Introducing the new minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians

Liberal Senator for Tasmania Richard Colbeck has been awarded the portfolios of Minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians and Minister for Youth and Sport.

Previously a building estimator and supervisor, managing director and proprietor of a building consultancy before entering politics in 2002, Senator Colbeck served as the Minister for Tourism and International Education under the Malcolm Turnbull government.

“It is an important time in these portfolios, particularly with the Aged Care Royal Commission underway and the need to support senior Australians in their later life." he said in a media release on Monday.

Want to know more? Visit his website here - http://www.richardcolbeck.com.au/

Liberal MP Stuart Robert has also been appointed as the first ever dedicated minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme under the new-look Morrison government. 

9 comments

 

Well they want to open up ALL the fishing spots -- which is a very bad idea -- as they will be able to fish in marine parks this is so darn wrong --  as there are so many that just don't care and catch heaps of fish and take it home put it in the freezer and down the track it is thrown out -- I come from a place where we have  game fishing every year and it is horrid the amount of fish that are caught and tortured for hours on end -- it nothing more than a BLOOD sport! 

Sure be able to catch a few fish for a family meal -- but stop the fishing in protected places!

Also the people that fish for a living are the worst,  they leave their nets and their lines /hooks etc to wreck the rest of the marine life AND they net EVERYTHING and pull it on board and so much other marine life is killed unnecessarily and is just thrown over board.

 what fish?

Yes ABE it is getting that way -- what is wrong with this idiot and uncaring, unthinking Morrison and his mob

Sorry Abe what has that got to do with another idot being incharge of aged care and other issues he knows nothing about?

Ted perhaps Mr Colbeck will every senior citizen a fishing rod!

Not a bad idea. Confucius said, give a man a rod, teach him to fish, he will never go hungry.

I would HOPE that the person given the Aged care and senior Australians portfolio would just have that to look after -- NOT ALSO Youth and Sport.-- God knows aged care needs a HELL of a LOT of looking into! 

They just show they don't care a hoot about the Aged or their care!

I'd like to congratulate Ken Wyatt for the work he did in his time as Minister for Aged Care. He worked hard and achieved a lot. 

I am sure you are probably right OM. But just remind me, what exactly did he achieve in the portfolio for Aged Care.?

Ken Wyatt did sweet BA for aged care -- just take a look at it and the horror that those poor people had to put up with and STILL are.

The same as Chris Pyne when he was in charge of it under Howard -- he -- Pyne -- even stated that he did not even LIKE old people!

That's nonsense PlanB, everyone likes old people!! Although I do have a confession.. as a toddler when my Granny tried to kiss me, I would run away. 

Just like all Liberal Polititions they would prefer if we all just dissapeared so they can all forget about us. We are in the way of their filling their pockets with cash that should rightfully be used in our support. 

Yes auzie,  that dead right and these that are in charge now are too young to even know what being aged is like and what the aged people need.

 

I don’t have a problem with Richard Colbeck having the portfolio for Aged Care..but he is also handling Youth and Sport. Too much in my opinion for a job to be well done.

One does not have to be aged themselves to have experience with what is required to enhance the lives of our older generation...just a lot of knowledgeable people around who can help. Hopefully he will have some good advisers.


And he will need the good advisors when the Royal Commission hands down its report!

You may well have a good point tere Sophie.

Both of those need their own minister. Youth is very important too so there are jobs and someone listening to them because their needs are totally different from us oldies.

Sport as well? Now that is ridiculous, how does that connect to Aged Care?

 

What gets me is when they appoint someone to do something they have no experience in that particular field. This guy was a building estimator, what has that got to do with aged care and why give him youth and sport as well, nothing will get done properly if he has that much on his plate with no experience in either field.

Why would the same person handle Old Age Care and the also Youth and Sport? Aren't those quite opposite portfolios?

Isn't it a travesty?

Don't we have enough people in Parliament? Not enough people on enormous salaries that have little to do and fall asleep during sessions??

This country is going really crazy with the polltical scene becoming more and more ridiculous each day, with men like that red faced Joyce daring even to open his uncultured and uninteresting mouth to insult others better than him, when he should have been dismissed from any public or political scene in shame, or those who used the job to make themselves richer instead of serving the people and are given positions of great responsibility that most are not capable to even understand?

It would be a good idea to educate our children in most aspects of political and decent country development, economically and humanly, with integrity and openness and teaching them to strive for a better living for all people in the country.

Maybe then we could enjoy some decent and intelligent politicians, not abusers and grabbers. It would be better to have an informed and interested Prime Minister than a very rich one!

But, of course, that is all Utopia in a country like ours where the British laws of the 13th century are still in use and and the system has changed very little.

Maybe one day (I doubt it but it is possible) Australia will be its own country, with its own appropiate laws and where government will be chosen by merit and capable knowledge, not stupid long lists of names that mean nothing to most and are confusing and unbelivably obligatory to chose a few from. And by politicians telling us how great they are and all they have done and will do for us, all false.

I do not believe there is a single politician in todays lists of men and women in government that really and trully is interested  only in the "best for the people" and knows how to bring it about. And don't tell us how bad the opponents are, tell us what you have "really done" in your time in government.

Show us how good you are to govern us better and how interested and well informed and educated you are to be able to be a politician and serve us well.

What comes to mind is a comment by Mr Abbot a while ago when he was Prime Minister of Australia and which shows the lack of cultural knowledge that a "Rhodes scholar" exhibited, as many others have though the times; he said he would be talking to his counterpart in "Canadia", calling that country by a wrong name!

I think most people, even school children, know that the name of that counytry is CANADA not "CANADIA".

That gives us an idea of the Rhodes schoolar education in thepolitical arena! Any more?

Couple of points, Alexia, the number of representatives is dictated by the population of Australia. You may be aware that Burke on the Labor side did exactly the same as Joyce with a member of his staff, left his wife and children to run off with her plus he wined and dined her on a trip through Europe at taxpayers expense. We don't currently have a very rich PM although Rudd and Turnbull were both millionaires but I don't understand why a rich person should be excluded from public office.

Politicians must go through a process before they are preselected and then must face the voters who decide whether they are capable enough to represent them. It's called democracy, Alexia. We have had politicians in the past who left school at an early age and according to your criteria would be unacceptable. Ben Chifley was a train driver who rose to become one of our great PM's. Paul Keating left school at age 14 and was another great PM. Mick Young was a shearer and roustabout before entering parliament and became a Minister in various portfolios as well as Leader of the House, a most demanding position.

That's a bit of a rant isn't it! Glad you got that off your chest.

Shorten and his current wife were both still married when she became pregnant.

Surely you have inadvertently mispronounced a word here and there. How childish is your comment re Mr Abbott.

Let's not forget Ms Plibersek who refererred to Africa as 'a country!

How many in the current  ALP parliamentary party have had jobs outside of the unions?

Ps

I suggest you check your own spelling and grammar..

Tony Abbott has and continues to make some ridiculous comments -- and statements -- here are just a FEW of them! there are MANY more

Shit happens'

We've all said it. But for Tony Abbott it became a disaster. Five months after an October 2010 trip to visit Australian troops in Afghanistan, the Seven Network broadcast footage of Mr Abbott discussing the death of Lance Corporal Jared MacKinney.

"It's pretty obvious that, well, sometimes shit happens, doesn't it?" Abbott said.

Confronted with the vision by the network's political editor Mark Riley, Abbott argued he had been taken out of context and that he would "never seek to make light of the death of an Australian soldier".

When asked how he had been taken out of context, Abbott went silent. For more than 20 seconds.

"I've given you the response you deserve," he (eventually) finished.

The virginity question

Way back when he was a newly minted opposition leader, Mr Abbott went on a charm offensive which included an interview with The Australian Women's Weekly featuring Mr Abbott's thoughts on life, love and the universe.

The one time trainee priest was asked about sex before marriage: "I would say to my daughters, if they were to ask me this question, I would say.....it is the greatest gift you can give someone, the ultimate gift of giving and don't give it to someone lightly, that is what I would say."

The January 2010 interview also contained the following gem about Mr Abbott's drug taking experiences: "To be sociable I puffed on a marijuana cigarette, but I didn't inhale. I don't even inhale normal cigarettes. I just hate the idea of drawing smoke into my lungs so when it comes to getting stoned in that way I was a complete failure."

Bernie Banton 'not pure of heart'

Bernie Banton was the face of asbestos-disease sufferers who campaigned for victims of James Hardie products until his death in November 2007.

In the middle of the 2007 election campaign, Mr Banton had arranged a meeting in the office of the then health minister Tony Abbott to present a petition. Mr Abbott missed the meeting.

Infuriated, Mr Banton called Mr Abbott a "gutless creep". But Mr Abbott dismissed the petition a "stunt".

"Let's be upfront about this. I know Bernie is very sick, but just because a person is sick doesn't necessarily mean that he is pure of heart in all things," Mr Abbott told the Nine Network. He later apologised.

The carbon tax repeal and women

In an interview with Nine Network's Today show at the end of last year, Mr Abbott prompted a widespread backlash after declaring abolishing the carbon tax was the best thing his government had achieved for women in 2014.

"As many of us know, women are particularly focused on the household budget and the repeal of the carbon tax means a $550 a year benefit for the average family."

It followed his infamous 2010 remarks while opposition leader that an emissions trading scheme would hurt housewives.

"What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially it's going to go up in price and their own power bills when they switch the iron on are going to go up," Mr Abbott said at the time.

Making Prince Philip a knight

When asked to explain Tony Abbott's baffling decision to offer a knighthood to Prince Philip in the Australia Day honours, a ministerial staffer speculated that the Prime Minister had only intended to get "up the nose" of the left wing media.

But the uproar was very much mainstream.

Conservative columnist Andrew Bolt, one of Abbott's fiercest supporters, called it "pathetically stupid" and potentially fatal.

The friendless captain's call led directly to the "near-death" spill motion against the PM a fortnight later.

Australian settlement before Europeans

Answering a question about foreign investment at an economic conference in Melbourne, Mr Abbott said Australia owed its existence to "a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um, scarcely settled, Great South Land."

Mr Abbott's chief Indigenous adviser, Warren Mundine, called the comment "silly" and "bizarre", while Labor senator Nova Peris, the first indigenous woman to be elected to federal Parliament, said it was "highly offensive".

"British settlement was not foreign investment. It was occupation," Senator Peris said.

'As dead as the former Liberal leader's political prospects'

In 2005, then health minister Tony Abbott was forced to apologise after it emerged he had joked at a Liberal Party function about John Brogden just hours after the then NSW Liberal leader attempted suicide.

Asked about a particular health reform proposal, Abbott reportedly said: "If we did that, we would be as dead as the former Liberal leader's political prospects."

The comment was made the day after Mr Brogden was found unconscious in his electorate office with self-inflicted wounds. Outraged mental health advocates branded the remarks appalling and insensitive and the opposition called for his resignation.

'Lifestyle choice'

During an interview in Kalgoorlie, Mr Abbott backed the WA government's plan to close 150 regional communities and said taxpayers should not be asked to fund the "lifestyle choice" of Australians living in remote areas.

The comments triggered immediate condemnation from indigenous leaders, including Mr Abbott's adviser, Warren Mundine. Greens senator Rachel Siewert described Mr Abbott's statement as "unbelievably racist" and Labor demanded Mr Abbott apologise, which he refused to do.

The day after the interview, Mr Abbott appeared on Alan Jones' Sydney radio show and said he was just being "realistic" and "stating a general principle".

Candidate's sex appeal

During the 2014 election campaign, Mr Abbott spoke candidly about the new Liberal candidate for the western Sydney electorate of Lindsay, Fiona Scott.

When asked to compare Ms Scott with former MP Jackie Kelly, Mr Abbott replied: "They're young, feisty, I think I can probably say have a bit of sex appeal and they're just very connected with the local area," he said.

The next day he defended the comments and said: "As the kids suggested to me, I had a dad moment. A daggy dad moment."

'Holocaust of job losses'

In question time last month, Mr Abbott accused Labor of causing a "holocaust of job losses". He quickly withdrew the remark and later apologised after it sparked an immediate outcry.

Mr Abbott made the comment after he was pressed in question time about rising unemployment and the government's plans to potentially buy submarines from overseas, sending jobs offshore.

Related Article'Lifestyle choice': Tony Abbott stands by controversial comments despite indigenous leader backlash

"Under members opposite defence jobs in this country declined by 10 per cent. There was a holocaust of job losses in defence industries under members opposite."

 

Alexia, the reason this government has the one minister to steer policy for both young and old says a lot about its inclusive nature. The time for divisive politics is over, the adults are in charge now. 

Adrianus,

”the adults are in charge now”? Who was in charge before the election?

Same adults but lead by that childish Turnbull. I'm just saying there's a very stark contrast now.

 

 

 

Congratulations to Ken Wyatt..a truly historic event.

Member for Hasluck Ken Wyatt (left) is sworn in as the as Minister for Indigenous Australians by Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove

Australia's new Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, wore a booka to the swearing-in ceremony.

It was given to Wyatt by Perth's Noongar elders and he wears it on special occasions. The red-tailed black cockatoo feather on the front symbolises leadership.

What does the possum symbolise?

Congratulations also to the new Morrison Cabinet and good to see the addition of a few more women in the mix.

Photo Credit: The Australian

Ken Wyatt is sworn in as Minister for Indigenous Australians by Australia's Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove during the swearing-in ceremony at Government House.Prime Minister Scott Morrison poses with the members of his new ministry at Government House. Picture: Gary Ramage

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