “left to bear thousands in upfront recruitment costs and without the workforce needed to complete their season”.
“More needs to be done by government to ensure both workers and non-approved employers understand the rules around job switching for Pacific workers,” he said. “We need to see penalties enforced against non-approved employers who illegally lure Pacific workers away from their workplaces.
“As the number of workers under the PALM scheme increases, we’re also seeing an increase in applications for protection visas.
“Given only a small number of these applications are approved, the government may need to consider proactive measures to inform workers of the requirements for seeking asylum.”
Immigration Minister Andrew Giles said the government’s $160m package to expedite asylum claims would “break the business model of unscrupulous actors who seek to exploit the system”.
“The mess Peter Dutton made of our protection system will take time to fix,” he said.
“But as a result of these investments, those in need of Australia’s protection will be provided certainty about their future sooner and those who are seeking to exploit the system and are applying simply to extend their stay in Australia will be swiftly refused.
“The PALM scheme remains integral to Australia’s migration system, helping to fill workforce shortages in regional Australia, and strengthening our connections with the Pacific.”
While workers are abandoning the PALM scheme, farmers are also considering leaving the program due to a new rule requiring workers under the scheme to be employed for at least 30 hours a week.
Smart Berries manager and agronomist Sally Jolly said the blueberry farm – which is based in Mundubbera more than two hours drive inland from Bundaberg and employed 350 PALM workers last year – was considering pulling out of the scheme due to the expense of meeting the 30-hour requirement. Ms Jolly said the changes meant farmers would lose out because prices had been agreed with the supermarkets.
“We’ve got weather that affects our working week and if we can’t work in the field, which most of our work is done in the field, especially for the PALM workers, it just can’t be done,” she said.
“The way it was where we had that 30 hours over six or eight weeks so it could average over that period was OK, but a flat minimum of 30 hours (every week) is quite difficult.”
Nationals leader David Littleproud said the 30 hours requirement would force farmers to “pay people to lie on the couch and do nothing” when the weather was too poor to work.
He said it would ultimately reduce the agricultural workforce and increase the price of food.
“Economics tells them they probably won’t plant the crop because they can’t afford to do that,” he said. “There were sensible provisions around averaging that allowed for the weather and for these workers to catch up when it stopped raining and things have dried out – that’s common sense.
“These changes have been driven by Labor and the unions … by ideology and not understanding the practical reality of what this will do.
“If you reduce supply, then ultimately what’s going to happen is everyone’s prices go up.”
Quebec Citrus Australia director Ainsley Emmerton said she was growing increasingly frustrated with the highly bureaucratic scheme and was weighing up if she should walk away.
“My husband just said to me this morning, ‘it’s just so hard’ because of having to deal with the elements like rain, it’s been a very wet week,” she said. “But when this 30-hour week comes in we’ve got to pay all the PALM workers 30 hours for no work, and that’s not our fault, because it’s raining we’re not going to send them out in the wet, so we’re going to get no economic benefit.”
Farmers were required to offer PALM workers at least 30 hours a week averaged over four weeks from New Year’s Day and 30 hours each week from July 1.
Former deputy secretary of the Department of Immigration Abul Rizvi said he didn’t believe the visa design had been “well thought through” and it had been marred by issues affecting many farm visa schemes, including allegations of exploitation.
Dr Rizvi said there was also a broader uptick in Pacific Islanders applying for asylum in Australia with more than 9000 people applying for protection visas since 2019, with most of the claims being rejected.
“People are just being stuck basically in what is best described as immigration limbo because they don’t want to go home and they can’t find a pathway to remain here permanently,” he said.
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Low wages and poor conditions are making thousands of UK doctors move to Australia
Thousands of British doctors have applied to move to Australia after being left “stunned” by the UK health system.
When Prajwol Dhungana, himself a doctor, was told he had the flu after waiting three weeks for a virtual appointment to see his GP, he ended up taking drastic steps.
Sick and exasperated, the 35-year-old visited a hospital emergency department, where he finally received care from colleagues who should otherwise have been diagnosing and treating life-threatening pneumonia caused by Covid.
Dr Dhungana is from Nepal, where the health system is considered poor and inadequate.
But he said he was left “stunned” by the UK’s own faltering National Health Service (NHS).
“How can it be that in my country where the health system is really basic, you can walk into an emergency department and see a doctor within an hour, yet in England, you must wait three weeks and then not even be seen in person?” he asked.
“I was shocked, literally stunned … it crystallised in my mind that after only two years in the UK, I had to leave,” he said.
“I was seriously sick, overworked and underpaid.
“At the end of a year I lose 47 per cent of my salary on tax, National Insurance and a state pension. That leaves me with just £20,000 ($37,848) to exist.
“There is no work-life balance in the UK and the doctors are striking. We’re not greedy, we just can’t afford to be treated like this,” he said.
Dr Dhungana earns a basic £40,275 salary ($76,200) at the University Hospitals of Bristol and Weston, in South West England. But he’s packing his bags for an equivalent job paying $193,240 (£102,103) at Brisbane’s Redcliffe Hospital in the New Year, banking a salary hike of 153 per cent.
He is one of an incredible 9000 UK doctors who have applied to transfer to Australia in the past five years, according to the General Medical Council.
Fresh statistics released by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) reveal more than 27,000 internationally trained practitioners have been registered to work in Australia, including 15,812 nurses and midwives, 5918 medical practitioners and 5398 allied health professionals since January 2022.
In the 12 months leading up to July 2023, around 5270 new practitioners were being registered to work in the nation’s health system every month.
The exodus to Australia prompted Britain’s UK’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting to recently fly 16,000km Down Under (and to Singapore) to discover what makes our health system work better.
Britain has been plagued by a year of crippling strikes by junior doctors demanding better pay, with more action planned for January 3 and 9.
“Stop stealing our doctors,” Mr Streeting told medical executives during his trip.
Mr Streeting visited Maroubra Medicare Urgent Care Clinic in Sydney, one of 38 opened by the Labor government since May last year, designed to reduce pressures on emergency departments.
He swapped notes with Australian Minister for Health and Aged Care Mark Butler and met health officials in Melbourne.
“It was really striking talking to Mark Butler at this stage in the life of the Labor government in Australia,” Mr Streeting said afterwards.
“He’s got the scars on his back from taking on vested interests and taking on opponents of reform,” he said, aware the British Medical Association has long rejected proposed “super surgeries”.
“What I want to do is turn the NHS on its head,” he told senior officials and GPs at the urgent care clinic.
“To move it from a system that is overly focused on hospital care, with so much late-stage diagnosis, basically a sickness service, to a neighbourhood health service, that gets to people faster, diagnosing and treating faster, and crucially joins up care, so patients no longer feel like they are being pushed from pillar to post.”
He also vowed to increase GP pay and slash bureaucracy so patients can be seen quicker.
NHS Digital revealed in May that as many as one in eight GP appointments are now taking place between two and four weeks after they’re made.
International league tables rate Australia’s health services over the UK’s for life expectancy, mortality from cancer, heart attacks and strokes, thanks largely to more scanners and hospital beds, as well as doctors and nurses per 1000 population.
Yet Australia spends significantly less on health, at 9.6 per cent of GDP compared with the UK’s 11.3 per cent, according to statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The NHS devours 44 per cent of government departmental spending.
“In terms of OECD countries, we are lagging behind. Australia is … spending less on health care and getting better outcomes,” Mr Streeting said during his visit.
NHS England has 7.8 million people currently on waiting lists.
In the UK more than two million people waited longer than the statutory 18 weeks for NHS hospital treatment last year, and six million patients are still waiting for consultant-led hospital treatment – the highest figure since records began in August 2007, says the Royal College of Surgeons.
The number of patients waiting longer than two years for hospital treatment has risen to a record 18,585, an increase of 14.5 per cent in just one month.
The longest waits are for trauma and orthopaedic treatment such as hip and knee replacements (3967), followed by general surgery, including gallbladder removals and hernia operations (2326).
Conversely, 50 per cent of Australians admitted to hospital from public hospital elective surgery waiting lists waited for 40 days or less, and 90 per cent waited for 323 days or less.
Streeting emphasised that an NHS under Labour would never be “sold off” but he stops short of detailing how the private sector could be used to reform the NHS.
AMA federal president Steve Robson credits Australia’s parallel specialty training system for the UK brain drain.
“We make it easy for them, we speak the same language, there’s minimal adjustment; a UK trained doctor can work in Australia – why wouldn’t you come when conditions are so horrific and so many British doctors are poorly remunerated and disinvested?” he said.
“The weather is great in Australia, there’s sun, sea and surf and mountains and, crucially, hospital equipment that works and a better work-life balance.”
“I’m looking forward to my wife and I having a family in Australia and being able to save for our future,” he said.
“You become a doctor because you care – and in England, you’re too tired, working until 10pm most nights, to remember that.”
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Broken power system still fuelled by calls for subsidy
A plea by energy retailers for higher prices to compensate for the rising use of household rooftop solar is an inevitable and predictable confirmation of the dysfunction that now characterises Australia’s electricity system. It represents another chapter in a tale of cascading subsidies that have become necessary as a system rooted in baseload generation from coal is forcibly switched over to one dependent on variable sources of renewable energy such as wind and solar.
If retailers get their way, energy users who have been forced to subsidise renewable energy projects, including rooftop solar, will be asked to pay more for the projects that these renewables were designed to force out of the market in the first place. The new cost would be included as part of the regulated price that retailers are allowed to charge. The power retailers also are largely the owners of the coal-fired power stations that still supply most of the nation’s electricity but are being rendered unprofitable by design and forced to close.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has upped the ante on the subsidy regime with a turbocharged Capacity Investment Scheme that will underwrite the profitability of 32 gigawatts of new renewable projects, up from 6GW previously. Like rooftop solar, the overbuild of large-scale renewables is needed to meet Labor’s target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. This target also is being revised upwards.
A large amount of wind and solar is required to deal with the fact individual projects will produce for only some of the time. But when they are all working together it is likely there will be a glut, as is the case with rooftop solar on sunny days when there is low demand. Wholesale prices are now often negative in the middle of the day.
But regardless of how many wind and solar projects are built, it’s likely there still will be periods of shortage that must be plugged when intermittent power generation is not sufficient. The experience in Britain has been that baseload generators have demanded subsidies to be available still when needed under a capacity market. Renewable generators that are producing power that is not needed have demanded to be paid as well.
Projects designed to help, such as the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro and expanded transmission network, are proving to be slower and more expensive than promised. Under Mr Bowen’s latest scheme, taxpayers will be on the hook to ensure all of the projects approved as part of the 32GW target achieve a minimum rate of return. Ironically, the subsidies will make renewable energy, the so-called cheapest option, more expensive than it otherwise would be. But a price guarantee and overbuild ensure that other options such as nuclear will struggle to find space in the market to justify their cost.
If adopted, the latest call for assistance from electricity retailers will be felt directly by energy users. Retailers want a higher price because of fierce competition from rooftop solar as well as the looming impact of batteries and offshore wind that will depress prices in the evening, after the sun has stopped shining and when wholesale prices traditionally have spiked. Retailers are urging the Australian Energy Regulator to factor the rise of solar into its considerations when determining the default market offer from July.
After two years of big increases in the default market offer price, the political pressure will be for the AER not to approve another big increase. But the laws of physics dictate that power will have to come from somewhere and private sector economics suggests absorbing sustained losses is not an option for generators.
This leaves taxpayers and users on the hook to continue Band-Aiding a system that has been broken by ideology and a lack of proper planning.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
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My son Joe at ANU
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