Government health service condones illegal drug use

The Sydney West Area Health Service has denied a leaflet it has published encourages young people to take drugs. The controversial leaflet is titled "Choosing to use but wanna keep your head together", and advises teenagers on what to do if they choose to take substances like ecstasy and cannabis. It is being distributed at schools and community facilities, and includes advice for students to wait until they turn 18 before experimenting with drugs, and then to "use only small amounts and not too often".

The director of drug and alcohol services, Kevin Hedge, says the leaflet does not encourage young people to take drugs. Mr Hedge says the leaflet clearly states that there is no safe drug use, but its advice is based on the realistic view that most young people experiment. "Our materials were designed originally to be distributed amongst agencies that deal with marginalised young people, homeless young people and people at high risk of drug use," he said. "From that perspective, the materials are a genuine public health approach to preventing harm."

But Jo Baxter from Drug Free Australia says the leaflet will confuse young people who are looking for guidance from drug use specialists. "They want to know whether or not these drugs are going to harm them," she said. "A message like that gives a sort of unintended message that they would condone the use and there is such a thing as safe use, when in actual fact we don't believe there is a safe use of illicit drugs."

Tony Trimmingham lost his son to a heroin overdose 11 years ago and has since founded Family Drug Support. He supports the leaflet and says people have to be realistic about the common use of drugs and alcohol in society. "They grow up in a world where drugs are prevalent and every single person in Sydney, and in fact the whole of Australia, will in some point encounter drugs and will be faced with the dilemma of whether to use or not," he said. "We can't evade that and I believe they do need education on how to deal with those occurrences."

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Juvenile crime stupidity

So Weasel has finally been convicted of serious crimes and is doing time in prison. At last. He has made the courts and the prosecutors look supine and gullible. He has repeatedly taunted police, lawyers and even judges. He has proven to be an incorrigible combination of stupidity, aggression and menace. But of course we cannot name him.

No. That would be unfair. That would be wrong. Criminal. I could be prosecuted. The Herald would be given a punitive financial penalty. Because he was under the age of 18 when he entered the criminal justice system. It also appears his identity will remain protected ad infinitum and ad nauseam, while even the reasons for this suppression are suppressed. In order not to trample on Weasel's prospects for rehabilitation, or the sensibilities of his upstanding family, or the mandates of the court, we use the pseudonym, Weasel. This is his story:

At a recent court hearing, Weasel, 18, was convicted on four counts of armed robbery, with five other offences noted. Acting in company, he had been knocking over service stations. During the sentencing, in a closed court, the judge issued directions that Weasel's name be suppressed. He directed that his family's identifying details, including names, be suppressed. family's names be suppressed. Not even their initials could be used. The family's names have already been suppressed for some time. That is a lot of suppression.

Such is the perversity of the opaque and oppressive culture created by the Children (Criminal Proceedings) Act 1987. Weasel is protected by a system he has besmirched at every point of contact. The office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has even presented him as a key Crown witness in two trials, with the full and certain knowledge that he is an incorrigible liar.

I have Googled Weasel's real name and found not a single reference. Not even police and prosecutors can gain access to his criminal record unless it is directly related to a new case, because of privacy laws related to juvenile offenders. Allow me to summarise his anonymous parade through our criminal justice system:

* June 2003: confrontation with police. Tells them: "You can't do anything. You can't touch us." Tells a police officer: "F--- you, you slut. You will get yours." Spits at a police officer, saying, "F--- you, you pig c-----". Charged and convicted of assault. No time served.

* January 2004: attacks a teenage girl. Convicted of aggravated assault. No time served.

* April 2004: assault with a weapon. Lying to police. No charges laid.

* June 2004: recorded in a telephone conversation saying he will lie in court.

* January 2005: commits perjury in a pre-trial hearing.

* July 2005: called as a Crown witness in a trial. Commits perjury.

* February 2006: called as a Crown witness in another trial, despite his earlier performance. Commits perjury. No charge laid.

* February-August 2007: engages in a series of criminal acts, acting in company.

* August 2007: charged on multiple counts of armed robbery. Incarcerated.

* May 2008: receives featherweight sentence (within sentencing guidelines). Identity suppressed. Non-parole period of two years and six months. Eligible for parole in August next year.

I have saved the worst for last. Weasel was once fleetingly and inadvertently named by the broadcaster Alan Jones when he read out a news report in The Daily Telegraph (a reference soon extinguished). The newspaper had published his name by mistake in breach of a suppression order.

Under the Children (Criminal Proceedings) Act, it is illegal to publish or broadcast the names of juveniles involved in court cases in any capacity, even as a witness or a victim, and even if the victim is dead, unless the judge lifts the prohibition, which the legislation allows them to do. The penalties include a criminal record and up to 12 months' jail. This case was heard by the Deputy Chief Magistrate Helen Syme. She rejected Jones's defence, found him guilty of a criminal breach of the act, fined him, put him on a bond, and upbraided him, saying he had "ample time" between reading the article and going on air to check whether the newspaper had approval to name the witness.

Syme, like every other judge or magistrate who has had anything to with Weasel, ended up looking deluded and naive. Breaches of suppression orders are so rare it would be absurd to check every news report ever quoted. Even if Jones's staff had checked that morning, the Telegraph would have had no idea it was in error. In the wider context of pubic safety and community values, Syme delivered a sanctimonious lecture on behalf of a bad person, a bad law, a bad principle, and an odoriferous prosecution. Her decision was dismissed on appeal.

At the time I asked the Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, who once excoriated "talkback terrorists" in a speech, why there had been such determination to prosecute Alan Jones for an unintended slip but not the reporter who made the error (let alone the flagrant perjury of Weasel). "It is my office's role to prosecute matters referred to it by investigators," he replied. "My office can only do its job in response to investigations and charges undertaken and put on by others."

Then who were the "others"? Cowdery suggested I ask the police prosecutors, or the Attorney-General's Department, where decisions involving prominent cases are often made. Bingo. No wonder so many of the criminals depicted in the book and TV series Underbelly were able to operate for so long and with such impunity. They may have been stupid and reckless, but they knew how the legal system works.

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Outcry over intensive care shortage for babies in Victoria

The state's most fragile newborns are being sent interstate because Victoria's neonatal intensive care units are stretched to breaking point. Over the past week, Victoria's 72 neonatal intensive care cots have been full, forcing dangerously premature babies or mothers with high-risk pregnancies to be flown interstate for life-preserving care. Four acute babies or mothers with high-risk pregnancies have been flown to Canberra or Adelaide in the past fortnight.

At the same time, the Brumby Government celebrated the opening of the new $250 million Royal Women's Hospital, which has been widely criticised for being too small to cope with a rising birthrate.

The Department of Human Services yesterday revealed that 12 newborns from regional areas, who would normally be treated at Melbourne hospitals, had been flown interstate for care in the past year. This was up from just three in 2005-06 and nine in 2006-07.

The new Royal Women's is equipped with 18 neonatal intensive care cots but can accommodate an extra two when stretched -- the same as the hospital it replaced.

Newborn Emergency Transport Service state medical director Dr Michael Stewart said the system was under pressure from a surge in demand. He said no babies had been harmed by the recent journeys. "It is obviously not ideal to have to do this, but we are looking at what is the safest and most effective for the whole system at the time as well as being very cognisant of the individual baby and their families," he said. "I don't think in the ideal world it is good to move an adult, a child or a baby from one hospital to another or out of the state if they need intensive care, but the reality is that is occasionally what we need to do. "These peaks can last for a few days to a week or so, sometimes they last several months, but the tip of the peak we hope just lasts for several days because that does get very difficult to manage."

The new $1 billion Royal Children's Hospital will have an increase in its number of neonatal intensive care cots when it is completed in 2011. Monash Medical Centre and Mercy Hospital for Women are the only other Victorian hospitals with units to sustain the dangerously premature newborns who need help to breathe.

Dr Stewart said the state usually coped with less than 60 babies needing intensive care at any one time and "cot-block" had improved since 2000 when there were just 48 Victorian neonatal intensive care unit cots. But Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists president Christine Tippett said there were simply not enough neonatal intensive care cots to meet demand. "The four units are constantly running at or near capacity and the pressure on staff and equipment is at an unsustainable level," she said.

Department of Human Services spokesman Steve Pivetta said babies in border areas were often closer to interstate hospitals and denied a lack of resources was to blame.

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New black separatism

In the build-up to last year's election campaign, a small news item got largely lost in the melee. Recently, however, the reported topic has assumed a new importance in the Australian political agenda. On September 13, 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The assembly recorded 143 votes in favour, 11 abstentions and four votes against. The last were cast by Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US.

The Howard government said it objected on the grounds that the declaration would impair the territorial and political integrity of the Australian state by supporting the creation of separate indigenous states. The declaration makes it clear that this is indeed its aim. Article 4 says indigenous peoples have the right to freely determine their political status and to pursue self-determination and autonomy. In short, it supports the old Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission demand for a sovereign black state.

The declaration was strongly influenced by input by Australian Aboriginal activists. Most involved was Mick Dodson, co-author with Ronald Wilson of the 1997 Bringing Them Home report on the Stolen Generations that accused Australia of genocide. Dodson is still engaged with the UN, serving as a member of its Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

As well as a black state, the declaration endorses other policies long demanded by radical Aboriginal activists. It supports the establishment of a body very much like ATSIC; that is, for the revival of a separate indigenous parliament.

In the face of the manifest failure of the separate Aboriginal school curriculum that made the learning of English optional - an experiment now notorious for leaving this generation of Aboriginal adolescents and young adults functionally illiterate - the UN declaration nonetheless demands more of the same.

It endorses customary law and wants indigenous tribunals to determine breaches and punishments. Apart from the fact indigenous people remain entitled to all the host nation's welfare and citizenship benefits, the latter's legal system does not rate a mention.

The UN also supports the principle that indigenous people should determine who qualifies as indigenous. It wants their rights enshrined in treaties and agreements between the state and those who define themselves this way. In other words, the UN has endorsed a program that, if introduced in Australia, would revive the entire separatist agenda of Aboriginal politics of the Hawke-Keating era, an agenda that, apart from lucrative positions here and abroad for a select class of tertiary-educated activists, has had no positive outcomes for Aborigines to speak of, and whose awful failings are reproduced with depressing frequency in the reports of one commission of inquiry after another.

Even though the Rudd Government has not yet officially declared its hand, it has already made it clear that action is only a matter of time. It not only endorses the UN agenda in principle but will specifically affirm its support for the declaration to the General Assembly. After the favourable media response to the apology to the Stolen Generations in February, Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith confirmed the Government was preparing to ratify the declaration. He told the Ten Network he was consulting with stakeholders about reversing Australia's opposition.

At the 2020 Summit in Canberra in April, the forum on the future of indigenous Australia was dominated by calls for the revival of an ATSIC-type representative body, by special constitutional recognition, and for a treaty. The Government's appointee as co-chairwoman of the sessions, Jackie Huggins, said she was very pleased these issues were back on the political agenda.

The published report of the summit, Australia 2020, listed its first "top idea" as: "The establishment of a new philosophical framework through which we negotiate a new definition of our relationship and how we might define it in the Constitution or treaty or settlement is necessary." The first of the low cost ideas endorsed by the same session was: "Support the UN Declaration on (the) Rights of Indigenous Peoples."

Kevin Rudd has powerful reasons of his own to go down this track. One of the pillars of his foreign policy is support for multilateral organisations, especially the UN. That is why Smith was the first in cabinet to signal the Government's intentions. To give the impression of being wedded to a minority group of rich, white dissenting countries is not how Rudd wants to be seen by the UN community.

The recommendations from the 2020 Summit were passed on to a parliamentary committee to mould them more to the Government's own political agenda. The first issue this committee raised in May was a new preamble to the Constitution to give special recognition to Aborigines. At the moment there is bipartisan support for this, with Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson publicly supporting the notion.

A constitutional preamble of this kind, coupled with a government announcement to the UN accepting its declaration on indigenous rights, would have a dramatic effect on the political landscape. It would re-establish the same old agenda that has failed for the past 30 years: self-determination, land rights and a separate Aboriginal parliament.

Meanwhile, the obscene contrast between the lives of most Aborigines and the Aboriginal political elite will remain unaffected. The losers will be the women and children in those dysfunctional communities that produce some of the world's highest rates of murder, violence and sexual abuse. The winners will be the activists, who no doubt are already booking their first-class air tickets and hotel suites in Geneva and New York for the upcoming rounds of meetings and conferences.

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