Joe Hildebrand: The extraordinary scandal that nobody saw

Joe is right.  The BIG source of domestic violence in Australia is violence against Aboriginal women by Aboriginal men.  I have seen it myself.  It seems to be utterly instinctive.  There are always disagreements between men and women but among Aboriginals the disagreement is normally terminated by the man hitting the woman. And in drunken rages the men will often chase the women around.

There is no cure. To cure it you would have to impose white behaviour patterns on blacks and that is not going to happen.

But there is one thing that governments can do. Most black townships already have a police presence but it is not nearly enough.  To save black women from assault you have to provide a police post they can run to when in danger.  And that post has to have accommodation for them.  It's far from a perfect solution but it would save some lives

Joe is right in that no politicians have a remote clue about how to tackle the problem.  They will do anything rather than embrace the one thing that would help


This week, an incredible event that should have made us all pay attention took place in the nation’s capital – but no one noticed.

It happened in the middle of the national capital, in the middle of Parliament House, and still nobody noticed.

It was an event so bizarre and unprecedented that even that morning it would have been utterly unimaginable.

Indeed, 20 years ago it would have been front page news across the country.

And yet here it was happening right under the nose of our national leaders and the national press gallery and nobody noticed.

So for the benefit of history, what happened was this: A dozen Aboriginal women from rural Australia made the long and torturous journey to Canberra – many for the first time – in a desperate effort to tell our national leaders of the violence and dysfunction that was crippling their communities.

And to do so they reached out to the one politician they thought might actually listen to them: Pauline Hanson.

I have often said that there is a counterintuitive commonality between the far left and the far right. It now seems the same applies to the far black and the far white.

The phenomenon is the same. People who feel unheard by their community leaders will start looking in the opposite direction until they eventually meet up with another mob coming the other way.

Then, like with any other love-hate relationship, they either f**k or fight. Such is the angry and turbulent mood of the modern political age.

At any rate, this grassroots delegation was cobbled together by Josephine Cashman, a firebrand Indigenous lawyer who has become so frustrated and enraged by tokenistic platitudes and political cowardice in tackling Indigenous disadvantage that she has, for want of a better term, gone rogue.

Her message was basically this: Forget the endless debates about changing the date or the flag or the anthem; forget the limitless accusations of racism on all sides: Can we please just stop people dying in our communities?

These brave Aboriginal women came to Australia’s most progressive city and its most powerful institution in a month when politicians and pundits were bending over themselves to declare how dedicated they were to closing the gap, after yet another Closing the Gap report showed they were doing anything but.

They also came in a week when the whole nation was traumatised by the sickening murder of a mother and her three children at the hands of a monster and commentators vowed to do everything in their power to stop violence against women and children.

And here they were, survivors and witnesses of such violence from the places where it happened the most, and still nobody noticed.

And, in the irony to end all ironies, the one politician who met and stayed with them more than any other was the one being excoriated on that very day for her latest clumsy comments on this very issue.

A lot of people will ask, given Pauline Hanson’s long and infamous history of false and outrageous claims about Aboriginal people, how on earth a group of Aboriginal women could stand in the same room with her.

To that, I would offer a more telling question: How much must mainstream politicians have abandoned and condemned these women with their silence for them to see a maverick redneck senator as their only hope?

I am certainly no fan of Pauline Hanson. In my last column I detailed just some of her racist absurdities, including the disgraceful and discredited allegations of Aboriginal cannibalism in her first book.

Some might say she has softened since then, although even just this month she was singularly unsympathetic to the plight of our First Peoples, which she blamed almost entirely on themselves.

I vehemently disagree with that view. I have no doubt that much of the endemic disadvantage that seems to strangle Indigenous communities is an overhang of the disease, the grog, the killings and the kidnappings that we brought with us.

But I also vehemently disbelieve that any such attitudes and actions are the driving force behind Indigenous policy today. Any honest person working in this area knows that there is an abundance of goodwill on all sides of politics. The problem is there is an equally abundant amount of argument and confusion over what the way forward should be.

Clearly I am too pale and too bruised to offer my own solutions but it strikes me as a national outrage that women who are living through the worst of this disadvantage were almost entirely ignored when they tried to rise their voice.

Credit to the Indigenous Affairs Minister Ken Wyatt who did meet with them – even if it was apparently a bit underwhelming – and Senator Jim Molan who took them all to lunch – which was apparently a bit of a hit.

And yet Pauline, incredibly enough, was the biggest hit of all.

“They really liked her because she’s not a snob,” Cashman told me. “She’s open to listening.” Unfortunately the only press about Hanson that day was over her excruciatingly contorted comments on poor Hannah Clarke and her family, which are impossible to comprehend let alone defend.

But you have to wonder if we are all equally contorted by a modern political and media culture that is more outraged by words than deeds.

While the nation was rightly united in grief for the Clarke family, the same deadly epidemic continues to sweep through our most vulnerable communities every day yet is strangely invisible.

According to Cashman, in the small and mostly Indigenous town of Wilcannia, which is home to only 550 people, 10 people have died in just the last eight weeks. Some by suicide, some by violence, all bound by poverty.

I have no die in the ditch objection to changing the date of Australia Day, nor the national anthem, nor even the flag – all relatively recent constructions. But it’s hard to feel passionate about parlour room debates when the people we pretend we’re trying to defend are dying at our grandstanding feet.

So anyway, all of this happened this week.

It happened in our national capital, it happened at Parliament House and it’s happening all over the country.

And nobody told you about it, so I’m telling you now. What happens next is up to all of us.

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CSIRO omits a key finding which doesn't link bushfires to climate change

Senator Matt Canavan reveals during Senate Estimates that the CSIRO failed to include a finding that “there are no studies linking climate change to fire weather” in a bushfire ‘explainer document’.

During Senate estimates a CSIRO official failed to explain why a previous CSIRO finding which said there was no evidence to suggest a link between climate change and bushsfires was not found in the recent document explaining the “climate change and science about bushfires”.

Mr Canavan told Sky News host Paul Murray omitting such a finding is like “writing a report for a newspaper about a football match and not including the final score”.

Speaking about Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s net-zero emissions target by 2050, Mr Canavan said Mr Albanese “doesn’t understand what he’s signed up to will devastate Australian farming”.

This is unbelievable that a government or any opposition that’s going for election every three years would get away with making a promise that’s going to be at least ten elections away,” he said.

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Hit job on Bettina's qualifications fails

Bettina Arndt advises

Good news. Nina Funnell has failed in her malicious campaign alleging I am faking my qualifications. AHPRA, the organisation regulating psychologists, has announced they are taking no action against me despite Funnell’s efforts to have me punished for allegedly misrepresenting my clinical psychology qualifications.

Funnell, one of the activists responsible for bullying universities into setting up kangaroo courts, launched the first attacks on me after the announcement of my Honour award on Australia Day.

That weekend, writing in New Matilda, Funnell and her editor & co-writer, Chris Graham, revealed their results of a two-year investigation into my qualifications. I refuted their misleading allegations here.

Now AHPRA has determined Funnell’s hit job has no substance. Their letter to me suggests some minor changes in the language I use to refer to my clinical psychology background. So instead of speaking about my “training in clinical psychology” I will now just refer to the fact that I completed a Master of Clinical Psychology degree at UNSW. After AHPRA decided not to take action after the previous complaint about me late last year, I wrote to the organisation  explaining that I planned to use that reference to my training and asked them to clarify whether that was appropriate. I had no response. Clearly the organisation now feels the need to be more specific – which is fine by me.

They acknowledge the problem of controlling how the media labels me – amusingly, New Matilda referred to me as a “clinical psychologist” in the captions to their hit piece. But AHPRA advises every effort should be made to get that right and where possible to clarify descriptions in interviews shown on video and online, including descriptions on overseas editions of my books.  I am in the process of doing that now – not such an easy task. Currently google has over 2.3 million hits listed under my name.

Recently we saw the perfect illustration of my central argument that professional backgrounds are often included in descriptions well-known people use to describe themselves. This is common practice for doctors like Bob Brown, despite them no longer being in practice or registered.

At the first public hearing of the Family Law Inquiry at Canberra, Megan Mitchell, the National Children‘s Commissioner  introduced herself stating; “I’m a psychologist by trade”. She is not a registered psychologist. I don’t suppose Funnell will do a hit job on Mitchell.

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Only ‘limited’ evidence for trans kids’ medicine but inquiry too ‘dangerous’?

The evidence for life-altering medical intervention in youth gender clinics suffers from “gaps” and “limitations” but a national inquiry would be “dangerous”, federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has been told.

The inquiry urged by more than 200 doctors and clinicians “would further harm vulnerable patients and their families through increased media and public attention,” the Royal Australasian College of Physicians said in a letter to Mr Hunt on Friday.

In August, after this newspaper began reporting concerns about the safety and ethics of “transgender” medical treatments for vulnerable minors, Mr Hunt sought “urgent” advice from the college, which covers paediatricians.

It has since emerged the college had lobbied with paediatrician Michelle Telfer — whose Royal Children’s Hospital gender clinic in Melbourne spearheads the pro-trans “affirmative” treatment model in Australia — for easier and quicker underage access to hormones and less oversight by the Family Court.

On Friday, Mr Hunt’s spokesman said the minister would review the college’s advice and consider what might need to be done.

There is intensifying global debate about the reasons for an exponential rise in often already troubled teenagers, mostly girls, diagnosed with gender dysphoria (distress at being “born in the wrong body”) and asking for puberty blocker drugs, opposite-sex hormones and surgery such as mastectomy.

On Thursday, the former British minister for mental health and suicide prevention, Jackie Doyle-Price, called for “more control over gender treatment for children”, citing litigation involving a regretful “detransitioner”, Keira Bell, 23, who said the NHS Tavistock gender clinic in London “should have challenged me more” over medical transition.

“Puberty is not the time for anyone to consent to life-changing treatment,” Ms Doyle-Price said in a tweet.

This week brought the launch of a new global body, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, which argues that the low quality of the evidence for the affirmative model has been obscured by dramatic but unsupported claims that young people are likely to kill themselves if denied hormones and surgery.

“Given the lack of evidence of benefits of these treatments on long-term mental health, and the evidence of alarmingly high rates of post-treatment suicide, the use of affirmative care outside of rigorously designed clinical trial settings is inconsistent with ethical medical practice,” the SEGM spokesman, US-based endocrinologist William Malone, said on Friday.

Before the rise of the affirmative model and teenage-onset dysphoria, the condition typically occurred in a small, stable percentage of pre-school boys, with the vast majority coming to accept their bodies as they matured and many emerging as gay or bisexual.

Philip Morris, president of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, which supports a national inquiry, said he found it “very surprising” for a medical college to claim it would be “dangerous” to hold “a balanced, comprehensive inquiry into the most effective and safe treatments for gender dysphoria”.

“An inquiry that comes up with consensus on the best treatments would give confidence and support to parents and children.”

Dr Morris said the health minister would be “very disappointed” with the college, having asked it for a verdict on what was “clinical best practice”.

“(The letter) gives him no advice about the competing merits of the affirmative approach versus supportive, more conservative treatments of children with gender dysphoria; it provides him with no information on the safety and effectiveness of puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones in children and adolescents.”

Treatment side-effects include infertility, loss of sexual desire, cardiovascular problems, and possible cognitive impairment.

‘Validation’ for Dr Telfer

Friday’s letter from the college warning Mr Hunt not to hold a national inquiry was welcomed by the gender clinicians’ lobby AusPATH, and RCH chairman Rob Knowles and chief executive John Stanway.

RCH said the letter had “validated” Dr Telfer’s work, and backed the college’s appeal for more public funding to spread gender clinic services, especially in rural and regional areas.

In the letter, RACP president Mark Lane said young people with gender dysphoria suffered “extremely high” rates of self-harm and attempted suicide. The college did not supply any evidence when asked.

Canadian psychologist Ken Zucker, a world authority on gender dysphoria and editor of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, has dismissed as “pure dogma” the affirmative model line to parents hesitating on the brink of treatment for their child, “Do you want a live son or a dead daughter?”.

“If you are depressed, your suicidality risk is going to be elevated, but you see that in kids who are depressed but don’t have gender dysphoria,” Dr Zucker told The Australian last year.

“The idea that adolescents with gender dysphoria are at a higher risk of suicide per se is dogma — and I think it’s wrong.”

In his letter, Dr Lane said youth gender dysphoria was “an emerging area of healthcare”, and the evidence on treatment outcomes was “limited”, and this was similar to the state of affairs with conditions, such as rare cancers, affecting a small number of patients.

He suggested federal funding for long-term research; a new “national framework” for consistent, high quality care across the country; and new “evidence-based fact sheets” on treatment.

“To facilitate a high level of informed consent, patients and families must be provided with information about the limitations of available evidence regarding gender dysphoria,” he said. “For example, there should be an informed discussion of the burdens and benefits of treatment options in a way each child or adolescent can understand.”

‘No merit or courage’

Sydney clinical psychologist Dianna Kenny, a critic of the affirmative model, said the college’s statement was “so politically correct as to lack any scientific merit or moral courage”.

Professor of paediatrics John Whitehall, another critic, said it was odd for the college to not want “public attention” for the issue of medical transition of under-18s.

“I would have thought there is already a great deal of attention, though all one way (in favour of the affirmative model),” he said.

“The RACP boasts of interest in public health and that usually involves full and frank discussion of all side-effects as part of preventing harm. Here, it is essentially (saying), ‘Be quiet and accept the experimentation’.”

In a 2018 submission to the National Children’s Commissioner, which was reporting on progress under the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, the college said taxpayers should subsidise puberty blocker drugs (which cost $5000 a year for each trans youth) as well as trans surgery, while “gender identity” should be taught in schools and medical courses at university.

The college did not answer a question about whether its advice to Mr Hunt was affected by any conflict of interest.

SEGM’s Dr Malone said there were rare circumstances in which untested treatments might be used as a last resort but challenged the college’s comparison between gender dysphoria and cancer.

“Gender dysphoria is not a fatal disease: no single, quality study has demonstrated that gender dysphoria causes suicides in young people,” he said.

“Treatment with hormones and surgeries to halt puberty deny young people a chance for natural resolution of gender dysphoria.”

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here