Albanese recalls ‘confronting’ moment on youth mental health
Jumping back to a little earlier in the press conference, the PM got a bit emotion when talking about mental health and how he’s seen it impact those around him.
He was asked, as the father of a young man, how important it is to discuss mental health at the dinner table.
Albanese said he preferred not to discuss what he says with his son, but said generally it’s “quite clear that young men, and young women, have issues that we need to talk about more”.
He then recalled a moment when he was shocked as a young man when a friend’s niece ended up in hospital with an eating disorder. He says she nearly died:
[She] ended up in RPA with an eating disorder, and that was really confronting. I was still pretty young at the time. I haven’t seen anything like that. She almost died. She is now well, she is now well, and has children of her own. But that was really confronting.
He also remembers Charlotte, a young woman who took her own life, which her mum believes was in part due to social media. Albanese says Charlotte’s story was one of the things that led to the government taking action on social media.
Key events
ASX to open modestly higher after Monday plunge
Jonathan Barrett
Australian shares are expected to open slightly higher this morning, erasing some of the steep losses triggered by Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff regime.
Futures prices are pointing towards a 0.7% lift in the S&P/ASX 200 to around 7,400 points when the market opens.
The benchmark briefly traded under 7,200 yesterday, before closing at 7,343 points, down more than 4% on the day in the worst ASX session recorded in five years.
Fund managers told Guardian Australia they are looking for signs of a truce in the tariff tit-for-tat, especially between the US and China, to signal a recovery in equities may be on the cards.
While Trump’s new tariff regime sparked an initial sell-off across global share markets last week, plans to hit the US with retaliatory imposts from major economies, including China and the EU, have heightened risks of a global recession.
Overnight, Trump threatened to raise his tariffs on China by an additional 50% from 9 April if China doesn’t withdraw its owns retaliatory tariffs of 34% by Tuesday.
Albanese heckled by protester during press conference
Albanese has been interrupted by a protester who shouts at the PM that his government has approved more coalmines during its term. She says:
Mr Albanese, you say you care about young people and yet since being elected your government has approved 33 new coal and gas projects…
She keeps shouting as security take her out of the building.
Patrick McGorry had earlier said climate change was one of the “megatrends” that are conspiring to make the lives and futures of young people much more challenging and pessimistic”.
Albanese says he was ‘very proud’ to host Asean as questions raised about economic pivot to China
Albanese says he wants Australia’s relationship to be strengthened further with Asean countries.
He’s asked whether the government is concerned that countries across Asia could pivot towards China, in response to the US slapping big tariffs on them. Australia hosted the Asean meeting in March last year, which Albanese says he was “very proud” to host.
I was really proud that every single leader came, no deputies, no representatives, every single leader, and that’s a direct result of the hard work that my government has done to turn those relationships around.
Our relationship with Indonesia has never been stronger, never been stronger, and the work that we’ve done there, but with other nations in ASEAN as well, and one of our responses to the decision of last Thursday will be to build … the idea of business missions, we’ve had business missions to Indonesia, to India, to Laos, to the region, to China as well, that have been important in terms of those economic relationships.
PM addresses budget repair and recession fears
Can the PM rule out a recession?
Albanese won’t directly say yes or no, but points to all the positive signs on wages going up, growth increasing, and inflation going down.
Earlier the PM was also asked whether the government would repair the budget and the budget bottom line (that will hit more than $1tn in gross debt).
Albanese said the government has been engaging in budget repair and will continue to do so – and says that bottom line has improved by more than $200bn over Labor’s first term.
We’ve continued to see now, over the last five quarters, wages grow five quarters in a row. We have in addition to that seen tax cuts for every taxpayer dealing with cost of living relief, and we’ve seen inflation … brought down to 2.4%. It had a six in front of it when we were elected, it peaked at 7.8 in 2022 and what happened in 2022 in the leadup to that election was a March budget, which saw a massive spike in the deficit up to $78bn, not a single dollar of savings [was] in that budget.
Yesterday, Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallagher also released Treasury’s modelling on the Trump tariffs. It showed that GDP would continue to grow, but at a slower rate than if there were no tariffs in place.
Albanese: ‘These are uncertain times’
Responding to the latest out of the US and the threat of more tariffs on China, Albanese says we are in uncertain times but the government is continuing to engage with the US.
Albanese says his government was the first to respond to the “liberation day” tariffs.
That’s why we have in advance done the work that we did over the last three years, but that’s why … we did the work in the not unsurprising announcement, although some elements of it were surprising, I’ve got to say – the Heard Island decision and Norfolk Island … some of it was rather strange. That’s the truth, but we are dealing with this in a considered, organised way.
McGorry: Young people aren’t interested in politics, they just want to get services
Both major parties have taken a slightly different approach to mental health support, but Pat McGorry says mental health, particularly for young people, is taking a bipartisan approach.
Asked whether he thinks the Coalition might take money out of the mental health budget, McGorry says “No, I don’t think they will.”
I think the Prime Minister already mentioned that this is, generally speaking, a bipartisan achievement of our country. I’m very proud of our country that they we built this system to the extent that we have already… This announcement is very strong from the government.
Young people aren’t interested in politics, they just want to get services.
Mental health expert says recent megatrends conspiring to make futures of young people ‘much more challenging and pessimistic’
Why are young people struggling so much with mental health? McGorry says there are a lot of factors, from the cost of living to climate change.
We can’t definitively answer that question, but we do feel that megatrends in society over the last 20 or 30 years, particularly socioeconomic … injuries to young people, and I think the government’s addressing that in a number of ways – student debt, housing, housing costs, climate change – all of these mega trends are conspiring to make the lives and futures of young people much more challenging and pessimistic.
McGorry says young people are like the canary in the coalmine of society and more work needs to be done to support them and create a “healthier, stronger, cohesive” society.
Former Australian of the year and psychiatrist Patrick McGorry calls Labor’s $1bn mental health pledge a ‘breakthrough’
The mental health workforce has been a key issue in ensuring people can get the help that they need. Mark Butler (who’s already been busy doing the morning media rounds) says this announcement will help alleviate those issues.
We’ve invested in the last couple of budgets in growing the number of psychologists and other mental health workers, and today’s announcement includes 1,200 additional training places to continue to grow that psychology workforce, to find new ways in which people can get psychiatry training and to grow that peer workforce that is just so important for mental health.
Former Australian of the year and psychiatrist Patrick McGorry is also at the press conference and called the announcement a “breakthrough”:
Two out of five young people need professional help. It’s a shocking figure and the government is acting decisively now to fill that gap you’ve heard about the missing middle. It’s not just about strengthening the primary care level of Headspace. It’s also building a system that helps those young people with more complex problems get access to scientifically based care, which has been a rarity in mental health.
PM spruiks $1bn mental health pledge in Sydney
The PM is up in Ashfield in Sydney to announce the $1bn mental health pledge.
Albanese says the commitment is on top of other recent promises to the health and mental health space.
This will be critical, because we know that one in five adult Australians experience a mental health issue for a year or more, and we want to provide more support for more people in more locations, and that’s what today’s announcement will do. We will deliver 31 new and upgraded Medicare mental health centres on top of the 61 that we’re already committed to, [and] 58 new, upgraded or expanded headspace services.
Ruston, questioned on Coalition’s policy on non-frontline public services jobs, brings up ‘scare campaigns’ about ‘things that aren’t necessarily true’
As I mentioned earlier, the Coalition will continue to get hit with questions over their public service policy backflip, despite trying to come out on the front foot with the change yesterday.
They’ve promised there will be no forced redundancies to cut the workforce by 41,000 and that it won’t impact frontline services.
But Sally Sara asks how they’ll ensure frontline workers aren’t impacted (there’s a fair bit of back and forth on this). Ruston says:
The Coalition has been very, very clear about this particular policy, that we believe that we don’t need more public servants in Canberra, but we do need more frontline workers.
Under this current government, we seen an incredible explosion in the number of non frontline public servants. Many of those and most of those are in Canberra.
Sara asks if there’s evidence of the number of non-frontline roles, and Ruston replies that the numbers are in the budget papers.
Sara pushes, asking whether the public can trust the Coalition when “we know in graphic detail, thanks particularly to the Veterans and Defence Royal Commission into suicide, that cutting back on roles and delays and poor administration in Veterans Affairs, for example, had dire consequences”.
Ruston says there have been “scare campaigns” that “have currently been running about things that aren’t necessarily true. So I would say that we need to actually look at the facts on the ground.”
Shadow health minister says forcing private insurers to pay for private health hospitals is ‘simplistic solution’ to ‘very complex problem’
Mark Butler is reportedly putting private health insurers on notice that they will be forced to pay up to $1bn a year to private hospitals struggling to operate.
Host Sally Sara asks Ruston if the Coalition would consider doing the same. Ruston calls it a “simplistic solution”:
I think is a very simplistic solution to what is a very, very complex problem. First of all, we need to know who is going to pay for the estimated billion dollar cost of the minister’s policy sort of comments, because we want to make sure that the 14 million Australians who have just recently been hit with above-inflation premium hikes this week are not going to be the people that pay for this billion dollar-commitment.
Anne Ruston attacks Labor over number of mental subsidised health sessions
The shadow health minister, Anne Ruston, follows Gallagher on RN Breakfast to respond to Labor’s announcement on mental health.
Ruston points out, as Dutton did earlier, that the Medicare mental health centres are a rebranded version of “head to health” centres that the previous Liberal governments established – though Labor has set up and funded more of them since coming into office.
Ruston says she welcomes the decision of Labor to “match” the opposition’s commitment to mental health but criticised them for committing to keeping the number of subsidised mental health sessions at 10 (which the opposition has promised to double).
The first thing they did when they came into government was to cut the number of Medicare subsidised mental health sessions in half, particularly for Australians with more complex and chronic mental health conditions that needed this support. Subsequently, we’ve seen their own department has given them a fail when it comes to the outcomes of that particular measure
You would not ration a medical service in any other situation in the health health sector.
Gallagher dons pink signs over Labor-red in Canberra
Wherever you are in Australia you might have noticed there are some pollies whose corflutes don’t exactly match the colour of the party they represent (or mention the party that they’re in).
It’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen it: back in 2022 we saw Liberal candidate (now senator) Dave Sharma run with posters missing the Liberal logo; we’ve seen Labor cabinet minister Tanya Plibersek, a long time user of purple for her posters and t-shirts over red.
And Katy Gallagher has gone for pink – which host Sally Sara asks about. Gallagher takes a second to answer:
Thank you for noticing, I look, I just take… to be honest, people just tell me what the best way to put yourself out there is. But I don’t think anyone would not know that I am with the Labor party. I’ve been around for a while now, and certainly I’m very proud to be a member of the Labor party.
She has been part of the ACT Labor institution for a while, previously serving as the territory’s chief minister.
