I Am Not Sure This Is Going To Be A Wonderful Christmas….

This popped up last week:

Australia’s economic problems have been brewing for years

We are in the most prolonged downturn since the 1991 recession. It’s time for a treasurer to do something about it.

John Kehoe Economics editor

Dec 6, 2024 – 2.56pm

The stagnant private sector economy and deterioration in living standards exposed in the national accounts this week have been years in the making.

Labour productivity has failed to improve since 2016; business investment is languishing close to 1990s recession levels; there has been no serious economic reform; undisciplined government spending is in vogue after too much stimulus during the pandemic; and the Reserve Bank of Australia has been forced to push up interest rates to grind household and business activity to a halt and bring inflation under control.

As a result of all of this, economic growth slowed to just 0.8 per cent through the year to September, and in per-person terms the economy has been shrinking for almost two years after adjusting for population growth. It is the most prolonged downturn since the 1991 recession. A better measure of living standards – disposable income per person – is 10.5 per cent below its peak.

The soft-hearted want to take the easy path and blame the RBA. The hard-headed know this problem has been brewing in Canberra over multiple governments under Liberal and Labor prime ministers and treasurers.

For years, serious economists have warned Australian economic policy was on the wrong track. Now it is coming home to roost.

Economist Alex Sanchez, a former adviser to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and self-described “Labor dry” of the Hawke-Keating reformist mould, says the platform has been burning for more than a decade.

“The sad thing as a country is that we’ve known about it, but done nothing to arrest it,” he says. “It just seems to have gotten all too hard, which is not characteristic of our country’s nature.”

“And I hold myself to account as well,” he adds, having stepped down from the government in July.

But in Canberra, it has been all buck-passing and blame-shifting. Labor is trying to deal with the symptoms of inflation and declining living standards. But cost-of-living handouts do not treat the underlying cause of the problem.

The political class increasingly sees every problem as a distributional issue rather than the poor fundamentals.

Making matters worse, profligate spending by federal and state governments is now in direct conflict with the RBA’s efforts to tame inflation. Governments have their foot on the accelerator as the RBA keeps its foot firmly on the brake.

Approaching an election, an increasingly desperate Albanese government is on a collision course with the RBA as Labor prepares to roll out more cost-of-living relief and a big-spending childcare package. The prime minister’s election slogan to Australians is “we have your back”.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has dropped the pretence that fiscal and monetary policy are working in the same direction. He now says the record government spending is propping up the economy to save it from technical recession.

While the government wants to avoid the economy going backwards, the extra dollars it is spending will inevitably prolong the inflation pain and elevated interest rates.

Labor did not cause the outbreak of the biggest inflation shock since the 1980s. Extraordinary pandemic stimulus from the Morrison Coalition government (backed by Labor) and the RBA; government-mandated lockdowns; closed borders; global supply chain disruptions; and a war in Ukraine that temporarily lifted global energy prices were the chief culprits.

Yet, the criticism from some economists is that after 2½ years in government, Labor should have done better managing the inflation outbreak and the economy more broadly.

The good news is the unemployment rate is a low 4.1 per cent. A jobs surge in government-dominated care sectors and the bureaucracy has held up the labour market. Chalmers has also delivered two budget surpluses due to a revenue boom from income tax and soaring commodity export prices.

The lucky treasurer

Economist Chris Richardson says Chalmers has been the luckiest treasurer in history, but there has been no real restraint on spending. Chalmers’ budgets have added $60 billion extra in net discretionary spending. The budgets have contained $104 billion in new spending decisions, but raised only $44 billion in extra revenue to pay for it.

That’s a generous calculation because it includes billions in theoretical revenue from a new superannuation tax on retirement savings balances above $3 million that is unlikely to pass parliament.

Total federal and state government spending in the September quarter was at a record 29 per cent of nominal GDP. Extraordinarily, it is the same level it reached during the peak of the pandemic lockdowns in mid-2020 when massive stimulus payments including JobKeeper were flowing.

Higher spending on the $49 billion National Disability Insurance Scheme, aged care, defence, state government public servants and infrastructure projects has pushed the nation’s finances into a long-term structural deficit.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development warned again this week that expansionary budgets will need to be reined in over the coming years to address fiscal pressures.

“Robust government spending growth has kept GDP growth positive as tight monetary conditions restrained private consumption and investment,” the OECD noted.

Westpac economist and former Treasury official Pat Bustamante says the “once-in-a-lifetime” expansion in the public sector is propping up the labour market, but skewing productivity.

“The longer this dynamic continues, the larger the risk we remain stuck in the slow lane when the public-sector sugar hit runs out,” he says.

The fundamental problem was laid out in a McKinsey report presented to company chairmen and chief executives this week. For much of this century, Australia has coasted on the easy gains from the mining boom and high immigration. Labour productivity growth has been virtually zero since 2016 and has slumped to 30th out of 35 rich countries. McKinsey’s “national emergency” warning is no exaggeration.

Productivity – how efficiently labour produces goods and services – is the key determinant of living standards and contributed more than 80 per cent of income growth for the three decades before the pandemic, the Productivity Commission estimates.

Governments are pumping in more money to the non-market economy (such as the NDIS, aged care and public service), which is expanding at almost triple the pace of the private sector. While higher demand for social services seems inevitable as the country becomes richer and older, bigger government is indisputably weighing down productivity.

Productivity is falling in the non-market economy and has had zero growth for 20 years. This is Chalmers’ “care economy”.

Productivity Commission chairwoman Danielle Wood said in July it “always has been and always will be difficult” to improve productivity in labour-intensive industries. “So what that means is as those sectors expand as a share of the economy, as they inevitably will, that will drive down productivity overall, and you have got to work harder elsewhere,” she said.

In other words, governments and business need to drive larger-than-usual productivity gains in the private sector to offset the expanding non-market economy. But it’s not happening. While private sector productivity is now growing at just below pre-pandemic averages, overall productivity is shrinking.

The key to getting private sector productivity firing is business investment, and it has been stuck around 1990s recession levels as a share of the economy for the past eight years under both Coalition and Labor governments.

Less investment in new tools and equipment and a shallowing of the capital stock makes workers less productive. Business cannot afford to sustainably pay higher real wages unless worker output is rising. Or if employers are forced to lift nominal wages without a productivity offset, the cost pressures will inevitably be passed on to consumers through higher prices, contributing to inflation.

Election cannon fodder

Today, real incomes and living standards have gone backwards due to a combination of higher inflation, elevated interest rates and income tax payments. It is election cannon fodder for Peter Dutton’s opposition.

Shadow treasurer Angus Taylor sharpened his attack this week when he said Australians were paying the price for Labor’s “big government, big Australia” policies. Taylor is economically literate to diagnose the problems. But the Coalition is yet to roll out meaningful policies to fix the challenges. Next week, it will unveil a big taxpayer gamble on nuclear energy.

Teal independent MP Allegra Spender is almost the only MP making a meaningful contribution to the tax reform debate, after publishing a green paper which she will use as a guide for demands in the event of a hung parliament after the election.

Australia’s over-dependency on growth-inhibiting taxes on personal income and non-mining corporate profits has been repeatedly called out by the International Monetary Fund, OECD and former Treasury secretary Ken Henry’s tax review.

Overhauling tax, workplace relations, fixing the energy system mess, competition and less stifling red tape should form the basis of a modern reform agenda.

It’s not beyond us for Australia to once again enter the hall of fame of being great economic reformers.

— Chris Bradley, McKinsey senior partner

Business is exasperated about the Albanese government and is giving up hope on Labor. The platitudes from the government have worn thin, particularly after a series of workplace law changes that empower unions and reduce flexibility.

The tensions were laid bare this week after Chalmers admitted that eventually – perhaps after election spending – the private sector must drive the economy.

In response, the bosses of BHP and Wesfarmers demanded a reduction in red tape and a more friendly environment for investment.

“I kind of wish he’d said this a year ago because this is exactly the message that’s been coming from ourselves, but also from broader business,” BHP Australia president Geraldine Slattery said.

The number of restrictive clauses in federal law (including “shall”, “must”, “may not”, “required” and “prohibited”) has surged by 50 per cent since 2007, according to McKinsey.

Labor’s policies involve bigger government reallocating resources around the economy.

Chalmers’ values-based capitalism is captured by subsidies for manufacturing and green energy such as solar panels, batteries and critical minerals, a $470 million taxpayer bet on PsiQuantum, the care economy and trying to shoehorn superannuation funds and the Future Fund to invest in the government’s priorities of the energy transition, housing supply and infrastructure.

It’s a very different economic approach to the Bob Hawke-Paul Keating Labor governments in the 1980s and 90s. Their focus was on expanding the market economy via productivity growth to pay for social security net programs such as Medicare and compulsory superannuation.

Liberals John Howard and Peter Costello followed up by introducing the GST and cutting other taxes, workplace relations flexibility and delivering 10 budget surpluses.

Then the mining boom arrived in the mid-2000s to deliver tax revenue windfalls, and that made Australia complacent.

The reform task has been made harder by the 24/7 media cycle, social media, powerful lobby groups, the proliferation of political advisers with no outside experience becoming MPs, a less ambitious and more politicised bureaucracy, a more divided electorate and rising budget pressures.

McKinsey senior partner Chris Bradley says governments and business should build a shared understanding of the productivity challenge and create a sense of urgency.

“The incredible economy that we built did not happen by fluke. It happened through amazing leadership from both sides of politics.

“The ingredients were a shared diagnosis of the problem, an absolute focus on urgency and a package deal of things that are collectively better.

“It’s not beyond us for Australia to once again enter the hall of fame of being great economic reformers.”

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/australia-s-economic-problems-have-been-brewing-for-years-20241205-p5kw02

All this makes a pretty depressing read, made a lot worse by the stupidity of the Opposition suggesting a quick little dose of nuclear would make the medicine go down, and solve all our problems.

With solar, wind, tidal and fossil sources available in abundance, and nothing that even vaguely resembles a nuclear industry at present it seems to me we need to go slow and carefully to develop  the nuclear skills we need and plan for serious phased adoption the decade after next. We have the luxury of time to get it right and to learn from all the mistakes of others of the last 20 years! In the meantime we have heaps of conventional energy sources!

We have time to do things properly and safely and this is what we should do I reckon!

What do you think?

David.

I Thought Australia Was In A Good Deal Better Shape Than This, But Some Stresses Are Showing Recently I Feel!

This appeared last week:

We feared rising antisemitism would lead to violence. Those fears came true

Gabi Kaltmann

Rabbi

December 6, 2024 — 7.00pm

Last week, I stood alongside other faith leaders and the minister for multicultural affairs in the city to announce the state government’s new anti-racism strategy. As a rabbi and multifaith leader, it was a privilege to participate in this vital initiative. But on my way home, an incident shook me to the core.

As I stepped off the tram on Burke Road in Camberwell, a man I had never seen before spotted my skullcap, came up to me and shouted, “F---ing Jew, free Palestine”, before running off.

I was stunned and horrified. As I stood there, processing what had just happened, I thought about how much Melbourne, the city where I was raised, had changed. I had never before been targeted in this way simply for being Jewish.

Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists murdered 1200 Israelis, took 250 hostages, and ignited a war with Israel, antisemitism has surged in Australia. Jewish Australians are experiencing an unprecedented rise in threats and hostility. Synagogues and Jewish businesses have been attacked, security has been tightened at Jewish schools, and those of us who are visibly Jewish now live with a heightened sense of vulnerability. Frankly, many of us are terrified.

On Friday morning, I woke to the devastating news that the Adass Israel Synagogue, one of Melbourne’s largest and busiest, had apparently been attacked by arsonists. Two people studying Torah inside suffered burns, and the building was severely damaged. Thankfully, no lives were lost.

The synagogue was founded by Holocaust survivors who fled to Australia in search of safety, and the congregation represents a community that is visibly and unmistakably Jewish. The members of Adass live a deeply religious, apolitical life, entirely focused on faith, family and acts of kindness. They have no political affiliation with Zionism or the State of Israel. Yet they were attacked simply because they are Jewish.

For months, Jewish leaders have been warning that rising antisemitism would escalate into violence. It was a warning I raised at the beginning of the year due to the number of unsettling incidents across our city. Tragically, those warnings have now become reality. Burning a synagogue is a violent attack on a community, its history and its future.

Antisemitism doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It flourishes when hatred and intolerance are allowed to fester. Since the October 7 attacks, Jewish Australians have been grappling with an increasingly hostile environment. Many feel abandoned by a society that prides itself on inclusivity but has not taken sufficient action to protect us.

Despite promises of increased security funding, progress has been slow. The appointment of a federal antisemitism envoy is a positive step, but it is not enough. What we need now is decisive action at the national level.

As a Jewish community leader, I am calling for a federal summit on antisemitism. This summit should bring together lawmakers, policymakers and community leaders to confront the fear and anxiety Jewish Australians have been living with for the past 14 months. It should provide a platform for co-ordinated action, ensuring that laws, resources and policies are implemented effectively across the country.

This is not just about the Jewish community. Antisemitism is often a harbinger of broader societal problems. When hatred against one group is allowed to grow unchecked, it inevitably spreads. Addressing antisemitism is not only about protecting Jewish Australians; it is about safeguarding the values of tolerance and diversity that underpin our nation.

The attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue is a stark reminder that antisemitism is not a distant problem; it is here. Now is the time for action.

Let “zero tolerance” truly mean zero tolerance. Let us show that Australia is a country where people of all faiths and backgrounds can live in safety and dignity.

Gabi Kaltmann is a rabbi at the Ark Centre in Hawthorn.

Here is the link:

https://www.theage.com.au/national/we-feared-rising-antisemitism-would-lead-to-violence-those-fears-have-come-true-20241206-p5kwge.html

I fear we have all seen this movie before and we know it never ends well, without careful and deliberate course corrections. We all have to keep working hard to make sure that all parts of our society are equally supported and respected. This approach is certainly the way I want things to play out with balance and respect for all! My feeling is that all community leaders need to work harder in times of civil stress, as we seem to be seeing at present.

My view is that we are in not too bad a shape right now but that the maneuvering room is rather reduced at present and we need to remain alert to the various stresses and strains in the community. The world is clearly a more dangerous and complex place than it has been in a good while! I rather fear the new Trump Presidency may not help. Time will tell, but I see complex times ahead!

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 776 – Results – 08 December 2024.

Here are the results of the poll.

Does The Use Of Facial Recognition Technology Need Clear Disclosure When Being Used For Commercial and Surveillance Purposes?

Yes                                                                      19 (86%)

No                                                                         3 (14%)

I Have No Idea                                                      0 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes: 22

A clear-cut out-come – people want to know when they are being watched!

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

Poor voting turnout. 

0 of 22 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.

I Think Albo Is Kidding Himself If He Thinks He Can Control Access To Social Media.

Just what is happening when the Government thinks it can insist ordinary law-abiding citizens manage the use of social media among those who can read enough to understand it but who are not adult? It will be a struggle!

‘Black Friday sale on VPNs’: Social media ban faces early obstacles

Tess Bennett Technology reporter

Nov 29, 2024 – 12.48pm

Passing the world-first laws that restrict Australians under the age of 16 from accessing social media may have been the easy part. Enforcing them is another story altogether.

From Monday, Australia’s online safety regulator will pressure social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook owner Meta, Snapchat and TikTok to introduce ways to verify the age of their users to comply with the blanket ban.

The tech giants – which widely criticised the laws as rushed and lacking crucial details about how they will be implemented in practice – must now work with the eSafety Commissioner, who has 12 months to figure out how the new regime will operate when it takes effect in late 2025.

If they fail to comply, platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X and Reddit could be fined up to $50 million after the government secured bipartisan support for the laws this week.

Attention has already turned to how kids can circumvent the ban, with Fred Schebesta, the co-founder of comparison website Finder advertising a Black Friday sale on Virtual Private Networks – software that allows users to appear as though they are accessing the internet from a different country.

“Parents! Finder is having a VPN sale for Black Friday. Special discount for those under 16,” the tech and crypto entrepreneur posted on X.

The legislation does not specify how sites should verify users’ ages. However, Australians won’t be forced to provide their passports or driver’s licences. Platforms can only collect government-issued identity documents if they have provided users with an alternative method of verifying their age.

Alternative methods could include monitoring user interactions and behaviour for signs that they are underage or facial age estimation software.

Findings of the Australian government’s age-verification trials, which are examining how biometrics, age estimation software and parental certification could be used to stop young people accessing social media, will be reported in June.

“The social media ban legislation has been released and passed within a week and, as a result, no one can confidently explain how it will work in practice – the community and platforms are in the dark about what exactly is required of them,” Sunita Bose, the managing director of tech industry group DIGI, said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Friday that the onus was on the social media providers to ensure the safety of Australian children.“We’ve got your back is our message to Australian parents,” Mr Albanese said.

Spokeswomen for Meta, TikTok and Snap told AFR Weekend they were still working through the details of how to set up internal teams to work through the implementation period.

“The task now turns to ensuring there is productive consultation on all rules associated with the bill to ensure a technically feasible outcome that does not place an onerous burden on parents and teens and a commitment that rules will be consistently applied across all social apps used by teens,” a Meta spokeswoman said.

Both Snapchat and Meta have urged the government to require device makers and app store owners like Apple and Google to verify users’ ages at the app store level, which they argue would minimise the need for social media companies to collect identity information.

Passage of the laws through the Senate on Thursday night made headlines around the world. CNN, The New York Times, The Associated Press, the BBC, London’s The Mirror and The Washington Post were among the mainstream outlets that carried stories, as well as all the biggest international technology news websites.

The coverage noted the sweeping ban had widespread support, but that it lacked details of how it would work and that it could pose risks to privacy and children’s social connection.

The Wall Street Journal called the ban “one of the world’s most restrictive social media laws”, and online British news outlet The Independent described it as a “test case” for other governments such as those in France and some US states which are planning to legislate social media age restrictions.

Bloomberg described the laws as “some of the most stringent internet usage restrictions outside of China and other non-democratic regimes and could provide impetus to other governments to act”.

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/technology/how-the-world-reacted-to-our-social-media-ban-20241129-p5kui5

My view is that this is a hysterical “moral panic” on the part of technologically ignorant politicians.

If there was a serious risk, how come we can wait for 12 months to do something?

It is all just political posturing IMVHO! The 'nanny state' really will struggle on this one and I have to say I reckon the platforms need to watch what is going on and exclude the clearly under age. They won't like it, but it should be part of their 'social license'.

David.

I Have To Say This Is A Really Interesting Question! Glad My Career Is Pretty Much Done…

This popped up last week and posed a rather existential question!

The Observer Artificial intelligence (AI)

If AI can provide a better diagnosis than a doctor, what’s the prognosis for medics?

John Naughton

Studies in which ChatGPT outperformed scientists and GPs raise troubling questions for the future of professional work

Sun 1 Dec 2024 03.00 AEDT

AI means too many (different) things to too many people. We need better ways of talking – and thinking – about it. Cue, Drew Breunig, a gifted geek and cultural anthropologist, who has come up with a neat categorisation of the technology into three use cases: gods, interns and cogs.

“Gods”, in this sense, would be “super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously”. In other words, the AGI (artificial general intelligence) that OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his crowd are trying to build (at unconscionable expense), while at the same time warning that it could be an existential threat to humanity. AI gods are, Breunig says, the “human replacement use cases”. They require gigantic models and stupendous amounts of “compute”, water and electricity (not to mention the associated CO₂ emissions).

“Interns” are “supervised co-pilots that collaborate with experts, focusing on grunt work”. In other words, things such as ChatGPT, Claude, Llama and similar large language models (LLMs). Their defining quality is that they are meant to be used and supervised by experts. They have a high tolerance for errors because the experts they are assisting are checking their output, preventing embarrassing mistakes from going further. They do the boring work: remembering documentation and navigating references, filling in the details after the broad strokes are defined, assisting with idea generation by acting as a dynamic sounding board and much more.

Finally, “cogs” are lowly machines that are optimised to perform a single task extremely well, usually as part of a pipeline or interface.

Interns are mostly what we have now; they represent AI as a technology that augments human capabilities and are already in widespread use in many industries and occupations. In that sense, they are the first generation of quasi-intelligent machines with which humans have had close cognitive interactions in work settings, and we’re beginning to learn interesting things about how well those human-machine partnerships work.

One area in which there are extravagant hopes for AI is healthcare. And with good reason. In 2018, for example, a collaboration between AI researchers at DeepMind and Moorfields eye hospital in London significantly speeded up the analysis of retinal scans to detect the symptoms of patients who needed urgent treatment. But in a way, though technically difficult, that was a no-brainer: machines can “read” scans incredibly quickly and pick out ones that need specialist diagnosis and treatment.

The study demonstrated doctors’ sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they had made, even when ChatGPT suggested a better one

But what about the diagnostic process itself, though? Cue an intriguing US study published in October in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which reported a randomised clinical trial on whether ChatGPT could improve the diagnostic capabilities of 50 practising physicians. The ho-hum conclusion was that “the availability of an LLM to physicians as a diagnostic aid did not significantly improve clinical reasoning compared with conventional resources”. But there was a surprising kicker: ChatGPT on its own demonstrated higher performance than both physician groups (those with and without access to the machine).

Or, as the New York Times summarised it, “doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. And, to the researchers’ surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors.”

More interesting, though, were two other revelations: the experiment demonstrated doctors’ sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they had made, even when ChatGPT suggested a better one; and it also suggested that at least some of the physicians didn’t really know how best to exploit the tool’s capabilities. Which in turn revealed what AI advocates such as Ethan Mollick have been saying for aeons: that effective “prompt engineering” – knowing what to ask an LLM to get the most out of it – is a subtle and poorly understood art.

Equally interesting is the effect that collaborating with an AI has on the humans involved in the partnership. Over at MIT, a researcher ran an experiment to see how well material scientists could do their job if they could use AI in their research.

The answer was that AI assistance really seems to work, as measured by the discovery of 44% more materials and a 39% increase in patent filings. This was accomplished by the AI doing more than half of the “idea generation” tasks, leaving the researchers to the business of evaluating model-produced candidate materials. So the AI did most of the “thinking”, while they were relegated to the more mundane chore of evaluating the practical feasibility of the ideas. And the result: the researchers experienced a sharp reduction in job satisfaction!

Interesting, n’est-ce pas? These researchers are high-flyers, not low-status operatives. But suddenly, collaborating with a smart machine made them feel like… well, cogs. And the moral? Be careful what you wish for.

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/30/if-ai-can-provide-a-better-diagnosis-than-a-doctor-whats-the-prognosis-for-medics

I will say, straight of the bat, I have no idea of the answer, but I do think the human touch from your kindly doctor is rather hard to replace!

David.

It Is Really Fun To Look Back And See What A Mess The myHR Was Five Years Ago. Seems Little Has Changed!

This appeared a bit over six years ago!

Hidden conflict: My Health Record boss privately giving advice to health firms

By Esther Han

November 15, 2018 — 12.00am

The chairman of the agency responsible for the bungled My Health Record rollout has been privately advising a global healthcare outsourcing company.

The Herald discovered the relationship between the UK based government contracting giant Serco and the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) chairman Jim Birch after obtaining internal documents that detail the board members' conflicts of interest.

The revelation comes as federal Health Minister Greg Hunt was forced to extend the My Health Record opt out period after a compromise deal with the Senate crossbench and a last minute meltdown of the website left thousands of Australians struggling to meet the original deadline.

Since April 2016, Mr Birch has been ADHA chairman with oversight of the My Health Record system, which will automatically generate digital medical records for millions of Australians who do not opt out by the end of January.

The ADHA board's "Personal Interests Disclosures Register", released under Freedom of Information laws, shows Mr Birch began "providing strategy advice to Serco" in November 2017. The register is not publicly available.

After the Herald submitted questions last week on whether the relationship posed a conflict of interest, Mr Birch quit the Serco advisory role.

Serco has won a number of multi-billion dollar government contracts to privately run - and in some cases deliver healthcare in - some of Australia's prisons, hospitals and detention centres.

The ability of Serco to navigate the controversial area of digital health records would be invaluable to any future expansion plans, given its "global healthcare strategy".

A spokeswoman for Mr Hunt said all 10 board members had declared their interests.

"Board members do not have access to system operations and board members cannot be present while a matter is being considered at a board meeting in which the member has an interest," she said.

Lisa Parker, a public health ethics expert at University of Sydney, said the public had been asked to trust that the agency is acting in its best interests. She said it should make public any information relevant to that trust.

The original My Health Record opt out deadline was October 15, 2018.Credit: Alamy

"Some members of the public may select not to place their trust in board members who they perceive to have conflicts of interest," Dr Parker said.

"This does not mean that transparency is wrong, rather it means that allowing associations that give rise to real or perceived conflicts of interest threatens the viability of the potentially important resource that is the My Health Record."

More competing interests exposed

The register also shows Mr Birch knows the chief executive of health-tech startup Personify Care, Ken Saman, and has been giving him advice since August last year.

The software company recently released "Personify Connect", a product that provides hospitals with "seamless integration" of its original patient monitoring platform with My Health Record.

Despite being scheduled to speak at a "Personify Care breakfast seminar" later this year, Mr Birch has never publicly declared this potential competing interest.

Mr Birch is also chairman of another startup called Clevertar that allows businesses to create "virtual agents" and offer "personalised healthcare support, delivered at scale". This relationship is on the public record.

Public sector ethics expert Richard Mulgan, from Australian National University, said the chairman should submit to a higher standard than ordinary board members and distance himself from anything suggesting a conflict of interest.

He said perception was just as important as reality and the public, not the people involved, was the best judge of whether there was a problem.

November 15th is the opt-out date for My Health Record, but exactly what does this data system mean for Australians?

"The personal interests register must be published," Professor Mulgan said. "The fact they haven't can only lead to the perception there are conflicts of which they are ashamed."

Mr Birch, Personify Care and Clevertar did not respond to the Herald's questions.

A Serco spokesman confirmed the company met with Mr Birch "occasionally ... over the past 12 months regarding business management", but did not answer whether it had paid him.

An ADHA spokesman said under laws, "no board member alone has the ability to make a decision in board meetings or for decisions made without meetings".

In regards to Serco, it said it "has no commercial relationship with Serco and the company does not and has not had access to the My Health Record system".

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/healthcare/hidden-conflict-my-health-record-boss-privately-giving-advice-to-health-firms-20181107-p50eh9.html

The mess that is the myHR has been rolling on for a very long time now. Are there any recent reports that it is now just wonderful and widely used all over?

I have not heard any such reports!

I wonder what Mr Jim Birch thinks about the myHR all these years later?

David.

All Forms Of Biometric Data Need To Be Managed Very Carefully And Much Better I Believe.

This appeared a few days ago:

Why Victoria’s privacy chief is so worried about facial-recognition technology

By Kieran Rooney and Carla Jaeger

November 30, 2024 — 7.11pm

Victorian gambling venues are increasingly using off-the-shelf facial recognition technology to help identify problem gamblers, prompting concerns that sensitive data is being put at risk.

The state’s information commissioner this week said some government contractors were not being held to strict privacy laws, and admitted several data breaches of government bodies it had not investigated.

Community Clubs Victoria chief executive Andrew Lloyd has written to the national privacy commissioner requesting assistance over the issue of facial recognition. He warned that it was “problematic” that self-exclusion files were being handed over to third-party suppliers that process and install the systems.

In that letter, seen by The Age, he raised concerns that venues and retailers were purchasing facial recognition technology from sellers that “essentially provide no guidance” about whether they complied with Australia’s data security and privacy guidelines, such as how information is stored and whether it is deleted appropriately.

“I think facial recognition systems can be a wonderful tool, however the implementation and protections need to be embedded properly within the business utilising the technology,” Lloyd told The Age.

“For licensed premises, facial recognition systems can provide definite protections, and in South Australia the government has implemented a gold-standard system in licensed clubs that interfaces with the gambling self-exclusion system, which is working extremely well.

“I am concerned to hear that some venues are giving their self-exclusion files to third-party suppliers to process images and install these systems. This practice is problematic.

“I think the privacy commissioner needs to provide more education and guidance for the retail and hospitality industry, so operators are not installing systems that are not compliant and not understanding what due diligence they need to go through to meet the Australian Privacy Principles and legislation.”

Problem gamblers can choose to be excluded from gaming venues, whose facial recognition software will alert security if those on the self-exclusion register attempt to enter a casino or gaming establishment. In most cases, people who sign on to self-exclusion registers in Victoria are warned their data could be used for facial recognition.

But as states across Australia have sought to strengthen protections around pokies venues and tackle organised crime, they have encountered challenges on the use of facial-recognition technology.

New South Wales Attorney-General Michael Daley this month said he was committed to the use of facial-recognition technology but warned there was a “way to go” in how it should be used.

“We must make sure that the technology works and that its implementation protects people’s privacy,” he said in parliament.

“With cybercrime and a range of other things, we all worry that the more data these systems collect the more is put at risk of being stolen.”

Australian Privacy Foundation immediate past chair David Vaile said the spread of cheap internet-connected technology increased the risk of personal information being exposed, particularly if it wasn’t regularly updated with security upgrades.

“All the attacker needs is a tiny, hairline crack to get through, and what the defender needs to do is have 100 per cent perfect perimeter security, which is impossible,” he said.

“The business model of the attackers has proven very successful, so they’ve grown in 20 to 30 years.”

Vaile said the use of different technology across each venue made it almost impossible for people walking through the door to judge whether the facial recognition technology in use was safe.

Retailer Bunnings this month was found by the national regulator to have breached Australia’s privacy laws with its use of facial-recognition technology, a finding it has sought to review.

Following this, the Office of the Australia Information Commissioner (OAIC) issued guidance about how businesses should approach the issue.

The office said it was up to organisations to justify that the collection was necessary in the first place and that they should take reasonable steps to identify risks for how information was used, stored, destroyed and de-identified.

“The fact that FRT is available, convenient or desirable should not be relied on to establish that it is necessary to collect the information,” the OAIC guidance said.

An OAIC spokesperson said the “onus is on organisations to reassess their own practices and ensure they comply with our guidance”.

Victorian Information Commissioner Sean Morrison told a parliamentary hearing last week that his office had concerns about potential breaches because government agencies were failing to enforce privacy laws when outsourcing work.

“The expectation there is that when agencies are contracting with the provider that they pass on all of the [privacy and security] requirements to those agencies – the access to information privacy or information security. And … we don’t believe that’s happening now,” Morrison told the hearing.

Morrison said his office was aware of several data breaches that did not result in investigations, and that agencies were not reporting breaches due to fears they would be investigated.

“There were also a couple of other breaches that we are aware of that we didn’t do investigations on … but where, again, the volume of information that was [taken] was much higher than it should have been.”

Victoria’s Privacy and Data Protection Deputy Commissioner, Rachel Dixon, would not provide further information about these breaches when asked by The Age, but said: “[OVIC] cannot investigate where it does not have jurisdiction over the organisation or type of information impacted”.

In 2022, tens of thousand Victorians’ had sensitive personal information exposed after a ransomware attack on a state government contractor, Datatime.

Datatime held several contracts with six different state departments spanning decades. Dixon launched an investigation into the breach.

The report, handed down in May this year, found Datatime had troves of public-sector data dating back to as early as 2003, including sensitive personal information like medical records and family histories.

“It was an organisation that was contractually required by several government agencies to delete the data that they were collecting within a matter of months,” Dixon said at last week’s parliamentary hearing.

The report also found that along with other cybersecurity issues, Datatime and the two departments it held contracts with at the time of the breach were unclear on their obligations to destroy and de-identify government data.

Dixon was unable to complete her investigation as the company entered voluntary administration.

Under OVIC guidelines, government agencies are supposed to bind all third-party providers to comply with laws which govern the handling of personal information and public sector data. The information watchdog is currently consulting agencies as it develops a new set of guidelines.

Without enforcing these privacy obligations to contractors, there is little recourse if a privacy breach occurs, said Dixon.

A state government spokesperson said any agency aware of a breach should report it to the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner.

Here is the link:

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/why-victoria-s-privacy-chief-is-so-worried-about-facial-recognition-technology-20241129-p5kuo7.html

This is really a pretty sorry tale, where are government contractor collected and held, and then failed to protect a large trove of personal data.

The problem is that there are hundreds of entities are doing the exact same things and the citizen really has no idea who has what data on them, how they are protecting it and when they are going to get rid of it – if ever!

That really bad problems have not reached the public consciousness (and caused public outrage and annoyance) is, I suspect, by good luck rather than good management!

Both sides of politics have promised proper reviews and improvements for as long as I can remember – but zilch ever happens. I suspect someone many in power must like it that way? There is no doubt commerce will try to get away with as much as it can, as cheaply as it can!

So the citizen is watched and tracked with bugger all recourse! Apathy is a wonderful thing…

David.

An Interesting Location For The Very Beginning Of Life On Earth!

This appeared a day or so ago! It is a reminder of just how ancient and diverse we are “down under”!

Where did we come from? Try looking in Shark Bay, Western Australia

Searching for the answers to life’s big questions can take you to some amazing places on Earth – such as the remote beaches of Western Australia where clues are found beneath the surface.

ZOE KEAN

Updated 9:04AM November 28, 2024

Do you ever stop and question why and how we have evolved to be the way we are? Survival is important to us, so why are we willing to risk our lives for those we care about? In a world where some species reproduce without sex, why do we need to find a partner to reproduce? Why do we fall in love, and is there a purpose in pleasure? Why are there males and females? Is life really that binary? Why do we get cancer? Why do we age, get drunk – even though it’s bad for us – or spend a third of our lives asleep? And why did we evolve consciousness and develop rich inner lives?

In contemplating evolution, we see the astonishing adaptability and persistence of life. Life on Earth has survived meteorite strikes, ice ages and continent-wide volcanic events. We, and the living forms we share this planet with, are the direct descendants of the survivors of those cataclysms. How has this history shaped us? Can learning about these feats of adaptation help us to live a better life? It’s these questions that have brought me to Gutharragudu/Shark Bay in Western Australia, a place where red desert sand meets the sea.

I’m starting my investigation at Gutharragudu because some of the secrets of the beginnings of life are held by creatures quietly photosynthesising just offshore.

I flew here on a small regional plane from Perth, having already crossed the continent from my home in lutruwita/Tasmania. When we commenced our bumpy descent and burst through the bulbous grey clouds, the vast glittering bay revealed itself – a shining patchwork of luminous blue streaked with dark patches of seagrass meadows waving below the water. In the local Malgana language, Gutharragudu means “two waters”, which describes how the 23,000-square-kilometre bay is split down the middle by the red dunes of the Francois Peron Peninsula. The light colour of the water is the first clue that Gutharragudu is special.

The water in the bay is not deep, and this is particularly true in an ultra-shallow pocket called Hamelin Pool. The shape of the bay, combined with a sediment wall caused by the seagrass, means that water flows into the pool at a higher rate than it flows out. The beating heat of Western Australia’s sunny days causes the trapped water to evaporate fast. These factors combine to make the massive pool, which is 1270km sq, almost twice as salty as the ocean. Hypersalinity is bad news for most species. In this unique environment, only the most salt-tolerant make it. The extreme conditions have allowed ancient forms of life, rare in our current world, to survive and thrive, providing a glimpse into what life on Earth may have been like billions of years ago.

Cyanobacteria exist in much of the ocean but are greedily gobbled up by sea snails, so they never get the chance to accumulate. But snails cannot hack the salinity of Hamelin Pool, which gives these tiny single-cell organisms the opportunity to collectively achieve something incredible – to build stone structures that can grow to over a metre tall.

These are called microbialites. Microbialites have different names depending on exactly how they are formed – they might be known as thrombolites or stromatolites. Both are found at Hamelin Pool, but here they’re generally called stromatolites. These rare creations are found in only a few places in the world outside of Western Australia, including a reef in the Bahamas and on the bottom of some Antarctic lakes.

The stromatolites’ domain stretches for kilometres, creating uncanny reefs along Hamelin Pool’s remote beaches. Access is strictly limited; if you want to swim among them, you need to go with a trained guide. “I usually take astronauts and astronomers out here,” explains our guide, Luke, as a small group of us travels over the red dirt track towards the beach. If life is ever found on other planets, quite likely it would look like these stromatolites.

The sun is out as we drive from red desert to the glaringly white beach. Hopping barefooted out of the four-wheel-drive, I’m surprised by the crunch between my toes. My feet are met not by sand but countless fingernail-sized seashells, metres deep. The cockle (Fragum erugatum) is another species that is adapted to the salty pool and has multiplied in its billions, creating long stretches of brilliant white coastline. As I look into the water, caramel brown shapes are visible in the teal shallows. Are they the stroms? Yes! With a rush of excitement I realise that I am about to get an insight into what life was like on the ancient Earth.

Luke shows us the narrow way by which we can wade in without accidentally touching any of these strange forms. Once I’m knee-deep, I launch in, float on the surface for a moment and then start gently kicking. Within seconds a group of stromatolites reveals itself, the choppy water causing sand to swish around them like structures in a snow globe.

Stromatolites are about half a metre tall with bulbous tops, dimpled, and an odd grey-cream colour.

Further out to sea the stromatolites become smaller and flatter, forming mosaic-like patterns on the sea floor.

They are about half a metre tall with bulbous tops, dimpled, and an odd grey-cream colour. I bob above them, oddly buoyant in the hypersaline water. The local Malgana people regard the stromatolites as their Old People and, as I swim on, they remind me of a phalanx of stony warriors. Further out, the water clears and their shapes change, becoming smaller and flatter and forming mosaic-like patterns on the sea floor.

Each form could be thousands of years old. Geologist Erica Suosaari of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum has a long record of researching Western Australia’s stromatolites.

Later, she tells me over Zoom that tiny bacteria created these stone structures in two ways. One is by “trapping and binding” sediments, like sand, that happen to wash past, creating a concrete-like substance. But they also “precipitate” minerals from the seawater, undissolving them from the water to create limestone. Coral also uses seawater to create its stone skeletons. This means only the outer layer of the stromatolites is alive.

Some of the first life on Earth looked exactly like this. If I’d flown further north and inland, I would have arrived at an arid part of Western Australia, confusingly called North Pole, where 3.4 billion-year-old stromatolite fossils have been found. Considering the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, these are truly ancient.

Are the organisms building the living monuments I’m swimming over anything like the tiny cells that built North Pole’s precious relics? I put this to Suosaari and she explains that for many of the ancient fossils, nailing down exactly what kind of single-celled critter made them is challenging, so we can only learn about the processes these living things used to build their monuments. At Hamelin Pool, she says the stromatolites are built in a way that is “very analogous to ancient structures … regardless of the species, it’s a process that’s been happening for billions of years and it’s incredible”. It is possible the earliest stromatolites were made by cells called archaea – simple cells that are subtly different to the bacteria that were foundational for the evolution of complex life.

The dominant species at Hamelin Pool, a photosynthetic cyanobacteria called Entophysalis, is ancient. Evidence of it stretches back at least 1.8 billion years. Entophysalis is not present in the world’s other large stromatolite system in the Bahamas, and for Suosaari this makes Hamelin Pool “the most incredible place on the planet because you really do have this window into the ancient”.

For at least 80 per cent of the history of life on Earth, stromatolites were the most common way life presented itself – microbes were the only game in town. But then things changed.

However, here in Gutharragudu they live on, emerging out of the millions of Fragum cockles on the sea floor. A range of small unassuming silver fish, adapted to the extreme salinity of the water, dart around them. Less common are the baby-blue jellyfish and the languid metre-long sea snakes that contain enough venom to kill dozens of people. One olive-green snake takes a break from hunting to headbutt my camera and playfully swim through my hair before ribboning off, leaving me equally awestruck and frozen with fear.

As I snorkel through this alien scene set in crystal blue, I’m struck by the unlikeliness of it all. For much of Earth’s history, life existed in these relatively simple forms. But from them, and over millions of years, endless forms – most beautiful and most wonderful – have evolved.

The code to life

I don’t look much like a cyanobacteria – for one, you don’t need a microscope to see me. But deep in our cells we have a lot in common. Both of us are built using information stored as DNA. To get to grips with how life on Earth evolves, we need to get into the nitty-gritty of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA to its friends. The broad strokes of evolutionary theory were understood decades before we knew about DNA. DNA provides the instructions from which our bodies are made. Molecules called nucleic acids link together in a chain, creating mega-long complex molecules. The order of these molecules provides the information needed to create an organism – our genome.

Nucleic acids preceded life as we know it. They were most likely cooked up in a hotbed of chemical reactions in ancient Earth’s numerous mineral-rich volcanic pools, though some scientists believe this happened in deep-sea vents, or even that the ingredients for life arrived on Earth via an asteroid.

Either way, early Earth was a laboratory, hosting chemical reaction after chemical reaction until one day everything came together to form a cell. While this may have happened more than once, only one lineage had what it took to survive. This cell is named the last universal common ancestor or LUCA.

From LUCA, everything that has ever lived evolved. From the ancient stromatolites of Western Australia to dinosaurs, deep-sea worms and humans, we are all related to LUCA.

This is an edited extract from Why are We Like This? by Zoe Kean, published by NewSouth Publishing, and out now.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/health/medical/where-did-we-come-from-try-looking-in-shark-bay-western-australia/news-story/004f5dfdd2bcb5196f36654dd467c603

The bottom line here is that the life found in these waters is the ancestor of all life on earth and it was from these that all life as we know it evolved.

Wonderful that we now know our story all the way back and lucky, I suspect, some of our ancestors are still around to show us where we came from all that long time ago!

Fantastic stuff that partly compensates for all the horror in the world at present….

David.