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Category: Accountability

06/09/2020

To Make google and Facebook pay, or not to make google and Facebook pay?

6 September 2020

Presumably the whole world is watching whether the Australian government can make google and Facebook pay to carry news items.

The reason is quite clear. They gain customers for being able to point them to the news sources, and then they get the advertising revenue from people on their platforms, while the people who collected the news make no money for having done so, and then lose the advertising that used to come to them when people bought their papers or watched their TV channels.

So initially I was quite in favour of the idea. Here were big foreign companies, structured to pay no tax, grabbing all the advertising and the media was dying because of the lack of advertising revenue. Strangely the ABC was not going to get any revenue- it was only going to the commercial media. I wondered if this was a good thing. Would google and Facebook favour the ABC as it was free, and direct people there rather than to commercial media. But if they did, would this produce a reaction from Murdoch, and would then the government do something more to favour Murdoch and disadvantage the ABC- hey, they are already cutting the ABC budget ?at Murdoch’s request.

But I was thinking that the rise of fake news and conspiracy theories, which threaten any rational voting or policy development is largely due to the social media behemoths. Everyone is equal in that they can post what they like, and things that are more interesting and clickable are more equal than facts. Added to this, in order to get people to stay there and click around, they are connected up with things and people that they like and who think like them. So we are all reinforced. We friend the people we like, and they friend us. And we get our facts from them, and they from us. So if we do not really chase facts in this candy store of pleasant experiences, we can soon have our own bubble, with no need for facts. Pontius Pilate has been much quoted for asking, ‘What is truth?’ He did not want to know what the truth was, and many who quote him are of the same mind. Exact truth may not always be clear, but you can get closer to it if you try, and hopefully that is what science and good journalism tries to achieve.

So when I saw the Australian government leading the world in trying to get revenue for the commercial media, when they had not even been able to get workable legislation to get them to pay some tax, I wondered who is driving this. The companies that have bought our privatised toll roads have the government collect their tolls, and fine people if they do not pay. So I wondered is this just Murdoch getting the government to collect revenue for him? Murdoch was very much in favour of the market as he gobbled up smaller media players. The Rudd and Gillard governments were ruthlessly attacked and ultimately destroyed by Murdoch, and it was always my opinion that this was because they would not change the media ownership laws to allow Murdoch to have nearly all of it- the need for balance and diversity being totally irrelevant and profits the only objective. As soon as Tony Abbott was Prime Minister this law was changed in Murdoch’s favour.

Now the market has changed. New technology has taken the money from newspapers and free to air TV, which were funded from their advertising. The model had worked reasonably well when I was young. The Fairfax family were rich from the advertising, and let the journalists write what they liked, or so we believed. With Packer, it was not quite so clear. The slogan was ‘Publish and be Damned’, but while that may have been true for more salacious material or less powerful targets, there was a suggestion that some areas were off limits, like tobacco when there was a lot of cigarette ads in the paper. Later, as Murdoch became more powerful, stories seemed to be changed a lot to suit his interest. When Indonesia had a very authoritarian government Murdoch’s coverage of it was very benign as he sought to get a satellite TV licence. This has advanced further so that now there is more advertorial content. Before local papers closed, people bought a quarter page ad and got to write the article on the rest of the page. Ideal for restaurants and clubs, but independent journalism? I think not, but it was/is the norm.

Once, stories were written first, then headline writers wrote the headlines for them. Now even senior writers are being asked to write a story to fit under a pre-written, catchy headline. Hey, we have to get a click to get the ad revenue. Senior writers have told me that the headline may be misleading and they have to slant their stories so it is not seen as absurd. What effect is this having? What about people who only read the headline? It no longer has substance- it was just put there so that they would notice it.

The ABC has been much criticised by the commercial media, and Murdoch in particular because it just gets money to provide a news and cultural service. It has a different funding model, and if the commercial media has no money, they want the ABC to have none either.

But it is time to look at the root cause. The model of funding media and journalism by advertising revenue is broken. It was fraying before google and Facebook etc came, and it is very broken now. Murdoch was quite happy to let the market sort it out, when he was winning and buying up his competition. Now he is getting the government to get him money from his technological competitors. And the Australian government, which seems more beholden to him than any other national governments is doing his bidding.

If google and Facebook decide to offer less news and change their algorithms to favour ‘free’ news sources, is this likely to affect the content of our searches? And will there be even more fake news and conspiracy theories than now? Quite possibly.

I have no particular brief to act for google and Facebook, and find their ads telling me that the end of the world is nigh almost laughable. I think that they must pay tax, and this must be based on their revenue, and not on the profits that can be so easily fiddled with foreign loans and transfer payments etc. But it seems that there are 3 related problems:

The government has a problem- how to get tax from these behemoths.
The public have a problem how to get unbiased honest news and science facts.
The commercial media have a problem how to pay their journalists when the revenue has gone to social media to whom trivia and produces just as much revenue as news.

We need to discuss this carefully, so that facts and public interest win.

www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-media-regulator/australia-to-force-google-facebook-to-pay-domestic-media-to-use-content-idUSKBN222066

28/07/2020

Workers Compensation in NSW and Victoria- ‘Immoral and Unethical’ – 4 Corners Exposes It. 28/7/20

This is what I have been saying for years. If you think the banks are bad, you have not dealt with insurers. They will do anything rather than pay people’s legitimate medical and living expenses.

My poor patients literally starve. They change their addresses each visit as they couch-surf their friends. The foreign patients with no Medicare cannot even get GP treatment, and because they are often paid sub-award wages in cash cannot even prove their incomes. Most specialists simply will not operate for the Medicare rebate, and even if they will the waiting time is a year. I tell the patients where the soup kitchens are. They are in huge pain and the most I hear from governments are warnings that they have been on narcotics too long, as they wait for the surgery that the insurers have refused to pay for.

The patient Scott with his supportive wife, at the beginning of the 27/7/20 4 Corners tells the story of his shattered life, which is just like what my patients tell me.

The Victorian the Ombudsman, Deborah Glass did an investigation into WorkSafe Victoria, the callous government insurer there. She found appalling behaviour and says so very clearly.

In NSW it is the same- the appalling, hopeless iCare, who should be called ‘I Don ‘t Care’ put together a bunch of insurance executives who had no experience in working with people. They all got awarded huge salaries and set about having computer algorithms to replace claims clerks. So when a claim goes wrong (which takes a while to figure out as 3 week delays are pretty much the norm), you call and ask to speak to the case manager. You can’t. But if you persist eventually you find one, but he or she only got the claim yesterday. i.e. There had been no person managing it until you hassled like hell, and it is often refused anyway.

Meanwhile the patient had no treatment and the fat cats at the top had not noticed that their system had a few glitches. And most of the concern in both the management echelons and the media is about some financial deficit which, if we are to believe the totally out-of- touch iCare CEO, Ken Nagle, depends how you do the accounting.

No one seems to remember that this is just a health insurance scheme to help Workers’ Compensation and Motor Vehicle accident Victims. If Medicare worked it would be completely unnecessary, and it cannot even manage to function like a private health insurer. It assumes that all doctors are crooks who cannot be trusted to order just the tests and operations necessary- they all have to be evaluated and denied by insurers who get every dollar that they refuse to pay, and who seek out dodgy doctors to carry out ‘Independent Medical Examinations’ (IMEs) to deny normal treatments. If the IME doctors do not do what the insurers want they get no more work from them.

The directors and top executives of iCare should be sacked and the whole thing given to ICAC to examine. ICAC needs more resources also.

SIRA (State Insurance Regulatory Authority) has been more hopeless than ASIC and APRA were with the banks, and should be abolished also. This story came from a whistle-blower, not from SIRA, the responsible agency, though some of us have been trying to get SIRA to act for years.

SIRA became a bit more interested after the Hayne Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry reported in February 2019, presumably as they realised that if the Commission has been given enough time to look at insurance, they would have had their own hopeless regulatory efforts scrutinised. They had an internal investigation, the Dore Inquiry (no, you almost certainly have not heard of it), but it did actually find that iCare was behaving appallingly. The report release was delayed 5 months (July-December 2019) and released just before Christmas with iCare’s reaction, which was to admit that they had made ‘mistakes’ and that they accepted all the recommendations. Great PR! Released on a busy day to avoid scrutiny and if you as a journo were a tiny bit interested, there was no story because iCare accepted the changes suggested. The SIRA strategy worked- no scrutiny of either iCare or SIRA.

At last there is a 4 Corners on this! Watch it if you missed it!

Let us hope that when it goes to ICAC some major changes are achieved. It seems that 4 Corners is the only regulatory force in the country. I guess that is why the government wants to de-fund the ABC.

https://youtu.be/fxIvKogrE2Q

11/07/2020

Happenings in Turkey, no sillier than NSW mining policy 11/7/20

A friend has sent me this to illustrate how life is in Turkey these days under President Erdogan, who fancies himself the new Kemal Attaturk. Ataturk however was the victorious general at Gallipoli and the founder of the modern Turkish state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after WW1. He wanted a modern, democratic, secular state an instituted a new western-style alphabet.

Erdogan has undermined democracy and concentrated power in his own hands. He claims to be Muslim and been a very divisive figure, playing to the less educated eastern side of the country against the more educated secular western side. He had fantasies of leading the Muslim world while building the country with borrowed money, principally in real estate investment. The quality of these high-rise buildings in earthquake -prone Istanbul will no doubt be tested in time. The economy is not doing well, particularly in the COVID19 crisis. This little story about digging up a glacial lake is a micro illustration of his capricious rule, which has involved things like emptying the prisons and locking up journalists and academics who oppose him.

Such stupidity does not only occur in Turkey. If it is foolish to undermine a little lake and dig a hole that cannot be filled underneath it, how much sillier is it to allow long wall mining under the catchment of a large, growing capital city that is prone to drought. Cracks will go from the surface to the mine depth and then the water will run out to sea. We should ask ourselves why we tolerate the NSW government, and Peabody, a US owned mine.

www.quora.com/What-happens-only-in-Turkey/answer/Simge-Topaloğlu?ch=1&share=02eab1a8&srid=zByA

09/07/2020

The Eden-Monaro By-Election of 4/7/20 was interesting for a number of reasons. 9/7/20

Amazingly there was a two-party-preferred swing to the Liberals of 0.37% and the margin was close, 50.48% Labor to 49.52% Liberal. Both the major party candidates were known to the electorate, Kristy McBain of Labor was a lawyer and Mayor of Bega Shire, and Dr Fiona Kotvojs, the Liberal was a science graduate and off-grid farmer who stood unsuccessfully at the 2019 Federal Election. Given that the electorate was very badly affected by the bushfires and Morrison was seemingly very callous and out of touch this is remarkable. It seems that he learned from the fact that he had ignored the fire warnings and took advice from the doctors early. This seems to have overshadowed his former errors. The overshadowing seems remarkable because some these people still do not have houses and the fire relief effort seems to have been mismanaged as well.

Labor’s primary vote was 35.9%, a fall of 3.27%. Former member, Labor’s Mike Kelly was popular and the fact that there are more parties in a by-election may have contributed to this fall, but the blandness of Labor and the lack of policies from Albanese must have contributed also.

The Liberals Primary vote was 38.35%, up 1.34%. In essence, Morrison has used the COVID19 crisis to turn Australia into a one party state. The government has formed a group with the Premiers, ostensibly to manage COVID19, but it also excludes everything else including Parliamentary scrutiny. Albo seems to recognise that criticism will not be welcomed in a time of crisis, so goes along into oblivion. This situation is working well for Morrison as, helped by the need to stimulate the economy, he gets access to the largest pork barrel in history. Given that he has proved a dab hand at pork barrelling with the Sports Rorts and Regional Development grants, this advantage is likely to give him the next election. Eden Monaro was just a bit close to and soon after the bushfires, but the fact that Eden Monaro was even considered possible to be the first government win of an opposition seat in a by-election for a century shows how the next Federal election is likely to go.

The minor party issues are also interesting. The Shooters got 5.36%. They were astute enough to change their name to Shooters Fishers and Farmers and this has paid dividends as they now have 2 lower house seats in NSW as well as one upper house one. Their 5.36% has them almost up to the Nationals at 6.4% which makes John Barilaro’s hope to win the seat looks almost silly. It must never be forgotten that the founder of the Shooters, John Tingle, took advantage of his friendship with Bob Carr, his position with sometimes balance of power in the upper house and concerns over guns to make a lasting deal that funds the gun lobby. Tingle persuaded Carr that only the Gun Clubs could keep track of individual gun owners, and made a deal that to hold a licence, gun owners had to shoot at a registered club at least once a year. The gun clubs can thus check them out, and hopefully report any crazies. In return for this the Gun Clubs get money to maintain the database of shooters. This of course can be used to organise shooters politically. Small political parties need quite a lot of money to keep track of members and keep them politically active. What an advantage the Shooters have! Now with the Fishers and Farmers in the name, the Nationals seem more of a tail on the neo-Liberal dog and a friend of miners and irrigators than workers for ordinary farmers. So the Shooter’s Fishers and Farmers are on the move. The Gun Control lobby needs to stay on its toes!

The Greens at 5.62% vote went down 3.16%, but the non-major vote tends to be divided up, so more independents and small parties in by-elections make it harder for the Greens. The Major party vote was 74.25, and the non-major vote 25.75. (My own hobby horse is that the major parties have a huge gerrymander as the preferential system means that together they get 75% of the vote, but almost all the seats).
The 3 Independents got 3.06% and the 5 tiddler parties 2.92% between them. The HEMP (Marijuana) Party 2.27%, Science 1.11% and the Lib Dems, Christians, and Australian Federation Party 0.69%, 0.65%, and 0.19%, all trying to keep their issues and upper house profiles alive. The Christians are sinking to an almost terminal level, but with the huge religious influence in the Liberal party they are hardly necessary.

So the key points were the strength of the Liberals based on COVID and their licence to pork-barrel, and the corresponding weakness of Labor- just enough to stop a challenge to Albo but with no chance at a Federal election if something does not change significantly. The weakness of the Nationals and the corresponding rise of the Shooters as the alternative is a bit of a worry, with the Greens and the others hard to assess.

https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseDivisionPage-25820-117.htm

10/06/2020

Vale Trevor Morling – the Passive Smoking Judgement of 1991, 10/6/20

Judge Trevor Morling has died at the age of 92.

He was the author of the famous ‘Morling Judgement’’’ which sent a shock around the world in 1991 as it stated that ‘passive smoking was potentially lethal’.

This has to be put in context if its significance is to be duly recognised. The seminal article about smoking causing lung cancer had been written by Doll and Hill in the British Medical Journal in 1950, and many articles followed in the 1950s linking smoking to a great many diseases.

In 1961, the Royal College of physicians, concerned that the UK government had not done anything to curb smoking, commissioned their landmark report ‘Smoking and Health’ in 1962. The US Surgeon-General did the same, resulting in a similar report in 1964.

The tobacco industry had to decide whether it would scale down its production, or tough it out and take the money. It did secret research which confirmed that burning tobacco produced carcinogens and other harmful products which could not actually be removed. There was a change of personnel and ethos. Prior to 1950, tobacco was a legitimate product like anything else. After the research was confirmed, the decision to keep selling and to deny the effects and hinder government action was the strategy that everyone working at the top of the tobacco industry had to accept.

Tobacco use was mainstream. 45% of all US adults smoked in 1954 (Statistica- Gallup) and consumption peaked in Australia in 1963. People smoked everywhere. There were no smoke-free areas in bars, restaurants or anywhere else. It was normal for house guests to light up and then ask ‘where is the ash tray? The Tobacco industry was keen to maintain this situation and talked of the need for ‘courtesy and tolerance’ between smokers and non-smokers, which was code for ‘doing nothing political’. Smokers all ‘chose to smoke’, which of course meant that they had voluntarily (and knowingly) assumed the risk and consequences of their behaviour. The tobacco industry also gave money to political parties, just asking for a secret promise that there would be no legislation against them before the next election. The medical industry were unaccustomed to this, and kept giving advice that was ignored, with a few significant voices such as Dr Nigel Gray of the Victorian Anti-Cancer Council and Dr Cotter Harvey of the Thoracic Society doing what advocacy they could.

Non-Smokers Rights groups were the main driving force for change in the US in the 1960s and 1970s arguing that people had a right not to breathe smoke. The health charities, Cancer Councils, Heart Foundations were very keen to be non-political as their core business was raising research funds. Real activists soon discovered that their opponents were not the smokers, but the industry, who claimed that there was no proof that passive smoking was harmful, and that courtesy and consideration was all that was needed. Their public stance was referred to as the ‘tightrope policy’. They had to admit that many people believed that tobacco was harmful, as they had to contend that the smokers knew the risk that they were taking and hence could not sue them for deceiving them. But they also had to claim that they did not know that smoking was harmful, so that they were no liable for selling unsafe goods. It was absurd, but it continued.

The tobacco industry as well as being very politically active were the major advertiser, tobacco being second only to food. This meant that the media were more reluctant to run stories that would affect their advertising revenue. Outdoor advertising was also ubiquitous with over 50% of billboards being for tobacco, reminding people to smoke, and especially plastered all over convenience stores where cigarettes were sold.

In 1981 Prof Takeshi Hirayami published a seminal paper showing that non-smoking wives of smoking husbands got more cancer than wives of non-smokers (Br Med J (Clin Res Ed) 1981;282:183). At last there was substantial medical evidence of the harm of passive smoking.

In Australia the medical groups had done quite good advocacy and in NSW a Transport Minister, Pat Hills, simply banned smoking on buses and trains in 1977, but pubs and clubs knew that smokers drank and gambled more than non-smokers, so they took the money from the tobacco industry and lobbied hard against smoke-free indoor air. The restaurant industry followed them, somewhat lamely.

But a breakthrough came in 1979 when 3 activists, Bill Snow, Ric Bolzan and Geoff Coleman formed BUGA UP (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions). Coleman had studied political economy, and saw the issue as the tobacco industry killing people for money. BUGA UP saw irresponsible and misleading advertising as the major vehicle for the promotion of products that had no intrinsic worth, tobacco being the leading example. They wrote on billboards, changing the wordings in satiric and humorous ways, and signed their work, BUGA UP, which was an invitation for all to copy. They also did street theatre, often concerned with disrupting tobacco promotion activities in supermarkets or malls. This had an immense direct effect as the billboard posters were only being changed every 3 months and the leaflets and street theatre were amusing. There was a lot of popular support as most people saw that smoking was harmful, and governments were too craven to act. There was also a lot of publicity when Coleman and Neville Biffin were arrested in 1981 and charged with defacing a billboard. They were convicted in 1982 and fined, but praised by the judge (Daily Telegraph 26/2/82) and given a light penalty, which sent a strong message. It also sent a shot around the world by making all other tobacco activism seem moderate by comparison. Australia’s activism was seen as more direct with a ‘Robin Hood’ flavour, but was also more conspicuous because it was against the ubiquitous tobacco billboards, and targeted the industry directly, rather than the more subtle and legalistic approach of the non-smokers’ right groups who had previously been the front line against the industry. It might be noted that at the 5^th World Conference on Smoking and Health in 1983 there were no scheduled sessions on political action or advocacy, and the first meeting was convened by renowned Californian activist Prof Stan Glantz. The presentation on BUGA UP had to be repeated as the room was not large enough for the people who had wanted to attend. The medical system was becoming energised.

The tobacco industry was very demoralised by this. They had set up a lobby group, pretentiously called the ‘Tobacco Institute.’ But this was re-energised by John Dollisson who was there from 1983-87.

In 1983 the Western Australian lower house supported a private member’s bill by Dr Tom Dadour to ban tobacco sponsorship of sport, but an energetic campaign led by Dollisson and using sporting bodies who received money from tobacco, defeated this in the upper house (Musk, BMJ Vol 290 25/5/85).

After his successful Industry fight against the WA Dadour bill, Dollisson’s feisty style set the tone for the tobacco struggles of the 1980s. He was physically strong and in debate would cram a number of aggressive arguments into each sentence, such as, ‘You are treating the smoking causes disease hypothesis as fact, then want to even say that passive smoking is harmful, and smoking is addictive and the advertising get the kids and then you want to tell people how to live their lives and trample on their rights and then you want the government to enforce a nanny state for you.’ (This is not a direct quote, but an example of how his speech was structured). Assuming that he was interrupted at this point, as he would not stop if he were not, the tobacco control advocate would then be able to only answer one of the points already raised. But Dollisson’s aggressive style eventually got him into trouble, with the Trade Practices Commission, prohibition of ‘misleading and deceptive conduct’ being used against one of his advocacy ads. Then the Australian Federation of Consumer Organisations bravely took him on. The story is told by Stacey Carter (Tobacco Control- BMJ Issue 12 Suppl 3):

In July 1986 he [Dollisson as CEO of the Tobacco Institute (TIA)] placed an advertisement in the national press entitled “A message from those who do…to those who don’t”²⁹ in which he claimed “there is little evidence and nothing which proves scientifically that cigarette smoke causes disease in non-smokers”.³⁰ Early in 1987, Dollisson placed a “followup” ad for the TIA, as demanded by the Trade Practices Commission, which among other things stated that the TIA did not accept that their original advertisement was misleading.³¹ This action triggered a six year legal war between TIA and the Australian Federation of Consumer Organisations (AFCO), at substantial cost to the TIA.

On 7 February 1991 Justice Morling decided that the TIA “had engaged in conduct that was misleading or deceptive” and banned the TIA from speaking publicly on ETS.^40,⁴¹ On appeal the injunction was lifted, but the court granted a declaration that the advertisement was misleading and deceptive contrary to the Act and the TIA were ordered to pay a large proportion of AFCO’s costs.

The ‘Morling Judgement’ as it was termed was the first time in the world that passive smoking had been held by a court to be harmful, and this rang around the world.

Dollisson left the Tobacco Institute and went to Philip Morris where he helped the campaign against the Victorian Government’s Tobacco Act of 1987, which raised the State tobacco tax and replaced tobacco sponsorship money as well as promoting health (which replaced tobacco advertising from the advertisers point of view) and also funded medical research. The Victorian legislation, effectively paid off the tobacco industry’s bought acolytes, and the aggressive approach to advocacy by Dollisson in Australia was seen as backfiring.

The decision also set the precedent for the test case Scholem v NSW Dept of Health, where a psychological counsellor successfully sued for workplace tobacco smoke exposure in May 1992.

Australia has been drifting in its tobacco control endeavours of late, but Trevor Morling will be remembered for his contribution, as well for the many other achievements cited below.

www.smh.com.au/national/chamberlain-royal-commission-judge-was-a-lawyer-s-lawyer-20201006-p562hk.html

08/06/2020

Domestic Violence Becomes a Workers Comp Issue 8/6/20

The NSW Supreme Court has held that the children of a worker killed at home by her mentally ill partner in a domestic violence incident can have compensation.

It is good that the issue of domestic violence gets publicity and that the children get compensation. But it raises the issue of whether employers are seriously able to assess the domestic situation of all employees and then whether they can ever hope to intervene in them. Employers ran a long campaign not to have to pay for journey accidents, people injured on the way to work, on the basis that it was not a risk that they could control, yet which potentially might cause a big change in their insurance premiums and thus costs. If we want our employers to be concentrating on making their businesses efficient and looking for hazards in the workplaces that they do control, it is slightly dubious public policy to have them sniffing around about employees’ home life. This case is slightly unusual in that the employer was effectively a partnership bet ween the couple rather than having a distant employer, and the company had been deregistered which suggests some dysfunction But the money accessed was Workers Compensation insurance and this will affect premiums and potentially other work situations.

It is true that a lot needs to be done about the discovery and action on domestic violence. It is also true that mentally ill people need to live somewhere and that their carers are at risk. Judges faced with people in dire need of help such as the children in this situation search for answers, and the Workers Compensation insurance scheme is a source of such funds. But the precedent set is not a good one.

The same principle applies when a baby gets into trouble at birth and has long-term adverse effects. If the obstetrician is found to have erred, there is a lot of money to give the unfortunate infant. If he or she is not found to have erred, there is no money for the infant. So now the premiums for obstetricians are very high and some retire in consequence. 4 Corners ran a show on this issue some time ago and it turned out that one doctor was responsible for about 60% of the problem births in Western Australia and had declined to speak to the show. Wow- go after him! Who was he? The Professor at the biggest teaching hospital of course. Most of the difficult cases in the State were admitted under his name, and the staff of the hospital did their best with these cases.

What is needed is a compensation system that is no fault. Sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes big mistakes have small consequences and sometimes little mistakes have big consequences. With systems, it is not usually one person who makes a mistake, there are miscommunications, lack of clarity who was responsible, lack of availability of something or someone. Accident causation theory is now an academic discipline, but the legal profession has not really caught up, let alone the political system.

A lot needs to be done about domestic violence, but I am not sure that making it a workers compensation issue will do anything more than push it into the public eye and help these children. Employers and insurers will run a successful political campaign to change the law to exclude it. I am not often on the side of Workers Compensation insurers, but a better solution has to be found.

www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/no-longer-a-private-matter-employer-held-responsible-for-family-violence-20200605-p54zy1.html

06/06/2020

The ‘Black Lives Matter’ Protest in Sydney 6/6/20

Prime Minister Scott Morrison was smugly distancing Australia from the riots in the USA over the George Floyd public murder, but voices were quick to point out that there had been 432 deaths in custody in Australia since 1991, despite Royal Commissions and their findings, which were not implemented.

The demonstration was planned as everyone here knows the COVID19 lockdown is gradually being eased as there are now few community-acquired cases in Australia.

But the Police applied to the Supreme Court and got them to declare the rally and march illegal under the COVID19 restrictions. I had been going to miss the march on health grounds, but the Police rather than the public health authorities wanting it declared illegal made me want to attend.

As I have written before, Police intolerance of any sort of dissent was clearly brought home to me when I wore a sign that said, ‘Respect the Dead by working for Peace’ at the ANZAC service in Hyde Park in 2019, where the police sergeant said that he would arrest me if I did not move 50 metres away.

John Howard initiated the needless Australian invasion of the Middle East against the wishes of 74% of the population who marched in 2004. The creation of a terror threat due to that folly, the handling of that threat by increasing surveillance, decreasing civil liberties and increasing Police power without supervision is a trend of our time. The other trend, the increase in social inequality has put pressure on Police, as the enforcers of the norms of a social system that excludes an increasing percentage of the population.

But the Police inability to handle mental illness or drunkenness and conflict has not been sufficient. There are too many deaths in custody, which principally affect Aboriginal people and too many Police shootings, which principally affect the mentally ill.

So I was not willing to sit at home because the Police did not want a demonstration that asked that they be called to account and change their ways.

Interestingly some of my son’s friends who are overseas students did not dare to go lest their visas be cancelled.

The Supreme Court’s ban on the rally and march was overturned on appeal in the morning, but my opinion was that most people going to the 3pm event were unaware of this and, like myself had decided to go anyway.

The city had prepared for the event by stopping the trams from Circular Quay, (could they have run from Central to Randwick?), and by the trains not stopping at Town Hall. So we walked from Circular Quay and the demonstration went back almost the full length of the Queen Victoria building in George St. It later went back further than this. Protesters were socially distancing and about two thirds were wearing masks. People were walking among the protesters issuing masks and hand sanitiser, and soon more than 90% were wearing masks. There was a wide spread of ages and racial origins.

The protest speakers were on the Town Hall steps, but could not be heard at all for a fair percentage of the crowd as the PA system which is on the traffic lights was not in use by the speakers. After about half an hour, at about 3.30pm the speeches stopped, and everyone assumed that the March would start. It did not. It was not clear what was happening, whether the rally was allowed and the march not. There was quite a lot of chanting of ‘Black Lives Matter’ and also activist shouting, ‘Too Many Coppers’ with the reply ‘Not enough Justice’.

There were Police amongst the protesters. They did not look comfortable, and I noted Glock pistols in their holsters. Glock pistols have no safety catches, so the only thing stopping them or someone else grabbing them was the flap and press stud on the top of the holsters.

We kept thinking that we were about to march, as we went forward in little bursts. But looking a long way ahead we could see that the placards were not moving. All that was happening was that the social distancing was being taken up. This and the chanting would have increased the infection danger somewhat, so one could only wonder at the reason for the delay. The rally and march had been scheduled from 3pm to 5pm with a break at 4.32pm when we were all to kneel for 1 minute to remember the 432 people who had died.

The March started a bit before 4pm and wound to Belmore Park near Central station with the stop and kneeling at 4.32pm an impressive moment. Belmore Park was totally packed, with social distancing quite undermined, so we took a photo and left. Apparently there were some minor scuffles between Police and people who stayed after 5pm.

It was interesting that the public, who have been very compliant and responsible throughout the COVID19 epidemic, were willing to defy the Supreme Court ban on the rally and march. The large Police presence suggested that they were willing to suppress the event, but there were a very large number of protesters, 17,000 seems a reasonable estimate. I do not think that the crowd would have tolerated not having the rally and not marching, so it might have escalated with lines of Police, riot shields, water cannon and tear gas. Fortunately sense prevailed.

It was a victory for the people in the sense that they stated in large numbers their attitude to Black Deaths in custody, and the limits to which they are willing to tolerate the Police, the government and the Supreme Court telling them what they may and may not do. The relatively poor uptake of the COVID19 tracking app is a similar indicator of the trust of government. No, we do not want COVID19, but we do not trust the government either.

As I get older, I trust people more and government and institutions less, and work for the power to go to those who legitimately own it, the people. This was a good day. Hopefully no COVID19 cases will result.

05/06/2020

Electric Vehicles: How helpful are they for Climate Change? 5/6/20

There are claims and counter claims for how much electric vehicles (EVs) improve the greenhouse gas situation. The production of batteries is quite energy-intensive, so a large battery car takes about twice as much energy to produce as a normal Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) car.

The ‘payback’ time for that extra energy is about 2 years based on the number of km an average (UK) driver does per year.

But the key variable is how the electricity is generated, both in making the battery and in running the car. If it is made in Asia with coal fired electricity to manufacture the car and then charged with coal powered electricity, there is very little benefit. If the battery is produced by renewable electricity and the car charged with renewable electricity, the savings are more than two thirds by 150,000km.

If you keep your old ICE car for 4 years, it will have produced about the same amount of greenhouse gas as it takes to produce a new electric car. Looked at it the other way, it takes 4 years for a new electric car to pay for itself from an emissions point of view as against paying just for the petrol of an existing ICE car.

www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-help-to-tackle-climate-change

05/06/2020

Aboriginal Deaths in Custody are not far from the US situation. 5/6/20

Australians looking at the riots happening in the US may be tempted to feel smug that it does not happen here. The riots don’t, but there has been a long history of Aboriginal deaths in custody, seemingly unchanged by a number of Royal Commissions. This is long overdue to be addressed, and is the peak of the tendency to criminalise our social problems.

You might argue that the policeman who tripped a 16 year old to arrest him did so because the youth threatened to break his jaw, but you cannot argue with the many deaths and inquiries’ findings.

We need to put our own house in order.

www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/04/morrison-says-australia-should-not-import-black-lives-matter-protests-after-deaths-in-custody-rally?CMP=share_btn_fb

05/06/2020

Housing Stimulus: More Middle Class Welfare 5/6/20

Successive governments have used the building industry to pump up the economy on credit. How so? For decades the tax deduction on negatively geared real estate has made housing a favoured investment. It has been the no-brainer way to make money. You borrow to own a property, and as long as it is your, all the capital gain is yours. So the lesser fraction that you own, the greater the percentage rise in your total assets. And since you save on tax and gain rent, it is far better than shares or other assets. If you ask to borrow 90% to buy shares, no bank would lend you 90%. They would fall about laughing, and you would be taking a big risk. If you wanted to borrow 90% of real estate, no problem- all perceived as low risk. How come? Because Australia’s private debt is rising and is now the highest in the world. This little Ponzi scheme has a cost. We have the best houses, which are the most expensive relative to our incomes, and we have a huge national private debt, which means that we pay interest to foreign banks and have no money to develop and own our own country. Like all Ponzi schemes, it is OK as long as you sell out before the bubble pops. The older generation are doing this, cashing out as the younger generation takes up the huge loans that are now necessary.

The tax department got less money to create this mess, so public housing was not built, and there is a huge shortage of public housing. Because prices are so high there is also a problem in affordable housing as wages in the real world have stagnated as globalisation allows jobs to go offshore to be done more cheaply by third world people. The negative gearing thing amounts to middle class welfare, where those who had one house were able to buy more, and those that did not merely saw rents and prices rise. Labor tried to address this and lost the election.

Now we have a recession, worsened by the COVID-19 crisis and the taxpayer has to step in, making more debt for the future. So what projects to spend the money on? More middle class welfare! Those who already have $150,000 to improve their house get another $25,000 from the future taxpayer, the young people of today.

It is merely another example of the Morrison government’s lack of commitment to a fair go for all. This could be a huge opportunity to build social housing to help those who have been left behind. Is the excuse that the projects are not ‘shovel-ready’? The government could pay for the huge outstanding renovations and repair bill on the public housing, which has been neglected for 30 years. Surely these repair lists on yellowed paper could be found and actioned.

Morrison governs for his voters, not for the country as a whole. His policies increase inequality, which stores discord for the future. This last effort will further the Matthew Effect, named after the biblical quote, ‘For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away’.

— Matthew 25:29, RSV.

www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/03/morrison-government-to-offer-25000-grants-to-help-build-and-renovate-homes