The nanny state has spoken on binge-drinking. But who’s listening?

By Janet Albrechtsen

The nanny state has apparently spoken. I went to bed last night feeling happy after a night out with friends. I wake up in the morning to news that I am a binge drinker because I indulged in more than three glasses of wine.

If you had four middies of beer last night, join the club. You are a binge drinker. That is according to the boffins at the National Health and Medical Research Council who have reportedly drafted new guidelines on safe drinking for Australians. While the Council is refusing to confirm reports in the Fairfax media until the release of its final report next month, perhaps the Council could do with some community feedback on their apparent eagerness to label so many of us binge-drinkers.

Yes, binge-drinking is a problem. Yes, alcohol driven violence is a problem. But surely that means addressing these real problems rather than conflating the issue of alcohol abuse by setting consumption limits at ridiculous levels. Health bureaucrats, whatever their well-intentioned beef, be it setting down eating and drinking guidelines for pregnant women or these latest drinking rules for the rest of us, always seem to frame their rules for the lowest common denominator brain. They treat us all like a bunch of feather-brained numskulls incapable of making sensible decisions about just about anything to do with our lifestyle. Now, we apparently have to endure being labelled a “binge-drinker” if we exceed 4 drinks during a pleasant evening out with friends.

There is another label that comes to mind. It applies to this kind of bureaucratic overreach. It’s called infantilisation. Reducing us to the status of children, they set down rules that end up neutering our ability to take personal responsibility for our actions. Like moves to ban the advertising of fast food, this is just another step by Big Brother to interfere in our choices by applying scary labels of binge-drinking to behavior that many of us would regard as normal.

Former federal health minister Tony Abbott is right to describe these new guidelines as fostering a “moral panic, which is taking over the land.” There is, says Abbott, “no doubt that binge drinking is a problem, but it is no worse than in the past. I am in favour of people improving society but you have to be reasonable about it. Usually these debates are more about establishing the virtue of the people leading the way. In the end what an individual does is his or her responsibility particularly with something that is legal.”

The medical boffins so keen to mould their own vision of utopia should keep in mind that this kind of dogmatic overreach comes with its own risks. When health guidelines are set at patently unreasonable levels, it might just mean people stop listening to these bodies about anything they have to say. It might undermine what is an important educative function if they start laying down rules that seem so preposterous to the social drinker. As Lenore Taylor said on the ABC’s Insiders today in response to claims that the delightful Belinda Neal MP had been the victim of sexism, we need to be careful about devaluing the currency by flinging about inappropriate labels. Likewise, binge drinking should be reserved for real alcohol abuse.

Before the chaps who are so keen to impose new nanny state drinking rules on us conclude their final report next month, they need to get out more. Perhaps have a drink or two with a few social drinkers who take umbrage at this new Puritanism. Labelling us all as binge-drinkers will do nothing to address the real problem of alcohol abuse.

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The latest in the saga of the failed computer system for Australia's submarines

Only a billion dollars and 15 years down the drain so far. When will they ever learn that it is hubris to buy ANY defence equipment unless it is "off the shelf"?

The first Collins-class submarine to be armed with a new combat system will be battle-tested against US forces in Hawaii later this month. The navy is nervously awaiting the performance of HMAS Waller under fire, hoping the submarine's new combat system will hold up and end one of thedarkest chapters in Australian defence. HMAS Waller will participate in the world's largest maritime exercise, RIMPAC 08, as part of war games involving 10 nations over five weeks from June 27.

HMAS Waller is the first of the navy's six submarines to befitted with the so-called Replacement Combat System, ending a six-year, billion-dollar fiasco caused by the failure of the initial submarine combat systems. The flawed combat system was the most serious defect of the Collins-class submarine project and has prevented the fleet from achieving maximum performance during its first 15 years of operation.

The new combat system by Raytheon is modelled on that developed for US navy nuclear submarines with slight modifications for Australian conditions. It aims to combine the submarine's various arrays of sonars, periscopes, radars and other sensors into a single plotting solution for the commander, making the submarine a far more deadly opponent. "This is the first opportunity for Waller to prove the enhanced capabilities that are provided by the upgraded combat system," a Defence spokesman told The Australian. "This system will provide the submarine with enhanced detection, tracking, classification and navigation capabilities."

Waller has tested the new combat system in sea trials, but has not yet trialled it under battle-like conditions. The system is being progressively installed in each of the six Collins submarines with the last due to be fitted in 2010.

Derek Woolner and Peter Yule, in their recent book The Collins Class Submarine Story, wrote: "The mechanical problems of the submarines have long been resolved and with the new combat system they will finally be able to perform at the level envisaged by the planners in the early 1980s." The original combat system supplied by US company Rockwell never worked and had to be junked. It was cumbersome, slow, difficult to operate and failed to handle data effectively. It was outdated by the time it was ready for installation.

HMAS Waller is at present on a six-month Pacific deployment that will include RIMPAC. "RIMPAC will allow Waller to test boat and crew in all elements of submarine warfare in a simulated multi-axis threat environment," a Defence spokesman said. Woolner told The Australian: "The big thing you would expect to get out of RIMPAC is to prove this (US) combat system was the right decision. "It ought to be able to link in seamlessly with American units there. It should be a lot faster and more stable than the old one."

RIMPAC will involve 35 surface naval vessels, including a US carrier strike group, six submarines, 150 aircraft and 20,000 personnel representing 10 Pacific rim countries. The Royal Australian Navy will contribute three surface ships, HMAS Waller and two helicopters, while the air force will send two AP3C Orion spy planes and the army two mechanised landing craft. A spokesman said the exercise would also practise the evacuation of civilians.

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The Chilling Costs of Climate Catastrophism

VACLAV KLAUS has given us a salutary reminder of the seriousness of the danger Australia is now facing from the "warmists". Both the Rudd government and the federal Opposition, currently led by Brendan Nelson, have promised us an emissions trading scheme; in the case of Prime Minister Rudd, by 2010. The responsibility of advising the federal and state governments on how such a decarbonisation regime should be established lies with Professor Ross Garnaut, a noted economist and diplomat, and a passionate advocate on the benefits of free trade and of the advantages of an ever-closer relationship between Australia and China.

The Garnaut Inquiry has issued two interim reports and Garnaut has given a number of papers to professional audiences in recent months. Three observations emerge from immersion in these documents.

The first is the childlike, unquestioning belief which Garnaut has in the IPCC story of global warming caused by anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, which, if not curtailed, will result in climatic and economic disaster for the whole world. Many people have noted the religious-like quality of faith in this story of human sin (particularly of Western mankind); the calamitous consequences following failure to repent; and the possibility of redemption through repentance and sacrifice under the wise guidance of green prophets such as Al Gore, James Hansen, Bob Brown, Peter Garrett, and now Ross Garnaut.

The second is the refusal to face the political reality posed by Chinese and Indian "intransigence" in the face of demands from the West, the EU in particular, to decarbonise their economies. India and China are embarked on trajectories of extraordinary and historically unprecedented economic growth. China is commissioning two new coal-fired power stations every week. Both countries are also operating and building nuclear power stations. China has ten operating nuclear power plants, one under construction, and six planned; India has fifteen operating nuclear power stations, eight under construction, and four planned. These are not countries devoid of technological and scientific expertise. The idea that they should give up their dash to modernity has been repeatedly and emphatically rejected by their most senior political leaders.

The third is the Orwellian use of the words market and price to persuade people to accept a degree of control over their lives which is unprecedented in the Anglosphere, except in time of war. This control is the necessary consequence of permanent decarbonisation regimes which will dramatically lower living standards.

The foundation on which the Garnaut (and Stern) prescriptions for global decarbonisation are based has to be repeated. It is taken as given that global temperatures have increased, are increasing, and will continue to increase to catastrophic levels because, and only because, mankind is emitting greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide in particular, and that these emissions have caused atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to rise, and global temperatures to increase as a consequence.

In order to save the planet (redemption in religious terms), mankind must stop "polluting" the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. This means reducing the current emission rate of approximately 25 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum (7 gigatonnes of carbon) to 5 or 7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. There is competition between the various prophets of decarbonisation as to the extent of the purification process required to save the planet. They are united, however, in the great urgency of the task. Delay in decarbonisation, they insist, will be disastrous, and they conjure up a "tipping point", some magical proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which will bring about runaway heating, or alternatively, perhaps, the next ice age. The tipping point is rather like the second coming of Christ, that final moment in history when Christ will come again in glory and power to judge the world.

As I argued previously (Quadrant, March 2008), such massive decarbonisation can only take place if the entire world's current stock of coal-fired power stations is replaced with nuclear power stations by 2050 (the currently favoured target date). At the same time all motor vehicles, ships and aeroplanes currently using liquid hydrocarbons (kerosene, petrol and distillate) as fuel for their engines, will have to convert to hydrogen, or accept batteries in lieu of internal combustion engines. The only alternative approach which will achieve the degree of decarbonisation the Greens and Garnaut demand, is to return to the living standards which were characteristic of Britain and North America in the eighteenth century, before the Industrial Revolution. China and India have rejected any such option.

Returning to the way of life of Adam Smith's Britain and George Washington's North America is not a politically feasible project, at least not in the Western democracies. So the Greens and their allies in this project go to considerable trouble to disguise their ambitions. One tactic they use to disguise the cost is to conduct econometric studies which predict very modest decline in GDP over the decarbonisation period, or even no decline at all. The fundamental problem with this is that per capita GDP is not a reliable measure of living standards and prosperity. As Frederick Bastiat pointed out over a century ago, deliberately smashing windows and then producing and installing replacements will contribute to GDP, but at the same time reduce living standards, because the resources required to build and install the new windows will have to be diverted from other more productive activities.

The decarbonisation parallel is that measured GDP will not be affected by the extra resources required to build wind farms relative to the resources required to build the same quantity of coal-fired capacity. However, because those extra resources will have to be diverted from producing other goods and services of value to consumers, the building of wind farms will, other things being equal, reduce living standards. Accordingly, using estimates of changes in GDP as an indicator of the costs of shifting away from carbon-based energy sources is not only misleading, but shoddy economic practice. Garnaut is guilty of this practice, a misdemeanour made worse by the way in which his modellers "assume" in their models that the price signals embodied in ever-rising prices for coal-based electricity and liquid fuels for transport will bring forth, in a cargo-cult fashion, new technologies which have not yet been invented, let alone deployed, but which will suddenly enable the world to reach a new, green, nirvana, and take the place of the old and proscribed technologies.

Arnold Zellner, one of the giants in the development of econometric analysis, relates this amusing story in a long interview published in the International Journal of Forecasting:

"Steve Peck and I simulated the Federal Reserve- MIT-PENN econometric model of the US economy that had over 170 nonlinear equations. Our simulation experiments showed that the model had very strange properties that were unknown to the model builders. From these results we concluded that the model was not safe for use in analysing serious economic problems."

Further he commented:

"I do not know of a complicated model in any area of science that performs well in explanation and prediction, and have challenged many audiences to give me examples. So far, I have not heard about a single one. Certainly the large scale econometric models and complicated VARs [very awful regressions] have not been very successful in explanation and prediction."

We can conclude that the debate about decarbonisation, and the various emissions trajectories which could be mandated to achieve the required state of purity, cannot be illuminated by econometric models. We are concerned here with the most basic building blocks of Western civilisation. We are entirely dependent upon liquid hydro-carbons for our transport needs and upon electricity for our energy and communications requirements. If petrol supplies are curtailed, all economic activity is seriously affected. If electricity supplies are shut down as a result of storm damage, for example, then those affected find that their lives are completely disrupted.

Much more here







More of that brilliant government "planning"

Brand new Emergency Dept. building but not enough staff to man it. An almost British level of bureaucratic incompetence

The $22 million Redcliffe Hospital emergency department revamp is struggling to cope with demand, the Redcliffe Herald has been told by patients. Just weeks after the launch of the state-of-the-art extension, the ED came under fire from a Clontarf mother, who did not want to be named, who told the Herald her feverish 14-month-old son had to wait three hours for treatment. "He was taken there by ambulance with a 39 degree temperature and was mottled looking,'' she said.

"I was told to ask for his temperature to be taken every 30 minutes. After the first time it took three hours of me hounding them before they tested him again. I was told three doctors were off sick and there were too many patients.'' She eventually took the boy home and later consulted her GP. "It's a real slap in the face when they build all these nice and flash buildings but it's the same old problems. The needs basis is there and the shiny new Emergency Department isn't fooling me."

The Herald was also told of an 18-year-old man who, last month, waited about seven hours for surgery after being badly bashed at Scarborough. While the Herald has published a litany of complaints over the past three years about the ED, it has also received many letters of support from patients.

The new, larger ED has 41 treatment areas and a new five-station triage zone. It's capacity is expected to grow from 47,000 annual patient treatments to 50,000. At its opening Health Minister Stephen Robertson acknowledged the Peninsula had an "increased demand" for hospital services but said the new ED would help responses to the demand. State Member Lillian van Litsenburg, who is travelling overseas, previously said the new ED would "improve patient flow and in turn enhance the day to day running of the hospital"...

One mother, a former nurse, who had seen the Redcliffe ED full said the service was still being clogged up with unnecessary patients. ``There are lots of people who don't need to be there, but they won't pay $60-$70 to see a GP and they go to the hospital for a snotty nose,'' she said. She knew of people from northern Brisbane suburbs who saw Redcliffe hospital as the closest option for treatment. ``They look at Redcliffe compared to the Royal Brisbane as easier to get to,'' she said. ``But they need to consider Prince Charles Hospital as an option, which has an under-utilised ED.''

Queensland Health held a community forum last night to discuss the construction of a GP super clinic at the Redcliffe Hospital. It will be a 24-hour, bulk-billing service aimed at taking the pressure off the ED, by servicing less urgent medical issues.

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