From the Crikey grapevine, the latest tips and rumours …

Binders of women but none on advisory board. Back in February, Industry Minister Arthur Sinodinos announced his intention to the establishment of a women’s advisory body for the department of industry, innovation and science.

“I envisage it being made up of representatives from the private sector, research institutions and government, including senior executives and actual practitioners,” he told the Women in Venture Capital Forum. “It will deliver feedback on existing initiatives and inform the design of new policies and programs to nurture more successful female innovators.”

But as reported in InnovationAus.com, some seven months later, nothing more about the body has been made public — we don’t know who, if anyone, has already been selected, the group hasn’t had a meeting yet and the department is yet to fill all it’s positions. Also, it seems there some slight drift from the original idea of a women’s advisory roundtable: 

“The department is working with the Minister’s office to identify members and participants for the roundtable. The group will feature women and men with experience in various parts of the innovation ecosystem,” a department spokesperson tells InnovationAus.com.

Conservative Language. A tipster has been in touch to let us know that the Australian Conservation Foundation is “preventing” their spokespeople from using the term “climate emergency”. Is this some grave Orwellian conspiracy, refusing to call the issue what it is? Not at all, the ACF tells us: “This is really splitting hairs stuff. The ACF is one of the loudest voices in Australia advocating for rapid action to stop climate change and halt the burning of fossil fuels. We use language and terms in our campaigns that the evidence we have gathered suggests motivates people to act, such as climate crisis.”

Victorian government checks in.  The Andrews government is apparently checking in with voters on a range of issues  — but, apparently, not how they’re going to vote. A tipster has dropped us a line to say they got an automated polll this week on behalf of the Victorian Government, asking “how they rated the Victorian Government on: leadership, climate change action, supporting police, supporting TAFE, and roads”. Our tipster was interested to hear that the poll said it was on behalf of the government and that voting intention wasn’t on the agenda.

Healthy job data. Well, so much for the lull in health employment. We recently noted that the health and social care workforce, which is Australia’s biggest industry in employment terms, had slowed its rapid expansion of recent years. Well, scratch that: according to detailed ABS employment data released yesterday, the health and social care workforce grew by a monster 3%, or 46,000 jobs, in trend terms in just the three months to August. Future reports may downgrade the figure but it is staggering growth (it was even larger, nearly 4%, in original terms) that takes the sector to 13.3% of the entire workforce. August also saw a couple of other milestones. For the first time ever, the education and training sector reached a million workers in original and seasonally adjusted terms, though it’s still just shy of the million mark in trend terms; in the last three years, that sector has put on nearly 90,000 workers as well as being one of our major exporters. On the negative side, what had looked like a pause in the long-term decline of manufacturing jobs in 2016 has definitely resumed, and that sector fell back below 900,000 jobs. It now employs 7.3% of the workforce in trend terms, its lowest level ever.

Whitlam to wow Wombat Hollow? Former New South Wales Liberal MP and former federal treasurer of the Liberal Party Michael Yabsley has attracted all manner of conservative stars (and Mark Latham) to the Wombat Hollow forum, held at his country property in the Southern Highlands. Previous guests have included Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, as well as Treasurer Scott Morrison former Labor leader Latham, broadcaster Alan Jones and Anthony Albanese’s bestie Max Moore-Wilton. The forum, associated with the moderate faction in the New South Wales Liberals, has now snagged former Malcolm Turnbull partner (and son of decidedly non-conservative former prime Minister Gough Whitlam) Nicholas Whitlam for a morning tea on October 4. Wombat Hollow is seen as a place for deal-making and behind-the-scenes intrigue for the Liberal Party, but that seems to be taking a backseat this time; Whitlam is there to talk with former leader of the NSW Liberals Kerry Chikarovski about his book on the Spanish Civil War,  Four Weeks One Summer.

 

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