The Australian Christian Lobby is wrong. Australians don"t support a gag rule | Rebecca Huntley

It’s the photo that launched a thousand memes. The freshly inaugurated Donald Trump, surrounded by a posse of white dudes signing a directive reinstating a “global gag rule” banning US-funded groups around the world from discussing abortion.

I saw the news about it on social media, shuddered, donated to Planned Parenthood and then felt just a little bit more grateful that I live in this country, a place where abortion and reproductive rights aren’t the hysterical hot button issues they are in the United States. I’ve only recently learned that while we might not share their toxic politics around reproductive rights, we have in the past taken America’s lead on the implementation of the global gag rule. It was last removed in Australia in 2009 by Kevin Rudd.

If the Australian Christian Lobby had its way, we’d follow America’s lead yet again. They are currently engaged in a pretty intense letter writing campaign calling for the re-instatement of an Australian global gag rule.

What is the ‘global gag rule’, and why does Trump support it?

Groups like Family Planning NSW are calling for funding to aid programs, specifically in Pacific Island countries, to be maintained in the May budget and with good reason. The Pacific has some of the worst reproductive and sexual health outcomes globally, with high rates of maternal and infant deaths, unintended and teenage pregnancies, sexual violence and unacceptably high rates of cervical cancer deaths.

Women giving birth in the Pacific are dying at 34 times the rate of women in Australia. Women in the Pacific are dying at up to 10 times the rate of women in Australia from cervical cancer. In developing regions, eight in 10 women with curable sexually transmitted infections do not receive treatment. Every two minutes, a woman dies in pregnancy or childbirth – the majority of these deaths are preventable. The main purpose of the global gag rule might be to stop aid agencies providing advice about abortion but the direct consequence is also to stop them providing a whole range of other services associated with sexual and reproductive health.

The people pushing for a gag rule in this country like to think they speak for the silent majority of Australians. Yet there is no evidence they do. Figures from last week’s Essential Report show Australians strongly support the nation’s commitment to providing important health services to women in Pacific Island nations.

In fact, 89% of Australians feel it is important women in Pacific Island countries have access to sexual and reproductive health services like contraception, cervical cancer screening and family planning. A strong majority of men (85%) and an even stronger majority of women (91%) support Pacific Island women having access to these services. There is very little variation in support across generations and party affiliation.

How important is it that women in Pacific Island countries have access to sexual and reproductive health services – like contraception, cervical cancer screening and family planning?

On the issue of whether our foreign aid budget should support the provision of these services in those countries, again there is strong support across gender and generation. This isn’t a women’s issue, it’s a community concern.

How important is it that Australia, through its foreign aid budget, supports Pacific Island countries to provide sexual and reproductive health services including contraception, cervical screening and family planning?

Finally, on the question of the global gag rule, 67% of Australians (64% men and 70% women) would be concerned if Australia also introduced this rule and stopped aid to groups that provide family planning and sexual and reproductive health services in Pacific Island countries. While opposition to the rule is highest among Greens voters, 62% of Coalition voters report being concerned about such a move.

How concerned would you be if Australia introduced a global gag rule and stopped aid to groups that provide family planning and sexual and reproductive health services in Pacific Island countries?

So much for the silent minority. Only 6% of those polled in the Essential Report would be unconcerned about a gag rule being reinstated. It’s clear that bringing vaccines, maternal health care, family planning and cervical cancer screening to the Pacific Island region is the intent of men and women across Australia.

Australians might be fascinated with Donald Trump. They might applaud his recent action in Syria and some of us might even sympathise with the idea of a ban on Muslim immigration. But the research shows there is no widespread support for a Trump-style gag rule that puts a rightwing Christian agenda before the health and wellbeing of Pacific Island women.

The Australian Christian Lobby is wrong. Australians don"t support a gag rule | Rebecca Huntley

Never mind America, access to abortion is a "nightmare" for many Australians | Van Badham

It was unsurprising to American women that their new president moved so swiftly to limit women’s access to reproductive autonomy. Less than a week into his regime, President Trump has reinstated a Ronald Reagan policy known as the “global gag rule”.

Abortion wars are, of course, a visible hallmark of American politics, where denying a woman’s right to choose has long been used as a wedge by Republicans to chip white voters away from supporting Democrat candidates. But while a thumping majority of Australians support women’s abortion rights – around 80%, according to reliable polls – the gap between what we say we believe in here and what we legislate is larger than many would imagine.

The danger of balance-of-power politics in our own system of government has made women’s bodies expendable to the politics of placating crossbenchers. Australia even implemented a “global gag” rule of its own when the former Liberal prime minister John Howard did a deal with conservative Catholic senator from Tasmania, Brian Harradine in 1996. Only when Obama overturned a Bush-era gag in 2009 did Labor’s Rudd government finally get around to rescinding Howard and Harradine’s work.

There’s an issue of restriction that also hits closer to home. For a pro-choice country, Australia’s provision of abortion is limited by a hodge-podge of clashing jurisdictional legislation and some old-fashioned under resourcing.

It may surprise many Australians to learn that even though the ACT, Tasmania and Victoria have recently passed legislation that prevents anti-choice activists harassing women around health clinics, only the ACT allows women to access safe, legal abortion-on-demand at any time.

Victoria and Tasmania both provide conditional services based on length of gestation; and South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory make it legal only with certain caveats. In New South Wales and Queensland, abortion remains in the criminal code.

It’s a position both defiant of popular opinion – in Queensland, four out of five voters support abortion rights – and reality. The Australian family planning organisation, Children by Choice, cites studies that half of Australian pregnancies are unplanned, and lists the complex reasons that compromise women’s access to effective contraception (beyond the very real possibility, too, of simple contraceptive failure): lack of agency in relationships, lack of information about contraception, lack of access to it in isolated or rural areas, cost, privacy concerns, cultural dislocation, effects of alcohol or drugs, the imposition of a medical practitioner’s beliefs. Violent relationships. Forced sex. Coercion.

But these considerations have not been enough to either rewrite the law or improve present circumstances in New South Wales, where campaigner Claire Pullen from Our Bodies, Our Choices NSW is one of many agitating for a realisation of rights. Although provision is made for women to access abortion if medical professionals and/or a court determine a pregnancy poses “serious harm” to the woman in question, there are, says Pullen, three barriers to access that remain in the way. “The first one is the legal barrier,” she says, “Since court rulings on this issue in the 1970s, no one’s been charged or convicted with administering or purveying an abortion. But you only need one activist police commissioner for that to end … and we’re due for a whole new set of police commissioners here.”

What this means is women seeking terminations are obliged into seeking referrals, as well as administrative and physical access to clinics that will perform surgical procedures. “The second barrier is geography,” Pullen explains, “Vast swathes of regional New South Wales have no accessible local services – at the one regional clinic in Albury, women patients have been subjected to notorious levels of harassment by anti-choice picketers.”

The third barrier, she says, is resourcing. “There are no public hospitals that officially offer abortion services in this state,” says Pullen, “there are only private clinics. New South Wales has some of the biggest public hospitals in Australia, with excellent ob/gyn doctors and services, but as they don’t get public funds to perform abortions, they’re more or less obliged to refer patients to the Marie Stopes clinic across the road.”

It’s not the only obstruction women face for meeting their healthcare needs. “We could also consider the stigma, the stalking and the public harassment that women endure when they’re accessing these services as a fourth barrier,” says Pullen. “Women outside clinics often face a line of people with graphic and inaccurate signs – they’re handed plastic foetuses by protestors, told they are going to hell and shouted at by fanatics. We don’t have an exclusion zone bill like they do in Victoria, although Penny Sharpe in the NSW upper house is fighting to get one through.”

The situation is similarly dire in Queensland, says Kate Marsh, the spokesperson for Children by Choice in Queensland. The geography of that enormous state combines with its archaic legislation to seriously limit women’s access to abortion providers, whether surgical or medicinal. “The understanding about when abortion is lawful is based only on case law,” says Marsh. “Because there’s no judicial definition of ‘serious harm’, many doctors are understandably reluctant to become involved in providing termination of pregnancy.”

If it seems crazy that the abortion pill – which accounts for almost 100% of abortions in Norway, and two-thirds in the UK, is only used in 23% of Australian terminations – legal restrictions explain why. “For medical abortions – which is the use of the abortion pill – you can only legally access those services if you’re before nine weeks gestation,” says Marsh of present Queensland law. “And outside of [Queensland’s] south east corner, there are only two providers of surgical abortions – in Rockhampton and Townsville.”

This isn’t just bad news for women in Cairns, or the state’s vast west, explains Marsh. “The services in Rockhampton and Townsville only operate one day a fortnight, because they fly doctors up from Brisbane and sometimes from interstate, depending on who is available.

“Even for women who identify their pregnancy early, to be able to confirm it with a doctor, access an ultrasound – and some of these women in remote communities have to travel just to get an ultrasound – and then wait for an available appointment at a clinic, that can push women past the point of the gestational cut-offs imposed at those clinics, which is 15 weeks. There are a couple of clinics (in the south east) that go up to 17 weeks, and there is one clinic on the Gold Coast that goes up to 19 weeks. After that, you’re flying to Melbourne.”

What this means for rural, isolated or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in remote communities is not only dangerous, but medically, physically, existentially disempowering. “It’s very much dependent on your local hospital, the individual personnel who staff that hospital and who you talk to when you get there,” says Marsh. “We have women who have been pregnant as a result of sexual assault, whose local hospital has refused to accept a referral from their GP to assess them.”

While Children by Choice fundraises to provide access to transport for women in these situations, their resources and their scope to help all who need it is limited. Beyond what her organisation can provide, receiving help, says Marsh, is a “postcode lottery” of geographical and economic privilege.

“Queensland health told a parliamentary inquiry last year that just under 300 abortions were performed in public hospitals in 2015 – and the figure for private clinics that same year was around 11,000,” says Marsh, “Women who live in metro areas and who have money, a credit card, or have friends and family to support them – they can get an abortion, no problem. But people who are disadvantaged, or who very young, may not have friends and family they can call on, women in remote areas or women experiencing violence – it’s a different situation.”

“It sounds like a nightmare,” I say to her when she tells me this.

“It is,” she says, “It is a nightmare.”

Never mind America, access to abortion is a "nightmare" for many Australians | Van Badham

Youthful Australians increasingly jobless, unmarried and residing at residence

Youthful Australians are much better educated than in the past but far more most likely to be unemployed, unmarried and residing at residence with their parents, a snapshot of demographic trends has discovered.

Much more young men and women are joining the dole queue, with the youth unemployment charge growing from 8.eight% in 2008 to 13.3% in 2014, according to the biennial welfare report card from the Australian Institute of Well being and Welfare (AIHW).

Relevant: ‘Punitive’ strategy to withhold dole will harm domestic violence victims, inquiry told

The kind of function youthful people are engaging in has also modified, with one particular in two getting in informal operate in 2013, compared with just above 1 in 3 (35%) in 1994. For the initial time, the youth component-time employment price in 2013 exceeded the youth total-time employment charge, at 44% and 43% respectively.

The federal government has proposed a 4-week freeze on jobseekers below the age of 25 accessing welfare payments, as a way of receiving more younger people into work.

Critics say it does not address the underlying triggers of unemployment, and is “punitive”, and unlikely to pass the Senate due to a lack of assistance from crossbenchers.

The statistics partly reflect the trend for younger folks to keep in education longer, with three out of 10 youthful individuals combining perform and schooling. 4 out of 5 Australians aged between 15 and 24 are totally engaged in schooling, education or employment.

Indigenous Australians and these residing in rural and remote communities, younger people with disabilities, and younger folks who do not have English language capabilities are considerably much less likely than broader society to be in schooling, employment and instruction.

Regardless of that, government welfare paying has been growing far more gradually than financial growth, at 2.six% and two.9% respectively.

Associated: Plan to delay dole for young jobseekers unlikely to pass Senate

The biggest proportion of welfare expenditure, at $ 93.1bn, went to the aged pension and disability and carer payments. That compares with $ 7.5bn spent on unemployment benefits, and $ 36bn on welfare companies.

The greater youth unemployment rate means dad and mom have to wait longer ahead of becoming empty nesters. In 1997, 50% of youngsters aged 18–24 lived with their mothers and fathers. By 2012–13, this had improved to 60%.

Australians are also marrying and obtaining youngsters later. The quantity of ladies who received married in between the ages of twenty and 24 fell from 34 per one,000 individuals in 2003 to 25 per one,000 people in 2013. Males are marrying even later on in lifestyle, with the variety of twenty-24-yr-olds marrying dropping from 19 per 1,000 to 15 over the identical 10-yr time period.

The common age of 1st-time mothers in Australia has risen from 25.four in 1971 to thirty.eight in 2013. In the exact same 12 months, the average age of a very first-time father was 33.

Female workplace participation has gone up too, with three out of four females amongst 25-34 in paid operate by 2014.

Although the huge bulk – 68% – very own their own home with or with no a mortgage, the quantity of folks renting has risen drastically from 18% in 1994, to 25%. The amount of older Australians who very own their houses outright has fell from 78% in 2002 to 71% a decade later on.

The percentage of Indigenous Australians who own their houses rose from 22% in 1994 to 30% in 2013.

Domestic violence continues to be the main driver of homelessness in Australia, with the huge bulk of people in search of homelessness companies currently being girls and youngsters.

Household violence is much worse for Indigenous ladies – they are 34 times more likely to be admitted to hospital due to domestic violence than the wider public.

Youthful Australians increasingly jobless, unmarried and residing at residence

Self-testing for HIV will soon be accessible for Australians

Australians will soon be ready to test themselves for HIV after the federal government announced that restrictions avoiding the manufacture and sale of self-testing kits had been lifted.

The government has unveiled its 2014-2017 nationwide techniques on HIV, hepatitis B and C, sexually transmissible infections (STIs) and a particular approach on targeting blood-borne viruses and STIs in the Indigenous community.

Its “ambitious” HIV approach aims to lessen the sexual transmission of HIV by 50% by 2015, as a essential phase in the direction of a 2020 elimination target.

To aid it attain this objective the government has eliminated a restriction avoiding the manufacture and sale of HIV home self-check kits.

The wellness minister, Peter Dutton, stated on Monday that firms can now apply to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) for approval to supply their check kits, which will be capable to be sold direct to consumers.

Dutton also announced that from following July these living with HIV will be capable to entry their medicine from a pharmacy of their choice, rather than a hospital.

The head of infectious ailments at the Alfred hospital in Melbourne, Professor Sharon Lewin, said the HIV approach set some “ambitious targets”.

“Australia has taken a rather daring step doing work towards getting rid of new HIV infections by 2020,” she said.

“The improved availability of testing and higher ease of accessing treatment method via neighborhood-based mostly pharmacies will each drastically aid in lowering new infections.”

There had been one,200 new HIV infections last yr and the highest prevalence of HIV in Australia is nevertheless amid gay males.

“A big challenge will be in getting rid of new infections in men who have sex with males,” Lewin stated.

Meanwhile, the government programs to halve the incidence of new hepatitis C infections by 2017.

Chronic hepatitis C affects about 230,000 people in Australia and is a top result in of liver cancer.

Dutton said the TGA lately approved a new hepatitis C treatment referred to as sofosbuvir (Sovaldi, Gilead).

This remedy can reduce therapy time and improve remedy charges for hepatitis C to 90%.

Hepatitis Australia, which worked with the government to produce the nationwide strategies, explained immediate action was essential to halt the increasing prices of new infections and “appallingly reduced ranges of remedy”.

“With out urgent investment in rigorous therapy applications, Australia will carry on to fail in its efforts to halt escalating costs of serious liver ailment due to chronic hepatitis B or C,” said Hepatitis Australia’s acting chief executive, Kevin Marriott.

Self-testing for HIV will soon be accessible for Australians

Mental illness has an effect on a fifth of youthful Australians

1 in 5 younger Australians are dealing with mental sickness, but much more than 60% felt unpleasant in search of expert aid, in accordance to a new report by Mission Australia and the Black Dog Institute.

The review of 15- to 19-year-olds across the nation located 21% of the 15,000 surveyed had been battling a probable psychological sickness. The charge between females in that age group was much increased than amongst young guys – 26% compared with 14%.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and young individuals with a disability had been also much more likely to be experiencing psychological illness.

But less than forty% felt cozy seeking info, advice or assistance from community agencies, online counselling or telephone hotlines.

“The confronting findings in this report illustrate the important challenges several of our younger people are dealing with when it comes to psychological distress and mental wellness issues,” Mission Australia’s CEO, Catherine Yeomans, mentioned on Wednesday.

“We know that a lot of of our youth are struggling with complicated problems, and it’s impacting on their ability to transition with self-confidence into adulthood.”

Yeomans explained early intervention and help is crucial to help people vulnerable.

The Youth Mental Well being Report was based mostly on a survey that asked respondents to response concerns about their experiences of anxiety and depressive signs over a period of 4 weeks.

• Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can speak to Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Suicide Get in touch with Back Services 1300 659 467.

Mental illness has an effect on a fifth of youthful Australians

Australians want to tax rich, commit on overall health and schools, depart own tax as is

Australians want the wealthy taxed much more, public investing on health and schooling improved, and their personal tax charge left specifically in which it is, in accordance to a survey released on Friday.

In sharp contrast to measures in the federal spending budget, Australians polled by the thinktank Per Capita uncovered a dramatic shift in the direction of support for investing much more on publicly funded solutions, and an improve in the perception that the nation’s wealthiest are not doing their honest share of the heavy lifting.

“Between 2010 and late 2012, our views of the tax system grew to become steadily significantly less generous – we felt more and more that we have been paying also considerably tax and our support for public investing, although higher, was falling,” mentioned the yearly survey’s summary.

“These sentiments have now reversed … [Australians] now reject the strategy to investing cuts mooted by the government’s commission of audit.”

The survey, carried out in February shortly right after the initial Commission of Audit report, found 70% of Australians feel the government need to spend much more on public companies. Just eight% believed it ought to commit less.

The survey also discovered that 53% of individuals believed they have been paying the correct quantity of tax, an approximate 17% swing away from the proportion who believe they pay out also much tax, when in contrast to the 2012 results.

“It’s a striking reversal from a quite consistent trend across the very first three years of the survey that noticed Australians feeling less generous about their tax contributions, to a place now exactly where men and women are saying, ‘We really don’t truly feel more than taxed and instead we want to make sure our public companies are protected and expanded,’ ” Per Capita’s executive director, David Hetherington, told Guardian Australia.

The survey discovered that a lot more than 7 out of ten people believe higher income earners do not shell out their fair share, but the final results revealed a level of “cognitive dissonance” between people who really don’t believe they count in the class.

Practically half the respondents who earned a high cash flow and who explained they paid also much tax also believed that other substantial revenue earners pay out too tiny.

“We’ve seen over a variety of many years that high income earners’ perception of what a large income is in Australia aren’t well grounded,” Hetherington mentioned. “People who are wealthy on an goal basis, do not see themselves as wealthy or higher cash flow earning.”

“We did ask how people would like to see public companies funded, and one particular of the responses was ‘higher revenue tax prices on the best five% of earners’ and that was the most well-liked.”

Subsequent in line, with 23%, was removal of tax concessions on superannuation and housing.

Hetherington explained the survey occurred weeks outside the normal “policy wonk” discussion that heats up shortly before a federal spending budget, so it was unlikely men and women were influenced by speculation all around what the treasurer, Joe Hockey, would reveal.

“However, I would say although that the broader political debate is a aspect that has an effect on the survey results,” he explained.

“I think what it shows is that the government has misread the mood of the Australian people, and in certain misread the value that people area on public solutions. We see a great deal of talk about value of residing pressures, but one particular of the factors that feeds into the way households perceive cost of living is entry to substantial top quality, minimal expense public services.

“If all of a sudden the kids’ Tafe program has gone up by a issue of four or five, we’re going to charge you $ 7 to go to the physician, we are continuing to subsidise non government schools at the cost of public colleges, I think individuals come to feel that.”

Far more than half of respondents mentioned that if the government is to boost funding to public schools, it must be accomplished by cutting paying on non-government colleges.

Australians want to tax rich, commit on overall health and schools, depart own tax as is

Joe Hockey tells Australians $7 physician charge is more affordable than "a couple of beers"

Joe Hockey has taken aim at Australians who are “screaming” about the end of cost-free visits to the physician, declaring the new $ 7 charge was the value of “only a couple of beers or 1 third of a packet of cigarettes”.

And in a blunt response to a question about how a youthful man or woman who had misplaced unemployment benefits would be capable to afford it, the treasurer said: “I would count on you’d be in a work.”

Hockey made the remarks for the duration of a radio interview on Thursday as he continued to push the case for the hard measures outlined in the Abbott government’s first price range, including a new $ seven co-payment to check out a GP or accessibility out-of-hospital pathology and diagnostic imaging companies from July following 12 months.

The doctor will be allowed to pocket $ 2 of the charge, while $ five goes to the government, raising $ 3.5bn more than four many years. For sufferers with concession cards and kids aged underneath sixteen the fee will apply for only the first ten services in each and every yr.

The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, who will provide his price range reply speech on Thursday night, has indicated Labor will vote towards the measure, as will the Greens and Palmer United party, making certain it can’t pass the Senate.

Hockey told the ABC’s AM plan he was stunned about criticism of the measure, with the income paid to go to a new health-related analysis fund.

“One of the issues that really astounds me is some men and women are screaming about [the] $ 7 co-payment,” the treasurer mentioned.

“One packet of cigarettes costs $ 22 that gives you 3 visits to the medical professional. You can invest just in excess of $ 3 on a middy of beer so that’s two middies of beer to go to the medical professional. Let’s have some point of view about the fees of taking care of our health, and is a mother or father really going to deny their sick child a check out to the physician which would be the equivalent payment of a couple of beers or a single third of a packet of cigarettes?”

The interviewer, Chris Uhlmann, replied that a 27-yr-old who had misplaced his or her task and could not accessibility unemployment rewards may not have the selection of a middy of beer, a packet of cigarettes or a go to to the medical professional. The budget outlined changes to Newstart and Youth Allowance for unemployed people beneath 30 that would see them get no revenue help for six months at a time.

Hockey stated: “I would anticipate you’d be in a occupation. That would be the starting level, you’d be in a task, and we require you to work … Almost everything we are performing is about lifting the tide so that we can get much more folks into jobs.”

Pressed on the plight of folks on fixed incomes, such as pensioners, Hockey explained: “Well we do have to make selections and undoubtedly our health care [has] received to be our primary consideration. The point is we make selections each and every day. I think people require to target on their wellness over the medium and prolonged phrase and to do so we’ve got to invest a little bit and a co-payment is going to support to do that.”

Hockey stated he and Abbott have been ready to talk to senators about the budget measures.

“Senators are human beings and they do have their own special way of passing legislation. We’re often prepared to speak to them,” Hockey stated.

Joe Hockey tells Australians $7 physician charge is more affordable than "a couple of beers"