Doctor and activist
24/12/2021
23 December 2021
Just in case you missed the 1970s, Dee Madigan has some historic insights into the end of tobacco advertising and the start of social marketing. ABC Radio National 4/12/21http://www.abc.net.au/…/when-the-tobacco-ads…/8993580<
24/12/2021
24 December 2012
I must admit I was surprised and disappointed by the news that Circus Oz was to close. I assumed that the lack of support for the Arts during COVID was the main factor. Circus Oz is one of the great icons of Australian culture- world quality circus gymnastics with a unique Australian irreverence. It will be a great loss. They also gave rise to the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, which was kids doing the same sort of thing, or as they called it, ‘Ordinary Kids doing extraordinary things’.
It was world quality like the Sydney, Melbourne or Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras, but like the Australian Ballet and Bangara Dance, it had a more distinctly Australian flavour.
So it was a shock to read that he artists did not want it shut down, and Management did it without asking them. Can we assume that the Australia Council and Creative Victoria demanded the management changes that were not delivered, or was Circus Oz management merely obdurate in their relations with the staff? The latter seems more likely.
Hopefully Circus Oz can survive, but it is not looking likely. The only other question is whether their ideological stance offended the government. Nothing was usually said, but the irreverence had an anti-Establishment flavour that some of us liked, and perhaps some did not?
www.artshub.com.au/news/news/circus-oz-company-members-respond-2521930/?fbclid=IwAR0BzMqHjGbimsukMRzo23yTjDJA6YH8_5VKjZ7Uy_U63z7C3iBnfr0xj8o
24/12/2021
22 December 2021
The huge, systemic and ongoing cop-out approach of the Federal and now the NSW State governments seems to be based on the hubristic belief that governments can set the agenda and influence the media to the extent of creating a perceived reality conducive to their interest. This is often successful, as the news becomes ‘What Mr Morrison did or said today.’
The narrative is changed slightly, so unless you are watching carefully, it always seems OK.
As in Animal Farm, ‘You may not sleep in a bed with sheets’. People did not remember the ‘with sheets’ bit of the slogan, but, hey, you do forget things.
But neoliberalism likes to stress individual responsibility. It allows small government, which advantages bigger players who can move into monopoly positions in an unregulated situation. It allows governments to have the perks and trappings without having to do too much as not much is expected these days.
The Federal public service is actually too small to do much except tell the States what they should do, and even this function is increasingly left to the politicians and their minders, those ambitious political science (or mainly art-law) graduates (with no scientific expertise). Hence the need for the Army when anything actually needs to be done.
But the key aspects of the current policy of getting rid of masks, social distancing restrictions, QR codes, and limits on people numbers in groups is a foolish populism and an assumption that business will do better if commerce returns to normal. This is right out of the IPA playbook. ‘Let ‘er rip and if a few oldies and sickies die off, that is the price of society continuing’.
It also has the advantage that nothing is the government’s fault any more. If the omicron variant gets out of control, that is obviously because it is so infectious and out of the Government’s control. If the population choose not to go out to protect themselves and the businesses go broke, that is not their fault, they opened everything up (and also saved a motza by not having any more pesky jobkeeper or jobseeker payments).
To say that this non-strategy will not work is to understate the situation. We managed to control the situation when there was no vaccine. Now that there is, the governments wants to throw away all public health norms for infectious disease and rely on vaccination alone. This has conspicuously not worked in Europe. Look at the Daily Case histograms (see link below) for Denmark, the UK, France, Spain and Italy. It seems that Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have managed to begin to turn around the latest spike, but I have not researched their latest policy changes. Israel, largely triple-vaxxed is doing better. The US has a rising spike- it will be interesting what happens with their poorly vaccinated population.
But there is no need to look overseas. The Australian graph is already rocketing up with new highs reached every weekday. We are not triple-vaxxed and now there is another vaccine shortage. NSW yesterday was responsible for 3763 of the national total of 5724 (66%) and the percentage is rising. So Perrottet is as bad as Morrison. (Figures from covid19data.com.au).
Individuals cannot protect themselves when the virus is everywhere unless they become hermits, and even then they will have trouble getting fed. It needs mass action. It is a public health problem that needs government action. This is so obvious that it is extraordinary that it should even need to be stated. But our governments have reached such a low level of effectiveness that we are in grave danger. The Lucky Country is about to squander its advantages yet again. We can only hope that the National Cabinet meeting is the platform for a national about face.
Please protect yourselves and try to get the governments to see reason.
24/12/2021
24 December 2021
Kerry O’Brien, who was for a long time host of ABC’s 7.30 Report took the opportunity at the Walkley Awards on 29 November to call for Julian Assange to be released. Hear what he said on the link below.
It seems to me that as an Australia, not living in the USA, Julian Assange was in no way subject to their laws, but it seems the US wants to charge him under their laws, then demand that countries with extradition treaties simply hand him over, effectively making their laws world laws. This might be OK for most murders and frauds etc, but for political crimes, it is a different matter.
Another significant fact that is deliberately overlooked is that Assange was not the first to release all the Wikileaks information. He had spent a lot of time with major media journalists and they had their front pages ready to roll. He was advised that if he released the information, he could be solely liable and they would merely be republishing material that was already public. So he delayed his release. The major media called him and demanded that he release the material, but he did not. They could not stop their front pages, so put it out before he did. They may accuse him of bad faith by not taking all the risk himself, but technically in a legal sense, these huge outlets did it before he did. And the US government, rather than target the major media who actually did it before he did, have given them impunity and are targeting Assange only. The lack of support from the major media is perhaps because they could be targeted; presumably that is the US government’s message, ‘See what happens to him- you would not like it to happen to you’.
Our government has no commitment to freedom of the press, and simply manipulates the media as much as it can, that is no news to anyone. Assange must be freed. We can only hope that Labor gets the courage to do something if they are elected. Don’t hold your breath.
www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-28/kerry-obrien-press-freedom-walkley-awards-julian-assange/11748198
12/11/2021
11 November 2021
Sean Kelly, the SMH journalist has written a book on Scott Morrison, ‘The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison’.
As an example he analyses Morrison’s first (maiden) speech. These speeches are always studied as they are when a new politician states their values and objectives, hopefully unsullied by the political pressures that will come later.
Morrison is from the Kurnell electorate, where Cook first landed. His first speech was the day after Prime Minister Rudd had apologised to the Aboriginals. Though Morrison says ‘sorry’ to the Aboriginals, he then makes it a regret that Aboriginal children are currently disadvantaged, and says that invasions were the colonial mistake was made by every powerful nation at that time. So effectively, the word ‘sorry’ is cheapened and the apology not worth much. As Kelly points out, the first impression is that it is an apology, but later everyone can find something to agree with. All powerful countries did it, so we are not guilty, and we have much to be proud of etc. The words are crafted to appear to mean something, but overall there is no policy and ambiguous meaning.
The question now is whether the crafted releases which dominate the news will overcome the silent record of Morrison’s Prime Ministership; stoking fear of Labor, pork-barrelling and not doing much that is useful or permanent.
www.smh.com.au/culture/books/on-policy-there-s-less-to-morrison-s-words-than-meets-the-eye-20211026-p593b3.html
12/11/2021
11 November 2021
The Health system has a major divide that is not often spoken about- the divide between mental health and physical health.
Physical health tries to be a science and likes to think that its diagnoses and treatments are based on sound experimental evidence. If someone is sick and there are not enough facilities there is a fair effort from the medical profession and relatives to get more resources and they are mostly successful. There is a highly respected system and career structure.
Mental health has similar endeavours, but has less of a scientific base for its diagnoses and treatments. There has been a lot of work on neurotransmitters associated with depression and drugs that supposedly increase the good ones, but no single test is associated with a diagnosis, and diseases are defined. It gives it a lingering stigma of imprecision.
The workforces in mental and physical health have relatively little crossover, even isolated within the same hospital. When I last worked in the health system 9 years ago in a hospital that had both an active ED and a mental health facility, patients were triaged as physical or mental, different teams saw them, and neither team wanted much to do with the other stream’s patients. There was a shared waiting room, but different personnel, assessment areas, practices and wards. Getting one of the other team to assess someone was an afterthought, or only when the pathology was fairly gross.
When I was in tobacco control, there was a lot of reluctance to try to get mental health patients to stop smoking as ‘they needed it’, which was another way of saying that to add the nicotine withdrawal to their generally stressed situation was merely making trouble. But the public health statisticians said that people with mental health problems had a lot of physical problems and died about 14 years earlier (AIHW). So glossing over the physical health of mental health patients is not without consequence.
It was interesting to note recently that a COVID-19 infection in a mental health inpatient went undiagnosed for 4 days, and drew attention to the fact that mental health patients had a poor vaccination rate also.
www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/hospital-patient-s-covid-19-infection-undetected-for-four-days-20211105-p596aw.html
11/11/2021
11 November 2021
iCare, the State workers’ compensation insurer has admitted that it has underpaid thousands of workers and will now repay them, according to an article in today’s SMH.
This story has been leaking out in the media for ages. At a day to day level, my patients have always complained that they get a lot less in compo than they got before their injury. This has been even for workers on regular salaries. Those on casual work were in a worse situation as there was some argument about what their PIAWE (Pre-Injury Average Weekly Earnings) were, especially if they got variable hours from a labour-hire company.
When this scandal first broke, I tried to tell my patients to ask iCare if they had been underpaid and some did. It seemed that iCare could not work out what their PIAWEs were. It did not have the data. In that employers’ future premiums related to how much was paid out in claims, it suited both the employers and the insurers to minimise their PIAWE, so if a low amount was put in, there was little incentive to check it up. Now, a few years later, iCare would need a forensic accountant going through the employer’s books to get to the correct amount. This is unlikely to happen.
So while this promise is a start, it is hard to believe that it will be enough to see justice done.
Workers’ Compensation has always been seen as a cost for business rather than a moral obligation to pay for people injured at work. Generally it is about minimising the cost of the payout, rather than having an energetic injury prevention programme.
The Minister in charge is the Treasurer, so all of this happened on Dominic Perrottet’s watch. Matt Kean, the new Treasurer may be more sympathetic, and this will help, but we still need a lot better enforcement of safety to prevent accidents, and much more power to injured people to ensure that they are correctly paid.
It illustrates that active Unions are necessary to redress the power imbalances in the the system. Legislation without enforcement is just words on a page, just as apologies from banks and insurance companies for rip-offs are just sound vibrations in the air.
Here is the article:
‘My sincere apology’: iCare will pay back $38 million to 53,000 injured workers
Lucy Cormack SMH November 11, 2021
State insurer iCare will pay $38 million to 53,000 largely underpaid injured workers affected by historic miscalculation errors between 2012 and 2019.
An iCare review of 16,000 injured worker case files has revealed an average error rate of 3.5 per cent or an underpayment of $26 a week due to miscalculated pre-injury average weekly earnings.
“I would like to offer my sincere apology to any injured worker who has been affected by this calculation error,” said ICare chief executive Richard Harding.
Among the most seriously injured and affected are 523 workers underpaid a total of more than $3.9 million, or around $7500 each.
The mass pay-out follows a joint investigation by The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and ABC’s Four Corners which last year revealed iCare had underpaid as many as 52,000 injured workers by up to $80 million in compensation.
ICare then disputed the underpayment figures, saying it believed only 5000 to 10,000 workers had been underpaid up to $10 million in total.
Chief executive officer Richard Harding on Thursday said affected employers and employees had been unable to provide the data to accurately assess underpayments. As a result, iCare conducted a “file by file review” of 16,000 cases as a sample to assess the scale of the errors.
“We’ve been advised there is a risk of overcompensation in this approach, but the desire is to get money back as quickly as possible,” Mr Harding said.
“I would like to offer my sincere apology to any injured worker who has been affected by this calculation error.”
The underpayments were caused by errors in the calculation of pre-injury average weekly earnings for injured workers dating back to 2012, when the insurance scheme was run by WorkCover.
Mr Harding said the average lump sum to be paid to the 53,000 workers will be around $700. However, some will receive thousands.
Affected workers will receive any money owed through an adjustment of their weekly benefits for the weeks already paid. Any historical overpayments caused by the same miscalculation error will not be recouped by iCare.
Revelations of financial mismanagement and widespread underpayment across the iCare stable first emerged last year, before a subsequent review into its culture and governance revealed systemic weaknesses and a failure to hold management to account.
Labor treasury spokesman Daniel Mooched said the announcement repudiated earlier claims that only a small number of people were affected.
“As always with iCare, the devil is in the detail. But today’s announcement is meaningful for the tens of thousands of people iCare underpaid”.
Mr Mookhey said the insurer must guarantee that it will not seek to recover the money from sick and injured workers through benefit cuts or employers through higher premiums.
Upper house Greens MP David Shoebridge said the pay-out to workers followed years of chasing by unions, injured workers and non-government MPs.
While he welcomed the payments, he said there was “no evidence from iCare that this payment goes anywhere near meeting their full obligation to injured workers”.
“We will continue to press iCare for a full accounting so that no injured worker is left short-changed,” he said.
Unions have described the decision to reimburse workers as a significant step but called for greater transparency about the process.
“This is hardly an organisation that can be taken at its word. iCare executives, who are better known for receiving fat bonuses, must detail their methodology,” said Mark Morey, Secretary of Unions NSW.
Last week, a budget estimates hearing heard iCare had reported a $1.4 billion underwriting loss in the past year, with the total accumulated loss of the past three years now exceeding $6 billion.
Treasurer Matt Kean, who is responsible for iCare, told the hearing new legislation following recommendations from another review prompted by the scandal would not be introduced until 2022.
04/11/2021
4 November 2021
Just when you think it could not get any worse- it does. There has been relatively little about Australia’s appearance and presentation at the Glasgow climate summit and the reaction to it; the media being preoccupied with the fact that President Macron of France called Scott Morrison a liar, and chasing abducted Cleo Smith in WA.
Australia has had a SANTOS stall at its exhibition at the Glasgow Climate Summit. Santos is spruiking its carbon capture and storage, subsidised by guess who? You and me as taxpayers, facilitated by Energy Minister Angus Taylor who is charged up with a $2.3 million donation from Santos to the Liberal Party.
Carbon capture is a complete nonsense. Coal is more or less solid carbon. To do some basic chemistry, a mole of carbon weighs 12gm and occupies 5.3 cubic centimetres. When it combines with oxygen it weighs 44gm and becomes CO2, a gas which takes up 22.4 litres which is 22,400 cubic centimetres or 422.6 times the volume of the original carbon at atmospheric pressure. To capture the CO2, and then compress and store it will almost certainly take more energy than was released in burning it. To halve the volume of a gas, you have to double the pressure, which takes 101 Joules of energy per litre per atmosphere. The carbon dioxide is also able to penetrate barriers, such as going through solid concrete, and the sites suggested for the carbon storage are at 31 degrees, when carbon dioxide does not become a solid until minus 78 degrees. So the whole process cannot be economic or sensible, and no ‘technology’ will make it so.
Everything in the above paragraph is high school chemistry, so no great knowledge is required here. Only those venal or wilfully ignorant can dispute this. How the myth of Carbon Capture and Storage can still be peddled is beyond belief, excepting the explanation attributed to Napoleon, ‘In politics, absurdity is no impediment’.
The fact that Australia could have a Santos stall in its display in Glasgow shows the extent to which the Morrison government is willing to make us an international laughing stock for the sake of their $23 million, not to mention the subsidies, the greenhouse effects and the delays caused by this policy.
The other quote that seems apposite is Greta Thunberg’s, ‘Blah, blah, blah’.
www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/03/australia-puts-fossil-fuel-company-front-and-centre-at-cop26?fbclid=IwAR3x1hmLa5dbh7nJ8i_IFx8PyZEAyzSIuIeJVMQOlZfLQfY0-nt9wXE1Wgs
10/10/2021
10 October 2021
The legacy of being turned into financial entities may be very severe. This article looks at their finances.
What will happen to Australia’s intellectual elite, now hopelessly underpaid or unemployed with no stable career path?
How can Australia compete internationally in this scenario?
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/09/australia-universities-neoliberalism-speculation-finance-real-estate-international-students?
08/10/2021
8 October 2021
Trucking giant Toll Holdings tells its drivers to avoid toll roads as they are not worth the time savings. It might be noted that Air Freight to Melbourne is actually taken by trucks, the only thing being sky high is the prices.The toll roads have the price levels befitting a private monopoly of Transurban. They were sold as lessening congestion. They have taken the money and now we have done nothing for our rail network. There was an article in the SMH of 29/9/21 and also this one:
www.truckandbus.net.au/toll-says-no-to-tolls/