Vaccination: We owe it to our children.
The rise in online media in recent years has been a boon for those seeking an independent and alternative source of information outside mainstream news outlets. With such a wealth of information at our fingertips, we are able to become at least moderately informed about any topic within minutes. While this independence brings with it more freedom and flexibility in the issues reported, it also can allow incorrect and downright dangerous anti-science beliefs to take hold, particularly among individuals and groups with limited knowledge or skills required to critically analyse information presented.
Two examples of an anti-science movements that have gained prominence in recent years are the extremely vocal anti-vaccination lobby and climate change denial. Dangerously, both have taken a strong hold in recent years despite an overwhelming body of scientific evidence to the contrary. Two possible reasons for this are a lack of scientific education and knowledge, or simply complete ignorance in support of an agenda or prejudiced viewpoint. In a world that science has greatly improved, we can’t afford to succumb to such viewpoints or we risk going backwards as a society.
The anti-vaccination lobby has been around for a number of years but has grown in strength and voice in recent years with the rise of various online ‘information’ sites, which has seen in a dangerous decline in children’s vaccination rates in Australia to 83% of four year olds - well below the 90% level that ensures community wide protection. This has coincided with an increase in whooping cough cases in recent years from 332 in 1991, to 38601 cases in 2011 (many due to a new, vaccine resistant strain of the disease). The importance of being vaccinated is highlighted by a comparative study published in the American Journal of Pediatrics which found vaccine refusers are 23 times more likely than vaccine accepters to contract Whooping Cough (Glanz et al. 2009) - a strong indication of the effectiveness of immunisation.
There are a number of other ‘facts’ put forward by the anti vaccination lobby which are not substantiated by evidence or worse, are contrary to scientific evidence. The Australian Academy of Science recently released a publication debunking many of the myths pushed by the anti-vaccination lobby, including the downright incorrect link between vaccination and autism.
This is not to say that vaccinations do not come without side effects, but when weighed against the risks of not being immunised these side effects pale into insignificance. An un-immunised child contracting measles is 2000 times more likely to develop encephalitis as a complication in comparison to the risk associated with being immunised.
In scientific circles, vaccination is one of the triumphs of modern medicine. In spite of the evidence, incorrect ideas still take hold to the detriment of children like New Zealand’s Alijah Williams, who recently contracted tetanus and now faces months in hospital after being refused vaccination by his parents. As a society, we owe it to our children to ensure that these diseases are not given a chance and remain a thing of the past.
You can read the Australian Acadamy of Science publication here: http://www.science.org.au/policy/immunisation.html.
The Future is Now
Climate Change is front and centre of public discussion again after the tragic effects of Hurricane Sandy in North America. One of the unfortunate traits of humanity as a whole is that we are still a very reactive species, and sometimes it takes a major disaster to spur action on any given issue. I am still doubtful whether Sandy is enough of a wake up call.
While it is hard to pinpoint climate change as the cause for a single event, there is one thing most scientists agree on - that climate change systematically caused or worsened Hurricane Sandy, in much the same way that smoking systematically causes lung cancer, or poor diet systematically causes diabetes.
Some effects are relatively obvious in exacerbating the effects of Sandy - the abnormally high sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic fueling the superstorm. Other effects are more subtle - a high pressure ridge in the absence of the semi-permanent low pressure system over the Arctic this year most likely as a result of the sea ice melt resulted in Sandy making landfall where it usually would have been pushed out sea, causing minimal damage. In Australia, we are seeing the effects also - more severe storms, heat waves and bush fires have been a more common theme in recent years.
These kinds of event are no longer the work of climate models - they are happening now. An interesting study from NASA recently highlighted this - changes in atmospheric humidity are in line with the worst-case scenario climate models - that is, we are looking at a five degree rise in temperature by the end of the century (we have so far seen around 0.8 degrees). The consequences of this are extensive and catastrophic, what we have seen recently across the globe is just the beginning.
We can no longer sit on our hands and take a wait and see approach. The future is now, and the more we delay, the more the costs will increase. It makes both environmental and economic sense to act now, so why not do something about it?
America's Outstanding Healthcare System.
“In 2009, Shanya Isom suffered an allergic reaction to steroids prescribed for an asthma attack, and within hours she was itching all over her body and bumps started sprouting up under her skin. Doctors soon discovered that the bumps were in fact fingernails growing out of every hair follicle. Shanya’s illness is sui generis: that is, doctors don’t know what it is or how to treat it.
Naturally, Shanya’s medical bills are growing and she and her family are going into debt in America’s outstanding healthcare system. The state-issued insurance does not cover her Baltimore-based specialist and only covers five of the 17 medications she is prescribed.
In the US healthcare system, driven by the free market as it is, it’s considered Shanya’s problem instead of a civic imperative to help she and her doctors pinpoint the nature of the illness and treat it. To hear it from anti-universal healthcare forces, however, Shanya should simply wait for charity to kick in—a good idea theoretically, but not in practice.
Perhaps the press surrounding her mystery illness will help out in that regard. Or we could give ourselves and our neighbors universal healthcare so Shanya doesn’t have to compound the nighmare of illness with the nightmare of debt.”
Source: www.deathandtaxesmag.com
Pale Blue Dot
Taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990, over 6 billion kilometres away, this is one of the most powerful images I know.
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” - Carl Sagan
A Humanitarian Approach
Stories of lives lost at sea are becoming all to common in recent months. One thing it seems everyone can agree on is that this needs to stop, and lives must be protected. Nobody enjoys witnessing tragedy on this scale. People do however disagree on how to solve this issue, and appear to have differing motives for doing so to the point that it is debilitating for parliament.
Amongst all the rhetoric from politicians on both sides, we must ask ourselves as a nation one question:
Should we merely be ‘stopping the boats’, or working to find a genuinely regional solution that offers a holistic approach to meeting the humanitarian needs of asylum seekers, and in particular those deemed as genuine refugees?
We must consider the implications of the motives that seem to be driving current policy.
Currently, the major political parties appear pre-occupied with stopping the boats, or turning them back. Yes, this might satisfy the swinging voter in the outer suburbs concerned about the ‘Asian invasion’, but will it actually assist people in need? Also, importantly but not often considered, how will this effect our relations with neighbouring countries such as Indonesia who are not entirely happy with Australia’s handling of the issue?
Undoubtedly, stopping people from getting on boats means they will not die on sinking boats. However, if we look no further than this, what then? What becomes of the future for these desperate men, women and children seeking a better life away from danger, where they can work and have access to health and education for their own children?
A holistic approach to this issue is needed - we can not simply make it go away.
One thing all parties agree on is increasing Australia’s refugee intake to 20,000 per annum. This would be a good step in removing demand and breaking the business model of money-driven people smugglers, the real enemies in this debate (with the exception of very few claiming to offer safe passage at no profit, a la Oskar Schindler). Given the current deadlock in parliament over the issue, legislating this on its own would be a step in the right direction.
However, this would not be enough to solve the problem. We need to look at the economics of people smuggling. In it’s simplest form, this is a supply and demand issue. If we want to stop people getting on boats, and do so in a humanitarian way, we must ensure there is adequate supply of resettlement places to ease demand for travel by leaky boat. Increasing intake is one part of the solution, but we also must better resource the UNHCR in Indonesia who deal with processing these claims. They are currently greatly under resourced, and as of last week, only 61 refugees had been resettled directly from Indonesia to Australia - vastly inadequate when one considers there are around 10,000 in the ‘queue’ (see more in previous post on queues) to relocate to Australia which offers much better prospects for health, education and employment, particularly given forecast labour shortages as our population ages. Somebody will need to be paying tax to fund all these extra pensions.
When considering this issue, and the fact that there is currently little hope of having claims processed in Indonesia, it is little wonder desperate people try and ‘come in the back door’ as Tony Abbott would put it. We need to start looking at addressing the problem at the source and give people hope of coming to Australia safely - not waiting for people to spend their life savings to get on boats, only to turn them around or send them to Nauru or Malaysia.
Despite all this and the risks involved, jumping on a leaky boat still appeals to desperate families searching for a new life away from oppression. Australia is still seen as a land of opportunity, as it was the English, Chinese, Italians, Greeks, Vietnamese and others many years ago. Judging by the current discussion in the public sphere however, one thing now seems unclear - While still the land of opportunity, is Australia still the land of the Fair Go?
Boat People un-Christian?
Tony Abbott says that boat-people are “un-Christian” for coming to Australia the way they do.
“I don’t think it’s a very Christian thing to come in by the back door rather than the front door … I think the people we accept should be coming the right way and not the wrong way … If you pay a people-smuggler, if you jump the queue, if you take yourself and your family on a leaky boat, that’s doing the wrong thing, not the right thing, and we shouldn’t encourage it.”
It is not surprising that Mr Abbott has a view about the moral dimension of refugee issues. It is entirely appropriate that he should consider the matter from the perspective of Christian teaching, given that he trained for the priesthood. I would go so far as to say that more politicians should pay attention to the moral implications of the policies they have to determine.
What is striking is that Mr Abbott could get the matter so spectacularly wrong, both as to the facts and as to the moral equation.
First, the facts. Mr Abbott should know that there is no queue when you run for your life. The recent execution of an Afghan woman by the Taliban (another example of a very well-established pattern) gives some idea of why people seek asylum.
A significant proportion of boat-people in the past fifteen years have been Afghan Hazaras fleeing the Taliban. If an Afghan were to embrace Mr Abbott’s scruples and look for a queue, the obvious place would be the Australian Embassy in Kabul. The Department of Foreign Affairs website informs us:
“The Australian Embassy in Kabul operates from a number of locations that are not publicly disclosed due to security reasons. The Australian Embassy in Kabul has no visa function.”
So where is the queue?
Leave aside that the location of the Australian Embassy is a secret, the larger point is that refugee flows are always untidy. The idea that desperate people will conduct themselves as if waiting for a bus to take them to the shops is not only ludicrous, it reveals a complete lack of empathy, or even understanding, of why refugees flee for safety in the first place.
As it happens, more than 90% of boat-people who have arrived in Australia in the past fifteen years have been accepted, eventually, as genuine refugees. Mr Abbott should understand this: it means that they are people to whom we owe a duty of protection according to our own laws, and according to the obligations we voluntarily undertook when we signed the Refugees Convention.
Second, the moral question. Mr Abbott should know, better than most politicians, that the Christian doctrine he claims to understand and espouse emphasises the message of welcoming and protecting the stranger. The parable of the Good Samaritan is just one example. Nowhere in Christian teaching (and nowhere in any moral code) is the message of kindness to strangers qualified by reference to their method of arrival.
From time immemorial, victims of persecution have fled for safety. It is usually untidy. The flight of Jews from Europe in the 1930s is an obvious example, and one which should focus our minds on the need for a response which is informed by moral learning rather than by political opportunism.
And how is it that it is “the wrong thing” to do whatever you can to try and save yourself and your family? What bizarre twist of reasoning makes it wrong to do whatever is necessary to save your family? Perhaps Mr Abbott needs to watch The Sound of Music again: the von Trapp family were refugees; the nuns were people smugglers; they did what they could to help the von Trapps through the back door.
Third, the “dog whistle” component. Many politicians here and overseas have found it easy and expedient to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment in recent years, just as it was easy, in earlier times, to stir up anti-Jewish sentiment.
It can hardly have escaped Mr Abbott’s attention that a significant number of boat-people in recent years have been Muslims. It is inconceivable that he failed to notice that some people, hearing his comments about boat-people being “un-Christian,” would have understood him as criticizing boat-people because they are Muslim, not Christian. It is a sad reflection of the depths to which political debate has fallen in this country that an avowed Christian could stoop to such shabby tactics.
Finally, a question for Mr Abbott. Imagine, just for a minute, that you are a Hazara from Afghanistan. You have fled the Taliban; you have arrived in Indonesia, where you will be jailed if you are found; you can’t work, and you can’t send your kids to school. You will have to wait between ten and twenty years before some country offers to resettle you. But you have a chance of getting on a boat and heading for safety in Australia. What will you do?
I know I would get on a boat; I know that most Australians would get on a boat. I imagine that Tony Abbott would get on a boat. I challenge Tony Abbott to answer this question directly and honestly: What would you do, Mr Abbott, if you were in their shoes?
If Mr Abbott answers this question, we can take another look at his criticism of boat-people as “un-Christian.” If he is not willing to answer it, then we have a fourth reason to disregard his criticism of boat-people.
Julian Burnside AO QC is an Australian Barrister and an advocate for human rights and fair treatment of refugees.
A Tax to Make Polluters Pay
In 1990, Australia’s current shadow minister for climate change, Greg Hunt co-authored an award-winning university thesis titled “A tax to make polluters pay”.
The title says it all.
It concludes:
“Ultimately it is by harnessing the natural economic forces which drive society that the pollution tax offers us an opportunity to exert greater control over our environment.”
Sometime between then and now, his position has clearly changed and is apparent he no longer believes the market is the best way to tackle this issue.
We know that market-based mechanisms work based on past experience. In the United States when acid rain was a major issue in the 1980s, a market-mechanism was proposed and met with the same criticisms currently being levelled at the carbon tax. When The Clean Air Act was introduced in 1990, businesses took the approach that meant the lowest possible cost to reduce their SO2 pollution.
The end result was that the problem was addressed at around a third of the projected cost and the environmental and social costs were minimised.
So why has Greg Hunt changed his attitude toward market-based economics?
Assange Deserves Protection
What does it say about a nation when it is more concerned about offending an ally than protecting it’s own citizens?
This is very much the perception in the case of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who this week had to turn to Ecuador as a result of Australia’s own inaction and failure to seek guarantees from Sweden and the United States about his safety.
It raises very serious questions when one of our brightest thinkers and most prominent activists for justice and transparency is effectively abandoned by our own government in light of calls for his assassination by American politicians. We must not forget Assange has acted as any journalist would, by reporting the information that becomes available and has not been found guilty or charged with a crime in any jurisdiction.
Is Australia just a puppet of the USA? It seems more and more the case every time a case like this arises and it is up to us as citizens to let our government know we must put the interests of our own citizens ahead of those of foreign powers.
On the Sanctity of Marriage
I grew up believing marriage is about love, but now that I have grown up I am confused. We live in a world where marriages are still forced upon women (and children) against their own will, and where people get married for any number of reasons other than love, while a loving gay couple can not recognise their bond through marriage. So much for the sanctity of marriage?
There is no good reason why a person should be denied the same rights as others because of their sexuality. The current illegality of same sex marriage does not stop relationships from happening. People are born with their sexuality, just like their skin colour, and denying the same rights is a harmful form of discrimination akin to apartheid South Africa.
For anyone serious about protecting the freedom of individuals, legalising same sex marriage should be a top priority. Lets make Australia a fairer place, where two people can legally recognise their love for one another, and end this discrimination. Love knows no boundaries.
Foreign Aid
I was shocked and disappointed at the decision by Labor to break its promise to increase foreign aid to 0.5% of GNI by 2015, for a number of reasons. According to some estimates, the $2.9 Billion cut from aid could have saved 290,000 lives over the next four years, but to Labor it seems funding fuel subsidies for billionaire miners is more important.
The 21st century is the Asian century and as a tool to ensure our own security and prosperity in these changing times, foreign aid is vital. Educated, healthy children overseas are far less likely to be brainwashed by extremists with a hatred for the west, and far more likely to get jobs, be more productive and earn more money. Richer, friendly neighbours also mean better export opportunities for Australian business and more Australian jobs. Foreign aid not only saves lives, but it is far cheaper than conflict and makes for good long term economic & diplomatic policy as well.
So while 290,000 people are effectively left for dead, the mining industry will help itself to $9.4 billion in tax breaks (over $4,000 worth of free fuel every minute for four years), the vast majority of which will go top up profits for the foreign investors who own 83% of Australia’s mining industry. This is a broken promise that will mean the death of many thousands of the worlds poorest people.
