Q&A, Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce - Southbank, VIC
6 May 2021
LEON KEMPLER: I’m really thrilled about the $13.2 billion going into NDIS. I’m told that 20 per cent of NDIS is for mental health. What particular approach will we have in terms of NDIS and mental health? Thank you so much, I love the initiative.
PRIME MINISTER: Well, thanks Leon. I’m actually going to leave most of that answer to Josh in the Budget next week. Mental health has been a key focus of mine as Prime Minister and particularly addressing the issues of national suicide prevention, and can I say that of the many things that have been achieved in this country over the last 14 months, and particularly here in Victoria, what was particularly achieved is that we surged support, surged support into the wonderful mental health services that we have available across the country. Whether it's Headspace or whether it's Lifeline, Beyond Blue, all of these services we surged support into. And we saw the demand for those services absolutely rocket. And it was Professor Hickey I think observed that there were at least 500 deaths by suicide that he believes we avoided over that period of time. And that is something that I can tell you is very, very good news to hear when there's been so much difficult and hard news for us to hear over the course of the last 14 months. Those mental health responses, I think have worked very, very effectively. I want to thank, without going into any one in particular, there has been so many that have to have contributed to us achieving that. But there is a lot more work to do and the intersection between mental health and the National Disability Insurance Scheme is very important. That's one of the reasons, I think why you're seeing some of the changes in participant costs in the future.
LEON KEMPLER: Thank you. On my right, Professor Duffy and then Alex Goodman on my left and then Antonio afterwards. Thank you very much, Professor Duffy.
QUESTION: Thank you so much, Leon, Prime Minister, thanks for your address. I also want to acknowledge the incredible work of the Motor Manufacturing Initiative and kickstarted it with space, from Swinburne University the director of the new Space Technology Industry Institute. Wonder if you could speak a little bit about the national space strategy. How are we going to build our national focus, a sovereign capability and in collaboration with partners, the US, Israel, and most notably, how do we become world leading and relevant to that world, an endeavour that grows faster than almost any other sector?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, thank you for the question. The National Space Agency is now well established in South Australia in Lot 14, well led and it is already doing the work of both integrating with our many space industry sectors in collaboration together, but also with our universities and research sector, but also linking up as part of the global space community. And we're moving, I think, quite quickly and they're already well advanced on launch facilities in a number of locations and for the return of spacecraft to Australia, I should say space vessels or vehicles, and you can give me the precise term. I am not the scientist, you are. But the Space Agency, I think has proved to be a very a catalytic and binding initiative that is really giving the sector, I think, a lot of focus and a lot of direction. This is why, as part of the six priority areas that we established for our Modern Manufacturing Initiative, space was one of them, and that's been backed up by significant grants to support modernisation and collaboration and technology development in the space sector. When I was in the United States back in 2019, one of the announcements we made was our anticipation of the Mars mission. And that was exciting, very exciting to be part of that. And one of the reasons why the United States was so interested in having us involved in that was because of the sophistication of our technology when it came to digging holes in the ground. We're very good at that here and we can do it in incredibly remote places. And that was a key part of the Mars mission. And so the experience gained from being part of such a global, globally ambitious initiative I think is tremendous. And that's why we committed resources to support Australian companies and Australian industry to be part of those types of initiatives. So that the space industry now under the leadership of Minister Christian Porter, I think will only go from strength to strength both by combining the integration of our manufacturing plans and initiatives with the broader national space strategy, which is then led by the National Space Agency in South Australia.
QUESTION: Thank you for your very interesting speech Mr Prime Minister. Alex Goodman from [Inaudible] Cyber Security. As someone who does [inaudible] to Israel, can you give us any insight into when we might be able to travel again and in particular do you see a travel bubble with Israel who are now vaccinated?
PRIME MINISTER: The next step we have in dealing with COVID in terms of people being to travel, having entered the arrangements with New Zealand, is the ability for Australians who are vaccinated to be able to travel freely. Now, that includes potentially you know, in Australia where from time to time, there might be restrictions in place. But also to be able to travel to non-red countries. By that I mean, it’s not a political comment, it’s countries that are obviously not experiencing the worst of the pandemic. And that is what the AHPPC, the medical expert panel is now working on with the National Cabinet to determine when we could meet such a threshold. And while Israel is a great example of a country that is quite comprehensively through the vaccine arrangements with a much smaller population of course, that does not necessarily mean that we have yet clinical full confidence in the vaccines to prevent transmission, transmissibility. That is still not known. We have good leading indicators on that. But until we can get some firm clinical evidence that it is preventing transmissibility, that presents a great risk for Australia. So we will continue to proceed very cautiously there. The next step is ensuring Australians can do that. Australians that have been vaccinated and registered and approved vaccines in Australia to be able to return home potentially with different quarantine arrangements, preferably home quarantine arrangements or contracted quarantine arrangements where we are not there yet. The next country I have referred to that could potentially be part of an arrangement like New Zealand has been Singapore. But of course, with Israel's vaccination record it lends itself, but I wouldn't want to indicate that that is something that is yet on our agenda.
