John Menadue

  • Israel must be its own worst enemy.

    The Palestinians have requested that they join the International Criminal Court. It could be a double-edged sword if both Palestinian and Israelis were brought before the International Court. But most people would believe that joining the International Court would be an important way to demonstrate that the Palestinians wanted to join the international community and be subject to its norms.

    But both Israel and the US opposed the request. Robert Fisk in The Independent on 6 January this year underscores the futility of policies in the Middle East.  See link below. John Menadue.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/robert-fisk-the-real-reason-why-israel-and-the-us-dont-want-palestine-to-join-the-international-criminal-court-9956751.html?utm_source=indynewsletter&utm_medium=email05012015

  • The Chinese are coming.

    After WWII the financial hegemony of the US and Europe in the IMF and International Bank was established. Later, the Japanese came to dominate the Asian Development Bank. That is now being challenged by China. See article below by William Pesek in ‘Bloomberg View’, subject ‘China steps in as world’s new bank’.  John Menadue.

    http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-25/china-steps-in-as-worlds-new-bank

  • Mary Chiarella. Co-payments, general practice and workforce reform.

    If there’s a problem in primary health care then nurses are (and always have been) the solution. 

    Susan Sontag wrote in 1978 “Illness is the night side of life: a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick”. I was working in palliative care nursing when I first read this and it struck me that, continuing the metaphor, nurses were therefore like tour guides for those negotiating these health care kingdoms of both the well and the sick. We provide the translator services (“what did they say nurse?”), the coordination of meetings and events (“I need an appointment to see…”); the advice on what to do and how to do it (“I don’t know how to work this spacer thing”), and always, always, always the assistance to do whatever needs to be done when people lack “the necessary strength, will or knowledge” (Henderson, 1966) to do it themselves.

    If we look to primary health care (PHC) there is clearly a need for “tour guides” in this space, whether it be to help them stay in the kingdom of the well or to assist them to travel in the kingdom of the sick. John Menadue has suggested the key is to rethink funding for general practice. I would go further. The key is to rethink who provides the bulk of PHC and then think about how to fund it.

    In 2009 I compiled a compendium of nurse-led PHC models in 38 countries for the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2009).The elements of PHC identified for reporting purposes in the template were that each service, programme or project should:

    • provide essential health care based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and technology;
    • be universally accessible to individuals and families;
    • involve full participation of the community;
    • have a cost that the community and country can afford to maintain;
    • foster self-reliance and self-determination;
    • be an integral part of the country’s health system and overall development; and
    • have an entry level for patients located close to the heart of the community.

    The main needs of the populations served were those of the chronically ill and the elderly, basic social and infrastructure needs, psychological and mental health needs, maternal and child health needs and acute care needs (particularly in war zones).

    To provide a local example of what is possible, the work of an Aboriginal renal nurse practitioner in Australia with both indigenous and non-indigenous groups suffering from end-stage renal disease brought about significant health gains. The need for this role was identified as a result of the rising number of people needing acute dialysis 24 hours a day. A retrospective study of the causes of this rise suggested that 80% of the patients had risk factors that, if addressed early enough, would have prevented admission to the tertiary referral hospital for acute intervention. These risk factors were further examined and the diagnostic, clinical and referral skills required to address them were evaluated, and it was found that the scope of practice of a nurse practitioner met the requirements. The community nephrology nurse practitioner was able to develop and implement nursing models that integrated evidence-based clinical management with nursing advocacy for quality of life.

    Two key areas, considered central to the success of the case studies, presented challenges for a number of contributors. These were the issues of reliable and adequate funding and resources, and challenges to narrow thinking about the capacity of staff to take on new roles. The issue of sustainable funding; access to other resources such as medication, equipment, textbooks and staff created significant challenges. Some projects were completely or predominantly funded through the charitable sector (for example Chile, Haiti, United States). For example, a US project working with a poor community in Chicago sought its primary funding from a charity, and supplemented it with grants from no less than 16 funding sources and a further 13 in-kind donation sources. The time required to undertake the fundraising, administration and reporting on so many donations takes the nurses away from much-needed care delivery.

    In addition, there were a number of reports of medical and some nursing staff having difficulty in letting go of conventional and stereotypical thinking about who ought to perform which tasks. This issue has been much studied and discussed (Chiarella 2002) and has been described in relation to affirmative action as the ‘myth of the meritocracy’ – the possibility of work being taken on by another group, unless similarly qualified, is unthinkable because they are seen as incapable of meeting the challenge (Hall 1997). Yet there is ample evidence and experience to show that different personnel and community members are capable of equal, high quality participation in health care decision-making and delivery. Strong claims to maintain the status quo are often made on the grounds of safety and quality, but the evidence about the outcomes demonstrates this resistance to change is based only on protecting professional power and privilege.

    There is such potential to harness the skills of nurses to provide first class primary health care in this country, yet currently we seem to move further and further away from this potential and back to outdated models of health care provision that service only those who can afford to pay.

    Mary Chiarella is Professor of Nursing, Sydney Nursing School, University of Sydney.

  • Maggie Callingham. Top schools ‘top’ because someone has to be bottom.

    Across Australia Year 12 students are collectively holding their breaths to see what results they’ve achieved and, consequently, what their futures hold.

    Only hours after their release, many secondary schools proudly display their best results on billboards for passers-by to see. Newspapers select high-achieving students to profile. As schools promote these glowing results, it’s worth highlighting that many have had the invisible slave of the disadvantaged schools working for them.

    That is, the high-profile academic success of some schools has occurred as a result of social stratification – the increasing gap between students into schools of low socio-educational advantage and schools of high socio-educational advantage – as well as differential funding arrangements. Around Australia, some condone these arrangements in the name of “school choice” while others condemn them in the name of “school equity”.

    School choice

    Australian states and territories each have their own version of one or more senior secondary certificates that promote pathways for their students – usually into some form of further education or the workforce. Victoria, for example, has the academic, university-oriented Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE), as well as the practical, vocationally-oriented Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL). However, the relatively high public profile of VCE results can incline schools seeking an academic reputation to offer only VCE – and in some cases, the even more prestigious International Baccalaureate (IB).

    Schools that promote their academic orientation and excellence usually do so to attract predominantly upper or middle-class families, or those aspiring to such classes. In addition to using expensive advertising to recruit their students, many academic schools provide scholarships to entice high-achieving students away from their neighbourhood schools. The pressure on these schools to maintain reputations for strong academic scores can motivate them to focus more on grooming their star academic learners and less on affirming their applied learners, or on catering for students from disadvantaged backgrounds requiring additional support.

    In pursuing such a strategy, academic schools privilege a select group: conforming, middle-class, elite-performance students. As a result, students and families that do not fit into the compliant, middle-class, academic profile of the school may find they are overtly or covertly encouraged to seek another school. The actual wording of this encouragement may be couched in language that indicates the student needs to find a new school “to suit his or her needs”, but the subtext is clear: the school is safeguarding its academic reputation and status. The outcome for these schools is an increasingly homogenised and advantaged school community.

    School equity

    In contrast, Victorian schools that offer both VCE and VCAL pathways meet an equity principle under which VCAL was introduced in 2002, to ensure that all students are able to access a senior secondary program of study. Schools prepared to take all-comers may find themselves catering not only for bright local students who haven’t been tempted elsewhere, but also non-academic students other schools have chosen to ignore or reject.

    As a result, these schools can be perceived as less successful than their high-achieving counterparts because their outcomes are likely to be skewed toward non-university pathways such as apprenticeships, traineeships, vocational courses or employment.

    These are each valid pathways, but as the Australian government acknowledged when it looked into youth transitions in 2009, much work is required to promote vocational pathways so they are seen as equal first-choice options. Unfortunately, five years on, little has changed in Australia regarding this public perception.

    One reason disadvantaged students are more likely to choose a less academic pathway such as VCAL can be found in Australia’s national and international testing results. Both NAPLAN and PISA results reveal that the lower the social class of an Australian student, the lower his or her test scores.

    It seems reasonable, therefore, that students who have been disadvantaged from an early age, the time when they learn foundation skills such as reading and writing, will be less inclined to pursue the reading and writing-oriented VCE. It is also not surprising that VCAL might better appeal to young people from economically disadvantaged families who then seek job-related pathways as a means to gain crucial financial independence or contribute financially to their families.

    School funding

    It’s no secret that schools don’t operate under similar funding conditions. Recent researchreveals funding increases from 2010 to 2013 across the three main school sectors are inversely proportionate to the socio-educational advantage of their student populations.

    Click to enlarge

    This growing social stratification and inequitable funding between advantaged and disadvantaged schools represent a critical equity issue for Australian schooling. While recommendations from the 2011 Gonski review of school funding attempted to address this inequity, it clearly continues.

    At a time of year when many advantaged schools celebrate their students’ high scores, it’s important to point out the contribution that disadvantaged schools have played in their success. It’s also timely to highlight the growing number of flexible learning programs in Australia that teach diverse student populations, including those with complex needs related to their disadvantage.

    These schools and programs too have valid stories to tell of their students’ successful academic and vocational results obtained under far less advantageous conditions. Unfortunately, these achievements are unlikely to appear on billboards or in newspaper articles.

    Maggie Callingham is a PhD candidate at the Victoria Institute for Education, Diversity and Lifelong Learning at Victoria University.

    This article first appeared in ‘The Conversation’ on 15 December 2014.

  • Malcolm Fraser. Australia’s dangerous ally.

    The National Interest, in its January/February 2015 edition has just published an article by Malcolm Fraser, ‘Australia’s dangerous ally’. The National Interest is not sold on news stands in Australia, but it is available online.

    Malcolm Fraser concludes his article by suggesting several steps that Australia should take to address problems in our relationship with the US.  First, the removal of US task force out of Darwin. Second, closure of facility at Pine Gap. Third, expanded diplomatic facilities and relationships in our region. Fourth, a boost to Australia’s defence force spending to about 3% of GDP.

    This article is based on submissions that Malcolm Fraser made to the 2015 Defence White Paper.

    The link to the article is below.

    http://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-australias-dangerous-ally-11858

  • What a disgrace! Australia at the UN on Palestine.

    Concluding our two year term on the Security Council, Australia voted against the proposal in the Council demanding Israel and the occupation of Palestinian territories end within two years. For the resolution to pass, nine votes were needed. Eight countries voted in favour of the resolution, including China, Russia, Luxembourg, France and Jordan. Five countries abstained, including the UK and South Korea. Only two countries voted against the resolution, the US and Australia.

    Over the years there have been a number of UN resolutions. Australia’s voting on these important resolutions can be found in the table in a blog from the Parliament of Australia ‘Diplomatic terrorism’: Palestinian statehood, the United Nations, and Australia’s voting record.  See link below.  John Menadue

     

    http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2014/December/Palestine_at_the_UN

  • Glencore buying Rio Tinto could burn hole in Hockey’s pocket.

    In the SMH on December 20, 2014, Michael West draws attention to Glencore’s checkered history on paying tax and the consequences for Joe Hockey’s budget if Glencore acquired Rio Tinto.

    Michael West said that ‘billions of dollars in tax payments are on the line, not to mention job losses and the spectre of this country seeding control over a large chunk of its natural resources to a secretive group of commodity traders ultimately run out of Switzerland.’

    Glencore has a colourful history. According to an Australian public radio report the company was founded by Marc Rich and Company in 1974 by billionaire commodity trader Marc Rich who was charged with tax evasion and illegal business dealings with Iran in the US, but pardoned by President Clinton in 2001.

    For link to Michael West’s article, see below.

    http://www.smh.com.au/business/mining-and-resources/glencore-buying-rio-tinto-could-burn-hole-in-hockeys-pocket-20141219-12ao4a.html

  • Rodney Tiffen. Murdoch – The tabloid tweeter tangles the truth.

    With two glaring exceptions, Australian public figures and media outlets generally rose to the challenge during the long siege at Martin Place this week. Mike Baird and Tony Abbott spoke with calmness and compassion, careful not to inflame the situation or do anything to encourage bigoted and unjustified reactions. The media – especially theABC, Nine, Seven and Sky News – reported the long hours of uncertainty, when very little was happening, with restraint, generally resisting the temptation to speculate in the absence of verified facts. While some false reports and rumours were broadcast, a sense of professional responsibility prevailed.

    In a sensitive, ongoing situation like this one, when TV can be viewed by hostage-takers, it is important that broadcasts avoid detailing planned police operations or inflaming relations between perpetrators and captives. They must also do all they can to preserve the dignity and anonymity of the hostages. The TV channels, and radio presenter Ray Hadley (who was in phone contact with hostages), acceded to police requests not to broadcast statements made under duress by hostages, or to report all they knew about what was going on inside the cafe.

    The first exception to this restrained coverage was the Daily Telegraph, whose special afternoon wraparound was headlined “Death cult CBD attack: IS takes 13 hostages in city cafe siege.” Desperate for sales and attention, the ailing tabloid seems to take the view that all publicity is good publicity. In this case, though, in addition to its manifest inaccuracies, the paper’s misplaced sensationalism jarred with the anxious and sombre public mood.

    The other jarring intervention was a tweet the following morning from the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch. “AUST gets wake-call with Sydney terror,” announced the American mogul. “Only Daily Telegraph caught the bloody outcome at 2.00 am. Congrats.”

    Murdoch saw a terrorist rather than a deranged individual, and on the basis of that hasty appraisal believed that Australia needed to wake up. What’s more, apparently oblivious to all the TV footage of the climax and the live online newspaper coverage (including that of his own paper, the Australian), he thought only his Sydney tabloid had caught the key action.

    If a political figure had made these comments – inaccurate, insensitive, alarmist – they would have attracted immediate and sustained criticism, but Murdoch has somehow attained a unique status in Australian public life. His frequently outrageous comments are certainly criticised in social media and on internet news services, but not, of course, by the two-thirds of daily newspapers he controls. The Fairfax papers and the ABC tend to either ignore his comments or treat them with undue respect. And, despite everything we’ve learned in recent years about the behaviour of his companies, it is almost certain that no one from the two major political parties will comment adversely.

    American journalism scholar Jay Rosen has criticised what he calls “he said, she said” journalism, a device used by news media to achieve “balance” at the expense of any serious search for the truth. When Rupert Murdoch appears in the Australian media, however, it is more a case of “he said, and he also said.” Perhaps this has been most evident this year, with Murdoch’s high-profile July visit to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Australian.

    This was Murdoch in an expansive mood, most notably in an interview on Sky News. He gave his views on climate change, which he thought was overplayed as a problem. “Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here,” he told viewers. The “most alarmist” scenario was that there would be a 3ºC rise in a hundred years. “At the very most, one of those [degrees] will come from man-made [sources].” If the sea level rises six inches, it would be a “big deal, the Maldives might disappear, but we can’t mitigate that… we just have to stop building vast houses on seashores.”

    These fanciful propositions seem to come entirely from within his own head. They were picked apart on internet news sites and in social media, but within the metropolitan papers and on ABC TV they were simply reported at face value.

    The most striking aspect of Murdoch’s current political views is their extremist content. The billionaire is now a proponent of a US Tea Party–style ideology – especially the view that government is the problem rather than part of the solution – although thankfully he hasn’t adopted that movement’s pro-gun views.

    Even when he expresses less extreme views, his grasp of facts can be shaky. Weighing into the debate about Australia’s 457 working visa last year, for example, he advised Australia to follow the United States in welcoming new arrivals. “I’m a big one for encouraging migration,” he told Sky News. “Just look at America.” No media reporting these words pointed out that nearly 28 per cent of Australians were born overseas, but just 13 per cent of Americans.

    But the greater impact comes from the way Murdoch expresses these views. Apart from the large number of inaccuracies in his public interviews and tweets, their key characteristic is dogmatism and intolerance. So, during his July visit, he described the NBN as “a ridiculous idea” and deplored investment in “windmills and all that rubbish.” He has been equally scathing of renewable energy investments in Britain, which have, he says, ruined the English countryside with “uneconomic bird killing windmills. Mad.” “Mad” was also his considered verdict on British efforts to contribute to the resolution of the crisis in the eurozone.

    His tendency to stereotype and malign those he disagrees with has often caused him trouble, perhaps most notably when he asked, via Twitter, “Why is Jewish-owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?” You’ve got to give Murdoch credit, said American political commentator Peter Beinart. “He’s packed a remarkable amount of idiocy and nastiness into 140 characters.”

    Under Labor, Murdoch thought Australia was a “weird place mucking up great future,” and that “Gillard once good education minister, now prisoner of minority greenies. Rudd still delusional, who nobody could work with. Nobody else?” His most constant hostility is towards the Greens: “whatever you do, don’t let the bloody Greens mess it up.”

    This style pervades his newspapers. “Kick this mob out,” the Daily Telegraph’s front-page headline on the first day of its 2013 election coverage, embodied not only the proprietor’s view, but also his style. And yet, at the same time as his media organisations are a force debasing the level of public debate, his utterances fail to attract the scrutiny received by those of other public figures. •

    Rodney Tiffen recently published ‘Rupert Murdoch: A Reassessment ‘.

    This article was first published in Inside Story on 18 December 2014.

  • Brian Johnstone. Terrorism and torture – the Catholic tradition.

    In Australia today, we accept that a person who has expressed ideas that justify terrorism may be restrained from acting out those ideas.  But we would not justify torturing a person suspected of harbouring such notions to force him to reveal them or to reject such ideas.   However, surveys in the Western world find that torture to obtain information is sometimes justified. The Prime Minister’s acceptance of torture in the context of the Sri Lankan civil war was as follows: “Obviously the Australian Government deplores any use of torture. We deplore that, wherever it might take place, we deplore that. But we accept that sometimes in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen.”  (http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2013/s3893068.htm, retrieved 15 Jan 2014).

    The Catholic tradition does not have a good record on torture. Pope Nicholas I in 866 condemned both the practice and the judicial institution of torture.  However, later torture came to be accepted by Church authorities and theologians.  Under the influence of Roman law, torture was first permitted legally by Pope Innocent IV in 1253. This pope allowed the infliction of torture on heretics by the civil authorities and torture had a recognized role in the courts of the Inquisition. Torture was also adopted by secular courts.  Pope John Paul II in 1993 condemned physical and mental torture as intrinsically evil. This is a striking example of the development of doctrine; how can we explain it?   The failure of the tradition to consistently reject torture can be attributed, apart from human sin, to three factors: Roman Law; a theory of order in the world and the lack of an adequate notion of dignity.

    Ancient Roman law accepted torture.  When the “barbarians” invaded Europe and the Roman Empire fell, the practice of torture was abandoned.  Trial by ordeal was instituted in its place.  To prove his innocence an accused had to submit to an ordeal, for example he had to walk a set distance over red-hot ploughshares. If he survived and recovered this was taken as a sign from God that he was innocent. In the eleventh century, with the revival of Roman law, the practice of ordeal was abandoned and torture was reinstated.  Judges were instructed to obtain a confession from the accused and to obtain this they could use torture.

    Behind this we can discern a complex legal, philosophical and theological theory.  God’s judgment on the matter was now no longer sought by examining the results of an ordeal. Instead, ecclesiastical and legal officials sought to examine the contents of the mind of the accused.  They no longer looked for blisters on the accused’s feet as indicative of guilt, but for “blisters” or heresies in his mind.

    Drawing on Greek thinking, philosophers and theologians held that there was an order in the world.  This order expresses the wisdom of God. Human beings could participate in this order by knowledge and free will.  This order was called an “ontological” order. An ontological order expresses the way things are.  The order was also considered to be a moral order; that is, it expressed the way things ought to be.  A rational person could thus recognize the truth of things and also discern what ought to be done.  This order was considered to be a template for the social and political order of society.

    Deviant ideas and practices were like a virus attacking the order in the world; moreover, they threatened to corrode the social and political order.  Both the Church and the secular power had a vital interest in preserving this order.  Secular courts and the Church Inquisition sought to discover the deviant ideas or “heresies.”  If individuals who were accused of heresy refused to confess, it was considered legitimate to torture them to obtain a confession.  It was known of course that people will make false confessions to avoid pain.  But those who justified torture were terrified at the prospect of their world falling apart as a consequence of people’s wrong ideas. They ignored the problem of false confessions and continued to practice torture.  When the Inquisition found that persons had deviant ideas and would not change, the Church turned such persons over to the state.  The state would then execute them.

    What was missing in this theory was an adequate idea of the dignity of the person.  In the thinking of the period an individual had dignity on the basis of his being in the right place in the order in the world.   In the case of a person who held heretical thoughts, his intelligence was out of order and by accepting such ideas his free will was out of order. He was not in the right place and so did not have dignity.  Being in the appropriate place in the world was also equated with being in a set place in the social order. An egregious manifestation of this way of thinking was that it could justify the torture of slaves and the lower classes, but not of the nobility or the clergy.

    This confusion was corrected by the Catholic Church in the Second Vatican Council, especially in the document on religious liberty (1965).  Every person has dignity because every person is created in the image of God. To be created in the image of God means to have received the gifts of intelligence and free will.  Intelligence and free will are received as gifts and we employ these capacities in communicating with other persons who have received the same gifts.

    The notion of order in the world that fits with these notions is not that of a fixed “ontological” order. It is an order that is brought into being through free communication between persons; fundamentally between God and human persons, then between human persons. The most basic form of this communication is the exchange of gifts.  Dignity comes about through the mutual gift of the recognition of dignity.  A primary gift to another is the recognition of the other’s dignity.  It is in recognizing the dignity of another that a person acquires his own dignity.

    It does not follow that only persons with intelligence and freedom are to be recognized as endowed with dignity. Disabled persons, even the severely disabled, may not be denied dignity. One who refuses to recognize the dignity of the disabled fails to acknowledge what is required by his own dignity and so loses that dignity.  A person who tortures another denies the dignity of the other and so denies his own dignity. To allow torture as an exception in “the hard case” is to concede that society, in the final analysis, is founded not on free communication, but on violence.

    Brian Johnstone. is a Catholic Priest who taught moral theology in Rome for nearly 20 years. Currently he teaches at the Catholic University in Washington. 

  • Why Rupert Murdoch is forever in Twitter trouble.

    In the ‘New Daily’ of December 17, 2014, Bruce Guthrie, a former editor-in-chief of  ‘The Age’ and Murdoch’s ‘Herald Sun’ tells us what he thinks about Murdoch’s twittering ‘But here he was seemingly gloating over the outcome of the appalling Martin Place events as if the only thing that mattered was its news value and the profits that might bring. No wonder he was dubbed a “gleeful ghoul” for the tweet. 24 hours later, despite dozens of entreaties, he still hasn’t apologised for it.’

    See below for full article.   John Menadue

     

    http://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2014/12/17/murdochs-twitter-trouble/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The+New+Daily+Thursday+181214&utm_content=The+New+Daily+Thursday+181214+CID_e0b29d13c4b7895f43354a244523cc86&utm_source=#.VJJJpU5bKqg.gmail

  • What will Israel become?

    In the International New York Times of December 20, Roger Cohen focuses on the future of Israel. He says ‘Every day … another European Government or parliament expresses support for recognition of a Palestinian state … In the space of a few weeks something has shifted. The Leader of the Labor Party, Isaac Herzog has been ushered from unelectable nerd to plausible patriot. Polls show him neck and neck with the incumbent [Benjamin Netanyahu].  For link to this article see below.  John Menadue

     

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/opinion/sunday/roger-cohen-what-will-israel-become.html?emc=edit_th_20141221&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=69612024&_r=0

  • Jesus and the modern man.

    James Carroll has been writing about religion for over 40 years. In this beautiful piece in the International New York Times of November 7 this year,  he describes how he still keeps going to Mass despite his many doubts. See link below.  John Menadue.

  • Pope Francis sharply criticises Vatican bureaucracy.

    In his pre-Christmas address to Cardinals, Pope Francis referred to a Curia that is outdated, sclerotic or indifferent to others. He said that the Curia, the administrative pinnacle of the Roman Catholic Church was suffering from fifteen ailments which he wanted cured in the new year. See link below for Pope Francis’ comments to the Curia.  John Menadue.

    http://www.news.va/en/news/francis-a-curia-that-is-outdated-sclerotic-or-indi

  • Caroline Coggins, Pausing in Advent.

    I was on retreat recently in Hong Kong and there was a very small pool with eight turtles in it.  It took me some days to notice; you have to slow down to see them. Their water was muddy, there was certainly no vista here, just the close company they kept with each other, and the bonus of the big shell that they could pull their heads in and out of. I liked the turtles, I watched them lean on each other to get up, rest on top of each other, they had that shell, but mostly their heads were out, steady and still, looking at me, as I looked at them, curiously.  They seemed absorbed and present in their small world, except when I jumped up quickly one day, full of some internal noise, and they too fled from their rock, plopping back into the water.  I had disturbed their universe, and they disappeared for cover.  Having our known world disturbed is never easy.

    A retreat is a particular time, seems simple enough, go away from the normal routines, from the usual sense of place and keep the silence to find the inner quiet.  Then let surface what will.  But the bed is too short for my frame, and I am restless, I want to roam the Island. The thought of being cooped up like the turtles is not attractive, although I admire their quality of mind.

    Hong Kong is familiar, as a young woman I lived here in transit, restless and aching for another life.  Now it is many years later and the advent wreath is here with its candle lit, and I come to wait on God, to be like one of those turtles, still. Nice idea, thinking I may have some control in this relationship, thinking these pains may have gone.

    This year when I read the Annunciation what I notice are Mary’s pauses, her response to the angels’ avowal that she is favoured by God. But what she utters is that she is deeply perplexed. Imagine Mary, a young woman, now, suddenly, in God’s presence told she is favoured.   She pauses, perhaps for a moment, perhaps longer, as she goes inside like these turtles, to what she knows, her own world.

    Then she is told she will conceive, she will carry the Christ, the saviour. Again the pause, how can this be? There is no longer Mary and her desire for God, there is Mary and God and their relationship. She pauses, the world must feel very strange to her now, unimaginable, and then in the midst, God’s fingers reach out to her, to touch a ‘yes’ between both of them.

    In these moments when we have no protection, no status or wealth, nothing except what emerges out of us in this pause, we can get a real and sharp feel of ourselves, and it is different to what comes out of us when we feel the world is our domain. Now made vulnerable, at last vulnerable to God, our pretences empty, a hand reaches out to us, unexpectedly, and it is almost too much, scoured as we are, surviving on scraps, a hand that knows us and an unbearable, but so needed warmth, envelopes us.

    We are totally unprepared for this no matter how versed we are. And often in such situations and facing such challenges we can behave like the turtles, scatter and hide.

    These challenges of living on the edge are not ones we usually leap toward: to be aged, disdained, ill, poor and perhaps not even Mary’s experience of being chosen.  Yet this is where we are met, our wounds bathed.  Control is a fear soaked antidote to friendship and love.

    The pauses reveal us, ordinary and wounded, afraid, afraid of love, of being known, of being not much.

    I fear and know that the only way home to my creator is through my story, my life of yes’s and no’s, the hurts that have left me afraid, and the no’s that have made me inflexible.  It is in relationship where the wounds lie, and it is when we wait that we come to know how we have been waited for. The pains and fears that tear me are also where the balm lies.  I am not forced only made ready. Joy is an outcome, but this indwelling love, happens by becoming all that shames and mortifies me and all that I secrete from myself is where God’s hand touches.

    This is God’s time, and the most difficult thing to accept is that God is waiting on me even more than I am waiting on God.  God waits on Mary, waits on us, whatever we are up to, whatever stories and pains we carry, whatever the state of lapse, or homelessness.  That’s what I think Advent is really about.

    What we receive is a pathway to those who suffer, not as benefactors but as the same.  Learning how to love ourselves, others, as we are loved by Him.

    And the turtles, they only have each other in their little pond, and shells to crawl into when they need to turn their heads away, but then they will lean into each other again, help each other to climb to the rock in the sun, and sit there and look, just as they are.

    Christ is born to us all, surprising us in the midst our littleness, pausing, we find the “Yes!” between us.

     

     

  • Is religion the cause of war and violence in the Middle East and elsewhere?

    We are consistently seeing the ghastly side of Islam with public beheadings but we also need to keep in mind the ghastly side of Christianity which was so evidence during the Crusades.

    Many conclude that religion, now and in the past, is the cause of so much violence. Karen  Armstrong has just written ‘Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence’. This book has been reviewed by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian.  He says ‘We know that the slaughter of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the Opium Wars, the First World War, the Armenian Genocide, Stalin’s Great Purge, the Second World War and the Holocaust, had little to do with religion. Indeed, much of us was explicitly anti-religious. So how on earth have we ended up with the idea – still in evidence in, for example, the comments readers leave on news websites – that religion above all is to blame for human violence.’

    See link to this review below:

    http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/08/fields-of-blood-religion-history-violence-karen-armstrong-review

  • Brian Johnstone. How to Respond to Terrorism? 

    How can we make sense of the contemporary situation of increasing violence?   Some groups engage in terrorism against other groups and these engage in torture as a means of defeating the terrorism of the others?  In liberal states torture is condemned as immoral; some seek to prohibit it by law, others defend it as a necessary and effective means to defend freedom.  Historical experience suggests that torture will continue.

    Paul W. Kahn, in Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror and Sovereignty, (Ann Arbor, 2011) argues that secular, liberal philosophy and the theories of rights that it has developed, cannot deal with these issues.  The key is a religious notion that he calls “sovereignty.”  By this Kahn means a notion of ultimate reality.  Both sides of the contemporary war on terrorism appeal to an ultimate reality.  For the jihardist this may take the form of a distorted notion of “god.”  But western, liberal states have their own conceptions of a sacred reality.  We may call this “our freedom.”  To defend this, these states send their young women and men to kill terrorists and to be ready to sacrifice their own lives in the service of the sacred reality.  Once we begin to speak of “sacrifice” we move into the realm of religious experience and religious discourse.

    We can relate Kahn’s analysis to our Australian situation.  If we have any doubts about the importance of the religious dimension in Australian political imagination we need only think of the veneration attached to the sacrifices of Anzac.  In the conflict between the two sides, terrorists and their opponents, as interpreted by Kahn, each side seeks to “degrade” the other and ultimately to prove the other’s “god” is false.  This degradation is what is going on in the macabre beheadings carried out by ISIS; in the logic of such groups it is not enough to kill members of the other group. The killing must be done in such a way as to mock and debase the basic values of the other group.  The same dynamism drives the exhortations to kill as many “unbelievers” as possible.

    It is a requirement of justice to repel the violence of such groups.  But the response of the “West” has gone beyond this.  As example we can cite the degrading practices of torture as revealed in the recent U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture Report.  The twisted arguments invoked to justify these practices are not examples of good reason; they are the utterances of distorted, self-justification, more akin to pseudo-religion. Other nations have been no better.  For example, in 2013 the British government finally agreed to compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s.  Other cases of torture for the protection of the British Empire are coming to light.

    Torture is not the only issue.   According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, CIA drone strikes in Pakistan have killed 416-959 civilians, including 168-204 children and injured 1,133 – 1796.  It is reported that the CIA has now recognized that such “targeted killings” can strengthen extremist groups and be counter-productive.  Killing by drones, it is now recognized, may actually increase support for the insurgents, “. . . if these strikes enhance the insurgent leaders’ lore, if non-combatants are killed in the attacks, if legitimate or semi-legitimate politicians aligned with the insurgents are targeted, or if the government is already seen as overly repressive or violent.”(The Age, December 19th. 2014) We may note the logic of these reservations; they are not based on considerations of morality and virtue. Drone strikes are questioned because they have been found to be a counter-productive use of power.

    It is facile to present the current conflict as between unmitigated evil on one side, and absolute good on the other.   We are told by politicians that, “They hate us for what we are,” as if “they” hated the virtue that “we” represent.  In an interview in Le Monde, 26 November 2001, René Girard explained the social and cultural mechanisms that are involved.  The terrorist groups do not hate the virtue that “we” represent: they envy the power that we have and desire intensely to acquire similar power.

    The contemporary terrorist is in fact caught up in a relationship of mimesis or competitive imitation with the “Great Satan,” as he calls the U.S.A. and its allies. The terrorist desires to have what the opponent has, namely great, overwhelming power.   The more violently “the great Satan” exercises that power the more attractive that becomes to the terrorist and the more violence the terrorist will use in an endeavor to acquire that power. The more “productive” the power of the terrorist, the more he is convinced that his “god” is true.

    We cannot counter terrorism and defend our values by the use of violent power that is contrary to those values.  Torture and targeted killing are not only counter-productive they are a denial of what we claim to stand for.  They are irreconcilable with faith in the ultimate reality or God that we hold to be true.

     

    Brian Johnstone, is a Catholic Priest who taught moral theology in Rome for nearly 20 years. Currently he teaches at the Catholic University in Washington.

     

  • Kerry Murphy. Intra-religious conflict.

    Most violent deaths of Muslims in the world are due to others claiming to be Muslims.  The conflicts in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are all predominantly conflicts within the Islamic community.  This is strongly felt within the communities but not usually reported in the mainstream media.

    This week in Peshawar in north western Pakistan, more than 140 mainly Muslim children are killed by men who claim to follow a version of Islam that requires them to chant ‘God is Great’ whilst they execute unarmed school children.  They claim this is because the military in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has attacked yet another group of people where other civilians are killed.  “We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” said Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani.  “We want them to feel our pain.”

    Attacks on school children are only too common in Pakistan.  Only a short time before, Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousufzai was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and she continues her campaign to support the education of children.  She has her own experience of violence against women seeking education. Her response was not to give up, but to continue her work and support for education to build a better Pakistan.

    Our own Christmas preparations are confronted in Sydney by an angry, disturbed man with a gun.  He has a history of violence, possibly also mental health issues, but he has a gun.   He was claiming a link to a murderous sect committing war crimes in Syria and Iraq and takes hostages in a Sydney café the week before Christmas.  He has been rejected by his own community for abandoning Shia Islam for the extremist Sunni Salafists of ISIS. Three people are killed; two families will have a very sad Christmas.  Christmas is normally a time when gifts are given, families congregate and a birth is celebrated, not usually a time for reflecting on death.

    How do we respond to this violence and death, confronting us in the week before Christmas?  Do we respond with violence and vengeance, as is likely in Pakistan?  Or is there a lesson in the outpouring of support and reflection that can be seen in Martin Place, Sydney.  Possibly thousands have walked along to offer condolences to people they never knew, and leave flowers which are now filling up parts of the usually busy mall.  Australians and visitors from many diverse backgrounds can be seen looking and reflecting on the violent outburst in our busy commercial centre.

    It lead me to reflect more on how we respond to death, and how different communities commemorate their families and friends. Recently my wife and I, not being Muslims, were invited to attend the memorial ceremony for the death of a respected elder in the Hazara community in Sydney.  Hazaras are ethnically and religiously distinctive in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  We did not see anyone in the large group who was not Hazara, and there were many people there.  We attended the Shia Mosque in Sydney and were welcomed by the Hazara community as we paid our respects during the recitation of the Fatihe – the initial verses of the Quran, commonly recited when someone dies.

    Outside, we met up with many Hazara friends, who we first met in detention and are now Australians with their families helping to contribute to our multicultural society.  I saw a man who was my first Hazara client, back in 1998.  We met in Port Hedland detention centre and have maintained irregular contact since then.  We reflected on the recent changes for new Hazara refugees coming to Australia and how their community is at risk in both Afghanistan and Pakistan by those claiming adherence to the Taliban and their Wahhabist supporters simply because they are Shia. Reports of attacks on Hazaras are all too common.

    We can feel the pain of others, even those we never met, but unlike the Taliban or ISIS, we do not need to respond by inflicting more pain in revenge or retaliation.  Destroying is easy. Building up takes a long time and maybe reflecting on creating, not destroying will be a more uplifting mindset for the Christmas and New Year period.  Is it too much to hope that in 2015 more people will work towards building and creating rather than destroying?  We can but hope for without hope what do we have?

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who specialises in refugee law.

     

  • Luigi Palombi. It’s time to fix the free trade bungle on the cost of medicines.

    Ten years on from the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, Australia is entering another round of negotiations towards the new and controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership. In this Free Trade Scorecard series, we review Australian trade policy over the years and where we stand today on the brink of a number of significant new trade deals.

    Negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership present an opportunity to correct a mistake made a decade in the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, which led to Australia paying higher prices for pharmaceuticals.

    In July 2004, Tony Abbott, then health minister in the Howard government, issued this statement:

    The price of pharmaceuticals will not rise as a result of the AUSFTA…

    Contrast this to what the Abbott government’s first budget, in May this year, told Australians:

    Over the past decade the cost of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule (PBS) has increased by 80%.

    To be sure, the “price of pharmaceuticals” is not the same thing as “the cost of the PBS”. But since the PBS is responsible for providing medicines to the vast majority of Australians, it is reasonable to infer that a contributing factor has been a rise in the price of pharmaceuticals. It is also reasonable to infer that the AUSFTA is partially to blame for that rise.

    The legislative instrument through which the AUSFTA was implemented is the US Free Trade Agreement Act 2004. The Therapeutics Goods Act 1984 was also amended to require companies seeking marketing approval for a pharmaceutical to provide a patent certificate as part of the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s (TGA) regulatory assessment process.

    The patent certificate must say if the sponsored medicine will “infringe a valid claim of a patent that has been granted in relation to the therapeutic good (being the patented medicine)” in question. It must also notify the patent holder.

    Otherwise known as “patent linkage”, the application for regulatory approval creates a link between a patented medicine and a possible generic substitute.

    The patented medicines are categorised as F1 formulary medicines, which means there is no approved substitute.

    When a generic medicine comes onto the market, these drugs are contained in the F2 formulary. Generic medicines contain the same active ingredient or have the method of production to the patented drug, or they may be similar in terms of its administration, dosage, method of treatment or indication.

    How does ‘patent linkage’ play out in Australia?

    “Patent linkage” provides advance warning to a patent owner, usually the manufacturer of a patented medicine, that a generic medicines’ manufacturer is about to enter the market with a competing and cheaper substitute medicine.

    With the knowledge that a generic medicine will trigger an automatic 16% price drop for the patented medicine – and result in its transfer from the F1 formulary to the F2 formulary – the patent owner applies to the Federal Court of Australia for a preliminary injunction.

    The injunction is normally granted and as a result, the marketing of the generic medicine is delayed by an average of three years.

    This means that the patented medicine stays in the F1 formulary. This affects the pricing of that medicine not only because the price is higher, but also because medicines in the F2 formulary are subject to mandatory price disclosure. This tends to exert downward price pressure on all medicines within the F2 formulary.

    For a generic manufacturer to defeat the injunction, it must mount a challenge to the validity of the allegedly infringed patent. The average cost of patent litigation is about A$5 million and requires a team of specialist patent lawyers, patent attorneys and highly skilled experts.

    In addition to the legal cost, the generic manufacturer is, by effect of the injunction, denied sales revenue for the duration of the injunction – not to mention the opportunity cost it incurs as its workforce diverts attention to the patent litigation.

    Patent linkage refers to the link that regulatory approval creates between a patented medicine and a possible generic substitute.Sarahbean/Shutterstock

    In Australia, legal costs follow the event, meaning that should the generic manufacturer lose, it will also be required to pay a significant percentage of the legal costs incurred by the patent owner in defending its patent.

    So, it is critical that a generic company carefully assess any patent that puts at risk a proposed generic medicine launch. This assessment costs money. And unfortunately, because of differences in patent law around the world, it is impossible for a generic manufacturer to extrapolate the results of a patent challenge in one country to that in another.

    How does it affect medicine prices?

    The longer a medicine remains in the F1 formulary, the higher the cost of that medicine to the PBS. This, combined with the consequences on price once that medicine moves into the F2 formulary, creates a significant incentive for patent owners to stop generic competition.

    Patent owners encircle a valuable patented medicine with a series of “evergreening” patents. These usually apply after the patent (for the active ingredient) has or is about to expire. This can extend patent protection beyond the normal 20 to 25 year period to a period closer to 40 to 50 years.

    Unfortunately, the profit margin for generic manufacturers has fallen significantly due to the price disclosure mechanism, while the cost of patent litigation has risen significantly. Consequently, the capacity of generic manufacturers to assume the risks involved in risky and expensive patent litigation has fallen dramatically.

    In the absence of any serious intervention by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, it is likely that fewer “evergreening” patents will be challenged in the future. This means that more medicines will remain in the F1 formulary and for a longer period and the costs of medicines will rise.

    A consequence of price rises, particularly at a time of economic austerity, is that newer medicines are not being listing on the PBS. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, which decides which drugs will be subsidised through the PBS, for instance, recently rejected the costly drug Sovaldi, despite effectively treating hepatitis C virus infection.

    If the Abbott government wishes to limit the annual cost increase of the PBS to 4%, it is critical that only medicines that are truly innovative and deserving of patent protection remain in the F1 formulary. If room in the PBS is to be made for medicines such as Solvadi, then it is essential for more of the older F1 medicines be moved into the F2 formulary more quickly.

    The cost of the PBS has risen by 80% in the past ten years. It’s likely that without the AUSFTA, the cost of the PBS, and by inference the cost of medicines, would have risen by much less.

    This article draws on research prepared for the 2014 Workshop “Ten Years since the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement: Where to for Australia’s Trade Policy?”, sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW Australia.

    Luigi Palombi is Adjunct Professor at Murdoch University. This article was first published in ‘The Conversation’ on 21 October 2014.

  • Truth, Justice and Healing Council’s challenge of celibacy falls on deaf ears.

    In an article on December 16 in the SMH online, former NSW Premier, Kristina Keneally said that the report of the Truth, Justice and Healing Council offered Catholics a wake-up call. She said that many in the Vatican are still asleep. She added ‘I can’t decide whether to scream or cry when I hear a bishop or cardinal deny that the Catholic Church has a particular and serious problem with child sexual abuse by pointing out that such abuse happens outside the church as well.’

    For the text of Kristina Keneally’s article, see link below.  John Menadue

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/truth-justice-and-healing-councils-challenge-of-celibacy-falls-on-deaf-ears-20141215-1276nv.html

  • Tony Doherty. Remaining balanced in times of tragedy and turmoil.

    Our ability to hang on to sanity and some sense of equilibrium this week has been sorely tested. In the face of scarcely imaginable acts of violence – right in the city’s heart, Martin Place, the balance of our emotional lives could be endangered. The press sifts through the many and various reactions – casual bystanders, politicians, radio commentators, the police. Everyone feels impelled to respond in their own way. A young woman on a suburban train declares her solidarity with Muslims (#illridewithyou) too scared to ride on public transport. Her twitter message goes viral.

    Recently when thinking about our personal responses to recent tragic events, such as the death of Philip Hughes. Martin Place, the Pakistan massacre, I came across a distinction which I found interesting and not a little helpful for a priest frequently called to face sudden tragedy. The distinction described three very different ways to sense another person’s feelings. Three kinds of empathy.  (Daniel Goleman. Dgadmin)

    The first is ‘cognitive empathy’ – imagining how another person feels and what they may be feeling. Trying to conjure up what it would be like going through a 17-hour hostage situation, held captive by a deranged man with a gun. Placing yourself in their shoes, in your mind, at least.  This is a fairly intellectual exercise of fellow-feeling. Crisis professionals, when faced with day-by-day trauma, sometimes, but not always, protect their balance in this way. They form a protective shell around their emotions simply to allow them to operate effectively.

    Then there is ‘emotional empathy’ – when you feel deeply along with the other person, as though such emotions were contagious. This form of empathy leaves a feeling of being drawn into another person’s inner emotional world, as a parent is in touch with their own child. One downside of such emotional empathy occurs when a person lacks the ability to manage their own emotional distress limiting the proper care that can be offered to the one suffering. It becomes a tightrope between appropriate detachment and excessively emotional involvement or, on the contrary, turning your back and searching for some form of mindless distraction.

    But there is another level of empathy – ‘compassionate empathy’, when we not only understand another’s predicament and feel with them, but are spontaneously moved to help, if needed. Simply speaking to do something. Genuine compassionate empathy occurs when one doesn’t allow emotional empathy to overwhelm and paralyse, but frees a person up to act and do something.

    The most homely example is what we face when someone dies.  We recognize quiet rationally the grief experienced by the death and loss. We can be drawn into that grief in a very personal way. But we can act to support the grieving person – say by bringing a casserole. The gift of food is traditionally a powerful expression of compassionate empathy. The Eucharist reminds us food is also a powerful symbol of hope – an anchor for our spirit.

    Finding the appropriate way to act in response to the Martin Place tragedy could be a vital step towards a saner and more balanced life and a more human future for us all.

    Is there any wonder that the simple act of accompanying a young frightened woman on a train struck a universal nerve?

     Tony Doherty is the Parish Priest at St Mary Magdalene’s Church, Rose Bay.  

  • Hazel Moir and Deborah Gleeson. Evergreening and how big pharma keeps drug prices high.

    Efforts by pharmaceutical companies to extend their patents cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year. In some cases they also mean people are subjected to unnecessary clinical trials.

    Big pharma makes big profits. Their useful new drugs are patented, protecting them from competition and allowing them to charge high prices. When the patent ends, other companies are allowed to supply the previously patented drug. These are known as generics. The prices of generic drugs are much lower than the prices of in-patent drugs – it has been suggested that for widely used drugs price falls can be as much as 95%.

    Pharmaceutical companies want to get their new products listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), because they will sell in much higher volumes. Taxpayers have an interest in ensuring that these drugs move from the high in-patent price to the much lower off-patent price as early as possible.

    On average, a patent provides effective protection from competition for about 14 years. But, of course, companies like monopolies and would like to extend the patent period. Over the past few decades they have used a process known as evergreening to keep generic companies out of the market for longer.

    How evergreening works

    Evergreening is achieved by seeking extra patents on variations of the original drug – new forms of release, new dosages, new combinations or variations, or new forms. Big pharma refers to this as “lifecycle management”. Even if the patent is dubious, the company can earn more from the higher prices than it pays in legal fees to keep the dubious patent alive.

    Evergreening is possible because in Australia the standard required to get a patent is very low. Different methods of delivering drugs (such as extended release, for example) have been known for decades. But when one of these known delivery methods is combined with a known drug, the patent office considers this sufficiently inventive to grant a new 20-year patent. Another favourite evergreening strategy is to patent a slight variation of the drug.

    Brand pharmaceutical companies argue that these “lifecycle management” patents provide improved health outcomes to the community. They meet the (very low) patentability thresholds of novelty and inventiveness. Critics argue that the claimed improved health outcomes are small or non-existent.

    An evergreening story: from Efexor to Efexor-XR to Pristiq

    An example is useful. In the case of the depression drug venlafaxine (marketed as Efexor), the original version had major side-effects. However, when provided in extended release form these side-effects were substantially reduced.

    Naturally the extended release form (Efexor-XR) became preferred. Although it might seem obvious to combine venlafaxine with an extended release form to overcome the side-effect problem, the patent office granted two new patents for extended release versions of venlafaxine.

    One of these was written in such a broad form that it delayed generic entry by two and a half years, while legal wrangling took place. Eventually the evergreening patent was declared invalid. But the cost to taxpayers of this delay is estimated at $209 million.

    Pfizer has a second evergreening strategy for venlafaxine. When venlafaxine is taken, the human body converts it to desvenlafaxine. In other words desvenlafaxine is a variant of the original active pharmaceutical ingredient venlafaxine. Clearly the two compounds are closely related. So it is astonishing that desvenlafaxine passed the tests for getting a patent.

    Desvenlafaxine is marketed as Pristiq. Pristiq entered the market early in the two-and-a-half-year period of legal wrangling over the extended release venlafaxine (Efexor-XR) patent. Pfizer’s marketing of Pristiq in February 2009 was so lavish that it attracted the attention of investigative journalists.

    Pristiq has no additional benefits for patients. Despite this, during the first six months of 2014 half of prescriptions were written for Pristiq rather than for the clinically identical Efexor-XR.

    But Pristiq costs between $A22.32 and $A26.50 more than Efexor-XR, depending on the dose. Based on reported prescription volumes in 2013-14, the cost to the taxpayer of doctors prescribing Pristiq rather than Efexor-XR exceeds $21 million a year.

    Unless generic companies challenge the desvenlafaxine patent, there will be no generic versions of Pristiq until after August 2023, when the patent expires.

    Would you like a placebo with that?

    When such minor variations in drugs are patented and marketed, there are also ethical considerations. Pfizer had to undertake clinical trials to obtain marketing approval for Pristiq. These involved blind comparisons with placebos. Thousands of seriously depressed patients involved in these trials received placebos for no good reason, since the chemical compound was identical with the action of venlafaxine in the body.

    Marketing of Pristiq clearly offers few benefits to the public. It does, however, offer Pfizer the benefit of extracting additional income whenever a doctor prescribes Pristiq. Many patients suffering severe depression were subjected to a placebo in order for Pfizer to undertake the clinical trials needed to obtain marketing approval for Pristiq. There seems to be no system for protecting patients from clinical trials undertaken only to support drugs based on evergreening patents.

    Evergreening entails large-scale economic and social costs for Australians. Reform of our patent laws to prevent evergreening is long overdue. This should be a priority for any government interested in reducing unnecessary costs to the health system.

    But instead, the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement talks expected to take place in Beijing this weekend could reinforce these problems and make reform of the patent system more difficult.

    Hazel Moir is Adjunct Associate Professor, economics of patents, copyright and other “IP” at Australian National University.  Deb orah Gleeson is Lecturer in Public Health at La Trobe University. This article first appeared in ‘The Conversation’ on 6 November 2014.

  • Hazel Moir, How trade agreements are locking in a broken patent system.

    Ten years on from the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, Australia is entering another round of negotiations towards the new and controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership. In this Free Trade Scorecard series, we review Australian trade policy over the years and where we stand today on the brink of a number of significant new trade deals.

    Australia has long had low requirements for obtaining patents. Some of these low standards were “locked in” in the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement. This made reform to the system difficult but not impossible.

    The same cannot be said of the proposals in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement(TPPA). If implemented, they will ensure no future Australian government can improve the patent system without violating the TPPA obligations. They also reinforce the current problems within Australia’s patent system.

    It is so easy to get a patent

    Patents are no longer just for scientists and engineers doing leading-edge research. They are not limited to technology or science. They don’t even have to be inventive – at least in the ordinary meaning of the word.

    Australia’s patent standards are incredibly low. In 2003, we even granted a patent for a method of teaching children about finance by having them work for their pocket money. The “invention” had lots of different parts such as learning about credit cards by getting next week’s pocket money early. This is actually the best way to get a patent in Australia – combine two known things or processes and as long as no one has written them down together, you can get a patent on it. If it has been written down, all that is needed is a third known process!

    The gradual watering down of patent standards over recent decades has led to an explosion in the number of patents being granted in Australia. In 1984 the number awarded was 7,044, in 2013 this had grown to 17,112.

    This has significant implications for pharmaceuticals and it has led to higher costs for consumers and taxpayers. For example, if a known medicinal compound is combined with a known method of release (such as extended release) then an extra patent is granted. A patent for extended release venlafaxine (brand name Efexor®) kept generic competition off the market for two and a half years, costing taxpayers over A$200m.

    The TPPA also reinforces the current flawed approach to granting patents. Hidden in footnote 54 to draft article QQ.E.1, it says patents should be granted when “the claimed invention would have been obvious to a person skilled or having ordinary skill in the art having regard to the prior art”. This means that it is inventive enough for a patent unless it is obvious to an unimaginative person working in a very narrowly circumscribed field.

    However there is a big difference between being inventive and not being obvious – just like there is a big difference between being beautiful and not being ugly.

    What else does the TPPA do to our patent system?

    As well as cementing this extraordinarily low standard for granting patents, the TPPA plans to broaden the extensive privileges already granted to patent owners.

    Existing privileges prevent Australian-based companies from making and exporting a drug to a country where it is out-of-patent if the patent is still valid in Australia. This is silly and costs Australia significant export earnings.

    The TPPA plans to go further by limiting the grounds on which patents can be revoked or cancelled. Pharmaceutical patents will be longer in some countries. Data exclusivity provisions will be wider and stronger, and may reinforce the market exclusivity of some drugs.

    What are the penalties for getting the patent system wrong?

    There are very few for patent owners. If your patent is challenged and revoked, then only the profits made since the legal challenge need to be repaid.

    Yet those who infringe a patent may be fined and may have to exit a particular line of business or develop less efficient means of production.

    The TPPA will make it more difficult to challenge a patent. It proposes a presumption of patent validity (Article QQ.H.2.3), which directly contradicts Australia’s current laws. Many scholars in the United States consider this presumption as one of the worst features of the increasingly broken US patent system.

    Why should we care about the TPPA?

    First, it is undemocratic for one government to tie the hands of all future elected governments. The IP chapter of the TPPA is heavy-handed regulation. It specifies in detail many aspects of patent policy which are currently subject only to parliamentary control. It will make domestic reform hard if not impossible.

    Second, cementing low standards for patent requirements will mean we can do little to control the cost of health care. Australian taxpayers will continue to pay a lot more for pharmaceuticals.

    Third, there is some – albeit tenuous – link between patents and innovation. All court cases on patent infringement involve an innovating company being sued. So only our innovating companies pay for our broken patent system. As only 25% of Australian innovating firms take out patents, it is the other 75% who pay the price of a bad system. Innovation is too important for our future to get it wrong.

    And for what? Just how much extra milk or beef exports will we get in the TPPA? Adopting the TPPA is rather short-sighted when we consider the future economic strength of Australia lies in the knowledge industries.

    This article draws on research prepared for the 2014 Workshop “Ten Years since the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement: Where to for Australia’s Trade Policy?” Sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW Australia

    Hazel Moir is Adjunct Associate Professor, economics of patents, copyright and other “IP” at Australian National University. This article first appeared in ‘The Conversation’ on 20 October 2014.

  • Antony Ting. Australia eyes missing billions with very own ‘Google tax’.

    Joe Hockey has hinted he may introduce a “Google tax” as a new weapon to tackle profit shifting by multinational enterprises. The Treasurer’s suggestion is not only political as a counter to aggressive tax avoidance by multinationals, but also suggests the government may not have full confidence in a successful outcome of the G20/OECD work on base erosion profit shifting (BEPS).

    The suggestion of a “Google tax” in Australia appears to be a coordinated action with the UK. Last week, the UK Treasury announced the introduction of a “Diverted Profits Tax” (commonly dubbed the Google tax). The tax will be imposed on profits artificially shifted from the UK at a rate of 25% from 1 April 2015. The tax is expected to generate more than £1 billion over the next five years.

    Details of the Australian tax are yet to be delivered, but it’s likely to work as follows, using Apple’s tax structure as an example. Apple has successfully sheltered US$44 billion in Ireland for four years, and that amount has never been taxed anywhere in the world. The US$44 billion represents the profits shifted from Apple’s sales in many countries, including Australia.

    If Australia had a Google tax, the ATO would impose 30% tax on a portion of the US$44 billion that represented the profits derived from sales in Australia.

    Will it work?

    The proposal, if properly designed, should be a powerful weapon for two reasons. First, it provides the much-needed legal basis for the ATO to impose tax on profits shifted from Australia to “taxpayer-friendly” countries such as Ireland. At present, even though the ATO is aware of the US$44 billion sitting in Ireland, the existing international tax regime does not empower the ATO to lay its hands on the profits.

    Second, a Google tax would be a unilateral action. Its introduction does not require international consensus and Australia does not have to wait for that to happen before taking action on profit shifting by multinationals.

    The G20 and OECD have been working very hard in an attempt to achieve consensus on measures to address the issues of BEPS. However, one major player may not support the project wholeheartedly. The US has been knowingly facilitating avoidance by its multinationals of foreign income taxes through its own tax system. To make matters worse, its participation in the G20/OECD BEPS Project has been described by a prominent US tax commentator as “a polite pretence of participation with quiet undermining”.

    International consensus is the ideal course of action to comprehensively resolve the issues of BEPS. However, without full support from the US, it is doubtful the project will be able to achieve meaningful measures to curb tax avoidance by multinationals. Therefore, unilateral actions may be the pragmatic response of other countries like Australia to protect their tax bases.

    Not so fast…

    The proposal will face a number of challenges. First, the tax would apply only if a multinational has shifted profits from Australia under a tax avoidance structure. This raises the question: what is a tax avoidance structure?

    Apple’s example is clear-cut. As the US$44 billion has never been taxed anywhere in the world, it will be difficult for Apple to argue it is not engaged in a tax avoidance structure.

    However, what about profits shifted to a country where the tax rate is 10%? This is one of the technical issues policymakers will have to address.

    Second, the ATO will have to find a way to determine the amount of profit shifted from Australia. Going back to the Apple example, how should the ATO estimate how much profit out of the US$44 billion booked in Ireland should be subject to the Google tax? This issue may be difficult and controversial, but should be manageable.

    The third and possibly most formidable obstacle to the introduction of a Google tax is that multinationals are likely to offer significant resistance to its introduction. They can be expected to apply intense political pressure, lobbying against this proposal.

    A common argument by multinationals is that unilateral action by a country will scare businesses away. This may or may not be a concern, depending on the types of businesses of multinationals.

    One important factor that policymakers should remember is that the location of customers is not mobile. Apple can generate A$600 sales income only if it sells an iPad to a customer in Australia. It is highly unlikely, and does not make any commercial sense, that Apple would give up the Australian market because it does not want to pay 30% tax on sales profits.

    Antony Ting is Senior Lecturer of Taxation Law at university of Sydney. This article was first published in ‘The Conversation’ on 9 December 2014.

  • Helena Britt. General Practice and value for money.

    Last year taxpayers spent A$6.3 billion on GP services through Medicare, about 6% of the total government health expenditure. This was a 50% increase (A$2.1 billion) in today’s dollars over the past decade and equates to about A$60 more per person in real terms.

    Health Minister Peter Dutton says this growth is “unsustainable”. He plans to introduce a GP co-payment in hope of reducing the number of times Australians visit a GP and to ensure users foot some of the bill.

    But targeting primary care for cost savings could backfire. Research we’re releasing todayshows that while the number of GP visits has increased, the services are cost-effective. If the same services were performed in other areas of the health system, they would cost considerably more.

    Under pressure

    Unsustainable or not, Australia’s health-care system faces a number of challenges, most notably from the rising prevalence of chronic conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. This is due to three major factors.

    1. Australia has an ageing population as our world-class health system keeps us alive longer.
    2. In response to government encouragement through Medicare initiatives, GPs are diagnosing disease earlier and providing preventive interventions for health risk factors and diseases such as hypertension, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes.
    3. An increasing proportion of Australians are overweight or obese, putting them at risk for chronic conditions.

    Earlier diagnosis means people are living longer with diagnosed disease. The result is exponential growth in required care over their lifetime.

    The search for more cost-effective health care for our population should be applauded. But reducing spending on GP services is not the answer.

    What do we get?

    Our team has been studying general practice activity for over 16 years through the Bettering the Evaluation and Care of Health (BEACH) program. This cross-sectional encounter-based study uses changing random samples of about 1,000 GPs per year, each of whom contribute details of 100 encounters with consenting patients. This provides a representative sample of about 100,000 encounters per year from across the country.

    Results from one of the BEACH books, released today, shed some light on what we got for the $2.1 billion of extra Medicare spending on general practice. In 2013-14 there were 35 million more GP services than ten years earlier, a 36% increase. This included 17 million more attendances by patients aged 65 years and over (a 67% increase).

    Length of GP consultations recorded through BEACH suggest that the average consultation now takes almost one minute more than a decade ago. The result is that GPs spend an extra ten million clinical hours with their patients, a 43% increase.

    The number of problems managed at these consultations has also significantly increased. GPs managed an additional 68 million health problems at these encounters (an increase of 48%), including 24 million more chronic problems.

    Management of these problems involved an additional ten million procedures (a 66% increase) and 12 million clinical treatments, such as counselling, advice and education, than a decade ago.

     

    Clearly, increases in the amount and complexity of GP clinical work are reflected in additional Medicare expenditure. If other medical specialists and/or emergency departments had provided these extra services, they would have cost far more.

    The average cost of a GP visit was A$47 from Medicare, plus a A$5 patient contribution. For a private specialist, the average visit costs Medicare A$82 plus a A$38 patient fee.

    A visit to the emergency department, which is paid by state and territory governments, costs far more. In Western Australia, for example, an emergency department visit in 2011-12 cost A$599 on average.

    More, not less primary care

    International research has repeatedly concluded that investment in primary care is the most cost-effective way to provide population health care. As GP services are far cheaper than other types of medical services, discouraging GP visits by introducing a standard co-payment for most patients would increase costs to governments, now and later.

    It may seem counter-intuitive, but one effective way to contain the cost of Australia’s health care would be to expand the use of GP services.

    One issue not acknowledged in the discussion about health costs is the increasing number of patients with multiple chronic conditions. These patients use more resources and are more likely to have fragmented care due to the number of health professionals involved. GPs play the central role in co-ordinating the management of patients with multiple chronic conditions, reducing costly hospitalisations.

    As the age of government-supported retirement increases, many Australians will have to work until they are 70. This highlights the importance of promoting good health across the lifespan, through a strong focus on primary and secondary prevention and co-ordinated management of chronic conditions.

    In any one year 85% of us visit a GP, but only about 15% of us are admitted to hospital, where a far greater proportion of health funds is spent. GPs supply the bulk of care to the population, so general practice is where our investment should be.

    If we want to strengthen our health-care system and ensure its sustainability into the future, it makes sense to encourage people to use its cheapest and most efficient arm: general practice.

     In addition to Helena Britt, other contributors to this article were:  Christopher Harrison, Clare Bayram, Graeme Miller, Joan Henderson and Julie Gordon. The Article first appeared in ‘The Conversation’ on 11 November 2014.

     

     

  • Walter Hamilton. Japanese election.

    Four more years of…

    Oh, by the way, Japan is having a national election on Sunday. Has anyone told the Japanese?

    Some are calling it the “Seinfeld election”––the election about nothing. Which probably suits Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who called it two years early, with no apparent justification. Others have cynically observed that some in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) reckon a disillusioned electorate is easier to govern.

    After 10 December, when Japan’s new Designated Secrets Law came into effect––locking up “sensitive” information for 60 years and threatening to lock up any leaking public servant for 10 years (and 5 years for any journalist who encourages a leak)––“disillusioned” took a giant backward step towards “uninformed”.

    Just for good measure, the LDP sent out letters to the country’s main media organisations, as the campaign got underway, demanding “fair” election coverage––by which it meant they should not give emphasis to any one person or any one issue. Yes, this was always meant to be an election about nothing.

    So is there nothing about which Japanese should be anxious, should be demanding answers? What about the fact that after two years of “Abenomics”, that wonder cure, the economy is now in recession? What about the moves to bring nuclear power reactors back on-line, when 70 percent of the population opposes the use of nuclear energy? What about the further planned increase in the defence budget, the third year in a row, at a time of massive budget deficits? What about the failure of the leadership to make significant progress in repairing Japan’s dire relations with China and South Korea? What about the corrosive effects of the widespread apathy eating up the Japanese electorate?

    Take one issue: nuclear power. A large stab of Japan, around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi power plants, remains  uninhabitable because of the disaster nearly four years ago. Mothers across the land have to worry daily about sourcing food for their children, which they hope will not be contaminated. The enormous costs of the radiation clean up silently mount up for future generations to pay; and the piles of contaminated soil and rubbish fester away in a thousand forgotten corners. And yet, in 60 speeches during this election campaign, Prime Minister Abe has not once directly mentioned––nor been required to mention––the nuclear issue.

    The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (the ruling party when the Fukushima disaster occurred) has likewise passed over the issue because it relies on support from unions whose membership embraces the electric power industry.

    Many commentators believe that Shinzo Abe called the election now because conditions in Japan are likely to get worse next year. According to the latest data, real wages in the September quarter fell by 3% compared with a year ago. The gross domestic product (GDP) has contracted in the past two quarters––despite the biggest monetary and fiscal stimulus ever.

    So, how is the ruling party likely to fare in this unpromising climate? If opinion polls can be trusted, the LDP and its coalition partner, the New Komeito, will actually increase their hold on power by winning more than two-thirds of the lower house seats in the Diet. Come again? Yes, on the back of a depressingly low voter turnout, Mr Abe will convert the policy vacuum into a fresh, unassailable mandate.

    How will he use this mandate? On past performance, he will demand even greater loyalty and co-operation from his party and from Japan’s mass media; he will intimidate opponents, now armed with tough new laws, such as the Secrecy Act; he will press on with an economic program that so far has produced, even by the most generous measures, meagre results.

    The Prime Minister says he needed to call a fresh election to get the public’s approval for his economic policies, specifically a decision to postpone the next scheduled consumption tax increase. This always sounded like a lame excuse.

    Mr Abe has spoken often about the need for broad-ranging reform, including lowering the corporate tax rate, opening up the labour market to foreign workers, expanding childcare to encourage more women into the workforce and liberalizing the agricultural sector. Holding an election puts back any reform program by at least 6-12 months. He could have acted to address all these issues head on, without an election, and yet he dithered. Most Japanese still don’t know why they are going to the polls on Sunday. Half of them won’t even bother.

    The opposition parties, taken by surprise, have made no headway during the campaign. The DPJ may increase its number of seats to around 70 in the 475-seat chamber, but that will still be less than a quarter of what the LDP expects to win. Several other opposition parties––that are mainly creaky vehicles for the unfulfilled ambitions of washed-up ex-LDP politicians––will probably lose ground. On the other hand, in this strange scenario, the Japan Communist Party is expected to double its representation, off a small base, by virtue of standing for something when all else seems mere opportunism. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC for eleven years.

  • The Wit of Whitlam – a great read.

    • ISBN: (Paperback)9780522868081
    • ISBN: (E-Book)9780522868098
    • PUBLISHED:03/Dec/2014
    • IMPRINT:Melbourne University Press
    • SUBJECT:Biography: general

    The Wit of Whitlam

    James Carleton

    Self-proclaimed international treasure Gough Whitlam never shied away from a pun, a put-down or a witticism.

    His wife Margaret was his ‘best appointment’, he called Malcolm Fraser ‘Kerr’s cur’ after the Dismissal and when Sir Winton Turnbull called out in parliament ‘I am a country member’, Gough interjected ‘I remember’.
    When it was suggested he was funny, Gough responded: ‘Funny! Funny? Witty, yes. Epigrammatic perhaps, but not funny. You make me sound like a clown.’
    James Carleton, Radio National presenter and founder of the university club ‘The Dewy-Eyed Whitlamites’, presents a keepsake of Goughisms that vindicates the Great Man’s self-assessment, ‘I never said I was immortal, merely eternal.’

    About the author

    James Carleton is a reporter and alternate presenter of Radio National’s Breakfast program. Specialising in national and international politics, especially the Middle East, he has reported for 7.30 and written for the Sydney Morning Herald.
    James is well experienced with conflict situations as the father of three young boys.
    In 1990 he founded the Sydney University club ‘The Dewy-Eyed Whitlamites’.

    – See more at: https://www.mup.com.au/items/154221

  • Graham Freudenberg. Gough being Gough.

    LAUNCH OF JAMES CARLETON’S ‘THE WIT OF WHITLAM’,BELLEVUE HOTEL, PADDINGTON, NSW, 8 DECEMBER 2014

    As Henry Kissinger discovered to his chagrin in Beijing in 1971, Gough made a habit of getting there first.  The Bellevue is no exception.  Most of us here probably associate the Bellevue with its glory days when Suzie Carleton was, as Gough always described her, its chatelaine.  And Gough and Margaret were very much part of that scene.

    But Gough and the Bellevue go back to 1951, before he even entered the Parliament.  That’s when, as junior to Bill Dovey, Margaret’s father, counsel assisting the Liquor Royal Commission, he exposed the Bellevue, along with the Captain Cook and the Edinburgh Castle, as one of the notorious sly-grog pubs of Sydney.

    You can’t get more ‘0ld Sydney’ than that – and Gough and the Bellevue were in the thick of it.

    It’s a reminder, too, that there was an Eastern Suburbs Whitlam before there was a Western Suburbs Whitlam, well before Werriwa.  And long after.

    He was appointed Minute Secretary of the Darlinghurst Branch of the ALP the very night he walked in to join the Party in 1945 – two days after he was demobbed from the Air Force.

    He was pre-selected for the Fitzroy ward in the Sydney City Council in 1947, but the Council was sacked before the election.  Later as you know, when he moved south and west, he failed in bids for the State seat of Cronulla and for the Sutherland Shire Council.  As he used to say:

    I might have been Lord Mayor of Sydney, Premier of NSW or even President of the Sutherland Shire.  But, alas, the fates were against me.

    The Fates brought him back to the Eastern Suburbs with a bang in 1975.  It was more or less a fluke that Gough and Margaret had bought their unit at Darling Point just before the Dismissal.  And Margaret immediately moved out of Kirribilli and into the flat the very next day.  They had never envisaged it as their home address for the next four decades.  But it became his Sydney headquarters for the campaign.

    It’s in Marathon Avenue.  So as not to alarm the bourgeoisie among the new neighbours, he didn’t put ‘E G Whitlam’ on the residents’ board in the lobby.  He identified the new tenants as ‘Miltiades’ – the victorious Greek general over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.    So began Gough’s second incarnation as Eastern Suburbs Man.

    This, of course, is the Gough that a bright-eyed curly-headed kid named James Carleton came to know – eyes wide open, ears wide open, taking it all in.

    But the special thing about young James is not only what he witnessed at first hand.  He was soaking up all the stories from some of the master story-tellers of the times – Mick and Eric and Ed and Brian, just to begin with.  It’s not adequate to say that they are keepers of the flame.  They lit it.  And indeed, they are part of the flame.

    So, as Gough might have said, James was destined to write this book whenever it was published.

    As shown by his ability to meet Louise’s deadlines.  A remarkable feat.  His big problem was that the stories just kept on coming.  From 21 October, right up to the Town Hall Memorial, and after.  In fact, it was the only wake I’ve ever been to where the only subject of conversation actually was the deceased.

    The reason is that everybody who ever met him has a Gough story.  They remember them and want to tell them. So the stream is endless.

    One reason why they remember them is that Gough had the great comedic gift of the totally unexpected.  Tony Burke, on telling Gough his new daughter was named Helena, couldn’t possibly have expected a monologue on the history of the name, from Helen of Troy to Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, who discovered the True Cross in Jerusalem

    –              Gough, I didn’t know that

    –              Tony, if you talk to me for even a short time, you’ll always learn                                           something.

    The Labor candidate at Alice Springs could hardly have expected to be introduced to the Renaissance School …

    –              Comrade, I am to poster-sticking what Giotto was to the circle.

    Another characteristic that comes through all the stories is his disdain for platitudes and clichés – something of a handicap for a politician.  So his standing instruction in the drafting of speeches was, as Queen Gertrude said to Polonius, ‘More matter with less art”.  Or, as I would put it, ‘more facts, less bullshit’.

    Gough himself put it in another way.  About 1974, we were discussing our respective writing styles.

    –              ‘Your trouble, comrade, is that you are too dithyrambic.  Mine is that I’m                          too inspissated .’

    Well, who can argue with that?

    [Dithyrambic – a passionate choral hymn, in honour of Dionysus, wild, bacchanalian;]

    [Inspissated – dry, densely detailed.]

    He did have the grace to say that we complemented each other.

    There were other occasions we discussed speech-writing – at the opening of the Sydney Entertainment Centre on 1 May 1983, not long after the return of the Hawke Government.  At this stage, I was working with both Bob Hawke and Neville Wran.

    –              How are you coping, comrade, doing what Our Lord says is impossible?                           (Man cannot serve two masters).

    [Reading from Canberra Times 25 March 1990] –

    “There was one VIP whose absence from the official opening at the Australian National Gallery on Friday night of ‘Civilisation: Ancient Treasures from the British Museum’, created a minor sensation.  The Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, was otherwise committed, so in his place stood the chairman of the ANG Council, Gough Whitlam, who read the following note from Mr Hawke:

    ‘My present preoccupation with the preservation of Australian civilisation prevents my joining you tonight…. Well, then, in the circumstances we’ve had to draw on an ancient treasure from the Australian National Gallery!”

    He acknowledged the brilliance of Mr Hawke’s message, and displayed his own considerable insight into the nature of political expediency by quipping: “Quite frankly, I couldn’t have done it better if I’d written it myself …. and I suspect it was written by the same person who would have written it for me!’ “

    Conclusion

    One of the pieces I wrote as valedictory I entitled “A Very Public Life’.  By this I meant, among other things, that there was a great unity – a one-ness – between the public and private Gough.  As he said of the Whitlam Government itself, ‘What you saw is what you got’ – and that really goes for the public figure and the private man.

    It wasn’t quite as Queen Victoria said of Gladstone: ‘He addresses me as if I were a public meeting’.

    But there was never much Gough said or did that was meant to be off-the–record.

    Indeed, the only time he took me to task, in all the hundreds of thousands of words between us, was when I wrote the Arthur Calwell entry for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and said that Gough had made a ‘calculated indiscretion’ in 1965 in telling a New Zealand reporter that Arthur was too old for the leadership.

    But indiscretions abounded, calculated or otherwise, and while those around him may have shuddered at the time, they are now all part of the legend.  And a great many of them are in this book.

    As Gough said: ‘I may be a legend but I am not a myth’.

    And I think that it is a mark of Gough’s true greatness that the legend grows, even as we recall things with love that in anybody else would be regarded as outrageous.

    It goes without saying that Gough would have enjoyed this book.

    It contains one of the keys to understanding Gough Whitlam.  And that is : he enjoyed being Gough immensely.

    And you can see how much enjoyed being himself, not least being the best caricaturist of himself, in every page of this book.

    In this book, we can enjoy Gough being Gough.

  • Max Corden. Australia needs higher taxes, not spending cuts.

    The federal budget balance is expected to deteriorate. The reasons are numerous but, in a lengthy statement, the government sums it up in terms of two key factors. These are: the softer economic outlook; and unresolved issues inherited from the former government.

    The economy is going through a transition. A decline in resources investment will be offset by a recovery in the non-resources sector. It seems the decline in resources investment may be sharper than previously forecast while the recovery in the non-resources sector may be more gradual.

    Thus, with real gross domestic product growing at a slower rate, hence “a softer economic outlook”, revenue from taxation will also be less. The result is a higher budget deficit.

    The previous Labor government can apparently be blamed for many “legacy” items, but one is rather curious. Our central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, has to receive A$8.8 billion to compensate it for losses incurred to its foreign currency reserves during the period when the Australian dollar appreciated.

    The choices faced by the government

    Given the deficit prospect, the government faces three choices:

    (1) Run a bigger deficit, (2) raise taxes, or (3) cut government spending.

    The government has already embraced choice (3) – cut spending. With regard to choice (2), it abolished the carbon tax and the minerals resource rent tax, and thus moved in the wrong direction.

    Perhaps the government will cut public spending further in areas it finds attractive. After cutting funding to the CSIRO, ABC and SBS, the staff of the federal public service, and funds available to the states for health, education and transport, not to speak of the universities, there are surely more possibilities.

    Incidentally, over 20 non-statutory bodies have been abolished or rationalised. The underlying (or even explicit) philosophy is to reduce the size and responsibilities of government. This is in tune with United States conservative attitudes.

    What the government should consider is raising taxes rather than further spending cuts. This is a very serious proposal. Yet, compared with the US approach, it may be more in tune with traditional Australian attitudes, which expect a great deal from governments.

    Why the federal government should raise taxes

    To understand the argument behind the need to raise taxes, it is important to understand what can be described as Howard’s Gift.

    Under the Howard government, beginning around 2003, there was a boom in the form of rising export prices of iron ore and coal. As a result, revenue from corporation tax increased sharply.

    This led the Howard government to cut personal income taxes on no less than five occasions. Also, superannuation concessions were extended. The details can be found in John Edwards’ Beyond the Boom.

    This was John Howard’s gift to the taxpaying middle and upper classes. It was clearly a response – perhaps understandable – to the export boom.

    The trouble was it had the effect of increasing budget deficits in later years when tax revenues declined. In particular, budget deficits in the Labor (Gillard) years were increased by Howard’s Gift. Even now it has an adverse effect on the government’s budget balance.

    However, as the mineral export boom in the Howard years turned out to be temporary, the income tax cuts that were motivated by the boom should also be temporary. In other words, they should now be reversed.

    Personal income tax rates should be increased to where they were before the boom. Usually opposition parties oppose tax increases. Prime Minister Tony Abbott ran a very effective campaign against the carbon tax when in opposition.

    So this proposed tax increase needs to have bipartisan support. If Labor gets into government later, they will be glad to have a decent revenue base for their budgets.

    Reform required for our tax system

    At the same time some other improvements should be made to the income tax system. These ideas all come from the famous Henry Report on the Australian tax system.

    The aim would be to simplify the system and, above all, to remove special concessions and deductions that principally benefit the better-off. These are the favourable concessions that affect the superannuation earnings of people on high incomes.

    All remuneration should be measured as wages. Capital gains tax rate concessions and various concessions available to primary producers should also be removed.

    In addition to increasing income tax rates to their earlier levels, more revenue needs to be obtained from the GST. This tax has to rise if sufficients funds are to be generated for the states’ vital functions.

    There is no doubt the GST is a relatively efficient tax, but it would be more efficient and easier to collect if goods and services of all kinds faced the same GST rate. Exemptions should be avoided and, probably, the rate increased closer to comparable international rates.

    However, the real problem with broadening the GST or raising the rate has to do with equity. This tax is a bigger burden for persons with low incomes than for the well-off. But equity within society is more effectively achieved with a progressive income tax and social security system than through exemptions from the GST. This means that some of the GST revenue gain should be returned to households in the form of increased social security payments and a more progressive personal income tax schedule.

    It is clear that Australia’s entire taxation system needs major improvements. This is clearly shown in the Henry Report, which is a valuable guide for reform.

    No doubt these matters will be discussed in the government’s prospective white paper on taxation. The government needs to raise more revenue while making limited improvements to income tax and the GST. The basic aim, above all, should be to avoid further damaging government spending cuts.

    And what about a recession?

    The government believes there is a “softer economic outlook”, which means we might face a recession. It is impossible to predict at this time whether this will happen. However, if there is any possibility of a recession, then it is not the time to cut government spending nor to raise taxes.

    However, the government does need to implement long-term structural reform of the tax system and expand its revenue base. In the face of a recession, the RBA will need to lower interest rates and stimulate the economy and also depreciate the Australian dollar. Such stimulus would, as a by-product, partly reduce the budget deficit.

  • Tilly Gunning. Children in detention.

    The ‘We’re Better Than This’ campaign was launched on the 26th of November 2014, it’s aim is to end the Australian Government’s indeterminate detention of over 700 refugee children. Lots of influential Australians have come together to support the cause by participating in a choir song, the proceeds will go to charity. To listen to the song and view the video of support, click here. Visit the We’re Better Than This website to discover figures regarding children in detention, and contribute to the organisation, and make a change.
    Tilly Gunning is John Menadue’s 14 year old grand-daughter.

  • Tim Colebatch. The Abbott budget is hard to sell.

    The Abbott government’s problems began long before the 2014–15 budget, but now the budget is at the heart of them. It has failed to win support from the voters, and failed to win support from the Senate.

    Why? I think there are two reasons. The first is that its measures, taken together, fail the test of fairness. That’s well known, and the opinion polls show the public’s reaction.

    The second is not well known, but it may have been grasped intuitively by many Australians, which is why the government’s appeals to national interest have fallen flat. In short, the sum of the government’s actions is not to reduce the budget deficit, but only to rearrange it.

    And now, as treasurer Joe Hockey will tell us on 16 December when he releases the heavily revised Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, or MYEFO, the plunge in mineral prices and the economy’s failure, yet again, to meet budget forecasts mean a return to surplus is now just a distant goal, and we will face big deficits all the way to the next election.

    But even back in May, if you looked at the budget numbers, the net impact of the Abbott government’s policy decisions would have cut the deficit by just $4 billion over its first four years in office. Add in a crucial cost the budget numbers left out, add in the extra spending approved since the budget, and the net impact of the government’s decisions has been to increase the budget deficit – not to reduce it.

    We’ll come back to that. The central issue in the public debate over the budget has been fairness. It is what has sustained the Senate’s opposition to the budget measures – even those that economists, including this one, would see as well-targeted.

    Much of this ground was well covered in an earlier Inside Story essay by the Australian National University’s Peter Whiteford. I will simply plagiarise some of its key points here. If the budget measures were adopted, Whiteford reports:

    • An unemployed twenty-three-year-old would lose $47 a week, or 18 per cent of his or her disposable income. An individual earning $250,000 a year would lose $24 a week, or less than 1 per cent of disposable income. Is that fairness?
    • Unemployed people aged under thirty, who receive less than 1 per cent of budget spending, would suffer almost 10 per cent of budget savings.
    • The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling calculates that the poorest 20 per cent of households, which earn 8 per cent of all household income, would shoulder 16 per cent of the budget cuts. The richest 20 per cent, which earn 40 per cent of all household income, would shoulder just 10 per cent of the cuts.

    If the government really wanted to close the budget deficit, why did it weight its cuts to fall so heavily on lower- and middle-income Australia, and so lightly on its own class of upper-income Australians? Did it not foresee the public reaction?

    If it was serious, why didn’t it come up with a comprehensive deficit-reduction strategy that tackled both sides of the ledger – increasing revenues, since that is where the real problem lies, as well as reducing spending? That would ensure that the pain was minimised by being shared by all, including those best able to pay. That would work to unite us, rather than divide us.

    The only unity Australians have gained from this budget is in opposing the lot – the good along with the bad. This week Essential Research published a new poll that found Australians oppose all six budget measures on its list, mostly overwhelmingly. Only 18 per cent support indexation of petrol tax, 20 per cent support cuts to university funding, 24 per cent support the $7 Medicare co-payment, and so on.

    Back in October, Essential found Australians supported only one measure on a different list of budget savings: sadly, cuts to foreign aid. Only 25 per cent supported the first lot of cuts to the ABC, only 28 per cent agreed with a higher pension age, and only 12 per cent supported the central measure intended to reduce the deficit: taking $80 billion from future school and hospital funding for the states.

    According to the old political wisdom, governments planning reforms should do them all at once, so that no one issue can get the airplay to stop it. That maxim now needs two qualifications: the government must start with strong public credibility and an ability to sell its message.

    This government had neither, and still hasn’t. Since the budget it’s gone quiet on the plan to shift schools and hospitals spending to the states, yet that is the cornerstone of the deficit-reduction strategy. Without it, there will be no deficit reduction. Presumably the government is waiting until after the NSW and Queensland elections, so as not to embarrass its state allies.

    Nor has it campaigned to explain why we should increase the pension age or index fuel taxes. The Australian’s Paul Kelly berates voters for not realising that the budget is in crisis, but the government’s actions suggest it doesn’t itself see it as serious. That much is clear from the detailed numbers in its two budget exercises so far – the 2013–14 MYEFO and the 2014–15 budget.

    The bottom line is this. Had the Abbott government’s spending cuts been implemented, they would have cut budget deficits by $70 billion over four years. Its tax cuts and new spending, meanwhile, would have added $67 billion. Net saving: $3 billion over four years.

    Some budget emergency!

    To put it another way, even in May, the plan was for 96 per cent of all the money saved by the Coalition’s spending cuts simply to be spent in other ways. Only 4 per cent was to be used to reduce the deficit.

    Under Labor’s policies, Treasury estimates, the cumulative deficit for the four years from mid 2013 to mid 2017 would have been $110 billion. Under the Coalition’s policies, it would be $107 billion.

    And that was in May: before the new commitment of troops to Iraq, before the free-trade deals, before the extension of the royal commission into the unions, etc., etc. Even if the Senate passed all the budget measures it has rejected, the new MYEFO will reveal that the net result of the Abbott government’s decisions has been to increase the deficit from what it would have been had Labor’s policies continued on autopilot.

    These are the budget’s own figures. All I’ve done is to add them up – and add the $1.2 billion costs of servicing the increased debt resulting from its tax cuts and new spending.

    Between them, the 2013–14 MYEFO and the May budget handed out $45 billion of new spending over the four years to 2016–17, and $22 billion of tax cuts – all funded by taking on new debt. Three decisions accounted for half of them: scrapping the emissions trading scheme ($13.7 billion), the splurge on new roads ($12.1 billion, without any cost-benefit analysis) and the $8.8 billion grant to the Reserve Bank – a grant the RBA had not asked for, and which appears to have been designed to inflate the 2013–14 deficit and lay the blame on Labor.

    That was not the only fiscal fix. During the Victorian election campaign it emerged that Hockey prepaid the Victorian government $1 billion for the East-West Link in June – so that it could appear as spending in 2013–14 (blamed on Labor) rather than 2014–15 (for which he must answer). Victoria, of course, didn’t spend the money, just banked it. MYEFO 2014–15 will show if there were other fiscal fixes like that one.

    One caveat: in the longer term, if the government’s budget plans were all implemented, they would reduce the deficit significantly. Its strategy has been to load up the deficit in 2013–14, and reduce it in later years. By 2016–17, Treasury estimates, the net impact of the government’s policy changes would lower the budget deficit by $9 billion, including $6.4 billion saved that year alone by cutting social security payments.

    Eventually the budget would get back to surplus, primarily as a result of increased income tax revenue from bracket creep, and the savings from the government’s plan to cut $80 billion from grants to the states for schools and hospitals.

    But the Commonwealth could never win an argument with the states on those cuts; it would be seen as abandoning its responsibilities in two crucial areas of government. It could win only if the states collectively decide they would rather have a bigger GST to spend as they choose than have the Commonwealth share the cost of running schools and hospitals. And premiers get to be premiers because they’re good at politics.

    The Abbott government could try to keep fighting the same old issues, but the polls suggest the voters have stopped listening. It still has twenty-one months left before it has to meet its electoral fate. It could turn off the life support for the old budget plan and reboot with a new comprehensive strategy – closing tax loopholes as well as cutting spending – clearly designed to reduce the deficit rather than pay out on political enemies (including students and universities, the ABC, foreign aid and welfare groups, and public transport). It would have to unite the country behind a common purpose, rather than divide it.

    But Tony Abbott by nature is a cultural warrior, not a unifier: that’s just not him. If the Coalition is to adopt a budget strategy to win over the middle ground, its Cabinet reshuffle has to start with him. I can’t see that happening.

    Tim Colebatch is former economics editor of the Age and author of the recent biography, ‘Dick Hamer: the liberal Liberal’.

    This article was first published in Inside Story on 5 December 2014.