John Menadue

  • Richard Norman, Suzanne Robinson. Health lessons from England.

     

    While Australia and England share much of their cultural heritage, the countries have answered the challenge of funding health care in quite different ways.

    The Australian Medicare system is predominantly based around private practice and fee-for-service. The English National Health System (NHS) is based on capitation, in which doctors are paid a fixed amount to manage a group of potential patients irrespective of the actual level of care.

    Neither system is perfect, but each can learn from the other; after all, they both aim to achieve efficient, equitable, high-quality health services is the same.

    Fee-for-service vs capitation

    Australia’s emphasis on fee-for-service funding reflects both a strength and weakness. Paying for each consultation or service, mainly through the Medical Benefits Schedule, incentivises doctors to do more.

    But it can also lead to over-provision of care. Most of us have anecdotes about returning to the doctor for procedural issues, such as renewing prescriptions, or receiving test results, which might be more efficiently done over the phone, or by a nurse or pharmacist.

    The English system, with its focus on capitation, may be too far in the opposite direction. Under capitation, doctors are paid an amount to manage a set of patients, this amount usually determined by estimates of need.

    If doctors are effectively paid no extra for providing additional care to a patient, then you can reasonably expect an average level of service below what is optimal.

    Both the English and Australian systems have tried various ways of blending fee-for-service and capitation, but the two systems continue to sit some distance apart.

    Pay for performance

    One possible way out of this impasse is to move towards a system in which doctors are paid for results, rather than activity.

    The English system has considerable experience in this area – good and bad – with its Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF), which attempts to pay doctors directly for their patients’ health outcomes.

    Under this system, surgeries are awarded points for a range of outcomes including chronic disease management, practice organisation, positive patient experience, and the provision of extra services such as child health and maternity services. These points are then translated into a financial payment for the surgery.

    In England, there is mixed evidence about the appropriateness of this system. Design has proven a major challenge; in the first year, there was a cost blowout as surgeries achieved a much higher proportion of points than was expected.

    So, could such an approach be taken in Australia?

    The answer is that it would be difficult. Patients are registered to surgeries in England, meaning it’s easier to link clinical outcomes with the activity of particular doctors.

    But Medicare data does show us which patients see which doctors, so linking to outcomes might be feasible in Australia.

    However, as with much of the area of international transferability of health policy, the basic policy idea would need to be adapted to reflect the existing health system architecture.

    Keeping people out of hospitals

    Over the past decade, the English health system has pursued a policy of local commissioning of services. Led by local GPs, Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) are responsible for allocating their local community’s health budget on emergency care, elective hospital care, maternity services and community mental health services.

    CCGs place general practitioners at the heart of health care funding decisions, giving them a role previously undertaken by lay managers in primary care.

    The aim is to strengthen primary care and keep people out of hospitals. If you make one body responsible for purchasing primary care (such as GPs) and secondary care (predominantly hospitals), you’re likely to make better use intensive GP interventions that would reduce the use of considerably more expensive hospital care.

    In the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, the Conservative-led coalition placed £65 Billion into the hands of 211 newly-formed CCGs, 65% of a total NHS budget of £95 Billion. The English experience of commissioning is still a developing story. It appears to offer benefit, but the design of the system is crucial. Those doing the local commissioning must be supported both logistically and financially, so they have the time to dedicate to this work and it isn’t just passed on to bureaucrats.

    Australia’s fragmented system

    Our health system is funded from a mixture of state/territory and federal money. Primary care is predominantly paid for by Medicare, while much of the financial cost of providing hospital care is met by the states and territories.

    This poses a major problem for health-care reform. There is an incentive for both the states and the federal government to shift costs towards the other, which can be easily done by moving patients between primary and secondary care.

    Further, the incentive to keep people out of hospital by providing more high-quality primary care is weak, because the government level responsible for primary care (federal) does not reap any savings from this extra investment.

    Community-level organisations such as Medicare Locals are being given small pockets of funding to commission locally, and it is likely that this role will be included in the new Primary Health Networks (PHNs) when they replace Medicare Locals.

    One option is to give local commissioners more power through the PHNs and redirect some state government funding directly to the community-based organisations.

    But caution is required, as English history demonstrates high-quality commissioning requires substantial time and financial investment, as well as effective leadership and the willingness of clinicians to engage.

    Designing a better health system

    Like most other countries, Australia cannot continue to fund the increasing demand for health care, and we need to look for ways to strengthen the role of primary care and keep people out of hospital.

    In the endless debate around how to pay doctors in a way that doesn’t cause over- or under-servicing, adding payments for keeping people healthy is one possibility Australia should consider. But we need to keep in mind the possible negative consequences of such a policy.

    Similarly, Australia should consider supporting local clinicians to make decisions that benefit their community. But because our health systems are so structurally different, the design of such a system for Australia would be a challenge requiring considerable thought.

    This article was first published in The Conversation on 4 September 2014. Richard Norman is Senior Research Fellow in Health Economics at Curtin University, Suzanne Robinson is Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at Curtin University.

     

  • Philip Kokic, Mark Howden, Steven Crimp. 99.999% certainty humans are driving global warming.

    There is less than 1 chance in 100,000 that global average temperature over the past 60 years would have been as high without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, our new research shows.

    Published in the journal Climate Risk Management today, our research is the first to quantify the probability of historical changes in global temperatures and examines the links to greenhouse gas emissions using rigorous statistical techniques.

    Our new CSIRO work provides an objective assessment linking global temperature increases to human activity, which points to a close to certain probability exceeding 99.999%.

    Our work extends existing approaches undertaken internationally to detect climate change and attribute it to human or natural causes. The 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report provided an expert consensus that:

    It is extremely likely [defined as 95-100% certainty] that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic [human-caused] increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.

    Decades of extraordinary temperatures

    July 2014 was the 353rd consecutive month in which global land and ocean average surface temperature exceeded the 20th-century monthly average. The last time the global average surface temperature fell below that 20th-century monthly average was in February 1985, as reported by the US-based National Climate Data Center.

    This means that anyone born after February 1985 has not lived a single month where the global temperature was below the long-term average for that month.

    We developed a statistical model that related global temperature to various well-known drivers of temperature variation, including El Niño, solar radiation, volcanic aerosols andgreenhouse gas concentrations. We tested it to make sure it worked on the historical record and then re-ran it with and without the human influence of greenhouse gas emissions.

    Our analysis showed that the probability of getting the same run of warmer-than-average months without the human influence was less than 1 chance in 100,000.

    We do not use physical models of Earth’s climate, but observational data and rigorous statistical analysis, which has the advantage that it provides independent validation of the results.

    Detecting and measuring human influence

    Our research team also explored the chance of relatively short periods of declining global temperature. We found that rather than being an indicator that global warming is not occurring, the observed number of cooling periods in the past 60 years strongly reinforces the case for human influence.

    We identified periods of declining temperature by using a moving 10-year window (1950 to 1959, 1951 to 1960, 1952 to 1961, etc.) through the entire 60-year record. We identified 11 such short time periods where global temperatures declined.

    Our analysis showed that in the absence of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, there would have been more than twice as many periods of short-term cooling than are found in the observed data.

    There was less than 1 chance in 100,000 of observing 11 or fewer such events without the effects of human greenhouse gas emissions.

     The problem and the solution

    Why is this research important? For a start, it might help put to rest some common misunderstandings about there being no link between human activity and the observed, long-term trend of increasing global temperatures.

    Our analysis – as well as the work of many others – shows beyond reasonable doubt that humans are contributing to significant changes in our climate.

    Good risk management is all about identifying the most likely causes of a problem, and then acting to reduce those risks. Some of the projected impacts of climate change can be avoided, reduced or delayed by effective reduction in global net greenhouse gas emissions and by effective adaptation to the changing climate.

    Ignoring the problem is no longer an option. If we are thinking about action to respond to climate change or doing nothing, with a probability exceeding 99.999% that the warming we are seeing is human-induced, we certainly shouldn’t be taking the chance of doing nothing.

    This article was first published in The Conversation on 4 September 2014.

    Philip Kokic is the Senior Statistician at CSIRO, Mark Howden is the Research Scientist, Agriculture Flagship at CSIRO, Steven Crimp is the Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO.

     

  • John Menadue. The Great Complacency

    Professor Ross Garnaut has spoken many times about our great complacency and our unwillingness to undertake the types of economic and social reform that we saw in the Hawke/Keating periods and in the early days of the Howard Government – think, GST.

    Have the golden days of reform gone forever?

    The former head of Treasury Ken Henry said that he has never known a period in which the standard of public debate on important issues is as bad as it is today. Ross Garnaut has spoken with obvious frustration about the ‘diabolical problem’ of sensible policies on climate change.

    In April 2012 Greg Dodds and I posted an article on this blog ’The Asian Century and the Australian smoko’. We argued that whilst we responded well to the opportunities in Asia for over a decade we went on ‘smoko’ from the mid-1990s. Our Anglo-Celtic both enriched and trapped us. Fear of Asia was promoted.  John Horward gave us permission to be ‘relaxed and comfortable’ again, to have a break from the Asian challenge and opportunities. The result was two decades of drift by business, universities, schools and the media in equipping ourselves for the region .Complacency set in.

    Ross Garnaut poses questions for us again…

    ‘Do we have a problem that requires business adjustment, income restraint and new reforms to lift productivity? Or is the Australian ‘she’ll be right’ approach to economic policy in the early 21st Century good enough? Economic modelling for today’s Forum by Victoria University’s Centre of Policy Studies suggests that Australia does indeed have a sizeable problem with the real prospect of falling living standards to 2020 if nothing is done to avert it.’

    Can we counter those vested interests in the community, those ‘diabolical problems’ that consistently run good policies off the rails? And there are serious obstacles to address. There are powerful vested interests that are hostile to risk taking and want to hold on to privileged positions. They don’t want reform and change.

    Media

    In our 24/7 media cycle the short-term, the partisan, the confrontational and personalities dominate. The attention span of the media on important policy issues is very short. Our Canberra press gallery, including the ABC, is more concerned about politics than policy. News Corporation, which controls 70% of the metropolitan newspaper circulation, runs a partisan agenda that is unprofessional and self-serving. Just look at its denialism on climate change. News Corp distorts and debases almost every public policy issue it touches. What an awful legacy Rupert Murdoch will leave!

    The mainstream media is a serious problem not only because of concentration of power but it still influences the agenda in other under resourced media. Social media, even bloggers are filling some of the vacuum but it is nowhere near enough.  Why doesn’t the ABC establish a high quality online policy portal committed to articulating the key issues that we face?

    Lobbying

    The World Economic Forum in its 2013/4 Global Competitiveness Report on ‘favouritism in decisions of government officials’ ranked Australia poorly, well behind such countries as Singapore,Sweden,Netherlands, ,Norway,Japan, Germany and the UK. In transparency in government decision making we also ranked poorly.

    So much of the influence on governments is not exercised in public and contested discussion. The secret lobbying in Canberra and the state capitals has shown how lobbyists can effectively twist the arms of ministers. Lobbyists know that they cannot win an open debate with the public, so they exercise their enormous influence in secret. Think of what the Australian Minerals Council has done to corrupt good public policy in the resources sector. Consider what happens in the health field with the secret influence of the AMA, the Australian Pharmacy Guild, the Private Health Insurance funds and Medicines Australia. We will never get worthwhile health reform until these secretive and powerful vested interests are publicly confronted and forced to publicly defend their positions. And beyond these few examples there is the influence of the Australian Hotels Association in promoting the scourge of alcohol. We need to address the destructive power of the lobbying industry and its corruption of the public interest and public debate. Favouritism in government decision making and a lack of transparency is a major obstacle to good policy making.

    Political donations

    Associated with the corrupting power of both in house and third party lobbyists is the ability of powerful and wealthy groups to win favours from politcians with political donations. The NSW ICAC inquiry has shown what charade donations have made of any sense of an open and honest public discourse. We need to consider the banning of all donations at both national and state levels. Our political system is being bought by wealthy vested interests.

    Think Tanks

    Think tanks should be providing us with independent and public advice on important public issues. But the most influential ‘think tank’ is the Institute of Public Affairs, which is secretly funded by wealthy companies like big tobacco and the mining sector. It runs phoney campaigns in service of wealthy private and secret funders. The Sydney Institute pretends that it is an independent forum, but never discloses the sources of its funding. These ‘think tanks’ that refuse to disclose their donors should be refused media access, certainly by the ABC, and denied tax deductibility for donations. If we are to have an honest and transparent public debate action must be taken against these phoney think tanks.

    Business Economists

    Most of the business economists that we see so regularly on TV or read in our newspapers are employed by the banks. The 19 member Committee of Australian Business Economists is dominated by bank and financial service employees. Some of these business economists make an important contribution to public debate on broad economic issues, but how often do they challenge the power of their employers who increasingly dominate our economy, particularly in the fast-growing area of superannuation and funds management.

    We used to have a number of independent “public intellectuals” usually from the universities. But with the exception of a few university people such as Professor Ross Garnaut, Professor Bob Gregory and Ian McAuley, these public commentators are few.

    With a few notable exceptions our climate scientists are remarkably tongue tired in the face of so much self-interest and crude ideology. Don’t they care about climate change? Do they feel that politics is beneath them?

    Dubious ‘contributors’ to this public debate are the large number of accounting and consulting firms who undertake ‘modelling’ to produce what their clients want. I am not sure how professional and independent some of this modelling is. Ross Gittins has described the problem of recent modelling on the effect on electricity prices if the Renewable Energy Target is abolished. He said ‘regrettably economic modelling has degenerated into a device for bamboozling the public’

    Leadership

    A key to the earlier periods of policy reform was political leadership supported broadly by business and the trade unions. I do think that we respond to strong leadership if we feel that the sacrifice is worth it in the national interest and that it is fair. Unfortunately today we so often have a lack of leadership and a partisan and coarse public dialogue.

    Strong and capable leaders will help to outflank the obstacles I have mentioned. But the obstacles are major reasons why complacency is winning the day.

    We are still enjoying the benefits of the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Can we shake ourselves free of our complacency and partisanship and stop fooling ourselves that ‘she’ll be right’.

  • Rod Tucker. Broadband projects fail reality test.

    In an article in The Conversation on 8 September 2014, Rod Tucker points out that the broadband projections will fail a reality test.  He said ‘If they [the Vertigan report] had used realistic data for growth in demand, their cost benefit analysis may well have shown that a FTTP network will provide Australia with the best long term value for money.’  Rod Tucker is Laureate Emeritus Professor at University of Melbourne.  See link to full article below.

    http://theconversation.com/broadband-projections-fail-reality-test-31341

  • Gavan McCormack. Disturbing trends in Japan Part 4

    Friendship, states, peoples and Australia

    The government of Japan struggles to reconcile servile incorporation in today’s US hegemonic project with Japan’s own nationalism, but the circle is not easily to be squared. Nationalism is distorted, denied and channeled into a ‘correct history’ movement, beautiful Japan campaigns, and antagonism to China and Korea. The wave of xenophobic abuse of China and Korea, speculation about a possible war, and ‘hate speech’ bullying of Zainichi resident Koreans, helps consolidate Abe’s support base and justify frontier militarisation. It constitutes the reverse side of his stealth revision of the constitution and promotion of military-first, US-serving priorities. Furthermore, basic insecurity is exacerbated by neoliberal policies that for more than a decade now have functioned to replace regular jobs with part-time, temporary or other non-regular ones (now accounting for 19 million people, or 38 per cent of the total workforce).

    It is not as though the Abe agenda has widespread national support. He took office after the lower-house election in December 2012 delivered his party a substantial majority on the basis of 27.6 per cent of the vote in the national ‘bloc’ component (hardly different from 2009, when it took 26.7 per cent and suffered a humiliating defeat), and 16.62 million votes in the small electorate seats, more than two million fewer than the 18.81 million it took on the occasion of its 2009 defeat. Since then support levels have wavered, kept high through his first year of government by the rhetoric of Abenomics but suddenly dropping below 50 per cent (from 54 to 47 per cent] in July 2014 as the ‘collective self-defence’ doctrine was adopted.

    There is now a thick fabric of cooperation and exchange between Australia and Japan. In both countries, the image of the other is generally positive, and they are urged to the embrace by their key security partner and ally, the United States. However, official Australia has a distinctive agenda not necessarily widely shared or understood in the community. It has long favoured Japanese constitutional revision and showed no sign in 2014 of concern at the way the Abe government was going about accomplishing it. It also favours an expanded Japanese regional military role and closer integration of Australian, Japanese and American forces. Official Australia is not known to have any reservations about the way the government of Japan has gone about constructing a new facility on Okinawa for the US Marine Corps or to have any apparent qualms about moves to switch the Japanese nuclear power grid (frozen in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster) back on and promote the export of nuclear-power-generation systems as a core sector of the Japanese economy. Australian silence on issues such as Yasukuni and the ‘comfort women’ is also appreciated in Tokyo, and naturally taken to signify agreement, or ‘shared’ values.

    In short, Australia has yet to disentangle affection and respect for the Japanese people from identification with the values and policies of the Abe government. For the moment, few seem conscious of the distinction and so support for the Abe government and its agenda is scarcely challenged. However, those who believe they share values with the Abe government should look carefully at contemporary Japan’s complex crisis of identity, history and role; at the radical but contradictory agenda pursued by Prime Minister Abe; and not least at the burgeoning confrontation in Oura Bay in Okinawa, where the juggernaut of the state, with its monopoly of force and readiness to sacrifice nature to military ends threatens the local, non-violent, democratic and fundamentally ‘conservative’ citizenry.

  • Jane Tolman. I don’t want to get Dementia.

    Dementia is what many of us fear most, and the effective risk is largely related to age.   The statistics say that at 65 years of age, only 2% have dementia.  But this figure doubles with the passage of each five year period.  By 90, the risk of having dementia is about one in four.  Because of the “survivor effect” (those with the fewest risks will live to old age), the subsequent risk no longer increases at this rate.

    There is no guarantee that dementia can be avoided, whatever we do.  But what does the evidence say about what strategies can reduce the risk? Genes account for only a small percentage of those with dementia, especially among the elderly.

    There is now evidence that the risk can be reduced, and that this will lead to fewer people with dementia.  In fact, we think that if the onset of dementia could be delayed by five years, then the numbers would be halved (Dementia Risk Reduction, prepared for Alzheimer’s Australia, 2007).

    Despite much controversy in recent years about the exact cause of Alzheimer’s disease- the most common form of dementia in the western world- it turns out that the factors which protect against heart disease also protect against dementia. The UK Blackfriars consensus produced this year suggested that within two decades up to 20% of predicted new cases of dementia could be prevented with lifestyle alterations designed to reduce blood pressure, obesity, cholesterol and diabetes.

    So what can we do to minimise the risk of developing dementia?

    The brain is arguably the most important organ and should be treated with respect at all times. “Getting knocked out” sounds bad, and it is. We are now aware that episodes of concussion are bad for the brain and there are reports that head injuries contribute to dementia.  Protect your brain, and not just from toxic substances.

    It’s never too early to start with life style changes. Both physical and mental activity are critical, and the earlier they start, the better. Regular is good- say 30 minutes every day of sustained physical exercise.  Patterns established in youth are harder to break in old age.  When it comes to mental exercise, repetition of familiar tasks is not particularly useful (such as Sudoku or crosswords); there must be real stimulation and challenging to the brain. Learning a language or taking a university course in a new field is what’s needed.

    Connectivity is the new buzz word for dementia.  This relates to the structure of the brain (how nerves connect with each other) and the disruption of neuronal connectivity is emerging as a key component in the impairment of brain function. But it also relates to social connections. People don’t thrive in isolation and neither do brains. As we age, we lose social connections (people die) so it’s necessary to have a large social network when we are younger. Being with people- having relationships, joining groups, developing interests which involve human contact- these will all improve brain function and help to reduce the dementia risk.  Ideally, you should have friends who are younger than you are, but at least a mixture of ages.

    Nurturing the senses is about maximising the inputs to the brain.  Good vision and hearing are among the important predictive factors for a good memory in old age.  Fifty percent of older people have an incorrect prescription for their spectacles, and while most very elderly people have some deafness, hearing aids are often not worn. Now is the time- however young or old you are- to have a check and correct any sensory deficits as soon as possible.

    What should you eat? Moderation and balance will usually do the trick.    Having a healthy weight before old age is critical: in older age weight loss means losing muscle, and this is a sure way of triggering falls, impairing the circulation and immune function. For most older people, care needs to be taken to maintain weight, and to have protein at the centre of every meal.  Salt is bad for the brain as it contributes to hypertension which itself causes damage.  Fats are essential, but are best in balance; avoid saturated fats as these may double the risk of dementia.  Fruits and vegetables are associated with longevity, but also promote good bowel function.  Constipation in old age is the enemy of health, happiness and functioning well, each of which helps us to live the dementia journey better. Broccoli and cauliflower also contain Vitamin E which is thought to be protective against dementia. If you need more guidance, the Mediterranean diet has recognised benefits.

    Alcohol in moderation may be protective, but with excessive amounts (regular consumption in excess of two drinks a day or four in a single session) come increased risks for hypertension, cardiovascular disease and dementia.  Binge drinking may increase the risk of dementia three fold after 65.

    Smoking is a serious risk for a range of illnesses, and if you survive cancers, chronic lung diseases (especially emphysema) and vascular disease (heart attacks and strokes) then dementia is also more likely in your old age.

    Regular blood pressure checks and careful control are essential, as hypertension is the enemy of brain health. Avoiding diabetes, similarly dangerous for brains, means a healthy diet, weight control and regular screens.  See your doctor if there are any new symptoms, especially lethargy, blurred vision, increased hunger, unexplained weight loss or increased thirst.  If you have diabetes, keep the sugars under control.

    Your psyche should be as important to you as your physical health. The responsibility for your state of mind rests with you, and while stress might not be avoidable, how you deal with it is up to you.  If you need help, get it.  Whether you get dementia is not up to you.  But there are ways to reduce the risk, and to make the journey less traumatic if you are unlucky.  What is up to you, is what you know (keep up to date) and your attitude to your health (be positive).  Reducing your risks for dementia is a lifelong undertaking and will make you a happier and healthier person.

     

    Jane Tolman is Director of Aged Care, Royal Hobart Hospital.

     

     

  • Gavan McCormack. Disturbing trends in Japan (Part 3 of 4)

    Abe, the radical

    Nominally conservative, Abe’s political career has been devoted to an extraordinarily radical agenda, nothing less than revision of all three of the country’s basic charters: the Constitution (1946), the Fundamental Law of Education (1947) and Ampo (the 1951/1960 security treaty with the United States). He aspires to ‘liquidate the post-war regime’ and replace it with a ‘new’ and ‘beautiful’ Japan.

    Abe’s party has from its inception in 1955 been committed to revising the constitution, especially Article 9, the declaration of state pacifism. The current LDP draft constitution (of 2012) widens state prerogatives while narrowing citizen rights and transforms the existing Self-Defense Forces into a ‘national defence army’. But overt revision has never been politically feasible given the strength of public opposition. Abe has chafed especially under the constraint that all previous governments had accepted—that Japan might possess an ‘inherent’ right to collective self-defence, but the constitution ruled out its exercise. On the eve of his Australian visit Abe’s cabinet disposed of this problem by simply adopting a new interpretation, reversing the restrictive interpretation and freeing Japan’s forces for future global missions. The Japan that under its constitution from 1947 to 2014 could not go to war now can.

    The evasion of constitutional principle by the simple device of reinterpretation, praised by Abbott and by the Obama government, was widely seen in Japan as a constitutional coup-d‘etat. It was in keeping with Deputy Prime Minister Aso Taro’s encomium (in a speech to party faithful on 29 July 2013) that Japan should learn from the Hitler example, the people in Germany simply waking one morning to find that their constitution no longer meant what they had thought it did. The New York Times editorialised that Japan was ‘facing a genuine test of its democracy’.

    As for education, in his first term Abe succeeded in revising the Fundamental Law of Education, making it an educational requirement that schools promote ‘love of country’. Early in 2014, Abe’s Education Ministry announced that moral education was henceforth to be given a core part in the school curriculum and that history, geography and civics texts for junior and senior high schools would, from April 2016, have to ‘reflect the government’s official position on contentious historical issues’.

    As for the security treaty with the United States, revision in 1960 caused such political turmoil that it has not been formally revised since then. Instead, however, de facto revision has been unceasing and fundamental, in accord with high-level governmental and inter-governmental understandings, including the National Defense Guidelines (1978, 1997 and forthcoming 2014) and the 2005–06 Agreements on ‘Transformation and Realignment’ of US forces in Japan. The fullest expression of the Abe security stance is expected to come in the late-2014 National Security Guidelines, but it is indicative that he has already opened the door to the export of Japanese weapons, established a National Security Council that concentrates power in his office, passed a ‘secrets protection’ law that prescribes draconian penalties for whistleblowers and investigative journalists and reminds some of the infamous 1925 ‘Peace Preservation Law’, is planning or constructing new Japanese bases in the far-southwestern islands of Amami, Miyako, Ishigaki and Yonaguni, and is working on plans to establish Japanese versions of the CIA and the US Marine Corps.

    Australia has no known stance on educational policy, but it has long favoured constitutional revision and a ‘normal state’ (‘strong’ and war capable) agenda for Japan. The fact that Abe takes aim in particular at Japan’s democratic, citizen-based and anti-militarist elements, preferring instead a paradoxical mix of the Shintoist, the American, the beautiful and the new, seems not to have registered in the Australian consciousness.

    Though Abe offends and worries the United States on many fronts, his redeeming quality is the enthusiasm he brings to the security agenda, implementing a substantial military build-up, merging with and functionally subordinating Japan’s military to that of the United States and building major new facilities for the Marine Corps in Northern Okinawa (as well as, more recently, in US territory (Guam and the Marianas)). For the cash-strapped Pentagon the prospect of such largesse,and of a 225,000-person subsidiary force, all costs met by Japan, well-trained and -equipped and ready for action on the Pentagon’s behalf under ‘collective self-defence’ principles in future wars, is irresistible.

  • Mike Steketee. Politics vs Science.

    “THE laws of physics are non-negotiable,” observed Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organisation, this week. https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_1002_en.html

    You wouldn’t think so listening to the often frenzied debate about global warming or, according to Tony Abbott’s senior business adviser Maurice Newman, what is really global cooling http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/were-illprepared-if-the-iceman-cometh/story-e6frg6zo-1227023489894 .

    Jarraud was commenting on the release of the WMO’s annual greenhouse gas bulletin https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/documents/1002_GHG_Bulletin.pdf  , based mainly on data collected by 50 countries. It shows a 34 per cent increase in the warming effect of greenhouse gases between 1990 and 2013. Most of this is attributable to carbon dioxide, atmospheric concentrations of which have risen by 142 per cent since the start of industrialisation in the 18th century, “primarily because of emissions from combustion of fossil fuels and cement production”. The WMO recorded an increase of 2.9 parts per million in 2013 – the largest rise since 1984 – although it added the figure was subject to seasonal and regional variations, such as a changing balance between photosynthesis and respiration or the amount of biomass burned.

    The figures put the best face on things, more or less. The WMO’s bulletin reports on concentrations of greenhouse gases rather than emissions – that is, what remains in the atmosphere after the estimated 25 per cent of emissions that are absorbed by the oceans and a similar amount by the biosphere, particularly plants. That means we are producing around twice as much long-lived greenhouse gases than can be taken up by the earth and the oceans. Moreover, the increasing amounts of CO2 going into the ocean is causing acidification at a rate that “appears unprecedented at least over the last 300 million years”. The consequences are not fully known but include reduced calcification, relied on by corals, molluscs and other organisms.

    Jarraud said the bulletin “provides a scientific base for decision-making. …Pleading ignorance can no longer be an excuse for not acting.”

    So much for the science. Back in the world of politics, where just about anything is negotiable, apparently including the future of the planet, Australia has decided that it has been doing far too much to deal with global warming. The price on carbon emissions has been removed, despite the evidence, both direct and indirect, that it worked. Most of the sharp increase in electricity prices in recent years has been due not to the carbon tax but the cost of upgrading infrastructure – the poles and wires – often unnecessarily because of perverse incentives. But the response from consumers has been exactly what you would expect from a price rise, whatever its origins – they have reduced their demand for electricity. This has been one of the factors in the break since 2010 in the long-term trend towards rising electricity demand. file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Kate/My%20Documents/Downloads/IP%2014%20Power%20down_0.pdf

    Prices in the electricity market have responded in another way. In the words of the report https://retreview.dpmc.gov.au/ret-review-report-0 of the inquiry established by the Abbott government into the renewable energy target, “analyses suggest that, overall, the RET is exerting some downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices. This is not surprising, given that the RET is increasing the supply of electricity when electricity demand has been falling”.

    Indeed, if the reduction is passed on in lower retail prices, as it should be in a competitive market, and offsets the higher cost of producing renewables, it might be thought of as a positive outcome by a government that hails the reduction in electricity prices brought about by the abolition of the carbon tax. However, the inquiry into the RET, headed by businessman and climate change sceptic Dick Warburton, had another purpose: to find a way of scaling back or eliminating the RET. As a result, the report argued that “artificially” low wholesale electricity prices could distort investment decisions.

    Thankfully, the report did not ignore some other facts, even if it put its own peculiar interpretation on them. Modelling it commissioned found the net impact of the RET on retail prices was small, including into the future. It concluded that the scheme had broadly met its objectives, with output from large scale renewable generators, mainly wind farms, almost doubling and that from small scale systems, mainly solar, already exceeding levels forecast for 2020. The cost of renewables had fallen, particularly for rooftop solar and the small scale renewable industry was becoming commercially viable.

    All this might sound like good news but the report thought otherwise. It found the RET to be a high cost approach to reducing CO2 emissions – $35 to $68 a tonne and $100 to $200 a tonne for small-scale renewables.

    So it is but it depends on the alternatives. At the moment there are none. The Gillard government set the carbon price at $23 a tonne and the international market price has moved much lower since. The report suggests the Abbott government’s direct action policy would produce cheaper abatement than renewables. But that remains to be seen – that is, if the policy is ever implemented in a viable form, given that it currently is blocked in the Senate.

    The government says it remains committed to reducing emissions by 5 per cent from 2000 levels by 2020, although the Climate Change Authority, among others, argues that this is less than required for Australia to meet its fair share of the international effort. The RET is the only remaining significant mechanism for at least heading in the right direction. Its role is to increase the share of emissions-free electricity, not, as the Warburton report argues, to solve the problems facing fossil fuel generators because of falling demand by winding back the RET.

    According to Andrew Blakers, director of the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems at the Australian Natonal University, Australia could achieve 90 per cent renewable energy by 2040 by replacing coal and gas fired stations that are due to be retired over the coming decades http://theconversation.com/renewable-energy-target-review-experts-respond-31050 . Solutions would need to be found for storing power from wind and solar, given their intermittent nature, but developments in battery technology suggest that this is in prospect. Blakers offers another option that he says would be cheaper: “pumped hydro”, under which water is pumped up to a reservoir when there is spare electricity from renewables and then run downhill through a turbine when needed. http://theconversation.com/how-pushing-water-uphill-can-solve-our-renewable-energy-issues-28196

    In a world that gradually is doing more to address climate change but still not enough to meet the target of limiting warming to 2C, Australia  has become the international laggard, despite being one of the highest producers of greenhouse gases per capita in the world. The International Energy Agency has estimated http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/25recom_2011.pdf  that taking a range of measures merely to improve the efficiency with which we use energy can reduce total global energy consumption by 17 per cent by 2030, making a big contribution towards cutting greenhouse gases.

    But according to an American study http://aceee.org/portal/national-policy/international-scorecard , Australia ranks 10th out of 16 OECD countries in overall energy efficiency and last in transport. Under the Abbott government, it “has dramatically reduced its investment in efficiency and has rolled back its efficiency incentive programs, causing its score to decline.” An example is this year’s budget, which withdrew commonwealth funding of public transport projects and increased it for roads.

    Given the relentless long-term trend towards global warming (memo Maurice Newman: periods of short-term cooling have been declining http://theconversation.com/99-999-certainty-humans-are-driving-global-warming-new-study-29911?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The%20Weekend%20Conversation%20-%201899&utm_content=The%20Weekend%20Conversation%20-%201899+CID_02ac31e1fe595615139d593549d1aefb&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=99999%20certainty%20humans%20are%20driving%20global%20warming%20new%20study ), it should be a case of all hands on deck. The opposition already has voted against direct action legislation in the House of Representatives on the grounds that it is a poor substitute for an emissions trading scheme. Perhaps it is but that does not mean the kind of projects that could attract funding under direct action, such as for increased energy efficiency in commercial buildings and industry, reafforestation and improved soil carbon, are not worth doing.  Labor should reverse its position and support the legislation in the Senate.

    As the WMO’s Michel Jarraud put it this week, “we are runnning out of time”.

    This article was first published in The Drum on 12 September, 2014.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Gavan McCormack. Disturbing trends in Japan (Part 2 of 4)

    Shared values

    Much was made during the visit of the ‘shared values’ that unite Australia and Japan. But are the values of Abe or his government really widely shared? From the time of his entry into the national Diet in 1993, Abe immersed himself in the historical revisionist cause, resisting moves towards formal apology for the war and compensation for war victims and objecting to what he and his colleagues refer to scathingly as a ‘Tokyo Tribunal view of history’. He believes Japan was unjustly blamed for the China and Pacific wars of 1931 to 1945. As his friend Hyakuta Naoki, Abe-appointed director of national broadcaster NHK, put it earlier this year, the Nanjing massacre of 1937 never occurred and Americans had ‘fabricated war crimes against Japanese leaders in order to cover up American atrocities’. He and most of his cabinet today belong to organisations that look back to wartime Japan for inspiration, with names such as Dietmembers Associations ‘for the Passing on of a Correct History’, for a ‘Bright Japan’ and ‘Reflection on Japan’s Future and History Education’, and the ‘Shinto Politics League’. The basic principle of Shinto politics was articulated in January 2000 by then prime minister Mori Yoshiro, who referred to Japan as an ‘emperor-centred country of the gods’—precisely the view held by those who led Japan to the disastrous wars of the 1930s and 1940s.

    The politician Abe professes to admire most is his own (maternal) grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke (1896–1987). Kishi was economic czar of Manchuria (Northeast China) in the 1930s, became minister for trade and industry in the Tojo Hideki cabinet from 1941 and signed the declaration of war against the United States, holding office in the wartime government till shortly before war’s end and being then held for three years as a suspected Class ‘A’ war criminal. Released, however, in December 1948, he became prime minister from 1957 (in which capacity he first visited Australia) to 1960. Tim Weiner’s History of the CIA refers to him as ‘one of the two most influential agents the United States ever recruited … [and who] helped carry out the CIA mission to control the government’ (which continued up to the 1970s). Commonly seen as nationalists, Abe and his grandfather are both better seen as servants of the United States posing as nationalists.

    Unlike Australia, in the United States it is clear some harbour serious doubts over what values are shared with Japan. When Tony Abbott extended the invitation to Mr Abe to address a joint sitting of the Australian parliament, one wonders whether he was aware:

    • that the US government has consistently denied the honour of a formal congressional address to Japan’s leaders, even though it has extended such an honour to successive Korean presidents (five in all).
    • that Abe in his first spell in government (2006–07) had been subject to formal rebuke by the United States on human-rights grounds (House of Representatives Resolution 101 of 2007) for failure to acknowledge and compensate the victims of the wartime ‘comfort women’ system, and that similar resolutions had also been adopted by Canada and the EU.
    • that while Abe in 2013 had to be satisfied with a businesslike White House lunch with President Obama, with no shared press conference, Chinese president Xi Jinping shortly afterwards got a respectful reception and spent a couple of days with Obama on a California ranch.
    • that, when Abe brushed off strong US objections and in December 2013 visited Yasukuni Shrine, the US embassy in Tokyo released a statement that ‘the United States is disappointed [sic.] that Japan’s leadership has taken an action that will exacerbate tensions with Japan’s neighbours’, and ordered him not to repeat it.
    • that President Obama himself directly rebuked Abe (in reference to his China policy) in front of a Tokyo press conference in April 2014. 

    In short, the present government of the United States has serious differences with the Abe Japanese government on both war memory and China (and Korea) policy. Japanese governments have striven desperately to secure from Washington the sort of honour bestowed on them in July 2014 by Canberra. Indeed it may well be that it was Washington’s ‘Japan handlers’—some at least of them also its ‘Australia handlers’—who put together the Australia honour. Much as the George W. Bush administration put together a visit by Prime Minister Koizumi in 2007 to the Elvis Presley shrine in Memphis to compensate him for the invitation to Congress he too desired but could not be granted, so for Abe Canberra would substitute for Washington. In its apparently unlimited enthusiasm over its new ‘special relationship’, Australia now is notably out of step with Washington, and Abe’s uncritical and extravagant Australian reception must have delighted him.

     

  • John Menadue. NATO, Ukraine and Russia.

    Nato,Ukraine and Russia…Katrina vanden Heuvel Washington Post 10 September 2014

    If the United States and Europe were thinking rationally, the NATO summit in Wales last week would have been an opportunity to discuss a lasting resolution to the violent crisis in Ukraine, which has claimed thousands of lives and crippled the country’s economy. Instead, amid a fragile cease-fire agreement between Kiev and pro-Russian rebels in the east, the assembled world leaders used the summit for more belligerent talk and reckless saber-rattling, with their ultimate goal increasingly unclear. The goal seemed more preparing the NATO alliance for a new Cold War with Russia than exploring how to make peace, even as Moscow was helping to bring about the cease-fire agreement.

    The meeting was just the most recent disturbing example of how cavalierly and cynically the NATO leaders — including President Obama — have escalated tensions, while dismissing opportunities to bring the conflict to a reasonable conclusion quickly. Absent from the discussion in Wales, among other things, was any recognition of NATO members’ own roles in triggering the crisis. Despite the dominant narrative that Russia is to blame for Ukraine’s uncertain future, history tells a different story — one in which the West’s provocative behavior has had predictable repercussions.

    There would have been no civil war if the European Union’s leadership had not insisted on an exclusive association agreement that prejudiced Ukrainian industry in the east and trade with Russia, or if the United States and European nations had used their influence with the demonstrators to abide by the Feb. 21 agreement then-President Viktor Yanukovych signed, which would have handed more power to parliament and called for elections in December, or if the United States and Europe had been willing to work with Russia to restore the Feb. 21 agreement and calm worries in Crimea and the east about the rights of Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

    Instead the U.S. and E.U. have encouraged the most radical elements in the Kiev government in their campaign to subjugate the east with military force — to seek a military solution to what is essentially a political problem in a deeply divided and economically fragile Ukraine.

    Our responsibility goes beyond the immediate crisis, too. There would not have been such a concerted Russian nationalist response to the crisis had the West not sowed the seeds of suspicion and mistrust over the past 18 years by growing NATO’s presence in Eastern Europe, in spite of the assurances that Russia ostensibly received from the George H.W. Bush administration that “NATO will not expand one inch to the east.” Russia clearly views NATO expansion not only as provocative but also as a betrayal of an agreement, and it perceives NATO’s push toward its borders as an act of aggression — and Western leaders know it.

    In this sense, NATO expansion is not a consequence of tension with Russia; it is the cause. As George Kennan, known as the “father of containment,” warned some 16 years ago, NATO’s willful expansion would create lasting tension. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan said in a 1998 interview with Thomas Friedman, reacting to the alliance’s pending additions of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake.”

    In 2004, NATO admitted seven new members, including the Baltic States along the Russian border. Four years later, the George W. Bush administration failed to win acceptance for Georgia and Ukraine — a bid that faced significant opposition from Germany and France — but the alliance symbolically declared that the countries “will become members of NATO.”  Those actions have inevitably colored any developments.

    While there is no question that Russia at times has contributed to tensions in the region, what has unfolded was predictable and preventable. The West should have understood that an attempt to bring Ukraine into an exclusive arrangement with the European Union would spark deep, historical divisions within the country and itself, and raise Russian concerns. After all, we have seen this before.

    “Logic aside,” writes John Mearsheimer in Foreign Affairs, “Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia — a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made crystal. Yet the hawkish outcry for a more confrontational stance toward Putin has yet to give way to common sense. Across the political spectrum, prominent figures are demanding harsher sanctions targeting Russia, as well as military assistance and NATO membership for Ukraine. These demands seem to increase regardless of what Moscow does and regardless of the fact that Russian cooperation is essential for the stabilization and rebuilding of the shattered Ukrainian economy. Never mind that Putin has just helped broker a long-sought cease-fire; sanctions, we are told, must be broadened and deepened. Punishing Russia is far more important than a political settlement in Ukraine.

    It is long past time for sober reasoning and comprehensive negotiations to end the bloody conflict. Fortunately, the parameters of a peaceful resolution are well established, and we have the cease-fire to build on.

    First and foremost, any possible membership of Ukraine in NATO or the stationing of NATO forces on Ukrainian territory must be firmly excluded. As I have written before, Ukraine’s chances for recovery depend on positive relationships with both Europe and Russia. There is only one way for Ukraine to stabilize, and that is as a bridge between Russia and the West, not a champion of either.

    Second, Ukraine should adopt a federal system that provides more autonomy for the eastern region and protects the rights of its Russian-speaking population. The E.U., Russia, and the United States should devise a joint plan to rescue the rapidly shrinking Ukrainian economy.

    Finally, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe should place observers and peacekeepers to monitor progress in the war-ravaged east.This is a fateful moment. The cease-fire is a positive step, but it may well be short-lived. For now, with NATO and Russia both preparing for the worst-case scenario, it is more important than ever to stop the triumphalist rhetoric and refocus our efforts on ending the conflict, not escalating. Make no mistake: there is no military solution to this challenge. Only a reasoned dialogue and political settlement can put Ukraine on the path to long-term stability and progress.

  • Gavan McCormack Disturbing trends in Japan (Part 1 of 4)

    These posts (published over 4 days) are extracts from an article by Gavan McCormack, entitled ‘Partnership 135 Degrees East’ which will be published in Arena.org.au. 

     

    Our best friend

    The current Japanese and Australian governments came into being in December 2012 and September 2013 respectively. Both are headed by conservative, neoliberal, climate-denialist, pro-American leaders, of similar age, who quickly established a close rapport. Following their first meeting, at an ASEAN summit in October 2013, Abbott declared Abe Australia’s ‘best friend in Asia’. In meetings that followed, in Tokyo in April and Canberra in July 2014, they resolved to transform the ‘strategic partnership’ into a new ‘special relationship.’ Both made unprecedented invited appearances at the highest-level national-security-council meeting of their counterpart country, and signed agreements for free trade and defence cooperation (including ‘trilateral security cooperation with the United States’) and closer scientific and academic links.

    Before the national parliament, Prime Minister Abbott delighted his guest and astonished many Australians by referring to the ‘skill and sense of honour’ of the imperial Japanese soldiers of seventy years ago. For his part, Abe resolved to ‘stay humble against the evils and horrors of history’, offering ‘sincere condolences towards the many who lost their lives’ and expressing his determination to do more to enhance peace.

    The Murdoch press waxed hot with excitement. The Australian’s Greg Sheridan declared the Abe performance ‘masterful … as intricate as a fine Noritake pottery work, with as many moving parts seamlessly working together as the robotics of a Nagoya car plant’, signifying ‘nothing less than the birth of a new Japan’.

    Abe’s expression of ‘condolences’ and his resolve to further the cause of peace were widely praised. Yet his ‘condolences’ were calibrated to convey sympathy while avoiding responsibility, and the greatest Japanese crimes—of Nanjing, Unit 731, and the sexual enslavement of hundreds of thousands of women across Asia—went unmentioned. It was as if those who ‘lost’ their lives at Kokoda and Sandakan had fallen victim to some mysterious ailment. Furthermore, by his references to peace, Abe plainly meant shedding the shackles of post-war constitutional pacifism and joining the United States in future wars because he sees it as heading the cause of global peace. Peace, in short, calls for war. It is a proposition worthy of Orwell.

    As for his professed commitment to settling disputes by dialogue and the rule of law, Abe in fact has ruled out discussion with China on the territorial issue that China sees as critical (contested sovereignty over the uninhabited islets known in China as Diaoyu and in Japan as Senkaku). There is, he insists, no dispute, no room for discussion or negotiation. What is called for is ‘not negotiation but physical force incapable of being misunderstood’ (brute force, in other words).

    Gavan McCormack is emeritus professor of the Australian National University, coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (http://japanfocus.org), and author of many books and articles on modern and contemporary Japan and East Asia.

  • John Menadue The Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Program – ’a dog’s breakfast.’

    In an article in Eureka Street on 8 September, Fr Frank Brennan described the Royal Commission report into the HIP as a ‘dog’s breakfast’. He described the reasoning behind Mr Hanger’s conclusion on commonwealth responsibility as ‘bizarre’. He added that the report was ‘inadequate and flawed’.

    See Frank Brennan’s comments at the end of this post.

    The pink batts issue has been dominated by party politicking, a relentless campaign by News Ltd and lazy journalism. The problems with the program were seized on at every opportunity to discredit the Rudd Government.

    I have long contended that the regulation of the home insulation industry is the responsibility, without any doubt, of state governments. (See my Blog of January 3, 2014 ‘Pink Batts – fact and fiction’). The states were and still are responsible for safety, however much the Royal Commissioner tried to shift the responsibility. He in effect said that the commonwealth should not have relied on the states to implement their own occupation and health safety laws, their own employment training programs, or their own building regulations. He said ‘To rely on the state and territory regimes to police their own respective workplace health and safety laws seems to me to have been misguided. ….’

    What an extraordinary thing to say. Any student of Economics I, Law 1 or Politics 1 would know that the states have clear responsibility in this area and that they jealously guard their territory. To say nothing of the responsibilities of employers!

    In all this misguided heaping of responsibility onto the commonwealth government, including the four deaths, we should also remind ourselves of issues that Michael Keating, Ian McAuley and I have raised in this blog.

    • There were 1.1 million installations completed under this program.
    • A CSIRO analysis found that the rate of fires (not deaths) under HIP was lower than previously.
    • 7% of installations had to be rectified which doesn’t seem a particularly high rate for the building industry.
    • One fatality was caused by a pre-existing fault; another electrocuted installer was employed by an electrician and the third death occurred when a contractor elected to work in oppressive heat.
    • It is suggested that the deaths occurred because the HIP was rushed. There certainly was a compelling reason for speedy implementation, but it is very problematical whether the four deaths would have been avoided if the commonwealth had taken more time.

    This has been a high politicised issue from the beginning. The Royal Commission report – the ‘dog’s breakfast’ – has not helped.It is reported to have cost $25m. It is one of the few promises that Prime Minister Abbott has actually kept!

    For the future a scheme like this might be better implemented if the program funds were paid directly to the homeowner as a reimbursement/subsidy after the insulation work was completed. This would have been much more likely to have avoided the commonwealth ever accepting responsibility for situations that it could never have prevented. But reimbursing the home owner would have been no more likely to have prevented those four deaths, assuming the relevant homeowners used the same contractors.

     

    Pink Batts – Frank Brennan – extracts from Eureka Street, 8 September 2014.

    This last week, we have seen the disastrous consequences with another royal commission which failed to take account of the role of state governments. The Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Program produced a report which is a dog’s breakfast. The mainstream media has been oblivious to the report’s glaring shortcomings, focusing more on the party politics of the blame game.

    That royal commission concluded that the Commonwealth when administering the program should not have relied on the states to implement their own occupational health and safety laws, their own employment training requirements or their own building regulations.

    The Commissioner, Mr Ian Hanger QC, reported, ‘To rely on the State and Territory regimes to police their respective workplace health and safety laws seems to me to have been misguided, as those regimes are largely reactive. That is, when an incident happens the workplace health and safety regulators or electrical safety regulators investigate, report and, if appropriate, take enforcement action. What was, in my view, required of the Australian Government with the HIP (Home Insulation Program) was the provision of some preventative measures to attempt to mitigate some of the obvious workplace health and safety risks endemic to the HIP.’

    And yet, the Commission went on to suggest that the Commonwealth should have considered having the states, rather than the Commonwealth, implement the whole program.

    The regrettable deaths of the four young men working on the Home Insulation Program were the result of problems in administration at the Commonwealth and State levels and in delayed, poor communication between Commonwealth and State officials, especially in Queensland where three of the four men worked and died.

    In reaching his bizarre conclusions, the royal commissioner received little help from government. He observed: ‘With very few exceptions, the public servant witnesses chose not to make any submissions. Quite extraordinarily, in my view, the Commonwealth chose not to make submissions when given the opportunity to do so. It made some desultory submissions in reply to the submissions of the pre-existing insulation business owners and the State of Queensland.’ A royal commission set up to investigate only the Commonwealth Government, especially when receiving inadequate co-operation from the Commonwealth Government, was bound to provide an inadequate and flawed report.

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. We ‘warn the Tsar of Russia’.

    In September 1892, the headline ‘The Hobart Mercury warns the Tsar’ did not threaten Russia sufficiently to attract a response or change its belligerent behaviour. I don’t think the Tsar thought it necessary to respond to people who have an exaggerated view of their own importance

    The Hobart Mercury over-reached itself. Australian Prime Ministers, particularly when they need a diversion from domestic issues, often do the same. There has been a lot of beating the drums of war and macho posturing lately. Perhaps we will soon see Putin-esque photos of a shirtless rider on his bare-backed horse.

    Despite all the international posturing what has really been achieved?

    • MH350 has still not been found, despite the Prime Minister telling us months ago that we had almost certainly found the black box. We have now decided to fund and contract out the further search for MH350. Why?
    • We projected ourselves quite naturally into the recovery of MH17, but it was the Malaysian Government and not the European governments that really delivered for us in the removal of 200 bodies by train and the retrieval of the black boxes. Thanking the Malaysians has been an afterthought.
    • We sent the AFP to Ukraine and the Netherlands to secure the crash site. They failed and had to be withdrawn.
    • We have become an ‘enhanced party’ in NATO.  What national interest is there in that?
    • By siding so deliberately with Japan in its dispute with China we have antagonised China, our ally in WW2
    • Now we seem exceptionally eager to commit Hornet aircraft to the war against IS in Iraq.  We don’t seem to learn from our mistakes and Tony Abbott now suggests that the failure of the Western involvement in Iraq from 2003 was the prosecution of the war rather than its flawed policy in the first place.

     

    As in the Hobart Mercury in 1892, our over-reach in foreign policy has led to extremist language. The Prime Minister has described the Islamic State (IS) as a ‘death cult’ and please ‘we should not give credence to people who are pure evil, pure evil’.  He added ‘people have been radicalised and brutalised through contact with this death cult’. He added further ‘this mob, as soon as they have done something gruesome and ghastly and unspeakable, they are advertising it on the internet’.

    Nothing could justify the barbarism that we have seen from IS in Northern Iraq, but Muslims would remember, even if Tony Abbott does not, the centuries of barbarism against Muslims.

    • In 1099 the first Christian crusaders stood ‘knee deep in blood’ of Muslims and Jews after the capture of Jerusalem.
    • The Muslim expulsion from Andalusia.
    • Tens of thousands of Muslim women were raped in Bosnia 20 years ago
    • We stood aside in 1995 from the massacre of Muslim men in Srebrenica.
    • Ethnic cleansing went on in Bosnia for years before the West intervened.
    • We cooperated in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 which George Bush called the new crusade. It resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people and the break-up of their country which has helped spawn IS.
    • More recently have we really expressed sympathy for the death of over 2,000 Palestinians, mainly civilians in Gaza? Israelis, yes. But Palestinians!
    • CIA officers in control rooms in Langley, press buttons for predator drones to kill insurgents and many civilians in Pakistan and Yemen. There is no blood on their hands like we have seen on the hands of IS killers. But is mechanised killing OK?
    • We did nothing for years about our good friends in Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries who funded the Sunni rebels.
    • For the best part of a century foreign companies have exploited the vast oil resources of the Middle East.
    • We have been invited to join ‘team Australia’ but many Muslims feel it is directed against  them and  casts doubts on their patriotism

    We should not be surprised that some young Muslim men have been radicalised. In 2004 after the train bombing in Madrid the Commissioner of the AFP warned us and said ‘If this turns out to be Islamic extremists responsible for this bombing in Spain, it’s more likely to be linked to the position that Spain and other allies took on issues such as Iraq’.

    To avoid responsibility for the response of young Muslim men, John Howard and now Tony Abbott are repeating at almost every opportunity that ‘would-be terrorists don’t hate us for what we do but for who we are and how we live’. What tosh. They will judge us by our actions…what we do.

    Some young Muslim men are responding to the humiliation of centuries in unacceptable brutality. Yet when ethnic cleansing of Christians and Yaziidis occurred in Iraq and when American hostages were murdered in Syria, our response was immediate.

    Where is our even-handedness in resisting violence and injustice in all its forms against all people? It is time our leaders looked at the history of foreign intervention in the Middle East and the great injustice that has been done. We are now reaping the harvest of what we have sown.

    Overreach, like the Hobart Mercury’s posturing 120 years, ago is not serving us well.

  • David Isaacs and Ian Kerridge. Asylum seeker’s ‘brain death’ shows failure of care and of democracy.

    The news that Hamid Kehazaei, a 24-year-old Iranian asylum seeker detained on Manus Island, has been diagnosed as brain dead following his transfer to the Mater Hospital in Brisbane is a tragedy. That it is a tragedy for this young man and his family is unquestionable The news – but the extent of this tragedy may be much more pervasive than we realise.

    If the emerging details of his case are correct, Kehazaei developed septicaemia as a complication of cellulitis (skin and soft-tissue infection) arising from a cut in his foot. This, in itself, is disturbing.

    Severe infection can result in brain death – either from infection of the brain itself (meningitis, encephalitis or brain abscess), or from brain injury due to a lack of oxygen resulting from cardiac arrest (as appears to be the case here), or from reduced blood supply to the brain. Yet it is very uncommon, especially in a young, previously healthy man.

    Such a case could occur in Australia and has been described in 2012 in young Indigenous adults in Central Australia. Nevertheless, severe sepsis resulting from a foot infection is preventable. And a case like this occurring in an Australian national would raise serious questions about the appropriateness of the antibiotics used and the timeliness of care.

    Most cases of brain death result from traumatic brain injury, stroke or lack of oxygen to the brain following asphyxia, near-drowning, or prolonged cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

    What happened to Hamid Kehazaei raises concerns about the adequacy of care provided to him during initial treatment, including wound care and antibiotics, and how soon he was transferred to expert medical care, first to Port Moresby and subsequently to Brisbane.

    If this young man became ill and had his brain die while seeking asylum in Australia and while in our care, then we must examine the details of his case and ask ourselves not only whether it was preventable but whether our policies and processes actually contributed to his death.

    But how can we even begin to ask these types of questions when we know so little about the circumstances in which he became ill, and his subsequent care?

    Protestations that this is due to the necessity of respecting privacy and confidentiality, ethical principles that are core to the health professional-patient relationship, are to some extent correct. But they also obscure important features of this case.

    The government is simply wrong to claim that this issue should not be “politicised”. What is ultimately at issue here is the way in which domestic politics and border policy impose norms (rules of behaviour) that are antithetical to medicine and health care and, fundamentally, to democracy.

    Medicine, like biomedical science, requires transparency and honesty to be clinically and ethically sound. Peer review, clinical audit, root-cause analysis, family conferences, conflict-resolution strategies, case consultation, multidisciplinary team meetings, mortality and morbidity meetings, open disclosure policies: all rest on the importance of transparency and respect.

    In contrast, we know very little about the people who seek asylum in Australia. Everything is secret – their arrival, their situation, their medical need, their illnesses, and their death.

    This requirement for secrecy has largely overwhelmed efforts by many good people – legislators, human rights lawyers, refugee advocates, health workers, politicians and ordinary citizens – to shine a light on what is happening to people in detention.

    The Immigration Health Advisory Group has been disbanded, restricting the degree to which the health professions can critique the care available to asylum seekers. And even those tasked with providing medical care to asylum-seekers struggle to advocate for the people under their care.

    Policies restrict the degree to which they can care for their patients or refer them for specialist care not available in the detention centres. Contracts bind them to secrecy and many, often shocked by what they have seen, are prevented from speaking out by legal threats and intimidation long after they’ve returned to the mainland.

    The language of “border control” has been used to excuse political secrecy. But such secrecy is what we usually associate with autocratic governments and is the antithesis of democratic ideals.

    What this case illustrates, yet again, is that the asylum seekers detained on Manus and Christmas Islands and Nauru have been excised not only from the laws that determine access to Australia but from the care we should provide any vulnerable person for whom we are responsible. And from the ethical principles upon which medicine and our health system are based.

    If we care about these people, and if we truly believe in the humane values that ground medicine and the moral principles that ground democracy, then we need to do two things. The first is to hold a truly independent inquiry into the care of people in detention. And the second is to end off-shore processing.

    David Isaacs is Professor of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at University of Sydney.

    Ian Kerridge is Associate Professor in Bioethics & Director, Centre for Values and Ethics and the Law in Medicine at University of Sydney. 

    This article was first published in ‘The Conversation’. 

  • Annette Brownlie. No new war in Iraq.

    Both major political parties are once again standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the US, in support of what amounts to a new military intervention in Iraq.

    The process began with the dropping of humanitarian aid supplies to the Yezidi. It has now moved on to the delivery of weapons and munitions to Kurdish Peshmerga forces. Meanwhile, Defence Minister David Johnston has indicated that Australian armed forces (Super Hornet warplanes and C130s) are to be made available to support whatever action the US decides upon.

    All of this has happened with scarcely any discussion – in or outside of the parliament. No questioning or dissent has been heard in this drive towards intervention and, possibly, eventual war. (However, a recent poll shows that 78% of the population opposes having Australian ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq.)

    Even the proposal that there be a parliamentary debate about the intervention, so that the government could make its case to the Australian people, has been opposed by both major parties. There is no possibility for the parliament to take any part in the decision to send Australian forces overseas.  Nor has the Abbott government explained the sudden need to switch from aid to arms. And it has certainly not explained what Australia hopes to achieve.

    The horror in Iraq today is a direct consequence of the war on that began with the invasion of 2003. John Howard’s government joined that invasion on the basis of falsehoods and against the opinion of the majority of the population. It appears that the present government is eagerly waiting for a request to follow the US once again.

    The massive “shock and awe” bombing and the 11-year occupation of Iraq created huge numbers of civilian casualties – including more than 1 million dead – and massive internal displacement of people. The West’s propping up of the repressive regime that followed, laid the basis for the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) fundamentalists. IS has become the latest reason for intervention. Ironically, it is using weapons captured from the Iraqi army and originally supplied by the US.

    The lesson that should have been learnt from Iraq is that military meddling in the affairs of the Middle East does not work. There was a disastrous outcome last time and no evidence to indicate anything different this time.

    Australia and the US do not recognise Kurdistan as an independent state. Sending arms to the Kurds means that Australia is continuing to meddle – in this case within the movement for Kurdish self-determination.

    If the Australian government was serious about helping the Iraqi minorities, rather than following the US into military intervention, it would immediately:

    • Expand the refugee program and offer sanctuary to the displaced and traumatised
    • Send humanitarian aid – food; engineers; doctors and constructions workers. 

    Sending yet more armaments to the area, which is already wracked by years of warfare, will not reduce the level of violence it is experiencing. The area needs less weaponry, not more.

    Annett Brownlie is a member of IPAN (The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network)

  • Ben Lewis. The false advertising of mandatory detention and “Stopping the Boats”

    Spend any amount of time listening to Australian policy makers or reading Australian media and you’re certain to hear a familiar phrase: “Stop the Boats”. It has become such a political imperative within the Australian asylum seeker debate that “Stop the Boats” is rarely even challenged.  But putting aside the question of whether Australia should (or even can) “Stop the Boats”, there is a fundamental flaw in the logic . . . the key policy which underpins the “Stop the Boats” thinking—namely mandatory detention—has been shown to be false advertising.

    The truth is that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that harsh immigration policies such as mandatory detention deter irregular migration. That’s because, when it comes to human migration, countries by and large don’t have control over who leaves a territory or to where they are headed. Empirical research for decades has shown that immigration policies are predominantly responsive to, not determinative of human movement.

    According to a 2011 study conducted by UNHCR’s chief detention researcher, Alice Edwards:

    “Pragmatically, there is no empirical evidence that the prospect of being detained deters irregular migration, or discourages persons from seeking asylum. In fact, as the detention of migrants and asylum-seekers has increased in a number of countries, the number of individuals seeking to enter such territories has also risen, or has remained constant.” 

    For example, over the past three decades, many Europe countries have significantly expanded their use of detention in response to irregular asylum seeker and migrant arrivals.  The result?  European migration figures have increased from an estimated 49 million in 1990 to 58 million in 2000 to 70 million in 2010. The same can be shown in the United States. Despite decades of “tough on immigration” policies, including annual detention figures approaching half a million, and a Congressional “bed mandate” requiring 34,000 migrants to be in detention every single day, the period from 2000-2010 was “a record setting decade of immigration” in the United States.

    Detention policies don’t deter. So why then do Australian policy makers stubbornly cling to the assertion that mandatory detention of asylum seekers and irregular migrants isn’t simply good policy, but is actually necessary to curb irregular migration when it’s clear the facts don’t support it?

    Part of the blame undoubtedly lies with the Australian public. The Australian policy of mandatory detention—roundly criticized outside of Australia—remains overwhelmingly popular within. Even as recently as last week, Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison defended the practice of detaining asylum seeking children using the staid “stop the boats” rhetoric, and with the legitimacy of broad public support for the country’s mandatory detention policy.

    Part of the blame also lies with Australian policy makers for continuing to use anecdotal rather than empirical evidence to justify the mandatory detention policy. As the editor of this blog has rightly pointed out, this is “sloppy policy evaluation” at best. Experts are in agreement that mandatory detention policies have no measurable impact on the number of irregularly arriving asylum seekers and migrants. There are a number of common sense—and empirically established—reasons for this.  According to Robyn Sampson, a leading researcher from Swinburne University:

    “Several studies have been undertaken to establish which factors most impact the choice of destination of asylum seekers and refugees and irregular migrants.  According to this body of research, the principal aim of asylum seekers and irregular migrants is to reach a place of safety. Asylum seekers and irregular migrants often have very limited understanding of the migration policies of destination countries before arrival and rely on people smugglers to choose their destination. Rather than being influenced primarily by immigration policies such as detention, most refugees and irregular migrants choose destinations where they will be reunited with family or friends; where they believe they will be in a safe, tolerant and democratic society; where there are historical links between their country and the destination country; where they can already speak the language of the destination country; or where they believe they will be able to find secure work quickly due to a perception of the country as one of wealth and prosperity.” 

    So to recap—the principle determinants of the choice of destination country for asylum seekers and irregular migrants are:

    1. Safety;
    2. Family;
    3. Perceptions of democracy;
    4. Historical links;
    5. Common language; and
    6. Perceptions of wealth/prosperity. 

    Most migrants, it turns out, are just the same as you and I.  They want to go to the nearest safe place where they can be together with their families and not be persecuted—bonus points for a common language, culture, or job opportunities. A policy of mandatory detention fails to address any of these; it merely punishes those who arrive in the false belief that if asylum seekers and irregular migrants are punished badly enough, they’ll simply stop coming.

    To an outsider, the irrationality of the mandatory detention policy would be comical if not for all of the pain and suffering it is causing. You may be able to “Stop the Boats” by physically restraining asylum seeking children and families before they reach you, but you certainly won’t deter future arrivals by punishing them once they get here. And why would you want to—especially when the overwhelming majority have been shown to be legitimate refugees, fleeing for their lives? (By the government’s own statistics, since 2008, 92% of all asylum seekers arriving by boat have been granted refugee status.)

    What are needed are not more “tough” immigration policies, but comprehensive regional solutions that attempt to address the root causes of insecurity that prompt human movement. The good news is that better policies do exist; policies that can be supported by empirical evidence and that respect international human rights obligations. But one thing is clear: better policy making won’t be built on the continued justification of mandatory detention as a deterrent. Detention as a deterrent is just false advertising.

    Ben Lewis is the Advocacy Coordinator of the International Detention Coalition (IDC). He is an international human rights lawyer with extensive advocacy experience working with irregular migrant populations in the US and Latin America. The views in this blog are his own.

  • John Menadue. MH17 – At last a thank-you to Malaysia may be on the cards.

    In ten days’ time, Tony Abbott will be visiting Malaysia and India.

    The visit to Kuala Lumpur will at last be an opportunity for him to thank on our behalf the Malaysian Government’s significant contribution to ‘Operation Bring them Home’.

    Without fanfare the Malaysian Prime Minister secured two key outcomes that have been of great benefit to Australia and others who suffered losses as a result of the shooting down of MH17. The first major outcome was the release from rebel territory of the refrigerated trains that carried over 200 bodies out of rebel territory. The second major outcome that the Malaysian prime Minister secured was the handover by the rebels to the Malaysian Government of the black boxes.

    Efforts of other parties particularly the Dutch Government and our own Australian Federal Police were helpful but the substantial breakthrough was organised by the Malaysian Government.

    Yet in his overseas travels to the ‘Anglosphere’ Tony Abbot has been almost everywhere except visiting the one country that has been of the greatest help to us. For all our talk about the importance of Asia out focus is almost always Europe. That has occurred also on the Russia/Ukraine confrontation which is overwhelmingly a European issue.

    Media headlines don’t necessarily make for a good foreign policy and particularly relations with countries in our region. And by the way, in that other diversion from the budget, nothing has yet been found of MH370 although Tony Abbott told us in April that he was confident that we had found the black boxes.

    In addition to acknowledging Malaysia’s major role in ‘bringing them home’, thanking the Malaysian Government will also be a useful way to put more ballast in the relationship with the Malaysian Government particularly after the intemperate remarks that Tony Abbott made about Malaysia’s human rights record.

    Justifying his opposition to the agreement with Malaysia over asylum seekers, Tony Abbott said in June 2011 in Parliament ‘Why would the Prime Minister send illegal arrivals to Malaysia where they could be detained and tagged, when she can’t guarantee the standard and accessibility of medical care and when she can’t guarantee the access to school for the children‘. Tony Abbott then went on ‘The one thing that is absolutely certain about this deal is that this Prime Minister, this Minister and this Government cannot be sure that boat people sent to Malaysia will be treated humanely.’

    A gracious and earlier thank you to Malaysia over MH17 would have been most appropriate and helpful in many ways. But better late than never.

     

  • Walter Hamilton. Copy and Paste

    The Japanese have coined a new word, kopipe, from the English phrase ‘copy and paste’. It featured, for instance, in recent reporting of the discredited stem-cell researcher caught out copying images and data from one research paper to another. But the word kopipe has many possible applications, such as in the ongoing debates about history and Japan’s expanding security alliance with the United States.

    On the matter of history, let me do some copying and pasting of my own from the text of the San Francisco Peace Treaty which Japan signed in 1951 to formally bring to an end the Second World War. Here is what it says in Article 11:

                Japan accepts the judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East [IMTFE] and of other Allied War Crimes Courts both within and outside Japan, and will carry out the sentences imposed  thereby upon Japanese nationals imprisoned in Japan. The power to grant clemency, to reduce sentences and to parole with respect to such prisoners may not be exercised except on the decision of the Government or Governments which imposed the sentence in each instance, and on recommendation of Japan.

    What are we to make, then, of Japan’s current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who patently does not accept the judgments of the war crimes tribunals? Abe, on the contrary, is a determined revisionist who apparently thinks that those responsible for making war on their neighbours and conducting or condoning systematic atrocities are worthy of celebration. (For the record, the President of the IMTFE was Justice William Webb of Australia.)

    During a parliamentary budget committee hearing last year Abe said the war crimes trials were a case of the Allies imposing their view of events on the Japanese. And in April this year Abe sent a message of support to a Buddhist event honouring Japanese who died after being convicted of war crimes. Abe wrote that they had ‘staked their souls to become the foundation of the fatherland,’ according to a report in the Asahi newspaper. The annual ceremony is held before a memorial statue that describes the war crimes tribunals conducted by the Allied powers as ‘retaliatory’ and calls executed Japanese war criminals ‘Showa Era (1926-1989) martyrs.’ Showa is the era name of the reign of Emperor Hirohito by whose authority Japan waged war in China and the Pacific. The memorial statue records the names of about 1,180 war criminals who were either executed or who died of illness or committed suicide in detention camps.

    It’s not the first time Abe has sent a message of encouragement to the event. Last year he wrote: ‘I want to establish the existence of a new Japan that would not be an embarrassment to the spirit of the war dead.’

    Abe’s maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, wartime Munitions Minister, was held as a suspected Class ‘A’ war criminal himself though never put on trial. He later made a political comeback and served as prime minister between 1957 and 1960. Abe could be described as a kopipe of his blood relation. But while Kishi’s unpopular policy of closer military co-operation with the United States eventually cost him the leadership, Abe’s pushing through of a new interpretation of Japan’s post-war constitution that effectively strips away its pacifist intention has come at little political cost. The Japan of 2014 is much less alert to its wartime responsibilities than the Japan of 1960. (It is worth noting that Abe’s language when addressing the subject during his speech to the Australian Parliament in July was not as conciliatory as that used by Kishi when he visited Australia in 1957.)

    The Japanese Government makes a lot of noise about the importance of observing international law­­­­ in its territorial disputes with China and South Korea, and over issues such as whaling. When convenient, however, it seems ready to bend or ignore laws and commitments. The official explanation that Abe was acting purely in a ‘private’ capacity when he honoured Japan’s war criminals is the usual ‘copy and paste’ for the double standard.

    Abe’s kopipe method was evident, too, during last month’s ceremonies marking the end of the war and the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war dead would be more than embarrassed, one imagines, if they had been able to hear the Prime Minister read out a statement in Hiroshima that was, in large part, identical to the one he made at last year’s ceremony. Some official had simply copied and pasted from the old speech and so little concerned was Abe for reflecting sincerely on the past he read the whole thing without either noticing or caring.

    Finally, and probably most importantly, there is the continuing ‘copy-and-paste’ militarization of Okinawa, the island prefecture that occupies less than 1% of Japan’s landmass but plays host to 74% of its US-only military bases. For decades politicians have promised the people of Okinawa that their disproportionate share of the burden would be reduced. A primary focus of groups campaigning for the pledge to be fulfilled has been the Futenma Air Station operated by the US Marines in the centre of Ginowan City. The facility is an obstacle to local development and seriously affects the lives of nearby residents with its noise pollution and constant danger of aircraft accidents.

    In 1996, the US agreed to return the land––but only on condition that another location was found in Okinawa.  As a result, work preliminary to the construction of a new facility recently began in Oura Bay at Henoko, Nago city, near the existing American base Camp Schwab. The city’s mayor and many others are fiercely opposed to the project, so the Japanese coast guard has been mobilized to haul in any protestors trying to breach a large exclusion zone in the bay proclaimed under a little-used provision of the criminal law.

    According to Professor Gavan McCormack of the Australian National University, Oura Bay ‘happens to be one of the most bio-diverse and spectacularly beautiful coastal zones in all Japan. It hosts a cornucopia of life forms from blue––and many other species––of coral…through crustaceans, sea cucumbers and sea weeds and hundreds of species of shrimps, snails, fish, tortoise, snake, and mammal.’ McCormack goes on to say: ‘If the project proceeds, it will rival in scale Kansai International Airport in Osaka Bay, take a decade or more to complete and cost somewhere in the vicinity of $25 billion. Those [foreign leaders such as Tony Abbott] who believe they share values with [Shinzo Abe] should look carefully at the burgeoning confrontation in Oura Bay between the Abe state, with its monopoly of force, and local, non-violent, democratic citizens.’ 

    Kopipe, rather than original thinking and genuine engagement, seems to be the fashionable way in Japan these days.

    Walter Hamilton is the author of Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story.

     

  • Clare Condon SGS. Sanctioned Violence: What does it do to our society and relationships?

    Some violent acts, depending on where and how they were perpetrated, are regarded as criminal. Others, however, are sanctioned by society, even applauded and cheered. Some are blatant; others are covert and subtle. Some are justified by cultural norms, by the blind eye or the deaf ear; they happen behind closed doors. Others are justified by official permission and approval, or even by public opinion.

    I wish to highlight four areas of sanctioned violence which I believe impact adversely on society and relationships. 

    Australia’s response to asylum seekers and refugees

    Currently in the Australian community, the government is justifying the use of violence to stop the smuggling of asylum seekers. This inhumane approach has bipartisan political support; it is driven by public opinion and generated by the politics of the fear of the stranger. The government’s actions are hidden from the public’s eye through secrecy and by holding people in detention in remote areas of Australia, or offshore in developing countries, such as Nauru and Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.

    The government’s often-used mantra “Stop the boats” demonises desperate people fleeing violence and persecution. By using emotive language, this policy is justified in a subtle but no less sanctioned form of violence towards humans. In letters from the government justifying this behaviour, people seeking refugee protection have been called “illegal maritime arrivals”. Their identity as humans has been expunged.

    Such demonisation sanitizes the reality for the Australian public. As a consequence, our societal and racial relationships are diminished and subtly eroded. We can begin to believe that some humans are more worthy than others, and that such actions are justified and normal, when in fact the government of the nation is engaged in sanctioned violence.

    Children are being held in detention centres. ..These children are exposed to brutal, negative and neglectful modelling. The consequences of such detention are likely to breed a dissociative reality for these children, leading to a spiral of hatred and evil within their own life experiences.

    As citizens we must ask: what behaviour do we propose for the future human development and relationships for these innocent children? Is society encouraged to be vindictive, self-serving, aggressive in all its relationships with anyone who is identified as a stranger, rather than a society which is welcoming, other-centred, and compassionate, respecting the dignity of the other in those relationships? One response from the government stated it would not be involved in “misguided compassion”. True compassion is a strong virtue. It is the antithesis of violence. There is nothing weak and soft about a well-guided compassionate response. 

    Sanctioned violence in sport

    Sport is a feature of a nation’s life and culture, especially in Australia. It has an essential role to play in a healthy society. Violence on the playing field and amongst spectators not only sets a bad example to impressionable young people, it is destructive of basic civil relationships. It can instil fear and anxiety, especially in children. . There are significant vested interests to subvert any attempt to study the area in a serious manner.

    It seems that violence in contact sports has increased. I suspect that the introduction of high monetary stakes, as well as sports betting, has influenced this increase. Do the normal expectations of civil behaviour cease once players step onto the field? Does the constant replay of violence and thuggery seek to justify this behaviour?

    One is not a ‘real man’ unless he is like these highly paid, macho stars. Is it not time for some extensive research on the facts and some community discussion on the type of role modelling that sport ought to be portraying to young people, and what kind of relationships society might expect to support and sustain in an advanced civil democratic society? 

    Domestic violence – the hidden nightmare for many women and children

    You might think it odd that I have placed violence in sport before one of the most hidden and often sanctioned – violence of the household or domestic violence – which impacts mostly on women and children. It is often hidden, excused and justified from a male perspective. The macho image often promoted by sport can become the macho image for some men in their daily behaviour. Are they connected?

    Australian research[1] indicates that: 17% of women aged 18 and over have experienced sexual assault since the age of 15; 87% have a relationship with the perpetrator; only 1 in 7 who experienced violence from an intimate partner had reported the most recent incident to police; women with an intellectual disability are 90% more likely to be subjected to a sexual assault than women in the general population.[2] Between 2010-11 and 2012-13, there was a 29% increase in the number of children who were subjects of substantiations of sexual abuse, thereby reversing previous downward trends.[3] Most of these are from the lowest socio-economic areas.

    These statistics are chilling. Domestic violence often leads to homelessness, further abuse of children, significant health issues for the woman and her children, ongoing economic hardship, unemployment, and social, psychological and family isolation. Thus, the capacity for building strong, healthy and mutual relationships in the future is undermined and damaged severely.

    Does media violence have an impact on human behaviour?

    There would be some who would say the jury is still out. Conflict is what makes a good story! Violence has always been part of the movie world, but now violence in movies, TV shows and electronic games has become the norm. They are louder, bloodier and more vicious. Some US research suggests that by the time a child is 18, he or she has watched some 200,000[4] acts of violence.

    There have been hundreds of reports with diverse views on the impact of media violence, particularly on children. However, there is reasonable consensus that long exposure of children to violence portrayed in the mass media leads to long-term aggressive behaviour.[5]

    My concern is the impact sanctioned violence has on society and our relationships. Some of the consequences can be corrosive and long-term. Where violence is sanctioned and regarded as acceptable and routine, then societal norms are being established for the future. Such acts become embedded in the cultural fabric of society.

    If it is acceptable for a government to treat strangers in a cruel and demeaning manner, then it becomes acceptable for the citizen to treat the stranger in a similar manner. If it is acceptable to use excessive violence on a sports field, then why not off the field in school yards? If it is acceptable to exercise violence in the private space of home, then why not on the streets? If it is acceptable to spend hours watching real or virtual violence on a screen, why not activate the same violence in ordinary relationships?

    My congregation of religious women follows the fifth-century rule of St Benedict, a way of life which helped to civilise Europe after generations of wars. Benedict’s dictum for his followers was that all should be structured so “that the strong have something to strive for and that the weak have nothing to run from”.[6]

    In those areas of our society where violence is sanctioned, we citizens need to actively participate in social engagement and collective action. We need to say no more, we can do much better. “Compassion is the very final possibility for saving the human person in his or her naked existence in the face of the direct negation of this existence”.[7]

    This is an edited version of an address delivered by Sister Clare Condon SGS at the Australian Human Right Commission https://www.humanrights.gov.au on August 13, 2014.

    Sister Clare Condon is the Congregational Leader of the Sisters of the Good Samaritan of the Order of St Benedict, Australia’s first ‘home-grown’ congregation of Catholic Religious women www.goodsams.org.au


    [1] Cindy Tarczon and Antonia Quadara, The Nature and Extent of Sexual Assault and Abuse in Australia, December 2012, The Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault www.aifs.gov.au/acssa/statistics.html

    [2] CASA Forum 2014 Victorian Centres Against Sexual Assault

    [3] The Child Protection Australia Report 2012-13 of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

    [4] American Academy of Paediatrics, Media Violence, 19 October 2009 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/124/5/1495.full

    [5] The Australian Psychological Society in 2013 updated its report: Media Representations and Responsibilities: Psychological Perspectives

    [6] Rule of Benedict, Chapter 64:19

    [7] Walter Kasper, Mercy, Paulist Press, New Jersey, 2013, p.29

     

     

  • John Menadue. Who owns Medibank Private (continued)

    In my blog of August 14 I examined the question of who owns Medibank Private (MBP) particularly in light of the Abbott Government proposal to privatise the business. This is not an idle question or an academic issue only. MBP has 3.5 million members and the government has estimated its sale value at $4 billion.

    The Government has now announced that MBP will be sold by Christmas

    It is clear that for many years it was assumed that the policy-holders/members owned MBP. That is clear from an examination of the accounts and the comments of a former chairman of MBP. John Deeble who was an architect of Medibank/Medicare and who was a director of the Health Insurance Commission which operated MBP put the issue as follows ‘The question of ownership in 1976 (when MBP was established) wasn’t raised because it was never considered that the government owned MBP.’

    The Commonwealth Government put $10 million as seed capital into MBP. This amount was repaid. The operating capital of MBP over the years was then contributed by the members through accumulated profits… No further capital contribution by the Commonwealth Government was made until 2005 when the Howard Government injected $85 million into the business. This amount has remained unchanged for nine years.  Last year MBP paid a dividend of $450m to the government. In one year the government received in a dividend more than five times what it had contributed in equity.

    In addition to the policy issues, it is also important to consider the legal advice which has been offered to the Commonwealth Government.

    In 1981 the Fraser Government considered selling MBP. According to Cabinet documents that have been released, the issue of selling MBP was considered by the Fraser Government’s Expenditure Review Committee – ‘the razor gang’. Members of this committee were Phillip Lynch, Margaret Guilfoyle and John Howard.

    The government’s legal adviser was the Attorney General’s Department which together with the Government Actuary and the Department of Health advised the ‘razor gang’ that the Commonwealth government did not own the assets of the Health Insurance Commission. We know from publically released Cabinet documents that on 19 March 1981 the Expenditure Review Committee decided that ‘the Commonwealth does not in any legal sense have equity in the Health Insurance Commission or its assets’.

    Three days later the Committee recommended to Cabinet that the proposed sale of MBP be abandoned. And it was abandoned.

    In 1988 the Hawke Government was contemplating the sale of MBP. The chairman of the Health Insurance Commission set out clearly in the authority’s annual report at that time that the Commonwealth had no beneficial rights in the fund’s assets.

    It is hard to see that anything has materially changed since 1981 when the clear view of the Fraser Government, based on legal advice was that MBP was owned by its members and not the Commonwealth government.

    The 3.5 million members of MBP have a major interest in this business which the Commonwealth Government now values at $4 billion.

    According to Peter Martin in the SMH today, policy holders are petitioning the government for ‘free shares’. This would seem essential but will it be fair? We know that there are a lot of hanger’s on clipping the ticket- co-lead managers, co-managers, brokers, advisers, lawyers and MBP executives. They will all be making a motza. But as for the members!!

    I am indebted to George Lekakis and The New Daily for the work they have undertaken on the ownership of MBP.

  • John Menadue. Refugees and asylum seekers..a re-think on Temporary Protection Visas.

    I have long argued that Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) should be rejected on the grounds that they don’t deter asylum seekers, people are left in limbo and because TPV holders could not sponsor family which resulted in risky boat journeys by women and children.

    It is time to think again about TPVs.

    At the present time there are over 30,000 asylum seekers in detention or in the community awaiting refugee assessment. That caseload is the result of the large influx of boat arrivals following the collapse of the Malaysian Agreement and the refusal of the Coalition and the Greens to agree to changes to the Migration Act which would have helped give effect to the agreement made with Malaysia.

    The current outstanding caseload is the highest I can recall. The previous highest number was 19,600 after Tiananmen which was a very homogeneous group.

    The large caseload of over 30,000 people from a variety of countries will take over three years to process, if all goes well!  We need to urgently consider ways to reduce this lengthy process. The introduction of TPV’s would help.

    Despite the often contentious debate on TPVs in Australia, giving a person a form of temporary protection, depending on the specifics of the arrangements, may be consistent with Australia’s obligations under the Refugee Convention. A number of countries provide some form of temporary protection alongside permanent protection arrangements. For example, people granted asylum in the US must wait one year before applying for permanent residence.

    The UNHCR acknowledges that, at times, temporary protection may be the most appropriate arrangement. For example, in circumstances where there are mass influxes (generally involving larger numbers than experienced by Australia), temporary protection may be a valid tool in ensuring protection is available for asylum seekers while allowing authorities the breathing space to more fully examine and determine the need for  permanent protection and stay in a country at a later stage.

    The Coalition Government had planned to reintroduce a form of TPV’s for irregular arrivals. But before the Senate changed on July 1, the ALP and the Greens defeated a proposal to reintroduce TPV’s. As a result of this political stalemate the government decided to use the existing Temporary Safe Haven (TSHV) and Temporary Humanitarian Concern (THCV) visa instead of TPVs.

    Asylum seekers for whom potential protection issues are identified (and satisfactory health and security checks completed) will be progressively placed on THSVs. They will then be granted a THCV for up to three years. If the assessment of protection claims does not identify any ‘potential protection issues’ asylum seekers will be placed on bridging visas. In this way the government has moved away from both the statutory and non-statutory protection visa assessment arrangement but has taken steps to ‘temporarily resolve’ cases quickly through the use of existing visa mechanisms. As the current arrangements apply, however, it would appear that many asylum seekers will remain in a state of limbo with neither a decision on their protection claim nor, if people are not refugees, on their removal. The consequences of this are that people could remain indefinitely on some form of temporary visa without a final determination of refugee status with the inevitable long-term impact this has on mental health. Extensive and expensive litigation is inevitable.

    This form of temporary status only delays a decision on the asylum claim for some time. Such an arrangement is not sustainable in the long term from the social wellbeing of asylum seekers, the cost involved as well as concerns of the broader community.

    At some point a final refugee determination needs to be made, whether it leads to temporary or permanent stay. It is quite unreasonable, where Australia has accepted that its protection obligations have been engaged, to allow people to remain in a state of limbo. It is cruel and destructive.

    In his evidence to the Human Rights Commission the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection said that asylum seekers would have trouble having their claims processed until he could offer a ‘visa product’ that only gave temporary residence. He added the absence of TPV’s at present ‘removes the possibility of considering alternative options for those currently on Christmas Island or elsewhere in Australia who arrived before July 19 2013’

    It is to be hoped that the ALP and possibly the Greens might sit down with the government and try to negotiate a satisfactory compromise.

    Negotiations to resolve this issue could include

    • The length of the visa (three to five years),
    • The assessment process at the end of that period.
    • What happens for people re-assessed and found to be refugees again?
    • Some sort of re-entry rights for TPV holders leaving the country for a short period.
    • The nature of benefits offered to people whilst on TPVs.

    The change of government and the large case load of 30,000 do require cooperation to obtain an acceptable compromise. TPVs are not ideal but they would be preferable to the present arrangements. Major effort is required to process the large caseload as quickly as possible.

  • John Menadue. The Iraq disaster – reaping what we have sown.

    The seeds of the disaster in Iraq were sown long ago. We are now reaping a very bitter harvest.

    A major contributor to the upsurge in violence, terrorism and extremism in Iraq is the sense of outrage that many young Muslim men feel about the invasion of their country by successive Western powers, including Australia.

    The Howard Government and News Corporation which supported our participation in the coalition of the willing must bear a heavy responsibility for the unfolding horror.

    I have set out below an article by Tony Walker in The Australian Financial Review of 29 March, 2003, headed ‘America’s hard history lesson’. I have also a link below to an editorial in the National Catholic Reporter of only a few days ago, entitled ‘Editorial: Path of destruction in Iraq began in 1991’

    Both articles draw attention to the futility of earlier Western interventions in Iraq.

    In 2004, Mick Keelty, the AFP Commissioner warned us that our involvement in Iraq made us a greater target for terrorism. In 2010, The Head of UK’s MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, told the Chilcott Inquiry that ‘ Our involvement in Iraq radicalised … a whole generation of young people, … who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam.’

    George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard were obviously unaware of the history of Iraq. We are now seeing a catastrophe because of leaders who were unable to learn from history.

    John Menadue.

     

     

    AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW

    SAT 29 MAR 2003,

    AMERICA’S HARD HISTORY LESSON

     

    By: Story Tony Walker, DOHA    

    Through the centuries, the Middle East has proved hostile territory to invaders from the west and north. Even if the invaders won the battles, none, ultimately, won their particular war.

    ‘The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia [what is now Iraq] into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information … Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far out from disaster.’

    That dispatch was written for The Sunday Times by its special correspondent T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). It appeared on August 22, 1920. How extraordinary that the same words could be published today and seem almost contemporary, depending on your point of view.

    What Lawrence was talking about was the irredeemable arrogance of British colonial rule although he might just as easily have been referring to the consequences of a new American unilateralism. He was not talking about an all-out war, like the one we are witnessing now, but about the aftermath of conflict, namely World War I, in which the Ottoman empire crumbled and was replaced across the Middle East by Pax Britannica. In Mesopotamia it was no benevolent pax; far from it.

    As Iraq braces for a further intensification of a conflict whose aim is to rid the country of its leader and his regime, Iraqis must fear that the war itself will be only part of the horror. If history is a guide, war will be followed by an uncertain possibly bloody aftermath.

    Ten thousand Arabs were killed, according to Lawrence, by the British military governors in Baghdad in putting down an uprising in the summer of 1920, two years after the end of WWI.  ‘We said we went to Mesopotamia to defeat Turkey. We said we stayed to deliver the Arabs from the oppression of the Turkish government, and to make available for the world its resources of corn and oil … Our government is worse than the old Turkish system,’ Lawrence wrote.

    Britain’s occupation of Mesopotamia might not have ended in the disaster predicted by Lawrence, but the clumsy redrawing of the map of the Middle East under the Treaty of Sevres by the ‘Great Powers’ actually, the dividing up of WWI spoils contributed in no small way to the general volatility of and latest convulsion in the region.

    Whatever happens in Iraq over the next days, weeks, months and years, it requires a level of optimism to believe that good will necessarily come from the destruction that is being visited on Iraqis and their country.

    Baghdad’s bloody history is not encouraging. Built in 762AD by the Abbasids, it has endured war and conquest repeatedly. It was sacked by the Mongols in 1258, the streets turned into rivers of blood, the alleyways filled with corpses. It fell to Tamerlane in 1401. The Persians seized it in 1508, then it was captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1534. It was recaptured by the Persians in 1623, before the Ottomans regained control in 1638 for the next three centuries.

    While it might be argued that no fate is too dreadful for Saddam Hussein, to achieve such a desirable result as his demise it should not be necessary to raze cities. You shudder to think what Iraq and its people will look like if the bombing continues for a few more weeks, followed by an assault on Baghdad itself. The errant missiles that slammed into a suburban Baghdad market on Wednesday, killing 15 civilians and wounding many others, are unlikely to be an isolated tragedy, even though the US has said repeatedly wrongly, as it turns out that the precision of modern weaponry makes this strike the military equivalent of laser surgery: no blood, no scars. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sounds more like Dr Strangelove every day.

    Speaking of Rumsfeld, his observation on Tuesday that the war was much closer to the beginning than the end was a belated nudge towards candour in light of the obvious that Iraqis, whatever they think of Hussein, are resisting more determinedly than expected.
    It’s interesting to note here that last week the Americans, repeating their mantra of ‘shock and awe’ to describe the initial bombing campaign, were telling people to stay in their homes and await further instructions while exhorting the Iraqi military to surrender. Now the message to people, especially in the southern city of Basra, is to rise up against their oppressors. Sceptics might conclude this is an admission that the undermanned invaders their supply lines stretched, their ability to secure their rear shaky need some help on the ground.

    If there is a querulousness in the latest statements by US officials it is quite simply because, whatever they pretend, things are not going according to the script. The regime has not imploded, the populace has not risen up, the liberators are not being welcomed with hearts and flowers. It is entirely possible that when the blowtorch is applied to Baghdad, a horrible regime will indeed collapse, or shrivel up in its burrows deep below the city. But on the evidence so far, it seems unlikely the Iraqi citadel will fall without a fight.
    In the meantime, George Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard and their advisers might reflect if it is not too late on some historical amber lights, starting with the Crusades, a campaign 900 years ago to liberate the heathen and enlighten them in the ways of Christianity (note that word: liberate). It failed.

    Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf remarks in his book The Crusades Through Arab Eyes that ‘the Arab world simultaneously fascinated and terrified by these Franj [Frankish invaders], whom they encountered as barbarians and defeated but who subsequently managed to dominate the earth cannot bring itself to consider the Crusades a mere episode in the bygone past. It is often surprising to discover the extent to which the attitude of the Arabs (and of Muslims in general) towards the West is still influenced, even today, by events that supposedly ended seven centuries ago.’

    Whether Westerners believe reference to the Crusades by Hussein or Osama bin Laden to bolster support to be legitimate, these historical events do resonate in the minds of many Arabs as if they happened yesterday.

    As the editor of the London-based Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat said in one of this week’s more acute observations: ‘I think this is an emotional time rather than a rational time.’

    Princeton University professor and Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis noted in a 1990 essay, ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, published in The Atlantic Monthly, that just as blind Arab prejudice about the West weighed heavily, so Americans functioned in a fog of ignorance about the Muslim world. When Lewis wrote then that American policy had not suffered disasters in the Middle East comparable with those in South-East Asia or Central America, he could not have imagined that things would change so dramatically in a decade or so.

    Regime change was but a twinkle in the eyes of Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld, and there was no sign of a malleable occupant in the White House.

    ‘There is no Cuba, no Vietnam, in the Muslim world, and no place where American forces are involved as combatants or even as “advisers”. But there is a Libya, and Iran, and a Lebanon, and a surge of hatred that distresses, alarms and above all baffles Americans,’ Lewis wrote.

    The bafflement is set to deepen in fact is deepening, as it seems that since September 11, 2001, Americans have lost a sense of proportion. Certainly normal prudence has been jettisoned.

    Among the more frequently cited historical lessons about the perils of Western hubris in the Middle East is the experience of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon may have been the world’s most brilliant general, but he suffered his worst defeat in the Middle East when his forces were repelled in 1799 in a siege of a stronghold of the Ottoman Turks at Acre, in what is now Israel. Attack after attack failed, and hundreds of French soldiers died in the process. Napoleon eventually retreated to Cairo with a decimated army.

    Accounts of the siege of Acre are not recommended bed-time reading for Bush, Blair and Howard. Blair, whose troops are laying siege to Basra, may draw some encouragement from the British experience in Mesopotamia during WWI. British troops occupied Basra in 1915. By 1917, they had control of Baghdad, and a year later they took Mosul. By the end of the war they held the whole of Mesopotamia. That was when the real trouble began as nationalistic Arabs formed anti-British secret societies. Riots broke out in 1920.

    These are the events that Lawrence, doubling as journalist and agent for British military intelligence, described in his dispatch for The Sunday Times. His final paragraphs make interesting reading in light of current events, especially the need for the US to rush additional troops to the region to cope with nagging Iraqi resistance.

    ‘We have not reached the limit of our military commitments,’ Lawrence wrote. ‘Four weeks ago the staff in Mesopotamia drew up a memorandum asking for four more divisions. I believe it was forwarded to the War Office, which has now sent three brigades from India. If the North-West Frontier cannot be further denuded, where is the balance to come from? Meanwhile, our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly in lives for the wilfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad.’ And, in conclusion: ‘We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world … How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?’

    All this underlines just how complicated will be the task of pacifying Iraq and then reconstructing it, which is why there has been such a premium on a swift military victory causing minimum civilian casualties and avoiding large-scale destruction of infrastructure. That prospect has faded. A viper’s nest has been stirred. The legacy of bitter conflict will further contaminate what is in any case a poisonous cocktail dating back to the days of British rule.

    As a paper on regional fallout from a war in Iraq by the Middle East program at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) points out: ‘Iraqi politics, from the creation of the state in the aftermath of World War I, have been dominated by the deployment of organised violence by the state to dominate and shape society; the use by the state of oil revenue to give it autonomy from society; and the recreation of ethnic and communal divisions within Iraqi society. The degree to which these dynamics can be overcome will depend upon the extent and nature of external influence in the aftermath of regime change. This in turn is dependent on the way war is waged.’

    The signs at this early stage are not promising. These are worrying moments for members of the coalition of the willing, no matter what sort of face they seek to put on progress in the war. History is not necessarily a comforting guide.

     

    The National Catholic Reporter, editorial, August 25, 2014.

     http://ncronline.org/news/global/path-destruction-began-1991

  • John Menadue. Scott Morrison at the Human Rights Commission.

    Minister Morrison, assisted by the Secretary of his department, continued his aggressive ways at the hearing on August 22.

    He said that his policies discouraged asylum seekers risking their lives at sea. He described himself as the champion of the voiceless, ‘the ones that are at the bottom of the ocean’.  He clearly wants to occupy the high moral ground.

    But was it really concern about deaths at sea which motivated his campaign against asylum seekers arriving by boat? Wikileaks reported that ‘a key Liberal strategist told the US Embassy in November 2009 that the boats issue was “fantastic” for the Coalition and ‘the more that came the better’ (SMH 10 December 2010).

    In Opposition the Coalition did not want the boats to stop. It did its best to ensure that the Labor Government did not stop the boats. That is why the Coalition sided with the Greens to block the agreement with Malaysia. The collapse of that agreement set in motion a dramatic increase in boat arrivals that ultimately led to Manus and Nauru.

    Scott Morrison’s concern for deaths at sea was not reflected in numerous comments he made in opposition to demonise asylum seekers. He told us that asylum seekers bring ‘disease’, everything from TB and hepatitis C to chlamydia and syphilis. He told 2GB that boat arrivals bring ‘wads of cash’ and large displays of jewellery. He urged his parliamentary colleagues to ‘ramp up the question to … capitalise on the anti-Muslim sentiment’. He described as a ‘government-funded junket’ Commonwealth government assistance for an 8-year old boy whose parents had been drowned off Christmas Island. He complained about the cost of holding funerals in Sydney for asylum seekers who had died off Christmas Island.

    That was not the moral high ground. But If Scott Morrison now feels a sense of moral responsibility that is to be welcomed.

    At the Human Rights Commission Scott Morrison avoided answering the question whether detention of children, or adults for that matter, deterred boat arrivals. He should have said, but didn’t, that there is no evidence that mandatory detention deters boat arrivals. We now know very clearly that what has deterred boat arrivals was not mandatory detention but government policies denying resettlement in Australia for any person who come by boat. It was the Rudd Government that started taking us down this path. That is why boat arrivals stopped and not because of mandatory detention.

    Both Scott Morrison and the Secretary of his department took exception to the President of the Commission, Gillian Triggs characterising the detention centres as prisons. The detention centres may not have armed guards, but they are worse than prisons. First, the detainees are not convicted criminals and they are not illegals. They are overwhelmingly vulnerable people seeking freedom from persecution. Over 80% of boat arrivals have been found to be genuine refugees. But not being criminals or illegals, we put them in hell-holes where many of them go out of their minds.  For innocent people the result is worse than being in prison.

    Second, we locate these detention centres in remote places with the clear intention of making it very difficult for detainees to have contact with friends, family or advisers. We are frightened that if the community hears their true story, we will show more concern and compassion. So we lock them up in remote places where we cannot hear their cries. Inmates at Long Bay are treated better than that.

    There is a major problem when the Minister for Immigration is both gaoler and guardian of children. A sensible start to winding back this appalling situation in the detention of children is for the minister to separate his roles.

    More importantly we need to quickly wind back mandatory detention for almost all asylum seekers. It punishes but does not deter. The evidence is quite clear on that. Unfortunately a succession of Immigration Ministers have pretended they are political tough guys by locking up both adults and children.

    What is more there are large savings to be achieved in winding back mandatory detention. Immigration detention costs over $3b per annum. Over $2b could be saved instead of filling the pockets of Serco, Transfield, the Salvation Army and others. The Commission of Audit pointed to the enormous differences in the costs of detention. For offshore detention it was $440,000 per head in 2013-14.; for on shore detention it was $ 239,000 and for community detention it was$ 90,000.  The most cost effective and the most humane is release into the community on bridging visas which cost $22,000 per head. In 2013-14

    Humanity and cost saving points to ending mandatory detention. Few comparable countries mistreat asylum seekers the way we do.

    Just as we now have a Royal Commission on sexual abuse I am sure that down the track we will have a Royal Commission on our treatment of asylum seekers.

  • John Menadue. Keep trucking!

    At the hearings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Melbourne last week, Cardinal George Pell is reported as saying that if the driver of a (trucking company) sexually assaulted a passenger they picked up along the way ‘I don’t think that it is appropriate for the .. leadership of that company be held responsible’.

    As a citizen I was angered as most people were by these comments. As a Catholic I was ashamed.

    If any trucking company, or indeed any organisation, had a record of sexual abuse like the Catholic Church I would expect that the leadership would either resign or be sacked. Responsibility cannot be avoided as Cardinal Pell suggests

    The Catholic Church faces a systemic problem that Cardinal Pell seems unable to come to grips with. In a submission with colleagues to the Royal Commission, we focused on that systemic problem, including the way bishops are chosen, church structures and an unaccountable male clerical culture. The problems go far beyond the individual truck driver or priest. This submission can be found by clicking on the website at the top left hand of this page, then clicking on religion, and then clicking on the submission of November 2013.

    It is hard going in the Catholic Church these days. For months the ugliness of the Church has been on display. But there is also great beauty, the saints, the art and particularly, the selfless service of the nuns day in and day out all around the world. The Catholic Church has kept the Christian faith alive despite its many blemishes. In my mind it is still the greatest influence for good in the world.

    Whilst the Catholic Church celebrates the Eucharist, I will be there.

     

  • Richard Woolcott. Indonesia under President Widodo.

    Australia will be dealing with a new Indonesian government in just two months. This will involve challenges and opportunities for both countries.

    The Constitutional Court in Jakarta has now confirmed the election of Joko Widodo as President-elect with 53.15% of the eligible vote. The Court’s decision is not appealable and he will be sworn in as President on the 20th of October.

    All Australians, especially our political leaders and senior officials, should be in no doubt that no bilateral relationship will be more important in the future than that with Indonesia.

    Indonesia stretches across our north, a distance from Broome in Western Australia to Christchurch in New Zealand. It is a country of some 250 million people, 81% of whom are Muslims. It has a literacy rate of 94%, an increasing middle class, and its economy is growing rapidly.

    Prime Minister Abbott has described the relationship with Indonesia as “our most important relationship” in many respects. His policy that his foreign affairs approach would be “more Jakarta and less Geneva” was shorthand for this approach.

    Our relations with the United States, China, and Japan, as well as neighbouring New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, are also of great importance to us. The future stability and prosperity of a democratic Indonesia is, however, of paramount importance to us.

    President-elect Joko Widodo, 53, represents a generational change and the potential for a significant shift away from established Indonesian politics. From central Java, he is a businessman who made furniture. He was the mayor of Solo, and then served 18 months as the Governor of Jakarta. He has a reputation of being a nationalist and a relaxed and friendly “man of the people”.

    While his experience of politics and of foreign policy issues is limited, he has indicated that he wants to unwind corruption and patronage in Indonesian politics and focus on raising the standard of living of the poor. His vice President, Yusuf Kalla, has more experience having been Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s first vice President for several years.

    Our government will need to discuss in depth with Widodo and Kalla, and the foreign minister when appointed, bilateral and wider foreign policy issues. Widodo has said that he is looking to make professional rather than political appointments, and it may be that Marty Natalegawa will be reappointed as foreign minister because of his wide knowledge and experience of foreign policy issues, with which Widodo is not familiar.

    Joko Widodo has said he wants good and consistent relations with Australia, but Indonesian sensitivities about territorial integrity and earlier allegations of phone tapping are seen as irritants in the relationship. Joko himself has referred to a “lack of trust” and he is aware that many Indonesian politicians and officials consider Australia as unpredictable and untrusting of Indonesia.

    The Joint Understanding on a Code of Conduct to manage more effectively the reaction to allegations that the Defence Signals Directorate was monitoring the phones of the President, his wife, and members of his staff is hopefully an important step forward if it is implemented to the satisfaction of both parties.

    The reason for the Indonesian reaction was that SBY had understood from his discussions with then Prime Minister Rudd that Australia was seriously seeking a closer, friendlier strategic relationship with Indonesia. Indonesia therefore saw the allegations as undermining trust. It was not, foreign minister Natalegawa argued, the way to treat a major neighbouring strategic good friend.

    It would be unwise not to acknowledge that the relationship has been damaged. In the 2014 Lowy Institute poll, 40% of Australians polled considered the relationship to be “worsening”. According to the Lowy institute the priorities on which Australia and Indonesia will need to consult most closely are asylum seekers, security, and terrorism. This will be a prickly task, calling for a courteous, culturally sensitive, sophisticated, and professional approach to restore and maintain the firmly based relationship we need.

    In our future relations with Indonesia Australia also will need to avoid several approaches, which have been disruptive in the past. One is “gesture politics” that is making statements and appointments that are insubstantial gestures in response to perceived public opinion.

    Australia should also avoid making statements on foreign policy issues which are essentially made for domestic political reasons but which are criticized by Indonesia, for example the suspension of live cattle exports without any prior consultation and towing boats back to Indonesian territorial waters.

    I believe we should listen more and lecture less. We also need to avoid making unnecessary statements that are seen as unbalanced in the region, for example alleged “assertiveness” by China and Japan are widely seen in Indonesia as responses to United States and Japanese assertiveness towards China.

    Joko Widodo is likely to make it clear that Indonesia will not take sides in China/US disputes, in China/Japan disputes, or on the South China Sea claims. Indonesia is not a claimant and has been assured by China that it does not claim any Indonesian territory. This underlines the desirability for Australia of a more nuanced focus on the region we share, and the regional problems that we need to manage.

    In this context I believe Australia does need a fundamental change to our national psyche, that would focus more on Asia than our traditional and well established links with the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada (collectively the “Anglosphere”), and Europe.

    We do need a continuous and sustained approach to the main countries of Asia. In this context a key task for the Australian government, when the new government is formed in Indonesia next October, will be to determine an appropriate and updated balance with our relationships with the United States, China, and Japan and to reinforce the government’s rhetoric about our role in the Asia-Pacific region with action and funding. We should consult Indonesia on a range of political issues, such as the Middle East for example, rather than limit our consultations to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe.

    There will be a major role for public diplomacy in that Australians and Indonesians do need to know much more about each other. It is regrettable that many Australians still regard Indonesia as a mysterious, chaotic, and corrupt country in which the rule of law is weak.

    According to the Lowy institute polls many Indonesians still see Australia as a potential military threat. This is largely because of historic fears, Indonesia’s size, its proximity, and its presumed potential instability as well as the situation in West Papua.

    While Indonesia, like Australia, welcomes a constructive and continuing United States involvement in the Asia-Pacific there is concern in Indonesia about the so-called “pivot to Asia” – now referred to as “rebalancing”. Many Indonesians regard Australian policy as too closely tied to the United States.

    The incoming Indonesian government can be expected to be concerned, for example, about close cooperation on the reported use of US missiles by the Australian navy and the purposes of drone flights from Australia.

    Also there will be concern that the Cocos Islands, so close to Indonesia and Malaysia, yet now part of Western Australia, might be used for security purposes in South-East Asia and the South China region. Such activities would be seen as directed at the containment of China, notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary.

    To conclude, the importance of our bilateral relations with Indonesia, and regionally in the context of the Asian century, cannot be overstated.  As a nation we need to be genuinely and continuously engaged with the incoming Widodo government of our very large neighbour of increasing global and regional importance.

     

    Richard Woolcott was formerly Head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Australian Ambassador to Indonesia

  • John Menadue. The Bishop and the Prime Minister

    In August 1987 The Bulletin published an account by Tony Abbott of why he left the seminary. A link to Tony Abbott’s account is below.     Following Tony Abbott’s account, Fr Bill Wright on August 25, 1987, replied. He was a priest at that time in the Archdiocese of Sydney and Vice Rector of St Patrick’s College, Manly. He is currently Bishop of the Diocese of Maitland/Newcastle. He is mentioned as a possible successor to Cardinal George Pell in Sydney.

    http://nofibs.com.au/2013/03/28/tony-abbott-on-why-he-left-the-priesthood/

    Bill Wright’s Bulletin article ‘Abbott’s decision: the other side’ is published below.  John Menadue

     

    “Abbott’s Decision: the other side

    Bill Wright responds to Tony Abbott’s account last week of why he left the seminary.

    Tony Abbott came to St Patrick’s College, Manly, in 1984 after taking degrees in Economics and Law at Sydney University, tumultuous involvement in student politics – he was Students Representative Council president in 1979 – a Rhodes scholarship to study politics and philosophy at Oxford, a distinguished sporting career and a stint of journalism.

    Physically large, loud in argument or jest, with the exterior self-confidence or brashness of those who have survived some tough schools, his was a commanding presence in the college community. Some were captured by his spaciousness; his warm, hearty and loyal friendship; his candor; and the moving sense that he was a man who had given up much in life to serve his Church.  Others, however, found him just too formidable to talk to, unless to agree; overbearing and opinionated; and with his heart really still set on other things, in other places.

    His first year here was not happy. Manly is not Oxford, nor even the law school. Not only is there less brilliance, with and sparkle to the acre – we draw on a broader constituency – but here also one has not only to enjoy or admire one’s companions for some aspects of their character, one has also to strike some more fundamental chord of fellowship with them, to find that they satisfy some vision of what a man, a Christian and a priest should be. Only on the extreme Left of politics is there as much need to believe in each other’s selfless devotion to the cause: only there is there as much faction and disillusionment. Tony was not, on the whole, impressed by his companions. He was certainly not fired by the stimulation of life at Manly.

    Manly did its best for him according to its lights. He was accelerated through the first two years of study in 12 months. Law, politics and economics, however, count as well for studies in theology as they might for studies in medicine. Tony required three years’ further study in theology which meant for all practical purposes three years at Manly or at some other seminary.

    Dr Grove Johnson, the rector at Manly, liked and believed in Tony. He saw the difficulty Tony had settling down to the constraints of life in the college and he believed that Tony should be sent overseas to study, as he had been. No student had been sent away for undergraduate studies for the priesthood since 1968. It was unlikely to happen. Johnson, however, hoped to encourage Tony and mentioned the possibility to him. This was a chimera which Tony would pursue almost until the day he left.

    In 1985 Tony faced a new seminary rector and a new discipline, theology. One of the tragedies of this story is that the study of theology did not capture Tony’s imagination. He did passably: not as well as his academic background might have indicated. I do not recall that he ever talked about theology while at Manly. His concern – and it was a genuine one – was with practical churchmanship: how the Catholic Church could better commend itself to the hearts of Australians; how the individual priest could enliven and uplift those who were turning away from uninspired ministers.

    As well as finding little real engagement with theology, Tony in 1985 fell out with seminary authority. The present rector, Fr Gerry Iverson, is not a debater. What he says is what he means and, even more importantly, what he feels. Tony, on the other hand is inclined to come on strong, to score points, to skate over or hold back any reservations he might have about his case. There was ample scope for misunderstanding between these two, and misunderstanding there was.

    Iverson did his best for Tony. He tried to share his concerns with him; but Tony wanted tangible support, not an analysis of his difficulties and especially not an analysis couched in the terms of psychology. Iverson gave him a lot of time and a good measure of real support. He put to higher authority Tony’s case for some other arrangement of his studies, he urged patience on the bishops when they were irritated by Tony’s public pronouncements on the ills of the church or the seminary – an irritation which Iverson privately felt as least as much as they did. He risked the ire of the archbishop by granting Tony approval to speak on radio and finally he supported Tony, within the limits of honesty, as a candidate for priesthood before both Bishop Murphy and Bishop Heather as well as lending his support to my appeal to Heather that he consider making some rather special arrangements for Tony.

    In any case, 1985 passed and in 1986 Tony was placed in the parish of Emu Plains for 12 months. He was not happy to be in this position initially but it turned out to be, I think, the best of his three years as a seminarian. Emu Plains and places like Emu Plains are what diocesan priesthood is all about. Maybe it could or should be about many other things as well but the ministry of a priest to the people of a parish is the raison d’etre of the diocesan priesthood. It is significant that Tony comments that he could not imagine this to be his life.

    Finally we come to 1987. Heather agreed that Tony could live on in a parish and attend a theological college by day. I do not know of any similar arrangement ever having been made in Australia. I thought Tony had won as much as was winnable. There was still the soul-ache for the life of the university, still the chimera, perhaps, of studies overseas. Well, it was not to be. Tony quit, as he says, on March 27.

    Quit? The word suggests giving up a struggle. The struggle for what exactly? I no longer feel that I know. For a time I thought that it was the struggle to be accepted, the struggle to get authority to say, ‘Yes, we’re behind you’. But that struggle Tony surely won. Two years of study stood between him and diaconate without the inconvenience of seminary life, without the continual appraisal of his performance. He had only to do his own thing to be home and oiled.

    Another man, attempting to put his finger on the heart of Tony’s difficulties said that he had a developed inability to be really intimate and that ‘without the warmth and trust of real intimacy’ he would find ‘life in the celibate priesthood too frustrating and lacking in peace’. Tony himself, reflecting on that, feels that the issue of intimacy was in fact, ‘a symptom of a deeper difficulty, namely a growing fear that I was not, after all, suited for a priest’s work …’  Either way, it is tempting to consider the possibility that, once Tony had beaten the system and was no longer able to locate the ‘struggle’ as being between himself and authority, he had no one much else blocking his path but himself. For another to say this is, of course, too glib: especially if the other has a vested interest in absolving his church and his seminary from as much blame as possible. No decent historian, either, would reach such a conclusion without access to the letters and diaries. But it is the sort of working hypothesis that a reasonable historian might come to and seek to explore further.

    There are many faults in seminary training. There are faults in those who administer seminaries, too. And there are special difficulties connected with the remoteness of the final authorities from the scene. In every student’s story, the problems that should not have occurred loom large.

    How odd of Jesus to make Judas an Apostle! And to turn away the rich young man? How odd that Peter, and not someone more stable (James?), was chosen leader? How odd that Paul was first a persecuter? That Ignatius had to be struck by a cannon ball: that Aloysius died a scholastic; that Pius X is a saint? Why should a man such as Francis have lived to see the corruption of his work?

    I do not presume to think, Tony, that I understand the interplay of freedom and providence. Neither, I am sure, do you. I only know that we must try to make things come out right, in the full knowledge that it may serve some  higher purpose for them to come out wrong. Or it may not.”

     

     

  • John Menadue. Those pesky nuns.

    I was taken with an article by Nicholas Kristof. It was first published in the New York Times and yesterday in the SMH. The link to the article is below.

    In this article there is a quote from an American nun “Let me get this straight. Some priests committed sex abuse. Bishops covered it up. And so they are investigating nuns!’.

    If only the nuns were running the show, the Catholic Church would be in much better shape.

     

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/superheroes-none-compare-to-our-heroic-nuns-the-first-frontline-feminists-20140819-105rfs.html

  • John Menadue. The ANZAC Myth.

    The four-year and well-funded carnival celebrating Anzac and WWI is now rolling. The carnival will depict WWI as the starting point of our nation, as our coming of age!

    It was nothing of the sort. It was a sign of our international immaturity and dependence on others. What was glorious about involving ourselves in the hatreds and rivalry of European powers that had wrought such carnage in Europe over centuries? Many of our forebears came to Australia to get away from this. But conservatives, our war historians and colonel blimps chose deliberately to draw us back to the stupidities and hatreds of Europe.

    It seems that the greater the political and military stupidity of wars that we have been involved in, the more we are encouraged to  hide behind the valour of our service people at Gallipoli, the Western Front and elsewhere.. The ‘leadership’ of Winston Churchill and General Ian Hamilton were catastrophic both for the British and for us. Australian and New Zealand forces at Gallipoli were commanded by a British General. No hiding behind the sacrifice of troops can avoid the facts. We should not have been there and it was a disaster.

    Unfortunately the more we ignore the political and military mistakes of the past, the more likely we are to make similar mistakes in the future. And we keep doing it. If we had a sense of our calamitous involvement in wars in the past like WW1 we would be less likely to make foolish decisions to involve ourselves in wars like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Our history is littered with tragic military adventures, being led by the nose by either the UK or the US.  And it goes on through the Boer War, the Sudan War and more recently, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. In all these cases, and just like WWI, we have desperately tried to hide behind the valour of our service people.

    The most important and justified war in which we have fought as a nation was WWII, in defence of our own people and land. But WWII is rated by the Australian War Memorial and so many others as of much less significance.  WW1 Is the Holy Grail.

    On April 25 each year we are told by tongue-tied people that the great sacrifice of WWI was in defence of freedom and the right. But I don’t think that they even believe it themselves. It just does not ring true. Tony Abbott says it was a ‘just war’. But he is yet to explain what was ‘just’ about it. It is claimed that it united this country, but it divided us in a way that we had never been divided before or since with Billy Hughes exploiting the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment in the country. Only 30% of eligible men chose to enlist. WWI was a great divider. It was not a unifier despite the platitudes of Anzac Day.

    Some claim that WWI was to bring peace to Europe. But the war and its aftermath laid the ground for even greater death and destruction in WWII.

    In relation to our population, our greatest loss of lives was in the Frontier Wars where over 30,000 indigenous people died in defence of their own land. But we ignore it in favour of the myths of Anzac. Best we forget the Frontier Wars.

    The first time Australians and New Zealanders fought together was against the Maoris in New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s. The ANZAC connection was not forged at Gallipoli but half a century before in the Maori Wars.  It’s best that we forget that too. It doesn’t do our self-respect much good to recall that we fought together with New Zealanders in a race war to quell the Maori people.

    The early and remarkable achievements of this young country at the turn of the century and early in the 19th Century are blotted out by the blood and blather of WWI, ANZAC and Gallipoli.

    Federation in 1900 was a remarkable achievement, pulling together our six colonies into a nation. We led the world in universal suffrage, the rights of women, industrial democracy and the minimum wage. The ‘Australian ballot’ or secret ballot was progressively adopted in the Australian states in the latter half of the nineteenth century. We were a world leader. Our ballot was adopted in New Zealand, Canada, UK and US

    In 1904 we had not only Australia’s first Labor Government. It was the first in the world. The rights of working people as expressed in the Harvester Judgement of 1907 put Australia as a leader on the world stage. We were an advanced social laboratory. Before WWI there were two decades of remarkable nationhood and advancement for ordinary people.

    But conservatives were frightened of the future. They wanted to drag us back to the heart break of the past. And they succeeded with the help of Billy Hughes and other Labor renegades

    In the process we broke our own heart – or as Marilyn Lake has expressed in a blog on April 23 this year ‘WWI fractured the nation’s soul’.

    It is time we were honest with ourselves and discounted the myths of WWI, ANZAC and Gallipoli.

    Instead we should celebrate the two remarkable decades of progress before the catastrophe of WW1.

     

  • Elizabeth Elliott. Compassion goes missing on Christmas Island

    When it comes to children in need, most Australians feel compassion.

    Most will applaud today’s announcement that ‘Boat Kids’ will be released into the community. However this decision does not go far enough. It includes only kids aged less than 10 years (excluding many vulnerable teens); only those detained on the Australian mainland (excluding kids on Nauru, Manus and Christmas Islands); and only kids who arrived before July 19th 2013. Furthermore, the number to be released includes kids already living in community detention housing.  

    Christmas Island is a remote tropical ‘paradise’ in the Indian Ocean, over 2600 km from Perth or Darwin. When I visited with the Australian Human Rights Commission in July 2014, as part of their Inquiry into Children in Detention, it was ‘home’ to 174 children, including 26 unaccompanied minors – all boys aged between 14 and 17 years.  Australia continues to detain kids, despite the United Nations Guidelines on the Detention of Refugees that ‘Children should not be placed in detention’ and that ‘Minors who are asylum-seekers should not be detained’.

    Compassion, it seems, has gone missing on Christmas Island.

    ‘Home’ for families in these immigration detention centres consists of a small metal cabin, some 3 x 3 metres squared in one of two rows of similar cabins separated by a wooden walkway. Add a bunk bed and a cot to the rooms and there remains little space for a child to learn to crawl or walk, or for exploratory play. According to the father of a 2 year old boy “the housing is dirty, sub-standard, hard to be there. The child keeps hitting his head on items in the room – the bed, the shelf – because of the lack of space.”

    Cramped conditions, a punishing climate and overcrowded living in close proximity to scores of families make for little privacy and dire health consequences. Childhood infections spread quickly. When we were there many children had a respiratory virus and there had been outbreaks of gastroenteritis. We repeatedly heard the refrain “my kids are always sick.”

    The air-conditioned environment exacerbates symptoms in the many children with asthma. Others have medical conditions requiring assessment, medical or surgical treatment on the mainland – and for some the long wait for transfer had been intolerable.  A two and a half year old with no speech, a 6 year old with deafness requiring grommets for glue ear, a child with a facial abscess needing surgical drainage, a boy with an undescended testes, a child with rotten teeth, a girl with sleep apnoea….

    Of greater concern than signs of physical ill-health, however, are the psychological symptoms we heard of from many children.

    They reflect past and ongoing trauma, including the depression and self-harm many have witnessed in their own mothers. Stress in young children was manifest by onset, in detention, of bed-wetting, nightmares and defiant behaviour. In older children we heard of refusal to eat, separation anxiety, regression of speech, development of stutter, mutism and social withdrawal. Some expressed their stress through their art. A 10 year drew his ‘family home in jail’ and a six year old drew herself behind bars, with the caption ‘I want go out’ . Crying was ubiquitous in these images.

    Conversations with teenagers, who could articulate their predicament, were particularly poignant.

    They became distressed, describing flashbacks of trauma experienced at home, during harrowing boat trips to Australia, and during their time on Manus, where some were sent as a result of incorrect age determination. According to one boy who went to Manus, ‘I saw with my own eyes one boy hung himself in a cupboard – they were taken to hospital.’ They talked of their fear of being returned to Manus when they turned 18. 

    All spoke of feelings of hopelessness, sadness and lack of a future. They talked of frequent crying, families missed, lost expectations, lack of education and feelings of guilt because they had not fulfilled their family’s hopes after more than a year in ‘Australia.’  One boy summed this up as ‘a horrible situation. I feel depressed, preoccupied with my misfortune. I have not smiled or laughed the last few months. There is nothing to make me happy or to tell my family to make them happy.’  Some talked of self-harm and some spoke of death. In the words of one 12 year old girl ’My life is really deth. I don’t know why I’m in the jail realy. I don’t kill any body.’

    Detention of children for lengthy periods is in contravention to the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. This states that ‘The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.’ The UN Human Rights Committee reiterates this: ‘Asylum seekers who unlawfully enter a State party’s territory may only be detained for a brief initial period in order to document their entry, record their claims, and determine their identity.’  Most people have now been detained on Christmas Island for over a year and the anniversary of their arrival came as a bitter blow for many.  One man asked ‘Is it the Australian government’s aim to make us all go mad?’

    As victims of a policy that dictates that any arrival by boat after July 19th 2013 will never be settled in Australia, many have accepted their fate of settlement offshore. But their arbitrary detention without assessment for refugee status has left them in an intolerable limbo. One father said ‘If they won’t have us in Australia, find somewhere else for us to go. We can’t go home.’ A mother expressed her anguish, ‘The criminals, at least they know their sentence – we don’t.’ Many felt guilty for placing their children in such a predicament. As one mother said, ‘Even if I did something wrong, coming here, why ruin the life of our kids?’

    As a reflection of their increasing despair and frustration about the adverse conditions for their children, a group of young mothers with young infants resorted to self-harm.

    When we visited 10 such women – deemed at future risk – were under 24-hour surveillance by guards, not nurses. Despite this mental health crisis the centre has no resident psychiatrist. ‘I swear the physical health is not so much a problem. It is the stress and the psychological impact of the detention that is getting to us,’ said one mother of two.

    It is outrageous to keep asylum seekers in the limbo of uncertainty. It is unacceptable to keep children in detention on Christmas Island, and it is unjust to deny children optimal health care and education.  One mother said ‘one of the most important concerns for my baby is he has not received his BCG vaccine – when everyone in the world should receive it. They say ‘we don’t have it’ or ‘later’ – the story changes.’ In the words of one child, ‘I not want to sit in jail? I want to go school….in here no have school everyday. Please help me?’

    Australians might well ask ‘Where is the compassion on Christmas Island?’

    If we are to retain our international standing as a civilised society, we cannot continue to persecute children seeking asylum as a deterrent to others.

    Elizabeth Elliott AM, is the Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health, Sydney Medical School and Consultant Paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead.

     

     

     

     

     

  • An abuse of power by the Israeli lobby.

    In 1967 the Israeli military attacked the USS Liberty, an American spy-ship which had been monitoring Israeli transmissions about the conflict during the Six-day War. Intercepted Israeli communications indicated that the goal was to sink the Liberty and leave no survivors. 

    As the story reveals, – see link below – both the US President Lyndon Johnson and the Secretary of Defence, Robert Macnamara, did their best to ensure that this action by the Israeli military – an attack on the US navy – never became public. 

    This story is written by Ray McGovern who works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. After serving as an army infantry/intelligence officer, he spent a 27-year career as a CIA analyst. He is co-founded of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

    During the tenure of President George Bush, he provided daily intelligence briefings to the Vice President and the Heads of National Security.   John Menadue

     

    http://consortiumnews.com/2014/08/17/a-uss-libertys-heros-passing/