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What happened to the fair go?

In Social justice, The Age on July 28, 2014

THE room was already full at Trades Hall in Carlton on a cold Wednesday night in July, but the floors creaked with people still walking in. “I’m not Thomas Piketty,” said Mike Berry, emeritus professor at RMIT, with a wry smile. “I understand some of you were expecting him.”

Piketty, the French economist and author of the best-selling tome, ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, is in great demand – and short supply.

Translated from French this year, his 685-page book sold out all over the English-speaking world. It is already the all-time best selling book for its publisher, Harvard University Press, which ran 24-hour shifts at its warehouse to keep up with orders.

In Melbourne, the independent bookstore chain Readings ordered just ten copies at first; since then, they’ve been selling it hand over fist, re-ordering a hundred at a time. For several weeks, incoming shipments sold out well before they arrived.

So, at the Trades Hall meeting to discuss the book – notwithstanding the absence of the author himself – the audience was particularly attentive. “Every so often a book just catches interest,” said Berry, a professor of public policy. “It’s broken out of the scrum, partly by sheer weight of evidence.

“Piketty shows that capitalism inevitably and remorselessly leads to increasing inequality. In short, unless we do something about it, we’re headed back to the 18th century world of haves and have-nots.”

For his efforts, Piketty has joined the exclusive, counter-intuitive class known as “rockstar economists”. In May the ‘New Yorker’ described the backstage clamour of Nobel Laureates eager to meet him before a public lecture.

But more importantly, inequality is now a global, mainstream concern. Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum – a coterie of large corporations – listed income inequality as chief among 31 risks “threatening social and political stability as well as economic development” in the next decade.

In Australia, too, as debate continues over budget cuts to welfare, health and education, commentators across the political spectrum are warning that our society has become dangerously unfair.

The top decile income share in Anglo-Saxon countries, 1910–2010. http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2

‘Capital’ is based on fifteen years of Piketty’s research, in collaboration with scholars around the world. He has collected and analysed wealth and income data as far back as he can find it. In France and Britain the records stretch beyond two centuries.

Unusually, he spends little effort analysing the bottom end of the scale, and instead, takes aims at the dynamics of the top. Since the global financial crisis, it has been this research that has turned the world’s glare upon “the 1 per cent”.

This is what his data shows: over the long term, the wealth tied up in capital – assets such as property and finance – accumulates more rapidly than economies grow. In broad terms, that means inheritance trumps merit, and wealth concentrates.

“The past tends to devour the future: wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly… than wealth stemming from work,” Piketty writes.

His research upends an article of faith of neoclassical economics: that inequality will decrease as nations’ incomes continue to rise.

That theory was developed in the mid-20th century, at time when the gap in wealth and incomes had narrowed considerably. Piketty argues this period was an aberration, caused by the century’s great shocks – two world wars and the Great Depression – together with the resulting government policies: tight regulation of financial markets and steeply progressive taxes.

In recent decades those policies have been unwound and economic growth has slowed. Inequality has risen again. We are witnessing “the emergence of a new patrimonial capitalism”, he writes.

Piketty’s data debunks any notion of trickle-down economics. Really, we live in a suck-it-up system : the wealthiest swill the surplus, and leave the poor to take whatever they can get.

On this matter, the Parisian academic is not a lone voice.

Nobel laureate and former chief economist of the World Bank, Professor Joseph Stiglitz recently visited Australia on speaking tour. The ‘Capital’ phenomenon, he says, is no surprise to him. In 2012, Stiglitz’s own book on the subject, ‘The Price of Inequality’, hit the bestseller lists in the United States.

“Inequality has risen to the top of the concerns facing America and most other countries – not that we’ve actually been able to introduce policies that deal with it, so far,” he says.

This April, Stiglitz told a US Senate committee that the American dream was “a myth”. For the last 25 years, median wages have stagnated and lowest wages have fallen, in real terms. Since the global financial crisis, nearly all the gains of the “so-called recovery” have accrued to the top 1 per cent, he said.

His message that day in Washington was scarcely contested by conservatives, he says.

“The International Monetary Fund has now stressed the role of inequality. The IMF is not a radical organisation, so nobody should think of this anymore as a left-wing agenda. You almost have to be radical not to take it onboard.

“Inequality used to be a question about how we were treating the most disadvantaged in our society. Now we’re debating how our whole society is functioning.”

Among the ill effects of inequality, Stiglitz argues, is “worse economic performance, no matter how you measure it”, whether by GDP or more holistic benchmarks of wellbeing and sustainability. In the US, the vast numbers of citizens with diminished incomes and poorer levels of health and education constitute a waste of the country’s “most valuable resource”.

It also feeds a further vicious cycle: a failing political system, which represents the affluent at the expense of the rest. “We have a democracy where most of the citizens think the system is corrupt,” Stiglitz says. “Not corrupt in the sense of stuffed paper envelopes, but in the sense that money has found legal ways influencing the process to get what it wants.”

Yet he is not without hope. Neither he, nor Piketty, accept that rising inequality must be so. It’s a product of public policy – the combined outcome of our schools, healthcare, financial systems, tax laws and corporate regulations.

In ‘Capital’, Piketty advocates for highly progressive income tax (with a top marginal rate set at more than 80 per cent) to prevent accumulation of wealth through soaring salaries, and a progressive global wealth tax, to prevent its further concentration.

“Inequality is not a fact of nature,” Stiglitz says. “It’s a consequence of the policies we put in place.”

*

In Australia, inequality is not so vast as in the United States, or Europe at the turn of the 20th century. But it is rising.

A new report from The Australia Institute, drawing on ABS data, reveals that the top fifth of households earn five times the income of the bottom fifth, but they hold 71 times the wealth.

It says the richest 7 individuals in Australia – including Gina Rinehart, Frank Lowy and James Packer – hold more wealth than the bottom 1.73 million households.

Meanwhile, the dole continues to fall well below the poverty line. The Australian Council of Social Services estimates that one child in six is living in poverty. Over 100,000 households – the bottom 1 per cent – are living in the red, with negative net wealth.

Yet, like the US and other immigrant societies, Australia has not been shaped by inherited wealth as much as Europe. Inequality has risen significantly since the 1980s, but for other reasons. In his book, ‘Battlers and Billionaires’, ANU economics professor turned federal Labor MP Andrew Leigh attributes the rise in inequality to three forces, in equal measure: higher earnings at the very top, inflated by technology and globalisation; the decline of unions; and less progressive taxation.

Leigh believes that Piketty’s theory is more relevant for our future than our past. Given high savings among the wealthy and a slower growing economy, inequality will worsen, he says.

So what is to be done?

Last year, Richard Denniss, director of The Australia Institute, took part in a televised debate, coordinated by the St James Ethics Centre, on the question: “Should the wealthy pay more tax?”

Income tax cuts introduced since 2006, by both the Howard and Rudd governments, have overwhelmingly favoured high earners, he says. The Institute estimates those cuts have cost the government about $170 billion, of which the top ten percent of earners have received significantly more than the bottom 80 per cent combined.

It hasn’t always been this way. At its peak between 1942-44, the top marginal tax rate in Australia was 93 per cent. Throughout the Menzies prime ministership, the top rate was never lower than 67 per cent. Now, even with the government’s proposed deficit levy, it will temporarily rise to just 49 per cent.

Likewise, tax breaks on capital gains and superannuation overwhelmingly advantage the wealthy.

Super concessions amount to $35 billion in forgone government revenue, Denniss says, most of which goes to the top five percent and none to the bottom fifth. And because women tend to work fewer hours and years in the formal economy, and are under-represented at the upper end of earnings, the super tax breaks also systemically favour men.

“You could only say that increased inequality has been the objective of subsequent governments in Australia, because everything they’ve done has exacerbated it,” Denniss says.

Alongside him in the St James Ethics Centre debate, also for the affirmative – surprisingly – was Geoffrey Cousins: former advisor to Prime Minister John Howard, current member of the Telstra board, and latterly, a high-profile campaigner against the James Price Point gas hub in the Kimberley.

Cousins sits on Telstra’s remuneration committee. In the 2012-13 financial year, the company had eight senior executives whose pay packages topped $1.5 million per year.

Yet, for the audience, Cousins joked that he wanted to wear a t-shirt saying: “I’m rich, tax me”. Afterwards, Denniss had one printed and sent to him, and Cousins swears he wears it – even outside the house. (“I wore it kayaking on Sydney Harbour,” he says.)

He has received a mixed response from well-heeled acquaintances, but if anything, his position has firmed. “I did a lot of research. The information was completely compelling regarding growing inequality around the world, and the fact that wealthy people generally pay a much lower percentage of their income in tax, one way or another,” he says. “It’s not just me: all sorts of wealthy people have said it’s a ridiculous situation.”

He believes the Abbott government’s budget has sharpened the debate in Australia. “There’s a great lack of fairness in what the government is doing and I think most people believe that.”

At the Ethics Centre debate, but on the negative side, was economist and former Liberal Party leader John Hewson. He argued the proposition was too simplistic; comprehensive tax reform is necessary.

But Hewson, too, is deeply concerned about inequality. Last month, he launched a report entitled ‘Advance Australia Fair? What to do about growing inequality in Australia’, which documented the deliberations of a conference held at Parliament House in January.

The participants included a range of civil leaders and academics, from economists to epidemiologists, invited by the non-profit group Australia21. Their report argues the case that more equal societies do better, with higher rates of social cohesion, mental and physical health, and even economic productivity.

Among its many policy recommendations were lifting pensions and benefits to the poverty line, directing more school funding and early childhood education to disadvantaged kids, and implementing significant tax reforms – such as ending tax breaks for superannuation, capital gains and negative gearing.

To the report’s suggestions, Hewson added one of his own: all major policy proposals should be subject to an “inequality impact statement”.

“Our land of ‘the fair go’ is disappearing,” he said.

“There is an urgent need for a mature community debate about how inequality is impacting on our lives, our culture, our economy and our society.”

For now, it seems Australians want to be more egalitarian, even though we may be unaware just how unequal we are. The Australia Institute’s recent survey showed that no matter what people earn, they tend to assume their incomes are about average.

Similarly, research conducted for the Australian Council of Trade Unions in 2011 found that most people vastly underestimate the real level of wealth inequality in society. When asked to describe their ideal distribution, they chose a division of wealth even more egalitarian again, regardless of their own position in the hierarchy.

But arrayed against these preferences, Denniss says, is the force of the business lobby, which describes welfare cuts as fiscal consolidation and derides new taxes as class warfare. So long as unemployment remains low, it’s easy for politicians to ignore entrenched poverty.

“I think inequality is an idea whose time has come,” Denniss says. “But what hasn’t arrived yet is a political party that will do something about it.”

*

At Trades Hall, the audience was comprised mainly of baby boomers. During the questions, one man stood and commented that Piketty’s book could benefit the rich, if rising inequality is understood as inevitable. “How can we make it help us?” he asked.

“Firstly, you’ve got to read it,” Professor Berry replied (understandably; it is a hefty volume). “And secondly: politics matters.”

To stimulate change, the buzz about ‘Capital’ would have to go beyond the media, he said, and suggested that people could form discussion groups to debate its themes.

Berry is author of ‘The Affluent Society Revisited’, which re-examines the work of economist John Kenneth Galbraith in the context of the global financial crisis.

‘Capital’ is the perfect book for the swirling discontent since the crisis, he says. Then, we found out that financial markets don’t function according to the textbooks. But so far, our approach to governing them hasn’t changed.

“There’s a sense of crisis in popular ideology about what the hell is happening out there in the real economy.

“But the critical thing is that although Piketty identifies remorseless tendencies towards inequality in free-market, freebooting capitalism, they are not laws. There are ways of countering them through political means.

“Policy is not dead, it’s just sleeping.”

 

Read an edited version of this article at The Age online

Little fox, big problem

In Environment, The Age on July 4, 2014

In some parts of the city, there are as many as 20 foxes per square kilometre. Are they friend or foe?

IN Melbourne, even foxes like footy. Or, rather, they like football grounds.

Last year, the Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology used GPS technology to track foxes from Melbourne’s outer east.

One pair lived at Lloyd Park, home of the Langwarrin Kanagroos, throughout the winter. The week after the grand final, the foxes moved on: there were no more sausage rolls to scavenge.

“They were there on game days, within 50 metres of hundreds of people – and no one knew,” says the centre’s deputy director, Dr Rodney van der Ree. “They’re able to live in very close proximity to us without getting spotted.”

The European or red fox – Vulpes vulpes – is a handsome animal. It has a pointed muzzle, auburn coat and bushy tail. In Quentin Blake’s famous illustrations for Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox, the titular mammal wears a waistcoat.

But they are one of the worst invasive species we’ve got. Foxes are considered a threat to 76 kinds of native birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, including the critically endangered orange-bellied parrot, spotted quail-thrush and western swamp tortoise.

“The fox and the cat, between them, have been responsible for the decline and extinction of many species of native mammals,” Dr van der Ree says.

Fox using the Calder freeway animal underpass near Bendigo. Credit: Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology 

Never mind! We are still fascinated by them; fox mad, even. Our championship winning netball team is called the Melbourne Vixens (last month, for the 2014 flag, they made mincemeat of Queensland’s Firebirds).

Search the internet for foxes in Melbourne and you’ll see the city declared “the fox capital of the western world” on the authority of the RSPCA, no less. Contacted by The Age this week, the RSPCA could not confirm it had ever made such a claim.

In fact, we can’t be sure how many there are. The last estimate came from CSIRO research in the early 1990s.

John Matthews, from the Department of Environment and Primary Industry, says there’s no reason to think numbers have changed significantly. But there are more than you think: in country Victoria, foxes number between 1 and 4 per square kilometre. But in the city, where the living is easy, there are four times as many.

Around the wharves and wastelands of Port Melbourne, the vulpine population is at its peak: as many as 20 foxes prowl every square kilometre.

Most sightings happen in autumn, when naïve pups leave the den in search of food and territory. On the citizen science website Foxscan, where people can list glimpses of foxes, the number of reports has been steady.

“They’re quite timid and shy, and they do whatever they can to avoid any interaction with humans,” says Matthews, who manages the state’s control programs for feral foxes, pigs, goats and rabbits from Casterton, in the Western Districts.

Nevertheless, sometimes we glimpse their secret lives at night: stalking along the train tracks in Elsternwick, slinking across a road in Box Hill, or padding over the flatland by a bridge in Essendon.

Sometimes, we even spy them in the day. Recently, two foxes were photographed on a rooftop in Mount Waverley after lunchtime. More often, however, we see them as roadkill in the morning: in the absence of urban predators, cars are their biggest threat.

Fox using the Calder freeway animal underpass near Bendigo. Credit: Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology

Greater Melbourne may or may not be the fox capital of the western world, but it is the first place they called home in Australia.

The new colony’s gentlemen brought them out for sport. In 1860, Edward Wilson, the owner of the Argus newspaper, lauded the benefits of fox hunting for youth. It “tends to prevent them from sinking into mere dawdlers in an opera box or loungers in a café”, he wrote.

A recent historical study by zoologist Ian Abbott contends that it took several attempts over decades before a fox population took hold.

He believes the successful culprits were the wealthy Chirnside brothers – Thomas and Andrew – who were among the largest landholders in the colony. They had already established a herd of deer, and by 1870, began importing foxes for hunting expeditions on their Werribee estate, where, soon after, they began constructing the mansion that still stands today.

Within two decades, foxes were declared a pest species in Victoria, and within four they pawed all the way into Western Australia. They’d long since conquered NSW and Queensland. Now, the red fox ranges over three-quarters of the continent.

Surprisingly, however, there were no recorded sightings in the centre of Melbourne until the middle of the 20th century. In 1948, a fox den was spotted at the cemetery in Parkville.

Now, they’re thought to occupy the entire metropolitan area. “There’s ideal habitat in the city,” says Matthews. “There’s ample food – lots of bins – and there’s really no predation.”

They’re deterred by dogs, but if there are none around, they’ll hide under houses or in tight gaps between buildings, in rock heaps, culverts or up cypress trees. They dig dens in parks or coastal scrub.

Foxes want warmth, security and good shelter, and they don’t want to give it up. They mark their territory with urine and scat.

“It’s a unique smell. But don’t ask me to describe it!” pleas Matthews. “Farmers know it. They’ll get out to the gate post in the morning and say: ‘Hmm, a fox was here last night.’”

Despite the stench, the animals pose little threat to humans – other than as a carrier of worms or, in the case of an outbreak, rabies. They are, however, a mortal danger to suburban chickens.

Many a suburban homesteader has woken to a grisly crime scene, after the one-and-only night they forgot to shut the henhouse gate. Often, the dead chooks remain uneaten. “Foxes are thrill-killers,” Matthews explains. “It’s instinctive. With the clucking and feathers going everywhere, they can get into a frenzy.”

In the countryside, foxes exact a toll on farmers’ flocks. But their impact on native species is far greater than their cost to agriculture.

In the city, there are now very few threatened species – largely because foxes and cats have already wiped them out. But on the city fringe, foxes are still eating endangered species, including southern brown bandicoots, eastern barred bandicoots, growling grass frogs and swamp skinks.

For the authorities in cities and towns, it’s very hard to control their numbers – some municipalities try trapping, or netting and fumigating dens. Citizens can help reduce fox numbers by making sure pet food isn’t left outside, clearing fallen fruit from trees and using a secure compost bin.

Elsewhere around the state, the Department of Environment and Primary Industries and Parks Victoria conduct an extensive baiting program, using the poison known as 1080. And in 2011, the state government introduced a $10 bounty for fox scalps. Since then, 285,000 have been accepted from hunters.

Neither method has escaped criticism. Many landholders are wary of 1080. For its part, the RSPCA states that 1080 “is not a humane poison”. It argues we must conduct more research into alternatives, so the technique can be phased out.

The bounty, meanwhile, has been roundly criticised by experts, who argue it’s a waste of money because foxes breed too quickly. Control programs need to wipe out two-thirds of a fox population over a large area to have a lasting effect.

In any case, if foxes were once the universal bad guy, now their role is much more ambiguous, especially in the city.

“Even in modified ecological systems, top order predators are still important to keep prey populations in check,” explains Dr van der Ree from the centre for urban ecology.

In urban areas, native predators are missing: the quolls have gone, there are no goannas and few powerful owls. That leaves the fox to help limit the populations of feral cats, rats and mice, and even possums.

“If you get rid of all the foxes then feral cat numbers can increase. You need to control foxes, cats and rabbits together. It’s got to be done strategically, over a large scale, otherwise they’ll just reinvade the area.”

It’s a controversial, but increasingly prevalent question: do we need foxes in our cities?

“No one would argue that foxes are not a damaging species, but sometimes they may help us as well,” says Dr Euan Ritchie, an ecologist from Deakin University whose speciality is the role of predators in ecosystems.

We need to rethink the way we deal with pest species more generally, he says. “A lot of the things we do now are expensive and they’re not working,” he says. “Are there ways to better coexist?”

Part of the answer, he says, is encouraging predator species, but doing so in conjunction with guardian animals on farms. Alpacas or Maremma sheepdogs are increasingly used to protect livestock from dingoes.

Dr Ritchie advocates for the re-introduction of Tasmanian Devils to Victoria, beginning with Wilson’s Prom. They’d help threatened species and improve biodiversity, he says, by controlling the numbers of foxes, cats, swamp wallabies and wombats.

“The way people often describe it is: My enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

It’s an argument made famous in 1949 by the pioneering American ecologist Aldo Leopold in his classic book, A Sand County Almanac. He wrote that he’d seen “state after state extirpate its wolves”, and subsequently, observed their landscapes overrun and defoliated and eroded by deer. “I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer,” he wrote.

Dr Ritchie says the scientific community is only just catching on. There’s now a growing push for ‘rewilding’: restoring habitats by introducing or reintroducing key species.

He is coordinating the Australian Mammal Society’s annual conference, at the Melbourne Zoo from 7-10 July. One whole day will be devoted to the ecological roles of predators.

“In the last 200 years, Australia has arguably the worst record in the world for mammal conservation. And globally we’re in the midst of a biodiversity extinction crisis comparable to some of the biggest mass extinction events we’ve had in geological history.

“If we can find any way to start reversing that, then we should prioritise it,” Dr Ritchie says. “We really need to be more bold, because if we keep going down the same path, many more species will disappear.”

A fox captured on camera near the Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne. Credit: RBG Cranbourne

The Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne has a feral-proof fence: it’s 9 kilometres in circumference and 1.8 metres tall, with a floppy top to prevent foxes climbing over. At the base, wire was laid below ground level and set back from the fence line, to stop foxes digging under.

“Once a week, we drive right around the perimeter to make sure there are no new holes,” says Ricardo Simao, the gardens’ land and infrastructure manager.

“The danger is that, sure, we might be keeping the foxes out, but we’re also stopping all other animals from moving through.”

So the fence has another trick: allowing native animals to pass. Simao’s team have crafted gates for bandicoots, wombats and tortoises. Now they’re working on one for swamp wallabies, whose numbers have risen fast in the absence of predation.

The bandicoots’ gates consist of PVC piping with flaps at either end: foxes can’t fit and rabbits aren’t curious enough to brave the flaps, Simao explains.

Southern brown bandicoots were abundant in the south-east when Melbourne was colonised. “Everyone used to see them – the animal wasn’t particularly shy,” he says. But gradually, the animals lost their habitat to urbanisation and their heads to foxes.

In the decade since the fence was built, however, the bandicoots’ numbers have increased and become “quite healthy”, Simao says.

“The next phase is to make sure it’s not an isolated population.”

Read this article at The Age online

Is this the end of Medicare?

In Social justice, The Age on June 9, 2014

A national institution, Medicare turns 40 this year. But are budgetary changes such as the doctor co-payment the beginning of the end for universal healthcare?

MEDICARE was always a shit-fight. It became law in the most extraordinary circumstances: one of a handful of bills passed during the only joint sitting of federal parliament in the nation’s history, after the double dissolution election in 1974.

As the Whitlam government prepared to introduce the system – then known as Medibank – its opponents rallied.

The Australian Medical Association marshalled a million-dollar “Freedom Fund”, donated by members. Determined to stop bureaucrats interfering with patients, it hired a former Miss Australia to front its publicity campaign. The General Practitioners’ Society of Australia circulated a poster depicting social security minister Bill Hayden dressed in Nazi uniform.

And that’s just the opposition from outside. Dr Anne-marie Boxall, co-author of Making Medicare, says Whitlam had little support, even from within the Labor Party. The party platform advocated a fully nationalised model, along the lines of the British National Health System (even though it may have required a referendum).

By contrast, Whitlam’s plan was for a public insurance scheme. Health services would be delivered by a mix of public and private providers, but paid for by taxpayers and guaranteed for everyone.

“The crucial members of his caucus didn’t agree with him, but he was adamant,” Boxall says. “He’d done a lot of thinking about it. So he waged the war of public opinion and he won.

“It’s an amazing political story.”

Medibank began full operation on October 1, 1975, just six weeks before the dismissal of the Whitlam government. The Fraser government tinkered with the system several times before abolishing it – only for it to be revived by the Hawke government in 1984 in almost exactly the same form.

Thirty years later, Medicare enjoys overwhelming public support. Politicians will swear to defend its honour, no matter their stripes or the system’s shortcomings.

And yet, in the wake of the federal budget, many people believe Medicare is under threat. The target of most ire is the proposed copayment for doctor’s visits, under which even the poorest will have to pay for up to ten appointments each year.

But are these changes the beginning of the end of universal coverage, or another nail in its coffin? Or are they in fact a distraction from the deeper afflictions at the heart of Australia’s health care system?

Health minister Peter Dutton describes the Coalition as “the greatest friend Medicare ever had”, echoing a line Tony Abbott employed during his days as health minister.

The coalition has demonstrated its amity with a host of surprise announcements, including the copayment, which also affects diagnostic tests, such as x-rays, blood tests and prescription drugs. (These charges will be capped for children, low-income earners and the chronically ill.)

More people will pay the Medicare levy surcharge, and fewer will qualify for the private health insurance rebate. Billions of dollars have been cut from public hospitals, and the preventative health agency and other health promotion programs have been shut down. The savings will be directed to a $20 medical research fund.

Dutton says that without these reforms, spiralling costs will jeopardise Medicare’s viability. “The government is very keen to keep Medicare and strengthen it. To keep it universal, we have to make sure it’s affordable. In my view Medicare is only sustainable if those people who have a capacity to pay contribute to the system.

Professor John Deeble, now 82, was one of the original scheme’s architects. He says that although costs have been rising, they’re manageable. Health spending by our governments is low compared with other wealthy countries.

“This is not really about the sustainability of Medicare or anything like it,” he says. “They just want to spend the money on something else, simple as that.”

The Medicare levy – currently 1.5 per cent of taxable income – was established as a premium for public health cover. If the nation’s health costs rise, the government can raise the levy, Deeble says. In that way, people’s contributions are determined by their capacity to pay – their income – not by how often they need treatment.

By introducing copayments instead, the government is embracing something fundamentally different: a ‘user-pays’ notion of fairness in health funding.

In Medicare’s first incarnation, when social security minister Bill Hayden introduced the bill to parliament, he declared that the new health system’s three motivating principles were “social equity, universal coverage and cost efficiency”.

Although the full details of the Coalition’s reforms haven’t been released, public health experts have been unanimous in their critique: as a package, it’s simply bad policy.

“We’ve actually tried all these solutions before, which is why we know they don’t work,” says Boxall, who is the director of the Deeble Institute for Health Policy Research.

“We need to step back and look at the structural problems with our health system.”

Among these are two key vulnerabilities, unforeseen at the time of Medicare’s design: the rise of private health care, and the growing burden of chronic illnesses.

“What we like about Medicare are the principles it was founded on,” Boxall says. “Things have changed. So what are we doing to improve universality, equity and efficiency?

*

For most of the 20th century, Australia had a two-tier medical system : a very basic insurance system for the working class and a fee-paying model for those who could afford it.

“Doctors offered quite different services, and in many cases different waiting rooms for each group,” says Associate Professor James Gillespie, from University of Sydney’s school of public health, and co-author of Making Medicare.

The World Health Organisation says “universal coverage” means “all people have access to services and do not suffer financial hardship paying for them”.

But under Medicare, we’re already failing the test on equity. More than one-in-six Australians say they don’t see a doctor or fill prescriptions because of the cost, according to an international study published last year by the journal Health Affairs. Other research has shown that people who live in poorer neighbourhoods are much more likely to delay medical care than those in the wealthiest suburbs.

Even without the new copayments, Australian patients fork out a lot for treatment from their own pockets, compared with other developed countries.

The two-tier system has re-emerged. One reason, says Gillespie, is that “both sides of politics have refused to think seriously about the role of the private system”. Major reviews commissioned by both the Howard and Rudd governments specifically excluded an examination of its role.

When Medicare began, private hospitals were a small industry, run by churches and charities. But in the last two decades, they’ve become big business, where doctors earn much more for their work.

Until the 1990s, private health insurance was in terminal decline. But spurred on by the Howard government’s incentives – the Medicare levy surcharge and lifetime cover discount – just under half the population now has private cover.

“We’ve ended up with a private system that shifts services away from the public and creates more privileged ways of doing things,” Gillespie says.

He says private funding can contribute to universal care, so long as core services are delivered the same way to everyone. Canada has a similar system to ours, but private insurance isn’t allowed to cover the services offered by its public system.

“If there’s a different system for those who can afford better, you end up with a residual service, which gets squeezed and becomes second best,” Gillespie says.

*

The coalition argues the copayment is a “price signal” to alert people to the real cost of treatment. But there’s something unusual about healthcare – even economists say so. In simple terms: you can judge how you’ll feel if you forgo buying a hamburger, but not if you forgo visiting the doctor.

“In the case of healthcare, part of the product itself is giving you that information,” explains Professor Jeff Richardson, from Monash University’s centre for health economics. “You’re not in a position to judge what life would be like with and without it.” All of which means that promoting efficiency is more complex than imposing a price signal.

Likewise, the relationship between health expenditure and outcomes is not straightforward. The nation’s health costs have been rising, but compared with other OECD countries, our total health spending – both private and public – is just below average. It’s half that of the United States, as a percentage of GDP.

“When the government says Medicare is unsustainable, it’s lying,” Richardson says. “The Australian government could spend much more on health if it wished. It’s simply a political and social judgement that it doesn’t want to.”

Curiously, despite Minister Dutton’s warnings about unsustainable health spending, his reforms – which aim to push more people into the private system – will end up costing more overall.

When the government acts as our single-insurer under Medicare, it has the power and incentive to bargain hard: as a result of bulk billing, GPs incomes are low by international standards. But with many different payers – like in the US system – it’s easier to for private insurers increase fees than control costs.

And for now, GPs and pharmaceuticals are the most cost-effective parts of the health system. Increasing their price will push more patients into hospitals, which are much more costly.

The measures are not a question of efficiency, Richardson says, but rather, an ideological choice that health is an individual responsibility, not a shared one, like defence or policing.

“If we swing over to the private sector and push it back on individuals, the health of poorer people will suffer and overall costs will almost certainly rise,” he says.

Dutton, however, maintains the measures aren’t about ideology, citing the Hawke government’s plans to introduce a $2.50 copayment for GP visits in 1991. (Paul Keating scrapped the idea when he took over as prime minister.) “I strongly believe that the changes we’ve put forward will improve access and the standard of care provided by GPs,” he says.

But the biggest challenge to the standard of care now comes from an entirely different source, one his reforms do nothing to address.

In Australia, the greatest healthcare inefficiency is found in a disconnect between the system – the fragmented network of hospitals, specialists and GPs, and their mishmash of state, federal and private funding – and the kinds of illnesses we have.

Where once we suffered acute ailments, we now need ongoing support with chronic conditions, says Dr Steve Hambleton, the outgoing president of the Australian Medical Association.

This change is partly a measure of success. The number of deaths from heart attacks, for example, peaked in the 1970s. But living with heart disease requires continual treatment and adjustment, especially as you develop other conditions. “The system doesn’t treat those people all that well,” Hambleton says.

Patients with chronic diseases need to see a broad range of health professionals and have frequent tests – but they are often seeing them in a piecemeal way with little continuity or communication between experts. Many of these, such as physiotherapists, psychologists or dieticians, are excluded or receive only limited funding under Medicare.

Both parties have attempted limited reforms to address the rise of chronic illnesses and the needs of our aging population. The Coalition brought in chronic disease management plans, which extend benefits to other kinds of treatment, beyond doctors. Labor’s super clinics and Medicare Locals aimed to bring together and coordinate different health services for patients. But the changes have been piecemeal.

“We need a proactive, long-term approach to care, supporting primary healthcare to keep patients out of hospitals, and make sure people don’t fall through the cracks when they move between community and hospital care,” Hambleton says.

*

THE wide, bright, hallway of the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service in Fitzroy is humming: people young and old are waiting and chatting; some are on the go, others hovering around a wood heater.

Today, a specialist is visiting today to conduct an ear, nose and throat clinic.

Jason King, the centre’s CEO, says they offer an holistic service. There are GPs, dentists, allied health professionals, visiting specialists, social workers and financial counsellors, all supported by Aboriginal health workers from within the community. “It’s not pumping them out every ten minutes. It’s ‘How’s mum and dad going? How’s uncle going who lives with you?’

“We’re the central hub, this is where people come and see family,” he says.

Last year, the health service celebrated its 40th anniversary, a history that has coincided with that of Medicare. Each year, about a third of the state’s Aboriginal population pass through its doors.

The centre’s model of integrated care, embedded in the values of its community, is exactly what doctors and experts have ordered – along with the World Health Organisation, the OECD and several Australian inquires going back decades.

But King says the co-payment and cuts to preventative health will either cost the centre patients or take a chunk out of its budget. Either way, that means fewer services.

There are 28 Aboriginal community-controlled health centres around the state. Jill Gallagher, CEO of their peak body, says Aboriginal health remains worse than the rest of the nation, and Victoria is no different.

“The life expectancy in Fitzroy is the same as the life expectancy in Fitzroy Crossing,” she says. “For every dollar spent on Medicare for a non-Aboriginal person, about 60 cents is spent on Aboriginal people. Access to primary healthcare is still not equitable, in spite of the fact there’s four times the burden of illness in the Aboriginal community.”

Dr Mary Belfrage, the Fitzroy service’s medical director, says any barriers to accessing health care cause people show up later, with advanced conditions, which are more expensive to treat. “It all translates to worse health outcomes, but it’s also inefficient,” she says.

“This isn’t about party politics or a particular budget. It’s about the principle of equity and how it impacts on health.”

Read this article at The Age online

 

Flirting with disaster

In Environment, The Age on May 13, 2014

Big business is calling for increased spending on disaster prevention. But with climate change set to cause more fires, floods and heatwaves, are we doing enough?

AFTER the deadly summer of 2010-2011, executives at Insurance Australia Group made a decision. Floods had swept through the eastern states, killing more than two-dozen people and causing billions of dollars of damage. 

“We have a whole ‘natural perils’ department made up of scientists and engineers who constantly model risk,” says Mike Wilkins, IAG’s managing director. “But it’s bigger than us. We needed to be part of a coordinated national conversation.”

The team began planning a “risk summit”, with 60 invitees from the business world, community groups and government. Together, they took aim at Australia’s record on disaster prevention. They identified two key problems: not enough spending on mitigation and poor land-use planning. Out of that summit, the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities was formed. It comprises a handful of very large and influential corporations: IAG, Westpac, Optus, Munich Re and Investa Property, as well as Australian Red Cross. 

The big end of town seems an unlikely champion for the cause, but Wilkins says each of the members sees the consequences first-hand when disasters hit. And above all, so do taxpayers.

The group’s research shows that for every $10 the federal government spends on post-disaster recovery, it spends less than $1 to reduce the risks beforehand.

In a joint statement released last year, the six CEOs said the economic cost of disasters will nearly quadruple by mid-century, rising to $23 billion annually. Wilkins says the costs of disasters could be halved with smart precautionary spending. His group wants the federal government to appoint a national resilience advisor and commit to long-term, pre-disaster spending.

However the roundtable’s figure of $23 billion annually does not even factor in the future impact of climate change. Statistics from Munich Re show that the number of extreme weather “loss events” for insurers in Australia has risen steadily over the last three decades. But Alexander Allmann, the company’s head of Geo Risks, says while anthropogenic climate change has had an impact on losses from weather catastrophes, it’s  not yet quantifiable. 

Yet last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released two new reports. The first details the impacts of global warming. Among the biggest risks for Australia are more deaths and damage caused by heat waves and wildfires, and increasing frequency and intensity of floods. 

It warns of diminishing agricultural production, less fresh water and increasing threats to coastal infrastructure caused by rising seas. A 1.1-metre sea level rise – possible by the end of the century – “would affect over $226 billion of assets” including nearly 300,000 homes.

The IPCC’s other new report says global greenhouse gas emissions rose nearly twice as fast in the last decade than during the 30 years before, and current reduction targets aren’t enough: we’re still on course for 4 degrees of global warming by the end of the century.

The World Bank has warned that if the worst comes to pass, “there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4 degree world is possible”. 

The Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research was established by the state Labor government in 2009. In last week’s budget, the Napthine government did not extend its funding. It will close at the end of June.

The state Environment Minister Ryan Smith declined to be interviewed for this article. 

Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s controversial response to the recent IPCC report meanwhile, was this: ‘‘Australia is a land of droughts and flooding rains,’’ he said. ‘‘Always has been, always will be”.

*

Earlier this year, the federal attorney-general’s department sounded a similar alarm to the business roundtable. “Existing funding arrangements for natural disasters present a significant fiscal risk for the Commonwealth,” it wrote, to an inquiry into public infrastructure. 

Those warnings have now been heeded, in part. On April 28, the federal government issued the terms of reference for an inquiry into the way we spend money on natural disasters. It will be conducted by the Productivity Commission, with a final report by the end of the year.

However, there’s no mention of climate change in the terms of reference for the inquiry.

The risks are not just borne by the Commonwealth. In Victoria, state treasury estimates that the government has spent $4 billion in the last decade responding to bushfires, floods and droughts. 

A recent report by Friends of the Earth suggested an even higher figure, at over $6.7 billion, as well as private insurance payouts of more than $13 billion over that decade. 

The biggest challenges lie within existing neighbourhoods, according to the roundtable’s research. It says our existing buildings must be retrofitted or, if necessary, relocated, with monitoring done by councils. 

In a worst-case scenario, it says, a bushfire could hit the suburbs of Melbourne’s northern fringe, cutting critical electricity lines and contaminating some of the city’s drinking water supplies. We should, it says, be equipping those homes for bushfire resilience – sealing gaps and vents, installing sprinkler systems, clearing around houses – and electricity wires should be buried.

For now, however, it seems we’re only making things worse. When disasters do strike, we build back the way things were. Reconstruction to a higher standard is known as “betterment”. The term has been included in the national disaster relief programme since 2007. But according to the attorney-general’s department, only one betterment project has been funded since then.

Meanwhile, the federal government poured $5.6 billion into reconstruction after the Queensland floods.

 “Those billions of dollars have largely been wasted because there was no requirement to spend in a way to reduce the risk of those impacts happening again,” says Dr Jamie Pittock, a flooding and climate change expert from Australian National University.

In comparison, the federal government’s  spending on preventing disaster – through the National Disaster Resilience Fund – totals only $52.2 million over two years. 

Pittock says the mistakes of early settlers are being repeated. “Across Australia we’re seeing poor state government regulations allowing local governments to develop land that should never be developed,” he says.

Climate change makes this problem much, much worse: many of these threats are beginning to come harder and faster. We’ve built homes, towns and suburbs in locations at risk of disaster, and those risks are rising.

The outgoing director of the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research , Professor Rod Keenan, says we’ve made progress adapting to some aspects of the climate threat. The long drought and the scorching Black Saturday summer prompted gains in water efficiency, along with better heatwave warnings and bushfire responses.

But overall, we’re still beset by the “notion that ‘she’ll be right, we’ve always had disasters and we’ll deal with them when the time comes’,” Keenan says, “rather than anticipating and planning to avoid the worst impacts”.

Even when we do consider the threat of floods and fires, we’re neglecting to account for the way global warming alters the risks. When Pittock and his colleagues analysed four major reviews commissioned after the 2010-11 floods, they found that the documents “virtually ignored the issue of climate change and its impact on flooding; some reports didn’t refer to it at all”.

Pittock says our estimates of flood frequencies are already unreliable and climate change makes them even less certain. This matters, because it makes hard defences such as levees, which are often favoured by governments and insurers, more risky. 

“If you miscalculate or are over-optimistic about flood frequency, you can make the situation far worse,” he says. The better alternative is to allow rivers room to flood, while relocating or raising infrastructure and homes. “Countries like the United States, the Netherlands and China are pulling down levee banks,” he says.

“It’s about time Australia learnt from that. There’s an upfront cost, but once you’ve invested in a more resilient strategy, the benefits accrue over decades or longer.”

Professor Keenan says he’d like to see communities holding informed discussions to pinpoint local risks and responses. Governments could fund their adaptation ideas by bringing forward recovery spending. 

“This matters because we can save lives,” he says. “We can reduce the impact of disasters on people’s livelihoods. And we can reduce the financial impact on the state government, so it can continue to spend money on hospitals and schools and public transport services.

“It’s far more sensible to invest a smaller amount of money now, rather than pay out more down the track when disasters happen.” Keenan says while it’s disappointing that the state government hasn’t allocated funding to his centre, he’s hopeful it might have a change of heart.  

 But Professor Jean Palutikof, the head of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility – which is funded by the federal government and based at Griffith University – cautions that its very hard to put money into preparation for a disaster, ‘‘because no government can easily justify the expenditure on something that hasn’t happened’’. 

Her words are borne out by the state government’s Climate Change Adaptation Plan, released just over 12 months ago. It allocated only $6 million in new spending, mostly in grants to local councils. The plan also failed to impose any requirement that climate change be taken into account in planning or infrastructure decisions. It won’t be revised until 2016.

*

Creswick flooded three times in the disastrous summer of 2010 and 2011. The deluge took the small town, north-east of Ballarat, by surprise. But its predicament – both before and afterwards – illustrates the challenges replicated around the country.

 In the 1850s, settlers had diverted the creek so they could extend the main street. “The lower end of town is built just about entirely on the flood plain, and no one realised,” says Don Henderson, the Mayor of Hepburn Shire, and a local builder in Creswick. The council was “totally unprepared” for the floods, he says, as were the catchment management authority and emergency services. Years on, the floods’ consequences have lingered. Some insurers no longer offer policies for low-lying homes. 

A council flood recovery office, opened on the main street, has only just closed its doors. It guided reconstruction works worth $30 million across the shire, including levee banks along the Creswick Creek, only just completed. 

For the council, the influx of federal cash has seemed like an act of god. Although only required to rebuild as things were, it has made a point of lifting its standards, Henderson says. For instance, it could have never have afforded to rip out the drains under local roads and replace them with bigger ones. ’’With the recovery funding, we were able to say ‘Yes this caught us with our pants down, but into the future we’re designing this town to be resilient’.”

Even so, the new level of flood protection – decided in consultation with the community – leaves some townsfolk exposed. 

Like so many of our disaster inquiries, the new Creswick flood modelling and mitigation plan doesn’t mention climate change, or take the increasing risk of extreme weather into its rainfall predictions, or cost-benefit analysis.

Russell Castley lives at Semmens Village, a pocket of 32 public housing units across the creek from the main street. They’re vulnerable to rising waters from three directions. During floods, the road becomes submerged, blocking both ways out. 

“Really, these units should never have been built here,” Castley says. He climbs the low mound near his home and points at the gaps. The levee system is designed to guard against a 1-in-50 year flood, without accounting for the shifting climate. 

“I’m 74 now,” he says. “I don’t know whether we’ll have another flood here in my lifetime. But I think the floods will become more frequent and possibly more violent, and I don’t believe this levee bank will protect this complex.”

After consultation on the town’s flood plan finished, a team from the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab, at University of Melbourne, arrived with a different approach: scenario planning.

They presented locals with three stories outlining the livelihoods of different people in Creswick in 25 years time, based on plausible but severe climate projections. Then, they asked how residents wanted to adapt.

The responses were distilled into a series of future visions, and displayed online and in shop windows on the main street. 

In one, the creek is returned to its original course by 2025. Low-lying land becomes a commons and flood-prone homes and businesses are moved uphill to the railway station. In others, the town converts its historic post office to a ‘Resilience Centre’ and constructs a water storage network to guard against drought. 

“When you’ve got an uncertain climate and radical changes in the pipeline, our old planning standards become a liability,” says Che Biggs, who led the research project. “We don’t know the exact likelihood of extreme events in the future and we never will. It’s time to stop asking for certainty before we begin to adapt. 

“It makes more sense to explore what can go wrong by using worst-case scenarios tailored for different regions. With the right process, communities and agencies can have these conversations without pointing fingers. “Otherwise, we’ll wait and see what hits us, then start the blame game afterwards.”

Read this article at The Age online

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Real change or just more talk?

In Social justice, The Age on April 30, 2014

Victoria Police is commencing its most significant reform in two decades. But can it tackle a problem it won’t name?

IT could be any city office. But on the fifth floor at Victoria Police headquarters, something particularly uncommon is going on. A brand new division is beginning its work.

The 20-odd staff members in the Priority Communities Division – a mix of uniformed and unsworn members – are tasked with transforming the way the force deals with the most vulnerable members of society, including recent migrants, Aborigines, the disabled and others who too often find themselves the target of police attention.

“It is a watershed moment for the organisation in terms of how we create better engagement across the community,” says the unit’s boss, Commander Sue Clark. “It hits all parts of the organisation.”

In scope, she likens the changes to Project Beacon, which began in 1994, in a bid to reduce the number of police shootings. Then, all officers were trained in conflict resolution techniques that didn’t involve their guns.

Police reform is always hard won. This time, it began with a group of teenagers in Flemington. In 2008, sixteen young men lodged a complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission, saying they were repeatedly stopped, harassed and abused by members of the Victoria Police, sometimes violently, and that it was a breach of the Racial Discrimination Act.

One of the young men, Maki Issa, estimates that police asked for his name and ID at least 100 times in the two years from 2006. One day he was stopped five times, he says. One officer in particular would greet him by name and then insist on asking for his ID. “I was thinking: ‘Is this guy sick, or is it me?’” Issa says.

At the time, he was 15. Besides schoolwork, Issa was training hard for a high-level soccer team, and volunteering as a coach for younger kids from the flats. He’d never been charged with any crime. When the case finally settled in the Federal Court, in February 2013, he was 22.

Maki Issa at a forum in North Melbourne. Photo by Aaron Claringbold. 

Victoria Police still denies the allegations, but as part of the settlement, it agreed to review its practices.

Last year, Chief Commissioner Ken Lay described the case as “a waypoint”. “We were going along and we hit this point, and now we’re going in a different direction,” he said.

The force sought public submissions and commissioned expert reviews. On December 30, it released a report, entitled ‘Equality is not the same’, which included a three-year timetable for change.

Among the reforms is human rights training to help members understand and undercut their own unconscious biases and stereotypes. Officers will also receive clearer guidance on when they can legitimately stop people, with definitions of what is meant by the grounds of “reasonable suspicion” and “high crime locations”.

The force will revise its data collection so it can analyse disparities among the ethnicities of people being stopped. And, in a major reversal, it has agreed to hold a trial in which citizens will be given receipts explaining why they’ve been stopped.

*

For the police force, the Priority Communities Division has an unusually flat structure. But at the top, Commander Sue Clark is its star recruit.

She is renowned for her work on cultural change, both in her earlier stint at Victoria Police and then at the AFL, where she was responsible for reshaping the code’s attitude to women. Her role with the league expanded to dealing with vilification and racism, and social inclusion in general.

It was a rewarding role. The AFL has “led the conversation with the community about really difficult issues,” Clark says. “Footy enabled people to talk about violence against women.”

She began her career with two decades “on the front line” as a police officer at Frankston and Dandenong, working with victims of sexual assault and child abuse. “You could see the problem: the limitations on policing and also on social services,” she says.

Under former chief commissioner Christine Nixon, she helped connect policing with a range of agencies and counselling services for domestic violence, sexual assault and men’s behaviour change. For the first time, they established referrals and confidential information exchanges so people wouldn’t get lost in the system. “When I think back, it was amazing,” she says.

Reports of family violence to police have tripled since the early 2000s – a sign that people have more faith in the system as a whole, she says.

That experience forged her approach to reform: a strong trust in collaboration with “critical friends” outside the force. Her new division is in the process of forming a number of advisory committees, which will represent multicultural, Aboriginal, youth and aged, disabled, and gay and lesbian communities.

“This is a long term journey,” Clark says. “This is not a short sprint. It’s not even a couple of kilometres. This is about changing the way we think, the way we operate and the way we draw on our community to help solve broader community problems. We’re in it for the long haul.”

*

When the police announced its reforms, the immediate response from advocates was positive, even from those most critical of the force in the past, such as the Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre.

Recently, the centre held public forums together with senior police to explain the proposed changes. Anthony Kelly, the centre’s CEO, is cautiously optimistic. “We see this as a crucial first step in a long-term shift to more impartial and democratic form of policing,” he says.

“One of the things we’re facing is that historically Victoria Police have always acted upon the social and political prejudices of the day. We’ve seen that with the policing of Indigenous people, the Irish, and then the Greeks, Italians and Vietnamese.

“The policing of the African community was heavily influenced by the statements of politicians and reflected through intense media stereotyping of African people as ‘problems’.

“Our clients say they were continually trying to explain to police they weren’t part of a gang, they were just hanging out.”

Finally, their complaints have been acknowledged. But the tension between African communities and Victoria Police remains. It can be traced back through many years of warnings and reports issued by advocates, youth workers and the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. After so long, police have much ground to regain.

Near the high-rise flats in North Melbourne, a small audience gathered for one of the joint forums. After presentations from assistant police commissioner Andrew Crisp and others, the panel took questions.

Assistent commissioner Andrew Crisp addresses the forum in North Melbourne. Photo by Aaron Claringbold. 

Khadija Alihashi, from Flemington, described herself as “one of the mothers” from the Somali and broader African community. She said there had been ten years of meetings and no change. “You guys bring the big bosses, but where are the local police? They never come,” she said. “We talk and we talk, but where’s the action?”

Maki Issa also attended the meeting. He said that when he joined the racial discrimination complaint, he wanted a receipting policy and better training. But he also wanted an apology – and he still hadn’t received one.

He said the police’s report didn’t acknowledge racism and shied away from using the r-word. “We cannot be scared of the word anymore. As long as we keep the word away from the public arena, it can be okay for people to behave that way.”

When Victoria Police does discuss racial profiling, it chooses its language carefully. Its report reiterates its “critical concern” about the community’s “strong perception of racial profiling by police”.

Likewise, in an hour-long interview about their work, Commander Clark and two senior members of the new division – Superintendent Charlie Allen and Leanne Sargent – managed not to say the words “racism”, “racial profiling”, or even the less-contentious “unconscious bias”.

Clark offered this construction: “the feedback from the community indicated there were instances of behaviour that has caused concern”.

Asked about how it is possible to enact cultural change without naming the problem directly, Clark said Chief Commissioner Lay had “acknowledged that there had been instances and behaviours that we deeply regret”.

Yet, it was clear that all three are enthusiastic about the task confronting them. “There is absolutely a fundamental acknowledgement that we need to change,” Clark said. “We can do things better.”

Such self-censorship may be a nod to the rank-and-file, which has often resisted reforms from high command. There are more than 12,000 uniformed members around the state, many of whom come from a very different era of law enforcement.

When these reforms were announced, the then police union boss, Greg Davies, said a receipting system would be a “rod for the backs of police… already cowed with the responsibility and oversight as it is”.

His replacement, Ron Iddles, says he wants to talk with Clark before passing judgment, and he’s looking forward to Victoria Police consulting with the association on the issue.

One of the independent reports feeding into the reforms, prepared by Professor Michele Grossman and colleagues from Victoria University, included interviews with 20 serving members.

A long-term, mid-ranking officer said many friends of his vintage “are still struggling with the shift in the organisation in the last five years” away from “an us-and-them scenario”.

Nevertheless, the academics found that the members they interviewed overwhelmingly wanted better cross-cultural training, not only in the academy, but also throughout their careers.

One officer described attending an incident between groups of African- and Anglo-Australian teenagers, where they immediately told the white youths to leave. It turned out, with video footage as proof, that they’d held the wrong group.

He reflected that he’d been “programmed” to make those assumptions: “we’ve heard about how much trouble [African-Australians] cause… therefore they must have been the ones that caused the trouble,” he said.

Melbourne University academic Tallace Bissett is completing her PhD research on the experience of young African-Australians with police.

In general, the young men she has interviewed would like less police presence in their lives. Strangely enough, their request may match the wishes of front line officers.

“It is clear that a lot of police officers feel overwhelmed and under-qualified to deal with many of the situations they face. They’ve had all these new expectations heaped on them but their training hasn’t developed at the same pace,” she says.

“Victoria Police is investing a lot of money into Priority Communities. An alternative would be to stop leaving it all to police, and invest in community infrastructure instead – to create places where young people can meet without being criminalised. Maybe what we want is a smaller police force, not a bigger one.”

*

Abraham Nouk is sitting in his makeshift recording studio in Collingwood, the walls lined with egg-carton soundproofing. Nouk runs an unfunded, informal youth centre and arts space called Creative Rebellion Youth. This afternoon, a young man is travelling in from Narre Warren for help to record a demo.

Nouk’s story demonstrates the personal and societal cost of policing gone wrong.

As a teenager, he lived with his family in Lilydale and Ringwood, and hung out around Dandenong with other friends who’d come from Sudan. He says they attracted constant, unwarranted police attention.

“When it comes down to African youth, we’re perceived as people who are involved in gang activities,” he explains. “That already fuels police hostility towards us. That’s where the boundaries are created.”

He has been held in custody and fronted court. It was getting worse, until four years ago, when he made what he calls his “concession”.

To avoid the police, he avoids the public. He no longer drives, because he was stopped so frequently. When possible, he doesn’t go out after dark.

He believes it is his only choice. “You have to adjust,” he says. “It’s not an easy process – it’s almost like exempting yourself from living fully. That’s just the way it is.”

Recently, Nouk has found acclaim as a performance poet, under the name Abe Ape. He’s been invited to perform at the Glastonbury festival in England in June. “I thought I logged into the wrong email when I received that one,” he smiles. “I logged out and back in again.”

In other ways, he has checked out completely. His lack of faith has bled beyond policing. He is skeptical, too, of social workers paid to pick up the pieces; of businesses that won’t employ African kids; and of people who clutch their bags at the sight of him.

The lesson, Nouk says, is to “acknowledge the fact that nothing is going to change”.

“That’s what I do, that’s what most of us do.”

He has little hope for the proposed reforms, and says the consultation hasn’t found its mark.

“Bottom line, if Victoria Police doesn’t want to admit the problem, it’s going to be a long time before these reforms have an impact. The people affected by it aren’t even speaking about it.”

Read this article at The Age online

For more on this issue, see this article about the police inquiries and cross-cultural training, and this account of the Racial Discrimination case brought by the young men from Flemington. 

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