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world politics - Rainbow Reporter

Criminalising HIV/AIDS

November 18th 2008 20:24

Justice Michael Kirby gave the 2008 Burnet Institute Oration Monday

Monday night I had the privilege of meeting Justice Michael Kirby, and hearing him speak at the Burnet Institute on the nexus between human rights and combating HIV/AIDS.

He’s worried about the rising tendency around the world for governments to use the criminal law to try to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS, and indeed is working with the UN and WHO on the issue.

Justice Kirby argues that the unique nature of the HIV epidemic – the modes of transmission, the lack of a cure or vaccine – means it has to be handled like no other epidemic. It cannot be handled just by medical means. Human rights are also an essential part of an effective response.

The argument goes something like this - and I should say these are my words, not Justice Kirbys.

Those most at risk from HIV are sex workers, men who have sex with men, and injecting drug users. Where those activities are illegal, people are reluctant to seek treatment or information on how to protect themselves, because that could identify them as ‘criminals’ and they could end up in jail. That makes controlling the spread of HIV more difficult.

For example, in the US, the ‘war on drugs’ has made it politically impossible to legalise needle exchange programs and safe injecting rooms. Hopefully, with the election of the new president, the US will come to its senses on this. As a result injecting drug users are one of the main transmission routes for HIV.

Where needle exchanges are possible, as in Australia, the numbers are tiny. In short, respecting human rights is essential in an effective response to HIV.

It’s also pretty stupid to put HIV infected people into jails, especially if you’re not going to provide safe-sex information, condoms and clean needles in there. That just turns them into HIV transmission factories.

At first sight, prosecuting people who infect others with the virus might sound attractive, but using the criminal law is problematic, to say the least. In some African countries, where a large percentage of the population is infected, it’s clearly unworkable. You can’t lock up half a country. The economy couldn’t stand the cost. The temptation – especially for an autocratic regime – could be to make it a capital offence. Bullets are way cheaper than jail cells.

What makes it worse is that the police and judiciary may be corrupt. People who think they might be jailed or shot if the authorities knew they were HIV positive are not going to disclose their status readily – even (or perhaps especially) to government health agencies set up to provide treatment. Nor are people going to seek out prevention advice, if this might bring them under suspicion.

Then there’s the question of how you define the ‘crime’. Do you make it illegal to knowingly pass on the virus, or to intentionally pass on the virus?

If it’s knowingly, then potentially any HIV positive person could be arrested for having unprotected sex with an uninfected partner. It could be tricky to prove you didn’t know you were infected: it could be argued, for example, that given your mode of life, you ought to have known you could be infected.

If it’s intentionally, then it’s similar to assault, with the virus as your weapon, but then there are problems proving – or disproving – intent.

Not to mention the near-impossibility, even in well-run and sophisticated countries, of proving scientifically that a particular sex act led to sero-conversion. That means identifying the specific strain of HIV involved and then showing it could only have been passed on from x to y during sex-act z. It's so difficult, in fact, that charges here in Australia have been dropped because proof was impossible to obtain.

But – horror scenarios in autocratic countries aside - if you don’t have criminal sanctions available as a last resort, how do you deal with someone who is determined to spread the virus? As recent cases have shown, there are some people who ignore medical attempts at behaviour modification and control. At what point do you decide that their human rights are less important than those of the people being infected without their knowledge?

Under Victorian public health law, that decision is made by doctors. You can be quarantined indefinitely – effectively imprisoned – if you’re deemed to be a danger to others. But should we really be giving doctors, rather than the law, the power of indefinite detention?

Although I don’t doubt the integrity of Australian doctors, it seems to me that to have your fate decided in secret by a committee of health experts is not acceptable in a democratic society. Recent cases, where the doctors dithered for far too long before involving the police, indicate they they’re uncomfortable with the judge/jury/jailer role, too.

There are no easy answers. Wholesale criminalisation is counter-productive, yet we must retain criminal sanctions as a last resort. I wish Justice Kirby well in his discussions at the UN and the WHO - but I don't envy him.

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Posted By: Doug Pollard - Category: HIV, AIDS, Australian politics, US politics, world politics

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Bring back the deficit, it's nothing to fear

November 9th 2008 22:18

NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF

It's time to rehabilitate public entreprises, government deficits and nationalisation and reverse the failed Americanisation of the Australian economy.

Cutting interest rates will not stave off recession. When banks are afraid to lend, businesses afraid to borrow, and consumers pay down debt and start saving because they fear losing their jobs, the answer is for the government to step in and create businesses and jobs.

There are so many things that have been allowed to wither and rot in the name of economic reform, which should now be revived.

Public utilities: privately owned public services like water, roads, telecommunications, gas, electricity, transport, superannuation, health and education are a contradiction in terms.

They are services, not businesses, and introducing the profit motive into their operations distorts them to the extent that they cease to adequately fulfil their service function.

And privatising them shifts the risk from those best able to afford it – business and government – to those least able to stand any loss – the private individual. You only have to look to see that in place of large government debt, we now have large private debt. The national debt is still there, it’s just been privatised.

Privatisation means services are no longer targeted at areas of need, but at areas where they can reap profits. For example, public transport is plentiful in high income inner-cities, but largely absent in lower income outer suburbs, because private transport companies are only interested in milking the existing infrastructure for what they can get. They don’t want to spend money building tram and rail lines, where any return is uncertain, and years in the future.

Similar distortions occur in housing: new housing is built where land is cheap, far from the city centre. This then generates the need for transport, which is met by privately owned toll roads. But the real needs are for lower cost inner city and near-city suburban housing, and low cost public transport to the outer regions – but these are ‘too expensive’ for private enterprise to provide.

Private schools and private hospitals also tend to follow the money, not the need. They have to, in order to survive.

There are immense benefits to be had from government building, owning and operating these services. They provide jobs, both directly and indirectly. Lots of them now, a smaller number down the track when the crisis has abated. They do not waste government money on placating shareholders, investors and banks – it stays here in Australia. They can be targeted so as to help meet greenhouse targets, e.g., reduce car use. They improve the liveability of the city. And much more.

Melbourne’s first priority ought to be a massive expansion of public transport, with a doubling of the area covered by the tram and rail networks – cleaner, greener and more efficient than buses. That’s the state government role.

Build the tracks, components, rolling stock here in Australia, and if the companies to do it don’t exist, create them – and export their products overseas to help our deficit. That’s the federal government role.

Australia needs to stop exporting raw materials and start making and exporting finished goods. The federal government needs to build, own and operate businesses to do this, and when times improve, they can be auctioned off if necessary. But for now, this is the governments job. Time to get on with it Kevvie, because cutting interest rates and propping up the banks is only going to save them. Your job is to save us.

There is another, human dimension to this. In the days when there were many government-owned enterprises, the government had the means at its disposal to create lots of jobs. These were, by and large, pretty secure jobs. In return for that security, they didn’t pay as well as the private sector.

Public enterprises – usually monopolies – did tend to be slow and bureaucratic compared to their private counterparts, thanks to the lack of competition. But they did have significant benefits which we need to recapture, especially in a recession.

Because they were slow and cautious, and not constrained by the need to make a profit, they tended to be safer. Rail operators and airlines didn’t put off or outsource maintenance to save money, for example. And while private companies may be individually more efficient, industries as a whole tend to become less efficient after privatisation because of the proliferation of companies duplicating various functions. See Melbourne’s public transport system.

Public enterprises also employed a lot of people who would have struggled in the private sector. People who preferred a less-pressured life. People who had family responsibilities that prevented them from being 24/7 workers. People whose highest priority in life was not the next BMW. People who, in a privatised economy, are more likely to be on some sort of public benefit.

Ask yourselves which is better. More people supporting themselves, providing service to the public, able to live independently, or more people on the dole, with low self esteem, poorer health, and a drain on the public purse?

It’s been said that the price of this was inefficient and wasteful public companies – but how much of that so-called ‘waste’ was paying salaries to people the private sector holds in contempt because they are not as ferociously selfish and competitive as business would like? How much was spent giving people with disabilities, older workers, minorities, working mothers and others the ability to contribute to society and feel useful.

As to inefficiency, it seems to me a little frustration and delay in getting your phone lines installed is a small price to pay for that. Not that the frustration and delay seem to have lessened any since privatisation.

In fact, privatisation is a misnomer. It was, and is, the sale of publicly owned assets and businesses that used to be run for the benefit of ordinary Australians, to companies that run them for the benefit of their executives and shareholders, who may be anywhere in the world. It’s time to bring them home.

Yes, it will cost, and that means deficits and taxes. So what? Right now we’re all carrying large personal debts, which the sensible among us are busy paying down. In future we might be paying larger taxes instead. But instead of an arid McMansion stranded on the outskirts of a city we can’t afford to visit, stuffed with plasma TVs and other deterioriating, soon-to-be obsolete gadgets, we could have a sustainable city country and future for our kids. Pretty much of a no-brainer, really.

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Posted By: Doug Pollard - Category: Australian politics, world politics

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Cometh the hour, cometh Obama

October 26th 2008 06:13

Watching the US election reminded me why, after twelve months trying to fit in, I simply could not live there. The relentless trivialisation of just about everything; the violence and poverty under the glitzy tissue-paper wrapping; at least half the population crushed into superstitious idiocy by the worst public health, welfare and education systems outside the third world; the selfish unwillingness of the other half to take any kind of responsibility for any of the problems in case it cost them money; the sheer gullibility of the majority that brought home the truth of the old saying, ‘there’s one born every minute.’

Yes, there is, and if you cannot parent them adequately because you have to work two or three jobs just to survive, cannot give them a decent education because most public schools are little more than armed concentration camps for juveniles and people won’t pay adequate taxes to fund them, cannot feed them properly because junk food is the king of the supermarket as well as the fast-food outlets, cannot give them proper health care because your employer won’t cover it and the public system is broken, again because people won’t vote the taxes . . . . well, it’s a miracle any Americans make it through as undamaged, optimistic and downright good as they mostly turn out to be.

Most Americans know all this in their hearts, though a kind of naive childlike patriotism makes them deny it to outsiders. Obama may be just another piece of glittery tissue paper to wrap this heap of shit in. The US is good at throwing up good, well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual ‘leaders’ who are more image than substance. It’s that lack of a proper critical education at work again – so many are incapable of sustained analytical thought.

But it could also be that Obama is the real deal – and even if he isn’t, the times may turn him into it. A major depression, like a war, has a way of showing up the inadequate, like Hoover or George W, but also a way of sometimes turning dross into gold.

The British people did not like Winston Churchill, and for the longest time did not trust him – and with good reason. He was a stubborn ruthless war-mongering aristocrat, pickled in alcohol and cigar smoke, prone to fierce depressions overcome only by his towering arrogant belief in his own privilege and importance. In short, he had the temperament of a dictator, making him the perfect man to stand up to and ultimately defeat Hitler, even if he had to destroy the Empire and very nearly the United Kingdom, too, in order to do it. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

So it may not matter that Obama is relatively inexperienced in high politics, for as a brutal depression takes hold in the States, who would want an experienced old hand who would merely follow the worn out, useless and wholly inadequate policies of the past that got the country into the mess it’s in? Why not a man with new ideas, what appears to be considerable personal integrity, and sufficient political ruthlessness to work the machine when necessary.

Obama is not a messiah – no-one is – and he will undoubtedly exhibit the usual feet of clay and disappoint many. But in the coming storm, is it better to trust a sick old man or a vigorous new one? Advised, and in a catastrophe replaced, by a seasoned older political operator, or by a woman with a certain amount of superficial folksy charm who sets the apparatus of the state on others, including her relatives by marriage, when they cross her?

Obama may not win. There are many troubled people in the US who would not shy from contemplating assassination. Obama is an unusual American. George W Bush – superficially charming, fond of a drink, somewhat lazy, not especially bright, content to let others run things while he plays with the Presidential baubles, a strong sense of entitlement to what he has not in fact worked for but has come to him by birth and luck, ultimately the puppet of people stronger and nastier than himself whom he tolerates because they keep him where he is, turning a blind eye to the ‘collateral damage’ his actions cause – is far closer to the typical American.

But the times are far from typical. The whole world is on the edge of a major depression. The human race is poisoning, polluting and overpopulating the only home we have, and the damage is accelerating. Obama may be a tad callow right now, but the fire is coming to anneal him. Cometh the hour, cometh the man – we can but hope.

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Posted By: Doug Pollard - Category: US politics, elections, world politics

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Not so safe as (Australian) houses

October 12th 2008 22:47

Pic by Rough Rider Blog

Well, it’s finally here. The recession we really have to have. And it won’t be over for a while. There’s a lot of talk about how Australia will ‘probably’ have a ‘relatively soft’ landing – but there’s an elephant in the room.

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'Vagina Monologue' author nails Palin

September 21st 2008 01:51

Burning the Earth

Sometimes someone else says it better than you ever can. Like now

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Posted By: Doug Pollard - Category: US politics, elections, ecology, world politics

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Welcome to the Socialist Republic of America

September 18th 2008 04:28

Back in the USSA

Funny isn’t it? US politics is entirely lacking a left wing – there is only a centre right, and an extreme right. Both parties believe in letting the market run free, don’t interfere with business, abhor public ownership . . . . .

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Posted By: Doug Pollard - Category: US politics, world politics

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