|
For a week sold as being about consultation and finding common ground, Alanis Morissette might have mused Mark Butler dropping a new way forward for the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) — and largely blindsiding the states and the community — was perhaps ironic.
With a closely guarded speech and a dream to cap the growth of the NDIS the health minister outlined his plan to refocus (but not to rebrand, he says) an agreement on support services for children with mild and moderate development delay and autism that sit out outside of the scheme.
The support services, otherwise known as foundational supports, were agreed to by the national cabinet two years ago.
It was designed to be run by the states and take the budget pressure off the NDIS — a scheme entering its adolescence paired with the growth spurt that comes with it.
The states have said they've been acting constructively with the government on the establishment of the foundational supports, which are due to begin by July next year. But Butler's speech at the Press Club hinted at a deeper frustration with negotiations that continue to drag as the states raised concerns about long term funding and each jurisdiction having different schemes in place.
So Butler laid down the gauntlet, daring the states to ignore the "sense of urgency" and get on with it now, if the plan is for the government to take the lead.
Queensland said they weren't briefed ahead of the speech. Victoria didn't know either. Neither did Western Australia's Disability Services Minister Hannah Beazley, who said she found out when the rest of us did. NSW Premier Chris Minns said he'd been told beforehand but "not a long time before" and
he wouldn't "sign a blank cheque" on reform.
A week of talks
But hey, one man's blindside is another man's olive branch. Up the road at Parliament House, the speech was met with broad approval among attendees
at the government's economic reform roundtable. The timing of Butler's address, a day before talks on budget sustainability were due to begin, was anything but subtle.
The talks, which kicked off on Tuesday, were fuelled by sandwiches, sushi and a (at least publicly suggested) sense of optimism that some common ground could be found. Business leaders, union groups and bureaucrats spent the last three days locked in the cabinet room with no natural light or access to their phones.
They were told to find the "low hanging fruit" to tackle Australia's productivity problem that could be
taken to the cabinet within days. Other ideas proposed, could be adopted for future budgets and election commitments.
The forbidden fruit of tax reform in the short-term was quickly ruled out in the lead-up to the summit, as unions and social services groups called for an overhaul of negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions.
But that doesn't mean tax wasn't discussed. A whole session was dedicated to tax, and the issue of intergenerational inequality was raised throughout the week. There's a desire to change this, but we're not going to see it anytime soon. It's likely the summit will end with incremental movement on housing and some kind of review into taxation to model some of the ideas put forward over the three days.
One group who wasn't having it all their own way
was the Australian Council of Trade Unions. After walking away from the Jobs and Skills summit in 2022 with a grab bag of goodies, the union's secretary Sally McManus admitted to feeling "a bit outnumbered" in the room of business and industry representatives.
As for whose idea it was to hold the roundtable, we're still officially none the wiser. Treasurer Jim Chalmers and the PM shut down questions earlier this week, and to really hammer home the point they're on the same page they appeared quite literally on the same page, penning an op-ed together
about how good the summit will be.
One has to wonder then if Anthony Albanese caught Chalmers's subtle shift in his pre-prepared remarks on day one of the talks. We were told the treasurer planned to heap praise on the prime minister for his support and the roundtable Albanese "proposed".
But flash forward to his actual address, where the praise for Albanese was still there, but Chalmers declared the roundtable was just something the prime minister simply "announced".
Israel's PM attacks Albanese
For weeks, the government has been touting its economic reform roundtable as a way of tackling issues at home but when Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a blistering personal attack on Albanese, attention quickly turned elsewhere.
Netanyahu called the PM a "weak" leader who "betrayed Israel".The language from Netanyahu is scathing but as our Middle East correspondent Matthew Doran wrote
it was months in the making after Albanese accused Israel of breaching international law for restricting aid to Gaza and for Australia's move to recognise a Palestinian state.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley didn't really want to weigh in beyond accusing the PM of mismanaging the relationship with Israel. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), wrote to Albanese and Netanyahu
asking for the tensions to be lowered.
It didn't work.
Netanyahu will appear in a pre-recorded interview on Sky News Australia later tonight, where he's reported to have said Albanese's record was to be "forever tarnished by the weakness he showed in the face of these Hamas terrorist monsters".
Albanese, for what it's worth, says he doesn't take Netanyahu's remarks personally and he's instead focused on working with the international community to find common ground on a two-state solution. |
