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Category: Privatisation

05/03/2021

Subsidies for Inequality

5 March 2021

As a child our family moved to Port Kembla, and we lived on Hill 60, just above the rocks where a lot of people have drowned recently.

I went to Port Kembla Infant’s School, which was overcrowded but interesting. Half the kids there came from the migrant hostel in the old WW2 army camp where ‘displaced Persons’ (as WW2 refugee families were called) lived. These kids arrived in kindergarten without a word of English. This was taken as normal by the teachers, who just plugged on. The kids from the hostel were called ‘Hostels’, but it was a descriptor rather than a pejorative. By the time we got to 2^nd class in our 4^th year (Kindergarten, Transition, 1^st Class, 2^nd Class) there was no difference between Aussie borns and Hostels. There were 46 in my 2^nd class and girls filled the top 6 places. There was minimal racism in kids leaving this school.

There was no anti-discrimination legislation or bureaucracy in the 1950s but all the parents had jobs in the steelworks or associated industries and the Housing Commission was building suburbs full of affordable housing as fast as it could. If you had a go, you got a go. The ABC Radio had an awkward segment before the news called ‘Learn English with us’ where some somewhat stilted practical speech exercises lasted about 2 minutes. I used to wonder how the new migrants all tuned in for this little segment if they could not understand the rest. But the intention was there.

In 1966 there was a movement demanding ‘State Aid for Church Schools’ on the basis that they had paid their tax, and now they had left the state system they were paying twice. The government wanted to win the election, and this was seen as critical for the Catholic vote. The Democratic Labor Party, which had split from the ALP were the champions of this and still represented a significant threat to the ALP as they preferenced the Libs. State Aid came in.

Some time later there was a lot of emphasis on ESL (English as a Second Language) classes at TAFE, which were held during school hours. Their target was migrant women and their objective was to encourage English speaking to allow the women both to meet each other and to participate in society more easily. John Howard defunded the programme; ‘user pays’ was the new paradigm.

I now live in Sydney in a relatively central affluent suburb. Each morning 8 private school buses start near my door ferrying students to 8 private schools. No public transport needed- the school takes care of it all. Others students in private school uniforms catch subsidised public transport to the schools of their parents’ choice. But the cost of ‘choice’ is ‘residualisation’. Schools where there are a lot of ethnic students suffer from ‘white flight’, and so have concentrated social disadvantage and a lack of native role models. One school I visited in Western Sydney had had a stabbing in the playground about 25 years ago. The school photos in the foyer had no white face for the last 20 years. That was as far back as the photos went.

When we wonder if the Cabinet have any idea how the poorer folk live, my opinion is that they do not. These social dynamics have now been going for long enough that it is possible to be old enough to be in Cabinet and have no idea how the other half live. Some think that people without jobs have ‘wasted their opportunities’ or have alcohol or gambling problems. Add a little self-ri ghteous religion, ‘the poor are always with us’, a touch of arrogance and a peer group that thinks the same, and you have policies that are increasingly dismantling the fair go and equity that should be at the heart of our culture. It may be that you cannot make all people equal, but you can give all children equality of opportunity, and all adults enough to live on. We have to change direction and do just that.

Here, at the risk of being repetitive, is an article on Christian Porter.

www.themandarin.com.au/150633-christian-porter-the-unshakeable-belief-of-a-white-man-born-to-rule/?fbclid=IwAR2PbktE5jzTIgIjcL4orzdW1TO8ax03VpOBCFDTzDbRUepQnigaB1WG24Q

21/02/2021

Privatisation of Quarantine = Government Collecting Money for Corporations- Permanently??

21 February 2021

There are two quarantine stories extant, one short-term, one long-term:

The Sun Herald front page story is ‘State Debt Collectors eye hotel millions’. It is about how 5264 invoices covering 7214 travellers who stayed at quarantine hotels have not paid and thus have to be chased for the money. The fact that they had to stay at these very expensive hotels for 2 weeks to be allowed to come home seems irrelevant. The fact that they may have had to stay in hotels for 9 months overseas in lockdown situations, had to come home on very expensive flights and may have no money and no job is also not mentioned. What might have been thought of as repatriating citizens caught in a situation that was not of their making is now a routine debt like a speeding fine, to be chased by the NSW government’s privately contracted debt collectors.

Meanwhile down in Victoria in today’s Age there is talk of building a quarantine hotel at Avalon Airport. Avalon airport was ex-RAAF and is about 3 hours from Melbourne (as I discovered to my cost when taking a Jetstar fight to Melbourne without looking where it landed). It is now owned by Linfox Transport group, and the Wagner Corporation of Townsville was keen to build the quarantine facility. When asked by an interviewer what accommodation would cost, Mr Wagner replied that this was ‘commercial in confidence’. There was none of this nonsense about giving arriving travellers a ‘fair go’; presumably such assurances are not necessary to get the contracts these days.

The colonial-era Manly Quarantine Station, which was saved from developers some years ago and remains in the dangerous situation of being a historic site in NSW used to have 3 levels of accommodation, for the rich, middle class and poor. At least the financial reality was recognised then.

Presumably backpackers who needed to come home would be happy to stay in backpacker accommodation, whereas some business folk really cannot manage less than the Ritz. But the government ought to make provision for Australians who want to come home and returning travellers needing to be quarantined should have the right to return without having to pay whatever a privatised accommodation facility chooses to charge them, without the government’s contribution being to unleash the debt collectors.

www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/it-s-not-optional-debt-collectors-sent-in-for-overdue-quarantine-hotel-bills-20210219-p5747y.html

www.theage.com.au/business/companies/bold-brash-and-benevolent-wagners-wheels-turn-to-quarantine-facility-20210219-p5744b.html

30/12/2020

Privatisation of Research will Kill Millions due to Vaccine Non-Availability 30/12/20

The COVID vaccines were an international race. Many countries and companies competed. The Uni of Queensland one fell over because it made the AIDS test a false positive. There are now 5 principal ones in the media; Pfizer from Germany, Astra-Zeneca/Oxford from the UK, Moderna from the USA, Sputnik 5 from Russia, and Sinovac from China. Over here we ignore the two from Russia and China, for some reason. Do we not trust them, are we just racist, or do we want to support Big Pharma in ‘The West’?

I recently met with some medical sceptics, who said that there is no public proof that the vaccine works, i.e. published papers. I said that it was in the media that there had been a 43,000 person trial with not very many side effects. They conceded that this was correct, but pointed out that you could inject water into 43,000 people with few side effects, and that it was a question of how many of the 43,000 had been exposed to the virus, compared to a group of 43,000 in the same environment who had not been vaccinated. And you could not ask a volunteer who had just had the vaccine to cuddle up to a COVID case- that would be foolhardy. Their key point was that all the data was still in the drug companies’ hands and not publicly available. Presumably the regulatory authorities have it, and hopefully they are still being rigorous under the pressure. We have to assume the vaccines work as we need to open up the world economy.

Our government promised a fortune to these companies before they even had a product to sell, and all the bluster about having an equal world in terms of vaccine access does not seem to have dollars attached. At present there is not enough vaccine to go around, but it still matters where you start. Logically, vaccinating Australians where there is very little infection would likely save fewer lives than vaccinating people where the virus is rampant.

I have told the story before about Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine with public funds and did not patent it so that the maximum amount of vaccine could be distributed to rid the world of polio. This was in sharp contrast to Glaxo, the drug company, which found that an old unpatented drug worked against AIDS, patented it and then insisted that the price of it be at least $US2 a day, although an Indian company said that they could produce it for 7 cents. The result was several million extra AIDS cases in Africa.

Sadly the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil was a similar story. HPV was found to be the cause of cervical cancer. The vaccine was developed at Uni of Queensland by Prof Ian Frazer, and then marketed by CSL and Merck. Its roll out was considerably delayed by its cost, despite the fact that the Uni of Qld declined to insist on royalties from sales in developing countries. It is still $73 a shot in Australia (2 needed, 3 recommended), though our government makes it free to Australian schoolchildren.

This article says that the Coronavirus vaccines will worsen inequalities. This is true, because not only will poorer countries not be able to afford the vaccine, they will also have more people die and have higher health costs as they will have to treat the cases. It will also have a bigger impact on their economies. The fine rhetoric about sharing world knowledge will certainly be tested. It might be noted that the Chinese released the draft genome of the Coronavirus to the world in January 2020 (Sciencemag.org) in the interest of stopping the outbreak, which was a credit to China and gives credence to their vaccine. On the other hand, I seem to recall that Pfizer declined to be involved in information sharing, but have been unable to find the reference for this.

Pfizer did not get public funding but their development partner, BioNTech, did. The question is how much profit will there be in all this, and how much will the price stop poorer countries getting the vaccine.

The fact that governments no longer fund the research directly and go into ‘private-public partnerships’ gives rise to the feeling that governments put in the funds but the private partners both determine the priorities in research with a bias towards research that can make a profit and then make that profit. The governments then either largely fund the profit, or leave their populations unable to benefit from the research that they as taxpayers funded.

I have two relevant articles on this, one below, and one coming shortly.

www.internationalhealthpolicies.org/featured-article/why-does-pfizer-deny-the-public-investment-in-its-covid-19-vaccine/

https://amp.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/a-pitiful-response-global-economic-inequality-a-side-effect-of-vaccines-development-20201226-p56q99.html

26/04/2020

Centrelink- an Encounter 9/6/16

Sometimes we have little experiences that are wake up calls. We need to note them, and act on them. I have little to do with Centrelink. Like most North Shore doctors I assume it does its job, and also tacitly assume it has nothing to do with me. It wrote to me about 6 months […]

03/10/2019

Drug Research Crisis

3 October 2019 Governments say that they want to fund research, but think that they are very clever if they can do it ‘in cooperation with the private sector’. They think that they will save money and get some inside running to a share of profits. Mostly they are played for mugs. The private sector […]

01/07/2017

NDIS- National Disability Insurance System.

1 July 2017 I have grave fears for this system. I am unsure even of the goodwill of some of its advocates. I was on the Social Issues Committee of the NSW Parliament and we looked at Disability services and the way that these were delivered. Basically if you ask how big the disability problem […]