Australian Politics
Friday, January 20, 2023
A racist medical regulator?
Rubbish! It is easy to cry "racism" when a minority person suffers harm but the facts in the case below mainly suggest a communication breakdown and the doctor concerned was unfairly treated.
The authorities in the matter of Aboriginal Miss Dhu were not negligent. Seeing that she was ill, they took her to hospital several times. The doctors however had difficulty finding what was wrong, not because of ill-will but because of the characteristic difficulty Aborigines have in communicating with whites.
For instance, it is a reflexive custom for Aborigines to say what they think their questioner wants to hear. So a question such as "Are you OK now?" would get a Yes reply even if such a reply were inaccurate.
And it does appear that her repeated unsuccessful visits to hospital had made the guards impatient and suspicious, which is why they were a bit rough with her towards the end but which is also an understandable response in the circumstances.
Clearly, nobody was aware of the difficulties that communication with Aborigines can pose. So if there are any lessons to be learned it is to improve that understanding, either by employing experienced Aboriginal intermediaries or by having all staff trained by people who really know Aborigines and their culture well. It really is an art.
I note that the doctor who saw her was from India. That could well have amplified the communication difficulties. One often hears of problems arising from a "communication breakdown" but this would appear to be a particularly unfortunate example of it
The doctor who declared a young Indigenous woman fit for police custody shortly before her death was almost cleared of professional misconduct by the national healthcare regulator, in what insiders say is one example of systemic racism within the organisation.
Noongar woman Hannah McGlade, a former board member at the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), is one of those concerned about the case and said she was speaking out to draw attention to “double standards” in the way Indigenous patients and practitioners were treated.
Former AHPRA board member Hannah McGlade has accused the national healthcare regulator of racism.
Former AHPRA board member Hannah McGlade has accused the national healthcare regulator of racism. Credit:Tony McDonough
McGlade resigned from AHPRA about five months ago after an unsatisfactory response when she raised concerns internally. She is now calling for reform, including the implementation of a separate investigation process for medical complaints involving Indigenous people.
“Aboriginal people are dying in this country because of racism in healthcare,” McGlade said. “AHPRA has a long way to go in addressing its own culture of racism.”
The allegations come after The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald revealed this week that AHPRA is grappling with ongoing claims of bullying, a “toxic” workplace culture and pressure to work through a backlog of complaints that investigators fear is putting the public at risk.
AHPRA chiefs declined an interview on Tuesday, but a spokesman said the organisation was half-way through implementing a strategy to improve the system for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
McGlade was the only Indigenous representative on AHPRA’s national medical board during the regulator’s investigation into the medical treatment of Dhu, a 22-year-old Indigenous woman who died in police custody in South Hedland, Western Australia, in 2014.
The death of Dhu, whose first name has been withheld for cultural reasons, triggered national protests and debate around institutionalised racism.
After being arrested and detained for unpaid fines, Dhu complained about pain and was taken to the hospital where her symptoms were dismissed as exaggerated or faked.
One treating doctor involved in assessing her, Vafa Naderi, failed to check her vitals or order an X-ray but instead noted “behavioural issues” and declared her fit for police custody.
The 2016 coronial inquiry would later find an early prescription of antibiotics to treat her broken rib, which had become infected, could have saved her life, and the doctors had made judgments based on preconceived ideas about Indigenous people.
However, when AHPRA conducted its own investigation into Naderi, an independent expert found while his conduct was unprofessional, it did not constitute professional misconduct, according to McGlade. There was disagreement between AHPRA boards about how to proceed. A legal firm was prepared to accept the expert’s advice, and pursue lighter disciplinary action, until McGlade intervened.
“I was the only member of the medical board who said: ‘This is not right. His conduct was so serious, it contributed to the death of a young woman. This is professional misconduct’,” McGlade said in rare public comments on AHPRA’s board deliberations.
McGlade had challenged the board and AHPRA’s commitment to reconciliation and had been asked to leave the room, accused of having a conflict of interest because she was Aboriginal, she said. But McGlade persisted and eventually persuaded the board to push for harsher action.
“It took the only Aboriginal person with a backbone to say – is that fair? Is that the right decision?” she said.
AHPRA ultimately referred Naderi to the WA State Administrative Tribunal and in June last year, Naderi was fined $30,000 – the highest penalty available under the law.
But he was not deregistered, nor were the nurses involved in Dhu’s treatment, who similarly failed to take her concerns seriously.
“That doctor got a slap on the wrist and he was still working,” said Dhu’s grandmother, Carol Roe, who gave permission for Dhu’s image to be used.
“My granddaughter was in agony. They should have looked after her, treated her with respect.”
A spokesman for AHPRA did not respond to questions about McGlade’s comments or penalties for the nurses who treated Dhu, but said her death “demonstrates the serious and tragic consequences of racism in our health and justice system”, and highlighted the regulator’s work to penalise Naderi.
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‘Queensland is so big, daylight saving just doesn’t work’
I don't want anybody messing around with my clocks nor do most Queenslanders. We have already voted on it
Daylight saving. Introduce these two words into conversation and, just like that, you have a lively spar of opinion. It’s the great Queensland debate. Are you for daylight saving or are you not?
Long a vexed issue, those for and against are mostly divided between the state’s more populated southeast corner and the state’s vast west and north.
An incredible array of pros and cons come into play – from annual time zone anarchy at the Coolangatta-Tweed Heads border and the reported billions of dollars in lost business revenue, to health and lifestyle factors.
Depending what research you are looking at, or who you are talking to, daylight saving gets people out playing with their kids, away from the TV and spending money at local businesses; or it isolates farmers who work until dark regardless of the time on the clock.
It is good for energy consumption because we turn our indoor lights on later but does this mean we use air conditioners more?
It has been attributed to an increase in heart attacks and sleep disturbances and causes anarchy when putting young children to bed. Conversely, it may also lower obesity rates, result in fewer car crashes and animal strikes and less crime.
It is also a simple matter of geography. Young children (and consequently their parents) are up with the birds that start chirping and squawking at a sunrise that hits Brisbane in December from 4.44am (with an uncivilised pre-dawn glow from 4.18am); while Mount Isa in the state’s north west corner doesn’t see sunrise at the same time of year until almost 6am.
Simply, daylight saving gives us a better quality of life or a worse one. It is to be welcomed; or avoided at all costs.
Whatever your view, this contentious and ongoing debate rears its head almost every summer when the rest of Australia’s east coast winds forward their clocks by one hour. Can the Sunshine State ever find its way to a resolution?
Daylight saving was first used in Australia in 1917 during World War I as an energy-saving measure, and again during World War II.
Tasmania introduced daylight saving in 1967, and in the Australian Capital Territory and all states (except Western and South Australia), it was trialled from October 1971 to February 1972.
All states – except Queensland, WA and the Northern Territory – then adopted it, with three time zones becoming five from the first Sunday in October to the first Sunday in April.
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Ashamed of Australia Day? Then don’t take the extra day off
Federal Labor has joined academia and enlightened corporates to tell bureaucrats they can opt to “work” Australia Day if the occasion triggers them, and claim a day in lieu when airfares are on sale.
While Albo claims it’s “fine to have some flexibility”, Australia Day has now been cheapened to an extra day off for academics, corporates and bureaucrats, guilt-tripped into a mythical misnomer of what the day represents, righteous about an erroneous view completely out of historical context.
We should acknowledge a terrible, suppressed history, but should not commit the counter-crime of forgetting the truth of the man behind it, whose remarkable tenacity birthed a free nation.
Thursday is not, as some activists will tell you, the day when Captain Cook invaded Botany Bay, but the anniversary of Governor Arthur Phillip’s landing, who, enlightened beyond his contemporaries, actively sought Indigenous advisers, trade and enforced law for convicts and Indigenous people to live harmoniously.
Australia Day is not, as some activists claim, a day that has been only celebrated since 1994 but has been marked every year since Phillip arrived with convicts and a garrison to guard them, woefully under-resourced.
As far back as 1818, government labourers were given a day off and “one pound of fresh meat” “as a “just tribute to the memory of that highly respected and meritorious officer”.
For an “invader,” Phillip chose Indigenous confidantes to translate and dine with, named land after them — including Manly and Bennelong — and even as the slave trade boomed globally, ensured the local population here did not meet the same fate.
When a man speared him through the shoulder at Manly, his order was: “No reprisals; it was due to misunderstanding”.
He was dismayed when his convict entourage at Parramatta were “so unthinking, or so depraved, as wantonly to destroy a canoe belonging to a fine young man”, noting it ended any chance of commerce between them.
He hung his countrymen for the crime — which seems counterintuitive if he was an invader. Phillip believed the Indigenous to be British citizens protected by law — in stark contrast to colonists enslaving native populations across the rest of the world.
Most surprising is that the colony survived famine in such dire straits that convicts were hung from trees for stealing when the alternative was starving.
As the rhetoric builds each Australia Day, we risk forgetting why we have it at all.
As far back as 1818, it was to celebrate a man who navigated uncharted seas with a fleet of prison ships of poor convicts into an unfamiliar land, afforded little help from Britain to build a penal colony that has evolved into the free nation we have today.
He built houses and roads, raised crops and stock, all with unskilled convict labour who didn’t know how to farm or want to be here, and soldiers who endlessly complained about the temperature (42C in the shade), sun, mosquitoes and lack of food, fought with each other and allowed convicts to abscond.
We don’t execute hungry flour thieves as we did in 1798 any more, but judging Phillip’s executions then with the eyes of today would be like judging Indigenous men documented in the same period for killing their wives with blunt force trauma, treating them as possessions, not people, under the tribal conditions of the same time.
It would be an outrage to say that their descendants today are in line with the culture of then. So why do that to Governor Phillip and the unfortunate souls on the First Fleet?
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Labor’s new tax on those that wear hi-vis to work
In the past week Greta Thunberg was “arrested” for trying to stop the expansion of a coal mine that would bulldoze the abandoned German town of Luetzerath. While a German Greens Government is desperately trying to increase the supply of reliable energy, even against the wishes of St Greta, our Labor-Greens government announced a $15 billion tax hit on our energy producing and consuming businesses.
The Labor Party does not call it a tax, instead preferring the Orwellian moniker of a “safeguard mechanism”. The safeguard mechanism would make 215 Australian businesses reduce their carbon emissions by 5 per cent a year. They will have to pay a capped price of $75 per tonne to do this.
Over the next 7 years until 2030 these businesses will have to reduce their emissions by 205 million tonnes. At $75 a tonne, which is three times the cost of Gillard’s carbon tax, this amounts to a $15 billion new tax to do business in Australia. (The $75 capped price will probably prevail because in Europe carbon credits trade at over $100 per tonne and in New Zealand the price is already at $70 a tonne.)
Former Labor MP, Joel Fitzgibbon, admitted that Labor’s policy was a carbon tax. Like all carbon taxes it will increase the cost of living. Airlines will be made to pay the tax. You will be made to tick the green box on your plane ticket under Labor.
But this new carbon tax will be paid mostly by the mines and factories in regional Australia. The tax will hit 63 coal mines, 22 iron ore mines, 35 gas production facilities and what is left of our manufacturing of steel, aluminium and fertilisers. It is not a good idea to tax the industries that make our nation prosperous.
Over 84 per cent of the carbon emissions covered by Labor’s carbon tax come from businesses in the regions even though only 30 per cent of Australians live in the regions.
Labor’s new carbon tax is a tax on those that wear hi-vis to work.
Queensland is hit hard by Labor’s new carbon tax. A third of the 215 businesses are in Queensland despite the fact we only have 20 per cent of Australia’s population. Queensland businesses are set to pay an extra $4 billion in tax, a much higher burden than the just $700 million that will be paid by Victorian businesses.
It is Queensland’s mining industry that is keeping our nation afloat. Coal is once again Australia’s largest export but the thanks it gets is to pay more tax to prop up a bloated Canberra bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, Labor’s policy lets the banks off scot-free. Banks are large emitters themselves due to the energy use of their data centres.
However, under Labor’s policy, emissions from the use of electricity is inexplicably ignored. If Labor had included emissions from electricity use, three of the four big banks would have carbon emissions over the 100,000-tonne threshold and have to pay the tax.
So Labor’s climate policy taxes the jobs in the hi-vis industries of mining and manufacturing, while turning a blind eye to the emissions created by jobs in suits.
And those hi-vis industries, guess who they will have to buy the carbon credits from? That’s right, the banks. No wonder the banking industry is one of the loudest supporters of Labor’s climate plan.
Labor has tried to claim that this new tax will not hurt business or jobs because other countries want us to reduce carbon emissions and if we do not we will lose their custom. However, this argument is completely undermined by Labor’s own suggestion that we will now need to introduce carbon tariffs on imported products to offset the costs of their carbon tax on Australian businesses.
If Labor’s new carbon tax actually helps Australian businesses sell products to climate conscious customers, why would we need a tariff to provide them protection against low cost goods from countries that do not impose a carbon tax?
This just proves that this new tax is another blow to Australia’s manufacturing industries. The biggest winner of Labor’s carbon tax will be China, who will take more of our manufacturing jobs as they continue to build coal fired power plants like they are going out of fashion.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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