Jul122017

UN aid officials in Yemen forced to shift resources from fighting hunger to cholera

United Nations

11 July 2017 – Unless the international community contributes $200 million to address the cholera outbreak in Yemen, the United Nations humanitarian arm will be forced to “reprogram” more resources tagged for malnutrition in the country already facing famine, a senior official today said.

“This unprecedented cholera epidemic would further weaken the resources, and the resilience that people had had over the last two and a half years of this war,” Jamie McGoldrick, the Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen, told journalists in Geneva.

There were now 313,538 suspected cases of cholera and 1,732 deaths, according to figures from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

About 40 per cent of the suspected cases and a quarter of the deaths were among children younger than 15 years old, particularly the malnourished. Older adults, pregnant women and people with chronic health conditions were among the greatest risk for death.

“All of this is entirely man-made, as a result of the conflict,” Mr. McGoldrick said by phone from Amman, Jordan.

He noted that two million additional people were added to the humanitarian case load since the start of the year as a result of the cholera outbreak, the looming famine, and the economic collapse.

Humanitarians were not as far ahead as they should be in terms of the cholera response, he noted, mainly due to the fact that they did not have enough resources to expand their operations into areas where health workers were working without pay.

“The actual system is in complete collapse,” he said.

The UN has received only one-third of the $2.1 billion it sought to provide food to the millions people facing famine in Yemen; separately, a $250 million funding appeal on cholera received only $47 million.

“Agencies have had to use resources which they had programmed otherwise, for example for food security or malnutrition,” said Mr. McGoldrick.

UN agency considers “shelving” cholera vaccine in Yemen

Meanwhile, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) is considering not shipping vaccines tagged for Yemen.

“A vaccination way ahead of an outbreak would be useful, but that would imply a huge amount of vaccines, taking into account all the countries where cholera was endemic,” Christian Lindmeier, WHO spokesperson, told journalists.

Jul112017

Remarks at Education Roundtable

Australia

PROFESSOR BYRNE:

Welcome, the Prime Minister of Australia, to our university campus in central London. Malcolm Turnbull I know from my many years in Australia, is an absolute leader, a champion for innovation. He has connections with the UK – he was here as a Rhodes Scholar – and deep friendships. I think he’d appreciate as much as any of us that this is an unbridled opportunity to build on long, deep friendships and really strengthen the relationships in education, in research, not only around universities but more broadly between our two countries going ahead.

So Prime Minister welcome. It’s wonderful to see you here. Perhaps I can invite you to say a few words and I’ll invite my colleagues to introduce themselves.

PRIME MINISTER:

Very good well thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me here today. The ties between Australia and UK universities of course, are about as intimate as they possibly could be. My old university, Sydney University was built to imitate, if you like, or recreate the spirit of Oxford and Cambridge. It’s motto, Sidere mens eadem mutato – the same mind under different stars – gives you an indication of the closeness of the relationship.

We all understand the closeness of the connections over so many years but let me get down to business. The most important thing I’d like to hear from you about, is about innovation and research and development.

We have a big innovation and science agenda in Australia. Innovation is the key to productivity. It’s absolutely essential. Our agenda is going well, we are seeing stronger investment in venture capital and startups, actually quite considerable strengthening there.

But one thing we do not do well enough in Australia, and you do much better than we do – and I’d like to hear from you, why you think that’s so – is that we don’t have enough collaboration between primary research and universities and industry.

In other words, we are not commercialising enough of our IP. In fact we were talking about it only at breakfast this morning Alexander with some of the CEO’s – now we’ve changed the research grant rules to give priority to or encouragement to that type of collaboration but given how close we are culturally and in every respect, with the UK, why are you – we believe that you’re doing it better than us, and how can we improve it. Because we want to make more of those great, Australian ideas and intellectual property turn into great Australian businesses and Australian jobs.

[ENDS]

Jul112017

Remarks at meeting with AstraZeneca CEO, Mr Pascal Soriot

Australia

PRIME MINISTER:

Thank you Mr Soriot, Chief Executive of AstraZeneca. You’re the leading manufacturer of pharmaceuticals in Australia and so committed to the excellence of your team in Australia and the big export business you’ve built out of Australia in this pharmaceutical industry. In advanced manufacturing, you’re investing another $100 million to expand your plant in Sydney.

That is great news. Congratulations, thank you. Now tell us all about it.

MR PASCAL SORIOT, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, ASTRAZENECA:

Yeah thank you Prime Minister, it’s been a great pleasure to announce this $100 million investment in Australia.

That comes on the back of another $100 million we’ve invested in the last few years in this facility. That is really a centre of excellence for us, for the manufacture of inhaler products for the treatment of asthma and COPD.

We intend through this incremental investment, we intend to generate about $2.6 billion of exports out of Australia to a great variety of markets including China. And these products are growing very very rapidly and we expect to generate even more investments in jobs in Australia over the next few years.

And I was saying a few minutes ago, it really pleases me particularly to make this investment because despite my accent I am an Australian by adoption. My children, my family live there and I plan to retire to Australia. So it’s really a very pleasing investment for me to able to announce today.

We have a tremendous team there, they’ve done a tremendous job. It’s really high quality manufacturing, really specialised manufacturing in the pharmaceutical industry and it’s our centre of excellence for the world.

PRIME MINISTER:

Well thank you Pascal, good luck and I hope it’s many years before you retire. You look very young and vigorous.

 [ENDS]

Jul112017

Remarks at Business Roundtable Breakfast

Australia

PRIME MINISTER:

Thank you Alexander, and thank you all for being here this morning.

Thank you for your commitment to Australia, for your investments in Australia.

Thank you Sanjeev Gupta for your decision to acquire Arrium. You’re going down to Australia tonight for ten days, and we look forward to you completing that acquisition and providing the investment support and security for the people of Whyalla and the steelmaking operations there which are so important.

I want to thank you all, as Alexander said, for your investment and partnership with Australia. The Australia-UK relationship of course is so close. There is no more trusted relationship at every level than we have with the UK. Whether it is at the level of family – most Australians have some ancestors in the UK and about five per cent of Australians were born in the UK – and of course our security ties. I’m sitting next to the former head of MI5. There were days when your predecessors wouldn’t have liked to have been with me, I think.

[Laughter]

I hope all is forgiven. All is forgiven, of course it is. Well I spent, with Alexander, part of yesterday in the Cobra Briefing Room deep underneath Whitehall with the Joint Intelligence Committee. It did occur to me that 30 years ago, if I had found my way into a basement under Whitehall, I mightn’t have been let out.

[Laughter]

So it is good, I do feel as though all is forgiven. That issue of trust, shared values, shared interest is so important. As Alexander said, we are committed to driving strong economic growth. At the election campaign, one of our slogans was jobs and growth; it’s not just a slogan, it’s an outcome, we’ve seen very strong jobs growth. We’ve had some terrific, just today – there’s always some new statistics – very strong business confidence figures out today published by the NAB. The economy is growing. We are recovering, and strongly, from the inevitable downturn of the mining investment boom. We had a huge increase in commodity prices, as you know, beginning about a decade ago. As Jan du Plessis from Rio knows very well. So massive investment and of course, it employed a lot of people, brought a lot of capital into the country when those big projects were built. Obviously the production continues, but the stimulus from the construction boom comes to an end.

Many people said we’d have a hard landing. Many distinguished economists said we would have a very hard landing. But in fact the resilience of the Australian economy, because of our commitment to free trade and open markets, enabled us to continue powering ahead.

Our growth, our economy, is much more diverse than it’s ever been. It is very much driven by our access to the big Asian markets, not just in exporting commodities, but services, agricultural products, food products. The economic growth in Tasmania for example, which has had tough economic times for a long time, is entirely driven by the export opportunities we’ve created.

That’s why when I was with Theresa May, the British Prime Minister yesterday, I was expressing great optimism for what she is going to be able to achieve in the post-Brexit environment because she is committed to Britain being an open trading economy, open to the world, recognizing just as we do that the more opportunities we have for our businesses to get out there and grow, the more opportunities for other businesses to come and invest with us and partner with us, the stronger we’ll be.

So I look forward to having a good discussion with you all and again, thank you for being here. Thank you for your confidence in Australia, because I can assure you it’s entirely reciprocated.

[ENDS]

Jul112017

Asia-Pacific moving in ‘wrong direction’ on some development targets, notes UN regional report

United Nations

11 July 2017 – Despite an impressive track record, the Asia-Pacific region will need to scale up development efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, the target envisioned, the United Nations development arm for the region has said.

“The region is making progress towards achieving the Goals on poverty, education, economic growth, industry and infrastructure, and life below water,” Shamshad Akhtar, the Executive Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), launching a report assessing regional development since 2000.

“[But] progress [has been slow] towards achieving food security, agricultural sustainability, good health and well-being for all, and gender equality,” she added.

The Asia-Pacific SDGs Baseline report, the first regional measurement methodology of its kind, was launched at the side lines of the ongoing 2017 session of the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, at the UN Headquarters, in New York.

The report has established a “baseline” for the SDGs through the assessment of regional progress since the turn of the millennium and has identified development gaps still need to be addressed to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

One of the key aspects highlighted by the report is that the region is moving in the “wrong direction” in terms of the targets related to on reducing inequalities, sustainable cities and communities, and ensuring responsible consumption and production.

“[This] trend must be reversed to achieve the Goals by 2030,” underscored ESCAP.

Furthermore, the report also noted the areas where data is insufficient or not available to accurately measure progress, such as in areas such as those to analyze the level of inequality.

“Data scarcity is a major challenge,” noted Ms. Akhtar in her foreword to the report, highlighting the need for a more integrated and inclusive approach for generating statistics.

“Addressing systemic data and statistics gaps for monitoring the SDGs will only be possible if resources are mobilized in a targeted and sustainable way to support the implementation of national strategies for statistical development,” she added.