“To see a mentally ill person in 2014 at a public hospital in NSW treated in such an appalling manner is really beyond comprehension. The sight of the deceased wandering the corridor naked and covered in excrement while the senior nurse is seen to mop the floor apparently oblivious to her is horrific. While this appears not to be a system failure it is clearly a serious human failure. It is for another place to take such disciplinary proceedings as appear necessary.” [Excerpt from a NSW coronial inquest judgment delivered on 7 September 2016]
Wednesday 17 May 2017
How the NSW public hospital system still fails those with mental health issues
“To see a mentally ill person in 2014 at a public hospital in NSW treated in such an appalling manner is really beyond comprehension. The sight of the deceased wandering the corridor naked and covered in excrement while the senior nurse is seen to mop the floor apparently oblivious to her is horrific. While this appears not to be a system failure it is clearly a serious human failure. It is for another place to take such disciplinary proceedings as appear necessary.” [Excerpt from a NSW coronial inquest judgment delivered on 7 September 2016]
ABC News, 12 May 2017:
The daughter of a woman who died after she was left to wander the halls of a New South Wales hospital while naked and covered in faeces says nurses there lied to her about what happened.
Miriam Merten died in 2014 from a brain injury after she fell over more than 20 times at the Mental Health Unit of Lismore Base Hospital, on the state's north coast.
A coronial inquest heard she was locked in a seclusion room for hours, and when the two nurses supervising her unlocked the door they allowed her to wander around naked, covered in faeces.
She continued to fall over outside the seclusion room.
Coroner Jeff Linden found she died from "traumatic brain injury caused by numerous falls and the self-beating of her head on various surfaces, the latter not done with the intention of taking her life".
"The sight of the deceased wandering the corridor naked and covered in excrement while the senior nurse is seen to mop the floor, apparently oblivious to her is horrific," he said.
The state's chief psychiatrist Murray Wright said he was equally shocked.
"I can't speak for what was happening in the minds of those nurses but I think it's an absolutely appalling incident," he said.
Ms Merten's daughter, Corina Leigh Merten, said she only found out exactly how her mother died when a journalist contacted her recently.
She said that at the time of her mother's death, nurses gave her a different version of how her mother died.
"I was in school, in Year 12, my dad came and picked me up and we went straight to the hospital," she said.
"At the time they told me she slipped and fell in the shower."
Now 20, Corina Merten said she did not know the coronial inquest was on.
"I'm so disappointed that it took a reporter for me to know what actually happened to my mum," she said.
ABC News, 13 April 2017:
The New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission said it had found that two nurses caring for a patient who later died from a brain injury kept no record of about 20 falls captured on CCTV.
The woman, known as Patient A, was filmed wandering naked and covered in faeces in Lismore's Adult Mental Health Unit in mid-2014.
CCTV footage showed that in the seven hours before she was transferred to intensive care she fell 24 times.
For most of that time she was alone in a locked room, but nursing records of her confinement made no mention of any falls.
During a five-hour period in the seclusion room, no-one entered to check the patient's temperature, pulse, respiration or blood pressure.
Patient A was not offered any food or water and had no access to a toilet.
The woman died from a brain injury the following day.
The HCCC found the two nurses charged with her care guilty of professional misconduct.
Far too late to benefit Miriam Merten, Health Minister Brad Hazzard said the State's Chief Psychiatrist and a parliamentary committee would review whether failures in mental health care persist.
See: Civil and Administrative Tribunal New South Wales, Health Care Complaints Commission v Borthistle [2017] NSWCATOD 56 decision concerning “Patient A” and Health Care Complaints Commission v Burton [2017] NSWCATOD 57 decision concerning “Patient A” .
NSW Health
Care Complaints Commission (HCCC), Annual
Report 2015-16:
Each
year complaints relating to mental health make up around 12% of all complaints
received by the Commission.
In
2015-16, there were 759 complaints in this category.
This
means that over the five years from 2011 to 2015-16 the Commission has received
3,051 complaints concerning mental health….
Over
the last five years the Commission received:
807
complaints about medical practitioners;
647
complaints about psychologists;
438
about mental health services in a public hospital and 299 about psychiatric
hospitals;
302
about nurses; and,
220
about community health services.
In addition to the 12% of all health complaints being listed as complaints concerning mental health providers, another 5.4% of all health complaints are complaints concerning psychiatry providers.
This annual
report also stated that 21% of all mental
health complaints between 2011-12 to 2015-16 related to professional conduct
and 31.9% related to treatment.
Of the mental health complaints received in
2015-16 there were:
46 referred
to professional council;
40 resolved
during assessment;
55 referred
for local resolution;
23 investigation
conducted by the HCCC;
46 referred
to the HCCC's Resolution Service;
12 discontinued
with comments;
7 referred to
another body/person; and
226
discontinued with no reasons stated.
Case study included in HCCC Annual Report
2015-16 at page 58:
The
Commission investigated a complaint against a mental health inpatient unit in a
regional public hospital. The key facts were that:
*
Patient A was scheduled under the Mental Health Act 2007 (NSW) with a dual
diagnosis of schizophrenia and alcohol abuse
*
The patient was difficult to manage due to lack of insight, non-compliance with
medication and high level aggression.
*
The decision to co-locate the patient in a double room with Patient B – both unpredictable
and potentially violent patients – without any a risk assessment.
*
On a night shift, required observations either not carried out at all or were
not carried out in the manner required, but staff signed off that all care
level checks were completed
*
Overnight Patient B was killed by Patient A.
The
investigation found that care and treatment of Patient A was inadequate. His
care plan was ineffective, rigid and failed to improve his condition. There
were lost opportunities in terms of appropriate, alternative ways to manage and
treat him. Furthermore, his safety and that of others was put at risk through
the decision to co-locate him with patient B and because staff failed to carry
out the required observations.
SANE
Australia 2013 report:
A
Mental Health Council of Australia study (2011) found that people with mental
illness reported similar levels of stigma from health professionals as from the
general community.
Some
of the study’s key findings are that:
* Almost 29% reported that a health professional had ‘shunned’ them. These
figures rose to over 50% for people with post-traumatic stress disorder and
borderline personality disorder.
* Over 34% had been advised by a health professional to lower their expectations
for accomplishment in life.
* Over 44% agreed that health professionals treating them for a physical disorder
behaved differently when they discovered their history of a mental illness.
NSW Health Care Complaints Commission decisions recorded in 2016 & 2017 re other nursing staff complaints relating to treatment of patients with a psychiatric illness:
RNs Haridavan Pandya and Sumintra Prasad – Unsatisfactory professional conduct, 2 February 2017, concerning their care of a mental health patient at Bungarribee House mental health unit in Blacktown hospital on 28 February 2014.
RNs Abraham Thomas and Donna Hayden, and Ms Julie Rumble – Unsatisfactory professional conduct, 11 May 2017,concerning the death of a mental health inpatient at Dubbo Mental Health Inpatient Unit on 28 February 2014.
Mr Stephen Woods – disqualified from being registered as an enrolled nurse for a period of 12 months, 16 May 2016, concerning a physical and verbal attack of a patient in the Mental Health Intensive Care Unit at Hornsby Hospital on 9 April 2014.
Mr Neil Mullen (RN) – Unsatisfactory professional conduct – Reprimand and conditions imposed, 18 July 2016, concerning care of care of nine patients in the Shellharbour Hospital mental health unit on 30 and 31 July 2014.
Mr Mike Siebe Greive - Registered Nurse - Disqualified for 18 months, 30 March 2016, concerning a female mental health patient at the Hornsby Hospital Adult Mental Health Unit between October and December 2013.
Registered Nurses Wendy Kennedy, Christopher Parker and Jisnu Dowsett cautioned and Stewart Thompson reprimanded by a Nursing and Midwifery Professional Standards Committee, 1 June 2015, concerning care of a patient at Lismore Adult Mental Health Unit’s eight bed High Dependency Unit on 19 and 20 February 2013. The patient was found deceased in his room on the morning of 20 February 2013.
Mr Ronnie Obusan - finding of unsatisfactory professional conduct – reprimand and conditions, 19 January 2016, concerning the nurse’s interactions with a patient in the mental health unit at Nepean Hospital in 2012.
I'm sure NSW residents would all like to believe that each and every time they present at a public hospital they will be treated with professional care and respect.
Unfortunately that is not always the case as prejudice, discrimination and racism are rarely acknowleged by government as existing within the state health care system and are therefore tolerated by default.
“Stigma against
people who have experienced a mental illness is deeply entrenched in our
culture. It finds expression everywhere from the Parliament to the front bar.
From courtrooms and pulpits to playgrounds it is possible to hear people who
experience mental illness cast in an unfair light.” [National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing Bulletin 6, Carr
& Halpirin 2002, Stigma and
discrimination]
FACTS OF THE MATTER: Trump, Russia and the 2016 U.S. presidential election
FACTS UNDER OATH
GRAHAM: OK. Do you stand by your testimony that there is an active investigation counterintelligence investigation regarding Trump campaign individuals in the Russian government as to whether not to collaborate? You said that in March...
COMEY: To see if there was any coordination between the Russian effort and peoples...
GRAHAM: Is that still going on?
COMEY: Yes.
GRAHAM: OK. So nothing's changed. You stand by those two statements?
COMEY: Correct. ……
SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, D-CONN.: Thanks. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Thank you Director Comey for being here and thank you to you and the men and women who work with you at the FBI for their extraordinary service to our country, much of it unappreciated as you've wrote so powerfully in your opening statement. You have confirmed, I believe, that the FBI is investigating potential ties between Trump Associates and the Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, correct?
COMEY: Yes.
BLUMENTHAL: And you have not, to my knowledge, ruled out anyone in the Trump campaign as potentially a target of that criminal investigation, correct?
COMEY: Well, I haven't said anything publicly about who we've opened investigations on, I briefed the chair and ranking on who those people are. And so I can't -- I can't go beyond that in this setting. [FBI Director James B. Comey responds to a questions from Senator Lindsey Graham (Republican-South Carolina) and Senator Richard Blumenthal (Democrat-Connecticut) during the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into “Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation”, commencing 10am US EDT 3 May 2017, transcript published in The Washington Post]
With
respect to the Russian investigation, we treated it like we did with the
Clinton investigation. We didn't say a word about it until months into it and
then the only thing we've confirmed so far about this is the same thing with
the Clinton investigation. That we are investigating. And I would expect, we're
not going to say another peep about it until we're done. And I don't know what
will be said when we're done, but that's the way we handled the Clinton
investigation as well…….
In
that particular investigation, my judgment was that it — that the appearance of
fairness and independence required that it be removed from the political chain
of command within the Department of Justice, because as you recall, it seems
like a lifetime ago. But that also involved the conduct of people who were
senior-level people in the White House, and my judgment was that even I, as an
independent-minded person, was a political appointee and so I ought to give it
to a career person like Pat Fitzgerald.
The
Russians used cyber operations against both political parties, including
hacking into servers used by the Democratic National Committee and releasing
stolen data to WikiLeaks and other media outlets. Russia also collected on
certain Republican Party- affiliated targets, but did not release any
Republican-related data. The Intelligence Community Assessment concluded first
that President Putin directed and influenced campaign to erode the faith and
confidence of the American people in our presidential election process. Second,
that he did so to demean Secretary Clinton, and third, that he sought to
advantage Mr. Trump. These conclusions were reached based on the richness of
the information gathered and analyzed and were thoroughly vetted and then
approved by the directors of the three agencies and me. [JAMES
R. CLAPPER JR., former Director Of National Intelligence August 2010–January
2017, giving evidence before the U.S.
Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into “Russian Interference in the 2016
United States Election”, commencing 4.30am AEST 9 May 2017, transcript
published in The
Washington Post]
When the
Intelligence Community obtains information suggesting that a U.S. person is
acting on behalf of a foreign power, the standard procedure is to share that
information with the FBI. The Bureau then decides whether to look into that
information and handles any ensuing investigation, if there is one.
Given its
sensitivity, even the existence of a counterintelligence investigation is
closely held, including at the highest levels. During my tenure as DNI, it was
my practice to defer to the FBI Director – both Director Mueller and Director
Comey – on whether, when, and to what extent they would inform me about such
investigations. This stems from the unique position of the FBI, which straddles
both intelligence and law enforcement. As a consequence, I was not aware of the
counterintelligence investigation Director Comey first referred to during his
testimony before the House intelligence committee on March 20th, and that
comports with my public statements. [JAMES R. CLAPPER, former Director of
National Intelligence, giving evidence before the U.S. Committee
On The Judiciary Subcommittee On Crime And Terrorism United States
Senate investigation into “Russian Interference in the 2016 United States
Election”, 8 May 2017, transcript]
I had two in-person meetings and one phone call with the White House Counsel about Mr. Flynn. The first meeting occurred on January 26, called Don McGahn first thing that morning and told him that I had a very sensitive matter that I needed to discuss with him, that I couldn't talk about it on the phone and that I needed to come see him. And he agreed to meet with me later that afternoon.
I took a senior member of the national security division who was overseeing this matter with me to meet with Mr. McGahn. We met in his office at the White House which is a skiff (ph) so we could discuss classified information in his office. We began our meeting telling him that there had been press accounts of statements from the vice president and others that related conduct that Mr. Flynn had been involved in that we knew not to be the truth.
And as I - as I tell you what happened here, again I'm going to be very careful not to reveal classified information…..
So I told them again that there were a number of press accounts of statements that had been made by the vice president and other high-ranking White House officials about General Flynn's conduct that we knew to be untrue. And we told them how we knew that this - how we had this information, how we had acquired it, and how we knew that it was untrue.
And we walked the White House Counsel who also had an associate there with him through General Flynn's underlying conduct, the contents of which I obviously cannot go through with you today because it's classified. But we took him through in a fair amount of detail of the underlying conduct, what General Flynn had done, and then we walked through the various press accounts and how it had been falsely reported.
We also told the White House Counsel that General Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI on February 24. Mr. McGahn asked me how he did and I declined to give him an answer to that. And we then walked through with Mr. McGahn essentially why we were telling them about this and the first thing we did was to explain to Mr. McGahn that the underlying conduct that General Flynn had engaged in was problematic in and of itself.
Secondly, we told him we felt like the vice president and others were entitled to know that the information that they were conveying to the American people wasn't true. And we wanted to make it really clear right out of the gate that we were not accusing Vice President Pence of knowingly providing false information to the American people.
And, in fact, Mr. McGahn responded back to me to let me know that anything that General Flynn would've said would have been based -- excuse me -- anything that Vice President Pence would have said would have been based on what General Flynn had told him.
We told him the third reason was -- is because we were concerned that the American people had been misled about the underlying conduct and what General Flynn had done, and additionally, that we weren't the only ones that knew all of this, that the Russians also knew about what General Flynn had done.
And the Russians also knew that General Flynn had misled the vice president and others, because in the media accounts, it was clear from the vice president and others that they were repeating what General Flynn had told them, and that this was a problem because not only did we believe that the Russians knew this, but that they likely had proof of this information.
And that created a compromise situation, a situation where the national security adviser essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians. Finally, we told them that we were giving them all of this information so that they could take action, the action that they deemed appropriate.
I remember that Mr. McGahn asked me whether or not General Flynn should be fired, and I told him that that really wasn't our call, that was up to them, but that we were giving them this information so that they could take action, and that was the first meeting.
[SALLY C. YATES, former Deputy U.S. Attorney-General & former Acting Attorney-General January 2015-January 2017, giving evidence before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into “Russian Interference in the 2016 United States Election”, commencing 4.30am AEST 9 May 2017, transcript published in The Washington Post]
‘ALTERNATIVE FACTS’
HOLT: Monday, you met with Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein. Did you ask for a recommendation?
TRUMP: What I did was, I was going to fire. My decision. I was not...
HOLT: You’d made the decision before they came into the room?
TRUMP: I was going to fire Comey. There’s no good time to do it by the way.
HOLT: In your letter, you said, ‘I accept their recommendation.’
TRUMP: Oh, I was going to fire, regardless of recommendation. He made a recommendation, he’s highly respected — very good guy, very smart guy. And the Democrats like him, Republicans like him. He made a recommendation, but regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey. [Excerpt from NBC News Lester Holt interview with Donald Trump on 11 May 2017]
TRUMP: What I did was, I was going to fire. My decision. I was not...
HOLT: You’d made the decision before they came into the room?
TRUMP: I was going to fire Comey. There’s no good time to do it by the way.
HOLT: In your letter, you said, ‘I accept their recommendation.’
TRUMP: Oh, I was going to fire, regardless of recommendation. He made a recommendation, he’s highly respected — very good guy, very smart guy. And the Democrats like him, Republicans like him. He made a recommendation, but regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey. [Excerpt from NBC News Lester Holt interview with Donald Trump on 11 May 2017]
Tuesday 16 May 2017
Comedian Hasan Minhaj's full speech at the 2017 White House Correspondents Dinner sans Donald Trump, then Trump sans Minhaj
At the annual black tie White House Correspondents Dinner................
Elsewhere on the night.........
Labels:
free speech,
US politics
NSW Police public relations blunder
Labels:
police,
Social media
Monday 15 May 2017
Of Gas and Hot Air
Energy
security became a major political issue following a storm-induced blackout in
South Australia late last year. Instead
of the massive storm which knocked over the transmission towers being the
“villain”, the Prime Minister and his Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg blamed the state’s level of renewable (wind)
energy for the outage. They have
persisted with this version of events regardless of all the evidence to the
contrary.
In
the months since then politicians and others have had a great deal to say about
the national energy grid and its shortcomings and renewables and base-load
power. Ideology has played a very
significant part in the statements of many politicians. This of course means that truth has often
been twisted or completely ignored.
Recently
the focus has been on gas and a predicted gas shortage.
Despite
the claims of the Government and many industry players, there is no general gas
shortage. There is, however, a looming domestic shortage because most
of the enormous volume of gas being extracted is being exported.
The
Federal Government has rather belatedly recognised that, despite the fact that
Australia will soon be the largest gas-exporting country in the world, there
will be a shortage of gas for the domestic market. Moreover, the Government has realised that
domestic consumers are paying more for gas than consumers of Australian gas in
Japan - even after the cost of processing and transporting of the resource to
that country. This has become a rather
urgent matter for the Government because domestic gas prices and the
uncertainty of supply is hurting local industries. For a government that talks about jobs and
growth, permitting more of our dwindling manufacturing base going either “down
the gurgler” or offshore would be politically foolish.
As
the Prime Minister’s meetings in recent months with the major gas exporters
have not produced the cooperation he hoped for, he recently decided to take
further action. It is action that the
industry is unhappy about saying that this will discourage global investment, a
claim which is unsubstantiated. There
are others, including some in the Government, who believe that this
interference in the market is not justified.
What
happens elsewhere? Western Australia,
the one Australian state which had the forethought to realise that there was a
need to protect local interests, has a gas reservation policy[1]. Many other countries, including Canada, the
USA, Israel, Indonesia and Egypt, have various mechanisms to ensure that they
won’t end up in the situation that Australia is heading towards. In their rush to encourage foreign investment,
successive Australian Federal Governments failed to see that safeguards to
protect domestic gas supplies were needed in the national interest.
Prime
Minister Turnbull has stated that his measures will only be needed for the
short term because he expects that there will be further development of local
gasfields which can service the domestic market. He is referring specifically to NSW and
Victoria which have currently stopped unconventional gas mining. (There is an exception in NSW. Santos’ project in the Pilliga in the
north-west is currently going through the planning approval process.)
The
Prime Minister is one of many politicians and industry players who have weighed
in wanting the opening up of NSW and Victoria to coal seam and unconventional
gas mining.
Recently
Ian Macfarlane, the head of the Queensland Resources Council, and a former
federal Coalition Minister, criticised the NSW and Victorian Governments for
lacking the will to develop their gas resources in the same way that Queensland
has.[2]
What
Macfarlane either does not understand or conveniently ignores is that it is
what happened in Queensland as well as overseas in the USA and elsewhere that
alarmed communities in NSW and Victoria and generated the campaigns against CSG
and unconventional gas mining – campaigns that have gathered strength also in
the Northern Territory and the north-west of Western Australia.
In
his interview with Leigh Sales on ABC TV’s 7.30 on April 27 Macfarlane paints a
very rosy picture of the industry in Queensland [3]. He claims “irresponsible green activism”
stopped the industry in NSW. Blaming
the anti-gas campaign on the “greenie” bogey is convenient for many
conservatives but is far from a true reflection of the breadth of community
opposition to an invasive and polluting industry.
It
will be interesting to see whether the urging of the Federal Government and
proponents like Macfarlane encourage the NSW and Victorian Governments to
change their positions on gas mining. If
this happens, the reaction from those who see the industry as an unacceptable
threat to agriculture and the environment is easy to predict.
Hildegard
Northern
Rivers
5
May 2017
GuestSpeak is a feature of North Coast Voices allowing Northern Rivers residents to make satirical or serious comment on issues that concern them. Posts of 250-300 words or less can be submitted to ncvguestspeak AT gmail.com.au for consideration. Longer posts will be considered on topical subjects.
Memo to all federal and state members of parliament: The Great Artesian Basin is not a vast underground sea of fresh water so stop treating it as if it is
Figure 1. The Great Artesian Basin; spring cluster data sourced from Fensham (2006Fensham, R. 2006. Spring wetlands of the Great Artesian Basin. Paper for the 2006 Australian State of the Environment Committee, Department of Environment and Heritage, Canberra.http://www.deh.gov.au/soe/2006/emerging/wetlands/index.html(accessed December 16, 2014). ).
It is long past time that all parliamentarians of every political persuasion ceased robbing the nation of its present and future water security with their petty partisan politics and insane reliance on ideology over scientific fact.
In simple language Kim de Rijke, Paul Munro & Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita point out that the Great Artesian Basin is not an endless supply of fresh water and to treat it as such is dangerous.
Taylor & Francis Online, 11 February 2016:
Excerpt from Society & Natural Resources, An International Journal Volume 29, 2016 - Issue 6: Thinking Relationships Through Water
With regard to the process of extracting gas and subterranean water, a commonality in the submissions of CSG companies and state governments is the simplification of the GAB. It is constructed as a large, well-understood, and unproblematic body of underground water:
[The GAB is] equivalent to approximately 22% of Australia’s land mass. Compared to the total storage capacity of the GAB, the amount of water projected to be extracted during CSG production is very small … the annual water extraction is likely to be less than 0.0002% of total storage. This is the equivalent of taking approximately 5 litres out of an Olympic sized swimming pool. (Australia Pacific LNG 2011, The Senate Inquiry, Submission 368).
Water, in such submissions, is a simplified and abstracted object of nature to be represented solely in terms of volumes and percentages. It is exemplar of Jamie Linton’s (2014 Linton, J. 2014. Modern water and its discontents: A history of hydrosocial renewal. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water1 (1):111–20. doi:10.1002/wat2.1009 [CrossRef], [Google Scholar]) notion of “modern water’” a particular way of knowing and relating to water abstracted from its local, social, cultural, religious, and ecological contexts. The anxiety-riddled relationships between the arid region overlying the GAB and water resources are posited as insignificant to extractive practices. Such instrumental and rationalist simplification is part of discursive strategies to produce a view of subterranean water amenable to the (economic) growth of the modern state (Linton 2010 Linton, J. 2010. What is water? The history of a modern abstraction. Vancouver, BC, Canada: UBC Press. [Google Scholar]; 2014 Linton, J. 2014. Modern water and its discontents: A history of hydrosocial renewal. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water1 (1):111–20. doi:10.1002/wat2.1009 [CrossRef], [Google Scholar]; Finewood and Stroup 2012 Finewood, M. H., and L. J. Stroup. 2012. Fracking and the neoliberalization of the hydro-social cycle in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale. Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education 147 (1):72–79. doi:10.1111/j.1936-704x.2012.03104.x[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]). The final Senate Inquiry report, however, chided some CSG company submissions, noting that
[The GAB] is not a vast underground ‘sea’ in which levels and pressures quickly and uniformly adjust to the extraction of water from one part. Rather it is a highly complex system of geological formations at a range of depths, of variable permeability holding water of different quality, at different pressures and through which water flows at very different rates, if it flows at all. The reduction in pressure in a coal seam will result in a local fall in the water level and pressure in that particular area which may alter the rate and direction of the movement of groundwater in adjacent formations. The impact of this change may take many years to have a measurable impact on adjacent aquifers. Similarly the contingent loss of water from adjacent aquifers may not be made good by natural recharge for decades or even centuries. (RATRC 2011, 19)
Discursive attempts by CSG proponents to portray a simplified body of subterranean water thus sit uneasily alongside broader scientific narratives of the GAB. A critical scientific challenge, as the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO, cited in RATRC 2011 Management of the Murray Darling Basin interim report: The impact of mining coal seam gas on the management of the Murray Darling Basin. Commonwealth of Australia 2011 Rural Affairs and Transport References Committee. (accessed February 8, 2016). , 19) notes, is “to visualize its exact structure.” While the GAB is no longer described as a source of “mystery water” (Powell 2011 Powell, O. C. 2011, Great Artesian Basin: Water from deeper down. In Queensland historical atlas: Histories, cultures, landscapes.(accessed February 8, 2016).), disparities point to continuing knowledge contests fuelled by the limitations of geological modeling technologies that aim to make “darkness visible” (Shortland 1994 Shortland, M. 1994. Darkness visible: Underground culture in the golden age of geology. History of Science 31 (1):1–61. doi:10.1177/007327539403200101 [CrossRef], [Google Scholar]).
Read the full article here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)