Two reports on iCare have come out on the same day- how convenient, one lot of publicity rather than two.The report of the Parliamentary Committee was one report, the other was a report by Robert McDougall, a retired Supreme Court judge.The political report looked at the disgraceful evidence given by John Nagle which showed almost no care for the injured workers and an appalling attitude of entitlement in him and his crony staff. iCare had not even known what workers’ Pre-Injury Average Weekly Earnings (PIAWE) were, and had not tried very hard to find out so that they could underpay them and minimise their costs. They relied on computer algorithms rather than staff to manage the claims, only getting staff on the case if there were problems, which there usually were, as the poor patients were having their treatments delayed or denied. The McDougall report had its terms of reference set by Treasury, who were also the department being investigated, and they also staffed the inquiry. The Treasurer, Dominic Perrottet did not agree to be interviewed by McDougall and got away with this. Is this some sort of bad joke? The McDougall report found incompetence etc, but no actual corruption that anyone could be charged with. As such, the McDougall report was a political success. It took the heat off the Treasurer from November to now, and will result in a bit of publicity, no serious recriminations and the usual promises of future action. John Robertson, an old union hack is the new CEO, so Labor will not criticise iCare now. My poor patients will be mucked around, be underpaid and have their treatment denied as usual. And Treasurer Perrottet will sail on hoping to be Premier as Gladys falls. What a joke!
30 April 2021
Morrison is running a highly Presidential style of government such that the
evening news is now more like ‘What Morrison did today’.
This reminds me of when I was in Parliament and would try to sell an issue
to the Parliamentary media, and they would say, ‘We’ve got our NSW story for
today; it is Minister X opening Y’. I would say, ‘Yes, but that is staged and
not really news and there will something else staged tomorrow and the next day
and you are merely a government propaganda arm’. The journalist would reply,
‘Yes, probably, but if I don’t cover that story I will get my ass kicked’.
These government backflips are mainly ignored by the mainstream media
because of Morrison’s media management strategy. He hold media briefings in
which he says what he is going to announce the next day, so those invited can
have a ‘sneak preview’. He then announces whatever it was so gets two bites of
the cherry. Of course any journalist who gives an unfavourable spin risks
having their outlet not invited next time, so they will just be commentators 15
hours behind the story. Here is a story from Bernard Keane at Crikey, who is
one of those not invited.
http://www.crikey.com.au/…/china-backflips-media…/…Continue Reading
The One China policy was basically the recognition of reality. Mainland Communist China won the revolution in 1949, and when China got its economic act together the world needed to trade with it as it was far more economically significant than Taiwan.
Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang leader, was defeated by Mao Tse Tung and fled to the island that had previously been called Formosa, now Taiwan. He maintained the idea that he would lead a counter-revolution, so there was One China. This counter-revolution became increasingly ridiculous with time, but was not abandoned. The Communists claimed Taiwan and treat it as a rebel province, and they stated that there is One China and that the price of trading with them was to have Taiwan excluded from the UN and other international bodies. That has been the situation for many years, and almost all countries accepted the One China policy, and stopped recognising Taiwan, even if they traded with it.
By definition, if there is One China, who governs Taiwan is an internal Chinese matter. We may not like what China does in Hong Kong, with the Uighurs or in Taiwan, but it is the US that has accepted the One China policy for years.
After WW2 at Bretton Woods it was assumed that free trade would allow countries that were competitive to rise, and those that were not competitive to fall. This was so that there would not be war over markets. But the system that the West set up gave an advantage to countries with lower wages, and if they were smart enough to get the fruits of their labour rather than stay as colonies with foreigners owning their industries, they rose. So China rose and is now a world power and the US are now seeking to intervene in Taiwan and re-create a two-China policy. One can hardly expect China to accept this massive loss of face.
The assumption was that Taiwan would eventually solve its differences with mainland China peacefully. After recent events in Hong Kong, this has become less likely in the short and medium term, but is still viable or even inevitable in the long term, which has always been China’s position.
China has done some sabre-rattling with flights over Taiwan and obviously the recent events in Hong Kong have made everyone nervous.
This article looks at the similarities of the Chinese way of doing business to capitalism. It could be said that the model of an intelligent government cooperating with industry is more successful than a few large industries competing. Competition works if there are many small producers competing in a market. When there are a few oligopolies using trademarks or patents to make more money and not to share knowledge, the old adage that ‘private competition is the best way to run things’ starts to break down. It may not just be cheaper wages that is allowing China to out-compete the US.
Starting a war because you are losing the peace seems a very unwise course of action.
Australia has to stop being the US lapdog. We are not taking the right path.
A new Oxford Study compares the incidence of Cerebral Venous Thrombosis with the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccine and the risk if you get COVID19. The risk from the A-Z vaccine is 5 per million, the Pfizer and Moderna 4 per million and the risk if you catch COVID19 is 39 per million. The sample size is large with over half a million cases in each group, so the reliability of the research is quite good.While there is no COVID19 about, it is obviously safer to have no vaccine and no risk, but the COVID19 situation could change at any time. The Business Council and other non-medical political groups are calling for a more open society and for the case chasers to try to keep a certain level of infections once the gates are opened. i.e. We get the money- someone else fix the problems. Presumably they will try to stop further lockdowns, particularly as the percentage of the population who have been vaccinated increases.The bottom line is that the A-Z vaccine is almost as safe as the Pfizer one, and it is a good idea to be vaccinated ASAP in case the situation changes for the worse. I had the A-Z almost 2 weeks ago and only noted a slight headache, and tiredness on the evening of the vaccine, and a bit of local tenderness at the injection site the next day. I will have the second shot in 10 weeks.
The Federal Government has discouraged EV uptake and now the Victorian Government wants to tax them to replace the petrol tax that pays for roads.
This is very silly. Roads do not have to be paid for by petrol tax. Any sort of tax will do. Taxes should be used to encourage sensible behaviour, not discourage it.
One other important aspect is ignored in this video and in most discussions about EVs. That is their possible use to stabilise the electricity grid. If they are charged when there is a lot of renewable energy, e.g. in the solar peak during the day, they can be discharged in the evening, so lessening the evening peak. If EV owners paid the day rate to charge and go the evening rate to discharge, they would make money and offset their vehicle cost.It might be noted that AGL (an electricity supplier) is encouraging electric vehicle fleets so that it can use their batteries to do just this, but hey, why would the government let little people in a on a good deal?The action point here is the write to Victorian Govt to stop the tax and facilitate the grid stabilisation by allowing EV owners to pay and be paid at the rate at the time they charge or discharge.
I note in Australia’s recovery, we now need skilled migrants. Why? Because we stopped supporting TAFE and gave the money to dodgy private providers.
At the other end of the pile we need unskilled migrants to pick our fruit because the wages are so low that Australians do not want to work for them.
Where are young Australians in all this? Are our kids going to unis with no jobs at the end of their courses? In India excess doctors drive taxis. Marx said that the capitalists were more loyal to their class than their country. Are we for a fair go for all Australians of not? A living wage? Or are skilled migrants who settle more likely to vote Liberal?
When friends discuss why the world of politics seems to be going downhill, they mention that there seems to be no respect for knowledge any more. Because information is so available it is not valued. But this is not the key. The problem seems to stem from two sources;
Firstly the two wars last century were over markets and at Bretton Woods at the end of WW2 the key to preventing wars thought to be free markets, where there would be unrestricted trade and countries could rise on fall on their relative advantages, or harder work. The second item was the notion of neo-liberalism where the duty of a company was to make as much money as possible, with other objectives being looked after by someone else. But as free trade progressed like a monopoly game multinational companies became more powerful than governments, so there was no one to stop the accumulation of wealth and power. Power and wealth became the important items. If you had these, clearly you would know what to do.
A number of small stories often give insights into changing priorities. When I was at school and aged about 11 another boy, Geoff, went on a trip to the USA, a rare thing to do at that time. We eagerly asked him what it was like over there. He said, ‘Money just stands up and talks over there. If you have money and you say something everybody listens’. What he meant was that it was not because the rich person actually knew anything.
When I worked at Sydney Water, there were 17,000 employees and there was had a program to separate storm water and sewage in the pipes in the old part of Sydney, where they had all been the same. There were employment programs for the long-term unemployed, disabled people and even ex-prisoners. There were quality control units and a well-respected apprentice training school with about 220 people that produced plumbers, electricians and carpenters. The staff worked their way up the hierarchy so everyone knew their job and the tasks that they were supervising. In the early 1980s these was a major change. Sydney Water was reclassified as a State owned enterprise. It was to be ‘right sized’ which was the euphemism for downsized to about 3,000 people. All functions not immediately necessary were stopped. No pipe replacement programs, fix them when they burst. No apprentice training. No quality control- (has to be out-sourced). No printing. No computerised land mapping program (a world first, given to the Land Titles Office and later privatised) and the government was entitled to a ‘dividend’ from the enterprise which was about a billion dollars a year from all the salaries saved and work not done. There was a game of musical chairs which went on for about a decade with new management structures, each with fewer places in it, where people repeatedly applied for jobs that had slightly different titles but which amounted to what they had done before. But more than this there was incredible nepotism and people who knew about money or were politically favoured replaced those who knew about pipes and water. Deskilling was on a massive scale. Then there was a project to look at salary relativities, which seemed to come to the conclusion that the salary should relate to how many people you managed. Professionals were hard to fit into this framework, so it was opined that they should get less, but in order to get them at all, there had to be some consideration of what they were paid outside the organisation. As a professional I was also high enough up the hierarchy to get ‘management training’. It seemed that the key objective was to create a new culture in the organisation, and the main element in this was the destruction of the old culture, which was naturally assumed to be inferior to the new vision of the new management. Workshops were held to define our objectives and visions. The silly old guard had thought that it was to provide water and take away the pooh.
This seems to be what has happened throughout the entire public service. Lifetime employment has gone, and the gradual salary increments that made public servants content to work for less because they had lifetime security of employment and respect for the niche knowledge that they had developed.
Now the two overwhelming values are power and money. They are assumed to go together. Money buys political power, and political power gives control of large amounts of money. So part of this new values hierarchy is the assumption that other values are lesser. Public interest knowledge as stored in the public service, the Australian Bureau of Statistics or the research community are run down as the new breed of consultants rise. The consultants are chosen by their masters for their political or economic orientation and have to come up with solutions that fit with the views of their masters lest they not get their next job. It is an incestuous and nepotistic system where ideology and opinion have displaced long-term experience and expertise.
Some years ago, as a NSW Democrat MP, I went to a YADS (Young Australian Democrats) conference in Canberra. The YADs were enthusiastic young people interested in politics, and some of them were lucky enough to work in Parliamentary offices. On the Saturday they hospitably asked me to come to a party that they were attending. I felt a bit old for the group, but they insisted. It turned out that the Party was at a Liberal staffer’s house. No one took much notice of the old guy in the corner sipping his beer, so I observed a group of very privileged young people telling stories of their exploits in the corridors of power. The striking part of the stories was the extent to which they were merely playing a chess game. They were the goodies, Labor were the baddies and the whole discussion was about winning. There was no policy content at all. The issue was whether we won or not. John Howard was Prime Minister and I was left with the overwhelming feeling that power was in the hands of those who had neither knowledge nor respect for the responsibility that they were carrying.
So I was interested to read this article by Jack Waterford, which traces the replacement of the public service by political staffers, ambitious non-experts with a lot of ideological baggage and little time for long-term expertise.
The replacement of respect for knowledge with respect only for power and money may be the reason for the decline in decision-making in our political and management systems, and may yet be the cause of the decline of Anglo civilisation.
Here is an article in Meanjin asking why the Australian War Memorial airbrushes history. It seems to me that this is to be expected. The lesson of the War Memorial should be respect for those who died, but a reminder that we must work for peace. Under Brendan Nelson with $500 million for the armaments industry to modernise the weaponry on display it is becoming a shrine of militarism.
ANZAC was a military debacle and the incompetence of the British generals on the Western Front was appalling. The ANZAC ‘legend’ of the birth of Australia was created to cover up this incompetence, so that any criticism of what happened was changed into a lack of respect for those who died. Presumably any criticism of what is happening at the War Memorial will get the same treatment.
If you ask soldiers to do totally unreasonable things, you should probably expect totally unreasonable things.
The Australian Commander, John Cantwell was of the opinion that the Afghan war could not be won, and every Australian life lost in Afghanistan was totally wasted. He was on the short list to be the supreme head of the Australian armed forces but he took himself off the list and retired in 2011 with PTSD and wrote ‘Exit Wounds- One Australian’s War on Terror’ in 2012. It is inconceivable that he did not tell the Australian hierarchy that the war was unwinnable prior to his resignation in 2011, which is 10 years ago.
To ask for ethical behaviour from the troops, when there is none at the top of the nation is hypocrisy writ large.
Australian troops are to leave Afghanistan, now that Biden has taken the Americans out. The fact that we had no strategic interest there, and that we were merely there to please the US merely shows how pathetic our efforts to please the US are.
We go into foreign wars in the hope that if we are ever attacked the US will defend us as they did in the Second World War. Let us look at some realities. The British had promised to defend us in WW2, but when we were attacked they sent two battleships that were promptly sunk and they wanted to keep our troops in North Africa and assured us that if we were captured they would come and recapture us when they had (hopefully) won in Europe.
The US came to help Australia as they could not let the Japanese take us over and they were already at war with them. The US visited Jakarka just before Indonesia invaded East Timor, so it must be concluded that they were happy to let that little country go. If in future the US has a global war problem, they will act on their immediate strategic interests which may or may not mean helping us. Being a bit player in historic wars in Vietnam or the Middle East will not be top of mind.
So we are giving our troops absurd tasks where they go overseas and see their mates killed for no real purpose. Note that the Australian commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, John Cantwell wrote ‘Exit Wounds- One Australian’s War on Terror’ and developed PTSD from what he said was an unwinnable war in Afghanistan in 2012.
We go into wars for no godo reason without so much as a a Parliamentary debate- the Cabinet just decides. We buy American arms wily-nilly to spend the 2% of our budget that the US demands in order to help their arms industry and balance of payments, picking up lemon fighter planes and overpriced and probably obsolete submarines. We let the US station its force in Darwin. We cooperate with the Israelis in weapons development and we sell arms to practically anyone, including Myanmar and the Saudis in Yemen. The arms industry is giving hugely to the Australian War Memorial but want more modern displays. It seems that the object is not to remember the fallen and that they fought for peace, but rather to have a Temple of Militarism where our youth can have their warrior fantasies.
There are some Peace groups that have achieved good things. Australians for War Powers Reform want Parliament to decide before we are committed to wars, and other groups are active’ IPAN, the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network, MAPW, the Medical Association for the Prevention of War, and IPPNW, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
But a lot more action is needed if we are to stop this military folly.