- HAVE YOUR SAY: Shaping the National Peak Body for Family, Domestic & Sexual Violence
- Speech from Chief Medical Officer, Australasian Sexual and Reproductive Health Conference – 16 September 2025
- Outback nurse transforms remote diabetes care with cans, rocks and bush tucker
- A new First Nations voice to guide Australia’s public health sector
- Healing land and spirit through Noongar knowledge and regenerative land management
- Sector Jobs
The NACCHO Sector News is a platform we use to showcase the important work being done in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, focusing on the work of NACCHO, NACCHO members and NACCHO affiliates.
We also share a curated selection of news stories that are of likely interest to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health sector, broadly.
HAVE YOUR SAY: Shaping the National Peak Body for Family, Domestic & Sexual Violence
NACCHO is calling on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander services and sector professionals to have your say in shaping the new National Peak Body for Family, Domestic & Sexual Violence.
The national survey (open until 10 October 2025) is broken up into three parts .
Please click on the links below to have your say in each section:
Your voices have already shaped this journey, we’re building on that foundation to ensure the Peak Body reflects community wisdom, sector expertise and lived realities. Please complete the survey and share it widely.
Find out more and access the survey.
If you have questions or wish to discuss further, you can contact the Coalition Secretariat at secretariat@coalitionofpeaks.org.au.
HAVE YOUR SAY: Shaping the National Peak Body for Family, Domestic & Sexual Violence.
Speech from Chief Medical Officer, Australasian Sexual and Reproductive Health Conference – 16 September 2025
The recent declaration of syphilis as a Communicable Disease Incident of National Significance (CDINS) highlights the growing urgency of addressing its spread across Australia. Unlike previous CDINS declarations for COVID-19, Japanese encephalitis, and mpox, syphilis has shown a steady increase over the past decade, with cases rising by an average of 13% annually since 2011. This declaration enables a nationally coordinated response to a long-standing public health challenge.
Read the speech by the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Michael Kidd AO, at the Australasian Sexual and Reproductive Health Conference in Adelaide about his declaration of syphilis as a Communicable Disease Incident of National Significance.
Outback nurse transforms remote diabetes care with cans, rocks and bush tucker
When Rishoniy Caine arrived in a tiny outback NSW town with one general store, no gym and the task of fixing its diabetes problem, she decided to do things a differently.
The Bundjalung woman knew from her experience as a nurse in remote Kimberly and Cape York communities the difficulties residents faced buying healthy food.
“If you can imagine the nearest town is 1,000 kilometres away, it can be very challenging to get fresh food. It’s almost non-existent,” she said. “Also a lettuce might be $16 and two litres of milk $12, while a can of coke is $2, a pie is cheap.”
She incorporated what she learnt from elders about bush foods and traditional medicine into a pilot program in a rural NSW town that faces similar issues — Collarenebri, about 75 kilometres from Walgett in the state’s north-west.
Cooking and gardening lessons are provided alongside medical treatment and, instead of weights, participants are encouraged to lift cans.
Kellie Henderson (left) has lost 30 kilograms and tamed her diabetes with Rishoniy Caine’s simple approach. (ABC Western Plains: Zaarkacha Marlan)
A new First Nations voice to guide Australia’s public health sector
The Public Health Association of Australia has announced they will be establishing an Aboriginal and Torres-Strait Islander voice to help guide their work after a near unanimous vote by their members. Nearly two years after the failed referendum saw a First Nations voice to parliament shot down, NGOs like the PHAA and state governments have chosen to follow the wishes of the majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander communities in Australia who voted for this special representation.
Listen to the podcast or read the transcript.
Young Aboriginal girl gets a check up at the doctor’s surgery Source: Getty / LOUISE BEAUMONT
Healing land and spirit through Noongar knowledge and regenerative land management
In Western Australia’s Wheatbelt, a region long shaped by industrial farming practices, a new model of regenerative agriculture is taking root. At Yaraguia farm, Ballardong Noongar man Oral McGuire is healing Country, reconnecting First Nations knowledge of caring for Country with modern land management to restore ecosystems and produce food that benefits both the land and the community.
Out in the Wheatbelt of Western Australia, something is happening … It’s a movement to heal Country – and community.
“And you can see the soil, how degraded it is.”
For generations, acres of land in the Wheatbelt was stripped by clearing, cropping and overgrazing. Ballardong Noongar man Oral McGuire says settlement and colonisation left scars on both soil and spirit.
“All of these activities are very extractive activities that for 170 odd years this little piece of land here, the whole landscape through this region, has suffered that abuse from, you know, settlement colonisation.”
Today, Mr McGuire works as a regenerative land manager, guided not by commodity farming, but by cultural law.
“Slow burning, or our cool burning that we do as Noongars, and we do it to replenish country. The season we are in now is the right season for us to be doing it.”
Fire, water, native plants – all are central to reviving ecosystems that once thrived here.
“So they are indicators that the soil, the balance and the health of the soil is returning, because they haven’t been here.”
Listen to the podcast or read the full story
Ballardong Noongar man Oral McGuire Source: SBS News / Christopher Tan
Sector Jobs – you can see sector job listings on the NACCHO website here.
Advertising Jobs – to advertise a job vacancy click here to go to the NACCHO website current job listings webpage. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find a Post A Job form. You can complete this form with your job vacancy details – it will then be approved for posting and go live on the NACCHO website.
Email us your story with some images to: NACCHOCommunicationsandMedia@naccho.org.au
and we will feature it in the news.
