THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Nationalization of industry is not dead. It is alive and well in the ACT

Nationalization of industry is not dead. It is alive and well in the ACT

Nationalization of industry mostly went out with the Dodo. It is particularly hilarious in the area of hospitals. Government hospitals Australia-wide are not bad but accessing them is the problem -- exactly the problem they were designed to avoid. You can wait half a day to be seen even in an emergency and for non-urgent care you can be waitlisted for weeks and months. There are rarely such problems with private hospitals.

I use both hospital types so know them well. In emergencies I am seen without delay at the Wesley (private) and the service at the radiation oncology section of the PA hospital (government) I cannot fault. But I can access the PA service only via a weeks-long waiting list.

So in Canberra the solution surely is to encourage the hospital board to get in a new boss who will restore the capability that a private hospital should have. Even a subsidy would be cheaper than building a new hospital

But the ACT government is dyed-in-the-wool Leftist so they are being driven by that very Leftist hankering for power. And the idea that organizational problems can be solved by building a new building is classic Leftist simplistic thinking. All govenments tend to have an edifice complex but this is ridiculous

The ACT government is about to make a compulsory acquisition of Calvary Hospital.

In 1979, Calvary Hospital began its good work at the invitation of the commonwealth government. The lease is for 120 years. There is 76 years to run.

Through legislation, the contract for service will be ripped up, land and property expunged. All of this without any consultation. Why?

The Canberra Hospital is the main, government hospital in the city. It has major problems. An independent review in March 2019 was scathing of the culture of TCH.

The Little Company of Mary runs Calvary and they have just finished building a 342-bed hospital in Adelaide for $350m.

After compulsory acquisition, the ACT government is going to build another hospital adjacent to the current Calvary Hospital and then knock the old one down. They estimate the cost to be $1bn for a 500-bed hospital.

The ACT government should simply commission the Little Company of Mary to build them a new hospital at half the cost and hand it over to the government. That would release $500m for other needed government infrastructure.

Is it religious discrimination?

In 2022, the ACT government conducted an inquiry into the availability of abortion in the ACT. The ACT Standing Committee Health Report was released on 10 April 2023.

Astoundingly, the report accuses Calvary of restricting “medical services” “due to an overriding religious ethos”.

Yet that same report notes that neither TCH or Calvary Hospital perform abortions (except in exceptional circumstances). Abortions are day procedures, carried out by other medical providers in the ACT.

Would the NSW government dare claim that St Vincent’s Hospital has an “overriding religious ethos”? Would the Queensland government be so brash as to claim that The Mater in Brisbane operates with an “overriding religious ethos”?

This brings us to the next question. Who is next? What other community groups are under threat in the ACT?

Clare Holland House is one of the most revered institutions in the ACT. It provides superb palliative care under the umbrella of Calvary Hospital.

We know that the ACT government has not taken up the majority of recommendations for palliative care from its End of Life inquiry. It naively thinks VAD is the solution to end of life issues. Those of us with experience in this space respectfully disagree.

The government doesn’t like horse racing. The ACT Race Club should be nervous.

Summernats is burning up too much fuel at its annual event. It will get its marching orders.

The Association of Independent Schools of the ACT must be sweating. Imagine the scenario.

Independent schools decide not to promote gender transitioning, based not on religious grounds, but on compounding scientific evidence. Suddenly, teachers, parents and children lose their rights as ordinary citizens.

Final question.

Which state will be emboldened by this ridiculous behaviour?

This is a serious issue with grave consequences for the Federation. The Prime Minister must get involved. After all, the commonwealth government invited Calvary to Canberra.

Nothing less than the rule of law is at stake. No Australian likes to be dispossessed of their land and property. No Australian likes their contract ripped up unilaterally.

One of the most significant reasons why Australia is a free and fair nation is because of our property rights, which ensure stability.

Property rights are a key “natural mechanism”, ensuring both the creation of wealth and its just distribution.

This move by the ACT government is dangerous, totalitarian in nature. Suddenly, everything is up for grabs.

Every Australian should be deeply concerned. Every Australian should act. Political and civil pressure needs to be applied to force the government to get back to the bargaining table with the legitimate owner – Calvary Hospital.

If not, a free and fair society will no longer be ours.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/australians-need-to-know-what-is-happening-in-the-act/news-story/3973b1f927fd3fb2e439e48f85efbdd7

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Nationalization of industry is not dead. It is alive and well in the ACT

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