Last year Paul Norton wrote with some sadness and much asperity “Is David Burchell brain-dead?”
Referring to the particular column which prompted the post, Paul contrasted ex-communist Burchell’s stance with the positions taken by anti-communist Robert Manne thusly:
David Burchell’s column, by contrast, repeatedly trivialises left-liberal positions on those issues and complacently denigrates those who hold such views.
Well, Burchell appears to be at it again, holding up as if it is an entirely new concept that the panoply of social ills afflicting many indigenous communities are more a product of poverty than of racism per se, because many of the same problems afflict the non-indigenous urban poor.
It’s true that some remote Aboriginal communities, caught in a morass of isolation, neglect and joblessness, have sunk to levels of dysfunction unknown to white Australians.
Yet dysfunction is remarkably colour-blind. If, as we did until relatively recently, you put white families, preselected for their turbulent family histories, into welfare ghettoes on the fringes of the main cities, they will struggle to hold their lives together, too. And then, exactly like indigenous families, they will weave narratives of defeat and despair to console them for their marginality.
Unlike Burchell, I’m not a literary academic writing in the area of public policy, and have only a few undergraduate course credits in social studies from the early 80s under my belt, yet I’d be amazed if he could point to one, single, solitary social studies course which did not identify poverty as the primary component of social disadvantage in blackfella communities here in Australia (as well as in communities of colour amongst our immigrant population and in other nations as well). That correlation with poverty, and particularly de facto ghettoised poverty, has never been in contention. The question he studiously avoids is - why is there such a strong correlation in so many countries between socioeconomic class and the melanin content of one’s skin?
Continue reading ‘More complacent denigration’
I’m no expert in health economics, but there’s been a lot of commentary over the years from some who are suggesting that the artificial lifeline given to private insurers and hospitals has done just about zip to “take the pressure off the public hospital system”, while nicely fattening pay packets and profit margins for some. At enormous cost to the public purse.
These comments from the Doctors’ Reform Society seem apposite:
Insurers are angry and say 400,000 people will drop private coverage, but Dr Tim Woodruff says they should not expect the current level of tax support to continue.
“I’m not worried about how much whinging they do. [I am] just pointing out that it is whinging because of self-interest, because they’ve got a vested interest in keeping as much money from the taxpayer rolling into their coffers as possible,” he said.
“They’ve got every reason to complain but it’s not a reason that should deter the Government from doing what they’re doing.”
Continue reading ‘Medicare levy thresholds and private health insurance’
Nutrient deficiency is something we generally associate with the developing world. But in Australia? Hardly. But, apparently, iodine deficiency is so prevalent in Australia - around half the population is iodine-deficient to some extent - that the government is likely to mandate the use of iodized salt in breadmaking. At least one professor is arguing it’s still not enough:
“The iodine fortification proposal for Australia has been watered down, it’s really inadequate,” Prof Eastman said.
“Originally it was going to be in bread, cereals and biscuits.
“It will assist in improving the iodine intake for children but it goes nowhere near meeting the requirements of pregnant women.”
Continue reading ‘Iodine deficiency in Australia’
Props to John Prescott for admitting that he suffered from an eating disorder, an eating disorder that’s probably much more common than we think:
Dr Glover, a specialist with Affinity Healthcare which operates the eating disorders unit at Cheadle Royal Hospital in Cheshire, said: “He displayed the classic traits of bulimics – the secrecy, the shame and the breakdown of trust with your family. Bulimia can be brought on by work stress. For some people, they use drink, drugs or cigarettes as an emotional crutch. For John, it was food.“John’s bravery will hopefully encourage more men to stop suffering in silence and seek treatment.” (from The Times)
The Oz carries this intriguing report about the upcoming Federal Budget which suggests the previous government did not have any funding allocated for the NT Intervention beyond 1 July this year.
Which reason do you think best explains why Howard and Brough didn’t organise any forward estimates from Treasury?
- Hubris - They assumed that a problem which took decades to develop could be sorted out by the boys in khaki in about 6 months.
- Incompetence - They just forgot.
- Laziness - Couldn’t be bothered. After all, it’s only public money.
- Rashness - Everything was arranged too hastily to make a proper plan (Eek! it’s been under our noses for years! Quick, no time to waste, it’s an emergency!)
- Cynicism -The plan was conceived after the Budget, so we’ll let Treasury doze and draw up some estimates once we’ve counted how many votes this brings in.
- Complacency - They assumed they’d win the election and could write it into this year’s Budget themselves?
- Disingenuousness - They assumed they’d lose the ‘07 election and left it as a Budget landmine for the incoming ALP? (Which it most certainly is - a $600 million landmine according to the report.)
So after all the posturing and bluster, after all the accusations from blowhards that anybody who questioned the Intervention is a supporter of child-rape, we learn that the “architects” of the “plan” didn’t set aside the provisions to actually carry it out.
What great economic managers. What great defenders of the little children. They fully deserved to lose their seats. As will Macklin and co. if they cock this one up.
Kevin Rudd’s pre-empted his own summit with his announcement at a Sydney Institute dinner last night of a proposal for universal early childhood centres. I don’t necessarily see any problem with that - the importance of early childhood for all sorts of things - crime prevention, skills and cognitive development, health outcomes, etc - is very well recognised in research from a number of disciplines and it’s one area where a “whole of government” focus can be very useful indeed, and should properly be debated at the summit.
Rudd’s speech can be accessed here.
In terms of the detail of the announcement, I have a lot of sympathy with the arguments of not for profit childcare centres, but the announcement is so aspirational (as it were) that there’s plenty of time to have a proper debate. It is important to note that his proposal isn’t just for childcare. It fits in with Kevin Rudd’s overall agenda of promoting equality of opportunity through policy intervention at the earliest possible stage of life - something I wrote about in my paper for the Search Foundation when I was seeking to identify a unifying ideological thread to his thought.
It’s interesting to compare what Rudd has identified as a major focus of the summit’s agenda with the results of polling conducted by the ANU. Continue reading ‘Early childhood revolution… by 2020′
And as a result the patients are starving.
It would appear, from reading this and other coverage of the sorry state of affairs at Royal North Shore Hospitals, that the hospital’s problems are related to the fact that decision-making in the hospital has been effectively concentrated in the hands of administrators whose principal concerns are the financial bottom line (and with a narrow, unstrategic, intellectually lazy conception of what this entails) and adherence to bureaucratic protocol regardless of the effect this has on the delivery of clinical services, with minimal or no input from health professionals such as clinicians or nutritionists.
This way of running things comes straight from the New Right toolkit of public choice theory, one of whose obsessions is the fear of “provider capture” by professionals (and their unions) in government services such as education and health. Such professionals, so the story goes, are motivated principally by self-interest of one sort or another, and thus if empowered to make decisions or influence policies in such services, will use such influence to enrich or aggrandise themselves at the expense of their employers and the wider public interest which they are supposed to serve. The solution is to exclude the professionals from influence over policy and management as far as possible, and vest power in generic managers free of links to vested provider interests.
Continue reading ‘Royal North Shore Hospital successfully avoids “provider capture”…’
That’s actually kinda how you could read the day’s news in politics - Victorian Premier John Brumby has agreed to sign up to the Commonwealth’s Murray-Darling plan (just over a year after it was pulled out of John Howard’s hat), Kevin Rudd thinks he might be able to end Japanese whaling through diplomacy, while he’s off re-engaging our fair nation with the world, and meanwhile the blame game just got ended, and health got a big injection of funds.
Meanwhile, Joe Hockey is whining:
Making fun of the Liberal party seems to be the new national sport, Joe Hockey has complained.
The shadow health minister and former workplace relations minister told Fairfax Radio everyone was picking on the party following revelations a serving federal MP - Scott Morrison - was denied membership of his local branch because of a factional dispute.
“Will everyone please stop bashing up the Liberal Party at the moment,” he said.
“It’s like a national sport for people, particularly journalists, at the moment to belt up the Liberal Party.”
“I think it’s in the national interest that the Liberal Party be a viable, feasible alternative government at state and federal level.”
Two points.
Continue reading ‘Rudd saves country and world, opposition talks about itself’
Neil Aspinall, the real “fifth Beatle” has died at 66 - of lung cancer. Aspinall rarely spoke publicly about the four Beatles, but he did tell this story of how he met George Harrison:
My first encounter with George,” Aspinall remembered, “was behind the school air-raid shelters. This great mass of shaggy hair loomed up and an out-of-breath voice requested a quick drag of my Woodbine. It was one of the first cigarettes either of us had smoked. We spluttered our way through it bravely but gleefully.
George also died of lung cancer, at 58.
A friend of mine’s brother recently died of lung cancer, aged 60. Another friend of a friend is dying of the same disease.
I can’t help but think that as I move up in my fifties, these stories will get closer and closer. I have friends who have smoked for 30 or more years now. When we were younger, we could postpone the idea of the threat of lung cancer. I suspect it’s going to get increasingly more difficult to do that.
The last remaining closed shop union, the AMA, is resisting moves by the federal Labor government to introduce a national register for medical doctors. Union boss, Dr Rosanna Capolingua, has been quoted warning of “remote Canberra bureaucracies”:
And in fact, [it] may be more removed, more distanced from the coal face and work less actively, more slowly when it comes to acting where there is a doctor that is a rogue doctor.
There are very good public policy arguments in favour of federalism - including the principle of subsidarity which, given her allegiances, Dr Capolingua would be more than familiar with. But such arguments also include the principle of innovation and trial and error where different jurisdictions can experiment with novel policy approaches, which if successful, could be adopted nationwide.
Assessment of the qualifications and competence of doctors is not a matter for experiment, nor a matter where there can be a legitimate divergence of approach.
Continue reading ‘Two words: Jayant. Patel.’
It seems that in the lead-up to the 2020 summit and (probably more importantly) the renegotiation of the federal-state health funding agreement, every medical specialty in town is trying to drum up publicity. For instance, the sleep specialists seem to have woken up a mass of publicity virtually overnight…
Another group who’ve gotten quite a run are those pushing for early intervention on chronic diseases. This ABC op-ed advocates more programs for preventative medicine, quoting a group called the Oxford Health Alliance:
“Four preventable chronic diseases - heart disease, diabetes, chronic lung disease and cancer- account for 60 per cent of the world’s deaths. Their underlying causes are tobacco use, physical inactivity and poor diet,” Oxford Health Alliance.
Continue reading ‘Hyperbole on preventable disease watch’
Today’s Australian:
A NATIONAL system of registration for doctors is being finalised by federal, state and territory governments, which will help prevent cases such as that of Jayant Patel in Queensland and the “Butcher of Bega” in NSW.
Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon yesterday said the Council of Australian Governments was expected to sign off soon on a national registration system for health professionals.
“It will make a difference to ensure high standards across the whole country,” she said on ABC television. “It’s no solace to the people who are victims of the treatment for now but it needs to be proceeded with.”
The current system for registration of health professionals is done by medical boards in each state and territory. The COAG proposal is to replace this with a national process overseen by nine separate boards for all the different health professions.
Ms Roxon’s comments were made in relation to the so-called Butcher of Bega, deregistered former doctor Graeme Stephen Reeves, who allegedly performed unnecessary and sometimes horrific gynaecological procedures at Bega and Pambula hospitals on the NSW south coast over several months in 2002.
Self-regulation in most professions has been problematic, so it’s beyond time to have an external oversight system properly put in place for the health professions. It’s only shameful that it took a case as full of blatant system failures as that of Dr Reeves to finally get some action.
Interestingly, I hadn’t heard this before in all the recent coverage (emphasis mine):
The board maintains Mr Reeves was able to dodge the restriction because he moved from Sydney to take up a new post in Bega and at the time legislation prevented the board from passing on details of the ban to his new employer.
Really?
Kudos also to the NSW Government for planning to institute a system of mandatory reporting for medical personnel of medical misconduct by their colleagues. Such systems have been recommended by watchdog groups for years (decades?) of course, and who knows how many unnecessary harms could have been avoided if such systems had been in place for all that time, but at least it’s finally happening.
Next: regulating the specialist medical colleges so that they can no longer unreasonably inflate their incomes by maintaining an artificial scarcity of medical specialists. Isn’t competition meant to be healthy?
Crossposted from Hoyden About Town (related post by Lauredhel)
I write this with chardonnay in hand.
Is the 2020 summit going to be a chance for every participant to push their own agenda? Will the suggestions that rise to the top, like bubbles in beer, be those which are the basest populism? Will they be the ones that make the front page of the metropolitan tabloids? Consider (as Paul Kelly might say), this intervention from The Reverend Tim Costello (which was duly splashed on the Courier-Mail’s front page today):
Mr Rudd indicated he was willing to consider Mr Costello’s comments that bars were too numerous and opening hours should be reduced.
Summit supremo (and PM) Kevin Rudd also says:
“I don’t have a whole lot of science to back it up.
“But let me tell you as I roll around the country, mums and dads are raising this with me in the supermarkets of the nation on a regular basis.
“What I see happening around the streets myself is a problem.”
Presumably our Kev isn’t rolling out the barrels. So much for “evidence-based policy”. As Richard Farmer pointed out in Crikey this week, “There has been virtually no increase in per capita alcohol income over the last decade”. But, as Bernard Keane remarked, “everyone loves a moral panic”. Continue reading ‘Australia 1919′
Well, whether it’s an empty talkfest or a serious contribution to our nation’s future, the Australia 2020 conference now has a website.
Nominations need to be in by February 25, and supported by two personal referees. For those that don’t get in, there’s the opportunity to make a 500-word submission; whether these will actually get read is open to question given that all the participants are volunteers attending in their spare time.
Continue reading ‘Australia 2020 website up’
With the news that the Commonwealth Treasury has flipped the switch to looking after our wellbeing, it might be timely to take another look at the Affluenza crew. The “less is more” perspective, associated in this country with Clive Hamilton, has its international incarnations - and indeed it must be a deliberate choice to eschew the vulgarity of intellectual property in book publishing that accounts for so many titles being published with the name “Affluenza”. I was going to have a rant about this (and I was going to rant, among other things, about the irony of economists of all people - exponents of the “dismal science” - being in the business of calculating what makes us happy), but perhaps fortunately for LP readers, Brendan O’Neill of spiked.com got there first in a recent book review in the New Statesman - his text being Oliver James’ The Selfish Capitalist: Origins of Affluenza.
Like O’Neill, I’m of that perhaps antiquated stamp of person who believes that the aim of the left should be to secure liberty through maximising equality in solidarity with one another. Call me an Enlightenment tragic, if you will, but the founders of the American constitution were quite right to describe “the pursuit of happiness” as a constituent principle of liberty - not state diktats about what will make us happy. Being on the left, I think that that pursuit is best pursued collectively, but some sort of quasi-Fabian and neo-puritan arbitration on individual choice should not be the core of the left’s purpose, still less the narrowing of the affective register in favour of a “therapy culture” and the creation of a brave new world of shiny, happy people. But, I appear to be ranting, so here’s O’Neill. (See also this review in spiked.)
Continue reading ‘Against herbal tea socialism’
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