SOMETIMES it is difficult to be precise when describing how you feel about something that is dear to your heart. For example, you may have two choices, but which one would you go for?
Should you feel relieved when you are told that what you are doing should come to an end? Or do you feel sad that, after all these years, you will no longer be involved in the things that you have cherished and done?
I faced such a situation early this month. I knew it would happen because, at this point in time, we are living in a world of great uncertainty that has never been experienced before. Still, it is something I could not help but ponder over.
Lately, I have written several articles on what is happening in Australia as the worst-ever global recession began to gather its ugly clouds over the South-East Asian horizon.
Like an invisible giant octopus, it has spread its tentacles to grab the once tiger economies of the world and beyond. Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and many other countries across the Indian Ocean and the China Sea have been hit by what seemed like a thunderbolt-flash, some much more severe than others.
Now it has engulfed Australia at the bottom end of the region and, for the first time in more than 18 years, its impact has caused thousands of job losses with unclear prospect of the future.
The once robust economy, propelled by the seemingly insatiable demands from China and India for Australian iron ore and energy resources, is in a somewhat shattered state.
Recession is a cycle that comes and goes just like a wave on the beach. In normal circumstances, it lasts between eight and 18 months.
But this time, no one can really predict when it will end. No one has experienced such an impact since the Great Depression of 1929.
The seriousness of the financial crisis that emanated from the US is reflected in the US stock market meltdown that has wiped out US$7tril in wealth, according to the latest report I received.
Is this huge loss surprising? Not quite, say some economists. They believe that the next economic crisis will result in US$10tril that “will go up in flames”.
No longer are economists talking about millions or billions of dollars. The word “trillion” sounds exciting and thrilling but scary for those whose investment portfolios and self-funded retirement plans have been plummeting all around.
As Warren Buffet, the investor extraordinaire, put it with a grim metaphor recently: “By year-end, investors of all stripes were bloodied and confused, much as if they were small birds that had strayed into a badminton game.”
His description of the recent market carnage came after his company Berkshire Hathaway recorded the 2008 annual performance as the worst in 44 years.
If the world’s biggest economy is facing such a predicament, how could the smaller nations escape from the web of the worst-ever global recession? It’s a pessimistic picture, no doubt, but to say otherwise is to bury our heads in the sand like an ostrich.
After more than two decades of continuous weekly appearance in this paper, “Insight Down Under” has become an unfortunate victim of the global recession that impacted Malaysia just as it has done on Australia. It is part of a cost-cutting exercise.
I know that many of my readers and followers will be disappointed because they will be losing a link to Australia where some of their children are studying or where they have extended families.
Some of them have sought my (free) advice about buying properties in Australia for their children, about working in the mines and other places, about the best time for holidays in Australia, the best time to change their ringgit into the Aussie dollar and many other matters.
I have met many of them during my annual visits to Malaysia. I have been invited to some of their functions and gatherings and been told that some of my articles were the subjects of discussions at such get-togethers.
In the final analysis, therefore, I felt I would let them down if I didn’t continue to keep them informed about Australia. Suddenly, a brilliant idea popped up in my head, spurred by a simple axiom: “One door closes, another opens.”
And that new door is open to all my supporters. “Down Under Today” – www.downundertoday.com – will be launched today.
In fact, “Down Under Today” will give more than what “Insight Down Under” could provide in the past. It will have my thoughts on some issues, my new ventures, business ideas and opportunities which may be of interest to my followers, new ideas as they arise, a new discussion forum and many more.
Finally, to my readers of “Insight Down Under”, this is not a farewell but a thank you for your support hitherto. I hope you will continue to do so, and keep in touch with me through www.downundertoday.com
My thanks also go to Star Publications (M) Bhd, in particular the editors of Sunday Star – past and present – for running “Insight Down Under” for more than 20 years. It is a bit sad to part ways after such a long and friendly association, but I wish them well for the future.
Certainly, it has been good innings for me – as they say in cricket terms.
THE voices were loud and clear: “Protect your police or protect yourself.” That was the central theme of the biggest rally for more than a decade in front of State Parliament overlooking the city of Perth last week.
The crowd came from everywhere to fill every available space, holding placards to show their solidarity with the police and demanding a mandatory jail sentence for anyone who assaulted police officers.
They were angry. They had had enough of anti-social behaviour and violence in the streets. In recent weeks, especially, several policemen were attacked and injured at the pubs by young and unruly people, mostly influenced by alcohol. Even policewomen were kicked and abused as they tried to calm the situation.
Some attackers obviously provoked the police for an excuse to assault them. Others claimed that the attacks were self-defence against the rough and excessive use of police tactics against them.
But serious attacks on police officers, prison wardens, ambulance officers, public transport security workers, firemen and teachers are becoming too common and worrying that tougher measures are required.
Anti-social behaviour and violence in the streets, particularly at nightclubs and bars in the entertainment precincts of Northbridge, Burswood, in the suburbs of Joondalup, Rockingham and Mandurah, top the list.
Police figures show that assaults in Northbridge have risen by 51% from 411 in 2004 to 620 in the past 12 months, and at Burswood they jumped by 246% from 74 to 256 in the same period.
In general terms, assault cases in Perth city areas went up from 538 to 702 and threatening behaviour jumped from 81 to 298. Surprisingly, assaults in Fremantle port city dropped by 3% from 395 cases to 380 in the same period.
But assault cases and threatening behaviour in the holiday resort town of Mandurah went up by 156 cases and 68 cases respectively, while the seaside town of Rockingham saw an increase by 156 cases and 68 cases. In the satellite city of Joondalup the figures went up by 45 cases and seven cases respectively.
These figures are somewhat startling but the police claim that in the past 12 months they have reduced some crime categories, including assaults, by 11% in Northbridge, 9% in Fremantle and 8% in Joondalup.
Nevertheless, the climax of the attacks on police emerged last week when two brothers and their father were acquitted by a District Court jury of eight charges over a brawl outside a Joondalup tavern in which Constable Matt Butcher was head-butted from behind and subsequently suffered partial paralysis.
The three men claimed the attack was self-defence because of the excessive use of force by the police, but the community, looking at a video taken by a passerby, was utterly disgusted and outraged by the verdict.
The weekend after the acquittal, a group of 20 young men were reported to have surrounded a police car in a northern suburb of Bullsbrook and taunted the officers to arrest them. The officers called for back-up and the youths fled when more police arrived.
The incident happened after three policemen were hurt a day earlier in a brawl at a Perth bar when another group similarly taunted the police and said their attacks would be deemed as self-defence.
At another incident in a separate pub, a man allegedly abused another man and then ran toward a policewoman and punched her in the face.
A moral blow
WA Police Union chief Mike Dean is understandably concerned that the acquital in Butcher’s case would result in more frequent attacks on the police.
“Unfortunately, it seems to have emboldened all the thugs across our state and once again these incidents look like they were fuelled by alcohol,” he said angrily.
Dean blames “slippery and greedy” lawyers who manipulated the legal system to get their clients acquitted. He also accuses the judges of being “soft” when it comes to sentencing thugs on assault charges against the police.
Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan described the acquittal as a moral blow to his officers, two of whom tendered their resignations to him on the spot and others indicated that they would leave the police services soon.
He is also concerned that if a mandatory jail sentence is not imposed on anyone who attacked police officers, no one would join the police service in future.
But Butcher, who was ruled ineligible for crime injuries compensation because his assailants were not convicted, was positive in his attitude and showed great courage.
He sat in the court during the six-week trial, listened to the damning evidence and watched the video nearly every day and then felt “a huge feeling of disbelief” at the “shocking verdict.”
“It put me into a head spin for the next few hours and it wasn’t until a long time later that it began to sink in,” he said in a personal message of thanks for the support he received from the public and his fellow officers.
“But what has been done has been done. It’s another one of the many chapters that has been closed but there are many chapters left for me. I have been left with permanent disability. I’ll never ever use my left arm or left hand again.
“More importantly, because of my disability I’ll never be able to return to the front-line, and that was my real passion.”
He then appealed to his fellow officers to reconsider their intention to resign.
“I would ask that they don’t lose heart and remain strong and united in protecting the good people in our society.”
LIKE some famous movie stars and top musicians, many men in Australia and other Western nations are more inclined to marry late in life and become fathers when they are in their 40s, 50s and even 60s or 70s.
What they didn’t realise until now is that the children they fathered are at risk of being less intelligent and the performance of their brainpower leaves much to be desired in their early years.
This shocking discovery, the first ever, in a new study of researchers led by world-renowned Australian psychiatrist and brain expert Dr John McGrath, was published last week in a medical journal, PLoS Medicine.
But an interesting contrast is that children born of older women tend to score higher in the same tests designed to measure the ability to think and reason, including concentration, learning, memory, speaking and reading skills.
Whether this has anything to do with older mothers’ better socio-economic status, better health care and health literacy is not known, though Dr Grath’s research noted these conditions.
These factors do not appear to help children fathered by older men in the same way as children of older mothers, he says.
Instead, some kind of biology appears to be at work. As men age, the sperm they produce appears to acquire genetic mutations.
And while the men’s fertility declines with age, the number of damaged sperm which are still able to fertilise a woman’s egg increases.
“It was very clear: If your mother was older, you were doing better. But it went the other way for the dad,” declares Dr McGrath, who is director of Epidemiology and Developmental Neurobiology at Queensland University in Brisbane.
The bespectacled young-looking professor has carried out various research, one of which led to him and his group discovering the importance of pre-natal vitamin D on brain development.
A winner of several national and international awards, Dr McGrath has published 110 peer-reviewed papers, three books and 13 book chapters.
Hitherto, previous studies have linked advanced paternal age to reduced fertility rate and associated problems such as increased risks of birth deformities and neuropsychiatric conditions. For example, becoming fathers at 40 or older has been linked repeatedly in the past to their offspring being at a significantly higher risk of schizophrenia, autism and a rare syndrome that causes facial or skull abnormalities.
Now, it has been discovered for the first time that children fathered by older men have an average score on the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale of six points lower than those fathered by men who were just 20.
Yet all the children have better access to health and educational services.
Although some scientists believe that the 20s and 30s are the ideal years for fatherhood, Dr McGrath stresses that researchers could not yet predict the ideal maternal and paternal age that might result in a healthy, intelligent child.
“Future generations will still be bearing the age-related mutations their fathers, grandfathers or great-grandfathers accumulated,” he says.
Dr McGrath points out that there is no single age threshold at which the risk increases, as is the case with women and Down syndrome after 35, and a continual decline for men.
“We, as a society, need to worry about the age of fatherhood a little bit more than in the past,” he says.
“While everyone is aware of a decline in fertility as we age, maybe the general public needs to be aware that there may be something else happening. We need to work out what underlies this association.”
His group of researchers, who have studied data collected from more than 33,400 American children and parents ranging in age from 14 to 66, has found a correlation between advanced paternal age and lower intelligence scores.
The children were tested at eight months, four years and seven years of age. They were also assessed for their sensory discrimination, hand-eye coordination, reading, spelling and arithmetic ability.
However, some researchers have suggested that children of older mothers might do better because they experience a more nurturing and attentive home environment.
If this is correct, how is it that Dr McGrath’s study did not show the same benefit among children of older fathers?
But his group found that genetics and social factors might play a role in their findings. They say that a woman’s eggs are formed before birth, so DNA may stay relatively stable.
Sperm, on the other hand, is produced over a man’s lifetime and may gain mutations as men grow older, they say.
Despite the impact Dr McGrath’s findings have caused on society, he says humbly that it is “small and preliminary”.
JAYANT Patel was a hard-working man who was hailed as “the teacher of the year” in 1991 and 1992 and received a distinguished physician awards three years later.
The fact that Patel had once worked at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Oregon (United States), a highly respected and quality healthcare organisation with “a halo effect”, made a medical chief in the Australian state of Queensland believe that this man was a “medical missionary” seeking to use his skills to do good for the country.
In fact, India-born surgeon Patel did make it clear that he was not interested in the money but “to look at an opportunity to give back to the community anywhere in the world”.
Later, after he allegedly fooled medical experts to obtain a job here, Patel was named “employee of the month” and offered a four-year contract by a Queensland hospital in Bundaberg, which was in “a state of chaos” with a growing surgery waiting list.
This, according to the hospital’s head nurse Toni Ellen Hoffman, was “a big slap in the face” for her after she had complained of “witnessing troubling episodes week after week” as patients died because Patel allegedly refused to transfer them to the better-equipped hospital in Brisbane.
In many cases, she claimed, patients’ surgical wounds came apart and Patel routinely refused to perform computerised tomography (CT) scans on cancer patients before he operated on them.
In one case, Patel also refused to transfer a man on grounds that he “was not in such a serious condition” after being crushed by a camper van. The man died as a result of his injuries.
Hoffman, who said that blowing the whistle on the surgeon has taken a toll on her life because she was vilified by doctors and politicians who initially defended Patel, had written in her notes: “Dr Patel screamed at the patient’s wife not to cry.”
But the final straw for her, she said, was when she saw the man’s nine-year-old daughter watch her father die.
The allegations emerged in a protracted commital hearing in Brisbane magistrate’s court, which was adjourned last week to be fixed at a later date.
Patel, 58, an American citizen who lives in Portland, Oregon, was extradited to Australia to face 14 charges arising from his job as director of surgery at Bundaberg hospital from 2003 to 2005.
The charges include three of manslaughter and eight of fraud for not disclosing in his employment application that he had been reprimanded by the Oregon State Health Authorities for medical negligence and that his medical licence was cancelled by the New York State Medical Board.
A former professor of surgery at the State University of New York, Patel came to Australia highly recommended by several doctors in Oregon where he had also worked.
But the court was told that he was sacked from his first job at a New York state hospital in 1982 for completing a patient’s medical charts without examining them and failing to properly provide care. He then lied in an application for a job at a second New York hospital and was pulled up before a disciplinary hearing in 1984 and given a three-year probation.
After this, he moved to Portland where he worked at Kaiser Permanente Hospital. After reviewing 79 complaints against him in 1988, Kaiser restricted his practice. He was not allowed to operate on anyone with pancreas or liver problems and he had to seek second opinion in complicated surgical cases.
The Oregon Board of Medical Examiners later cited him for “gross and repeated acts of medical negligence”. Patel eventually surrendered his New York medical licence in 2001 and was unable to get work for more than a year before his resume was sent to the Bundaberg hospital in Queensland in late 2002.
Leading prosecutor Ross Martin told the court that Patel failed to notify the Queensland medical authorities of his past history and tried to cover up his year of unemployment by falsifying the dates on his resume.
“He effectively removed a substantial gap in his career which may have raised questions,” Martin said.
Martin alleged that Patel had misdiagnosed patients, performed surgeries he was barred from doing in the US and, ultimately, severely harmed five patients, three of whom died.
Patel was alleged to have been loud, boastful and insisted on doing very complex and large-scale surgeries that were outside the capabilities of the Bundaberg hospital as it was inadequately equipped.
In a statement to the court, Hoffman said Patel had an unrealistic expectation about what the hospital could handle.
Patel was not required to say anything in his defence until the court ruled at the end of its hearing.
CLIMATE Change Minister Penny Wong is adamant that Australia will begin to turn into a low-pollution economy from July next year despite moves for a parliamentary inquiry into alternatives to the controversial carbon emissions trading scheme.
And she is making it quite clear that the government will set a yet-to-be-announced annual cap on the amount of emissions it produces – a first in Australia’s history.
The exact 2020 target of between 5% and 15% reduction in emissions may depend on the outcome of the world leaders’ conference in Copenhagen later this year.
But the decision to go ahead with the plan emerged last week amid what appeared to be an argument over a call for the inquiry by Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan, who then decided to dump it because “the inquiry was being politicised”.
While the Opposition now seeks to resurrect the inquiry, the Greens want as many experts as possible to advise Parliament on how to design an emissions trading scheme that will “create new jobs and investment in the net zero carbon economy of the future”.
On the other hand, the Business Council of Australia (BCA) is calling on the government to reduce the impact of the plan on business during the economic crisis. It is seeking ways to minimise the initial cost for companies.
The BCA is concerned that companies will not have sufficient cash flow to buy the carbon reduction permits they need or invest in the emission-reducing technologies they have to have and still remain viable.
That aside, there have been some suggestions that the Rudd government was uncertain about its own climate change policy or it did not know what it was really doing.
If the government had a firm policy, why did Swan even think of having an inquiry to consider alternatives to the plan?
Senator Wong, who is Malaysian-born and the first Asian to become a federal minister, was questioned about this in a TV interview last week. She replied that the government understood the importance of providing certainty and had put out a White Paper on its approach to climate change.
Although an inquiry of this nature was not unusual, she said, it was discontinued when the way in which the parliamentary committee was being “interpreted” became clear.
Undoubtedly, as Wong pointed out, this is a hard task of whole-of-economy reform in keeping with Labour’s commitment to the electorate.
For a start, the Rudd government will introduce a Bill in Federal Parliament by the middle of this year in time for the implementation of the carbon reduction trading plan.
If the Opposition and the Greens block the Bill, the plan could be delayed or even deferred. Neither the government nor the environmentalists want this. They would like to see the plan launched as soon as possible.
At the same time, there are also some conservatives among the Opposition who disagree with an ambitious target. Emission control is the integral part of the government plan, which also includes energy efficiency and the reduction of greenhouse gases.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has pledged that part of his latest A$42bil stimulus package will be spent on insulating every home in Australia. This would help reduce the nation’s carbon emissions by some 50 million tonnes, in addition to the minimum 5% reduction of carbon pollution by 2020.
Big manufacturing emitters would have to pay more for their carbon permits. This is aimed at getting them to lower their carbon emissions and help shift Australia into a low-pollution economy.
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull believes that Australia’s emissions trading scheme must be able to work effectively with other schemes internationally. The government should not finalise its emissions trading scheme until it knew what the Americans were going to do, he said.
But Greens Deputy Leader Christine Milne wants Australia’s best scientists to tell Parliament why the government’s 5% to 15% target is “completely inadequate”.
She described the target as a recipe for sabotaging the Copenhagen global talks where, according to her, “the rest of the world wants to talk about a negotiating range of 25% to 40%” emissions reduction.
Not surprisingly, both the Opposition and the Greens have formed what seems to be an unlikely alliance in calling for an inquiry into the much-debated emissions trading scheme.
The Opposition, however, is positioning itself to create the impression that it is more serious about climate change than it has shown previously although it has not announced its own target.
Turnbull did, however, suggest some sort of process of capturing and storing carbon and “bio-char” that turns crop and forest waste into charcoal, which is then returned to the soil.
But, as Wong said: “The most responsible thing to do, even in this economic environment, is to start the hard task of reducing our emissions right now.”
The arguments are varied with various groups, organisations and public opinions suggesting different methods from carbon tax to low fixed price on carbon permits in view of the global financial meltdown that has amplified the negative effects of the government plan.