NSW health budget
I believe the State Government health budget is a pre-election smoke screen, and it appears Premier John Fahey is guilty of hypocrisy.
Harsh words, but the Fahey government's health budget conceals what their real plan for our public health system is.
The Fahey government is proposing to trial an American style health system in Port Macquarie. Actually it's worse than the private US system. The proposal will create a private hospital monopoly. The existing private hospital is owned by the same company, Mayne Nickless.
Port Macquarie will become the only town in Australia to have two private hospitals, no public hospital, and 2 private hospital beds for every 1 public bed. It's obvious this is the prototype hospital for NSW. It's also a miniature hospital of what was an election promise, that being a 182 bed Public Base Hospital. Is there an election in the air?
There is little doubt what the Health Minister proposes for Port Macquarie will lead to greater fragmentation of the public health care system in NSW. This in turn may well lead to a drop in the use of curative services and an even larger drop in the use of preventive health services (community services) for the poor.
Their health strategy increases inequities in access to public health services and could effectively limit access to adequate health care for those unable to pay.
Growing opposition to privatisation of health is being mounted in NSW, which shows that the state government's health strategy has minimal support.
Don Mackay
Port Macquarie
SPSF
Your report "SPSF capitulates to Kennett" (GLW, August 18) by Ray Fulcher and backgrounded by Bill Deller is wrong on several key points.
First, the State Public Services Federation (Victoria) has not "accepted the Kennett government's industrial program of individual contracts." On the contrary, at a Committee of Management meeting at which Bill Deller was present, the union reaffirmed the previous leadership's "commitment to and support of the federal system of industrial regulation" and resolved "to support all efforts to obtain access to this system for all its members."
However, given that the union's pursuit of federal coverage will take several years, the union's members want and need assistance now in relation to contracts being forced on them by the government. Meanwhile, in cooperation with the Trades and Labor Council, the union is continuing its political campaign against the government's actions. Therefore contracts will be negotiated only on the basis that they are collective rather than individual, and that there is no diminution of existing terms and conditions.
But, of course, Deller wants it both ways. In your article he even admitted, "We were prepared to deal with contracts if the members said to do it. We had already had preliminary discussions with the government, but we still pursued a federal award." The union is currently doing no more than this, and in fact simply restated the previous leadership's "preparedness to negotiate employment agreements on behalf of its members."
The question therefore needs to be put to Deller: Does he now advocate leaving the union's members to fend for themselves and try to negotiate contracts on their own? Or is he just nit-picking?
Second, the ALP Pledge (anti-privatisation) unions did not support the Batt team against the McVey-Deller team in the SPSF elections. Kay McVey asked the Pledge MPs for support but they declined because of their policy of not interfering in the internal affairs of unions. They treated Karen Batt similarly. Besides which both teams had supporters among the Pledge group's rank and file. In contrast, an official of the meatworkers union (ALP Socialist Left) has claimed that his union provided financial support for the McVey-Deller team.
Third, your reporter has carelessly repeated the Deller team's false claim that the new secretary, Karen Batt, is "receiving an extra $34,000 per annum". The SPSF budget papers show that the salary of the new secretary, Karen Batt, is almost the same as that of former president Kay McVey ($52,000 plus travelling allowance), making Batt the lowest-paid SPSF secretary in Australia. Previously, as senior vice president, Batt was being paid $10,000 less than her current salary, while the then secretary, Jim Young, was being paid $92,000 plus a generous range of allowances. This looks to me like a drop of at least $40,000 in the secretary's salary.
How then did your reporter get it so wrong? By not bothering to check Deller team's creative accounting. Being poor losers, they are now trying to use apolitical methods to blacken the reputation of the victors. Thus they have mischievously compared the base salary of last year's president (i.e. excluding travel expenses and on-costs) with the total salary cost of this year's secretary (i.e. including travel expenses and on-costs such as superannuation, Workcover levy and payroll tax).
I am surprised that your reporter did not bother checking Deller's claim about the salary issue given that the last time Deller made such a wild accusation (about the salary of former president Alison Donohue) he was successfully sued for $16,000. Members of his rank and file group were left to pay this unnecessary expense and $6,000 has still not been raised.
Frans Timmerman
SPSF member and Pledge group member
Clifton Hill Vic
Land
On Saturday 04/08/93 I attended a public forum organised by the Wilderness Society. The topic was the "Starcke Land Package" and commented on the evil slimy tentacles of the George Quaid Holdings and their desire to capitulate to the power of overseas money e.g. American.
The public was encouraged to write letters supporting the indigenous people's rightful claim on their land. Someone made a comment regarding Aboriginals need to live on their land because they love it but also because the land needs them, because they love it. The land is their mother and the spirit is in the land.
I have a dream borrowing from someone far wiser than I that this continent will become totally aware that it needs the ancient yet practical wisdom on how to live here and not to stuff it up.
I have a dream that the selfish power whore mongers will be shown to be the detestable revolting hypocritical traitors of this planet that they really are
and I have a dream that we the ordinary people of Australia will learn lovingly from the indigenous people why they love and cherish this land. We need them and their knowledge.
Shelagh Cox
Balmain
Sao Paulo Forum
A couple of errors crept into the editing of my report on the Sao Paulo Forum in the August 25 issue. I did not write that Fidel Castro said that there had been a "euphoria" expressed in previous meetings of the Forum about "neo liberalism". I recall no such euphoria at either the third (Managua) nor the fourth (Havana) Forums and I can only find declarations to the contrary in the resolutions of any of the four meetings of the Forum.
Fidel did say at the Havana meeting of the Sao Paulo Forum that at recent Latin American Heads of State summit meetings, which he had attended, there had been a certain euphoria expressed by the governments present that neo liberal economic policies would create wealth. He pointed out that despite these sentiments, at the last Ibero-American Summit, for the first time the Heads of State felt obliged to include the issue of poverty on the agenda.
The article says that the leadership of the Forum "reflected" (which is certainly true), but I was trying to make the point that they were "elected". Finally 450 delegates and observers attended the Havana Forum, not 450 observers in addition to the delegates.
Stephen Marks
Managua
Obsession
On "The Churches and Sexual Abuse" (GL #109) I cannot help but feel anger at the way many of those Christian centres of mythology (and other fairy tales) operate. Recently I read that during the Nazi regime the major churches in Germany were far more concerned with the "immorality" of the regime, i.e., its ideas on sex and a child for the fuehrer, than with the disgusting violence against Jews and other people.
The churches' insane obsession with sexuality and its shameful treatment of women becomes even more abhorrent when one looks at the attitudes of those fairytale bosses to the issue of sexual abuse. The amount of coverups, even complicity, is sickening but does not come as a surprise. This same bible-bashing hypocrites applauded the deal made between Reagan and the Pope in which the church would attempt to silence liberation theology priests and other "leftists" in Latin America in return for the US' support for the Polish Solidarity movement.
Thus the overall picture becomes clear. The Catholic church as the best example, has such a rigid and monolithic hierarchy, from the Pope down, it strangles any real meaningful discussion. It doesn't matter whether a large majority of the rank and file support abortion, homosexuals or liberation theology, the cardinals and bishops wave the excommunication banner.
Without a rank and file revolt the mythological god kings will keep up their dirty games while trying to keep the people in an opium slumber. Good old Feuerbach would have some fun with the bastards if he was alive today.
Michael Rose-Schwab
Gurambai NT
Puzzled
Sean Malloy and Doug Lorimer (GLW, August 18) confuse me. Hebrew-speaking population of Israel? Do they include the half-million-odd Israeli Arabs who speak better Hebrew than most Zionists? Please elucidate.
Max Watts
Sydney
Pen pal
I am looking for a pen pal to write to. My name is Steven Taylor. I'm on death row in Florida U.S.A. I enjoy swimming, riding motorcycles, playing football and baseball. If you wish to converse you can write me at this address: Steven Taylor 288 - 500 (A1), Union Correctional Institution, PO Box 221, Raiford, Florida 32083, U.S.A. 41 - 1114
Food
"Industrial Cuisine" (GL 112), presents the ways in which capitalism distorts the human body through the commodification of all aspects of our eating and health.
A concern that arises from reading the article, along with two of the letters on vegetarianism in the same issue, is the need to situate the options and solutions in the overall context of what it is that really needs to change. Clearly we need to eat less processed, packaged and refined foods, but just what mechanisms do we need to ensure that this becomes an option for the majority of people?
The benefits that a service like FOE and Uni food co-ops provide are not long term strategies for actually changing the nature of food production under capitalism. They offer an amelioration for those of us who happen to live in the inner city or who have access to Uni. Living in the outer suburbs means shopping at Westfield Centres or Woolworths, which is all you are likely to be aware of.
Co-ops or households sharing tasks are part of how we might want to organise our lives in a different sort of society, but we need to ask what else must change to provide the opportunity for that to happen. If we had a shorter working week then more labour intensive gardening and creative food preparation may be one option some of us could choose. In a democratic processes it is also necessary to be aware that not everyone may want to spend their time in the garden.
What really needs to change is the decision-making processes of production. As long as the food industry is owned and controlled by profit driven multinationals, we are unlikely to see a significant shift in methods of production and packaging.
Co-ops may provide the framework in which discussions and awareness-raising about the problems with capitalist food production as well as the benefits of organising in a more sharing manner can develop. We need to take that awareness into work with others building a movement to fundamentally change the structures. We need to challenge all aspects of the state and class system to benefit the majority, not just settle for comfortable options for some of us.
Melanie Sjoberg
Christie Downs, SA
[Edited for length.]
Israel
Philip Mendes' letter (GLW 1/9) seems to miss the point entirely with the first argument that he raises against Malloy and Lorimer's excellent article (18/8). Mendes doesn't understand what constitutes a nation.
Nations haven't always existed, they are the product of a specific stage in the class struggle. One of the major tasks of the bourgeois revolutions (France, Germany, America, Netherlands, etc) was to create a nation. The bourgeoisie needed to break down the feudal provinces and petty kingdoms and establish a national market with uniform taxes, tariffs, coinage etc.
Mendes continues with a complete distortion of historical fact "... the Israelis have never attempted and are certainly not attempting today to commit genocide against the Palestinians." The Israelis committed systematic and planned massacres against the Palestinian people which resulted in the forcible eviction from Palestine of over 900,000 Palestinians after 1948. The classic example of this was the massacre at the village of Deir Yassin on April 9-10, 1948, where Israeli troops went from house to house shooting people whilst they slept. Many acts of a similar nature were responsible for the terror which led to the mass exodus of Palestinians.
In regards to the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, the Israeli army was completely complicit in these actions. The 400,000 Israeli citizens who demonstrated against their government were not doing so to "protest their army's failure to prevent the massacre" but rather to protest the complicity of their government in carrying out the massacre.
Chris Slee's letter in the same issue contained many good points. It is important to realise, however, that the PLO's demand for a "two-state solution" does not preclude or contradict the demand for a "democratic secular state". Rather, it is a transitional demand designed to hasten the establishment of a democratic secular state. If the Palestinians can have a separate state on the border with Israel it will demonstrate to all the world (and most importantly to the Israeli working population) that the Palestinian people want to live in peace with Jews but the barrier preventing that is the Israeli state.
Adam Hanieh
Ovingham SA
[Edited for length.]
Murder statistics
The following statistics were recently released by the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics:
In the 25 years since capital punishment was abolished here, the murder rate has remained the same.
In New South Wales the majority of murderers do not re-offend.
The main increase in crime has been in robberies which have increased by 20%.
The latest research from USA, shows that there is no evidence that capital punishment causes any decrease in the murder rate.
These facts contradict the current impression given by the mainstream media that murders are increasing. It is tragic that we are not given a true picture of the state of affairs by the media, because this results in calls for changes to our laws by ill-informed people, based on false information.
If a referendum were to be called in New South Wales concerning the reintroduction of capital punishment, the majority of the voting public would be completely ignorant of the true facts, with possible tragic consequences.
Stephanie Wilkinson
Seven Hills NSW