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Author: Arthur Chesterfield-Evans

26/02/2025

Vale Marg White

26 February 2025

Marjorie Irene White (just call me Marg) died on 18 December 2024. She was the doyen and major organiser of the Melbourne activists of MOP UP (Movement Opposed to the Promotion of Unhealthy Products) and later BUGA UP (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions). The difference between the two groups was that MOP UP confined itself to legal activities, and BUGA UP did not.

Marg was born in 1930 in Macksville, the only child of Frank and Irene Macrae. Frank was a farmer, who took Marg everywhere he went, so she developed a handy range of practical skills and good self confidence Her mother was a schoolteacher and she helped her mother and acquired a love of teaching.

They moved to Kendal in 1937 and she was somewhat protected from the Depression as her father could grow food and her mother’s teaching job remained. Later Kendal, a town of only 600 people, was where the troop trains stopped on their way to northern Australia and Papua New Guinea. She was a popular youngster as she took treats to the troops. Frank bought a small weekender at Bonny Hills where the family spent holidays. He later retired there.

She was very musical and a good student, topping NSW in geography and going on to Uni in Armidale and then Sydney Uni where she did a BA and Dip Ed and specialised in early childhood education, believing that lessons learned early were the most important. She met her future husband, David Ogilvie White, who had got into medical school at 16, but was more interested in playing chess. She pushed him to do more work and actually pass. They married in 1954 and went to ANU in Canberra where she met Bob Hawke and Hazel, resulting in a lifelong friendship. Consistent with her idea that everyone should reach their full potential she encouraged Hazel to get a degree when Bob was not keen on this. They remained great friends, with Bob and Hazel staying with them in Melbourne. David’s career blossomed and he rose in the academic ranks becoming Professor of Virology and head of Infectious Diseases at Melbourne University.

She became involved with MOP UP (Movement Opposed to the Promotion of Unhealthy Products) and had quite a large corps of medical students who were keen to help. Some of their stunts were very effective. MOP UP made a graveyard with satiric names based on tobacco brands and handed out leaflets outside the Marlboro Australian Tennis. The sponsorship was dropped in 1985. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was met with a group of protesters in black tie outfits playing mock instruments as ‘The Royal Carcinogenic Orchestra.’ They also dropped their Benson and Hedges sponsorship. MOP UP continued street theatre and leafleting while BUGA UP refaced cigarette billboards, and occasionally alcohol or offensively sexist ones. Marg quietly worked as an organiser, but not merely of the activists, keeping in contact with the political and medical establishments, writing letters and encouraging progressive initiatives.

She was happy to contribute directly to the BUGA UP campaign; standing at a tram stop in a houndstooth tweed suit, complete with cape, she would reface the cigarette ad on an arriving tram, then stand back, spray can under her cape looking like the super-respectable middle aged schoolteacher that she was. If you were getting on or off the tram or blinked you would have missed it.

At that time the tobacco industry used ‘shop panels’, cigarette ads about 50x90cm stuck on each side of the doors of convenience stores with two-sided tape. They stuck well enough, but could be prised off easily with either a claw hammer or small jemmy. Marg went out with an activist one night to clean up the shop panels which her companion removed and stacked in the backseat of her car. There were few security guards and no CCTV cameras in the mid 1980s, but they were spotted and hailed. Her companion ran off and she drove away, but the Police had been alerted, so she was chased with Police lights flashing and sirens blaring. She pulled over and the officer who came to car window was flabbergasted to see a respectable grey-haired woman. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘I am just on my way to pick up my daughter from the ballet’ answered Marg calmly. ‘Oh, sorry lady’, said the Policeman. The story goes that he got a hard time back at the station and was told, ‘Yes, that was her; that is the exact description’. Meanwhile Marg hurried home and put the shop panels under the house in case the police returned. They never did.

Marg was a philanthropist and gave money to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Australian Ballet, as well as the Australian Conservation Foundation. She was an environmentalist and fought for causes she believed in, successfully funding an expensive QC to stop a canal development at Laurieton in NSW near the family weekender at Bonny Hills. The success of that case became a template for similar residents’ actions.

She was active in many roles in the Australian Democrats and became President of the Victorian division when they were a significant force in Australian politics. At home, she nursed her husband who had liver failure, probably occupationally acquired.

Her greatest achievement is probably the Victorian Tobacco Act of 1987. The Western Australian government had tried to ban tobacco advertising in 1983, but were beaten by sports associations that complained that they would founder without tobacco money. So the Victorian Tobacco Act sought to increase tobacco tax and use the money to buy out the sponsorships of sports, cultural events and all the other entities that had been bought by tobacco, as well as funding medical research and doing health promotion to take up the empty billboards among other initiatives. It was the first Health Promotion Foundation in the world, and the legislation passed by one vote. Nigel Gray, doyen of the Establishment and head of the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria said that the legislation would never have passed without the public support generated by the activist groups, of which Marg was a critically important member.

She is survived by three daughters and two grandchildren.
Marjorie Irene White (just call me Marg) died on 18 December 2024. She was the doyen and major organiser of the Melbourne activists of MOP UP (Movement Opposed to the Promotion of Unhealthy Products) and later BUGA UP (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions). The difference between the two groups was that MOP UP confined itself to legal activities, and BUGA UP did not.

Marg was born in 1930 in Macksville, the only child of Frank and Irene Macrae. Frank was a farmer, who took Marg everywhere he went, so she developed a handy range of practical skills and good self confidence Her mother was a schoolteacher and she helped her mother and acquired a love of teaching.

They moved to Kendal in 1937 and she was somewhat protected from the Depression as her father could grow food and her mother’s teaching job remained. Later Kendal, a town of only 600 people, was where the troop trains stopped on their way to northern Australia and Papua New Guinea. She was a popular youngster as she took treats to the troops. Frank bought a small weekender at Bonny Hills where the family spent holidays. He later retired there.

She was very musical and a good student, topping NSW in geography and going on to Uni in Armidale and then Sydney Uni where she did a BA and Dip Ed and specialised in early childhood education, believing that lessons learned early were the most important. She met her future husband, David Ogilvie White, who had got into medical school at 16, but was more interested in playing chess. She pushed him to do more work and actually pass. They married in 1954 and went to ANU in Canberra where she met Bob Hawke and Hazel, resulting in a lifelong friendship. Consistent with her idea that everyone should reach their full potential she encouraged Hazel to get a degree when Bob was not keen on this. They remained great friends, with Bob and Hazel staying with them in Melbourne. David’s career blossomed and he rose in the academic ranks becoming Professor of Virology and head of Infectious Diseases at Melbourne University.

She became involved with MOP UP (Movement Opposed to the Promotion of Unhealthy Products) and had quite a large corps of medical students who were keen to help. Some of their stunts were very effective. MOP UP made a graveyard with satiric names based on tobacco brands and handed out leaflets outside the Marlboro Australian Tennis. The sponsorship was dropped in 1985. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was met with a group of protesters in black tie outfits playing mock instruments as ‘The Royal Carcinogenic Orchestra.’ They also dropped their Benson and Hedges sponsorship. MOP UP continued street theatre and leafleting while BUGA UP refaced cigarette billboards, and occasionally alcohol or offensively sexist ones. Marg quietly worked as an organiser, but not merely of the activists, keeping in contact with the political and medical establishments, writing letters and encouraging progressive initiatives.

She was happy to contribute directly to the BUGA UP campaign; standing at a tram stop in a houndstooth tweed suit, complete with cape, she would reface the cigarette ad on an arriving tram, then stand back, spray can under her cape looking like the super-respectable middle aged schoolteacher that she was. If you were getting on or off the tram or blinked you would have missed it.

At that time the tobacco industry used ‘shop panels’, cigarette ads about 50x90cm stuck on each side of the doors of convenience stores with two-sided tape. They stuck well enough, but could be prised off easily with either a claw hammer or small jemmy. Marg went out with an activist one night to clean up the shop panels which her companion removed and stacked in the backseat of her car. There were few security guards and no CCTV cameras in the mid 1980s, but they were spotted and hailed. Her companion ran off and she drove away, but the Police had been alerted, so she was chased with Police lights flashing and sirens blaring. She pulled over and the officer who came to car window was flabbergasted to see a respectable grey-haired woman. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘I am just on my way to pick up my daughter from the ballet’ answered Marg calmly. ‘Oh, sorry lady’, said the Policeman. The story goes that he got a hard time back at the station and was told, ‘Yes, that was her; that is the exact description’. Meanwhile Marg hurried home and put the shop panels under the house in case the police returned. They never did.

Marg was a philanthropist and gave money to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Australian Ballet, as well as the Australian Conservation Foundation. She was an environmentalist and fought for causes she believed in, successfully funding an expensive QC to stop a canal development at Laurieton in NSW near the family weekender at Bonny Hills. The success of that case became a template for similar residents’ actions.

She was active in many roles in the Australian Democrats and became President of the Victorian division when they were a significant force in Australian politics. At home, she nursed her husband who had liver failure, probably occupationally acquired.

Her greatest achievement is probably the Victorian Tobacco Act of 1987. The Western Australian government had tried to ban tobacco advertising in 1983, but were beaten by sports associations that complained that they would founder without tobacco money. So the Victorian Tobacco Act sought to increase tobacco tax and use the money to buy out the sponsorships of sports, cultural events and all the other entities that had been bought by tobacco, as well as funding medical research and doing health promotion to take up the empty billboards among other initiatives. It was the first Health Promotion Foundation in the world, and the legislation passed by one vote. Nigel Gray, doyen of the Establishment and head of the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria said that the legislation would never have passed without the public support generated by the activist groups, of which Marg was a critically important member.

She is survived by three daughters and two grandchildren.

14/02/2025

Vale Brian Robson- an Obituary

14 February 2025

Brian Robson, a significant but understated helper in the fight against tobacco died recently.

Here is my obituary for him.

I met John Brian Robson (known as Brian) at a Non-Smokers Movement of Australia (NSMA) meeting in 1980.

NSMA had been started by Brian McBride in 1976 when he sued a bus driver for deliberately blowing smoke in his face some time after smoking was banned on buses. No one wanted to be a witness in the case, so he delivered the subpoenas to the bus passengers in person, as usually the same people sat in the same seats every day. To his pleasant surprise they turned up as witnesses in Court and the bus driver was convicted of assault and fined $1. A precedent had been set. In those days everyone’s name and address were available in big phone books, so Brian McBride had some abusive phone calls and had set up the Non-Smokers’ Movement of Australia (NSMA) as a support group and to further the cause of smoke-free indoor air. Brian Robson was there before I had joined.

Some of the Non-Smokers movement members were in BUGA UP (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions), which was a smaller group who used to spray satirical messages on billboards (mainly but not exclusively tobacco) to draw attention to the harm the products did. BUGA UP also protested in shopping malls and performed street theatre to draw adverse attention to tobacco promotions. The BUGA UP folk never mentioned their other activities at NSMA meetings, so it took a while to realise that Brian was a ‘member’ of this group. ‘Member’ is perhaps the wrong word for being part of BUGA UP, as legal advice was that since many of their actions were illegal, being a ‘member’ would have made one part of a criminal conspiracy. So no ‘members’; t just had people who were willing to act and came along when contacted. Brian was one of them. He was short in stature and quite shy at a personal level, but a good photographer and extremely good at his work, which was the emerging discipline of computer programming and database management.

He used to come to the NSMA demonstrations, but was rarely in the photographs, mainly because he took them. Some demonstrations were at the airport to try to achieve smoke-free air travel. He had a sign that said ‘Sorry Okker the Fokker is Chokker’, a reference to the Fokker Friendship aircraft. I asked him what it meant and he said, ‘Well it really doesn’t mean anything, but people like it’. He was right, of course, and his sign made the public more likely to see the protest in a positive light. It was typical of him; gentle, kind and understated.

He tended to work behind the scenes collecting and processing the photos and slides of both the NSMA and BUGA UP activities for newsletter or pamphlets or reproducing slides for when BUGA UP ‘members’ were asked to speak at meetings or courses on the issue that they had raised, the effect, responsibility and regulation of advertising. He was something of an archivist, but his main contribution was the development of websites and databases which allowed NSMA to be far more effective than it would have been otherwise. He helped a large number of worthy causes with their databases and websites, usually for free.

As a professional engineer at Telecom Brian rose to the position of Computer Coordination Manager. Arguably, he could have qualified for the epithet ‘computer nerd’ as he knew his professional subject really well, but gave no attention to issues of fashion, wearing clothes long after they had seen their best years. He was promoted on the merit of his knowledge, but admitted Computer Coordination was a hopeless task. Every department in Telecom had been allowed to purchase and develop whatever software it chose, so there were a myriad of incompatible programs. Meetings to resolve this usually involved managers much higher up than Brian trying to convince everyone else that their system was the best and everyone else should change to it. It was desirable to move to a new system for everyone and technology was changing. Telecom set up a group called ‘TIME- (Technical Innovation Management Environment) to see what technology was proven and should be adopted. Brian despaired. He said that by the time something was ‘proved’ it was obsolete. Telecom had to ask its IT experts and buy what they suggested. ‘We won’t be right all the time, but we will mostly and TIME merely guarantees that we will be way behind the times’, (especially as membership of TIME related to one’s position in the hierarchy rather than one’s IT knowledge).

Naturally Brian normally kept his BUGA UP work well separated from his Telecom duties. But Brian had a lot of phone extensions in his little section, so had agreed to host a BUGA UP answering machine. Unsurprisingly, there was a complaint to Telecom about this phone number’s ‘illegal activities’. Telecom vowed to trace the call and take all measures to stop it. Eventually the dedicated sleuths arrived at Brian’s section and he asked them what they were looking for. They told him of their mission to trace where the answering machine was. “Oh” said Brian. “It would be embarrassing for Telecom if it were found on one of our own extensions, wouldn’t it?” The sleuths suddenly realised that their mission had to change its focus. “Why don’t I find the problem and deal with it?’ offered Brian. “Yes, that sounds like the best solution,” the sleuths agreed. Brian took the answering machine home.

BUGA UP was tackling tobacco sponsorship of culture and sport. The Winfield Cup for Rugby League had a bronze statue of a large and a small footballer caked in mud walking off after a grand final. BUGA UP devised the ‘Windfailed Cup’, which had a large doll putting a cigarette into the mouth of a small doll. Brian made and photographed it. It was publicised on the ABC with Roy and HG. Many poster of the cup were made and sold by BUGA UP.

Telecom became Telstra and management decided to downsize. Big payouts were offered as redundancy. The longer you had been there and the more you knew, the more you were paid to leave. Brian qualified for a big payout and got ready to go. Then management decided it was losing all its expertise, so devised a knowledge questionnaire for employees seeking redundancy. If you passed it, you couldn’t leave. Brian reckoned he could do it all, so spent his last few weeks dodging the questionnaire. He left and was immediately re-hired by a private computer firm who had, you guessed it, a contract with Telstra. They were amazed at his knowledge and paid him as much in 2 days as he had been paid in a week and he had totally flexible hours, doing part of what he had done before.

Brian’s working career transitioned over the years from programming on mainframe punched cards to desktop database programming. It was in the late 1980s when Brian created a successful job tracking database system for photographic services at the Australian Museum.

Around this time, Brian, Ric Bolzan and Denise Greig, a plant photographer, formed “Diversity Media” to produce multimedia interactives on CD-ROM. It was one of the first Australian companies to do so, producing Plants of Australia, which was technically and financially successful. Unfortunately the newly emerging “internet” quickly killed off the CD-ROM multimedia market which made Diversity Media unable to capitalise on the investment in Brian’s core programming infrastructure to produce subsequent products.

He also worked for the newly created NSW Heritage Office in the late 1990s where he designed and developed a database for the State Heritage Register. When the database went online, it was one of the first in the world to use the new “internet” technology and it won a NSW Premier Public Sector award for technology. Brian is still fondly remembered by staff of the formative years of at the Heritage Office and much of the data and structure developed by Brian is still in use today.

As a true eccentric in that he had a few unusual interests, he continued to develop databases and websites either for money or for worthy causes such as the Bondi Beach website www.bondibeachvillage.com, which provided both historical and current information on venues and activities. He personally checked out all the coffee shops.

He had particular interest in the abuse of apostrophes. He felt that grammar was completely going to pieces so called himself ‘Apostrophe Man’ and wrote to any supposedly reputable publication that dared to commit an error. It was a losing battle. He had a website www.sharoncolon.com where more egregious mistakes were photographed and documented, and scoured pulp magazines for absurd headlines; a happy hunting ground.

Originally a Grafton boy, he loved country music and went each year to the Tamworth Festival. Sharon Colon branched out into his other interests ‘The Fifties Fair’ and Rockabilly music, documented from 2003-2014 with lots of photos, but only two with him in them in 11 years.

He lived alone with 2 cats, and was found dead in bed at home when he uncharacteristically did not turn up for a lunch date. He will be missed by a number of his groups, locals in Bondi, Country music and 1950 rockabillies, his old Telecom and Heritage office friends, BUGA UP and the non-smokers, those concerned about grammatical errors, some software and database developers and those who respect consistent but respectable eccentricity. He is survived by his brother, David and his wider family.

http://www.sharoncolon.com/country/pics2013/rsh3379.jpg

14/02/2025

A Visit to East Timor- and New Year’s Eve at the Presidential Palace

2 January 2025

I have always been fascinated by the story of East Timor. It was very much a colonial backwater, a historical remnant of the Portuguese, who had first arrived in 1529 and fought with the Dutch until treaties in 1869 and 1893. Up till 1850, it had been under the Portuguese administration in Macau.

Timor was invaded by the Japanese during WW2, and East Timorese fought with the Australian and Dutch against them, running a guerilla campaign. Between 40-70,000 Timorese were killed as the Japanese seized food supplies and burned villages.

After WW2 it remained a Portuguese colonial backwater with minimal education or infrastructure development. In 1960 it gained the right to Independence, but was still under Portugal. Indonesia, under Sukarno, which was trying to get hold of West Papua specifically stated that it had no interest in East Timor. The small Viqueque revolt resulted in some improvements in education and some Timorisation of the civil service.

There was a revolution in Portugal in 1974 and the decolonisation of Mozambique and Angola speeded the decolonisation process, with a new Governor legalising political parties. Two groups emerged, the left-leaning Fretilin and the Right-leaning UDT (Democratic Timor Union), which was more a party of the elite and initially favoured continuing ties with Portugal. Indonesia had just eliminated the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) in a bloody struggle, so were concerned about Fretilin. Whitlam. the Prime Minister in Australia, who supported the Indonesian takeover of West Papua, was concerned that there would be a non-viable state in the region.

Fretilin and the UDT were initially in coalition, but the Indonesian military made it clear the to the UDT that they would not tolerate a Fretilin government and the coalition broke up. On 11 August 1975 UDT mounted a coup, as they were concerned at the increasing popularity of Fretilin and asked for union with Indonesia and the Indonesians to help them.

Indonesia immediately invaded, and five Australian journalists, who were covering the story in Balibo disappeared without trace. It had been claimed that Fretilin were communists so the Australian and US governments took no action, either against Indonesia or in pursuit of the journalists’ fate. They became known as ‘The Balibo Five’. Only the Australian Democrats supported the right of the East Timorese for self-determination, and some sections of the Left of the ALP, who were held to silence, of course.

Fretilin campaigned in the UN for recognition, particularly Jose Ramos Horta and after 24 years in 1999 and in the presence of an economic crisis the Indonesians agreed to a referendum on self-determination. The referendum result, which was widely expected, favoured independence from Indonesia by almost 80%. But gangs of pro-Indonesian youth, helped by the Indonesian government went on a killing spree. It was estimated that 200,000 Timorese had died during the 25 year Indonesian occupation, many ‘disappearing’; and about a third from malnutrition. But immediately after the vote, the militias killed about 1,400 people and forced about 300,000 into West Timor.

The UN intervened quite quickly with UNMET, the UN Mission to East Timor, in which the Australians were first to arrive and helped stabilise the situation.

Once East Timor achieved independence in 2002, they had the problem of economic survival. Australia held negotiations about where the boundary would lie, which was critical because there is a lot of gas in the Timor Sea and it would depend who owned it. Australia bugged the room where the East Timorese cabinet were deliberating and insisted on the border being very close to their coast. A whistleblower revealed this bugging in 2004 and the Timorese appealed successfully to the International Court.

Australia withdrew from the Court process, but then in 2012 agreed to the border being the midline between the countries, which is the international norm. Thw whistleblower, codenamed Witness K and his lawyer Bernard Collaery, the ex-ACT Attorney-General, were pursued by the Australian government in the courts and convicted of breaching national security.

So I have always wanted to visit Timor Leste, and have finally made it for a10 day trip (not really long enough).

It is a 3rd World country, but seems to have a great sense of hope. It is an hour and half flight from Darwin, and about the same from Bali. There is not much information available to tourists, though a Lonely Planet and some other guidebooks are now available.

I have taken advice from a diplomat friend and will be going in a car with a guide, (the expensive rich person’s way to go that I have always despised) so I will not be giving advice on the cheap local buses that go between the major cities and are quite cheap.

Our guide, Guido (short for Egidio Da Purificatcao Soares of Timor Sightseeing) was brought up on a farm in the western part of the country and recalls as a 14 year old his whole family were threatened by gangs immediately after the referendum. The gang asked his father did he want to go to West Timor or stay in East Timor. He says that he father wisely said that the family wanted to go, because if he hadn’t they would have been assumed to be in favour of independence and massacred on the spot. They had had 14 cows and had already sold some, but took a few in a truck as they went to West Timor. He said that at the border the Indonesians threw them out of the truck as if they were sacks of potatoes, searched the truck then threw them back in in the same way. They sold the cows for a pittance and lived in a tent in Indonesia for 3 weeks until the UN had negotiated with the Indonesians and the ‘refugees’ were allowed to return. He said he was pleased to see the Australian forces at the border.

He commented that in the Portugese times there was no electricity except in small parts of Dili and the Portugese generated their own on their properties. The Indonesians had improved infrastructure and electricity and introduced universal education, but anyone who was thought to support Fretilin or independence simply disappeared.

As we were here on New Years Eve, I wondered what to do and assumed that we would watch the fireworks on the beach. Guido suggested we go to the Presidential Palace. I assumed that this was impossible for a tourist. Not so, the Presidential Palace is open to all on New Year’s Eve. So we went. It has a large concreted area about the size of 3 football fields in front of it, with lawns about twice that size again. There was a stage set up and a dozen life size nativity scenes all the way up the wide drive. The military at the gates welcomed us and said that they would be giving out free food and drinks at 9pm. There were quite a lot of people, but it was not crowded early, with a lot of young families and kids with balloons and flashing lights. The state had popular local singers, with replays on some big TV screens like at a football match. There was a wonderful festive atmosphere. I held my phone up and started to take a video pan to try to capture the atmosphere. As I did so a man came close and thrust something into my spare hand. I stopped filming and looked at him. It was the Prime Minister, Xanana Gusmao handing out ham and salad rolls and fruit juice. He had 3 young minders in T shirts merely carrying boxes of rolls and drinks. Naturally I pursued him and asked for a photo, and he very courteously asked me my name and where I came from. The event went on with presentations to people who have obviously done good, and also what seemed like a very long sermon, but of course, apart from the MC breaking into English to welcome foreign visitors, the whole thing was in Portugese. At about 9pm, some military wandered around and urged us to get some of their free food from the trucks near the gates. They obviously have a very good relationship with the populace. The President Jose Ramos Horta arrived with the Cardinal and about 20 ambassadors and made a speech at about 11 followed by one from Xanana Gusmao.

They had a table in the middle of the open area with seats for the dignitaries. At midnight there was the countdown, a lot of fireworks (no, not quite as good as Sydney), and the broke out large amounts of champagne and cut a huge 2025 Fruit cake and gave some to those nearby including us. It was like going back 50 years, where everyone was trusted, there was no security and the largesse was universal.

East Timor is in an interesting time. The population is very young and full of hope. They want to develop tourism and also the Sunshine gas project which is being done by Woodside and the Australians in the Timor Sea. Obviously this will be a financial lifeline, but not good for a warming planet. I asked Guido if we could go to the south of the country where all this is to happen. He said, ‘Yes, but there is nothing to see, it is just coastline at present’. He took some Spanish folk there a short while ago who were doing a feasibility study for a gas platform. So I will see the sights including Balibo and the Museums of the Revolution in Balibo and Dili, which was not open this week. I may revise this post after those visits.

East Timor is currently the least visited country in Asia. This is worth changing.

14/02/2025

Vale Brian Robson

14 February 2025

Brian Robson, a significant but understated helper in the fight against tobacco died recently.

Here is my obituary for him.

I met John Brian Robson (known as Brian) at a Non-Smokers Movement of Australia (NSMA) meeting in 1980.

27/01/2025

NDIS and Health System in Crisis- what is the answer?

27 January 2025

The health system has been in crisis for years and now NDIS is the same.
State and Federal governments are locked in crisis talks, and now the NDIS is over budget and looking to ‘transfer services’ to other parts of the health system.
Why does all this go on, and what is the solution?
The short answer is that there are many sources of health funding and the main policy objective of all of them is to transfer the cost to someone else, and if they are a private source, to maximise the profit.
This ‘transfer costs’ imperative means that no one is concerned about the overall cost, merely their bit of it.
The major players are still the State and Federal government. In simple terms the States look after the hospitals and the Federal government looks after non-hospital services.
Medicare is being starved and pays less and less to doctors relative to inflation. The private health funds pay what they have to, the CTP (Motor Accidents) and Workers comp systems are either private or use a private model and pay as little as they can get away with and the patient pays the gap, unless they decide that private health insurance is not worth the money, which in most cases is true, and get a bit of Medicare and pay the rest.

Examples of cost shifting are easy to find. The Federal government has let Medicare rebates to GP fall to 46% of the AMA fee. It was 85% when Medicare started, so many doctors simply don’t bulk bill and charge a fee. So people go to the Emergency Departments that are free, but funded by the States. A visit to the ED is 6x more expensive than a GP visit, but the Federal government has shifted the cost to the States, so they don’t care. When you go to the ED and get a script, the hospital used to give you all the drug course. Now they give you a few tablets and a script for a pharmacy outside. The script was needless, and generates the costs of the trip to the pharmacy, the pharmacists fee, the PBS Federal government contribution and the patients script fee. A lot of wasted time and money, but the State saved a bit. When you went to the ED, you used to be followed up in a hospital outpatient clinic where the consultant was paid a sessional fee and oversaw registrars checking the cases and learning. You could also just book and go to a specialist clinic. These have largely been stopped to save the State money. Now you go to the specialists’ rooms and the State saves money, but the total cost per visit is much more.

If you look at the overall efficiency of health systems, Medicare as a universal system has overheads of about 5% counting the cost of collecting tax generally. Private health insurance overheads in Australia are about 12%, Workers comp 30% and CTP over 40%. These figures are approximate and very hard to get, because the dogma is that competition drives down prices, when clearly the system is more efficient if there is a single paying entity. Interestingly, the Productivity Commission made no attempt to quantify these overheads when it looked at the cost of the health system- you may ask why. The point is if you take out profits, which are the same as overheads from the patients’ point of view, and make everyone eligible, you do not have to have armies of insurance doctors, investigators, lawyers and tribunals to see if the insurer has to pay or if it can be dumped on Medicare and the patient.
As far as foreign people using the system are concerned, universal Medicare for people living in Australia is administratively simple, and the cost of treating tourists who have accidents is cheaper than policing the whole system. Enforcement has quite high costs.

In terms of the cost of insurance, US schemes vary from 12-35%R, with the high costs ones being most profitable as they police payouts more thoroughly and naturally refuse more treatments. Note that the CEO of Unitedhealthcare in the US was recently shot, with the words ‘deny’ and ‘delay’ on the cartridges used. Surveys have shown that 36% of people in the US have had a claim denied. Claims are accepted here, but in a survey of my patients 60% of my scans and referrals of CTP patients were denied by NRMA. i.e, We accept the claim, but deny the treatment.

What Is needed is a universal system, free at the point of delivery.
What about over-servicing? The current system makes trivial problems of people with money more important than major problems of people without money. Underservicing is the major problem with ambulance ramping at EDs and long waiting lists.
In a universal system, which doctor is doing what is immediately accessible, with comparisons to every other doctor doing similar work. It is just a matter of checking up on the statistical outliers.

The problem is simple. The major political parties are given donations by private health interests to let Medicare die. Combine this with the Federal/State rivalry that makes cooperation very difficult and a reluctance to collect tax and you have the recipe for an ongoing mess.

The NDIS is an even bigger mess. It is a privatised unsupervised welfare system that arbitrarily gives out money and is subject to massive rorting.

The welfare system that looked after people with disabilities, both congenital and acquired by age or circumstance had grown up historically in institutions that were fossilised in their activities and underfunded to prevent expansion or innovation. People with disabled children looked after them with whatever support they could find. As these disabled cohorts reached middle age, their parents, who were old, were worried about what would happen when they died and wanted to lock in funding for their adult children before they died. They were an articulate lobby group with real problems and were quick to point out the flaws in the existing systems. They visited institutions that had no vacancies and thought that they had put their names on waiting lists. But no central list existed, and the institutions tended to give their beds to whoever came first when a death created a vacancy. ‘Just give us a package, and we will decide how to spend it’ was the parents’ cry. But then NDIS experts came in and interviewed people and gave away ‘packages’ based on an interview. A new layer of experts was created. District nurses or others who might have been able to think of more innovative or flexible options, or who could judge who in their area needed more than someone else had no input. People with real disabilities were given money, but did not know how to assess providers, so dodgy operators snapped up the packages, delivering dubious benefits. The government had no serious regulation or control system. Now the cost of NDIS has blown out, so the solution is to narrow eligibility and force people off the NDIS and onto other parts of the health system. Sound familiar? People with disabilities and their relatives are naturally worried; and rightly so. The lack of these services was why the NDIS was created. The answer is to have universal services. Set a standard, make it available and police quality in the system. Private interests may have a place, but there is no need for profits, non-profit organisations have been the mainstay of providers for years. For profit providers tend to cut costs, which in practical terms means either services or wages or both to concentrate on shareholder returns. The best way to allocate resources optimally is to empower the people actually doing the job, who also have the advantage of being able to see relative needs as they go about their routine work.

An interesting tome on the subject is ‘The Political Economy of Health Care’ by Julian Tudor-Hart, which looked at the changes in the British National Health System from when it started as an idealist post-war initiative run by those working in it with management overheads of about 0.5%, to when it was fully bureaucratised with overheads of about 36%. He was also responsible for the ‘’Inverse care law’ which is the principle that the availability of good medical or social care tends to vary inversely with the need of the population served. This inverse care law operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, and less so where such exposure is reduced.

The key point of that people have been taught that governments are hopeless and that you should pay as little tax as possible, so instead of good universal services being developed, a market has developed which is on its way to an American system.. People all agree that the US has the worst system in the developed world at delivering health care. But they overlook the fact that the US health system is the world’s best at turning sickness into money. That is what it was designed to do and that is why it is sustained and maintained. The same drivers are all here.

Note the Federal/State bickering in the article below (and weep).

My recipe for change is to have a Swiss style of government where the people can initiate binding referenda on governments and could simply answer a question like ‘Do you want to pay 5% more tax to have a universal health and welfare system?’ If a question like this got up against the doomsayers, we might have a chance. But of course the change to the constitution to get the referenda in the Swiss model is almost impossible to achieve, the Swiss having been discarded when the Australian Constitution was written in about 1900.

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2025/01/25/exclusive-albanese-shut-down-hospital-talks-pressure-states?utm_campaign=SharedArticle&utm_source=share&utm_medium=link&utm_term=VT5jI6Zo&token=Z3cA3Py

21/12/2024

Vale John Marsden

20 December 2024

We were all saddened to hear of the death of John Marsden. He was certainly the greatest Australian writer of books for adolescents in my lifetime.

I knew him well. He was in my class at boarding school and we were in the debating team together and rivals for the oratory prize. He was a day boy.

He used to wait at the bus stop and talk to the more junior boys there. This was thought of as a bit unusual. No one usually took an interest in kids younger than themselves. Older kids usually went to the library and only appeared just before the bus went. He also did not catch the first available bus, but stayed at the bus stop talking- not many people realised that. It was not until years later that the reason became known to some.

His father hit him frequently and he did not want to go home. Years later he told the story that he had been sitting on his mother’s knee when he was quite young and she had asked him. ‘Do you love me?’ He had replied ‘I don’t know’, and she promptly pushed him off her knees onto the floor. The idea that the question needed to be asked is so odd that the reply becomes less so. There is no doubt that his childhood was very unhappy.

We went out one evening to a debate and came home by train. Some of our group smoked and then when he got home he unfortunately hung his coat over a chair and the cigarette packet came tumbling out. His father gave him a beating as usual, and insisted that all his friends, i.e.us, come to the car park to be ticked off by his father or he would take the matter to the Headmaster- a very serious matter at that time. His father duly drove up, wound the window down and berated us, standing in the car park. John was quietly dying of embarrassment but, hey, that was life at school. But while we were thinking about getting away from school and its problems, he was thinking about how things could be better and talking to kids at their level about their issues. He understood adolescent kids because he talked to them a lot.

He left home soon after he left school and had some years of financial and personal hardship, with some of the parents of his schoolmates helping him.

I lost track of him for some years, as neither he nor I were very active in the old boys for a long time as he had moved to Melbourne. I had become aware of his writing and read ‘Letters from the Inside’, the correspondence between two 15 year old girls who start as pen pals. One is in gaol, though it is not clear why, and the other lives in fear of a violent brother. The fact that he could write so credibly from the perspective of adolescent girls was quite extraordinary, and he left readers tantalised at the end. He met my son when he was just a baby but later my son became a huge fan of his Tomorrow series. He was so enthusiastic about John’s book that his teacher credited him with getting the whole class to read it.

John stopped writing to set up his school, funded considerably from his book royalties and embodying the ideas he had developed from looking at the dysfunctions that he had experienced and the successes he believed were possible.

When John came back as the honoured speaker at a school reunion I caught up with him, which was great. He was working very hard, running the school that he had started with a skeleton administrative staff, and all the while writing to the people who wrote to him, answering their questions, helping them with their fears and firing them with his enthusiasm. But he was still smoking and it had taken some toll of his health so (as usual) I urged him to Quit and put in place a succession plan at the school. He did those things, though I do not claim it was due to my urgings.

I had always had the dream that I would go to his school and teach for a while, things that kids are not taught these days, perhaps in the time after exams when the kids are merely filling in time waiting for the Christmas holidays, or speaking at a speech day. Sadly, it never happened. When I went to Melbourne, it was either term time and he was too busy, or holidays when he went away.

He died suddenly, though perhaps not unexpectedly, so this will not happen now. As we get older, we need to be more urgent with our intents.

Fortunately he will have many friends and many writers able to give credit to his greatness, but also to understand and express his warmth and his humility.

15/12/2024

Banks Charging $3 a withdrawal- the logical end of capitalist thinking?

11 December 2024
Once upon a time banks functioned to store your money safely giving you some interest for the use of it or lending it to you for a bit more interest.
Then the government made a quick buck by selling the bank to people who had the money to buy shares.
Then the concentration of wealth changed so that most of the money was held by fewer people. And technology changed and the people with the most money used the new higher tech ways of banking.
And then there was less profit in the little people.
And the accounting changed, the CEO salaries went from several tens of multiples of the normal people’s salaries to hundreds of times. But they had to show results to the shareholders to justify this.
So they closed most of the branches and replaced them by Automatic Teller Machines to save all those rents and staff salaries.
And they decided that even to stock the ATMs was too expensive so they put fees on them to use them, but they got criticised for that, so they lessened the number of ATMs, which saved even more.
A few people actually still wanted to go to the few branches left and wait until they could get to the reduced service, but the accountants said that the return on capital to the shareholders from this aspect of operations was not as much as the returns on internet transactions. Clearly the shareholders wanted ‘user pays’ in every aspect of the business so the banks decided to make these little folk pay a fee to get their own money, as had been so successful with the ATMs.
And no one even commented that the function of banks was to provide a service of looking after people’s money, the question was really how to ensure that the shareholders’ returns could be maintained.
And they all lived happily ever after.
THE END

15/12/2024

Nuclear Power

13 December 2024
In the Nuclear power ‘debate’ Dutton is using the exact words of a nuclear power lobbyist who I heard at a Royal Society meeting last year. He says in essence that all the other countries have nuclear, so we need it too, which is silly in that we have far more renewable energy than they do.

So the message is the that Liberals have given in to the nuclear lobby, because of course a couple of nuclear power plants are necessary for the AUKUS submarines, though both Liberal and Labor have been carefully avoiding this fact, as they know that the Australian people currently do not support either nuclear power or AUKUS submarines and they want to get us to accept it all in two bites rather than one.

The hasty inquiry into nuclear energy, which I flagged last month conspicuously did not have the AUKUS submarines mentioned in the their terms of reference despite the fact that in discussions about the AUKUS submarines it was mentioned that Australia will need two nuclear reactors larger than the Lucas Heights one, and a lot more trained nuclear scientists and technicians. Labor just wants the Committee to find nuclear electricity unnecessary and criticise the Liberals.

The sad reality of our two party duopoly is that when one side is voted out, the other comes in with all the policies it wants to bring in. So if you dump Albanese because he did not do much and you think Dutton can help (not a view I support), you get nuclear whether you wanted it or not.

In countries such as Germany , where Winston Churchill wrote the constitution so that no single party could ever get a majority, they have to get coalitions so that each issue has to get considered on its merits. It is not a winner takes all and gives all the policies of whichever lobby group has been successful lately. It seems that the Teals are the only hope; the thin Teal line holding democracy

08/12/2024

Health Insurance Executive Targeted in New York

6 December 2024

A top health insurance executive was killed in what seems to be a targeted shooting in New York’. It seems that he was threatened over ‘health insurance issues’.
Every day I see patients who have their perfectly reasonable treatment requests refused by workers comp or CTP (Compulsory Third Party = Green Slip) insurers. The ‘case managers’ who are grandly titled case clerks have little power and follow protocols dictated by more senior folk in the organisati0on. I am unsure if they get bonuses for cases costing less than some statistical average for that type of claim, but nothing would surprise me. Sometimes it seems that they just refuse treatments because they think that they will get away with it, but the odds are stacked that they will often succeed anyway. The case clerks (Case ‘Managers’) cop a lot of abuse and are rotated frequently, perhaps to prevent their abuse or perhaps to prevent them getting to know their ‘clients’, who some of us would call ‘patients’. The case clerks have very little discretion and the system is very slow and seems designed to ensure that absolutely no one could ever be overpaid. The clerks follow their protocols, and are often unavailable and do not return calls. Most use their first names and a letter (presumably the first letter of their surnames) presumably so that they will not be personally targeted by those whose treatments they are refusing. (One would have thought that as people handing out money to people in distress that they might be very popular). It is as if one side are playing a game with money, but for the other side it is deadly serious.
Given that about a third of the population live from paycheck to paycheck, the fact that insurers have 3 weeks to accept or reject the whole claim, then 3 weeks to approve or deny any treatment, and longer if it is a difficult case, a huge amount of human misery can be created without even stressing any protocols. Governments are keen to keep premiums low and seem keen to support any insurer –suggested legislative amendments that achieves this aim. Interestingly the NSW Parliamentary Committee reviewing the NSW Workers Compensation legislation in 2022 had no input for either patients or doctors or their organisations. Presumably they did not seek such input and there was no publicity for the inquiry.
I see in my practice many distressed people whose lives are destroyed by these treatment denials. Now with the insurers only liable for the first 5 years after injury, if they can delay treatment longer than that, they are off the financial hook and the patients need to be treated by Medicare if that is possible. When I say ‘if that is possible’, many specialists will not do any Medicare work as it pays less than half the private rate. The waiting list is usually over a year for non-emergencies and the specialists are even more reluctant to treat cases that should have been paid by workers comp or CTP insurers. Even that assumes that the patients have Medicare; overseas students or people on working visas do not.
My belief is that insurers want to control medicine and the WC and CTP insurers, now with considerable input from the American Health insurance industry are preparing for the (very soon) day when Medicare is irrelevant and insurers tell doctors what they may do.

The patients whose lives are destroyed by the insurer denials of their reasonable treatments are upset and angry, often shattered physically and by the loss of their homes, properties and marriages do not think through how this has all happened. They are angry with the ‘case manager’ but not those higher up in the organisation who set the protocol that was the basis of their treatment denial.
Years ago, when I went to tobacco control conferences in the USA, there would sometimes be discussions among doctors about how to treat various medical conditions. Amongst the non-Americans, the talk was about what regimes were best. The Americans were usually concerned with what the insurers would pay for to the point that it was sometimes frustrating to have them in the conversations. I won a Fellowship in 1985 to study workplace absence and got some flavour of the way treatments were denied. I now see it all unrolling in Australia.
In the US guns are easy to get. When I saw a US health executive had been shot by an unknown person, I did not find it hard to find a motive, and thought that there could probably be a very large number of suspects. I Australia the case managers do not dare give their surnames, but the top executives are still all on the company websites.
If we continue to let Medicare be defunded because of private health donations to the major political parties and put money ahead of people’s reasonable needs, we will follow the Americans.

Here is the Reuters article in the SMH 6 December 2024

Health executive shot dead on New York street

Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealth’s insurance unit, was fatally shot yesterday outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel in what appeared to be a targeted attack by a gunman, New York City police ofﬁcials said.

The shooting occurred in the early morning outside the Hilton on Sixth Avenue, where the company’s annual investor conference was about to take place. Thompson was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead. The attacker remained at large, sparking a search that included police drones, helicopters and dogs.

“This does not appear to be a random act of violence,” New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said. “Every indication is that this was a premeditated, pre-planned, targeted attack.” The suspect, wearing a mask and carrying a backpack, ﬂed on foot before mounting an electric bike and riding into Central Park, police said. Law enforcement authorities said the gunman appeared to use a silencer on his weapon, CNN reported.

UnitedHealth Group said Thompson was a respected colleague and friend to all who worked with him. “We are working closely with the New York Police Department and ask for your patience and understanding during this difﬁcult time,” it said in a statement. “Our hearts go out to Brian’s family and all who were close to him.”

UnitedHealth Group is the largest US health insurer, providing beneﬁts to tens of millions of Americans who pay more for healthcare than in any other country.
Video footage showed the gunman arrived outside the Hilton about ﬁve minutes be
fore Thompson. He ignored several other people walking by, NYPD Chief of Detectives, Joseph Kenny told reporters.

When Thompson approached the hotel, the gunman shot him in the back with a pistol and then continued ﬁring, even after his gun appeared to jam. “Based on the evidence we have so far, it does appear that the victim was speciﬁcally targeted, but at this point, we do not know why,” Kenny said. The shooting happened not long before the scheduled investor conference at the Hilton.

UnitedHealth Group chief executive Andrew Witty took to the stage about an hour after the event started to announce the rest of the program would be cancelled.
“We’re dealing with a very serious medical situation with one of our team members, and as a result, I’m afraid we’re going to have to bring to a close the event today,” he said.

Police tape blocked off the area on 54th Street outside the Hilton, where blue plastic
gloves were strewn about, and plastic cups appeared to mark the location of bullet casings.
Thompson’s wife, Paulette Thompson, told NBC News that he told her “there were some people that had been threatening him”. She didn’t have details but suggested the threats may but suggested the threats may
have involved issues with insurance coverage. Eric Werner, the police chief in the Minneapolis suburb where Thompson lived, said his department had not received any reports of threats against the executive. The killing shook a part of New York that is normally quiet at that hour, about four blocks from where thousands of people were set to gather for the city’s Christmas tree lighting. Police promised extra security for the event.

“The police were here in seconds. It’s New York. It’s not normal here at seven in the morning, but it’s pretty scary,” said Christian Diaz, who said he heard the gunfire from the nearby University Club Hotel where he works.

Police issued a poster showing a surveillance image of the man pointing what appeared to be a gun and another image that appeared to show the same person riding on a bicycle. Minutes before the shooting he stopped at a nearby Starbucks, according to additional surveillance photos released by police. They offered a reward of up to $US10,000 ($15,500) for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, where the company is based, said the state was praying for Thompson’s family and the UnitedHealth team. “This is horrifying news and a terrible loss for the business and healthcare community in Minnesota,” he said in a statement. Thompson, a father of two sons, had been with UnitedHealth since 2004 and served as chief executive for more than three years. Thompson was appointed head of the company’s insurance group in April 2021 after working in several departments, according to the company’s website.

“Sometimes you meet a lot of fake people in these corporate environments. He certainly didn’t ever give me the impression of being one of them,” said Antonio Ciaccia, chief executive of healthcare research non-profit 46brooklyn, who knew Thompson. “He was a genuinely thoughtful and respectable guy.”
Reuters, AP

There was considerable follow up:

www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/bullets-used-in-us-healthcare-exec-s-killing-had-writing-on-them-20241206-p5kwa6.html

www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/wave-of-hate-flows-for-health-insurance-industry-after-ceo-s-shooting-death-20241206-p5kwcz.html

26/11/2024

Social Media Ban misses the point- it’s about Algorithms

25 November 2024

Social media is not a fixed thing to be either accepted or banned.

I was surprised to find my son in favour of a ban, thinking it would stop communications between kids. He assured me that with groups able to be formed easily on WhatsApp, kids could still exchange whatever social relationships or information they liked.

It got me thinking about why social media might be harmful. Presumably kids can gang up more easily as they can all see what others write, just as minority groups can find and reinforce each other for good or ill. But this would also be a problem on WhatsApp.

The key point was one that I made a few posts ago. The object of social media is to keep people online so that they will see the advertising and make money for the social media owner. The way that this is done is to put people in touch with people like them or who believe things like them, particularly if their views are unusual. It is also helpful to upset or disturb people as while they are stimulated they will stay online.

The converse of this is that calming people down, or giving them sensible information has no financial advantage.

What viewers get in their feed is determined by algorithms, which are AI (Artificial Intelligence). These algorithms could be set to give good o]knowledge to anyone who asked for it or was open to it. Google searches often give a series of ads where someone paid to be the first thing found in the search, followed by a ‘top pops’ of replies or hits. It could rate the academic reliability of knowledge sources and give greater weight to more credible sources.

The same principles apply to social media. It is about what the object of the algorithm is, and thus what content it favours and directs.

Algorithms are of course ‘commercial in confidence’ which is code for ‘making money and therefore unable to be accessed or interfered with’. In other words, making money is more important than any social distortions or effects are merely tough luck for those affected.
But it seems to me that a more intelligent approach is needed to social media.

It’s about algorithms stupid!

www.change.org/p/oppose-australia-s-proposed-social-media-ban-for-under-16s