"Paternalism" helping black children

It may not be ideal but it sure does a lot more good than admiring blacks as "noble savages" and "respecting" their dysfunctional alcohol-sodden culture. And too bad that it upsets lots of simplistic Leftist pretences to wisdom. Welfare payments destroyed most of what was left of traditional Aboriginal society so attempts to remedy that damage are proper. And since a complete welfare cutoff is not on the cards, paternalism seems to be needed to unscramble that egg -- insofar as it is possible at all. The thing that would do most good is making welfare payments available only in areas where there is work available -- such as Victoria's fruit-growing areas -- and there does appear to be some mental movement in that direction

In June last year, when controversy over the newly announced Northern Territory intervention was at its height, lawyer Noel Pearson slayed its critics with a powerful argument: "Ask the terrified kid huddling in the corner, when there's a binge-drinking party going on down the hall, ask them if they want a bit of paternalism," he said. "Ask them if they want a bit of intervention, because these people who continue to bleat without looking at the facts, without facing up to the terrible things that are going on in our remote communities, these people are prescribing no intervention, they are prescribing a perpetual hell for our children."

Twelve months after former prime minister John Howard announced the emergency intervention, following revelations of horrific and widespread child abuse, the difficult and painstaking process is advancing slowly. The former and current governments both deserve credit for abandoning failed, decades-old approaches. A start has been made, with 9000 health checks, more police, a drop in gambling, drug-taking and alcohol abuse, and improvements in school attendance and fresh food consumption.

Importantly, the intervention has shifted remote Aborigines to the centre of mainstream political debate, after a generation during which mainstream Australians became disengaged from their plight. During this period, welfare "poison", as Pearson identified the shambolic, failed models of indigenous governance and an obsession with the rights agenda among urban elites, brought about the near-disintegration of remote indigenous communities. Parenting skills were lost, law and order deteriorated and education, health and living conditions fell to Third World levels. The critics of intervention were so lacking in their understanding of how dysfunctional the communities had become they vastly underestimated the magnitude of the task at hand.

Now, slowly but surely, the communities themselves, lawmakers and the public are realising that effective measures are essential to give indigenous children and adults the same protection as others from sexual abuse, domestic violence and assault.

The Howard government's indigenous affairs minister, Mal Brough, kicked the process off with a proactive, determined approach. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Indigenous Affairs minister Jenny Macklin have also established themselves as pragmatic realists in indigenous policy, focused primarily on outcomes rather than ideology. After making the long-overdue apology to the Stolen Generations, the Government has moved on with the herculean task of helping indigenous Australians close the 17-year life expectancy gap between themselves and the rest of the nation.

At least some of the early improvements discernible across the Territory from the intervention so far are due to the fact that about 12,000 indigenous Territorians are having their pensions "income managed", quarantining money for necessities such as fresh food and medicine. The initiative announced by Ms Macklin yesterday to mark the intervention's anniversary was a sensible extension of the "tough love" approach. From early next year, a pilot program in Hermannsburg, Katherine, Wadeye and the Tiwi Islands will link Centrelink welfare payments, for black and white families, with school attendance. These, as Ms Macklin pointed out, must be turned around. It is also appropriate and fair that the trials will be extended to the wider urban white society as well.

The next stage of the intervention will be largely shaped by the Rudd Government's review, headed by Kimberley indigenous leader Peter Yu, due to report in September. Beyond the basics of food, clean water, education and health, a view is emerging that longer-term issues of investment, infrastructure and employment could require a kind of Marshall Plan, as Nicolas Rothwell foreshadows in The Weekend Australian today. This could mean resources and tax incentives being directed in a way that allowed the strongest communities to emerge as viable, sustainable centres in the regions that produce most of Australia's exportable wealth. Already, Ms Macklin has foreshadowed mining royalties being used more productively for the benefit of communities. For generations, the proceeds of mining have underpinned one of the highest standards of living in the world for much of white Australia. The ultimate challenge of indigenous policy is to ensure the benefits are shared by those who live where the wealth is produced.

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The Prius is a huge waste of resources

The following is a clearly correct letter to the editor of "The Australian" by Anthony Hordern of Jamison, ACT

POLITICIANS’ comments about “green’’ cars are merely techno-babble they have picked up somewhere but don’t really understand. 

Hybrid vehicles are at best expensive and inefficient. Inefficient because they have two power sources instead of one, two control systems instead of one, two losses in converting mechanical power to electrical power and back again, two sources of electrical ``slippage’’ (generators and motors) instead of none in a manual transmission, plus they have heavy batteries to carry around. And those costly batteries need to be replaced every two to three years.

Meanwhile, so-called “zero-emission’’vehicles require much new science before they are available in the showroom, if ever. Hydrogen takes more power to produce than it replaces and “plug-in’’ electric cars are not the answer either. Techno-illiterates assume that pollution in the Latrobe and Hunter valleys simply disappears.

Turbo diesel is the way to go right now. The technology is well proven, diesel engines are inherently more efficient than petrol ones and they last longer.

Surely the four-cylinder engine plant Holden is closing at Fishermans Bend in Melbourne could readly produce modern turbo-diesel engines with minimum re-tooling and without funds from the taxpayer.

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Hospital Emergency Dept. 'like war zone'

South Australia: Flinders Medical Centre's emergency department "is frequently overwhelmed and resembles a war zone", the hospital's general manager has admitted. The comments were made in a letter of apology to a patient who had made a complaint to the department. The letter is from Flinders' general manager, Associate Professor Susan O'Neill, and apologises on behalf of Dr Di King for any distress the patient, Kathryn Gibbons, of Encounter Bay, had suffered. Dr King was one of several doctors to see Mrs Gibbons that night.

"Your comments regarding the level of overcrowding and strain on the ED at the time Dr King totally agrees with," it says. "Regrettably, the ED is frequently overwhelmed and resembles a war zone. "Staff struggle to maintain basic patient comforts and service, however patient safety is our highest priority and this was maintained." Mrs Gibbons suffers a rare and severe form of asthma, known as "brittle asthma".

In January, she went to Flinders to seek treatment for her asthma but, after a long and frustrating wait during which she felt her needs were ignored, she drove back to Victor Harbor to get treated.

In May, she wrote a letter of complaint to Flinders. On June 13, she received the letter from Associate Professor O'Neill, which goes on to assure Mrs Gibbons that she was in no danger and that her treatment was appropriate.

Southern Area Health Service chief executive Cathy Miller, speaking on behalf of Associate Professor O'Neill, said the letter was paraphrasing Mrs Gibbons' own words. She added that the emergency department was getting busier and putting additional pressure on workers. "There's no doubt the EDs are busy places and we've experienced an increase of 5 per cent from last financial year to this financial year, which is an additional 3000 patients," she said. "It is an emotive place to work and people are passionate about what they do. It can become a busy place (and) it can look quite chaotic."

Ms Miller said they were having success with new measures to improve patient flows and that the redevelopment of the department would also help. "It is the time lag between demand going up and other processes kicking in," she said.

The letter's release comes in the middle of a bitter and prolonged dispute over pay and conditions. Up to 85 per cent of the emergency specialists from the state's public hospitals have handed in their resignations, effective on Friday. FMC emergency medicine senior consultant Dr David Teubner said the doctors were resigning because the overcrowding in emergency department was risking the safety of patients. "It is impossible to practice safely in an overcrowded environment (and) the majority of the time there are more patients than there is space for them," he said. "It's undignified, it's just an awful environment in which to work. It's just soul-destroying. "To deal with (the overcrowding) we need adequate numbers of senior staff and we're unable to attract such people from interstate because of the pay."

Dr Teubner also said this year was the worst it had ever been, and that it would get even worse with winter. "The hospital is doing an enormous amount . . . to make things better but we're busier than ever and there's pressure from the Department of Health to close beds to save money," he said.

Health Minister John Hill said there was a "huge increase" in presentations at Flinders, but the State Government was working to address the issues. "We know thousands more people are going to FMC every year seeking help in the ED. Our ageing population and the shortage of GPs in the south are resulting in this huge increase in presentations," he said. "And the State Government is addressing this through the $153 million redevelopment of FMC, including building a brand new ED with increased capacity. "The expanded and redeveloped emergency department will include 21 additional treatment cubicles, to cater for an extra 14,000 people seeking treatment every year."

Mr Hill added that a GP Plus Health Care Centre at Marion and extra staff being employed by the Government would also help. Doctors and the State Government met again at the Industrial Relations Commission last night to discuss the enterprise bargaining agreement. Industrial Relations Minister Michael Wright said a new offer to the state's public doctors had been put on the negotiating table. He said talks were "progressing well", and they would possibly continue over the weekend. SA Salaried Medical Officers Association senior industrial officer Andrew Murray said there were still "significant issues" to be resolved.

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Science, dogma and dissent: Ross Garnaut's Heinz Arndt lecture

What a disappointment. I hoped that Prof. Garnaut would use his Heinz Arndt Lecture to describe the balance he intended to strike in his recommendations between evidence for risky climate change and a growing body of evidence that the risks are low to moderate (at most). Given his well-known views, I expected to find the balance tilted in favor of the former but I hoped to find that it would be moderated by recognition of the latter. Unfortunately, Prof. Garnaut paid no attention to any scientific facts and made no attempt to strike a balanced risk assessment.

Instead, what really struck me was what the speech implied about the religious nature of Prof. Garnaut's own adherence to the 'climate-alarm' view. Ross Garnaut seems to believe that 'scepticism' about climate change is analogous to... or is, 'dissent'. That is, he prefers to describe critics of his views using a term drawn from religious history, identifying someone who rejects a dogma. My reaction on first reading was surprise at the use of a term that implies acceptance of man-made global warming is really a faith from which critics may 'dissent'. Did Ross Garnaut understand that (obvious) implication, I wondered?

Of course, he would not be alone in describing climate change conviction as a faith. Charles Krauthammer recently offered a similar observation in his Washington Post OpEd. But it was not a view I expected Prof. Garnaut to adopt.

Answering the question whether it is possible for 'dissenters' can be scientists, Ross Garnaut invokes Gallileo, whom he wrongly describes as a 'dissenter'-Gallileo was no such thing; Gallileo's conflict with the Church was about the appropriate role of empricism and contained no basic doctrinal dissent-as an exception that proves his rule. Garnaut agrees that dissenters may have scientific points to make, but he adds that this contrary example tells us little about modern science. The illustration does, however, tend to confirm that he considers those whom he describes-a little pompously-as being in the majority with the 'learned academies in the countries of greatest scientific accomplishment' (p.6), are in some sense an ekklesia.

It would, I suppose, be fair to call 'skeptics' dissenters if they were merely aesthetic or doctrinal opponents of the environmental religion. But the 'small minority [some minority - pwg] of reputed climate scientists' whom Garnaut acknowledges reject the vague, over-blown claim of the IPCC (dignified by Garnaut as 'bayesian uncertainties') do so on the basis of emprically refutable claims. These claims include, for example, the entirely scientific (because testable) assertion that the statements in his Interim Report about an alarming acceleration of increases in global temperature are wrong in fact (witness the evidence of the temperature record for the past decade) or based on basic statistical errors in sampling and estimating a time-series trend.

When Prof. Garnaut concludes 'the Dissenters are possibly right, and probably wrong', what evidence does he adduce? None. Not a shred. This is depressingly consistent with the approach taken in his Interim Report. He does not consider that the science offered in contradiction of the IPPCC pronouncements (the hypotheses of 'those who are best placed to know'-see p. 5 of his address) calls anything into question because it is 'dissent' and not science.

So much for name-calling. What positive reason does Prof. Garnaut offer for accepting the 'uncertainties' of the IPCC as reasonably indicative of a probability? No scientific reason, as it turns out. This is the most curious argument of all in his address. His reason for accepting the need for elaborate, 'impossible-to-measure' schemes of carbon-emission mitigation (the second two-thirds of his address) is a religious reason.

Prof. Garnaut invokes "Pascal's Wager" (p.7)-a sort of bargain struck de profundis in the heart of this brilliant but deeply disturbed 17th century philosophe-to accept the existence of God on the basis of faith alone, rejecting the counsels of reason, out of fear of the (metaphysical) consequences. Pascal resolved to accept the existence of God out of an irrational fear of an eternity of torment in hell should he deny God and happen to be wrong.

This is a sympathetic tale, of course. It's a 'wager' that many adolescents face at some point in dealing with a personal crisis. But as a psychic convenience, it is the abnegation-the abjuration-of science. Disagreements about climate change polices are not a personal crisis. They are a challenge to rational, democratically-informed, public policy. They deserve informed assessment and a careful dissection of interests (of present and future generations, in this case). In his address, Ross Garnaut has promised us elaborate economic models and detailed regulatory schemes based, ultimately, on an irrational framework (the models might not be all that reliable, either).

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