Birth Control
My girlfriend is a midwife. On July 1, 2010, new legislation (called the “National Registration and Accreditation Scheme”) comes into force, affecting all health professionals, including midwives. One of the provisions of this legislation is that to register as a midwife, you need to show that you have insurance that indemnifies your practice. Without registering as a midwife, you cannot practice as one.
OK, so what? It’s a little illiberal to force people to have liability insurance, but it’s hardly an unusual step. The problem is that insurance to indemnify midwives who practice individually is simply not available. One of the reasons is that the statute of limitations on legal action is extremely long, since the baby’s right to sue doesn’t even begin until 18 years after birth. It may also simply be too risky to indemnify individual midwives of uncertain ability, given the massive payouts that are likely to result from negligence. In any case, liability insurance for individual midwives cannot be bought for love nor money.
If midwives can’t practice individually, that has a number of consequences. Obviously it restricts the ability of midwives to practice as they please. It also reduces a woman’s chance of having the same midwife throughout pregnancy and thereby developing a personal relationship before the birth. But most importantly, it makes it essentially impossible for women to choose home birth in practice. Obviously hospitals don’t send out midwives to carry out home birth – women have to come to the hospital for that. And since midwives can only be indemnified when attached to hospitals or other large health practices, that means there are no midwives available to assist in a home birth. Anyone a woman recruits to help with a home birth will be acting as a midwife while unregistered, which attracts a $30,000 fine. (Bizarrely, the woman giving birth also gets fined for “enticing” the midwife to practice).
It’s a regressive step towards a monopoly health services system – where people don’t get to choose how medical care is provided, even for something as personal as birth.
Confidence in Government
|
Every intellectual Leftist is well aware of the faults of their government. The endless whining and bitching about what the government should and could do features highly over the morning latte. But like a bitter wife complaining about a dead-beat hubby who she refuses to divorce: all would be better if only hubby was nicer to her and had more money and power. The answer to government failure is always the same: bigger and more powerful government will solve the problem.
There are two recent laughable examples of this belief. And while they don’t actually involve the four riders of the Apocalypse (pestilence, plague, famine and war), they do involve plague and fire.
The first example was the political stumble from Queensland’s Premier, Anna Bligh. On the threshold of a swine-flu epidemic she suggested that people might like to stock up on food. Common sense suggests that a few extra tins of soup and some dried milk powder might be a good thing to keep in the back of the pantry.
But there was an immediate outcry at the mere suggestion. Apparently people would panic. And in the panic they would buy, well .. food. And then the shops would run low on food, and then that would cause even more panic and then people would stock up on even more food, and then the children would starve (apparently because there was so much food about), and the dead would walk the earth, and .. well .. it would be better just to make people feel safe.
Of course if she had stuck to her guns and there had been mass scale food buying, several things would have actually happened.
- People would have ended up with a stock-pile of food, and be more prepared for an emergency.
- People would have realized how fragile supply mechanisms are in the short term.
- People would have realized how robust supply mechanisms are in the longer term.
- People would have realized how helpless The Gummint is to do anything about it.
All of which would have undermined people’s confidence in the Gummint. So she ‘clarified’ her statement to say that she had only meant ‘a day or two worth of food’. Right.
The second example was the number of calls which were ignored during the Victorian bush fires. Some 80% of calls to the 000 emergency number went unanswered on the day. Apparently people who’s houses were being engulfed in flame were ringing 000 emergency in the belief that the Gummint would (or even could) come and rescue them. Why would anyone think, as their homes and all their neighbours’ bush homes burned, that the Gummint fairy God mother type force .. er .. thing would magically appear and protect them from Mother Nature’s fury? Apparently they believed that spending 20 minutes on hold to the Gummint was better than spending 20 minutes protecting themselves and their families from dying. And die they did.
Clearly the Gummint is a more powerful force than Mother Nature. Or it would be – all they need to do is to create a new law. Right?
Well actually, people’s faith in the government kills them.
-
Recent Comments
Catallaxy Files- Read and weep statists February 4, 2012More government spending will not bring back the days when supposedly triple-A-rated mortgage securities could be fashioned out of dodgy loans to unqualified borrowers. Arnold KlingSinclair Davidson
- Farewell Chris Huhne February 4, 2012Chris Huhne, the UK climate change and energy minister who did more than any other minister to bankrupt his country by pursuing the folly of wind power, has resigned. Huhne is a wealthy member of the elite who did not practice what he preached. In other words, Huhne is a hypocrite.Samuel J
- Julia Gillard’s policy to prop up inefficient firms will be counterproductive February 3, 2012In The Australian today (subscription required): “According to Julia Gillard, things are difficult for Australian manufacturing as the resource boom threatens “to hollow out other sections of the economy”.Henry Ergas
- Read and weep statists February 4, 2012
- inCISe
- Hardly fair to vulnerable children February 3, 2012For the last three years, I have been arguing that Australia’s failing child protection system is being run in the interests of social service providers and not ‘at risk’ children. In the name of ‘family preservation,’ state community service departments are leaving children for far too long with highly dysfunctional families and only remove them as a last r […]Jeremy Sammut
- RIP democracy says Brendan O’Neill February 3, 2012They say Athens was the birthplace of modern democracy. Well now it is the graveyard of democracy. In the name of saving the euro, Brussels bigwigs have proposed a system of external interference into Greece’s economic affairs and national sovereignty that is so far-reaching it would make Victorian colonialists beam with pride. The EU dream that libera […]Brendan ONeil
- Constitution folly February 2, 2012Australia is once again revisiting the core problems of the failed Indigenous policies championed by the Labor Party. The expert panel for constitutional reform to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution gave their recommendations to the federal government on 19 January. The Gillard government has pledged to hold a constit […]Editor
- Hardly fair to vulnerable children February 3, 2012
- IPA news
- Who'll drag us free of our heavy debt burden? February 2, 2012While most Australians were tanning themselves at the beach during their summer breaks, the federal opposition and the...
- Renewable energy rules lose traction January 31, 2012Energy policy in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries is spurred by concerns that gas...
- Danger of new thickets of gas regulation January 30, 2012Peter Roberts' "Globalised gas pricing has local costs" (Talking Point, January 30) applauds the commonwealth's National...
- Who'll drag us free of our heavy debt burden? February 2, 2012
