Business News - WA
At Close of Business podcast September 16 2024
(upbeat music) - All the latest business news from WA, deliver daily. At close of business, news briefing. - Good afternoon and welcome to that close of business podcast. I'm Nadia Boudihajo and I'll be reading your Monday headlines. Western Australia's cottage meat industry is at risk of collapse after one of the last large abattoirs decided it could no longer process meat from small producers. Duttonup butchering company last week gave paddock to plate farmers. Four weeks notice it would seize custom kills. The West Fork backed joint venture is understood to have hit capacity constraints. This has impacted the ability to process its own products which underpin the 270 staff operation. Duttonup butchering company was understood to be the final abattoir offering the service in the area. The decision has left small producers scrambling to find alternative options weeks out from opening ham orders for the busy Christmas period. The lack of custom kill options leaves impacted producers mulling lengthy and costly drives to the wheat belt or battling over limited capacity at small scale processes. In mining, mineral resources has revealed made and resources for its lockier gas and irregular oil projects in the Perth basin as it reviews its path forward in the region amid a stalemate with the government. Lockier, the jewel in Min Red's Perth basin crown has a 435 peta jewel to see contingent gas resource making it one of the largest onshore gas discoveries in Western Australia. Min Red said the project had significant exploration upside with a prospective gas resource of more than 1.4 billion cubic feet. The irregular oil project has a made and total to see contingent resource of 31.6 million barrels of oil equivalent making it one of the largest onshore oil discoveries in WA since Barrow Island in 1964. In a research note, Morgan Stanley set an in-ground value estimate on the contained resources at $907 million and highlighted the exploration upside on Min Red's tenements and in Prop T. Silverleaf Investments has withdrawn its $65 million plan to build apartments at Fremantle's Wall Store site after assessing the project's financial feasibility. Fremantle developer Silverleaf dropped its Wall Store's proposal from the state government's significant development unit assessment pathway last week. The proposal includes a bill to rent accommodation and an aged care component. It comes more than a year after the WA Planning Commission approved the first stage of the overall redevelopment of the site at the corner of Cantonman Street and Elder Place. Silverleaf Director Gerard O'Brien told business news, the decision to withdraw the application after it being in the SDAU pathway for about three years was made with a heavy heart. That's all the headlines from me. For the full stories or more news from today, visit businessnews.com.au. And coming up next on the podcast, I speak to Jack McGinn about the partnership between two influential businessmen as they try to solve WA's healthcare squeeze. (upbeat music) - The business world is teaming with opportunities to succeed and every day is a chance for the ambitious to learn, know and grow. Over recent years, we have built the greatest business journalist team in WA, delivering you the most trusted, comprehensive, intelligent and up-to-date news across every sector, every platform, every day. No fluff, all informative stuff. At business news, we believe progress boils down to one simple habit. That is, what you subscribe to today shapes what you will become tomorrow. Subscribe to success, subscribe to business news. Visit businessnews.com.au/subscribe for more information. (upbeat music) - Welcome back to I Close the Business. I'm Nadia Boudihajo and today I'll be speaking to Jack McGinn who wrote about a partnership between Pertiman and Apollo Health in the latest edition of the business news magazine. So Jack, this stemmed from a trip that Health Minister Amber Jade Sanderson made in February. Could you tell me more about what this trip is about? - So, the Minister's trip to India earlier this year was built as a way to showcase WA as a destination for workers in healthcare and also for international students. And it was in part at least designed to take some steps towards addressing what is a pretty big issue in Western Australia, which is a shortfall of healthcare professionals. India actually has a surplus of healthcare professionals talking registered nurses and doctors. And the minister went over there and made some, made a bit of noise around that, caught the attention of some pretty prominent local and international businessmen in the process. And as a result, yeah, there's a story out of it. - And you also mentioned there's a service agreement that was signed between Pertiman and Apollo. So could you tell me a bit more what that is all about? - Yeah, so off the back of that trip, there's a quote here to say that Minister Sanderson's office put out basically her saying that India has a strategy to produce high quality healthcare workers in numbers greater than they need for their own healthcare system with a view to facilitating migration elsewhere. And we wanna make sure WA is the number one choice. So that was a quote that was picked up by, like you say, Pertiman, which is a company aligned with Vickers Rambol, its chairman founded by Vickers Rambol and probably best known for that massive fertilizer development up in the borough, but it has quite broad and sprawling interests, including in the provision of healthcare and recruitment. So Pertiman has teamed up with Apollo Healthcare, which is an Indian organization, the largest private healthcare provider in India. So India's an enormous population and this organization is set up a network of hospitals, but also a network of training registered nurses, which like the Minister said in her comment, is really done with a view to potentially exporting that labor to other markets as well. So it's done not just for the India market, it's more of a broader view of the world. So those two have come to a service agreement. At the moment, we don't know exactly how much money is behind that service agreement, but it's worth noting that Vickers Rambol ranked fifth in our rich list and that Prathap C Reddy, who's the cardiologist that founded Apollo, he's in his 90s, has an estimated net worth of 4.46 billion Australians. So we're talking billionaires coming together around this one and that's what came of it. - I mean, all of this is done to attract more healthcare workers to WA, but what hurdles do, I guess, participants face in relation to migrating here? - So there are a few hurdles and Vickers Rambol took the view that the government was pretty aware of some of the hurdles and maybe taken us some steps to try and fix them. There are some issues with getting visas across the line and there's this view that we are in a global race for talent, right? So if it's easier for a healthcare professional to say go to the UK versus coming to Western Australia, they're likely to want to go to the UK. So it's not just a case of getting them here. It's also making ourselves an attractive jurisdiction against other jurisdictions around the world. So yeah, the legislative change is a really big one. The nation's migration laws are, there's an amendment before the parliament at the moment. There was a migration strategy released last year. That bill sort of lays some pathways designed to help meet targeted workforce needs, including in that healthcare space. So Vickers Rambol in his comments to us basically said, we know it's not the easiest policy to get past the immigration policy in Australia, but we're really committed to sort of being a voice and really pushing, which I suppose someone needs to do when it comes to this sort of thing. - And just circling back to the main players of your story, Pertiman and Apollo, as part of their partnership, what has been done to increase more, I guess more Indian workers for Australia's workforce? - Well, at this point, it's very much in the early stages. The representatives from Apollo who are in Western Australia are in a bit of a fact finding mission, a little bit of trying to understand the local market, the local needs, and what they might be able to do. So they run obviously some training programs over in India, and as part of that, they run these finishing schools, which basically prepare the students for local conditions for the market they might enter as a registered nurse. Yeah, so they run these finishing schools over there, which basically designed to prepare them for a local market. In the immediate term, they're sort of looking at sending some people through a pilot program in the UK, which would then allow them to come to Australia a little more easily than if they would have come directly from India. But as I said, there's a big push in the background to make the pathway a little bit easier. And for the state government's part, it lobbied to increase skilled migration intake this financial year, so it was allocated 2,350 spots. They managed to increase that to 10,000 spots. It's also investing 4.6 million in pathways for entry for skilled healthcare workers following the crack review last year, which was a look at regulatory settings for overseas health practitioners. Basically what we're talking about. A lot of things being done in that sector and a really interesting read on the partnership between the influential Indian businessman trying to solve WSA healthcare worker shortage. Listeners can read Jack's story online at businessnews.com.au, or pick up the September 2nd to 15th edition of the Business News magazine. Thank you for listening, and thank you, Jack, for joining me. - Thank you. - The latest business news, deliver daily. Subscribe and rate the show, wherever you listen to your podcasts. For all the latest business news, visit businessnews.com.au. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]