Australian government's Greenie strategy pointless says advisory body

The Government's leading economic think tank has launched a scathing attack on one of Kevin Rudd's most significant climate change policies - the mandatory renewable energy target - claiming it will drive up energy prices and do nothing to cut dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.

In a carefully timed submission to the Government's climate change policy review, the Productivity Commission also flagged a review of tax distortions that increase emissions, such as the generous fringe benefit tax treatment of motor vehicles. Following the recent debate over a possible cut in fuel excises to relieve the cost burden on motorists, the commission has also encouraged the Government to put up fuel prices by including transport fuels in an emissions trading scheme from 2010.

The Government's chief climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut, has already signalled concerns about Labor's ambitious election promise to set a mandatory renewable energy target of 20 per cent of power to be generated through sources such as wind and solar energy by 2020. In February, with the release of his first interim report, Professor Garnaut highlighted the need to phase out the MRET as quickly as possible, warning it could push up electricity prices and override the impact of a trading scheme. The Productivity Commission was specifically invited by Professor Garnaut to comment on the policy response to climate change.

While recognising the need for a range of policy options to accelerate the development of clean energy technologies, the commission has questioned the efficiency of the proposed MRET in parallel with an emissions trading scheme. It claims such an approach would increase renewable energy generation at the expense of gas-fired electricity, but not drive any deeper cuts in emissions. It also expressed concern that the scheme would "provide a signal that lobbying for government support for certain technologies and industries over others could be successful". "An MRET operating in conjunction with an emissions trading scheme would not encourage any additional abatement, but still impose additional administration and monitoring costs," the submission says.

The Rudd Government remains committed to the implementation ofits MRET scheme, allocating $15million in last week's budget towards administering it over the next five years. A spokeswoman for Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said the Government made an election commitment to its expanded MRET. "The purpose is to drive investment in, and deployment of, renewable energy in the short and medium term," she said. "The Government will design the renewable energy target in a careful way to reduce Australia's emissions at the lowest cost to the economy."

The commission's submission is consistent with many key points raised in recent Garnaut review discussion papers. These involve the need to include transport fuels under emissions trading and calls for a review of emissions-increasing tax structures, such as fringe benefits tax treatment of cars, and of market rules for power transmission and pricing once a price is put on greenhouse emissions. "There may be interventions elsewhere in the economy (for example, in the taxation and tariff systems) that inadvertently create incentives for increased (greenhouse gas) emissions," it says. "While there could be good public policy reasons for these interventions, the emergence of more ambitious climate change objectives provides an additional reason for reviewing their appropriateness."

Opposition climate spokesman Greg Hunt said the MRET should be replaced with a clean energy target that included technologies such as clean coal and gas. "If you want to clean up the power stations, which supply 92per cent of Australia's energy, and if you want to firmly tackle climate change, you have to have incentives for the take-up of clean coal and gas," he said.

Australian Conservation Foundation climate spokesman Tony Mohr welcomed the commission's focus on taxation review, but suggested the benefits from a mandatory target were greater than attributed. The gas industry welcomed the submission as "an important and credible addition to the debate around how Australia achieves emissions reductions most efficiently".

The commission's comments come as Brendan Nelson described price rises stemming from the Garnaut review as "the train heading down the track". "Mr Rudd has capitalised on the widespread community concern in relation to change, but he's also capitalised on the fact that most Australians are actually ignorant about what it's actually going to cost," the Opposition Leader said in Melbourne. "At the moment, most Australians who are struggling to feed, clothe and house their children ... have not been able to read hundreds of pages of economic theory in relation to the implementation of climate change.

"Most Australians are generally supportive ... But I still think there is a vast, widespread community ignorance in terms of what adjusting to climate change is actually going to cost us."

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You may be dead before you get a public hospital appointment in Queensland

QUEENSLAND Health made two specialist appointments for a man who had been dead six years and sent the notification to an address where he had never lived. Thw letter "shattered" the man's widow, Diane Baldwin, when she found it on Tuesday among mail addressed to her and her new partner. "You can imagine how devastated I was when I got it," Ms Baldwin said. "I was shaking."

Astoundingly, Leonard Baldwin had been scheduled for two specialist urology appointments at the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital on May 27 despite never seeking such treatment while he was alive, she said. Mr Baldwin died of a heart attack on the side of a road in NSW six years ago.

Ms Baldwin said she had farewelled her husband just before Christmas, expecting him to be gone a week. But she next saw him in a funeral home where she had to identify his body. "I'm trying to get on with my life and this completely devastated me," she said."It brought it all back and yesterday I was a mess."

Queensland Health blamed a "typing error" and apologised for any distress the letter caused Ms Baldwin. But a department spokeswoman was unable to explain why the letter was addressed to a house at which Mr Baldwin had never lived. The couple had been living at Beenleigh at the time of his death and had "never lived over this way, ever, when he was alive", Ms Baldwin said. She said she rang a phone number on the letter to advise them Mr Baldwin had been dead six years.

"It would be good if they could do something about the people who are alive rather than the dead getting appointments," she said. "They talk about waiting lists and people can't get in but someone dead can." Last year, a man who had been dead for almost a year was scheduled for surgery at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital . The blunder stunned grieving mother Ann Heath, 66, who said her son Michael Trindall, 45, should never have been on a public waiting list.

That disclosure came just weeks after then premier Peter Beattie announced the Government would tender for a broker to manage its public hospital elective surgery waiting lists. Mr Trindall also had been scheduled for a urology appointment, which his mother said he would not have needed even if he were alive.

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Elderly patients in Australian public hospitals are 'malnourished or at risk'

Partly due to "healthy" food! The myth that there is such a thing as healthy food is normally just a time and money waster but sometimes the consequences can be more severe

NEARLY one-third of elderly hospital patients are malnourished, and a further 61 per cent are at risk of malnutrition. A study of 100 Australian hospital patients aged 70 or more also suggests doctors and nurses do a poor job of spotting the problem. Even when they do, few of the patients affected are referred to a dietitian for help. The study, carried out at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital, found doctors and nurses recorded a patient's recent weight loss in only 19 per cent of cases. Poor appetite, another risk factor for malnutrition, was recorded in medical notes barely half the time, or in 53 per cent of cases. Just 7 per cent who had recently lost weight, and 9 per cent of patients with poor appetites, were referred to a dietitian.

The authors of the paper, published in the journal Nutrition & Dietetics, wrote that malnutrition in elderly hospitalised patients "remains a significant problem with low rates of recognition and referral by medical and nursing staff". They called for better education for doctors and nurses to encourage better identification of the problem. "No one's really taking any notice of the fact that people are coming into hospital undernourished," said study co-author Alison Bowie.

The palatability of hospital meals was another issue. Ms Bowie said the tendency to make hospital food healthy, with low-fat and low-salt meals, did not help to make them more appealing. "We are working on making hospital meals more energy-dense," she said. "Being on a low-fat diet isn't the No1 priority when you are sick in hospital."

Nutrition status of the study's participants was assessed using a "mini nutritional assessment" tool, which consisted of 18 questions resulting in a score. Patients who scored less than 17 were classified as malnourished, while scores between 17 and 23.5 indicated risk of malnutrition.

The study's authors wrote that the understanding of malnutrition risk factors among doctors and nurses was poor, and "considerable scope" existed to improve training programs. Last month, a public inquiry into NSW hospitals was told that hospital food was "atrocious" and malnutrition was "rife".

Dietitians' Association of Australia executive director Claire Hewat said the latest study showed that malnutrition was a problem "even in a wealthy, Western country like Australia". "There's been research saying this for as long as I can remember as a professional, but it keeps being swept under the carpet. "People who are malnourished heal more slowly, their wounds break down, they are at greater risk from pressure sores, they are weak so they can't get up and do their physio so easily, and they are more prone to falling. "All elderly people should be screened (for malnutrition) so we can pick people up more quickly. "If they (governments) don't do something about it, it's going to blow their costs out of the water," Ms Hewat said.

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An Academic Bill of Rights in Australia?

By Rafe Champion

The Australian Liberal Students' Federation and the Young Liberals have unleashed an attack on leftwing political bias in university teaching. The problem is real but the proposed remedy may not be effective, beyond lifting awareness of the problem. An alternative is proposed. Taking a cue from the US Students for Academic Freedom organisation, the Federation and the Young Liberals are pushing for an Academic Bill of Rights to promote changes to curricula, hiring of staff without regard to political affiliations, remedies for students who believe that they are being marked down for political incorrectness, etc.

Certainly there is cause for concern about the level of bias in course contents and the attitudes of many teachers towards conservative and non-left liberal ideas. Symptoms of the problem include:

* The dozen or score of economically illiterate books purporting to critique economic rationality, one of them edited by a man who is widely regarded as the leading public intellectual in the land.

* A collection of papers, workshopped through the Academy of the Social Sciences, that emerged rather like a set of anti-Liberal Party political pamphlets.

* Widespread incomprehension of the ideas of Hayek and classical liberalism. So the then leader of the opposition (now the Prime Minister) could launch a public attack on a crude caricature of Hayek without arousing widespread hoots of mirth or gasps of horror from opponents and supporters respectively.

The point is that nobody can consider themselves broadly educated at present without the same grasp of Hayek's ideas (in outline, not in detail) that we expect people with tertiary education to have on things like Darwinian evolution; Mendelian genetics; or the way that the Copernican revolution and Einstein advanced physics.

Similarly everyone in the relevant fields should be familiar with the work of Jacques Barzun on education and cultural studies, Ren, Wellek on literary studies, Karl B_hler and Ian D Suttie on language studies, psychology and psychoanalysis, Bill Hutt on industrial relations, Peter Bauer on third world development, Stanislav Andresky on the methods of the social sciences, Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian school of economics.

The push for the Bill of Rights will generate a great deal of angst without any guarantee of achieving either the Bill or the desired improvements, even if the bureaucratic systems are put in place to support it. Top down intervention is most likely to generate resistance and resentment, to politicise and personalise the problems in a divisive manner.

A non-bureaucratic, "bottom up" alternative is proposed. At the very least this could run in parallel to the proposed Liberal initiative and it should enlist the support of people of good will of all political persuasions. Investigation and discussion should proceed on two fronts; one is the question of course contents, the other is the broad issue of what tertiary education is supposed to achieve.

Taking the second issue first. A recent Unleashed article 'Back to school' (2 May 08) revealed, yet again, a great deal of disappointment and dismay over the university experience for many students. The simple fact of the matter is that Australia followed the US experience, learning nothing from it, despite the clear warning in Barzun's 1968 book on The American University. The sector expanded too rapidly for the process of education to keep up: that is, the discovery of the disciplines and rewards of serious, though not pedantic, teaching, learning and scholarship. But that is a topic for another day.

On course contents, there is a need for a data base on what is being taught, a survey of course outlines and reading lists to identify courses that are not providing students with an introduction to the best thinkers and ideas in the field. This should lead to suggestions for improvements. This may be done in a manner that is contentious and divisive, but it should be possible to proceed in way that is illuminating and educational in its own right. The aim is to recruit the spirit of cooperative scholarship, using a base of evidence to advance the cause of learning and scholarship. There is no need to deny university teachers their own interests, their points of view and their politics. The question is how the courses stack up when they are examined in a climate of civil and robust debate.

The Liberal initiative has been smeared as an attempt to restrict freedom of speech. On the evidence in hand, it is no such thing. It is better described as a long overdue reaction to the radicalisation of the campuses in the aftermath of the Vietnam debate in the 1960s and 1970s.

The task of investigation, reporting and suggestions for improvements can start in a modest way, wherever people with time and energy are prepared to start the process. There was a small beginning a couple of decades ago, with a survey of courses in politics at the 21 universities at the time. It was very hard to find any reference to Hayek and his work. What is the situation today, how much has changed in two decades?

The process needs to be sustained and it needs to generate debate on campus and beyond, wherever there are people with an interest in the life of the mind, in education, in ideas, in maintaining good order in "the house of intellect" (as Barzun called it).

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