'Relationship has recovered': smiling Xi hosts Albanese
"The most important thing we can learn from this is that a commitment to equal treatment, to seeking common ground while sharing differences, pursuing mutually beneficial co-operation, for our countries and peoples," he said.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
West Australian
35 minutes ago
- West Australian
Jessica Page: Failure is politics' new norm, setting impossible-to-reach targets only to devalue a promise
Aiming high should be encouraged, but ambitious targets can quickly become a broken promise that strangle worthy debates and shackle even the best leaders. In hindsight, Bob Hawke said he should have stuck to his script in 1987 and included the fine print in his pledge that 'no Australian child will be living in poverty' by 1990. Impossible? Probably. Does that mean Australia shouldn't aim for that? Absolutely not. A looming, and similarly worthy, national deadline on housing was exposed as a long shot this week. Secret Treasury briefing notes warned the Albanese Government that its target to build 1.2 million homes by mid-2029 'would not be met' and suggested changing it. Jim Chalmers said he was 'pretty relaxed' about the accidental leak and what was in it. 'We'll need to do better and we'll need to do more and the advice just reflects that,' he said. At the current construction rate, it's estimated Australia will fall short of the target by almost 160,000 homes, or 13.3 per cent. But at last check, as of September 2024, WA was only 8.2 per cent behind on its share and could boast it is the second best behind Victoria. Or, more accurately, the second least-bad. Housing Minister John Carey has pulled every lever, and famously used every metaphor, in his attempts to address Perth's housing shortage. Now he has also been charged with building the State's way out of a hospital crisis, as Minister for Health Infrastructure. But if the Government's claim it has added more than 900 beds since 2021 is right (and they have produced the proof) then an extra 63 beds at the new women's hospital in Murdoch won't be enough. Because, on every measure that matters, the health system is still buckling. WA led the introduction of the four-hour rule for emergency departments in 2009 and by 2011 all tertiary hospitals were meeting the target of admitting, discharging or referring at least 85 per cent of patients. Fast forward to 2025 and it appears some targets have been left on the surgical scrapheap. The proportion of patients spending less than four hours in ED has plummeted from 78 per cent in 2014-15 to less than 60 per cent in 2023-24, according to a Productivity Commission report. 'Better than the other States' was a very thin, albeit true, argument from the State Government. St John WA is set a target to reach 90 per cent of priority one triple-zero calls within 15 minutes. On Monday, its response performance was 72.8 per cent. Less than 50 per cent of priority two and three calls were attended within their recommended time frames. St John WA blamed a 'sharp spike in influenza-like illness', but those stark statistics are not a one-off. The 90 per cent targets have not been met, in any category, since August 2020. More often than not, they are a long way off. Ambulances can't get to the next patient, if they're unable to transfer the current one. More than 5500 hours of ambulances ramped outside hospital EDs in June barely raised an eyebrow, because it wasn't a record. It's the new norm, and staff are simply too busy, too often, to raise the alarm. A senior physician, who must remain anonymous, said the four-hour rule inside hospital EDs worked in the beginning because there was spare capacity and resources to throw at it. They blame neglect by both sides of politics for what is now a 'completely dysfunctional system' across hospitals, aged care, disability services and GPs as the first port in a storm. 'It was already broken, had lost its capacity and ability to flex up. COVID sent it into a death spiral,' the doctor said. 'You are definitely losing lives if you're not meeting those targets.' In Budget estimates in Parliament last year, then-health minister Amber-Jade Sanderson insisted St John WA's key performance indicators are 'working well' but that she couldn't release them because of contract requirements. And couldn't disclose whether any penalties have been paid. The new norm is not good enough. KPIs that can't be met are not working well. Jim Chalmers rejected Treasury's overture to revise the national housing target down and, likewise, these health targets need to be dug out of the too-hard basket. But for them to be worth the paper they're written on, they need to be enforced. Time to try another lever. Jessica Page is the State political editor.
Perth Now
an hour ago
- Perth Now
Sweet and sour in Beijing: PM's China trip bears fruit
Sweet and tangy jujubes could soon be on the way to Australian shelves as part of a broadened trade pact with China. The agreement was one of six signed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Chinese Premier Li Qiang on Tuesday as Australia and China sought to boost business links as US President Donald Trump upends the global trade order. Jujubes, a small apple-like fruit, will be exported to Australia while apples from the Australian mainland will be allowed to be exported to China for the first time. Another four memoranda of understanding were signed by the pair as Mr Albanese met the highest-ranking Chinese leaders - President Xi Jinping, Premier Li and Chairman Zhao Leji - in the centrepiece of his six-day visit to China. Australia and China must deepen economic co-operation given increasing trade frictions elsewhere, Mr Li said after a lavish welcome in Beijing's Great Hall of the People. "In recent years, co-operation has encountered headwinds," he said, adding that it was hard to find two countries with more complementary economies than Australia and China. His comments were echoed by Mr Albanese. "My government believes unequivocally in free and fair trade as a driver of global growth, and I know the discussions that we've had today have been very constructive," he said. But the relationship is not without its challenges. China has chafed at Australia's stringent foreign investment regime on Chinese firms. Mr Li said China would protect the rights of foreign businesses and treat them in accordance with the law, in an oblique reference to Australian plans to tear up a Chinese-owned company's lease of Darwin Port. "I trust Australia will treat Chinese enterprise fairly and properly resolve issues regarding market access and investment review," he told a gathering of Australian and Chinese business leaders. Mr Li and Mr Albanese also signed an agreement to kickstart a review of the 10-year-old free trade agreement between the two nations. Collaboration on steel decarbonisation, increasing tourism links and paperless certification of agriculture products were also broached at the meeting. The prime minister will visit the Great Wall on Wednesday before flying out to Chengdu in the southwestern province of Sichuan - known as the home of the giant panda.
News.com.au
4 hours ago
- News.com.au
Environmental reform could slash government spending, lift productivity: expert
Urgent reform of Australia's 'broken' environmental laws would dramatically cut government costs and lift productivity growth, a leading environment expert claims. The Albanese government has faced continued pressure over Australia's sluggish productivity growth, which is among the worst in the developed world. Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation chair Ken Henry said sweeping environmental reform could be the solution. The former Treasury secretary will tell the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday there is 'no chance' the Labor government will meet its net-zero target while also delivering upon housing and infrastructure commitments without reform to state and federal environmental protection laws. 'The Australian government has an ambition to massively increase critical minerals exports and downstream processing here in Australia,' Dr Henry is expected to state. 'This means more mines, new industrial facilities, and more pressure being loaded onto broken EPBC project assessment and approval processes.' The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, or EPBC, is Australia's main national environmental legislation. Dr Henry said the government's pledge to erect 1.2 million homes by 2030 would require more land and transport, meaning more interaction with EPBC assessments. 'These projects, be they wind farms, solar farms, transmission lines, new housing developments, land-based carbon sequestration projects, new and enhanced transport corridors or critical minerals extraction and processing plants, must be delivered quickly and efficiently,' Dr Henry will tell the NPC. 'All these projects will be critical to enhancing economic resilience and lifting flagging productivity growth. 'Boosting productivity and resilience relies upon environmental law reform. 'But the biggest threat to future productivity growth comes from nature itself; more particularly, from its destruction.' Dr Henry will urge for a breaking of the 'deadlock' to deliver sweeping reforms in a single package. They would include protecting Matters of National Environmental Significance guidelines by shifting the focus to regional planning, urgent finalisation of the effective national environmental standards, and formation of a national environmental protection agency. He will also urge for 'genuine co-operation and a shared purpose' between business and environmental groups as well as between the states and federal government. 'Environmental law reform provides an opportunity to reconstruct the co-operative federal reform capability we developed in the 1990s but have since lost,' Dr Henry will state. 'A strong federal reform capability will be required to deliver other, even more challenging economic reforms. Environmental law reform can provide the template.' Dr Henry said there was 'no point in building a faster highway to hell', and while approvals needed to be granted faster, the environment needed to be protected. 'In reforming the EPBC Act, we can get this right. We have had all the reviews we need,' he will say. 'All of us have had our say. It is now up to parliament. Let's just get this done.' The Labor government is contending with a raft of proposals to fix productivity, from superannuation reform to artificial intelligence and disability inclusion. At the same time, Environment Minister Murray Watt said in May that legislating a federal environment protection agency was a 'very high and immediate' priority.
