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Category: Personal

26/02/2025

Vale Marg White

26 February 2025

Marjorie Irene White (just call me Marg) died on 18 December 2024. She was the doyen and major organiser of the Melbourne activists of MOP UP (Movement Opposed to the Promotion of Unhealthy Products) and later BUGA UP (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions). The difference between the two groups was that MOP UP confined itself to legal activities, and BUGA UP did not.

Marg was born in 1930 in Macksville, the only child of Frank and Irene Macrae. Frank was a farmer, who took Marg everywhere he went, so she developed a handy range of practical skills and good self confidence Her mother was a schoolteacher and she helped her mother and acquired a love of teaching.

They moved to Kendal in 1937 and she was somewhat protected from the Depression as her father could grow food and her mother’s teaching job remained. Later Kendal, a town of only 600 people, was where the troop trains stopped on their way to northern Australia and Papua New Guinea. She was a popular youngster as she took treats to the troops. Frank bought a small weekender at Bonny Hills where the family spent holidays. He later retired there.

She was very musical and a good student, topping NSW in geography and going on to Uni in Armidale and then Sydney Uni where she did a BA and Dip Ed and specialised in early childhood education, believing that lessons learned early were the most important. She met her future husband, David Ogilvie White, who had got into medical school at 16, but was more interested in playing chess. She pushed him to do more work and actually pass. They married in 1954 and went to ANU in Canberra where she met Bob Hawke and Hazel, resulting in a lifelong friendship. Consistent with her idea that everyone should reach their full potential she encouraged Hazel to get a degree when Bob was not keen on this. They remained great friends, with Bob and Hazel staying with them in Melbourne. David’s career blossomed and he rose in the academic ranks becoming Professor of Virology and head of Infectious Diseases at Melbourne University.

She became involved with MOP UP (Movement Opposed to the Promotion of Unhealthy Products) and had quite a large corps of medical students who were keen to help. Some of their stunts were very effective. MOP UP made a graveyard with satiric names based on tobacco brands and handed out leaflets outside the Marlboro Australian Tennis. The sponsorship was dropped in 1985. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was met with a group of protesters in black tie outfits playing mock instruments as ‘The Royal Carcinogenic Orchestra.’ They also dropped their Benson and Hedges sponsorship. MOP UP continued street theatre and leafleting while BUGA UP refaced cigarette billboards, and occasionally alcohol or offensively sexist ones. Marg quietly worked as an organiser, but not merely of the activists, keeping in contact with the political and medical establishments, writing letters and encouraging progressive initiatives.

She was happy to contribute directly to the BUGA UP campaign; standing at a tram stop in a houndstooth tweed suit, complete with cape, she would reface the cigarette ad on an arriving tram, then stand back, spray can under her cape looking like the super-respectable middle aged schoolteacher that she was. If you were getting on or off the tram or blinked you would have missed it.

At that time the tobacco industry used ‘shop panels’, cigarette ads about 50x90cm stuck on each side of the doors of convenience stores with two-sided tape. They stuck well enough, but could be prised off easily with either a claw hammer or small jemmy. Marg went out with an activist one night to clean up the shop panels which her companion removed and stacked in the backseat of her car. There were few security guards and no CCTV cameras in the mid 1980s, but they were spotted and hailed. Her companion ran off and she drove away, but the Police had been alerted, so she was chased with Police lights flashing and sirens blaring. She pulled over and the officer who came to car window was flabbergasted to see a respectable grey-haired woman. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘I am just on my way to pick up my daughter from the ballet’ answered Marg calmly. ‘Oh, sorry lady’, said the Policeman. The story goes that he got a hard time back at the station and was told, ‘Yes, that was her; that is the exact description’. Meanwhile Marg hurried home and put the shop panels under the house in case the police returned. They never did.

Marg was a philanthropist and gave money to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Australian Ballet, as well as the Australian Conservation Foundation. She was an environmentalist and fought for causes she believed in, successfully funding an expensive QC to stop a canal development at Laurieton in NSW near the family weekender at Bonny Hills. The success of that case became a template for similar residents’ actions.

She was active in many roles in the Australian Democrats and became President of the Victorian division when they were a significant force in Australian politics. At home, she nursed her husband who had liver failure, probably occupationally acquired.

Her greatest achievement is probably the Victorian Tobacco Act of 1987. The Western Australian government had tried to ban tobacco advertising in 1983, but were beaten by sports associations that complained that they would founder without tobacco money. So the Victorian Tobacco Act sought to increase tobacco tax and use the money to buy out the sponsorships of sports, cultural events and all the other entities that had been bought by tobacco, as well as funding medical research and doing health promotion to take up the empty billboards among other initiatives. It was the first Health Promotion Foundation in the world, and the legislation passed by one vote. Nigel Gray, doyen of the Establishment and head of the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria said that the legislation would never have passed without the public support generated by the activist groups, of which Marg was a critically important member.

She is survived by three daughters and two grandchildren.
Marjorie Irene White (just call me Marg) died on 18 December 2024. She was the doyen and major organiser of the Melbourne activists of MOP UP (Movement Opposed to the Promotion of Unhealthy Products) and later BUGA UP (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions). The difference between the two groups was that MOP UP confined itself to legal activities, and BUGA UP did not.

Marg was born in 1930 in Macksville, the only child of Frank and Irene Macrae. Frank was a farmer, who took Marg everywhere he went, so she developed a handy range of practical skills and good self confidence Her mother was a schoolteacher and she helped her mother and acquired a love of teaching.

They moved to Kendal in 1937 and she was somewhat protected from the Depression as her father could grow food and her mother’s teaching job remained. Later Kendal, a town of only 600 people, was where the troop trains stopped on their way to northern Australia and Papua New Guinea. She was a popular youngster as she took treats to the troops. Frank bought a small weekender at Bonny Hills where the family spent holidays. He later retired there.

She was very musical and a good student, topping NSW in geography and going on to Uni in Armidale and then Sydney Uni where she did a BA and Dip Ed and specialised in early childhood education, believing that lessons learned early were the most important. She met her future husband, David Ogilvie White, who had got into medical school at 16, but was more interested in playing chess. She pushed him to do more work and actually pass. They married in 1954 and went to ANU in Canberra where she met Bob Hawke and Hazel, resulting in a lifelong friendship. Consistent with her idea that everyone should reach their full potential she encouraged Hazel to get a degree when Bob was not keen on this. They remained great friends, with Bob and Hazel staying with them in Melbourne. David’s career blossomed and he rose in the academic ranks becoming Professor of Virology and head of Infectious Diseases at Melbourne University.

She became involved with MOP UP (Movement Opposed to the Promotion of Unhealthy Products) and had quite a large corps of medical students who were keen to help. Some of their stunts were very effective. MOP UP made a graveyard with satiric names based on tobacco brands and handed out leaflets outside the Marlboro Australian Tennis. The sponsorship was dropped in 1985. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was met with a group of protesters in black tie outfits playing mock instruments as ‘The Royal Carcinogenic Orchestra.’ They also dropped their Benson and Hedges sponsorship. MOP UP continued street theatre and leafleting while BUGA UP refaced cigarette billboards, and occasionally alcohol or offensively sexist ones. Marg quietly worked as an organiser, but not merely of the activists, keeping in contact with the political and medical establishments, writing letters and encouraging progressive initiatives.

She was happy to contribute directly to the BUGA UP campaign; standing at a tram stop in a houndstooth tweed suit, complete with cape, she would reface the cigarette ad on an arriving tram, then stand back, spray can under her cape looking like the super-respectable middle aged schoolteacher that she was. If you were getting on or off the tram or blinked you would have missed it.

At that time the tobacco industry used ‘shop panels’, cigarette ads about 50x90cm stuck on each side of the doors of convenience stores with two-sided tape. They stuck well enough, but could be prised off easily with either a claw hammer or small jemmy. Marg went out with an activist one night to clean up the shop panels which her companion removed and stacked in the backseat of her car. There were few security guards and no CCTV cameras in the mid 1980s, but they were spotted and hailed. Her companion ran off and she drove away, but the Police had been alerted, so she was chased with Police lights flashing and sirens blaring. She pulled over and the officer who came to car window was flabbergasted to see a respectable grey-haired woman. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘I am just on my way to pick up my daughter from the ballet’ answered Marg calmly. ‘Oh, sorry lady’, said the Policeman. The story goes that he got a hard time back at the station and was told, ‘Yes, that was her; that is the exact description’. Meanwhile Marg hurried home and put the shop panels under the house in case the police returned. They never did.

Marg was a philanthropist and gave money to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Australian Ballet, as well as the Australian Conservation Foundation. She was an environmentalist and fought for causes she believed in, successfully funding an expensive QC to stop a canal development at Laurieton in NSW near the family weekender at Bonny Hills. The success of that case became a template for similar residents’ actions.

She was active in many roles in the Australian Democrats and became President of the Victorian division when they were a significant force in Australian politics. At home, she nursed her husband who had liver failure, probably occupationally acquired.

Her greatest achievement is probably the Victorian Tobacco Act of 1987. The Western Australian government had tried to ban tobacco advertising in 1983, but were beaten by sports associations that complained that they would founder without tobacco money. So the Victorian Tobacco Act sought to increase tobacco tax and use the money to buy out the sponsorships of sports, cultural events and all the other entities that had been bought by tobacco, as well as funding medical research and doing health promotion to take up the empty billboards among other initiatives. It was the first Health Promotion Foundation in the world, and the legislation passed by one vote. Nigel Gray, doyen of the Establishment and head of the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria said that the legislation would never have passed without the public support generated by the activist groups, of which Marg was a critically important member.

She is survived by three daughters and two grandchildren.

14/02/2025

A Visit to East Timor- and New Year’s Eve at the Presidential Palace

2 January 2025

I have always been fascinated by the story of East Timor. It was very much a colonial backwater, a historical remnant of the Portuguese, who had first arrived in 1529 and fought with the Dutch until treaties in 1869 and 1893. Up till 1850, it had been under the Portuguese administration in Macau.

Timor was invaded by the Japanese during WW2, and East Timorese fought with the Australian and Dutch against them, running a guerilla campaign. Between 40-70,000 Timorese were killed as the Japanese seized food supplies and burned villages.

After WW2 it remained a Portuguese colonial backwater with minimal education or infrastructure development. In 1960 it gained the right to Independence, but was still under Portugal. Indonesia, under Sukarno, which was trying to get hold of West Papua specifically stated that it had no interest in East Timor. The small Viqueque revolt resulted in some improvements in education and some Timorisation of the civil service.

There was a revolution in Portugal in 1974 and the decolonisation of Mozambique and Angola speeded the decolonisation process, with a new Governor legalising political parties. Two groups emerged, the left-leaning Fretilin and the Right-leaning UDT (Democratic Timor Union), which was more a party of the elite and initially favoured continuing ties with Portugal. Indonesia had just eliminated the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) in a bloody struggle, so were concerned about Fretilin. Whitlam. the Prime Minister in Australia, who supported the Indonesian takeover of West Papua, was concerned that there would be a non-viable state in the region.

Fretilin and the UDT were initially in coalition, but the Indonesian military made it clear the to the UDT that they would not tolerate a Fretilin government and the coalition broke up. On 11 August 1975 UDT mounted a coup, as they were concerned at the increasing popularity of Fretilin and asked for union with Indonesia and the Indonesians to help them.

Indonesia immediately invaded, and five Australian journalists, who were covering the story in Balibo disappeared without trace. It had been claimed that Fretilin were communists so the Australian and US governments took no action, either against Indonesia or in pursuit of the journalists’ fate. They became known as ‘The Balibo Five’. Only the Australian Democrats supported the right of the East Timorese for self-determination, and some sections of the Left of the ALP, who were held to silence, of course.

Fretilin campaigned in the UN for recognition, particularly Jose Ramos Horta and after 24 years in 1999 and in the presence of an economic crisis the Indonesians agreed to a referendum on self-determination. The referendum result, which was widely expected, favoured independence from Indonesia by almost 80%. But gangs of pro-Indonesian youth, helped by the Indonesian government went on a killing spree. It was estimated that 200,000 Timorese had died during the 25 year Indonesian occupation, many ‘disappearing’; and about a third from malnutrition. But immediately after the vote, the militias killed about 1,400 people and forced about 300,000 into West Timor.

The UN intervened quite quickly with UNMET, the UN Mission to East Timor, in which the Australians were first to arrive and helped stabilise the situation.

Once East Timor achieved independence in 2002, they had the problem of economic survival. Australia held negotiations about where the boundary would lie, which was critical because there is a lot of gas in the Timor Sea and it would depend who owned it. Australia bugged the room where the East Timorese cabinet were deliberating and insisted on the border being very close to their coast. A whistleblower revealed this bugging in 2004 and the Timorese appealed successfully to the International Court.

Australia withdrew from the Court process, but then in 2012 agreed to the border being the midline between the countries, which is the international norm. Thw whistleblower, codenamed Witness K and his lawyer Bernard Collaery, the ex-ACT Attorney-General, were pursued by the Australian government in the courts and convicted of breaching national security.

So I have always wanted to visit Timor Leste, and have finally made it for a10 day trip (not really long enough).

It is a 3rd World country, but seems to have a great sense of hope. It is an hour and half flight from Darwin, and about the same from Bali. There is not much information available to tourists, though a Lonely Planet and some other guidebooks are now available.

I have taken advice from a diplomat friend and will be going in a car with a guide, (the expensive rich person’s way to go that I have always despised) so I will not be giving advice on the cheap local buses that go between the major cities and are quite cheap.

Our guide, Guido (short for Egidio Da Purificatcao Soares of Timor Sightseeing) was brought up on a farm in the western part of the country and recalls as a 14 year old his whole family were threatened by gangs immediately after the referendum. The gang asked his father did he want to go to West Timor or stay in East Timor. He says that he father wisely said that the family wanted to go, because if he hadn’t they would have been assumed to be in favour of independence and massacred on the spot. They had had 14 cows and had already sold some, but took a few in a truck as they went to West Timor. He said that at the border the Indonesians threw them out of the truck as if they were sacks of potatoes, searched the truck then threw them back in in the same way. They sold the cows for a pittance and lived in a tent in Indonesia for 3 weeks until the UN had negotiated with the Indonesians and the ‘refugees’ were allowed to return. He said he was pleased to see the Australian forces at the border.

He commented that in the Portugese times there was no electricity except in small parts of Dili and the Portugese generated their own on their properties. The Indonesians had improved infrastructure and electricity and introduced universal education, but anyone who was thought to support Fretilin or independence simply disappeared.

As we were here on New Years Eve, I wondered what to do and assumed that we would watch the fireworks on the beach. Guido suggested we go to the Presidential Palace. I assumed that this was impossible for a tourist. Not so, the Presidential Palace is open to all on New Year’s Eve. So we went. It has a large concreted area about the size of 3 football fields in front of it, with lawns about twice that size again. There was a stage set up and a dozen life size nativity scenes all the way up the wide drive. The military at the gates welcomed us and said that they would be giving out free food and drinks at 9pm. There were quite a lot of people, but it was not crowded early, with a lot of young families and kids with balloons and flashing lights. The state had popular local singers, with replays on some big TV screens like at a football match. There was a wonderful festive atmosphere. I held my phone up and started to take a video pan to try to capture the atmosphere. As I did so a man came close and thrust something into my spare hand. I stopped filming and looked at him. It was the Prime Minister, Xanana Gusmao handing out ham and salad rolls and fruit juice. He had 3 young minders in T shirts merely carrying boxes of rolls and drinks. Naturally I pursued him and asked for a photo, and he very courteously asked me my name and where I came from. The event went on with presentations to people who have obviously done good, and also what seemed like a very long sermon, but of course, apart from the MC breaking into English to welcome foreign visitors, the whole thing was in Portugese. At about 9pm, some military wandered around and urged us to get some of their free food from the trucks near the gates. They obviously have a very good relationship with the populace. The President Jose Ramos Horta arrived with the Cardinal and about 20 ambassadors and made a speech at about 11 followed by one from Xanana Gusmao.

They had a table in the middle of the open area with seats for the dignitaries. At midnight there was the countdown, a lot of fireworks (no, not quite as good as Sydney), and the broke out large amounts of champagne and cut a huge 2025 Fruit cake and gave some to those nearby including us. It was like going back 50 years, where everyone was trusted, there was no security and the largesse was universal.

East Timor is in an interesting time. The population is very young and full of hope. They want to develop tourism and also the Sunshine gas project which is being done by Woodside and the Australians in the Timor Sea. Obviously this will be a financial lifeline, but not good for a warming planet. I asked Guido if we could go to the south of the country where all this is to happen. He said, ‘Yes, but there is nothing to see, it is just coastline at present’. He took some Spanish folk there a short while ago who were doing a feasibility study for a gas platform. So I will see the sights including Balibo and the Museums of the Revolution in Balibo and Dili, which was not open this week. I may revise this post after those visits.

East Timor is currently the least visited country in Asia. This is worth changing.

21/12/2024

Vale John Marsden

20 December 2024

We were all saddened to hear of the death of John Marsden. He was certainly the greatest Australian writer of books for adolescents in my lifetime.

I knew him well. He was in my class at boarding school and we were in the debating team together and rivals for the oratory prize. He was a day boy.

He used to wait at the bus stop and talk to the more junior boys there. This was thought of as a bit unusual. No one usually took an interest in kids younger than themselves. Older kids usually went to the library and only appeared just before the bus went. He also did not catch the first available bus, but stayed at the bus stop talking- not many people realised that. It was not until years later that the reason became known to some.

His father hit him frequently and he did not want to go home. Years later he told the story that he had been sitting on his mother’s knee when he was quite young and she had asked him. ‘Do you love me?’ He had replied ‘I don’t know’, and she promptly pushed him off her knees onto the floor. The idea that the question needed to be asked is so odd that the reply becomes less so. There is no doubt that his childhood was very unhappy.

We went out one evening to a debate and came home by train. Some of our group smoked and then when he got home he unfortunately hung his coat over a chair and the cigarette packet came tumbling out. His father gave him a beating as usual, and insisted that all his friends, i.e.us, come to the car park to be ticked off by his father or he would take the matter to the Headmaster- a very serious matter at that time. His father duly drove up, wound the window down and berated us, standing in the car park. John was quietly dying of embarrassment but, hey, that was life at school. But while we were thinking about getting away from school and its problems, he was thinking about how things could be better and talking to kids at their level about their issues. He understood adolescent kids because he talked to them a lot.

He left home soon after he left school and had some years of financial and personal hardship, with some of the parents of his schoolmates helping him.

I lost track of him for some years, as neither he nor I were very active in the old boys for a long time as he had moved to Melbourne. I had become aware of his writing and read ‘Letters from the Inside’, the correspondence between two 15 year old girls who start as pen pals. One is in gaol, though it is not clear why, and the other lives in fear of a violent brother. The fact that he could write so credibly from the perspective of adolescent girls was quite extraordinary, and he left readers tantalised at the end. He met my son when he was just a baby but later my son became a huge fan of his Tomorrow series. He was so enthusiastic about John’s book that his teacher credited him with getting the whole class to read it.

John stopped writing to set up his school, funded considerably from his book royalties and embodying the ideas he had developed from looking at the dysfunctions that he had experienced and the successes he believed were possible.

When John came back as the honoured speaker at a school reunion I caught up with him, which was great. He was working very hard, running the school that he had started with a skeleton administrative staff, and all the while writing to the people who wrote to him, answering their questions, helping them with their fears and firing them with his enthusiasm. But he was still smoking and it had taken some toll of his health so (as usual) I urged him to Quit and put in place a succession plan at the school. He did those things, though I do not claim it was due to my urgings.

I had always had the dream that I would go to his school and teach for a while, things that kids are not taught these days, perhaps in the time after exams when the kids are merely filling in time waiting for the Christmas holidays, or speaking at a speech day. Sadly, it never happened. When I went to Melbourne, it was either term time and he was too busy, or holidays when he went away.

He died suddenly, though perhaps not unexpectedly, so this will not happen now. As we get older, we need to be more urgent with our intents.

Fortunately he will have many friends and many writers able to give credit to his greatness, but also to understand and express his warmth and his humility.

16/02/2024

‘Health Policy’

Chesterfield-Evans, A. (2024)

Journal of Australian Political Economy No. 92, pp. 98-105.

HEALTH POLICY
Arthur Chesterfield-Evans

Just before the 2022 federal election, Mark Butler, now the Minister for
Health in the Albanese government, spoke to the National Press Club,
praising the courage of the Hawke government in creating Medicare in
1984. His speech also set modest priorities for a prospective Labor
government, committing to (1) improve the digital health record and make
the MyHealth record actually useful; (2) develop multidisciplinary care;
(3) establish a new funding model for ‘MyMedicare’; and (4) grow the
medical workforce, with special mention of nurses and pharmacists (Butler
2022). Significantly, Butler did not commit afresh to Medicare as a
universal health scheme free at the point of delivery, the key element of
the original 1984 scheme that he praised. In an environment where,
politically, it seems that taxes cannot be increased, perhaps this ideal may
be an impossibility, but it is surely significant that it is no longer stated as
an aspiration.
Currently, Medicare is quietly dying as the low rebates cause doctors to
abandon it. Australia is moving to a US-type private system by
default. This has resulted in large amounts of hand-wringing rhetoric, but
so far little action. This short article comments on the changes initiated by
the current Labor government during its first year and a half, contrasting
these with the deep-seated problems needing to be addressed if better
health outcomes are to be achieved.
Labor’s reforms
The government has made some minor changes to Medicare which came
in with great fanfare on November 1, 2023. There were new item numbers

for new specialist technologies or treatments and an increased Medicare
rebate for GPs, up to $41.40 for a standard visit for a RACGP member,
which is 40.6% of the AMA fee. Doctors without the RACGP qualification
still get $21, which is 20.6% of the $102 AMA fee.
When Medicare was born, the Medicare rebate was 85% of the AMA fee.
The rebate has risen at half the inflation rate for 39 years, so doctors now
feel ripped off every time they see a Medicare patient. Labor blames the
disparity on the rebate freezes of the previous LNP Coalition governments,
but its own record is poor. Successive governments of all types have
deferred to the private health lobby and are starving Medicare, slowly
defaulting towards a principally private system, as in the USA. This is a
deeply-troubling prospect because the US health system has been
recurrently criticised (Commonwealth Fund 2021) – and rightly so –
because it makes access to health care dependent on ability to pay. Notably,
however, it is the world’s best system at turning sickness into money.
The other recent Labor ‘reform’ was to allow pharmacists to process
prescribed medications to cover patients’ requirements for 60 days, rather
than 30 days, thereby halving the costs of prescribing and dispensing.
While this may seem helpful, patients are often confused by complicated
generic names and generic brands; and compliance or discontinuation of
medicines is a largely unquantified problem. These are existing problems
with the current arrangements for dispensing medications: the recent
policy change, while well-intentioned, does not redress them. It transfers
resources from professional staff to the pharmaceutical industry.
The ‘Strengthening Medicare Taskforce’ had good medical and allied
health representatives and support. Its December 2022 report defined the
problems but, trying to avoid controversy, positive suggestions were thin
on the ground. A deeper analysis and more comprehensive approach to the
redress of health issues is needed.
Basic problems in the health system
Diverse funding sources causes cost-shifting
Fundamentally, no-one is in overall control of the health system. It has a
number of different funding sources: the Federal and State governments,
the Private Health Insurance industry (PHI), Medicare and individuals

themselves. Workers Compensation (WC) and Compulsory Third Party
(CTP) insurers also put in a bit. These arrangements lead to a situation
where each funding entity attempts to shift costs without any real care for
the overall cost of the system. Private entities such as pathology and
radiology also have an interest in providing more services, whether they
are needed or not.
The broad division of the health system is that public hospitals and
emergency departments (EDs) are State-funded, and non-hospital services
are Federally, PHI or self (patient) funded. There is some overlap,
however, because the State’s provision of some community-based services
allows them to save on hospital-bed days; and private funds paid to State
hospital in-patients are eagerly sought. The starvation of Medicare (which
reduces the Federal government’s spending) has resulted in more patients
going to EDs at higher (State) cost, as well as increasing PHI and patient
costs.
This cost-shifting has evident implications for the affordability of health
care: notably, a recent study showed that Australia, when compared to 10
other countries, scored poorly on its measure of affordability
(Commonwealth Fund 2021).

A new health paradigm is needed
Yet more fundamentally, there is a huge problem with the conceptual
model of the health system. In common parlance, the ‘health system’ is the
‘paying to treat illness’ system. Paying doctors to see and treat patients is
seen as the major cost and is the most politically fraught element in the
system.
Historically, everyone was assumed to be healthy and had episodes of
either infectious diseases or surgical problems. They went into a hospital
for a brief period and either recovered or died. The legacy of this is that
heroic interventions are over-resourced and the more cost-effective early
interventions are under-resourced.
Infectious disease is now relatively uncommon, notwithstanding the recent
and ongoing coronavirus concerns. Most disease is chronic; and the
objective is to maintain health for as long as possible and to support those
who need support in the community rather than in institutions. ‘Health’
must be re-defined as a state of physical and mental wellbeing; and
maintaining it as ‘demand management’ for the treatment system.

Life-style diseases of diet, obesity, smoking, vaping, alcohol, drug-use and
lack of exercise need attention. It might be commented that these habits
are more determined by the political economy of the products than by any
health considerations; and the government should intervene to re-balance
this market failure.

Hierarchies, cartels and corporatisation
The medical system is hierarchical with specialists at the top and GPs at
the bottom. The specialist colleges have produced less practitioners than
would have been optimal. The starvation of General Practice has led to
increasing specialist referrals for simple procedures. Most patients are
happy to go along with this, though often much less happy about the rising
costs. Practitioners tend to work down to their station rather than up to
their capacity. GPs, if given the appropriate additional education and
empowered to act, could do what quite a lot of specialists do now, while
nurses could take the load from GPs; and, in terms of home support, a more
comprehensive and flexible workforce needs to be developed.
Private medical insurance systems are a further source of problems. They
have marketing, churn, profits, liability and fraud issues; and they make it
necessary to account for every item of every procedure. While the
corporations watch every cost, the regulator cannot. Corporations buy
medical practices and take up to 55% of the gross revenue. Smaller
radiology practices are being gobbled up as investments (Cranston 2020).
If overheads are defined as the amount of money put in compared to the
amount paid for treatments, Medicare costs about 5% and PHIs, as they
are regulated in Australia, about 12%. In the USA, the private health funds
take up to 35%, and Australia’s CTP system got close to 50%. A universal
health insurance system could avoid many of these costs and would be far
superior from a social equity point of view.
Similar problems are evident in the provision of care for people with
disabilities. Labor pioneered the NDIS when last in office a decade ago,
and rightly claims this as evidence of its commitment to redress the
previous neglect. However, the NDIS can be considered as a privatisation
of the welfare system. It overlaps medical system functions and is poorly
regulated. If its efficiency is judged by the percentage of money put in that
is paid to the actual workers delivering the service, care is not very

efficient. There have also been significant criminal rip-offs (Galloway
2023).
Retirement care arrangements have major flaws too. Aged-care
accommodation is largely driven by the real estate industry; and access to
continuing care is an add-on of often dubious quality.

What should the government do?
The problems described above are diverse, deep-seated and not easily
rectified. However, a government intent on staying in office for a series of
terms could heed the call for some big thinking, drawing on the experience
of health practitioners themselves. Here is a list of what might be done,
becoming more medical and more politically difficult as it progresses:
• Keep people healthy with education, clean water, sanitation, housing,
good food, regular exercise, high vaccination rates, road safety,
universal swimming lessons, CPR and first aid training and the active
discouragement of smoking, vaping, alcohol and drug use, junk food
and gambling.
• Provide housing with graded community support options for those
people with disadvantage or impairment. Create a registration and
insurance system for home and community support services, so that
individuals can buy standardised services from other individuals.
• Maintain fixed staff-patient ratios related to the disability
classification of residents in institutional care.
• Make maximum use of community and school interventions and
support services such as District and Community nurses and School
nurses, mental health support networks, Aged Care Assessment
Teams, Hospitals in the Home etc.
• Address health problems as early and as low down the support and
treatment hierarchy as possible, by empowering those who provide
the services.
• Create a meaningful regulatory, inspection and enforcement system
for support services, both community and residential, and for
workplaces and recreational facilities.
• Use the medical information system to research drug and treatment
effectiveness.

• Support General Practitioners and try to increase their ability to solve
problems without referral. Have GPs work in Health Centres with
community support workers as far as possible; and improve
communication with data collection a by-product of normal work, not
an additional imposition.
• Have independent evaluation of the numbers needed in the specialties
and pressure the colleges to provide these numbers. Use waiting times
as an initial index.
• Initiate either university-based or college-based continuing medical or
professional education, with mandatory refresher exams every
decade.
• Have universal professional indemnity insurance, with doctors and
other health professionals unable to be sued if they report all incidents
of sub-optimal outcomes within 48 hours of becoming aware of them,
and participate in regular quality control meetings.
• Publicise and promote organ donation, end of life plans, wills and
enduring powers of attorney as sensible steps in life-management.
• Evaluate Intensive Care interventions in QALY (Quality-Adjusted
Life Years) terms, researching their outcomes and comparing them to
earlier intervention initiatives.
• Change the composition of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory
Committee so that it has no pharmaceutical industry representative on
it; and remove ministerial discretion from its decisions. The previous
system evaluated new drug listing approvals with a cost-benefit
analysis (Doran et al. 2008), but the Howard reforms of 2007,
following the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement and lobbying by
Pfizer, put a drug industry representative on this committee, making
its negotiations more transparent and thus more difficult for the PBS
to negotiate prices (Access to Medicine Working Group 2007).
• Work towards replacing Workers Compensation and CTP insurance
schemes with income guarantee schemes (this will only be possible
when Medicare allows timely treatment).
• Create a credible and indexed scheme for paying medical
professionals which does not have KPIs that distort performance.

• Make Medicare a universal taxpayer funded health system that is free
at the point of delivery and stop subsidising PHI. It might be noted
that the Government currently quotes Medicare and PHI costs
together as a sum rather than itemising the two, which serves to
disguise the subsidy to PHI (Parliament of Australia 2022).

Conclusion
The current federal Labor government has made statements about health
policy reform and done minor tinkering during the first year and a half in
office. Based on this start, it is doubtful that it will have the courage to
make the necessary major changes, addressing the systemic problems.
Fine rhetoric is unlikely to achieve much. That makes it doubly important
to develop proposals for more fundamental reform. Written with this
intention, the suggestions made in this article could be the basis for
tackling the fundamental institutional and political economic issues
problems associated with personal and societal ill-health.
Dr Arthur Chesterfield-Evans trained as a surgeon in Sydney and the UK
and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He currently works as a
GP with interests in workers’ compensation and third-party injury. He has
been a tobacco activist and an elected member of the upper house of the
NSW Parliament. He has Master’s degrees in Occupational Health and in
Political Economy.
chesterfieldevans@gmail.com

References
Butler, M. (2022) ‘Address to National Press Club, 2 May,’ available:
www.health.gov.au/ministers/the-hon-mark-butler-mp/media/minister-for-health-and-aged-
care-speech-national-press-club-2-may-2023.
Commonwealth Fund (2021) US Report, available:
www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2021/aug/mirror-mirror-2021-
reflecting-poorly.
Cranston, M. (2020) ‘Radiology enjoys a post-virus buying boom’, Australian Financial
Review, available: www.afr.com/policy/economy/radiology-enjoys-a-post-virus-buying-
boom-20201106-p56c7k.

Doran, E., Henry, D., Faunce, T.A. and Searles, A. (2008) ‘Australian pharmaceuticals policy
and the idea of innovation’, Journal of Australian Political Economy, 62, pp. 39-60.
Galloway, A. (2023) ‘Federal crime syndicates using cash vouchers and gifts to steal NDIS
funds’, The Sydney Morning Herald, available: www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/criminal-
syndicates-using-cash-vouchers-and-gifts-to-steal-ndis-funds-20230414-p5d0ma.html.
Parliamentary Library (2022) Health overview, available:
www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_departments/Parliamentary_Library/p
ubs/rp/BudgetReview202223/HealthOverview.
PBS (2007) ‘Access to medicines working group’, available: www.pbs.gov.au/info Access to
Medicines /general/working-groups/amwg/amwg-jul-2007.
Sax, S. (1984) A Strife of Interests: Politics and Policies in Australian Health Services,
Sydney: George Allen and Unwin.
Searles, A., Jefferys, S., Doran, E. and Henry D.A. (2007) ‘Reference pricing, generic drugs
and proposed changes to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme’, Medical Journal of Australia,
187(4), pp. 236-39.
Strengthening Medicare Taskforce (2022) Taskforce Report, Commonwealth Department of
Health, available: www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-02/strengthening-medicare-taskforce-report_0.pdf.

09/11/2023

Burma/Myanmar Sportswashing

9 November 2023

I visited Myanmar (Burma) in December 2017.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace prize winning daughter of the founder of modern Burma, who was immensely popular with the people had been elected in a landslide in 2015. She and her party had boycotted the 2010 elections as farcical, but the military dictatorship had allowed her to stand in 2015, where she had won with 86% of the parliamentary seats.

Despite this win, the military junta still refused to yield power and kept the critical portfolios in the Cabinet, so she was nominally in charge and trying to change the system but her hands were largely tied. It was hard to get anyone to talk about politics, and few spoke English, but I had enough contacts to let me in on the situation.

It was a third world country trying to develop tourism. It had some relatively modern tourist buses but few hotels of a reasonable standard. (This did not bother me as a lifetime backpacker). Most cars were old, but there were a significant number of modern ones. The only feature of these was that they were right hand drive in a country that drives on the right, so the drivers were on the wrong side when it came to overtaking. It was because Japan had made a number of recent model second hand cars available and these had been snapped up.

Yangon, the biggest city and historical capital had a building that should have been the Parliament and it was in quite good condition but mothballed and currently not used for anything. The city was third world, crowded and prone to blackouts, so many buildings had diesel generators in the street outside, which were turned on when the blackouts came, making pretty bad pollution worse.

The people were friendly and courteous, and keen to develop the new tourism industry that had opened up under the same pressure on the military government that had led to the elections. There was a palpable tension between the population and the military, who moved around with surly expressions as if they knew that they were hated, but were not going to give ground.

This was very evident in Mandalay, the second largest city, which has an old palace in a large fortified area, complete with a moat. The military have taken control of all but the central palace with signs forbidding anyone walking in the extensive (neglected) gardens. They have a large depot within the grounds and a surly military guard post at the gate that inspects passports.

The other major expression of this separateness was in Naypyidaw, the capital. This city was recently built with Chinese money and is in the mountains about 3 hours drive from Yangon, presumably to make it less vulnerable to possible revolution. It is very modern with 8 lane highways with absolutely minimal traffic. The foreigners were in a cluster of large modern hotels, again Chinese-built. The hotels were remarkably cheap for their standard, but I noted that at 9pm there were almost no lights on in any of the rooms and there were only about 20 people for breakfast in our large international-standard hotel. The foreign hotel area was a bus ride from where the people lived, and that was not a large area. The National library was a modern air-conditioned building, not partially large. We were about the only people in it apart from the staff. It was on a bus route, but nowhere near any population centre.

Four years later, in February 2021, there was a military coup and Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested on a number of charges related to national security. She has been in prison ever since on charges that the western countries have called politically motivated. It seems that her major crime was to use a two-way radio phone network that was not accessible to the military junta. Her economic advisor, Australian Professor Sean Turnell was also tried without an interpreter and gaoled. He was released in November 2022 after 21 months in detention and representations from the Australian government. There was some resistance to the coup and some people were killed. Resistance is ongoing and almost certainly widely supported, but it has had minimal publicity in the western or Australian media since Prof Turnell’s release.

The reason for this post is that a soccer team from Myanmar with strong junta connections is to play Macarthur FC in Sydney shortly. This looks like a sportswashing exercise to legitimise the government and lessen its isolation.

I suggest that you write to Penny Wong and ask that they not be given visas www.pennywong.com.au/contact/, and to Macarthur FC and ask that they not play them, email: admin@macarthurfc.com.au. Here is the request from the Australian Coalition for Democracy in Burma:

https://scontent.fsyd3-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.15752-9/384547058_856337555857136_1438592052866809960_n.jpg?_nc_cat=106&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=8cd0a2&_nc_ohc=d416jFlBrW8AX8aY4cQ&_nc_ht=scontent.fsyd3-1.fna&oh=03_AdQLV1CGyViy42LJ37Vj04hsMufoe42jxyxxt5uM6PUNPg&oe=6573B503

04/04/2023

Classification of Impairment

4 April 2023

I was lucky enough in my surgical training years to have most of a year working as neurosurgical registrar for Dr John Grant. He set up the 1st spinal Injuries Unit in Australia saying that while everyone was looking for a miracle cure that would allow injured spinal tissue to repair, most paraplegics were dying of bedsores or infections coming up their urinary catheters and much better practices and training was needed.

He went to England in 1960 and with Sir Ludwig Guttman started the Stoke Mandeville games, the precursor of the Paralympics. He developed the Paralympic Games to help his patients, who were mostly young men whose lives had been shattered after a catastrophic injury, often after doing something daring or unwise. Wheelchair athletics was a major part of this, as it gave the young paraplegic people something to strive for. John Grant became head of the Australian Paralympic movement and Chair of the Organising Committee of the Sydney 2000 Paralympic Games. My part was merely to help treat the spinal patients.

Later I moved into occupational medicine so as to fund my work in the anti-tobacco movement. There I found impairment from workplace injury and had to decide who could work and who could not. This got a nasty edge to it as insurers wanted people classified as fit, so that if they would not work their pay could be suspended. The Courts argued about this until the legal process was deemed so expensive that the American Medical Association worked with the insurance industry to devise a complicated medical examination which measured ‘Whole Body Impairment’ as a percentage. This was not supposed to simply translate simply into how much money an injured person was awarded, but of course that is exactly what happened. Since pain cannot be measured it had to be left out of the calculation, so you can have terrible pain, but if you have only lost a few measurable degrees of back movement, your percentage impairment may be minimal. The system also makes no distinction between an impairment and a disability. If you are a labourer and have a lower body injury and cannot work at all or are someone who works at a desk and can maintain their previous income, the impairment is the same. I have never learned the details of the system, as I think it a bad farce, but it is used to assess impairment in Australia, makes a lot of money for the doctors who do the medicals, and saves the insurers a fortune. Of course there are few who try to fake injury, but in my experience this is fairly rare, far rarer than insurance companies would have you believe.

But making an objective assessment of what a person can and cannot do is not easy, and so one is to pity the classifiers who want a level playing field by classifying people for the Paralympic Games. Given that each country wants to pick a team of winners and they classify their own athletes, it is little wonder that in some countries ‘intellectually disabled’ are as smart as anyone else, or that you cannot even notice a limp in some of the runners.

The 4 corners of Monday 2 April looked at the whole Paralympic Classification system and produced damning figures that 10 of 12 of the gold medal winning Spanish basketball were not disabled at all, and that in some areas 69% of the winners had minimal disability.

As this sad farce continues there is a huge kerfuffle lest the tiny number of trans athletes with the genetic advantage of having had male hormones might get an advantage over females.

John Grant must be turning in his grave.

26/11/2022

The IR Bill- two problems and a suggestion

25 November 2022

When I buy petrol, I sometimes ask the attendant how much he or she is paid. Often they glance at the CCTV camera and say that they cannot answer that. But the other morning early I asked an attendant who looked like a very tired student from the Indian subcontinent. Yes, she had worked all night, a 12 hour shift for $10/hour cash. I asked her how she thought she might get a decent wage. She replied, ‘Well, an Australian boss might help’. I took this to mean someone who paid an award wage.

As small business tries hard to exempt itself from ‘sector-wide’ bargaining, I wondered how she will fare if there is still no industry-wide award or no enforcement. What will change?

I have a friend who runs a small business and he says that although wages have not risen, neither have small business profits. I asked why? He said that the supply chain had ‘consolidated’ and took a larger share of the final price. One might note that Deliveroo just left food delivery, Amazon is taking an increased percentage of online retail sales, Airbnb takes an increasing percentage of accommodation spending, Uber has increased its percentage take from its rides, and Spotify pays very little to those who make their music. It is the Monopoly game in real life, the big get bigger and the frail are pressed to the rail. The view that the biggest problem small business has is big business seems a neglected truism. The question is whether this will or indeed can be addressed by Federal Parliament. The point is that competition drives down prices, but cartels and oligopolies develop if not stopped. A new book looks at this problem, Chokepoint Capitalism www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/books/2022/11/30/chokepoint-capitalism#mtr

Another aspect is that the system seems totally unable to restrain is the salaries of top executives. One person I know advised, ‘I always vote against the management salary increases at the AGM’. There is legislation that salary rises have to be approved by the shareholders, but it seems that the top executives always have enough proxies to ensure that they salary rises come despite the efforts of small shareholders like my friend. So I suggest legislation that stipulates that no executive may get more money than, say, 20 times the full time equivalent hourly rate of the lowest paid person in the organisation. It seems that a few hundred thousand at the top does not matter, but a few dollars at the bottom do. This needs to brought into perspective.

25/11/2022

Fire Bombing of Friendly Jordie a Litmus Test

24 November 2022

The fire-bombing of the Bondi home of Friendly Jordie on 23/11/22 will be a litmus test for the NSW Police.

Friendly Jordie is a comedian and political commentator who took on John Barilaro, famously staying at his luxury property while filming commentary critical of him. He was then accused of stalking Barilaro, using Police powers usually limited to terrorist suspects, which looked very much like abuse of Police powers.
He has a considerable audience, particularly among younger viewers.

Clearly this was a threat to him personally.

I have some experience of this. In 1983 I was living alone in Newtown in an upstairs bedroom and at about 3am I was woken by the sound of breaking glass downstairs. I looked out, but could see nothing. Quite quickly there was a smell of kerosene and immediately after the whoosh of a fire being lit and a raging fire in our back lane, like a car on fire. In some trepidation I ran downstairs, went to the back door, turned on the outside light and started to hose the back fence. There was no response from any neighbours and I reflected that in a house full of semi-detached houses almost everyone except me slept in the front bedrooms away from the lane. My hose did not have a nozzle, so I stood at the back door and had put my finger in the end of the hose to direct the water. There was an explosion and the light went out. This was pretty frightening, but it turned out that some of the water from my hose had squirted upwards onto the light, which had exploded, luckily a little away from directly overhead.

After a while the fire died down somewhat and I took stock of the situation and ventured to the back gate. A car was burning out close to the fence, but the fence was undamaged. I called triple zero and reflected on the situation. There was a World Congress of Advertising Agencies at the Opera House on and two days before, BUGA UP had staged some street theatre on the forecourt with a confession booth with ‘Redeematiser’ sign on it, and a ‘priest’ in a cassock urging advertisers to come in and confess their sins. I had been there to get interviews for my radio program ‘Puff Off- Australia’s leading program on smoking.’ An executive from the ‘Tobacco Institute’ had walked by and been conspicuously unamused.

The Fire brigade arrived very quickly, put the rest of the fire out and prised open the boot, which was empty. I waited for the Police for about an hour, then went back to bed. The Police turned up about an hour later, more than 2 hours after I had called and the officer smelled strongly of alcohol. I told him of my concerns about who might have been responsible for the incident, but he was quite dismissive. He said that people often set cars alight. I said that I had lived in the area for more than a decade, went for long evening walks and had never seen a car set alight. He said that he would get the chassis number from the number plate on the computer, (as he did not want to bother even looking under the now-cooled bonnet). Some years later there was a lot of publicity about corruption allegations in Newtown Police Station.

So there is a real question whether the fire bombing attack on Friendly Jordie will be investigated adequately. He has a far higher profile than I had, and fire-bombing a house is more extreme than torching a car. But his allegations touch Caesar nearer.

Here is the story in the SMH:

ARSON INVESTIGATION
YouTuber ponders suspect shortlist after latest attack
Sally Rawsthorne, Sarah Keoghan, SMH 24 November 2022
YouTube personality Jordan Shanks-Markovina, better known as Friendlyjordies, says he has a ‘‘long list of suspects’’ in the alleged arson attack on his Bondi home on Wednesday, the second time the address has been targeted in a week.
Police and Fire and Rescue NSW have launched investigations after the property in the eastern suburbs sustained ‘‘significant’’ fire damage in the early hours of the morning.
Shanks-Markovina, 33, who is an Australian political commentator and stand-up comedian, said yesterday he had a ‘‘long list of suspects’’ based on his work.
‘‘We’ve done some extremely dangerous reporting over the last year on a bunch of extremely powerful people and corporations; there are many people that would want to do that,’’ he said.
‘‘I do have a shortlist in my head of who I think could’ve done it. I would hope that the NSW strike force that is supposedly set up for fixated people and terrorists would be looking into this instead of a comedian and his team for six months straight,’’ he said.
Friendlyjordies producer Kristo Langker was charged by NSW Police’s Fixated Persons Unit in June last year and accused of stalking former NSW deputy premier John Barilaro. The charges were later dropped.
There is no suggestion Barilaro is involved in the alleged arson attack.
‘‘Someone has just tried to kill Jordan Shanks,’’ his lawyer, Mark Davis, said.
It is the second fire at the home, which is a subdivision, in a week. Davis said last Thursday’s arson attack hit the other dwelling mistakenly. ‘‘It’s the second time, there was an attempt [last week].’’
Shanks-Markovina yesterday posted an image of the fire to his Instagram account, captioning it ‘‘I’m still alive’’.
The YouTuber was not home at the time of the alleged attack because he couldn’t find his key, instead spending the night at another property.
Emergency services were called to Wilga Street by multiple neighbours just after midnight on Wednesday. ‘‘The fire is being treated as suspicious,’’ Fire and Rescue NSW’s Adam Dewberry said.
Specialist forensic police and dogs ‘‘trained in the use of detecting accelerants’’ will investigate the cause of the fire, he said.
NSW Fire and Rescue said it took crews half an hour to extinguish the blaze, which ‘‘caused fairly significant damage’’.
The home remained a crime scene yesterday, with detectives arriving at the address in the afternoon as the smell of smoke hung in the air.
‘‘Officers from eastern suburbs police area command attended along with Fire and Rescue NSW and found the veranda of the house well alight,’’ police said.
‘‘The fire was extinguished with significant damage caused to the home and an adjoining property.’’
Shanks-Markovina has been a YouTube personality for around a decade. He has interviewed Kristina Keneally, Tanya Plibersek and former prime minister Kevin Rudd among others.
Recent videos on his YouTube channel, which claims 627,000 subscribers, include ‘‘KFC Workers Confess Their Sins’’ and ‘‘Anthony Albanese: Enemy to Women?’’.

24/11/2022

Danny Lim Bashing a bad sign of the times

24 November 2022

Danny Lim is a regular at many protests. He is a very kind and gentle man, and his protests are quite individual and idiosyncratic with very humane values. He would never harm anyone, and the way he was thrown face first onto the tiled floor at the Queen Victoria Building by the Police is frankly a disgrace.

As the gap between rich and poor widens with neo-liberal policies and a welfare system which is starved of funds, the level of social frustration rises. Many times in Parliament I was asked to pass legislation which simply increased Police powers, mostly in response to an item in the media where some crime had occurred. There was never any question as to why the crime occurred, there was simply an increase in Police powers and usually the maximum fines or sentences. The Police Service was re-named the Police Force, presumably to reflect the same philosophy. No one ever asked if this would actually work.

I have formed the view that the defence industry increasingly uses the Australian War Memorial as a temple of militarism. A couple of years ago, Nick Deane of the Marrickville Peace Group asked me to help him hand out leaflets on Anzac Day that said, ‘Honour the Dead by Working for Peace’. So I dressed in suit, wore a discrete sign with the slogan on it and went to the edge of the public area in the Hyde Park ceremony and started handing out his leaflet. People took it, and most agreed that it was reasonable.

After a while a Police sergeant came and told me to move 150 metres away as I was ‘offending people’. I said that no one had been offended, (not that there is a law against offending people in any case) and I was not going to move, as I had a right to stand there. He said words to the effect of, ‘You will do what I tell you or you will be arrested and charged’. I told him that he was there to enforce existing laws, not make them up, and if he charged me he would merely be told by the Magistrate that he did not have a case. I agreed to move about 2 metres so he could save face. He was furious, and went off asking to find someone who was offended. He came back and we had a second altercation. I really thought that if I had not been in a suit and told him I was an ex-MP, I would have been thrown down and roughed up. It was a line ball as it was.

The Police are there to keep us safe, not remove people harmlessly expressing opinions, and certainly not to do so roughly. They must obey laws of reasonable behaviour the same as we should. Clearly pressure on them needs to be maintained. The presence of cameras on every phone will help in this- no longer will stories of people ‘falling over’ be believed.

Fortunately Danny has come out of hospital and seems OK, but the video below leaves little doubt that he was assaulted by Police.

www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/excessive-police-force-is-damaging-sydney-s-reputation-minister-told-after-danny-lim-arrest-20221123-p5c0no.html

16/11/2022

BUGA UP Nostalgia

16 November 2022

BUGA UP (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions) was most active fro m 1979-1985, and had a big effect on tobacco and smoking. It was also a high point in the demand for advertising to be responsible for the consequences of its use of its products.

In the end, the advertisers accepted a ban on tobacco to keep the threat of stronger regulation at bay. They cut back on sexism a bit and the movement to regulate them died down. So alcohol, gambling annd junk food ads have survived.

Here is a link to some of the TV programs from that time and a little after.