Clear the air
The Non-Smokers Movement of Australia asks that Standards Australia, an influential private body that sets uniform standards for Australia clean up its act. Its draft of The Use of Ventilation and Air Conditioning in Buildings, part two, "Ventilation of Buildings" while claiming input from the health department (a fact denied by the health department) has actually succumbed to the tobacco lobby and other vested interests. Essentially, the report defines "clean air" as air that contains tobacco smoke, ultimately endangering the health of all Australians.
We condemn the report's acceptance of tobacco smoke as a "common contaminant". This report delicately steps around the health issue of tobacco smoke in the air while specifically defining "body odour" as a pollutant.
In plain English, the draft standard assumes that at present the public tolerate smoke in certain areas (pubs, restaurants, etc.), so therefore, regardless of the dangers to people's health, the air quality can be set at a poorer level. This is a worrying and unsatisfactory conclusion.
President NSMA
Sydney
[Abridged.]
Pharmaceuticals
Pharmaceutical drugs are a double edged sword. Side effects can often outweigh the benefits. There's also an immense financial cost aside from the social one.
In the Daily Telegraph on January 10, Veteran Affairs Minister Bruce Scott stated that there was an "estimated $36 million annual cost of confusion over medications". A study by the Australian Healthcare Institution published in 1996 showed that 10% of all treatment complications occurring in hospitals are due to drugs and are most were preventable. This is in hospitals. What's happening in the broader community?
A reputable Sydney institution has plans to set up a consumer phone line for drug information. But what about the funding? Despite some sections of government lending their support, other vested interests are notable in their absence.
Consumers have been let down in the past when not given adequate information about the problems associated with drugs prescribed for them. GPs are often too busy to tell them and pharmacists do their best in the surrounds of a busy shop lacking privacy.
We need this info line ASAP. Please contact me with any story you have about problems with prescription and over the counter drugs, herbs, vitamins — PO Box 207, Miller NSW 2168 or e-mail wunschy@ozemail.com.au.
President NSW Medical Consumers Association
Sydney
[Abridged.]
Work for the dole
There are many problems involved in Howard's "work for the dole" scheme which seem not even to have entered the PM's head.
Young unemployed are to work 15-20 hours per week and received their normal dole pittance. If they are doing community work previously done by volunteers, this seems fair; but if they are working for a private business and getting the dole paid out of taxes, we can see who is profiting from unpaid labour!
Young people at the same time are expected to search and apply for full-time permanent work, keep a diary of the jobs they chase, and will have to be available for interview, if lucky. Will they get time off for these, and if banished to rural areas to work, how will they get the time to travel long distances to cities for interviews, and what will the journeys cost? And will those sent mile from home receive some financial assistance to help towards accommodation? Think again, Mr Howard!
St Kilda Vic
[Abridged.]
Michael Collins
Sean Healy's pieces in GLW reviewing the film Michael Collins have helped to rescue the history of those times from the "Mick or Dev" approach. I lived in Dublin from age two between 1911 to 1928. Three of my elder brothers were in the IRA and I grew up in the midst of a great popular movement. The film fails to carry any sense of this movement.
I came to know the excitement that went with shouting out "up the republic" and "up the IRA". The IRA, the first ever voluntary guerilla force, wore no uniforms and when not "soldiering" dissolved back into the population. Normal warfare didn't exist. Britain resorted to terrorism and to two new forces to carry it out — the Auxiliaries (ex-officers) and the "Tans" or "Black and Tans" (ex-soldiers), each on special rates of pay and relieved of any army discipline.
The spread of the IRA throughout the country, the adoption and adaption of its methods, are a great instance of collective creativity.
It is necessary to bring out the harmful role of the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood), left unexplained by the film. This was a secret, oath-bound, bourgeois nationalist movement pledged to the violent eviction of Britain from Ireland and working secretly within other bodies. James Connolly, trade union organiser, Marxist theorist, second-in-command and martyr of the 1916 uprising, had opposed these "physical force men" as they were called, by insisting that in a revolutionary movement aims must be primary, means secondary, these latter being peaceful in possible and violent if necessary. The means selected should be those most likely to advance the aims.
With the election of a defiant, all-Ireland Sinn Fein in 1918, declaring itself a Republic governing from Dublin, the Brotherhood should have been disbanded. It wasn't, but took the control, particularly of the IRA, out of the hands of the popularly elected power. There was no conflict. Collins was chief both of the IRB and Sinn Fein's defence services. De Valera went along with the anti-democratic practices. Policies tended to be military ones involving few people, rather than political ones involving more.
I have long thought that those for the treaty overestimate the military problems, while underestimating the political possibilities. However, transcending that is the issue of the surrender by Collins and others of the very republic they had been proclaiming as the peoples' will, but without prior consultation with those very people. Sadly, at no time were democratic issues made dominant nor a program of social reform made the focal point. The IRB methods — "the rule of the gun" — produced a fratricidal civil war.
Gladesville NSW