Clearly eager to channel the spirit of Kevin ’07, Anthony Albanese and Labor’s health spokesman Mark Butler have reheated Rudd’s GP super clinics policy from 2007, with a Medicare Urgent Care clinic trial at 50 locations offering bulk-billed basic non-critical emergency-style services.
The $135 million trial — partly inspired by a similar New Zealand scheme — is less grandiose than the super clinics policy, which was eventually to cost $600 million and delivered too few clinics far too late.
Nonetheless, the announcement gave Albanese the chance to perform in a friendly environment — a Medicare rally in Melbourne providing the platform for an attack on the Coalition’s record on health spending (which has increased in real terms, but never mind) and its invariably nefarious plans for Medicare.
Labor would also happily keep the entire election campaign focused on health where it holds a substantial advantage over the government in the minds of voters.
The government’s position on health is hampered by the fact that its Greg Hunt — he’s run out of principles to abandon, some critics claim, terribly unfairly — is leaving politics, and is now officially an ex-politician, but still being health minister for the duration of the campaign. Health sector reaction to Labor’s policy — unsurprisingly given its small size — is a widespread “meh”.
Also eliciting no great enthusiasm was the announcement that retiring LNP member for Dawson, long-time Manila visitor and fetid ungulate George Christensen was defecting — defecting — to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. But rather than celebrating this coup of securing perhaps the Coalition’s single most appalling MP, Hanson seemed decidedly underwhelmed, relegating Christensen to an unwinnable third spot on the One Nation Queensland Senate ticket (that One Nation has any winnable spots on any ticket is a sad indictment of humankind, but anyway).
Christensen thus wouldn’t even get the privilege of running under the Hanson standard in his now-former seat of Dawson, because One Nation had already picked someone for that (businesswoman Julie Hall), thus depriving the far-right outfit of a legitimate chance of seizing a lower house seat — and presumably sending a huge sigh of relief through the LNP.
Hanson, of course, has a history of falling out with the geniuses who get elected on her coattails, and may have decided to go straight to the bit where she publicly dumps on them and kicks them out. No worries for Gorgeous George, however, who will get an extra $100,000-odd by standing again for election instead of just retiring quietly to make a living running the Australian chapter of QAnon. Your tax dollars at work.
At the National Press Club, Greens leader Adam Bandt gave by far the best response to an attempted gotcha question, from The Australian Financial Review’s Ron Mizen (normally a fine journalist, but we all have bad days or annoying editors who demand we ask dumb questions). Asked to identify the wage price index figure — a figure obscure enough to bring to mind “damn your drunk tests are so hard” — Bandt told Mizen to google it and then brilliantly explained how asinine gotcha questions were.
The PM, meanwhile, was in Melbourne to announce yet again that the government was spending money to save the last of Australia’s inefficient, ageing oil refineries. Just to demonstrate that some political journalists accompanying Scott Morrison actually do their jobs, after yesterday’s visit to a Rheem factory in Western Sydney, The Canberra Times journalists Gerard Cockburn and Dan Jervis-Bardy revealed that Rheem was about to slash workers from the factory and move some production offshore — the sort of issue you’d think the the Liberal campaign brains trust might have checked on ahead of time.
Asked about the embarrassment, Morrison offered only the following gibberish: “It is for Rheem to outline their future plans. They are also investing in their future and what you refer to [as] voluntary redundancies. That is what they advised us.” Well, that’s settled then.
Meantime, ABC viewers might recall that ABC’s Greg Jennett criticised Albanese for having too long a media conference on Sunday. Today Albanese is being bagged for having too short a media conference. Morrison walked out of his media conference while journalists were still asking questions too. We await the shellacking from journalists.
