Archive for the 'Poverty' Category

Miracle cure for trachoma found by the Australian Govt Intervention in the NT

Published
by
tigtog
4 months ago
in Disasters, Health, Indigenous, Medicine and Poverty
. 44 Comments

I’m not quite sure what it was, but there must have been one, because the AGI health checks on indigenous children in the NT last year did not record a single case. (Update: this claim of zero cases of trachoma recorded, taken from the post linked to below, has been contradicted, although the rate recorded is still extraordinarily low.)

Fred Hollows must be causing a scene around the Pearly Gates in the way he’s kicking himself for missing such a simple and effective solution to a common cause of blindness that was a special concern to him due to Australia’s central desert regions having the highest incidence of trachoma in the world.

The crucial ingredient in miraculously eradicating trachoma appears to be (drumroll) the recruitment primarily of recently-graduated doctors from urban and coastal regions (who’d never seen a case of trachoma before) to do all the health checks in a region where the condition is endemic. Voila! No cases of trachoma recorded! The previous incidence rate of 45% reduced to zero in one strike! Marvellous (and who knows what other medical conditions may also have been eradicated by this daring initiative?). Think of all the funding for blindness programs that can now be re-allocated because there are no more cases of trachoma in the central desert!

I suspect that this miraculous eradication method could quite possibly be effectively adapted elsewhere. What say you?

Update: some of you need your sarcasm meters recalibrated. Yes, the “miracle cure” is pure snark.

Advance Australia (un)Fair

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 1 week ago
in Economics, Howardia, Poverty and Sociology
. 42 Comments

NATSEM at the University of Canberra has released a report [pdf] on trends in spatial socio-economic inequality from 2001 to 2006 [via Peter Martin]. As Martin suggests, it’s a useful corrective to claims lacking nuance that the Howard years saw a rising tide of prosperity lift all boats equally. There were definite winners in the household income stakes, as this graph demonstrates:

Micro fiction competition!

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 1 week ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Developing world, Donation challenge, Health, International and Poverty
. 61 Comments

It’s been ages since we’ve done a competition. I’ll donate $300 for the best entry in a microfiction comp to Medecins Sans Frontieres. The idea is to write a story in 300 words or less. Must be prose. No haikus! The theme is “The Postmodern Pirate Queen”. In your story, you must include the phrases “peg leg” and “time streams”. Steampunk is a suggested but not compulsory genre. That’s all!

Suggestions on judging and criteria solicited. And matching donations encouraged! You have til midnight on Saturday.


Portrait of the Queen by *Pirate-Queen on deviantART

Guest post by Senator Rachel Siewert: Award modernisation - what’s going on?

Published
by
Guest Poster
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Howardia, Industrial Relations, Poverty and Women
. 9 Comments

This issue is something I’d planned to write about but have lacked time to do so. Some very important changes to the legal regulation of working conditions are being made in this country largely beneath the radar of media scrutiny - outside the business press. So I’m happy to post this contribution from Greens Senator for Western Australia, Rachel Siewert. - MB

Senator Rachel Siewert is the Australian Greens spokesperson on Industrial Relations.

Massive upheaval is occurring to Australia’s standard employment conditions and minimum wages, with little to no understanding or public attention.

The ‘award modernisation’ process currently underway in the AIRC, following a request from the Workplace Relations Minister, Julia Gillard, will impact on all Australian workers … either directly through loss of conditions or indirectly through lowering the base from which agreements can be made.

While the Rudd Government likes to compare its IR policy with Work Choices (…so it can say things are slightly better than they might have been), a better way of evaluating their policy is to look at the industrial relations system that existed in Australia before the aberration of Work Choices. On this test the Government is failing to provide adequate protection for workers.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Senator Rachel Siewert: Award modernisation - what’s going on?’

Guest post by Peter Murphy - Zimbabwe: Despotism or Democracy?

Published
by
Guest Poster
5 months ago
in Developing world, Elections, Feminism, Health, Imperialism, International, Politics, Poverty and Women
. 48 Comments

Peter Murphy from the Zimbabwe Information Centre writes:

Opening Remarks

This story of Zimbabwe and its political, economic and social turmoil is really a story about how women are trying to have their human right to a say in their society, about how the people want to help those millions who have HIV, about how the trade unions want to develop a prosperous, peaceful and just society, about how the professional classes want to create a way of governing that is straightforward, fair and works.

It is a story for the whole of Africa, and that is why all of Africa and in particular South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania and Botswana are part of this story.

As I write the people of Zimbabwe are being called out to a one-horse election that they don’t want, because it has already been drowned in blood, violence and cheating.

Between the March 29 presidential and parliamentary elections and today, almost 100 activists from the Movement for Democratic Change have been murdered, often in the most terrible way, over 3,000 have been very badly injured through torture, and now about 100,000 have been internally displaced because their homes and property have been looted or completely destroyed.

Zimbabwe now faces a chaotic regime collapse, with perhaps a minimal role for the international community in the immediate crisis.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Peter Murphy - Zimbabwe: Despotism or Democracy?’

Northern Territory Intervention one year on

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Education, Health, Indigenous, Parenting, Policy, Politics, Poverty and Race
. 29 Comments

Crikey is reporting today that a leaked progress report demonstrates that the Northern Territory Intervention, now just short of a year old, is “a shambles”. It’s worth reading the full story, but it’s also interesting to note that Mal “who will think of the children?” Brough has admitted that the thing was cobbled together in 48 hours, as just about everyone suspected at the time.

When Jenny Macklin announced the composition of the panel who will oversee the review of the Intervention earlier this month, commentary predictably focused on whether those appointed were “critics” or “supporters”, which seems an idiotic yet predictable angle given that the whole point of the thing is to see whether it’s attaining its actual goals, something recognised by Peter Yu who was named as the review’s chair. Most of the coverage of the Intervention has continued to be framed in ideological terms, not least from those who claim that we need to move on from ideology.

Continue reading ‘Northern Territory Intervention one year on’

More complacent denigration

Published
by
tigtog
6 months, 3 weeks ago
in Health, Indigenous, Media, Politics, Poverty and Race
. 34 Comments

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’

To those who have, even more will be given

Published
by
Mark
7 months ago
in Economics, Government, Howardia and Poverty
. 34 Comments

Perhaps our Christian Prime Minister has been reading Luke 8:18. I suppose we’re lucky that those who have little won’t find even the little they have taken away from them, but Andrew Leigh and Peter Martin are surely justified in asking why a fairly dodgy election promise to start with is being implemented in such a way as to disproportionately reward those who are already well off.

The redesigned scheme, due to come into effect on July 1, works like this: Every dollar that first home savers put into an account - up to a maximum of $5,000 - will be matched by a government contribution of 15 cents.

Except for Australians earning more than $80,000 per annum. They will get a government co-contribution of 25 cents for every dollar they invest. Really. …

Unless they earn more than $180,000 per annum in which case they will be blessed with a government contribution of 30 cents per dollar they invest.

That’s right.

Wayne Swan’s made much of creating incentives to save. I can’t for the life of me see why high income earners need public incentives. I thought we’d had enough middle class welfare under Howard. Now it seems we’re to get upper class welfare under Rudd.

Continue reading ‘To those who have, even more will be given’

Early childhood revolution… by 2020

Published
by
Mark
7 months, 2 weeks ago
in Climate change, Education, Government, Health, Parenting, Policy, Polls and Poverty
. 59 Comments

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′

The food crisis

Published
by
Robert Merkel
7 months, 2 weeks ago
in Developing world, Economics, Environment, Foreign policy, International, Policy, Politics, Poverty and Trade
. 50 Comments

First it was oil. Now it’s food, and the people of the developing world are, as usual, copping the worst of it:

Basic access to food is slipping out of reach for many people in developing countries. The cost of the rice has risen by more than three-quarters in two months and the price of wheat has more than doubled in the same time.

The desperation in dozens of countries has turned deadly of late. In the past week alone there have been violent, food-related riots in Haiti, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cameroon.

While there are short term factors pushing up food prices - amongst them, the drought in south-eastern Australia - there are also long-term factors pushing the price up, some not easily fixable, and some that are. Continue reading ‘The food crisis’

Democratic candidate an elitist? Say it ain’t so!

Published
by
Kim
7 months, 3 weeks ago
in Culture, Economics, Foreign Elections, Poverty, Religion, Sociology and USA
. 36 Comments

In the consistently depressing American presidential primaries (depressing anyway for anyone who doesn’t want to see the Rovean attack lines the GOP will use continually roadtested by Democrats that is) the latest furore revolves around some remarks Barack Obama made at a San Francisco fundraiser about blue collar voters - in states like Pennsylvania (or the rustbelt bits thereof as opposed to the swank bits of Philly and the college kid concentrations etc etc).

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

You can read his remarks in full context at the Huff Post post I linked to above.

As with almost anything Obama says, there are certain quarters where this stuff is read through the poisonous prism of race. But it’s also got a class element. Obama’s reciting the conventional wisdom of the Thomas Frank variety - blue collar whites will vote on cultural identity rather than economics. Frank is actually wrong in his much touted analysis of the correlation between income and Republican voting, as Laura Flanders pointed out some time ago. But expecting actual facts to make it into US political discourse - well, you’ll be waiting with your gun in your cold dead hands for the second coming etc… There are - in truth - enough of such voters around to make a difference in a close race, though (and the last two were both really close).

Where Obama’s right Continue reading ‘Democratic candidate an elitist? Say it ain’t so!’

Homelessness

Published
by
Mark
7 months, 3 weeks ago
in Government, Howardia, Media, Poverty and Sociology
. 37 Comments

One of the things the 2020 Summit is supposed to encourage is long term policy thinking. That’s something, arguably, that was consistently absent from John Howard’s style of governance - as demonstrated well by Nicholas Gruen in this essay. Note that I’m not arguing that right wing regimes per se lack the ability to plan ahead - Thatcher certainly had it, as mendacious as many of her measures were. But Howard and his government appeared to be a very particular style of political beast - electorally driven beyond belief. When we weren’t told that we were living in an earthly paradise, any problem that reared its head was instantly fixed - and ideally through a highly ideological announcement that would serve a double purpose as a “wedge”. Most of the time, the media moved on the next rabbit in the spotlight and the ensuing hat trick, and the issue went back underground. Consider - for instance - the Howard government’s response to homelessness. The only post-war government to lack a housing minister, the Coalition never did a thing, apart from occasional exhortations from Peter Costello about the virtues of voluntarism, until Mal Brough came along. Brough announced some sort of PPP for community housing, which, as far as I can tell, never got beyond the headline stage. He had bigger fish to fry.

It’s interesting, then, to consider the response of both the Rudd government and the media to the National Youth Commission’s homelessness report. Continue reading ‘Homelessness’

World Bank finances 4-gigawatt coal plant in India

Published
by
Robert Merkel
7 months, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, Developing world, Environment, Foreign policy, International and Poverty
. 5 Comments

The New York Times’ environmental blog, Dot Earth, has the story

The troubling tension between propelling prosperity and limiting climate risks in a world still wedded to fossil fuels is on full display this week. India’s Tata Power group just gained important financial backing from the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank, for its planned $4 billion, 4-billion watt “Ultra Mega” coal-burning power plant complex in Gujarat state.

While it might be tempting to decry this development (and I’m very, very tempted), the alternatives aren’t exactly cheery either. This plant might be huge, but they’re at least built with state-of-the-art coal technology, which is substantially more efficient than the alternatives. And the global abstract concerns of climate change are brought into perspective when you realize (As pointed out in their comments thread) hundreds of thousands of Indians die every year from pollution - the pollution of the air in their house from cooking fires. And while we all might like this to be made redundant by solar panels or windmills, the more likely alternatives are millions of petroleum-fuelled small generators, or dozens of small, inefficient, and even more polluting smaller coal-fired plants. Or nukes - if they could get the uranium from somewhere…

Martin Luther King - the legacy

Published
by
Kim
7 months, 4 weeks ago
in History, Industrial Relations, Poverty, Race and USA
. 16 Comments

1968 was a very eventful year, and we’re seeing a number of anniversaries which - hopefully - stimulate further reflection on some of the key personalities, cultural and political events four decades down the track. Friday the 4th of April was the fortieth anniversary of the death of Dr Martin Luther King.

There are a number of such reflections around in the blogosphere this weekend. Andrew Bartlett provides a number of valuable links, including one to Joseph Palermo at The Huffington Post who makes an interesting and important point about the difference in perceptions about King before and after his death:

Contrary to mainstream belief today, while King was alive he was never widely heralded in the media as a “savior” or a “great leader.” He was just as often denounced as a “polarizing” figure and his work was often denigrated in racist terms. As was the case with Robert F. Kennedy, the love affair with MLK only took off long after he had become a kind of martyr.

King had actually found himself at something of a crossroads in 1968 - most of the civil rights the movement had been seeking had been embodied in law - largely through LBJ’s decision to force them through a mainly reticent if not unwilling Congress. Continue reading ‘Martin Luther King - the legacy’

Tangled up in blue

Published
by
Mark
8 months, 1 week ago
in Economics, Howardia, Industrial Relations, Media and Poverty
. 22 Comments

Brendan Nelson’s been at one of the regular talkfests organised by The Australian and the Melbourne Institute - the “New Agenda for Prosperity Conference” - having his say on industrial relations.

The day after Julia Gillard buried AWAs (or did she?), Dr Nelson’s taken time out from his compassionate crusade to resurrect the Coalition’s support for statutory individual workplace agreements:

The proposition is for an AWA with a different name and a better safety net. “The Coalition has heard the message from the electorate about AWAs and we no longer support them,” he said.

“Having said that, it is important for Australians to understand that we continue to support individual statutory agreements with a fair no-disadvantage test.”

Nelson, meet Labor trap.

Given that even mining companies were being quoted in the Fin Review yesterday as being “relaxed” about the absence of individual statutory agreements after 2009, this can only be about pure ideology. Which is, of course, what got Howard into so much trouble. The Coalition’s inability to paper over the cracks of the Howardian legacy just ensured Labor gets to run the scare campaign it wants to run at the next election.

This folly was perhaps predictable. What’s more interesting is one of the other themes from Nelson’s speech The Australian decided to highlight in advance of its delivery. Continue reading ‘Tangled up in blue’