This weekend I'm grateful for... happy endings

Lousy blogger that I am, I forgot the update to the Protect Medical Research campaign.

This fortnight I've been grateful for good sense prevailing, and the medical research budget being maintained. Good news. I will hang up my activist pants for now...

Brought to you by Maxabella Loves.

Learning about... medical research funding

I took the boys down to the Melbourne Rally for Research today, and tweeted in the twitter version at the same time. It was pretty exhilarating. We stood with 3 ladies who'd come down from the country, a KPMG health economist and a heart transplant recipient- and 4000 other supporters of research.

Big Bro had, unprompted, been talking about his version of the issue at Kinder on Monday- "Big Julia needs to STOP and start respecting doctors who want to make sick people better"- so much so that the teacher asked me for more information! She also asked me to discuss the rally with him in terms of "togetherness", a topic that they're starting to cover as a class. It was an interesting thinking point for me, too- the togetherness of researchers, clinicians, patients and patients' friends and families.

There has been a heap of coverage today about the issue of why medical research needs funding by the Australian government. The whole issue was addressed pretty well in this piece from 7pm project (which I have never actually watched in person, 7pm being prime bed-preparation time); it's from about 3-7 minutes (unless you want to see the QLD infomercial!)

Discoveries Need Dollars: don't cut the cures.

This weekend I am grateful for... medical research

I heard a rumour this week that the Federal Government is planning to cut medical research funding in the May federal budget, as part of the broader savings agenda needed to pay for flood rebuilding and other spending commitments like the NBN. While I have no problem with paying for these important projects, I do have a BIG problem with the apparent presumption that Australia can afford to cut medical research funding. Facebook and Twitter campaigns have already started to spread the word about why medical research needs ongoing funding- and as of Sunday there is a website! Things are moving quickly!! I thought it was worth using this week's Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post to say why I'm grateful for medical research:

1. Medical research improves our health and saves lives.

Case in point: this is Little Bro.

Born in 2008, saved in 1928. 100 years ago I don't know if Little Bro or I would still be around. When I was 37 weeks pregnant I had bacterial pneumonia and spend a few nights in hospital being pumped full of penicillin and other antibiotics. If it hadn't been for medical researchers who developed penicillin as an antibiotic, including the Australian Howard Florey , who knows how Little Bro and I would have fared. There's so much that we take for granted in our lives- immunizations, lying babies on their backs to reduce SIDS deaths, cardiac pacemakers, humidicribs, taking folate while pregnant, IVF- which are the result of medical research.

2. Medical research is good for the economy.

I'm not an economist, but those in the know (like Access Economics) say that for every $1 that the government puts into medical research, $1.17 is returned to the economy. Medical research improves the health of the country, reduces medicare costs and decreases hospital stays.

Medical research is the best investment in your life.

Are you grateful for medical research?

Disclaimer: my entire career has been paid for one way or another in large part by the Australian and US research budgets. But I'm grateful. Very grateful.

PS. And I'm top of Maxabella's linky list!! Howzat?!

PPS on Saturday. Thanks for your supportive comments. The Discoveries Need Dollars Facebook page has just posted a touching story about Ava, a little girl given the gift of hearing with the Australian-invented Bionic Ear.

Is medical research funding small change?

I guess every mum has their moments of minor indulgence: for me it's 15 blissful, uninterrupted minutes of News Radio in the bathroom every morning (10 if the natives are restless). This morning it was very nearly my last 15 minutes as I choked in the shower hearing that the budget for promoting the Coalition's failed Work Choices legislation had been a cool $100 million.

One hundred million dollars. And what did that achieve? An electoral rout and a "never again" tag (for what it's worth). And I guess there were some jobs and profits made at advertising agencies and the media outlets that ran the ads as a silver lining.

The obvious question is, what else could the government do with $100mil?

I'm no economist, but I can spout what I know about: the cost of medical research. You know, that thing that saves lives...
Yesterday it was announced that the federal government would invest $107million over the next five years on nine largescale Australian research programs addressing complex research problems like how to improve the health outcomes of Australians with developmental disabilities or who have suffered strokes and developing new treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

Maybe workplace reform is about as complex a problem as any of these... But is advertising a failed campaign worth five years of medical research?

Image from http://www.vectorstock.com/assets/preview/203801/dollar-cash-injection-vector.jpg

Justine Clarke for the Senate?

I am normally a believer in the procedure of the Australian parliament, but yesterday's efforts at a speech performance by South Australian Liberal Senator Mary Jo Fisher (below) really did verge on the bizarre. I thought politicians' staffers were meant to prevent massive gaffes like this... Fortunately in the twelve overnight hours they have woken up enough to remove the following from Senator Fisher's wikipedia entry:

"Fisher proved herself to be mentally deficient when she decided it was an effective debating technique to do the Hokey-Pokey and the Time Warp in the senate during a discussion about a carbon tax." (You can still see it in the "View History" tab)

If this is how the senate operates these days, may I make some nominations for the next election?

This works best if you can run the two videos simultaneously :)

Candidate 1:

versus

Candidate 2:

Let's leave performing to the professionals, Senator Fisher. Your predecessor, Amanda Vanstone, could have told you that.

Should relatives attend a baby's funeral?

Should family members attend the funerals of a 3 month old and an 8 month old baby?

Should family members be able to choose where the funeral is held?

If the family had no money to cover the costs associated with the funerals, should the taxpayer pay some costs associated with a funeral?

These were some of the questions that have been raised by certain politicians in the last 24 hours, most prominently Tony Abbott and the opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrisson. Of course, their view has been influenced by the fact that the funerals were for Zahra El Ibrahimy and Sam Husseini who were drowned, along with their mothers (whose bodies were never recovered) and about 30 other people while scenes like this were underway:

It disgusts me that this debate had to be a debate at all. We are in a country that already provides bereavement payments to the poorer members of our society; why does this even have to be a question? Let the families grieve.

I am relieved that some members of the Coalition have come out against this dirty piece of politics, and that the mood in the mainstream media (and even The Australian!) seems to be one of compassion (and common sense and decency).

Rest in peace with your mothers, Zahra and Sam.

Image from news.com.au

------------------------------

Postscript- there is a much more thorough discussion and a lot of insightful comments at the only politically-skewed blog I read, Grog's Gamut. One anonymous comment I found particularly pertinent was:

I understand the Defence department paid travel costs for 60+ soldier colleagues to come from Darwin to Launceston for the memorial service for Corporal Richard Atkinson on Monday. Two of his closest mates were flown back from Afghanistan to be there. This seems as appropriate to me as flying seven people from Christmas Island to Sydney for the funerals of their families.

Hardly accurate to suggest there is something strange about the Australian Government paying for funeral travel costs in such cases.

FEBRUARY 16, 2011 9:13 AM

Where are all the women?

After my gender stereotyping rant on Tuesday, I should say that this wasn't meant to be Feminist Week, but recently all sorts of gender gap issues seem to keep coming up in my mind.

There's a lot of talk around the blogosphere and beyond about "mummy guilt"- all to do with the awful consequences of not doling out to your children the right mix of proteins and fats, love and discipline, structure and unstructure, complex and simple carbohydrates, independence and support, socialisation and solitude....... Then there's the subspecialty, working mummy guilt, where you get to feel bad for not committing enough time to your paid work and not enough time to your children (and throw in neglect of your partner and friends for some extra side dishes of guilt). And within the working mummy guilt comes the feeling of "how can I do better?" which can morph its way to "what are women doing wrong?"

In my case I work in academia. Lots of well educated, reasonable, wonderful, enlightened people, lots of enthusiastic students and recent graduates- and a lot of people (half or more) at this early career stage are women. And then something happens and all the women stagnate or retreat or relocate or resign or die OR SOMETHING and beyond a certain point women become unusual and the ones that make it feel the need to run seminars and lunches about the issues women in academia face. I've attended plenty and read plenty on the topic, and have picked up some useful tips for success as a woman in academia:

- don't take maternity leave (from an Australian academic who brought her children to work from birth until they were old enough to attend daycare)
- don't have children (admittedly this is paraphrased by me, but from an interview with the Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrum, aged 77, who said that in her youth she "had a clear decision and made a decision not to have a family because in earlier times that would have been a very, very difficult thing to accomplish.")
- learn to play poker (this is from a US academic who said she needed this skill to network via the weekly poker gatherings), or otherwise pretend to be a man (this from a NYT article on the topic)

Suffice to say, I fail in all areas.

So why is this getting to me today? Yesterday I attended a panel discussion seminar and there was an exclusively male panel. No big deal- I've been noticing this a lot recently at seminars and conferences. But the presenter wasn't so accepting and, slightly embarrassed, said "Oh... we didn't intend for it to be an all male panel given [the program in question] has more females than males in its intake." No need for embarrassment- it happens all the time without anyone realising....

Then on the way home I was listening to 774 ABC radio, and heard Stephen Mayne discussing the issue of gender inequity at upper levels of corporate life, which he has also written about in today's Age. He puts it down to "issues such as networking, perceived experience, blokey headhunters and the old boys' network." Perusal of the comments is fairly depressing- presumably in the potential anonymity plenty of people feel free to speak their mind, and I'm left with the feeling that whatever women lack to get to the higher levels of academia- whether it's intrinsic or extrinsic- is probably the same in many other professions.

And where does that leave me? Gloomy, I think. Resigned to my fate, whatever that is. I do what I can and at the end of the day I can hope people say about me, "she did well for a woman."

On a side note, on the topic of men-vs-women, I concur with Maxabella that very few blog readers are male, especially round here, and in the process of procrastinating over researching this I discovered that, at least in the field of entomology, women tend to blog anonymously (hell-o) much more than men.

Decisions decided

I haven't been holding my breath for the 17 post-election days, but I did feel my lips turning blue in the final 20 minutes before we knew the outcome- that is, the 20 minute ramble of Australia's new Hippie-in-Chief*, Rob Oakeshott. Finally, we have a government (ok, so we always did, just one in caretaker mode...)

And to all those people who said they'd vote differently if it came to a second election: next time, vote for who you want to win. You never know, they might fall over the line.

I can't guarantee that I will be putting the politics label to bed for the next three years- we do have a state election in a few months- but hopefully This Growing Life can get back to the important business of parenting and gardening, and everything in between. Once the writs are returned, I will unlink to my favourite statistician, but as a final tribute to Antony Green, here is a song from Keating! the musical.

Onward!

*full credit for this wonderful term goes to my friend Upulie, who really needs to restart blogging! I am hoping that by linking to her she might be inspired..........

The truth on plain packaging of cigarettes

I'm still in a froth about the Australian Alliance of Tobacco Companies Retailers' ads against plain packaging of cigarettes. In the process of finding some outlet for my frustration I have come across Action on Smoking and Health Australia which has an excellent page with information about plain packaging and this ad to counter the AAR campaign. I am also trying to focus my energy and get together some information that I can put together into a letter that voices my concerns to certain influential politicians- and to the new Liberal Member for Bennelong, the Hon. John Alexander, who is "vitally concerned with... health and exercise" and "an advocate for preventative health", yet whose party accepts donations from the tobacco industry and which will not commit to plain packaging of cigarettes.

Hmm, take a deep breath.... back to normal programming....

How hard the Greens campaigned for Melbourne

One of the outcomes of the still-undecided Federal Election was the landmark victory of the Greens' Adam Bandt in the seat of Melbourne. We ventured into GreensLand yesterday, and saw the extend to which the Greens courted every possible vote:

...including letterboxing a house which has been a burnt out shell for several years!

Democracy for Dinner

We took the boys to the local primary school to vote today. I had prepared Big Bro (partly as it's likely he'll go to that school in a couple of years) but every time we discussed going to the school to vote he wondered "is there water? Where is the boat taking us?" He also found the concept of voting a bit abstract. The best I could do was offer that we were saying who we liked best (how do you explain government to a three year old?) The post-vote sausage seemed much more easily understood!

After a day of questions I proposed we have our own election, to decide on tomorrow's dinner. Four ballot papers were quickly printed and the not-so-secret ballot was taken.

Returns Officer Big Bro and scrutineer Mama agreed on the vote: Pasta-3, Salad-1, Rice-0. Pasta wins on first preferences.

The blank protest vote?

I didn't watch Mark Latham's election report on 60 Minutes last night, but I read this morning that he advocates casting an informal vote as a protest against the major parties.

To quote last week's Q&A: how big a tool is Mark Latham?

Cigarette Advertising: Something that get me really angry

I'll say it right now: smoking is a disgusting, life-destroying addiction.

Do not smoke around my children.

Do not smoke around me.

And any company that exists to profit from addicting people to this habit is pretty close to evil in my eyes.

My anger about the tobacco industry was reignited this week by two factors:
- hearing an excellent seminar by Prof. Melanie Wakefield, a behavioural psychologist at the Cancer Council Victoria, who described the important factors- in particular, increases in cigarette prices, restrictions on smoking in public places, and "shock" advertising- which have fueled the recent decline in smoking in Australia

- seeing the political advertisements by the Alliance of Australian Retailers* with lots of nice little corner shop owners saying that plain cigarette packaging will just make their lives hard, and, even more blatantly politically (specifically, anti-ALP), saying that "like the alcopops tax", there was "no evidence" that plain packaging of cigarettes would decrease smoking.

*I am too angry to link to any of the tobacco lobby's propaganda. Google it if you want to know...

These, plus a quick bit of googling, have led me to understand that

1. Plain packaging has the potential to reduce smoking rates, by reducing the appeal of cigarettes both to potential smokers and current smokers (reducing uptake and increasing quitting).(lots of research has confirmed this, including research by the tobacco lobby showing that "tobacco companies view cigarette packaging as an integral component of marketing strategy" (1))

2. The Alliance of Australian Retailers is almost entirely funded by the tobacco industry. No nice little corner shop owners there. (Phew, I was just about to boycott the local milkbar.)

3. The Labor Party is committed to plain cigarette packaging. The Liberal Party will "consider" it if in government... which is widely taken as a dismissal. (2)

4. The Liberal and National Parties continue to receive funding from the tobacco industry- millions of dollars in the past decade, with no plans to stop (3). The Labor Party has refused such donations since 2005 , and prior to this was funded to a lower extent (4).

Read what you want into it, but let's just say that I would vote for anything that reduces the exposure my children have to smoking.

Did I mention I was angry? Good thing the Liberal Party have forsaken my seat and not sent a single blue-ribboned doorknocker north of the Yarra, cos I would be wasting plenty of their time.