When will health authorities declare the climate crisis as a public health emergency and act accordingly?
When will governments realise that the media crisis is a public health emergency, both globally and locally, and act accordingly?
When will Australians recognise that taxation policy is a critical health matter?
These, and so many other questions (and answers) are canvassed in this week’s ICYMI column, which also brings news on childcare, Indigenous data governance, and conflicts of interest in public health research.
Don’t miss the interview with former Minister Ken Wyatt, as well as updates on opportunities, awards and events.
The quotable?
To say that trust in the news media has declined is correct, but too vague. The reality is that destroying confidence in the practice and products of journalism is a potent and successful political strategy.”
Climate
Australian public health legend, the late Professor Tony McMichael, is quoted in this article in Nature Medicine, ‘After millions of preventable deaths, climate change must be treated like a health emergency’.
The health impacts from climate change have been apparent for at least 20 years, but the climate crisis is still not treated like other global public health emergencies, writes Dr Colin Carlson from Georgetown University Medical Center.
In a related X/Twitter thread, Carlson said:
Cutting greenhouse gasses isn’t enough anymore. National governments have to meet the challenge of climate and health with substantive commitments: access to essential medicines; access to high-quality care; access to food and clean water. And the World Helath Organization needs to give them a blueprint.
The present-day death toll of climate change exceeds every public health emergency of international concern before COVID-19 combined. Eventually, WHO will have to convene an Emergency Committee. The only question is whether Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wants it to be his legacy or the next DG’s.
But no one will act unless we change the narrative that climate change is still a future crisis to be prevented at the last second. Four million people are dead. They had names, families, dreams. Most of them were children. Every single one of those deaths was preventable.
Five years ago it was “ten years to save the planet.” Now, it needs to be “four million people are dead.” Say it, say it, say it. Write to your Senators, write it on the walls under a bridge, write it anywhere someone will see. Climate change is a public health emergency.
Meanwhile, Dr Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, a co-author of McMichael’s 2003 study, who is now the head of the climate change and health unit at the World Health Organization (WHO), is quoted in a related article in Grist.
The article also quotes an open letter by McMichael just weeks before his death in 2014: “Our mismanagement of the world’s climate and environment is weakening the foundations of health and longevity.”
And yet, says Carlson, a very small proportion of the four million deaths caused by climate change so far “will have been recognised by the victims’ families, or acknowledged by national governments, as the consequence of climate change”.
Read: Africa’s path to climate-resilient health systems
Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.
“They contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth’s climate on a scale significant to human civilisation,” said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in historic climate disinformation at the University of Miami.
Media matters
It’s only the fifth week of 2024, and already there are a flood of reports about cutbacks to journalism and media organisation in many countries. Given the interconnected nature of our world, this will have consequences for policy and public debates in Australia, especially as misinformation and disinformation proliferate.
As Reporters Without Borders recently noted, more than half of humanity will be called to the polls for presidential, parliamentary, regional or municipal elections in 2024 – 4.1 billion voters. Eight of the world’s ten most populous countries will have elections this year. They include the United States, which will organise one of the most important votes for the future of democracy.
This CNN article cited below, ‘News industry off to brutal 2024 start as mass layoffs devastate publishers’, cites recent cuts to The Los Angeles Times, TIME, Business Insider and other outlets as “part of a much larger and unrelenting storm battering the journalism industry”.
Over the past 18 months, most news organisations in the US have been forced to make difficult decisions to reduce their workforces, including CNN, The Washington Post, NPR, Vice Media, Sports Illustrated, Vox Media, NBC News, CNBC, while local and small outlets have also cut back.
“The latest round of layoffs come after 2023 marked the worst year for job cuts in the journalism sector since COVID-19 upended the world in 2020, with roughly 2,700 jobs eliminated,” reports the CNN article.
A Columbia Journalism Review article by a journalist who is “likely the last Washington bureau chief for the Daily News”, explores the implications for democracy.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the state-owned Channel 4 is set to cut almost 250 jobs, or about 15 percent of its full-time workforce, reports The Guardian.
US journalism academic Dr Jay Rosen explored some of the factors in a long X/Twitter thread on 29 January, reproduced below.
Factors converging on the news industry to hollow it out, weaken the product, scare investors, and threaten jobs:
1. With a few exceptions, the search for a stable business model has been unsuccessful, in part because the problem changes faster than R & D in the news business.
2. The rich guy rescue plan rarely works. The rescuer typically underestimates how hard it is to find money in news and keep quality reasonably high. When that is made clear, rich guy’s commitment starts faltering. And the hedge funds lie in wait. See San-Diego Union Tribune.
3. The ad industry doesn’t need the news industry when there are so many other ways to purchase attention, and so many better ways to target users.
4. The internet is rewiring not only the media sector (as with streaming) but the public itself, which is breaking up, or being broken, into multiple – some say parallel – realities. As you can tell from my attempt to describe it, we do not have a good language for this shift.
5. The news industry is still struggling to re-establish a direct connection with readers (through newsletters and podcasts, for example…) after social media captured a lot of that territory for itself.
6. After a period in the 2010s when it appeared that they did, the big tech platforms today clearly don’t care much about news delivery or quality, and yet they have greatly disrupted these things.
7. Local news is the hardest hit, and local is how people form an initial relationship with journalists and journalism – or don’t. TV viewers still develop bonds with local anchors. But TV newsrooms lean heavily on the local newspaper’s reporting, and that is where the crisis is
8. Journalists have to take it upon themselves to treat sustainability as their problem, but this is not what they signed up for. They signed up to do great stories.
9. Philanthropy has taken its time to grasp what is happening, and government funding is (in my view) as much a threat as it is a solution
10. To say that trust in the news media has declined is correct, but too vague. The reality is that destroying confidence in the practice and products of journalism is a potent and successful political strategy, as with Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone.”
Final note: Decades ago, the leadership class in American journalism accepted the argument that real pluralism had to come to their newsrooms, or the journalism would suffer. Or at least, this is what they said to themselves…
But the bosses also said this: We can have a diverse and multi-colored newsroom, and maintain the view from nowhere.
See the contradiction? Under-represented journalists are to simultaneously supply a missing perspective and suppress it – in order to prove their objectivity.
I mention this for a simple reason: Some of the wounds are self-inflicted.
On related matters, don’t miss this long read on the Murdoch empire in Mother Jones.
Sean Kelly cites former PM Malcolm Turnbull, who “really admired” Murdoch when they first met almost 50 years ago, and does not underestimate the older man’s influence to date: “It’s hard to think of one person that has made a bigger contribution to delaying action on climate in the world…And, of course, Trump and January 6: wow. There isn’t a person alive today who has done more damage to the United States.”
Another long read not to miss: from Columbia Journalism Review, a fascinating article about Bad Press, a documentary on the history of journalism in tribal nations in the US. (Of 574 Indian nations in the US, only five have laws guaranteeing freedom of the press.) It also canvasses local news deserts, the sustainability of community news, and the battles Indigenous journalists face when writing about their communities.
Meanwhile…in Australia, another loss to journalism.
#AusPol
One of the most powerful moments in the Nemesis episode on ABC TV this week was listening to former Minister Ken Wyatt. We clipped the snippet below, in case you missed it.
Wyatt describes former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s approach to issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people: it was “Tony’s way”, rather than consulting or co-design with Aboriginal people – and doing things TO Aboriginal people rather than WITH them.
Wyatt said Government staffers had described him as “our token Aboriginal”. Wyatt was excluded from decision-making and “on the outer in Indigenous issues” despite his expertise. “I used to hate the missionary approach in the way that we did things under Tony,” he said.
Also, don’t miss this long read in the February edition of The Monthly about how systems failure after systems failure in Tasmania failed children and young people. So many cases of abuse, so much suffering and trauma could have been prevented if only systems had not failed, repeatedly.
If you haven’t already, buy a copy of the magazine. It’s worth it, for this article alone.
With taxation policy so important for health, it’s worth reading Richard Denniss’s address to the National Press Club yesterday, noting that if we were to collect the average amount of tax collected by OECD countries then this year, we would have to collect more than an extra $100 billion. Per year.
While Australia is a low-tax country, Denniss says the “highest taxed countries in the world also happen to be the richest, most productive, and happiest countries in the world”.
“Scrapping fossil fuel subsidies, taxing the fossil fuel industry fairly, taxing the tech platforms and closing the loopholes that allow many of our wealthiest individuals and companies pay no tax will strengthen our society and our economy,” Denniss said.
“Investing in free childcare would drive far more people into the workforce than any tax cut. Investing in convenient public transport will drive down the cost of living. And investing in our essential services will improve both our quality of life and our productivity.”
And then there was this kicker:
As Oxfam Australia points out, increasing taxation revenue is also part of the solution for poverty.
On 29 January 2024, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) released its final report for the inquiry into childcare services. Read it here.
Statement by SNAICC
SNAICC – National Voice for our Children has welcomed the ACCC’s recommendations to reform the current childcare system, in particular scrapping the Activity Test and changing the market-driven approach to early education and care (ECEC).
SNAICC CEO Catherine Liddle said the findings of the ACCC’s year-long enquiry found that a one-size-fits-all approach to ECEC does not meet the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families supports many years of calls for reform.
“The ACCC inquiry is the latest in a significant body of evidence backing SNAICC’s position that current ECEC systems put up particular barriers to affordability and access for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.
“It should be no surprise that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are less likely to be enrolled in ECEC services, which has an impact on efforts to improve life outcomes.
“Removing these barriers by reforming the system, and growing and strengthening Aboriginal community-controlled (ACCO) services, will make a huge difference for our children and families.
“SNAICC’s Stronger ACCOs, Stronger Families report released last year showed how a new funding model that valued culture, and resourced ACCOs could reduce the number of children going into child protection.
“ACCO services not only provide quality and culturally strong ECEC, they assist families and kin to access support services if and when necessary. They can make all the difference to setting children up for a successful transition to formal education, and close the gaps across a range of social and economic outcomes.
“It is heartening to see the ACCC strongly recognising the importance of ACCO services, directly recommending maintaining and expanding supply-side support options for ACCOs that provide childcare and additional support services for First Nations children, parents and guardians.
“SNAICC is working with the Early Childhood Care and Development Policy Partnership under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap to develop new funding model options for ACCOs that deliver ECEC and other supports to children and families. The ACCC findings reinforce how important it is for governments to work with us to agree and implement new ways to fund and expand ACCO early years services.”
Ms Liddle said the ACCC’s recognition that particular workforce challenges facing ACCO early years services need direct Government support was welcome.
“We know that childcare deserts exist more acutely in regional and remote areas, and the challenges of recruiting and retaining a skilled workforce are exacerbated.
“While recent Federal Government reform is helping, much more needs to be done.”
First Nations peoples’ health and wellbeing
Lowitja Institute has published ‘Taking Control of Our Data: A Discussion Paper on Indigenous Data Governance for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People and Communities‘.
Developed by the Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty Collective, a network of leading Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers who advocate for the rights of our peoples and our nations in relation to data, this paper aims to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and organisations to realise Indigenous Data Sovereignty by putting Indigenous Data Governance into practice.
The paper includes a structured, practical tool to guide organisations through the processes involved in embedding Indigenous Data Governance at the community level.
Read about Sawee Bero who has worked with ATSICHS Brisbane for almost five years in a few different roles, most recently as Youth Practitioner.
Justice matters
Read Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service statement:One year after Inquest findings, more must be done to honour Veronica Nelson
Global health
The WHO is developing a Health for Peace initiative. 
An alliance of conservative WHO member states and right-wing US organisations has halted the process of granting a reproductive health organisation “official relations” with the global body, reports Health Policy Watch. It is described as another example of the “culture wars” polarising and paralysing the global health body.
Read: Lessons from Lower-Income Countries’ COVID-19 Vaccination Efforts: they demonstrated how to reach people where they are by using innovative and tailored approaches that often required collaboration among national governments, local organisations, and vulnerable communities. Their experience provides crucial lessons as the world prepares for the next pandemic. 
Public health
Read: Avoiding conflicts of interest and reputational risks associated with population research on food and nutrition: the Food Research risK (FoRK) guidance and toolkit for researchers.
See the NHMRC communique 
See the study and a Monash University statement about it.
Opportunities
Awards and honours
The 2024 Australia Day Honours list recognises and celebrates 1,042 Australians, including many people contributing to health, including the COVID-19 Honour Roll.
Here are details of the Australian of the Year 2024 winners.
In reflecting on her award, Professor Julie Leask paid tribute to the “many quiet achievers making vaccine programs happen – the Aboriginal Health workers, the nurses, community workers and others who put in so much to get people vaccinated. I am grateful to them for their work in public health”.
The award news prompted an outpouring of tributes to Leask on X/Twitter, some of which are compiled here.
Upcoming events
See previous editions of ICYMI
