THE BIG CLIMATE DEBATE CONTINUING

Two articles below but there are more -- e.g. here

Kevin Rudd's climate charade

It's just more of his renowned tokenism

The conjunction of the launches of ABC television's The Hollowmen and the Federal Government's response to climate change is spooky. The latter is starting to look a lot like the former, a "bold" response that will produce much activity but do little to address the problem or offend anyone too much. In public relations terms, this will make it a considerable success.

A few weeks ago, I suggested that the sort of prescriptions advocated by Ross Garnaut's draft report might harm the economy. But with the subsequent release of the Government's green paper by Senator Penny Wong, all of us - citizens and businesses - can sleep easy. There will be an emissions trading scheme, but, as some environmentalists have convincingly shown, it now looks like it will do little to reduce Australia's carbon emissions. The proposed measures are too modest, the exclusions and compensations too generous.

That's not to say there won't be a lot of talk and argument over the details: there will be enough marginal winners and losers for that. Indeed, the whole thing is a feast for the media and business lobbyists and parts of the legal and finance industries. But this activity should not be confused with reducing carbon emissions. The Government's policy is clear: do as much as is necessary to create the illusion of progress, but no more.

Not the least interesting thing about this is the shifting role of Professor Garnaut. He was brought onto the carbon train before the election to demonstrate Kevin Rudd's passionate commitment to fighting greenhouse emissions. But now Rudd is in government and Garnaut is pushing major action that might upset industry and voters, the professor is starting to look like an extremist. Before long, the Prime Minister will be able to position himself as the moderate and talk about saving us, not from climate change, but from Garnaut. It's a beautiful sidestep, in a technical sense, and one hopes the writers of The Hollowmen are paying close attention.

If the above seems a little cynical, consider two large pieces of circumstantial evidence for the insincerity of the Government's professed high concern for climate change. Kevin Rudd prides himself, perhaps above all else, on his respect for process in policy development. But in this case, good process is being ignored. Public discussion of the green paper will effectively stop in September, when submissions have to be lodged. Yet two of the key inputs into that discussion will not be available until October: Treasury's and Garnaut's calculations of the economics of climate change reduction. Professor Jeff Bennett, an economist at the Australian National University, has noted, "What that means is that the permit policy [already announced by the Government] is, at least to date, completely unjustified by any economic consideration of its benefits and costs." That doesn't sound like a Government genuinely committed to a logical and effective policy response.

Nor does the huge contradiction that exists between the Government's positions on climate change and immigration. Writing in the latest issue of People And Place, the demographer Bob Birrell points out that population is the factor over which government has by far the most control if it wants to slow down the increase in greenhouse emissions. The politics of reducing energy use significantly (for example, by making voters pay more for petrol) will generally defeat any government, but reducing immigration would be much easier. And yet net immigration is running at 180,000 a year, at which rate the population will rise to 31.6 million in 2050. The implications of this for Australia's carbon footprint are enormous, yet almost never discussed. Australians produce more greenhouse gases than any other nationality. Therefore on average, every immigrant, no matter where they come from, will increase their emissions by moving to Australia. Birrell notes there is a "dissociation between government aspiration and action", and he's not wrong.

We've seen this dissociation before. John Howard's government often used high rhetoric to proclaim its belief in the need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States in the war in Iraq, a conflict of global importance. But our actual commitment to the great cause was (without any disrespect to those who did fight) embarrassingly slight. A reminder occurred this week with the publication of Running The War In Iraq (HarperCollins), a memoir by Australia's General Jim Molan, who spent a year as chief of operations of the allied forces in that unhappy country. At one point he reminds us there were 411 Australians out of a force of 160,000. At another he notes that the Americans have suffered about 4000 military fatalities. (Australia has suffered none.)

Molan told The 7.30 Report this week: "The Americans used to say [of Australia's modest involvement], 'if you're not here in Iraq to fight, what are you here for?"' The rules of engagement for our troops were, he said, "designed to minimise what the force did, the consequence of which was to keep the casualties down. And government makes that decision". In his book, Molan writes, "We in Australia luxuriate in what I describe as wars of choice and choice within wars: we choose the wars we will fight in, we choose the timing of our participation, . we choose the kind of operations we will conduct, and we choose when we come home."

The way things are unfolding, the war on carbon will be another war of choice. And it's the hollow men who make those choices.

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Lonely voice of climate dissent declared valid

There is something odd about the ferocious amount of energy expended suppressing any dissent from orthodoxy on climate change. After all, the climate cataclysmists have won the war of public opinion - for now, at least - with polls, business, media and Government enthusiastically on board. So, if their case is so good, why try so fervently to extinguish other points of view? There is a disturbingly religious zeal in the attempts to silence critics and portray them as the moral equivalent of holocaust deniers.

Take the British Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which aired on the ABC last year with an extraordinary post-show panel of debunkers assembled to denounce it. The one program which actually questioned the consensus on man's contribution to climate change, it has been singled out for condemnation and forensic dissection in a way no other program has, least of all Al Gore's error-riddled An Inconvenient Truth. This week, the British communications regulator, Ofcom, published a long report dealing with 265 complaints about perceived inaccuracy and unfairness in Swindle.

Despite crowing from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the ABC and others, Ofcom does not vindicate Swindle's attackers. In fact, while it declared itself unable to adjudicate on the finer points of climate science, it found the program did not mislead audiences "so as to cause harm or offence". Further, Ofcom defended the right of Channel 4 and the much-vilified producer Martin Durkin to "continue to explore controversial subject matter. While such programs can polarise opinion, they are essential to our understanding of the world around us and are amongst the most important content that broadcasters produce." Amen.

Ofcom also noted: "Although the complainants disagreed with the points made by the contributors in the programme, they did not suggest that the overall statements about climate models were factually inaccurate." It identified one factual error - a mislabelled axis of a temperature graph - which the program had already changed in later versions and which Ofcom described as "not of such significance as to have been materially misleading so as to cause harm and offence".

Ofcom nitpicked as hard as it could and Swindle emerged virtually unscathed. I wonder how a Four Corners episode would fare under such scrutiny. The two principal complainants, the oceanographer Carl Wunsch and Sir David King, Britain's former chief scientific adviser, were found to have been wronged - but only partially.

King claimed to have been misquoted by the atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, who told the program: "There will still be people who believe that this is the end of the world - particularly when you have, for example, the chief scientist of the UK telling people that by the end of the century the only habitable place on the Earth will be the Antarctic. And humanity may survive thanks to some breeding couples who moved to the Antarctic." Ofcom found King had not said the Antarctic would be the "only habitable place on Earth" but "the most habitable place on Earth". Big deal. However, he had not made the "breeding couples" comment, which was the invention of another cataclysmist, Sir James Lovelock.

As for Wunsch, Ofcom found the program's producers had not "sufficiently informed" him of its "polemic" nature, although they had told him their aim was to be sceptical and "to examine critically the notion that recent global warming is primarily caused by industrial emissions of [carbon dioxide]." In any case, after he complained, his interview was removed. Ofcom dismissed Wunsch's more serious complaint that his views on the "complicated" relationship between carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperature had been misrepresented. But it acknowledged "unfairness" to him in the way his comments were placed "in the context of a range of scientists who denied the scientific consensus about the anthropogenic causes of global warming".

Ofcom also dismissed all complaints about impartiality in most of the program dealing with science. But it found the final section on Africa lacked impartiality when it claimed Western government policies "seek to restrain industrial development [in the Third World] to reduce the production of carbon dioxide", thus restricting the availability of electricity in Africa and causing health problems.

As for the climate change panel's barrage of complaints, Ofcom found the program makers did not give the UN body adequate time to respond to allegations it was "politically driven"' and other claims, but the audience was not "materially misled so as to cause harm or offence". The Ofcom report (worth reading in full at www.ofcom.org.uk) is an embarrassment to the panel.

The fact is that, regardless of the definitive pronouncements made by politicians and economists, the science on global warming is far from finalised. Dr David Evans, a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office for six years to 2005, is one of many insiders who have reversed earlier positions. "There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming," he wrote this month in The Australian.

Ultimately, the integrity of the scientific community will triumph, Evans has said. "The cause of global warming is an issue that falls into the realm of science, because it is falsifiable. No amount of human posturing will affect what the cause is. The cause just physically is there, and after sufficient research and time we will know what it is."

Until then, open debate is important. It is also wise to maintain a healthy suspicion of the zealots, who insist they have all the answers - and that Australia, which is responsible for 1 per cent of the world's carbon emissions, ought to wreck its economy to prove a point.

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THE CONTINUING PUBLIC HOSPITAL WOES

Two articles below:

Surgeons pulling out of pennypinching public hospital system

SURGEONS are pulling out of public hospitals' on-call rosters because of the "pathetic" pay - leaving patients waiting days for operations. Royal Australasian College of Surgeons president Ian Gough, himself a Queenslander, said Queensland surgeons were increasingly reluctant to be on-call because they felt under-valued - and that included pay issues.

Queensland surgeons say the issue is putting increasing pressure on public hospital beds and nursing staff because some patients, particularly those with trauma-related injuries, are having to wait longer for operations.

Professor Gough said that under Queensland Health's visiting medical officer agreement, the hourly on-call rate was between $7 and $11, depending on the frequency of on-call rostering. "During that time you may receive lots of telephone calls and have interrupted sleep. It has an effect on your family and social life," he said. "There has been a great deal of disenchantment among some surgeons and as a consequence, an unwillingness to continue to be on-call."

If a surgeon in Brisbane is called back to the hospital, the hourly rate increases to between $186 and $212 and relates to a doctor's seniority. Those working outside Brisbane receiver higher rates.

Professor Gough conceded that on-call surgeons were remunerated "reasonably well" when they were called back to hospital. However he said the overall on-call rates were insufficient incentive for many surgeons and called for a fee-for-service system to be considered. He said Queensland Health was relying on surgeons' altruism to be part of on-call rosters. "Surgeons don't have any incentive to be on-call other than their goodwill and wanting to care for the patients," Professor Gough said. "The money that's offered is actually very poor."

His comments were echoed by Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital trauma services director Cliff Pollard, who said that not paying surgeons sufficiently for being on-call was a false economy. "It's a big cost in terms of beds," he said. "Surgery can be delayed and patients spend longer in hospital. "We're not talking about time-critical patients, they get treated in Australia very well. "But with things like single limb fractures, you may have to wait sometimes a few days (to be operated on)."

An RACS spokeswoman said about 60 per cent of all surgeons in Australia operated only in the private sector. "The more who leave the public sector, the more pressure there is on the people who stay," she said.

Professor Gough raised the issue with Queensland Health reform and development division executive director Stephen Duckett at the RACS's annual Queensland branch meeting at Coolum recently. Professor Duckett accepted at the Sunshine Coast meeting that public hospital surgeons had "punishing" on-call rosters and said the pay issue was being examined. He said yesterday that Queensland Health did not have central data that reflected whether senior surgeons were pulling out of on-call work at public hospitals. Professor Duckett said Queensland Health was about to enter into enterprise bargaining with public hospital medical staff over pay rates. "Details of Queensland Health's position are not yet finalised," he said.

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Some patients have to wait just to get on a hospital waiting list

More than 33,000 sick Victorians are waiting just to get on an official waiting list for treatment at public hospitals, the Opposition claims. They are in addition to almost 40,000 people already waiting for elective surgery on the State Government's official waiting lists. Documents obtained by the Opposition under Freedom of Information, and seen by the Herald Sun, show that in December last year 33,869 Victorians were waiting for an outpatient appointment. People must be assessed in hospital outpatient clinics before they can be put on a waiting list for surgery - meaning those who are yet to be assessed do not show up on the official elective-surgery waiting lists.

Liberal health spokeswoman Helen Shardey said public hospitals were being forced to manipulate waiting lists to avoid being penalised by the Government. "There are literally tens of thousands of patients languishing on the Government's secret outpatient waiting lists and thousands more who don't have appointments who are waiting to get on to these lists to see a doctor," she said. "We are now in the unconscionable position of having people waiting to get on to these lists in order to join the queue for elective surgery. In many cases these people are waiting years." The documents show that the "secret waiting list" grew by 8722 patients in just three months leading up to December 2007.

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Stupid "safety" laws stop charity handing out food leftovers

FRESH food that could be redistributed to charities overwhelmed by needy families will continue to be wasted because of a state law. OzHarvest, a charity that operates food rescue programs in NSW and ACT, wants to expand into Brisbane but can't until the Civil Liabilities Act 1995 is amended to protect them from potential legal action. Business development manager Julie Claridge said the law - also known colloquially as the Good Samaritan Law - protects people who donate food to community organisations but does not cover OzHarvest as the distributor.

Ms Claridge said she had been in talks with the Department of Justice since January but would be increasing pressure with the aim to be in Brisbane by early next year. "We've had a favourable response and understand (the amendment) should go ahead, it's just a matter of when," she said.

A spokeswoman for Attorney-General Kerry Shine said the matter was still being considered but could not say when it might be resolved.

Victoria was the first state to introduce the provision in 2002, followed by NSW, and then Tasmania in July this year. SA and the ACT introduced Bills last month, which were expected to be passed soon.

Ms Claridge said an "incredible amount" of surplus food was available in capital cities that was otherwise destined for land fill and that could benefit disadvantaged people. "In Sydney we tap into such a small amount - just 1 per cent of the food that would be thrown away, we use to supply 140 charities," she said. "After World Youth Day, we collected 3000kg of food - apples, mandarins, lunch packs, fruit buns and pre-prepared meals like chicken tikka masala, that would otherwise have been dumped."

OzHarvest has five refrigerated vans in Sydney that collect excess fresh food daily from retail outlets, corporate offices, caterers and function centres, and redistributes it to charities such as youth shelters, women's refuges and those helping the homeless. An average of 75,000 meals are delivered each month.

Ms Claridge said the organisation hoped to start with one van and team with a community service in Brisbane, using their infrastructure and contacts to target areas of need.

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