And the likelihood and impact of the release of shallow methane clathrates remains largely unknown.
Fifty Years on, the Whitlam government's Community Health Program is more relevant than ever
On Friday I had the privilege of attending a forum Celebrating the Whitlam Community Health Program: Lessons for the Future and participating on a panel at the Whitlam Institute.
The forum was the culmination of an ARC-funded Project looking at Contemporary lessons from a history of Aboriginal, women’s and generalist community health services in Australia 1970-2020, which involved more than a dozen investigators from nine universities and partner organisations.
The Community Health Program
The Community Health Program was established in 1973 and within three years it had funded over 700 projects, including community health centres, Aboriginal medical services, and women’s health centres.
Gough Whitlam, in a 1993 keynote address to the Australian Community Health Association’s National Conference in Adelaide in 1993Communities must look beyond the person who is sick in bed or who needs medical attention. The (Hospitals and Health Services) Commission will be concerned with more than just hospital services. The concept and financial support will extend to the development of community-based health services and the sponsoring of preventive health programs.
Even though the program was gouged by later governments many of the services funded still exist. For example I’ve worked with the Liverpool Women’s Health Centre this year, which was founded by a collective in 1975 and funded through the CHP.
The vision of the CHP remains relevant today: ensuring that people can have access to relevant,meaningful multidisciplinary care in the community. When the CHP was conceived in the early ’70s it sought to meet the preventive care needs, to address inequalities, to reduce demands on hospital emergency departments, and tackle rising rates of chronic disease – issues which we have gone backwards on since.
The presentations and panel discussions highlighted that while the community health sector remains dynamic, Commonwealth engagement with the sector has been erratic. There’s a need to return governance to communities, reduce the variability in services offered by community health between states and regions, and to return to block funding rather than project funding. Primary Health Networks are well placed to tackle these issues, and to foster the kind of resilient local service systems that we’ll need to address environmental, social and economic shocks in the near future.
Thanks to all involved for a very thought-provoking afternoon.
Project team
Researcher and Project Manager
Dr. Connie Musolino, University of Adelaide.
Chief Investigators
- Professor Fran Baum AO, Stretton Health Equity, University of Adelaide.
- Associate Professor Tamara Mackean, Flinders University.
- Professor Warwick Anderson, The University of Sydney.
- Emeritus Professor Colin MacDougall, Flinders University.
- Professor Virginia Lewis, La Trobe University.
- Associate Professor David Legge, La Trobe University.
- Dr. Toby Freeman, University of Adelaide.
Partner Investigators
- Patricia Turner AM, CEO of the National Aboriginal Community ControlledHealth Organisation (NACCHO).
- Denise Fry, Sydney Local Health District.
- Paul Laris, Paul Laris and Associates.
- Tony McBride, Tony McBride & Associates.
- Jennifer Macmillan, La Trobe University.
Researchers and Students
- Dr. Helen van Eyk, University of Adelaide.
- Dr. James Dunk, The University of Sydney.
- Abdullah Sheriffdeen, Flinders University.
- Jacob Wilson, Flinders University.
New York rideshare conpanies agree to pay USD $328 million owed to drivers
“For years, Uber and Lyft systemically cheated their drivers out of hundreds of millions of dollars in pay and benefits while they worked long hours in challenging conditions,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. “These drivers overwhelmingly come from immigrant communities and rely on these jobs to provide for their families. This settlement will ensure they finally get what they have rightfully earned and are owed under the law.”
Uber, Lyft agree to pay combined $328 million for withholding money from drivers - ABC News US
"We spent a whole week extracting from the UN officials we met information that's relevant": A.I. Bros muscling in on Israel's occupation of Palestine
Shults and Lane are aware that claiming that AI could “solve the crisis” between Israelis and Palestinians is likely to result in a lot of eye-rolling if not outright hostility, especially given the horrific scenes coming out of Gaza daily. So they are quick to dispel that this is what they are trying to do.
“Quite frankly, if I were to phrase it that way, I’d roll my eyes too,” Shults says. “The key is that the model is not designed to resolve the situation; it’s to understand, analyze, and get insights into implementing policies and communication strategies.”
The notion that greater insights can come from chucking flawed training data into a model than asking experts or people affected is a central, flawed conceit of all current A.I.
The UN Hired an AI Company to Untangle the Israeli-Palestinian Crisis - Wired
Medicare’s forty-year update
Interesting Inside Story piece from Mike Steketee about the Australian Government’s efforts to update Medicare - and the pressures involved:
Creating multidisciplinary teams of health professionals and more alternatives to expensive hospital care harks all the way back to the community health centres established by the Whitlam government in the early 1970s, for which funding was cut by subsequent governments…
Medicare’s forty-year update - Inside Story
Timely given tomorrow’s Whitlam Institute Policy Forum on Celebrating the Whitlam Community Health Program: Lessons for the Future
When climate adaptation exacerbates the problems
Maladaptation is usually understood as referring to the unintended consequences of well-meant measures to reduce climate vulnerability. But it also includes the fallout from decisions that favour technical fixes over more holistic approaches.
Climate adaptation is not a neutral or apolitical process. It can perpetuate problematic approaches, including colonial land practices and the exclusion of Indigenous voices. This can create tenuous resource distribution, erode democratic governance and compromise Indigenous sovereignty, exacerbating vulnerabilities. It can also subvert community-driven bottom-up adaptation, instead focusing on national agendas caught up in international politics.
Useful points in this Conversation article by Ritodhi Chakraborty and Claire Burgess:
The standard research approach to disasters is not directly relevant to pandemics and many of the future disasters we face
It is questionable that the notion of the naturally well, (auto)regulating disaster subject applies to the Covid-19 pandemic. What is more: This notion contributed to the hegemonic formation of the resilience paradigm, which has served beyond the disaster research field as a legitimation of neoliberalism’s reduction of governmental support and the imposition of self-reliance. The radicalization of the racial capitalist, “economization of life”8 that neoliberal programs have fostered across the globe has been directly responsible for the immense death toll of Covid-19 and it serves as both a structural and a cultural obstacle to the type of (global) solidarity that is indispensable for dealing with this pandemic. The privatization of public health and the dismantling of social safety nets left public institutions unable to cope with the virus and forced people to expose themselves to it as they had to keep working in order not to go hungry. Moreover, in many countries, the ideology informing the management of the pandemic was one that prioritized saving “the economy” over saving the lives of those perceived as disposable (for not being beneficial to said “economy”).
In the past few years, the resilience paradigm has been increasingly challenged in disaster studies—though its use continues to be popular. But another framework for interpreting disaster that was promoted by Cold War disaster research seems to be largely uncontroversial: The characterization of disaster as revelation. The idea that a disaster would reveal hidden truths about humans and how they live in the present can be traced back to premodern times. During the twentieth century, it became pivotal for ascribing disaster predictive faculties with respect to the future.9 Cold War disaster researchers contributed to backing up the idea of the revealing nature of disaster scientifically. Borrowing from the language of the natural sciences and thus increasing the scientificity of their claims—they described it as an “equivalent of an engineering experiment,” or a real-world “laboratory” in which the underlying structures and “patterns” of societies would become observable.
"Action as a citizen [on climate change] is far more powerful than action as a consumer"
Luke Kemp on bad-to-worst clikate scenarios:
“you develop a certain kind of emotional distance from the problem. And I find, personally, that, like all humans, risks seem much worse and disasters are much worse, when they have a human face on them. I find it much more difficult to read about things like genocide, political violence, and gendered violence, for instance, than I do when I think about 6 degrees of warming—even though 6 degrees, just in the sheer number of fatalities and the sheer number of suffering, could be far, far worse. But it lacks that human element to clearly connect with”
Dr. Doom on the Hottest Summer (So Far) - Nautilus via Arthur Charpentier
Dialogue and friendship in Jaffa in a time of war
People say to me, ‘You have to be realistic, you’re dreaming of peace, and you’re dreaming of collaboration between Arabs and Jews, but you’re not realistic,’” she said while slapping a sticker on a lamppost. “People just lost faith.”
The night’s ringleader is Yeheli Cialic, 23, a Jewish Israeli who grew up in a “mainstream family” but now describes himself as a communist and an “anti-Zionist.” He says helping Arabs negotiate the institutionalized prejudice they face in Israel is the civil guard’s priority.
This feeling of anti-Arab discrimination has only grown under the successive governments of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And since the attacks, advocacy groups say Israeli authorities have eroded free speech by treating many expressions of Palestinian solidarity as incitement…
The crew is mostly young. Among them is Amit Okin, 23, who ran away from his yeshiva and his increasingly religious family to become a self-described anarchist with safety pins in his ears and a half-shaved head.
“I didn’t understand it, I didn’t understand why we can’t love everybody,” he says, unnecessarily apologizing for his almost-perfect English. “We are always told that they hate us, so we need to hate them. I always felt something was wrong there.”
The African workers taking on Big Tech's shameful outsourced content moderation practices
The human toll of moderation of staggering - and almost all hidden so the brushed metal psychopaths of the tech industry can continue to deny their products' massive negative human toll.
Foxglove, the nonprofit supporting the moderators’ legal challenge against Meta, writes that the outcome of the case could disrupt the global content moderation outsourcing model. If the court finds that Meta is the “‘true employer’ of their content moderators in the eyes of the law,” Foxglove argues, “then they cannot hide behind middlemen like Sama or Majorel. It will be their responsibility, at last, to value and protect the workers who protect social media — and who have made tech executives their billions.”
Silicon Savanna: The workers taking on Africa’s digital sweatshops - .coda
Arundhati Roy's scathing appraisal of India's descent into fascism under Modi
The banality of evil, the normalization of evil, is now manifest in our streets, in our classrooms, in very many public spaces. The mainstream press, the hundreds of 24-hour news channels, have been harnessed to the cause of fascist majoritarianism. India’s constitution has been effectively set aside. The Indian Penal Code is being rewritten. If the current regime wins a majority in 2024, it is very likely that we will see a new constitution.
They would have known that, at the same time they were feting Modi, Muslims were fleeing a small town in Uttarakhand in northern India after Hindu extremists affiliated with the BJP marked x’s on their doors and told them to leave. There is open talk of a “Muslim-free” Uttarakhand. They would have known that, under Modi’s watch, the state of Manipur in India’s northeast has descended into a barbaric civil war. A form of ethnic cleansing has taken place. The Centre is complicit; the state government is partisan; the security forces are split between the police and others with no chain of command. The internet has been cut. News takes weeks to filter out.
You Mustn’t Pretend You Didn’t Know - The Los Angeles Review of Books
"Academics need to think harder about the purpose of their disciplines and whether some of those should come to an end"
We believe the time has come for scholars across fields to reorient their work around the question of ‘ends’. This need not mean acquiescence to the logics of either economic utilitarianism or partisan fealty that have already proved so damaging to 21st-century institutions. But avoiding the question will not solve the problem. If we want the university to remain a viable space for knowledge production, then scholars across disciplines must be able to identify the goal of their work – in part to advance the Enlightenment project of ‘useful knowledge’ and in part to defend themselves from public and political mischaracterisation.