I started off in treatment medicine, and saw all the harm tobacco did, so went into prevention. That became political activism as smoking was not an accident or a custom; it was a carefully marketed product, which also bought politicians to make sure that it could keep doing what it was doing.  As I journeyed along I found that no one was much interested in prevention if it lessened their ability to make money. 

I left hospital medicine to get a job with more civilised hours to pay the bills while I campaigned.  Occ Health and Safety in the public sector- just the shot!  Occ Health and safety always had management loudly avow commitment to it, but this was very thin when they were asked to back words with money, or to tighten up on cheap but polluting practices.  Asbestos, chlorine leaks, silica dust, work practices causing RSI or back injuries all required big fights to change practises, and good prevention was not always achieved in my career experience.

But Defence was always bad, even though they had a large budget.  A friend at my ski lodge married an aircraft maintenance engineer who got leukaemia, as did many of his workmates. They had been cleaning the back of fighter aircraft with benzene, one of the worst carcinogens known.   My friend was soon a widow with the Fleet Air Arm denying liability.  She felt that the military had a mentality where every victory cost a few lives and this applied in peace time as well as in wars.  As Kirsty, the farmer and mother on 4 Corners put it, ‘It feels like we are just collateral damage’.

When I was in Parliament a small group from near Williamstown Air Base said that the air was contaminated with jet fuel.  There is a target range there and as the fighters turn low they gun the engines, spewing out quite a lot of unspent fuel into the atmosphere.  A man called Noel was the main spokesman.  The fuel landed on his roof, and in his water tank.  He had measured the levels of contaminants and had figures which showed levels much above safe limits.  No one would take an interest.  He pointed out that the developers were buying the farmlets ever closer to the base and building houses even as he found the water was contaminated- from above interestingly, not from below.  He dropped out of the fight, as his energy ran out- he had lymphoma.  I did not believe that this was a coincidence.

After I left Parliament I went farming in New Zealand in 2010. By chance I met a very rich American who had come to buy land in NZ.  He was effusive in his praise for NZ.  It had stable government and pure water, so was ideal to grow food. He wanted to join NZ and make a contribution as well. The Kiwis were flattered, but one asked him ‘What about Australia?’  ‘No’, he said. ‘They have unstable governments that do not do anything and have let the mining industry stuff up all their groundwater’.  It seemed a very sweeping statement at the time.

A couple of years ago a stockbroker told me that I should invest in Origin Energy as they had lots of unconventional gas in Queensland and it was in an area where no one worried about pollution.  The ground water was not a problem.  Stockbrokers know these things.  (The shares are worth half what they were).

Now both Federal and State governments and both political parties are falling over themselves to give money and favours to dodgy Adani (see last week’s 4 Corners). This is despite the fact that it will pollute the groundwater and the Great Artesian Basin, our nation’s major water resource, not to mention the farmland and the Barrier Reef.  And Turnbull (aka Rhetoric Man) is pressuring the States to allow more fracking, so that he can solve his gas shortage caused by letting ‘the market’ rip unregulated.

We have to take back our country. I have come to the conclusion that political parties cannot be trusted because they can be bought.  We need Direct Democracy Now!  Decisions by plebiscites!

I have some experience in this area, though I would not seek to overstate it.

In 1985 I won a public service fellowship to look at workplace absence and I looked at the evidence of whether drug testing in the workplace worked. The main place it was suggested was at pre-employment medicals. The idea was that if you tested them and they were OK, they could have the job. It was a pretty silly idea as only a really serious addict would come to job medical interview with drugs on board so the pick up rate was low, the costs high, and the impression on the workers quite negative.

Later in my OHS job a worker was sent in for a medical as he was said to be using hard drugs in the portable toilet (thunderbox). He was taunting and arrogant, saying that I could not prove anything, and could not do anything as he would not give permission for the test. He was right of course, but he soon proved his accusers right as well by falling out the door of the thunderbox with a needle stuck in his arm.

When I worked in private OHS, the NSW State government saved money by sending people on parole to be drug urine tested on Medicare by local GPs. I was stuck with it in our practice which was one of the few that still agreed to do the testing. A man came in, angry and abusive, demanding immediate service, which he was granted to stop him terrorising the waiting room. He brought in a jar of very cold urine for testing. I said that I wanted a fresh specimen, gave him a jar and pointed to the toilet, ten paces away. He left to ‘get a new specimen’ and came back some time later. I said that I wanted to see him pass it, so he pulled his undies down saying, ‘There it is, are you happy now?’ No I wasn’t, as he had another small vial of urine in his hand as he held his undies. ‘You are a hard bastard’, he said as he eventually passed the urine, which unsurprisingly showed he was still using narcotics. The Parole people were pleased. They said, ‘We knew he was using but could not get a GP to get us a specimen’. I was not surprised that GPs were reluctant. At $15.20 for a Medicare visit that involved a terrified waiting room, half an hour of time, a threat to have your head punched in and the disruption of a whole afternoon for a whole medial practice, I told them that we were not going to continue testing either. Presumably he went back to gaol, and one might wonder how much good that did.

My next encounter was a female friend who had been very traumatised by a previous serious rape attempt that she had fought off. She was going through Central Station on her way to work, when a sniffer dog made the Police insist on searching her bag and ‘patting her down’. She had an empty plastic bag in her handbag that she had had a small amount of marijuana in some weeks before. But she was very traumatised by the experience because of the memories that were stirred and by the idea that she could not even walk around without people assuming that they had the right to touch her body.

The NSW Government will not allow pill testing at concerts, but wants to try to stop the drugs entering. Presumably there is a risk that younger people will bring them in if they are exempt from searches. Where will this end? Body cavity searches? MRIs outside concerts?

Prohibition will generally not work in the workplace, let alone the rock concerts. We need harm minimisation policies. This is not easy and it is not perfect, but it is better than prohibition.

Here is the NSW story in the NY Times, presumably with the unstated subheading, ‘Look what these mad Australians are doing now.’

www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/world/australia/strip-search-children-drugs.html