Money for nothing: the Climate Pollution Reduction Scheme and the ascent of Abbott

I’m writing about an emerging form of mental illness that has recently been identified by mental health professionals, and that I think I may be suffering from: politician induced depression, or PID. It’s been found in dictatorships for decades, but in recent years has turned up in increasingly endemic proportions in Western countries like Australia.

The main symptom is a growing despair that is activated every time the sufferer sees or hears a politician speak. Treatment consists of graded exposure to current affairs programs and radio news broadcasts, plus compulsory reading of books such as Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy. Membership of the Greens is also recommended but not mandatory. As a final resort, sufferers are urged to run for parliament.

I’m only half joking. Australia these days is a hot place, and our capital cities are no exception. The evidence of climate change is everywhere, but all the pollies care about is keeping the coal industry onside.

I complained recently about a November heatwave in Melbourne – actually there were two mini-heatwaves, and the temperature reached 38.2 on 20 November before the cool change brought some rain.

But that was nothing compared to what the rest of the country was facing. In New South Wales, weather records were broken as some places reached 45 degrees. Meanwhile, South Australia’s equally giant heatwave saw eight consecutive days of over 35 degrees, between Sunday 8 November and Sunday 15 November. During the heatwave, maximum temperatures in parts of South Australia also nudged 45 degrees. On 19 November, Adelaide’s temperature reached 42.8 - the city’s hottest day ever recorded for November.

During these heatwaves catastrophic fire warnings were issued in both states. Dozens of bushfires swept across both South Australia and New South Wales, including Sydney’s northern outskirts; at different times in each state, at least 100 fires were burning.

There were also bushfires in Victoria and even one in Tasmania, which is known for its chilly weather compared with the rest of Australia.

And this was before summer had actually begun.

A climate scientist with the Bureau of Meteorology, Dr Harvey Stern, said that there was a ‘high chance’ that the hot weather that swept New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria was connected to climate change. As well as giving the world a sneak preview of what they can expect from global warming in the next few decades, Australia is currently the highest per capita producer of emissions in the world, so we really need to get our act together.

Climate capers
Meanwhile Australia’s politicians have been fiddling while the country literally burns. The two main party groups, the governing Australian Labor Party and the conservative Coalition (Liberals and the rural-based National Party) have been taking part in what amounts to a faux battle about climate change. The battle has resulted in zero action on climate change but huge media furore over the fall of Coalition leader Malcolm Turnbull (pictured above), yesterday replaced by the right-wing Catholic Tony Abbott.

Because he does not have a majority in the upper house, ALP leader Kevin Rudd had been trying to negotiate with the Coalition a deal that would enable the passing of his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) before going to the climate summit at Copenhagen. The CPRS is in the form of an emissions trading scheme.

Former Coalition leader Malcolm Turnbull and some members of the Coalition had been in favour of passing the Scheme, complete with amendments the Coalition had negotiated with the ALP, in time for Copenhagen. But a noisy minority of right-wing Coalition members were building up a simmering resentment towards Turnbull.

The fact is, in this sunburnt country, many of these renegades don’t actually believe that human-induced global warming exists, or they seem not to care, and they’ve publicly declared their stance. Basically they were trying to steal the glory from Rudd at Copenhagen, and to respond to Rudd's own move to the right by moving even further to the right than he has.

The anger of these renegades finally resulted in a dramatic change of leadership yesterday to Tony Abbott, who won by the narrowest of margins. This win was unexpected, as Abbott, a former health minister in the Howard Coalition government, is unpopular with voters, particularly women.

Turnbull was hoping to get the amended legislation passed in the Senate before his leadership showdown, but it wasn’t to be. With Abbott as leader, just hours ago the Senate formally rejected the legislation. This means that Rudd won't be able to take his CPRS to Copenhagen as a fait accompli. But it also enables the government, if it so chooses, to dissolve both houses of parliament and call an early election.

The great irony is that the ALP and all parts of the fractured Coalition have actually been on the same side all along – that of doing very little to mitigate climate change, and keeping the big polluters, particularly Australia’s powerful coal industry, happy. It’s difficult to understand how the international community could have been happy about the CPRS Rudd would have have taken to Copenhagen if the Senate had passed it. In fact, a recent article in The Guardian slams Australia’s record and current action on cutting emissions.

In negotiating CPRS amendments with the Coalition (Coal – ition?), and indirectly helping to precipitate their leadership crisis, Rudd made an extremely poor scheme even worse. He also demonstrated he would do anything to avoid negotiating with the Greens.

Disturbingly, the media have been reporting the leadership drama with the focus entirely on the politics rather than the planet. They’ve allowed Turnbull to portray himself as someone willing to sacrifice his prime ministerial aspirations for the principle of taking action on climate change. No-one in the mainstream media so far has directly challenged this breathtaking deception.

Meanwhile, the actions of the renegade Coalition members have enabled Rudd to pretend to the confused electorate that he’s their climate saviour, when the opposite is the case. Rudd might have got somewhere with his CPRS if he’d negotiated with the Greens, who have five members in the Senate, and independent senator Nick Xenophon, who at least believes in climate change (ironically, today in the Senate two disaffected Liberal 'wets' voted with the government on the amended CPRS; if these two Libs and Xenophon had supported a CPRS influenced by the Greens, it could have passed). Rudd chose instead to negotiate with a right-wing party that did nothing to mitigate climate change during its 11 years in office. And in the end it betrayed him, after giving him its word it was negotiating in good faith.

Despite all the spin, and the media focus on the Coalition in the last week or so, Fran Kelly reported on Radio National on 30 November that support for the ALP had dropped slightly, accompanied by a slight boost in support for the Greens. This suggests that at least some voters were unhappy with the further weakening of an already compromised CPRS that the Coalition's amendments would have led to.

Locking us into doing nothing
Even without the Coalition’s amendments, the incredibly complex piece of legislation installing the CPRS -- it will be reintroduced to parliament next year -- will lock Australia into targets so low they are laughable. The official target is 5–25 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the conditions attached to a 25 per cent reduction are so many that this higher target is unlikely to prevail. And Treasury modelling indicates there’ll be no actual reduction in greenhouse emissions until around 2033, because investment in offsets such as overseas carbon sinks will count towards the reduction.

The CPRS also not only offers, but locks in for the future, massive compensation to the big polluters. Importantly, the compensation figures included in the legislation assume that Australia cuts its carbon emissions by only 5 per cent by 2020. This means that in theory a higher rate of compensation to the polluters could kick in if the cuts are steeper than 5 per cent.

According to the Citizens Climate Campaign, Professor Garnaut, the Government’s own advisor on climate change policy, has criticised the CPRS, especially the compensation it offered the biggest polluters.

The deal struck with the Coalition on 24 November, before Turnbull’s defeat, would have watered the legislation down even further. Under the deal the government would have doubled its handouts to the coal industry, providing $1.5 billion over five years. Power generators would have received a further $4 billion in permits to pollute, bringing the total in permits to $7.3 billion. Further, $1.1 billion would have been spent on assisting manufacturing and mining businesses with higher electricity prices because of the CPRS. To top this off, $5.76 billion set aside to compensate consumers for the increased cost of living would have been cut.

Ordinary Australians were already going to be subsidising the big polluters, which would be able to go on with business as usual. However, these amendments would have made their subsidy even higher – $4 billion, rather than the original $2.5 billion, which was bad enough.

The dramatic turnaround in Coalition policy leaves many environmentally aware Australians feeling confused. On the one hand, they're relieved that we are not yet locked into a useless ETS; on the other hand they’re dismayed at both major parties’ refusal to really tackle climate change.

However, they shouldn't get too excited. The Minerals Council of Australia stated today that this was an opportunity to improve the CPRS legislation (read: throw more taxpayer money at the mining industry).

The proposed CPRS was complicated to start with and always had pathetically low targets. But when the global financial crisis struck, and even before it started negotiating with the Coalition, the government had heralded further industry-friendly changes, including moving the starting date from 2010 to 2011.

This cavalier approach to the planet, along with the Coalition’s changing position and the willingness of the media to air the views of climate change denialists in the interests of spurious balance, sent a message to the average Australian that climate change was not as dire a problem as previously thought. A recent poll by the Lowy Institute of International Policy found that Australians were less concerned about climate change than they had been two years earlier. According to the poll, on a list of 10 goals in 2009, climate change had slipped from its 2007 position, when it came equal first.

The Greens in Higgins
On 5 December a by-election will take place in my electorate, the House of Representatives seat of Higgins. The Liberals have a new candidate, Kelly O’Dwyer, to replace the one-time Liberal treasurer Peter Costello. The ALP isn’t fielding a candidate as Higgins is a safe-as-houses Liberal seat, but the Greens are. Their choice of candidate has been controversial though: Dr Clive Hamilton is a progressive economics academic and commentator, and one of Australia’s most committed climate change activists, but he has trouble connecting with the electorate and getting his message across.

Given the current Liberal Party furore it will be interesting to see whether Abbott’s leadership reduces the Liberal vote in Higgins. O’Dwyer claims to believe that humans play some role in climate change, but any policy must preserve our economy.

The Greens are the only party in the federal parliament with emissions targets that recognise the climate science – by 2020 they want a 40 per cut in carbon emissions compared to 1990 levels. Whether Higgins voters recognise the urgency of the situation, and send a message to both the ALP and the Coalition to get their act together, is yet to be seen.

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My diagnostic disaster – part three

The story so far:

In an attempt to save my sanity. I had decided to apply for a part payment of a government allowance. To do this I needed a doctor’s report, and to obtain one I returned to a psychiatrist I had seen eight years earlier. At the time he had diagnosed me with bipolar and unsuccessfully tried to put me on an epilepsy drug. I had left in disgust. Upon returning in the hope of getting a doctor’s report, Dr Field (not his real name) had diagnosed me with ADD.

As I sat in Dr Field’s office trying to absorb the news, he was already back to his old diagnostic tricks. ‘Do you feel stuck in the present?’ he asked. Stuck in the present? I wished I was. I was stuck in the past, stuck in the future – the present was in some ways elusive. But even a preliminary perusal of the literature he’d given me to read on ADD suggested that the picture was far less simple than his question suggested.

‘I want you to go on dexamphetamine’, he said. ‘It’s a stimulant, but it has the opposite effect on people with ADD. It’ll calm you down’.

I was shocked but also stunned at my own naivete. Dr Field loved drugs: why would I think he wouldn’t have found one to treat his latest diagnostic interest?

I tried to explain my reluctance to take a stimulant drug but my efforts were wasted. It was all contrariness and non-compliance as far as he was concerned.

He smiled at me. ‘If you don’t take this drug you won’t get anywhere in life. Are you willing to throw away your entire future?’

In the end we reached an agreement. I would try the drug, and come back and see him again; and he would fill out the report form.

Despite our agreement, I knew I would never take the drug for any length of time; my system was just too sensitive for something so strong. But I was desperate for the report, so decided to try one dose and see how things went. In the unlikely event that the drug didn’t act as a stimulant, I’d take sufficient doses to please Dr Field so he’d fill in the report.

That Saturday, I picked up the prescription. Twelve tablets. How much would this be worth on the black market, I wondered. I joked to myself that perhaps I could go to Fitzroy Street (a street in Melbourne popular with drug dealers) and see if I could sell them.

I took one tablet. Just as I’d thought it would, it made me speedy (did this mean I didn’t have ADD? Who knew?) I rang Simon, a friend who lived close by, and asked him to come over and ‘babysit’ me. We decided to walk through the quaint, gentrified estate near where I live to the haven of Central Park. I was ‘with it’, but very talkative, chatting volubly about some of the meticulously renovated Edwardian houses we passed. Simon later confirmed that I had seemed a bit ‘high’.

I slept very lightly that night, just as if I’d taken a huge dose of caffeine. I wanted my brain back; dexamphetamine and I were fated to part for all time.

By this time I was feeling sheepish and quite manipulative. Why had I gone through this ridiculous farce? What was I trying to prove?

The following week I faced Dr Field once more. If I was manipulative and conniving, I was also honest. ‘I took one tablet’, I told him, ‘and it made me feel very speedy and a bit out of control. So I didn’t take any more. I did try.’

‘Well unfortunately I can’t help you. Counselling without medication won’t work.’

‘But what about the doctor’s report?’ He seemed to have forgotten all about it.

‘The report?’

‘Yes – that’s why I came to see you. I’m hoping to be able to get this government payment. But I’ll only be able to get it if the report’s filled out. We spoke about this last time.’

I handed him the form. He scribbled away as I sat in my chair feeling relieved and gladdened. I had looked after myself, gone through the hoops, done everything I needed to do, and now this surreal episode was drawing to a close.

‘There you go.’ He handed me back the form – like so many doctors he had almost illegible writing.

I stood up as I took it from him, gave him my most charming smile. ‘Thanks Dr Field.’

‘Good luck’, he said.

Once on the tram I eagerly pulled out the report from my bag. My heart sank.

‘Oppositional personality features and paranoid attitudes’, I read, ‘given prescription of dexamphetamine but too scared to take it’, and ‘needs medication and counselling but refuses’ (I would have gladly gone for the counselling without the medication, indeed would have done so eight years earlier).

‘Pleasant person but throwing her life away’, was his passing shot.

The report was useless; as a non-compliant patient I didn’t stand a chance of getting the payment.

The story doesn’t end there. I finally saw sense and went to a local GP I had seen intermittently over the years who headed a large clinic. She knew I had anxiety and had at one point prescribed sleeping tablets. She listened to my request and filled out the doctor’s report for me, and needless to say it read quite differently from Dr Field’s version. After many months and much stress, I finally received the part government payment I’d been seeking.

I can’t see myself as a total victim in this story; it was plain dumb of me to go back to Dr Field, to think I could see him on my own terms rather than his. I didn’t enjoy the feeling of trying to manipulate him into filling out the report. But the experience did make me think about psychiatry and the power it brings with it. I now believe that this power has its own inherent psychic dangers – in order to maintain their registration, psychiatrists should be required to undergo some kind of periodic co-counselling with colleagues to ensure they have not succumbed to, say, narcissistic delusions of grandeur or a tendency to over-pathologise.

Dr Field, in his own funny way, could see the damaged part of me better than some other psyches and for this reason I was attracted to him; but he could not see all of me, me in my complexity and entirety. His considerable talents were stymied by his inability to learn anything from his patients, to listen to their narratives, to open his heart to them as well as his mind.

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My diagnostic disaster: part two

In my last post I began relating the story of my odd encounter with a rogue psychiatrist, Dr Field (not his real name). Below is the second instalment.

When I left Doctor Field I never intended to go back. But eight years later, my brilliant career as an editor was floundering in a sea of uncertainty and self-doubt. I was at a crossroads: publishers were paying less, and wanting work done that was often beyond my expertise. I was weary of the chronic exhaustion and anxiety, not to mention loneliness and isolation, that large jobs forced on me. I wanted a style of work that was sustainable. Refusing the big jobs for the sake of my sanity, my savings were getting run down.

I needed some government help. I wasn’t going to stop working but find a niche that suited me, with a safety net underneath – a net flexible enough to allow me to work part time, as the particular payment I sought would do.

I was finally ready to admit that I had a serious, complex condition and that I couldn’t make it on my own. I was going to put my hand out.

But first I had to get the necessary documentation. This included a complicated form that had to be filled in by a doctor, stating the seriousness of the patient’s condition and that it was either stable or being treated.

This presented a dilemma; I had seen two psychiatrists consecutively for long periods of time, and I didn’t want to ask either of them to complete the report. Neither had ever presented me with a diagnosis, probably because they did not want to encourage what amounted to an obsession with self-analysis. But nor was either of them a specialist in anxiety disorders, and they had shown little or no interest in imparting skills to help me manage my anxiety. Despite this, all three of us had assumed that the goal for me was more or less normal functioning where work and love were concerned. I could not go back to either one of them and admit my ‘failure’.

Then I thought of Dr Field, and the results of his test. I rummaged around in my filing cabinet and found it: it was all there in black and white, the extent of my pathology. This could furnish some supporting evidence, but I would need to get it from the horse’s mouth. I would arrange to see Dr Field purely for the purposes of getting a doctor’s report on my condition. And, as our approaches to drugs and psychiatry were at such variance, I would make it clear that I did not want to see him on an ongoing basis.

The determination to foreclose ongoing treatment was my first mistake. There would be a few more before Dr Field and I were through for good.

I rang up his office and his receptionist answered. I bluntly asked her if I could make an appointment to see Dr Field on a short term basis. I made it clear, probably sounding over-determined, that I did not want to see him for long term treatment.

That’s the point at which the pathologising began. The receptionist passed on this message to Dr Field, and once we were in session he mentioned this reluctance as an instance of my pathology. Already there was more than a whiff of the 1950s approach to psychiatry in Dr Field’s attitude towards me. What next, a lobotomy?

The first minutes after I sat down in front of him, however, were quite okay. The room was small with an untidy shuffle of papers and a television in one corner, the walls painted a pale apricot beige, but the vinyl armchair that I sat in opposite him was low and comfortable. I had completely forgotten the look of him, and now recalled the unexpected cuteness, the expensive suit. Perhaps it would all be alright. I told him about my editing dilemma and he tipped his head to one side, quickly, in that rather appealing way – could it be he was really listening? ‘You’ve thrown in the towel’, he said. I nodded and had to stop the tears from welling up. Was he offering sympathy? understanding?

Half an hour later he had diagnosed me with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and told me the only hope for treatment was regular doses of dexamphetamine (otherwise known as speed). He had also apologised for diagnosing me with bipolar eight years earlier. Since our last encounter, he explained, he had discovered that many patients with what he’d thought were the symptoms of bipolar actually had ADD or ADHD.

So much was going on in my head as I smiled back at him. What was the point of trying to explain my chronic low blood sugar, the brain fog I already experienced from food intolerance, my battles with caffeine and the fact that my body reacted badly to any kind of drug? How could I possibly try and crack open that wall of medical certainty and blind faith he had in the efficacy of drugs to cure all mental ills? This combination of the old-fashioned and the maverick in him was bewildering. A psychiatrist like him, willing to be on the diagnostic cutting edge, should have been as focused on the body as he was on the mind – wasn’t that the point of psychiatrists being medical doctors as well as specialists in mental disorders?

At that moment I started to become what he had set out to portray me as – calculating and false.

But at the same time I was also knocked sideways by the actual diagnosis. Somehow it made sense. The literature he gave me to read later brought it home even more sharply.

According to the literature, there are a number of forms of ADD. The commonly known ADHD, characterised by hyperactivity and low academic achievement, is only one of them. There is also inattentive ADD, associated with girls and far harder to spot, as well as hyperfocused ADD, but also a couple of others even lesser known. If anything, I had inattentive ADD. I was considered a ‘brain’ at school, but was for the most part a lazy student until I pulled my finger out for the final year of secondary school and got pretty good marks, including a standardised perfect score in English. But I floundered at uni as an undergrad, failing some subjects and obtaining only mediocre or poor marks in most others.

At the age of nine, before I knew anything about mental illness, I’d suddenly come to the conclusion that there was something deeply wrong with me. Later I had assumed that this was just the first stirrings of my neurosis. But perhaps on some level I was aware of some more basic shortcoming in my neural architecture.

On the other hand, my ADD symptoms might have been environment related (as I’d always assumed), an attempt to respond to and escape from the conflicting emotional demands of parents who were respectively resentful, depressed and emotionally distant (my mother) and needy, obsessive and controlling (my father).

Regardless, Dr Field’s methods of diagnosis were lazy and reductive. One Australian ADD site has a list of other conditions that may present as ADD and should be eliminated before any diagnosis. Dr Field did not bother to eliminate any of these. What about my chronic low blood sugar, for example? Couldn’t that have been a culprit? (In my case, I believe it’s a separate condition, but who knows how it contributed to my adolescent difficulties?) When I asked Dr Field about whether I could get a brain scan to confirm the diagnosis he said a SPECT scan was available, but waved dismissively as he said it. (I decided not to – a confirmation of ADD would encourage my self-obsession).

A few more things about ADD before I leave the subject – I’ve done a bit of reading on brain plasticity, and I believe there are many types of brains, as well as many ways people can improve brain functioning. The fact that I’m an editor suggests that my brain has changed quite considerably already simply by the work I’ve done, and practices such as meditation and mindfulness, as well as life skills training, can help further.

Even if I had no physical health problems, I don’t believe the kinds of drugs that are prescribed for this condition – basically stimulants – should be the standard alternative in most cases, but rather a last resort.

Standard treatments for ADD that already exist and should be tried before drugs include behaviour modification, cognitive therapy, anger management, social training and family counselling.

To some extent these treatments seem to support the concept of brain plasticity (the brain's ability to alter itself to develop new capabilities), but more cutting edge treatments that further acknowledge plasticity, such as software that literally retrains the brain, are already available for disorders such as dyslexia -- why not for ADD?

It scares me to think of the number of children being diagnosed with this condition who may simply be suffering from food intolerance or low blood sugar. However, that doesn’t mean the condition doesn’t exist.

Anyway, just as the literature suggested was typical for an ADD person (the extent to which I fitted some of the ups and downs and brain states described was chilling) I caught the tram home thoroughly discombobulated. Dusk had fallen and as I stood in the swaying, brightly lit tram among the suited commuters clutching their mobiles, my mind was busily rewriting my entire life story – my difficulties, social and otherwise, made more sense than they ever had.

But in my bag was a prescription for dexamphetamine.

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My diagnostic disaster

I have read a few different stories about bad psychiatric diagnoses on the blogosphere and have been planning to tell my own weird tale. Grab a cuppa, sit back and listen to my odd encounter with the enigmatic Doctor Field (not his real name).

I first have to briefly explain the system in which psychiatrists work in Australia. The majority are in private practice, but they operate under Medicare, a taxpayer-funded national medical system.

This means the government provides set subsidies for all classes of consultation, but the psyches themselves have their own industry-recommended rates and it’s very unusual for them to charge only the amount of the government subsidy (that’s known as ‘bulk billing’). With some psyches willing to negotiate reduced fees, these days you might be paying anything from $30 to $100 or more per visit after the government rebate.

(You can now get a rebate for consultations with psychologists, but that’s a different story.)

Of course there are doctors working in the public psychiatric hospital system, which is very underfunded in Australia. Rural mental health is in the main poorly serviced, partly because many psychiatrists and psychologists simply don’t want to live in the country.

Anyone who lives in a large city like Melbourne and can afford to pay the amount over the Medicare rebate will have some degree of choice in accessing a psychiatrist. But they may have to wait a while if they want to see a particularly popular one, and really good female ones are especially thin on the ground.

I first went to see Dr Field way back in 1999, on the recommendation of Janine, a friend of mine. It was my own stupid fault I ever got ‘involved’ with him. I knew he was really into dispensing drugs – he’d put Janine on Epilem, a drug for epilepsy, because she had anger issues (she’s very mild, this friend – it wasn’t a behavioural issue, more about how she felt towards others).

I’d just finished up with my previous psychiatrist. She’d given me the structure and discipline to complete a post-grad degree but was next to useless when it came to what was at times an extreme form of social phobia. I started a full-time job after the degree but had to leave the job 3 1/2 months after I started because I wasn’t coping. At the time I was hopeless at managing my anxiety and panic disorder. It was a crucial period of my life and between us, my psyche and I stuffed it up.

By the time I left the job I’d gone downhill to the extent that I would get panic attacks almost every time I had to speak to an authority figure on the phone. I was looking around for a psyche and this time I wanted a man, to help me deal with my issues with men. Janine was seeing Dr Field in a therapy group she attended three times a week, and she thought he was brilliant.

So I went to his rather cramped, untidy ‘rooms’ near the CBD. He looked to be in his late fifties and had a heavy body bursting out of an expensive suit. His face was set in folds and, disconcertingly, the tip of his tongue protruded ever so slightly from his mouth. He was oddly cute: when making a point he tilted his head to the side and his eyes disappeared into the folds of his face as he gave his quizzical smile.

One of the first things he did was give me quite a long written test to fill out. This was to enable a preliminary form of diagnosis – ie what the practitioner would be likely to find in the patient, given the results shown. It’s odd but some of the extreme findings comforted me in an ‘I told you I was ill!’ kind of way.

Supposedly I had some indications of psychosis and paranoia, as well as the expected anxiety, and some unpleasant character traits that were a little bit too accurate for comfort. (For the record: I don’t and have never had psychosis.) Interestingly, following my job trauma, there were also signs of post-traumatic stress.

But the key thing he did, after either one or two consultations, was diagnose me with a mild form of bipolar. He believed my friend Janine had this mild form and, like her, he wanted me to go on Epilem.

Doctor Field is a maverick. He gets a bee in his bonnet about a particular pathology and sees everyone through the lens of it. I know that because it’s what he did to me. He believes – well, he did at the time – that this mild form of bipolar is incredibly common and under-diagnosed, and commonly expressed in unreasonable feelings of anger. But his diagnostic methods weren’t that sophisticated. I remember him asking me blatantly leading questions like ‘do your thoughts race sometimes?’

Anyways. I took the Epilem and got predicably freaked out about the fact that it made me vaguer than usual (this effect would probably have reduced if I’d continued to take it). I remember absent mindedly parking in a No Standing area and being furious when I got a parking fine (so much for the drug reducing my anger!). I immediately stopped taking the Epilem. I went back to Dr Field and told him I’d taken myself off it because it was making me vague. He called my reaction ‘hypomanic’ (it was certainly impulsive, but I was never going to warm to the Epilem and should have said so from the beginning).

We were fated to part company. He tried me on Prozac, and that was a disaster. Combined with the strong coffee I’d started drinking again – it was poison to me for a variety of reasons – I became a walking panic attack.

Soon I left Dr Field and found a kindly male psychiatrist, an elderly Freudian who probably did not pathologise me enough. Eventually he put me on another antidepressant and it did help. And eventually I left this psyche, not cured by any means, not happy or fulfilled, but convinced I had gone as far as I could with psychotherapy, and drugs for that matter.

So what the hell was I doing sitting in Dr Field’s office eight years later? And what would he diagnose me with this time? Tune in next week for the next instalment!

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Weather report

It’s hot in Melbourne. It’s been hot since last Saturday. You suffer, you endure, and then it starts to get to you, not just physically but emotionally. Apart from two days that are expected to be 27 and 28 (but will probably be revised up) it’s going to be hot for another week. Already we've had five consecutive days with temperatures over 32 degrees, rivalling the 1896 record of six consecutive days with temperatures over 30 degrees -- but possibly creating a new record because the 1896 temperatures may not have been over 32 degrees.

Luckily the nights have been cooler. My scientific friend tells me it’s the minimum temperatures you have to watch in a heatwave rather than the maximums. Late yesterday afternoon brought a cool change of sorts; I pottered round the laundry and backyard, handwashing, weeding and guiltily attending to my fast-wilting plants. I opened the windows and doors to let the cool in. Later that night I stepped out the front door and just stood on the porch with my hands stretched out, the feel of cool, breezy air on my skin like water, the wonderful sensation of being too cold.

The internal weather has been just as difficult. A few weeks ago I wrote about a date with a certain Gentleman; now I feel compelled to reveal the outcome. Nothing happened. There – I’ve said it. But in writing it I realise now that I really believed something would.

At the end of our first meeting, standing out the front of the café, I turned away during that horrible split second when you are trying to communicate your general impression and perhaps negotiate a second meeting. I hate this moment and was childishly trying to avoid the uncertainty and embarrassment of it. Afraid to show vulnerability, I didn’t give him my phone number, saying hurriedly something like ‘we can email’. Later I tried to remedy this by sending an email telling him I’d enjoyed meeting him and would like to meet up again. But perhaps the damage was done.

Or perhaps all along I was unconsciously protecting myself from a painful short-term fling that would lead nowhere.

Anyway, he replied to my email and said that he’d be interested in meeting up again, although he sounded pretty low key. I knew he was going overseas; he’d told me early on that he was planning a trip to Johannesburg to visit his ailing mother, and was coming back on 2 November. During those weeks I walked around clutching the thought of him to me, keeping him as a little prize for the future, a pocket of sexual adventure, enjoying the idea of him in absentia. I was pleased that the onus was on him to contact me when he came back: I would find out what he really thought of me.

And magically enough he did – an email appeared in my Inbox on 2 November. But this email was even more low-key and non-committal than the earlier one. He’d just got back, was very tired but thought he’d better drop me a line. Later I would wonder why.

I wrote back effusively, telling him I hadn’t gambled on the Melbourne Cup, that it was deathly quiet because of the four day weekend, and asking him about his trip. What I didn’t do was ask him out on a date. I’d already done that in a way – now it was up to him.

That was over a week ago. Since then – nothing.

Of course, I don’t know why he’s been silent, and probably never will. Perhaps he never liked my pics (he took five days to reply after I sent them before we met) and was just being polite. Perhaps he sensed my underlying pathology at our café meeting and wanted nothing of it. Perhaps he read too much into my instinctive turning away as we farewelled each other outside the café. Or perhaps none of it has anything to do with me; he’d described his mother’s physical and emotional collapse during our chat – who knows what the situation was when he got there?

I’m not heartbroken – how could I be after one meeting? – and not even heartsick. But I’m worried about what this meeting says about me and where I’m at with personal relationships. Perhaps, at the moment, they are just too hard.

If I do decide to venture into that territory again, though, there's one thing I've learned that I'll definitely be bringing to my next dodgy or even not-so-dodgy website date. Don't hesitate, or wait for the right time. There's no time like the present. Strike while the iron is hot, because she who hesitates is lost, and a bird in the hand is worth -- well, you know the rest.

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Selling homelessness: the housing affordability crisis in Australia

More than 105,000 people are homeless in Australia on any given night, but the true number is likely to be higher. Homelessness is not confined to those sleeping rough – it includes anyone in insecure, substandard accommodation. Homeless people may be ‘couch surfers’ who alternate between different friends’ houses; those living in temporary accommodation such as a refuge, emergency shelter or motel; or those living somewhere that is physically or emotionally unsafe because of a lack of alternatives.

Rather than focusing on the homeless themselves and the personal reasons for their predicament, I’m interested in the role of housing affordability and availability, both for those who rent and those who own, in contributing to homelessness. Until the government considers these issues its efforts to reduce homelessness will be in vain.

Of course, the global financial crisis has probably increased homelessness and housing stress in Australia. The rise in unemployment and the government’s stubborn refusal to increase Australia’s clearly inadequate dole payments have probably left more people sleeping in their cars or living in cramped conditions with relatives, something that has become widespread in the US.

Housing affordability
But housing affordability was a problem before the GFC. The International Housing Affordability Survey found that housing affordability in Australian cities was among the worst in the world. The report rated seven of the eight major housing markets in Australia as severely unaffordable. While there was a slowing in the growth of house prices following the crash, Australia’s ‘housing bubble’ looks set to get worse despite the fact that unemployment is still rising. The Age reported on 3 October 2009 that 'the median price of a Melbourne home in September 2009 was $520,000, compared to $488,944 for the previous month', a jump of 6.4 per cent. Meanwhile a report released in October predicted that house prices in Australia would rise by 20 per cent in the next three years.

Meanwhile, the rental market is mean, lean and ruthless. In Melbourne, for example, only 9.1 per cent of dwellings rented out in the June quarter were affordable to lower income households, a huge reduction from four years earlier, when 29.4 per cent of homes were affordable for this group.

One reason for the blowout in housing costs – but not the major one – is unbridled immigration without the necessary planning. Last year Australia’s population grew by 1.9 per cent, one of the highest rates in the world and ‘unprecedented among developed nations’. It is forecast to surge from 22 million to 35 million in 40 years. There is simply not enough housing stock (let alone natural resources) to bear such an increase.*

Other reasons for housing unaffordability are the deregulation of the loan market, making loans easier to get by those who might not be able to afford them; low interest rates; the self-reinforcing effect of speculative booms; and government grants for first homeowners. But these reasons are themselves underpinned by the main cause of Australia’s lack of affordable housing – the government’s generous tax treatment of home owners and property investors.

Labor promises to reduce homelessness
When the Labor government came into office, Kevin Rudd made a personal commitment to tackle the problem of homelessness, labelling it a ‘national obscenity’. The Road Home, the government’s White Paper on homelessness, was released on 21 December 2008.

The White Paper outlines the government’s National Affordable Housing Strategy. The strategy includes an ambitious commitment to halve homelessness by 2020 and ‘offer supported accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it by 2020’. It promises $6.1 billion over the five years from 2008–09 for measures such as ‘social housing, assistance to people in the private rental market, support and accommodation for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, and assistance with home purchasing’.

The strategy involves agreements with the states and territories, which are required to provide some funding and are responsible for improvements in services that they run or administer. The White Paper includes interim targets and also accountability measures that the states and territories are required to report on annually.

However, even a quick look at the targets reveals an interesting contradiction. While Australia’s population is set to explode in the next 40 years, it seems that the government is only interested in reducing homelessness as a proportion of the total population. The White Paper states, as an interim target, that:

By 2013, the rate of homeless persons will need to be around 40 homeless persons per 10,000 population or better if we are to achieve our 2020 goal.

Other interim targets for 2013 include:

• The number of people engaged in employment and/or education/training after presenting at specialist homelessness services is increased by 50 per cent
• The number of people exiting care and custodial settings into homelessness is reduced by 25 per cent
• The number of families who maintain or secure safe and sustainable housing following domestic or family violence is increased by 20 per cent.

But some of the targets – and they are very specific – deal with absolute numbers, for example, ‘by 2013, a decrease of 7 per cent in the number of Australians who are homeless to less [sic] than 97,350 people’ and ‘the number of people released from [care and custodial settings] into homelessness is reduced by 25 per cent (3,552) by 2013’. It seems there is a fundamental confusion about the ambitions of the White Paper – does it aim simply to reduce homelessness proportionally, or to reduce the absolute number of homeless people?

Our worsening housing shortage
Australia already has a significant housing shortage. According to the Business Spectator of 26 August 2009, BIS Shrapnel estimated that ‘Australia’s dwelling stock deficiency … will peak at 160,000 properties by 2010’.

And it’s the disadvantaged who are missing out. The same article quotes the National Housing Supply Council, which released a report in March 2009. The report estimated that back in June 2008, 85,000 new homes were required to address ‘homelessness and low vacancy rates in the private rental market’.

The rental markets in Australia’s major cities have been constricted for years now. In Melbourne, for example, the trend metropolitan vacancy rate for the June quarter 2009 was only 1.3 per cent, compared with 3.6 per cent for the period from 2000 to 2005.

Given that the government plans to drastically increase Australia’s population in an already tight housing market, it seems inevitable that the total number of homeless will continue to increase. And ironically, one of the underlying reasons for homelessness – excessive immigration – will provide justification for the government’s failure to reduce the total numbers.

The Housing Industry Assocation acknowledges this problem. Citing the projected population increases, it warns: ‘already Australia has a substantial gap between the supply of dwellings and the underlying demand for dwellings. The gap is set to widen further with obvious consequences for house prices, rents and affordability.

‘Not only will there be a greatly increased demand for accommodation, Australia is faced with further strains on urban infrastructure, health and education to meet expected increases in population.’

If that’s the case it says something very important about us as a society. While refugees and family reunions – the most legitimate targets for immigration – account for some of the intake, roughly two-thirds of Australia’s permanent immigrants are skilled migrants. These people can afford to pay hefty application fees and have skills Australia needs, and so are not likely to be among the most disadvantaged when they arrive. But given the lack of housing stock, and the inadequate supplies of new social housing even with the government’s targets, market forces will mean that the wealth needed to access what housing there is, whether by renting or owning, will increase. As the population increases, more disadvantaged people who are currently at the bottom of the housing ladder will fall off it entirely.

Just as job seekers sometimes give up on the labour market, would-be renters become discouraged if they are repeatedly unsuccessful in finding somewhere to live, leading to overcrowding as they outstay their welcome with relatives. Alternatively, they may pay huge proportions of their income on rent in overcrowded share houses with what was once living space becoming makeshift bedrooms. Meanwhile the slum is making a comeback.

As a society,we seem to be accepting that excessive skilled immigration will bring greater housing disadvantage to a number of Australian citizens. These citizens may include newly arrived refugees, the mentally ill, the old, the unemployed, the physically disabled, the addicted, and the sick. This is the unspoken trade-off the government is willing to make.

Yet the government will be able to claim success if a lower proportion of people in a grossly inflated population are homeless!

Regardless, the housing strategy is already running into problems. The Age reported on 28 August that, due to a ‘$1.5 billion cost blow-out’ on the schools infrastructure program, the government would be cutting $750 million from its $6 billion plan to build 20,000 new public housing units. While most of that cut was due to lower than anticipated costs, the number of new homes built was to be cut to 19,200.

Tax benefits for the rich at the expense of the poor
But the main reason for the housing affordability crisis in Australia is government tax policies that favour owners and property investors, resulting in the loss of literally billions in tax revenues – billions that could be used to build affordable housing. The main culprits are the capital gains tax exemption and the land tax exemption for owner-occupied housing; negative gearing for investment properties; and the discount on capital gains for investor properties.**

These tax benefits result in an obscene government subsidy to wealthy home owners at the expense of the poor. The Senate Select Committee on Housing Affordability, reporting in June 2008, estimated that these concessions came to a whopping $50 billion per year. If you add the exemption of owner-occupied housing from the asset test for the age pension, that’s another $10 billion. Compare that with the paltry figures the government has promised to combat homelessness; now imagine what would happen to the texture of Australian society, its cohesiveness and degree of income equality, if only half that huge amount were spent on social housing!

As commentators quoted by the Senate committee point out, such figures may reward existing home owners but they do nothing for the institution of home ownership itself.

Small investors welcome the housing bubble because they are making more money, and owner-occupiers also welcome the rise in their property prices. But those with children must watch them struggle to find a decent rental property, struggle to get into the housing market, and then struggle to maintain huge mortgage payments.

The problem of negative gearing
Negative gearing occurs when an investor borrows money to buy a property, but the interest payable on the loan is higher than the income gained from the property. The investor is able to claim the loss against taxable income. (Investors also get a discount on the capital gains they derive from the property.)

Negative gearing has been slammed by many in the welfare sector because it gives favourable tax treatment to those who already have a first home and are investing in a second one, as compared with those who are buying their first home.

The Senate Select Committee on Housing Affordability admitted that negative gearing was encouraging investors at the expense of home ownership, reporting that ‘investors now account for about a third of new home loans’.

But trying to get rid of this tax has proved electorally unpopular, and it is a truism that it increases investment in private rental properties and therefore the amount of rental stock available. This comforting idea is illusory. Most of the investment fuelled by taxpayer-funded negative gearing goes into existing housing stock – it’s not being used to buy new houses.

The tax benefits available to property investors – negative gearing and capital gains discount – are supposedly needed to make the investment worthwhile because the properties are so expensive to buy in the first place. But because these benefits have increased demand for investment properties, negative gearing is itself partly responsible for that expense.

In September 2009, the Brotherhood of St Laurence released a report it had developed jointly with the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. The report confirmed that the government’s tax policies made housing more expensive for disadvantaged Australians. And it found that for households in the top 20% of incomes, the average annual benefit of the exemption from capital gains tax on owner-occupied housing was worth $8,000 – almost seven times the average of $1,200 in subsidies for housing expenses that the government pays households in the lowest 20 per cent of incomes. It offers the following example:

Wealthy negatively geared property investors in the top 20% of incomes are getting around $4,500 from tax benefits in relation to investment properties. However, people from the poorest households who receive the top rate of Commonwealth Rental Assistance gain an average subsidy of just $2420.

Another reason that the capital gains and land tax exemptions are wasteful is that they also encourage people to invest extensively in their homes as a form of saving; for example, building a larger home than they actually need.

Reforming the housing market
In order to increase housing affordability and accessibility for the most disadvantaged, and to favour first home buyers over property investors, the Brotherhood has called for the following changes:

Remove the capital gains tax exemption on homes worth more than $1.1 million.

Combine the introduction of taxation of imputed rent and capital gains with mortgage interest deductibility [to benefit first home buyers].

State governments should consider removing the exemption from land tax for very expensive owner-occupied dwellings while at the same time removing or reducing stamp duty on lower-priced homes.

Any resulting revenue gain should fund measures to make housing more affordable for those in need, including providing more public and non-profit housing and more generous support for those on rent assistance.

Give pensioners in large houses tax breaks so they could let out part of their houses without being penalised.

Other options
The government needs to:

immediately double its commitment to new social housing and reinstate the urgency with which it originally seemed to be tackling the housing crisis, expediting the implementation of its National Affordable Housing Strategy and putting pressure on the states to prioritise this area

conduct an inquiry into immigration policy that takes account of Australia’s housing availability, its already overstretched infrastructure, the limits of its natural resources such as water, and the implications for the disadvantaged of excessive immigration

use negative gearing solely to encourage the building of new housing stock for rental purposes

increase its commitment to providing adequate skills and training in needed areas, which would also reduce unemployment.

Improving the rental market
Change tenancy laws to encourage European-style long-term tenancies as an alternative to owning.

Immediately outlaw rent auctions.

Make it mandatory for landlords to make their own decisions about who lets the property, rather than property managers who are often young and prejudiced.

Coordinate tenancy laws across the states so that blatantly unfair practices, such as the requirement in Queensland that all renters go on six-monthly leases, be abolished.

Places caps on rent increases, abolishing increases based purely on market forces.

A fairer go in the housing market
Putting the 'fair go' back into the housing market would not benefit the disadvantaged alone. Everyone, even the richest, gains from the social cohesion, lower crime rate and stronger community spirit that a more equal society offers. Bring it on!



* I fully acknowledge that this is a touchy issue, given Australia’s shameful history of openly discriminating against non-Caucasians during the years of the White Australia Policy (the discrimation was so blatant even the Brits were embarrassed by it). Those opposed to immigration in Australia have traditionally been on the right and motivated by a fear of the other. We are, as many are proud to say, a nation of migrants apart from Indigenous people, so who are we to turn others away?

For the record I’m not against immigration as a concept and think that Australia should favour refugees from all races (including asylum seekers who arrive by sea) over skilled migrants. However, I do think we need to look seriously at reducing future increases to the skilled migrant intake and start to plan how we are going to house, feed and provide water for our growing population.

** Please note that I am not bagging people who invest in this way and are simply responding to government tax policy. My own parents have a small investment property and their ordinary-sized house, in a sought-after suburb and on a large block, is now worth over $1.5 million. I am lucky enough to benefit from the fact that my landlord is not still paying off the property I rent, but is an outright owner, so was not affected by the high interest rates before the GFC.

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