Does This Mean We Can Forget About The Dutton Nuclear Fantasy? I Think So!

This appeared a few days ago:

Energy

Proposed nuclear power plants in Queensland could not access enough water to prevent a meltdown, research finds

About 1,000 times the combined capacity of Wivenhoe and Boondooma dams was required to cool Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactors in 2011

Joe Hinchliffe

Sun 23 Mar 2025 06.00 AEDT

Proposed nuclear power plants in Queensland would not have access to enough water to stop a nuclear meltdown and could strain capacity on drinking water and irrigation supplies even under normal operations, research has found.

Analysis by the Queensland Conservation Council (QCC) has found that one of the two nuclear reactors proposed for the sunshine state under the energy plan that the Coalition will take to the upcoming federal election would require double the water currently used by the existing Callide coal-fired power station. The other, Tarong, would use 55% more water than its existing coal station.

Tarong’s primary water source is the Boondooma Dam, from which it is allocated 30,000 megalitres per year, and which also supplies drinking water for the nearby town of Kingaroy and irrigates the rich agricultural country along the Boyne River. But Tarong also has a pipeline to the Wivenhoe Dam, the main supply of water for Brisbane and Ipswich, which – due to substantial premiums – it only uses when Boondooma Dam levels are low.

More than 1.3 million cubic metres of seawater were required to cool Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactors and prevent a complete meltdown in 2011 – about 1,000 times the combined capacity of Wivenhoe and Boondooma dams.

The report has been described as “flawed and highly politicised” by the coalition.

The QCC director, Dave Copeman, said the fact there was “nowhere near enough water capacity in our dams to stop a nuclear meltdown if things go wrong” exposed the Coalition’s energy plan as a “nuclear fantasy”.

“If there was an emergency, you could run the whole [Wivenhoe] Dam dry and still not have enough water to stop a meltdown,” Copeman said.

“The Coalition is not being honest with farmers and the community about the realities of their nuclear scheme. At best it’s impractical, at worst it’s grossly irresponsible and could result in a major incident.”

Here's why Peter Dutton's nuclear power plan is a fantasy - video

The Callide coal-fired power plant has a 20,000 ML of annual water allocation from the Callide Dam, which is fed by the Awoonga Dam. As of Wednesday, Awoonga – which supplies the city of Gladstone’s water – was at 46% capacity, and Callide – which supplies drinking water to Biloela – was at 16.5% capacity. Callide Dam is also used to replenish aquifers that irrigate crops in the Callide Valley.

Callide would have to find an additional 27,000 ML of water to power the kind of power plants implied by the Coalition’s nuclear plan, the QCC report found – with Copeman saying there was simply “not enough water available”.

Clare Silcock, the renewable energy engineer for the QCC who crunched the numbers on the report, said the Coalition’s nuclear proposal was scant on details. Instead she drew upon the Frontier Economic’s modelling that the opposition has relied upon to argue its nuclear vision for seven reactors across the country would be 44% cheaper than the government’s renewables-led plan.

That report models just over 100,000 gigawatt hours of nuclear electricity in the National Electricity Market (NEM) – which covers Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia – by 2050.

Six of the proposed nuclear sites are within the NEM, and so the QCC report assumes the generation would be spread equally across those sites.

But Silcock said none of the other four proposed plants were “going to be particularly better in terms of water availability”.

“This is going to be a problem for anywhere in Australia,” she said. “Particularly in South Australia, they’re in a brutal drought at the moment. We’ve just done the analysis for Queensland – but the question is valid around all those six sites”.

Ian Lowe, emeritus professor at Griffith University’s school of environment and science, said the QCC research was “sound”.

Lowe said that a rule of thumb was that a nuclear power station needed about 15% more water than a coal-fired power station of the same capacity. So whether the proposed Tarong and Callide nuclear plants would require more or less water than the current coal stations would depend on the capacity for which they were built.

“[But] if we were to build the amount of nuclear power proposed in the Frontier Economics report as part of the Coalition’s long-term approach for 2050 electricity, there would not be enough water for Tarong and Callide to provide the proposed share of power,” he said.

That meant that the Frontier report was “implicitly assuming that the nuclear power program would be expanded” beyond the sites already identified by the Coalition.

“So it would be reasonable to ask the question: if the much larger nuclear program proposed in the Frontier Economics report were to go ahead, where would all the extra power stations be sited?” Lowe said.

“Given that we are the driest inhabited continent and rainfall patterns are being significantly disrupted by climate change, they would have to be on coastal sites and using sea water for cooling, which would add further costs due to the design complication of resisting corrosion”.

Shadow energy minister Ted O’Brien MP described the QCC report as “flawed and highly politicised” criticising it for making assumptions about water usage based on a 2006 feasibility study into the possibility of establishing a nuclear power industry in Australia commissioned by then prime minister John Howard.

“The fact is, the latest nuclear power plant designs are incredibly efficient and their water usage is comparable to coal fired power stations which they will eventually replace,” O’Brien said.

“The Coalition has embraced a world’s best practice ‘coal to nuclear’ because it allows us to leverage existing infrastructure – including water, transmission and a local workforce.”

The Coalition minister pointed to the Palo Verde Nuclear power plant in the Sonoran Desert, one of the United State’s largest power producers and the only one in the world not near a large body of water as it uses treated wastewater from nearby cities.

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/23/proposed-nuclear-power-plants-in-queensland-could-not-access-enough-water-to-prevent-a-meltdown-research-finds

I think this suggests we should give the Dutton nuclear fantasy a miss until say about 2100!

It will be of very little concern to me, and most of you, by then I reckon.

David.

This Is A Useful Discussion Of Some Worthwhile Diagnostic Tests That Can Be Done At Home.

This appeared last week:

Expert guide to home health tests: Great idea or pandering to the ‘worried well’?

Australians can now do at-home tests for everything from menopause to sexually transmitted diseases. But which DIY kits can you rely on?

Stephen Lunn

23 March, 2025

Walk down the aisle of any chemist and you’ll come across a growing list of home self-testing kits. Vitamin D deficiency, perimenopause, urinary tract infections, STIs are among the conditions to be tested. Go online and there are even more – including at-home cholesterol and blood-glucose testing.

As we all strive to understand our health better, information is key, but context is critical.

The Covid pandemic normalised home testing. But like Covid, the results of point-in-time home tests may not be as black and white as they seem.

Mark Morgan, chair of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners expert committee on quality care, says the fallibility of Covid tests, which can depend on many factors such as how sensitive the test is and when it is taken, can apply in situations beyond the pandemic.

“Pregnancy self-testing kits have been around for decades,” Professor Morgan says. “A positive test is life-changing, but a negative test might miss very early pregnancy.”

Home testing is generally carried out through either pinprick blood tests or urine testing. Professor Morgan says at a helicopter level, this self-testing has its place, with significant caveats.

“Home testing certainly kicks goals for convenience. For some tests such as sexually transmitted diseases, home tests also afford some additional privacy. On the flip side, results of tests can be confusing, inaccurate and misleading.

“Imagine doing a self-test that turns out to be falsely reassuring. For example, using a phone app to look at a new dark spot on your skin. If the phone app provides false reassurance it might delay your diagnosis of skin cancer,” he says.

“Buying a self-test to engage in some sort of hunt for conditions may well do you more harm than benefit. An example might be self-testing for food allergies that might then lead to a lifetime of restricted diet with no appreciable benefits to health.

“One helpful rule of thumb before doing any test – ‘will the result change what I do next?’

“There are thousands of blood tests available, but doctors will be highly selective about which ones to recommend because some tests just don’t matter,” Professor Morgan says.

But John Kelly, chief executive of Atomo Diagnostics, a listed company providing HIV self-testing kits and developing a syphilis home-test, says Australia has been “relatively slow to adopt widespread rapid testing, due in large part to the reimbursement for testing being heavily skewed to laboratory testing services”.

“This can adversely impact how testing is offered to the community, and we saw this with an over-reliance on PCR testing during the Covid pandemic,” Mr Kelly says.

“There are certainly participants in the healthcare industry that will lose market share as the transition to decentralised point-of-care testing and self-testing accelerates.”

In an effort to provide some clarity for consumers, we’ve had medical experts take a look at some of the raft of home-tests now available.

Cholesterol home screening

Product: Lifesmart Cholesterol Multifunctional Monitor – cholesterol, blood glucose, ketone. $69 plus shipping (Online from ablehealth.com.au). Cholesterol test strips sold separately. $39.95 for 10.

The test requires a small pin prick to obtain a blood droplet, which is placed on the test strip. That strip is put into the monitor for analysis.

It connects to a smartphone via Bluetooth, so that all information can be viewed and analysed in real time. You are also provided with a guide as to what is considered desirable, borderline high, or high, with advice on what to do next, including contacting your GP if it is high.

A free app will allow you to share the data with your doctor, dietitian or family. A similar product in the UK allows a patient to send the results directly to the NHS.

Paul Glasziou, emeritus professor of evidence-based practice at Bond University, says cholesterol is just one element to consider when assessing someone’s risk of heart disease, so an overemphasis on it can be risky.

“Further, even with a good lab analysing a good blood sample there can be significant variation over different days, between 5 and 10 per cent, even if the person’s cholesterol is stable,” Professor Glasziou says.

“Clinically there is really only a need to test a person’s cholesterol every one to three years, for instance during someone’s annual health check.

“All the rest is just noise, a waste of money, and anxiety-inducing. The random variations mean a person is likely to over-interpret the results. I think it’s an appeal to the worried well,” he says.

STI self-screening

Product: TouchBio Chlamydia and Gonorrhea rapid test (for females) $24 (available online)

Product: Atomo Diagnostics HIV Self Test ($25 online or in selected pharmacies) (Syphilis test in development)

The first of these tests is conducted by collecting a vaginal swab, and using a process similar to a Covid RAT test to obtain a reading. It has some limitations, in that it may not detect some chlamydia strains contracted within 60 days of the test, and similar for gonorrhoea strains within 10 days.

The second test is done by a pin prick blood test.

The RACGP chair of specific interests, sexual health medicine, Sara Whitburn, says “better access to testing and subsequent treatment for positive results is crucial for reducing the transmission of STIs, so new initiatives to encourage testing are welcome”.

Mr Kelly says his company’s experience with HIV testing reveals many people will avoid going to the doctor when concerned about sexually transmitted infections.

“This is due to a broad range of factors including embarrassment, cultural barriers to seeking testing, familiarity – their doctor knows the partner or children.

“Some people don’t want an STI test registered on the Medicare record. A lot of immigrant arrivals are not in the healthcare system and don’t have a doctor,” he says.

Dr Whitburn warns the chlamydia and gonorrhoea test is limited.

“It is validated only for vaginal samples, so it can’t be used to screen for oral or anal chlamydia and gonorrhoea,” Dr Whitburn says.

“Chlamydia also often presents as asymptomatic, and gonorrhoea may by asymptomatic or symptoms may not present until months after infection.

“Improved access to screening is valuable, but regular testing with your GP or a sexual health professional who can test for these and other infections is still essential for sexually active people,” she says.

Bowel screening

Product: Colovantage Home Test ($45 online or in some chemists)

This is a faecal immunochemical test for the screening of bowel disease. It detects whether there are traces of blood in the stool as a result of colorectal disease. The method is somewhat complex, including collecting water around the stool in the toilet for analysis.

Australia already has a free national bowel screening program. Test kits are sent every two years to all Australians aged 50 and over. And since last year those aged 45-49 are eligible to screen with the program if they apply.

There has been some recent concern about younger people being diagnosed with colorectal cancers.

“Colorectal cancer was the fourth-leading cause of cancer death in both men and women younger than 50 years in the late-1990s but is now first in men and second in women,” the American Cancer Society wrote in its report Cancer Statistics 2024.

Professor Glasziou says the Australian government’s screening program is about right on a cost-benefit analysis.

“There has been some argument about the age at which the free screening starts, but I would say about 50 is the right age.

“The exception would be for those with a family history. I’d suggest they maintain regular contact with their GP on this,” he says.

Perimenopause

Product: WeTestBio Perimenopause FSH Home Test Kit ($29 for a two-pack online or at pharmacies)

The test is performed using a urine sample. The information coming with the test says that “as the female body ages and produces less oestrogen, FSH (follicle stimulating hormone) levels increase as the hormone tries to stimulate the ovaries to produce a healthy egg”.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/health/medical/expert-guide-to-home-health-tests-great-idea-or-pandering-to-the-worried-well/news-story/3be9c94d816645f9918f3b6b5fac9de3

This is a useful review of what is presently available for home – testing and I am sure there are a few more in the pipeline. Seems to me such testing is useful to help people decide if they need to seek professional help as well as ease the worry of those who test negative.

This is surely the start of a trend which will only ramp up over the next few years.

Watch this space!

David.

It Seems We Have Got The NDIS Working Reasonably Well Without Bankrupting The Country – As Was Feared By Some!

This is a useful review of the NDIS – suggesting we have got the system working pretty well.

Here is some expert commentary:

Steve Robson

Let’s not forget how bad it was before the NDIS

23 March, 2025.

Australians have every reason to be proud of our National Disability Insurance Scheme. Introduced with bipartisan support, it has been, by any measure, a great success. The lives of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Australians and their families have been transformed for the better. Yet despite this record of success, the NDIS has a giant target painted on it and has become the program that many people love to hate.

As its cost reaches almost $45bn a year – and more than 660,000 Australians now have funding packages – attacks on the sustainability of such a monolithic social program have reached fever pitch. Some accuse it of “strangling” the private sector, others rage against what they see as fraud, overspending, and mismanagement. Still others point to disastrous outcomes for participants.

Where does the truth lie? Is the scheme a really a giant white elephant sitting squarely on the chest of our economy?

A dozen years after the NDIS was introduced it is easy to forget just how bad disability supports were in this country. As far back as 1974, the Woodhouse Report advised the Whitlam government to institute an NDIS-like system. Whitlam was dismissed before any legislation could see the light of day, and the privations suffered by many Australians with a disability and their families continued to worsen.

By the dawn of the new millennium, tens of thousands of people with major disabilities lived lives of social isolation, unemployment, impoverishment, and commonly a major burden fell to their families. After years of kicking this can down the road, Australia became a signatory of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2007, the result of strong and spirited advocacy from disability and carers’ groups. At the time, no-fault schemes were up and running in NSW and Victoria. These funded supports for some people with acquired disabilities but little was available for people who were born with them.

In 2009, the Productivity Commission was tasked to come up with a plan to overhaul the broken system. The resulting report shocked many Australians. “The current disability support system is underfunded, unfair, fragmented, and inefficient,” the report read. So bad was the pre-existing system that the commission found itself “overwhelmed by the social and economic disadvantage manifest among people with a disability and their families – and the inability of the existing system to cope”. Evidence was heard of carers contemplating “murder-suicide” plans, so intolerable were the lives of many Australian families struggling to find help.

The “system”, as it was, seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis. Indeed it barely qualified as a system at all. Yawning service gaps were found across all of the states. Many people outlived family members who cared for them, and carers were under immense pressures and were found to have the lowest levels of wellbeing of any Australians. People with similar levels of disability received head-spinning differences in the levels of support they received – this was so bad the Productivity Commission described it as a lottery.

The report recommended a national social insurance scheme to provide certainty for every Australian in the event of a major disability. The resulting NDIS is almost unique globally and we should be proud of this. Similar but smaller-scale schemes operated in some European countries but were opt-in. In Australia, the NDIS was to become compulsory. Our trailblazing path also meant, of course, that there was no blueprint to follow from overseas. A scheme so ambitious, so large in scale and scope, and of such complexity was always going to experience a difficult birth. Yet “the benefits of the scheme would significantly outweigh the costs”, the report stated.

Before the NDIS, state and territory governments provided so-called “block funding” to disability service providers to deliver services – the funding then was rationed out to recipients of services. Supports might include care at home, day activity centres, or other services. The level of service and support varied between and within states, and there often was little or no choice. Even changing providers could be a challenge.

The NDIS flipped this completely by providing the funding to the person, not the organisation. The NDIS was all about putting Australians in charge of their own plan. The person with the disability was better placed to determine what they needed than to have external providers impose “one-size-fits-all” solutions on them. The NDIS would fund “reasonable and necessary supports” to allow people to live their lives in a way as ordinary as possible. Such supports could vary, from having personal care at home, to buying aids and equipment, funding various therapies such as physiotherapy, increasing social participation, and purchasing transports.

To be eligible for NDIS funding a person has to have a permanent disability that has substantially reduced their intellectual, neurological, physical or social functioning. Because of this strict definition the great majority of the millions of Australians who have a disability aren’t eligible for NDIS funding – only about 10 per cent meet the criteria. The NDIS also was not designed to replace the Disability Support Pension, which provides income for living. It is about additional costs, such as a wheelchair or home support.

Applying for NDIS support is not easy. It requires paperwork proving that the applicant’s disability is permanent and substantially reduces their capacity to undertake activities of living. Independent medical assessments were instituted to avoid “sympathy bias”. Packages are declined if the person’s condition has treatments available that could alleviate the disability.

So far, so good. The next step was funding a scheme that was hailed as the greatest social policy initiative since Medicare. The Productivity Commission recommended the commonwealth be the single funder of the NDIS, although this did not end up being the long-term reality. The initial funding boost was an increase in the Medicare levy from 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent. The NDIS was to be controlled by the National Disability Insurance Agency, designed from its inception to be independent of government – for that read “political meddling”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirms the NDIS will not be means tested under his government claiming the scheme is about “access”.

The NDIS was introduced carefully over seven years, but so massive was the undertaking that it was described as like a plane taking off while still under construction. The first trials were in 2013, and the full national rollout began in 2016 with NDIS being accessible across all states and territories by 2020. With that rollout, states and territories quietly defunded legacy programs. As a consequence, much of the funding for people who have a disability but don’t qualify for the NDIS has dried up.

More than a decade since first trials of the NDIS, where do we find ourselves? By any measure the NDIS has been transformative for hundreds of thousands of Australians. Unpaid carers have returned to the workforce and those already working have been able to work for longer. Many package recipients themselves can enter the workforce, often for the first time. Countless lives have been improved and dignity has returned to a generation of Australians.

The NDIS behemoth has been the largest social reform most of us have lived through – and that makes the NDIS a large target. Indeed, it draws a lot of fire and ire. Absolutely there are problems with the scheme – as you would expect with any massive national project – but it is important to be clear that the NDIS well and truly delivers on most of its aims, and delivers handsomely.

It is important to take a close look at public criticisms of the NDIS; first and foremost is the cost of the scheme. The Australian Institute of health and welfare reports that roughly one Australian in six has some form of disability. Fortunately, for the majority of people, their disability is not too disruptive. However, for many people the effects of their disability have a greater impact on their lives. Although the Productivity Commission estimated that just over 400,000 people would be eligible for NDIS support, at the moment more than 660,000 Australians are receiving packages. Why were the commission’s predictions so wonky? The main reason is that states and territories provided woeful statistics to feed into the commission’s models. This speaks to the low priority state governments gave to Australians with a disability at the time.

The fact that autism now is the most common primary diagnosis for persons funded by the NDIS is regularly aired as evidence of something suspicious. Indeed, about a third of all funded packages are for autism. Intellectual and mental health conditions are the most common disabilities experienced by Australians, as occurs globally. Research into autism has been intense in recent years and this has seen many people who formerly were told they had “intellectual disabilities” now recognised to have autism as the underlying condition. Whereas mental health conditions may wax and wane, autism is commonly pervasive and lifelong.

Could it be that the presence of the NDIS has fuelled a tsunami of bogus “autism” diagnoses? The reality is that the diagnosis of autism for teenage Australian children, as reported by the scientifically watertight Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, was one in 23 before the NDIS existed. The current rate is actually lower now – at about one in 31 children – after the NDIS was supposed to have driven the rate up. The proportion of people with autism in the scheme has indeed increased, but only by about 6 per cent over the past seven years. Australia’s current rate is in line with comparable countries such as the UK, the US, and even Japan. Packages for autism average just over $30,000, in comparison to supported living packages which are almost 10 times higher. It is likely that, rather than the NDIS luring bogus claims, in most cases people now have a source of support that was not available in the past.

Another factor is that exit rates – the number of people leaving NDIS packages – are lower than predicted. People are opting to stay in the scheme rather than move to other forms of care – which would cost the government money anyway. Another factor is that people who were assumed to be receiving suitable care in existing schemes were, in fact, receiving poor quality care. They very sensibly decided to take the superior packages on offer with the NDIS.

What about the $45 billion yearly price tag? Surely that is a fiscal fiasco? Well actually it isn’t. The scheme’s packages directly employ 270,000 Australians, and providing associated services employs many thousands more. A conservative estimate is that every dollar spent by the NDIS generates $2.25 in economic activity. That money isn’t hoarded – it is spent and most of it goes to small business and sole traders. They pay tax and also spend on goods and services. NDIS spending is a major economic stimulus.

Let’s compare this to defence spending where each dollar only generates about $1.70 in economic stimulus. Putting this in economic terms, NDIS spending is better for the economy than defence spending, where much of the money goes overseas. Defence also regularly clocks up monstrous cost overruns – $5bn wasted on disastrous helicopter programs, more than $1bn lost for battle management systems. In comparison to the profligacy of defence losses, the NDIS is a model of prudence and frugality.

In response to political concerns about NDIS expenditure, a razor-gang went through the schemes in 2022 with average packages being trimmed by about 4 per cent and one third of people taking a haircut of greater than 5 per cent. Family members who had returned to the workforce had to quit again to take up the slack at home. Since that time the number of people disputing NDIS decisions has increased by an incredible 400 per cent. This blowout not only disrupted the lives of deserving people but piled additional legal costs on the NDIA. The Administrative Review Tribunal adjudicates on disputes where people protest against NDIS decisions. These wrangles cost more than $17m a year in legal fees to the government.

Naturally, where there is government money there is the potential for fraud. No surprises there. This is well recognised by the NDIA and fraud management processes encourage package recipients to report suspected misconduct – from other recipients and providers. It is impossible to imagine a multibillion-dollar scheme funding hundreds of thousands of providers that doesn’t attract some rorters, scammers and outright crooks. Investigations show that malicious fraud costs the scheme less than $50m a year – a lot, to be sure, but a small proportion of the total spend. Although it is difficult to estimate, audits suggest that less than 5 per cent is inappropriately spent. Let’s compare that to Medicare, where Pradeep Philip’s recent comprehensive review suggested that somewhere around 12 per cent of expenditure was potentially subject to issues with compliance.

It will soon be even harder for dodgy NDIS providers to take financial advantage of vulnerable Australians.

There are undoubtedly some big problems with the NDIS that are much more difficult to tackle and cause major difficulties. With the incredible demand for disability services, there simply are not enough staff, not enough providers, and major geographical restrictions on service availability. So bad is this problem that many package recipients have no way to spend the money the receive – disability services are not sufficient to provide the care they need.

The risk of poor-quality services is another concern. The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission was set up to protect participants from poor-quality care. Many providers must become “registered” with the QSC as a quality measure. Yet this system is hardly a guarantee of quality; the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability unearthed myriad cases of dreadful care from registered providers. Becoming a registered provider is challenging, an exercise in navigating through a sea of red tape. For this reason many smaller providers choose not to become registered to avoid the expense and stress. Unfortunately, commentary often paints “unregistered providers” as villains and shonks but this is far from the truth. Many NDIS recipients greatly value their flexibility, cost-effectiveness – and because they are the only option.

Another issue affecting costs is that registered providers must abide by the NDIS price guide that sets out price ranges with price ceilings. Naturally, providers are going to set their prices at the maximum allowed. This is known as the “disability mark-up”. Providers in a tight market will look to cherry-pick the “easy” participants and often find it uneconomical to provide services in regional areas. The NDIA itself is overwhelmed by demand and struggles to find staff – as anyone applying for a package knows well.

Is the NDIS delivering what it promised and what so many Australians desperately needed? Yes, and no – but mostly yes.

Australia now has a world-leading system that aims to provide care for people with serious disability no matter who they are, how their disability came about, and where they live. Any scheme the size and scope of the NDIS will have problems – just look at the average home renovation. At the moment, though, the NDIS is delivering for hundreds of thousands of Australians. Its problems can be addressed without the need for hysterical hype.

Steve Robson is professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Australian National University and a former president of the Australian Medical Association. He is also a council member of the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/health/caring/lets-not-forget-how-bad-it-was-before-the-ndis/news-story/759137d2ff74a3ce5699215d6473b07a

It is pleasing to read expert commentary reporting that we now have a system that is working pretty well for most of our most vulnerable, and we have not bankrupted the country. It was never going to be perfect, but it looks to be making a real positive difference!

Australia should be proud of implementing a system that has managed to improve the lot of so many who really needed our help and compassion.

Well done to the advocates and experts who got it all together, and made it work!

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 786 – Results – 23 March 2025.

Here are the results of the poll.

Should Voluntary Assisted Dying Be Available For Individuals With A Reasonable Need For Such Services With Sensible Safeguards?

Yes                                                                    15 (83%)

No                                                                       3 (17%)

I Have No Idea                                                    0 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes: 18

Most seem to be comfortable with legalised euthanasia with safe-guards

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

Very poor voter turnout. 

0 of 18 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

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

David.

At The Song Said – The Times, They Are A’Changing. We Need To Face The Future More Alone.

This appeared last week:

Australia is trying to pretend the world hasn’t changed

Trump’s revolution has upended politics in the US, Canada, Germany and the UK. Neither Labor nor the Coalition has seriously confronted the difficult policy responses required.

Michael Stutchbury Editor-at-large

Mar 15, 2025 – 5.00am

Donald Trump’s new world disorder is gate-crashing Australia’s now-prolonged election campaign just as it is upending politics on both sides of the Atlantic. But will Labor and the Coalition face up to what this means?

Wall Street has been spooked into a correction-sized sell-off over Trump’s preparedness to let an escalating global trade war trip the American economy into recession. For Australia, that’s just the start of it.

The Queensland and NSW floods have forced Anthony Albanese to delay a pencilled-in April 12 election to May. Treasurer Jim Chalmers will now hand down a March 25 election budget that wasn’t supposed to happen.

That will give Labor an opportunity to set an election narrative. But a decade of looming budget deficits amid stalled productivity will expose the old assumptions that have underwritten Australia’s envied prosperity.

First, that Chinese demand for Australia’s iron ore, coal and gas will readily finance the politicians’ elect-me promises, such as Albanese’s Medicare bulk-billing policy costing $8.5 billion over the next four years.

And, second, that Australia can keep free riding on the American alliance that has kept the peace in the Asia-Pacific.

Neither Labor nor the Coalition has seriously confronted the dismantling of these foundations of Australia’s modern prosperity.

A probable post-election minority government would lack the stability to take the difficult policy responses required.

---

Trump’s willingness to favour authoritarian Russia over democratic Ukraine and to risk the NATO-led Western alliance signals Australia’s need to ratchet up defence spending amid the forecast decade of fiscal deficits.

UK Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a sizeable increase in defence spending, financed by cuts to foreign aid.

In Berlin, new centre-right Chancellor Friedrich Merz seeks to exempt Germany’s military budget from the nation’s constitutional debt limit. It would be a historic development.

Germany’s centre-left-led coalition collapsed hours after Trump’s November 5 election and amid the rise of the anti-immigrant far-right Alternative for Germany party.

Shortly after Germany’s February 23 election, Merz said his absolute priority would be to strengthen Europe so that it could “really achieve independence from the USA”.

“I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program,” he said.

While Germany is surrounded by like-minded European states, the circling of Australia by Chinese warships exposes the nation’s vulnerability in the absence of the American security blanket.

The popular backlash against Trump is testing the Albanese government’s support for the American alliance and the Coalition-inked AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal opposed by a broad progressive front from the Greens to Paul Keating and Bob Carr, to Malcolm Turnbull.

The global cost-of-living squeeze is prompting pro-growth deregulation and smaller government, such as through Elon Musk’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency.

Push to smaller government

In the UK, Starmer vows to cut the cost of business by 25 per cent and trim the “flabby” British state.

“We’ve created a watchdog state completely out of whack with the priorities of the British people and that is unfit for the volatile and insecure world we live in,” he said overnight Thursday AEDT.

This includes abolishing NHS England, the “bloated” bureaucracy that runs the National Health Service, at the cost of 13,000 jobs. Imagine the Mediscare if the Coalition proposed that in Australia.

Australia’s government spending blowout has been driven more by in-kind programs such as the NDIS, childcare and Medicare than by means-tested transfer payments.

That has left the government spending less targeted on lower income earners, according to a report this week from the e-61 economic research institute and the University of NSW.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says America’s biggest banks are being weighed down by “unduly burdensome regulatory requirements” and “backward looking policies in response to an undercapitalised system predating the global financial crisis almost two decades ago”.

Starmer announced plans to axe the UK Payments System Regulator by folding most of its functions into the Financial Conduct Authority. UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves says that post-financial crisis banking regulations have “gone too far”.

Threats by the New Zealand government to wind back increased post-GFC capital requirements to help revive economic growth were a factor in Kiwi central bank governor Adrian Orr’s sudden and unexplained exit last week.

There is no such push from Australian Labor, which forced the previous Coalition government to set up the pro-regulation Hayne royal commission into banking misconduct.

Shadow treasurer Angus Taylor vows to attack “excessive regulation and compliance costs” exceeding $1 billion annually for some big financial firms.

That would include requiring the Australian Prudential and Regulatory Authority to emphasise competitive access to finance as well as financial system stability.

“Over-regulation has left Australians under-insured, under-advised, and under-banked,” Taylor said last month. But the Coalition’s commitment is undermined by Peter Dutton’s populist threats to wield the big stick on insurance companies.

Pro-growth deregulation

Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” withdrawal from the Paris climate accord is mirrored by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s immediate dumping this week of a consumer carbon tax on petrol, diesel and gas scheduled to rise to $C170 ($187) per tonne of carbon emissions by 2030.

Australia’s still-rising energy costs were confirmed by this week’s Australian Energy Regulator’s ruling that benchmark household power bills could increase by up to almost 9 per cent because of a more-expensive and renewables-driven electricity network.

Labor’s political response in the March 25 pre-election budget is set to be a Band-Aid debt-financed repeat of its $300 energy bill rebate to households and small businesses.

Australia’s clean energy transition is more costly than promised, undercutting the cheap energy advantage needed for Albanese’s Future Made In Australia hopes to become a so-called green energy superpower. The Coalition’s ambitious nuclear energy policy lacks a mechanism to bring down energy costs in the next decade.

While energy costs remain high, increased green, red and black tape is closing down parts of Australia’s industrial processing base and eating away at the nation’s comparative advantage in resource development. Trump’s America is overtaking Australia as an LNG exporter.

Labor’s empowering of trade unions and increased workplace regulation is undermining workplace-level productivity.

In his prime ministerial acceptance speech this week, Canada’s Carney vowed to “win” the trade war with Trump. “These are dark, dark days brought on by a country we can no longer trust,” he said.

Even though not even in parliament, the former Bank of England governor won the Liberal Party ballot to replace the unpopular Justin Trudeau as leader of Canada’s ruling centre-left government.

Like in Germany, Canada’s leadership change was Trump-induced. Trudeau resigned on January 6 in the face of looming defeat by populist Trump-lite Conservative Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre.

Since Trump launched his trade war on Canada, however, the government’s patriotic tariff counter punches have clawed their support back to level-pegging with the Conservatives.

Unlike in Canada, though, Albanese rightly rules out tit-for-tat trade retaliation against Trump’s refusal to exempt Australia from his 25 per cent global aluminium and steel tariffs. That would be self-defeating for a medium-sized commodity-exporting economy at the foot of Asia.

But there is more to come, including Trump tariffs on beef and pharmaceutical imports. And, from April 2, the big one of global “reciprocal” tariffs.

Trump’s new global disorder will require Australia to compete more sharply. If the election campaign does not recognise this, the next government will lack the mandate needed to deal with the world in which we live.

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/australia-is-trying-to-pretend-the-world-hasn-t-changed-20250311-p5lil1

All I can say is that we look to be in for a pretty rocky ride while ever Trump is in the White House so we need to get used to living “on the edge”!

We would do well to watch Mark Carney in Canada and learn what we can from him as he also manages Trump.

Stand by for fireworks and instability!

David.

Australia Needs To Get Out From Under The US Hegemon And Its Warped Trumpian Strategies And World View!

There is a better way!

CANZUK: An idea whose time has come

Daniel Hannan

Mar 16, 2025 – 9.39am

Within hours of Britain’s declaration of war on September 3, 1939, Michael Joseph Savage, New Zealand’s first Labour prime minister, made a statement from his hospital bed (he was to die seven months later).

“Both with gratitude for the past and confidence in the future, we range ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go. Where she stands, we stand.”

With how many nations does the UK have such a bond, an alliance so instinctive and automatic that it needs no explanation? The list is a short one, but it surely includes the three countries with whom we truly do have a special relationship, namely Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

We are linked by language, culture and kinship. We share a legal system, drawing on one another’s precedents. We have similar parliamentary forms, complete with maces, state openings, green benches, the works. We salute the same king.

The modern campaign to knit the four chief realms into a closer association was launched in British Columbia in 2015, and goes under the acronym CANZUK, a term first coined by UN officials because the four nations almost always voted en bloc.

CANZUK campaigners want closer diplomatic and defence collaboration, an automatic right to work in each other’s countries and a common market based on mutual recognition of standards in goods, services and professional qualifications.

For a decade, CANZUK was treated by politicians as a worthy idea, but not an urgent one. Then came the second Trump term, the tariff wars and the upending of US foreign policy. Both main Canadian parties have warmed to a CANZUK-type deal, as have all three coalition parties in New Zealand. In Britain, too, the idea is gaining in popularity. And you can see why.

To grasp the extent to which the world has tilted on its axis, try the following thought experiment. Suppose that Donald Trump was secretly working for Vladimir Putin. What would he be doing differently?

It is one thing to halt weapons shipments to Ukraine, including those batches already in transit, and to cut off intelligence sharing. But Trump is going well beyond such measures. He has repeated Putin’s propaganda claims, calling Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator and accusing him of having started the war. He has told his cybersecurity agency to deprioritise the threat from Russia. He has relieved pro-Ukrainian US generals of their commands. He has voted in the UN with Russia, Belarus and North Korea against a motion condemning the invasion of Ukraine from which even China abstained.

Most seriously, he has picked fights with NATO countries, threatening to annex Greenland and is waging economic war against Canada.

The leaders of the other Anglosphere democracies have been left stranded, like governors of outlying Roman provinces when the Eternal City was sacked. Consider, if nothing else, the impact on Britain’s defence procurement.

Since the 1950s, Britain has assumed that, in a big war, we would be fighting alongside our American allies. Yes, we could manage smaller wars on our own: Aden, the Falklands, Sierra Leone. But, if things turned truly nasty, we’d be in a US-led coalition.

Like other Western allies, we therefore specialised rather than developing full-spectrum defence capacity. We relied on the US for heavy lift, advanced satellites and intelligence. More seriously, we depended on it for the development and maintenance of our nuclear missiles.

Our current deterrent, Trident II, will last until 2040. And then? Can we be sure that the US will be a dependable ally? I think it likely; but, after the past two months, I can no longer be certain.

What of Europe? Again, I like to think that we will still be on the same side – the side of freedom and democracy – but it was not long ago that the EU planned to close the Irish border out of pique because our vaccine roll-out had been faster than its own.

In the run-up to Brexit, Jeremy Hunt, as foreign secretary, was astonished to find that Britain’s investment in the defence of Europe – armoured regiments in Estonia and Poland, the RAF effectively acting as Romania’s air force and much else – generated no bankable goodwill. Even now, when you might think the EU would be falling over itself to draw Britain into a closer defence arrangement, it sticks doggedly to the position that it won’t talk to us about anything else until we give its vessels the right to fish in our waters.

No, there is only one set of countries with whom it is unthinkable that we would fall out 40 years from now: the other CANZUK nations. This matters, among other things, because we need to make decisions soon about our next-generation deterrent.

If we decide to build a fully autonomous nuclear capability – one that needs no US storage or spare parts, like France’s – we will need our own rocket-making capacity. That will cost around twice as much as buying the off-the-shelf US alternative. On our own, we couldn’t afford it; as part of a CANZUK consortium, we could.

CANZUK has consistently polled at around two-thirds support in the four putative constituent nations, making it by far the most popular policy that governments could feasibly implement but haven’t.

Why haven’t they? Partly because enthusiasm, until recently, came largely from parties of the right: Conservatives in the UK and Canada, Liberals in Australia, and all three right-wing parties (National, New Zealand First and ACT) in New Zealand.

Some leftists reflexively opposed anything that looked like imperial nostalgia or, worse, a pining for the White Commonwealth (though, in reality, all four nations have larger non-white populations, proportionately, than the EU has). In Britain, Euro-nostalgics were upset to see Leavers proposing free movement with distant countries, on grounds that British people could more easily imagine themselves working in Australia or Canada than Finland or Slovakia.

But all that was before Trump began menacing Canada with annexation – and, indeed, roughing up other US allies. When Australia signed its trade agreement with the US in 2005, it specifically exempted its steel exports from any tariffs decreed in the name of national security. Trump has imposed them anyway.

Suddenly, CANZUK is beginning to look both inevitable and urgent. At Canada’s Liberal leadership debate last month, the candidates were falling over each other to demand closer economic links with the other great English-speaking monarchies – despite it being the French-language debate.

When I suggested CANZUK in the House of Lords this week, the level-headed minister, Baroness Chapman, replied that the government would listen sympathetically to any proposal.

I don’t, from first principles, prefer a CANZUK pact to a US-led one. I would rather keep the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement, NATO, AUKUS and all the rest of the apparatus we have built since the 1941 Atlantic Charter. I am delighted to see New Zealand, under its impressive defence minister Judith Collins, lining up with AUKUS.

If the American alliance can be salvaged, CANZUK will complement it. But if not, it is a comfortable fall-back, constituting, as it would, the third most powerful military force on the planet.

How quickly can we put it in place? Well, October of next year is the centenary of the 1926 Imperial Conference which began the formal transformation of the British Empire into a voluntary association, a Commonwealth.

As King George V hosted his various premiers on that occasion, so his great-grandson, Charles III, should invite the prime ministers of his four chief realms – who by then, with a bit of luck, might include Peter Dutton in Australia and Pierre Poilievre in Canada as well as Christopher Luxon in New Zealand. That meeting should announce the formal creation of a CANZUK secretariat, based, for time-zone reasons, in Vancouver, and tasked with ensuring free movement of labour, market reciprocity and a common defence among the four kindred nations.

It would give every participating premier a massive electoral boost. And you know what? If Sir Keir Starmer can pull it off, he’ll deserve it.

Daniel Hannan is a former Conservative MEP, a House of Lords member and a founder of Vote Leave.

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/canzuk-an-idea-whose-time-has-come-20250316-p5ljw2

I could not agree more. The Trumpian experiment has failed and we need to get out from under.

I sure do not want to be led by a nation which has a man with the morals of an alley-cat as its leader. We are a good deal better than that, and we should takes steps to maximize our distance until such time as more sensible rulers emerge in the US. JD Vance is equally repugnant IMVHO….

We have our own values and interests and should follow them! Let the Americans fester until they can put true decent American values back into action and kick these bounders out!

David.

This Is An Epidemic We Have Brought on Ourselves. Silly Us!

This very alarming article appeared last week:

Our children are rapidly losing their sight. What can be done?

The sudden rise of short-sightedness worldwide, particularly among kids, has experts alarmed and rushing for answers before a myopia epidemic takes hold.

Richard Godwin

The global myopia rate tripled between 1990 and 2023. Why?

12:00 AM March 15, 2025

The Weekend Australian Magazine

Every morning – shortly after checking my phone and shortly before brushing my teeth – I pull down my lower eyelids in turn and smush a contact lens on to each of my eyeballs. I’m pretty good at this by now and can do it without a mirror. After a heartbreaking diagnosis when I was 12 – and a genuinely tragic first pair of glasses – my vision declined throughout my teenage years, finally stabilising at -4.5 dioptres, which means that objects come into focus at 22.22cm (ie one metre divided by 4.5) in front of my face.

My eyeballs are the wrong shape. They grew into eggs instead of perfect spheres. My increased axial length – that’s the distance from my corneas in the front to my retinas at the back – means that objects come into focus in the wrong place. Without contacts or glasses, everything is underwater.

Like most of my fellow myopes (shortsighted people), I have come to view this as a mild hindrance but a manageable one. It hadn’t occurred to me until I began speaking to the world’s leading myopia experts that I suffer from a disease. Least of all a preventable ­disease. Least of all a disease that if left to spread at its current rate will result in millions of people going blind.

It sounds alarmist and yet when you look at the numbers, alarm feels appropriate. Necessary, even. The global myopia rate tripled between 1990 and 2023, according to a recent study in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2050, half of the world will need glasses and 10 per cent will be high myopic (a -6 dioptre prescription or higher), which carries severe risks of complications and even blindness.

“Myopia should absolutely be viewed less as an inconvenience and should take its proper place as a disease,” says Dr Donald Mutti, professor in optometry at Ohio State University.

“Not all myopic eyes have the pathologies that threaten vision,” he explains. “But it’s ­absolutely the case that myopia increases risk for ocular disease.”

Ocular diseases include cataracts, glaucoma, and the two that cause the experts most concern. One is retinal detachment, which is when vitreous fluid – the jelly inside your eyeballs – begins to leak and pushes the retina away at the back, “a bit like a bubble in wallpaper” as a leaflet from Moorfields Eye Hospital in London helpfully puts it. Moorfields has been handing out a lot of such leaflets recently. Amid a ­“substantial” increase in retinal detachment surgery, the hospital recently reported a sharp increase in the proportion of myopes undergoing the treatment, with the steepest rise among younger patients.

“If your retina detaches, you lose vision,” ­explains Dr Annegret Dahlmann-Noor, the ophthalmologist who led the Moorfields study. “It starts in the periphery and moves towards the centre and if it gets to the point where it affects your central vision, then usually recovery is not complete. We’ve seen teenagers and people in their early ­twenties present with retinal detachments. It’s a trend we can see.”

The other condition that “really destroys” your vision, as she puts it, is macular degeneration. This is now the leading cause of blindness in working age people in China, explains Dr Jan Roelof Polling, who is part of the myopia working group at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam. “As your eyeballs grow longer, it puts the tissues under strain,” he says. “The stretching is OK when you’re young. But when you’re older you lose collagen – and there’s lots of collagen in the eye. So now the eye is stretched but it has holes in it.”

Again, this is a condition that once mainly affected older people but is now hitting ever-younger patients. Unlike retinal detachment, there’s not a lot that can be done about it. “You can have injections into the eyeball to take the bleed away but that’s about it,” says Polling. “One third of all high myopes develop myopic macular degeneration, which almost always ­results in visual impairment or blindness.”

One third of all “high myopes” … if you scale that up you begin to see the cause for alarm. The world population is expected to be 10 billion by 2050. One-tenth of that is one billion; one-third of that is 333 million. That’s a USA of blindness.

“That’s why we’re starting to worry now,” says Polling. “You only have to look at China, where 80-90 per cent of people have myopia and a significant proportion become blind or visually impaired within their working careers. It’s a huge worry and a huge expense for families. This will become a much bigger problem.”

At this point, you’re probably wondering why. Why has the world’s eyesight deteriorated so badly? The current estimate is that 15-20 per cent of British teenagers are myopic, but our data gathering isn’t nearly as good as it is in East Asia and Singapore, where this is already recognised as a dire catastrophe. In Singapore, the “myopia capital of the world”, around 80 per cent of adults are myopic. In Seoul, South Korea, the condition affects 96.5 per cent of 19-year-old males.

This is where we are heading, stresses Dahlmann-Noor. “We analysed hundreds of data sets last year. We used to have a rigid algorithm to find out what the underlying problem was when a five-year-old already had myopia. We would do our diagnostic tests and we would ­reliably be able to find something wrong – ­genetically, metabolically, whatever.

“Now? If we do the same tests as before, we find children with myopia who don’t have a thing wrong with them. They only have myopia. So there is a trend for the onset of myopia to be earlier. And there is a trend for children with simple myopia coming into our NHS [National Health Service] clinics at an earlier age.”

There is a strong genetic component to ­myopia. If both of your parents need glasses, you probably will too; rates of myopia are also higher in certain Asian and Afro-Caribbean populations than in white people. Still, none of this explains the rapid increase in recent years. It isn’t the gene pool that has changed, says Dahlmann-Noor: “What has changed very ­dramatically are our lifestyles.”

There are two factors of particular concern. One is that children are not spending nearly as much time in daylight as they need to. Daylight is thought to stimulate the release of dopamine in the retina, which inhibits eyeball growth. Given that we evolved as an outdoor species but now spend around 90 per cent of our lives indoors, the idea that our eyes are struggling to cope with our low-light interiors isn’t so ­surprising. The other factor is that children are spending too long engaged in “near-work”, i.e. concentrating on things too close to their face and thus squeezing their eyeballs into the wrong shape from an early age.

Since myopia develops while the eyeball is still growing, the crucial window is in childhood. Hence the standard advice for children is known as the 20/20/2 rule: for every 20 minutes of near-work, spend 20 seconds focusing on something in the distance; and most importantly, spend two hours outside each day. Also, go and get your eyes tested.

So, environment plays a crucial role. Much of the blame for the shockingly high rates of myopia in East Asia (notably in urban areas) seems to come down to the highly competitive education system. East Asian children start school earlier in life, work longer days, receive far more homework, and spend very little time outdoors. Similarly, in Singapore, children spend as little as half an hour a day outside.

One of the few East Asian countries to have seen a decline in myopia rates in recent years is Taiwan, which in 2010 introduced a policy known as Tian-Tian 120, which encourages schools to incorporate 120 minutes of time outdoors into their daily schedules.

You would think that “less homework, morebreaks” is a message that most schoolchildren could get behind. But it’s not solely schoolwork that’s to blame – children’s leisure time has shifted too. China also tops the global chart of hours spent playing video games each week (12.4 hours on average, compared to the UK’s 7.2). And one of the things that Polling has noticed from studying Dutch teenagers is that it’s no longer principally the academic children who need glasses – it’s everyone. “There has long been an association with education and myopia,” he says. “It used to be that the kids with glasses were the ones who went on to study at university – and the kids who played soccer stayed without glasses. That’s changed with people born after 2000. Everyone is on their phone now.”

Dahlmann-Noor is reluctant to draw conclusions before the link between early eyeball development and devices has been more rigorously researched. However, she does stress that if children only had access to phones when they were 16 or 17, the effects on their eyesight wouldn’t be nearly as bad. “That’s when the eyeball has reached its final state. But I have families coming into the consultation rooms who clip a smartphone on to their child’s ­pushchair and have Peppa Pig running. Why does a one-year-old need to have Peppa Pig on a smartphone? But these things have invaded everyone’s private space and we don’t even ­notice them any more.”

We are by now fairly used to the idea that phones have made a generation of teenagers anxious, depressed, sleep-deprived, narcissistic, susceptible to terrible influencers – and the rest. US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the evidence in grim detail in his bestseller The Anxious Generation, and if you’re on any parental WhatsApp groups you’ll be aware of his thesis: the wide adoption of the smartphone since 2010 plus a gradual erosion of unstructured outdoor play has prompted a teenage mental health catastrophe, resulting in higher rates of suicide and self-harm, particularly among teenage girls. Nonetheless, the idea that these same forces might literally be destroying our children’s ability to see things clearly – might even eventually blind them – is not one that I’ve seen discussed, even in the most tech-phobic parental forums. And yet: one Danish study found double the risk of myopia in 16- to 17-year-olds who used electronic devices for more than six hours a day. Chinese studies have correlated axial length with time spent on both computers and phones and found that yes, there is a link.

It should be stressed, however, that experts are cautious about pushing the thesis too hard. Dahlmann-Noor points out that the myopia trend long predates smartphones. Concentrating on anything close to your face can be bad for your eyesight. Your child could be copying out The Book of Common Prayer, she could be performing a mindful colouring exercise, she could be playing Tetris on a Game Boy in 1992 or she could be doomscrolling TikTok. The eyeball would be under the same strain.

Moreover, it’s generally agreed that near-work is secondary to time outdoors as a determining factor. “If you’re looking at school-age kids from six or seven or so, we have not found that near-work has the influence that people often think it does,” says Mutti. “It just doesn’t show up as that significant a factor in cohort or longitudinal studies.”

Mutti has been collecting data on ­behavioural patterns and myopia since 1989 and is convinced that time outdoors is the ­significant factor. “It’s pretty clear that kids are spending less time outdoors than they used to,” he says. “When I was a kid, my mum would ­encourage us to get out of the house: ‘Come back when it’s dinner time’. But indoors is just a lot more entertaining than it used to be. And parents have more concerns about unsupervised kids running wild on the streets.”

Many of these are perfectly rational, I’d add. I’d love my children to play outside more. But my immediate urban environment is designed for cars, not children. There are few activities for children to safely do outdoors that don’t ­require parental supervision and/or cash.

And it’s not as if time spent on screens and time spent outdoors are unrelated. If my eldest is playing football with his mates, he is, perforce, not playing Roblox. If my youngest is watching Bluey while I get some work done, this is almost certainly happening indoors. And it’s the youngest I should be most worried about, says Mutti. Even as a “near-work ­sceptic”, he is extremely concerned about the effect of screens on the very young. “To me, the preponderance of evidence is not in favour of near-work being so important in school-age kids,” he says. “But could near-work influence a young child’s eyes? A preschooler’s eyes? That’s a valuable question to ask. In my ­research on refractive development, there are strong effects of near-focusing on the ­development of infants’ eyes – maybe into the toddler years.”

He demonstrates this to his students with balloons. “The focusing muscles act as a ­mechanical force, tensing force at the front of the eye. If you put a squeeze around the balloon in the front, it elongates at the back. So it’s not hard to see how near-focusing could change the shape of an infant’s eye. That makes me very concerned about how toddlers are spending their time.”

And here is an “absolute difference” brought on by technology. “You no longer have to be able to read to be an intense near-worker as a toddler,” he says. “If you watch small children, they love their iPads. They’re very adept at swiping and scrolling and finding their next video even at age two. I’m concerned about the intense use of electronic devices among toddlers.”

Polling adds that just because it’s harder to find a direct link between myopia and screens, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. “It’s relatively straightforward to measure light exposure or even simply how much time a child is outside. It’s much harder to measure focal distance.”

But either way, it hardly seems surprising that myopia rates rapidly accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, during which children were both locked up indoors and forced to look at screens. Neither I nor my 11-year-old have forgotten the torture of his Year 1 Zoom lessons. Indeed, the pandemic period of 2020 to 2023 saw a “notable” increase in myopia rates. One recent Scottish study found a 42 per cent rise in the incidence of myopia. And a recent study in Hong Kong found that myopia rates in six to eight-year-olds had doubled during the Covid-19 pandemic: 25 per cent of six-year-olds and 46 per cent of eight-year-olds were myopic.

It’s worth stressing again that the earlier ­myopia presents itself, the worse it will be. “It’s difficult because you don’t see immediate ­effects,” says Polling. “You need a lot of ­exposure from a very young age and then, at the age of eight, you finally become myopic.” Some parents with mild myopia aren’t too ­concerned if their child is diagnosed with a similar prescription, he says. But if you’re -3D at eight you are basically certain to be -6D or above at 18. And macular degeneration might arrive in your forties or fifties. “These windows are precious and fleeting,” says Polling. “If we can delay the onset of myopia until 12 instead of 10, that’s a huge difference.”

What’s interesting – OK, what’s maddening – is that when you bring this sort of thing up with parents, they will often treat screens as a symptom of myopia as opposed to a cause. As in: “Oh yes, I’ve noticed that Rosa always holds the phone up close to her face when she’s watching cartoons in bed.” Here is an account from an online myopia community from a ­parent panicking about the results of their three-year-old’s first eye examination: “He would watch TV up close (but most kids seem to) and also watch the phone up close with his head tilted to one eye …” It’s almost as if we ­accept it as inevitable. A bit of genetic bad luck. As opposed to a situation we might ­actually do something about.

The difficulty for ophthalmologists comes with framing a condition that will be perfectly manageable for most people and may not present any complications as a matter of urgency until decades down the line. The costs involved in requiring contact lenses might focus minds. As might the risks. A few years ago, I contracted acute keratitis from dirty contact lenses. This is an infection of the cornea that can lead to blindness – and honestly, the pain was ­unbelievable. It was like having sandpaper and chilli alternately rubbed into my right eye and the cure was almost as torturous. I had to apply eye drops every 30 minutes for 48 hours. I have been scrupulous about contact lens hygiene ever since.

But that’s the thing about eyes. You take them for granted until you don’t. “I speak to people who have macular degeneration in their forties and fifties,” says Dahlmann-Noor. “They are incredibly bitter. They say, ‘I just wish someone had warned me that this was on the cards’.” It’s certainly enough to be a serious long-term worry for the NHS.

Still, Dahlmann-Noor expresses some optimism. “For all my life, there was nothing you could do about the growth of the eyeball,” she says. “You’d go and have your eyes measured, you’d get your new glasses, and that was it. But now myopia has become such a problem that there has been a lot of research and there are ­finally treatments.”

It is not possible to stop or reverse the onset of myopia. But it is possible to slow it down. Corrective glasses and contact lenses work by creating a second image shell in front of the retina, which pulls the image forward and counteracts the elongation of the eyeball. These have been shown to slow the progression of myopia by 40-50 per cent.

Then there are atropine eye drops, which are already widely prescribed in Asia (sometimes to pre-myopic infants) and are likely to become available in the UK this year.

There are factors that are beyond the control of medics. “These Big Tech companies need to start taking care of kids’ health,” says Polling. “They need to make their apps less addictive. And to warn parents not to give children phones before the age of six, and keep them to a minimum after that.”

Given the extreme indifference tech ­companies have so far displayed towards the welfare of children, you’d have to say they are extremely unlikely to do that without being ­legally obliged to do so. “Now, I’m sorry, that’s not very optimistic!” he laughs.

“But there is something children can do,” he stresses. “Just play outdoors.”

I suspect that would do most of us adults some good too.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/our-children-are-rapidly-losing-their-sight-what-can-be-done/news-story/83b93c845b07f3404f5fd775c7743070

We need to get these little mites out and in the broad daylight for a decent spell each day,

Just how that fits with school, music and so on I have no idea but they need to get out there somehow! 

I suspect the harm is done after 15 or so but before then its all hands to the pumps of glasses by the time 15 rolls around!

David.