Ken Wyatt Biography
Kenneth George Wyatt AM (born 4 August 1952) is a member of the Australian House of Representatives representing the Hasluck Electoral Division in Western Australia for the Australian Liberal Party. Since January 2017, Wyatt has served as Minister of Age Care and First Minister of Indigenous Health for Australia.
He is of Aboriginal Australian descent (Noongar, Yamatji and Wongi), Indian, English and Irish descent, and became the first Aboriginal member of the House of Representatives in 2010 as well as the first federal indigenous minister in 2017.
Ken Wyatt Age
He is 66 years old as of 2018.
Ken Wyatt Early Life And Family
Cedric Wyatt’s cousin was a senior official. Cedric’s son, Ben Wyatt, is the current WA Labor government treasurer in Western Australia.
Wyatt is an Australian indigenous, partly English, partly Irish and partly Indian. He was born on the Roelands Mission farm near Bunbury south of Perth in Western Australia, a former home removed from their families for young indigenous children.
His mother, Mona Abdullah, was one of Aboriginal children’s Stolen Generations removed from their parents and moved to Roelands where she met with her husband Don. The heritage of Wyatt’s father is Yamatji and ancestry of Ireland. His mother’s family heritage is ancestry of Wongi and Noongar,[6] while her surname, Abdullah, is a cameleer from an ancestor who migrated from India, helping to lay the telegraph line trans-Australia.
Ken Wyatt Education And Career
Wyatt served as senior public servant in the Aboriginal health and education fields before entering Parliament. He has held positions as Head of the Aboriginal Health Office of the WA as well as a similar position with NSW Health. He previously served as Aboriginal Education Director with the WA Department of Education. In the 2010 election, Wyatt stood in Hasluck’s seat for the Liberal Party, defeating Labor incumbent Sharryn Jackson.
He won the seat with a 1.4-point swing and became the first Aboriginal to be elected to the Australian House of Representatives (excluding David Kennedy, who was a member of Bendigo from 1969 to 1972), and the third to be elected to the Parliament (after Neville Bonner and Aden Ridgeway, both Senators).
Mal Brough is Aboriginal, but he doesn’t identify himself as such. Wyatt attended the opening of the 43rd Australian Parliament on September 28, 2010, to take up his seat as a Hasluck member. He wore a traditional Booka–a kangaroo skin coat with feathers from a red-tailed black cockatoo, representing a leading role in the culture of Noongar. Noongar elders had presented him with the cloak.
On September 29, he made his first speech to Parliament and received a standing ovation from both government and opposition benches as well as from the public galleries. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced on 20 September 2015 that Wyatt would become Assistant Minister of Health, making him the federal parliament’s first indigenous frontbencher.
On 21 September, as he was overseas, he was not sworn in with other ministers, his ceremony being held on 30 September. On 18 February 2016, after a rearrangement in the ministry, Wyatt’s responsibilities were expanded to include older care in addition to health; and further expanded when on 24 January 2017 Wyatt was the first Australian indigenous minister to be appointed as Australian government minister, with responsibility for the Aged Care portfolio and the newly established Indigenous Health portfolio.
Ken Wyatt Net Worth
His Net Worth is estimated to be about $260,000 or $280,000 per year.
Ken Wyatt Awards and honours
Wyatt was appointed as a member of the Australian Order for Aboriginal health services in 1996. In 2001, he was awarded the Centenary Medal.
Ken Wyatt Interview
Dicey Topics: Ken Wyatt talks money, religion and bodies.
MONEY
You were born in Bunbury, south of Perth, to a father with Yamatji and Irish heritage, and a Wongi-Noongar mother. Did you grow up with money?
Meanwhile, your mother, a member of the stolen generations, also struggled. To buy personal items – clothes, shoes – she had to apply for welfare.
I’ve seen letters that Mum wrote to the welfare department saying she needed a new dress or even underwear. I know what it’s like to struggle week to week. I saw my parents do it. I used to trap rabbits and sell them to the butcher. We’d eat what we needed, and the money would go to the family pot. Damper was more common than bread.
Do you consider yourself wealthy now?
I consider myself to be comfortable.
How much money does a federal MP make?
Actually … I don’t look at my salary! I’m assuming it’s about $260,000 or $280,000. [The base salary for parliamentarians is $203,020 per annum; the average annual salary for a cabinet minister is $350,209.]
Does that feel like too little, too much or just right?
I’ve thought about this, and I think we don’t pay our politicians enough. You want people who are going to go in and look after the interests of all Australians. I earned more as a public servant [as director, Aboriginal Health, for WA’s Department of Health] than as a backbencher. I look at the corporate sector and can’t see how you justify salaries of $18 million, especially when I see people in my electorate battle from week to week.
BODIES
To what extent were you conscious – or self-conscious – of being Aboriginal growing up?
Extremely. When you think of the 1950s and ’60s, people were very blunt. You got used to accepting terms like “nigger”, “boong”, “coon” and “blacks”. Even later in life, people have made a derogatory comment about Aborigines before looking at you, then saying, “Oh no, you’re different, you’ve become civilised.” I had a neighbour who said to me, “We really like you and your wife, but I don’t like Aboriginal people.” Gee, where do you even begin with a comment like that? In most cases, you say, “Tell me what you mean.” Once you start talking them through it, all of a sudden you pick up their sense of embarrassment. They never say it again.
Why does the mix of federal parliamentarians not reflect our multicultural community?
Part of the challenge we will continue to have are party structures. Selection processes have always favoured sons and daughters who people want in the seat, even though other candidates might be outstanding. One day Australia’s parliament will evolve to a point where it reflects the community, though. It’s changing.
What do you like about getting older?
In our community, grey hair and grey beards represent the getting of wisdom and statesmanship. I’m reaching that stage. If I grew out my beard now, it’d probably be white and I’d pass off as Father Christmas. The only downside is your body ages and you become frail.
I can’t imagine being an MP is conducive to staying on top of physical health.
I do a lot of walking, but I’m laid up at the moment because I’ve had a knee joint replacement. The other problem is that you go to a whole range of functions and someone will say, “We’ve cooked these scones for you” or “We’ve made this chocolate thing.” So you have a very thin slice of cake or one scone. The trouble is, you do that five times a day!
So this is a huge occupational hazard.
[Laughs.] It is! But the beauty is, when I go to a Country Women’s Association event, the scones are superb. I end up having a couple with strawberry or plum jam, and nice thickened cream with a hint of vanilla through it.In 2015, Western Australia’s Liberal government wanted to deregister hundreds of Aboriginal heritage sites. For those sites to qualify for protection as “sacred”, the government required religious activity to occur on them. You said at the time, “The Dreaming is a religion.”
If you read Genesis – which talks about the Creation – then read the beginning of the Dreaming, the parallels are blatant. I made that point about the Dreaming being a religion to put it into a contemporary context. Our Dreaming is no less than the Catholic or Anglican religion, or Buddhism.
Do you consider yourself religious, spiritual, both or neither?
I consider myself spiritual more than religious. I do read scripture, and I do follow a particular faith.
I go to a Catholic church in Victoria Park in Perth. I like the priest. He doesn’t preach at you; he talks about the importance of the message and how it may relate or not relate to you. It’s not the old fire and brimstone from when we were young kids. I take out of it what I want, but that doesn’t change what I am, or the essence of me as a Noongar man with Yamatji and Wongi heritage.
Ken Wyatt News
Elderly resident found with maggots in head at aged care facility.
An elderly resident in an increasingly substandard aged care facility in New South Wales has been hospitalised after maggots were found in his head.
The disturbing discovery comes months after Bupa’s Eden facility was sanctioned by the government because residents were at “immediate and severe risk”.
Federal Aged Care Minister Ken Wyatt said it was “totally unacceptable and concerning” the south coast facility had a resident with maggots in a wound so quickly after it was inspected by the newly beefed-up regulator the Aged Care Safety and Quality Commission.
“In this day and age, with all of the attention given to care being centred on individuals, we shouldn’t see this occurring,” Mr Wyatt told reporters in Sydney on Tuesday.
“I’m disappointed they’ve allowed this to happen.”
Bupa’s chief operating officer Carolyn Cooper today apologised to the resident and his family.
“I have personally spoken to the family today and understand their disappointment,” she told AAP in a statement.
Results from government inspections show a decline in standards at the Eden facility over the past few years.
In 2013, the facility, which was then known as Eden Community Care, met all 44 of the accreditation standards.
Those standards remained intact in 2016 after Bupa began running the home.
But in August 2018 inspectors found five were no longer being met. Conditions continued to deteriorate and, by November, the government refused to sign off on 22 of the necessary standards.
The next month the commission reported “critical deficiencies at the service contributing to serious and detrimental failings” including in human resources, clinical care, medication management and health and personal care.
The facility was sanctioned, with its Commonwealth funding stripped back. Bupa was ordered to recruit and train new staff to address the shortcomings.
The latest incident means investigators will again return to the facility, Mr Wyatt said.
The man has since returned to the facility and Ms Cooper said immediate action had been taken to improve wound management and provide further training to staff.
But the government will continue to lobby the company on a “raft of matters” that make it clear the government is concerned, the minister said.
“Australia expects aged care providers to shape up and provide the level of care that is needed.”