Talkback radio listeners the nation over gathered to hear the voices of noted intellectuals such as Angry Anderson and Pauline Hanson.

Among the more interesting signs at the rally is this curious offering.

I’m not even vaguely sure what it means, yet he does look rather impressed with his efforts so it must mean something. Seriously, anyone know what on earth he is on about?

Then there was this elaborate creation.

Under a list of disasters to have happened under JuLIAR Gillard are both the NSW and QLD floods. So somehow now Gillard is to blame for anything bad that happens under her Prime Ministership, even if they are natural disasters that she would have no chance of stopping unless she somehow attained godlike powers. Japanese Tsunami, GILLARD’S FAULT. London riots, GILLARD’S FAULT. Transformers 3 GILLARD AGAIN. Van Halen pulling out of Soundwave Revolution GILLARD HOW COULD YOU LET THIS HAPPEN?

Then this curious individual who was treated like a messiah by the crowd.

 

Mr Abbott helped to the podium Victorian truck driver Troy ‘Grover’ Logan, who walked for eight days and 368km from Albury on the NSW-Victorian border to attend the rally.

Why did he walk? Who knows.

 

Mr Logan’s wife Angie said her husband’s campaign had cost him his job, with his trucking company having sacked him for his absence.

Bosses generally don’t like it when you don’t turn up for work. Who knew!

I don’t want to patronise anyone, but earlier today I asked my wife what air was made up of. My wife is a university-educated woman but she couldn’t tell me the gasses that were in air. I reckon she’s like most people who don’t really know that sort of thing. Anyway, air is made up of — and excuse me for rounding the percentages here — about 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen. The nitrogen is a useless, filler gas, and oxygen is the stuff we need. There are also a bunch of trace gasses like argon. There’s also carbon dioxide, which is the gas we’re told is responsible for global warming, and it’s found in air in about the concentration of a tiny fraction of a percent. That’s air.

Now, when we breath in we take in a lungful of air — 80% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, and a range of trace gasses including carbon dioxide — and our bodies use about a quarter of the oxygen. When we breath out can you guess how much carbon dioxide is in our breath? Remember, only a fraction of a percent of this global warming gas went it. Well, we breath out 4% carbon dioxide. That’s right, our bodies actually produce carbon dioxide which we’re told causes global warming. There are seven billion of us on the planet, each of us breathing ever five seconds, or three seconds for children, and each time we breath we produce carbon dioxide.

And you know what? I’ve never heard a single scientist talk about this.

Flushed with pride after pwning the world’s entire scientific community, Oldfield took a call:

Caller: I just think that if they come here they shouldn’t try to make it like it was at home.

Oldfield: Yeah, well you’d think that if things were so bad at home, and things are so much better here — which is why 99.999999% of them apply to come here in the first place — then they wouldn’t want to change this place once they got here.

Caller: Yep. This is not a Muslim country and they should stop trying to make it one.

Oldfield: Well, I don’t think that it’s so much Muslim culture as it is Middle East culture, and people shouldn’t come over here and try to build Middle East culture in the place of Australian culture.

Then Oldfield brought a news story to the attention of his listeners:

Four men have been charged over a credit card skimming scam. Three of them, it turns out, are boat arrivals who are now either citizens or have permanent residency. The government says that its vetting procedures are sound but obviously they’re not.

I just can’t believe this because what we have here is a case of three people accepting Australia’s compassion and then turning around and biting the hand that feeds them.

And finally, Pauline Hanson’s ex-colleague took a call and jumped on the dump button.

Oldfield: We have [caller] on the line. Hello, [caller].

[Caller] (with thick accent): Hello, David. I just wanted to talk about the Jews killing the Muslims.

Oldfield: Um, well, we won’t be allowing that call. We can’t broadcast racism. Racism is when you make sweeping perjorative statements about one group of people instead of restricting those statements to only those individuals for whom those statements might apply.

Got that?

MEDICARE spending on psychological therapy will blow out to $1.5 billion by 2011, twice its budget allocation, according to a new analysis.

Despite the huge investment – three times the original five-year estimates when the scheme began in 2006 – the Federal Government has not released any evidence that the consultations are improving mental health…

Long consultations with psychologists grew fastest – by 32 per cent. But they were used disproportionately by city dwellers, with country people only about 60 per cent as likely to attend them.

The analysis also shows patients are being hit by out-of-pocket expenses likely to be prohibitive for those on lower incomes – an average $35 for 50 minutes with a psychologist.

This result is not surprising, and I’d like to touch on two related points to elucidate the origins of this costly failure:

1. The rebate scheme derived from the Howard government’s fetish for lining private pockets with public funds. (This is a fetish he shares with his ALP State counterparts, and Kevin Rudd, ‘social democratic’ rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding). Rather than invest in the necessary infrastructure and staffing to make mental health work in hospitals and the community, the Government has opted for a market solution here – throw money around, and, rather than actually plan anything, let private psychologists (and their ‘clients’) sort it out. This is transparently magical thinking, but it’s standard practice for man economists and bureaucrats today.

Understandably, private psychologists were themselves happy with this scheme. For everybody else, there is little reason for enthusiasm. Firstly, the range of things that private psychologists cannot do makes them totally unsuitable to be the sole clinicians for many of the ‘mentally ill’. A private psychologist cannot prescribe medication, cannot arrange hospital admissions, or crisis assessments. Consequently, all of the shortfalls that existed in the system prior to this rebate have continued. For instance, a hospital in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley failed to meet 80% of its ‘performance targets’. In short, the $1.5 billion in funding didn’t create a single bed for the suicidal and psychotic. This only intensifies the pressure on the poorly-paid, poorly-funded public services. The consequence is that hospital patients wil continue to be churned through the system, CAT (Crisis Assessment Team) services will continue to minimise risk (i.e. “You’re not at immediate risk, you still have one foot standing on the bridge”) etc.

Moreover, as you’d expect from a market-based approach, private psychology services have been skewed to the benefit of wealthy areas. This has been the case for some years, as evidenced by this 2007 report:

IF YOU live around Hawthorn or Kew, finding a psychologist that Medicare will pay for is a breeze. If you live in Reservoir or Footscray, it’s quite a bit harder. And if you’re unlucky enough to live in a country town such as Ararat, you miss out altogether…

Access to Medicare is generally a good thing, but because health practitioners follow the market, Medicare rebates tend to favour those in wealthier, urban areas where health workers congregate, she says.

This is starkly demonstrated by the distribution of Medicare psychologists. Hawthorn and Hawthorn East, with 55 Medicare psychologists, have more than the Northern Territory, with just 22.

Despite the rebate, private consultation still usually has a cost (which varies widely) due to the ‘gap’ between the rebate and a clinician’s fees. Naturally, this has the effect of making the rebate a kind of ‘middle-class welfare’, that favours those with more disposable income. You can test this hypothesis yourself, using Victoria’s Registry of psychologists to search different areas. Affluent Brighton has many more psychologists than Deer Park, for instance, despite each being roughly similar in terms of population size and distance to the CBD. Meanwhile, the Medicare rebate has furthered the proliferation of charlatan McTherapy franchises who see dollar signs where one ought to see suffering (discretion prevents me from naming them). In short, the market behaves here as one would expect. It follows the money, and is completely incapable of solving a complex problem (namely, that of psychiatric care in Australia).

2. The ‘mental health’ industry, independent of funding issues, is rotten to the core. Where it is not geared (privately) for sheer profit, it is driven (publically) for ‘outcomes’ and ‘KPIs’.  This is most evident wherever you find an acronym somewhere in the ‘mental health’ profession, such as the DSM (the dominant basis for psychiatric diagnosis in Australia) or CBT (the dominant form of ‘therapy’). The rise of these acronymic approaches coincides with what one psychiatrist called ‘the dumbing down of mental health expertise’. The ‘client’ of psychology is, in fact, a human, always with a polyvalent history and complex presentation, but in the dominant paradigms of treatment, he or she is reduced to an inert, imbecilic, and readily-quantifiable object, a constant in the equation, if you like, rather than an ‘x’. In practical terms, this means that GPs and psychiatrists prescribe medication as if patients were guinea pigs. Diagnosis by prescription is common practice, with the workings of almost all psychiatric drugs remaining largely a mystery for researchers, despite the grandiose claims of pharmaceutical companies. A whole range of human phenomena, from unhappiness to grief to anxiety are reconstructed as ‘medical disorder’, and therefore rendered, in principle, amenable to drug treatments.

This is compounded by the DSM system, which ought to be an intellectual embarrassment, but which is used as a lingua franca. Then you have the fromagerie of most ‘treatment’ itself – a mix of ‘self-help’ techniques, and recipe-book style manuals, all of which provide a one-size-fits-all solution to multiplicitous problems. This is explicitly the case for CBT, whose founder, Aaron Beck, says quite plainly that clinicians ought to ignore a patient’s discourse and manifold array of symptoms in order to effect a ‘problem reduction’. Beck says that this reduction is necessary in order to get the ‘client’ to ‘damp down’  his or her ‘inappropriate emotional reactions’, and reintegrating back into the individualistic production line of alienated, competitive, consumer capitalism.

Needless to say, between markets and their ‘therapeutic’ prescriptions, it’s not surprising that Australia still has a problem with  ’mental health’.

TONY JONES: I hear what you’re saying about the earth having been hotter in different periods in its entire global history, but let me ask you this. Have you read the science that we’re talking about here – for example, have you read the IPCC’s report?

TONY ABBOTT: No, I don’t claim to have immersed myself deeply in all of these documents. I’m a politician. I have to rely on briefings – I have to rely on what I pick up through the secondary sources.

But look, I think I am as well versed on these matters as your average politician needs to be.

TONY JONES: But you have read Ian Plimer’s book.

TONY ABBOTT: I haven’t yet finished Ian Plimer’s book. I have started Ian Plimer’s book.

TONY JONES: But you have quoted it from time to time.

TONY ABBOTT: I’ve quoted a couple of passages, and I confess I’m probably more familiar with the book through people who’ve written about it than I am through having read it myself.

TONY JONES: What evidence do you have then for saying that the earth has cooled since the late 1990s.

TONY ABBOTT: Well, I am not setting myself up as the great expert here, but the Hadley Institute in Britain, which is apparently one of the most reputable of these measuring centres, according to press reports, has found that after heating up very significantly in the previous 25 years, there seems to have been a slight cooling, but at a high plateau I’ll accept that.

TONY JONES: That is Ian Plimer’s argument. So when you actually go…

TONY ABBOTT: This is the Hadley Centre – this is measurements.

TONY JONES: I’m about to tell you what the Hadley Centre actually says. When you go and look at what it says about global temperatures you’ll find that they say that the years 1998 to 2006 include the hottest, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth and the sixth hottest years in recorded history.

TONY ABBOTT: And the hottest one was at the beginning and the less hot ones have been since.

And it goes on. To summarise:

• Tony Abbott has not read the IPCC report.
• But he has read Heaven & Earth.
• But he’s only started it.
• But he’s capable of reciting whole passages of it at the drop of a hat even though he hasn’t read it.
• This is because he’s familiar with the book having read people who have written about it.

This is why Andrew Bolt being the intellectual beacon of Liberals is a good thing.

Bring on the next election.

From what I can see of the emails, they prove no such thing. What they do demonstrate, however, is that scientists, and science itself, are fallible, and subject to the vicissitudes of personality and politics (broadly speaking), just like every other aspect of life. To construct an entire conspiracy theory out of this decades-old fact is to therefore be clutching at straws.

None of this ought to be news for the conservatarians, or anybody else, for that matter, except the former have an irrational fear and hatred of all things that smell even vaguely pomo. Because of this, some fairly basic points, such as science being fallible, or occurring within a context that is full of contingencies, are likely to be new and unfamiliar, despite these points having been made, in different ways,  some time ago.

Indeed, Kuhn argued long ago that ‘more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection data’, and that ‘personal and historical accident is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time’.

Note also that, whatever the purported sins of these AGW scientists from East Bumcrack, their scientific failings are utterly trivial when compared to the shenanigans of Big Pharma, for instance, about whom the conservatarians are entirely silent.

We can expect to see plenty more about this on the blogosphere. (Larvatus Prodeo has a thread here — the comments are interesting, though the post itself pulls its punches, IMHO). This is what constitutes a scientific scandal when an entire generation of computer-literate conservatarians have been getting their ‘science’ from Andrew Bolt and Ann Coulter.