A fundamentally flawed proposal to bust open super for first home buyers housing deposits could hike the nation’s five major capital city median property prices by between 8-16%, preliminary analysis from Industry Super Australia shows.
Allowing couples to take $40,000 from super would send property prices skyrocketing in all state capitals, but the impact would be most severe in Sydney, where the median property price could lift a staggering $134,000. (see table 1 below)
In most areas the price increases and extra property taxes would quickly surpass the amount of super a first home buyer could withdraw, so homebuyers would be paying more but at the expense of their super. In all cities but Hobart if a couple took out $40,000 from their super, nearly all would be lost through the price hikes the increased demand would fuel, in Sydney prices would spike by three times that amount.
The market would react quickly to the scheme becoming a reality, within a year the full price increases would likely be realised.
Many potential buyers would soon be locked out of the supercharged market, others would be lumped with far bigger mortgages – and would hit retirement with little savings and only the pension to rely on.
A big loser in this scheme, being pushed by a backbench MP, is the taxpayer, who would be forced to pay billions more into the aged pension, which could lead to higher taxes.
There is no free lunch in super and for every $1 taken out of super by someone in their 30s the taxpayer must pay up to $2.50 more in increased pension costs when they retire.
But the scheme is a real winner for the banks who would reap the windfall of the inflated mortgages.
Last week Superannuation Minister Jane Hume joined a chorus of economists, housing experts and a Retirement Income Review report author who have cautioned against raiding super for housing.
The findings of ISA’s preliminary analysis backs expert warnings that such a scheme would inflate prices and make affordability worse.
ISA will soon publish a detailed technical report on its findings, a briefing report on the proposal can be found here: https://www.industrysuper.com/media/super-bad-why-super-for-a-house-will-hurt-first-home-buyers/
Industry Super Australia Chief Executive Bernie Dean, commented as follows:
“This just confirms what experts have been saying for ages; that throwing super into the housing market would be like throwing petrol on a bonfire – it will jack up prices, inflate young people’s mortgages and add billions to the aged pension, which taxpayers will have to pay for. Politicians who own multiple investment properties and pocket 15% super might think price hikes are a ‘secondary’ consideration. They don’t care about locking young people into hugely inflated mortgages and a bleak future with hardly any savings to fall back on. We need sensible solutions – like boosting the supply of affordable housing which will bring prices down and get young people into a home without lumbering workers with higher taxes in the future. We welcomed the minister pouring cold water on this idea very publicly last week and would encourage the Treasurer and the PM to back her up and show that the government is not beholden to extreme elements within its ranks.”
On Friday 26 February, Julian Assange's father John Shipton (pictured), is to embark on his #HomeRun4Julian tour. He will be touring regional Victorian and New South Wales towns on his way to Sydney and Canberra to demand justice for his son, Julian Assange.
The rally will be addressed by John Shipton, amongst others. From there, John Shipton will be embarking on his #HomeRun4Julian tour of regional Victorian and New South Wales towns on his way to Sydney and Canberra to demand justice for his son, Julian Assange.
Indigenous activists and 3CR Radical Radio show hosts Robbie Thorpe and Viv Malo will open the send off with Jacob Grech as MC. Introducing John Shipton, father of Julian Assange and Jerome Small, long time Human Rights Campaigner and supporter of WikiLeaks and Assange.
At 6:30pm Following the send-off of John Shipton, there will be the regular weekly "Melbourne for Wikileaks" (@melbourne4wiki) Vigil for Julian Assange outside Flinders Street Railway station, also on Swanston street, 1 kilometer south of the State Library.
Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) are partnering with filmmaker Maxine Trump on the Australian premiere of her award winning film To Kid or Not to Kid in Melbourne and Perth on the 26 and 27 February. The documentary is being screened as part of SPA’s ‘Stop at Two’ campaign. This will be the first time the film will be screened in theatres before being released on Amazon Prime on February 27th.
SPA National President, Sandra Kanck, says the aim of the campaign is to normalise the choice of having small or childfree families.
“The choice whether or not to have children is one of the biggest decisions any individual or couple will make in their lifetime,” says Ms Kanck.
“This decision is often swayed by family and social factors that have traditionally encouraged larger families. It is clear, however, that overpopulation is playing a very significant role in humans’ unsustainable impact on the planet, including climate change and these matters are now bearing on the decisions made by many to have smaller families or no family at all.
“As an environmental NGO, we advocate for smaller families as one solution towards reducing pressures on the Earth and support those who go down that path,” says Ms Kanck.
“We applaud director Maxine Trump for turning the camera onto her personal life to bravely dive into the taboo and stigmatised topic of child-free living and to explore the reasons behind this choice,” she says.
“As Director Trump has herself declared ‘’’Why can’t we talk about not having kids?’ We think it’s about time we did.”
Ms Kanck also advised that this month will see the launch of Childfree Magazine, founded by Brisbane based Tanya Williams, author of A Childfree Happily Ever After.
“The launch of this new magazine is another timely contribution towards a less judgemental world where it’s OK not to have children,” says Ms Kanck.
More information
“To Kid or Not to Kid” will be screened in Melbourne on February 26, 08:30 pm at Cinema Nova, bookings here. It will be screened in Perth on February 27, 06:45pm at Bassendean Community Centre in cooperation with Transition Town Guilford, more information here. The Melbourne screening will also include the short film ‘Talking Heads: Choosing to Have Children….or Not’ made in house by SPA.
For more information, please contact Michael Bayliss, SPA communications Manager, at [email protected]
Maxine Trump, Director of To Kid or Not To Kid can be contacted for interview or movie review at [email protected]. or at the website.
Tanya Williams, Chief Change maker at Childfree Magazine>/em>, can be contacted at the website.
Melbourne for Wikileaks (@melbourne4wiki) holds vigils for Julian Assange, every Friday, from 6:30pm until 8:30pm, under the clocks at Melbourne's iconic Flinders Street Station. Yesterday, Friday 19 February, I unfurled a canvas banner, 5 meters wide and 1.7 meters deep, with a big picture of Assange on it. No sooner had we raised this banner than we heard loud cries of support for Julian Assange. Support also came from cars, whose drivers tooted their horns, as they drove past the station. (See video below.)
After some time, in which members of the group handed out leaflets and and spoke to passers-by, a succession of people spoke through a megaphone. I was the third speaker. The video of that 7 minute speech was filmed and uploaded to YouTube and is embedded below. Unfortunately the recordings of two other speeches were lost and can't be included here. (I will transcribe my speech soon and include it in this article. Note that in the part where I argue that Julian Assange could not get a fair trial in East Virginia, I said this would be because the "jury was likely to be made up of employees of US intelligence services and their siblings." I meant to say, of course, "employees of US intelligence services and their relatives.")
James Sinnamon speaks at Vigil for Julian Assange
Thanks to everyone who told me my hat looked terrible. I promise never to wear it again.
I'm here today to show my outrage at the fact that the Australian government has done nothing, while this heroic, courageous and visionary journalist, Julian Assange has been illegally held in prison, illegally psychologically tortured and now, illegally physically tortured because no reason other than the fact that through Wikileaks, he was able to tell the world what the United States didn't want us to know about what they were doing in their own grubby political world and other countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
We now know, because of Julian Assange and other whistleblowers [2] before him, that the American case for their wars against Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan was a pack of lies. We know that because of Julian Assange and courageous whistleblowers from within the ranks of the United States military and within the United States government who know that what the United States has been telling the world is a lie and they've proven this to us. They've given us the information to show us that they've been lying to us. [3]
Now, because the world knows so much more about what the United States has been doing, it means that they are not able, so easily, to make up a pretext towards another war against another country.
Obviously, two countries that are in America's cross-hairs is Venezuela in South America - they want to take over Venezuela and steal all their petroleum - and they want to take over Iran for daring to be a sovereign independent sovereign country not under the control of the United States.
Now, Julian Assange is an Australian citizen. To report the crimes of the Americans and their allies is not a crime. It's journalism.
To speak the truth is not a crime. It's journalism.
But, in the eyes of the crooked, vile people, that are running the United States, and their allies, it is a crime for people to speak the truth about their crimes, and that is why they have been trying, since 2010, to get their grubby little hands on Julian Assange and they have done that through subterfuge with the help of the crooked Swedish government and the London government, they've fabricated a charge that Julian Assange had sexually assaulted these two women in Sweden.
Julian was quite prepared to go Sweden to answer those charges, but the Swedish government would not agree to prevent him from being extradited to the United States. So, he knew that the Swedish government, in collusion with the United States, had attempted to get him on to Swedish soil only so that they could send him off to the United States.
In the United States there plan was to try him in secret before a jury made up exclusively of people from East Virginia, who are mostly working for intelligence agencies or their siblings. [4] So it is unlikely that this so-called jury would have [inaudible ] paid any attention to the argument of Julian Assange's defence team. They would have taken about 30 seconds to pronounce him guilty and once Julian Assange had been found to be guilty, their plan was to lock him in jail for 175 years and in his prison term he would be confined to a single cell for 23 hours a day and allowed outside for only one hour a day. [5]
He would be denied any books, any Internet, anything. His life would be an absolute misery. The people he would be in jail with would be convicted terrorists and other murderers.
The prospect of this was so terrible for Julian Assange that he was clearly thinking of committing suicide rather than allow himself to be locked in jail for 175 years.
Now, all this time, for the last 10 years, the Australian government has said almost nothing. It's been ages - weeks since the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has said a word about Julian Assange. All he has said is, "Oh, it's going on in England and it's not really our business to interfere with what the British courts are saying."
Not a word about the complete travesty of justice that Julian Assange is facing with the fact that every day he is brought to court - every day he was tried - he was brought to court inside a cage. He couldn't speak to his lawyers. He couldn't pass notes to his lawyers. He was stripped several times and searched each day before he went into court.
How is that 'due process' according to Foreign Minister Maurice Payne? She calls that 'due process'?
Clearly, this Australian government, that's supposed to have a duty of care towards Australian citizens, doesn't want to know.
They're turning their backs on Julian Assange and doing nothing.
Any government that allows another government - the British government, the American government - to treat any of its citizens, that have committed no crime, in this way, doesn't deserve to be in power.
And what we have to do is, when every member of Parliament asks for your vote at the next election, ask that member of Parliament: What have they done for Julian Assange for the last 10 years whilst an innocent Australian citizen, who has committed no crime, has been tortured physically, [6] confined illegally and psychologically tortured? Where have they lifted a finger for Julian Assange? Ask them that question and it will be amazed if any one of them can talk to you with a straight face.
What you have to do is you have to find some candidates who do have a backbone and do have principles who are prepared to stand up for Julian Assange. Find those candidates, vote for them.
So what we are going to do is to continue to hold these vigils every Friday night. We're going to try to reach a larger and larger audience, get more and more people to these vigils and these protests and make our voices so loud that it will be impossible for the Australian government to ignore and continue to do nothing for Julian Assange.
It's about time the Australian government acted. If they had a backbone. If they had any decency in them, here's what they would do:
Tomorrow they would send out an contingent of Federal Police. [7] They would go right to Belmarsh Prison. They would tell the Belmarsh Prison authorities that Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, is being held there illegally by the British government. They would demand that the British government immediately release Julian Assange to come back to Australia. That's what a government with a backbone and decency would do.
Now the Australian government has done nothing. They've barely said a word about Julian Assange these last ten years. Any word they say is to cast aspersions on Julian Assange.
None of these people deserve your vote. None of them deserve to hold office. Make sure you act on that at the next federal election. Thank you.
Footnote[s]
[1] On the previous Friday 12 February, I had not gone to the vigil due to the sudden and unexpected, if short-lived, outbreak in Coronavirus infections on that day. On the Friday prior to that, Friday 5 February, the banner had been made with only one tubular canvas slot at each end into which the supporting dowel poles with which it could be held up for display could be inserted. Unfortunately, because of the banner's great size - 5 meters x 1.7 meters - one pole at each end was not sufficient to support the banner. A third tubular canvas slot was needed in the middle. As a workaround, I stood behind the banner (as pictured right) and held it up with my raised arms hands in the middle. After some time this fatigued me and we chose to place it flat on the ground facing upwards. (The image is linked to a short @melbourne4wiki tweet which contains a short video from which that image was copied. That tweet was re-tweeted by "Denver Free Assange" (@DNVfreeJA) The following Friday wooden poles to support the banner were inserted into its three long narrow vertical pockets, as you can see in the video.
[2] Correction: Julian Assange is, himself, a journalist and not a whistleblower.
[3] Corrrection: In fact the WMD fabrication that was used to start the war against Iraq in 2003 was not exposed by any whistleblower or Wikileaks. United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter. Scott Ritter, who had previously uncovered Iraqi chemical weapons, argued in 2003, that chemical weapons in Iraq didn't exist in quantities substantial enough to pose a threat. He consequently opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq but, for most people, that news was overwhelmed by the vast amount of corporate newsmedia reporting in favour of the invasion of Iraq.
[4] Two corrections: I should have said that the "jury ... are all working for intelligence agencies or their family" and not the "jury ... are mostly working for intelligence agencies or their siblings."
[5] Julian Assange would be allowed out for only one hour every day into another adjacent cell as small as his main cell for exercise.
[6] Correction: During his illegal detention inside the Ecuadorian embassy, which lasted 6 years and 10 months (19/6/12 - 11/4/19) Julian was psychologically tortured, but not physically tortured. This changed after Julian Assange was dragged out of the embassy on 11 April 2019 and imprisoned at Belmarsh. There Julian Assange was subject to both psychological and physical torture.
[7] Monday 22 Feb 2021, 7:47AM +11 : Upon further reflection, whilst the British government's imprisonment and torture of Julian Assange is clearly illegal, Julian Assange's release is unlikely to occur simply as a consequence of a contingent of Australian Federal police officers attempting to enforce Australian law and international law on British soil.
However, were Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to speak to British Prime Minster Boris Johnson to demand Julian Assange's release, I think it highly unlikely that the British PM would not accede.
If Boris Johnson did not agree to release Julian Assange, Scott Morrison would have this recourse: He could threaten to take the case to to the International Criminal Court (ICC) or to the United Nations. The ICC would almost certainly find the United Kingdom's treatment of Julian Assange illegal, if not criminal.
If Julian Assange's case were ever brought to the United Nations, the United Kingdom's odious complicity with the US government would be clearly shown before the whole world.
In the high likelihood that Boris Johnson would then agree to release Julian Assange, Scott Morrison should then send a contingent of Australian Federal Police to escort Julian Assange from Belmarsh Prison back to Melbourne in order to safeguard him from any further malign behaviour by any agent of the United States government.
This is how a decent and humane national leader would behave.
End the illegal detention and torture of this Australian hero.
Why won't the Australian government act to get Julian Assange out of the Belmarsh hellhole?
By its stated intention to imprison the visionary Australian journalist and publisher, Julian Assange, for 175 years, the United States government has confirmed the criminality and malevolance of those who are truly in charge of it. State officials, including Hillary Clinton, have also been recorded talking openly about assassinating Assange.
Because mainstream media now only reports what the US government tells it, the world needs the Wikileaks news service to reveal the truth behind the United States' and its allies' wars, over the last three decades and beyond. Wikileaks has protected the identities and the ability of people in the military, government spy agencies, government bureacracy, or private corporations, to get vital information out to all of us about repeated dangerous and criminal acts of states towards ordinary people.
The United States' deep state has been trying since 2010 to get its hands on Julian to punish him for revealing its war-crimes to the world, and for refusing to reveal his sources. The US wants firstly to prevent Julian Assange from resuming his own work for Wikileaks, and secondly, to set a precedent that would allow the US henceforth to kidnap any other journalist, whose reporting would reveal to us facts about other invasions of, and meddling in the affairs of countries throughout much of the world - in countries like Venezula, Cuba, Bolivia, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iran - that the US wants to keep hidden from us.
Julian Assange is not even an American. He is an Australian citizen. He has committed no crime - he has only been found guilty of the misdemeanour - skipping bail in 2012 to seek asylum in the London Ecuadorian embassy after the Swedish prosecutors had sought to extradite him for questioning over allegations of sexual assault by two Swedish women.
When the Swedish government refused to give Julian a guarantee that they would not allow the US to extradite him, he decided that the request for questioning could only be a ploy on behalf of the US. So, Julian skipped bail' and sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy. For thus acting to thwart US attempts to illegally kidnap him from Swedish soil 8 years ago, UK Judge Vanessa Barraitser sentenced Julian Assange to imprisonment alongside convicted terrorists and murderers in Belmarsh Prison for 50 weeks - the absolute maximum offence for the misdemeanour of skipping bail.
Even after Julian had served that outrageous sentence, Barraitser further extended his detention to allow more time for the US prosecutors to prepare their 'case' for extradition, which, after weeks of further kangaroo court proceedings, was denied to the US, whilst all the prosecution's smears against Julian were still upheld.
In spite of this unexpected ruling, Barraitser refused to release Julian. He is expected to spend many months in degrading conditions behind bars whilst various appeals by the US against her rulng are heard.
What you can do
Attend the Melbourne for Wikileaks (@melbourne4wiki Twitter page) vigil for Julian Assange at Flinders St. Station every Friday at 6:30pm.
In contrast to her loudly interveningon behalf of journalist Cheng Lei, and writer Yang Hengjun, who are both currently detained on criminal charges in China, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, in concert with this and former Australian governments, has ruthlessly turned her back on journalist and publisher, Julian Assange. Julian Assange, arguably of greater stature than any other journalist in the world, remains in the dungeons of the corrupt UK government, which is in league with the United States and its war machine. Assange's 'crime' was to expose United States war crimes (and those of other states) to the world. It is indicative of America's despotism that its allies will do its bidding against their own citizens, helping the US to try to destroy Assange as a warning to any journalist who might try to write the truth about war and corruption when it involves powerful people. It is shocking that President Trump pardoned the perpetrators of what came to be called 'Collateral Murder', but backed the continued persecution of Assange. Behind his saccharinely benign grandpa mask, Biden takes a similar stance. [Candobetter Editor: Title change on 10 Feb 2021]
If Assange had exposed sadistic Nazi crimes, he would be called a hero. By exposing sadistic United States war crimes, he is falsely and despicably branded as a criminal. Critics of the Nazi war and torture machine, when they were in power, were unlikely to survive. We know that critics of the American war and torture machine have similar poor life expectancy. What does that tell us about the US-NATO alliance and its most faithful supporter - Australia?
Some Australian journalists are more equal than others
The Australian government's efforts to free Cheng Lei from prison in China receive front page publicity.
"Payne said officials had visited Cheng six times during her detention, most recently at the end of January. In the days after Cheng’s August detention was made public, two Australian foreign correspondents were flown out of China, helped by Australian consular officials after the pair were questioned by China’s state security ministry." (Kirsty Needham, "Australian journalist formally arrested in China on suspicion of leaking secrets," Reuters, 8 Feb 2021.)
We saw similar grandstanding in efforts to rescue corporate media Al Jazeera journalist, Peter Greste who, along with Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, on 29 December 2013, was arrested by Egyptian authorities, who complained of journalistic misrepresentation. The three journalists were accused of helping Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood, and of doctoring news items in a manner that endangered the Egyptian state. Suzette Dreyfus later criticised Greste, for his repetition of opinions used to slur Julian's credentials as a journalist and publisher. Greste has written two such articles, "Julian Assange is no journalist: don’t confuse his arrest with press freedom," published by the so-called Alliance for Journalists' Freedom (AJF), April 16, 2019, and "Peter Greste on Julian Assange," also published by the AJF, Feb 25, 2020. With friends like this in the AJF, you might say, who needs enemies? Greste really throws the courageous Assange under a bus. Interesting, then, that Greste was released without explanation after an international outcry from the same western block that is either persecuting Assange or leaving him to rot.
ABC journalist, Bill Bertles and Financial Review journalist, Michael Smith, probably escaped China just before being arrested. Arriving in Australia, they were feted by their colleagues and the government. Appropriately, the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China:
Meanwhile Julian is checkmated in England by foreign powers egregiously manipulating the judiciary.
Australia turns a blind eye to utter corruption in the British judicial system against Julian Assange, time and time again:
In 2010 Assange voluntarily answered questions from the Swedish police about a very strange story of an alleged rape claimed by a female journalist. The police found there was not enough evidence, closed the case, and told Assange he was free to continue on to England. The United States subsequently leaned on Sweden to reopen the case, and England arrested Assange, where he went through three hearings about extraditing him to Sweden. His lawyers warned him that such extradition and the charges were a ploy to get him extradited from Sweden to the United States, where he had as much chance of a fair trial as anyone would in Nazi Germany, who reported on the concentration camps. Assange jumped bail and sensibly applied for and received asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. After this the British continuously tried to extract him from the embassy.
During this time, unbeknownst to the world public, the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny contacted the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in 2013 to let it know that she was going to withdraw the charges and an international warrant for Assange's arrest, (on the cooked up charges of 'rape'), because they were plainly excessive relative to the alleged crime. In an action demonstrating political influence on the justice system, biased against Assange, in favour of the United States, the British Prosecution Service tried to convince her not to drop the case for extradition. These communications were only revealed in 2018, although it was obvious to many that something like this must be going on. (See Bowcott, Owen; MacAskill, Ewen, "Sweden tried to drop Assange extradition in 2013, CPS emails show," The Guardian, 11 February 2018.)
Apparently, the Crown Prosecution Service succeeded in getting Prosecutor Ny to keep up the persecutory processes against Assange, despite public disapproval from within the Swedish legal fraternity. However, in March 2015, Sweden allowed Assange to respond to questions from the embassy in London. Most of the charges had expired under the Swedish statute of limitations by then but, to this day, many people in the world think that Assange was found guilty of rape. This is because of the eagerness of the corporate media to report and support the United States narrative, in preference to reporting the facts to a public that needs to be properly educated in this matter.
On 17 May Prosecutor Nye officially suspended their investigations and revoked the warrant to arrest Assange. The option of resuming the process was kept open in case Assange came to Sweden before August 2020.
On 11 April 2019, Assange was arrested and dragged out of the embassy by English police, in an aggressive display of naked contempt for his refugee status by the English state. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correra had been openly sympathetic to Assange, but could not serve a third term. He had refused to allow police into the embassy, according to his diplomatic rights under the Vienna Convention. The new president, Lenin Morero, quickly demonstrated hostility towards Assange and is thought to have been responding to inducements from the United States to breach the embassy refugee obligations to Assange. (See "Julian Assange Arrest Part of Lenin Moreno's Deal with IMF: Ex-Foreign Minister Patiño Under Morero," Telesur, 14 April 2019.)
Undercover Global, a Spanish defense and security firm, conducted multiple invasive surveillance activities on behalf of the United States CIA, involving filming and recording all Assange’s activities in the embassy, including conversations with his legal team, even when Assange tried to talk to them privately in the toilet area. Later British courts would unaccountably allow the United States to use this illegally gathered information, which should have been inadmissible, in their case for extraditing Assange. This conduct alone should utterly discredit their mission in the eyes of the world public but, sadly, the mass media has failed to alert and educate the public adequately.
Does anyone remember how the middle classes all over the world marched down their main streets, calling, "We are all Charlie!" when Islamic fundamentalists killed journalists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris? Yet, when a man who, arguably, will be the last journalist and publisher to be able to reach the world on issues of global surveillance, the military industrial complex, and mass media corruption, is thrown into a maximum security prison, silenced and maddened, there is an abject failure among the same classes who thought the Charlie Hebdo cause so chic, to shout, "We are all Julian Assange!" and demand that the Australian government intervene to stop his censorship, suppression, and imprisonment.
Federal Labour Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese ('Albo' - pictured right), on Australia Day, tweeted in praise of local Australian heroes, with the glaring exception of Julian Assange, the most widely-recognised Australian anywhere, whose suffering is unfathomable, and whose services to the anti-war movement are immeasurable. Why wasn't Julian Assange included and why does the Australian Government allow the UK and the US to continue their illegal persecution, imprisonment, and torture, of this Australian citizen?
Anthony Albanese's Australia Day tweet about Australian local heroes fails to mention another Australian who is at least as heroic of any one of the four people featured in that image, and far more famous: Julian Assange
In response to the following Tweet Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) the Leader of the Labor Party Opposition in the Australian Federal Parliament:
"These are the true heroes of Australia. They put themselves on the line every day of this pandemic – to keep us safe, to keep us healthy, and to keep Australia moving forward. On this Australia Day, on behalf of the nation, we say thank you."
"Thanks to @julianAssange_https://wikileaks.org and @SaveManning we now know the truth about Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, US Political corruption, … Surely, Julian Assange is no less an Australian hero? Why won't our Parliament demand Julian's freedom?"
Julian Assange is an Australian citizen who has committed no crime. Julian's only 'crime' is to set up the Wikleaks news service from which we have learned a great deal about the United States' wars, proxy wars, and economic sanctions, impacting extensively on humankind through recent decades. These malign actions by the U.S. government have cost the lives of many hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia, Bolivia, Haiti, Venezuela, and elsewhere, as well as causing economic devastation. Were it not for Wikileaks revealing to us much of what the U.S. government would prefer to have kept hidden from us, we can only guess what further amount of carnage and devastation would have ensued.
As has been found by Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture [1], Julian Assange has been effectively imprisoned and tortured for 9 years now. Following the initial 8 years Julian spent confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy, in order to avoid being extradited to the U.S., he was outrageously locked up for an additional 50 weeks in a maximum security prison, mostly in solitary confinement, by the disgraceful London magistrate Vanessa Barraitser, for skipping bail in 2012. He had skipped bail only in order to legitimately seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Fifty weeks is the absolute maximum that anyone can be sentenced to for skipping bail, and the length of Assange's sentence was unheard of. When this outrageous sentence expired, Barraitser further extended it, giving the U.S. government lawyers' more time to prepare their 'case' for Julian's extradition.
Should the United States government succeed in having Julian Assange extradited, he stands to be tried in secret [2] before a jury selected from the Eastern District of Virginia, a community which consists almost entirely of U.S. spy agency employees and their spouses. It is highly unlikely that any one of these jurors would pay the least regard to any evidence put forward in Julian Assange's defence. Almost certainly, he stands certain to be found guilty and thence to be sentenced to 175 years in solitary confinement. Once Julian Assange's sentence commences, he would only be allowed to leave his cell for 1 hour each day for exercise - this is effectively a death sentence, if not worse,
Even the extradition hearings have been a cruel medieval travesty of justice. Julian was deprived of sufficient preparation for his defense. He was subsequently brought into the courtroom in handcuffs, held inside a glass cage from which he could not hear clearly, and denied the right to speak in private to his lawyers. Public seating at the court was severely limited, so coverage of the event was grossly inadequate. The mainstream press avoided covering this crucial international matter and, when it did, it tended simply to publish press releases from the US legal team, ignoring Julian's defense. The trial was not publicly filmed and the alternative press had virtually no access to what was going on. Although disallowing Julian's extradition on medical grounds, the judge threw out matters relating to the political nature of the United State's pursuit of Julian because he had exposed its war-crimes and corruption, with US officials urging his assassination, and the public right to know about these crimes and anything else that governments do. Two Australian parliamentarians have visited Julian and have tried to stick up for him, but the Australian Government ignored their reports. Unfortunately the United States has been allowed to appeal even the judge's denial of extradition on medical grounds, and Julian continues to be held in prison whilst his massive team of persecutors prepare more ersatz legal arguments whereby they claim the right to cover up their own grotesque crimes.
Surely the Australian government has a duty of care to any Australian citizen, but particularly to a citizen who has contributed so much to humanity and who has committed no crime. Even skipping bail was deemed justified by the United Nations, which has tried to intervene on Julian's behalf, but which the UK government has persistently and shamelessly ignored.
It is long past the time in which the Australian government should have intervened against the U.S. government's efforts to kidnap Julian Assange from London. The Australian government should act now to demand that the U.K. immediately free Julian Assange from his illegal detention and send him on a flight back home to Australia, with a guarantee of immunity from United States pursuit when he gets here. Were the Australian government not to do this, the matter certainly should be raised on the floor of Parliament by Anthony Albanese and debated. But Albanese is missing in action so far.
Footnote[s]
[1] Nils Melzer's full title is "United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment"
[2] Were Julian Assange to be tried in public, the United States 'case' against him would fall in a heap. The whole world would see the real United States' government for the outlaw rogue regime that it really is. Although I have, so far, not viewed the documentary evidence for this, I think it is safe for me to assume that the United States' government intends to conduct its 'trial' of Julian Assange in secret, hidden away from public view. In retrospect, I don't know if this was ever raised by Julian's defence team, but had the U.S. prosecution refused to give an undertaking to try Julian public, it's 'case' would have been shown to be even more of a joke than it already was.
On Jan. 20, 2021, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network urges Australians to reflect on our relationship with the US during this inauguration and think deeply about how we may forge an independent and peaceful foreign policy in the coming years.
While President Biden promises to differ from former-President Donald Trump, Australia faces issues that will persist regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
On-going conflicts in the Middle East, the growing power of China, the ramifications of global warming and many more issues necessitate an intelligent foreign policy informed by the need for peace, science and our national interests.
IPAN has established the People’s Inquiry exploring the costs and consequences of the US alliance and US-led wars to assist in the development of this foreign policy. The Inquiry is already receiving submissions which will result in a report covering the Australian public’s opinion on the US alliance and its alternatives.
Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s admission that Australia is “joined at the hip” to the US is a worrying prospect - a sentiment that has continued under Prime Minister Scott Morrison – and is one not supported by an Australian public that routinely disagrees with US foreign policy.
Australia needs to build a diplomatic and policy apparatus that can not only deviate from Washington but pursue the interests of the Australian people.
This will only happen when a cohesive and informed foreign policy approach is established. The People’s Inquiry will contribute to this through soliciting public submissions and expert opinion.
Details of this Inquiry can be found at the following link: https://www.independentpeacefulaustralia.com.au
Republished, with embedded 25 minute Video, from Assange extradition court ruling (11/1/21) |PressTV. This is the most recent edition of Richard Medhurst's (pictured) weekly Communiqué broadcast.
A British Judge has ruled on whether Australian journalist Julian Assange will be extradited to the United States. The WikiLeaks founder is wanted on espionage and computer hacking charges and faces up to 175 years in prison.
As Richard Medhurst, who attended the extradition hearing, explains, the judge's decision to block extradition solely on health grounds still leaves press freedoms at risk and validates the politically charged indictment by the US.
Conceivably, were the prosecution, at a subsequent hearing, to assure Judge Vanessa Barraitser that they would take tender-loving care of Julian Assange during his solitary confinement and 'trial' before a jury packed with U.S. secret service operatives, she could then rule that the health grounds objection to the U.S. plans to extradite Julian Assange no longer holds whilst again disregarding the clear politcal motivation behind the U.S. extradition request.
Update (Thursday 1/4/2021): Melbourne supporters of Julian Assange will be holding our weekly vigil tomorrow evening at Flinders Street Station from 6:30pm Good Friday, this Friday 2 April. For more information see @LorineBrice
Melbourne supporters will be holding their weekly vigil for Julian Assange this Friday at 6:30pm outside Flinders Street Station. It is vital for every Australian, who values free speech and opposes the unlawful detention and torture of Julian Assange by the U.K. government at the behest of its U.S. master, to demand that our government act now to free Julian Assange. For more information, see @LorineBrice, @Melbourne4Wiki.
Be there: 7:30pm, this Friday, at Flinders Street Railway Station. Listen to speeches and help us hand out leaflets.
Failure to act could well result in Julian's death, as Greek Australian activist, Yanis Varifoukis, explains in the video embedded below:
This household had a moment of great joy last night, to hear that Judge Vanessa Baraitser, presiding at the Magistrate's court, has disallowed Julian Assange's extradition on medical grounds. She found there was a high risk of his suiciding if confined in a US prison. However, she apparently threw out the grounds of public interest (protection of journalists); political persecution, and oppression. She also seems to have upheld the honouring of the UK treaty obligations to the United States, as the only public interest matter. For some of us, her decision on medical grounds, that Assange would probably suicide in US prison conditions, is equivalent to preventing the extradition of a prisoner to Nazi Germany, on grounds that they would probably not survive the concentration camps. The US prison system actually allows major corporations to benefit from slave labour of prisoners; it conducts secret trials; and it holds prisoners indefinitely without trial - as in Guantanamo Bay prison. The war crimes and international surveillance of governments and private individuals that Julian Assange exposed show the United States as a totally rogue state. It is not even a party to the International Criminal Court. Julian Assange's defense team called the UK treaty obligations with this rogue state into question. We need an international media and state denunciation of state alliances with the United States, but that would, ironically, require journalists to run the danger of being pursued by this rogue state, just as Julian Assange has been. One hopes that a defense of Julian Assange against the US appeal would benefit from a higher court looking again at the points of law disallowed by Judge Baraitser.
A major people's Inquiry into the costs and consequences of the US Alliance and Australian involvement in US-led wars has been launched. Why is this inquiry so different? Because it is not run by government. It is run for the people by the people. The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN) has trumped most voluntary organisations by taking democratic power into its own hands. This people's inquiry was conceived of and agreed to by IPAN members and is run and officiated by volunteers, in cooperation with web news-site Independent Australia. You are invited to make a personal or organisational submission because they really want to know what you think about Australia's foreign policy. Please consider donating. The Inquiry was launched on 26th November 2020, and details can be found on the Inquiry website, namely https://independentpeacefulaustralia. In the video below, organising participants describe the aims and basic organisation of the inquiry. After some preliminary explanations, at 8.10 minutes into the video, Kellie Tranter, the Inquiry Chairperson, gives a great speech about why "Australia must reconsider its relationship with the U.S." We republish the transcript of her speech from her website. Other speakers follow.
Speech at the launch of IPAN’s US-Australia Alliance Inquiry, November 27, 2020 by Kellie Tranter.
I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet today, and pay my respects to their Elders past, present and future.
May I thank IPAN, particularly Annette Brownlie, for inviting me to be a part of the first national public inquiry into the costs and consequences of the Australia-US Alliance.
May I also say what a privilege it is to be given the opportunity to work alongside the panel of experts Alison, Jeannie, Greg, Ian, Terry, Vince, Chad and Peter, who collectively bring such depth of knowledge, experience, wisdom, and energy to the conversation.
Our aim
Condensing the views of many experts to date on the direction in which we must head in terms of defence and foreign policy, the general consensus is that our aim is to:
- be a responsible independent middle power taking a more independent position with multilateral organisations;
- be respected internationally not only for our moral clarity, integrity and values but also for our domestic governance systems, constructive global activism and human rights advocacy, provided always that what we espouse must be consistent with what we practice at home;
- recapture our strategic independence;
- recognise the paramount importance of peace in the Pacific to our national interests;
- determine our own foreign policy, respecting other nations and interests but looking after our own interests;
- gradually downgrade military cooperation with the United States and involve the parliament and the people in the development of our foreign and defence policy;
- be self-starting and self-reliant rather than sitting back waiting for a friend who may not come;
- prioritise our own security;
- understand that our future lies in South East Asia and make our way in Asia ourselves. Develop a coalition of interests; and
- accept that we can’t squeeze China down and that Asia will not be shaped by US military force or economic measures.
Leadership
Achieving our aims requires leadership.
We are a competent people and should be a confident country. Our political leaders need to expend some political capital and time doing these things to prepare us for the new era that is dawning.
We need leaders with imagination, courage and intelligence, who will put the nation’s interests before their own. People who recognise that a time of change has come, who have sensible views about how it should be met and who can provide the leadership to drive change forward.
The current status
The current status is perhaps best summed up by Paul Keating when he said there’s “Nothing ever impressive about Australia’s Foreign Policy.”
We are a dependent middle power. We wait for signals from Washington before we speak.
There are not enough of our own foreign policy achievements. There are few examples of Australia deciding what it wants in the world, working out how to get there and taking steps to achieve that.
Australia is too closely tied to United States.
In July 2019 US made a $300 million push to expand naval facilities in the Northern Territory, with 2500 marines being rotated through Darwin in recent times.
It is unlawful and morally wrong to let another country take us to any war of aggression, but it is despicable to do so when those wars are based on lies and misinformation. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria are the most recent examples.
Apropos Afghanistan, too little reflection has come now, following the release of the Brereton report. Immediately after the September 11 attacks the Howard government invoked the provisions of the ANZUS Treaty which references the United Nations Security Council in Articles I, IV and VI. UN Security Council resolutions 1368 and 1373 adopted before the US led invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October 2001 did not authorise the use of force and didn’t even mention Afghanistan. We now know that the US did not even seek specific legal support from the United Nations Security Council for its actions in Afghanistan.
The first Australian parliamentary debate about the war didn’t take place until October 2010, after we’d been there nearly a decade, and only after activists, lawyers, independent journalists, diplomats and humanitarian organisations had been publicly agitating for it.
A month later it was reported that the then Defence Minister, Stephen Smith, had cracked down on media coverage of the war in Afghanistan, gagging senior Defence Force officers and insisting that any media inquiries to the Defence Force be diverted to his office. Defence Force personnel were also barred from talking to the media during the parliamentary debate on the war.
The point missed by mainstream media is point 38 of the Brereton report which states that ‘the events discovered in this inquiry occurred within the ADF, by members of the ADF, under the command of the ADF. To the extent that the protracted and repeated deployment of the relatively small pool of Special Forces personnel to Afghanistan was a contributing factor – and it should be recognised that the vast majority of Special Forces personnel did repeatedly deploy to Afghanistan without resorting to war crimes- it was not a risk to which any government, of any persuasion, was ever alerted.’
If that is true, then the government has allowed Defence to operate independently on foreign soil and without proper supervision. That is culpable in itself and, even accepting that the principles of ministerial responsibility and of military chains of command meshed with responsibility seem to have been thrown by the wayside, cannot continue.
On 18 November Australia was still waiting for a decision from Trump on an Afghanistan troop withdrawal so we could follow suit even though our government was sitting on the horrific findings of the Brereton report which was released publicly the next day.
So we have a report saying there’s credible evidence our soldiers have committed war crimes and we’re still waiting on Washington to tell us what to do.
How many lives could have been saved if all individual members of parliament and the Australian people were permitted to air their concerns and openly evaluate strategies without consequences.
How many people know that we currently have troops serving in Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, the Golan Heights, the Sinai, Cyprus , South Korea, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates and in every single State of the United States, either serving or embedded.
My FOIs to find out precisely what we’re doing in the Golan Heights and the United States were declined.
One wonders what else Australia might have had knowledge of or been involved with overseas when in 2017- a year after it was first reported that retired Australian Major General Mike Hindmarsh was serving as a senior advisor for the United Arab Emirates forces engaged in conflict in Yemen – we voted against a UN resolution about the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights and impeding the exercise of the right of people to self-determination, and in September this year we voted against the implementation of the recommendations contained in the report of the UN Secretary General on the causes of conflict and the promotion of durable peace and sustainable development in Africa (A/RES/74/302).
We voted no and the African nations themselves voted yes. The same African nations we romanced for a time to secure a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, then abandoned, and whom we will have to court again when we next bid for a seat on the UN Security Council in 2029-30 given that for successful election to UN bodies African votes are key to reaching the required 2/3rds majority.
Australia’s position of doing everything it can to oppose the ban on nuclear weapons, because it believes we rely on US nuclear weapons as a deterrent, is well known but misguided. It naively ignores the grave risks of “nukes” to all people of the world, particularly the scope for human error to lead to devastation, and leads to an absurdly militaristic mentality as demonstrated last year when we voted against a UN resolution for further practical measures for the prevention of an arms race in outer space. That was no doubt because of our government’s longer running enthusiasm to ‘deepen our cooperation with the United States on hypersonics’.
Post-COVID Scott Morrison announced that Australia will ramp up defence spending to $270 billion over the next decade as the country prepares for a “post-COVID world that is poorer, more dangerous and more disorderly.
About $90bn of that will be spent on advanced new kit, including “hypersonic” weapons, fighter jets and a cyber warfare capability. Australia will also put its own spy satellites in space.
Richard Speier, a member of the adjunct staff at the non-profit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation warned of the proliferation risks of hypersonics:
‘Hypersonic missiles travel at a speed of one mile per second or more—at least five times the speed of sound. They are able to evade and conceal their precise targets from defences until just seconds before impact. This leaves targeted states with almost no time to respond….It could authorise the military rather than the national leadership to conduct retaliatory strikes, but this would raise the risk of an accidental conflict.
We are enmeshed in the United States military machine. In Brian Toohey’s book ‘Secret’ he states that the US requires almost all countries that buy its weapons systems, including Australia, to send sensitive components back to the US for repairs, maintenance and replacements without the owners being allowed access to critical information, including source codes, needed to keep these systems operating…Australia could not conduct operations requiring the use of its advanced weapons platforms for any length of time without US support….This means we could be defenceless if attacked, unless the US allows the Defence Force independent access to key operational components of fighter planes, missiles, submarines, surveillance systems and so on… ‘
Australia’s relationship with China, on the other hand, is at its lowest point since diplomatic relations were established in 1972. We bait and antagonise.
In a July 2020 survey of how urban, educated Chinese view Australia’s bilateral relations going forward, 49.5% of respondents said the United States is the biggest impediment.
No doubt fuelled by Murdoch media and politicians, a Pew Research poll on 6 October 2020 found that negative views of China increased most in Australia, where 81% now say they see the country unfavourably.
Unsurprisingly, Australia abstained from voting on the yearly UN resolution about combating the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.
Australia’s justification for abstention can’t possibly be support for free speech and freedom of expression when its own citizen, Julian Assange, having exposed US war crimes, sits in a high security prison facing extradition to the United States where, according to US prosecutors, 1st amendment protections don’t apply to foreign journalists.
Our Government has done nothing and remains silent.
In terms of respect for international rules-based order, last year Scott Morrison criticised the UN and called it an unaccountable internationalist body. Australia was criticised for blocking progress at the UN climate conference in Madrid by trying to use carry over credits for beating Kyoto targets. We have long ignored international criticism of our treatment of asylum seekers and Indigenous Australians. We continue to permit the export of weapons and/or componentry to countries known for human rights. And we continue to abstain from votes calling for the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
Our Defence and foreign policies don’t seem to be underpinned by any strong or even substantial human rights values.
The path forward
I’m looking forward to the ideas generated by and through this Inquiry. The good news is that on the back of all I’ve said, there’s plenty of room for improvement in the defence – foreign policy space.
The first thing this requires is that Australia recognise and support the fact that diplomacy is vital to safeguarding our national interests. An annual spend of $28 billion on Defence compared to $1 billion on diplomacy is unsustainable and moronic. Not only that, but it has been reported that a numerical deficiency in strategically minded staff at DFAT has allowed Home Affairs and Defence Departments to step in and fill the strategic void.
The late former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser warned that ‘If the United States goes to war in the Pacific we don’t have an option to stay out of it. That as it stands the Australian Prime Minister has no capacity to stand up in Parliament and say we’re going to pass this one by because of US troops in Darwin and presence of Pine Gap.
Fraser called it a “total betrayal of Australian sovereignty, the parliament and the people.”
He proposed giving the United States 6-12 months to put their troops somewhere else, and to pull out embedded troops where it would lead to a conflict of interest.
He said Pine Gap would be more difficult, suggesting we give the United States 4-5 years to replicate Pine Gap somewhere else but pull out Australian personnel so it becomes known that it is a US controlled base. Signal that we’re not complicit.
In considering Pine Gap it’s important to remember that Wikileaks released a U.S. Strategic Sites List of 300 sites critical to US national interests and that would critically impact on the US’s ability to defend itself. It did not include Pine Gap.
I would also add that Australia must demand that it be able to operate key Defence systems independently of the United States.
Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University, Hugh White, has already pointed out that in 10 years from now, China’s GDP will be US $42.4 trillion and America’s US $24 trillion, that money is power and that the United States will be unable to persuade or compel China to live within the rules of a regional order US has set and upheld for so long.
At a National Press Club meeting in August the Deputy head of mission for China’s embassy in Australia, Wang Xining, offered his embassy’s offices to get Ministers talking to each other. Assuming the Chinese wouldn’t adopt Australia’s approach to negotiations with East Timor and plant bugs, that sounds like a good place to start in terms of understanding, building relationships, testing each other and permitting criticism where necessary and warranted.
Australia needs a concerted effort to show it is serious about engaging with China. A strategy for enhancing Australian-Chinese relations. Possibilities might include a specific plan to open up dialogue, targeted Ministerial letters highlighting opportunities for engagement, the expansion of DFAT’s South East Asia expertise, investment in the expansion of our diplomatic network in China and it might, just might, help if the Prime Minister actually visited China.
Former Prime Minister Paul Keating sees the United States as a balancer or conciliator in South East Asia, bearing in mind the United States is on the other side of the world. A new President in the White House wanting to restore America’s international reputation may now offer us a chance to reset the current trajectory towards war with China, even if that desire is fuelled in part by his own or his family’s commercial self-interest.
I would like to end on climate change.
Within about a decade, dealing with the consequences of climate change will be the only game in town.
Dr Jaci Brown, research director at the CSIRO’s climate science centre, says that in 10-20 years’ time, our 2019 climate will not be seen as unusual and that this decade will be one of the coolest in the next hundred years.
The recent Bushfire Royal Commission report noted that warming over the next two decades is baked in. If we start acting now containment is the best likely outcome.
Action on climate change is in our national interests and defence procurement must align with that purpose. Needless to say it is my view that it’s pure insanity for the Federal government not to endorse the key recommendation of the Bushfire Royal Commission to create its own aerial water-bombing fleet.
At least Defence seems to be close to the head of the pack in terms of awareness and concern.
In a 2019 speech General Campbell warned that “In about 10 years from now global warming above pre-industrial levels is set to rise by 50%. At 1.5 degrees of warming we can expect more significant impacts. Particularly in regards to oceans, low-lying areas and human health. The poor and most vulnerable will be hardest hit. Livelihoods lost. Food scarce. Populations displaced. Diseases spreading. And this now looks like our best-case scenario…”
My views on political failure to deal with climate change and the over-reliance on Defence to deal with its consequences are well known.
By itself, Defence will not be able to cope with the likely concurrent events, and one can only assume the same problem exists for the United States.
Indeed the Pentagon is planning for extreme temperatures, collapsing countries, wars on multiple continents and simultaneous natural disasters in circumstances where there are not enough troops to defend the United States and to address foreign catastrophes. In short, a substantial degradation of the ability to deal with conventional military problems, but in the context of a demonstrated inability of the United States government to respond properly, in terms of both logistics and capacity, to its own domestic crises. The problem was clear after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, but its tragic depth only really surfaced in the parlous lack of response to the ongoing COVID nightmare.
One must ask, if a situation arose where the US has to choose between allocating scarce military resources between preserving one of its imperial conquests and dealing with an out of control crisis at home, would the exceptionalist American psyche permit the embarrassment of an overseas withdrawal of an occupying force.
Mother Nature will almost certainly force our hand to navigate our own way forward independently of the United States. We shouldn’t wait for a crisis to get us to that point: we had better begin planning our route while it’s still light.
"Investigation into how hysterectomy might modify other disease processes has been conducted using Rochester Epidemiology Project (REP) data. These studies have linked hysterectomy to long-term health consequences including pelvic floor dysfunction and fracture risk, as well as dementia, depression, and Parkinson’s disease." (Stewart, Elizabeth A., et al, "Reassessing Hysterectomy," Minn Mid. 2012 Mar; 95(3):36-39.) Yet, hysterectomy is one of the most common operations performed in Australia and New Zealand. Every year in Australia, around 30,000 women have a hysterectomy. In fact, it is the second commonest major surgical operation after Caesarean section for women under the age of 60. This is despite the fact that other surgical and other treatments exist for many of the conditions for which hysterectomy remains an apparently unthinking and profitable default for surgeons. As well as the implications of both partial and complete removal of the uterus, general anaesthetics carry increasing risks of dementia with age. The use of hormone replacement therapy post hysterectomy has been shown to be an important protective factor against dementia.
"• Surgical menopause is associated with faster cognitive decline and worse cognitive performance later in life.
• The younger the age at surgery, the more rapid the decline in cognitive function.
• Early surgical menopause at ≤45 years of age is further associated with higher risk of dementia.
• The limited number of available studies highlights the need for large cohorts to further examine this research question." (Georgakis, Marios K. et al, "Surgical menopause in association with cognitive function and risk of dementia: A systematic review and meta-analysis," Psychoneuroendocrinology, Volume 106, August 2019, Pages 9-19, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306453018311478.)
[Long-term] Outcomes of Gynecological Surgery
"There has been remarkably little investigation into the long-term outcomes of hysterectomy, particularly given its widespread use. Studies limited to one year of follow-up consistently show that hysterectomy outcomes are good, with a low risk of complications and improved quality of life. However, findings from the few longitudinal studies that have been conducted suggest that there may be long-term consequences. Some studies report favorable symptom relief and quality of life improvement at five to eight years, whereas others raise concern about long-term risks related to dementia and cardiovascular disease. Moreover, experts argue that many outcomes of hysterectomy require 20 to 30 years to manifest.
Investigation into how hysterectomy might modify other disease processes has been conducted using Rochester Epidemiology Project (REP) data. These studies have linked hysterectomy to long-term health consequences including pelvic floor dysfunction and fracture risk, as well as dementia, depression, and Parkinson’s disease.
Most of the attention to long-term risk of morbidity and mortality after hysterectomy has centered on prophylactic bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (BSO) at the time of hysterectomy. As recently as 2006, data showed that the rate of oophorectomy or salpingo-oophorectomy either alone or with hysterectomy was approximately 73% of the rate of hysterectomy (14.0/10,000 versus 19.1/10,000).
The rationale for elective BSO at the time of hysterectomy has been twofold: BSO would decrease the risk of ovarian cancer, and once a woman reached menopause, her ovaries were no longer hormonally active and, thus, no longer useful. Both suppositions are flawed. First, research has shown that hysterectomy with BSO puts women at greater risk for mortality from conditions and diseases far more common than ovarian cancer. Although ovarian cancer can be difficult to diagnose, it is a relatively rare disease. When considering mortality risk for more common diseases including coronary artery disease and hip fracture, a decision analysis model favored retention of the ovaries until at least age 65 for women with an average risk for ovarian cancer. Similarly, in a large nationwide cohort study, hysterectomy alone performed in women younger than 50 years of age increased the risk of cardiovascular disease later in life, and there was additional risk among those who undergo oophorectomy. Second, the notion that the ovaries are no longer useful after menopause has been shown to be flawed as well. Although ovarian estrogen production plummets after menopause, the ovaries continue to make substantial amounts of androgens. These ovarian androgens undergo peripheral conversion to estrogens and may have direct beneficial effects on mood and libido. Recent REP studies have focused attention on the long-term risks of removal of the ovaries with or without hysterectomy.
Even hysterectomy with ovarian conservation has been shown to have significant effects on ovarian function, resulting in earlier menopause. Moreover, losing one ovary early in life appears to be associated with a significant increase in risk for dementia late in life. This challenges conventional gynecologic thought that the loss of one ovary would not have serious medical consequences. In fact, it appears there may be a stepwise increase in dementia risk for women who have undergone hysterectomy alone, hysterectomy with unilateral oophorectomy, and hysterectomy with BSO. In summary, the removal of either ovary or of the uterus may have far-reaching health consequences. Therefore, the surgical removal of female reproductive organs should be considered carefully." (Stewart, Elizabeth A., et al, "Reassessing Hysterectomy," Minn Mid. 2012 Mar; 95(3):36-39.)
Evans, Elizabeth Casiano et al summarised in "Salpingo-oophorectomy at the Time of Benign Hysterectomy, A Systematic Review, "
"TABULATION, INTEGRATION, AND RESULTS:
Studies were extracted for participant, intervention, comparator, and outcomes data. When compared with hysterectomy with BSO, prevalence of reoperation and ovarian cancer was higher in women with ovarian conservation (ovarian cancer risk of 0.14–0.7% compared with 0.02–0.04% among those with BSO). Hysterectomy with BSO was associated with a lower incidence of breast and total cancer, but no difference in the incidence of cancer mortality was found when compared with ovarian conservation. All-cause mortality was higher in women younger than age 45 years at the time of BSO who were not treated with estrogen replacement therapy (hazard ratio [HR] 1.41, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.04–1.92). Coronary heart disease (HR 1.26, 95% CI 1.04–1.54) and cardiovascular death were higher among women with BSO (HR 1.84, 95% CI 1.27–2.68), especially women younger than 45 years who were not treated with estrogen. Finally, there was an increase in the prevalence of dementia and Parkinson disease among women with BSO compared with conservation, especially in women younger than age 50 years. Clinical practice guidelines were devised based on these results.
Called, "DiEM TV: Another Now with Yanis Varoufakis," this, one of several Varoufakis videos, focuses on how to break up Amazon dot com - but then passes on to how to break up the feudal world order. Varoufakis has unique experience of the global financial-political system, and so he does a good analysis of Amazon's engulfment of the real world and of feudal capitalism. Most interesting is his advice on how to break this behemoth down to size via Lilleputian-style exploitation of the financial system. Part of the video involves Varoufarkis reading from a novel he recently published about a global-democratic revolution after the 2008 financial collapse, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present. You may or may not hold Varoufakis's communistic value solutions, but his methodology could also play out with many different new kinds of polities. I enjoyed this mixture of Socratic style and Swiftian analogies. You may wonder at his aiming ammunition at Amazon dot com, when his books sell there, but he says his publishers choose to market them there. This does not detract from his analysis. You may also wonder about his understanding of alternative energy resource-limits, but that also should not prevent you from learning from this analysis. Video inside article.
The continued detention and torture of Julian Assange by the U.K. government has required tyranny and violations of International asylum Law, British Law, and the law of the United States. Ironically, while the Australian Government has recently apologised for shocking Australian military crimes in Afghanistan, it continues to allow a perverted legal system to punish Assange for exposing many similar crimes by the United States. In the mean time, by scrapping virtually all the nuclear weapons control treaties with Russia as well as the Open skies Treaty, Trump has made global war more likely.
The embedded 5:22 minute video, below, is of Taylor Hudak's 27 November update in the latest developments In Julian Assange's case. The full transcript, adapted from the YouTube text, is included below. In it there is a call for President Trump to salvage something of his reputation by issuing a pre-emptive pardon to Assange. Unfortunately Joe Biden is even less likely to want his own acts on policy in Iran to be exposed.
Transcript of Taylor Hudak's talk
On Thursday November 26th a mandatory 28-day hearing was scheduled at Westminster Magistrates' Court before Deputy Chief Magistrate, Tan Ikram. Like other remand prisoners, Assange must be presented before a court every 28 days so the judge can choose to either expand or terminate his detention. However, a Covid-19 outbreak in Belmarsh Prison, where Assange is being held, prevented him from attending the hearing.
It was reported that Edward Fitzgerald, speaking on behalf of the Defence, told the court that Assange has waived his right to attend the hearing in fear of contracting Covid-19. A week earlier, on November 18, a spokesperson for Her Majesty's Prison Service announced that Belmarsh Prison would implement stricter Coronavirus measures, after three inmates tested positive for the virus.
Assange and other prisoners are confined to their cell for 24 hours a day. Additionally, showers are no longer open and meals must be provided directly to the prisoners in their cell.
Days prior to the recent hearing, 56 people tested positive for Covid on Assange's house block, which holds 168 people and several were sent to the hospital, and while Covid-19 has a high survival rate for a healthy individual, Assange's chronic respiratory issues, combined with the ongoing psychological torture and years of medical neglect, put him at a greater risk of being impacted negatively by the effects of the virus.
On November 22, Doctors For Assange (https://doctorsassange.org/) issued another letter. The letter calls for the immediate end of the torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange. Additionally the letter states:
He is at a high medical risk from Covid-19 given a chronic lung condition and likely immunosuppression due to prolonged psychological torture. He meets internationally agreed criteria for release of vulnerable prisoners in light of Covid-19.
Assange's mother Christine Assange went to Twitter to state, "If my son dies from #Covid19 it will be murder!" She
cites that the UK government, the court, and the prison, have all been warned that Assange is vulnerable to the virus, that that the U.K. and U.S. government opposed emergency bail, and that Belmarsh Prison is placing all Covid-positive prisoners in Assange's wing. Because of the recent increase in Covid-positive prisoners, Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, has called for Assange's immediate release from prison.
The statement from RSF not only reflects on the potential impacts of the virus, but how new Covid safety measures in a prison including isolation could have seriously damaging effects on Assange's mental health.
With Assange's decision to not attend the hearing in fear of contracting the virus, the Defence, the Prosecution, and the Court, have scheduled for another hearing to take place on December 11th.
Meanwhile, outside the courthouse, Assange's supporters gathered for a peaceful protest ,demanding his freedom and for no U.S. extradition.
In other news, President Trump pardoned his former National Security Adviser General Michael Flynn. This prompted free press advocates and Assange supporters to amp up the pressure on the President to issue a pre-emptive pardon to Julian Assange.
His fiance and mother of his two children, Stella Morris, posted a heartfelt appeal to President Trump on Twitter asking for a pardon, including a picture with her two young children.
Morris wrote, "These are Julian's sons Max and Gabriel. They need their father. Our family needs to be whole again. I beg you, please bring him home for Christmas." And what better way for President Trump to stand up to what he calls the Deep State and the intelligence community, who have been actively working to undermine his Presidency, than to Pardon the man who exposed their corruption, Julian Assange. And, while it is the Trump Administration that has charged the Wikileaks founder, it is never too late to get on the right side of history, prevent further damage and uphold human rights.
If President Trump were to pardon Assange, it would not only be a historic move, but it would leave a lasting and positive impact on his legacy. Trump would not only be remembered favorably for preventing the destruction of the First Amendment and press freedom worldwide, he would be saving the life of Julian Assange.
Both the defense and prosecution have submitted closing arguments earlier this month and the judge (Vanessa Baraitser) is expected to make her ruling on January 4th 2010.
Demonstrations in support of Assange will be held on the 4th in London, (Washington) DC and other locations. To stay up to date on this case please, make sure that you subscribe to our YouTube channel (acTVism) and if you've missed any of our reports, go to our Julian Assange case updates playlist to get all caught up.
I'm Taylor Hudak. As always, thanks for tuning in and I'll see you in my next report
This is urgent. A rushed Senate inquiry will ignore the recommendations of an independent review and devolve our national nature laws to the states instead. We need you to speak up.
Our nature laws should work to protect nature, not facilitate its destruction. Professor Samuels’ interim report agreed. He recommended a package of reform including strong, binding national standards and an independent ‘cop on the beat’.
But instead of waiting for the final report and developing a new reform package to save our species, the Morrison government re-heated an old Bill from 2014 that will make the extinction crisis worse. This tick-a-box Senate inquiry will hand off federal powers to state governments, with even lower standards.
Importantly, this is a missed opportunity for the federal government to work cooperatively with the business sector, environment movement and scientists on a durable reform package that protects nature and jobs. So no legacy, no leadership; just ideological lunacy. I’m so disappointed.
The inquiry Senate Committee are only receiving public submissions until tomorrow - Wednesday 18 November.
Can you send the Committee a submission today urging the Government to release the full review, and to come back with legislation that addresses our biodiversity crisis – a durable reform package with strong standards and independent regulation?
Attacks on human rights and freedom of speech are at the center of the Julian Assange extradition case, so why has the press coverage been so minimal?
The case may split opinion, but punishing Assange and others for bringing to public attention serious violations by our governments is averting our attention away from the bigger picture.
In the embedded video, below, journalist Richard Medhurst joins host Ross Ashcroft to discuss.
Reform all aspects of how we treat our ageing population. More real, boots-on-the-ground funding for in home care. In home respite options. More support for carers, and recognition of the huge amount of unpaid work they are doing every single day. Complete overhaul of how income and assets are calculated, the scrapping of the "6 month hardship" rule. Streamlining the process for calculating daily fees and admission to long term placement. Specialised support and advocacy agency within the Department of Human Services, or an independent body, to assist carers to navigate the system. Go to Tara Kostezky's Campaign
Why is this important?
Our care of our ageing population is a National scandal, and a disgrace. There is an appalling shortfall of support services for both participants and carers in the home, lack of real in home respite options, chronic lack of available services in rural areas in particular, poor acknowledgement of the Carers Recognition Act in all dealings with government departments and the health care system...the list goes on and on.
Residential Aged Care is a nightmare to navigate for carers who are already exhausted by the time the need for facility care is needed. Carers will (quite naturally, given what the current Royal Commission is bringing to light, and of which those on the ground are already completely aware) avoid placing loved ones into care until it becomes apparent there is no other option left. And by that point, they are usually completely burnt out and overwhelmed. And then: they are confronted with the financial aspects of residential placement, at the time they are least able to do so.
Government department delays, an almost deliberately dense and complex process, conflicting advice from Centrelink, government run "advocacy" services, and My Aged Care: all of these are things with which carers are all too familiar. And there are many, many older members of our community who have no advocacy at all from family or friends who best know their needs. These poor unfortunates are thrown into the system, to be churned through, stripped of their assets, and forgotten. After all, who would care?
The financing of Aged Care is unjust and uses figures which are unrealistic for the poorest members of our society to meet. Unless the person is "fully concessional", they fall into the murky category of "partial concessional". Figures of $350 *per week* are not unheard of, ABOVE the 85% of the Aged Pension. Hardship can be applied for...but only after 6 months of trying to sell whatever tiny assets that person has (usually the family home). Families are being forced to sell assets well under market value due to the urgency of needing to come up with funds immediately. Reasonable debts, such as unpaid council rates, are NOT included in the calculation of what the asset is worth. The net effect of this on a broader scale is sinple: channelling the assets of the very poorest into the hands of the profit margins of our for profit Aged Care Homes. We already have a "death tax" in this country...except of course - again - this only applies if you are poor. The wealthy can simply pay the RAD and be done with it, and when the end comes, it is returned to them, as the very name suggests: Refundable Accomodation Deposit.
The effect on a larger social level is this: the traditional passing on of wealth to the next generation becomes out of reach of those who most need it.
And what does all this pay for? Ants in the wounds of the dying. Shocking abuse of a daily basis. Burnt out and cynical staff who can no longer actually give a damn, through their own need to survive emotionally, because profit is king and proper compassionate staffing ratios are expensive to maintain. Absolute human misery and suffering.
Why should anyone care about this anyhow?
The demographics of the coming two decades show very, very clearly that we are on the brink of a tsunami of the ageing population. Directly, or indirectly, you WILL be confronted with these issues.
And because none of this is fair, or just, or right, or - most importantly - compassionate to the slightest degree.
And if you can't find it in yourself to care for those reasons, here are two more: the economic aspects of this will have long lasting implications for our economy, and none of them are good with the system we now have in place. And the second reason? You will be old one day too. What sort of care do you think will be awaiting you when you no longer have any other options left? Go to sign at the Community Campaign
Some people assert that only populations vulnerable to severe impact from COVID-19 should be quarantined, but this article shows how difficult this is. In fact COVID-19 vulnerable people are also those who require a lot of professional health care maintenance, however they cannot access that health-care when there is a high infection risk of COVID-19. They are, in effect, on the horns of a dilemma, if we don't suppress this disease and their diseases. The article below, based on a UNSW and international study has a number of recommendations for dealing with the current problem.
The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated into a ‘syndemic’ for people with chronic illnesses, a new UNSW study analysing data from low and middle-income countries shows. There has never been a more dangerous time than the COVID-19 pandemic for people with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, cancer, respiratory problems or cardiovascular conditions, new UNSW Sydney research has found.
Among the adverse impacts of the pandemic for people with NCDs, the study found they are more vulnerable to catching and dying from COVID-19, while their exposure to NCD risk factors – such as substance abuse, social isolation and unhealthy diets – has increased during the pandemic.
The researchers also found COVID-19 disrupted essential public health services which people with NCDs rely on to manage their conditions.
The study, published in Frontiers in Public Health recently, reviewed the literature on the synergistic impact of COVID-19 on people with NCDs in low and middle-income countries such as Brazil, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Nigeria.
The paper, which analysed almost 50 studies, was a collaboration between UNSW and public health researchers in Nepal, Bangladesh and India.
Lead author Uday Yadav, PhD candidate under Scientia Professor Mark Harris of UNSW Medicine, said the interaction between NCDs and COVID-19 was important to study because global data showed COVID-19-related deaths were disproportionally high among people with NCDs – as the UNSW researchers confirmed.
“This illustrates the negative effect of the COVID-19 ‘syndemic’ – also known as a ‘synergistic epidemic’ – a term coined by medical anthropologist Merrill Singer in the 1990s to describe the relationship between HIV/AIDS, substance abuse and violence,” Mr Yadav said.
“We applied this term to describe the interrelationship between COVID-19 and the various biological and socio-ecological factors behind NCDs.
“So, people are familiar with COVID-19 as a pandemic, but we analysed it through a syndemic lens in order to determine the impact of both COVID-19 and future pandemics on people with NCDs.”
Mr Yadav said the COVID-19 syndemic would persist, just as NCDs affected people in the long-term.
“NCDs are the result of a combination of genetic, physiological, environmental and behavioural factors and there is no quick fix, such as a vaccine or cure,” he said.
“So, it’s no surprise we found that NCD patients’ exposure to NCD risk factors has increased amid the pandemic, and they are more vulnerable to catching COVID-19 because of the syndemic interaction between biological and socio-ecological factors.
Mr Yadav said the researchers’ findings led them to recommend a series of strategies for healthcare stakeholders – such as decision-makers, policymakers and frontline health workers – to better manage people with NCDs in light of the COVID-19 syndemic.
“Healthcare systems – such as Australia’s – do have some of these strategies in place, but they need improvement,” he said.
Highlights from the recommended strategies include:
• Develop plans for how to best provide health services to people with NCDs, from the moment they are assessed through to their treatment and palliation.
• Develop digital campaigns to disseminate information on how to make positive behaviour changes and better self-manage NCDs and COVID-19.
• Decentralise healthcare delivery for people with NCDs: involving local health districts and investing in community health worker programs could help to mitigate future outbreaks. In addition, tailor self-management interventions for people with NCDs.
• Ensure effective social and economic support for people with NCDs who are vulnerable to catching COVID-19, particularly Indigenous, rural, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) and refugee communities, as well as people with severe mental illness.
• Evaluate technology-assisted medical interventions to improve healthcare services, because complex case management, assessment and support is increasingly being done via telehealth appointments or other technology.
Why healthcare must focus on prevention
Mr Yadav said high-income countries could also learn from the researchers’ findings.
“COVID-19 has been a major threat to people with NCDs in developed countries – for example, new statistics from Britain show that in 2020, high numbers of people in England and Wales died from NCDs at home after shunning the healthcare system because of the pandemic,” he said.
“In Australia, COVID-19 will increase inequality and poses a risk to some high and middle-income earners, but it’s a double threat to others such as Indigenous, rural, CALD and refugee communities, as well as people with severe mental illness – as reflected in our paper.”
Mr Yadav said in Australia in 2018, the most recent data available, 89 per cent of deaths were associated with 10 chronic diseases.
“The Australian healthcare system needs a bigger focus on preventive healthcare, to improve outcomes for patients with NCDs and prevent more people from developing these diseases amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said.
Mr Yadav said putting serious preventive healthcare investment on the backburner could lead to individual, societal and economic upheaval in the long-term.
“Investment in prevention today will help save healthcare costs in the long-term, help reduce the incidence of NCDs and enhance our resilience against future pandemics.”
Dr John Kingston, Veterinary Advisor to Australia's National Dingo Preservation and Recovery Program, says that the internationally beloved dingoes of Fraser Island (K'Gari) have all but disappeared from their beach territories as government authorities condemn survivors to a cruel death by starvation.
Dr Kingston said he was appalled at the condition of dingoes observed during recent NDPRP visits to the island.
‘Dingoes said by government and animal welfare authorities to be naturally lean are revealed as starving and probably doomed to extinction in photographs taken on the island for the NDPRP’, Dr Kingston said. ‘Hip bones protruding, backbone, ribs, muscle wastage, are all evidence that there is not enough food for these animals.
‘The Fraser Island dingoes are a semi-domesticate, an apex predator unique in the world, in that they form a bridge between the wild and humanity. Upwards of 80% of visitors to Fraser Island-K’gari wish to see a dingo in the wild. Is it any wonder, with seeing dingoes in this emaciated state that people want to feed them?
‘I don’t believe there is any veracity in the argument that feeding dingoes makes them aggressive. There is no scientific evidence for this at all. And yet it is an argument consistently raised and repeated by government authorities and their scientific advisors. This false belief was shown to be based on misinterpreted data in a paper by Rob Appleby, Bradley Smith et al, and another by Arian Wallach and Adam O’Neill. Prior to 1994 when the feeding of dingoes was stopped on Fraser Island, there had never been an attack by a dingo on a human.
‘Therefore,’ Dr Kingston says, ‘it is imperative that feeding of these dingoes commences. There is also no data to prove government statements that the dingoes will overpopulate the Island if supplementarily fed, as dingoes self-regulate their own numbers. These imaginary problems never occurred during the thousands of years the dingoes were fed. We call for random food drops immediately.’
The Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, which has legal responsibility for the animals’ welfare has consistently rejected conservationist concerns.
And the RSPCA, which once warned that the QPWS could be prosecuted for animal cruelty over its use of dingo traps on the island, now seems to back management policies, also referring to ‘skinny dingoes’ which it says are naturally lean and in good condition.
‘The photos show young females from the same territory, not old enough to reproduce and obviously not subject to pack support or discipline, now being pregnant, a sign of a species in crisis’, he said.
‘In a stable dingo pack, alpha females suppress breeding amongst other female pack members, so they are more able to help care for her pups and raise a successful litter.
‘Where are the animal ethics, and can we as a nation of animal lovers continue to watch as these animals slowly die a cruel death from starvation?
‘Do we wish for our overseas visitors to see the way we treat these precious iconic animals?
‘Where is Compassionate Conservation in all this?’
Dr John Kingston, BVSc,
Veterinary advisor
National Dingo Preservation and Recovery Program (Inc. A0051763G )(NDPRP)
People concerned about Harkaway, in the Green Wedge, near Berwick are asking for your help to stop development ruining this lovely area. Why don’t you write to the Minister too and plead with him to say "NO." Submissions urgently needed before 5pm on 6 November. Subject: Proposed Rosemaur development for King Road Harkaway, Email to: [email protected] Details inside article.
To all who care about preserving special places like Harkaway and their green wedge surrounds:
Harkaway is a hidden gem tucked away in the rolling foothills to the Dandenong Ranges just north of Berwick in the City of Casey. Until now, State Governments of both “colours” have agreed it should be sacrosanct - a “no go” zone for urban use development.
Wealthy Melbourne businessman Lindsay Hogg wants Planning Minister Richard Wynne to rezone his property in the middle of Harkaway’s precious Green Wedge land to enable an otherwise prohibited development including a restaurant, function centre and art gallery.
We are not against the concept, but looked at from every angle, this is the wrong location. It would bring large volumes of regular traffic into a dead end, high fire risk area, right through the tiny hamlet.
The local community will be subjected to this onslaught seven days a week, from 7am through to 1am Friday/Saturday, and until 11pm for the other five days, including Sunday.
Lunch patrons who have "wined and dined" would be passing the primary school where two cars can’t get by each other at pick up time, and there is no scope for widening. Many children walk or ride bikes to and from school or to the shop, park, tennis courts and playground, especially at weekends.
The change that would result from such a rezoning would be enormous and irreversible. The bushland and rural character of King Road would be transformed into an urbanised streetscape, with significant potential for environmental damage to Walsdorf Creek and increased traffic accidents.
The local community is united against this development, but its voice is drowned out by the media campaign of Mr Hogg’s PR team which is presenting the application as a “fait accompli”.
The Planning Minister is seeking feedback on the proposal.
Please refer to the attached information sheet to help you provide it - loud and clear.
Save the Casey Foothills Association is joining forces with the Friends of Harkaway Association and the Harkaway Residents Group to try and prevent what would be a grotesque anomaly in this location.
There are far better alternative site options that would result in an improved outcome for the venture.
Please make a submission before 6 November and help prevent this potential catastrophe.
Or if you miss this deadline, please email it direct to the Minister.
Political pressure is the only way to protect our increasingly threatened special places from assault by powerful monied forces with their own agendas.
HARKAWAY & ITS GREEN WEDGE ARE UNDER SERIOUS IMMINENT THREAT
From what?
A SITE SPECIFIC AMENDMENT TO THE CASEY PLANNING SCHEME BY THE PLANNING MINISTER TO REZONE ONE PROPERTY IN THE MIDDLE OF HARKAWAY’S PRECIOUS GREEN WEDGE LAND.
For what purpose?
TO ENABLE AN OTHERWISE PROHIBITED LARGE SCALE URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN KING ROAD – NAMELY AN ART GALLERY, FUNCTION CENTRE, RESTAURANT AND TWO DWELLINGS.
What can I do?
MAKE A SUBMISSION BEFORE THE CLOSING DATE (See below for details)
What is the time frame?
SUBMISSIONS NOW ACCEPTED UNTIL 5:00 PM, FRIDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2020.
The Government had given the neighbours only 4 weeks’ notice & has not advised the village or other outlying residents at all. An extension of 3 months was sought. We got an extra 2 weeks.
How can I get more information?
Google “Rosemaur Gallery”. Select “Planning”, then “Documents” tab, OR type into your Search bar https://www.planning.vic.gov.au/policy-and-strategy/rosemaur-gallery#documents, or just click on the link below:
What are the main issues? (See “Further Considerations” below for expanded list)
Planned large volumes of related traffic will be funnelled through the village past its primary school.
Widening and sealing King Road would:
o Destroy the character and identity of Harkaway as a country hamlet in a semi-rural bushland setting;
o Risk damage to the environmentally sensitive Waldorf Creek.
The site is in an increasingly high fire risk area at the far extremity of a dead end road.
The only escape route would entail annexing and sealing the equestrian trail, thus turning both King Road Harkaway and Farm Lane Berwick into through roads.
The proposal contradicts the very purpose of the existence of the green wedges and makes a mockery of the Planning Minister’s promise to further protect them.
(This can be addressed to Mr Stuart Menzies, Director - State Planning Services and Cc’d to the Planning Minister: [email protected])
Remember – one sentence is better than nothing. Just say what you want to say in your own words, and you’ll be able to expand on or speak to this for the Panel Hearing, currently scheduled for next January 2021, should you wish to do so.
Further considerations
For over 20 years, our local residents have fought and won numerous battles to protect Harkaway’s special environmental and amenity values. On each occasion, State Government has supported the contention that these values must be preserved at all costs and Harkaway deemed sacrosanct.
Never before has our community been disenfranchised by Government in this way.
This application constitutes complete disregard for local community and for democratic process.
o People who live in and/or regularly visit the village of Harkaway would be as adversely affected as anyone else but were not notified.
o The short time frame and failure to consult affected parties raises the question of undue influence, or at best, democracy being compromised in the interests of misguided economic expediency.
Harkaway Road itself is fairly narrow and winding. It’s intersection with King Road is dangerous, despite the very small, inadequate roundabout. (No room for bigger one.)
The in-principle acceptance of the application is claimed to be partly based on the supposed value of the art collection. But it appears there has been no proper assessment of its real value. Regardless, this should not drive a planning decision.
The whole district is a Designated Bushfire Prone Area, and an estimated 40% of site is subject to the even more restrictive Bushfire Management Overlay.
There are no reticulated services in the area except electricity.
Harkaway’s 175 year old history, it’s unspoiled non-urban character, its wonderful landscapes and its high-value biodiversity should qualify the whole area as having State significance. Any suggestion that an inappropriately located art gallery and function centre could trump this is a nonsense.
The direct intervention by the Planning Minister Richard Wynne:
Flouts proper planning protocols by unjustifiably bypassing local council as the primary decision-maker on changes to the Planning Scheme.
Contradicts the very purpose of the existence of the green wedge zones.
Sets a dangerous precedent for future similar damaging applications.
Pre-empts and undermines a current Government review that aims to further strengthen protections in the Green Wedge zones.
Provides a massive concession to the proponent but inflicts enormous detriment on the local community. (Note: The applicant has registered as a charity, so will presumably be exempt from certain rates and taxes.)
Flies in the face of his stated intention not to intervene in local planning decisions.
If Casey Council and the Victorian Government preside over the wanton squandering of this unique, widely treasured asset that is Harkaway – “the jewel in Casey’s crown” – for the sake of an inappropriately located, wildly experimental, fragmenting development on the basis of a nebulous promise by a vested interest landowner living elsewhere, it will go down in Casey’s history as an outrage second only to the findings of the IBAC enquiry.
Harkaway needs your help. We can’t fight this David & Goliath battle alone.
RACGP Acting President Associate Professor Ayman Shenouda said that GPs would be managing the long-term impacts of the virus on some patients for years to come.
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) is warning government that GPs will need adequate resources to manage the long-term care of COVID-19 positive patients. The RACGP has released a guide for GPs providing care to adult patients who have previously tested positive to COVID-19 or have a history suggestive of undiagnosed COVID-19 and have - or are at risk of - post-COVID-19 conditions. The guide was developed in collaboration with HealthPathways. RACGP Acting President Associate Professor Ayman Shenouda said that GPs would be managing the long-term impacts of the virus on some patients for years to come.
“Some COVID-19 positive patients quickly make a full recovery but that is certainly not the case for all people,” he said.
“Evidence is emerging that some patients are being left with serious physical, cognitive and psychological impairments that will require long-term care. For these patients, it is not a case of contracting the virus, getting better and never thinking about it again.
“Post-COVID-19 conditions include lung scarring, post-viral fatigue as well as ‘brain fog’. Emerging data suggests that up to 80% of people with severe cases of COVID-19 resulting in hospitalisation will experience post-COVOD-19 conditions.
“There is also evidence that people who have contracted COVID-19 exhibit neurological symptoms, from loss of smell, to cognitive impairment, to an increased risk of stroke. There are also potential long-lasting consequences such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following severe illness, liver dysfunction, and heart failure.
“These long-term effects are likely to be particularly severe for older people, those with chronic disease and those who experienced severe acute COVID-19. GPs will be crucial in managing the health and wellbeing of these patients in the years ahead.”
The Acting RACGP President said that GPs need government support in caring for the potentially significant needs of patients with post-COVD-19 conditions.
“When we look at the patients most likely to suffer severe post-COVID-19 health concerns it is older people and those with multiple chronic conditions, including patients who have delayed or avoided care during the pandemic,” he said.
“A voluntary patient enrolment model, where clinics receive additional payments for ‘enrolling’ a patient with a regular GP, would be particularly beneficial for these patients. This model enhances comprehensive care for patients and reduces hospitalisations for those who frequently visit GPs.
“Post-COVID-19 health impacts will take a significant toll on many patients including on their mental health. The guide is mindful of this and includes information on accessing mental health services or online supports.
“The Federal Budget included a $100.8 million investment in extending the doubling of Medicare-subsidised psychological therapy sessions for people who have used their initial 10 sessions.
“That is a welcome announcement that will make a real difference. However, in the longer term, many patients including those suffering the after effects of COVID-19 would benefit enormously from new Medicare subsidies for longer consultations.
“Longer consultations allow GPs to take the time to talk through what our patients are experiencing and how we can help them.
“Similarly, new Medicare subsidies for longer consultations for people with chronic conditions would be very helpful. These are the patients who require a bit more time and attention, particularly if they have had COVID-19.”
The guide includes information on:
· infection control precautions and advising patients that having COVID-19 may not confer complete immunity
· collaborating with the patient to develop an individualised plan to support their recovery. This also presents a unique opportunity to optimise the management of existing chronic conditions
· providing care for specific groups recovering from the virus including those with severe COVID-19 requiring hospitalisation, older patients and people with disability
· options for enhancing support for patients including home delivery of medicines, assistance with food and meals and support lines including the Older Persons COVID-19 support line.
If you want to save this area of the Mornington Peninsula from over development and save the koala bears who live there, would you chip in a bit to help the Save Reg's Wedge group to fight this. The place in question is the Sir Reginald Ansett Estate Green Wedge in Mt Eliza.
Act now to stop the multi-tower, multi-story Ryman Development at 60-70 Kunyung Rd, Mount Eliza on Green Wedge Land in Koala habitat!
The Save Reg's Wedge Community Group are raising funds to enlist legal representation to the upcoming VCAT Hearings in November 2020 and March 2021 (Reference: P1362/2020) but they need your help!
Mornington Peninsula Shire Council unanimously rejected Ryman’s massive development, along with the majority of the concerned community, but Ryman seem to be ignoring our community’s wishes and instead attempting to push their project through.
This development will cause environmental destruction, dangerous traffic chaos, and set a precedent for development across the Mornington Peninsula and Victoria.
Legal representation that has the expertise to fight poor planning development proposals is expensive and beyond the reach of us individually, but collectively we can work together to help save the habitat from this gross over-development on the Urban Growth Boundary, in proven Koala habitat! Will you help us? Go fund me campaign.
"Can the people with COVID suffer long term effects? Including long term effects that affect the brain? Yes. These are the so-called “long-haulers.” And it is not necessarily just people with COVID who have required the intensive care unit."
"Dexamethasone, a steroid medication, specifically a glucocorticoid. Yes, it can cause anxiety, irritation, psychosis, delirium, sleep disturbance. This is why when we do give steroids, we try to avoid giving them before sleep. When assessing someone’s mental status, or psychiatric state, its important to know what they are normally like at their baseline. Are they acting differently? That’s really what you’re looking for. Steroids are prescribed very frequently, and these side effects, are not necessarily rare, its not like we give steroids and necessarily expect them to have these side effects. It's very hard to put a number on how often these side effects occur because there are so many different medications that can cause these symptoms and so many other factors that can contribute towards mental status changes. So you will never get a concrete number on how often these mental side effects occur, but if I had to put a number, I would say less than 10%, at least based on my experience of giving thousands of patients steroids.
Well, let me start out by saying there are over 30 million documented COVID cases and 1 million deaths worldwide, and over 200,000 deaths in the US. The clinical spectrum of disease can range anywhere form no symptoms to mild symptoms, to pneumonia, to ARDS and shock with multiorgan failure, and death. Because COVID is a new disease, the possible long-term health consequences, are still not well-known. So these long-term effects of COVID, we can call this postacute COVID, defined as the presence of symptoms extending beyond 3 weeks from the initial onset of symptoms. And Chronic COVID is beyond 12 weeks.
But postacute COVID syndrome is not just seen in those who had a severe illness and were hospitalized. In a telephone survey conducted by the CDC among a random sample of 292 adults (≥18 years) who had a positive outpatient COVID test and were symptomatic, 35% said they did not return to their usual state of health 2 weeks or more after testing. And this occurred in all ages of adults.
The most commonly reported symptoms after acute COVID are fatigue and dyspnea. And this is exactly what I’ve been seeing with some of my patients with COVID. This persistence of fatigue, and feeling short of breath. Other symptoms include joint pain and chest pain. In addition to these symptoms, there are cases of patients with specific organ dysfunction, primarily involving the heart, lungs, and brain. This might be a result of the viral invasion, by hijacking those ACE2 receptors in our body, but it can also be related to the intense inflammation and cytokine storm, or a combination of these.
In a study of 55 patients with COVID, at 3 months after discharge, 35 had persistent symptoms and 39 had abnormal findings on chest x-ray or CT scan, meaning interstitial thickening and evidence of fibrosis, meaning scarring. In 2 different studies that were done, they looked at patients with COVID who were discharged from the hospital. At about three months after discharge, about 25-30% of patients had at least some impairment in lung function, as evidenced by pulmonary function tests.
Heart damage, aka myocardial injury, as defined by an increased troponin level in the blood, has been described in patients with severe acute COVID. Inflammation of the heart muscle, meaning myocarditis, in addition to heart arrhythmias, has also been described after SARS-CoV-2 infection. I dedicated an entire video to this topic, so you can check that out for more details. The virus that causes COVID, SARS-CoV-2, can infiltrate brain tissue when the virus gets in the blood. It can also get to the brain by invading the olfactory nerve, which is the nerve responsible for the smell. This is why the loss of smell is a common symptom. Besides the loss of smell and loss of taste, the most common long-term neurologic symptoms after COVID are headache and dizziness. Less common, but still possible, is stroke, brain inflammation, meaning encephalitis, and seizures. In previous pandemics with SARS, MERS, and influenza, some people who recovered from those illnesses had neuropsychiatric issues that lingered for months. So were talking about cognitive health here, like depression and anxiety. And the post-COVID is known to cause “brain fog” and mood swings, this has been reported up to 2 to 3 months after initial COVID" illness. [Source: Partial transcript accompanying the video above.]
[Note alternative video URL is https://youtu.be/ZtwpzqAJMBo.]Chris Hedges discusses with Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador, the hearing underway in London to extradite Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to the United States. Murray’s exhaustive reporting, which can be found at https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/, has become one of the few sources of reliable information about a hearing that has become notoriously difficult to cover because of court restrictions imposed on the alternative press, and which is being ignored for political reasons by most mainstream news organizations. If you wonder why there is no video-coverage available of the Assange mistrial, it is because (a) Human Rights NGOs, which were promised video-access, had this cut off after the first day and (b) despite access being available to most corporate and government media, mysteriously, none has availed themself of it. That is the reason that you and I are not able to monitor this mistrial, and that is possibly the reason it has been able to continue. The public gallery is virtually empty. This is really a secret trial. Only five family members of Assange have been allowed, with Craig Murray having the title of uncle, to Assange. Craig Murray's coverage of the trial is apparently under a shadow ban from the major internet platforms; his readership has dwindled to something like 10 per cent, despite his coverage providing a unique and valuable public window, where almost none exist, into this dark political tower that the Old Bailey has become.
Excerpt from Craig Murray's report for Hearing Day 21
Your Man in the Public Gallery: Assange Hearing Day 21
October 1, 2020
I really do not know how to report Wednesday’s events. Stunning evidence, of extreme quality and interest, was banged out in precis by the lawyers as unnoticed as bags of frozen chips coming off a production line.
The court that had listened to Clair Dobbin spend four hours cross-examining Carey Shenkman on individual phrases of first instance court decisions in tangentially relevant cases, spent four minutes as Noam Chomsky’s brilliant exegesis of the political import of this extradition case was rapidly fired into the court record, without examination, question or placing into the context of the legal arguments about political extradition.
Twenty minutes sufficed for the reading of the “gist” of the astonishing testimony of two witnesses, their identity protected as their lives may be in danger, who stated that the CIA, operating through Sheldon Adelson, planned to kidnap or poison Assange, bugged not only him but his lawyers, and burgled the offices of his Spanish lawyers Baltazar Garzon. This evidence went unchallenged and untested.
The rich and detailed evidence of Patrick Cockburn on Iraq and of Andy Worthington on Afghanistan was, in each case, well worthy of a full day of exposition. I should love at least to have seen both of them in the witness box explaining what to them were the salient points, and adding their personal insights. Instead we got perhaps a sixth of their words read rapidly into the court record. There was much more.
I have noted before, and I hope you have marked my disapproval, that some of the evidence is being edited to remove elements which the US government wish to challenge, and then entered into the court record as uncontested, with just a “gist” read out in court. The witness then does not appear in person. This reduces the process from one of evidence testing in public view to something very different. Wednesday confirmed the acceptance that this “Hearing” is now devolved to an entirely paper exercise. [...] Read more at https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/10/your-man-in-the-public-gallery-assange-hearing-day-21/.
[English translation of video-dialogue below the video.] In this very interesting video, Frederic Taddei of Interdit d'interdire (Forbidden to censure) states, at the beginning, that he has no intention of evaluating the value of hydroxycloroquine and azithromycine, because he lacks the medical knowledge to do so. He states his intention in inviting his guests (Olivier Berruyer, economist and statistician, and Raphaël Liogier, sociologist and philosopher) is to find out why there is so much controversy over Professor Didier Raoult and his promotion of COVID-19 treatment using hydroxychloroquine. [Note that this unpolished translation took hours out of several days. Both debaters spoke emotionally and with multiple redundancies, also different versions of the word hydroxychloroquine.] Among other things, the participants' discussion of the politics seemed to boil down to the ambiguity of testing drugs in a pandemic situation where big-pharma, other commercial competition, and fraud, loom. I thought that the main argument could be summarized as: (Olivier Berruyer) 'The effectiveness claimed by Didier Raoult for hydroxychloroquine could only be proven through randomised double-blind trials, but these have never been successfully completed due to a series of mishaps', and 'There is no way anyone could scientifically reproduce Raoult's method because he keeps changing it', versus (Raphael Liogier) 'Pending a perfect cure for COVID-19, Didier Raoult is doing the best he can as he treats people in a personalised manner, monitoring their responses, with drugs he believes to be effective'. I would add that, as the translator, and as an evolutionary sociologist, my own feeling about the reasons for such controversy is that it is related to the way apes behave over a tasty food supply or some other big event (good or bad) that concerns them. It is natural for everyone in the community to get involved in something important - in this case a pandemic. We seize whatever handle, whatever fact or factoid we can get hold of, and we run with it, to the best of our ability and enthusiasm. Apes with alpha-pretensions get up in trees and shout loudly about what they've got, competing for audiences and power. So, I invite the reader to keep in mind ape-ethology when he/she reads the translated dialogue below. {See also the notes at the end, on hyrdoxychloroquine trials and prescription of this drug and the law in France.)
FREDERIC TADDEI (Host of Interdit d'Interdire): But the controversy around Professor Raoult goes beyond all that. For four months the lines have been drawn between those who believe in Raoult and those who don't believe in him. It has become a real war of religion. So, although we cannot debate the existence of god, or faith, or miracles - you either believe in them or you don't - we can debate the sacred literature. That's what we are going to do, with a pro- and an anti-Raoult, since France has been divided into pro- and anti-Raoult. My two guests are not medical doctors, but they have looked into what Didier Raoult says. The first guest is Raphael Liogier. He is a philosopher and sociologist, professor at the institute of political studies in Aix en Provence.
FREDERIC TADDEI [Addressing Liogier]: You are the author of Sacred medicine, history and future of a sanctuary of thinking, with Jean Bauberot, and of the Horror of emptiness, a critique of industrialist thinking, which will come out at the beginning of the school year, [...] and which will talk about, notably, the politics surrounding Didier Raoult. I will add that you are a member of the ethics committee at Didier Raoult's Marseille IHU [IHU = Instituts Hospitalo-Universitaires], and that you took part in the editing of the report at the request of Professor Raoult, on how to articulate research and care, in a time of pandemic. This report is expected to be available soon, and everyone will rush to read it. So, for you, who defend the work of Professor Raoult, what is the meaning of all this controversy, in two words, RapHael Liogier?
Interdit d'interdire - L'affaire Didier Raoult
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: Over and above, the polemics, it's much deeper. We are looking at a loss of credibility in science and a transformation of the major scientific paradigms. Whilst we are talking about things like randomised double blind trials, we are talking about a method that is supposed to be able to find a pure and absolute drug. Then, on the other side, we have Didier Raoult's methodology which is, in fact, a methodology more of feeling one's way; it's more relativist: one seeks, one looks at what works and what does not work. There isn't that background, paradoxically, that is almost religious, in fact, where the religious are not on the side you would expect. They are more given over to positivism and rationalism. The philosopher, Hegel, said that everything real is rational. My feeling is that the anti-Raoults are like Hegeliens who defend a kind of industrialist ideal of controls, research, truth, perfect drug, etc. This whilst, in a way, society has largely gone past that. And that's the quarrel, the meaning of the quarrel, in the most profound meaning of the term. I think that's it. We are looking at two different conceptual approaches, two different scientific paradigms, clashing.
Now we go to Olivier Berruyer, founder of the Les-Crises site which specialises in deconstructing propaganda; Olivier Berruyer, who wrote a study that was very critical of Didier Raoult's work, based on Raoult's publications and his assertions. For you, Olivier, what underlies this controversy?
OLIVIER BERRUYER: I would not put myself in an anti-Raoult camp. Raoult was one of the only ones to do a very interesting piece of work on sequelae, scanning infected people [...], so I'm not anti-Raoult, in fact. I am pro-the fundamental principles of science; that's true. I would say that underlying this controversy is that we are becoming a conflict-oriented society. Everyone tries to get a position against something, much more than they do to be for something. This is really quite interesting. The major media push for this, in order to create some buzz, clicks, to sell more paper, but, in the end, one notices that this pushes people to not use their critical faculties to try to find the truth, or at least to come together to create situations where they can discuss it together, but can cause a fairly large number of people to become fanatical, using their critical faculties to confirm their biases, rather than doubting - and science is made up of doubting, and Russell said, "Never be certain of anything." In any case, have reasonable doubts, don't over-doubt, because that will also prevent you from reaching the truth. For me, it's really that: this story of strange passions, when instead one could discuss the subject peacefully. I do hope we will enter reality and leave this sort of Orwellian truth potion, where each person invents their own reality. When we live in different realities, we can no longer communicate.
FREDERIC TADDEI: Let's start then by what you don't like, Olivier, in Professor Raoult's work, since you have said that you are not an 'anti-Raoul', and that you admire him for a certain number of things. But, nonetheless, you have been very very severe about his publications and his assertions concerning COVID-19.
OLIVIER BERRUYEY: [...] I disapprove of his having ceased to do science and medicine in order to do politics. He has politicised a subject that should have remained scientific. In order to prove that he was right, he abandoned the fundamental principles of medicine at a time when we needed them the most. He transformed the IHU Marseille institute into a lobbying centre for chloroquine. [Berruyey disagrees that Raoult's had a method of 'feeling one's way', describing it as] simply Raoult dedicated to proving that he was right, bit by bit. Systematically deconstructing any study that contradicted his assertions. Staying silent about a number of studies that showed certain dangers of the treatment, but carrying on about some extremely pedestrian studies, such as Professor Peron's, which was then withdrawn a few days later, and no-one talked about it anymore; and hiding the truth from people so as to make believe that chloroquin works. So, I demonstrated this in referring to scientific publications. I can do it here - it would take a bit of time - but people can look [for themselves]. I can cite a couple of little examples, which started off this chloroquin story. At the beginning of February, Raoul said, 'We have to listen to the Chinese. They are really the kings of virology. The Chinese use Chloroquin'. Terrific. So we must use chloroquin. After a month he said, 'We have to use hydroxychloroquine'. Hydroxychloroquine is close, but it isn't the same thing. The Chinese do not use hydroxychloroquine. Then he says, 'We're going to add an antibiotic, because that works better'. The Chinese guidelines say, 'If you use hydroxychloroquine, above all, don't use antibiotics because it is dangerous. And so, after a while, we find that Raoult says we should listen to the Chinese, but does the opposite. And, I will cite a second example which, to me, epitomises the problem: There was a study that showed that chloroquin seemed a little dangerous. Raoult said, no, it wasn't, and produced a small paper in response, drawing the reader's attention to a third study, which said chloroquine was not dangerous. Very good. However, after a comma following that statement, it said that, if you added an antibiotic - Raoult's protocol - it was very dangerous. It raised mortality. It's really pretty odd to have under your nose a study that says your protocol is dangerous, in order to convince people that your protocol is not dangerous. That's Raoult's method, in fact. It is perfectly understandable, because it's no longer science. There isn't any debate because 90% of scientists can see very well that it doesn't work, that there is a big methodological problem. But, obviously, there is a media problem as well, which tries to give the impression that if they look into it, that will be divisive. Scientists are not very divided. Someone with a doctorate in virologie, in biochemistry, who knows science, can see very well that there is a big problem. That's true overseas too. All the fake-science hunters have demolished this work.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: I would really like to... The first thing is that to really look at it. In a way, my interlocuteur has validated what I said at the beginning. I said that Raoult works by feeling his way. Initially he said we have to follow the Chinese, then he changed his dosages, he changed the very nature of the product, going from chloroquine to hydrochlorothiazide. [sic] So, exactly - Raoul works pragmatically. And science has always been pragmatic; medical science especially. Medicine isn't physics theory. I have myself studied a little of the epistemology of medicine, and it isn't physics theory, it is, in fact, an almost artisan practice, where one goes from caring for patients to research, and from research to caring for patients. And Raoul functions within that paradigm. It is for that reason that he favours what he calls "observational studies" on the one hand, and going back and forth between them and caring for patients, on the other. It is in this way that he has progressively developed his treatment, which proves, in fact, that he is not maintaining a monological posture, only talking to himself and not with his team. No, he has progressively developed in his work whilst caring for patients - and I would remind you that the largest number of people tested in France proportionate to inhabitants is Marseille. He therefore had an enormous living lab for his practical studies, and he developed, little by little, coming to a point where he had the most efficient treatment possible. But I want to say a second thing, a second thing which is that what Didier Raoult was proposing cannot be limited to hydrochloroquine [sic], and I think that here, we are trying - it's a bit like the tree that hides the forest - we are trying to hide a certain number of errors. I think these are political errors. It's not a question of conspiracy theory, but of political errors by politicians. That's what took Didier Raoult well beyond the question of hydrochloroquine. [sic] Systematically testing everyone - and that's what was done in Marseille. You can reproach him what you will, but I assure you, it was what he could do in Marseille, as much as he could do with the means that he possessed - systematically everyone, and then to put to one side, that is, to put into quarantine, individuals who tested positive - and only them, only them. Then, after that, look after them, no matter the degree of their illness, and this with every precaution - meaning even when they were asymptomatic, and with every precaution - the precautions that are possible whilst using the drug hydrochloroquine mixed with azithromycine - but, as you said, my interlocuteur, doing scans, doing everything necessary, including systematically doing electrocardiograms. I went there, so I had an electrocardiogram. Everyone had an electrocardiogram. I was asymptomatic. So, taking every precaution. So, it was a methodology with everything together, of crisis management, second point. And the third point with which I would be in agreement, I think, and not completely with my interlocuteur, the third point, is that where there has been politicisation - but I am not sure that it came from Raoult. I think that there was politicisation from outside. Because, the only thing that Raoult did, if you listened, apart from his cheeky humour, his mind, his character [which was] a little direct. He might allow himself to say that it was a little bit of flu, etc. I'm not talking about that. Because, from a scientific point of view, he was a very serious person. I want to say that he was politicised precisely because what he was proposing was not just hydrochloroquine, it was a comprehensive strategy, opposed, in fact, to systematic quarantine. We don't know today if general quarantine was good. We don't even know if it saved lives or if, to the contrary, it caused lives to be sacrificed, when we look at societies like the Korean society, which did not practice systematic confinement, but which practised, as was proposed as a general method by Didier Raoult, systematic testing and quarantining of those who tested, and the act of caring for them, but which effectively reduced the circulation of the virus. Therefore, I believe, something quite rational and very pragmatic. But without that conceptual approach of seeking the perfect drug, because, whilst looking for the perfect drug, one finishes up sacrificing lives, on the pretext of claiming a kind of pure vision of what would have happened by the [indecipherable]. Medicine has only very rarely worked that way in the field of viruses and bacteriology. It didn't function that way with AIDS, which was frightening, and much more frightening in terms of numbers of deaths, of lethality, than the coronavirus. Why have we become obsessed with this today? Why has it entered into debate? I don't believe it's Didier Raoult who should be questioned. The question should be, why has Didier Raoult been the pretext of this, of these politicisations?
OLIVIER BERRUYEY: There is a lot to say. Amusing... We know that the people of Marseille were not put into quarantine at all, contrary to your [Raphael's] statement. Obviously, to stop an epidemic in the way that Korea did, is a very good example. You have to test to the maximum, from the beginning. We [the French] did not test to the maximum from the start, no more at Marseille than anywhere else because, at the time that we should have started testing, Raoult was saying everywhere that there would be fewer deaths [than from] scooters, and that all that was nothing particularly serious, that it was funny, really, and there was nothing to do, that [only three Chinese had died? - (indistinct)]. And so it was: when we needed to do something, we didn't do it. In effect, it's more problematic, when you finish up with millions of people infected, to do it. You can't dream of treating them. But, with respect to what Raphael Liogier said, would it be possible for us to agree on the fact that, today, we lack sufficient proof to say that there is clinical effectiveness and sufficient safety of use of hydroxychloroquine, not hydrochloroquine as you term it, with regard to managing COVID? Can we say today, at least, we don't know if it works?
FREDERIC TADDEI (INTERVIEWER): Raphael, Olivier has put a question to you.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: So, I have three things to say about that. The first is that there was no quarantine in Marseille, but there were systematic tests, for the good reason that Didier Raoult does not have the police force at his service and does not have the powers of a state, in order to declare a quarantine and impose a quarantine on people. He is only able to look after them according to his ability, which is only a medical ability. So, that's a first thing. Evidently a quarantine required a political decision. That's precisely what I am criticising - on people who had tested positive, of course. On the dangers of the product. There is a difference between danger and effectiveness. I think that the proof of effectiveness, of absolute effectiveness of the product are not yet there. It's true that the only way to have formal proof of the effectiveness of the product would be to have randomised double-blind studies, etc etc. On the other hand, the proof we have today, with the backing away from this drug, which had been in free circulation for years, is that it is not dangerous if one takes a certain number of precautions - precautions which were taken. That's the first point. The second point is that, once again, the practical studies and the studies that were undertaken at the IHU institute on thousands of patients, show that there is a reduction in the viral load. I know that after it was said, "Yes, but there is other stuff." There is perhaps other stuff, but, whilst waiting for it, we have a death-rate that does not exist. And, not certainty, but an approximation of a treatment that reduces the viral load and which allows, at least at the start of the illness, avoiding passing on to the next stage. It seems to me that the statistics - although I know that you won't agree - since today this is the subject of controversy - but the statistics today in terms of mortality of infected people, seem less than in Marseille, at least in the people who have been treated at Didier Raoult's service - the 3 or 4 thousand people who went there, [compared] with the rest of France. [...] Therefore, for the moment, these statistics are effectively subject to caution, but I think that Didier Raoult was right to take that risk, for the good reason that he knew that by taking precautions, at least he was not causing the people he was caring for medically to run a risk. And thus, that the only possible risk, the only measurable one, might be to his advantage, according to what he knew. I believe that the matter is proven enough from that perspective.
OLIVIER BERRUYEY: What's proven is that Pharmacovigilance pointed to seven deaths and two hundred very grave side effects with chloroquine. In any case, it is not because you say so ... there is strictly not the slightest proof that the medication saves lives, nor that it reduces the viral load. The phrase that I cited before, saying that there is no demonstrated clinical effectiveness, was a phrase from Sanofi [Multinational Pharmaceutical Company and manufacturer of hydroxychlorquine] which was broadcast about 15 days ago, to every Belgian doctor. I repeat: To this day there sufficient clinical proof does not exist from which to be able to draw any conclusion about the effectiveness or safety of use of hydroxychloroquine in the management of COVID - that the manufacturer of hydroxychloroquine is telling you that it doesn't know if it works and if it causes damage. I find it amazing that we have succeeded in creating in France a world center for chloroquine lobbying, which manages to be far more extreme than its own manufacturer's. Furthermore, using techniques that even the worst laboratories would not use to promote their drugs. That's the problem. And, with reference to what you say, [...] The people of Marseilles are not macaque monkeys, nor things, on which, hey, let's look at this powder and see if it works, sniff this, gee, it's killing them. Lets test it a while to see and if there aren't too many deaths, maybe we can test it on animals. I mean, there were tests done on monkeys three weeks ago. Chloroquine with antibiotics, without antibiotics, at the beginning, before, after, the disease. It is ineffective for monkeys to date. It's all that. There's no 'feeling one's way'. Raoult's only subtlety is that chloroquine has to be given at 8am, or at midday. Should you give 600mg or 550mg? He's not asking, does [unclear] work or does plasma work or does interferon work? It's not respecting fundamental principles. It's taking a health risk, because it's not at all a [unclear] medicine. Hydroxychloroquine attacks the heart, somewhat, and so does COVID. When you add azithromycine, that also attacks the heart. A lot. That's why there are people who die of that treatment. As noted by Pharmacovigilance. These aren't things made to cause trouble or administrative regulations designed to prevent people being cared for. You said it very well yourself, Mr Liogier, the best thing is to have randomised double blind trials. To do a clinical trial you need a month. It's not something that takes eight and a half years. And, in fact, actually, the English did it; they didn't see any effectiveness, they just stopped testing hydroxycholoroquine, to go and concentrate on something else, other drugs. Because, when you say there aren't negative effects - if the greatest precautions are taken and one does echocardiograms every day, there probably aren't too many serious effects, I agree, but, in the whole story, over and above having attacked fundamental medical principles - and, I repeat, there is more need - listen, we lose time this way! Because, in the end, we have a raft of evidence - and I hope we will find the solution soon - I don't care - I hope it will work - chloroquine. I don't care, I am neither for nor against, but today there is a whole raft which demonstrates that it probably doesn't work because pharmacokinetics tells us that the dosage does not reach a sufficient level in the body to work. It has been tested on monkeys; it doesn't work. It has even been tested on the English; it doesn't work. And the tests on the people of Marseille, in terms of methodology, are ridiculous; there was never a control group, so one could not know if it works or does not work. We are losing time. If there is a second wave in autumn, we will attack it just as we did the first. There is no treatment. We have not tested interferon, we haven't tested lopinavir. Look, there are 50 molecules tested by [? unclear]; we have only talked about one. We have put all our eggs in the same basket. We must have had half the clinical tests in the world on that particular molecule. It's pretty staggering! There's no security for patients and it's not gone to the heart of the matter. I don't want -
FREDERIC TADDEI: Raphael Liogier has the floor. We have four minutes before the break.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: Olivier, you know that today, most trials are not focused on chloroquine. They are focused on the others - It [chloroquine] is taking nothing from them. It's taking nothing from [trials] done elsewhere. I don't see why controlled use of Chloroquine in certain contexts would cost time. Why? I don't see the logic in what you are saying to me.
OLIVIER BERRUYEY: [Much crosstalking.] I will answer you, Mr Liogier. [...] All the media has said, for weeks, chloroquine is wonderful! Well, allow discovery to people. Come on, let us test Remdesevir on you. People said, 'No, I don't want any! I want chloroquine, and I don't want a placebo'. You have prevented recruitments [to other drug trials]. Stacks of media articles have described the problem very well.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: I think it's a lot more complicated than that, what happened with the Discovery trials.[1] You are simplifying what happened with the Discovery trials. Furthermore, there was a series of trials undertaken using doses that were more than double those that were used at the Marseilles IHU. Responding to what you said about Sanofi - because you said a lot of things I need to respond to. On Sanofi - the fact that it wasn't conclusive, yes, I agree with Sanofi, as I said at the start. However, with regard to what you said about safety, you said there were seven deaths, until proof to the contrary, there is no certainty at all that death was due to any direct effect of chloroquine! And, moreover, the only effects that were able to be observed were relatively weak, and they can be controlled, they can be controlled, actually, by dosage, and they can be controlled, in fact, by - in certain extreme cases - by not using chloroquine - obviously. It's a medication which has effects, strong effects, and since those effects are strong, a certain number of precautions need to be taken - precautions that were taken. So, I say to you, you say, what was done in Marseille, it's vague, it's not serious, etc. All the same, thousands of people have passed through the IHU; hundreds have been cared for at the IHU, of which we have access to, whatever you say, we have access, I mean, through observation, to the progress of those patients- one can compare them statistically with what happened in other hospitals. We don't have - it's not yet conclusive, but it seems to me that it goes in the direction of the protocol that was used in Marseille. So, afterwards, one can say what one wants, regarding what Sanofi has said. You know very well that it doesn't constitute a proof. A laboratory can say whatever it likes; they are not scientific, even if they pay scientists. Besides, other interests could be involved, since Sanofi makes other medications, and it wouldn't be so profitable for Sanofi to sell hydrochloroquine, [sic] which is a drug that costs 30, 40, 50, 60 times less than all the others that are [unclear] proposed. So, I don't want to enter into conspiracy theories, but I don't think that your argument on 'the laboratory that says that... etc.' is a good argument.
[PROGRAM BREAK]
FREDERIC TADDEI: [summarises and asks Olivier Berruyey a question]: Olivier you said, in effect, that Didier Raoult failed to conduct a 'serious' trial in this area, randomised, double-blind etc. etc. He could have done it, you say. It takes a month. But, at the same time, we can see that no-one else did it either. In France no-one conducted that trial. Each time that we were told, 'Yes, someone is conducting a trial', either we never heard the results, or we discovered that it didn't have exactly the same protocol as Didier Raoult's. All that helped to strengthen the idea that there was a conspiracy against Raoult, against his treatment. Then some saw the reason that Rhaphael Liogier evoked, that it was a low cost treatment, and therefore undesirable, in the face of a preference for a very very costly hypothetical treatment that would present one day. But, for you, why hasn't anyone done serious clinical trials in France on this treatment?
OLIVIER BERRUYEY: Very quickly, very quickly, in effect, Didier Raoult did not conduct serious clinical trials, and I believe that he did not even conduct a legal trial, because there were problems with the legality of what he did, related to the primitive nature of those clinical trials, which are criminally punishable and [unclear] is dealing with this at the moment. We can see that the authorities have been completely lax on this issue. Why he didn't do it is very simple, because, when you do a trial, you have proof as to whether something works or does not work. In fact, what Raoult did, was to reject the method which would have subjected his assertions to a test of proof ... he knows very well ... but it's been a century that chloroquine, or quinine, from which it derives. People [?advocated] it as a treatment for flu; it wasn't. Every new era refers again to this resource. So, Didier Raoult, I understand very well, because he isn't doing science, he's doing politics. So, he wasn't going to do something that potentially would show him to be wrong. Why wasn't it done elsewhere? Yes. It is being done. The Discovery Trial in Europe, but its going very badly, because it is having difficulty recruiting, for the reasons I mentioned before. Look at the media coverage. There are many articles that explain that people wanted chloroquine and nothing else. The intention was to work out once and for all what was happening in France, but others said, let's involve other European countries. Let's do a European thing, with the Germans, with the Italians, with Spain. It will be wonderful! -- Finally only Luxembourg joined the study. I think they only had 10 patients, what's more. So, the thing was completely ridiculous. Macron promised us the results for the 13th of May, so, ride the tiger, it won't be long. On the other hand, however, maybe due to Brexit, the English did manage to test it. Their test showed that a double dose of chloroquine was ineffective. It is therefore very strange that Liogier again took up that argument. 'Look, people tested it at double the dose. That's the reason it didn't work'. It's beyond ridiculous.
FREDERIC TADDEI: There was a review planned by the Angers CHU [Centre Hospitalier Universitaire], wasn't there?[2] I said to myself, we can tell people about it during this program. We will know the answer then. It won't be necessary after to have friction between believers and unbelievers; between for and against Raoulters. We'll just [unclear - refer to?] the Anger results. What happened to it?
OLIVIER BERRUYEY: It was a lamentable government mistake. We agree. There was no pilot. That business was in the image of -
[Both talking over each other so Unclear.]
FREDERIC TADDEI: Why, in that case, would [French President] Macron go and visit Raoult? Was it because he doesn't want to cut himself off from all the French who believe in Raoult? Is this demagogy?
OLIVIER BERRUYEY: I don't know. Because Macron is anti-system, as he says. And there will be anti-system people there. And, with all these anti-system people, they will argue between themselves. [Laughs.] It's lamentable. Truly lamentable.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: Well, to begin with, I don't know why it would be a ridiculous argument to say that one doubled the dose. You must know what the medical word, 'pharmacon' means? In Greek, it means what? It means something that both poisons and treats. So, that means that dosage, in medicine, until otherwise proven, is a fundamental variable. Therefore, an absolutely fundamental variable. It's not a detail. It's not at all funny. To have given a double dose - that could be totally counter-productive. Therefore -
OLIVIER BERRUYER: [Shouts and makes exaggerated feeling with hands out motions:] He's feeling his way! Feeling his way! He's feeling his way. He's looking.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: Don't get excited. Calm down.
FREDERIC TADDEI: [Laughing silently at the spectacle.]
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: You know perfectly well, that if you take aspirin, even aspirin, you can kill someone by increasing the dosage. Even more so with [? azithromycine]. You know very well that dosage is actually important. Especially a double dose. You yourself have argued as if it's a medication that should be handled delicately. To double the dose, I believe, is a major [unclear]. Secondly, I find the argument interesting, what you are trying to do here: That Didier Raoult is politicking. I don't see in what way Didier Raoult is doing politics. I think this is a way of attributing a kind of conspiracy theory. If Didier Raoult has not done double-blind randomized etc studies, this would not be because we are in a crisis, and an emergency, would it? You look after people before you do controlled experiments, don't you? It wouldn't be for that reason, as I believe it is? There's crisis, a time of crisis, and there's a time for research, at another rhythm. And I am in agreement that the two may work without excluding one from the other. But, instead of thinking this way, people project onto Raoult some kind of malign intention, since you say, 'He wouldn't have, because that would have proven that ...' So, why has he become so attached to hydroxychloroquine? Why, when it doesn't work? Because he is absolutely bent on proving that it does, so he had a malign intention? He makes the people he looks after take a risk - and his patients' opinion, I mean patients he has taken care of, whose opinion is important, until proven otherwise - after all, no legal suite has been launched against him to date, and I don't think that every doctor in France and Navarre could say as much. There is no legal matter against Didier Raoult in Marseille today. It's not because the people of Marseille are more stupid than others; it's because they feel looked after; those who were touched have felt it in the first degree. As for me, I cannot understand what can be Didier's interest - what is the conspiracy theory that supposes that Raoult's obstinacy is politically motivated? That is, hydroxychloroquine as a political weapon for Didier Raoult. Why? In order to become mayor of Marseilles? To be elected President of the Republic? To get the Nobel Prize? But he won't get the Nobel Prize, of course. You say that you are sure that ultra-serious trials will prove that it doesn't work. Then he is sure, at that moment, to hit the wall and not win the Nobel Prize. So, what he is, you are saying is - conspiracy theory - intentionality, and, furthermore, he is stupid, because, as it will be revealed, he will fall on his face. Which one is it? Either he's an extremely intelligent bloke, in a conspiracy theory, or he's completely stupid. You want both at once. It's contradictory. You can't have both at once. So, I don't understand your relentless desire to politicise Raoult's discourse, when he is just behaving like a doctor in a time of crisis, in an emergency situation. And, until there is proof to the contrary, the patients he takes care of, who are massive in number, well, I believe they are quite satisfied. That's not bad. He hasn't killed anyone.
OLIVIER BERRUYER: At the IHU there are 75 places. Is that right? There are 75 beds?
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: [Nods.]
OLIVIER BERRUYER: You aren't contradicting me? There were 36 deaths.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: Yes. Exactly, 75 beds. - No, no! [in response to the 36 deaths statement]
OLIVIER BERRUYER: Raoult finished up saying it at the [?United Nations/United States]. That's all I'm saying. There were 36 deaths and 85 beds. Already it seems to me that they weren't very happy. There, you see. Second point:
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: No! No! 75 beds, I agree, but -
FREDERIC TADDEI: Let Raphael Liogier speak. He is a member of the Ethics Committee, after all ...
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: 75 beds reserved for urgent cases who must enter those beds according to very specific conditions, you know, because they are very expensive - there are very particular hygiene conditions, in order to manage a patient in a bed at IHU. Therefore, the patients stay a very short time, then move on - the next kind of care occurs in the main part of the AP-HM [Hôpitaux Universitaires de Marseille], in the [?], sometimes even in other hospitals, or sometimes people go back home. The 75 beds are a place of transit, in fact, thousands of people have been through them, since the beginning of the crisis. 75 beds, it's just a place of transit and for - how can I say it - extreme cases, exactly.
OLIVIER BERRUYER: Okay. It's not a place of transit. Most people who are treated - there are more than 3000 - have not been hospitalised. Those people were ambulatory, they were not - at any rate, there was nothing wrong with them when they were examined for symptoms. And even asymptomatic. There were 36 deaths. So, then, give us the number of hospitalisations that occurred before there were 36 deaths. That interests us. Do the ratio. You like ratios; you are a statistician. So, little statistical manipulations; [? one can't do too many of them.]
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: I am not a statistician! I don't know the exact numbers. But I know that up until then, and until proof contrary, there have been no complaints, individuals who were displeased with the treatment, and the deaths to this point which have been accounted for - I'm not a doctor, but we will see - [?unclear] were not deaths, until proof to the contrary, due to treatment there, but due to what is called co-morbidity - a whole series of things. What counts - since you are a statistician - what counts - and, in the end, it's that which we will look at - is the number of persons treated, not just hospitalised, in the IHU - because, to be precise, they pass through the emergency part, intensive, because they are in crisis, and, after that, their place becomes available for someone else. What is important to know is, on the total of people treated, who may or may not have been hospitalised - if the illness did not require hospitalisation - to know what the statistical ratios are in terms of mortality, aggravations, or people who left. It's that alone that will give us the data, and we will have it. We will have it, necessarily. I believe that the [ratios] are to the advantage of the IHU, for the moment.
FREDERIC TADDEI: It was believed that we had that data when the Lancet, the prestigious scientific review, published a study that tended to agree with your critical work, Olivier Berruyer, since it was said that, looking retrospectively, several tens of thousands of patients, who had been treated just about everywhere in the world, once could conclude - and that is what this study concluded - published in the Lancet - conclude, not only that this treatment was ineffective, but moreover, it was dangerous; it added to the mortality. And, it was, besides, following that publication, that the WHO [World Health Organisation] said that it would be better not to use hydroxychloroquine anymore, and, in France, its use was forbidden, therefore, as treatment. And then, boom boom, the next day, or the day after that, the Lancet itself backpedaled and warned against what it had published the day before. And we noticed, and we were told, that data had been falsified, etc etc. How do you explain that, Olivier Berruyer, because you must have read it, this study, you must have thought it backed you up and then, the day after, that it didn't.
OLIVIER BERRUYER: No, no. Not at all. At no moment did I take a position on chloroquine. I don't know if it works. There is only one way to find out if a medication works - you need to do a double blind randomised trial. And then you will know if it works or not. I have never said on my site whether it works or does not work. There are studies that say it works, when it's not true. So, that's the Raoult problem. I don't say that hydroxychloroquine doesn't work. I say that, when Raoult says it works - and he said it from February, in February, he said, it's good, we've found the remedy and COVID will be the easiest respiratory infection to treat. I repeat his words, and 400,000 people are dead. Perhaps we will not have a remedy and that's something that people are not about to accept. There may never be a medical treatment, because generally viral illnesses don't have treatments. There's no treatment against measles, against rubella, against flu. It doesn't exist, so, there's no obvious treatment. Simply, when I saw the Lancet - to go back to the subject, the conclusions went in the same direction of five or six preceding studies; it wasn't a revelation. In effect, its statistical power was interesting, for having a beginning of an answer. [The study] in the Lancetconcluded by saying, 'Now, it's not sure, we need to do a randomised double-blind trial'. It was not categorical on this point. Anyway, globally, that the Lancetgot caught up in all these politics was quite astonishing. It's proof that there is fraud in science, of course. That's the reason we have [? unclear] ethical; that's why we have fraud-hunters. I'm not against Raoult. I'm against bad science. It's just as disgusting what Mehra [presumably Dr Mandeep R.Mehra, the leader of said study that was withdrawn] did, as what the Lancet did. Them and Raoult's bad science. So, we really have to organise ourselves, we surely need to do major reforms, on pharmaceutical laboratories so that there will be less lobbying at that level, on public research, and on the publication of data, umm... I'm not going to elaborate further here, but there are lots of things to do.
FREDERIC TADDEI: After the final rebound on the study in the Lancet, against which the Lancet itself has warned us, what conclusion have you drawn, a part from the fact that we are always in the shadow of belief, aren't we? Whether we are for or against, Didier Raoult. It's passion and it's blind.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: There, yes. We are testing, but we are blind, in fact. We have blind conclusions. [Laughs.] Even if, in effect, the Lancet article, as the New England Journal of Medicine, which are two big medical journals that published the same information, are not entirely conclusive. For me, what I find fascinating - and I agree with my interlocuteur - is the politicization that has taken place, a politicization - and I imagine that you would agree with me saying, how is it that reaction to the only article in a serious publication (putting aside the standard of the article itself) has been an almost immediate reaction by the WHO and the French government? This is irresponsible on the part of Raoult's critics, who call him inopportune, but I think that what they did was inopportune, in the real sense of the word, meaning, 'ill-timed'. I mean that it was extremely rapid, as if an immediate reaction was needed. That's the first point, because there, the politicization is very real. And, the second point: These scandals make it seem - because it's over and above the question of chloroquine, over and above the political question of Raoult, for or against, and all those things - make it seem as if, today, research in medicine particularly - there are problems today in medical research - how should I say it? In the financial links of laboratories - because we know that it is partly linked to that - the [unclear]. I mean financed in order to go faster, in order to impress - since we are talking about statistics - impressing by having extremely wide statistical samples, using artificial intelligence to process them, via a start-up - we don't really know that start-up is serious, if it exists, if it even exists, for as long as it has done what it has done, how it did it. We discovered, little by little, that even Australian hospitals had not given the figures that they were presented [in the study] as having been received. There were even errors where an Asian hospital was counted among Australian ones. To sum up, it was - Imagine, imagine the other way round, just for a second, what would have happened - we saw what happened there - Imagine what would have happened if such a mistake - I mean such a scandal - had occurred in the setting of the emergency management choices that Didier Raoult might have made in his IHU. He would have been literally crucified! Because truly, the article - I mean it's almost never happened - [...] I had never seen, at any case, in the Lancet [...] even the head director of the Lancet had already criticised his publication editorially in certain articles - but, to such an extent? It had never happened. A questioning of the actual credibility of the most prestigious scientific medical journal in the world, the one that is supposed to represent the greatest guaranties, I tell you, followed by the New England Journal of Medicine. It is truly extraordinary! Truly extraordinary!
FREDERIC TADDEI: We need to be clear that there have been previous retractions by great journals like the Lancet. And, as Olivier Berruyer said before, more and more falsification. I remember two books on that problem, which increases every year because researchers are obliged to publish in order to justify the money they ask for, therefore publishing takes place at greater and greater speeds, and sometimes the data is a bit manipulated to make it fit one's case. All the same, a retraction -
[two people talking at once]
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: In science it impacts even more, because it isn't only publishing in order to publish, like us in political science, it's because it is necessary to publish immediately, because [the research] was financed by a laboratory that wants immediate results, so as to be able to proceed more quickly towards commercialisation of its drug. I think that's it, really. It's undeniable; I'm not slinging stones at anyone. There are direct links between finance, pharmaceutical laboratories, and what is called 'basic research'. It's undeniable.
FREDERIC TADDEI: Olivier Berruyer, given that this has been a recurring accusation during the entire Raoult business, this accusation against big pharma, the pharmaceutical industry, and its links with a number of doctors who would then be anti-Raoult ...
OLIVIER BERRUYER: I feel that it's a rather sad business. Obviously there's a basic problem, and I'm not pro-big pharma. I think that we should nationalise Sanofi because it isn't right that we lack a public laboratory for the production of medications. I think that we should forbid remuneration of doctors by laboratories. I think we absolutely need a public organisation for publications. Okay, that's all true, but there are also problems with the public system. For instance at the IHU of Marseille, where Raoult started signing 150-200 studies a year, when a quality researcher only publishes about 100 in his lifetime, normally. This makes Americans laugh, knowing that each time colleagues who have organised themselves at Marseille, publish in a review, it means that 600 euros go to the AP-HM, to the detriment of other hospitals in France, for which there is also a big problem with public finance and that method of finance, which has been very strongly criticised by the Court of Accounts [French supreme auditing institution]. I dare to hope that the government will act on this point. Yes, there is a problem, and it needs to be treated. Now I find it regrettable that side of things that consists of saying, 'Yes, but any doctor in a situation of conflict of interest is an untrustworthy creep, a low-life, whom you should not listen to.' I repeat, I don't like this system, but you should not conclude that just because there is a financial conflict, that shows that you should look more closely at the case against that person, just because they have a conflict of interest. It doesn't mean that what they say is false. And conflicts of interest are not only financial. There is also the Marseille IHU conflict of interest. It's obvious. Mr Raphael Liogier is trying to tell me that there would be no problem if Raoult were to say, 'Hey, I made a mistake. I've just treated 3000 Marseille people for nothing. Chloroquine doesn't work at all.' It's true that it is going to be very interesting in a few months, alas, if scientific truth concludes this. [...] To conclude, as Mr Liogier does, that when Sanofi says that chloroquine doesn't work, it's possibly -
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: [Interjects]
OLIVIER BERRUYER: [Laughing and waving finger] Yes, yes, I think you did say that. You said that, even when the laboratory says its own drug doesn't work, to try to get out of it - when normal logic would [conclude that the drug] doesn't work - [by saying], 'But no, perhaps they are hiding another drug, which they can sell for a higher price.' Meaning that those involved prefer that we die without treatment. That's it. This is dirty reasoning. And that a philosopher could think that, could introduce that idea to the population - and we know that the population will easily react to such a shocking kind of thing
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: [Softly] No, no, no, no.
OLIVIER BERRUYER: I find it very shocking. We can go over that bit in the recording. I'm not fussed. That's exactly what you said.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: Fine, we'll go over that bit in the recording. I'm not fussed either.
OLIVIER BERRUYER: But it's the little refrain that
[Liogier and Burruyer talk over each other.]
OLIVIER BERRUYER: Yes. Okay, I'll take that on. It's of little importance.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: Don't say it's of little importance.
OLIVIER BERRUYER: But what importance does it have?
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: Don't say it's unimportant. It is important. I think what you said is important.
OLIVIER BERRUYER: You have to find the sweet spot. Of course, you have to doubt, of course there are conflicts of interest, of course you have to be careful, but afterwards you find yourself in a world where you imagine that everyone is surrounded by untrustworthy creeps who aren't telling the truth and who... Hey, when I think of the number of doctors who have bust their guts throughout France [and] there's an attempt to make us believe that Raoult is fighting a war for medicine ... but all doctors have tried it - Even the Salpetriere [major teaching hospital in Paris] used it from the outset, since the Chinese used it. I've talked to doctors at the Salpetriere, and it's not the only thing, Raoult is not the only one doing it - all the doctors are busting their guts; you have 15-20% of the medical corps who have caught COVID. That's too many. To try to make them all out to be low-lifes and sell-outs, all of them - it's too many - to cultivate that sort of - I don't like the word, 'populism', that sort of [?bitter opinion] to conduct polls-
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: [Interjects] I didn't say that -
OLIVIER BERRUYER: But many have said it. You didn't say it, but many have in that fringe-thinking. I find that - I don't see how we can construct a decent world if one thinks that way and, if, furthermore, one has different realities. One can no longer agree on basic facts, when Science normally allows us to do that.
FREDERIC TADDEI: Raphael.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: Okay. Firstly, on Sanofi, I absolutely did not say that they were low-lifes, that they wanted to sacrifice peoples' lives to profit etc. I'm only saying that, when you give as an argument [that] chloroquine doesn't work - the proof you say is that Sanofi says so - is not at all an argument, a laboratory that says something works or does not work, even if the same laboratory manufactures that particular medicine. That's what I wanted to say. Because I am not at all into conspiracy theory and I'm not at all inclined to the idea that the world is full of low-lifes. I believe there are interests, but multiple and variable interests: we have an interest is being cared for, an interest in being happy, an interest sometimes in earning money, and all that is very complex and multiple. I don't believe in an intentional malignity. So, it wasn't a perverse argument. It was just to say that there is no proof for [the argument] you have advanced -
OLIVIER BERRUYER: Yes, yes.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: - that it's because of what Sanofi said.
OLIVIER BERRUYER: Of course. There is only blind clinical testing, that's the only proof.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: That is true. I am even in agreement with you on that. But I believe, on the other hand, that practical international studies in crisis situations, in pandemic situations, over a long time - over a short time! - excuse me! - are not at all incompatible with tests in [unclear] and, contrary to what you say, do not slow down research. But, as far as the number of important articles by Didier Raoult is concerned, I'm letting you know that this also happens in America, but I am an invited researcher at Columbia University, which has a very, very, very big medical school - of medical research - and I assure you that the [?unclear] there, the really big researchers, well, they also put their names on many massively published articles. Then, money doesn't go to the AP-HM, it goes to the IHU Foundation - yes, it's not the AP-HM.
OLIVIER BERRUYER: It goes to the AP-HM, it goes to the AP-HM.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: Nooo...
OLIVIER BERRUYER: No, no, not directly. Into the pockets of -
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: It doesn't go into Raoult's pockets...
[They continue to contradict eachother for a little while]
OLIVIER BERRUYER: At any rate you haven't published the accounts. You haven't published anything on your figures on your internet site, therefore ... It would be good, besides, if you would do that.
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: Wait! Wait, just a second! I am not a representative for the IHU! I don't know the IHU's [financial] curves, I am a university professor in political sciences, and I am a member of the Committee of ethical supervision, and my position stops there. And no more than that.
FREDERIC TADDEI: This show is about to end. I propose that you each conclude with a few words - if it's possible to conclude anything in this business, when there will certainly be comebacks. Olivier Berruyer, on this business of Didier Raoult:
OLIVIER BERRUYER: It's a rather special business because usually you can have doctors who try to fool other doctors and scientists. Here we have someone who has come out and who is more preoccupied with what other scientists think of his work, in order to get opinion to support his side. He has succeeded rather well in this. [unclear] Raoult's method; Raoult's refusal of the scientific method is nothing new. It has happened before. It is Moliere's vaccine. Hey, here comes COVID, blood-letting for everyone! Let's test, but, above all, don't separate the group into those that are bled and those that are not. In any case, we've been bleeding people for 200 years so, if it didn't work, we'd know it. It's exactly that, this method that rejects science. It's a method that rejects proof and it refuses respect for the patient, who is not a guinea-pig.
FREDERIC TADDEI: Raphael Liogier's response?
RAPHAEL LIOGIER: Well, it's funny, because I find that it's exactly, in a sense, symmetrically the opposite. It's symmetrically the opposite, meaning, to offer a patient a strategy that does not pretend to be unfalsifiable, is pragmatic. It's rational and pragmatic. Pragmatic because rational. And, if there were, in fact, problems, well then, it would stop. If there were [problems] then [the treatment] would stop. That would happen through observation of the patient by the doctor. When one is operating on a scale of thousands of patients, the problem is inverted. The problem of randomised trials is that theyseek a pure, an absolute, medication, which you have said yourself may never be found. Well, it's through waiting, as long as the perfect medication, the unfalsifiable medication, has not been found, in some way, then you are sacrificing the population. Sacrificing the population, in a way, by calling on a kind of positivist theology of ideas that it is absolutely necessary to find the corresponding medication, but without going as far as Moliere, because that's a false criticism, because, in that era, it was more or less magic. It is in fact - euh - medicine is not a science like the others. It is a science which supposes what is called the unique dialogue, which means a special relationship with the patient, which therefore evolves. This is, in effect what Didier Raoult practices, without this implying any opposition to basic science.
This interdiction was modified in July 2020, so that Plaquenil (brand-name for hydroxychloroquine) could again be prescribed. However, the French national health scheme would not reimburse prescriptions for its use outside traditional indications, like malaria, lupus and arthritis. It could still be used and prescribed for other purposes, including COVID-19 treatment, as long as this was stated on the script, but in such cases, the government would not reimburse the script. See
>Non, l'hydroxychloroquine n’a pas été "réautorisée en douce par le gouvernement Castex". See quotes below in English and French:
"However, it states that Plaquénil may be prescribed outside its marketing authorisation, as provided for in the Public Health Code, provided that "this is justified by scientific knowledge and that the patient is clearly informed". "In this case, it must be mentioned on the order and it will not be reimbursed", noted the DGS stressing that "in case of problem, the civil, criminal or ordinal liability of the doctor can be engaged." (Translation from: "Elle précise toutefois que le Plaquénil peut être prescrit hors de son autorisation de mise sur le marché, comme prévu par le code de la Santé publique, à condition que "cela soit justifié par les connaissances scientifiques et que le patient en soit clairement informé". "Dans ce cas, cela doit être mentionné sur l'ordonnance et elle ne sera pas remboursée", a relevé la DGS soulignant qu'"en cas de problème, la responsabilité civile, pénale ou ordinale du médecin peut être engagée."
Daily, lively and dedicated coverage at https://defend.wikileaks.org/liveblog/ from what is closest to the horse's mouth, from https://defend.wikileaks.org/. There is plenty to read about, including a defense whereby Julian Assange is located on the autism spectrum and strong precedents where England refused US request for extradition in very similar cases, which took into consideration the harshness of US prison conditions and the likelihood of suicide.
In the cases of Lauri Love and Gary McKinnon, the U.S. government was blocked from extraditing them because the United Kingdom High Court of Justice (Love) and the British Home Secretary (McKinnon) recognized their Asperger’s syndrome would result in degrading or inhuman treatment that violated human rights. Source: https://shadowproof.com/2020/09/23/doctor-assange-aspergers-prison-extradition-trial/.
The video below is of an international peoples' forum on Assange's predicament, dated 21 September 2020.
The Australian Museum has published the first ever field guide to the land snails of Lord Howe Island, by Australian Museum (AM) scientists, Dr. Isabel Hyman and Dr. Frank Köehler. Featuring over 80 species, with detailed colour photos, the guide showcases how these small unique and beautiful gastropods play a vital role in the health of an ecosystem.
Dr. Köehler said that LHI has Australia’s highest diversity of land snails, with around 65 species not found anywhere else.
“Lord Howe Island is well-known for its many unique animals, such as the Lord Howe Island Woodhen and the Lord Howe Island Phasmid, Less well-known are the many different species of endemic land snails.” Köehler said.
“The field guide reveals the stunning snail biodiversity of LHI, and through the imagery and maps, makes it very easy for both the novice and expert to identify them,” Lead author Hyman said.
Having studied these snails since the AM expedition to LHI and Balls Pyramid in 2017, Hyman and Köehler said that many of the snails have suffered badly from predation by introduced rats since 1918.
“Five species have declined so drastically that they are considered Endangered or Critically Endangered. But following an island-wide rodent eradication program undertaken in 2019, we are hoping to see an increase in the populations of these rare creatures,” Hyman said.
Köehler said that after the rat eradication, they were originally expecting a slow recovery in the snail populations, maybe visible only after two or three years.
The Australian ABC has repeatedly reported on the expulsion of two Australian journalists from China this week, and the torture and disappearance of Chinese journalists. Yet it has said nothing about our own Julian Assange, who currently faces a rigged trial, accused of breaking the laws of a country he has never entered, whilst held in prison in a country which has ignored his refugee status and tolerates US use of information obtained illegally through spying. British journalist, Afshin Rattansi, is an exception in the anglosphere media world in his continued efforts (see video below) to show the world how Britain, Australia, and the United States, are treating the man who exposed US war-crimes.
This episode of Going Underground, begins with a montage of some of its most prominent guests who have come out in support of Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange, who now faces his US extradition trial, including Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Oliver Stone, Roger Waters, Slavoj Zizek, Benjamin Zephaniah and many more. Next, Going Underground’s Social Media Producer Farhaan Ahmed heads down to the Old Bailey where Julian Assange is facing his US extradition trial and speaks to Wikileaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson, legendary journalist and filmmaker John Pilger and fashion icon Vivienne Westwood who all attended the pro-Assange protests outside the court. Finally, Going Underground speaks to Dr. Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park 5, who were wrongfully convicted of the rape and assault of a white female jogger in Manhattan’s Central Park. He discusses what it was like to serve out his sentence in a supermax prison, despite knowing he was innocent, the racist overtones of the media and criminal justice system that wrongfully prosecuted him and 4 others, the intervention of Donald Trump and Pat Buchanan in the case calling for their deaths, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprising in the United States and what this means for the police, criminal justice system and the racist history of the United States and much more!
A fundamentally flawed proposal to bust open super for first home buyers housing deposits could hike the nation’s five major capital city median property prices by between 8-16%, preliminary analysis from Industry Super Australia shows.
Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) are partnering with filmmaker Maxine Trump on the Australian premiere of her award winning film To Kid or Not to Kid in Melbourne and Perth on the 26 and 27 February. The documentary is being screened as part of SPA’s ‘Stop at Two’ campaign. This will be the first time the film will be screened in theatres before being released on Amazon Prime on February 27th. 
In contrast to her 
On Jan. 20, 2021, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network urges Australians to reflect on our relationship with the US during this inauguration and think deeply about how we may forge an independent and peaceful foreign policy in the coming years. 
A major people's Inquiry into the costs and consequences of the US Alliance and Australian involvement in US-led wars has been launched. Why is this inquiry so different? Because it is not run by government. It is run for the people by the people. The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN) has trumped most voluntary organisations by taking democratic power into its own hands. This people's inquiry was conceived of and agreed to by IPAN members and is run and officiated by volunteers, in cooperation with web news-site Independent Australia. You are invited to make a personal or organisational submission because they really want to know what you think about Australia's foreign policy. Please consider donating. The Inquiry was launched on 26th November 2020, and details can be found on the Inquiry website, namely 
"Investigation into how hysterectomy might modify other disease processes has been conducted using Rochester Epidemiology Project (REP) data. These studies have linked hysterectomy to long-term health consequences including pelvic floor dysfunction and fracture risk, as well as dementia, depression, and Parkinson’s disease." (Stewart, Elizabeth A., et al, "Reassessing Hysterectomy," Minn Mid. 2012 Mar; 95(3):36-39.) Yet, hysterectomy is one of the most common operations performed in Australia and New Zealand. Every year in Australia, around 30,000 women have a hysterectomy. In fact, it is the second commonest major surgical operation after Caesarean section for women under the age of 60. This is despite the fact that other surgical and other treatments exist for many of the conditions for which hysterectomy remains an apparently unthinking and profitable default for surgeons. As well as the implications of both partial and complete removal of the uterus, general anaesthetics carry increasing risks of dementia with age. The use of hormone replacement therapy post hysterectomy has been shown to be an important protective factor against dementia.
Called, "DiEM TV: Another Now with Yanis Varoufakis," this, one of several Varoufakis videos, focuses on how to break up Amazon dot com - but then passes on to how to break up the feudal world order. Varoufakis has unique experience of the global financial-political system, and so he does a good analysis of Amazon's engulfment of the real world and of feudal capitalism. Most interesting is his advice on how to break this behemoth down to size via Lilleputian-style exploitation of the financial system. Part of the video involves Varoufarkis reading from a novel he recently published about a global-democratic revolution after the 2008 financial collapse, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present. You may or may not hold Varoufakis's communistic value solutions, but his methodology could also play out with many different new kinds of polities. I enjoyed this mixture of Socratic style and Swiftian analogies. You may wonder at his aiming ammunition at Amazon dot com, when his books sell there, but he says his publishers choose to market them there. This does not detract from his analysis. You may also wonder about his understanding of alternative energy resource-limits, but that also should not prevent you from learning from this analysis. Video inside article.
This is urgent. A rushed Senate inquiry will ignore the recommendations of an independent review and devolve our national nature laws to the states instead. 
Reform all aspects of how we treat our ageing population. More real, boots-on-the-ground funding for in home care. In home respite options. More support for carers, and recognition of the huge amount of unpaid work they are doing every single day. Complete overhaul of how income and assets are calculated, the scrapping of the "6 month hardship" rule. Streamlining the process for calculating daily fees and admission to long term placement. Specialised support and advocacy agency within the Department of Human Services, or an independent body, to assist carers to navigate the system. 
Some people assert that only populations vulnerable to severe impact from COVID-19 should be quarantined, but this article shows how difficult this is. In fact COVID-19 vulnerable people are also those who require a lot of professional health care maintenance, however they cannot access that health-care when there is a high infection risk of COVID-19. They are, in effect, on the horns of a dilemma, if we don't suppress this disease and their diseases. The article below, based on a 
Dr John Kingston, Veterinary Advisor to Australia's National Dingo Preservation and Recovery Program, says that the internationally beloved dingoes of Fraser Island (K'Gari) have all but disappeared from their beach territories as government authorities condemn survivors to a cruel death by starvation.
People concerned about Harkaway, in the Green Wedge, near Berwick are asking for your help to stop development ruining this lovely area. Why don’t you write to the Minister too and plead with him to say "NO." Submissions urgently needed before 5pm on 6 November. Subject: Proposed Rosemaur development for King Road Harkaway, Email to: 
RACGP Acting President Associate Professor Ayman Shenouda said that GPs would be managing the long-term impacts of the virus on some patients for years to come.
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) is warning government that GPs will need adequate resources to manage the long-term care of COVID-19 positive patients. The RACGP has released a guide for GPs providing care to adult patients who have previously tested positive to COVID-19 or have a history suggestive of undiagnosed COVID-19 and have - or are at risk of - post-COVID-19 conditions. The guide was developed in collaboration with HealthPathways. RACGP Acting President Associate Professor Ayman Shenouda said that GPs would be managing the long-term impacts of the virus on some patients for years to come.
If you want to save this area of the Mornington Peninsula from over development and save the koala bears who live there, would you chip in a bit to help the Save Reg's Wedge group to fight this. The place in question is the Sir Reginald Ansett Estate Green Wedge in Mt Eliza.
[English translation of video-dialogue below the video.] In this very interesting video, Frederic Taddei of Interdit d'interdire (Forbidden to censure) states, at the beginning, that he has no intention of evaluating the value of hydroxycloroquine and azithromycine, because he lacks the medical knowledge to do so. He states his intention in inviting his guests (Olivier Berruyer, economist and statistician, and Raphaël Liogier, sociologist and philosopher) is to find out why there is so much controversy over Professor Didier Raoult and his promotion of COVID-19 treatment using hydroxychloroquine. [Note that this unpolished translation took hours out of several days. Both debaters spoke emotionally and with multiple redundancies, also different versions of the word hydroxychloroquine.] Among other things, the participants' discussion of the politics seemed to boil down to the ambiguity of testing drugs in a pandemic situation where big-pharma, other commercial competition, and fraud, loom. I thought that the main argument could be summarized as: (Olivier Berruyer) 'The effectiveness claimed by Didier Raoult for hydroxychloroquine could only be proven through randomised double-blind trials, but these have never been successfully completed due to a series of mishaps', and 'There is no way anyone could scientifically reproduce Raoult's method because he keeps changing it', versus (Raphael Liogier) 'Pending a perfect cure for COVID-19, Didier Raoult is doing the best he can as he treats people in a personalised manner, monitoring their responses, with drugs he believes to be effective'. I would add that, as the translator, and as an evolutionary sociologist, my own feeling about the reasons for such controversy is that it is related to the way apes behave over a tasty food supply or some other big event (good or bad) that concerns them. It is natural for everyone in the community to get involved in something important - in this case a pandemic. We seize whatever handle, whatever fact or factoid we can get hold of, and we run with it, to the best of our ability and enthusiasm. Apes with alpha-pretensions get up in trees and shout loudly about what they've got, competing for audiences and power. So, I invite the reader to keep in mind ape-ethology when he/she reads the translated dialogue below. {See also the notes at the end, on hyrdoxychloroquine trials and prescription of this drug and the law in France.)
Daily, lively and dedicated coverage at 
The Australian Museum has published the first ever field guide to the land snails of Lord Howe Island, by Australian Museum (AM) scientists, Dr. Isabel Hyman and Dr. Frank Köehler. Featuring over 80 species, with detailed colour photos, the guide showcases how these small unique and beautiful gastropods play a vital role in the health of an ecosystem.
The Australian ABC has repeatedly reported on the expulsion of two Australian journalists from China this week, and the torture and disappearance of Chinese journalists. Yet it has said nothing about our own Julian Assange, who currently faces a rigged trial, accused of breaking the laws of a country he has never entered, whilst held in prison in a country which has ignored his refugee status and tolerates US use of information obtained illegally through spying. British journalist, Afshin Rattansi, is an exception in the anglosphere media world in his continued efforts (see video below) to show the world how Britain, Australia, and the United States, are treating the man who exposed US war-crimes.
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