Month: May 2019

Modest Expectations – Iroquois

I have just been looking at the election results again, and remembering very clearly the backslapping which occurred with the landslide that Bjelke-Petersen effected in the 1974 election in Queensland when the ALP was reduced to 11 seats. At the same time the Queensland Labor Party, the Santamaria-Vince Gair offshoot, was wiped out completely.

The only safe Labor seat left then was Port Curtis or, as it is now named, Gladstone. True to form, in the 2019 swing to the Coalition in the electorate of Flynn, which is a pendulum electorate at the best of times, Gladstone remained Labor as did much of Rockhampton.

Queensland has this history over the past 50 years of being electorally volatile.

However, what intrigued me recently was Blackwater, which is touted as the coal mining capital of Queensland; the coal is exported via rail to Gladstone. The two booths there voted strongly Labor, as did the electors of Bluff down the road where the coal trains interchange in 2019.

The story of Blackwater is instructive – named because of the colour of the water passing across the coal seam. It had a population of 77 in 1966. Then the open cut coalmines came and the population swelled to 10,000 in the 1970s to decline to a current figure of about 4,000. There were about 1,000 voters at the two booths. The majority voted Labor (57 per cent at one booth and 64 per cent at the other). It is also true that other coal towns across the Bowen Basin of Collinsville, Moranbah, Dysart and Tieri all voted for Labor.

Small figures but instructive as a pointer. Given how unreliable the polls are, you might as well attribute the swing in Flynn to the State Government with the duumvirate (or more correctly duamfeminate) of Palaszczuk and Trad, as to the substitution of Morrison for Turnbull. However, quite rightly there was the Longman by-election and subsequently the swing back on May 18, which would point more to the second as the major cause for that phenomenon Nevertheless, change is not always due to one factor.

Flynn has a great many people on the land doing it tough because of the drought, and as you cannot directly blame God, well the State Government may as well cop the blame through its surrogate, Shorten, despite him being the son-in-law of the Queensland Dame, surely a person of renown in her own State.

Blackwater is just one of 40 odd mining centres in the Bowen Basin, which is South of the Galilee Basin.

Admittedly one of difficulties in defining voting patterns in the Bowen Basin is the number of “fly-in-fly-out” (FIFO) mining employees, estimated at 18 per cent of the population. It would be interesting to know the home postcodes of these FIFO miners but the assumption that they are locals, who earn the money that sustains the local economy, needs to be tested if we wish to clearly define the miners’ voting patterns. 

Strathmore Furore 

I came to Australia as a 14-pound “Pom” on the S.S. Strathmore, a P&O liner. The 14 pounds is an estimate. I might have weighed a pound more or less at four months old, in 1946, when I arrived with my Mum. The ship berthed first at Fremantle.

Somehow the Sydney Daily Telegraph had got wind of stench from our ship. Was the Fremantle Doctor that stiff a breeze to reach Sydney?

The story the paper ran the day after the Strathmore arrived was headlined: alien passengers filthy, ship’s passengers allege. Unbeknown to me for sixty-odd years, around 200 refugees had boarded the ship in Port Said—distressing many of those who, like us, had embarked in Southampton.

A Mr Pugh (“ex-R.A.A.F”) said to the Telegraph: “They are mostly women over 50. “Some,” he added for good measure, “are aged 70”.

That sexism and ageism was just lustre dust to the real thrust of the tabloid’s story: These filthy Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Palestine Jews, Cypriots, Greeks and Maltese were covered in sores and so dirty that the real passengers dare not dip their toes into the same pool.

A Mr Spencer of Regent Motors in Melbourne described the refugees as verminous, pointing out that they refused to be deloused. He demanded, “Why don’t we select our migrants from the magnificent types offering in England, and in Norway, where there are 10,000 ready to come here?”

The Sydney Morning Herald also made news of passengers’ complaints. “They’d turned the ship into a floating ‘Tower of Babel’ (and) wore peasant-type shawls draped about their heads (or) jackets gaily bedecked with patterns worked in silver wire.”

The Herald too handed Messrs Spencer and Pugh a megaphone. Each said in turn:

“The immigrants spat on the decks, threw their fruit peelings everywhere, and hung their washing across the deck promenades. It staggers me that Australia should have to rely for its population on the type of people that this ship brought.”

Sydney’s broadsheet listed just some of the languages spoken in the seagoing Migdal Babel: Hebrew was the first mentioned … then Egyptian, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Austrian, Hungarian, Yugoslavian (sic) and Czechoslovakian (sic).

The furore ran for several days in newspapers around Australia.

Then the following Friday, The Sydney Morning Herald published a letter from a man called David Hand. He was a passenger on the ship, an Australian, who was also an Anglican priest. His five-paragraph letter was written “purely in the interests of truth and justice”.

The fourth paragraph reads: “As a priest on board, I had occasion to learn a good deal about the moral or immoral behaviour of the passengers; and I know that the highest officers of the ship would support my contention that the morals of the British people were no better – perhaps worse – than those of the ‘aliens’.”

He added in the final paragraph, “Those who were privileged to get to know any of them usually found them friendly, keen to learn Australian ways and language, and full of admiration and gratitude of the British people.”

I must have had my foot tickled by one or two of them because I have always sensed what he means by “privilege”.

ME & my mouse are indebted to John Bevins for this recollection. John was responsible for some of the most potent and innovative social marketing and advertising campaigns from the 1980s to end of the century. 

Flynn Addendum – A Message for Albo

This is a tiny parable about the town, which perceived unfairness and bullying.

There was this Tamil couple with their two Australian-born daughters, who were taken from a Queensland town called Biloela in the electorate of Flynn (the majority of which voted 58 per cent for the Coalition). They have been in detention in Melbourne since 2018 under the Dutton aegis, to be deported back to a country where 48,000 Tamils have been killed.

Biloela liked this couple. In fact a petition was raised for them to stay – many people are signing it. The flag over Biloela is not blue. Fifty four per cent of the Biloela citizens voted Labor on May 18. Biloela North admittedly voted 51 per cent Coalition. However, Thangool, 12 kilometres down the road voted 71 per cent Coalition. “Small numbers. Means nothing.” Or perhaps just an example of small town fair play disliking the Big Government the Coalition says it despises and keeps banging on about.

The parable of this story is taken from the Book of Morrison paraphrased: “There is no fair go for those who are forced to go.” 

Coal and the Pro-Adani Canavan

Matthew lives in Yeppoon. He has a wife and four children. Yeppoon is a coastal community that is renowned for its beaches, tropical climate, and the islands out on the bay. So says Wikipedia. It is where people who can afford not to live in Rockhampton go. Rockhampton is on the Fitzroy River far from the coast. It is not the place in which to spend summer. Yeppoon is better.

Yeppoon does not have a coalmine. Matthew has a younger brother called John. John likes coalmines. In fact he has been reported as keen to acquire the Rolleston mines, which were surplus to need for Glencore. John and Matthew seem to regularly communicate about their love for coal.

In a cuddly meal at the “Brekky Creek” Hotel in 2017 with the AFR, Matthew’s position was described thus: “The senator has become an avid reader of mining history and uses it to justify his position to use taxpayer funding to back Adani’s controversial mine, saying a leg-up from taxpayers helped get all new mining regions off the ground, evoking the “if you build it they will come” attitude of the Bjelke-Petersen era.”

Now I live around the corner from where there was once a coal mine, next to the primary school. The two mineshafts, Birthday and Jubilee, were sunk in 1897, and named for the 60th year of the Victorian reign. In fact my late neighbour as a boy used to dart round the corner to get lumps of coal from the dump for the family fire. He would brandish them triumphantly as he scooted home. Lots of soot in the air but it was only where the working class lived.

Matthew would be proud of how the then NSW Government offered to assist the viability of the coal mine when eventually after 30 years it was shown to be uneconomic, but in his terms needing “a leg-up.”

Oh, it was so picturesque, Matthew. Undercapitalised, the mine was never mechanised; so there were pit ponies lowered every morning to work in the mine’s narrow shafts. There were 159 men on the day shift, and the atmosphere was dusty with the temperature reaching 38 degrees C. Miners had a short life.

It is impossible to reconcile why any Australian government would tolerate such a situation, but during this time it was mostly a Labor seat with the then H.V. Evatt being one of the members for the Balmain seat when the miners were working under such appalling conditions. So much for his occupational health credentials!

But I digress. Even as late as the mid-eighties there were discussions about using the mine for gas supplies, and I remember that the opening to the mineshaft was still visible at that time.

Incidentally the remediation process for the mine took decades, including the death of three workers in an explosion of methane gas. To make the mine safe after that tragedy needed four million gallons of water – not sea water, fresh water – to get rid of the coal gas. Note water usage, Matthew.

As a student of mining history, I am sure Matthew would like to know the original stakeholders for the Balmain mine lived nowhere near Balmain. A bit like Adani, but more Old World. London to be exact.

And Matthew, somebody always has to pay the Piper … maybe your children and our grandchildren.

Hawke in the Willow

When I was seriously involved in politics, I met Bob Hawke once when he was Prime Minister and was very impressed and flattered that he knew who I was. He was one of those politicians who knew both faces and reputations. He was on a different rail line to me.

However, one night years later my wife and I with a few friends were celebrating our ninth wedding anniversary. Now the ninth wedding anniversary is willow for all of those who are not obsessed in knowing what to give on a particular anniversary. Needless to say, I had just presented my wife with a cricket bat at the celebratory festivity in the Flower Drum restaurant in Melbourne, when in walks Bob and Blanche with a few friends, including the late Martin Crowe, then recently retired after captaining the New Zealand cricket team.

Given that the last time Hawke had greeted me like a mate, and with a reasonably high sherbet level I took the cricket bat over to them after they had settled in but before any of that elegant Flower Drum Chinese tucker had started to flow. I asked Bob as a mate to sign the bat for my wife giving him a potted history of why I had a cricket bat in a posh Chinese restaurant. He obliged. Blanche signed too. Hawke however looked at me quizzically given that it was a unique experience to be asked to autograph a cricket bat in such an environment. However, that was the personal touch of the man.

Then as I thanked them and was walking back to our table, the owner of the restaurant insisted on signing it too.

As we were walking down Little Bourke Street after dinner, my wife had the cricket bat over her shoulder, and somebody in the street yelled out, “Melbourne is not that dangerous, luv.”

Mouse Whisper

Heard in the Manolo Blahnik industrial boot store in Paraburdoo.

“So if blue is Liberal and red is Labor, when they come together in the political centre do they mix to form purple? The Political centre must be called the Purple Patch then.”

By the way, just back from Mousehole where the last Cornish speaker, Dolly Penteath died in 1777. Her last words were defiant. “Me ne vidn cewswel Sowsnek” – “I don’t want to speak to English”.

Modest Expectations Nein

Hey wait a minute. Sure, most people didn’t predict the result of the election. I thought we had 1972, although I had reservations about Shorten and his lack of charisma and the fact that 1972 did not yield the landslide that Whitlam had hoped for given how ghastly McMahon was.

Plainly Morrison was underestimated – the child actor with the perpetual grin prevailed … sort of.

But hey again, wait a minute. The language is going a bit over the top: “crushing victory”, “blood bath”, “horror night”. Hardly. What has happened is the media Kommentariat have got it wrong – to a degree.

Having said that, even before the election, Shorten, although losing a seat in South Australia in the redistribution was gifted another seat in the ACT and three in Victoria– one new and two previously held Liberal Party seats. In other words, Shorten started with a three-seat advantage.

Unlike Whitlam who won five seats in his home State, Shorten lost, if you don’t count the new seat of Fraser and the two notionally Labor seats as gains, one in Victoria. My pre-election line: “And tellingly Shorten comes from Victoria” begged a reply. I however did not expect “It won’t matter. He’s a loser.”

And the ironic final blow was that Shorten has lost Bass, the seat where the Beaconsfield mine is located and where he started constructing his national profile in 2006.

Morrison has eked out a victory, with Dr Faust very much clothed as a banana bender or cane toad – whichever description takes your fancy when describing our Northern State. He now has 24 members from Queensland (25 if one counts Bob Katter) in the House of Representatives with their de facto leader Barnaby Joyce just across the border.

Morrison is probably relieved that he has lost Abbott, because he does not have to find a place in the ministry and the Falangist right have lost their parliamentary leader.

Morrison should however be mindful that all three of the latest Coalition Prime Ministers have lost their seats, one by resignation and two at elections. Not a good precedent.

One significant gain is that Arthur Sinodinos has regained his health in his battle with cancer. How long he is in remission will be critical for Morrison. His exchanges with Penny Wong were exquisite on election night. Sometime one sees elegance in politics and how two people with differing views can accommodate the other.

Morrison may have heard his Brisbane colleague Dutton say, “This is the sweetest victory of them all”, repeating the quintessential Keating paean to hubris. As Keating found out three years later, Nemesis is the enemy of hubris. However, Queenslanders are a distinct breed. Having worked and travelled widely in Queensland, I recognise that it is useful to have a friend or two there, especially if these friends are close to the land. They give one a jolt of reality, and yet if I were Morrison I would prefer those jolts to be spaced and constructive.

The Victorians put away the cricket bats that I thought they would produce, and have given the Coalition the benefit of the doubt. However, there were big swings in some of the Victorian electorates and Mr Frydenberg will be acutely aware that he has a restless constituency, with cricket bats still at the ready.

And listening to Barnaby Joyce post-election where he seemed to be under some influence – perhaps alcohol – then the next years are not going to be pleasant. Likewise for Queenslanders, who have been engulfed in extreme weather changes and with a decaying asset in the Great Barrier Reef are hankering for more jobs. To them Adani spells Employment. Again we shall see.

Quilpie

I love going to the Queensland Outback. It reflects the Australia of my childhood.

One week a couple of years ago, we stayed in Quilpie in a small motel at the end of town, overlooking the railway track. Fresh water was limited in the town and so we bathed in the motel shower – hot bore water with a distinct sulphurous smell – in other words dilute sulphuric acid. Breakfast was as I remember in the classic fried eggs and bacon on white bread toast. Could have added sausages.

In the evening we sat around having a beer or two with the fettlers whose job was to maintain the railway out to Quilpie and who were staying at the same motel as we were. Mind you, they said, there was only one cattle train a year between Charleville and Quilpie, but the line had to be maintained. An empty freight train comes out from Toowoomba once year to pick up stock and then generally goes back empty, just so the Queensland Government auditor presumably can be informed that the line is still in use.

And yet here is a decaying railway line passing through one of the major black opal mining areas in the country. There is a shop with the most exquisite black opals. Beyond – at Eromanga – there is dinosaur country with a fully-fledged palaeontology setup. In this area, as in Winton to the north, there is a trove of dinosaur and megafauna skeletons. The accommodation here is first class, and the shower water is drinkable.

One only has to look at the media to see how popular tourist rail journeys have become worldwide, and that journey out to Quilpie from Toowoomba is far from boring. After all, how many places in Australia are a refuge for bilbies, as is the Charleville railway station. Tourism Queensland: good for jobs; good for the environment; and after you have renovated it, the Great Western Railway would be a great attraction, the basic infrastructure is there – Michael Portillo might even be induced to ride it.

Pity about the railway line from Charleville to Cunnamulla. Just south of Cunnamulla it was blown up in one of the biggest explosions ever in Australia in 2015 when a truck carrying ammonium nitrate exploded on the Mitchell Highway. No-one was killed , but the explosion has left an impressive hole – as if a meteorite had hit there.

However, the problem is that Queensland politicians only seem to think of mining and thus predictably not much happens to this rail line beyond Chinchilla, predictably a coal mining area.

But Queensland is not just coal. It is so much more!

As Miss Bingle may have called out: “Why the bloody hell don’t you realise it?” (With appropriate acknowledgement of the Prime Minister when he ran the Tourist Commission.)

Dental Health

The re-election of the Coalition will mean that the Dental Health of the nation will hardly rate. The Prime Minister said it was a State matter. It is not. It is a Constitutional responsibility: *51(xxiiiA) The provision of maternity allowances, widows’ pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances. (My underlining)

I always remember in the generation before me that in the working classes when a woman became engaged to be married there was a strong likelihood of her having all her teeth removed, if they had not all rotted away already.

The problem in pre-antibiotic days, the mouth was a pool in which the teeth harboured nasty germs and hence was the fountain for systemic disease. If it were not teeth it was tonsils. Removal of both followed. And even further back, in the generation before, diphtheria lurked.

This is no longer the case so long as dental hygiene is maintained and there is fluoride in the water.

My premise is that fluoride should be added to every town’s water except where there is already enough naturally occurring fluoride in the water supply, such as at Quilpie in western Queensland. Another problem of course is that most bottled water does not contain fluoride. It should be mandatory, but as with the dairy industry products to Asia reported elsewhere, science bends to the voodoo.

In fact there are 48 councils in Queensland where there is no fluoridation of the water supply i.e. 68 per cent of the Councils representing 800,000 people. Councils in the more populous regions are fluoridated. So with Queensland politicians in the ascendency, water fluoridation is not likely to happen unless there is a will to do so.

As I have foreshadowed before – and as I have done for years – I shall continue to pursue the need for a national dental scheme, drawing from the experience of Medicare, remembering that Medicare was once strongly opposed by the medical profession, the Coalition and others, even Queenslanders.

The Forgotten Warrior

Mention of Medicare reminds me of someone else. In all the posthumous idolatry of Bob Hawke, we have forgotten probably one of the real statesmen – that rare person in politics who was courteous, intelligent and who probably unleashed Paul Keating onto the wider stage. He was the policeman from the seat of Oxley. He is a Queenslander and his name is Bill Hayden.

When all the plaudits are being handed out to Bob Hawke about Medicare, the real architect was Bill Hayden with the introduction of Medibank, a decade earlier. He resurrected the Australian Labor Party as successfully as the right of the NSW wing of the Party buried him, and of course as they say, the rest is history.

Apart from a reference to another Queenslander, the drover’s dog being able to win the election, Hayden did not carry on like that later Queensland incumbent who was rejected by his Party. Hayden continued his career as Minister and later Governor-General.

He undoubtedly would have pursued the reforms that Hawke instituted, but he would have renegotiated a foreign policy, which would have made us less of a United States satrap. But then of course we shall never know the validity of that comment. Further, I doubt whether Hawke would have behaved as Hayden did if, instead of winning, he had been defeated in his 1983 quest to be leader of the ALP.

Bill Hayden lives on. He is a great Australian.

Twirling Tea Leaves – A Tempest in my Teacup

I am a bit worried about all this fuss involving a gentle giant rugby union player called Israel Folau.

He posts this notice: “drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists, idolators – Hell awaits you”.

Now do we presume that Hell is currently empty of such diversity? If not, it could just as well be a description of the population of the Eastern suburbs of Sydney – or for that matter anywhere else in Australia where there is a heterogeneous population of people.

    • Drunks – we do not seem to have a problem societally there.
    • Adulterers – we have no-fault divorce
    • Liars – most politicians led by Trump
    • Fornicators – see Adulterers-in-training
    • Thieves – the banking Royal Commission disclosed how acceptable that is – presumably Hell is also in the Cayman Islands.
    • Atheists – doesn’t matter, they don’t believe in Hell.
    • Idolaters – my objection is stated below.

I do not subscribe to the Dante interpretation of Hell.

It does not interfere in my belief that there is a God that I do not see demons with tails and carrying pitchforks as potential eternal companions. I happen to believe very much in the Trinity and am comfortable with the Anglican High Church interpretation.

So am I an idolater “awaiting Hell” because I believe iconography a very important component of my belief system? The Christian Church over the centuries has been racked by the Iconclastic, with whom I disagree. You see iconoclasm in the effect that Cromwell and his ilk had on England. Quoting David Freeberg on a different period: “At the end of the sixth century, Gregory the Great threw the pagan idols – that is, the statues of classical antiquity – into the Tiber. They were idols not only because they were beautiful and therefore seductive, but because they were the replete symbols of a corrupt religion, only recently hostile to the true one.” Thus it is difficult to work out who is the Folau idolater.

However, I am not distressed about being sent to Hell because Israel has listed me. Should I exhort the non-iconoclastic cohort of the Christian Church to rise up against the iconoclast Folau? The answer – “No”.

So what is the fuss all about?

It could be argued that Folau is being made a martyr for his religious beliefs. I cannot detect any hatred, just an assertion about Hell. Hell may be on the Planet upon which we live, but show me the actual workplace please.

There is another worrying, less metaphysical aspect. Qantas sponsors Rugby Union and I wonder would this pursuit of Folau be so great if, for instance, another Alan, Alan Jones was the head of Qantas.

The Emblem of Rugby Union Australia should be changed to a Teacup.

Mouse Whisper

And to my Boss Blogger who is always asking me for smart quotes.

“You picked the wrong electorate – you said Corangamite would be the bellwether electorate, should have put the bell on the Chisholm sheep, you dill” … as whispered from Mousehole in Cornwall, where I am having a glorious time with all me mice mates.

Modest Expectations Ate

Bob Hawke has died. A cricketer, he would have been proud of making 89. Unlike Whitlam, he had a very good first XI. Some were brilliant. He did not make the same mistakes as Whitlam. He was not divisive; as with all good captains, he gauged the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition, and that of his own side. He had at least one dictum – he exerted attitude change in his own party such that the old time union collective thinking in which he had grown up, was changed.

However, when you go against your normal working person constituency, no matter how beneficial that might be for the Australian community, paradoxically you increase the power and influence of those elements which remain emphatically opposed to your reforms and who, over time, would seek to distort or destroy those reforms.

In time others may pore over the Hawke legacy and I for one wonder what he would have done for Australia if he were of the current generation and waiting for Saturday.

A Surfeit of Coke

Talking of mortality, one option that has not been widely canvassed about the current US Presidency is that Trump may die suddenly in office. If it is true that he drinks 12 cans of Diet Coke a day, has a diet of fast food and is so obviously overweight suggests that he is a walking health disaster waiting to happen.

In his latest medical history his height is recorded as 6ft 3in, but on his medical record when was being drafted into the US Army the record says 6ft 2in. Has he grown an inch as an adult? Really? Look at his shoe heels. Already obese at his recorded 243 pounds, how does anyone know what his real weight actually is? That missing inch plunges him further into the Obese.

Of course we do not know about his health status any more than we know about his tax returns. He obfuscates from his sandpit. It is his whole strategy to create sandstorms.

However, the one thing that Trump cannot make a deal about is his physical health.   He can only hope that the drugs will deal with his atheroma, not to mention what appears to be a cancer-prone diet.

Judging by the media reports there is a chorus of learned doctors or psychologists who obviously believe he is mentally impaired despite the protestations. His bizarre behaviour is just a quirk of his personality – a legacy of his early childhood his apologists say.

Trump prefers Diet Coke, and his daily consumption of it is extreme. According to the pundits, the excess drinking is linked to mood swings and dementia. As we all know, because he tells us, he is a cohort where n=1. He may be thus unaffected and the mood swings may be due to other factors, but the world ought to know. It is reasonable to know the mental state of a person who has control of the nuclear button, and what has caused it.

Is he mad? It is a question that publically the world would not answer through its current beige array of politicians. There are those politicians who prefer the Trump flamboyance – a man of many mental colours. There is that state of Munich delusion that one can cuddle up to Trump, know this man’s mind, and get him to sign a promise to be a “good, predictable boy”. Some have tried to put a political straitjacket on him – to be his great friend and mentor – to their cost. That is his art of the Deal. It costs you, not him!

Well, his handlers could deprive him of Diet Coke and see what happened, and see if the twitter finger stops twitching and rationality prevails.

However he is well past satisfying Koch’s postulates. The Diet Coke could have replaced his blood and no longer would he be like any of us mortals …

He is the Child Trump caught up in The Rapture. The Rapture is quoted as a doctrine that at the return of Christ, all believers will be caught up, “raptured”, to meet the Lord in the air. The bodies of dead believers will be resurrected, and all believers, living and dead, will be glorified. To the believers, it is a passport to immortality. That is the Child Trump constituency, who may call him not King but at least Duke.

The problem as with Mr L Ron Hubbard, whose disappearance galvanised a whole generation of charlatans, if he dies now as a demonstrably unhealthy Old Trump, his followers may believe the Child Trump is not dead. He may become a cult for the Enraptured, setting up shrines with figurines of the dear little child with golden hair and red baseball cap along the highways of America waiting for him to come again.

However, that is probably better than that of him never accepting the American people’s verdict saying at the end of 2020 “You’re fired!”

Shoulder replacement – The Anatomy of Medical Advance

I have a worn-out body. A major road accident over 30 years ago did not help.

So I was attracted to an advertisement in a major metropolitan daily for complete shoulder replacement. The advertisement is cast in a way that suggests it is just the thing for a worn out shoulder. Out with the old; in with the new. Like repairing a car, but with a car you at least can get a written guarantee.

However, when one is embarking on a major operation, such as a shoulder replacement, it may go well. You, the patient, if it is a new procedure, may become the poster person for the operation, the one the hospital and surgeon wheels out when boasting how great you, the Result is. You are the Positive Result and are allowed to say a few words, the surgeon performs the benediction, interviewer sums up from the media handout – and the camera is turned off.

The problem is that what the advertisement lacks is setting out the complications, which are rapidly becoming the small type to protect the surgeon and which frankly most patients do not want to hear. There it is in small type at the bottom of the advertisement: “any surgical or invasive procedure carries risk. Before proceeding, you should seek a second opinion from an appropriately qualified health practitioner.”

However, if you get a complication with such a complex operation as a shoulder joint replacement, you are looking down a long corridor of pain and disability.

I consulted a shoulder surgeon some time ago, because that is how specialised orthopaedics is. This bloke was very frank. Shoulder surgery was difficult; unpredictable results; the surgeon he would recommend is “very good”. However, in the end it is how much knowledge I, the patient, have in making an informed decision. I weighed the evidence up, and said I had decided against an operation on either shoulder.

Outcome is one matter for making an informed decision, especially as increasingly surgery is leaving foreign material in your body. Some is fine; some is not and when a technique is new, how do you know the likely outcome? The answer is you, the patient, do not. Trust in the integrity and skills of the operator are paramount.

But not quite! What was absent from the advertisement was the cost.

Let’s list them.

There is the cost of the hospital stay – everything down to the nametag. The cost of the surgeon – the enquiry about whether there was an assistant and why – and then the anaesthetist. That person is often forgotten in determining the cost, because he or she is the person the patient sees fleetingly.

Then there is the cost of rehabilitation. Because there is a belief that the surgery has a magical effect similar to laying on of hands, the need for rehabilitation may be underestimated. Try to take a middle course and ask, even if it means flattering your particular surgeon that “it could not possibly happen with him or her at the ready”, get a price which includes a contingency item for the costs of complications.

The solution – make it mandatory for prices to be displayed, including the guaranteed consumer floor price – that is, the Medicare benefit. This makes the shortfall starkly obvious.

Then given the notorious asymmetry of information, it is suggestive that there may be a case of brokerage – where those with knowledge negotiate for the customer, without the emotional stress of having the condition. Needless to say, there is a business model to be developed where, through brokerage, the asymmetry in health information can be corrected – as long as the process is uncontaminated, as the mortgage brokerage system recently was shown to be.

It’s Time – The Bubble rhymes with Trouble

One has the feeling that Victorians are going to go after Morrison and his crew with cricket bats. Morrison is not the right fit for Victorian voters. The hillbilly persona does not wash well in Victoria especially as he so clearly identifies himself as a New South Welshman, and the fact that Frydenburg is the only Victorian of note left standing says a great deal about the state of the Liberal party. The problem is the myth of a liberal Victorian has been blown away with the rise of the populist far right in Victorian Liberal politics, since the Kennett accession in 1990s.

The situation uncannily resembles 1972 – a NSW Prime Minister and a Victorian Treasurer. However, the Leader of the Opposition was Whitlam in 1972 – New South Welshman, secured six seats in NSW, the greatest number. His “It’s time” introduced the charismatic presidential-style campaign. Despite everything, Whitlam did not win in a landslide. In fact, Labor lost four seats in Victoria, one in South Australia and two in West Australia. However, it picked up seats in Victoria (net two), Queensland and Tasmania.

Snedden was never in any danger of losing his seat of Bruce in 1972 and Frydenburg should be in the same position. But is he? The bellwether seat is Corangamite, long a Liberal stronghold but for some time marginal with the spread of Geelong to the west counterbalanced by the shift of affluent retirees to places like Torquay and Barwon heads. If Corangamite is lost, so is Australia to the Government.

And tellingly Shorten is a Victorian.

If the Labor party wins big in Victoria, and takes seats in New South Wales and South Australia, what happens in Queensland, Northern Territory and Tasmania becomes irrelevant in the numbers game, except in perpetuating the cleavage in Australian society. This cleavage is not more starkly demonstrated than by the Green and Labor advance in the northern coastal regions of NSW. However, go across the border into the Gold Coast and one is in solid Liberal Party territory.

One has to realise that love of a member in Queensland is inversely proportional to the despisal in the “Mexican” States. Listening to a highly intelligent North Queensland academic referring to the member for Dawson as “good ol’ George” is confronting for those of equal intelligence without the privilege of being baked in the tropical sun.

However, there are several differences in the political scene now and in 1972 and that is the rise of the Independents. The Independents are fashioning themselves into a party of the Centre, freed from the constraints of the Creationists, Falangists and Rural Socialists, that coalition within the Coalition. One of the important features of this election is to see how well the Independents perform – one observation is that they seem to do well when the incumbent member is so appalling that anyone somewhere decent becomes electable.

The bellwether here is Kerryn Phelps. She profited from the clumsy dumping of Malcolm Turnbull and the fact that she had a high profile. However, the problem with her high profile is that she has a great deal of baggage and given her time as President of the AMA and the nature of her support base at that time, it would be a surprise if she has maintained that support base. Considering that her opponent has had more time to assess her, is a former DFAT charmer, is as likely to be as smooth as Dr Phelps is spiky, then she has a challenge. If she holds the seat, then again one can guarantee the swing is on against the Government.

However, the lessons for the government are undoubtedly how this country goes about climate change, how it participates in the Coalition of nations in the South Pacific, how New Zealand and ourselves become outspoken on the matter – just as I would remind the reader that 20 years ago we were outspoken about getting nuclear testing by the French out of our backyard swimming pool.

So I can predict, but I am notoriously bad at it. However, irrespective of whether Morrison or Shorten is Prime Minister after this weekend, any future government worth its reputation should realise that Australia is the joint Guardian of the South Pacific and Southern Ocean and Antarctica – and that is only the start. Trade and jobs become irrelevant if the Earth becomes uninhabitable.

And that, Mr Morrison, is not a Canberra bubble!

The Curse of Pre-polling – The Loss of the Democracy Sausage

I have voted. It was very convenient. It was easy to park the car near the hall. No waiting time. I met both the Greens and Liberal candidates – both nice guys. However as it is a safe Labor seat, you are more likely to meet Elvis Presley than the Member.

Pre-polling is so popular, since most Australians view voting on the Day as one step from having to go to the dentist. Having to run the gauntlet of those trying to shove a piece of paper into your hand and then having to queue, in the end, everybody will have exerted their preference and have voted by Election Day. In several elections’ time, if this trend continues, Election Day may become the Day that nobody came. So there you are, with the picture of politicians with a heavy countenance as they have when they are voting for an increase of their entitlements, in bilateral solemnity agreeing to now decrease the pre-polling time in the future. After all, one has to protect the “democracy sausage”.

Mouse Whisper

Heard in the Louis Vuitton emporium in Pooncarie as one stockman said to the Vuittoneur as he was looking through the range of outback portmanteaux:

“Why is it that politicians are always having Visions? Who do they expect to see? And why – if you can have a Vision of the Future – is it not acceptable to have a Hallucination of the future? Makes as much sense.”

 

Modest Expectations Septimus

Jeff Kennett recognised during a trip to New York that the colour yellow stood out in the visual spectrum. He had seen the New York taxis were all yellow and they stood out somewhat better than the various muted colours of the taxis in Melbourne at that time. So he decreed the yellow taxi for Melbourne.

Clive Palmer has recognised his party’s colour stands out like wattle in springtime.

Mr Palmer is a clever man. The hoarding owners know that and make him produce the cash before they agree to display his message.

On the hoardings Mr Palmer’s image appears to be photo-shopped so he looks much lighter and younger than he actually is – he is a very heavy gentleman and sometimes when he was captured asleep in Parliament, I wondered whether he had Pickwickian Syndrome named after the fat boy in that Dickens novel who was always falling asleep.

But while the heavyweight Mr Palmer is barely on view in person in this campaign, his messages are there: “Fast Trains”, “More Wages”, “Cheaper Energy”, “Free Cake” and they have apparently resonated with some in the electorate. Clive has perceived the end stage of the information revolution; photo-shopped images and two word policies. “Clive Palmer” itself is a policy.

Mr Palmer has been underestimated. His Chinese partners have found that out. His nickel workers have found that out – shimmering generosity followed by real famine. It is now up to the Australian electorate not to overestimate Mr Palmer.

And remember! Yellow is also the colour used for biohazard warnings.

The Psychopathology of Politics

I once toyed with going to Yale to undertake a doctorate in the psychopathology of politics. It was the early 1970s and I had come under the influence of Alan Davies, the then Professor of Politics at the University of Melbourne. “Foo”, as he was affectionately called, continued to influence much of my thinking in this area, and enabled me to write about it, getting some currency in the 1970s when I was considered to be “someone of promise”.

I didn’t go to Yale, but my interest in politics remained. I have two aphorisms that have stood the test of time: “all politicians proceed from a basis of low self-esteem” and “politics is the systematic organisation of hatreds”. The first is attributed to Harold Lasswell, a major American political theorist, and the second to one of that political Adams family which yielded two American Presidents.

However in the potpourri of personal politics where the pathology lurks, it is the ability to see yourself through the eyes of the viewer, which is a saving grace. Jacinda Ardern has that skill. She is an art gallery of images; so many images she is able to project and yet remain that singular woman I described in an earlier blog.

On the other hand, one thing about Bill Shorten is that he doesn’t have the intuitive sense of image that Ardern has. If I were his adviser, every time I saw him jogging I would tell him to jog away from the media lens. Or if he insists in exercising to find a medium in which he does not look like a duck, paddling along, paradoxically without a bill. Watching him jogging, it’s hard not to expect him to quack. But then again when you’ve got a critic like Murdoch, who presumably was not called “Boof” for nothing at Geelong Grammar, then your jogging gait is only a small irritant.

Morrison understands this image aspect of politics much better than Shorten. Whether his “aw shucks” approach has worked, we will find out in about a week’s time if the independents don’t cruel the pitch. Morrison abandons images that don’t work, like his “happy clapper” church routine. He is the ultimate pragmatist. Research obviously is telling him that the baseball cap is working. Remember Turnbull venturing into Queensland with his brand new Akubra? He was referred to as “that tent peg” – wide hat thin body.

You don’t want your audience laughing at you; only with you. This is another aphorism and one of perspicacity in being able to tell the difference.

Of Australian politicians, Penny Wong is wonderfully deft in a way that is not Ardern, yet from the same school; those who can stand outside themselves and see their image as others do. Her minimalist approach to herself is extremely effective. 

Dental Benefits

Stephen Duckett, well remembered in a past life as the Raider of the Lost Cookie Jar, has instigated a discussion on one of the most neglected areas of Australian politics – establishing a national dental health scheme. There was a somewhat insipid yet positive response from Shorten but as far as I can see nothing from the Liberal Coalition.

The paper is timely and whether you agree with the detail or not, it is important. However, it is 67 pages long and I don’t intend to critique it – rather it is useful to emphasise a few points and place the accent on different areas.

First of all, let us say that the advocacy for a dental benefits scheme, along with a medical and pharmaceutical scheme, has never had a champion in the Australian parliament. In fact I cannot establish whether there has ever been a dentist in the Australian Parliament.

After the Constitutional amendment in the 1946 referendum, the ubiquitous Earle Page, (a rural medical practitioner in his own right) championed the adoption of a national medical scheme, which was established in 1953, and massively updated following the Nimmo Report in 1969 with first Medibank and then Medicare.

Yet government policy has been silent on a universal dental policy. First of all, organised dentistry was opposed to it as they saw it as unnecessary government intervention in affairs of the mouth.

However, there are a number of matters that need to be addressed before the detailed question of coverage and affordability can be considered.

The first is the matter of fluoridation. Australia has a vocal fringe group opposed to fluoridation of water. To these people, it is yet another of the many tentacles of the Giant Conspiracy. There are many rural local government areas, particularly in Queensland, that do not have fluoridated water.

It is not only the Conspiracy Theorists, but also some Big Business that wishes to thwart fluoridation. I experienced this side of the debate where a community, in a public meeting, supported fluoridation without dissent, but the largest industry in the town – Murray Goulburn, which was not present at the meeting – went direct to government to say it would not put fluoridated water in the milk products. The reason given was that the Asian market rejected fluoride in milk products.

The community decision was ignored. Business triumphed over public health. Until a separate water pipe bringing unfluoridated water was provided at taxpayers’ cost to Murray Goulburn, the children of the Victorian township of Cobram unnecessarily forwent fluoridated water for nearly a decade after the community decision.

The point is that any universal dental scheme must take into consideration the requirement for universal fluoridation in the water (with the only exemption being those communities that have the recommended level already naturally present in the water supply), and not to be prisoner to the vagaries of some local governments. This whole question of national fluoridation needs to be addressed before benefits are paid for dental treatment.

The second consideration is the Australian Constitution and the question of “what are ‘dental benefits’?” If the dentists had encouraged the provision of a dental benefit scheme from the outset, then the definition of “dental” would have been clear. However, there are a number of health professions that have “dental” in their title. Not are the least of which are “dental hygienists”. These professions with dental in their title could argue that their services should be eligible for benefits under the Australian Constitution. Unlike “medical” which has been defined, any profession with “dental” in its title could be recognised as an independent profession. For instance, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) lists dental hygienist, dental therapist and dental prosthetist.

I am a great supporter of a universal dental scheme, but I am also opposed to shovelling out money without consideration of the consequences. This will be a recurrent theme as my blogs keep piling up.

A Child Care Parable

There once was a young post-graduate student, who was pregnant. She had graduated in medicine and then there were restrictions on pregnant women being interns in hospital. Some reasons had a trace of validity, but most were the consequence of male prejudice in a male dominated profession. Her husband was newly graduated in medicine but the annual wage for an 80-100 hour week was about 1,000 pounds including his board, but not hers. She remembered escaping being machine-gunned by a low flying American plane in the war. Although a small child in the street in Ljubljana, and the plane was so low she saw the face of the pilot, who aborted his strafing run when he saw that it was a child. He was black.

She was thus of migrant parents who had been refugees from central Europe. So her upward progress had been though determination and sheer hard work. She wanted a career, but she also wanted her child to be looked after in a safe environment in which she had a role in assisting. So she started a group with friends, who initially raised funds by serving coffee and biscuits at the university theatre. Eventually she secured a premise in an old Jewish school in the inner city near the university.

Then the battle for recognition and viability started – making ends meet and battling a government department headed by conservative male bureaucrats and complicit older women, whose model was the wartime nursery. These were set up so that women were freed to work in the factories and elsewhere. After the war, it was assumed women would know their place and retire behind the white picket fence. Those who wanted careers could resort to parents or nannies.

A fire had occurred six years before in a childcare centre, in which a number of children had died. Regulations were tightened, some justified, others less so. For instance, there needed to be a dining room with spatial dimensions of ten square feet for the first ten children and then eight square feet per child after that, presumably on the basis that the more children there were the smaller they became. Really?

Attitudes hardened and the idea of providing for parents to run a co-operative was resisted. However the co-operative was formed with parents as directors and the government reluctantly provided funds to renovate and equip a centre in accord with their strict regulations.

Parents paying fixed term fees from one to five days a week solved the question of financial certainty and hence assured financial viability.

The Centre had a trained registered nurse with child and midwifery qualifications as the executive officer and a kindergarten teacher, and others trained to various skill levels, both full time and part time, meeting the requirement for one staff member per five children for infants and one for fifteen when they were at kindergarten level. I use the word “skill” because education here requires in-service training, more males, and adequate salaries. Of these aspirations, she never enticed a male onto staff. Otherwise she was very successful.

She was adamant that all the staff be trained and cared for by the executive. The turnover rate as a result was low.

She had two sons, one who went into care at six weeks. They are now in their fifties, successful in different fields, each with a working spouse and each with three children.

Her advice even now could help a government intent on bringing in a childcare scheme, free of rorts. Subsidising the for-profit sector without demonstrable parent involvement is not the right business model.

The Centre she set up is still going strong.

Mouse Whisper

Experienced at the lunch table at the Magill winery in the suburbs of Adelaide when asked whether she preferred to be called “woman” or “lady” the young waitperson responded: “established female”.

Modest Expectations Fathom

This question may be seen as a bit odd for those who don’t have a father who was a young man in the 1930s, and I say father not mother – not to be disrespectful to women – but as a sign of the times in the 1930s.

“Which side were you on during the Spanish Civil War?” Did you back the republican government or Franco? It is a double-barrelled question, because that war can be interpreted as a battle between fascism and communism for two reasons. Hitler was testing out his military might, not only on the Republican army but also the Spanish citizens and Stalin was making sure, in the guise of supporting the Republican cause that he sacrificed socialists and anarchists to his form of authoritarianism, laughingly described as communism. However, the Republic was the legitimate government.

The Spanish Roman Catholic Church supported the Franco insurgency as also did the Church in Ireland. An Irish brigade was formed to fight for Franco. It was so ill-disciplined that Franco sent them home. However, the Irish connection is a recurring theme.

Most of those men from other democratic countries, including Australia, who went to fight were on the Republic side. The only recorded Australian who actually went to fight for Franco had a change of mind and he was killed while flying for the RAF in 1940.

However, it is a textured question. The cloth for the Spanish Civil War was woven years before. The Italian Futurist movement, which glorified war and dismissed history as bunk, was hidden beneath its paintings and poetry that provided the warp for the rise of Mussolini. Disaffection and perceived decay of the Weimar republic among other factors led to the rise of Hitler in Germany.

This was manifest not only in Australia, but as the New York Times noted this week in an editorial: In the 1930s and the 1940s, The Times was largely silent as anti-Semitism rose up and bathed the world in blood. That failure still haunts this newspaper.

A young Sydneysider, Phillip Morey, experienced its rise in the early 1930s, when he recognised the Fascists with that expressive word “rodomontade”. Below is taken from a memoir written about Philip’s experience:

He loathed the fascist New Guard that had been cavorting around New South Wales at the time. He considered the rhetoric of Eric Campbell, its leader, to be a “bombastic rodomontade”.

Philip remembered Campbell from two years before when the antics of Captain De Groot on Saturday 19 March in 1932 had initiated a confrontation with the Lang Government. Not that Philip had much sympathy with Jack Lang …

Francis De Groot was an Irish fascist who lived on his own bravado. Campbell was the populist Fascist — organiser of clandestine training for his New Guard for whom Mussolini in Italy and this new fellow Hitler in Germany seemed to have some answers to the world disorder.

Philip was determined that he was not going back to this world where the colour of the shirt seem to dominate — whether they were “black shirts” or “ white shirts” — Philip had thought Campbell’s posturing all very puerile — playing soldiers with his band of followers in various parts of Sydney. He had heard just before he’d left that they had been drilling in Killara, further up on the North Shore. Campbell had even issued a directive on street fighting — how to march with fixed bayonets and how to clear buildings with grenade, tear gas and rifle.

The text rings true when you see the antics of the extreme right today. The current mob has the ethnic hatred of Eric Campbell and later Eric Butler with his League of Rights. Then the target were Jews, and there is still residual anti-Semitism, but Muslims are now the prime target, and unlike the pathetic followers of Eric Campbell, their spiritual descendants have access to murderous weaponry.

How more insidious are the inheritors of Bartholemew Augustine Santamaria, in the 1930s, a rising intellectual within the Labour movement and protégé of Archbishop Mannix, once an avowed member of Sinn Fein? Santamaria was an avowed admirer of Franco, the only difference between Franco and Mussolini was that Franco stayed neutral during World War II and died in bed.

The Santamaria playbook mimicked his perceived communist foe in the union movement. He created industrial “Groups” within trade unions, backed by a secretive “Movement” designed to plant Catholic operatives in key positions throughout the Australian Labor Party – only now they are embedded in the Liberal Party.

But back to the question of 1936, how many of those who now support the heir to the Movement in the Sydney Institute would have voted Franco if they had been in the time of my father? However, I do not want to limit that question only to that select few – anybody can answer.

And the relevance? Franco was a tyrant who clothed himself in the Roman Catholic Church – currently in the western world, we would have one would-be tyrant, who clothes himself in fundamentalist creationism and another in the Orthodox Church. They are most prominent but not potentially the only ones. Franco is their shroud.

The “textured” metaphor is apt.

And my father? I believe he would have voted for the Republic, but then I never asked and he was unpredictable.

Fanfare for the Common Man – A Reflection on Anzac Day

Across the water from the small township of Lubec, Maine is Campobello Island in Canada. I have crossed the bridge to the island. Campobello Island is synonymous with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt smiled. Roosevelt exuded optimism. He was also a cripple, struck down by poliomyelitis one morning on this most beautiful of islands. Yet he strove for independence.

Until the ghastly event in Christchurch, I thought I came from a country where to “bare arms” is to get down to work with my fellow citizens. Yet I live a country where our major commemoration is a World War One disaster at Gallipoli and our national day is called by some “Invasion Day,” when Great Britain dumped a bunch of their unwanted – convicts and marines – in a desolate place called Botany Bay in 1788. Despite its apparent vigour, Australia is a country rooted in pessimism.

By contrast, the USA national day celebrates something more than putting a British foot on a distant shore.

Australia has a dirge for a national anthem. That of the USA was forged as the smoke from the British bombardment of Fort McHenry cleared and the American flag was still flying. Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Today Fort McHenry is one of two places in the United States where the fifteen-star flag still flies. The other is at the end of the Oregon Trail.

I have seen much of Australia.

But then I have been privileged to roam the United States too. I have sponsored two musk oxen called Amethyst and Pixie Stix in Alaska. I have sat in the South San Franciscan courtyard of Genentech just after it had started listening to the late Bob Swanson’s aspirations and then writing about it. I have eaten king salmon in Salem, Oregon, and crab in Sabine Pass, Texas – both sublime experiences. I have stood at the door of that miracle of Minnesota, Mayo. I have gazed at Mount Rushmore and know now why those four presidents were carved. I have wept at Shiloh. I have stood in the wheel ruts of the Oregon Trail in Douglas, Wyoming. I have joined in a march to the San Francisco Tenderloin on January 15 to honour Martin Luther King. And oh, so much more!

The United States in all its diversity has been my energiser from the first time I ever went. Even in adversity, this country has always exuded optimism, irrespective of Trump.

“Make America great again!”

What rubbish! America remains great so long as it never lose its Smile, it never loses its Optimism; but above all it never loses July the Fourth and its Constitution.

If we want to replace January 26 as Australia Day…

“The first celebration of Wattle Day was held on 1 September 1910 in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. Plans in 1913 to proclaim the wattle as a national emblem and to celebrate Wattle Day nationally were interrupted by World War I, but wattle remained a strong symbol of patriotism during the war years.”

This Google entry sums up Wattle Day succinctly.

One can only be struck by the colours of the Australian countryside in early spring. The yellow displayed is not only because of the wattle but also because of the canola in the broad acres and broom along the roads – there are so many yellow wildflowers but elsewhere it is the yellow of the prickly gorse scourge. So every symbol has its downside.

Intermingled with these patches of yellow is the eucalyptus green countryside – the wattles themselves, the gum trees and then there are the green pastures and cereal crops yet to ripen.

And when the land is so green and yellow should this be the time to remember our country with a national day? After all, the Argentinians, whose national day is May 25 say you can look up into the sky and see their flag. In September we would have the option of both looking up to see the Southern Cross but also to see our national colours across the land.

Even D.H. Lawrence in his rather dismissive novel about Australia, Kangaroo, wrote: In spring, the most delicate feathery yellow of plumes and plumes and plumes and trees and bushes of wattle, as if angels had flown right down out of the softest gold regions of heaven to settle here, in the Australian bush.

And what a time of the year! September is the gateway to the football finals; the cricketers are emerging from their chrysalides; and the festival finishes on the first Tuesday in November. A September 1 Australia Day would be a time of rebirth and not one stained by the metaphors surrounding colonisation and invasion.

Leave January 26 to New South Wales to work through those first years of the Rum Rebellion – and with climate change the temperature will probably be the same in September as it is now in January.

The Doctors’ Dilemma

In 1946 the Australian Constitution was amended to include the provision of health benefits for medical treatment, dental treatment, hospital and pharmaceutical benefits. Very specifically defined. In 1946 when this question was asked of the people of Australia, there was not the diversity of health professionals operating outside an institutional framework.

Therefore whenever any other professional group (apart from the dentists) wants access to Medicare, they have been blocked by the Constitution. Except that there have been a number of instances where the Constitution has been sidestepped, notably in the 1970s when optometrist benefits were introduced. It so happened that at that time there were a number of optometrists who were politicians on both sides of the House – and bingo, benefits were introduced because optometrists in the provision of these services were deemed “medical”.

In fact, many areas of medicine could not operate without the inclusion of the cost of the nurses, technicians and scientists, as occurs in pathology, radiotherapy and diagnostic imaging. The fee for Medicare benefit can incorporate a professional component (the doctor moiety) the technical moiety (including the non-medical staff) and a capital component (for the machinery). This is best exemplified in the structure of radiotherapy benefits.

However with the expansion of the Medicare Benefits Schedule after 2000, payments were made to a whole variety of health professionals through the Medicare Benefits Schedule but all were contained within or linked to medical care.

This interplay with doctors is shown by the midwife eligibility criteria:

A collaborative arrangement is an arrangement between an eligible midwife and a specified medical practitioner that must provide for:

(a)  consultation with an obstetric specified medical practitioner;

(b)  referral of a patient to a specified medical practitioner; and

(c)  transfer of the patient’s care to an obstetric specified medical practitioner, as clinically relevant to ensure safe, high quality maternity care.

There is no independent set of benefits. “Collaborative” is the closest the government legal advice has allowed given that “deeming” would be a red rag to the bull for the present generation.

However, this cute sidestepping trying to avoid the Constitutional restrictions only survives unless there is a High Court challenge.

Currently this manoeuvring does not threaten the doctor’s livelihood, but once the threat of another health professional group threatening general practice incomes then it is not only the politicians who will hit the fan.

Obviously if your basic income is government guaranteed who would not want that? The AMA is reported as being opposed to nurse practitioners obtaining Medicare benefits for their patients as with the independent stream of allied health professionals. If the government were to do so, would nursing be deemed “medical” or would the Government have to put nursing benefits as a Constitutional amendment to a referendum? With the backing of powerful nursing unions in an atmosphere ignited by the MeToo movement, any referendum would be a forgone conclusion.

Getting an amendment into the Constitution would be one achievement; it would then be a case of setting the scale of benefits. All the arguments about relativity would explode both between professions and within the nursing profession and each of the other professions included in the Constitutional amendment.

Talk about Pandora’s Box. In amongst this mayhem the central agency boffins would be tearing their hair out over the fiscal consequences of all this.

And compounding all this political noise is the proposal put forward by Shorten to set up a universal dental scheme – I shall deal with that in my next blog. Ah, the joys of policy formulation.

Mouse Whisper

The owner of the Dry Dock pub on the Finke River was heard to say to the customer in white:

“Son, when are six feet eighteen hands? Not too difficult to fathom the answer.”