John Menadue

  • Business can take lead on refugees to end ‘execution by indifference’.

    In this article, Tony Shepherd, former President of the Business Council of Australia, urges Australia to be more generous in helping asylum seekers from Syria. He says:

    ‘As I stare out the window on the plane ride home (from the refugee camps in the Middle East) I think that if history has taught us nothing else, it is that generosity is always rewarded. Our nation, Australia, was built by immigration;  it has been the secret of our success. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the nations that chose to open their hearts and invest in new people, over the decades to follow, came to dominate diplomacy and lead in the global economy.’

    See link below to this article by Tony Shepherd in the AFR.

    http://www.afr.com/opinion/business-can-take-lead-on-refugees-to-end-execution-by-indifference-20160202-gmjcyj

  • John Menadue. Wasting food in France is now illegal.

    The Australian edition of Huffington Post carried a very encouraging story on 4 February this year that it is now illegal for supermarkets in France to waste food.

    Both Chambers of the French Parliament have unanimously voted to ban large foodstores from throwing food away.

    Supermarkets must either compost or donate unsold and nearly expired goods to charity. The law also prohibits stores from pouring bleach over food items to prevent homeless people from foraging. Schools across the country must begin to educate students to overcome food waste.

    Another law which went into effect on New Year’s Day makes it mandatory for large French restaurants to provide ‘doggy bags’ or take-away containers.

    These actions by the French Parliament have been welcomed by charities and French food banks.

    According to the Huffington Post, France is the first country in the world to adopt food waste legislation of this kind.

    Hopefully other countries and the Australian states will think seriously about it

  • Mark Gregory. Stone-walling on a second rate NBN network.

    In responding to questions at the Senate Estimates hearing held on 9 February 2016, NBN Co CEO Bill Morrow admitted he did not know the number of nodes being built during the Fibre to the Node (FTTN) rollout and he went on to say that any information about what is being rolled out by NBN Co would be commercial-in-confidence, meaning that he would very selectively answer questions put to him by Senators. By the end of the session, Morrow had answered very few questions.

    The purpose of Senate Estimates hearings is to examine the operations of government relating to expenditure of public funds and plays a key role in the parliamentary scrutiny of the executive. But as Morrow demonstrated so diligently is that you can persuade executives from a government business enterprise to attend the hearings but you cannot guarantee that they will answer any questions put to them.

    At a time when Australia has embarked on the largest nation building project of the digital era, executives from the government business enterprise rolling out the NBN rely on obfuscation and “commercial-in-confidence” to ignore reasonable and justifiable questions from Senators.

    Morrow’s responses at the Senate Estimates hearing included, “I do not know”, “I would have to take that on notice”, “I will take it on notice”, “I would imagine we do”, and I do not have that [information] here” and many variations of these statements.

    Senate Estimates hearings involving executives from NBN Co have become a sad pantomime. Senators spend a couple of hours asking Morrow and CFO Stephen Rue probing questions about what taxpayers are receiving for an ever increasing expenditure of public and borrowed funds and unsurprisingly most of the questions remain unanswered because key NBN Co executives that should be expected to be able to answer the questions about expenditure and what is actually being done by NBN Co, are not present.

    Australian’s should be concerned that executives from a government business enterprise are permitted to deflect, delay or simply ignore questions from Senators that are attempting to scrutinise how the government is spending taxpayer dollars.

    On more than one occasion now, Morrow has refused to acknowledge documents leaked from NBN Co and reported on in the media. If someone within NBN Co believes a document to be important enough to leak to the media, it is highly likely that Morrow would be asked questions about the document at the next Senate Estimates hearings and Australians should have a reasonable expectation that Morrow will provide answers.

    But this is not how it works in practice because Morrow’s response to a question about the document titled IOP 2.0 FTTN review dated 26 February 2015 was “The document that you refer to, somebody showed me a copy of that. I cannot confirm that that is even a valid NBN document. If it was, it would be commercial-in-confidence.”

    When asked again about a detail contained in the document, Morrow stated “I cannot confirm anything that is in that document. If that was our document, it would be commercial-in-confidence. I cannot even confirm that it is our document. Anybody can prepare something of that nature. Therefore, the information that you are asking, if you want to know the number of nodes or something then I am happy to take that on notice.”

    Australians might wonder how hard would it be for the CEO of a government business enterprise to ask that someone check the organisation’s document register and to follow up with an email to employees asking if someone had drafted the document.

    And you can be certain that NBN Co carries out an internal investigation to find the people that are leaking documents containing details about the different NBN rollouts and in particular details about NBN Co’s rollout of the obsolete VDSL2 Fibre to the Node (FTTN) component of the NBN.

    Morrow’s use of plausible deniability is something that we might expect in a Monty Python skit but not by the CEO of a government business enterprise responsible for Australia’s largest infrastructure project.

    The logic goes something like this: As CEO Morrow should not be expected to know the details of what is going on within NBN Co and even though leaked documents are reported in the media, and subsequently brought to Morrow’s attention, it would be disruptive to enquire if the document originated within NBN Co, therefore Morrow is unable to confirm the documents originality and cannot speak to anything contained within the document.

    At the end of the hearing the Chair Liberal Senator Linda Reynolds summed up the collective exasperation at what had just transpired when she said “there is a lot of technical information and detail that two people cannot possibly be across. So what I was suggest is that you consider your preparations for the next estimates. As you know, that will be a longer session, no doubt, with nbn. We know it is going to be in the week of 29 May. There are longitudinal themes, so if you and your staff are able to go through and review those themes and make sure that you either have the appropriate officers here, or on hand, so that they can email you some questions and you are able to answer the questions more quickly for the committee members. I think that would also assist you in taking fewer questions on notice, which obviously has a significant workload sitting behind that to get them in on time.”

    Morrow’s efforts at Senate Estimates hearings have been nothing more than professional stone-walling. Australians expect more from senior executives that are responsible to government and it is folly to treat the Senate with disdain. The secrecy and lack of transparency surrounding the NBN is a warning sign that cannot be ignored. Australians will be left with a second-rate broadband network at a time when our major competitors in the global digital economy are rolling out fibre to homes and business.

    Mark Gregory is a senior lecturer in the School of Engineering at RMIT University.

  • Michael D. Breen. Freedom to Mock.

    Tim Minchin’s ‘Come home Cardinal Pell’ nails it for many in Oz. Minchin voices the rage, the frustration and the suffering of unrequited victims, their relatives, and Church goers and observers.

    Rage boils when people feel unheard. It becomes incandescent over unfairness. It sizzles when one class triumphs over another.

    The song flashes the spotlight on the dark places were abuse happened initially or where cover up merchants operated.

    The song is composed. Also composed is the Statement from the Catholic Communications Office February 17th. ‘The past few days has (sic) seen a great deal of incorrect information relating to Cardinal George Pell and his upcoming Royal Commission appearance.’

    Both compositions seek to persuade. Let’s look at how they do it and the fallout. Minchin uses the long as literature tradition of satire. Satire works with wit, imagination, exaggeration and offence. Satire and protest songs have been the rallying and inspiring forces for much social reform.

    The P.R. document purports to tell the truth. However the genre is so steeped in spin that it invites critical reading from most judicious readers. Both genres can, and often do, create a backlash, which is the opposite of their intended purposes.

    Satire, seeking the high moral ground can cause serious collateral damage. There is no absolute freedom of speech. There are responsibilities as in the exercise of any right or power.

    As it is three factors stand between Pell and his appearing in Australia before the Commission. One is the professional opinion of a doctor. Then there is the acceptance of that opinion by the Commission. Thirdly there is the will of Pell himself. I have not seen any criticism of the first two factors.

    Pell is not currently before the court charged with an offence. Even if he were he would deserve the presumption of innocence. That may change. But no matter the amount of pain felt or hatred generated towards him the man, he enters a process of inquiry.

    Neither he nor any citizen deserves lynch law or trial by media or art. The problem is that if he is seen as the victim of unfairness he and his advocates can evoke undeserved compassion or complaints of unfairness.

    For satire or P.R. the end is frequently seen to justify the means. This is no more so than in social media. But I would argue that if the damage done to an innocent person, the target or bystander of a satirist attack, the attacker needs to review their motivation, means and methods.

    If a satirist like Charley Hebdo knows violence would ensue from a particular piece of work are they justified in going ahead? Is it surprising that the media focuses so much on the fate of victims and on free speech? What are the ends, which involve such destructive means?

    Zealots thrive on opposition. Second century Tertullian is quoted as saying, ‘The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.’ At times Tony Abbott seemed to regress to a zealous Democratic Labour Party mindset where he believed that he was doing God’s work and that opposition to his cause just proved he was on the righteous track.

    It would be too easy and convenient for sexual predators or concealers to claim their accusers were just anti-Catholic bigots.

    There is a line between ‘playing the man’ and following due process or solving the problem at hand. Whether in sport, or that other sport, politics currently there is too much tolerance for assault on the person. And the media love it.

    Advocates for victims or Pell are challenged to have respect for their clients. Can we all also maintain sufficient respect for the processes of the land to see that supra jungle standards are maintained all round? Or at least have the patience to see what they yield?

    Michael D. Breen is a Zen Buddhist ex Jesuit. He is a retired, organizational and humanistic psychologist. He fends off relevance deprivation with forays into woodwork,, metalwork, writing and Zen.

  • John Menadue. Making the Federation work better.

    The Abbott Government decided that over the next decade commencing in 2017 the Commonwealth Government would reduce grants to the states for education and health by $80 b. This is likely to produce a major and concerted campaign by the states to protect their hospitals and schools. It does provide an opportunity for more effective cooperation between the Commonwealth and the States in the health sector. I have reproduced below an article on this subject which was posted in May last year as part of the policy series co-edited with Michael Keating. I argue for the establishment of a joint Commonwealth State Health Commission in any state that will cooperate. In addition to this state by state approach, it might also be possible to build cooperation on a region by region basis. I do not think that a major change in constitutional arrangements is possible or that the Commonwealth will concede completely to the States or vice versa. But I believe that a pragmatic and step-by-step approach could be successful.  See repost of article below.

    Repost

    State governments spend about 25% of their budgets on health and another 25% on education. A cooperative arrangement between the commonwealth and state governments in one of these areas would greatly improve the operation of our federation. This article will focus on possible cooperation in health.

    A State handover of health services to the Commonwealth, as suggested by Tony Abbott many years ago, would be one way to overcome the waste and buck-passing between the Commonwealth and State governments in health. Kevin Rudd suggested that his government might take over state hospitals. Opinion polls suggested that the public would support this approach. But Kevin Rudd backed away. In passing it should be noted that the Commonwealth has no recent experience in running hospitals. It is not an easy task.

    But as a Commonwealth takeover is most unlikely, an alternative would be to establish a Joint Commonwealth/State Health Commission (Joint Health Commission) in any State where the Commonwealth and a State government can agree – a coalition of the willing, a Commonwealth/state partnership on a state by state basis.

    It is envisaged that the joint commission, with shared Commonwealth/State governance would be responsible for funding, planning and integrating all health services in that State. Consistent with an agreed plan, the Commission would then buy health services from existing providers – Commonwealth, State, local, NGO and private.

    A political agreement between the Commonwealth and any State is essential. If this political agreement is achieved, we would see a more cohesive and integrated health service, delivered much more efficiently. Once the benefit was clear in one State, hopefully other States would follow.

    I believe that this proposal would have strong public support. We are tired of the blame game.

    Either the Commonwealth government or any State government could initiate the breaking of the impasse.

    Background

    The Commonwealth Government provides about 43% of national health funding and the State Governments and territories 26 %. Another 31% of funding is from non-government sources (mainly individual users of health services).

    In both the NSW and SA health reviews that I chaired some years ago, a view was widely expressed that it’s all very well for State governments to review their health systems, but a major problem is the inefficiency, fragmentation, gaps, cost and blame shifting which results from the different roles of the Commonwealth and State governments in health’. This view was expressed, not only by those working in the health system, but also by the community generally. It was also frequently expressed by the media. The problem of divided responsibilities is well understood. The public doesn’t really give a hoot who plans and delivers health services. The public’s real concern is that the services are provided efficiently and equitably.

    Integration of commonwealth and state health functions are essential. Professor John Dwyer, in this blog, estimated   that more than 600,000 state hospital admissions per year could be saved if there was more timely community intervention which is funded by the Commonwealth.

    A solution requires a political agreement between the Commonwealth government and at least one State. The political issue cannot be avoided and attempts to get around this issue are likely to be unsuccessful, time-consuming and cumbersome. A bureaucratic or organisational response to a political problem will be unsatisfactory. The issue must be addressed politically. If there is political agreement, governance, financial, administrative and other issues could be successfully managed.

    Such an approach would not produce a unified national health system, but six (excluding the territories for the moment) joint health systems which are State-based. Nonetheless, this would be superior to the present division and fragmentation. The six State-based joint commissions may also better reflect the different history and needs of respective States. One size doesn’t necessarily fit all.

    The states may also be now more interested in what is proposed here because the 2014 budget suggests that over the next 10 years the Commonwealth will contribute $ 50 b less to state hospitals than the outgoing Labor government proposed. There was no certainty that this 10 year funding would have remained in place but I don’t think there is any doubt however that the Abbott government will attempt to shift more responsibility to the states for hospitals and schools.

    A Joint Health Commission in any State where the Commonwealth and the State could agree would have the following characteristics.

    1. Coverage of Joint Health Commission

    The wider the coverage the better to ensure real and comprehensive resource allocation and integration of services across the full continuum of care. The following programs should be included as the planning responsibility of the Joint Health Commission.

    • State Health (including Health Care Agreement)
    • High level residential aged care
    • Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA)
    • Home and Community Care (HACC)
    • Commonwealth Regional Health Services in rural and remote areas.
    • Medical Benefits Scheme (MBS)
    • Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme (PBS)
    • Aboriginal Health
    • Local Government health
    • NGOs (e.g. nursing services)
    • Public health

    State Health, HACC, etc. would tender for the provision of services to the Joint Health Commission. Similarly, local government and NGOs would tender, although allocations to them would probably need to be made through the State Health department.

    Private hospitals could probably be excluded from this coverage, as they depend on private contributions rather than direct government funding – except for occasional seed money. But provision should be made for private hospitals, along with local government and NGOs, to tender for supply of services to a Joint Health Commission, (see 3 below). The private delivery of health services should be encouraged where it is consistent with the state-wide plan and is delivered efficiently.

    Importantly, existing providers would continue to operate and provide services, and where appropriate, ministers – both Commonwealth and State – would continue to be responsible for their own services. But those services would be purchased by the Joint Health Commission as part of a state-wide plan, which I refer to under ‘functions’ below.

    2. Pooled Funding of Joint Health Commission

    The Joint Health Commission would receive a negotiated pooled allocation of funds from the Commonwealth and the State government. which reflected the coverage of programs for which it would be responsible (see 1 above), with appropriate population growth and cost indexation add-ons. As a starting point the shares of the two governments would reflect their current funding shares. Changes in the shares and total funding would be subject to the advice of the National Health Performance Authority (NHPA). That Authority would provide public advice to the two governments. The two governments would need to agree on annual funding arrangements.

    Whilst confidence in the funding formula is developed, it might be useful to consider shadow funding in the first 3 years and move to actual pooling of funds thereafter.

    3. Functions of Joint Health Commission

    1. a) Shared Resource Allocation through the purchase of various services from providers – Commonwealth, State and local government, and NGOs as part of a joint strategic plan.
    • In this case, shared resource allocation can be achieved through the establishment of a minimum set of Commonwealth and State programs.
    • The major changes associated with the JHC would provide an opportunity to move from producer dominated health care delivery to an output/patient focussed delivery system. So many of our health programs reflect provider interests; the MBS reflecting the interests of doctors and the AMA, the MBS reflecting the interests of the Pharmacy Guild and Big Pharma and public hospitals reflecting the interests of their providers, state governments. Patients are a secondary concern. We need to shift to a patient focussed health system in such key areas as chronic, acute and occasional care.
    • Funding would be allocated with agreed short and long term integrated outcomes, rather than siloed program outcomes, with specified standards and levels of performance.
    1. b) Shared Performance Management

    Oversee continuous improvement of the health system, monitor progress and establish reform targets and timelines:

    • Development of standard measurement
    • Benchmarking
    • Patient-centred best practices

    The NHPA provides an excellent opportunity for the establishment of a system that can meet the needs of consumers, community and health services. The NHPA can provide an approach that examines health status and outcomes, determinants of health, and health system performance.

    The NHPA should facilitate the mapping of progress for the population of a State, region or service. It could also be used to examine progress in tackling a particular health problem (e.g. aboriginal health), and to take a wider look at the interface between health and other government departments, the private sector and non-government organisations.

    4. Joint Health Commission Governance

    The following features could be included, and would ensure full Commonwealth and State government input into the state-wide plan:

    • Membership of the board should be high level to enable strategic decision-making on broad and longer-term issues.
    • Maximum transparency and disclosure of the Joint Commission’s work and final recommendations in order to neutralise special pleading and vested interests and to ensure public understanding and support.
    • The board of directors must have clear ‘governance’ responsibility and not a junior role. They should reflect the broad interests of the whole community and not be seen as representative of the Commonwealth or State or ‘insider interests’ that so dominate health systems in Australia.
    • Independent chair appointed by the two Ministers from a short list provided by the respective Commonwealth and State Health CEOs. It might be useful to have the chair from another State.
    • Apart from the chair, no jurisdiction to have more than 50% representation.
    • Representation could include other Commonwealth and State jurisdictions (e.g. Indigenous Affaires) and people having experience in the private sector.
    • The board would appoint the CEO who would be responsible to the board and not the two jurisdictions.
    • The board would approve the strategic plan and budget.
    • A constitution may be useful to provide more user-friendly objects, role, function and operating procedures, including engaging the private sector.
    • Subsidiarity should be an important principle for governors in developing the state-wide plan. Management and service delivery should be driven down to the lowest and most local level possible, consistent with state and nation-wide standards.
    • The Board should have a small secretariat, but rely on Joint Health Commission for planning etc. It must avoid a new level of bureaucracy.
    • Board costs would be shared by Commonwealth and State.
    • The Commonwealth and State minister would be responsible for negotiating high-level policy principles, including overall funding on the advice of the board. This would help reduce the risk of the board dividing on Commonwealth/State lines. Ministers must reach broad agreement if the Joint Health Commission is to work.
    • The board should be responsible to the Commonwealth and State minister, with one financial report to both. If there is not agreement between the two ministers, there would be a public dispute resolution procedure which would encourage cooperation and dialogue between the two ministers. This would encourage public trust in the integrity of the process. I would expect that this would produce an agreement in almost all cases. If resolution is not possible, the Commonwealth minister would prevail; given the need for a stronger national role and that the Commonwealth Government provides 43 % of national health funds compared with 26 % by the states.

    These governance arrangements could be reviewed in 5 years.

    Summary   

    A Joint Health Commission established upon agreement of any State with the Commonwealth would be a substantial improvement on the present arrangements. It would help break the impasse on federalism and better integrate health services. It requires a political decision between the Prime Minister and premier.

    The public is tired of the blame shifting and fragmentation in health and would respond to a sea change such as this. Such a joint health commission in any State that agreed would help achieve what both of them are seeking in health – a better integrated health system and a favourable community response, A committed Commonwealth government could use its financial leverage to make such an offer attractive to the states.

    A Joint Health Commission in any one State could begin to address the ‘big ticket’ problems in health delivery – the Commonwealth/State fragmentation, an eroding primary health care system, an antiquated workforce structure and obvious system failures in safety and quality.

    Of course, the fragmentation in health is not just caused by Commonwealth-State fragmentation. The two big Commonwealth programs – MBS and PBS – are not effectively integrated.

    All these big-ticket issues are lost sight of in the argy-bargy of Commonwealth/State blame and cost shifting.

    Not only would a Joint Health Commission in one State be a substantial improvement, it would also be very symbolic, demonstrating that governments can address hard political issues in a cooperative way.

    We must stop asking continually for more money or tweaking the health dollars, when many problems are structural. A lot of health spending is counter-productive – throwing money at problems to get them out of the media or for short-term political gain, rather than solving systemic problems. Any increase in health dollars must be accompanied by system change. A Joint Health Commission starting in one State is a sound way to begin breaking the impasse.

    The key is political will by ministers. If there is the political will, the governance problems can be resolved.

    There is no reason that the principles proposed above in health could not be applied in other fields such as education.

    John Menadue AO was formerly Secretary Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Secretary Department of Trade, Ambassador to Japan and CEO of Qantas.

  • Evan Williams. Film review. ‘Trumbo’ (M)

    Everyone remembers Psycho, in which Anthony Perkins played a knife-wielding weirdo obsessed with his dead mother, and most of us remember Rambo, in which Sylvester Stallone played a super-patriot action-hero fighting for truth, justice and the American way. We all know about Romeo, and some of us will remember Dumbo, Disney’s animated baby elephant with the big ears. But Trumbo? He’s not exactly a household name, and unless you’re something of a film buff you may never have heard of him. Trumbo is the hero of Trumbo, a wholly absorbing film from Hollywood director Jay Roach.

    For the record, Dalton Trumbo was a successful screenwriter during Hollywood’s golden years, one of the notorious ”Hollywood Ten” blacklisted in the 1940s for refusing to testify before Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee was set up to weed out communists in high places, and the definition of “communist” was fairly loose. These were the dark days of anti-red witch-hunts, when many a loyal American was named and shamed for real or imagined communist sympathies. The Hollywood Ten finished up in gaol, and many other writers, actors and directors were sacked or boycotted by the major studios. Some eked out an income by writing under assumed names, but their work was never credited on-screen. In Roach’s film the screenplay – crisp, witty and disturbing – is the work of John McNamara, and I doubt if Trumbo himself could have written a better one

    It’s true that many Hollywood celebrities had communist connections . As an opening title informs us, thousands of Americans joined the party during the war years when Uncle Joe Stalin was a loyal ally of Uncle Sam. Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) joined up in 1943, and in the eyes of McCarthy and his witch-hunting mates, was a still a certified security risk years after the war was over. It was much the same here. Thousands of lefties and Laborites, haunted by bitter memories of war and depression, drifted into the communist camp. My own father was one, causing much anguish to poor mum, who was convinced that dad’s CP membership had denied him an army commission.

    Roach’s film is as much a portrait of those paranoid times as a study of Trumbo himself. Cranston, familiar to all except me as the star of the TV series Breaking Bad, gives us a grimly dogged and highly convincing impersonation. But for all his studied mannerisms and surface gestures, we never engage deeply with Trumbo as a human being. If anything, Diane Lane as his loyal wife Cleo, and Elle Fanning as his teenage daughter, are more vivid and sympathetic characters. Roach falls back on repeated shots of Trumbo belting away at an old manual typewriter or writing in his bathtub, sustained by cigarettes, whisky and Benzedrine hits, as if this were enough to reveal his inner life. I wanted to care more for the guy. Neighbours shunned and vilified him, and the syndicated columnist Hedda Hopper (a gleefully malicious Helen Mirren) pursued a relentless personal vendetta . Hopper comes across as the real villain of the story – not McCarthy or the feeble studio bosses or the big-name stars like John Wayne who spurned Trumbo in his hour of need .

    How good was Trumbo anyway? He made a tidy fortune as a screenwriter, but apart from Kitty Foyle, about a working-class girl who makes good, and the Oscar-winning romance Roman Holiday, there’s not a lot else of Trumbo’s I remember. Roman Holiday was written by Trumbo’s friend Ian McKellan Hunter, who based his script on Trumbo’s storyline and declined to turn up at the presentation ceremony to accept his Oscar (which officially went to Trumbo in 1975). A turning point came when Stanley Kubrick defied Hollywood moguls by insisting that Trumbo be credited for the screenplay of Spartacus (1960). Spartacus isn’t Kubrick’s best film, but it sealed the fate of the Hollywood blacklist and signalled the end of the McCarthy era.

    Could it happen again? I think so. There’s no shortage of political hysteria in the air these days, and plenty of reckless military adventurism of the kind that feeds hatred and suspicion. I can imagine a round of Islamist witch-hunts in the US, especially if Donald Trumbo (sorry, Trump) becomes president: “For our own security I want to weed out all those Islamists in the State Department and the White House.” There’s a telling moment in Trumbo when news comes through of the death of justice Wiley Rutledge, wiping out a narrow liberal majority on the US Supreme Court and denying Trumbo any chance of a successful appeal against his gaol sentence. With the recent death of justice Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama has a choice. He can cement a conservative majority on the court or make it a little easier for liberal causes to succeed. Future Trumbos will await his decision with interest.

    Three-and-a-half stars

    Evan Williams reviewed films in The Australian newspaper for 33 years. He is a Life Member of the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia for services to film criticism and the film industry.In 2015 he received the Geraldine Pascall Lifetime Achievement Award for critical writing.

     

  • Peter Gibilisco. Neoliberalism and its Perceptions

    Politics has changed so much over the years; our political climate is unstable, since 2007 we have had five different prime ministers. A person in my position would ask how does this affect people with severe physical disabilities?

    Neoliberalism has its aim to put into question all collective structures capable of obstructing the logic of the pure market. Such a belief allows one to question the ideology behind the welfare state, progressive taxation and other social policies that can lead to an egalitarian society. Their ideology harvests the sentiment that many welfare recipients are lazy and should do more to help grow the economy. But rather neoliberals are persistently oriented towards supporting a society in which self interest prevails and that is why they give all their energy to policies that claim to further the individual pursuit of wealth. That is, the individual pursuits that are deemed worthy of government support are those that are beyond those living on the “other side” of the great divide between the rich and the poor.

    I am lucky enough to live in Australia but even with my poor eyesight I am still able to witness the degradation of impoverishment upon ordinary people whenever I visit my local community, Noble Park.

    Individual pursuits, whether of the rich or the poor are always, at least to some extent, justified in terms of one’s self-interest. And this goes a long way to explaining the powerful and dogmatic reasoning behind the powerful ideology as it is supported by those who are very rich. And that is confirmed by the equally dogmatic phrase: ‘power is money’.

    Liberal political and economic policies are dominated by this ideological viewpoint. Such policies have been integral to political economies all over the world, in both developed and developing countries. The re-birth of Liberalism as Neoliberalism was seen as the answer to the western world problem of stagflation, which reared its head in mid 1970s. Hugh Stretton put it well:

    Alternative strategies for dealing with the offending stagflation would advantage different classes, parties, industries. Economic reform was as usual a political task. Other interests saw opportunities to change the direction of development to improve the mixed economies’ efficiency by means which would incidentally make the rich richer, business freer, welfare cheaper and the poor more self reliant. Those means were described as de-regulating, privatising, restoring competition, cutting welfare, “rolling back the boundaries of government” (Stretton, 1986:7).

    Neoliberalism is a political economic theory and practice that has emerged with greater and greater appeal since the 1960s, and since the 1980s it has increased in prominence at the level of public policy formulation. The neoliberal approach rejects social democratic doctrines. Neoliberalism focuses politically on the establishment of a stable medium of exchange, the reduction of localised rules, regulations and barriers to free-ranging commerce, and the privatisation of state-run enterprises. This contemporary and dominant economic ideology of most western countries is referred to with a “neo-“ prefix because it is a latter-day version of the classical liberalism that initially arose in the 18th century. Moreover, neoliberalism claims to be a political system designed to highlight both the political limitations of the market economy in the nation-state, and the economic efficiency and effectiveness of the market economy when it is freed to operate on a global scale.

    Classical liberal economics was developed by Adam Smith, and we can sense its appeal at what we now say was the beginning of the industrial revolution. Smith argued that government intervention disrupted the natural order of society. According to Smith, the natural order of society can be defined as a society left to its own devices. Smith based his economic beliefs on the argument that most economic self-interest is altruistic. This can be noted in his famous quote from The Wealth of Nations:

    ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves. Not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.’

    Now, after thinking about this for some years, I come to the view that something like this principle is working itself out in my own relationship with what is now referred to as the “disability sector”.

    As it is commonly understood altruism is about selflessness, it is a principle or practice of concern for the welfare of others. But my situation seems to be endorsed by Smith in the above quote. In the social service delivery to which I am a recipient, involving a personal care attendant, the “altruistic effects” that actually work themselves out in the workplace becomes a friendship circle – workers and clients are mates. This workplace is actually our home in which the residents are actively welcoming the visitors to their “space”, under their private “roof”. It is not only those paid for their work in this workplace who have an interest, a general self-interest, in forming what takes place. After all it is also a place sustained by the friendships that are generated.

    According to Smith, this classical liberal system would provide for an economic infrastructure that could not only provide economic benefits, but also help promote a proud, virtuous and motivated society (Gibilisco). Amartya Sen portrays the mixed emotions of self-interest:

    ‘Can you direct me to the Railway Station?’ asks the stranger. ‘Certainly,’ says the local, pointing in the opposite direction to the post office, ‘and would you post this letter for me on your way?’ ‘Certainly,’ says the stranger, resolving to open it to see if it contains anything worth stealing (Sen, cited in Stretton and Orchard, 1994:51).

    During an interview with me, Hugh Stretton explained his dissent from this ideological interpretation of Adam Smith. He pointed out that Smith never said that the interests which prompted people’s economic decisions and behaviour were all selfish. Smith’s first book The Theory of Moral Sentiments was about our feelings, and concerns about other people’s needs, safety and happiness, as well as our own. When he said, in The Wealth of Nations, that he owed his breakfast to his baker’s self-interest, there is good reason to think that Smith meant the baker’s joy in his skills and work, and pride in the quality of his bread and the pleasure it could give his bread’s consumers, as well as the money it earned him.

    Smith certainly believed that people’s generous feelings, and concern for others’ safety and prosperity, as well as their own, could join in determining their market choices and their social and political values and behaviour. Because it comes from the neoliberal ‘bible’ (i.e. Smith’s The Wealth of Nations) I think this observation must play a vital part of any effective attack on the neoliberals’ assumption that material self-interest is the sufficient cause of market efficiency, which in turn, they then suggest, is a necessary condition – many even think of it as a sufficient condition – of a good society.

    Meritocracy

    Meritocracy is defined by government policies promoting the principles of merit. The actions pursued by advocates of meritocracy are fundamental to the belief that people get out of the system what they put into it based on what they deserve according to market based principles – i.e. what they produce and how what they produce performs in the market. It is a political vision for the future based on merit, and opposed to the traditionally conservative theories of the aristocracy. However, Michael Young a well-known writer on the subject has argued that “meritocracy is even worse than aristocracy because it attempts to acquire plus points because it connotes power and privilege as merited rather than born with”. He further argues that meritocracy is detrimental to those with disabilities. Young in his 1998 article titled: “Meritocracy revisited: assessing the social implications of meritocracy” puts it like this:

    … showing how sad, and fragile, a meritocratic society could be. If the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become, and, if they were convinced it was all for the common good, how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage.

    As a result, today we may have the worst of both worlds. Social reality, as portrayed by today’s media, tells us that the rich are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer. In the case of people with disabilities, their capacities, under such a system, are rarely deemed meritorious or worthy of reward.

    Moreover, this brings into question, possible deplorable links between meritocracy and equal opportunity.

    However, we need to keep in mind that the concept of individual merit had been introduced as far back as Michael Young’s 1956 book The Rise of Meritocracy. In a more recent article, he has suggested that:

    [a] line of argument that is also made much of in the book is that a meritocracy can only exist in a full form if there is such a narrowing down of values that people can be put into rank order of their worth.

    This connects with a political insistence on the rise of a new form of meritocracy, which can also be prejudicial and ultimately discriminatory against those with socially defined lesser abilities or different abilities. Young argues that what one is born with, or without, is not of one’s own doing. To put it in a more crude form of discourse, being a member of the “lucky sperm club” confers no moral right to advantage. But such a view of “luck” does seem to align with the political-economic doctrines of some advocates of neoliberalism

    This article is dedicated to the memory of my friend and mentor, Hugh Stretton.

    I would like to thank Bruce Wearne and Christina Irugalbandara.

    I would like to promote this worthy new organisation http://www.uvpd.org.au/index.html

  • John Nieuwenhuysen. Multiculturalism Today and the Little Evil

    According to the ABS, the proportion of Australians born overseas has reached its highest point in 120 years. At about 6.6 million people, the overseas born represent 28 per cent of the country’s total, and, since 2005, migration has contributed half of total population growth. Some 47 per cent of Australians in 2015 were either born overseas or have parents who were.

    The diversity of Australia’s population has also increased, and the days of White Australia are long since gone. The traditional major country sources of immigration remain Britain and New Zealand, which represent 20.8 and 9.1 per cent respectively of our overseas born population. But Asian migration has been rising; and, in 2015, 6 per cent of Australia’s overseas born were from China; 5.6 per cent from India; 3.5 per cent from Vietnam; 3.2 per cent from the Philippines; and 2.2 per cent from Malaysia.

    How do the Australian people view continuing high levels of immigration, and its increased diversity, at a time of record overall population growth? And how stands its opinion of multiculturalism?

    According to the annual surveys by Monash University’s Professor Andrew Markus for the Scanlon and Australian Multicultural Foundations [Mapping Social Cohesion, 2015, National Report P.41], there has been “a consistently high level of endorsement for multiculturalism.” In response to the proposition that “multiculturalism has been good for Australia,” the survey found agreement in the three years 2013, 2014 and 2015 in the range of 84-86 per cent. The proportion in the survey registering strong agreement with the proposition increased from 32.2 per cent in 2013 to 43.3 per cent in 2015.

    Since, as Professor Markus notes, the meaning of multiculturalism in Australia is open to interpretation, survey respondents were asked to indicate their agreement with five different statements on multiculturalism. The survey showed that “the strongest positive association was with its contribution to economic development [75 per cent agree] and its encouragement of immigrants to become part of Australian society [71 per cent.]”

    This positive attitude to multiculturalism has co-existed not only with a high net overseas migration intake but also temporary admissions of entrants and New Zealand citizens to Australia, totalling close to two million people.

    This persistently high net migration level and such a great number of temporary entrants would in past years have aroused heated debate. As Professor Markus notes [page 34]: “Whereas in the early 1990’s, a large majority [over 70 per cent at its peak] considered the intake to be ‘too high’, most surveys between 2001 and 2009 indicated that opposition to the level of intake was a minority viewpoint.”

    Subsequently, in the last two years, with the collapse of the mining industry, slow Chinese economic growth, and government deficits, Markus [page 34] notes that there it was expected that support for the existing level of immigration would fall. But instead the reverse has happened-in both 2014 and 2015, Markus found that around 60 per cent of respondents considered that the intake was “about right” or “too low”.

    Professor Markus speculates on the reasons for this continuing support and considers [page 35] that, among other causes, it may reflect the “…perceived effectiveness of government asylum seeker policy…” as well as possibly a misunderstanding of the numbers of asylum seekers.

    Any observer who recalls the heated debates about immigration policy in the early 1990’s, when the Commonwealth Bureau of Immigration Research provided a plenitude of both scholarly works and public forums, and compares that time with today, can note how the asylum seeker controversy dominates current media coverage. That concentration seems to have pushed aside previous issues, such as the size and composition of the migrant intake.

    In many ways, I think this is highly unfortunate. Australia has enjoyed a good reputation for its successful settlement of people from all around the globe. Now, the harshness and inhumanity of the “Stop the Boats” policy is dominating the image of the country. The obsession of both major political parties to try to ensure that Australia is absolved from facing up to the harsh reality that wars, poverty and civil strife create streams of legitimate asylum seekers, is a deep scar on the country’s contemporary history, especially since it has public support. In particular, it ignores the great success of the absorption, under the leadership of Malcolm Fraser, of such a multitude of refugees after the Vietnam war.

    The credit that Australia deserves for its overall immigration program is thus being sadly undermined by a harsh and obstinate attitude to asylum seekers, and a neglect of obligations under the UNHCR convention. Hugh Mackay [The Age, January 26] has rightly damned the policy as “…immoral, because it treats people who have committed no crime as criminals….and fails to honour a moral principle we should claim as one of Australia’s core values-fairness.”

    Perhaps political leaders think silently of the asylum seeker policy as a little evil which is compensated for by the great, enlightened good of the general immigration program. But as the author of Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton once wrote:

    “Consent to a little evil, and it will grow…and a great evil will overwhelm us…No shame or remorse will save us then. Therefore consent not to… evil at all.”

    John Nieuwenhuysen AM FASSA is an Emeritus Professor at Monash University

     

  • What’s holding back the world economy.

    In this article from The Guardian, Joseph Stiglitz points to the slow growth rates in the developed world and the reasons for them. He says that

    ‘In the US, quantitative easing did not boost consumption and investment partly because most of additional liquidity returned to central banks’ coffers in the form of excess reserves. … It appears that the flood of liquidity has disproportionately gone toward creating financial wealth and inflating asset bubbles rather than strengthening the real economy. … The risk of another financial crisis cannot be ignored. … [We must] begin with re-writing the rules of the market economy to ensure greater equality, more long-term thinking and reigning in the financial market with effective regulation and appropriate incentive structure.’

    See link to article below:

    http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/08/whats-holding-back-world-economy-joseph-e-stiglitz

  • Murdoch takes Abbott as his guest to President’s banquet in US.

    According to a report on Media Watch on 8 February, Rupert Murdoch brought Tony Abbott as his guest at a banquet in Washington which President Obama attended.

    Several of the Murdoch papers in Australia suggested that this was a personal meeting between Tony Abbott and President Obama. It was nothing of the sort. It was a cocktail party and lunch attended by 100 guests and presumably President Obama shook Tony Abbott’s hand, but it seems it was nothing more than that.

    It says something about Murdoch’s political judgement that he took an ex prime minister to this lunch.  Surely he would have known that inviting tony Abbott as his guest would likely antagonise Prime Minister Turnbull. Or was that his intention?

    In any event, it was a beat-up from beginning to end.

    See link to Media Watch below:

    http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s4402700.htm

  • Trevor Boucher. Tax principles and negative gearing.

    I just wish that current comment about negative gearing would pay some attention to tax principles. Tax principles? Yes, they do exist.

    A person who negatively gears a rental property has two objectives in mind: getting a rental return and reaping a capital gain on disposal.

    The interest paid out is in pursuit of both objectives but the difficulty of apportioning it to each of those objectives means that the whole of the interest is charged against income, even income from other sources.

    The excess interest over rents received could by legislation be quarantined to future rental income, or held for deduction against the capital gain on disposal.

    Money has a time value. Deduction of excess interest against current income provides a present benefit but the tax impact of the capital gain is deferred until the gain is realised. Meanwhile the person’s wealth increases as the property’s value rises.

    Taxing capital gains helps to redress the imbalance. But that redress has been damaged by the fiscal vandalism represented by taxing only half of a realised capital gain.

    A dollar is a dollar is a dollar. Whether a dollar receipt comes from personal exertion or from property investment it carries the same taxable capacity.

    Remove the fifty per cent capital gain discount and negative gearing loses some of its shine.

    Trevor Boucher was Australian Commissioner of Taxation 1984-93. This was followed by two years as Australia’s Ambassador to the OECD.

     

  • Jonathan Page. The Inspiration of Vietnam

    Postcard from Hanoi:

    I have been an oncologist for some 35 years, treating adults with advanced cancer. Despite a far greater understanding of the disease, with the discovery of quite remarkable “targeted” therapies, most patients still die of this disease. Many are not suitable for these treatments, many don’t respond or respond poorly and briefly, and of course many simply present very late in the course of the cancer.

    As an oncologist I am thus confronted by uncertainty, sadness, despair and grief on a regular basis, as are all the members of the oncology team, but at times leavened by the joy of success, the gratitude of families and the deep insights into the human “soul”.

    Through my own adult life I have had a mixed relationship with death, particularly my own, beginning with a simple non-acknowledgment, then noticing an increasingly intrusive terror, with quite visceral reactions to certain patients as they moved towards their own demise under my care. I was in my forties at that time and would experience profuse sweating, tremors, nausea and a curious clouding of consciousness. I thought I may have malaria (a noble affliction) but to whom should I go for wise counsel? There was little wisdom to be found. Over time my symptoms evolved into a depression, but this only became clear to me years later, in retrospect.

    Technically I had been suffering “thanatophobia”, that is “fear of death”. A common complaint, but rarely considered (in our society) since we prefer a “cultural denial”. Thus, more recently, over 15 years or so I have pursued a deeper understanding of death, my own and that of others. This universal phenomenon unites us all. As John Donne reminds us: “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee”.

    I have learnt much from Joan Halifax who wrote “Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death” and the late Stephen Levine who wrote both “Who Dies? An Investigation into Conscious Living and Conscious Dying” and also “A Year to Live: How to Live this Year as if it were your Last”. I have completed a one year course based on this latter book.

    Death has now become less fearsome to me and more interesting! As Buddhism has told us for 2,600 years, a regular meditation on one’s own death will invigorate one’s life and shed some light on the true nature of the world and the meaning of our own experience.

    The complete practice of oncology requires some exploration of one’s own mortality, to more deeply understand the experience of each patient, to be of service and, importantly, to learn. There is a long history in most cultures of a specific “companion to the dying”. Medical practitioners including oncologists are ideally placed to occupy this role.

    Over the years I have been greatly supported by a mindfulness practice including regular meditation. Again, this cultivation of mindfulness, bringing one’s mind into the present moment with awareness and “heartfulness”, is an ancient Buddhist practice, taught also in other spiritual traditions and in more modern secular environments. This practice enables a deeper understanding of one’s inner emotional life, allowing one to be more “available” for patients, rather than locked within a defensive carapace. The risk of “burnout” and depression is far less.

    Strangely (or perhaps not) these skills have never been a substantial part of medical education or the oncology specialty, with some notable exceptions such as the programme at Monash University in Melbourne and the long-running “The Healer’s Art” course developed by Dr Rachel Naomi Remen at University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.

    What about Vietnam?

    I have had the privilege of visiting this astonishing country many times, firstly as a medical student in 1974, then more recently with colleagues, supported by the Hoc Mai Foundation, travelling to Hanoi to teach Medical English, oncology and other specialty topics. However, at a deeper level, I (and I suspect my colleagues also) travel to Vietnam to learn from this resilient, gracious and warm-hearted people. I feel there is a spiritual nature to the Vietnamese society, reflecting elements of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.

    It is helpful to leave one’s ‘ego” or one’s “sense of an important self” at home and thereby immerse oneself in this enriching and restorative culture. The Vietnamese (to my eye) seem to embody a friendly mindfulness, a universal respect, remarkable patience and lack the reactivity so often seen in more “Western” cultures.

    I am looking forward to a further visit to Hanoi, to renew friendships and, importantly, to imbibe the pervasive spiritual vitality in that city that now has a direct positive impact on my work.

     

    Jonathan Page, Medical Oncologist, Manly and The Mater Hospitals, Sydney, NSW.

  • John Menadue. Postcards from Hanoi.

    I will be in Hanoi from February 17-26, attending a Hoc Mai Foundation workshop on learning from each other about health issues in Vietnam and Australia, and assisting in the learning of English in the health field. Hoc Mai means ‘forever learning’.

    The foundation was established in the late 1990s. University of Sydney was a very active partner.  Over 30 groups of Australian clinicians and others interested in Vietnam have travelled to Vietnam since the late 1990s. 29 Australians will be in our group in Hanoi.

    Emeritus Professor Kerry Goulston will be leading our group. He has made almost 30 visits to Vietnam as part of the Hoc Mai Foundation.

    During this February visit, a few of us will be sending ‘postcards’ from Hanoi. The first postcard  from Jonathan Page, a medical oncologist, follows.

  • Robert Manne. Why we have failed to address climate change.

    In this article, published in the December The Monthly Essays, Robert Manne describes the major obstacles to addressing climate change. He refers to the unique nature of climate change and the difficulties that it has presented for scientists to persuade the world community about the problem and the need to take action. Robert

    Manne also refers to the difficulty that just at the time when concerted government action is necessary, the public debate from Liberal economists pointed to the need to scale back government. The post WWII consensus associated with Keynes and Bretton Woods was under challenge.

    The problem was particularly acute in the US with funding by oil and energy companies of think-tanks and the ideological Right, which led on to the Tea Party.  John Menadue.

    For this excellent article, see link below:

    www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/december/1448888400/robert-manne/diabolical

  • John Menadue. Hoist with their own petard

    Private health insurance funds like NIB are complaining about high specialist fees. But these very same funds are major contributors to the problem. And it is a problem. In the last 30 years we have seen a dramatic increase in specialist fees.

    A major contributor to this increase in specialist fees is the ‘gap insurance’ that private health insurance firms offer. Gap insurance effectively underwrites specialist’s ability to increase fees and weakens Medicare’s ability to cap fees. In the AFR today, NIB gives two examples of how this is done. For prostatectomy (surgical removal of prostate) the Medicare Benefit Schedule Price is $1,939, but with gap insurance NIB offers to cover this up to $2,941. For knee replacements, the Medicare Benefit Schedule Price is $1,318, but with gap insurance NIB offers to cover this up to $2,014.

    But that is not the end of the story by any means.

    The growth of private health insurance makes it more difficult for Medicare to control fees. Instead of the Medicare Benefit Schedule Price capping fees, the Medicare price is just the first stepping stone to higher fees. Whilst NIB will pay up to $2,941 for a prostatectomy, compared with the $1,935 in the Medicare Benefit Schedule, the AMA has a recommended fee of $4,465. And on top of that AMA recommended price, NIB tells us that some surgeons are charging another $6,000. Yet we have a Royal Commission on Trade Union behaviour!

    NIB reveals the same pattern for knee reconstructions. The Medicare Benefit Schedule Price is $1,318 but that is ratcheted up to $2,014 through NIB gap insurance. And then it goes up to $3,960 to the AMA recommended fee. To top this off, NIB advises that some surgeons are charging between $4,500 and $5,500.

    There are many reasons why health costs are rising. Private health insurance companies like NIB and specialists are major contributors.

    The ‘market’ that economists talk about does not work in the health sector. Providers, doctors and hospitals, have the power to set prices as the above figures show.

    With the ‘market’ not working there are really only two ways for governments to avoid price and fee gouging. The first is through price control. That is largely the way that Japan keeps its healthcare costs down. But that approach is unlikely in Australia given our constitution and political situation.

    The second is to have a single public payer to counter the power of providers. That is generally what countries with successful health schemes do.

    Medicare was designed as a single payer. But its power has been diluted by the growth of private health insurance with gap insurance. We are steadily moving down the disastrous US path. And the Australian taxpayer is paying $11 b. p.a. to subsidise these destructive private health insurance funds.

    We should have no sympathy for NIB, BUPA and Medibank Pte about rising costs. They are major contributors to the problem. And they get bundles of money from taxpayers despite the damage they do.

  • John Menadue. Regional cooperation on refugees, Bali and a Track II Dialogue.

    I attended a Track II Dialogue in Bangkok recently to try to help develop a framework of shared responsibility to manage in a humane and efficient manner, displaced people movements in the region.

    There is concern that the Track I Regional Dialogue at government level has not been particularly fruitful. So much of the response to asylum seekers, refugees and displaced people in the region has been ad hoc, fragmented and political.

    The Track II Dialogue included a range of government officials in their private capacities, refugee experts, international agencies and people from think-tanks. The Dialogue was initiated by the Centre for Policy Development in Australia. It now has many additional conveners and supporters including from Mahidol University in Thailand, ISIS Malaysia, the Sydney Myer Fund, the Planet Wheeler Foundation, the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation, Qantas and Corrs Chambers Westgarth.

    Australia’s successful participation in the Indochina refugee program would not have been possible without the cooperation of regional countries. There were several key elements in that cooperation ,one being that  regional countries would hold Indochinese asylum seekers in safety and facilitate processing. That commitment from regional countries was backed by a broad agreement that countries such as the US, Canada, France and Australia would assist in resettlement. This basic pact between regional countries and settlement countries was messy around the edges, but it worked. My experience with the Indochina program is the reason for my contention over many years that we need to build a regional framework or architecture to manage the flow of displaced people into and within our region.

    But whilst the principles of that earlier pact over the Indochinese outflow are still valid, it is also obvious that no two situations are the same. Most of the asylum seekers from Indochina into South East Asia were in direct flight from Indochinese countries. Many asylum seekers in the region now are not in direct flight but are in transit. There are also many economic migrants in the region who are not asylum seekers but seek improved economic opportunities for themselves and their families. In many ways these displaced economic migrants bring an economic benefit to host countries but their status is irregular and precarious.

    These regional countries face far greater problems over irregular movements than we do. For example in 2015 Malaysia had 272 000 people of concern to the UNHCR, Thailand had 625 000, Indonesia 13 000, Bangladesh 233 000 and Myanmar 1.5 m. Australia had 58 000 people of concern to the UNHCR.

    So the situation faced by regional countries today is different from the situation faced by those countries at the time of the Indochina outflow.

    But there is another major difference. A key to the resettlement of asylum seekers in regional countries in the aftermath of the Indochina war was that relatively wealthy countries were prepared to accept large numbers of refugees for resettlement. The US did the heavy lifting with other countries such as Australia, France and Canada. But now, regional countries cannot rely on this same degree of outside help in resettlement. As regional countries, we have to collaborate and address our problems together. That is not a bad thing but it means building a new framework of regional cooperation.

    Amongst other things Track II seeks to build on the ‘Bali Process’ which was established in 2002 at the initiative of the Australian and Indonesian governments.   Australia then faced an earlier flow of boat arrivals mainly as a result of wars in the Middle East that we involved ourselves in at the request of the US.

    There are now 45 member countries of the Bali Process, including key countries Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Australia and Indonesia are co-chairs of the Bali Process at both ministerial and official level.

    The Bali ‘process’ has been cumbersome, ad hoc and fragmented. Australia has been a fair-weather friend to the region on refugees. When the Indochina program closed down in the mid 1990s, we left regional countries with responsibilities for many handicapped and disadvantaged Indochinese asylum seekers. After the Bali Process was initiated in 2002, we lost interest when boat arrivals to Australia fell away. In the recent Andaman Sea crisis, when many asylum seekers from Myanmar were stranded at sea, the response from ‘Bali’ was very slow. Many souls died of starvation and dehydration. The Australian government was asked whether it was prepared to help and Tony Abbott infamously said ‘Nope, nope, nope’. This was despite the fact that our Minister for Foreign Affairs was and still is co-chair with Indonesia in the Bali Process. Eventually the Thai government stepped in with support from Malaysia and Indonesia and the desperate people stranded at sea were allowed to land.

    There is quite a way to go in the Bali Process to build a framework of cooperation. It is very clear for Australia and for other regional countries that we cannot manage this problem on our own. There must be shared responsibility and burden-sharing. We need to build trust and a structure that will provide dignity and protection for vulnerable and displaced people.

    The recent Track II Dialogue in Bangkok made the following recommendations to the Bali Process Ad Hoc Group. 

    The Track II Dialogue recommends the Bali Process Ministerial Meeting authorise senior officials to:

    (a) review the response to the 2015 Andaman Sea situation, the resulting caseload, and ongoing maritime movements there and in the Bay of Bengal, within the commitments and principles outlined in the Regional Cooperation Framework (‘RCF’), to share those lessons among Bali Process members and work to implement necessary improvements; and

    (b) Take a broader focus and, drawing on the RCF, make any recommendations necessary to improve national and regional contingency planning and preparedness to enable more predictable and effective responses on forced migration, utilising existing capacity such as in ASEAN, IOM, UNHCR and civil society. Recommendations should reflect the principles that effective policy responses require shared responsibility and distributed capacities.

    The Dialogue offers to support the Bali Process in these endeavours to develop a more effective regional architecture over time.

    These recommendations are made with a view to upcoming fora relevant to the Bali Process, including the UN High-Level meeting on ways to address large movements of refugees and migrants on 19 September 2016. 

    The Bali Process Ad Hoc Group Senior Officials responded positively to the recommendations made by the Dialogue at their meeting in Bangkok on 2 February, agreeing to submit them to Ministers next month in Bali. The Co-Chairs of the Ad Hoc Group Senior Officials released a statement following their meeting, and referred directly to the Dialogue in paragraph [12]:

    The Meeting welcomed an update from the Co-Chairs on the recent meeting of the Track II Dialogue on Forced Migration, held in Bangkok on 29-30 January 2016, and noted recommendations sent by the Dialogue conveners to the Bali Process Co-Chairs. Members agreed to recommend to Bali Process Ministers that officials be tasked to conduct a review of the regional response to last year’s irregular migration events in the Andaman Sea, and share the lessons among Bali Process members. It will also identify recommendations to improve national and regional contingency planning and preparedness to enable more predictable and effective responses on forced migration. Members reaffirmed the importance of engagement with the Track II Dialogue and other civil society, and agreed that the Co-Chairs continue such efforts to engage with key civil society stakeholders.

    Government and non-government members of the Track II Dialogue in Bangkok all showed strong commitment to the overall process and to maintaining involvement to build an architecture of regional cooperation to manage and assist people displaced in the region.

    The next two meetings of the Track II Dialogue will be held in Malaysia in September 2016 and Indonesia in early 2017.

    The Track II Dialogue is already providing a flexible, sustainable and credible platform for regional cooperation and for influencing government policy. Good progress has been made, but a lot of work remains to build a regional framework/architecture.

    What is critical is not the process of consultation but practical and humane outcomes.

    Further information about the Track II Dialogue and its second meeting in Bangkok is available on the CPD website here.

    https://cpd.org.au/2016/02/secondadfmmeeting/

  • John Menadue. Part 2. How we deliver healthcare is as important as the funding of healthcare. Medicare has degenerated into a payments system.

    In Part 1 I focussed on the importance of improving the delivery of health care and not just funding.

    In Part 2 I will focus on specific areas where costs should be reduced.

     

    Part 2

    Getting costs down

    • The government should abolish the subsidy for private health insurance which costs all up about $11 billion p.a. This welfare subsidy is one of the fastest growing areas of Commonwealth government health expenditure. We have never had high income welfare recipients on such a scale before .PHI is the Damocles sword hanging over our health system. PHI is the reason for the disastrous American health system. High levels of private health coverage in Australia are achieved not through the attractiveness of the products on offer but mainly through the carrot of the tax subsidy and through the stick of penalising the uninsured. The subsidy favours the wealthy, is inefficient, has underwritten rising specialist fees through gap insurance, has not taken the pressure off public hospitals and has weakened Medicare’s ability to control costs. PHI discriminates against country people where there are few private hospitals. The immediate abolition of this subsidy would do more to improve our health system than anything else. This is welfare big time- far more than the welfare we used to pay to the motor industry. The abolition of the $11 b. subsidy would more than fund a universal dental scheme. Alternatively, say $5 b. of the saving by abolishing the subsidy could be paid directly to private hospitals through an activity based funding arrangement. It is absurd that public funds should be churned through high cost private health insurance rather than being paid directly to hospitals. Before the Howard government, Commonwealth government funds were paid directly to private hospitals, but this was discontinued. Direct Commonwealth funding for both public and private hospitals would also substantially improve the integration of hospital care. But private hospitals would oppose this because they find it much easier to twist the arms of private health insurance companies. And some of the major hospital groups, particularly Ramsay, are generous donors to the Liberal Party.
    • We need a more productive workforce. Health is the largest and fastest growing sector in the Australian economy. Despite all the talk of improving productivity in Australia no-one has been game to take on the entrenched privileges in the health workforce.Where is the honesty and consistency here? The blue collar workforce is fair game but not doctors and lawyers. We need expanded roles across the board particularly for nurses, pharmacists, allied health workers and ambulance officers. The Productivity Commission in its February 2007 report estimated that a 5% improvement in the productivity of health services would deliver savings of about $3 billion p.a. This is a very conservative estimate. The health sector in Australia is rife with demarcations and restrictive work practices. eg 5 % of normal births in Australia are delivered by mid wives. In the Netherlands it is 70%, in the UK 50% and in NZ 95%. We have a few hundred nurse practitioners when there should be thousands. The work practices in most industries are light years ahead of the work practices in the health sector.
    • Fifteen years ago 45% of doctors were GP’s. It has fallen to about 35% yet we know that care is most equitably and efficiently delivered by GP’s. Specialists are reactive and we all know they have become very expensive thanks to gap insurance provided by private insurance companies.
    • We could save about $2 billion p.a. in drug costs if we paid drug suppliers the same prices that are paid in NZ. We also pay a high price for the protection of pharmacists through the 5000 limit on the number of community pharmacies and the restrictions on where new pharmacies can be located. Pharmacies cannot be established in supermarkets.
    • We need to raise productivity in our hospitals. The Productivity Commission suggests that the productivity gap in best practice in public hospitals ranges from 3% to 89%. In private hospitals the range is 22% to 37%. There are major governance problems in many hospitals with a dis- connect between management and clinical functions. Running hospitals is very difficult with clinicians coming and going from private practise like the cottage industries of old.
    • The Commonwealth/State fragmentation in healthcare results in blame-shifting, the evasion of responsibility and higher costs. If for example the Commonwealth Government or a joint Commonwealth/State body had responsibility for all health care funding in a state or region, there would be a clear incentive to focus on treatment in the community and in homes to ensure that the high cost hospitals are really a last resort. The National Health Performance Authority found that in 2013/14 over 600,000 hospital admissions for 22 conditions could have been avoided with timely interventions in the community, mainly by GP’s. But the problem in doing this is that the Commonwealth government funds general practice and state governments operate hospitals.
    • The real elephant in the room in health care cost reduction is avoidable mistakes, including deaths. They are euphemistically called “adverse events”. But Ministers, clinicians and managers do their best to avoid the issue. Based on earlier surveys in NSW and SA I estimated, very conservatively the cost of avoidable mistakes in our health sector at $5b pa (see my blog of June14, 2013). Despite a great deal of money and effort there is no sign of improvement. Insiders won’t solve the problem Good people are caught in a bad system.
    • Only last week, Medibank Private said that $800 m. p.a. could be saved if a reference pricing system with Australian and global benchmarks was introduced for prostheses such as for hip and knee replacements, plates and pacemakers. Medibank Private said that prices for identical products could be 45% lower in the public system compared with the private system. With differentials like that it is no surprise that private health insurance premiums have increased at three times the rate of inflation.

    The quality of our health care is generally good but waste and inefficiency is deep and widespread.

    We need to address waste and costs in a measured way. We should not panic, but we should get it done. Australian healthcare costs are 9-10% of GDP. This is not high by world standards. It is below the OECD average. A major reason why we have been able to do better than others is that we have Medicare as a public insurer. One lesson is clear all around the world. The countries that have high levels of private health insurance, like the US, have high costs.

    A fundamental problem in the health sector is the way we deliver healthcare. But we keep focusing only on funding. We have a horse and buggy health delivery system that is unfit for the 21st Century. Medicare takes that horse and buggy delivery system as a given.

    I have almost given up hope that the ALP will restore Medicare to what was intended, a single payer and a strong public insurer.

    The vested interests don’t want change in the way we deliver health care. They must be delighted to see how gutless the ALP is.

    More and more money will not necessarily improve the delivery of health care and neither should we expect it to. It will mainly entrench a lot of bad habits and the position of vested interests.

     

  • John Menadue. Privatising Medicare’s payments system and the erosion of Commonwealth Public Service capability.

    The government has apparently accepted the advice of the Commission of Audit that Medicare’s payments system should be reviewed with the possibility of privatisation. The payments system includes Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Aged Care Services and Veterans’ Affairs.

    It sounds like another expression of neo liberalism, that only the private sector can be efficient and cost-effective.Let us see whether that is so through market testing. I remain sceptical.

    As a regular user of Medicare services and payments, I am not aware of problems in the payments system. But if there are problems, the government should fix them.’.

    This proposal on privatizing Medicare payments is part of the continuing trend to degrade government capability in both policy and administration of programs. The Australian Public Service is becoming short of senior people who understand the complex world of business strategy and those things required in commissioning the delivery of services or planning infrastructure investments and their delivery. In social policy it is not at all clear that the Commonwealth now has the people who understand the big systems that are so essential to a large part of what the public sector does.

    In between jobs, the new Secretary of PM & C put the problem this way in an interview with Laura Tingle in the AFR in May 2015. He said:

    ‘I think our institutions are being eroded in their capability and eroded in public trust. … Over time large parts of the public service have lost their policy development edge.’

    He has been replaced in Treasury by John Fraser, most recently a banker. Yet much of the governments’ deficits around the world have occurred as a result of governments having to bale out the banks for poor decisions and poor risk management.

    The problems that we apparently have with Medicare are common to many agencies. Good accounting in government has been abandoned and replaced with narrow financial metrics. Outside a few agencies, there just isn’t the capacity to do proper cost/benefit analysis. Many decisions are made on the run on the basis of cash outlays over four years.

    This failure of government administration suits private providers who exploit ministers’ and bureaucrats’ lack of analysis capacity and the domination of short-term cash outlays in the public presentation of the budget.

    It also suits neoliberals to get as much off the budget as possible even if the community is worse off. This is happening in the health sector. Some government expenditure is relieved by pushing business towards private health insurance, but we know that administrative costs of private health insurance are three times higher than Medicare. Furthermore we know that the growth of private health insurance makes it harder for Medicare to control fees. So whilst the budget may look a little better, the community is much worse off.

    We have had glaring examples of how government policy, capability and operations have been run down to the benefit of accounting and consulting firms who come and go with projects and their ‘economic models’, but there is little building of intellectual capital in the process.

    Staff numbers in the Australian Taxation Office have been cut back at a time when we have record tax avoidance and hundreds of our major companies paying no tax at all.

    I have rarely seen a root-and-branch criticism of a department as we saw with the Australian Public Service Commission Capability Review of the Department of Health and Ageing last year. The Secretary of the Health and Ageing at the time is now Secretary of Finance.

    The Department of Immigration and Border Protection has become securitized with a focus on border protection and control at the expense of nation-building and humanitarian programs. Senior and competent people with knowledge in nation-building and refugee programs have left the department. We see the result most graphically in the snail-pace response to settling 12,000 refugees from Syria. Less than 10 have arrived! Canada has put us to shame.

    The Attorney General’s Department failed to tell security agencies about the risk of Mann Haron Monis weeks before he entered the Lindt Café. The Attorney General’s Department has carriage of the policy and implementation of ‘meta data’ through the Data Retention Act. We were told at the time it was urgent because of the terrorist threat. But the policy cannot be introduced until the end of 2017at the earliest because of flawed implementation. AG’s department has just not been up to the job.

    One reason for the pink batts problem was the loss of  implementation capability in the Department of the Environment. That same department has bungled the approval of the Carmichael mine.

    The Department of Defence is subject to very little effective checking of its very expensive capital projects. It keeps making the same mistakes. As John Stanford put it in this blog on 11 December last year

    ‘Our defence acquisitions keep repeating the mistakes of the past, from mixing and matching systems inappropriately and accepting excessive risks, to allowing political judgements to override efficiency considerations and the proper regard for the public purse. In the new submarine acquisition, we seem to have learned nothing from the Collins Class procurement’.

    When the new submarines are delivered China and India will have nuclear submarines.

    The Department of Defence has a one-line budget appropriation which effectively denies rigorous examination of mega-dollar projects by the Department of Finance and others.

    The sorry story continues with the mega funding of roads. As Mike Keating and Lucas Fraser pointed out in the policy series in last year’s blog

    ‘A reasonable projection of planned road expenditures indicates that the accumulated stock of debt to FY 2023-24 could be of the order of $114 b. When added to the already accumulated debt, this amounts to a total accumulated road-derived public sector debt of $140 b. within a decade, a matter than until now has been entirely unreported’. Where is the Department of Transport or Infrastructure Australia when we have such gigantic and wasteful expenditures on roads”?

    There is a dismal and concerning story about how the capital of government is being deliberately eroded.

    We are paying a very heavy price for neoliberalism and the down-sizing of government that goes with it. The selling of Medicare’s payments system may be another step along this path.

    The coinage of the Australian Public Service is being seriously devalued. Can the threads of good policy development and administration be recovered? It is getting late.

  • John Menadue. Part 1. How we deliver health care is as important as the funding of health care. Medicare has degenerated into a payments system

    Part 1 of these articles will focus on the inefficient way we deliver health care, the many perverse incentives and the power of vested interests to resist reform in health care delivery.

    Part 2 will focus more particularly on examples of waste and inefficiency in health care delivery

    Part 1

    We have been told many times that our health system is unsustainable.

    To justify its case for an increase in the GST, the government was telling us that an increase was necessary because of rising costs in health and education. Now the GST is apparently off the table as Malcolm Turnbull retreats on yet another issue.

    Some premiers and commentators suggested that an increase in the Medicare levy was best because it was fairer than an increase in the GST. And we will hear a lot more from the premiers about health because the Abbott Government said it would cut $ 80 b from grants to the states for education and health over the next decade commencing in 2017

    But what is being avoided in all this confusion about budget repair and health costs is that there is no real discussion about the waste, inefficiency and low productivity in our health sector. We continue to focus on the funding of our health sector, but refuse to debate how the delivery of care – its cost and safety – can be improved. Medicare is overwhelmingly discussed in terms of funding only. It should also be about how those funds are spent to improve the delivery of health services. Basically Medicare funds an existing system of health care delivery. That needs to change.

    There are three main reasons for our failure to address the delivery problems in health care.

    The first is the power of the vested interests. These vested interests fight doggedly and selfishly to maintain their privileged position in health delivery. The principle vested interests in health are the AMA, the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, Medicines Australia and the private health insurance sector. In an earlier blog I said that the Health Ministers may be in office, but they are seldom in power. The vested interests –the providers- are really in power.

    A second reason for the failure to focus on delivery of health services is that politicians are afraid of the vested interests – doctors, pharmacists, pharmaceutical manufacturers and suppliers, and the private health insurance sector.

    The third reason is the failure of economists and other commentators to consider efficiency in the delivery of health services. These economists talk continuously about the need for appropriate incentives, but in the health sector many of the incentives are quite perverse – such as fee for service.

    As Ross Gittins put it in a recent SMH article, ‘Like so many of the interest groups, econocrats are obsessed with funding education and health rather than ensuring both systems are working in ways that have found a good trade-off between fairness and efficiency, and effectiveness.’ … See link to article.

    These economists that we hear and see so often in the media are mainly employed by the banks. They have little or no knowledge or interest in health economics. They tie themselves in knots over the need for IR reform and improvements in productivity in the workforce generally. But over the years I have never heard any of them address the appalling work practices and demarcations in our health sector which really go back to the 19th Century. Yet our health and welfare sectors employ 13% of our workforce, the largest sector by far. It is also the fastest growing. At its worst, our waterfront never had the appalling work practices and demarcations that still persist across our whole health sector. Clinicians justify our archaic work practices on the grounds of safety when it is really territory they are defending.

    Economists are yet to grasp that health consumers have little power over prices or quality of care. Power is with the providers-doctors, pharmacists, drug distributors and private hospitals. That is why a strong public insurer is essential to counter the power of providers. If there is not a strong public insurer we will follow the disastrous path of the US that has the most expensive and unfair health system in the world. But our economists who say they believe in markets will not recognise the failure of the health ‘market’.

    On 4 Corners several months back, Norman Swann suggested that waste in health expenditures could be as high as 30% of our total health expenditures. I think that estimate may be on the high side, but it is clear that there are excessive costs. – see link to article ‘Four Corners: No wonder we’re wasting money in health care – we got the incentives wrong’ by Jennifer Doggett, Ian McAuley and John Menadue.

    In a paper in July 2007 I estimated that there was at least $10 billion in possible savings and productivity improvements in health. That represented about 10% of our total health costs in that year. I think it would be nearer 20 % or $ 30 b per annum. I have spoken and written extensively on this matter.

    The lack of accountability in health

    Despite the rapid increases in costs and escalating demand in the healthcare industry, there is no accountability in any meaningful way for what the health industry delivers. Doctors are accountable for malpractice but not for their overall performance particularly in general practise. Accountability is patchy in many private hospitals. Taxpayers have a legitimate reason to ask – ‘Are we getting value for money particularly when we pay 80 % of doctor’s incomes.’ In a survey several years ago by the Health Council of Canada, 97% of over 1,800 senior respondents said that healthcare providers should be required by law to reach certain service benchmarks in such areas as patient outcomes , the use of preventive strategies like screening and waiting times. There is the same lack of accountability in Australia.

    The Council also asked the group ‘Do you believe healthcare in Canada will improve if the government spends more money on healthcare?’ 58% said ‘no’.

    Managing the demand for health services

    The demand for health services is increasing rapidly across all age groups and not just among the old. We are over-diagnosed and over-treated. In 1984-85, medical services per head were 7.1 per annum. In 2007-08 they were 13.1 per annum – about double. The trend continues.

    • We must accept that we cannot have all that we want in health and that governments, in consultation with the community, have to set priorities. Can we afford continuing existing levels of funding for IVF and end-of-life treatments at the expense of funding for mental health and indigenous health?
    • We need to rationalise our co-payments to make them efficient and equitable. We all should take more responsibility for the way we use health services, particularly as we are now much wealthier than we were 30 years ago when Medicare was introduced. A universal health scheme does not have to be free. But it must be fair and efficient. But co-payments are a dog’s breakfast! We pay about 18% of health costs out of our own pockets, but there is very little rhyme or reason in how this is done.
    • The best way to curb the long-term growth in health spending is through prevention in such areas as alcohol, smoking, junk food and obesity. Our sporting, alcohol and junk food sectors are in a joint enterprise to promote poor health. But the first action of the Abbott Government in its first budget was to abolish the Australian National Preventive Health Agency which was focussing on lifestyle risk factors.
    • We need to change the perverse incentives, such as fee-for-service, which is associated with bulk-billing. Clinicians are rewarded by the number of transactions rather than health outcomes. It promotes what is called ‘turn style medicine’ FFS is particularly inappropriate for chronic care, mental health and services with high fixed costs and low variable costs, such as imaging. The government should move away from fee for service and set budgets for general practitioners when they prescribe drugs, order pathology tests or imaging services. We need more doctors on salaries and capitation payments for caring for patients-not on a service by service basis. Hopefully, the Medicare review will grasp this nettle.
    • We need to tackle the wide variations in the incidence of clinical practice across the country, e.g. caesarean sections and cataracts. In the Australian Atlas of Health Care Variations the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care found ‘substantial variations in health care use in areas such as antibiotic prescribing, surgical, mental health and diagnostic services’ Medicare should be much more proactive in exposing and limiting very expensive and inexplicable variations in clinical practice. .It also needs to publish the enormous variations in doctors fees and particularly the fees of specialists. Better public data for greater transparency is essential.

     

     

     

  • John Thompson. Fiona Nash and private health insurance for rural Australians

    Screen Shot 2016-02-11 at 4.04.29 PM

    A few nights ago on Q&A, the Minister for Rural Health, Fiona Nash, undertook to drop out of private health insurance while she was in office. Ms Nash lives in Crowther, a small town about midway between Wagga Wagga and Bathurst. Foregoing private health insurance makes a lot of sense for her because, like most rural and regional people, she pays a large amount to private insurers and has very limited access to private hospitals and related private services in her area.

    The map above shows why rural people are especially short changed with the private health system. The brown markers indicate public hospitals and the private hospitals are shown by purple markers. Crowther is almost in the middle of the map – 180 kms from Wagga Wagga and 141 kms from Bathurst.  There is one private hospital in Wagga Wagga and one in Bathurst, and neither has an emergency department. [On my count, there are about 30 public hospitals in this area. JM]

    The private health system is one of the most expensive Commonwealth Government programs.  In 2016/16 direct outlays by the Commonwealth Government will be $6.3 billion and income tax foregone will amount to $4.2 billion, a total of $10.5 billion for the year.

    Ms Nash, as a Nationals Party representative, should recognise that the private health system is particularly costly for her rural constituents because they are getting such a very raw deal. They are paying large sums directly to the private insurers and similarly large sums in taxation to support those insurers.  And they are getting very little in return.

    Rural Australians should ask themselves what they are getting for the large sums they are paying, both directly and through their taxes, to private insurance companies, and perhaps follow the lead of their elected representative, the Minister for Rural Health.

    John Thompson is an economist with an interest in health policy.

  • Jim Bowler. Mungo Man needs help – to come home

    It’s time for funds and a plan to preserve and commemorate this visitor from Ancient Australia, writesJim Bowler, the geologist who discovered Mungo Man’s remains.

    Forty-two years ago, on 26 February 1974, I first encountered the remains of Mungo Man eroding out of the desiccated shores of Lake Mungo. He had been ritually buried over 40,000 years earlier – at a time when the lake was full – by an ancient community that thrived in the fertile environment. The re-emergence of Mungo Man has changed the way we understand Australian history. Together with the earlier (1969) discovery of Mungo Lady, these burials provided the foundations on which the Willandra Lakes World Heritage area was defined and accepted by UNESCO in 1981. That region stands today as Australia’s richest legacy of early occupation. Yet forty-two years later, after decades of constant calls for the return of Mungo Man, none of the responsible state and federal ministers have committed to caring for these sacred remains.

    In November last year, a repatriation group of Indigenous representatives took the first step towards Mungo Man’s return. The 40,000-year-old human remains, along with the more fragmentary remains of some ninety other individuals from the Willandra Lakes area, were transferred from the Australian National University to the interim storage of the National Museum of Australia. After years of frustration, the traditional owners of the Willandra Lakes area – the Mutthi Mutthi, Ngiyampaa and Paakantji tribal groups – reluctantly decreed that unless appropriate keeping arrangements were made by the end of 2017, they will dispose of all Willandra remains, with the possibility of complete reburial. The possibility that the remains of Mungo Man may not be laid in a formal place – an underground sacred crypt with above-ground recognition of the dead, perhaps, in memory of deceased Elders and of those thousands who fought in defence of their lands – should stir the nation’s conscience.

    Mungo Man is acknowledged worldwide as the centrepiece of our evidence of ancient Australia. He has featured in documentaries, novels, histories and scientific papers, and he has given us an insight into life in ancient Australia through paleopathology, DNA analyses, and studies of isotopic bone and teeth structures. Moreover, the ritual nature of his burial has changed our understanding of the time-depth and complexity of Aboriginal culture. The body was coated (or heavily sprinkled) with rare ceremonial ochre – the blood-red symbol of life – which had been imported from distant sources. His grave was associated with a nearby hearth, from which smoke might have drifted over the assembled mourners on the lakeshore. The discovery stands without equal on the global stage. Politicians who frequently claim occupancy with members “of the world’s oldest continuing cultures” are denying a keeping place to the very person who provided the historical substance of that claim. The Australian nation awaits his return home.

    In Mungo Man, the interaction of climate and people come together. The cultural implications of his burial reflect complex relationships with his environment. The central function of ochre, the association with fire, and the careful details of the grave emplacement combine to define a community with connections to the land they loved. Such evidence resonates with Aboriginal connections to country today. There is great dignity here in that people–land relationship. Exemplified today in the Dreaming, song lines and creation stories, it remains of central importance in helping define traditional people’s identity with and connection to the place they call home. White Australians have something important to learn from our Aboriginal cousins.

    Stan Grant’s passionate reminder of our shameful treatment of Aboriginal Australians, and subsequent discussions of our national identity have touched new sensitivities in the fraught relationships between Aboriginal and white Australia. Two centuries of failure to acknowledge the magnitude and pain of dispossession have come back to confront us. The neglect of the human remains of Australia’s oldest identity, Mungo Man, adds yet another dark stain to our relationships with the first Australians. We now must seek new opportunities to restore fractured bonds, to help heal at least part of the pain inflicted on the original occupants of this land.

    This year marks the centenary year of the Somme and we honour the memory of those who died on the Western Front during the first world war. It is where my father spent two harrowing years navigating duckboards and dodging shell holes in Amiens and Villers-Bretonneux. A century later, the deaths of the tens of thousands of Aboriginal men and women who died in defence of their land await their memorial occasion. The continued absence of facilities in memory of Mungo Man and all he represents pales against the $100 million Villers-Bretonneux Educational Centre Tony Abbott unveiled last year. While the honouring of our war dead is essential, what is sacred in France demands equality at home.

    Unless immediate steps are taken to ensure adequate accommodation for sacred items that amplify and help define the meaning of human occupation of this continent, the iconic figure of Mungo Man could be lost forever. We have but eighteen months to ensure safe passage. The repatriation process needs realistic funding and a discretionary commitment to World Heritage management to ensure it takes place. Without state and federal assistance, the Indigenous repatriation group will be forced to rebury the remains of Mungo Man instead of preserving them for future generations in a sacred keeping place.

    We are dealing here not just with an assemblage of ancient bones, but with the dignity and cultural richness of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters. As a nation, we need to seize this opportunity to release Mungo Man from his custody. The return and celebration of Mungo Man will set us on a course to heal those bleeding wounds Stan Grant so eloquently defined. It is an act of recognition to Indigenous Australians of the nation’s debt to their ancestral history.

    Jim Bowler is a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences. This article was first published in Inside Story on 9 February 2016.

  • The Pope is not the only one who doesn’t get it.

    This is an extract from Robert Mickens’ ‘Letter from Rome’ of 10 February 2016, published in Global Pulse.  In the full article, Mickens refers to the extraordinary success and acceptance of Pope Francis in so many areas. There is however a downside. Mickens coments:

    But there is a dense cloud hanging over all the good this prophetic priest and bishop has done for the Church. It is a pall that is casting an ever darkening shadow on his otherwise energizing pontificate.

    The black spot is – how can one put it? – the pope’s seemingly ambivalent attitude and approach towards dealing with clergy sexual abuse of youngsters.

    Just to be clear. Francis ticks the boxes favorably in over 80% of the categories where a pope can make a difference. But there are some areas – and the sex abuse issue is probably the most painful – where he doesn’t seem to get it.

    And that is a real tragedy.

    Thankfully, Vatican apologists are no longer making the ridiculous claim that the sexual abuse crisis (let’s call it what it is, a worldwide pandemic) is a priority for the pope.

    Even the apologists need to look themselves in the mirror and admit that it is not.

    If it were, the pope would have at least made time to meet with the 17-member Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors that gathered last weekend in the Vatican. This is a body Francis instituted in 2014, but only after he was shamed into doing so by Cardinal Sean O’Malley, a member of his privy council (C9) and the US Church’s sex abuse trouble-shooter.

    But the Jesuit Pope seemingly had more important things on his agenda, like addressing devotees of the mysterious and still-controversial St Padre Pio, one of two Capuchin saints whose fully clothed corpses were brought to Rome last week and paraded through St Peter’s Square in glass boxes.

    Francis was also unavailable to see “Spotlight”, the recent film on the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting that helped bring clergy sexual abuse to light.

    The filmmakers offered a private screening for members of the Vatican’s child protection commission (the flick is not out yet in Italy) but only five of the seventeen bothered to show up.

    Five!

    One of them was Peter Saunders, a Brit who was sexually abused by a priest when he was a boy. The other members then voted Mr Saunders off the commission because, in their view, he’d rather be an advocate for the victims than an advisor to the pope.

    Obviously, Francis is not the only one who doesn’t get it.

     

  • David Isaacs. Secrets and lies and bad morality: Australia’s policy on people seeking asylum

    The latest episode in the long, sorry saga of how badly we can treat people seeking asylum was played out in the High Court in February 2016. Long because the story started in 1992 when the Paul Keating Labor government introduced mandatory detention ‘as a temporary measure’ in reaction to a handful of people arriving in leaky boats from Cambodia. And I use the term ‘people seeking asylum’ advisedly, because the term ‘asylum seekers’ dehumanises the people and has been shown to cause Australians to switch off. The High Court found it is legal for the Government to send babies born in Australia and children and adults transferred to Australia for mental health and other problems back to Nauru. This decision was predictable because the Government passed retrospective legislation making it legal. As the human rights lawyer Daniel Webb put it so eloquently, the law is complex but the morality is simple. Bad Governments pass bad laws to allow them to do things that are morally wrong. I am a doctor not a lawyer, so I am not qualified to say at what point the High Court has a duty to make sure our Government does not exact really heinous legislation, but this is pretty bad. Excising Christmas Island from the mainland and sending people into detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island is our Guantanamo. These are ‘black sites’ where people can be severely mistreated under a veil of secrecy: out of sight and out of mind.

    To argue that people are now free to come and go from the detention centre on Nauru is disingenuous. They are not safe if they leave the detention centre and they are not safe in the detention centre. Their visas to stay on Nauru are restricted to 5 years, so their future is as uncertain as ever. Nauru is their prison. Mr Dutton has stated that the hospital on Nauru is comparable to Australian hospitals. I did a clinic at the Republic of Nauru (RON) Hospital in December 2015 and it is far, far worse than any Australian hospital I ever visited. Furthermore, the staffing is as important as the facilities and the RON Hospital struggles for qualified staff. Of course, Mr Dutton will argue things have changed in the last year. Verifying the truth is impossible when the only journalist allowed in for years was a single Murdoch Press Government sympathiser and doctors who speak out risk two years in prison.

    Ethics can be defined as ‘how we ought to behave’ and medical ethics as how health professionals ought to behave. I recently published a paper (available on request) in the Journal of Medical Ethics (http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2015/12/20/medethics-2015-103066.abstract) in which I argue that prolonged immigration detention fulfils all the criteria for torture. I then argue that doctors and other health care professionals are conflicted: they have a duty to their patients to help them but they also have a duty not to condone torture. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) argues to this day that water-boarding prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was not torture because the technique was devised by psychologists and supervised by doctors. The doctors would presumably argue that the water-boarding was going to happen anyway and they were ensuring the prisoners did not drown. Highly respected colleagues and lawyers have said to me “Nauru is not as bad as Guantanamo”. Is it not? Are we to have degrees of torture? There have been unconfirmed (probably unconfirmable) reports by a guard of water-boarding and ‘zipping’ being inflicted on people in immigration detention in Nauru (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-14/guard-tells-parliamentary-inquiry-asylum-seekers-tortured-nauru/6699162). Why would the guard lie? Mr Dutton denied it, but he would wouldn’t he.

    The harms we are inflicting on adults to punish them for having the temerity to flee persecution in their homelands are immoral. We treat innocent adults worse than we do convicted criminals. But the public are more likely to sympathise with the argument that children are innocent victims. Gillian Triggs realised this, which is why her Forgotten Children enquiry is so powerful. Alison Light, in her wonderful book “Common people”, describes how the 19th century English workhouses were intended to punish men who did not want to work, but the biggest victims were women and children. I was struck by the parallels with immigration detention centres. I am proud that increasing numbers of paediatricians and paediatric nurses have decided to speak out against what is being done to children by our Government in our name. Alanna Maycock, Hasantha Gunasekera, Karen Zwi and Josh Francis have all risked imprisonment for telling the truth.

    What should happen? The Government mantra, ‘We’ve stopped the boats’, means the immigration detention centres are redundant. Keeping people imprisoned can only be to deter other desperate people from seeking asylum. Europe, struggling with a far bigger immigrant problem, has not resorted to such vulgar deterrent policies, although extreme right wing European groups cite Australia as an example to follow. We should allow the derisory number of children to remain in Australia with their parents. We should close the detention centres on Nauru and Manus, which are not only immoral but hugely expensive (it costs over half a million dollars per year for each person kept on Nauru). Mr Turnbull committed his Government to a tough stance on border control. If that stance includes continuing to torture innocent people we should hang our heads in shame.

    Professor David Isaacs is Senior Staff Specialist, Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology and Clinical Professor of Paediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Sydney. He works at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead.

     

  • Ravi. Poems from detention.

     

    My pen and paper

    I walk a deep sadness path with my loneliness. This emptiness makes me slow.
    I fall to my knees and cry out loudly.
    Tears knock silently at my eyes.

    I can’t find anyone to share my pain with so I make friends with my pen and paper. I share with them all my pain.
    They cry with me.

    The paper becomes wet with their tears.

    • Ravi

     

    Feelings of Loneliness

    I am alone
    very alone.
    And this is what alone is:
    To be nothing
    To have nothing
    To hurt so badly
    Aching not only in your heart
    But in every cell of your body.
    I am ignored,
    utterly unnoticed,
    thrown aside
    as a completely uncared for orphan.
    And friendless
    because they’ve all gone.
    Their love,
    their smiles
    all gone.
    I was left behind
    with no one to walk with.
    Oh how I want them back! With no friend to see or hear my agony I cry.
    With all possibility of hope
    vanished
    sorrow moves in to love me.

    After travelling to Australia from Sri Lanka by boat, Ravi was detained in Nauru Regional Processing Centre and Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation for over three years. He is now living in the community and has published a collection of his poems written from within our detention centre system.

     

  • John Menadue. The collapse of the Malaysian Arrangement has led to the depravity of Manus and Nauru.

    Having done its best in Opposition to wreck the Malaysian Arrangement in 2011, the Turnbull government is now seeking the help of Malaysia over detainees in Manus and Nauru. For political cynicism, this is hard to beat.

    In May 2011, the Australian and Malaysian governments announced an ‘in principle’ arrangement that up to 800 boat arrivals would be transferred from Australia to Malaysia for their asylum claims to be heard. In response Australia would be prepared to accept 4,000 refugees from Malaysia. The arrangement with Malaysia was signed on 25 July 2011. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees gave it qualified support. At that period, boat arrivals were running at four to six per month.

    The Gillard government introduced legislation to give effect to the arrangement with Malaysia which was necessary as a result of a High Court decision on the transfer of people. That legislation was bitterly opposed by the Coalition and others in an evenly divided House of Representatives. The legislation failed in September 2011 when boats were running at only four in the month.

    In this opposition to the Malaysian arrangement, the Coalition was actively supported by the Greens and some key NGOs.  The Greens and the NGOs wanted more than was on the table and finished with nothing – or something worse – Manus and Nauru. NGOs need to be politically astute and consider government’s responsibilities on security, economy and society. Or as Gough Whitlam put it pungently in another context. ‘Only the impotent are pure’.

    Failure to pass the legislation to implement the Malaysian Arrangement opened the door for people smugglers to really get to work. As a result of the failure of the Malaysian Arrangement, boat arrivals rose from about four or five a month to 48 in July 2013. Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison were not interested in stopping the boats. Their political objective was to stop Labor stopping the boats.

    Having helped defeat the legislation in the parliament, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison seized every opportunity to bash Malaysia’s human rights record and ‘canings’.

    But now we find that despite this history, the Turnbull government is now discussing with Malaysia ways to resolve the Manus/Nauru mess, a situation which no-one believes is sustainable. Consistent with what I have heard in the region, Laura Tingle in the AFR on February 4, 2016, said

    ‘Now it emerges that we are once again talking to Malaysia – the country with whom the Labor government was doing a deal … which was supposedly so abhorrent to the Coalition and the cause of human decency. ‘

    We have gone cap in hand to the Cambodian government and paid it over $50 million to resettle four refugees from Manus/Nauru. Our government has also been in discussions with the Philippines and Kyrgyzstan but without success. Now the government is talking again to Malaysia which Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison reviled in 2011.

    Tony Abbott helped to keep the door open for people smugglers by successfully but unscrupulously contributing to the defeat the Malaysian Arrangement.

    The Malaysian Arrangement was not ideal, but it would have significantly helped manage the flow of desperate people. It would also have been a building block for a regional framework which is necessary to manage displaced people in our region.

    I will be writing further about the importance of this regional framework.

    The result of the failure of the Malaysian Arrangement is the depravity of Manus and Nauru. Political cynicism has been exposed but at great cost to very vulnerable people.

    We have become a pariah in our treatment of asylum seekers.Even if we are stuck with Manus and Nauru for a while yet, there is no excuse for the Australian Government allowing detainees being treated so inhumanely.

    See link to earlier articles, Parts 1 and 2,  I wrote with Peter Hughes on this subject ‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals. Part 1’. See also post ‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals. Part 2’.

     

  • John Menadue. ‘We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem’.

    Treasurer Scott Morrison has been expounding the above philosophy of his for months. But he couldn’t be more wrong. Unfortunately the Secretary of Treasury has now followed up with nonsense that Australia should have a ceiling of 25% of GDP on government spending (I assume he is referring to Commonwealth Government spending).

    Michael Pascoe (Michael Pascoe on Page 21 of February 03, 2016 issue of Sydney Morning Herald) nailed the ideological clamour and suggestion that lower levels of government spending result in improved economic performance and that Australia has a high level of government spending that should be reduced.

    In the article, Pascoe says ‘What can be clearly shown is that there is no correlation between relatively low government spending and the very best possible credit rating.’ Pascoe produces the latest figures from the ‘right wing’ Heritage Foundations 2016 Economic Freedom Index, which compiles all government spending – federal, state and local. This article points out that Australian Government spending is running at 35.6% of GDP. He adds that almost all countries with AAA status from Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch, have higher government spending as a proportion of GDP than Australia: Australia 35.6%, Canada 40.7%, Denmark 57.1%, Germany 44.3%, Hong Kong 17.6%, Luxembourg 43.6%, Netherlands 46.8%, Norway 44%, Singapore 18.2%, Sweden 53.2%, Switzerland 33.5%.

    These figures make it clear that high levels of government spending do not necessarily result in poor economic performance. Pascoe concludes ‘It turns out that having markedly higher government spending isn’t so necessarily disastrous after all.’

    In a submission to the Senate Select Committee into the Abbott Government’s Commission of Audit, Jennifer Doggett, Ian McAuley and I contend that the problem is not that government expenditures or that the public sector is large in Australia compared with other countries. We contend that the problem is a short-fall of revenue and that on international comparison, our tax revenues are low.

    In our summary to the Committee we say …

    The Commission of Audit’s brief is based on assumptions that Australia is burdened with “big government” and that taxes are an impediment to business investment and workforce participation.

    There is no evidence for either assumption. The trend in Commonwealth expenditure has been downwards since the mid 1980s, falling from a peak of around 28 percent of GDP to a range of 24 to 26 percent of GDP in recent years. In comparison with similar prosperous countries Australia has one of the smallest public sectors.

    The problem a body such as the Commission should address is our inadequate tax base, which is the main reason the Commonwealth has had a structural deficit for most of this century. We aren’t collecting enough revenue to fund the public services needed if the economy is to thrive.

    We should not shy away from raising taxes. Evidence from international comparisons and from surveys on competitiveness suggests that reasonable levels of tax do not impede countries’ economic performance. In fact, countries which compete on the basis of low taxes do so to compensate for competitive weaknesses, such as inadequate infrastructure and poor standards of education – in other words impoverished public sectors.

    Such evidence, however, seems hard to convey to those gripped by a zeal to cut spending and taxes. Even in a “small government”/low-tax country like Australia it is possible to find areas where private funding and provision of services can displace public funding and provision.

    But such displacement is usually at high economic cost, simply to achieve an arbitrary fiscal objective. There is no point in reducing taxes if the private costs are greater than the saving in taxes, with no improvement (and in many cases a deterioration) in the services provided. We illustrate this in the case of health care funding. This is an area of significant public outlay and where, because of ongoing growth in demand, there are voices – often the voices of self-interest – calling for a shift from public to private insurance. Such a shift would be costly on all economic criteria – technical efficiency, allocative efficiency and equity.

    The rushed and secretive processes of the Commission are not the path to good public policy. There may be areas where a change in the public/private mix is justified on economic grounds, but these are not one-way towards the private sector as implied in the Commission’s brief. Because we already have a small public sector it is likely that a proper process, with research and consultation, would find a need for a net expansion of Australia’s public sector. By shutting off that possibility those who drafted the Commission’s brief are imposing a constraint which may be contrary to the community’s wishes and sound economics.

    The full submission to the Senate Select Committee can be found by going to my website. Click on ‘John Menadue Web Site’ top left of this blog page.

     

     

  • How long can we keep lying to ourselves.

    In the SMH on February 5, 2016, columnist Waleed Aly says ‘The history of asylum seeker policy in Australia will be remembered as a story of how successive governments legislated their lies to justify a world of make-believe borders and imaginary compliance.’

    See link to article below:

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/nauru-how-long-can-we-keep-lying-to-ourselves-20160204-gml6or.html

  • John Menadue. What has happened to the 11,990 Syrian refugees?

    After telling us for months that Australia would not take additional Syrian refugees, Tony Abbott announced on September 9 last year that the government had ‘agreed to settle 12,000 Syrian refugees … one of the world’s largest (intakes) to date’. We were told that the first refugees would arrive by Christmas and the 12,000 by June 2016. State governments, community groups and churches then geared up to respond.

    But to date, after five months, only about ten Syrian refugees have arrived.

    We should contrast our performance with the generous and efficient response of the Canadians. The Canadian government website reveals that at the 31 January 2016, 15,157 Syrian refugees had landed in Canada since November 4. That number of arrivals was made up of 8,767 government-assisted refugees, 1,049 blended Visa-Office-Referred refugees and 5,341 privately sponsored refugees. By the end of January 165 Canadian communities had welcomed Syrian refugees. There had been 57 government organised flights.

    In Canada, at the 31st December 2015 there were 13,881 applications in progress, with 6,381 applications finalised but the refugees had not yet travelled to Canada.

    For this generous and efficient response the Canadians put us to shame. Why? I suggest there are several reasons.

    The first and most important reason is the political leadership and will of the new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. What a contrast with Abbott, Morrison, Dutton and now Turnbull.

    The second is that our ‘Immigration’ Department has been changed dramatically and is no longer adequately equipped to handle a movement such as this with expedition and efficiency. Senior and experienced people with expertise in the area have left the department. The ‘settlement’ function which has been so critical for managing newcomers to Australia has been transferred out of the Department of Immigration to the Department of Social Services. Furthermore, just as our foreign policy has become securitized, so our refugee and immigration programs have been overwhelmed by border control and border protection. We even have a military style Operation Sovereign Borders. The Department is not really involved in nation-building any more. It is about border control and we saw an example of this in the Melbourne fiasco late last year. Once upon a time Australia had a well-managed ability to move people quickly who are in need of resettlement. Ministers Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton have participated in the crippling of that ability.

    The third and a more specific problem is the delay in the large backlog of cases that are waiting ASIO checking. This is despite the fact that ASIO in recent years has received a substantial increase in personnel and other resources. Checking is necessary but the fear of foreigners that has been promoted by ministers has effectively thrown the weight of effort into control rather than a humanitarian response. There are always risks in the speedy movement of large numbers of desperate people but in the past we have been able to manage that efficiently – and reasonably quickly. And the lesson of terrorism in France and elsewhere in recent months is that it is mostly young people born to earlier arrivals rather than new refugees that have turned to terrorism.

    Canada has shown us a better way to help Syrian people in great need. The Canadian Government web site puts it this way. ‘Resettling refugees is a proud and important part of Canada’s humanitarian tradition. It reflects our commitment to Canadians and demonstrates to the world that we have a shared responsibility to help people who are displaced and persecuted.’

    In Australia we also used to have that humanitarian tradition of shared responsibility to help people who are displaced and persecuted. The Coalition and the ALP are trashing our proud tradition.

    We should make amends by increasing our Syrian intake to 25 000 and really applying ourselves to the job. The Canadians have shown us the way.

     

  • John Menadue. Tax reform and vested interests.

    We are in the midst of a misleading campaign on tax and budget reform.

    Large corporations and high income groups are pressing the government to increase the GST in order to reduce company tax and taxes for high-income groups. I have seldom seen such a blatant and self-interested campaign by vested interests. And they seriously suggest that it is in the name of tax and presumably, necessary budget reform. Even Mike Baird has joined in this nonsense.

    We are told by these vested interests that the benefits of tax advantages for the powerful and wealthy will ‘trickle down’ to the rest of us, including the disadvantaged and the poor. These stories about trickle-down have been with us for years. It is claimed that the ‘trickle down’ from the wealth would encourage ‘growth’ and ‘jobs’. But there is no empirical evidence anywhere to back up this argument. Scott Morrison continues in the same vein, that if only there were more tax incentives, we would ‘work, save and invest’ more.

    See an excellent article on this issue by Ross Gittins in the SMH on February 1, entitled ‘Business-led tax “reform” won’t fly’.

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. ‘Balance’ and the ABC

    The ABC has a mistaken notion of media balance.

    It has become clear that Nick Ross, a Senior Technology Editor at the ABC, could not publish a story critical of Malcolm Turnbull’s NBN unless he also published an article critical of Labor’s NBN. To add to this bias by ABC management he was told that Labor’s plan was dead because Labor couldn’t win the next election. The ABC management was desperate to be onside with the new Coalition government.

    The ABC was making a political judgement and refused to allow a professional judgement of policies. The ABC continually ties itself in a knot over this issue.

    I recall that in the name of ‘balance’, Gough Whitlam was effectively denied access to the ABC in the 1960s. He was not allowed to appear on ABC current affairs programs unless there was a Minister to provide ‘balance’. By refusing to have a Minister appear, the ABC in effect allowed the government, to veto Gough Whitlam’s appearance. Fortunately Talbot Duckmanton, the General Manager of the ABC was persuaded that the government should not veto appearances of opposition leaders.

    We now have the ABC resuming its old veto policies, saying in effect that it will not have an article critical of Malcolm Turnbull’s NBN unless there is an article critical of Labor’s NBN.

    In the name of ‘balance’ professionalism and honesty is being forfeited.

    We have had a ludicrous so-called debate about climate change and the media’s attempt to provide balance. The media have given equal prominence to skeptics who are really a small and declining fringe. The nonsense from the skeptics has been given the same sort of coverage as the professional advice of thousands of eminent scientists around the world.

    The most grievous offender in this, of course, in Australia has been the News Ltd publications. The ABC should however re-examine what it means by ‘balance’ and the implications for its professionalism and duties to the whole Australian community.

    The ABC continues to give its former Minister and now Prime Minister an arm chair ride.