Bound by birthright: who will succeed to the British throne?

LONDON

KATE emerged from hospital on Thursday – thin, pale and puffy-eyed but with her trademark dimples on show – with a bunch of bright yellow roses held firmly in front of the current abode of the next royal heir.
The Duchess of Cambridge is due to spend the next little while lying low at Kensington Palace, being nursed through the difficult start to her pregnancy. William is due to return to his work with the RAF and must, around Christmas-time, decide whether to re-enlist for another three years.
He is known to be keen to stay in uniform rather than move to full-time royal duties. He knows that, otherwise, there could be decades of ribbon-cutting ahead; after all, his father, at 64, is still waiting for the big gig. If the Queen has inherited her mother’s longevity, Charles could be in the wings for another 15 years, by which time he would be 79.
The news that there is about to be a third heir to the throne has prompted royal historian Michael Thornton to suggest that, given his age and his history of improper political interference, it would be best for Britain if Charles stepped aside from the succession in favour of a much more popular younger generation.
He cites international precedent, pointing out that the Count of Barcelona renounced his rights to the Spanish throne in 1977 in favour of his then 39-year-old son, the current King Juan Carlos I.
But Charles is probably incapable of such self-sacrifice, Thornton writes in the Daily Mail: “For Charles is a man prone to self-pity and faltering self-esteem and has described his hugely privileged existence as Prince of Wales as ‘a comfortable form of inherited imprisonment’. He remains obsessively intent on claiming his birth-right as our next King, regardless of the effect this may have on his country or the institution of the monarchy.
“His behaviour in recent years has bordered on the unconstitutional. His bombardment of government ministers with interfering and meddlesome letters – known in Whitehall as the notorious ‘black spider memos’ on account of his often indecipherable hand-writing – has become a barely suppressed political scandal . . . ”
Thornton then goes on to describe a series of political skirmishes, legal changes and court battles to shield from public view a series of more than 27 “particularly frank” letters written by Charles to various departments, including the Cabinet Office. The High Court ruled in September that there was “an overwhelming public interest” in releasing them. This was overturned by the Attorney-General on the basis that if Charles “forfeits his position of political neutrality as heir to the throne, he cannot easily recover it when he is king”. That decision is now going to the High Court.
All of which seems to confirm that Charles’ letters do constitute political interference, verboten under Britain’s system of constitutional monarchy.
Thornton, author of Royal Feud: The Queen Mother and the Duchess of Windsor, argues that a King William V and Queen Catherine would be cleanskins; they have no political agendas and are liked for their kindness and genuine interest in ordinary people.
Well, yes. But they are also liked because they are young; he is handsome and she is pretty; and they seem to genuinely love each other. Like the Obamas, even in public they exchange warm glances and light touches and laughter. The cameras adore them, and so do the people watching at home; the Cambridges are an embodiment of the fairytale, of happily-ever-aftering.
At least for now. But no matter what difficulties may follow, they have a huge head start on Charles and Diana, who began in a loveless marriage – at least on his side – that rapidly disintegrated into one of mutual loathing.
Diana may be gone but she is not forgotten. Chatting to English people socially, it seems that men mostly wish Charles well and think it’s fair enough he should be happy at last. But women, even younger ones, are more likely to be bitter over what they saw as the manipulation and abuse of his young first wife.
And some, like Daily Mail letter-writer Marie, despise them both, describing Charles as “an egocentric adulterer brutal enough to ground his wife so that she snaps and totally goes berserk” and Diana as “twisted and conniving”: “And now Charles wants to be king and head of the Church of England – a character like him the head of the Church of England!”
But her view is no longer that of the majority. After years of public opinion polls suggesting Britons wanted William on the throne instead of Charles, a poll just after the Jubilee found people now favour a Charles and Camilla reign. Fifty-one per cent wanted Charles crowned, although a sizeable rump (40 per cent) still preferred William.
But polls on this issue do not matter. The monarchy is not a popularity contest. There is a queue and it will be observed, barring mischance. As one male Scottish reader of the Daily Mail commented, “Let’s skip a generation because we have a shiny young attractive couple who photograph well . . . perhaps if the child is very cute we could have the Queen put down?”
So perhaps a more interesting question is the apparently trivial one of the child’s name. As Rowan Pelling pointed out in The Telegraph, this baby will lend its name to an age, as Elizabeth I did to an era, Georges III and IV did to architecture, and Victoria did to old-fashioned rectitude and empire.
“The Duchess of Cambridge . . . has to find a name that pleases her husband, her in-laws, Burke’s Peerage, the Commonwealth, Hollywood and the global army of royal-watchers. It must not sound incongruous when prefaced with the title Queen or King, which rules out a tribute to her mother Carole” – Carole, presumably, being seen as a middle-class name.
But this babe of a modern age, brought into being in a brave new world that says a commoner is fit to carry a future monarch, and a queen can rule as well as a king, will live under one old ban that has not changed. While the 16 Commonwealth countries have agreed to overturn the rule of primogeniture under which a brother always gazumped a sister in line to the throne, that gilded seat is still forbidden to Catholics.
Meanwhile, the baby bonanza has begun for the mercantile classes, with one pottery producing commemorative mugs with “A royal baby in 2013” on one side and “Hooray for Will and Kate” on the other. Along with Kate, Britain’s outnumbered republicans are reaching for the anti-nausea pills for what will be a long haul.

First published in The Age.

Crusading lawyer drops a bomb or two

LONDON
GEOFFREY Robertson thinks he might owe his existence to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. At the time his father, an Australian fighter pilot, was due to be part of the Allied invasion of Japan. “He was due to report to naval headquarters on the very day that news of Hirohito’s surrender crackled over the wireless,” Robertson writes in his new book. “Instead of reporting for duty, he telephoned the women’s air force corporal he had taken out in Townsville, and proposed.”
It was the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima that gave the emperor his excuse to surrender; without it, his father might well have been one of hundreds of thousands more soldiers to die in the conflict, Robertson says.
That knowledge has always tempered his view of nuclear weapons, which he did not regard as an unmitigated evil. But in his new book, Mullahs Without Mercy: Human Rights and Nuclear Weapons, the international human rights lawyer takes a tough stand. He says it is time the world called the construction and use of the bomb a human rights atrocity, and set up systems to prevent it falling into the hands of “malevolent regimes which seek to gird their loins for Armageddon”.
To wit, Iran. And Egypt and Syria and Libya. But mostly Iran, which has a history of “appalling criminality”, including massacres of political prisoners. Its nuclear ambitions are by far and away the biggest threat to world security because they will trigger a new arms race, he says.
Robertson argues that it is Iran’s progress towards N-weapons that has spurred Israel into its latest bombing of Hamas; Israel is clearing out Hamas’ missiles because it wants to bomb Iran in early 2013, “once it achieves ‘nuclear capability’, which [Israel] confuses with nuclear culpability”.
Robertson, a QC and probably the world’s best-known human rights lawyer, is 66. He has lived most of his adult life in London but was born in Australia. He speaks in the rich, plummy tones of an English toff. Private Eye has accused him of having had “a vowel transplant”; a philologist once said he spoke like an Etonian in the age of Queen Victoria.
Robertson says he talked like that long before he studied as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford: “I didn’t speak at all until I was five and then came out with the inflections of ABC announcers.” Not bad for a graduate of Epping Boys High School in Sydney.
Robertson is popularly known in Australia for his ABC TV series Hypotheticals, in which he hosted debates on topical issues using the barrister’s verbal thrust and parry, often spearing the heart of the question and sometimes panelists.
It was during one of these episodes in 1988 that he met Sydney author Kathy Lette, who won him away from his then-squeeze, the bounteous Nigella Lawson. He and Lette, a lissom, wise-cracking queen of chick-lit, married in 1990. They have two children who are old enough now to be “semi-detached”, as he puts it.
His cufflinks today are a gift from his wife: tiny silver handcuffs. “Only Kylie could get her wrist through those,” muses Lette.
While Lette writes humorously about the personal side of life – froth with a feminist bite – Robertson’s work has been exposing and fighting the worst in human nature, the systematic abuse of the vulnerable.
It began with Aborigines in Australia, a theme continued when he won a landmark 2007 suit to have the remains of Tasmanian Aborigines returned to their people from the British Natural History Museum. He spent five years as president of a special court into war atrocities in Sierra Leone that indicted former president Charles Taylor over crimes against humanity.
He has also acted for high-profile clients including WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange and fatwah-ed author Salman Rushdie, and represents the jailed former president of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko.
Robertson’s books include Crimes Against Humanity – the latest edition required 300 more pages than the one before it, he points out grimly – and The Case Against The Pope, in which he used legal principles to argue the Vatican should be treated as a “rogue state” because of its shielding of paedophile priests. “We must view child abuse as a crime against humanity when it is done on that industrial-scale level,” he says.
So, why a book on nukes now? Hasn’t the nuclear threat been with us since Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Yes, he says, but for decades after that, it was largely a stable two-party threat, with the politics of Mutual Assured Destruction staying the trigger fingers of US and Soviet leaders. Later, the Big Five nations with nukes were all at a level of development where leaders had too much to lose to risk using it: “Wives and children and retirement plans.”
Now unstable nations with aggressive, authoritarian regimes have nuclear ambitions. “We haven’t had an explosion since Nagasaki so everyone is very complacent,” he says. “But we are probably about to fight a war to stop Iran [getting the bomb], and we don’t yet realise that this is Pandora’s Box. There’s nothing to stop any number of countries from reaching for nukes – the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has said it wants some, Saudi Arabia says it will buy some from Pakistan . . .
“We need to spool back the film and look at how dictators have behaved over the past 10 years.”
Robertson points out that Saddam Hussein used Scud missiles against Israel in Kuwait in 1990 even though Israel was not one of the combatants. “If he had had nuclear weapons to shoot at Israel he probably would have done so . . . You can imagine how much more difficult Syria would be if Assad had the bomb, or Libya if Gaddafi had had it. If he had kept building it, he would have had one by 2010, and he would have been quite capable of shooting a missile at Paris or London.”
So Iran’s nuclear program is even more dangerous than North Korea’s simply because it is in the Middle East and will inspire its neighbours to do likewise, he says.
Robertson argues that Iran’s government is particularly unfit to hold nukes because of its appalling history of human rights abuses: international assassinations, mass torture – including women prisoners of conscience given 15 lashes five times a day – and the 1998 slaughter of a suspected 7000 religious and political prisoners.
Robertson likens these murders to the mass graves of Srebrenica and the Japanese death marches of prisoners of war. It is Iran’s theocratic leaders whom he has dubbed “Mullahs without mercy”.
But still, he does not support a pre-emptive attack on Iran by Israel or the US.
He thinks Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is acting precipitately because he fears the millennialist thinking of Iran’s Shia Muslim leaders. They believe that a messianic figure, the 12th imam, will return to the world to reward believers and destroy infidels following a time of great chaos and “screaming from the sky”.
Netanyahu and others, Robertson writes, “discern great danger in this . . . belief, so fervently promoted by [Iranian] President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad . . . they fear that an excessively devout Supreme Leader . . . might one day decide to drop a nuclear bomb on Israel in much the same spirit, to create that chaos”.
But he warns that a pre-emptive strike in the absence of a direct threat from Iran would be illegal under international law and would create its own humanitarian disasters, killing thousands of civilians and releasing poisonous clouds into the atmosphere.
He doesn’t think Iran would use the bomb unless it was attacked and “the regime was tottering”.
He thinks the weapon used to fix the problem should be international law and wants laws passed that would criminalise governments that acquire new nukes, and political will to be harnessed to force disarmament by those nations that already have them.
Robertson says nuclear weapons should be banned entirely, as are dumdum bullets and landmines.
And the legal regime needs teeth, not just to gnash but to bite. The International Atomic Energy Agency is a poor monitor and has no power to punish those who breach its guidelines, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty has no enforcement mechanisms either, he says.
But does international law have any force? Wouldn’t this just be another lawyers’ picnic, with duplicitous or defiant states going their own way regardless?
Robertson points out that international law is now gaining great traction over war crimes with the prosecutions of leaders such as Charles Taylor, who copped a 50-year sentence, and Ratko Mladic, on trial over genocide in the Bosnian war.
“Aggressive authoritarian dictators have been given pause by the fact that there is now law. It’s not so much the dictator himself but the generals and the army heads. We saw that in Libya where the prospect of being charged with crimes against humanity . . . led generals to defect during the NATO strikes in 2011 . . . ”
Robertson acted for Human Rights Watch in a British case against the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet over his record of torture. There was an attempt to extradite Pinochet from Britain so he would face trial in Spain.
Britain found him too ill to stand trial but contrast the existence of that legal action, Robertson says, with the position he was in when he joined Amnesty International in 1979: “One of my first tasks was to write a letter about the torture chambers. ‘Dear General Pinochet . . .’ ”
Mullahs without Mercy by Geoffrey Robertson is published by Vintage Australia. RRP $34.95
Geoffrey Robertson will speak at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne at 6.30pm on December 14 and at the Sydney Opera House at 4pm on December 16.
First published in The Age.

Whose problem is it? It’s all of ours

THE death of Brian Yao while his mother, Jie Yu, played poker machines followed a series of reported incidents involving Asian-Australians leaving their children in cars while they gambled.

It is unclear whether Asians have a greater problem with gambling than other ethnic groups. A small study done as part of research commissioned by the Victorian Casino and Gaming Authority found that Chinese-Australians were seven times more likely to gamble heavily than the wider community.

But this does not necessarily equate to gambling problems, says researcher Rick Yamine, because many Chinese have a high discretionary income and can afford their gambling. And usually, he says, they do not play the pokies, preferring traditional games such as pai gow and sic bo and lucky-number games such as roulette. He says Jie Yu’s case was not typical.

But Asians do make up a higher-than-expected proportion of families over whom there are gambling-related neglect notifications, according to Jenny McAuley, Victoria’s Assistant Director of Child Protection. “Our figures would reflect that the Asian community does struggle with gambling. Certainly this is reflected in the profile of people that are notified to our services … The Asian community is generally very aware of this problem, and is responding to it (by) supporting community members.”

But McAuley believes the problem of gambling-related neglect is probably under-reported, which means that the families who do enter the child-protection system might not be representative of what is happening in the wider community.

Ainslie Hannan, who contributed to the Playing for Time report, is concerned that Jie Yu and other Asians can be made scapegoats in the media for problems she believes are caused by state gaming policy and the availability of poker machines. (There are five pokies venues within a five-kilometre radius of Yu’s Ferntree Gully home).

Hannan says, “There’s a theory called the theory of exceptionality. It says that if there is a structure in the state that doesn’t work, like gaming policy, you get a marginalised group and say it’s about them, rather than saying it’s about the broader community and the amount of gaming … Who puts the state on trial?”

Julie Nelson, of Gamblers Help, says that viewing such a tragedy as a minority group’s problem helps ward off the anxiety a death such as Brian’s arouses in the community. “Part of that is about society saying, `It can’t happen to us; we are all normal. This couldn’t happen to me or anybody I know.”‘

Also see: Ending The Affair and Gambling With Life.

First published in The Age.

This is your life

Karen Kissane

THE girl was rushed to hospital with complications following an abortion. She begged staff to shield her from a relative working in the hospital who might tell her conservative Indian family.Staff put the girl in a different ward to where the relative, a nurse, was stationed, but failed to tell the girl she had the right to a “manual” admission, with her details kept in an old-fashioned paper file. Instead, her case was recorded on the hospital’s computer database. Here it was found by her relative, who was allegedly in the habit of trawling the system for familiar names.

The result, says New Zealand Privacy Commissioner Bruce Slane, was “a complete breakdown in family relations”. He tells the story to illustrate the sensitivity of health information and the sometimes devastating consequences of its improper release – as well as the ease with which health databases can be violated.

It is a New Zealand story, but it has implications for Australia. The computer revolution is about to hit your doctor’s surgery – and link it with your pathologist’s lab, your local hospital’s emergency room and even those discreet clinics where you might seek treatment following a less-than-discreet sexual encounter.

A Federal Government taskforce is investigating what form this country’s national “E-health” records system should take, and the Victorian and NSW governments have already launched pilot programs for cyberspace sharing of information between doctors and hospitals at a state level.

The information age has opened up Orwellian possibilities for the detailed tracking of individuals’ use of health-care services and the linking of all their medical encounters on one electronic health record (EHR). It could contain all the clinical information now recorded on paper: the symptoms that led you to seek a consultation, the doctor’s diagnosis and the treatment offered.

There are potentially great benefits. Patients should face fewer unnecessary repeat tests or medical accidents. Doctors would be able to get a complete patient history at the press of a button. Researchers could scan the experiences of millions of people to identify nationwide trends in illness and the effectiveness and safety of treatments. And governments hope to cut costs and better assess the performance of doctors and hospitals.

But computerisation raises big questions about how to mediate the sometimes competing goals of all these “stakeholders” in the health system.

Who decides what should and shouldn’t go on to an electronic record? How should privacy be protected, and to what degree must patients relinquish it to satisfy goals identified as being “the common good”? Should organisations collecting information patients reveal as part of their confidential health care encounters be able to use or sell it for profit?

Bureaucrats keen to contain costs and researchers hungry for mass data are among those who have pushed for a centralised database to which every Australian would be connected lifelong. Such a database would be overseen by the Health Insurance Commission, which administers Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

The centralised model was supported by a 1998 report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs inquiry into health information management. It recommended that individuals carry health “smart cards” and that the medical details on the cards be backed up in a national data warehouse.

“Centralised” has since become the “C-word” of the debate because of concerns that it might arouse public alarm. Parties privy to discussions on the issue privately say there are still some in Canberra who want the centralised model. Publicly, however, stage proponents are talking now only of a system for linking multiple databases.

This means that your separate carers – GP, specialist, chemist, hospital – would each keep their own computerised file on you, but it would be possible for each to access material from the others electronically.

If you arrived in casualty unconscious, hospital staff could call up your GP’s notes to check on your history of blood-clotting problems or allergies to medication; if you needed a new prescription from your GP, he could call up your hospital records
to confirm that today’s prescription would not react adversely with medicine you were given last time you were admitted.

Theoretically, doctors would need your authorisation, and perhaps your smartcard, to do so, although they would probably have the right to override lack of permission in an emergency. And more sensitive information might be “masked” so that a higher level of access was required to read it. “There’s no need for the GP at the 24-hour clinic to know about the three abortions you had when you were 15,” says Dr Sandra Hacker.

Hacker is the AMA representative on the National Health Information Management Advisory Council, the organisation charged with assessing the options. Its Electronic Health Records Taskforce is due to report to health ministers on the issue in July.

Hacker says the AMA is opposed to a central warehouse because of privacy concerns, and she believes the public would be outraged by it. But while she thinks it an unlikely option, she cannot rule it out. “If that’s what the Government legislates, that’s what will happen.”

Patient advocates are not even reassured by the more moderate alternative of links between databases. “The effect (on privacy) may be much the same either way,” warns Meredith Carter, executive director of the Health Issues Centre.

Supporters of a comprehensive system, such as Dr Chris Kelman, a researcher with the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Research, point out that computer systems containing sensitive information are already in use in banking and the military.

In an article he co-authored in the Medical Journal of Australia , it was suggested that an EHR could even be stored as a secure web page. He says, “The technology is capable of maintaining privacy. Look what’s happening with encryption.”

But if computer hackers can turn a NASA satellite in space, how safe is even the most highly encrypted health records system?

“Scary, isn’t it?” says Dr Sam Heard. Dr Heard, director of the general practice education and research unit at the Northern Territory clinical school of medicine, Flinders University, is not opposed to e-health. He has been working for 13 years on a project called the Good Electronic Health Record. He favors what he calls the “radical” model, where patients themselves would carry their record or choose a trusted third party to store it for them.

Databases worry him. “The more people have access (to a system) and the larger the database, the more valuable it is and the more at risk it is,” he says. “How many people would be using it at any one time? Imagine the security nightmare.”

Dr Heard warns that hackers can download from the Internet “Trojan horse” software that allows them to infiltrate a system and force it to spit out information. It is possible to make a system completely secure, he says, but that would also make it close to unusable.

A less sinister but equally worrying problem is internal computer glitches. Last year, several thousand Americans’ patient records were accidentally displayed on the Internet for two months. A gremlin in the database of the University of Michigan Medical Centre left records detailing treatments for specific medical conditions, employment status and social security numbers available to anyone tapping into the centre’s website.

While the debate about the security of the technology is important, patient-advocate Carter sees it as a secondary one. The real point is that “any system you build is going to rely on human beings to operate it, so you will always get human corruption and human error”.

Carter says the NSW Independent Commission against Corruption reported in 1992 that it had found “a widespread commercial trade in personal information, including Medicare data, between officers of government agencies and other institutions which should know better such as banks, insurance companies and debt collectors”.

Dr Heard worries about the potential for celebrities or even ordinary individuals who have aroused animosity to be targeted and blackmailed or humiliated by the exposure of their health history. “How much would knowledge that (a former prime minister) had cirrhosis of the liver due to alcohol be worth?” he says.

Violation of computer systems by government employees is still being reported. In February, a Queensland inquiry into the misuse of that state’s police database was told that more than 30 officers at one station had given individuals’ details to the station’s cleaner, who moonlighted as a debt collector.

In January, the Melbourne Magistrates Court was told that a customer service officer for the Health Insurance Commission, Mieng Tang, had used his position to access the Medicare histories and personal details of up to 90 people a day. Most were Asian women and women who had been on IVF treatment. His defence was that he had been “bored”.

Here was illustrated both the blessing and the curse of computerisation: Tang was able to flick through many more files than would have been possible if he was handling more cumbersome paper folders, but it was the audit trail of the computer system that detected his illicit access.

Carter points out that these audit trail safeguards were set up because the law requires it of databases held in the public system. But she says the private health sector, which will self-regulate privacy matters under legislation currently before Parliament, will not face the same stringency.

Lastly, there is the potential for deliberate privacy “breaches” for reasons that those controlling the data think justifiable. There was an outcry in 1987 when teenage girls were listed to testify about their under-age abortions in a court case against a disreputable Melbourne gynaecologist. “People said, `Forget the charges; what are you doing to these girls?”‘ Carter says.

In America, pharmaceutical companies have bought health insurance companies so that they can access patient records and direct market to both patients and doctors. Hacker says Australian doctors are now being approached by companies looking to buy their practices.

In Canada, the Privacy Commissioner, Bruce Phillips, reported that information technology also puts a great deal of power into the hands of public servants. He told of an Ontario woman who, supported by her doctor, sought breast reduction surgery to alleviate chronic pain in her back and shoulders. “The health bureaucrats responded by demanding photographs before agreeing to foot the bill,” Mr Phillips said.

On a bigger scale, the greater political acceptance of the role of market forces has led to widespread “data mining”, the sale of mass health information for commercial use. In Iceland, every citizen was tested so that their genetic makeup could be recorded on a DNA databank now managed by a commercial biotechnology company.

Medical data originally given by patients to Britain’s National Health Service in good faith is now under the control of organisations free to sell it to the highest bidder, according to Professor Stuart Horner, the 1998 chairman of the British Medical Association ethics committee.

And Australia’s Health Insurance Commission is already examining how best to sell “de-identified” material from the Medicare and PBS databases. “They are going to do whatever they can within the bounds of their political ability to exploit and mine that resource to get revenue,” says Stephen Millgate, executive director of the Australian Doctors’ Fund.

He says the HIC’s sales aims, expressed in its 1998-99 annual report, “are written in hard-core commercial language; it’s aggressive, it’s about customers and marketing and being competitive”.

Millgate is the greatest doomsayer in Australia’s EHR debate. He is convinced any model adopted by government will be a disaster because its goals will be administrative and budgetary rather than patient-focused. “And there will be no savings; the cost of putting up a system which is accurate is enormous. It will chew its own head off in costs in the first two or three years.

“There are some moral issues here too. Half the world doesn’t have basic health care, while we’re going to spend millions in Western democracies to know everything about everybody’s health. What groups will be unfunded so you and I can have a continuous record of every ache and pain?”

Millgate doubts promises that patients will remain free to choose whether to “opt in” to the system. “What you will find happening is that if you don’t `opt in’, you won’t get certain rebates. It’s quite easy for governments to say something’s not compulsory and then change the financial incentives to make it crazy for someone to resist it.”
A spokeswoman for the federal Health Minister, Dr Michael Wooldridge, says the Government knows that Australians are very protective of their health privacy and that any system would have to be voluntary, with information kept only in summary and patients having the right to edit their records. “If they didn’t want to admit that they were on a psychiatric drug, for instance, they could just take that off.”
While protecting privacy, this raises its own problems. A patient might suffer an adverse event because doctors acted on the assumption that the EHR was complete when, in fact, essential information had been left off it. Who is then legally responsible: the patient who requested the information withheld from the record, the doctor who agreed to withhold it, or the doctor who made a mistake because he was uninformed?
But accurate, accessible records could be invaluable for the chronically ill. Dr Wooldridge’s spokeswoman points out that almost a third of hospital admissions are of elderly people, and most of them have been made seriously ill by interactions between their many medicines.

It is these people that Hacker predicts will use and benefit from linked EHRs. But groups such as her own customers, psychiatric patients, are likely to avoid them, she says. Electronic records of therapy consultations accessible to anyone other than the treating doctor “could make psychiatry almost unworkable. I see politicians, judges, other doctors: they’re not going to want to reveal things to me if they think others will see it”.

Slane, New Zealand’s privacy advocate, is concerned that systems in that country have too often been set up to spread an unjustifiably wide net over patients whose views have not been taken on board. “It seems to be assumed that having people’s health information is a jolly good thing and a use will be found for it sometime in the future … with public opinion a risk to be managed later,” he says.

This ignores the central issue. “The essence of privacy is respecting what other people think is important to them as private, rather than us saying what the values are and that they should apply to everyone always.”

Health Records: The upside

While away on work, Mr Smith, a truck driver, sees a GP. He complains of severe headaches and asks for strong pain relief. What the doctor sees is an unkempt man from out of town requesting a drug of addiction. With Mr Smith’s permission, the GP calls up his medications history to check that Mr Smith has not been misusing prescribed painkillers. He hasn’t.

But a prompt pops up on the screen telling the doctor that the national adverse events register has recently detected an interaction between two drugs Mr Smith is taking for other conditions. Surveillance of the national health records system had found that people taking both often suffered hypertension and severe headaches. The GP prescribes alternative medication for Mr Smith.

– An imaginary scenario from “An integrated electronic health record and information system for Australia?” Medical Journal of Australia.

Health Records: The downside

At the height of Western Australia’s abortion law row in 1997, a woman who had suffered several traumatic childbirths and miscarriages, followed by a severe stroke, found herself pregnant again. Her husband’s vasectomy had failed. She feared another difficult pregnancy might kill her and booked a termination.

The following day, an elderly man phoned and asked for her by her full title, including her middle name. He told her he knew she was due for a termination and sterilisation at the hospital concerned, and that she would rot in hell. More abusive calls followed and a poem “written” by an aborted child to its mother was hand-delivered to her home. An investigation failed to discover how her details were accessed and leaked, although it noted that a staff member had phoned an anti-abortion group from the hospital during the relevant time-frame.

First published in The Sunday Age.

Key deal to resolve euro bailout in doubt

HOPES for a grand plan to solve the European debt crisis were fading ahead of last night’s emergency summit in Brussels, with France and Germany still at odds over the rescue package and Italy’s coalition government facing potential collapse over differences on austerity.
Fears of a double-dip global recession rose as a meeting of the European Union’s 27 finance ministers that had been planned for the start of the summit was cancelled.
The leaders of the EU countries were still set to meet overnight to discuss rescue proposals — non-euro countries such as Britain are keen to ensure they are not disadvantaged by any deal — and then the 17 members of the single-currency euro zone were to meet to vote on final measures.
The prolonged political hand-wringing over the 18-month debt crisis produced near despair among some EU diplomats. One official told The Guardian: “Everybody realises that we are on the brink of such a total catastrophe that anything that prevents it and a huge recession must be grasped. The markets will kill us if they haven’t laughed themselves to death.”
The rescue proposals have three pillars: persuading creditors to give up hope of being repaid a large proportion of Greek debt (known as a write-down or a “haircut”); injecting more money into Europe’s banks so they can withstand the shock waves of a Greek default; and boosting the euro zone’s bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, so that it can cope if larger debt-ridden economies such as Spain or Italy need to call upon it.
There seems to be agreement that banks should get €108 billion ($A144 billion) to increase their capital base so they will not have to freeze lending if they lose large amounts of money over Greece.
But the other two strands of the deal are facing hurdles. Private creditors are reportedly resisting pressure by the European Commission and the European Central Bank to accept haircuts of up to 60 per cent, three times the 21 per cent agreed to in July. Banks have offered 40 per cent and warned that anything more would endanger the banking system.
The size of the debt write-down must be decided before the final figure of the boost to the bailout fund, which could go as high as €2 trillion, can be calculated.
Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are again at loggerheads over whether the European Central Bank should buy up more Spanish and Italian bonds to support those countries. Dr Merkel rejected a draft summit communique that appeared to suggest this measure should continue.
Dr Merkel faces strong domestic opposition to the ECB’s bond-buying. Germans fear it will lead to inflation and compromise the central bank’s independence.
The two leaders are united, however, in their insistence that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi arrive at the summit with his divided coalition pulled into line behind a plan to slash Italy’s €1.9 trillion debt.
On Tuesday, negotiations with Mr Berlusconi’s Northern League coalition partner over pension reform and an increase to the retirement age had broken down so badly that it was thought Italy might face an election over the issue.
Northern League leader Umberto Bossi said he was “pessimistic” about the government’s survival.

GENERATION LOST?

WHEN Eva Valiente finished her university studies in advertising, she fired off written applications to 200 companies in Madrid. She did not get a single reply. So Valiente got part-time work with a chain of fashion shops. They sacked her when she turned 25 — she was too old for their look now, they said.
“It is illegal but the laws are weak for beginning people,” she says, with the hard-earned wisdom of a 26-year-old.
She tells of a friend who was offered a “job” in which she would work from 9am to 9pm five days a week — and get no salary for a year. Talking of the desperation of young Spaniards for work, she says “it’s for crying.”
Spain’s youth unemployment rate is a staggering 53 per cent, the highest in the 17-member eurozone. Among the jobless are Valiente’s boyfriend, a qualified lawyer who has never had work in his field, and two of her sisters: one a graphic designer who has never worked and the other a psychologist who recently lost her job. All of this in a middle-class, educated family — Valiente’s father is a doctor.
The eurozone now has a total of 3.3 million young people who cannot find work. Leading this dismal set of statistics are Spain and its fellow victim of financial crisis, Greece (52.8 per cent). With half the eurozone nations in recession, there are now enough unemployed people of all ages to make up a middling-sized country: 25 million.
There are warnings of a “lost generation” from the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development. In a report in July, it demanded urgent action to stop the cyclic jobless problem becoming permanent, particularly for young people. “We need to avoid the risk of a lost generation by all means,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria.
An alarming report by the World Economic Forum, Global Risks 2012, used even tougher language. It warns that with unemployment and systemic financial crises, the world is sowing “the seeds of dystopia”, defined as “the opposite of utopia, a place where life is full of hardship and devoid of hope”.
The report, based on the views of 469 leaders from industry, government, academia and NGOs, warned that rapid global changes risked producing misery for much of humanity. The risks included “a large youth population [that] contends with chronic, high levels of unemployment, while concurrently the largest population of retirees in history becomes dependent upon already heavily indebted governments.
“Both young and old could face an income gap, as well as a skills gap so wide as to threaten social and political stability.”
Declining economic conditions could jeopardise the social contracts between states and citizens and increase nationalism and populism. The Forum warned of the emergence of “critical fragile states — formerly wealthy countries that descend into lawlessness and unrest as they become unable to meet their social and fiscal obligations”.
The number one risk to global stability, according to the report? Major systemic financial failure — that is, the collapse of finance or banking institutions, or even a whole currency.
All of which leads back to Spain and its potential to wreak economic disaster upon the rest of Europe and, perhaps, the world.
Madrid does not look like the capital of a struggling nation. Its broad, proud boulevards and graceful old buildings speak of majestic confidence. Its pavements are smooth and its many public gardens green and manicured, despite a summer so hot that there have been bushfires in the provinces. Madrid does not seem to have in any numbers beggars such as the Romanies on Parisian streets, or the English homeless holding out plastic cups for coins in London.
But Spain is suffering. While Greece’s public writhing under the agonies of austerity in a recession has been the focus of headlines, this is because if the eurozone falls, Greece is likely to be the first domino. In many ways, however, Spain is the bigger worry.
Greece is a small nation and accounts for only 3 per cent of the eurozone economy. While its exit from the euro might trigger a crisis of confidence in Europe’s financial markets, the euro would have a chance of surviving it. But Spain is Europe’s fourth-largest economy and is widely considered too big to bail.
That did not stop the European Central Bank deciding in June to lend Spain up to €100 billion to help its struggling banks in an attempt to ward off a more serious emergency.
Spain is in financial crisis — and Valiente and her family and friends are out of work — because of what Spaniards call “the brick bubble”. When Spain joined the euro, credit became cheap as the European Central Bank kept interest rates low for the whole zone. Spaniards bought property, leading to a construction boom. In 2007 came the bust.
Credit tightened. People stopped buying. The value of houses plummeted, some by more than 50 per cent, leaving many people owing big mortgages worth more than the property involved. Banks found themselves weighed down with mortgage defaults and toxic assets worth a fraction of their previous value. The countryside is dotted with ghost towns, huge housing developments that remain unfinished and unsold. Federal and regional governments that had spent big as revenues flowed found themselves unable to balance budgets.
The human cost is dire. Spain now has 1.7 million households in which no one is working, and the government says it does not expect joblessness to fall below 22 per cent until at least 2015.
For Valiente and others like her, this means adult life is on hold indefinitely. She and her boyfriend would like to live together but they can’t afford it, she says in frustration: “You can’t leave home. You can’t be in a couple. You can’t be a mother. You feel like you are too old for everything, but at the same time, you have to live like you’re a 15-year-old. You live with your parents; you live like a teenager.”
This pattern of delayed adult milestones is also showing up in statistics, says sociologist Almudena Moreno Minguez of Valladolid University. “If you compare us with other European countries, Spaniards are now marrying three or four years later, on average, and having children six or seven years later.”
This is partly because many of those aged between 25 and 34 who moved out of home a few years ago when they started work are returning because they’re unemployed and broke. Parents call them “boomerangs”, she says.
“The parents aren’t happy. There comes a point when even the family cannot support another three or four members at home.”
She says research shows that young people are feeling angry and alienated from the formal structures of society; they feel they have no voice in the deciding of public affairs. Recent improvements to welfare benefits did not include them, she says, and Spain spends less of its GDP on training and education than the rest of the eurozone.
Many Spaniards talk with disdain of the “botellones” (from the word for big bottles) — young people who gather at night in public places to drink and party because they can’t afford clubs or bars.
Moreno says, “Even worse than not investing in them, people here try to make them feel guilty. ‘You are responsible for this situation.’ It’s like they have spat them out.”
A survey of young people aged 15 to 29 asked them to rank different institutions according to how well they respected them. Moreno says, “They gave justice 3, unions 4.5 — and politicians 2.”
Their disdain for politicians is shared by their elders. Newspaper columnist Luis del Pino, who contributes to El Mundo, says Spaniards have an old saying, “Two things are bad for your health — politicians and smoking, in that order.”
He says “legal” political corruption is to blame for many of the financial problems. Regional politicians manipulated local banks to encourage finance for local projects: “They put boards of directors that oriented these savings banks towards giving credit to big construction companies who were friends of the politicians. All this subsequently collapsed.”
Four Spanish banks that have been part-nationalised because of toxic debts have at least €71 billion ($A87 billion) in bad loans on their books.
Politicians also made many political appointments to get friends and supporters on the public payroll, he says. “Mayors and ministers have a total of 17,000 ‘personal advisers’, according to my colleagues at El Mundo. That’s an €850 million expense each year.”
And some politicians also manipulated the “brick bubble” for personal profit, buying land they knew was to be rezoned and reselling it for many times the original value, he says.
But Spain also has tight labour laws that need reform. Both right-wing and left-wing economists agree regulations, generous but not all unreasonable in boom times, now serve to lock young people out of work.
Sick employees can get most or all of their wages for 18 months. Employees can only be sacked without a payout in the first year, and many long-serving staff would cost €80,000 or more to let go. Businesses stay small because once they reach 50 employees, they must have five workplace reps to bargain on wages and conditions, each of whom receive 15 paid hours a month for these duties. Companies also pay higher rates of tax once they have more than 25 staff.
Inigo del Toro Calonje lost his job as an environmental engineer with a company designing golf courses when the boom bust. Golf courses had sprung up to add value to housing developments in the middle of nowhere but suddenly his company’s clients stopped paying and Calonje, unable to find another job, decided to set up his own consultancy.
It cost him €4000 and took three months to set it up to comply with government regulations. He earns only 60 per cent of what he earned as an employee but must pay company taxes each month and is driven mad by the different environmental regulations in Spain’s 17 regions. “They punish us for trying to be independent,” he says.
He is not the only one feeling punished by “la crisis”. “Social instability is a risk because we will have a large group of young unemployed for a long, long time,” warns Almudena Moreno (pictured). “It will produce social conflict and the social structure will break down because young people don’t see any future; they don’t see any solution. What is going to happen in three or four years if we don’t find a solution?
“Here, democracy is quite young. It’s less than 40 years [since dictator General Franco died], it’s nothing. Our structures are quite weak. It’s hard to predict but if groups such as the long-term unemployed, the young people with no future and the people who have been evicted join together, their social power could be terrible, and dangerous too.”
Luis del Pino is another who can foresee potential trouble. He warns of the “amazing speed” with which the middle class, the backbone of any developed society, is disappearing.
“It would be a disaster if this led to the rise of political extremism. Franco is within living memory here. When you put several million people in a desperate enough situation, then they will hear anyone who promises them some hope, even if that anyone is the most despicable man.”
Right now, those questions are too big for most of the young jobless, for whom the main question is where to go next. Many are considering joining the tens of thousands leaving the country to seek fortune in foreign lands.
Enrique Melendez, 30, who lost his job writing for a public relations firm, is thinking about migrating to South America. It’s far away but they speak Spanish there, he says.
He is grateful to have worked at all: “At least the people around 30 had a job and lost it. At least we have had the experience of work. It’s more dangerous for the next ones coming behind us, who’ve never had a job and have no experience.”
Eva Valiente is wondering about moving too. She has two ideas; to become a cook and move to a rural town — “life is cheaper there” — or to go to England and improve her English and, therefore, her saleability. Maybe both. She cannot see anything changing for her in Madrid any time soon: “They say the crisis will go on for five or 10 years. I don’t know. Young people are very sad.”
HARD FIGURES
■ The number of people helped by Spanish Catholic charity Caritas
2007: 400,000
2011: 1 million, mostly families with children
■ Unemployment
2005: 8.7%
2012: 25%
■ On the edge of poverty
10.5 million people, 22% of the population
■ Court orders for evictions
2007: 25,943
2010: 93,636
■ Homes in which no one works
2005: 2.6%
2012: 9.1%
SOURCE: CARITAS SPAIN

First published in The Age.

Far right on rise in Europe

POLITICS: ‘As anti-Semitism was a unifying factor for far-right parties in the 1910s, ’20s and ’30s, Islamophobia has become the unifying factor [now]’

BY KAREN KISSANE IN PARIS, ATHENS

WHEN France’s far-right National Front was newly minted in the 1970s, the people who backed it were stereotyped as working-class roughs with shaved heads and ugly tempers, sometimes photographed at street demonstrations with their fists punching the air. That was then. This is now.
Thibault, 22, lives in Paris and has just graduated from university with a commerce degree. He has studied overseas and he and his sister Camille, 18, who is studying art history, speak fluent English. Their mother is a school teacher and their father a retired businessman.
On a mild summer evening, they mill on the pavement with a couple of dozen other young people waiting to join a meeting of the youth wing of the National Front, the nationalist party led by Marine Le Pen, daughter of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. Jean-Marie once called the Nazi gas chambers “a detail of history”. Marine Le Pen has been accused of being Islamophobic.
Thibault has followed the party since 2002, when Jean-Marie caused a stunning upset by making it to the second round of the French presidential election.
“I couldn’t comprehend why there was so much hatred towards him and why he was being persecuted,” Thibault says. “I was aware that he had made homophobic and anti-Semitic comments and I’m happy now that such positions are no longer part of the Front National. It must be understood that he is obviously not the same age as Marine Le Pen and that he belongs to another generation . . . The party now truly reflects all of my opinions, whereas 10 years ago it would have troubled me.”
Thibault and Camille are part of the new face of the right in France, which has seen a surge of support among the young and those living in the provinces, many of whom are economic refugees fleeing the struggling banlieues (suburbs) that ring Paris.
The right is on the rise not just in France but across western Europe. There has been a similar spike in support in Greece where, at the June election, hardship and anti-immigrant feeling catapulted Golden Dawn — a more extreme right-wing party often described as neo-Nazi — into an unprecedented 18 seats in the Greek parliament.
Parties pushing anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim ideas now have significant parliamentary blocs in eight countries, including Germany, Hungary and the Netherlands, where politician Geert Wilders has compared the Koran to Mein Kampf.
They feed unapologetically on growing resentment that foreigners are taking local jobs and welfare benefits. France’s anti-Muslim Bloc Identitaire serves a pork-based “identity soup” to homeless people; Greece’s Golden Dawn hands out food parcels only to people carrying Greek identity papers.
“As anti-Semitism was a unifying factor for far-right parties in the 1910s, ’20s and ’30s, Islamophobia has become the unifying factor [now],” says Thomas Klau, of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
British think tank Demos last year used Facebook to recruit more than 10,000 young supporters of 14 parties and organisations in 11 countries to answer questionnaires. The findings revealed a powerful swell in hardline nationalist sentiment in the young across the continent, particularly among men.
Demos used Facebook’s own advertising tool to extract data about 450,000 supporters of the organisations. Almost two-thirds were aged under 30, and three-quarters were male and more likely than average to be unemployed.
The resentment about outsiders is peculiarly spread. At this meeting of the youth wing of the National Front in Paris, several members are the children or grandchildren of migrants. Karime, 20, is a railway worker whose grandparents emigrated from North Africa. He, too, complains about migrants edging the French out of jobs and welfare but, for him, the main attraction to the party is Marine Le Pen; his face lights up as he talks about what a warm leader she is, and how she truly understands the problems facing the nation.
For Thibault, those problems can be summed up thus: “Past governments have failed to assimilate the incoming flux of immigrants and we are now faced with a tremendous challenge with the third generation of people from North Africa and Africa.
“They have no respect for France’s tradition and culture and seek to impose their own customs and values, which is intolerable. France is probably the most welcoming country in the world — free education and social security — but we cannot welcome all of the world’s misery. For that reason, we need to critically reduce the number of migrants.”
He has come to this view partly because of his mother’s experience teaching, he says: “She is also witnessing this change; numerous children with absent, unemployed fathers, violent and troubled. When you have 70 per cent of the class that isn’t French native and who don’t speak French, how are you supposed to pass on French culture and its heritage?”
He is also sceptical about the European Union and favours protectionism for French products. His sister, Camille, likes the Front’s zero tolerance approach to law and order issues. “There is an increasing sense of insecurity in the big cities,” she adds.
While they feel perfectly comfortable with their views, they are aware that not everyone regards the party in the same light. They chose not to use their surnames for this article in case potential employers should find them on the internet.
Le Pen ranked No. 1 of 10 candidates among young voters in the first presidential ballot earlier this year. She has softened the party’s stance in ways that appeal to a younger electorate.
French political analyst Nonna Meyer of Sciences Po says she has shifted the party away from her father’s image and rhetoric. “She’s younger, she’s a woman, she condemns anti-Semitism . . . She says she is tolerant, it is Islam that is intolerant . . . she up-ends the discourse,” Meyer says.
The opposite is the case with Golden Dawn in Greece, where the rhetoric is increasingly savage. Just before the Greek election in June, MP Ilias Panagiotaros promised that if his party were elected, “It will carry out raids on hospitals and kindergartens and it will throw immigrants and children out on the street so that Greeks can take their place.”
Kostis Papaioannou, former chairman of Greece’s National Commission for Human Rights, links Golden Dawn to rising racist violence. “This is not the rise of the extreme right,” he told The Saturday Age. “We have had the extreme right in parliament for a period; they are mainly ultra-conservatives, who pay attention to values like safety and tradition and illegal immigrants. That was as far as they went.
“But Golden Dawn — this is neo-Nazis. They openly use violence and hate speech, deny the Holocaust, and their internal structure is like an army.”
He says the party’s success at a first election in May was followed by a big rise in race attacks, such as one in Piraeus where 25 people entered a house in which Egyptian immigrants were sleeping: three managed to escape but one was badly beaten. “These people were arrested and they were members of this neo-Nazi party,” Papaioannou says.
In the last quarter of 2011, there were 70 such incidents in just two neighbourhoods of Athens. Groups attacked people who were walking or waiting for a bus, or unleashed dogs to terrify them.
“This is organised,” he says. “In many attacks there are juveniles taking part. Golden Dawn is doing very systematic work in recruiting teenagers in high schools in Athens.”
This is not an image of the party that is recognised by many of those who vote for it. Kostas Fasianis, 39, used to own a mini-market in the Athens suburbs before the economy went bad; now he is unemployed. Politically, he describes himself as a nationalist and a Golden Dawn voter. “The core of the party is people like me and you, the common people,” he says. “Its highest value is that we love our country and are patriotic.”
He wants Greece to guard its borders and deport illegal immigrants, who he believes bring diseases into the country and contribute to rising crime: “In Athens it’s become more violent and it’s uncontrollable. People nowadays, they could kill you for five euros.”
Fasianis says it is a lie to say that Golden Dawn activists have ever attacked leftists or immigrants: “There’s no truth at all to that, and it’s proved by the fact that no member of Golden Dawn was ever convicted in court,” he says.
Kostas Papadakis, 35, is the owner of an Athens mini-market and voted for Golden Dawn for the first time in June. He, too, wants a crackdown on illegal immigration, as well as a renegotiation of the sovereign debt repayment deal that is crippling the Greek economy.
“The country has changed dramatically since the first wave of immigrants,” he says. “It started with Albania, and now there are people from Africa and Afghanistan, and large parts of Athens have become ghettoes.”
For Papadakis, Golden Dawn is an alternative to the corruption of the conservatives and socialists whose economic mismanagement has brought the country to its knees. Of its more extreme elements, he says: “Yes, I also believe that there are members in Golden Dawn that act as neo-Nazis. Personally, I have nothing to do with that. I am not a neo-Nazi and not a strong supporter.
“I want Golden Dawn in the parliament to shake up the system. It’s so unjust that 10 million Greeks have to pay and suffer for the money that was embezzled by the 300 members of the Parliament.”
A World Economic Forum report on Global Risks 2012 warned that Europe’s financial crisis, with resulting 50 per cent unemployment in countries such as Spain and Greece, was sowing “the seeds of dystopia”.
Those seeds have begun to sprout.

First published in The Age.

Brits return to Blitz mentality

The Olympics security contractor had no hope of meeting the requirement, writes Karen Kissane in London.

For those trying to organise security for the London Olympics, the blame games are already up and running.
Gloomier Londoners already viewed the Games as an ordeal to be endured with the kind of British stoicism displayed during the Blitz. The chaos around security, however, is of an entirely different order. It opens the way to catastrophe.
In the past 10 days, Britain and the world have learnt that the Games has a shortfall of 3500 security guards as well as problems notifying existing guards when and where they are to report for work. Only 30 of an expected 300 officers turned up to guard cyclists. Only 10 of 58 arrived to guard footballers; 20 of 58 were at the main Olympic hotel; and none turned up for an induction day at Coventry Stadium (70 expected).
“It’s a lottery as to how many staff are going to turn up,” Clive Chamberlain, chairman of Dorset Police Federation, told The Guardian. “It’s a fiasco, an absolute debacle.”
The Home Secretary, Theresa May, at the centre of a political firestorm over the mess, claims the government knew nothing of the crisis until told last week by G4S, the company hired to provide Games security. She has called in 3500 emergency personnel, including sailors, airmen and police, to fill the shortfall.
Another 2000 might be needed, but the government is fending off that embarrassment, despite warnings from defence chiefs that notice is required if troops are wanted at the opening ceremony next Friday. This would bring the total military involved in the Games, planned and unplanned, to 19,000.
GS4’s chief executive, Nick Buckles, copped a grilling by MPs this week in which he admitted he couldn’t guarantee he could supply even the 7000 guards now required at his tattered end of the bargain. He said he could not predict the scale of “no-shows” until recruits failed to respond to an email. He also could not promise that all the guards would speak fluent English: “I don’t know what fluent English is.”
Asked by an MP whether the debacle was a “humiliating shambles”, Buckles admitted, “I would have to agree with you.”
G4S has had £400 million ($600 million) wiped off its market value and is predicting it will make a £50 million loss on the Games contract. But it is insisting on its £57 million “management fee”.
How did it come to this?
It appears computer glitches at G4S sent recruits to the wrong venues or supplied them with incorrect schedules.
There also seems to be a larger than expected number of casual employees who have lost interest or found another job.
However, May said the company had been assuring ministers it would “overshoot” the recruitment targets in its £284 million contract. This is at odds with an internal Home Office memo, revealed this week by The Sunday Times, that warned in April, “We will very soon start to see big shortfalls against planned numbers.”
Part of the problem is governmental dithering.
Last December, fully six years after London won the Games, the government had a last-minute rush of blood to the head over security issues and dramatically amped up the brief to G4S from 2000 guards (in a contract signed in December 2010) to 13,700 guards.
The tardiness was despite the fact that London was hit by the 7/7 suicide bomb attacks the day after winning the race for the Olympics in 2005. Defence chiefs had offered to provide Games security but the government decided outsourcing to a private company would be better.
Margaret Hodge, chairwoman of the Commons public accounts committee, said: “It is outrageous. [The organisers] knew in 2005 that security was going to be a major challenge but they left it too late.”
There also have been concerns about the quality of recruits. G4S, which won the contract partly because it had provided security for the Olympics site during construction, has also protected the Wimbledon tennis championships.
A security consultant who went undercover for the company at Wimbledon last year wrote a report listing alarming lapses.
These included some staff lacking even “the most basic security knowledge” needed to guard a significant terrorism target; staff routinely leaving premises unprotected by sleeping on the job; and some recruits being allowed to skip hearing and smell tests designed to check that they were able to notice fires or explosions.
The security consultant who wrote the report, Peter Bleksley, is a former Scotland Yard detective. He warned that the problems could “eventually prove catastrophic for G4S” and some were so serious they could have “fatal consequences” if they were not fixed before the Games.
Buckles claims those concerns were taken on board and dealt with, but one whistleblower has claimed the company has been forced to resort to a “no-fail policy” for recruits in the current crisis.
Despite the torrent of bad publicity, Games chief Sebastian Coe has promised safety will not be compromised: “My responsibility is to make sure that we get a Games that is safe and secure. We will do that, and it is to make sure that our teams, the Home Office and the military sit alongside G4S and mobilise and deploy exactly who we need to.”
It will certainly be one of the most militarised Olympics ever, with missiles poised and jets on hand and the Royal Navy’s largest warship deployed to launch military helicopters.
All that might prove of little use if a terrorist slips through the net at Heathrow Airport. The Observer reported that suspects had been able to enter Britain in the run-up to the Games without being picked up by security checks. A senior border officer said inexperienced recruits were repeatedly failing to refer passengers on a watch list to counter-terrorism officers.

First published in The Age.

Security lapses cast dark cloud over London Olympics

Poor weather and London’s notorious traffic snarls could be the least of the problems when the 2012 Olympics begin next week, reports Karen Kissane.

FIRST there is the weather. London has had its wettest summer on record. In a recent newspaper column, the city’s irrepressible mayor, Boris Johnson, mused on how that might be turned around in time for the Olympics: ”Perhaps we could stage a pagan ritual at Stonehenge, involving either the sacrifice of maidens [if there are any these days], or a goat, or a rabbit, or maybe just a worm – whatever the RSPCA would allow.”

The sun god Ra could be implored to ”vaporise the thunderheads ? before the entire country dissolves like a sugar cube and sinks into the sea”, he wrote.

Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, has warned spectators of rowing and equestrian events that their viewing areas are a sea of mud, and advised raincoats. One of his officials – presumably one of little faith regarding Ra – went a step further: ”Bring wellies.”

Then there is travel, or lack thereof. London’s road traffic moves like molasses on a normal day. Its underground train system is already so jammed at peak hour that fuming commuters must let trains go without boarding because there simply isn’t room to squeeze on. Some stations close for a while on exceptionally bad days, keeping commuters from even getting onto a platform. But the system will have to cope with about a million extra trips per day during the Olympics. Londoners are being asked to work from home or find other ways to stay off the system for the duration.

This week, road traffic into London slowed to a crawl as parts of the 48 kilometres of dedicated Games Lanes – to be used only by members of the ”Olympic family” – came into operation. An accident and a suicide caused two separate bottlenecks, with traffic not moving at all for about 45 minutes. Other jams were caused by last-minute braking as drivers fearing fines in the Olympic lane suddenly swerved to change lanes.

All these difficulties are tiresome, particularly for the gloomier Londoners who already viewed the Games as an ordeal to be endured with the kind of British stoicism displayed during the Blitz. But they are minor and predictable problems.

The chaos around Olympics security, however, is of an entirely different order. It opens the way to catastrophe.

Over the past 10 days, Britain and the world have learnt that the Games has a shortfall of 3500 security guards, as well as problems notifying the guards who do exist about when and where they are to report for work. Only 30 out of an expected 300 security officers turned up to guard cyclists. Only 10 out of 58 arrived to guard footballers; only 20 out of 58 at the main Olympic hotel; and no guards at all turned up for an induction day at Coventry Stadium (70 had been expected).

”On a daily basis it’s a lottery as to how many staff are going to turn up,” Clive Chamberlain, chairman of Dorset Police Federation, told The Guardian. ”It’s a fiasco, an absolute debacle.”

Home Secretary Theresa May, at the centre of a political firestorm over the mess, claims the government knew nothing of the crisis until it was told last week by G4S, the company hired to provide Games security. She has called in 3500 emergency troops, including sailors and airmen, and police from eight forces around the nation to fill the shortfall.

Another 2000 might be needed but the government is fending off that further embarrassment, despite warnings from defence chiefs that notice is required if their troops are to be in action by the opening ceremony next Friday. This would bring the total numbers of military staff involved in the Games, both planned and unplanned, to 19,000.

GS4 chief executive Nick Buckles endured a grilling by MPs this week in which he admitted that he couldn’t guarantee he could supply even the 7000 guards now required by his tattered end of the bargain. He said he could not predict the scale of ”no shows” until recruits failed to respond to an email. He also could not promise that all the guards would speak fluent English: ”I don’t know what fluent English is.” Asked by an MP whether the debacle was a ”humiliating shambles” for his company, Buckles admitted, ”I would have to agree with you.” G4S has seen £400 million ($A600 million) wiped off its market value and is predicting it will make a £50 million loss on the Games contract. But it is still insisting on claiming its £57 million ”management fee”.

How did it come to this? It appears computer glitches at G4S sent recruits to wrong venues or supplied them with incorrect schedules. There also seems to be a larger than expected number of casual employees who lost interest or found another job. But May claimed the company had been assuring ministers it would ”overshoot” the recruitment targets in its £284 million contract. This is at odds with an internal Home Office memo revealed by The Sunday Times that warned in April, ”We will very soon start to see big shortfalls against planned numbers.”

Part of the problem is due to governmental dithering. Last December, a full six years after London won the Games, the government had a last-minute rush of blood to the head over security issues and dramatically amped up the brief to G4S from 2000 guards (in a contract signed in December 2010) to 13,700 guards. The tardiness was despite the fact that London was hit by the July 7 suicide bomb attacks the day after winning the race for the Olympics in 2005. Defence chiefs had offered to provide Games security but the government decided outsourcing to a private company would be better.

Margaret Hodge, chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said, ”It is outrageous. [The organisers] knew in 2005 that security was going to be a major challenge but they left it too late.”

There have also been concerns about the quality of recruits. G4S, which won the contract partly because it has previously provided security for the Olympics site during construction, has also protected the Wimbledon tennis championships.

A security consultant who went undercover for the company at Wimbledon last year reported alarming lapses. These included some staff lacking even ”the most basic security knowledge” needed to guard a significant terrorism target; staff routinely leaving premises unprotected by sleeping on the job; and some recruits being allowed to skip hearing and smell tests designed to check that they were able to notice fires or explosions. The security consultant who wrote the report, Peter Bleksley, is a former Scotland Yard detective. He warned that the problems could ”eventually prove catastrophic for G4S” and some were so serious they could have ”fatal consequences” if they were not fixed before the Games.

Buckles claims those concerns were taken on board and dealt with, but one whistleblower has claimed the company has been forced to resort to a ”no-fail policy” for recruits in the current crisis.

G4S made headlines in the 1990s over security breaches with its prisoner-escort service. This week, prosecutors decided not to bring charges against three of its guards who, at Heathrow, restrained an Angolan man who became ill and died of cardio-respiratory failure following the incident in October 2010.

Despite the torrent of bad publicity, Games chief Coe has promised that safety is not compromised: ”My responsibility is to make sure that we get a Games that is safe and secure. We will do that, and it is to make sure that our teams, the Home Office and the military sit alongside G4S and mobilise and deploy exactly who we need to.”

Assistant Commissioner Chris Allison, the national Olympic security co-ordinator, has also denied that security is falling over: ”The plan is exactly the same as it was. It is just being delivered by different people. I went through the search regime at Olympic Park ? and it was everything you could possibly want.”

It will certainly be one of the most militarised Olympics ever, with missiles poised and jets on hand and the Royal Navy’s largest warship deployed to launch military helicopters.

All that might prove of little use if a would-be terrorist slips through the net at Heathrow Airport. The Observer reported that terror suspects were able to enter Britain in the run-up to the Games without being picked up by security checks. A senior border officer claimed inexperienced recruits were repeatedly failing to refer passengers on a watch list to counter-terrorism officers.

With less than a week to go before the London Olympics begin, the blame games are already up and running.

First published on theage.com.au

Lone, fragile future beckons the Greeks

The crisis engulfing the country has led to violence, recriminations and widespread hatred of politicians, writes Karen Kissane in Athens.

At the beginning of last year, they were both in work. By the end of it, they were both unemployed. Now, like many young city people, Vasso Simu and Panagiotis Vovos have been forced by what Greeks call “The Crisis” to return to the simpler life on the land that their grandparents had led.
Simu and Vovos are both 31. She had been an adviser in an insurance company, he had been a computer programmer. Unemployed and with no future in the city, three months ago they moved back to his mother’s village on the island of Evia, two hours’ drive from Athens.
“We wanted a new life in the countryside,” Simu says. “We have our own garden: tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, beans, corn. We will make our own olive grove.” She works in a restaurant to earn them cash but they hope eventually to make a real living out of selling what they grow.
Meanwhile, they love the traditional life. “Every day we are swimming in the sea,” she says with satisfaction. “We get up early and collect the eggs. Right now Panagiotis is filling the ground with water and then he will fix the house of the chickens. I make marmalade and all the food for us to eat. We are very happy.”
There are not many Greeks who can say the financial crisis has led to happiness. The economy has been crippled by five years of recession, aggravated by an extreme austerity drive that has driven up taxes while public spending, wages and pensions have been slashed. Unemployment is at 23 per cent and is close to 50 per cent for young people.
The national debt is so mountainous that Greece might default on its repayments and walk away – out of the euro and back into the drachma, out of the European Union and into a lone and fragile future.
All of this is enough to make tomorrow’s Greek election, a rerun of a poll six weeks ago that failed to deliver a government, the most important since the end of World War II. It will effectively be a vote on whether Greece should continue to accept the tough terms of its financial bail-out by the “troika” of the EU, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
This means it is also an election that Europe’s leaders are watching with bated breath. If Greece defaults or leaves the euro, there will be a domino effect across the rest of the troubled zone, with Spain, then Italy, and even Belgium and France facing investor flight and unsustainably high interest rates.
Spain and Italy endured a market storm this week as the Greek election drew near, despite the fact that eurozone leaders agreed to a €100 billion ($126.1 billion) rescue package for teetering Spanish banks.
On Thursday, Spain’s Foreign Minister warned of impending doom for the eurozone as his country’s borrowing costs reached an unsustainable 7 per cent. Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo told his wealthier neighbours: “If that Titanic sinks it takes everyone with it, even those travelling in first class.”
The threat of a Greek default is real. The main conservative contender in the Greek election, the New Democracy party, wants to change some terms of the bailout but basically supports the deal. But a left-wing party that also has a good chance of coming first, Syriza, has promised to renegotiate or even tear up the memorandum of understanding. Default even has a nickname now: “Grexit.”
A printing house is rumoured to be on stand-by to produce drachmas should they be needed. European banks and political leaders are drawing up contingency plans for an emergency. Ordinary Greeks have their own contingency plans; they are pulling up to €800 million a day out of banks to try to safeguard their savings by hiding them in their homes or squirreling them away overseas.
Greek domestic politics are always roiling but are particularly fevered now because people of all political stripes are furious with the major parties – conservative New Democracy and socialist PASOK – that have led their country to ruin. If there is one thing that unites this fractious nation, it is a withering contempt for its inept (and often corrupt) leaders.
Leo, who does not want his surname used, is a fine arts graduate, a former chief executive of a private school and most recently an icon painter who supported himself happily by painting for 20 years until the crisis struck. Two years ago, he found himself with no orders for icons and no money to pay rent. He ended up living on the streets of Athens.
He was taken in by a hostel, Klimaka, and is living there until he qualifies for the age pension in a year. He won’t be voting tomorrow.
“I do believe that my vote is valuable and [should] not to be spent on those crooks,” he says. “I am very angry with the politicians, particularly those who ruled for the last 25 years and present themselves for our votes now. They don’t accept that they are failures.”
He refused to elaborate, saying the language he would have to use to describe them would not be fit for a family newspaper.
Voters have physically attacked politicians in the street. Many demonstrations against the bailout terms have ended in violence. Last week, the rage leapt into the political arena itself with an incident that has become known as “the slap”.
Ilias Kasidiaris is a spokesman for Golden Dawn, a party described by some as extreme right and others as neo-Nazi. In a live TV debate he lost his temper after verbal goading from a female communist MP and struck her. He also threw a glass of water at another female politician. He later blamed them for having provoked him but he faces assault charges.
While prosecutors have no doubt he did wrong, comments on social media were more evenly divided. A Facebook page was set up with the title “God bless his hands” (a Greek expression that is the equivalent of “serve her right”). It gained 4000 fans in a day.
The caption below a photograph of Kasidiaris said: “Today Ilias did what all the Greeks wanted to do for a long time – slap the political system and its representatives.”
Michalis Spourdalakis, professor of political science at Athens University, says: “A man beating up a woman is not acceptable in Greece, but beating up a woman who is a politician, that’s OK. This is because [people think that] as a woman she is out of her place to be in politics, and also because politicians are hated.”
Spourdalakis says he did not believe the doomsayers who warned two years ago that the consequences of the austerity measures insisted upon by the bailout would be a disaster. He now thinks they were right.
“There has been loss of income, an undermining of the basic functions of hospitals and schools and universities – everything,” he says. “Seventy thousand small businesses have gone bankrupt. There have been very strong anti-authoritarian measures; police have been beefed up and have been very aggressive against demonstrators.
“And there’s no dialogue any more; collective bargaining has gone in this country, and it has been part of the tradition of Western democracies since the 19th century. All this has happened in just two years.”
Leonidas Vatikiotis, who teaches political economy at the Varna Free University of Cyprus, says it is the most brutal austerity program imposed on a developed nation since World War II. It has shrunk the middle class and triggered “generalised poverty” and “social genocide”.
“People can’t pay the loans for their own homes; they are homeless at 50 or 60, and ashamed of it,” he says.
“In the centre of Athens we have 25,000 homeless, and usually they were in the middle class. They weren’t workers or public servants, they were shop owners or self-employed.
“Athens is a ghost city at night, with people wrapped in blankets waiting in the shadows.”
At the same time as Greeks are earning less, welfare is shrinking, with the closure of 54 hospitals and 1000 schools last year. This is a big problem in the remote mountains where sending children 30 kilometres to school in winter is dangerous. “You can’t compare Greece’s school ratio with, say, Sweden’s, because Greece has different geography,” Spourdalakis says.
The consequent loathing of establishment politics has led to a polarisation in Greek voting patterns. At the last poll on May 6, voters savaged the main parties that had supported the bailout deal, parties that had dominated Greek politics for decades, and turned instead to parties that were further left and further right.
The ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn shot to prominence when it won 7 per cent of the vote and entered parliament for the first time with 21 seats. It was buoyed by a wave of hostility towards illegal immigrants – it wants to send them “home” and lay landmines to protect borders – as well as concerns about street violence and crime. Its new status is being linked to a spate of assaults on immigrants.
But the real arm-wrestling tomorrow will be between New Democracy, which won 18.5 per cent of the vote last time (120 seats) and the new left-wing coalition Syriza, which got a close-run 17 per cent (52 seats). (In Greece, the party that wins the highest percentage of the vote is awarded a bonus 50 seats.)
The Syriza leader, Alexis Tsipras, whose coalition contains 12 parties of greens and socialists, has promised to stand up to Europe over the terms of the bailout.
He says Greeks have been duped into thinking that there is only one way out of their economic mess, “through the cruel austerity [German chancellor] Madame Merkel and the IMF have inflicted upon us”.
Tsipras has also won brownie points by attacking the corrupt political elite and crooked bankers. “Greeks who vote for Syriza are not expecting Syriza to solve all the problems,” Spourdalakis says. “They vote just in hope of a breath of fresh air and as a small step towards self-respect. There’s no way in this country we can have a troika going into every public office and telling us what to do. Greeks are insulted.
“But they also lean towards Syriza because it is not corrupt and because it supports them in the struggle against the memorandum. Syriza were there in the protests, they were tear-gassed too, they were jailed with them. That’s why they trust them.”
Polls show Syriza neck-and-neck with New Democracy, but neither is expected to win outright in the 300-seat parliament. “We are hopeful we will be the first party and confident we can find a framework to come together [to govern] with the Democratic Left and perhaps the Communist Party,” says John Milios, a professor of economics who has helped write Syriza’s economic platform.
He says the party accepts the main goal of the bailout terms: a primary surplus in the budget. “But it’s impossible to achieve the goal of growth, which is required for a primary surplus, while paying €110 billion in interest by 2020. If we follow this austerity program we would have to further reduce wages and pensions and dismantle welfare.”
Milios says the party will prevent further cuts in the income of most people, returning the minimum wage to €751 a month (it had been cut to €560) and reintroducing collective bargaining.
“We need to work out how to make the debt viable and take specific measures for stronger growth rates.” This would involve big infrastructure projects to boost employment, he says.
Big projects such as the Athens Olympics in 2004 were a large part of what got Greece into trouble in the first place. Spending on stadiums and roads gushed on the strength of easy credit, but public revenues, strangled by tax evasion, did not keep up with the outgoing torrent.
Business and citizens did their bit, too. They borrowed lavishly for consumer goods and for property, which ballooned into a bubble that burst, leaving many over-burdened with debt that outstripped their assets.
At least the disaster has not stripped Greeks of their sense of humour. A young man dressed up for a carnival party this year in a black dinner suit and hired himself a fancy car for the evening. He told other guests: “I’m coming as the 1980s!”
Many are now reassessing their values along with their budgets. Fay Vernikou, 29, and Kostas Hatzipanagiotis, 31, are another young couple who fled to the island of Evia when they foresaw hard times.
He used to work for a publishing company and she was a primary school teacher in Athens. They were not unemployed when they chose to move three years ago, “but you could see what was coming”, Hatzipanagiotis says. “It was the time of the first austerity measures.”
He says Greeks had the mistaken idea they could be consumers without first creating anything. He is trying to become more self-sufficient, including by growing his own food, but confesses ruefully that he is struggling to wean himself off TV and the internet.
“The crisis is our fault as much as anyone else’s fault,” he says. “Sometimes Greek society is hoping for a fairy godmother. We always put the blame on politicians but we also played a part.”
He won’t be voting tomorrow because he doesn’t think elections make a difference: “People need to organise into small groups and set up co-operatives to change our lives. We shouldn’t expect politicians to solve anything.”
Milios also thinks the current crisis brings as its flip side an opportunity for change, but while Hatzipanagiotis is thinking small, he is thinking big.
Milios sees the mess as being about the failure of Thatcherism and neo-liberal policies that gave too heavy an emphasis to markets and business, and not enough to the human needs of society.
If Greece can force a renegotiation of its loan terms, it creates space for a discussion “about a different kind of society, one based on social needs and not on the interests of the few or the maximisation of profit as a prerequisite of accomplishment of any goal”.
He also sees his party’s stance as a spur to the saving of the euro. Many economists believe it will survive only if the European Central Bank guarantees the debt of all members and issues European bonds to raise money for them. This option is fiercely resisted by Germany and its Chancellor, Angela Merkel.
But her party is expected to do badly at the next German elections, Milios says. “We expect that the whole European structure will change. I think we are playing a role as the initiator of this process.”

First published in The Age.