04/01/2023
At last; some sense on Defence- but not from Kim Beasley.
4 January 2023
We have to be self-reliant and we have to distance ourselves from the USA, which seems to have a government controlled by its ‘defence’ industry’s need for wars.
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Category: Government
03/01/2023
Flaws in Constitutions
3 January 2023
The US Constitution has many flaws. The most conspicuous being the ‘right to bear arms’ which is taken as the right for every citizen to carry guns around the place, with predictable consequences. There is also state controlled voting rights, which get fiddled and the right of elected governments to draw the electoral boundaries, a sure-fire recipe for dodgy electoral system. It seems the US Supreme Court has managed to give itself a privileged position and now precedent cements this.
Of course the major problem is that the US Constitution was made to be almost impossible to change so all these flaws are perpetuated, the latest problem being that Presidents can appoint Supreme Court judges for life and these judges now override the legislatures by saying the law is against the Constitution, as in the case of abortion.
How the US will fix this is not of academic interest. The Australian Constitution was not some document of all wisdom for all time; it was made with the overriding imperative to get the 6 colonies into one country. All the power except marriage, tax and foreign policy was given to the States. Looking at how Australia works in practice, one would not even guess this. We have uniform laws only because the state Ministers work out ‘template legislation’ and all State Parliaments pass it unamended. About a third of all State legislation and certainly the most important stuff it this, with the States Parliaments serving as very expensive rubber stamps.
Now we have major constitutional changes suggested, a Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal people and removing the English monarch of head of State and creation of a Republic.
It would be better if there were some other changes also. My favourite would be to move towards proportional representation and to allow citizens referenda to override Parliaments, and to limit the terms of Parliament so that political party hierarchies could not have such significance. This would be a move to more of Swiss-style constitution, as was suggested but discarded as it was not Anglo in 1899 at the Constitutional discussions then. The German constitution, which was written by Winston Churchill to ensure that no single party could ever have a majority, or even the changes in the NZ voting system which made it unlikely could, also be considered. We have to recognise that we have the same problem as the USA, a fossilised constitution that needs significant change. It is ridiculous that we do not have the confidence even to talk about this. Change is not easy, but that is hardly the point. Are we inferior to our great- or great-great-grandfathers that we cannot plan our future?
US Constitution’s flaws on show
Nick Bryant SMH Columnist, 3 January 2023
A plan by the probable next US House Speaker to read the Constitution aloud could have unforeseen consequences.
For more than a quarter of a century, American politics has doubled as a civics lesson from hell. The Clinton years introduced us to the impeachment process, something not witnessed since the mid-19th century. The disputed 2000 election reminded us of the vagaries of the Electoral College and revealed how the Supreme Court could intervene to determine the outcome of a presidential election – who knew? The January 6 hearings, which culminated in the first-ever referral of a former president to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, served both as a primetime crime drama and a tutorial in constitutional law.
To mark the opening of the 118th Congress today, the Republican Party intends to conduct its own teachable moment. If he wins the House Speakership – a contest that looks like it will provide a lesson in the chaotic state of the modern-day GOP – the Republican leader Kevin McCarthy intends to read in its entirety the US Constitution on the floor of the House of Representatives.
This ritual will border on the liturgical. The Constitution, despite Donald Trump’s recent threat to terminate it, has taken on a near Biblical status. Its framers are regarded as patron saints. Yet Americans who listen in may well be shocked to hear these portions of scripture take on a different meaning when placed in their rightful context.
No passage has been more misappropriated than the Second Amendment, which notes that ‘‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed’’. As people will hear, however, the primary focus of the founding fathers was the creation of a ‘‘well-regulated militia’’ rather than the firearms they would carry. The intention was to guard against a standing army, which in post-revolutionary America was seen as a tyrannical throwback to the days of British rule.
For almost 200 years, then, the Second Amendment was often referred to as the ‘‘lost amendment’’ because in an America that ended up creating a professional fighting force, the US military, it was considered obsolete. Not until 2008, following a decades-long propaganda campaign by the National Rifle Association to twist and falsify its meaning, did the conservative-leaning Supreme Court make the Second Amendment the constitutional basis for individual gun ownership.
Those who listen in might be surprised to hear how little the Constitution says about the Supreme Court, despite its omnipresence in modern politics. Nowhere does it state that the court should be the final arbiter of whether laws passed by Congress are legal. Judicial review, the ability to declare an act of Congress or presidential executive action unconstitutional, is a power that the Supreme Court granted itself in the early 19th century.
The irony is that the court’s hardline conservative justices are driven by a philosophy of jurisprudence known as originalism, which determines controversial rulings, such as the overturning of Roe v Wade, based on their interpretation of the original intent of the Constitution. Yet the founding fathers never intended the Supreme Court to hold such sway. ‘‘The judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power,’’ wrote Alexander Hamilton. Thus this right-wing philosophy falls at the first historical hurdle. Originalism is the enemy of originalism.
Defenders of American democracy may also be disappointed by what they hear, for nowhere in the Constitution is there a positive assertion of the right to vote. The original intent of the founding fathers was that only white men of property should be enfranchised, although they left it for the states to decide.
Over the years, as the electorate expanded, voting rights came to be framed in a negative way. The 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870 after the Civil War, stated voting rights ‘‘shall not be denied’’ on account of ‘‘race, colour, or previous condition of servitude’’.
In the 1930s, the 19th Amendment finally decreed that women ‘‘shall not be denied’’ the vote. But voting has sometimes been called ‘‘the missing right’’ because the Constitution does not explicitly and positively spell it out.
‘‘We the People,’’ the rousing words in the preamble of the Constitution, were certainly never intended as a statement of great participatory or populist intent. Indeed, the whole point of the Constitution was to guard against the tyranny of the majority and what its aristocratic authors called an ‘‘excess of democracy’’.
Following the American Revolution, the Constitution was designed to be a counterrevolutionary text; what the Harvard historian Jill Lepore has called ‘‘a check on the revolution, a halt to its radicalism’’. Maybe that explains why Kevin McCarthy is so keen to read it out. The Republicans are a minority party increasingly reliant on the founding fathers’ minoritarian model of democracy.
They have lost the nationwide vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections, but the Electoral College gives them a shot at the White House. The power granted by the framers to small states, which were allotted just as many senators as the most populous states, artificially inflates the Republican Party’s influence in the Senate. The original decision to allow states to determine voting qualifications has enabled Republican-controlled state legislatures to suppress the vote.
Hopefully, the reading of the Constitution will remind citizens of its flaws and how this American gospel is in desperate need of revision. But therein lies the constitutional catch-22. The founding fathers made it fiendishly difficult to amend.
Dr Nick Bryant is the author of When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present. Peter Hartcher is on leave.
28/12/2022
Please Write Submission re Vaping by 16 January
28 December 2022
Vaping is now own by tobacco companies who are following exactly the same path as they did with tobacco. They managed to get out of having to prove it was safe because a few naive doctors, still fight the tobacco wars said it was ‘better than tobacco’, an incredibly low bar to clear- not really a bar at all.
Then they said it could be used to quit, and a handful of doctors who made a living from Quit clinics when 99% of people quitting just do so, supported this. Now it is being marketed in new ways to that the adds are not visible to those who are likely to oppose vaping and the habit is growing hugely, with the Industry also using peer-to-peer marketing to evade and futures regulations or prohibitions.
Vaping is now more of a gateway to smoking than a path from it, and that suits the Industry just fine.
It is likely that the solvents will be harmful in the long term, so the precauti0onaly principle would mean that it should be banned until it is proven safe, which is frankly unlikely.
In London there is now a coffee shop that advertises Vaping and Coffee’ which assumes that indoor vaping is not smoking and will be tolerated by non-vapers. Presumably they will resists vaping controls indoors until passive vaping is shown to be harmful and tat might take 30 or 40 years- a total tobacco epidemic re-run. So please write a submission to the inquiry.
Now here’s a deadline: We have until January 16 to help stop toxic vaping
18/12/2022
Trust – a letter to Ross Gittins, who wrote the below article on Trust
18 December 2022
Dear Ross,
I congratulate you on your article on ‘Trust’. It is the glue that holds society together, and when it is broken there are huge consequences.
Since the first plane hijacking in 1970 checking people onto planes is a growth industry. Years ago you could walk into any office building, take the lift to the top floor and ask the General Manager’s secretary if you could speak to (almost always) him. Now everyone carries tags even to get in the front door or the lift. This may all be related to inequality or only mostly.
But it is also the rise of the manager. The best expose of this I have read is ‘The Political Economy of Health’ by Julian Tudor-Hart. He follows the British NHS from its founding till 1998. At first it was a noble experiment with all those in it paid adequately and trying to give health for all as well as they could. The whole thing was self-governing, and everyone was trusted to procure things as cheaply as possible and look after each other and the patients. Then managers came and asked ‘What is the cost of a day in hospital?’ or’ What is the cost of an X-Ray?’ Some said that it was unwise to ask this, as keeping records that detailed would simply add to costs, which everyone was reasonably sure were as low as possible already. Hart details successive management demands and consequent cost increases until the cost of management became about 35% of the total, without any apparent improvement in the service.
Managers do not trust people to do their jobs, so they insist on KPIs, which then become more important than the job itself, distort the tasks done and kill any initiative that might have been used by the staff. Since the task are all defined to be as simple as possible the staff are de-skilled or not allowed to use any initiative and the managers award themselves a pay rise, so the gap between the lowest and highest paid reaches its current obsene level.
We now have a situation where most people work down to their station rather than up to their ability. We have a huge workforce in security and no one is allowed to use their own initiative beyond their management defined protocols as they pour time into producing KPIs so that they can be checked up on. Management has created immense overheads, even on top of their own inflated salaries. And no one can figure out why productivity growth is stalled! More trust is one solution. I can think of others.
2022: The year our trust was abused to breaking point
Ross Gittins Economics Editor SMH
December 14, 2022
As the summer break draws near, many will be glad to see the back of 2022. But there’s something important to be remembered about this year before we bid it good riddance. Much more than most years, it’s reminded us of something we know, but keep forgetting: the central importance of trust – and the consternation when we discover it’s been abused.
Every aspect of our lives depends on trust. Spouses must be able to trust each other. Children need parents they can trust and, when the children become teenagers, parents need to be able to trust them. Friendships rely on mutual trust.
Trust is just as important to the smooth functioning of the economy. Bosses need to be able to trust their workers; workers need bosses they can trust. The banking system runs on trust because the banks lend out the money we deposit with them; should all the depositors demand their money back at the same time, the bank risks collapse.
Just buying stuff in a shop involves trust that you won’t be taken down. Buying stuff on the internet requires much more trust. Tradies call on our trust when they demand payment before they start the job.
Our democracy runs on trust. We trust the leaders we elect to act in our best interests, not their own. Our country’s co-operation with other countries rests on trust. Of late, our relations with China, our major trading partner, have become mutually distrustful.
The trouble with trust, however, is that it can make us susceptible. And, as Melbourne University’s Tony Ward reminds us, it can be just too tempting to the less scrupulous to take advantage of our trusting nature.
They can get away with a lot before we wake up. But when we do, there are serious repercussions. Much worse, the loss of trust – some of it warranted; much of it not – makes our lives run a lot less smoothly.
The truth is that, as a nation, we’ve slowly become less trusting of those around us. But this year is notable for events where trust – or the lack of it – was central.
It’s widely agreed that the main reason the federal Coalition government was tossed out in May was the unpopularity of Scott Morrison. The Australian National University’s Australian Election Study has found that the two most important factors influencing political leaders’ popularity are perceived honesty and trustworthiness.
Its polling showed Morrison 29 percentage points behind Anthony Albanese on honesty, and 28 points behind on trustworthiness.
By contrast, many were expecting Daniel Andrews to be punished at the recent Victorian election for the harsh measures he insisted on during the pandemic. It didn’t happen. We don’t have fancy studies to prove it, but my guess is he retained the trust of the majority of voters.
The ANU study always asks questions about trust in government. This year it found 70 per cent of respondents agreeing that “people in government look after themselves” and only 30 per cent agreeing that “people in government can be trusted to do the right thing”.
This helps explain why the federal election was no triumph for Labor. The combined primary vote for the major parties fell to 68 per cent, the lowest since the 1930s. Labor’s own election report explains this as “part of a long-term trend driven by declining trust in government, politics and politicians”.
Related Article
Senior economics writer SMH
Ward reminds us of the benefits of a high level of trust. It reduces “transaction costs” – the cost of doing business. “Profits and investments are higher if you don’t have to spend lots of time and money checking whether other parties are honest or not,” he says.
“People invest more in their own education if they believe a fair system will reward their efforts. If you think the system is rigged, why bother?”
Comparing countries, economists have found strong links between more social trust and higher levels of income. Trust is one of the top determinants of long-term economic growth.
And high-trust societies, with less distrust of science, had better outcomes in tackling COVID. That’s one respect in which we didn’t do too badly this year.
16/12/2022
A Scientific Approach to Conspiracy Theories
16 December 2022
It seems that alienation and feelings of impotence increase the likelihood of conspiracy theories.
If this is so, a social policy that lessened economic polarisation might be a good idea.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-conspiracy-theories-share-a-cluster-of-psychological-features/
11/12/2022
China Relaxes COVID Zero Policy
11 December 2022
President Xi Jinping has relaxed China’s Zero Covid policy.
One is reminded of King Canute, who wished to show his flatterers that there were limits to his power, so he took them to the seaside, planted his throne on the sand and commanded the tide to come in no further. Naturally it came in and his legs got wet.
President Xi Jinping recently made himself the most powerful man in China since Mao Zedong, but has also insisted on the Zero Covid policy.
As viruses evolve, they usually change to strains that are less lethal but more infectious, which helps them to spread. So trying to go back to zero was almost certainly impossible and the attempt was obviously disrupting Chinese society a lot. It may have been that while Xi was impregnable within the People’s Congress, if his Covid policies totally lost him support in the population change would still occur.
Relaxing the policy is likely to cause a big spike in infections. This will cause a lot of problems as older Chinese are less vaccinated- perhaps only two thirds, though 90% of younger people are. Older folk are therefore more likely to die, particularly as the Chinese vaccines are not quite as good as the Western ones.
From an Australian perspective the improvement in the Chinese economy is likely to help us. We rode through the last global recession, with the Government congratulating itself on our resilience and their wisdom, but the point was that our trade was principally with China, which was not having a recession. If China starts growing again, it may help us a lot. Hopefully this time, if things go well, we will take an opportunity, rather than just handing out tax cuts to the rich.
08/12/2022
NSW Labor Weak on Gambling
8 December 2022
With the NSW Election due in March, Labor leader Chris Minns obviously does not want to upset the gambling, hotel and club industry, so is wimping out on gambling control.
The Liberals, under the religious Dominic Perrottet, are likely to lose the election, so are willing to bring in cashless gaming cards, which will allow the money lost to be traced, or limits placed on problem gamblers. The gaming industry hates this, as most gamblers actually cannot afford it, and the money laundering component is very large but currently unquantified.
Labor could support Perrottet and get the job done, but would rather cuddle up to the gambling industry, win the election and then presumably make some sort of token gesture to the voters. No wonder the big parties are on the nose.
The power of the clubs and pubs is very considerable of course. Labor had banning pokies as a policy in Tasmania in 2018 and just lost, winning 3 seats when they needed six. Gambling industry money was rated a considerable factor in the loss.
www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/04/labor-sticking-with-pokies-ban-despite-tasmania-election-loss-rebecca-white-says
Here is the SMH article
07/12/2022
The Myth of Liberal Competence
5 December 2022
Why people think the Liberals are better money managers never ceases to amaze me. They are ideological, venal and often do not know what they do not know and are too arrogant to ask.
Everyone said that Australia’s IT policy under John Howard was outstandingly poor, and it did not seem to improve under Turnbull as the Libs rejected (optical) fibre to the premises to save a few dollars.
Here is a retrospective look at the NBN, which should have been seen as a national asset and funded to a standard, rather than a government monopoly trying to keep costs down.
07/12/2022
Brittany Higgins trial shows that legal system is not fit for purpose
7 December 2022
Everyone is aware that the Brittany Higgins trial was abandoned as some material was found in the jury room which showed that a juror had researched information on false memories. Jurors are specifically not allowed to look at material outside the courtroom, presumably so that their judgement can only be based on information from that source.
The ACT Director of Public Prosecutions was going to have a re-trial with a new jury, but the trial was abandoned because of the state of Brittany Higgins’ mental health.
I had spoken to some barristers who were of the opinion that the prosecution should never have been attempted because she could never win because no one would be convicted when it was one person’s word against another. This was demonstrated in the High Court decision when Cardinal Pell was accused of sexually molesting two boys, one of whom had suicided. It was the surviving boy, (now man) v Pell, so Pell was acquitted.
I spoke to a retired prosecutor who disagreed with this. He said that the accused, Bruce Lehmann, had been ‘very well advised’. Lehmann stated that there had been no sexual contact; he had merely retrieved some documents and left the building. This meant that there would be no argument over ‘consent’ and he would not have to go in the witness box. My prosecutor said that the circumstantial evidence was that Higgins was found naked and distressed in a foetal position on a couch and it was unlikely that she would have simply taken off her clothes and adopted this position for no reason, so the trial had a reasonable chance.
But because Lehmann was not giving evidence and Higgins had to make the prosecution case, she was the one effectively on trial with a hostile defence barrister.
Unsurprisingly this was very traumatic. Whether she had done enough to convince the jury will never be known as the trial was aborted by the judge. But she was not in any mental state for a retrial, which presumably would have followed the same course.
Her lawyers will apparently sue her employer and she will presumably only have to prove this on the balance of probabilities.
Lehmann plans to sue the media for defamation, and presumably hopes either to repair his reputation or at least recover some settlement monies.
But the obvious conclusion is that if you are raped in Parliament House, it is not worth trying to pursue justice. As my father told me as an adolescent, ‘Avoid the Courts son; you will get law, but you will not get justice’.
Here are some references, with a ‘w’ missing, except for Jacqui Maley’s SMH article.
ww.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-02/bruce-lehrmann-rape-charge-to-be-dropped-brittany-higgins/101725242
ww.smh.com.au/politics/federal/media-alleged-that-bruce-lehrmann-assaulted-other-women-court-20221202-p5c39n.html
ww.canberratimes.com.au/story/8010840/bruce-lehrmann-preparing-defamation-action/?cs=14264
www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-brittany-higgins-matter-is-closed-has-anything-really-changed-20221202-p5c3b4.html
03/12/2022
Children in Care- a Brief History
3 December 2022
One summer evening when I was still a medical student, I was strolling with friends through a festival with stalls and lights in Hyde Park. A young woman approached me and said “I’m a ‘Hookah for Christ, will you come with me?”, and handed me a leaflet. She was a few years younger than I and one of the most stunningly beautiful women I have ever seen. I paused, somewhat shocked, and wondered how much Christ and how much hookah was in this Goddess incarnate and whether I should follow her path to enlightenment. My girlfriend reappeared at this point and was very definitely of the opinion that I should not.
Some years later, in 1992, I had further cause to rue this ignorance as DoCS (Department of Community Services) were involved in a court case with a sect called the ‘Children of God’, who, it was alleged, had used young girls sexually to recruit members for their cult. The sect maintained that the term ‘Hookahs for Christ’ was merely a rhetorical device. The sect had expensive lawyers and won the case , though there was considerable public doubt about the freedom of cult members. DoCs was highly criticised over the case and the Premier, Nick Greiner, cut huge number from its middle management.
Neo-liberalism was new at that time, and his slogan was ‘Putting people first by managing Better’, which was in itself reflected an attitude of the time that managers knew better than those who actually did the work. A contemporary management slogan was ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, which tended to translate into ’Don’t spend any money on prevention, as it might not break’. Money spent supporting families has trouble showing big returns on management KPIs. The NSW Public Service was being massively downsized and there are some of the view that DoCS has never recovered from this downsizing, as human organisations rely on human knowledge and if there are just generic managers and new recruits, there is not enough corporate memory and experience to handle cases.
In 1999 when I was in Parliament, I was approached by a number of people telling me that DoCS was failing children at risk. The children with dysfunctional families from drug abuse, alcohol or domestic violence were not getting home support, and the initiation and supervision of fostering arrangements were poorly executed. I tried to set up an inquiry into DoCS. I had a number of NGOs speak to the cross bench. I had to get enough numbers so that there was a majority in the upper house. One of the groups suggested that the UN treaty on the Rights of the Child be a term of reference. This seemed reasonable, but Fred Nile said that he and Elaine would not vote for the inquiry if this was in the terms of reference. Richard Jones said he would not if it was omitted. I needed both of their votes to be sure of the numbers. I thought Richard would fold if I left it out- I was pretty sure Fred Nile wouldn’t. The Liberals, who were in Opposition at the time, were generally up for anything that would embarrass the Labor Government. I asked if they would support it, and told them that if Richard Jones changed, we had the numbers. They said, “We are a serious political party. If you cannot guarantee the numbers, we will not support you”. I regretted telling them about Richard and I did not move the motion. 21 months later the Liberals decided to support the idea, and approached me to amend my motion slightly, which initiated an inquiry (10/4/2002) .
The 2003 Inquiry found that DoCS was indeed dysfunctional . It had contracted out quite a lot of work to charitable NGOs without them having either the funds or the expertise to deal with difficult cases. Huge resources were spent monitoring wayward adolescents to keep them out of the criminal justice system until they reached 16, after which DoCS were not legally responsible for them. Cases did not have much preventive work done or decisions made and tended to stay on the desks of managers ‘unallocated’ until there was a problem . When there was a crisis or the matter went to Court, a relatively junior DoCS person would be allocated the case and have to face a crisis situation. The plans given to the Children’s Court for approval were hastily cobbled together at the last minute, often by new case managers who had only just got the brief. The Government had introduced ‘mandatory reporting’ with a phone and fax Helpline. This meant that there were huge numbers of reports, and huge efforts dealing with multiple reports on the same child or situation, but the call centre gobbled up resources that would have been better spent actually managing cases. The government was reluctant to get rid of the mandatory reporting ’Helpline’ as it was supposed to force schoolteachers etc. into reporting cases, which would leave no stone unturned. The function of DoCS seemed more concerned with appearances than reality and it got a lot of negative press.
Behind all this was the Children’s Court, where the conscientious Senior Magistrate, Scott Mitchell, was about the only quality control on the Department as he insisted in fulfilling his legislated role of ensuring that there was a realistic plan for children placed into custody of relatives or foster homes.
The Minister for Community Services, Fay Lo Po was sacked as was the head of DoCS, Carmel Niland. Neil Shepherd, who had been Deputy Director of the Cabinet Office and Health of the EPA replaced Niland. The Labor government promised a billion dollars over 10 years (most towards the end of the 10 years). Prevention was addressed with a new program, Brighter Futures, but the key problems remained with lack of action on 21% of cases noted by the Helpline, so there was another Special Commission into Child Protection Services in NSW in 2008 by Justice Wood , (who had achieved fame because of his work on Police corruption and paedophiles in 1997 ). Wood was helped by DoCS officers and one of their complaints was the stress that the Children’s Court put them under when they had to front up to Scott Mitchell with their child management plans. The report recommended weakening the power of the Children’s Court, and Scott Mitchell was disposed of by appointing a new President of the Children’s Court, who was to be a Judge- a level higher than Mitchell, who would have had to apply for the promotion that he was not going to get. On 1/9/2009 Attorney-General John Hatzistergos appointed Judge Mark Marien the new President , claiming he was strengthening the Court as he expanded on the new Judge’s CV, which lacked anything relating to child welfare.
An academic researcher, Katherine Macfarlane, noted that even in 2015 there was no data collected on how many Australian children in Out of Home Care ended up in the criminal justice system. She termed it ‘Care Criminalisation’ and noted that this data is collected in other jurisdictions .
It would seem that DoCs, which had a name change to Dept. of Family and Community Services (FACS) and then in 2019 came to be part of the Dept. Communities and Justice, still has its problems .
A report in the Sydney Morning Herald on 28/11/22 noted that a private contractor, Lifestyle Solutions, had subcontracted a child’s care to another subcontractor, Connecting Families and the children in question could not go to school as they were too cold without a winter uniform, despite the payment of $77,000 per month to the contractors to look after them . The Office of the Children’s Guardian has not accredited the Dept of Community and Justice Western NSW District to look after the 547 children in its care as it did not ‘meet the requirements‘ in the frequency of visits and that it had ‘limited evidence to demonstrate the district’s support for children’, its record-keeping was inconsistent, and its work in keeping in touch with families came in for questioning .
The Department has never been run properly. One of my minders in Parliament had worked there and spoke of the immense stress of going to Court almost unbriefed or accompanying Police to take children from the parents to foster homes. One of my patients who is an upper-middle level case manager has been off work on stress for 14 years, with no serious effort made to rehabilitate her.
But when there is no public housing, rents are unaffordable, welfare payments are insufficient to survive on, day care is expensive, Aboriginals are becoming increasingly isolated from both mainstream Australia and their own community leaders, ‘choice’ and subsidies have left poorer public schools as ghettos of disadvantage, inflation is rising and services are now for profit, it is hardly surprising that things are not going well. Anyone trying to put together a stable social situation for a disadvantaged family would struggle without these basic elements.
Society’s systemic problems need to be addressed if we are to return to the halcyon Aussie concept of a fair go.