July 2020 - The Best Mouse Tap

Modest Expectations – Shakespeare in Love

Our jolly duo and their retinue have been in Washington for the normal annual discussions on reintroducing the testudo as a secret weapon in the invasion of the Chinese consulate in Sydney and whether oars for the Australian quinqueremes are suitable for a long blockade of the Sino-Territorian harbour in Darwin. Their visit coincides with the national security adviser in the White House testing positive to COVID-19.

In a more serious vein, it seems a long way to go to give the Yanks a gentle slap.

The question remains as to whether a custom-made suite is being created in one of the defence establishments to test how comfortably these stalking horses can be accommodated for 14 full days after they return. Facilities so plush as to make even the Ministers blush?

By “stalking horses”, would the Commonwealth be setting up such a facility so that all the Ministers can assure us mug punters that they can freely travel overseas and say that “all measures will be taken to protect the Australian community” on their return from overseas where “fruitful and productive talks” were undertaken.

The basic cancer in this country is that the politicians and their mates are sealing themselves off from the rest of the country, so they retain all the healthy remuneration and the perks of office and beyond – irrespective of the party. A special quarantine facility would just serve to emphasise this separation. This whole situation is only going to be cured by some deep electoral cleaning, a very difficult task given the way the media’s saprophytic existence supports the status quo.

Nevertheless, it may be interesting to see if an obscure single line item appears in the coming Budget.

Growing Old

* Residential aged care or nursing home. I grew up with the nursing home nomenclature and feel comfortable in it describing what should be emphasis on the “nursing” rather than the “residential”.

It was a revealing article. On a day when the pandemic was raging through Victorian nursing homes*, a report appeared in the Property Section of the AFR (28 July), headed “Estia Health can’t quantify pandemic hit to earnings”. Says it all.

Estia Health is one of the largest residential aged care providers in Australia with 69 homes, 6,180 beds and more than 7,500 employees across Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland. Its chair and board have nobody with any clinical health expertise. Gary Weiss, the Chair, Doctor of Juridical Science (JSD) from Cornell, is the very model of the modern business tycoon, “legendary corporate raider”, asset stripper, draining the demand side to maximise profit.

His responsibility portfolio also includes Ardent Leisure; so he is a very busy person. Yet he appears to have no expertise in the central issue – containing pandemic in nursing homes, given that two of the Estia homes have well over 100 COVID-19 sufferers. Doesn’t fit your business model, Dr Weiss? What are doing to improve the situation about the rest of your Empire?

For many years I was involved in the management a number of public nursing home facilities in rural Victoria as the both Director of Medical Services and also later as Director of Clinical Training. When I came into one of those positions the first thing was to undertake a review of the nursing home residents’ medications with the local pharmacist. It is one measure of a doctor’s involvement in nursing homes because one gets a sense of how often the residents receive medical attention by such a review.

There were always stories of medical practitioners, who did visit private nursing homes waving to the resident and then moving on and billing Medicare. The fact that such stories had currency was disturbing enough, but I certainly found in some areas a reluctance of doctors to visit nursing homes on a regular basis.

I was fortunate that the nursing homes I was involved in were attached to the hospital and worked under the rules of the particular health service. I was able to thus monitor and encourage the local doctors to see the residents regularly. May I also say that there are some general practitioners who are interested in geriatrics and they should be identified as future role models for their less involved colleagues. At that time there was a country health service that had completed the transition from being an acute care facility to one which concentrated on care of the elderly, and the nursing staff re-trained accordingly.

The problem was that this model needed a “champion”, but the doctor, who initiated this change was too self-effacing to promote his model widely. It was regrettably a lost opportunity.

These public nursing homes exist as a function of the health care system. It is ridiculous to maintain the fiction that they are a home in the conventional sense. Health care is superimposed on a residential environment. It should be noted that the public sector has 10 per cent of these nursing home “beds” in Victoria and yet only 0.6 per cent of the COVID-19 sufferers.

Private nursing homes and the local health care services are under different jurisdictions. There is thus a situation when a facility for the elderly, the most vulnerable people in the community, has no formal link to the local hospital. This has been the case before the advent of the Virus and the early responses to this situation showed so clearly this dysfunctional aspect of the health care system, even to the extent of a private nursing home initially refusing to cooperate.

Let us consider the “Before Virus” situation, when an individual resident needed urgent medical attention in a private nursing home, the immediate conventional response was to send them to hospital, often without informing the hospital in advance – or ever. If there is an agency aged care worker, or just a very understaffed nursing home at night, it is just a natural response for the patient to be sent off to hospital regardless.

On arrival by ambulance the resident waits, often in the ambulance, is admitted to the hospital or left in the emergency department and sent back to their “home” often without any communication between hospital and aged care facility. If admitted they are either discharged back to the home or to the mortuary.

So much for coordinated action! The lack of same has led to mutual resentment between nursing home and hospital.

However before the pandemic arose, establishing a Royal Commission to take the heat out of the sector seemed the best choice.

The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission has been, as I said before during the Time of Newmarch, one of the most useless neo-government bodies I can remember. The Royal Commission seems to be an irrelevancy as it grinds on, with Lynelle Briggs and Tony Pagano only reporting in October; personally I have a high regard for Lynelle Briggs.

Significantly the Commonwealth now with a medically qualified Departmental Secretary, Brendan Murphy, with a broad knowledge and contacts with Victoria, his Department has been able to move relatively quickly to mobilise the hospital workforce, bolstered by AUSMAT, to fill in the deficient work force in the private nursing home sector. How different from the uncooperative, often confrontational scenario described above!

The Victorian government is developing a strategy on the run. The question remains of whether NSW should have recast their policy after Newmarch rather than having it been bogged down by one of those face-saving useless inquiries. On the other hand by early response using AUSMAT, the North-western Tasmanian infection of a number of nursing homes was nipped in the bud. That was a lesson Tasmania seems to have learnt. The essence is that the States assume responsibility for the private nursing home sector. What is happening in the other States in the wake of the above disasters – nothing? One only can presume that the private nursing home industry is fighting back, and of course seeking government support rather than asking their shareholders to assume extra financial responsibility.

The nursing homes are not generating the Virus; it is being brought in from outside. However, once it is in the nursing home, it has the sort of chaotic environment in which the Virus loves. Nursing homes thus will require extensive structural updating, and not the least in this time of the Virus, the most effective air conditioning. AUSMAT brings that order to curtail the Virus.

However, the staffing, the qualifications, the required skills, the discipline required are the critical element. I find it somewhat baffling that the AMA have called for a Royal Commission, while there ostensibly is one due to report before the end of 2020.

However, in this area where there is a lack of objective data because in reality government oversight is minimal; then the various politicians fall back on anecdote. In so doing, it only serves to emphasise the disparate quality of the private nursing home sector; one politician has a good experience and therefore it is only natural to generalise from this one case in the absence of systematic data; a second politician has a bad experience … It is another matter for the politician to use his experience to defend the whole sector.

Having had a long association with this sector, it has been clear to me that it is important the industry should be recognised as part of the health sector – and therefore management should be devolved to the States so the possibility of co-ordination can exist, particularly in times of emergency. For instance, it was almost nigh on impossible to get nursing homes accredited and staff credentialed – as occurs with hospitals, because private nursing homes exist under Commonwealth rules. Those with shoddy practices are always resistant to such oversight, and unfortunately my experience is that the Commonwealth effectively goes along with that.

The problem is the all the health services concentrate on the services for which they are directly funded; and any regional co-operation is personality dependent. If there is a lazy or incompetent manager, the system is such that it protects them, because conflicting anecdotes and personal prejudice tends to thwart the solution – competent management.

Public/private health services have tended not to work because the mix stumbles over the financial imperative. The question boils down to how much am I, or my family, willing to pay for me to be placed in a nursing home environment. For the family without contacts in the health sector, the lack of objective information is a major problem when families are faced with making a choice and thus fall back on affordability and public relation handout where every private nursing home is “an invitation to Paradise”.

The better the nursing the less the knee-jerk reflex to bundle the patient off to hospital when ill. The more a doctor visits the better the preventative measures. The presence of a competent specialist geriatrician, especially those with psycho-geriatric experience who has a regional role in not only reviewing the difficult resident but educating the local general practitioners and nursing staff, the better the care. The whole matter of medical training in geriatrics and its ongoing turf dispute with medical rehabilitation specialists is another issue, which needs resolution in the longer term. However, “turf issues” are not helpful.

The last thing that is needed when the AUSMAT bring order and control of the Virus and then leave, its immediate task completed; yet there appears to be no national plan follow up. You know the normal mantra, “we have to wait until the Royal Commission reports.”

I would accept what Murphy and his mob decide rather than wait for a Report encased in governmental aspic, even one with the redoubtable Ms Briggs.

By the way, it is unfortunate comparison of AUSMAT with the SAS, AUSMAT do not, to my knowledge, kill innocent bystanders.

To Dr Weiss and all of your fellow owners of nursing homes, nursing home care should be a different vehicle – one shorn of the primacy of the dollar, one where you realise irrespective of how wealthy you are, old age approaches.

If one of the outcomes of this pandemic is to improve overall standards, improve co-ordination with the nursing home sector, enhance mutual respect, have a regular interchange of data and engage in all the rules of good management that the text books provide, then Australia should be satisfied. I for one want to be assured that I will not die in a bed of soiled sheets, where nobody comes and death arrives as a massive relief.

Fr Don Edgar OGS

Don Edgar died last week. Don was a country boy; his parents ran the newsagency in Wangaratta at the time I entered his life. Don and I met in College. Don was a theology student and I a medical student. There was nothing memorable about our meeting, which is often the case when you run into somebody and although you may immediately have nothing in common, you have an instant mutual regard – and form a friendship.

One person we both admired was the College Chaplain, Barry Marshall.

Following Barry Marshall, Don had a lifelong association with the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, in which he was appointed Companion, which brought a set of obligations where “piety” had a real meaning.

Barry Marshall was a charismatic figure. He influenced Don immensely. Marshall grew up near Coolah, north of Dubbo. His father was a grazier. It was unsurprising that after a stint in the RAF during the war and then ordination he became a “bush brother” based in Bourke. It is a funny thing but if my friends and acquaintances were a typical cross-section of Australian professionals, then there must have been a rite of passage to pass through either Bourke or Broken Hill on their way to their future career.

Both Marshall and Edgar were committed Christians, and Trinity College at the time of Marshall’s chaplaincy had a balance of spiritual guidance and robust secular behaviour. Marshall had a twinkle in his eye and reminded me of Father Brown with his kindness, his ability to listen, to have an easy relationship with the “Jocks” and possessing disciplined firmness. There were boundaries that he would not cross, and Don inherited much of this sturdiness. It was a tragedy that Marshall prematurely died as the result of an accident in Oxford, when he still had much to fulfil.

Don’s religious discipline I suspect had its seeds in his early time from the age of 13 being a naval cadet, with an eventual career beckoning at the end of his teenage years. He was a model cadet, midshipman and at the time of his resignation to pursue his religious vocation, a sub-lieutenant. Many of his fellow naval officers were in College at the same time but studying electrical engineering. Generally, aspiring naval engineers were sent to the UK for graduate education. Electrical engineering was the exception because graduates could study under Charles Moorhouse, who was Professor at University of Melbourne and regarded internationally as the doyen of this discipline.

There was one memorable night after we had both graduated and he was a curate in a country parish near the Victorian border in the North-east in the lee of the snow-capped mountains. My then wife and I were invited to stay with him, but the weekend was one of filthy weather that only Victoria can produce, windy, sleety rain – and the drive north in a car, far from waterproof. The heater gave up early early in the trip.

It was miserable, but eventually we were able to find the vicarage. We were almost completely frozen. However when we entered, the transformation was miraculous. The building was small and hardly imposing, but inside the fire had turned the rooms into a welcoming environment; the claret was at room temperature, the soup was simple – and Don was an easy-going welcoming host.

We had arrived long after the time we hoped to get there, but the fact that Don had provided such a comfortable destination is a memory that has been indelibly imprinted ever since. Never then and since had I felt such a welcoming environment – there is an element of magic – or is that another word for a unique spiritual experience?

Such was the nature of this extraordinary man who spent many years emulating the Abbé Pierre dicta – as a worker priest in railways yards in France, where he always said he was cold-shouldered by his co-workers until they found out he was an Australian not a Pom. On his return to Australia he continued to work in the railway yards in Darwin, he got married, had four sons.

During this period he re-entered the mainstream to the extent that for a time he was the vicar in Tongala, a dairy community in northern Victoria. It was another wintry night in 1981 when I was on my way to see him and his family, when my car aquaplaned on the flooded road, and the car ended up against a post and burst in flames. Maybe, it was an intercession, which caused the miracle of my escape from the car before it caught fire and burned. My injuries caused by the accident prevented me from moving for weeks afterwards, and I was shuttled from hospital to hospital. Don visited me in hospital, but it was another six months before I visited Tongala and met the family.

Over the years we would see one another periodically as his domestic circumstances and calling changed, but when he finally landed in the western suburbs of Melbourne working among recent arrivals, in particular the Southern Sudanese community, it was almost impossible to find out what he was achieving so self-effacing he was. He just would not talk about himself. It was only listening to the sons talking about their father at his funeral that I knew what I had missed.

We had seen him last in February when we shared a Candlemas cake. He was then hampered by bilateral carpal tunnel operations, which ironically left him not only with stigmata but also dependent, which he hated.

This year has made communication separated by borders difficult, and it was only several days before he died that his stepdaughter asked that he was moved to palliative care and he specifically had asked her to let me know. As I said, I thought he was indestructible and he would bury me, but that was not to be. When he heard an audio message I sent to him, he responded with: “Good old, Besty.”

He died two days later.

The Eucharist was held at All Saints Footscray, from where he was farewelled by ten family members and an impressive array of the Church hierarchy. There were over 200 sites watching via online streaming. Modern technology had enabled us to be involved from 900 kilometres away.

Given the simplicity of his life, I wonder what he would have said if he realised that he was being borne away to his Destination in a Rolls Royce hearse. “Good old, Besty, trust him for noticing” and I can hear that laughter as he said it.

The Day the Mormon came calling

It was just an ordinary day in Parkville some years when looking through the window of his terrace house, he saw two young clean cut men in dark suits, white shirts, thin ties and close clipped hair walking down the street. The boys had arrived from the Ark of Mormonism, he thought. It was an affluent neighbourhood so the two Mormons took the chance of separating. They stopped in front of our hero’s house. Next moment there was a knock on the door and the young watcher answered the door. The normal response to tell them to politely to go away was replaced by another stratagem. There being only one chap was just too tempting.

The young man was invited in and seated in the front room. Before he could get a word out, our hero asked directly “Are you a Christian?” looking intensely into the eyes of the young man. “I am a Mormon,” he commenced as he fingered what was probably the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon occasionally joins the ubiquitous Gideon Bible in motel rooms. Once our hero had flipped through the Book with all its underlying basic dogma, which could be construed as a derivative of American values. Pity about the polygamy, white supremacy with a Palestinian tan, and so on. It was not by chance that it was a Moroni who passed the tablets or was it cactus juice to jolly old Joseph Smith. Bit of intolerance in our hero, (which can be ascribed to youth) when he burst forth with “You are heretic. You need to be saved. You need to repent. You need to embrace Anglicanism.”

This conversional diatribe continued; our hero was now out of his chair stalking around stabbing the air with his finger calling out: “Hallelulah’ let this infidel be saved.” The voice rang out. The Mormon was now on his feet backing around the room trying to get away from the intense yet beatific expression.

“Repent ye, and be saved from this work of Satan. Become an Anglican.”

At this juncture, a young woman entered the room. She looked at the chap with his back to the wall. She laughed at the sight as much as that young woman ever did.

“For God’s sake, would you stop yelling, you’ll wake the children. Let him go. You’ve had your fun.”

“Nearly had him converted when you interrupted. Fire and brimstone. Good for the soul. He just about ready to change your gear that of the Anglican – sports coat, leather elbows, college tie and cords.”

“Don’t mind my husband, you can go whenever you would like.” She had ignored her husband, moved out of the front room and opened the front door, there being little distance between the room and the front door. The terrace house was one of those with the front door is almost on the footpath.

If you have never seen a “scuttle”, then you had to see that one, eyes to the ground, clutching his Briefcase and Book, and into the arms of his partner who had come back to see what had happened.

The young woman gave her husband one of those looks and went back to the kitchen or wherever.

Never been troubled by Mormons since though. Whether the Anglican converter’s transmission matured as he aged is a moot point.

Putin Nyet

As an addendum, Sydney Russians were one of the groups that voted against Putin. A shirtfront? At least a tug on the coat tails.

Mouse Whisper

The John Travolta of the Australian Parliament, Furbo Wilson has set up a ginger group called The Wolverines (given the colour of wolverines perhaps it should be more appropriately called the “umber” or perhaps “melena” group.)

Now for Mr Wilson, a few facts:

wolverines stink like skunks
they feed off other animals’ kill – the animal equivalent of rent-seeking.
wolverines are snowy relatives of the weasel

So your group of jolly jape-ridden parliamentarians could be called the Wolverine Skunk Weasels.

Beware also if the Labor Party ever set up a Grey Wolves group. Grey Wolves are the biggest killers of your WSW. Take your pick Tibetan, Eurasian, Caspian Sea or Tundra Wolves -all Grey.

We rodentia know stuff!

Modest Expectations – Siatonta

Grisons, Switzerland – where they say siatonta

Harry Cain sounds as if he should be a shamus in a Raymond Chandler novel, but he was an amusing health bureaucrat whom I met in the early 1970s in Washington. We were both characterised as “bright young men of promise” and interested in improving the health care in each country – in fact we would be in the vanguard of such improvements, so our conversation went.

When we first met it was the Nixon administration in the USA, and the Gorton-McMahon carousel in Australia, but like many smart bureaucrats he was advancing upwards through the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. We saw one another whenever I visited the United States. Harry, with his sardonic manner, was popular and knew which buttons to push. He and I got along as well as any two could when we were a Pacific Ocean apart.

I have been going through my files and I came across a news article about Harry in the Los Angles Times of 14 April 1978.

Harry Cain had an intermittent stutter and it apparently manifested itself when he had to address an audience. This day when he started to address an audience of 200 fellow federal bureaucrats, his stutter got the better of him and his boss had to read his statement:

“I have totally lost my tolerance for the bureaucratic swamp through which a bureau like this must wade … old bureaucrats never die, they just grow obsolete and get transferred to another agency which can’t use their skills and can’t fire them.”

With those words he quit and it was reported that: “bemused bureaucrats came up to shake his hand (and) a woman threw her arms around him and asked, ‘what are you going to do now?’”

His reply was that he was going to climb out of that swamp and dry out for a while.

To my knowledge, having dried out, he remained within the Beltway – running for a time the American Health Planning Association, getting quoted, and arguing that there was a need for a less centralised control under Obamacare –reduced government intrusiveness which he characterised as “the micro-management of Medicare. The scale and complexity of the health care industry (which) are beyond the grasp of 500 politicians sitting in Washington.”

But nowhere does Harry appear to say he ever wanted to drain the swamp. However, there still remains the problem of how to co-ordinate an American health care sector when there are so many interpretations and so many unresolved prejudices; unfortunately his time has passed.

Strong as Your Weakest Link

In 1666, a fire started in Fish Yard off Pudding Lane, spreading from the king’s baker’s oven. Thomas Farynor, the baker, could not contain it and off down the lane the fire sprinted. The fire spread rapidly through the pitch and thatch of the crowded buildings until it was stopped four days later by the military blowing up houses at the edge of the inferno. Very few people died directly, although many buildings, including the Guildhall and churches including the Gothic Old St Paul’s, were destroyed. Spot fires persisted for many months in London.

Unfortunately, a French watchmaker was hanged after a false confession to starting the fire. Thomas Farynor was one who signed the petition accusing the watchmaker of starting the fire, then rebuilt his bakery and died four years later.

In 2020, the fire was a COVID-19 virus phoenix arising from its suppression in Melbourne. The strong rumour in need of rebuttal, if untrue, is that the recent spread of the coronavirus in Victoria was started by one of the ladies who had returned from overseas and in whom being confined rankled, or so the story goes, so much so that she started imparting sexual favours to her custodians in return for “day leave” as it were. The security detail was unskilled and untrained in the ethics which are implicit in being able to distinguish not only what is legal and what is not – but also the difference between right or wrong, even if these particular individuals escape prosecution.

The endemic problem is that the security industry is rife with undertrained part-time staff. It is not a new problem. When I was a medical student, I used to ride in the back of the Mayne Nickless security van, as the third guard. I was provided with a loaded pistol although I had no training. I worked in that job part-time for years. However the lack of training is never a problem until something goes wrong, as has happened with the spread of COVID-19 from the Melbourne quarantine hotel when the security was laughable. And somebody, Mr Premier, sanctioned its use, didn’t he?

As I write, the COVID fire is still not under control in the two largest States. We await the outcome of the enquiry and wonder how close to the truth the above rumour is and how many truckloads of whitewash will be brought in to expunge the stain. Presumably the perpetrators will be deluged with some of the wash.

However, there is another potential ember attack on the horizon, the jolly ministerial pair of Payne and Reynolds are slated to fly to Washington with a retinue of braided officers and presumably the “usual suspects” which accompany such people of renown. However, as a concession, limiting the number of the flacks limits the number of potential exporters of the COVID -19 to Australia, I presume they will have a trained medical team to ensure they will all be abiding by Australian requirements. They are going into an environment where the Boss is in flagrant denial. Are all these travellers going to abide by our rules or by the lax American requirements?

I presume social contact will be constrained and I would hope that all travellers are vetted for their history of alcohol consumption. Actually I would hope that all will be on the wagon for the duration given the propensity for alcohol to reduce adherence to anti-COVID rules.

And what are they going for anyway, except for huff and puff – apart from the fact that it will make the Chinese dragon even more infuriated. As I am writing this I am also watching Midnight Oil with that political dud, Peter Garret singing US Forces at a 1985 concert on Goat Island:

“US forces give the nod

It’s a setback for your country

Bombs and trenches all in rows

Bombs and threats still ask for more” … and onwards.

Easy to protest. I am surprised that the ALP is so acquiescent to the US trip. Richard Marles is its spokesperson. Richard Marles, the Geelong Grammarian who loves his toast buttered on both sides, is encouraging the jolly catch-up. Marles is not stupid and he is not endangering either himself physically or the nation by being a COVID carrier. However, it was the week when it was revealed that overseas forces in 1975 had rid themselves of a “troublesome Prime Minister”, and Marles knows that the shadowy forces mark down any Labor politician who does not bend the knee to overseas authority.

Being a boy used to the light blue trimmed blazer, he would well know the bounds of being a radical chap. He may have read about Whitlam’s sacking when he was a boy in Glamorgan knickerbockers – and somebody may tell him about a Mr Marshall Green whose successors are still abound.

The last recorded time an Australian Minister went to Washington was Peter Dutton and, as reported, his infected return elicited an almost hysterical reaction among his colleagues, who were were taken in hand and reassured by Dr Paul Kelly.

You know, small details about those who are going need to be considered in meeting these Americans. How many of the travellers are susceptible: over the age of 60, obese, suffering from cardiac or respiratory problems and having diabetes? Then there are the cigarette smokers.

Enough said. Sounds as if it’s not worth the risk, especially as Trump and his regime may be a footnote in history after November – and sanity begins to prevail again. After all, one is only as strong as the weakest link.

Peril at Buck House

Given I’m actually old enough to have participated in the prequel of the Whitlam sacking, to me it was always clear that it was a put-up job.

I must congratulate Jenny Hocking in having the fortitude to have the letters released. Strangely, Whitlam never maintained the rage, because what made him both great and yet vulnerable was his basic generosity.

This was the story of the three fops. One was Whitlam, but all his other positive characteristics overshadowed this vainness. The other two were also Sydney lawyers, one became a Senator; the other, Governor-General. They were James McClelland and John Kerr respectively. Both were very careful about their appearance – one exquisitely flamboyant and tasteful, exciting the sobriquet of “Diamond Jim” and the other embarrassingly boorish and tasteless, caricatured as an Irish squire with top hat and frock coat.

Whitlam was the son of a senior public servant. His education was a mixture of the public and the private with a taste of the early Canberra. McClelland, the son of a paperhanger and signwriter, was educated at St Patrick’s Ballarat and St Kevin’s in Melbourne, where he and B.A. Santamaria were mates. Kerr, whose father was a boilermaker who worked in the Sydney dockyards, went to Fort Street School.

All were very bright scholarship boys; all became lawyers – the second world war interrupted their careers. Whitlam and McClelland were in the RAAF. Whitlam was a navigator so he flew, whereas McClelland was a leading aircraftman and stayed on the ground. However, Kerr was the star; he was one of Alf Conlan’s bright young men – and a colonel by the end of the War. With Alf, he probably absorbed the dark arts of the double agent.

After the War they came to know one another well and, if it is to be believed, Whitlam was persuaded by McClelland to appoint Kerr as Governor-General on the retirement of Paul Hasluck. The die was cast, as Kerr’s boilermaker father may have said.

The constitutional crisis was played out, demonstrating Kerr as duplicitous egged on inter alia by Buckingham Palace. If the letters had been released earlier – say in 1999 when Turnbull was heading the push for a Republic, Australia may have been in a totally different state now. The longer the release was delayed, the more the response would be who cares? The major players, except the Queen, are all dead.

Undoubtedly the Queen knew about the coup. Her private secretary Martin Charteris was showered with imperial honours, most noticeably an escalating array of those that are reserved for personal gift from the queen. It is doubtful if a displeased sovereign would have been so bountiful.

However what I find instructive is that some years later when Charteris had retired to polish his escutcheon, the Queen was placed in a similar spot in relation to a constitutional crisis which occurred in Saint Kitts and Nevis in 1981, when the Governor, Sir Probyn Inniss, used his reserve powers to refuse assent to a bill passed by the government of Sir Kennedy Simmonds, the country’s premier. Inniss believed that the bill was unconstitutional. The situation was resolved when Queen Elizabeth II, at the request of Simmonds, terminated Inniss’s commission as governor.

The problem when retracing history is that in the end what has been done has been done. I, together with a number of other players who had roles akin to those of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, may speculate on what could have been.

Fraser was a lousy Prime Minister and it may been argued that what Hawke wrought may have occurred six years earlier if Whitlam had belatedly brought in a new crew headed by Hayden and Keating and then had been allowed to manage economic policy until the scheduled election in 1978. But in the end Hawke did take over in 1983, and changed economic direction.

Many changes have occurred since 1975. The Melbourne establishment’s power is now vestigial and while the demise of these Whigs masquerading as Tories may have occurred, there has risen a very powerful plutocracy, with Sydney at its epicentre; but with Perth as a powerful outstation.

The reserve powers exist as long as the links to the British monarchy exist. Therefore, the Kerr situation could be used as a precedent for a repeat, if the plutocracy did not like the government. When you review the Governors-General since Kerr, one would have been confident that Cowan, Hayden, Stephens and Deane had the strength, integrity and wisdom in using the reserve powers in a way so as not to compromise the Australian democracy.

I would not have been so sure about the last lot of Governors-general, but the “reserve powers” situation should be addressed. It is a totally unacceptable situation that one unelected person is able to connive with a distant monarch, with increasingly tenuous links to Australia, to sack the elected Government – and to call that ability “reserve powers”.

What a joke!

The Australian propensity to change its Prime Ministers – seven in 13 years – equally may be a joke. Thus it has been a basically unstable time and fortunately Australia has not been confronted with a Governor-General such as Kerr, using at whim the so-called “reserve powers”. Therefore, I would be wary of any merchant being appointed as Governor-General in the future. However, “reserve powers” remain the joker in the Canberra pack.

Codification of the reserve powers – just a jumble of words. I wouldn’t hold my breath that anything would occur, unless both political parties think clearly about what it means. Self-interest may drive the thoughtful on both sides of politics. Conservatives should wake up in a sweat about the spectre of a Jack Lang as Governor-General invoking “reserve powers”.

And the Australian Republic? I am an avowed Republican – but so what? I know what I would want. Given the social and economic instability of the current situation in this year of the Virus, the matter of a Republic seems somewhat of a sideshow. However, at such time as the Queen abdicates or dies, that will be the time for a serious thrust from the Republican forces.

In the meantime, the Republican movement should plan that the sideshow is ready to become the main event. Then the matter of any “reserve powers” may become irrelevant – or would it?

Putin and His Kosher kitchen

In 2001, Putin was still feeling his way amongst the leaders of the World. In January of that year he dined with the then President of Israel, Moshe Katsav. As reported in the NYT, the meal was kosher, “making the occasion a first for a Russian leader in a thousand years.”

The food was kosher – mushroom soup, vegetable stuffed veal, roast turkey with fruits; even the caviar was from red salmon rather than from the scaled sturgeon.

As distinct from the White House which still ordered-in kosher when the Israeli leader came calling to Washington, Putin created an entire kosher kitchen that, as reported, required “among other things, an army of rabbis, all-new utensils and a blowtorch.”

A kosher blowtorch?

Yes, the blowtorch can help make a kosher crème brulee.

Putin has tried to dampen down the anti-semitism that has been a feature of Russia social policy – pogroms being the centrepiece. However, after briefly trying to implicate Jews in the 2016 anti-Hilary campaign, Putin has aligned Russian sacrifice in WW2 with the Holocaust. It is a way of emphasising the history of anti-semitism among the Slavonic people, but extracting Russia from the general contumely.

As reported during a recent January speech at the dedication of a monument to the siege of Leningrad, Putin indicated his latest thinking on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. The Kremlin now sees the distinct and separate story of the Jewish wartime suffering as supportive of its broader campaign to improve the image of the Putinic Russia.

After all, Putin has had an easy time of it facing a divided opposition where clearly, for whatever reason, he has an ally in Trump. Putin very clearly realises that Russia can only achieve limited goals with military force. It is ironic that he seems to be using a similar tactic to that used by the USA to destroy the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. His support of Syria and the continuing military action in the Ukraine after his annexation of Crimea are targeted, and it could be argued that these could have been stopped if Trump were not his ally. However, the whole Trump association may have to wait until Trump’s finances are disclosed – if ever.

Putin, despite his spoiling tactics and his annoying misuse of cyberspace where it is inconceivable that he has any technological advantages, has looming problems. His is not a wealthy country as judged by its GDP, especially with its reliance on oil and the need to manage a vast country, made particularly vulnerable by both climate change and his own disdain for the environment – and the Virus.

It is always unwise to underestimate the Russians, as distinct from Putin. They have this habit of producing excellent strategists. This ability is manifest in their overall supremacy in chess. Russians are remembered mostly for their WW2 exploits against Germany and by their defeat of Napoleon.

Capturing Moscow has been a mirage for many invaders.

In 1709 there was the less well-known Battle of Poltava in what is now Ukraine. In a long term but initially successful campaign against Russia under a very competent leader in Charles XII, the Swedes against the Russians had the high hopes of taking Moscow.

Instead, the Swedish empire was effectively destroyed at that Battle and the Russians, under the generals of Peter the Great, not only gained Ukraine but also the Baltic states, giving Russia unimpeded access to the Baltic Sea. This access was consolidated by the concurrent construction of St Petersburg by Tsar Peter on what was swampland on the Baltic shore along the banks of the Neva River.

If you want to experience both Russian power and grandeur, St Petersburg should not be missed. As a parenthetic comment, the reconstructed Amber Room in the Summer Palace is one the wonders of the modern world.

Yet with his keen sense of history, Putin would know that Russian leaders have thrived on governing with the use of often unspeakable brutality. Putin has recently won a vote for him to govern until he is 83 years old. His desire for alliances, his disruptive tactics, his hold over Trump, the American floundering in Iraq and Afghanistan, his drive to maintain and expand access to seaports have served him well, as he has climbed the rungs of power from his unheralded anointment as Yeltsin’s successor in 1999.

Nevertheless, especially once the Virus has extracted its toll, when Trump has gone, when the Chinese have assessed his true value to them and Russia is again exhausted financially, the coming decade will certainly be a test of whether the blowtorch will only be used for the crème brulee.

Mouse Whisper

I have actually seen the newspaper cutting from The Age sometime in mid 1981 under Missing Friends, personal:

“Would anyone knowing the whereabouts of GUY FAWKES please tell him we have an urgent job for him in Canberra.”

H.B. (Marlo)

Would anyone knowing the whereabouts of H.B. from Marlo…

Modest Expectations – Macmillan

I thought the letter in the Medical Journal of Australia from a group at the Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH) noteworthy and hence promoted it to “top blog”. The letter suggests that 11 per cent of COVID-19 cases in Victoria were detected in health care workers, which is no different from the proportion within the State of such workers (which in itself is a percentage to wrestle with, i.e. one health care worker involved in the care of the other 88 per cent of the population).

Their data suggest that the community is a far more dangerous place to be exposed to the Virus than the work place.

The background is that the RMH established a clinic to test symptomatic staff from the RMH and nearby hospitals. By 6 April 1,160 symptomatic staff had been assessed and 11 were COVID-19 positive. Eight could be said to have had contact within the community, the others not determined – although thought to have had a low risk of contracting the virus in the hospital.

However, this letter was written in the very early days of the COVID-19 pandemic with tiny numbers, and it is very important to know if that trend continued given that the letter was not published until July.

Went Phishing & Lost The Bait

I was scammed the other day – well let us say the attempt at scamming failed but it was an enlightening experience and shows how clever these people are. However, having said that, I presumably I was only one in a long line of potential targets and the spiel would have gone through many iterations.

The phone rang late one morning and there was a woman at the end of the line. The accent was foreign but recognisably Asian accented. The nature of the approach was courteous but one of the problems of old age is hearing what has been said. Foreign accents however modulated are difficult to understand at the best of times. This was a mature voice, if I could put it that way.

She purported to have rung from the Visa security unit and they had detected concerns about two of my recent transactions – one for $300 and one for $1,300 – and she was trying to stop the transactions.

However, I kept asking questions because I had did not have access to my current accounts. I was passed to her “Supervisor” – a male whose accent was more Bangalore then Bangkok. He was very smooth, and there is obviously an escalation plan (perhaps a male is thought more authoritative). He said that the Federal police had been notified and an officer had been assigned the case and I remember the name – Rodriquez – fictional, but an interesting choice. Then miraculously my man on the line had been able to reverse the smaller of the transactions. However, the bigger one was presenting a problem.

I then said “could I ring them back after I checked my account and could they leave a number to call them back”? Some of the scammers apparently do make that provision, but seemingly not in this case.

Thus the whole transaction was obviously not going well because the woman came back on the line and tried to increase the anxiety level by urgently asking for my account details.

That was enough entertainment for the morning. I hung up. They had made errors. However, because of the way scams are constructed, there is little time to think, especially when it is the first time such a sophisticated scam had been launched on oneself. They had switched from it being a Visa to a CBA account in a very seamless way, and even produced the BSB for a nearby branch (unfortunately for them, not one where my account is held).

I thought in retrospect that these scammers know how to press buttons. I have been robbed in the past, and it is an unpleasant experience. Therefore apparently concerned sympathetic voices on the end of a phone who have just enough information to sound legitimate and informing you of a robbery elicits an initial primal reaction. This has to be resisted, and in the end – as we keep being told – it comes down to never give callers your details unless you have initiated the call – as in booking a hotel stay. However, it is all so simple until it happens to you.

I understand now very clearly why the elderly are so vulnerable – some months before my mother-in-law had been targeted in a similar scam.

Yet is it still confronting when the ACCC puts out a report to say that $630m had been scammed in the past year. The problem is escalating in terms of money lost to the scammers. For my part, I am now very well aware of Scamwatch and the information provided is simply written and an excellent reminder that at times like this when so many are vulnerable, the Virus is not the only malady to avoid.

Florida Mosquitoes One day; Virus the Next

As I write, Florida has recorded 15,300 cases of COVID-19 in a single day (18,000 if equated to Australia’s population). What is that particular attitude on the part of the average Joe to hear it and yet then, masked, takes his children to Orlando Disneyland?

Modified from an earlier report from the New York Times:

To stop the spread of the virus from more heavily affected cities further north, the archipelago in southern Florida was blocked off since late March to June 1 to anyone who does not work or live there. Hotels were ordered closed, and passengers who flew in through the airport were screened and instructed to self-quarantine for two weeks. The isolation measures were among the strictest in the country.

The actions worked: The Keys had just 100 COVID-19 cases and three deaths, according to data from the Florida Department of Health. The three counties to the north that make up South Florida — Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach — have had a total of more than 25,000 cases and 1,000 deaths.

Yesterday, there were 74 infected in Key West, a significantly smaller percentage of the population to Florida as a whole.

I have been to Florida a number of times, but it seems now to be as dangerous as in the old days of pirates, swamps and caimans. It should be remembered that this now is the third most populous state in USA with over 21 million people whereas in 1900 it was about 500,000; Key West was the biggest city then.

Mosquito was king, distributing malaria or dengue among the population. However, mosquitoes are just the vector for the bug and even, despite a vast amount of money expended on discovering a vaccine against the plasmodium, none has emerged. Preventative measures have then been directed towards destroying the vector or shielding human contact by physical or pharmaceutical means. As I have related in an earlier blog, I have had malaria – only one attack luckily.

Dengue, on the other hand, is caused by a mosquito-borne virus and there is a vaccine limited to certain countries where the condition is endemic. It is available for those who have had the disease before and is delivered by three injections. It is not available in Florida although it is available in certain American territories, such as Puerto Rico.

Chronic disease, no matter the cause, is no joke; but until one catches it, as I did with malaria, then it remains one of the jokers in the pack of life. It seems that Florida is full of those jokers gradually, in the case of COVID-19, being extracted from the pack to over 250,000 recipients to be precise who have been extracted from the pack – as they say it is a joke or in the terms of the Head Joker a hoax –going to die laughing.

Key West is a settlement at the end of 44 stepping stone islands that lie between it and Miami. Miami may have the beach, but Key West has the sunset. However as one source said, “Without a doubt, there is dengue in Key West.” In fact Key West saw a dengue fever epidemic in 2009 and 2010, but it was suggested that it only affected five per cent of the population. This epidemic was mocked by a Dengue Night Fever Group, complete with wings and a John Travolta lookalike. The epidemic seemed to respond to the joke, and fizzled out.

Nevertheless there was a serious side, as one report put it: “At the Key West Cemetery, where the gravestone of B.P. ‘Pearl’ Roberts’ epitaph of ‘I told you I was sick’, has become world famous {and preceded Spike Milligan’s similar ‘I told you I was ill’ by 13 years}, dozens of “ovitraps” – black plastic cups laced with poison to kill female mosquitoes and their eggs – mingled among concrete urns and vases of water rife with squiggling larvae. Plans for next year include providing sterile male mosquitoes to prevent their mates from reproducing.”

Key West is the most southern settlement in the United States, 90 miles from Cuba as stated on the giant buoy. Over the horizon on this crimson sunset was the island we thought at the time impossible to visit from the USA, but 10 years later we were to be part of an American delegation to Havana.

When we were there in winter, Key West was a line of empty T-shirt shops with no visual means of support; it was the site of Harry Truman’s winter White House with the famous coffee table that, with the flip of a wrist, could be converted into a card table covered in green baize, and the Hemingway house with its trademark six-toed cats. Even though it was winter, there was a cheerful, devil-may-care population. Nobody mentioned dengue when we were there, but since at that time the last outbreak had been in 1934 – and we were there before the outbreak in 1991, there were no warnings about stagnant water or to wear insect repellent and sleep under mosquito nets.

After all, if you live in Key West it is not as though you reckon exposure to hurricanes and caimans is as bad as exposure to the neoliberal pirates from the North. After all there must be some compensation in living on the Oklahoma panhandle where the winds swirl in the sagebrush or the wilds of Homer on Kachemak Bay in Alaska where the snow-covered volcanoes threaten one from across the water. Places like Key West, the Oklahoma panhandle and Homer are remote enough to fend off the virus without too much central government assistance.

Of all public policy matters, population health and the accompanying science of epidemiology gets pushed down the agenda and attracts comparatively little government funding. To me one of the critical features of public policy in health is to have public health experts with clinical experience. Here there is a need to ensure a close relationship between the public health and infectious diseases disciplines.

More particularly, there is a need for policy nous, not the normal line up of university experts pushing their own barrows, nor general practitioners, whose knowledge of public health is so scanty. That is why on many occasions I have stressed the value of Paul Kelly and Nick Coatsworth to Australia. Michael Kidd, the other deputy medical officer as they say looks good in a suit but his work experience is not in public health. His value has been in his ability to chair meetings and have a soothing influence, which does have a subsidiary role in the often tense atmosphere surrounding this virus. Fortunately, he does not claim to be a public health expert and that he is certainly not.

However, at the apex of government there is responsiveness from the politicians, and it has been hard won from these people who probably thought of public health in terms of tips, drains and sewerage. For many years any public health emergency has been short-lived and more of an inconvenience – remember the cryptosporidium outbreak in Sydney in 1998?

In a fortunate way, so many of our governments are conservative and therefore make it difficult for the barbarians who are attempting in Victoria to drag down Andrews to replace him in Victoria with an effigy of Trump, complete with a neoliberal squawk of followers.

Florida is governed by such a Trump acolyte and thus ignorance, empty slogans and bluster are substituted for policy. No leadership, none. Just lachrymose self-pity. But those clowns, with their allegiance to those who put Trump in the White House, criticise Andrews for having 177 new COVID-19 cases on this particular day.

What was that number again in Florida, admittedly with four times the population of Victoria? 15,300. Their Governor just loves Trump.

However Key West, could still easily be closed down again, by taking a leaf from the Andrews folio. But leaves are so easily blown away.

Abattoirs & Meat Packing

Janine Sargeant – Guest Blogger

COVID-19 has exposed many cracks in society. The general level of personal hygiene and behaviour in social settings is one such ‘crack’ that has been variously addressed or papered over. However, the hygiene of abattoirs is one problem that needs to be fixed now.

Hygiene in animal slaughter and processing is crucial for food security. Unfortunately, abattoirs and meat packing plants have a mix of environmental and physical factors conducive for the spread of COVID-19. Meat workers stand close together, working long shifts, in cold and wet conditions. Production lines are structured so that the workers cannot physically distance – standing within 1.5 metres of another person for more than 15 minutes is deemed a COVID-19 risk. Further, workers may handle the same beast and that means the Virus can be spread so easily.

Clusters of COVID-19 cases have occurred in abattoirs and meat packing facilities around the world in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain and the UK. More than 17,300 cases have been recorded in meat factory workers in the USA, with 91 COVID-19 related deaths. The latest outbreak in a German “meat processing factory” has infected 1,000 workers.

In Australia nearly 130 COVID-19 cases have so far been recorded in three abattoirs in Melbourne; one facility has been responsible for 111 cases.

Abattoirs and meat packing facilities can’t be closed down, if at all possible, for long periods so protection for the workers is essential to minimise or eliminate transmission. The meat industry has already been able to deal with Q fever, which is endemic in abattoirs, and brucellosis and TB in cattle – both diseases shared with humans. These have been contained.

Q fever presents a further problem because it often presents in a nondescript way. It is treatable in the early stages but both unrecognised and chronic Q fever cause symptoms that can last for months or years and may be fatal. There is a vaccine and by law all meat workers in Australia must be tested for and vaccinated against Q fever, their names added to an official register. The meat industry has been able to deal with these issues and now needs to apply itself in a similar way to urgently address the problem of COVID-19 transmission. Up to 2006 the cost of vaccination for Q fever was met by government. Now it has to be borne by the individual – somewhat of a disincentive, and a warning if a vaccine against COVID-19 is eventually discovered.

Operating with reduced staffing is nigh impossible in the meat processing production line. So the question for abattoirs and meat packing facilities is how to address the current problem as efficiently as possible. Physical protective equipment such as arm and hand protectors is already provided, so the provision of personal protective equipment (PPE) for all workers would not be unreasonable. Dealing with physical separation can be addressed with perspex dividers as have been installed between workers on production lines elsewhere, together with consideration of staggered rosters to reduce contact at the beginning and end of shifts, and on breaks.

In the short term these measures should at least reduce the opportunities for transmission while longer term solutions are explored.

There is no certainty about a vaccine for COVID-19 being available any time soon. Even the most optimistic research scientists – including the shameless self-promoters – admit that a vaccine before the end of 2021 is unlikely. The less optimistic admit that a vaccine may never eventuate, just as there is no vaccine for the common cold, also a coronavirus. Therefore society will have to live with this virus for some time to come and adjust the way business is conducted – industry by industry. Let us start with the abattoirs at a time when the rest of the world is in disarray.

Oblivia – A short play with words

In explanation

(a) in accepting a challenge to write a short story in fewer than 400 words on a religious subject based on what I saw and then added a few brushstrokes

(b) an appreciation of Lausanne cathedral

For her she had come for inspiration.

She, the lady in the crimson turban and gathered pleats threw up her arms and then prostrated herself before the altar. It was a small stage, there were no saints alive in the rose window above her. A rose window held true to its 13^th century countenance as sketched by Villard de Honnecourt; as constructed by Pierre d’Arras. An Imago mundi which Oliver Cromwell would never have countenanced had he been allowed to get out of his Albion cage. So she thought.

A vague thought, but not “nouvelle”.

She did not see her companion fall down, striking his head on the stone – a fitting tableau. It was academic whether the fall preceded the fit.

She did not hear the head strike the marble.

She remained prostrate. Precisely on the stroke of the 120 “cat-and-dogs” mantra, she raised herself to a kneeling position and carefully flicked the crucifix from the pleats of her dress.

Her companion was bleeding from the right ear – unseeing eyes beneath increasingly blue-tinged eyelids – body quivering in the throes of grand mal epilepsy. Body askew on two levels. The head on the step – the body across the flag stones. Not particularly good for maintaining the airway.

The earplugs in her ears as she listened to the Tallis motet Spem in allium made communication difficult, especially as the videte miraculum had just commenced.

Her companion was dusky and his sounds were choked.

She crossed herself – an extravagant flourish considering the Calvinist surroundings – stood up only to genuflect – then plunged into a kneeling position, head upturned towards the Inspiration.

The workers fixing the heating system in the Grand Bay of the Cathedral had dropped their tools and run the length of the nave to the fallen person. One rolled her companion over; another then had run back to where the mobile phone had been left and was calling the ambulance. One worker was wrestling with the airway; could the colour be reversed? Another had fingers on the radial pulse. The fitting had stopped; the eyes remained without recognition. The light filtering down from the rose window elicited no response.

For him, he was left with no inspiration.

Mouse Whisper

Well, if the mausmeister can come over all “authoric”, so can I.

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy

Gone a-droving “down the Cooper” where the Western drovers go;

As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,

For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

Well, sounds to me as if it was an early Australian version of bull shift.

Modest Expectations – Natasha Nuora

Given what has been happening this week and I have been on the road in areas suggested as potential hotspots, I am starting this week’s blog with a few jottings. The radio has been the constant companion and television ever present in motel rooms, wherever you stop to socially distance.

I jotted down “self important politicians pontificating about how bad everything is – all on fat salaries and perks”.

I have never been a great fan of Tony Abbott, but when he was engaged as a firefighter or as surf lifesaver, he may have attracted some media attention, but unless it was all spin he continues to provide a real tangible service to the community.

So what of the current batch of politicians? What are they doing? Now in the time of the Virus where are all these well paid politicians and their side kicks – on the ground helping out rather than buried in spin – helping out with food deliveries – helping their constituents get through the crisis and not inflaming it.

For instance, those people in the high rise have two local parliamentary members – one Federal; one State. Both are Green.

Their names are Adam Bandt and Ellen Sandell. The photo-op outside the high rise apartments – of course. What else, running around picking up scraps of paper at the foot of the apartment blocks setting down the grievances of the locked down residents – and there is more – they are complaining to the government or in the political terms “ making representations”.

Now given that they represent comparatively small geographical areas, I would expect that these two would know what resources can be rapidly mobilised and instead of uselessly fluttering around be working to assure the “care element” for the tower residents.

Now if I were the local parliamentary member, given so many people have isolated in a series of high rise building, I would be seeking answers to questions of resident safety in the case of fire. Simple questions as to assure the smoke alarms in each of the flat are in working orders and nothing is blocking the emergency exits.

As I jot, in this fast moving scenario, comprehensive testing has concentrated the Virus in one of the towers. The Government has seemingly restored some order here.

I sympathise with Premier Andrews. He has the cattle he has been left with – often elected through branch stacking and factional deals. Obviously, a few able colleagues will have escaped the net of incompetence. One of these is Richard Wynne, who is the Housing Minister and the State member for Richmond who is very much acquainted with public high rise towers and what’s more effective.

The Victoria Opposition? I’m sorry I suffer from coulrophobia, which makes me having difficulty commenting further.

However, there is one person who overcomes my coulrophobia, and that is Premier Gladys. Obviously the spectre of the Ruby and Newmarch keeps her awake at night.

As soon as the pandemic flared up, she was into border lockdown without any contingency plans. Then a COVID-19 positive teenager turns up in Merimbula -after all, if the spread is going to happen, school holidays is a perfect time as Victorians flee winter.

However, had she anticipated border lockdown and was there a contingency plan? Well, apparently no. However, next day, she is encouraging NSW border townspeople not to travel and may have to lock down that area.

I bet there is no contingency plan in place to withdraw her troops in the face of the advancing Virus to the Murrumbidgee River, and yet she stigmatises her NSW border constituents and reinforces what has been said for years – that the NSW border should be reset at the Murrumbidgee River, so little the NSW government is concerned about its Riverina population welfare.

Day 1 of border closure – 6.00am – 4 degrees C

Data, Gladys, data – 10 cases across Albury-Wodonga and not one for 92 days until a couple of Melburnians were caught escaping Melbourne. The Victorians have locked down metropolitan Melbourne – that should be sufficient in any case.

It also raises the question of why isn’t the Government coming down hard on the appalling behaviour in Sydney, where social distancing appears to be reduced to about 30 cms if you’re one of the massive pack of people lining up to enter a hotel in Double Bay. Callers to ABC’s breakfast program discussed strategies for avoiding unwanted hugs – there seems to be a pandemic of short memories about how to avoid catching COVID-19 if that discussion is anything to go by.

Then Gladys’ nightmare continued, JetStar slipped a plane through the NSW cordon, emphasising the inherent fragility of policy being as strong as the weakest link.

Now two of the 48 passengers refused to be COVID-19 tested. If that one percentage of “refuseniks” is considered representative of those who are probably the same cohort as the anti-vaxxers, then there is a need for quarantine space not being a plush hotel to accommodate them.

No doubt, NSW has done an excellent job in relation to hotel quarantine, but that does not diminished the argument for designated quarantine facilities. The new and immediate challenge is a government intent on providing a refuge for an unspecified number of Hong Kongers at the same time as the States are showing hotel fatigue by pleading for fewer overseas flights.

Then, there must be a plan to cater for expanding travel given that for a long period into the future, the world will have reverted to the nineteenth century quarantine situation given the differential effect of the Virus on nations – and not wanting to completely stifle international travel yet not wanting travellers to be isolated for quaranta giorni, the basis for the word “Quarantine”.

The Greater Green Triangle

I have spent a lot of time in the Greater Green Triangle over the years. From the time I was responsible for some community health projects in Western Victoria and more recently when I was Director of Medical Services at Edenhope Hospital for a couple of years. If you asked 100 people in Victoria or in South Australia (outside the GGT) where is Edenhope, I would guess the number who knew where it was in each State would run into single digit figures.

However, Edenhope exemplifies a border town and the interdependence of border settlements with one another. Their ability to accommodate to different governments with different legislation is one of the qualities that I love about such towns. I have worked in many.

The problem is that being at the extremes of the State, unless in Queensland where the border is close to the capital, the border residents tend to be forgotten. And this is so, even in Queensland! At the Post Office Hotel in Camooweal on the Queensland-Northern Territory border, you can get the best steak sandwich in Australia – but who would know.

However, let’s return to the Greater Green Triangle. The Victorian-South Australian border was set in 1836 to run along the 141st meridian. Although there is some discrepancy between the then and now measurement, what distinguishes the area east and west of the line is the limestone South Australian coast and hinterland; and this is reflected in the buildings. Mount Gambier stone is a distinctive limestone. One of the ways community in rural Australia has traditionally defined itself is through its football leagues. In this area traditionally there has been a strong Australian Rules tradition; all the border leagues are organised around perceived communities, and these do not seem to recognise borders as a barrier.

The Greater Green Triangle has its base along the coast from Apollo Bay in Victoria to Kingston in South Australia, and as it goes north, where the major population centres are Horsham and Keith, before it runs against the Mallee, an area that also crosses the border.

The point is, as I found out when I assisted in the establishment of the cross-border Greater Green Triangle University Department of Rural Health, that it proved a viable size to deliver an area where medical students could gain enough clinical experience. It showed that the region had both the intellectual capital to provide tertiary education for the population locally and also a population to support clinical training. Both Flinders and Deakin University have had a significant investment in this putative region.

Working at Edenhope demonstrated how clearly important Naracoorte (known locally as Nazza) was to those living on the other side of the South Australian border. This was emphasised by the 2011 floods, which closed the road between Edenhope and Horsham. This meant that services in South Australia were crucial.

Look at the data. Regional Victoria has been virtually free of the Virus for a long time. Therefore, the case is clear for a more sensible approach to border closure in the south-west of Victoria and the south-east of South Australia.

The recent cross-border exemption of 50 kilometres recognises the importance of Mount Gambier and Naracoorte to Western Victoria. However, it dose not recognise the importance of Portland, Hamilton, Warrnambool and even Horsham to South Australians living along the border. As I write this, there is apparently a substantial backlog of people seeking to gain the requisite permits to cross the border

Recognition of the Greater Green Triangle – a long-established and recognised area by three governments – is now being undermined under the current COVID-19 restrictions. The tri-governmental decision to close the Victorian border with NSW fails to recognise that this economic, educational, health and community zone should not be undermined during the COVID-19 pandemic.

East of Eden

The Victorian border south of Eden suddenly looms as a small notice and a bigger notice further on announces the East Gippsland Shire. There is one mobile neon sign saying that those from some undefined hotspots are not allowed into NSW. The cars that whiz past, including several towing caravans – all with Victorian number plates. There is no sign of any active policing of the border.

However, that was before the NSW decision to close the border from Tuesday midnight.

There is no doubt that this border crossing will present a logistics problem. It is going to be interesting to see how the NSW police will arrange their supervision of the Princes Highway border for an extended period, given that it very sparsely populated in an area of bush regeneration, with lots of tracks and not much population until Eden 50 kilometres up the Highway. The ADF may be very useful here. Presumably for completeness, the NSW water police or the Navy will be patrolling the 31 nautical miles between Mallacoota and Eden.

This past weekend we decamped to Merimbula. We were curious to see how the devastated region, after the ghastly summer bushfires, was regenerating. We had watched, as did so much of Australia, with horror and helplessness the destruction being wrought. We contributed to the bushfire relief, but it seemed a pittance. We were then ashamed at the politicians’ response, many of who were overseas, even though there was forewarning of the disaster afoot, much in the same way this border closure has been handled. Many warning signs; then the white stick panic.

Our visit coincided with the weekend of the Eden-Monaro by-election, and although some equated the electorate with the bushfire, the actual area of the electorate burnt was comparatively small and unpopulated. However, that statement is little comfort to hamlets like Cobargo or Mogo where the devastation was numbing. In Australia loss of property is like losing your mind – your memory.

Yet in Merimbula there are few signs of the bushfire. The trees grow tall in the gullies and onto the rises of this hilly settlement with its glorious views of the water stretching out into the Pacific Ocean. Here is a world of the best rock oysters and great fish cuisine. And that emblem of middle class – the golf course – that has been unaffected. The trees are majestic and the fairways green.

Here is the remnant temperate rain forest, which stretches out onto the slopes of the Great Dividing Range. Yet here is an electorate, where a climate denier whose only bush fire policy seems to be fuel reduction, nearly got elected. I would like to see how she would go about man-contrived bush fuel reduction on Brown Mountain. Fortunately, she received a huge thumping by the Merimbula voters.

South of Eden where the devastation was so pronounced there is a very small population – tiny settlements such Kiah are littered with the graveyards of houses, although the local store stoutly displays a “bottle shop” sign.

I remember the reports from Eden, which saw people congregating at the wharf. The flames across Twofold Bay must have been a terrifying sight.

The sturdiness of the bush has been shown by the way the new green leafy growth has been shinnying up the black trunks – to announce its new arrival. However, death is beige, trees whose beige foliage hangs forlornly. The trademark colour of emerging wattle is noticeably absent. Yet there are banksia and grevillea in flower – small numbers but as with the grass, and the ferns and wildflowers, exhibiting regeneration. Nature does not wait for government assistance. Will the thousands of eucalypts across NSW and Victoria that now have epicormic growth gradually recover? Time will tell, but the intensity of the fires was such that we are unlikely to see recovery any time soon, if ever.

There are areas of clear felling and trees scorched beyond immediate redemption. There are no sounds – no bird sounds, no evidence of wildlife, no animals skittled on the roadway. It is not yet Spring but this is a silent world, apart from diminishing noise of the highway.

Yet the two government bush fire inquiries are meandering down bureaucratic gravel roads. The NSW Inquiry finished its community consultation in May, and the Federal Inquiry is due to finish on August 31. When will there be recommendations; when will there be action?

The governmental inertia is appalling and, as has been shown by the Berejiklian approach to government, it gives no idea of whether she knows what she’s doing – apart from kicking the can down the highway and trying to find it in a white stick panic. The NSW bushfire report is due “before the next fire season” (policy by length of the string principle) and presented to her (policy by ceremonial burial)

However, get ready for her response in 2021 when the remaining South Coast bush may have been subject to fuel reduction, but not in the way she meant – only it was not her fault. Nature had just misinterpreted her message.

Stabilising our “Arc of Instability”

Neil Baird – Guest blogger

Celebrated American travel writer Paul Theroux describes his impressions of our neighbouring Pacific islands in “The Happy Isles of Oceania”. It is an ironic title for a book that others have described as “The Arc of Instability” – the chain of islands extending from the Cook Islands in the east to Indonesia in the west.

While the latter epithet was originally applied to geological instability, it now much more accurately applies to geopolitical instability. The Chinese “dragon” has awakened and is blowing its hot, corrosive and corrupting breath in the direction of our archipelagic neighbours.

That makes it high time that Australia and New Zealand wake up to the threat that accompanies China’s interest. We should be doing much more to counter that threat while we still can. Instead of our benign neglect of the region during the past 75 years Australia and New Zealand need to become very proactive and pragmatic. It is far too late for idealism – the light on the hill burns low.

Anyone sceptical of the danger that the Xi Jinping-led China presents to Australia should be reminded that his approach shares the hallmarks of a number of pre-World War 2 dictators.

Inter alia, Winston Churchill’s “The Gathering Storm” and Willard Price’s “Japan’s Islands of Mystery” and “Japan Rides the Tiger” very perceptively and accurately predicted the likely outcomes arising from the behaviour of such “Imperialist” dictators.

Willard Price’s books are most relevant to Australia’s current situation with respect to our neighbouring archipelagic nations. His description of the Japanese strategy and actions in regard its League of Nations Mandate of the Micronesian territories north of the Equator are particularly apposite in our current situation. President Xi’s China is closely following General Tojo’s playbook, albeit a little less brutally; so far.

Xi Jinping has demonstrated his imperialist credentials in the South China Sea. They have since spread rapidly with his “Belt and Road Initiative” which, as well as many Pacific and Indian Ocean states, now even encompasses the satirically characterised “Democratic Socialist Republic of Victoria”.

A serious and rapidly worsening problem in Australia’s immediate neighbourhood has emerged. While many of our neighbouring nations have been described as “failed states”, it is probably more accurate to class them as “unviable states”. In hindsight, it would have been better if they had formed a federation giving them some critical mass when they gained independence from their former colonisers.

They are, apart from Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, mostly too small, in terms of land area and population, let alone resources, to be economically viable individual nations. All are, to be bluntly honest, seriously deficient administratively. That makes them unusually mendicant and, therefore, vulnerable to external influences.

This reality must be allowed for in any approaches Australia makes to our neighbouring nations in an effort to counter the influence of the Chinese government. These countries need help and, to preserve its own future, Australia needs to help them.

However, to effectively help protect our neighbours from Chinese hegemony, Australia must be much more realistic and practical in its approach than has been the in the past. The paternalistic, diffident approach of Australia has created a vacuum that China is rapidly filling.

Australia must help protect these “Pacific paradises” from the detrimental effects of Chinese “colonisation”. This will require a very different diplomatic approach that to challenge the capabilities of both Australian and New Zealand bureaucrats – be they diplomats, trade representatives or “aid” consultants. They will need to be very incorrect politically.

That will require a much more culturally sensitive and realistic approach than has ever been demonstrated by current employees of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and flies in the face of their education and departmental acculturation.

The simple fact is, as any senior island nation bureaucrat will privately confirm, their biggest problem is “political interference”. Read “corruption” from elected representatives from ministers downwards. The Chinese government panders to this. Australia does not. This policy puts us at a great disadvantage. Australia must learn to work around and overcome that distasteful reality.

With that reality firmly in mind, Australia needs to much better plan its approach to those tiny nation states. We have to accept that they are not really “democracies” in the way that most Australians and New Zealanders understand that word.

Apart from brown paper bags of cash, diplomacy has a long tradition of purchasing influence. Scholarships, similar to those offered by the successful Australian Indigenous Education Foundation, provided to the bright – they’re always bright – children of politicians would be a start.

So would appropriate venture capital funding for business start-ups. “Educational” tours for politicians are always popular. There are numerous examples of what could be done in that line without having to go so far as the old German trick of “limitless” credit cards.

Australia could do much more in the areas of health, education, transport, agricultural, forestry and fisheries development, disaster relief and even defence. Australia could provide these island nations with safe, efficient and comfortable Australian designed and built ferries for inter-island transport. Importantly, Australia should train them to operate and maintain those ferries safely.

In contrast Australia should not be:

(a) building “Taj Mahal” financially unviable convention centres, or

(b) providing fleets of fancy cars to transport the delegates to non-existent conferences.

Above all, unlike our Chinese rivals, Australia should not be pushing debt onto the islanders, which only serves to reinforce their mendicant status.

The aid provided should be practical, sensible, conspicuous and culturally sensitive. There is no point in providing aid in any circumstances where someone else gets the credit for our generosity. Importantly, rather than handing over cash that inevitably would be spent on Toyotas, Yamahas, Hyundais or Maseratis, Australia should promote purchase of Australian goods or services.

“We have plenty of desirable home grown goodies to offer,” as one reliable source said to me.

Not To Know What Happened Before One Was Born Is Always To Be A Child

I once had dinner with the essayist, author and sometime editor of Harper’s, Lewis Lapham, in New York. It was very cordial, entertaining dinner. I was trying to entice him to Australia to give a talk, but somewhere, sometime he slipped out of the net and did not come.

Later he did come to Australia and Bob Carr hosted him. The meeting of those minds is not surprising because although Lapham was a gifted essayist with a very astute mind, he could not resist writing such words: “I first met him at a New York dinner party in 1962, among the company then traveling in the entourage of President John Kennedy, and over the next half century I ran across him at least once or twice a year – in a Broadway theater, on a lawn an Newport, Rhode Island, in the Century Club dining room, on the stage of an university auditorium.” However, he carried his self-importance more easily than Carr, probably because he was a true intellectual.

In any case he was talking about Arthur Schlesinger. Schlesinger was a historian, a very good historian, who saw the world in which he lived, as Lapham recalls, as a place “to construe history as a means rather than the end, the constant making and remaking of the past intended to revise the present to better imagine the future.”

Schlesinger, although he died in 2007 at the age of 89, had witnessed the growth of the information revolution, without watching it explode. He noted that it was associated with “an attitude of mind which accommodated the floating world of the timeless fantasy, impatient and easily bored, less at ease with a stable storyline than with the flow of brand names images in which nothing necessarily follows from anything else”.

The problem with eloquence is that those mentioned above are listening to a different beat and hence the comment is lost in that floating world. Further, eloquence may mask thoughts that may be too personal, too generalised or just too loquacious.

“The problem is if the population do not recognise that history captures the past then the populace may be presented with solutions where there is no link between cause and effect. To be told what is right without any evidence, without the benefit of history is to caught up in the whirlwind of fake news, fascist politics and quack religions.”

Schlesinger was talking about Bush The Younger’s legacy in dumbing down American educational standards. Such a statement retains its relevance 13 years later, when the barbarian is no longer at the gate – he is within the gate. Now educational standards are reduced to slogans and chants of invective repeated.

Lapham compares Schlesinger’s analysis of history with that of a man who “forged the strength of Roman history into a weapon”. According to Lapham, both this man and Schlesinger recognised history was not a nursery rhyme. The name of the Roman was Cicero.

Cicero paid a mortal price for his defence of the integrity of the republic against vanities of would be Emperors; and by the way, the quote at the head of this article was written by Cicero; how prescient a description of the current American President.

Mouse Whisper Primo

Overheard in the executive office of an unnamed casino: “Of course we have bought a vat of sanitiser – how else are going to launder all the money we are getting?

Mouse Whisper Secondo

Premier Gladys, my whisper from the floor, may I give you a tip about salt and pepper shakers – use them first, then hand sanitise. Then everybody can share or else wipe the shakers down before you use them.

Modest Expectations – Maria A Nona

Just a brief acknowledgement of Prof Brendan Murphy becoming the first medically qualified head of the Commonwealth Health department since Gwynn Howells was Director-General from 1973 to 1982. Murphy has a certain quality, which can survive the neo-liberal/ Canberra mandarin doubt. You know, doctors should stick to their knitting – and not mix it with the “big boys”.

I must say I have been always sceptical of that mantra which inter alia the late John Paterson promoted – namely you could be content free and run a Health department with minimal knowledge of the portfolio. To Paterson, health was only an unadorned matter of cost accounting.

Another view of the Endurance

There is one piece of COVID-19 information about the South American situation that does not get much coverage. The rate of infection in Uruguay is very low, currently being less than 1,000 infected, with 27 deaths.

Now Uruguay has only 3.5 million people and while the death rate on a population basis is higher than ours, the number of cases is very respectable given that it has borders with Brazil and Argentina.

In an earlier blog I have written of my experiences about Uruguay last year. It has the characteristic of a Spanish-speaking culture but one I found, as an Australian, a very comfortable one. Maybe it was because we had two fantastic guides with an appreciation of Australians.

If we look at attenuated tourist bubbles of countries that have suppressed the virus, Uruguay should not be left off the list.

Two matters stand out. The first is that a third of the population lives in high-rise condominia along the Montevideo waterfront. In some parts Uruguay may be sparsely settled, but it has one substantial city, Montevideo, with a crowded population that seems to have avoided the CoVid-19 occurrence of other cities with substantial high-rise populations.

The second relates to the MV Greg Mortimer, with a substantial number of Australians on board. There could have been a complete disaster without the intervention of the Uruguayan Health authorities.

The World Health Organisation had declared COVID-19 a pandemic three days before the brand new, luxury MV Greg Mortimer (which despite its illustrious name is registered in the Bahamas), with a crew of 85 and 132 passengers, set sail from Ushuaia on March 15 on a 21-day cruise following a similar route to that of the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton.

During the next 13 days the virus struck, although everybody tested negative for the virus before they boarded. Progressively more and more tested positive until 81 of the crew and passengers had contracted COVID-19.

Both Argentina and the Falkland Islands would have nothing to do with them, even though the passengers had embarked in Argentina at Ushuaia. The Uruguay government allowed the ship to anchor 16 kms off shore and then sent in a medical team to assess the COVID-19 status of those on the ship

Uruguayan physicians who boarded the MS Greg Mortimer to assess the passengers and crew

This story has been told recently by a respiratory physician, who was on the ship. He highlighted how careful and ordered the Uruguayan authorities were in handling the situation. They provided a “sanitary corridor” which allowed for repatriation, where those who were sick, including one of the ship’s doctors, were taken from the ship. Eight were hospitalised and one person unfortunately died.

As described in a recent issue of the Macquarie University journal, the way the matter was handled was in stark contrast to the Ruby Princess fiasco.

To his credit our Prime Minister was very generous in thanking Uruguay, a fact that should not be forgotten in the Year of the Virus.

The Presidential position had just changed back to the Conservative coalition, with Lacalle Pau, the surf-loving scion of an old Uruguayan family winning the runoff from his Socialist rival by only 30,000 votes. The maturity of this change in government reflects well on the state of democracy in Uruguay and on the successful approach of containing the virus even with a change of government.

Remember also Uruguay has a 1,000 kms border with Brazil and while there are nine border crossings, in one instance between two of the border towns, it is virtually just a line on the ground, little if any spread of the virus has occurred across the Brazilian border.

Yet according to The Guardian, Uruguay is fourth in the world for success against the Virus with New Zealand first and Australia second.

The discipline shown in handling the Greg Mortimer is an exemplar, and explains the current success. While it is not stated when you are moving people from an unsafe environment to a sanctuary, nobody wants to be last off, and yet the Uruguayans were able to maintain the discipline and co-operation for 19 days before the last person was evacuated from the MV Greg Mortimer.

In Uruguay, the current Minister of Public Health is Dr Daniel Salinas, a medical graduate but it seems that five years is a long time as Health Minister. He has only been in the position since March this year.

Talk about a baptism of fire and he has already been “outed” for going where he should not have gone during the lock-down. The words were harsh, but for now he has kept his job.

In the Year of the Virus

In the Year of the Virus, what is written at the beginning of the week may be superseded at the weekend by the way the virus is driving the government agenda, both the economy and social intercourse. How something so small can change the way we go about our life tests our ability to maintain order and not succumb to the chaos of the individual ignorance – whether wilful or not.

Chaos is epitomised by the image of the two old guys in a street in one of the infested suburbs culturally kissing one another on the cheeks and then when they knew they were being photographed grinned like idiots into the camera. As I pointed out last week, the active elderly are potentially great Virus spreaders, especially as the niceties of the reasons for testing seem beyond them.

Premier Andrews is very adroit in being prepared to call out the Aspen skiers as “persons of interest” who brought the Virus into Australia. “Bad people”. However, his adroitness is in not blaming but at the same time blaming his Labor-voting constituency.

Andrews recognises it is pointless to call out the peasant mentality that the Florentine Leon Alberti identified 500 years ago as “amoral familism” – an inability to think beyond the extended family. Panic buying is one symptom, and disregard of any appeal to community values is another. Hence the Andrews adroitness is the gentle appeal to particular community leaders in public; and then giving them a stronger message in private.

The message has changed abruptly about those in quarantine who refuse to be tested. It turns out that the resistance has occurred among children – or rather their parents for testing their offspring.

For adults, there is no excuse; the sanction should be unyielding. The other means are either the addition of another ten days to the quarantine period, or else use the new saliva test for children. The reasons for these changes rest with the experts’ assurance that the extra ten days are sufficient and that the saliva test has a comparable degree of sensitivity and specificity to those of the current procedures.

However, it does not change the need to have designated quarantine facilities near all the international airports. One of the successes occurred early with the efficient evacuation of people from Wuhan to Christmas Island and the Darwin Howard Springs facility.

That is one good reason to have permanent quarantine facilities, if for no other reason than to streamline the process of quarantining returning citizens and permanent residents to Australia and to provide space so people are not cooped up in hotels with untrained supervision, as instanced in this case. The short-term objective of improving the bottom-line of the hotels should give way to planning for a long term recognition that inevitably we will have another raft of diseases without vaccines, and thus need designated, properly designed facilities.

Whereas a ship used to raise the yellow flag to denote Infection, so must a community flag be raised to indicate a suppression of pandemics, for which the only defence is suppression through isolation. What does Australia want – worrying about cultural sensitivity and spurious privacy issues or protection against the disruption caused by a pandemic?

Andrews invoked Bentham’s utilitarianism in his media conference last Sunday; his government must work for the greatest good for the greatest number. Here he is so right, but the refusal of a substantial number of people to be tested will challenge how consistent his resolve is, or whether he considers them as “conscientious objectors”.

Governments have a number of precedents for such a group, but he seems to believe that locking down certain suburbs until the end of July may suffice. It is a difficult policy to police.

On the other hand, the vested interests remain. There is a serious one that will lurk well beyond the end of July.

Quoting from the Sunday Age, “questions have been raised this week over when health authorities contacted Cedar Meats about the positive cases and over the government’s decision not to initially name the abattoir, whose owner was a long-time member of the Labor Party.”

Meat processing facilities – in my language, abattoirs – because of the working environment are perfect areas for the virus to re-gather its strength. This Cedar Meats facility owned by the Kairouz family has previously been subject to questions about its occupational health and safety, and now by definition it is a “hot spot” until proved otherwise.

However, rather than pursuing the Lebanese connection, would it not be better to set up a preventative strategy in regard to all the meat processing facilities throughout Australia? Maybe that is in process, and as a casual observer, all I can say is that it is an obvious matter to consider, given it is an international problem even threatening to compromise the food supply chain. Therefore, who is working on the uniformity of rules here that recognise the seriousness of the situation?

Quarantine facilities are not holiday camps. They are facilities to isolate for a period for the few whose freedoms are temporarily sacrificed for the greater good. The government has become expert in building such facilities for asylum seekers. Maybe with the media spotlight on them and staffed by trained health professionals rather than guards of dubious experience, there will be more humanity in the construction of quarantine facilities. The Olympic village model springs to mind, with all subject to social distancing and hand washing “between events”.

The promise of a COVID-19 vaccine

The history of vaccines, and especially one against a coronavirus would suggest that it is nonsense to expect a solution in the near future – if ever. There may never be a vaccine and therefore the world must work around suppression of the Virus.

It is somewhat like 1938 and Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper and talking about “peace in our time” – it could easily be any of our current political leaders substituting “vaccine” for “peace”. The world has found out that it cannot eliminate war – it devises mechanisms to try and suppress it – not very successfully as there are hot spots breaking out everywhere as countries lose respect for borders read “social distancing”; for “hand washing and sanitisers” read “defence”.

The corpus of research scientists has the same quota of flimflam chancers as the rest of the population. Labelling someone a “research scientist” is not equivalent to beatification. As a somewhat mediocre medical researcher I was fortunate to work among some brilliant medical scientists. I sympathise with Brendan Murphy and his obvious unsuitability for research. Mine was a forgiving research environment, but then I never wore a tie in the laboratory.

I learnt the hard way, but because I was in a laboratory where the technical standards were high to complement some of the best scientific thinkers of my generation I was very privileged. I learnt enough to achieve two doctorates in a time when one could do that without being consigned to the debtors’ prison for unpaid HECS fees.

However, I learnt one lesson from two distinguished scientists, Ian Clunies Ross and Frank Fenner. When the myxomatosis virus was developed to infect and kill rabbits, both these men were the first to have themselves injected with the virus to show that the virus did not harm humans.

I remember one of my experiments demanded taking arterial blood. First person for this study to have that procedure done on himself was me. As the responsible researcher, if I expected others to take part, then I should be the first volunteer. Arterial puncture is no big deal now, but it was different 50+ years ago.

These days the whole process has been made more complicated as the ethicists have moved in. These days Clunies Ross and Fenner probably would be surrounded by reams and reams of paper seeking justification for their research.

However, the principle remains the same.

As one psychologist has expressed it: “The golden rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you, is about as basic as morality gets. It’s the bridge between empathy and sympathy, between putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and making some accommodation to them as a result.”

That simple statement does not need a synod of ethicists to ratify. After all the 1978 Belmont Report said much the same in a great many more words. Among the reasons for this Report were revelations in regard to the Tuskegee experiments. The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service. The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis; the African-American men in the study were only told they were receiving free health care from the Federal government of the United States.

Dr Cutler referred to below was complicit in a substantial way.

Naturally there are now researchers tripping over themselves in the search for a vaccine for COVID-19 as if this whole research exercise is less about research and more of a gold rush. The issue of how to fast track this process has inevitably lead to the question of challenge trials.

Descendents of the victims of the Tuskagee experiment

The nature of a challenge trial involves giving healthy subjects a prospective vaccine and, in this case, then infecting them with a coronavirus. As the Tuskagee and Guatemala experiences show, it can be totally unethical, and while these quoted may be extremes, there are many shades of grey.

An article in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books commented on a new book on Adverse Events: Race Inequality and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals by Jill Fisher, a social scientist at UNC-Chapel Hill. The reviewer, Carl Elliot, a Professor at the University of Minnesota, notes 38 members of the US House of Representatives have called for COVID-19 challenge studies to be put in place. Perfect – they can be among the first cohort to be challenged with the Virus but protected by The Vaccine.

Carl Elliot is concentrating his literary endeavours on whistle blowing and unethical research. He makes the point that in these often dangerous challenges, the “volunteers” come from the bottom of society: the poorest, the most easily exploitable, prisoners, people in impoverished countries like Guatemala or Alabama.

A challenge study on Guatemala poor in 1946-48 mimicked those carried out by the Nazis. These US researchers:

intentionally infected victims with syphilis and gonococcus without informed consent
failed to provide victims with treatment or compensation
covered up and did not publish or disclose the experiments, including the intentional infections and failure to provide treatment.

It was not until after his death that the person who led the study, John Cutler, a public health luminary, was revealed as the monster he was – but there were accomplices. After all, for every Dr Jekyll there potentially lurks a Mr Hyde.

Challenge studies may be integral to testing of particular research protocols, but the researchers should be prepared to be the first to be challenged. The organisation 1DaySooner promotes challenge trials and allows individuals to volunteer, or to be advocates for such trials. The website notes there are currently (as at 2 July 2020) 30,108 volunteers “interested in being exposed to the coronavirus to speed up vaccine development”. Volunteers implies they will not be paid or expect to be paid.

Still, if I were the lead researcher I would expect to be the first one infected. How many of the myriad researchers will volunteer to be the first one tested with their own challenge protocol if and when it gets to that point?

Let Him Sleep

In a question on notice on 28 October 1982 from Barry Jones, the then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Tony Street responded with the following. In so doing, between the two, they encapsulated much of the story of Raoul Wallenberg:

(1) Is he (Street) able to say whether Raoul Wallenberg was First Secretary of the Swedish Embassy in Budapest from July 1944 to approximately February 1945 and was he described as the ‘hero of the holocaust’ for his work in saving Hungarian Jews during the Nazi occupation?

(2) Is it a fact that he was last seen in Hungary in or about February 1945 when he set off for an appointment with officers of the Red Army?

(3) Is it a fact that reports have been received in Sweden that he was being held in a Soviet prison since that time, that he was last sighted in the late 1970s and that, at the age of 70 years, he may still be alive and that he has been seen in Soviet prisons?

To which Minister Street replied in part:

… the Government is aware of reports that Mr Wallenberg is alive and that he has been seen in Soviet prisons. Sweden continues to pursue the Wallenberg case with the Soviet authorities, who so far have done no more than repeat their claim that Mr Wallenberg died in prison in 1947.

The Australian Government fully supports the efforts of Sweden to have the case re-examined by the Soviet authorities. Because the Australian Government has no direct standing in the matter, however, there has been little opportunity for us to make an effective intervention. The matter is basically the concern of the Swedish and Soviet Governments and for the time being it is felt that Sweden is best placed to press for a more satisfactory response from the Soviet authorities…

There is no doubt that Wallenberg was a very brave man. What he did for Hungarian Jews in trying to save as many as possible from the gas chambers was extraordinary. One of his strongest promoters in the Australian community is Dr Frank Vajda. Wallenberg saved him, at the age of nine, together with his mother, from the firing squad – a direct intervention. Everybody interprets miracles differently, and there is no wonder that Vajda, who later became a noted Melbourne neurologist, views Wallenberg as his personal saviour.

Wallenberg was made Australia’s first and only honorary citizen in 2013. An exhibition honoring him was shown around Australia between 2015 and 2019. In his brief time in Hungary, he saved many Jews. Some, as with Professor Vajda, came to Australia. There are around Australia many Wallenberg monuments. In Melbourne, I have always acknowledged the bust of him when driving past, if it was safe to do so, since the bust is perched near a busy intersection in Kew.

It is inconceivable that the Russians would not have known that the Wallenberg family not only enabled German industrialists to hide their assets but also ironically helped the Nazis, though their bank, to dispose of Dutch Jewish assets. The Russians tend not to differentiate; once a Wallenberg, always a target.

Whenever or whatever the Russians did to Raoul Wallenberg just highlights the corkscrew of the Russian mentality. In 1982 the possibility, however tenuous, existed that he was still alive. Now 108 years after his birth, non acceptance of his death makes his memory a pointless hagiographic conceit.

On 26 October 2016 the Swedish tax authorities (responsible for death certificates) finally pronounced Wallenberg dead and to be considered having died 31 July 1952. “Han ska anses ha dött den 31 juli 1952”, skriver Skatteverket i sitt beslut.”

Given those words, it is surprising the Swedish embassy allowed the question mark over his death to remain on the information sheet advertising the Wallenberg exhibition last year in NSW. The Swedish Government has done so. When Tony Street replied to Barry Jones’ question nearly 40 years ago, and there may have been a reason not to bring closure.

The Swedish Government has now recognised one of its national heroes has died. He should no longer exist in some limbo. To dismiss the recognition as a Swedish administrative mechanism is to not accord Wallenberg the recognition that he died in Russian custody.

Also, I know that some people who were directly saved by his intervention believe he should be revered as a giant of the spirit, but he was made our only honorary citizen of Australia in 2013. Why? He did not have the chance to accept; did the proposer, having refused to assign a date of death, seek to ask his advice on the matter?

I wonder whether being made an honorary citizen of another country would have been significant to him and whether he himself, having been described as being a diffident person, would have accepted? One of the problems is that people who often indulge themselves in the pursuit of vestments and honours just assume that the object of their esteem would agree.

There is a touch of arrogance in making such assumptions, particularly in the case of affording people nationality. And if you think about it, why “honorary”? Either you are a citizen or you are not.

Then Prime Minister Julia Gillard, in her eulogy when Wallenberg was awarded his honorary title, said: “Some of the individuals whose lives he redeemed became part of our first great transforming wave of post-war immigration; among the first to pledge themselves to their new home after Australian nationality was formalised in 1949.

Surely that was testament enough to his ongoing legacy – those who were spared and then were able to make such contributions as Frank Vajda. What does Honorary citizenship add and in 120 years of Australian Federation, why one?

I think Wallenberg was one of the greatest men of the twentieth century, even though he had such a short life. After all, he was the same age as Jesus when he disappeared.

Jesus left a spectacular legacy, one that has been transformative for our country as with others. Do we then make Christ an honorary citizen of the country? And of course we do not have a death certificate for Him either. But does anybody believe that Wallenberg rose from the dead? Allow him closure.

Mouse Whisper

Ever thought why it is mice but not hice? Well it is all because in the Saxon language hus was a neuter noun whereas mus was feminine. So in the plural it is still hus but for mus, which becomes mys to the plural (as was lus).

But it is more probable that in the future there will be “three blind mouses” before it becomes “as safe as hice”. After all, those little gadgets that are pushed around computers are mouses not mice. It just illustrates there is a tendency in all language usage towards homogeneity and simplicity.

So as my Aussie quoll friend would say, it’ll be grouse, mate – and grouse is grouse never grouses nor grice.

Or because we mouse love devouring literature, will it become a case of “eatymology”?