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Category: Accountability

03/03/2017

The Power of Social Media- Articles 5/3/17

Social media is increasingly important as it replaces mainstream media and mixes personal interaction with news and information. It is dollar driven but also personal, so that we identify ourselves and our values. Those who communicate with us individually do so with personal or mutual interest, but those who do mass communication do so for financial or political interest. Since those at the big end who harvest the data are able to match the personal with the financial and political, it gives them immense power. At the little end getting someone to click on something can give you a lot of money that you would not have had, so a gimmick or a headline that makes people click on something is a trick to be striven for, without necessarily thinking through the consequences.

To illustrate this important thesis, I offer this article from The Saturday Paper, which is its later part suggests that fake news was merely headlines that would get clicks to make money and that Trump was used as he would make people click. The fact that this favoured his campaign was an incidental to the primary object of the fake news creators, who merely wanted the royalties from making people click. The idea that the tiny fractions of a cent per click on a website can create a President of the USA shows how far our decisions and lives are at the mercy of the short-term profit motive.

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2016/11/26/how-fake-news-online-skewed-the-us-election/14800788004023

The power of collected data is that it allows the correlation of people interests, values and core values. Knowing what people believe, what is important to them and having access to them either through friends, honest communications or disguised communication gives the ability to change large sections of the populations values and actions, which gives a whole new meaning to the concept of ‘Manufacturing Consent’. This is very significant for the nature and use of power.
Marx said that power was control of the means of production. In nominal democracies power will become control of the means of information. This is frightening stuff. It was in the Guardian. Read on if you missed it.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

Note also

www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy?CMP=share_btn_fb

27/12/2016

Doctors for the Environment Recommend Load-Based Licencing for Polluters 27/12/16.

Today I reconnected with Dr Ben Ewald from the Hunter, who has been working with Doctors for the Environment. He has been lobbying for a Federal EPA and wrote a submission on the load-based licensing system, which is another name for polluters paying a levy per tonne of pollutant that they produce. There is some charge for each type of pollutant, and the charge can also be loaded for how close the pollutant is to population centres, as this relates to its health impacts. NSW has had such a scheme for years, which is fact the best developed in Australia, but NSW keeps the rate of this tax very low otherwise NSW would merely end up importing electricity from other states that pollute more but had no such tax. Hence the need for a national system. The current NSW fee is only 0.82% of the sale price per megawatt.

Other facts were that there is 1.1 million tonnes a year of Sulphur dioxide produced in Australia, 51% from coal-fired power stations. They also produce 380,000 tonnes of Nitrous oxides, 52% of all produced annually in Australia. Coal-fired power stations produce 8,900 tonnes of PM2.5, which is however only 29% of the national output of PM2.5, which is 31,000 tonnes. PM2.5 is particles of 2.5 microns in diameter, which are the smallest ones measured. There used to be a lot of emphasis on how much pollution in the air by how much weight of pollutant there was per cubic metre of air. Then researchers realised that big particles get caught in the nose, whereas small particles continue down into the lungs and have bigger health effects. So the absolute weight of particles is not as important as the number of smaller particles. Hence the new interest in PM2.5!

It also turns out that while the coal-fired power stations are the ones with the load-based licences, the open cut mines produce the most carbon particle pollution but are exempt from fees! That is a political decision of course. Doctors for the Environment need to be supported as they beaver away producing the submissions and organising the facts that the governments need to be told and that the activists need to amplify! Here is the submission:

http://dea.org.au/images/uploads/submissions/NSW_-_Review_of_the_load-based_licensing_scheme_submission_12-16.pdf

26/11/2016

Power, Injury and Awards

26 November 2016 Power, Injury and Awards. I work in medicine, treating mostly third party motor vehicle injuries and workers compensation injuries. There are much fewer of the latter because there are less employees. Many people working as couriers are ‘self employed’ contractors. One man had to pay $75,000 for the right to deliver parcels […]

09/11/2016

Trump’s Win- why? 9/11/16

Here is my theory. Basically democracy in English speaking countries has been taken over by private entities. There are only two entities who can win power in the UK, USA and Australia. They are called political parties. They are not in the constitution, but because they vote as a bloc, they control the parliament. Because they are private entities they do what their donors want. Few citizens want privatisation, but the donors to the parties do- so we get privatisation. Few want to go to war, but for some reason the parties do, so we go to war. We want universal health cover- Medicare, but it gets rolled back and we have to buy private health insurance, which suits that lobby. Unemployment is rising and the government fiddles the figures and no longer takes responsibility for the problem, it just talks about ‘the market’. What the people think or want does not actually matter. The parties continually put their interests and power ahead of what the people want. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the political parties do not seem to care. They get donations from the rich, and run campaigns to convince the poor to vote for them.

Faced with this situation and two political parties, people are accustomed to voting for the lesser of two evils, or making a protest vote, which is what they did. Trump was anti ‘the system’, so although he was deeply flawed personally that was enough. The Democrat Party machine had got rid of Sanders, the leftist challenger to the status quo, so it became status quo Clinton v. Non status quo Trump. Then the polls got it totally wrong. How come? Part of the same thing- the whole polling establishment obviously had a large segment of the population missing from their sample, but did not know it- like the government really. So if some people did not vote for Clinton because they were disgusted and thought it would not matter, they were wrong.

But if the level of disgust in the process of government is enough to turn a US Presidential election, one must also wonder about the effect of the media. For years, news has been replaced by infotainment. What is important is replaced by what is titillating or exciting. News is trivial, what is important is often not covered, particularly things like falling middle class jobs and stagnating wages. The media is the message. If you are not in the media, the message is that you do not matter. But also note the rise of ignorance. Quiz shows used to ask historic or scientific facts. Now it is TV trivia. And ‘shock jocks’ on commercial media are there to shock and to push products. They do not have to be consistent or informed- just entertaining enough to rate and bring in advertising dollars. So the non-expert, pontificating and criticising overcomes the expert discussing sensibly- how many of those are on TV? The shock jock has become more important than the politician. So why are we surprised when it now happens in real life? The shock jock beat the politician. And the pollsters got it wrong again- just like in Brexit.

What will happen with Trump in charge? He will destroy Obamacare, the relatively minor improvements made towards a universal health system, appoint Conservative Supreme Court judges and officials in public policy such as Climate Change, and boost gun ownership. More significant changes to corporate power will take the approval of Congress and the House, now both Republican-controlled. Obama was elected on the slogan, ’Change is possible’. Obstruction by the Republicans ensured it was not. Now Trump will try, but the same obstructers now have even more power and are not about to let one of their own damage their interests. So Trump is unlikely to be a force for good unless he has unexpected foreign policy triumphs.

So what is the long-term solution to government ruling for the rich by buying political parties? Democracy has to be taken back to the people. The Parliament is controlled by parties and they are private entities and so can be bought by other private interests. This has ever been the case in systems that evolved in Westminster. It is Anglo-Saxon arrogance that makes us think that our democracy is best. Quite simply, it isn’t. Our political power structures, like our corporate structures concentrate power at the top. Swiss democracy involves power being moved down as low as possible with politicians merely enacting what public referenda decide, and with no opportunity for individual politicians to get long-term power structures assembled for themselves. It is time we looked at these models and worked for constitutional change based on a real change of philosophies, priorities and power.

09/11/2016

Trump’s Win- Why?

9 November 2016 Here is my theory. Basically democracy in English speaking countries has been taken over by private entities. There are only two entities who can win power in the UK, USA and Australia. They are called political parties. They are not in the constitution, but because they vote as a bloc, they control […]

11/09/2016

CTP Facebook Article- The Facts 11/9/16

CTP, Compulsory Third Party insurance (Green Slips) is an area where I work. In theory, if you are injured in an accident that is not your fault, all your treatment is currently paid for by your insurer. The law says that they must pay for ‘reasonable and necessary’ treatment, which I assume to mean the treatment that would happen in good routine medical practice. Wrong.

The insurers have 3 months to decide if they are liable for the accident. If they decide they are not they will not pay. If they decide that they will pay, all treatment decisions have to be referred to them as to whether they will pay or not, and sometimes, despite MRI scans, severe symptoms and a neurosurgeon saying that their life is at risk, they will not pay. I have a number of patients who have waited over a year in agony for treatments that are both reasonable and necessary but the insurers will not pay for. They say that the patients can get it themselves if they like (obviously if they can afford it), of they can get it on Medicare (if they have Medicare and if they can find a surgeon who will operate on Medicare for a third of the money that should be paid by the insurer. Such surgeons cannot be found).

The protocol for disputes vary slightly between insurers. For example, the NRMA protocol is that you can firstly approach the claims clerk who rejected it and ask him/her to change their mind. Secondly you can appeal to their team leader. Thirdly you can appeal to the NRMA Senior Claims Manager. Fourthly you can appeal to the government appointed Medical Assessment Service (MAS), which guarantees to assess the disputed issue and rule within 3 months! Or the treating doctor can try to find a Medicare surgeon, send them to a public hospital, or write yet another prescription for pain killers. (Mostly the insurers pay for pain killers, though they do argue over some other drugs). Many GPs have simply given up treating CTP patients.

All these delays, frequently running into months can be compared to the doctors and nurses in Emergency Departments of public hospitals who have to write long explanations for the Health Minister if patients wait more than 4 hours in the Emergency Departments. So if you think private medicine is better than public- think again. We are going the way of the US. Insurers control it all.

Patients are assesses by an iniquitous system devised by American Insurance companies in cooperation, (inexplicably enough) with the American Medical Association. This has resulted in a tome, the ‘AMA Guidelines for the Assessment of Permanent Impairment’ which supposedly gives a percentage of impairment of your body, so that injured people can get compensation based on the percentage impairment that they have. Doctors can do a course in how to use this guidebook and then do lucrative medicals based on it. The reason the book was produced was to lessen litigation on how injured someone was, which would save legal costs. As pain cannot be measured, this was left out, which is just the first reason why the book is a farce. Since pain is the main thing that stops people working, to talk of impairment without considering pain is almost like having a swimming race without water- just not quite. Secondly despite the tome’s carefully crafted descriptions, doctors assessment using the guidelines vary widely. Thirdly, it is very hard to get over 10% impairment, which is the amount Mr Baird’s reforms intend to define as more than a ‘minor injury’ so there will be many people with only a few percent impairment, and thus minimal compensation, who will be unemployed and unemployable. Fourthly, the guides only talk of ‘impairment’. Any one who works in disability knows that there is quite a difference between an impairment and a disability. For example if someone is very shortsighted they are impaired, but if they have good prescription glasses they may not be disabled by that impairment. People who work with their brains are similarly less disabled than those who need their physical strength, but have the same impairment. So physical workers are again disadvantaged.
The new scheme will cut out lawyers and advocacy, and will give a statutory small amount to ‘minor’ injuries. The insurers will dump long term patients on the welfare system and continue to get a lot of money for doing not much that is useful.

I would finish by saying that I think the whole system is appalling and that the way to solve the health system problem is to raise the Medicare rebate from 48% of the AMA fee to 85%, where it was when it started, and there would be no trouble getting doctors to treat the patients who needed it. There also needs to be a single insurer, so that disputes between insurers will not delay treatment, which they frequently do, and everyone should be covered, even ‘at fault’ drivers, who still need treating despite their error.

For the present six insurers, all are bad, but they are not all as bad as each other. There are no published figures to compare them rationally, but based on personal experience, I have just changed my insurance from NRMA to GIO. The TV ad about feeling ‘confident’ about your insurer is a bad joke.
Wish me luck, as I wish you.
Here is an SMH article by Anna Patty 12/9/16 which raises the issues in a somewhat understated way.

www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/green-slip-reforms-will-leave-most-motorists-to-fend-for-themselves-20160905-gr8zca.html

29/06/2016

My second Obeid story. 29/6/16

I was in NSW Parliament and an old school friend wanted to meet for old times, so we went down to the coffee shop at Sydney Hospital. As we went in Grahame Richardson and Eddie Obeid were talking together. As we walked past Richo was facing me, Eddie had his back to us. I nodded at Richo and went past. My friend and I had rather a long chat, but as we came back, Richo and Eddie were still there. I nodded at Eddie. Richo, (who is a very sociable guy whatever else he may be) said, ‘Hello Arthur’. I was a bit surprised he even knew my name, but he is good at that sort of thing. I stopped, turned round and replied, ‘Hi Richo’. Then a sense of devilment took me and I added, ‘What are you going to do about Beasley?’ Beasley was ALP leader at that time and was not doing very well in the polls, and some people wondered when he would be replaced.

‘We are going to replace him’ said Richo.

‘And who with? I asked. (No harm in asking).

‘Rudd’, said Richo.

‘He’s not much chop is he? Bit of a Bible botherer?’ I replied.

‘Best we’ve got at the moment’, said Richo.

‘That may be,’ I said and toddled off.

Seven months later Rudd replaced Beasley, and the rest is history.

Richo is not a man to stab you in the back- he stabs in the front, presumably smiling and telling you it needs to be done. Eddie was the NSW numbers man, which is why no one moved against him. Carr and Egan kept him out of the ministry, but when Carr went, he came in. Things went bad, and eventually when things were very bad, compromise Premier Nathan Rees tried to clean up the NSW Labor party, and drop Tripodi, a mate of Eddie’s. He failed and was then thrown out. Kristina Keneally became Premier, just before the election with a good new female image, but of course NSW Labor was not fixable or saleable by then, and Barry O’Farrell won in a landslide, only to lose office due to forgetting that he received a bottle of Penfold’s Grange Hermitage from the property developer today said to have called on Eddie.

29/06/2016

Eddie Obeid. My First Story. 28/6/16

When I first got into Parliament in 1998 Eddie offered me a lift to Parliament. I accepted. It seemed harmless enough. He had a car with a driver and lived not far from me. Then he offered to give me some advice about how to get on in Parliament.

I said, ‘Fine, Go ahead’. There was no harm in listening.

He said, ‘Arthur you are in a very little party, but if you vote with the (then Labor) government, we will give you a little win just before the election and you will be re-elected’.

I said, ‘Well, Eddie, you might think we are a little party, but we have a lot of policies that are important and if you help those policies, I will vote for you and if you don’t I will vote against you. That is my job”.

He said, ‘No Arthur, you do not understand, we are the government’.

I said, ‘That does not really impress me, my job is to change the government’.

He gave me a lift the next 2 times and we had virtually the same conversation. He would say, ‘Arthur, you are not really understanding,’ (meaning I was not voting the way he wanted). ‘You are a very small party and we are the government and if you vote with us, just before the election we will give you a little win etc’.. So on the 3rd recitation of this I wondered what a ‘little win’ might be. I had got into politics campaigning against tobacco and I knew that what was needed to save a lot of lives was smoke-free air everywhere, especially in the pubs and clubs that were the bastions of smoking, and a big health campaign against tobacco. ‘So I said, ‘Well, what I came onto parliament for was to fix the tobacco problem, you could fix that at no cost. It is just a ban, and the health campaign would pay for itself in hospital costs almost immediately. That could be the ‘little win’ you talked about’.

He said, ‘That is a very big thing. We could never do that’. I said, ‘Well I guess its no deal then’. He turned up the radio and we sat without talking as Ray Hadley rabbited on.

I did not get a lift in the mornings, but I kept getting a lift with him for some time in the evenings when we finished late. He was quite friendly and I used to meet him in his office. But one day he said to me, ‘Arthur I give you a lift home and you do not vote for us.’ There was no answer to this. Could anyone think that a lift home should change a vote in Parliament? Eddie obviously did. I figured there were some people who did nothing for nothing. After that I took a taxi voucher. The taxpayer had to cop the extra price of an independent mind in Parliament.

29/06/2016

Using the COVID19 Crisis for Bad 29/5/20

Some years ago, my attention was drawn to a 2007 book, ‘The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism’ by the Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein. The idea was that if a coastal community was blown away, say by a Tsunami with a loss of owners, records etc, some coastal land could be […]

21/06/2016

Medicare- Did the Liberals try to abolish it?

21 June 2016 This is a current question with Shorten claiming that the Liberals are trying to privatise it and Turnbull calling this a Labor lie. What is the truth? The answer is in the history of Medicare funding. Medibank was set up by the Whitlam government and the bulk billing frees were set at […]