I Am Waiting To See How Many Health Bureaucrats Are Fired Over This Stuff Up!

This appeared last week:

Patients told to drink water as hospitals ration IV drips

By Henrietta Cook and Jewel Topsfield

August 17, 2024 — 5.00am

Victorian hospitals have been urged to ration intravenous fluids by getting patients to drink water, scaling back the use of drips during surgeries and administering medications orally after warnings about a global shortage of saline.

An internal Victorian Department of Health document – sent to hospital chief executives, directors of medical and surgical units, nursing and pharmacy directors and Ambulance Victoria – calls on health services to conserve 14 intravenous fluid products at risk of shortages.

“Efforts to conserve fluids need to increase to enable supply to meet demand,” the August 7 document reads.

“It is critical that all IV fluids are used judiciously.”

The warning comes after reports of a global shortage of saline IV supplies. The Victorian government and the Australian Medical Association stressed that the situation was not dire or a risk to surgeries and patient care.

The association’s Victorian branch president, Dr Jill Tomlinson, said Victorians should be “alert but not alarmed”.

“We haven’t had any elective surgeries cancelled,” she said.

“It is true to say that there are shortages and that is influencing how we do things, but it is not directly impacting patient outcomes.”

The advice comes as Australian health ministers agreed on Friday to share intravenous fluid supplies, which are used in almost all surgeries, to hydrate patients and administer medication directly into the bloodstream.

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler met health ministers to co-ordinate a response to Australia’s declining supplies of IV fluids, including sharing data on usage and supply and helping local manufacturers keep up with demand.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration has said the shortages are due to global supply limitations, unexpected increases in demand, and manufacturing issues.

The state’s health services have been told to convene teams to monitor and manage intravenous fluids “due to the increasing criticality of the shortage”, according to the Victorian Department of Health document, which was labelled “sensitive”.

It said where clinically appropriate, healthcare workers should consider alternatives such as fluid replacement via the mouth or tubes through the nose and into the stomach.

Medication can also be administered via the mouth, beneath the skin or into muscles where appropriate. Other conservation strategies detailed in the document include limiting “routine administration of IV fluids to patients undergoing day surgery” and minimising excessive fasting before surgery to reduce the need for fluid replacement.

A senior clinician at a Melbourne hospital, who did not want to be named because he was not authorised to speak publicly, said IV fluids had been used too liberally by hospitals over many decades.

“I would say half the patients on the surgical ward don’t need it,” he said.

He said healthcare workers at his hospital had been rationing IV fluids in the past month by encouraging patients to drink cups of water or other fluids.

The Royal Melbourne Hospital recently sent a message to staff about “significant interruptions to our supply of intravenous fluid bags”.

It said all health services were required to reduce the amount of IV fluids they used by 20 per cent to enable supply to meet demand.

“We ask that all staff use IV fluids judiciously and where clinically appropriate,” the notice read.

The hospital did not respond to questions from this masthead, referring the matter to the state Health Department.

An Allan government spokesman said Victoria had not been affected at this stage and there had been no disruptions to patient care.

“The department is actively supporting health services to conserve and monitor available stock, amid ongoing discussions with the main suppliers,” he said.

There is only one factory in Australia that is manufacturing IV fluids onshore – Baxter Healthcare’s Toongabbie factory in Sydney’s west.

A Baxter spokesman said the factory was “operating at historical volumes and full capacity to help meet the rising demand”.

Professor Nial Wheate, a medicines scientist from Macquarie University, said the shortage of IV fluid demonstrated that Australia was overly reliant on overseas manufacturers.

“There should definitely be more of a domestic and government-backed industry in Australia for saline and, I would argue, any types of medicines,” Wheate said.

“We are too reliant and when we cannot get medicines it is putting Australian lives at risk.”

Doctors at Northern Health, one of Victoria’s largest health services, were last month told to review prescribed IV infusions and switch to an alternative as soon as clinically possible.

“We are experiencing national stock shortages with sodium chloride 0.9% 500mL intravenous bags with disruption to supply anticipated to continue for the remainder of 2024,” staff were told in an email on July 17.

A spokesman for Northern Health said it was confident of its supply for the coming weeks, and it had not had to reduce any procedures.

The shortage has been more of a problem in NSW, where there have been reports of patients having to stay in hospital for longer following surgery because little or no IV fluid was administered to them, leading to dehydration and hypotension.

The AMA’s national president, Professor Steve Robson, said NSW – which has the biggest healthcare system in Australia – was facing larger logistical challenges than other states.

“We are getting no sense whatsoever of any particular problems in Victoria and Queensland and there seem to be plenty of fluids in Tasmania,” he said.

“I think a big part of it is caution at the moment. Because of uncertainty about supply, people are doing everything they can to preserve IV fluids at the moment and that’s a very reasonable precaution in the circumstances. They’re probably stockpiling as well – we saw the same thing with toilet paper during the pandemic.”

Robson said he commended the Commonwealth and state health ministers for establishing a taskforce to deal with the issue.

With Lachlan Abbott

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/patients-told-to-drink-water-as-hospitals-ration-iv-drips-20240816-p5k30w.html

Honestly, Monty Python could not have made this up! More seriously just how did this happen and what odds do you give of the population ever knowing the why and who was to blame.  maybe the culprits could forma company and start manufacturing fluids. We know there is a market!!!!

While I live and breath I plan to publish anything I can find out about this travesty! That the shortage is apparently global is astonishing! I wonder how things are in North Korea?

Any tips / insights much appreciated! A prize is on offer for identifying the next global stuff-up!

David.

I Thought All The Extreme Luddites Had Already Been Disposed Of – But It Seems Not!

This appeared last week!

Greenhouse gas emissions

Chair of Nuclear for Australia denies that calling CO2 ‘plant food’ means he is a climate denier

Dr Adi Paterson’s statements are apparently at odds with the group’s official position, which says nuclear is needed to tackle the climate crisis

Graham Readfearn

Sat 17 Aug 2024 01.00 AESTLast modified on Sat 17 Aug 2024 02.02 AEST

The chair of a leading Australian nuclear advocacy group has called concerns that carbon dioxide emissions are driving a climate crisis an “irrational fear of a trace gas which is plant food” and has rejected links between worsening extreme weather and global heating.

Several statements from Dr Adi Paterson, reviewed by the Guardian, appear at odds with statements from the group he chairs, Nuclear for Australia, which is hosting a petition saying nuclear is needed to tackle an “energy and climate crisis”.

Nuclear for Australia was founded by 18-year-old Queensland nuclear advocate Will Shackel, who has said repeatedly he believes reactors are needed to fight “the climate crisis”.

Two climate science experts told the Guardian that Paterson’s statements were misguided and typical of climate science denial.

Paterson defended his statements, telling the Guardian he was “not a climate denier”. He described himself as “a climate realist” and an “expert on climate science”.

In May, Paterson, who resigned in 2020 as the chief executive of the government’s Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, suggested on LinkedIn that concerns about climate change were “an irrational fear of a trace gas which is plant food”. He has been a regular guest on right-wing media outlets since the Coalition earlier this year said it wanted to lift the ban on nuclear and build reactors in seven locations.

On his Facebook page, Paterson has said that “cold is more dangerous than warm” and described a leading scientist as a “climate creep”.

On LinkedIn, he said US space agency Nasa was “deliberately confusing public understanding by publishing ground surface temperatures”, saying the agency’s climate work “should be given to a credible independent group. Defund NASA!”

In April, Paterson told an audience at the Centre for Independent Studies that “you can’t make a correlation between extreme events and climate” and said “no matter what you believe about carbon dioxide – it is plant food”.

“Increasing carbon a little bit is not going to dramatically change the climate. The plants will grow better,” he said, saying the planet was in a period of low CO₂.

Prof David Karoly, a councillor at the Climate Council and a respected atmospheric scientist who has been studying the affects of CO2 on the climate since the late 1980s, said Paterson’s statements were typical of those from climate science deniers.

He said while CO2 levels were currently low in comparison to other times in Earth’s history, they were higher than at any time since the emergence of homo sapiens.

“He is misguided,” Karoly said. “CO2 has led to increases in temperature extremes, extreme rainfall, sea level rise and increases in bushfires and fire weather. CO2 has already dramatically changed the climate.”

Dr John Cook, an expert on climate change misinformation at the University of Melbourne, said Paterson was “regurgitating arguments” across a range of “thoroughly debunked talking points”.

He said: “It’s inconsistent to argue that CO2 is a trace gas which can’t possibly make any difference but at the same time claim that CO2 is going to green the planet.”

Shackel did not respond to questions. In an interview with the Guardian, Paterson argued the UN’s climate change panel “has made it very clear” that it was “not possible at this point” to link extreme events to changes in the climate.

But the panel’s latest report said it was “an established fact that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions have led to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes”, with evidence for rising temperature extremes, extreme rainfall, droughts, tropical cyclones and more dangerous fire weather.

Paterson said he did think rising levels of CO₂ were a problem and that fossil fuels needed to be limited “as soon as we can”. “It is a very, very serious problem but it is not a climate crisis,” he said.

He said he had been concerned about climate change for many years but said unduly worrying children over the issue was “a form of child abuse”, and “the chance of significant catastrophic events” occurring in the next 30 years “related to an increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere in the southern hemisphere” was “small”.

Paterson added he was more concerned about the “ecocide” from building wind and solar farms” than about climate change.

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/17/dr-adi-paterson-nuclear-for-australia-climate-change

This is really all very confusing but does not change the basic fact that we need to be going full steam towards a zero-carbon future. To be doing anything else is to defy what we know to be true about emissions and global heating / warming.

I really wish the science community could get their act together and on this speak with one voice! Some people really do not know when to shut up - or are too fond of the sound of their own voice! All this stuff does is confuse those who lack a PhD in a scientific discipline and can sort the facts from fiction! 

I find this all pretty sad and time wasting!

David.

Let Us All Be Clear On This – Buying Elicit Drugs By Mail Is Very Dangerous - Unless You Can Access Proper Drung Testing – And Rat Bag Governments Won’t Make That Service Available.

This appeared last week:

‘Rocked to our core’: Warning over son’s dark web laced ‘oxycodone’ death

A young Australian tradie felt he had to turn to the dark web for pain medication, but the pills were laced with a deadly unregulated opioid.

Blair Jackson

August 18, 2024 - 11:37AM

NewsWire

The parents of a teenage Melbourne tradie are raising the alarm about purchasing medicine online after their son’s overdose death on a synthetic opioid.

Jetson Gordon, 18, died in April 2022 after an overdose of what he thought was oxycodone, but was actually laced with a dangerous, potent synthetic opioid called nitazene.

Mr Gordon bought the pills on the dark web and his parents later found the package in his bedroom.

The health authorities in multiple Australian states have issued alerts about various types of nitazenes in recent years, in cases where the potent substances have been sold as or cut into MDMA, ketamine, and meth, as well as heroin or pills sold illegally as actual prescription opioids.

Mr Gordon’s parents told the ABC their son “had an unfortunate experience around pharmaceuticals and prescribed medication”, so he decided to purchase oxycodone on the dark web.

The 18-year-old was enjoying his carpentry apprenticeship but stressed about living out of home for the first time, his parents said, having moved from regional New South Wales to Melbourne.

“It’s completely rocked us to our core … it’s life-changing,” his stepmother Emily Berry said.

“I don’t think he knew of any risks in doing it or he wouldn’t have done it,” she said.

Nitazenes are regularly tens-of-times more potent than fentanyl, and hundreds-times the strength of morphine. This dramatically increases the chances of the user becoming unconscious and stopping breathing.

Doctors found Mr Gordon died from n-pyrrolidino etonitazene toxicity, ABC reported.

After Mr Gordon’s flatmates found him dead, the young man’s parents found a package from the UK in his bedroom; there were 24 pills inside, and half a pill in his bed.

The pills were stamped with an “M”, as some legally-produced oxycodone is.

British authorities say nitazenes are being made in China and shipped through the UK.

The Gordon family says authorities have told them it will be impossible to trace the dark web pills.

Here is the link:

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/rocked-to-our-core-warning-over-sons-dark-web-laced-oxycodone-death/news-story/a235d4da679fc24f81041f6d63db072e

We know from the ACT pill-testing experience that people will use drug-testing services if they are available but when it comes to it, Governments really could not actually care less if the odd patient dies because there is not ‘pill-testing’ available.

If they did care they would actually do something with the scale and reach needed – it is as easy as that! They won't because 'Mr/Mrs Self-righteous' would apparently prefer these 'druggies' just die!

It is hard to work out just which ‘Circle of Hell’ best suits these politicians and their flunky bureaucrats but it should be a hot one!!!

I really find this sort of hypocrisy both infuriating and terribly sad. What about actually doing what you suggest you will to get elected?

Any clever ideas to provoke change?

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 760 – Results – 18 August 2024.

Here are the results of the poll.

Are You Concerned About The Risk Of A Terrorist Incident At Present In Australia?

Yes                                                                               13 (62%)

No                                                                                  8 (38%)

I Have No Idea                                                              0 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes: 21

A totally apathetic poll from which I reckon zilch can be drawn! Seems like I need to leave them up for longer – or make them more interesting! Comments welcome to break my boredom!

Please suggest a few topics we might all enjoy!!!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

A totally disconnected voting turnout. 

0 of 21 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many special thanks to all those who voted! 

David.

An Expert Observer Warns We Are In Pretty Uncharted Waters!

This appeared last week:

It’s the most volatile election in living memory and anything can and will happen

Tom Switzer

10 January, 2024

In five decades of living alternately on the two sides of the Pacific, I have never seen anything like it. The political atmosphere in America is far more pessimistic, partisan and polarising than anything seen in Australia.

The left’s venomous hatred of Donald Trump, with its comparisons with Adolf Hitler, is matched by the right’s loathing of the Democrats and hostility towards liberals. On political shows, talking heads of old have become shouting heads.

Meanwhile, in the centre, inhabited by about a third of Americans, there is despair at the extremism of both left and right.

Indeed, this year’s presidential election campaign seems more volatile than anything seen in the US since 1968 – with the race riots, war protests, political assassinations and burning of the cities.

Witness the extraordinary twists and turns during the past few weeks: the sudden debacle of the presidential debate; the near-assassination of a former president; the sudden scratching of the incumbent President from the race; the sudden elevation of a Vice-President her own party had deemed a serious burden; and then, lo and behold, the same VP suddenly pulling even in the presidential contest.

What makes matters even more turbulent is the global disorder: from eastern Europe to northeast Asia to the Middle East, the world faces several threats that could easily spin out of control and suck Uncle Sam into more 21st-century quagmires.

All this reminds one of the final episode of Fawlty Towers, the brilliant English comedy of the 1970s. The local health and safety inspector confronts a hapless Basil Fawlty with a long and horrendous list of everything that is wrong with his hotel, including a filthy kitchen, inadequate temperature control, cracked and missing wall and floor tiles, lack of hand basins and – gasp! – two dead pigeons in the water tank. To which actor John Cleese replies: “Otherwise, OK?”

Well, for many Americans and indeed many people around the world, things are far from OK.

One can be forgiven for thinking the 2024 US presidential race – a contest between a left-wing firebrand from the union’s most left-wing state and a rude, crude, lewd buffoon charged with four indictments – is like what Henry Kissinger thought of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s: it’s too bad both sides can’t lose.

It’s a truism in contemporary US politics that to win the White House a candidate needs to win over independents and undecideds in about seven key swing states: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. The question is whether Trump or Kamala Harris, notwithstanding their many flaws, can appeal to these swing voters.

The 78-year-old Trump taps into legitimate grievances about lax border controls, identity politics, energy prices and the direction of US foreign policy under neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists. As distinguished British historian Niall Ferguson warns, any great power that spends more on servicing its debt than on defence will not stay great for long. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, recognise this banal truth.

To reorder US strategic priorities away from Europe to Asia is hardly isolationist. It is a prudent recognition of the limits to power in a multipolar world that does not accommodate the US dominating the globe as it did during unipolarity. It is also consistent with Barack Obama’s much-touted pivot to Asia more than a decade ago that was aimed to counter the China threat.

Yet Trump’s polarising style of politics, much less his character and temperament, disgusts many independents and even right-leaning suburban voters.

Bret Stephens, the award-winning columnist from The New York Times and a recent guest of the public policy research organisation I head, reflects the views of many Americans on the right intellectual spectrum when he laments that Trump has “done the most to reshape the Republican Party into something unrecognisable to someone like me, who grew up in Ronald Reagan’s shadow”.

In Stephens’s judgment, Trump’s main crime is to smash “the old conservative consensus, which believed in classically liberal ideals like free trade, strong international alliances and the benefits of immigration, as well as some classically conservative ones, like the necessity of moral character in political leadership and civility in public life”.

Remember Trump and Vance pledge a 10 per cent across-the-board tariff that is reminiscent of the trade protectionism that helped turn a great recession into the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Add to this their support for a mass deportation of immigrant workers, who have been a source of American growth, and it’s no wonder so many age-old conservative institutions – from publications such as National Review and The Wall Street Journal editorial page to think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute – are profoundly uneasy about Trump mark II.

Then there is 59-year-old Harris: the prospect of America having its first female president, who’s also black, has energised millions – not just ethnic minorities but also the young and those who have never voted.

But Harris is also a San Francisco Democrat – a metropolitan sophisticate whose politics are fundamentally at odds with the thoughts and attitudes of Middle America – and she has chosen as her running mate a fellow left-winger from Minnesota, which has not voted Republican since 1972.

The Democrat ticket promises more of the same regulation and subsidies of Joe Biden, plus huge tax increases – even as Harris tacks or changes her lines on various issues such as fracking. For those who believe America’s greatest strength, from which the world benefits, is the can-do individualism that fuels its economy, Harris and Tim Walz present a worrying prospect. What is also disturbing about Harris is her refusal to subject herself to any media scrutiny. In the three weeks she has been the Democratic candidate, Harris has not faced one press conference or interview with a senior journalist. Can you imagine a new Australian prime minister or opposition leader shying away from any interviews or press conferences weeks out from an election?

Sky News host Rita Panahi has hit out at the media for trying to rebrand Tim Walz as a "safe centrist".

According to Gerard Baker, a regular contributor to The Times and The Wall Street Journal, the American mainstream media may well do “what they nearly got away with doing for Biden the last few years and cover for someone evidently incapable of holding office”.

All this makes for an unhappy country and helps explains why the race is a dead heat: all the available opinion polling evidence suggests Harris is now breaking even with Trump in battleground states.

But how reliable are the polls? In 2016 and even 2020, polls massively underestimated Trump’s strengths. A few weeks out from both elections, Hillary Clinton and Biden held commanding double-digit point leads. Yet both elections were exceedingly close. Then again, the polls before the November 2022 congressional midterms predicted a big Republican victory in the House of Representatives. They, too, were wrong.

In the most volatile election in living memory, even the most seasoned observers of American politics have no idea what will happen on November 5. Does anybody?

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/its-the-most-volatile-election-in-living-memory-and-anything-can-and-will-happen/news-story/eb7737ba34daaa1d9e749f70524298f8

I agree with Tom we are in for a pretty wild ride over the next 5 months!

Buckle up!

David.

Now This Trend Really Is An Existential Threat Longer Term!

This appeared last week:

Fertility crisis Women

Birthrates are plummeting worldwide. Can governments turn the tide?

Nations are deploying baby bonuses, subsidised childcare and parental leave to try and reverse a rapidly declining fertility rate – largely to no avail

Tory Shepherd

Sun 11 Aug 2024 00.00 AEST Last modified on Sun 11 Aug 2024 09.58 AEST

Sophia and her partner have been thinking about having children for about five years. They are concerned about humanity’s impact on biodiversity loss and climate change and worried about what the future holds.

“Our conversation has two parts,” says Sophia, a communications specialist who preferred not to use her full name. “One is: what’s the contribution of a child to the global [climate] crisis? The second one is [about] what would their life be like.

“I live with heaps of grief about biodiversity collapse. I think about the future and what the future of a child would be like in that sense.”

The fear of climate change has led to couples having fewer babies; about one in five female climate scientists say they will have no children or fewer children because of the crisis.

It’s not the only reason for what governments and headlines are calling a baby crisis, a population crisis, a fertility crisis, a demographic crisis, an ageing crisis and an economic crisis. The cost of living, housing security and a lack of opportunity also play their part.

The upshot is that all over the world (nearly – but more on that in a bit), governments are concerned that women are simply not having enough babies.

Elon Musk thinks falling birthrates are a bigger risk to civilisation than global heating. There’s a burgeoning movement of pronatalists wanting to have “tons of kids” to save the world.

It’s fairly clear that, when women are more educated, more liberated, and more able to access contraception, they start having fewer children. What’s not clear is how to convince them to have more. Cheaper childcare? More flexible workplaces? More help from the menfolk? Affordable housing? More optimism about the future?

‘Low-fertility future’

Statistics show most countries are now below replacement rate – that’s 2.1 children per woman, enough to replace the existing population with a bit of a buffer.

Five decades ago, Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb sparked global fears of “mass starvation” on a “dying planet” because of overpopulation. Now, experts are warning the fertility crisis is set to leave a dwindling youth base supporting a swelling ageing population and panicked governments around the world are throwing money at the omnicrisis.

On 11 July, the United Nations released World Population Prospects 2024, a revision of their population estimates from 1950 to the present for 237 countries, with projections to the year 2100. The report said that “women today bear one child fewer, on average, than they did around 1990”, and that the world’s population is now expected to peak at about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s (up from about 8.2 billion today) before starting to fall.

That peak will come earlier than expected for reasons including “lower-than-expected levels of fertility”, it found.

In March, an article published in the Lancet set off a new wave of headlines warning of catastrophe. A study titled global fertility in 204 countries and territories, 1950-2021, with forecasts to 2100: a comprehensive demographic analysis for the global burden of disease study 2021, by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), found the world was approaching a “low-fertility future”.

The IHME study said by 2050, more than three quarters of the countries will be below replacement rate. By 2100, it will be 97%.

The only countries projected to have more than 2.1 by then are Samoa, Somalia, Tonga, Niger, Chad and Tajikistan.

“Governments must plan for emerging threats to economies, food security, health, the environment and geopolitical security brought on by these demographic changes that are set to transform the way we live,” an accompanying press release said.

Low-income places with higher fertility rates – such as sub-Sarahan Africa, which is set to contribute over half the world’s births by 2100 – will need better access to contraceptives and female education, the researchers said.

Low-fertility, higher-income countries such as South Korea and Japan will need open immigration and policies to support parents.

The study also looked at pro-natal policies already in place, such as free childcare, better parental care leave, financial incentives and employment rights. But the findings suggested that even pro-natal policies could not boost fertility rates up to replacement levels, although “they may prevent some countries from dropping to extremely low fertility levels”.

Dr Natalia V Bhattacharjee, a co-lead author on the study, said the trends would “completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and will necessitate reorganising societies”.

Bhattacharjee also warned that some countries might try to “justify more draconian measures” to limit reproductive rights.

We are not replacing ourselves through births

Dr Liz Allen

Meanwhile, in Taiwan, where the fertility rate has now fallen to 0.865, they are closing schools. In Japan, where the rate is 1.21, sales of adult incontinence products have outstripped nappy sales. In Greece, where it’s 1.264, some villages have not seen a birth in years and people are being encouraged to work a six-day week. And in South Korea, where it’s 0.72, the population is expected to halve by 2100.

“Australia’s population is structurally ageing and that means that we are living longer and we are not replacing ourselves through births,” says Dr Liz Allen, a demographer and lecturer at the Australian National University centre for social research and methods.

Australia’s fertility rate peaked at 3.5 in 1961. By 1975 – not long after Gough Whitlam abolished the luxury tax on the contraceptive pill – it had dropped to replacement level (2.1), and now, a couple of years after the 2021 figures the study used, it sits at 1.6.

That 70s dip was thanks to the pill, Allen says, but also other big social changes around gender equality, with women increasingly educated, working and with access to no-fault divorce.

There are those who decide they don’t want any children. There are women deferring having children, and therefore having fewer as their personal fertility declines. And in Australia and other developed nations there are fewer teen pregnancies – generally considered a good thing, but also something that contributes to a lower fertility rate.

Childcare, baby bonus, parental leave: can governments fix it?

Governments throughout the OECD – and increasingly in developing countries – are trying all manner of ways to boost fertility.

Most low-fertility countries have some form of maternity leave. Many have subsidised childcare and some form of family allowance and just over half have flexible work hours or tax credits for dependent children, according to the United Nations. But even Nordic countries, with their focus on gender equality, parental leave and a strong social services network, are experiencing declining fertility.

In China, the “one-child policy” has become a “three-child policy”, along with better maternal health care – and decreased access to abortions. Japanese politicians are trying to outdo each other with pronatalistic policies including subsidies, free daycare, better job security and support for fertility treatments. And the South Korean government has spent more than US$200bn to support families to have children.

It hasn’t worked. The best-intentioned policies have consistently led to less of a baby boom and more the occasional baby bump.

Take Australia’s baby bonus, for example, introduced by then treasurer Peter Costello with the exhortation: “One for mum, one for dad, and one for the country”.

It worked, a bit, but experts describe the fertility uptick as more of a “blip”. That hasn’t stopped countries including Russia, Greece and Italy giving baby bonuses a go.

Jennifer Sciubba, an American demographer, political scientist and author of 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World, was on the Ezra Klein podcast recently talking about the complex interplay of factors determining baby desires.

She says following the “success sequence” – getting an education, a great job, a home, some savings – means pushing back having children. And once people have more money, they also want to have other things in their lives that kids might detract from – going out for a nice meal, taking a holiday, a full night’s sleep.

Having more than two can seem unimaginably intensive, hard and expensive, she says, but it’s never just the money. What about family and community support? Religion? The “little logistics” like needing a new car to fit enough car seats?

Through east Asia, Sciubba says, the idea is spreading that “marriage is no longer required to have a good life”.

“It might actually stifle your life because of gender relations within the household,” she says.

Sciubba questions how much the state can do. Then there’s the prevailing culture; in South Korea, for example, there’s paid paternity leave, but men don’t take it.

“[And] once [countries] fall below [replacement level], they tend to stay there,” Sciubba says.

Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, has offered free IVF, tax breaks and low-interest loans for families with children – and while that has pushed up the fertility rate, it is also a cloak for nationalist identity politics and comes with restrictions on birth control and abortion.

“You can strip away individual rights” in order to increase fertility rates, Sciubba says. “I am not advocating for that.”

She points to the example of Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, the dictatorial communist leader who came to power in the late 60s. He tried to boost the fertility rate by outlawing contraception and banning abortion for women under 40 with fewer than four children; women died from childbirth or backyard abortions and orphanages filled up with abandoned babies.

“You did see births increase … as long as his thumb was pressing on it. Then it went back down,” Sciubba says.

A 2022 review done by the Australian National University for the federal government’s centre for population found financial incentives like the baby bonus and the family tax benefit can have a positive effect on fertility. “However, the effect is usually small because transfers represent a minor fraction of the total direct costs of children,” it found.

The baby bonus potentially increased births, temporarily, by about 2%. Other policies, including better childcare and better parental leave, can all do a bit, but they are not fixing the problem.

The top three most important factors associated with fertility decisions, the ANU review found, were the cost, job security, and “having someone to love”.

Allen says by about 2054, it’s likely there will be natural population decline – more deaths than births. So immigration will be more important than ever to fill skills shortages and fuel growth. To build homes and infrastructure. In Australia, immigration is used to buffer the fertility rate – but it is its own policy battleground.

‘The blame gets placed on women’

With no answers in sight, Allen says, there’s also an ethical problem. Women are asked to have the kids, care for the elderly, participate in the workforce and do the unpaid labour at home. And young people now see through this, she says.

Allen says the push for women to shoulder the burden of the demographic “crisis” has been going on in Australia since colonisation. It was part of displacing First Nations people and creating a European outpost, she says, of ensuring the “right kind of women” breed.

“We see echoes of these encouragements from these politicians over time. They say things like ‘populate or perish’. ‘Lie back and think of England’. ‘One for mum, one for dad and one for the country’. ‘The right women aren’t having enough babies, the wrong women are having too many babies’,” Allen says.

“The blame gets placed on women. Women are seen as the gatekeepers of population and are seen as hedonistic and selfish if they do not populate.”

She points to a 1944 inquiry into Australian birthrates, where women were – for the first time – allowed to have a voice. In response to (yet another) call for women to “populate or perish”, one woman voiced her frustration at the burden thrust upon her.

“You men in easy chairs say populate or perish,” she said. “Well I have populated and I have perished with no blankets.”

Sophia is now pregnant – just in the early stages – which is why she didn’t want to use her full name.

“I was pretty sure that I didn’t want children. There was a big lifestyle factor. It changes your life to be responsible for another human.

“Ultimately it was a very selfish decision … on this one I’m going to own it. I selfishly wanted that extra depth in my life. But it wasn’t an easy decision for my partner or I ... we really laboured on it, pun intended.

“But on balance we decided it was what we wanted for our lives.”

More here:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/11/global-birthrates-dropping

The having of children is a complex and very personal topic and it is interesting to see how each generation works out what suits them.

Long term I suspect it will all even out, with people deciding pretty rationally, what they wish to do. No doubt – as a population – we are all still learning to handle the fact that, for all practical purposes sex has been separated from parenthood! I am also not sure Governments should interfere at all!

How you feel about this fact that sex and reproduction are now largely separate is up to you but there are very divergent views on the topic as we all know!

Comments and perspectives welcome!

David.

We Won’t Have A Functioning Health System If Our Society Unravels!

This appeared last week:

Disturbing societal trends raising the risk of a terror attack

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess has done more than raise the level of Australia’s terror threat. He has redefined our security challenge to recognise an increasingly intolerant and divided country.

Cameron Stewart

12:00AM August 10, 2024.

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess did more this week than raise the level of Australia’s terror threat. He redefined our security challenge to recognise an increasingly intolerant and divided country.

Burgess has been forced to broaden ASIO’s traditional focus to respond to a host of new and disturbing trends that, taken together, have undermined social cohesion and increasingly have normalised violence as a part of protest and public debate.

While some of ASIO’s grim assessment reflects the manifestation in Australia of violent trends in the US and Britain, it also has been influenced heavily by the extraordinary fire and fury ignited at home by the war in Gaza.

Burgess was adamant this week that his decision to raise Australia’s terror threat level from “possible” to “probable” was “not a direct response” to the local fallout from the turmoil in the Middle East. But in the same breath he made a powerful case as to why the heated local response to that conflict is the most “important”, “relevant” and “significant driver” of the country’s “degrading security environment”.

“The conflict has fuelled grievances, promoted protest, exacerbated division, undermined social cohesion and elevated intolerance,” Burgess says.

His comments have led each of the major political parties to point the finger at each other for their part in this outcome.

Anthony Albanese slammed the Greens for fuelling community divisions over Gaza while Peter Dutton said the government should share the blame for failing to tackle anti-Semitism decisively since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year.

Meanwhile, the Greens, who have refused to strongly condemn Hamas, anti-Semitism or the defacing of MPs’ office by anti-Israel activists, accused the government of politicising the issue, claiming their supporters were only “pushing for peace”.

ASIO’s assessment of this new volatile mood is stark, with Burgess declaring “politically motivated violence now joins espionage and foreign interference as our principal security concerns”.

But the critical part of his assessment is that this risk of politically motivated violence is no longer caused by a singular terror driver, such as the rise of Islamic State in 2012.

Instead it is now likely to flow from a range of growing social ills, including a spike in political polarisation and intolerance, violent protests and debate, anti-authoritarian beliefs in part fuelled by excessive Covid lockdowns, conspiracy theories, distrust of institutions and a normalisation of provocative and inflammatory behaviours. What’s more, many are combining these beliefs into what ASIO calls “new hybrid ideologies”, all amplified by the internet and social media, which remains the primary platform for radicalisation. Hard-to-detect lone wolf attacks with a gun or a knife are the likely method of attack, rather than old-style terror cell plots to blow up major landmarks or cause mass casualties.

The relevance of the Gaza conflict to ASIO’s assessment is not that it has created these dangerous trends but, rather, it has helped to fuel them.

The storming of the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, on the basis of Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election result was the first major global illustration of the emerging social trends Burgess talks about. These volatile social and political trends have continued to evolve in the US and are reflected in the savage and inflammatory language used by both presidential candidates, Trump and Kamala Harris, on the campaign trail. No one knows precisely why shooter Thomas Crooks chose to try to assassinate Trump last month, but the act was an illustration of the darker, more intolerant times ASIO speaks of.

Meanwhile Britain has been deeply shaken this week by violent anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots fuelled by online misinformation and extremist views following a deadly knife attack on children in Southport.

In Australia, ASIO says it has disrupted eight potential terror attacks in the past four months, all involving radicalised youths between the ages of 14 and 21.

This included the stabbing of an Assyrian Orthodox bishop in western Sydney in April by a 16-year-old who was interacting with extremists online. The boy was a part of an online group of fellow extremist youths called Brotherhood, and he used a smiling portrait of Osama bin Laden as his WhatsApp profile picture.

What ASIO fears most is that these dangerous new factors are being turbocharged by the divisions caused in Australia by the conflict in Gaza.

“We’ve been seeing all of the trends that Burgess spoke about in his address for quite some time now, they pre-dated Covid and were certainly accelerated during Covid,” says Lydia Khalil, director of transnational challenges at the Lowy Institute. “The Gaza conflict is similar, it is a contentious societal and political issue contributing to the legitimisation and the normalisation of the use of violence to achieve political ends.”

The Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7 last year triggered the first ugly manifestation of this in Australia when a flag-burning mob celebrated the Hamas killings and chanted anti-Semitic slogans outside the Sydney Opera House.

Since then there has been a record spike in anti-Semitic attacks across the country, including bashings and verbal abuse of Jews, online harassment, the forced closure of Jewish businesses, the targeting of Jewish performers in the arts and Jewish students on campus during the university encampments.

The pro-Palestinian movement in Australia since October 7 has expressed legitimate concerns about the high civilian death toll during Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. But the activist rump of this movement has gone much further than legitimate protest and has embraced exactly the sort of “provocative, inflammatory, intolerant, unpeaceful and uncivil” behaviour that Burgess warned of when he raised the terror threat level.

These pro-Palestinian activists have proved to be anti-Israel activists above all by failing to distinguish between Israeli politics and the Australian Jewish community. They repeatedly have encouraged chants advocating the eradication of Israel and the carrying of blatantly anti-Semitic signs and slogans.

The sort of politically motivated violence Burgess has warned about erupted in Melbourne’s Jewish heartland of Caulfield late last year when pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested for charging at Jewish counter-protesters during a provocative rally outside a synagogue.

Shortly afterwards, pro-Palestinian activists confronted Israeli family members who had lost their loved ones in the October 7 massacre, storming into the Melbourne hotel where they were staying and placing dolls covered in fake blood on the floor.

This ugly activism is driven by what intelligence agencies describe as a “self-righteousness” about the pro-Palestinian cause that blinds these protesters to the normal standards of protest behaviour. Hence, we have seen acts such as the bizarre and offensive defacing of Australian war memorials with pro-Palestinian slogans when these memorials have no relevance to the current conflict in the Middle East.

More ominously for ASIO is the movement’s support for the vandalisation and defacing of the electorate offices of more than a dozen federal MPs and ministers, some of whom can no longer work from those taxpayer-funded workplaces.

In June pro-Palestinian activists set fire to the electorate office of Melbourne Jewish MP Josh Burns and painted horns on his image in a poster. ASIO would have noted Burns’s response when he said: “I’m nervous about someone getting hurt or worse. How is this a peaceful act? It didn’t bring about peace in the Middle East. If it did, I would have vandalised my own office.”

The government shares part of the responsibility for the rise of this out-of-control racist activism because from October 7 it has failed to call out anti-Semitism as strongly as it should have, fearing an electoral backlash from Muslim voters in its western Sydney electorates.

But it is the Greens who have done more than any other political group in the country to fuel this increasingly violent protest movement and undermine the country’s social cohesion that Burgess has warned about.

The Greens have refused to call out the excesses of pro-Palestinian activists including the defacing of war memorials, where Greens leader Adam Bandt glibly dismissed the issue, saying the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader “were more agitated about graffiti than they have been about the slaughter of people in Gaza”.

Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi has even refused to say whether the listed terror group Hamas should be dismantled.

Former ASIO chief Dennis Richardson says political leaders need to avoid any actions that can lead others down a pathway to violence. But he also says those most likely to carry out acts of terrorists or politically motivated violence don’t usually take their leads from politicians.

“It’s always a bit difficult in a liberal democracy because part of the liberal democracy is robust public debate, and part of that robust public debate is politicians having a go at one another. But I don’t think it’s appropriate for politicians to be encouraging those who would seek to essentially blockade electoral offices,” Richardson says, without naming the Greens. “That strikes me as being fundamentally anti- democratic.

“And if you’re going to encourage people to do something like that, you do run the risk of perhaps even unintentionally creating a framework in which it’s easier for people to rationalise what other things they may want to do. So you’ve certainly got to watch that.

“But, equally, I doubt whether too many of those who do engage in politically motivated violence get their lead from politicians.”

Richardson says the key question for ASIO is whether the local passions inflamed by the Gaza conflict could spill over into a deadly act.

“I think (Burgess) was in part saying, ‘Look, there are people out here who at the best of times are borderline, and developments such as we see in Gaza can amplify in their own minds and make it more likely that they might do something.”

For example, Richardson says Australia “would be a much better place if no one in the country had any sympathy for a terrorist organisation like Hamas”.

However, he says among those who do have some sympathy for Hamas in Australia, there’s “a whole spectrum of views”.

“These could range from just being sympathetic to Hamas, through to actually being prepared to do an act that might put people’s lives in jeopardy and actually kill people,” he says.

“The great challenge for ASIO and law enforcement is to monitor a whole range of people who exist right along that spectrum and try to identify those who might actually take that fatal step. And that’s a pretty tough challenge for any organisation.”

The Lowy Institute’s Khalil agrees that this new and broader range of potential security threats identified by ASIO makes the agency’s job of protecting Australians more difficult.

“There are manifestations of political violence now in our society, or concerns around them, that go beyond terrorism,” she says. “It’s becoming an increasingly blurry line between what is legitimate in a democratic society and what should be proscribed, and that is one of the things that makes responses a bit more difficult, because it’s not like it was in the past, where you had these discrete organised groups which would try to conduct various plots and attacks. Now it’s very muddy.”

Khalil says there are now numerous triggers for the type of grievance extremism that Burgess refers to.

“A lot of people are frustrated with the way that democracy is working and they’re increasingly believing that it doesn’t meet the needs of the average person, that it’s really focused on elite interests,” she says. Perceptions of growing inequality and cost of living have led to frustration with governments, fuelling anti-authoritarian views and a wariness of institutions.

“I think it’s not just an issue for ASIO, they’re just one part of the broader spectrum of the response,” Khalil says. “This isn’t just a security issue. So while ASIO will deal with the pointy end of it, where people are radicalised to violence based on whatever mix of grievances they have, that is just one end of this issue. The rest of it is really a broader societal issue.”

Burgess is at pains to say this new range of potential threats is “significant but not insurmountable” and that a terror threat level of probable does not mean inevitable.

But his conclusions are a wakeup call to the real-life consequences of the country’s drift towards intolerance, violent political rhetoric and crumbling political and social civility.

“Like you, I still think we live in a paradise and I think we are the lucky country,” he told Sky News. “But this is stretching us and testing us.”

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/disturbing-societal-trends-raising-the-risk-of-a-terror-attack/news-story/698e0e0204e8f0aa5c23769ef4594bee

I am becoming increasingly concerned that we are all taking the stability of our democracy and its institutions for granted and that we all need to think if there is anything we can do, as citizens, to help just a bit!

The functioning of our society is very complex and can be easily disrupted – witness the IV fluid shortages at present – and we all need to do what we can to move things in the right direction. Sadly there are many these days who would frustrate our efforts – witness the UK at present!

Stay alert and a little bit alarmed I reckon!

David.

A Good Reminder Of Just What Matters In Preserving Health!

This appeared last week.

Bernard Salt

Think the internet changed Australia? How about sewerage.

12:00AM August 10, 2024

The Weekend Australian Magazine

It is a topic that surfaces at centenary celebrations, workplace farewells and, poignantly, eulogies too. It is the idea of looking back and remarking upon how much Australia has changed over the decades.

Making do without access to modern technology (mail versus email), the formality of everyday dress (hats and gloves) and the stiffness of interpersonal protocols (Messrs and Mesdames) are popular observations. So too is the overarching belief that all this change places us, today’s Australians, at a unique time in history. And that we, the players, are dealing with pressures that did not exist decades ago.

There is some merit to this way of thinking. Previous generations disconnected from work when they left the workplace. This is less so today with access to smartphone technology.

However, the question isn’t so much “How have things changed?” The question should be reframed: how has Australia changed in the past 60 years (1964-2024) as compared with the previous 60 years (1904-1964)?

It’s fair to say that we the people of the 2020s have had to manage an avalanche of change over six decades. There’s the rise of China, the empowerment of women, the invention of the internet, the use of mobile phones, the emergence of diversity, equity and inclusion, and recognition of the marginalised.

Nevertheless, those still alive in 1964 (and born in the 1890s or earlier) recalling events of the previous 60 years could equally lay claim to have lived through an era of profound change.

Let’s start with the impact of Australia losing 60,000 men in World War I and then having to navigate the Spanish flu epidemic. These events were followed by the broader use of electricity, the popularisation of cars, the greater use of the telephone, and the idea of working in a city factory as opposed to being “in service” on a country estate. Toss in the Great Depression, World War II and the atomic bomb, and then finish this era of profound change with a baby boom to express our unbridled confidence in Australia’s future.

In the previous 60 years (1844-1904), the Australian colonies unified to become a commonwealth. Australia was then, and still is today, the only continent to be claimed by a single nation. The idea of federation (of a continent) was bold thinking for the time. This was an era of wealth generation delivered by gold, wool, wheat and export of refrigerated meat. It was a time when our biggest cities were sewered, ultimately delivering longer lifespans and a better quality of life. (Arguably, the advent of sewerage did more for average Aussies than the invention of the internet.)

So, yes, the development of the smartphone and DEI and being able to order Thai food and have it delivered by Uber Eats is a world away from the privations and the triumphs of any previous 60-year era.

The more interesting question is what Australia might look like 60 years hence, in 2084. This future era will be shaped by exiting baby boomers, by the impact of trading blocs, and by the clarification of Australia’s role as a food producer, resources provider and safe harbour for civic-minded people wanting a better life for their kids.

We should aim for this future Australia to always be a place of peace and opportunity.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/think-the-internet-changed-australia-how-about-sewerage/news-story/6756b92cb843b5762358c3239b7f0a3a

I reckon this is a thoughtful piece that does preserve a longer perspective that can be easily lost. I am probably just a few years older than the author but I find the perspective true and valid.

Amazingly my parents memories go back all the way to the early 1900’s and my grandparents actually lived and could just remember, and tell me about, the end of the 1800s! Good generational timing I suppose.

The point of all this is to remind us all of the debt we owe to public health initiatives – now over a century old – that have so helped longevity and quality of life! These measures really matter as you can see each time they break down in war, famine etc.

It really helps to keep perspective to consider what steps have made the most difference to all our lives!

David.