No, unfortunately, there is no way to access it, which is what Tannaz was eluding to in that it’s hard to reach. The problem is that the Application instance doesn’t have a pointer to the widget. You would need to rework this bit so that it did store the widget to self so that from your hook you could do something like: self.parent.dialog._reload_action().
The filter_publishes.py hook allows you to set filters for the publishes, but it does not allow interaction, so the user would not be able to toggle on or off the status’ to filter.