Huge call on childcare ‘ban' reform
Ms Rowland said reform was possible 'within certainly the next 12 months' so long as she secured support from state and territory counterparts at a meeting of the country's attorneys-general today.
'We envisage that the most immediate and urgent outcome is to achieve that 'banned in one, banned in all' aspect in the near term,' Ms Rowland told ABC Radio National on Friday morning.
'In the longer term, there needs to be a bar raised right across the states and territories to strengthen those criteria for working with children risk and exclusions. Attorney-General Michelle Rowland said reforms to working with children checks could take up to 12 months. NewsWire / Martin Ollman Credit: News Corp Australia
'In terms of timing, these are matters that will be discussed today, so I don't want to pre-empt those outcomes … (but) in terms of the most immediate one to achieve — 'banned in one, banned in all' — I would like to think that this is something that is certainly capable of being done within certainly the next 12 months, if we can have a better sense of that following today's meeting, then that will be a good thing.'
The Albanese government has proposed banning nationally anyone barred from working with children in one jurisdiction.
Opposition leader Sussan Ley said a 12 month wait for reform of the WWCC system was unacceptable and 'completely unsatisfactory'.
She claimed the government's response to reports of alleged child abuse lacked urgency, despite Anthony Albanese calling them a 'wake up call' for governments nationwide.
'The PM has talked a big game on fixing these issues but twelve months to deliver this isn't good enough,' Ms Ley said.
'We've done our bit in the federal parliament to work with the government to pass new laws but it is now up to the Prime Minister to lead and finish the job.
'The States and territories need to get their act together and accelerate this critically important piece of work to protect our kids.' Opposition leader Sussan Ley said a 12 month wait for reform of the WWCC system was unacceptable. NCA NewsWire / Emma Brasier Credit: News Corp Australia
Ms Ley said there needed to be 'stronger leadership' on the issue, and that the states and territories must be forced to act faster.
'Given the crisis we are seeing in our childcare centres, twelve months for the first set of changes is completely unsatisfactory,' she said.
Multiple states and territories are grappling with the fallout from multiple high-profile cases of alleged abuse at childcare centres, namely in NSW and Victoria.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan last month announced measures for all childcare centres in the state to be required to ban personal mobile devices from September 26, and launched an 'urgent review into child safety' the findings of which are due on Friday.
Further north, a NSW parliamentary inquiry into the childcare sector in NSW was told by a senior cop managing the child abuse squad that offenders 'shop around' for centres to offend at and urged for a database to be establish for police to be able to access.
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Herald Sun
39 minutes ago
- Herald Sun
Steve Price: Brad Battin needs to show some Jeff Kennett showmanship
Filling in on 3AW back in the early 1990s I upset Premier Jeff Kennett so badly he stormed into my office and demanded an apology. My crime was replacing Kennett, on air, with Opposition Leader John Brumby. Jeffrey was on holiday but guarded his regular weekday half-hour spot on the Neil Mitchell show like it was one of his children. The Premier was a lot more volatile back then, during his eight-year reign in the top job, and to say we almost came to blows is not an exaggeration. The pair of us have laughed about it subsequently. He was also, prior to defeating Labor's Joan Kirner in 1992 as Victoria wore the 'rust-bucket state' tag, an exceptional Opposition Leader. John Cain Jr, the predecessor to Kirner, and Labor had driven Victoria into the ground and Victorians were fleeing in great numbers to places like Queensland. Back then the Herald Sun ran a page one that was just black, signifying how bad things had got in the state. Basically, a funeral notice. Kennett was like a dog attacking a bone and he was a daily presence in media whether it was on AW with Mitchell, arguing with the ABC or shovelling dirt at journalists when he finally became premier. Hardly a night passed without Kennett appearing on the nightly news. Kennett was a showman admired and despised in equal parts. Compare that brand of retail politics from a career advertising man with the bland versions of Opposition Leaders Victoria has had to endure through the tortured decade of Labor leaders Daniel Andrews and now Jacinta Allan. Think about this — the Victorian Liberals have been through Matthew Guy twice, Michael O'Brien, John Pesutto and now Brad Battin. Talk about navel gazing and self-destruction. Surely it can't be that hard to find a suitably aggressive, media friendly alternative to two of the most despised political leaders we have ever experienced. It hasn't happened and as steady a hand as he has been, Brad Battin is just not cutting through. Let me prosecute the case that it's not entirely Battin's fault. I'm currently presenting the Peta Credlin Sky News TV program five days a week for five weeks. This week we contacted the Opposition Leader's office to request a live on-air chat about a loosening of the laws around self-protection if someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night armed with a machete. The response from his media team was to suggest we talk instead with David Limbrick of the Libertarian Party. Offered a prime-time spot to prosecute the case that Premier Allan was ruling over a state of lawlessness so bad that people were arguing we should be able to arm ourselves with baseball bats and fight back, instead we were pushed towards an Independent, not even a Liberal. This was not an isolated case, indeed last week we asked the same office to interview Battin about Jacinta Allan's vote grabbing delusion that she would legislate to make it law you can work from home two days a week. Same response. Sorry, Brad's not available. I was prompted to check when the last time Victoria's Opposition Leader had appeared on Sky's top rating four day a week Credlin show and found, according to our records, it was five weeks ago. I present the Friday version of Credlin and can't remember the last time he appeared with me either. Now Battin and his team can choose to appear in the media and with whomever they choose. But to suggest he has a high profile as Opposition Leader is ludicrous. Most Victorians would struggle to even name him. It's a problem the conservative side of politics, both state and federal, struggle with. The NSW Liberal Opposition leader is a bloke called Mark Speakman who as late as this week was facing a leadership challenge over a net-zero bungle. In South Australia a bloke even I have never heard of leads the Liberals – Vincent Tarzia. Vincent took over after former leader David Speirs was forced to resign after pleading guilty to two drug charges and a video showed him snorting a substance from a plate. The best known Liberal Opposition leader in Australia would be WA's Basil Zempilas, who has been in the job five months. Basil, of course, is best known for his football commentary on the Seven Network not for his politics and he leads a team of just seven members of the lower house. Then of course we have the newly minted Federal Liberal leader Sussan Ley who when a poll was taken to identify who she was by showing members of the public a photograph of her, not one person knew who she was. One thought she was Gina Rinehart another a bank executive and to be fair not everyone knew who even Anthony Albanese was. Liberals around the country are searching for leaders that can connect with wider Australia. Ley deserves her shot at the top job and given the Coalition will be in Opposition for the next four years she has plenty of time to get known. Brad Battin doesn't have the luxury of time with a state election just 14 months away and Victorians deserve better than an alternative Premier being hidden away. Unlike most state and federal politicians, he has a work history as an ex-police officer and prison guard – ideal for prosecuting the case in a lawless state overrun by violent crime. Someone needs to tell him to accept every media opportunity offered to him. He should take a leaf out of Kennett's playbook where he insisted on live in-person interviews so he couldn't be edited. Victoria had and still has a love-hate relationship with our most successful recent Liberal Premier, but one thing is for sure you couldn't ignore him. So, media savvy was he that after being confronted by a barbecue wielding union protester out the front of the old AW studios in Bank St he made one more big demand. He asked us to install a landline into his office to conduct live interviews from there. We did it only to regret the decision as Jeff kept dialling in to go on air like some sort of media commentator. At least Victorians knew who he was. Dislikes • Convicted drug and gun criminal Snoop Dogg as the Grand Final entertainment – how does that fit the AFL's family image. • Anthony Albanese promising to recognise a Palestinian State. • Cowardly masked neo-Nazis marching through Melbourne in the dead of night. • ACTU pushing for a four-day week at Canberra's economic roundtable next week. Likes • Reserve Bank cut interest rates for the third time this year. • EV drivers look like being slugged a road user tax – about time. • Ageless Magpie Scott Pendlebury at age 37 going around next year. • Donald Trump doing what our leaders should do cleaning up Washington DC of homeless criminals and drug dealers. Steve Price Saturday Herald Sun columnist Melbourne media personality Steve Price writes a weekly column in the Saturday Herald Sun.
West Australian
2 hours ago
- West Australian
Three days to turn up ideas for three budgets: Jim Chalmers has big roundtable ambitions
By Thursday evening you should know what the Albanese government wants to do with its next three years in power. At least, that's the best case scenario for Treasurer Jim Chalmers. But the wooden bugs inlaid in the ceiling of the Cabinet room have heard a lot of hot air and ideas in their decades. So, too, the old political hands who suspect next week's economic roundtable will be another in a long line of ambitious talk fests that lead to minimal change. The money man and his hand-picked roundtable participants are sifting through hundreds of suggestions for how to fix poor productivity, a budget mired in red ink and bolster economic resilience. They'll spend three days next week in the sacred Cabinet room, locked away from distractions and prying eyes, aiming for genuine conversation to thrash out potential solutions. Dr Chalmers has promised a late and lengthy press conference on Thursday evening to relay the next steps to the public. But he insists that even if only a handful of concrete pledges emerge the intense consultation over the past several weeks has already made the exercise worth it. 'We've shaken the tree. There's a whole bunch of ideas. We've got people grappling with the big trade-offs that governments have to make in economic policy,' he told Agenda during a one-on-one interview this week. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Treasurer unleashed the beast in June when they announced the roundtable in twin National Press Club speeches delivered a week apart. The Government has expressed surprised at just how many ideas people had stashed away and were willing to voice. Treasury has received almost 900 submissions and the Productivity Commission another couple of hundred for its 'five pillars' reports feeding in to next week's talks. The core group of 22 attendees spending the whole three days next week in the cabinet room, and the 25 others invited to attend individual sessions, will bring their own thoughts. Regulators have also offered up 140 new ideas to cut red tape. Dr Chalmers has met with more than 75 of the nation's top business leaders over the past month, while ministerial colleagues have collectively heard from more than 700 people across 41 pre-roundtable meetings in their own portfolios. In fact, the sheer onslaught of suggestions has led the Government to tamp down expectations over the past fortnight. 'I see this as three days to help inform three budgets,' Dr Chalmers said. 'There'll be a lot of work that begins on Thursday, not ends on Thursday. 'I'm pretty confident that the directions that people are encouraging us to take, that there will be elements of that that we'll be able to pick up and run with.' Mr Albanese has also been keen to emphasise that the talks might be in the Cabinet room, but they are not Cabinet discussions. His Government will pick and choose what it does with the suggestions that emerge — and that will take time. 'There will be some things that are put forward that can be done immediately. Some things can be the result of legislation, some things will feed into next year's Budget, some things will feed into a future commitments about future terms,' he said this week. Many of the core participants are reluctant to outline their thinking publicly ahead of the roundtable, but there is clear consensus already building in areas such as speeding up environmental and planning approvals and reducing duplication across State and Federal processes. This was reflected in leaked Treasury advice obtained by media this week which set out options for speeding up approvals and clearing a backlog of housing applications as possible outcomes from the talks. Dr Chalmers, who has been briefed weekly on all the submissions, said his interests lay in making the Federation work more effectively, better regulation and faster approvals. 'My broad view, as you know, is that if it's good for Western Australia, it's usually good for the nation,' he said, talking about whether the States would get on board. 'WA plays a key defining role in our national economy, and so we work closely with Rita and Roger and the West Australian colleagues to find these win-wins and to make progress.' State treasurers, meeting on Friday, agreed to work across jurisdictions on faster approvals for major projects, cutting red tape and reducing overlap, boosting competition and building more homes faster. They also agreed to continue work on a model for road user charges — needed to replace fuel excise as more people start driving EVs — but cautioned that would take time. Independent MP Allegra Spender has been speaking to fellow roundtable participants and said there was clear recognition across the board that environmental laws were failing to protect nature and stymieing progress on renewables and housing. 'Reforming these in line with Graeme Samuel's recommendations is an urgent priority for almost everyone I've spoken to,' she said. Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn has also pointed to housing supply and the energy transition as key priorities, while unions back a 'fast to yes, faster to no' approach for renewables projects. 'We think there is a growing consensus on the need to tackle intergenerational inequality in Australia. We hope the roundtable participants work together to help address this,' ACTU secretary Sally McManus said. ACCC head Gina Cass-Gottlieb has also been speaking with other participants and a spokeswoman said there was a shared interest in competition, innovation and 'right fit regulation'. Red tape is also in the sights of business participants. Council of Small Business Organisations Australia chair Matthew Addison said that 'regulatory burden and complex compliance obligations (were) impacting businesses of all sizes'. The Business Council of Australia, representing some of the nation's largest companies, this week estimated red tape cost the country more than $110 billion a year in compliance costs and called for a target to cut this by 25 per cent by 2030. The idea is similar to one put forward by the Productivity Commission as well as that being pursued in the UK by Keir Starmer and is in line with Dr Chalmers' thoughts about the 'Abundance agenda' (after Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's influential book). Better regulation aside, artificial intelligence and tax are proving to be more contentious topics. Take the proposal from the Productivity Commission to lower company tax rates for all but the 500 largest businesses, partially offset by a new 'cashflow tax'. Big business rejected the whole plan, but COSBOA backed the company tax cut element, although it signed on to a BCA-led statement against the cashflow tax element. Mr Comyn said of course the Commonwealth Bank would like a tax cut, 'but I don't think that's the highest priority'. Last week, Dr Chalmers warned participants that he wanted them to start talking before gathering in Canberra and that any ideas costing money had to come with suggestions on how to offest the extra burden. His message has been heeded in part. Not the money part, though. 'We need to make sure that the ideas that people put forward are affordable, and I see that our political opponents and others have criticised that,' Dr Chalmers said. 'But the alternative to that is telling people to bring unaffordable ideas. The alternative to this roundtable is to involve people less.' One person — involved in preliminary discussions but not heading to Canberra — thought Treasury should simply reject any proposals that didn't detail where the money would come from. Ms Spender says she believed there was appetite for a proper tax reform process, while the BCA called for a snap three-month review. 'Everyone acknowledges that we can't fix our tax system in a single afternoon, but there's appetite to kick start a reform process that can examine the many interesting proposals put forward to date,' she said. But shadow treasurer Ted O'Brien indicated in a speech on Friday that taxes were a red line for the Coalition. 'From recent media reports, it looks like the roundtable has been engineered to rubber stamp a doubling down on Labor's failed tax and spend strategy,' he said. 'Let me be crystal clear: the Coalition will be no such rubber stamp. And we reject any suggestion Labor has a mandate to hike taxes.' He also likened the roundtable to Willy Wonka's famed chocolate factory, with Dr Chalmers as the candy man himself offering up 'the tasty temptation of higher taxes mixed with big doses of debt', in a speech that might leave the Treasurer reconsidering Mr O'Brien's invitation. Nevertheless, Dr Chalmers said he had an 'overwhelming sense of gratitude' that people had largely approached the talks in the right spirit. 'I don't see my role as … banging heads together. I'm trying to draw the threads together where there is sufficient common interest and sufficient common ground for the Government to do further work,' he said. 'Our job is to make the most of this opportunity before this window of opportunity shuts.'
Perth Now
2 hours ago
- Perth Now
Hidden issue fueling Aussie crisis
Jim Chalmers says it's 'not surprising' Australia's birth rate has slowed given the 'financial pressures' on families, however, he has rejected calls to bring back the Costello-era $3000 baby bonus in favour of 'better, more enduring ways to support parents'. The comments come ahead of Labor's highly anticipated Economic Reform Roundtable, which will bring business and unions groups to Canberra for three days of intensive discussions on how to lift Australia's sluggish productivity rate. 'It's not surprising that the birth rate has slowed given the pressures on people, including financial pressures,' he told NewsWire. 'We want to make it easier for them to make that choice. If they want to have more kids, we want to make it easier for them to do that, and that's what motivates a lot of our changes.' NED-14018-How-Australias-birth-rate-has-fallen However, as Australia struggles to boost the economy, and in turn raise wages and living standards, it's also contending with a sluggish birth rate of 1.5 births per woman, which is under the 2.1 figure needed to sustain population growth. Boosting productivity was also essential to ensuring that Australia's ageing population could weather economic headwinds, the Treasurer said. 'Now, the reason why the productivity challenge is important to this is because our society is ageing, and over time, there will be fewer workers for every person who's retired,' he said. 'We need to make sure that our economy is as productive as it can be, as strong as it can be to withstand that demographic change, which is going to be big and consequential.' Treasurer Jim Chalmers said boosting productivity was essential to help Australia weather an ageing population. NewsWire/ Martin Ollman Credit: News Corp Australia Mr Chalmers also spurned calls from former Liberal prime minister John Howard to resurrect the $3000 baby bonus cash incentive bought in by his treasurer Peter Costello in 2004. The Queenslander's parliamentary colleagues have advocated for other measures to spur a baby boom, including Nationals senator Matt Canavan's proposed $100,000 loans for first-time parents to buy their first home. Parliament's maverick father of the house Bob Katter also proposed incoming splitting for parents so they paid less overall tax. For example, a household where two parents earn a combined income of $150,000 pays about $10,000 less tax than a household with a single worker pulling in $150,000. Instead, Mr Chalmers said Labor's supports were 'more enduring,' pointing to policies like guaranteeing three days of subsidised child care for families earning less than $533,280, increasing paid parental leave to 25 weeks, and paying super on government-funded parental leave to tackle the gender superannuation gap. The decline in birth rate. Source: Supplied Credit: Supplied 'That policy from a couple of decades ago was a one-off payment, and we found ways to support parents which is meaningful and enduring, not one off. That's the main difference,' he said. 'Our political opponents … haven't said how they would fund that, how they would pay for that, whereas we've been carefully budgeting all this help for parents in our budgets and providing that in an ongoing way. 'We're always in the market for ideas about ways to support families. We've got all this cost-of-living help rolling out, (like) all the childcare changes. All of that, I think, demonstrate a willingness on our part to support families (in making) decisions about whether they want to have kids or have more kids.' Mr Chalmers says the 'generational anxiety' plaguing Australia youth simultaneously contending with rising house prices and inflation will also be a touchstone ahead of the economic reform roundtable, which at one point was called the productivity roundtable before it was quietly changed. He concedes productivity can 'sound like a cold lifeless piece of economic jargon' but explains the metric is 'about efficiency' and 'about how we make our economy stronger to deliver for more people so that they can earn more and get ahead and be better off'. Australia's birthrate has fallen below the 2.1 births needed to sustain Australia's population. Jason Edwards/ NewsWire Credit: News Corp Australia Generational equality has also fuelled some of the roundtable's more controversial submissions, including the Australian Council of Trade Unions' call to limit negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions on just one property by the next five years, and teal Wentworth MP Allegra Spender's overhaul of the tax system that she says is overly reliant on income taxes. The ACTU has also reiterated calls for a four-day work week, while the Productivity Commission irked business bodies with calls for a new 5 per cent cash flow tax and a road user charge to ensure EV drivers, who skip the fuel excise, also contribute to road upgrades. How to best handle the opportunities posed by artificial intelligence, while mitigating the risks and job losses, will also be debated on day two; however, Mr Chalmers is quietly optimistic. 'I think one of the big challenges, broadly, but especially for young people, is how they adapt and adopt technology, so a big focus will be how do we skill people up to use artificial intelligence so that it's it works for them, not against them, particularly in the workplace,' he said. Mr Chalmers will use talks to create consensus on what he says is the 'most transformative influence on our economy and our lifetime', and while he doesn't want to pre-empt decisions, education settings and regulation will likely be immediate action points once talks end on Thursday. '(AI) has to change the way we think about skills and capabilities, and I'll work closely with colleagues in the education portfolios, the industry portfolio and elsewhere to make sure that we've got the settings right,' he said. 'Whether it's regulation, whether it's education, in a whole bunch of areas, governments have to catch up and keep up with the accelerating pace of technological change.'
