Month: January 1995

Dangerous drugs, cash and assets handling at Melba Health Centre have been attacked by an internal audit prompted by an employee’s whistle-blowing.

A copy of the audit, by Coopers and Lybrand, obtained by The Canberra Times revealed that many of the employee’s allegations about sloppy cash and drug handling procedures and missing assets were correct.

No procedures to ensure all cash received is receipted and banked. No procedures to ensure Medicare bulk-billing reflected the nature of the consultation provided. Nearly half the items on the assets register could not be found at the centre.
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ACT Opposition Leader Kate Carnell called yesterday for an urgent review of all seven government-run health centres following defects found in procedures at the Melba centre by an independent audit. She said the audit had revealed lack of security over cash; no monitoring of assets; missing assets; drugs not secured in accordance with the Dangerous Drugs Act; purchase irregularities; flextime and leave irregularities. The Government had had the report by Coopers and Lybrand for nearly a month and had not made it public. “”Concerns about practices at Melba Health Centre have been expressed by former staff members for more than a year,” she said.

“”The Government has ignored these concerns and has allowed some fairly dubious practices to continue unchecked.” There was a need for a review across the system, she said. The Minister for Health, Terry Connolly, said the Government took allegations by employees of malpractice seriously and that was why it had commissioned the independent audit. It would deal with the specific findings about Melba and any systemic faults found by the audit would be looked at across all the health centres. All centres were subject to regular departmental review and review by the Auditor-General.

The “”whistle-blower” who drew attention to irregularities at Melba Health Centre last year says she has been victimised and her career ruined as a result. An independent audit by Coopers and Lybrand confirmed her assertions of irregularities over the procedures for handling of petty cash, drugs and assets at the centre, but could not come to any conclusion about other assertions about misuse of cars and phones. The “”whistle-blower”, a practitioner nurse, said yesterday that she had been rewarded with an “”inefficiency action” _ which can lead to dismissal or transfer. The nurse did not want to be named for fear of reprisals and did not want specific staff or doctors at the centre named for fear of defamation actions. She said that some of the staff and doctors were not involved in the irregularities or the victimisation.

The Minister for Health, Terry Connolly, said her allegations had been taken seriously. An independent audit had been sought. The efficiency matter was separate and being looked at by the Merit Protection Review Agency, so he could not comment on that. The acting chief executive of the Department of Health, Heidi Ramsay, said the employee had not been victimised and there was no link between the her allegations and the inefficiency procedures. The nurse said that when she had started work at the centre in January 1993 she had noticed drugs not being kept in accordance with the Dangerous Drugs Act, that staff were misusing petty cash and other irregularities. She had tried to fix things by setting an example. “”I moved the drug trolley out of the public foyer many times into my room,” she said. “”I had to fit my own lock to the drugs cupboard in my room.” She would not join the “”so-what” attitude about drugs and petty cash. She got the impression that as a result the staff, with rare exception, did not like her.
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The stark figure of $2.5 million in rent and maintenance arrears being written off by the ACT Housing Trust smacks of mismanagement. True, it represents more than just the past year’s unpaid rent. In fact it is several year’s arrears. That may lessen the overall annual amount, however, it also indicated that the problem must have gone on longer than what should have been acceptable. The amount has to be put in context. There are some 100,000 dwellings in ACT, 12.5 per cent are Housing Trust dwellings. It means there are about 12,500 Housing Trust dwellings in the ACT. The $2.5 million, therefore, is on average $200 a dwelling. That is about one a half week’s rent per dwelling. It is difficult to imagine the private sector being caught out in such a way. No-one wants the Housing Trust to behave totally like the private sector. The private sector is in the housing sector purely for profit. The Housing Trust has social obligations. The trust’s tenants are typically people with children, without jobs and without much cash _ the very people shunned by private-sector landlords and the very people unable to post bonds that could obviate the possibility of tenants leaving with unpaid rent. There are some signs that this write-off is an attempt to clean the slate and begin with a new regime. Now is a good time for that. To some extent Canberra’s public-housing administration has been a victim of the recession. While other states slumped in the recession and had long public-housing waiting lists, Canberra was seen as a place of higher employment and opportunity and shorter public-housing lists. It attracted interstate tenants. With the recession ended, some tenants and left _ and left unpaid bills behind them.

Naturally, in an election environment, the issue has become a political one. Opposition housing spokesman Greg Cornwell is rightly appalled at the writing off of such an amount with the stroke of a pen. On the other hand, the Minister for Housing, David Lamont, said the bad debts had been one of the reasons for a review of the ACT Housing Trust. Whether that review solves the problem is another matter. It will be impossible to eliminate arrears in public housing. If rent is behind it is very difficult to throw children into the street because of the misdeeds of parents. However, some steps have been taken by the Act Housing Trust to help. A scheme to take rent directly from pay and social welfare payments has been introduced after some soul-searching. It seemed a little patronising. However, many tenants, especially those with dependant children, were no doubt pleased to see the rent come out of wages or welfare payments before their spouse could spend it on other things. It is this sort of lateral-thinking, educative approach that will marry the social aims of public housing with the administrative aims of getting the rent in.
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The Senate inquiry into ABC operations is providing a useful public questioning of the role of the ABC _ in particular whether it should engage in pay television. More generally, other questions arise. What is the rationale of even having a public broadcaster? How should it be funded? What should be its programming philosophy? In the early days of television a fairly cumbersome system of user-pays through licences was in place. The theory was that the fees paid for government provded television infrastructure and the ABC.

Not everyone had television so why should non-users subsidise users. Before long, however, virtually everyone got television and licences were scrapped. The ABC became totally taxpayer dependent. As a result, in the 1980s, it ran into the same fiscal pressure as every other publicly funded body in the nation. In the ABC’s case, questions were asked about user-pays. The vast bulk of viewers tuned to commercial channels; why should they subsidise the very few (usually from high socio-economic groups) who watched the ABC? Questions were asked about the ABC’s efficiency and range of functions. What was it doing financing orchestras? And the ABC was pushed to become more commercial by raising more of its own money. In its defence, the ABC develped an expertise in self-promotion and self-preservation. The unfortuate consequence has been, however, that it has to some extent encouraged judgment of its functions in purely dollar terms. The famous eight-cents-a-day campaign comes to mind. The message was “”high quality service for trivial cost”. It may have had some public impact, but it did not fool government decision-makers who could quickly multiply the eight cents, the days and viewers and arrive at the $500 milllion a year bottom line _ a big ticket Budget item in any department’s language. The call for justification continued. Clearly, the ABC cannot justify itself in purely financial or technical terms. Despite a decade of debacles on the commercial side, no-one seriously challenges the proposition that the Australian private sector is technically and financially capable of putting to air (or cable) several television services, and that without the ABC Australia would still have financially viable and technically sound television services. So the subsidy has to be justified on other terms.
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The NSW Minister for Education, Virginia Chadwick, launched some controversial guidelines on teacher performance this week and ACT educators will be looking across the border with some interest. The aim of the guidelines is sound: ensuring teachers perform and that those who do not should be given the chance to improve and failing that be out.

Parents have a right to expect their children are not taught by unsatisfactory teachers. Precisely how to test the performance of teachers, however, is a more difficult issue. In other fields of human endeavour, measurement of performance is far easy: profit figures, production figures, client assessments and assessments by managers are usually good indicators. Such measurements in the classroom, especially primary and lower secondary classes, are meaningless in the present public education environment. In public schools, profit is not a motive and in any event is not a sound base for educational standards. In the absence of external exams or other objective outcomes testing throughout the education system, the production approach is impossible. As a general rule, children are not in a position to measure the performance of teachers. And assessments by managers _ in this case school principals _ has its difficulties.
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On a superficial level it appears that the sort of crime associated with late-night drinking has shifted from Civic to Manuka. The impression has been gained for several events, notable last New Year’s Eve where the unruly crowds of previous years appeared in Manuka. Last weekend problems arose again in Manuka, this time in the form of vandals hitting cars in the covered carpark in Manuka. Traders immediately called for a change in the law on drinking hours. The Attorney-General, Terry Connolly, has commendably not gone for the knee-jerk response. Rather he has referred the question to the Community Safety Committee.

This committee was responsible for the Civic by Night report which made recommendations that appear to have had beneficial effect in Civic. Those recommendations appear to have worked because they were not knee-jerk and they attempted to solve the problem with a range of measures: police, licensees and transport. Changing licence hours alone will do nothing. The experience of prohibition in the United States showed that people will get their grog from somewhere. The better response is multi-faceted. Licensees have to be convinced to act more responsibly with under-age drinking and serving intoxicated people. A greater on-the-ground presence of police forces is needed. Better late-night public transport is needed to prevent drink-driving. It may be, however, that the sort of vandalism seen in Manuka has deeper causes: unemployment and general alienation from society.

It is certainly true than changing drinking hours would not have prevented the vandalism at the weekend: it is common ground that it occurred between 9pm and 2am. The closing hours issue is centred on whether places outside Civic should close at 4am. So it may be that the few Manuka incidents this year do not represent a full-scale shift of the drink-crime problem from one location to another. The important point is that treating the causes of crime is more important than treating the symptoms. In the ACT, some very worthwhile work is being done with making criminals meet their victims so they can understand the grief and anger they cause and held repair the damage.

This is not as spectacular nor as easy as announcing huge increases in penalties (for people who may never be caught), but it is more effective. Being tough on causes of crime rather than symptoms may have become a political cliche in recent months. None the less it is true. Whether politicians can live up to it, however, is another matter. It may be that some will mouth the cliche and not do the unspectacular work of attacking the symptoms. Mercifully, even in this election environment we are not being treated to some of the idiocy seen in other states and territories where politicians, out for a quick vote, chant “”lock them up”.

The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Housing, Brian Howe, is quite right to be concerned about the state of Australia’s housing stock and its inefficiency and therefore its inability to provide housing for those most in need. He is right to say something ought to be done about it. However, all the indications are that the Government will look at the issue in isolation; it will deal with symptoms not causes. Mr Howe expressed his concern at the launch last week of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report entitled Public Housing in Australia. The report said that 216,000 households were waiting for public housing. It would cost some $8.6 billion to satisfy the demand. Australia has about 370,000 public houses. The trouble is, Mr Howe points out, that many houses built for families have only one or two occupants. In privately owned homes one house in three has two or more vacant bedrooms. He argues therefore there is a massively underused capacity, especially when there are so many without housing. He wanted the private and public sectors to work together to iron out the imbalance. He foreshadowed a National Housing Payment Scheme to help low-income renters in the private sector so that no-one had to pay more than 30 per cent of their income in rent _ a sort of housing Medicare.

He pointed out that rent assistance is the Commonwealth’s fastest growing social-justice program, with annual payments rising from $225 million in 1984-85 to $1.4 billion in 1993-94. Mr Howe may be proud of those figures, but in fact they demonstrate failure. If the Government keeps pouring money in so people can get into the private housing market, any first-year economics student knows that the result will be higher rents. As demand goes up; so do prices. So the more the Commonwealth pays in rent subsidies, the higher rents will go. But the housing situation is more profound than that. A huge range of factors determine how and where people house themselves and how much it costs. Housing cannot be looked at in isolation. The inefficiency of the housing stock is partly due to government policy and administration _ mainly state government policy. Put simply, the actions of state government make it extremely costly for people to move to more suitable housing. Typically, young families face a choice of extending an existing house or moving to a larger house. Similarly, older couples face the choice of staying in a large house after children have left, or of moving. State Government policy makes extending more attractive. Moving house entails very large, punitive stamp duties.
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As the fighting in Chechnya enters its sixth week, the diplomatic hypocrisy rings clear in the silence of western governments. They have said only what a shame there has been such bloodshed _ no condemnation of its cause no support for those who democratic aspirations are being fired upon. It is as if they regretted the ineptitude of the Russian conscripts and the tenacity of the Chechen resisters. Such an untidy inconvenience. What a pity it could not have been wrapped up in a couple of days and then put out of the world’s conscience as Russia merely dealing with an internal affair _ an internal affair, the diplomatic euphemism for turning a blind eye to repression of minorities and oppositions. What a bitter irony in the conduct of world affairs that western governments pretending to follow the great tradition of President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points should so blindingly support President Boris Yeltsin in the name of supporting democracy. The Cold War is dead but it rules western diplomacy from its grave.

The Soviet police state so joyously disbanded has regrouped. Chechnya joins Timor, Tibet and Burma on the sell-out list. Democracy is fine as long as it is not inconvenient, as long as it does not upset the power plays. Both western governments and Boris Yeltsin are foolishly mistaken if they believe that the resistance can be defeated in a short time. The historic pattern is that people with common language and culture will not abandon their hopes for independence, nor will people endlessly tolerate repression by external or internal rulers. The sooner that is recognised and western governments pressure Mr Yeltsin into unconditional talks the better. Mr Yeltsin present policy of refusing to talk to the Chechen leader Dzhokhbar Dudayev is painfully short-sighted _ not only for the people of Chechnya and the Russian soldiers needlessly sacrificed in the fighting, but also for Mr Yeltsin himself. What does he hope to gain? Does he want power over the Chechen people?
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The sympathy of the world will be extended to Japan and particularly the people of Kobe whose city was severely damaged by earthquake this week. Nature can strike in a capricious and arbitrary way. It does not distinguish between the affluent and the poor or the developed and undeveloped. But its fall-out does. None is immune from human suffering, but the history of century’s earthquakes and many other natural disasters shows that more affluent societies usually get proportionately fewer deaths and injuries. This is because the infrastructure in those societies is that much better. Buildings and transport links are built stronger. Emergency services are more sophisticated; they can rescue more people more quickly and treat them better.

Aid usually comes more quickly to the stricken part of the nation. That said, no matter how affluent a nation is, present technology will not match the awesome forces of the movement of tectonic plates. Japan has invested awesome sums in earthquake prediction, setting up a system of under-sea and coastal monitors. The theory is that a big quake comes after a series of small ones. That apparently did not help this week. It is true that the bulk of Japan’s earthquake-prediction system is geared at the Pacific plate and Tokyo rather than the Philippine plate which caused this week’s quake, none the less, earthquake prediction seems a very risky insurance policy. Indeed, California _ which is also on a major fault line _ has abandoned the philosophy, instead spending the money on improving building control, building better buildings and strengthening existing ones.
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