Welcome back to another week at Pure Poison. Use this open thread to discuss anything that doesn’t fit the conversation under other posts.
Today is International Women’s Day, and it’s nice to see that some of our conservative commentators are taking the opportunity to raise important women’s issues.
Have at it.
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109 Comments
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There’s an interesting opinion piece by James Hansen in the Australian today. But it does raise a question. In it Hansen advocates a carbon tax approach as opposed to a cap-in-trade approach. I wasn’t aware that James Hansen was an economist with expertise in taxation versus markets. Certainly he is entitled to an opinion about them. But unless he has special expertise in those, it’s not clear why his opinion should carry any more weight than any other layperson. It’s sort of like asking for an opinion piece by an economist on the evidence for/against AGW.
One woman is splashed all over the papers and allegedly asks 1 million dollars for her story….
another one actually achieves something and gets buried somewhere in the sports pages….
http://www.theage.com.au/sport/stephanie-gilmore-wins-laureus-action-sports-award-20100311-pzsu.html?autostart=1
I know which one I want my daughter to look up to!!!
Nowadays, you are famous for doing stuff all!!!!
Gregc09 @101
…but the chances of you getting an effective carbon-reduction strategy out of most economists is hamstrung by their lack of heart to upset the industrial status quo. So perhaps Hansen would be better to listen to than the average economist….
gezzam@ 102 – I agree completely. A nameless someone wanted a higher media profile and now realises what happens when you get what you wished for!
I am getting heartily tired of the Coalition’s party line on virility. The orchestrated
( should that be “orcastrated?) campaign to show Abbott in his smalls at every opportunity is bad enough…..now today we have Christopher Pyne describing the Coalition maternity-leave scheme as “virile”. What effing eff!?? “Virile”….? Let me get that straight : from the Latin word for “man”, we have a “manly” maternity-leave scheme?
They’re making a laughing-stock of themselves again.
monkeywrench @103
fair enough, though again why Hansen’s opinion regarding an economic-related question probably holds no more weight than say, your’s or mine. I have no quibble with him commenting on the climate change science. That’s his domain of expertise. But I’m not convinced he has anything to add to the tax versus cap-in-trade debate beyond the rest of us. There are actually people who spend their research careers trying to understand better the pros and cons regarding taxes and market approaches. Lets hear from them.
monkeywrernch: I know exactly what you mean. I choked on my coffee this morning when I read this:
Is someone who has a fear of the Predatory Tone a Tonaphobic?
I noticed that no one seems to have had a go at Paul Sheehan lately.
As someone who works in the health industry, there was one statement in his most recent opinion piece that stuck out above all else: “for every 20 doctors and nurses providing primary care there are an estimated 30 bureaucrats administering what they do, how they are paid and how much patients are recompensed”.
I refer to http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/pubs/2009/pdf/annualreport09_249-272.pdf, where it shows: “Medical, nursing, allied health, other health professionals, scientific and technical staff, oral health practitioners & ambulance clinicians as a proportion of all staff %” – 72.3% as at June 2009.
The 27.7 % not included in this category is broken down into a few other broad categories, which I wont go into. Suffice it to say very few are “bureaucrats”.
I also noticed, in that same quote, that he appears to misuse the term “primary care”. Ordinarily this might not matter, since the meaning is clear from the context of his article. But in the broader context of the current health debate it is important to know that “primary care” usually does NOT mean hospital care, which is what he was commenting on.
One of the laudable aims of Nicola Roxon’s recent proposals, as I understand it, is to try to encourage Australians to make a much greater use of “primary care” (ie GP’s, etc) to keep them out of hospitals.
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