I was interested to read in today’s Courier-Mail (pg 29) that Queensland Premier Peter Beattie considers it “immoral” for a national as wealthy as Australia to rely on developing nations to provide its medical workforce.
The Premier was referring to what I am told is a growing reliance on overseas trained doctors for rural and regional Australian hospitals.
The Premier was supported by AMA Queensland president Steve Hambleton, who according to the newspaper report, said “We are now getting some of our doctors from very poorly doctored nations … That’s not fair. We should be a net exporter of medical expertise, not an importer.”
This is exactly how I feel about forestry issues. How can a country with as many trees as Australia import hardwood from Indonesia and Malaysia? How can the Greens rally against the Tasmanian forestry industry and turn a blind eye to the imported teak furniture displayed in every second furniture store?
For my all my posts at this blog on forestry (beginning with this one) click here and scroll to bottom to read about the lock up of the Pillaga-Goonoo forests in north-western NSW earlier this year.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
What has “morality” to do with trade?
Is Beattie saying it is immoral to import? – ipso facto it is also immoral to export. Bang goes minerals/primary production.
One of Australias biggest export earners is education – foreigners coming to Australian schools and university. Is that also immoral?
Another ALP icon administering CPR to the dinosaur of socialised medicine.
Plenty.
It depends how many of our kids places it costs ?
When you child doesn’t get a place due to “export” income don’t complain.
And looking at the rapidly escalating private health fund increases (including my own) you have to wonder about snouts in the trough.
Incidentally it was Sir Joh and the casket system that used to fund a wonderful free system in Queensland. Probably wouldn’t work these days but gee a rampant conservative bringing socialised medicine – “don’t you worry about that”.
1. The AMA is a trade union with government sanctioned monopoly – what’s Beattie’s beef?
2. Joh was an agrarian socialist.
Beattie’s Labor Government strenuously supports popularist environmentalist icon and Douglas Shire Mayor, Mike Berwick, who was quoted recently in the Port Douglas & Mossman Gazette, “People have got to understand that biodiversity conservation is more important than hospitals…”
On top of the shocking revelation that more than 80% of Queensland Health are non-patient-contact staff, I find Beattie’s declaration of ‘immorality’ unconvincing.
I’m unaware of the context in which Berwick’s statement was made, but I’m still waiting for someone to name for me a single species driven to extinction by logging in Australia. That’s not to say that logging without any regard for biodiversity is an acceptable option. The link between forestry and extinctions is another of the urban myths promoted by the usual crowd to gain public support for their political advantage.
Is Steve Hambleton a member of Doctors for Forests? I’m a foundation member of Foresters for Medicine. You could not begin to imagine how much influence we have on national health policy.
My argument about species extinction is just fragment the habitat and then let the feral cats concentrate in the reminants and blame it all on the cats. But my guess would be most extinctions have happend in the semi arid areas with no logging or land clearing. Just how important is “biodiversity” if you look at our agricultural systems in general they are still reasonably productive after 100 years, (more then 1000 years in some places) of farming and decimation of biodiversity (admittidly a few stuff up here and there). Where are the equations and experiments tha prove a high level of biodversity is necessary? Biodiversity does not even seem measurable apart from nearly meaningless species counts. I would suggest biodiversity is just a greenie buzzword that has to be attached to all funding grants, corporate plans etc because it’s the current fashion.
Cripes Richard – that’s a bit rough. We have only 150 years agriculture / pastoralism in this country and the jury is still out on long term sustainability – erosion, salinity, acidity. I will agree that biodiversity contributes little to monocultural style agriculture, probably providing a refugia, source of infestation, for some pests (and some beneficial insects too).
And if that’s all you care about – I guess that’s probably on OK argument. All over for the big end of town and the shareholders at that point.
But people love animals – see level of pet ownership, attendance at zoos, animal theme parks etc.
We have Australian Bush Heritage seriously buying up properties with serious money.
http://www.bushheritage.org
Ornithologists doing the same in the NT. People fanatically shooting cats (good on them – get into them)..
In general thinking Australians aren’t that proud of our extinction rate of native marsupials and a few maddies seem to be willing to spend vast amounts of money keeping them from the brink. Are all these people that stupid. It’s perhaps a question of values and ethics in the end.
And if you get many landholders in quieter moments, you will also get proud stories of what interesting marsupials, birds, reptiles and amphibians they have on their properties. I note Jen herself even having a higher bias for happy snaps of wildlife than ploughed wheat paddocks.
One of big challenges for pastoralism is keeping some representative biodiversity on their properties while earning a buck. Some of us would like to believe more bucks in a win-win. Kangaroos though obviously a problem.
Research in this area is difficult and complex but there are some ecologists out there having a go.
Green groups including ACF, WWF and so on have in fact repeatedly criticised logging practices in Southeast Asia and called for restrictions on imports.
Here’s an example from Green Left Weekly: http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1992/57/57p3b.htm . Google will produce plenty more.
It’s good to see you in agreement with the greenies on this one.
John Quiggin,
The Daintree timber community, like so many others, was falsely promised a tourism economy to replace logging, but to no avail.
In the interim, repeated criticism of logging by your ‘green groups’ has overshadowed alternate economies by anti-community fanaticism. For example:
http://www.wilderness.org.au/campaigns/forests/queensland/Daintree_Douglas_Shire_a/
http://www.wilderness.org.au/campaigns/forests/queensland/daintree/
http://www.cafnec.org.au/campaigns/daintree.cfm
http://www.cafnec.org.au/campaigns/daintree.cfm
Association of ‘greenies’ with your select organisations, is a joke. Call them what they are; erosive
“The Daintree timber community, like so many others, was falsely promised a tourism economy to replace logging, but to no avail.”
Tourism certainly seemed to be booming last time I visited, and the links you cite seem to be about the danger that excessive development will undermine it. Maybe you could explain your point a bit further, with some stats on employment in the region. It’s my impression that employment has grown rapidly, but feel free to correct me.
The economic importance of tourism to the politically more powerful communities of Cairns and Port Douglas, is starving the Daintree Cape Tribulation community, through unethical regulation and multi-million-dollar subsidies. Unemployment is very high (I do not have actual figures) and property values are depressed. The links I cited reveal green groups’ attempts to further disenfranchise this already disenfranchised community by quarantining tourism revenue from local benefit.
The conservation of wet tropical rainforests through prohibition of a historical land-use such as logging has obviously created an economic hardship which must be replaced, otherwise the outcome is self-evident. Sustaining a conservation land-use will require a conservation economy and green groups need to fight for these communities, not against them!
It’s expected that greens would call for restrictions on rainforest timber imports. The problem with their approach is that they are apparently having little if any impact on improving logging practices in the rainforests, but they are successfully reducing the domestic forest industries in native forests. They are more effective at home than they are overseas – also to be expected.
This leaves our community, with its growing demand for timber, pulling the resource from elsewhere, so of course some of it comes from the cheapest source – the rainforests of SE Asia.
The greens have the luxury of lofty ideals and no responsibility. If the decisions about where to source the wood resided on their desks, they would find the real world a bit more complex than they currently understand it to be. They would probably deal with this issue by just choking off supply, driving up prices and forcing the community to use steel and other green house gas intensive materials. What then? Choke off the supply of steel?
The normal response to this is to call for more plantations, but such a superficial response overlooks the fact that a sawlog plantation is still a more than 25 year project. Also worth noting that where ever modern bluegum plantations take hold in the landscape, guess who starts to oppose them, the greens. Bob Brown is on the public record with statements to this effect.
With regard to the medical workforce ; the reliance on overseas trained nurses is even greater.
Australian health care providers are now increasingly looking to South Africa and the Phillipines in particular to make up for shortages.
Interestingly, both groups ( doctors and nurses) are fanatical at protecting their patch – doctors V nurse practitioners and nurses V personal care attendants – and enjoy high public respect whilst doing so.
If as Louis suggests groups like the AMA are glorified trade unions , they’re certainly a more thoroughly protected species than wharfies for example!
Health is a sacred cow when it comes to economic reform and it will take a few more Dr Deaths before the public is prepared to swallow it’s medecine.
Phil, a pseudo greenie like yourself should take a trip to Europe and look for the original biodiversity there, basically none left, an agricultural landsacpe (stable & productive for 100’s of years) that people pay money to go and see.
Even try NSW around the iconc Byron Bay, just inland the mosaic looks good, old dairy farms and patches of rainforest (actually mainly just patches camphor laurel, and elms). Most of the visitors to national parks go for about one hour and the fact that people have more pets and more zoo visits suggest that even emotionally most people do not need all this conserved biodiversity outside the zoos and a small number of scenic national parks.
With climate change there is good examples where lots of people die because of it, but with a deacrease in biodiversity the long term impacts seem largely conjecture and possible reflect emotional brain washing.
On the other hand we really have not systamatically measured or modelled biodiversity the way we have climate. Go and have a look for long term species composition data from anywhere (Koonamore reserve perhaps one of the best). All the data is short term, patchy, incomplete we need a long term biological monitoring network at defined sites, not a 3 year project to look at bird diversity is a small patch of the rangelands type of activity. The 600-700 odd of BoMs climate monitoring sites should each have a analog long term biodiversity / functional ecology site.
Cairns council give employment figures and breakdowns for their LGA
http://www.cairns.qld.gov.au/council/corporate_plan/economic_dev.htm
Also http://www.htwresearch.com.au/cairnswatch.html
The region is blessed with beaches, rainforests and the reef.
They are fortunate that tourism is pushing development, other areas such as the Pilliga appear to be devoid of eco-cafes serving biodynamic muffins and skinny lattes.
“The region is blessed with beaches, rainforests and the reef”
Which rather suggests that the greenies who successfully pushed to protect the reef in the 70s and the rainforest in the 80s might have had a point.
As you say, roq, this doesn’t work everywhere that needs protection, but where it does work it should be welcomed.
Richard – cripes again. This is the whole point that Australians have grappled with since settlement – in general we don’t have nice deep fertile soils, low salinity, few droughts and regular rainfall. Stable for 100s of years in Europe ain’t Australia. This is agricultural science now pseudo greenism (whatever that is).
In terms of biodiversity and climate change agree we really don’t have a lot of info. In the oft quoted north Queensland we have many species (so we’re told) close to their thermal limits. If you can move quick enough i.e. you’re not a slow growing tree – you can move up-slope till you run out of mountain. And some species in the drier areas will win through the CO2/rainfall/fire/drought mix that is served up. I’d suggest the greater public only has a vague grey concern about climate change and biodiversity – “read something about it somewhere.. ..”
In terms of national parks – well why are Lamington, Fraser Island, Girraween and Carnarvon booked out almost beyond comfort in the cooler months and public holidays. Every time I drop in at national parks – usually lots of cars – some just day picnicers and others out for a “big walk”. Numbers – gee I don’t know exactly how many. Most even say “g’day” to you on the track.
Do we have any numbers of people interested in rugby vs art galleries vs national parks/camping – Jen ?
I admit Byron Bay/Maleny areas look “pretty” but people are just admiring a South African introduced pasture grass in high rainfall envvironment – kikuyu. My God Rog – I just realised – people like the colour green. Maybe we’re all closet greenies – quick run outside and flog yourself. Elms and camphor laurels look nice too but are a bloody pest. And all based on a clapped out dairy industry struggling to emerge into new crops and hobby farms. Whole area used to be the big scrub until we cleared it all. Also interesting how many enthusiasts are putting bits of rainforests back.
What is really interesting is on an number of occasions I have picked up hitchikers in the Byron hinterland. For ganga consuming counter-culturalists it’s intersting how much some know about different rainforest species – will debate how bad lantana actually is – soil improver and increases bird species (so they say man !!) – but all hate camphor laurel with a passion – get big lectures on herbicide cocktails for control – you see man it’s all to do with the plants physiological response to suckering under attack (hey and these guys are counter-cultural greenies. Many have rainforest regeneration projects.
Idealism – just an eye opener – botany committment high – Rog they also didn’t rob me, convert me to communism, were appreciative of a ride in my greenhouse gas producing eco-vandal machine – they did offer me some ganga but I declined and didn’t inhale either. (It’s the plants Man!)
When I lived in Cairns in 1971 (ran away from school) it was a service town for NQ and the Gulf – ringers getting busted bones fixed at the hospital etc. Enormous numbers of tourists in Kombis, the caravan park was like the UN, the dole office overwhelmed. Plus all the dispossessed who ended up in Cairns because life and police were easy.
Subsequently that tourism potential has been exploited enormously under the green sustainable whale watch feel good mantra. Like Byron Bay its just a big theme park.
In the Daintree at least, it is not the rainforest or other intrinsic values of the public lands that warrants criticism on the grounds of unfair competition. It is the millions of dollars of subsidisation to construct and maintain free-forest-access facilities to accommodate 770,000 visitor places in a multi-tenured environment that only carries about 500,000 visitors per year.
Under the name of ecotourism, these taxpayer-funded facilities were constructed adjacent to local resorts, on freehold lands acquired in development nodes instead of pre-existing National Park, commandeering the ecotourism markets which best supported the local community.
Commercial Activity Permit holders, predominately from communities away from the Daintree and with a latent carrying capacity of some 560,000 visitors per year, are required to pay only $1.20 per client to commercially gain from these multi-million dollar facilities. Such paltry payments go nowhere near to full cost-recovery for the sustainable management of the respective facilities.
The disparity of recurrent funding for salaries, capital expenses, vehicles, repairs and maintenance, administration, signage, marketing, insurance, training, superannuation, workplace health and safety, et cetera, provides the marketplace with the illusion of free-entry, when in fact taxpayers unwittingly finance a multi-million dollar exclusionary influence to fair-trading between the public and private sectors.
Gosh, here we are again with this simplistic binary logic that assumes that it is either ecotourism or timber harvesting, biodiversity or forestry, sustainability or agriculture.
Hello? How about “all of the above”. The simple fact is that much of the Daintree tourism is taking place in locations that were never likely to be harvested and some of the greatest biodiversity is found in timber stands that have been “extensively modified”.
The irony is that Australian States normally expend 15% of GDP and the current shortfall in Queensland health funding is roughly equal to the amount of the blow out in public service costs and 15% of the hole that has been punched in Qld agricultural production by the current hideocracy.
And as a descendent of the first permanent settler in Byron shire, and one who can remember what it was like to have a peaceful surf with a few friends, it must be said that nothing, absolutely nothing, will stuff a place up like cool people. For these people simply cannot be exposed to a beautiful place without telling the whole bloody world about it. Yet, if they really loved the place, rather than merely consumed the physical landscape, they would keep their mouths shut.
The Bay (only blow-ins use the implied familiarity of the term Byron) is now the high church of narcissism. A minority of permanent green voters subjugates a mainstream majority by gathering the votes of an equally sized cohort of transients who will have been replaced by identical cliche’s before each election.
What all these places need is an influx of people in bermuda shorts, cardigans and protruding nasal hair. The cool dudes, fearing dagginess by association, will run all the way to Mungundi and build stately pleasure domes by artificial (salt) lakes.