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Are unmanaged conflicts of interest hazardous to our children and our wealth?

Filed under: General — MurrayBacon @ 3:12 pm Wed 24th September 2008

John Key article

Labour Party has been quick to criticise John Key of being in a conflict of interest situation. John Key has admitted making a mistake, but denied using his parliamentary position for personal profit.

It is interesting that Labour claims to take conflicts of interest seriously.

Several conflicts of interest that harm families legitimate interests were notified to Labour, in the form of my submissions to Parliamentary Sub Committees:

Given that Labour and National have taken no action towards managing these conflicts of interest, to protect the public from these legal workers, then I question Labour’s sincerity in criticising John Key over a relatively minor issue, when they have failed to act on issues leading to serious damage of our children and also resulting in serious wastage of taxpayer funds for no advantage to society.

Submission to Justice Law and Order on Family Court Matters Bill
Submission to Social Services Committee on Child Support Act
Submission to Justice Department about DV Act

While legal worker/Parliamentarians take part in decisions about the regulation of legal workers (conflict of interest!), then public protection will not be advanced.

Change will only occur when the public say strongly “enough is enough, we want the situation managed competently”.

The following is extracted from my submission to Justice Department on DV Act. It gives a paragraph or three on each type of conflict of interest. (The rest of this submission gives recommendations for changes that would provide management of these conflicts of interest, to protect the public from these abuses.)

To manage these conflicts of interest would cost under $1 million per year and would deliver benefits to society of well over $100 million per year. (If you are interested to read these recommendations, please EMAIL to me and I will send the submission to you.)

More detailed descriptions of some of these conflicts of interest are given on this website and there are references to these at the foot of this article.

Managing Conflicts of Interest so they are not a barrier to Courts delivering Good Quality Cost Effective Service

When a conflict of interest is NOT managed appropriately, then actors have (possibly hidden) incentives to serve people other than their ostensible customer. When actors act on their conflicted interest, they fail to deliver the proper quality and level of service to their customer. Later, as customers become aware of the conflict of interest, they are likely to become severely aggrieved and if there is no proper redress – eg trying to sue a legal worker – then they will be strongly tempted to sort the situation out in the real world, by broken bones, crushed skulls and spilt blood.

It is far better to make sure that conflicts of interests are competently managed, so that these problems never arise. This is not being competently done, by the present chiefs of court judges. They are simply trading by publicly claiming their integrity and skills. This smoke and mirrors approach does not address the real issues and complaints from the public are simply being ignored, as long as they can get away with this type of behaviour.

The following conflicts of interest need to be managed:

Parliamentarians who have worked as lawyers, taking part in debate and votes.

While they have some specialised knowledge, their personal conflict of interest is hazardous to Parliament protecting the interests of family consumers and protecting the taxpayer’s interest. When non-lawyer Parliamentarians stand back from taking a vigorous part in these debates, they are abrogating their duty to citizens and especially to all of our children. Non-lawyer Parliamentarians must look carefully at how well they are protecting citizens, from closed-shop lawyers.
Good quality legislation is clear and straightforward, so that people may arrange their lives within it, without “needing” recourse to the courts. Lack of clarity in legislation creates disputes, which generates far more income for legal workers than clear legislation (conflict of interest).

For citizens to understand legislation, it needs to be efficiently accessible to them. At present, legislation and rules are now efficiently accessible to citizens, but judgements are generally not easily or cheaply or efficiently accessible to citizens. The NZ Government has run “Citizens access to justice” investigations several times through the last 30 years, but more has been spent on talking than doing — as it cuts into commercial interests of legal workers (conflict of interest).

If the parties have poor knowledge of the likely outcome in court, then the negotiations can only be inefficient and fraught with problems. This only increases the potential income of legal workers involved in the negotiations (conflict of interest).

Hearing of Complaints about Legal Workers

The legal system from end to end, has always shown stellar arrogance, as it knew that it ran the complaints processes, with oversight by only wastefully expensive and profitable judicial review. Arrange that judges and lawyers are managed and supervised by people drawn from outside of legal profession and who are not subject to the conflicts of interest that the judges are exposed to.

Today, all of the productive professions have oversight by people outside the profession.

Supervision by a group of people providing at least some oversight from people outside the profession is given to limit the conflict of interest on the part of people within the profession on the supervisory panel.

Principal Family Caught Judge Management of Frivolous Litigation

At present, the Principal Family Court Judge has a personal financial conflict of interest, in that his pecuniary advantage lies in building the empire of Family Court and of legal workers in general. This conflict of interest should be clearly monitored by Parliament, or better still the management of family court judges should be by a manager not subject to this conflict of interest. This issue is the single issue offering the largest financial savings for Government and citizens.

Principal Family Caught Judge Management of Research

The judges who manage the judiciary fail to protect honest respondents and Government Legal Aid ie the public purse, from unnecessary and frivolous legal actions brought by legal workers. This serious conflict of interest costs the Government several $100 millions per year and seriously financially damages families. Although they speak publicly about putting the interests of children first, they put their personal and legal worker’s interests first. Justice would be better served by managing unnecessary “legal actions” paid for from the public purse. This would then allow the Family Court to meet its commitments within its existing budget, possibly even reducing the cost of this court.

Law Commission and Justice Department sponsored “research” consists mainly of talking to legal workers, with minor input from “specially selected” customers. By avoiding professional quality sampling (and the comments of the broad range of customers), the resulting research may be manipulated, by the employers of the researchers (conflict of interest). The Justice Dept research lacks professional credibility, it is based mainly on the viewpoints of legal workers. This submission is focussed on the viewpoint of giving families an effective disputes resolution service where value exceeds the cost, at a cost within the sensible budget of hard working families.

Judges

The primary problem in Family Court relates to the tolerance and fostering of perjury. (This eats way at the integrity and productivity of all NZ courts, but the problems caused persist much longer when they impact on family relationships in Family Court. Perjury generates more “legal work” and this profits all legal workers. Instead of honouring their ethical “responsibility” to the court, many legal workers encourage perjury. This is a pernicious conflict of interest and it will only be honoured when the legal workers complaints hearings are supervised from outside of their profession, similarly to all of the productive professions.)

Thus, it is more efficient for the child, to impose high standards for behaviour, accountability and responsibility onto both parents. To do so, would generate less adversarial spirit and thus less income for legal workers (this being another conflict of interest against the child’s best interests).

Further examples on the MENZ.ORG website, covered in more detail:

Lawyer with integrity not taking advantage of a conflict of interest
Inviting media to report on cases at #12
No picnic for fathers at #21
I compliment a lady lawyer, who gave me honest advice about the familycaught, that saved me probably over $10,000, this being at her own cost. This lady served her customer (me), even though this action cost her the same amount that it saved me. I admire her integrity.
Her integrity was more important to her, than taking my money.

Complaints about legal workers heard by their own union
To whom it may concern at #22
I discuss legal workers complaints being heard by their own union, the Law Society. This is a clear and obvious conflict of interest, that has been complained about for several hundred years, with no action being taken to rectify the malpractice that results. By comparison, complaints against real professionals are heard by bodies independant from the unions or advocacy bodies of these professionals.

Ringside seats available Catton v -IRD at #2
Jayden Hedley Another child failed by the family court at #6

I discuss that if the laws against child abduction were competently and efficiently prosecuted, then the legal workers (lawyers and judges) would collectively lose well over $50 million per year. By refusing to prosecute according to the laws of NZ, these workers are putting their personal financial interests ahead of the safe upbringing of NZ children.

Finally but can I win at #7
I discuss that the family legislation in NZ is setup not to protect children, but to make it easy for legal workers to threaten and extort parents directly of through Legal [Workers] Aid, to maximise their personal take from the parents. Although I didn’t use the words “conflict of interest”, this is exactly what is being discussed.

Lets prosecute child abductors at #7
I discuss the 40% care factor in NZ Child [and Spousal] Support legislation as an unmanaged conflict of interest. The Australian child support system has now reduced this figure to 15%, to treat this situation more fairly. It is astonishing how NZ men have been so slow to put pressure onto politicians, to get NZ to follow the Australian changes.

Lets prosecute child abductors at #47
Legal workers make more money by refraining from prosecuting women child abductors and springing out any women taken to caught by the police.
On 26th of October 2005 I, Murray Bacon, sat at the back of a caughtroon at Manukau District Court, with judge adams and legal workers gray cameron and simon jefferson discussing whether to send a Declaration to Sweden, saying that a boy aged 5 and a girl aged 11 had been illegally removed from NZ.
I expected 5 or maybe 10 minutes of discussion, as the issues at a family level were simple, clear, unambiguous and obvious.
Over 2 and a half hours went by, as these people discussed the removal from NZ, which preceded the passing of the Care of Children 2004 Act, the possibility that the Swedish Government and Courts might not act on this letter and therefore possibly it should not be sent.
How could this discussion go on for so long? The issues were being discussed as if this was the first ever Hague application to leave NZ. I knew that this was not true, as NZ has averaged about 50 applications per year, so through several years there had been several hundred similar applications.
It felt to me that the issue was being stretched out, to justify larger bills. I’m told this hearing cost the NZ and Swedish Governments close to $20,000, apparently only for disadvantage to these children.
As a citizen, I cannot be silent, about what looked to me to be featherbedding to provide financial support to legal workers, at serious cost to the quality of care for children.
Familycaught judges decry child abduction in public, but under cover of secrecy, their actual behaviour is largely one of encouragement, enabling and support. Parents and grandparents must defend their children, despite the familycaught.

The Conflicts Of Interest that occur in the “legal” process are not being managed by the present “Chief Justice” and the present “Principal familycaught judge”, thus the management of these conflicts of interest must be performed from outside of the legal workers community, by people with the skill and integrity to do this. This is not difficult to do and is essential, if we want the familycaught to ACT!!! against child abduction. Concepts of quality control and performance auditing, have been used successfully in competitive industries for half a century .

If we want acceptable performance from caughts, then these management tools must be used in the management of the caughts. Although there is some knowledge of these techniques among legal workers, management of the caughts have been careful to never apply them for the advantage of the NZ citizens or the protection of the most vulnerable of NZ’s citizens. Our caughts will only move forward under their own initiative, when access to judges is by well informed customer choice, influenced by cost, on a competitive basis.

Talk about these issues with your local MP, well before the election!!!!!

Cheers, MurrayBacon

20 Comments »

  1. Yes Mr Bacon, I award a point against Labour on this matter…
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekQ_Ja02gTY

    Comment by Colin of Nazareth — Wed 24th September 2008 @ 6:40 pm

  2. All this hysteria about domestic violence can only be explained for me by a vast corrupt government-organized network, similar to Customs “Officers” being allowed a percentage of everything that they find. The campaign is brilliant and simple of course, it sounds righteous, raises lots of money for lawyers and governments, womens’ groups get some too. Or am i just paranoid ?

    Fathers’ groups will be infiltrated too , in England the government used to infiltrate (democratically elected) Union meetings with clever, charming, well qualified men during the strike decades of the 70s and 80s. Of course they never infiltrated (private) company board meetings. They will be doing similar things to fathers’ groups , i am sure.

    Comment by Perseus — Wed 24th September 2008 @ 11:16 pm

  3. Lets have another example:
    Legal aid system offers guilt money – lawyer
    VICTORIA ROBINSON
    Last updated 05:00 05/07/2012
    Lawyers can earn up to 500 per cent more if they get clients to plead guilty at their first court appearance under new legal aid rules, a top barrister claims.

    Auckland barrister Lapa Laubscher argues the fee structure creates a potential conflict of interest for lawyers, and something needs to change so the public can be confident the system is fair.

    Laubscher said he had worked out that, under the new legal aid fixed fee system introduced earlier this year, it was 531 per cent more lucrative for lawyers if their client pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity.

    When a defendant pleaded not guilty at their first appearance, their lawyer would effectively earn $300 per hour.

    But if they pleaded not guilty and the matter was decided at a defended hearing the lawyer would earn just $56.47 per hour, Laubscher said.

    “That must be an incentive and much as lawyers would like to say ‘we’re above that, we act in the interests of the clients, we put our own interests aside’, you know, I just think it should be apparent for a member of the broader public looking at the whole system that this is a fair system and legal aid dispensed to legally aided people is dispensed in a fair and equitable way.”

    Laubscher said he would expect and hope that lawyers would not try to rort the system by trying to get their clients to plead guilty early in their cases’ progress.

    “But I believe that to put that temptation there is not good. There might be a subconscious tendency not to be totally independent in the advice you give to your clients.”

    This situation applied for the bulk of legal aid work, including judge-alone hearings, and cases where the maximum sentence was less than two years’ imprisonment.

    Laubscher said he understood the government was trying to find savings in tough economic times.

    “If we say in this country that we want to give access to justice for all, there is unfortunately a price to be paid. If we’re not willing to pay the price we may say ‘well perhaps we should narrow the level of the access we give to legal representation and justice to all’. That’s a debate one needs to have.”

    Ministry of Justice director of legal aid services Michele McCreadie said lawyers had a responsibility to act in their clients’ best interests.

    “Under the fixed fee payment system for legal aid lawyers, practitioners are paid for the completion of activities undertaken in each legal aid case.

    “This payment framework recognises that, though few cases are identical, the majority move through well-defined stages. However, if the client or the nature of the case makes it particularly complex, there is the opportunity for payment to be managed on a different basis.”
    _________________________________________________________________________________
    This issue isn’t just theory.
    I recall a lady describing to me, how she had been prosecuted for manslaughter after the suffocation death of her toddler. She had been jailed for two and a half years, out after 18 months.
    As she described her legal-worker’s-aid lawyer, I felt that she hadn’t been properly defended. She wasn’t particularly concerned about the quality of her representation, but she didn’t know enough to know what to look for.
    I kept my mouth shut, but I left with a very uncomfortable feeling about legal-worker’s-aid.
    This is important not just for the wastage of her time in jail, but it also left her in the situation that CYF’s would take any later children that she bore. The shades of grey in real life were not presented for her by her advocate, who just took the easy cash and shot off, exactly as described above.
    Why then does the Government fund legal-worker’s-aid?
    MurrayBacon.

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Fri 6th July 2012 @ 4:33 pm

  4. Share Your Story USA National Parent’s Organisation

    #51. Story By

    JANE ASH

    I am a stepmom to two children who live with myself and my husband. The judge ordered an estimated $2,000 a month in child support to the mother who has less than 20% of the children’s time.

    The Federal Government pays a subsidy to states, to cover costs of processing child support awards. These are lucrative, especially if the task is done at low cost and poorly.

    The child support operations, some in state government, some contracted out, overflow with cash and doubtless the overflow sometimes ends up in local judge’s pockets, to help keep the flows going.

    Like all crime, the fountain of cash must be balanced by a drought somewhere else.
    Is it right that poor parents are mangled, to support generous fountains, where they aren’t even needed?

    How did the best interests of the children get lost?
    How was integrity lost so easily?

    NZ is a little different, but not very much?

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Sun 12th January 2014 @ 8:24 am

  5. Share Your Story – child support funds theft:

    #55 Story By
    TANA BURROUGHS

    When I was 15, I got pregnant, married my child’s father, and had a son in 1984. Shortly afterwards, his father and I divorced because his dad never worked, but his paternal grandmother hid her son to keep him from paying child support. I turned it over to Louisiana Child Support Enforcement in 1988 to try to get them to help. From that time to this, it has been a nightmare.

    On three or four occasions in all this 29 years, the father has been picked up, brought to jail, but never had to stay. A couple of times he had to be bailed out and had to pay a little money to me, which his mother paid. Never more than 1000.00 at a time, total about 4000.00 over all in all these years.

    On more than one occasion, my case got closed by CSE, with no explanation. When I would go to them and ask why it was closed when I was receiving nothing, they could not explain, and would reopen the case, but nothing would happen. During these years, many warrants were issued, but they were not being served. There was always an excuse why the warrant was not served. There are many unserved warrants in my record.

    Suddenly, there are copies of checks in my record which they say I got and signed, but they are not mine and I never got them! Even the bank says they never came through the bank, but they appear to have. Recently I was told by someone in authority in my local CSE office, that both the DA and a person in the CSE office are involved, but they will never testify to that fact for fear of losing their job. My ex step mom worked for many lawyers through these years.

    So who can I contact now? The DA will not return my calls or see me. This is fraud, plain and simple and I am stuck.

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Sun 12th January 2014 @ 8:52 am

  6. Dan Ariely: Beware conflicts of interest
    TED2011 · 5:35 · Filmed Mar 2011

    0:12
    So, I was in the hospital for a long time. And a few years after I left, I went back, and the chairman of the burn department was very excited to see me — said, “Dan, I have a fantastic new treatment for you.” I was very excited. I walked with him to his office. And he explained to me that, when I shave, I have little black dots on the left side of my face where the hair is, but on the right side of my face I was badly burned so I have no hair, and this creates lack of symmetry. And what’s the brilliant idea he had? He was going to tattoo little black dots on the right side of my face and make me look very symmetric.
    0:47
    It sounded interesting. He asked me to go and shave. Let me tell you, this was a strange way to shave, because I thought about it and I realized that the way I was shaving then would be the way I would shave for the rest of my life — because I had to keep the width the same. When I got back to his office, I wasn’t really sure. I said, “Can I see some evidence for this?” So he showed me some pictures of little cheeks with little black dots — not very informative. I said, “What happens when I grow older and my hair becomes white? What would happen then?” “Oh, don’t worry about it,” he said. “We have lasers; we can whiten it out.” But I was still concerned, so I said, “You know what, I’m not going to do it.”
    1:26
    And then came one of the biggest guilt trips of my life. This is coming from a Jewish guy, all right, so that means a lot. (Laughter) And he said, “Dan, what’s wrong with you? Do you enjoy looking non-symmetric? Do you have some kind of perverted pleasure from this? Do women feel pity for you and have sex with you more frequently?” None of those happened. And this was very surprising to me, because I’ve gone through many treatments — there were many treatments I decided not to do — and I never got this guilt trip to this extent. But I decided not to have this treatment. And I went to his deputy and asked him, “What was going on? Where was this guilt trip coming from?” And he explained that they have done this procedure on two patients already, and they need the third patient for a paper they were writing.
    2:15
    (Laughter)
    2:17
    Now you probably think that this guy’s a schmuck. Right, that’s what he seems like. But let me give you a different perspective on the same story. A few years ago, I was running some of my own experiments in the lab. And when we run experiments, we usually hope that one group will behave differently than another. So we had one group that I hoped their performance would be very high, another group that I thought their performance would be very low, and when I got the results, that’s what we got — I was very happy — aside from one person. There was one person in the group that was supposed to have very high performance that was actually performing terribly. And he pulled the whole mean down, destroying my statistical significance of the test.
    2:55
    So I looked carefully at this guy. He was 20-some years older than anybody else in the sample. And I remembered that the old and drunken guy came one day to the lab wanting to make some easy cash and this was the guy. “Fantastic!” I thought. “Let’s throw him out. Who would ever include a drunken guy in a sample?”
    3:13
    But a couple of days later, we thought about it with my students, and we said, “What would have happened if this drunken guy was not in that condition? What would have happened if he was in the other group? Would we have thrown him out then?” We probably wouldn’t have looked at the data at all, and if we did look at the data, we’d probably have said, “Fantastic! What a smart guy who is performing this low,” because he would have pulled the mean of the group lower, giving us even stronger statistical results than we could. So we decided not to throw the guy out and to rerun the experiment.
    3:40
    But you know, these stories, and lots of other experiments that we’ve done on conflicts of interest, basically kind of bring two points to the foreground for me. The first one is that in life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces. They just have the incentives that get them to be blinded to reality and give us advice that is inherently biased. And I’m sure that it’s something that we all recognize, and we see that it happens. Maybe we don’t recognize it every time, but we understand that it happens.
    4:12
    The most difficult thing, of course, is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. And that’s a much, much more difficult lesson to take into account. Because we don’t see how conflicts of interest work on us. When I was doing these experiments, in my mind, I was helping science. I was eliminating the data to get the true pattern of the data to shine through. I wasn’t doing something bad. In my mind, I was actually a knight trying to help science move along. But this was not the case. I was actually interfering with the process with lots of good intentions. And I think the real challenge is to figure out where are the cases in our lives where conflicts of interest work on us, and try not to trust our own intuition to overcome it, but to try to do things that prevent us from falling prey to these behaviors, because we can create lots of undesirable circumstances.
    5:01
    I do want to leave you with one positive thought. I mean, this is all very depressing, right — people have conflicts of interest, we don’t see it, and so on. The positive perspective, I think, of all of this is that, if we do understand when we go wrong, if we understand the deep mechanisms of why we fail and where we fail, we can actually hope to fix things. And that, I think, is the hope. Thank you very much.
    5:21
    (Applause)

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Sun 25th May 2014 @ 12:10 pm

  7. Fighting Crime in the familycaught$

    Marc Goodman A vision of crimes in the future
    TEDGlobal 2012 · 19:25 · Filmed Jun 2012

    I have hijacked his talk, keeping his theme that crime detection and quality control need to be performed by the public using openly available information.

    Relying on secret Government forces to fight crime, against Government forces working in protective secrecy – just isn’t working.

    I have cut out the breadth of his speech and focussed only on encouraging the public to fight crime, on the streets and in Government agencies, such as secret familycaught$:

    ___________________________________________________________________________________________
    I study the future of crime and terrorism, and frankly, I’m afraid. I’m afraid by what I see. I sincerely want to believe that technology can bring us the techno-utopia that we’ve been promised, but, you see, I’ve spent a career in law enforcement, and that’s informed my perspective on things. I’ve been a street police officer, an undercover investigator, a counter-terrorism strategist, and I’ve worked in more than 70 countries around the world. I’ve had to see more than my fair share of violence and the darker underbelly of society, and that’s informed my opinions. My work with criminals and terrorists has actually been highly educational. They have taught me a lot, and I’d like to be able to share some of these observations with you.
    Today I’m going to show you the flip side of all those technologies that we marvel at, the ones that we love. In the hands of the TED community, these are awesome tools which will bring about great change for our world, but in the hands of suicide bombers, the future can look quite different.
    I started observing technology and how criminals were using it as a young patrol officer. In those days, this was the height of technology. Laugh though you will, all the drug dealers and gang members with whom I dealt had one of these long before any police officer I knew did.
    “¦”¦..
    It’s not just about terrorism, though. There’s also been a big paradigm shift in crime. You see, you can now commit more crime as well. In the old days, it was a knife and a gun. Then criminals moved to robbing trains. You could rob 200 people on a train, a great innovation. Moving forward, the Internet allowed things to scale even more. In fact, many of you will remember the recent Sony PlayStation hack. In that incident, over 100 million people were robbed. Think about that. When in the history of humanity has it ever been possible for one person to rob 100 million?
    “¦”¦.
    Or, controversially, and not without its risks, what happens if we just gave [what needed to be protected] to the whole public? Then we could all be engaged in helping.
    We’ve already seen examples of this working well. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is staffed by journalists and citizens where they are crowd-sourcing what dictators and terrorists are doing with public funds around the world, and, in a more dramatic case, we’ve seen in Mexico, a country that has been racked by 50,000 narcotics-related murders in the past six years. They’re killing so many people they can’t even afford to bury them all in anything but these unmarked graves like this one outside of Ciudad Juarez. What can we do about this? The government has proven ineffective. So in Mexico, citizens, at great risk to themselves, are fighting back to build an effective solution. They’re crowd-mapping the activities of the drug dealers.
    Whether or not you realize it, we are at the dawn of a technological arms race, an arms race between people who are using technology for good and those who are using it for ill. The threat is serious, and the time to prepare for it is now. I can assure you that the terrorists and criminals are.
    My personal belief is that, rather than having a small, elite force of highly trained government agents here to protect us all, we’re much better off having average and ordinary citizens approaching this problem as a group and seeing what we can do. If we all do our part, I think we’ll be in a much better space. The tools to change the world are in everybody’s hands. How we use them is not just up to me, it’s up to all of us.
    This was a technology I would frequently deploy as a police officer. This technology has become outdated in our current world. It doesn’t scale, it doesn’t work globally, and it surely doesn’t work virtually.
    We’ve seen paradigm shifts in crime and terrorism. They call for a shift to a more open form and a more participatory form of law enforcement.
    So I invite you to join me.After all, public safety is too important to leave to the professionals.
    Thank you. (Applause)
    (Applause)
    ______________________________________________________________________________________________________
    Use the link button above, to watch the original speech, or read the original transcript.

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Mon 26th May 2014 @ 9:44 am

  8. A lawsuit is shining fresh light on specialty hospitals

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Sun 8th June 2014 @ 7:41 pm

  9. Murray (#12): Not sure what relevance this has here except perhaps that any disagreement by a male with a female’s allegations is now called ‘harassment’.

    Comment by Man X Norton — Mon 9th June 2014 @ 9:26 am

  10. I am just trying to illustrate that when conflicts of interest are ignored or unmanaged, then somebody is getting an open opportunity to take advantage of other people. Maybe the advantage is being paid for something that they never did (provide legal aid defence, or paid for a spine operation that wasn’t needed but medical insurance would pay for it, or obtaining a soft legislation to let them sell alcohol when the public don’t want it (where is the hidden money going?), or more gambling tables, in return for a convention centre that isn’t really needed (where is the hidden money going?)….

    Hidden conflicts of interest persuade people to make decisions in the interest of the briber, rather than the public who are meant to be being served. This is why the election financial returns are supposed to be honest. However, Lational and Nabour parties built in loopholes, to enable contributions to be hidden from the public. This makes it harder to see who their masters are. John Banks was caught because he didn’t follow the technicalities, to get the benefit of the loopholes.

    In terms of hidden donations, it seems that Nabour and Lational are hiding far, far more illicit influence than John Banks was ever offered or received. Typical, drop the small guy, to prove the system is working. I prefer to watch hangings of guilty people, than electoral farce.

    Watch their legislation and try to work out the powers that are controlling them. My guesses in descending financial value:

    1. Alcohol
    2. legal workers against competitive, honestly informed marketplace
    3. Gambling
    4. free trade agreement with uSA with more fine print that telephone book and secret until passed into law
    5. business rorts eg price fixing in building products

    Are you paranoid enough?

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Mon 9th June 2014 @ 12:42 pm

  11. A Clinical Trial and Suicide Leave Many Questions: Part 1: Consent?

    The doctors responsible for the man’s care, were in a position to get a $15,000 bonus if he took part in a drug trial, for one year and completed the trial period.

    The patient was not told about the conflict of interest, so was not well placed to protect himself from the doctor’s hidden financial interest.

    When the patient didn’t respond to the drug of the trial, instead of trying other drugs, as an honest doctor would normally do, they committed the patient to keep him captive in the trial.

    He suicided, so the doctors lost their bonus payment anyway, damn!
    Too bad about the patient’s life!
    Who could care less?

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Mon 9th June 2014 @ 4:28 pm

  12. Medical Ethics – that should have protected the life of the patient mentioned above

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Mon 9th June 2014 @ 4:34 pm

  13. Can anyone see any similarity to the familycaught$ in NZ?
    Lack of knowledge, hidden conflict of interest, public poorly protected by professional organisations:

    Indian women pushed into hysterectomies

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Mon 9th June 2014 @ 5:01 pm

  14. Life isn’t changing fast: The Crimes of the Powerful are Under the Investigative Radars

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Fri 22nd May 2015 @ 2:25 pm

  15. The Lancet: Doctors silenced over Australia’s immigration centres

    A new law potentially threatens health workers with jail if they reveal too much about what really goes on inside Australia’s immigration detention centres. Chris McCall reports.

    Nurse Marianne Evers lasted 3 weeks when she went to work in the Pacific island nation of Nauru. It sounded like a dream nursing job, but in revelations that subsequently made headlines, Evers described suicides, fights, beatings, and lack of proper toilet facilities at a centre holding would-be immigrants to Australia that Australia had kept out. She calls the place a ‘concentration camp’. It is not the image that Australia’s Government wants, or likes tourists, investors, or voters to see. Under the new Australian Border Force Act passed this year, people like Evers will have to think a lot harder before they talk to the media, as it might mean a jail sentence.

    There has been plenty to discuss. For example, Evers told The Lancet that she was aware of four suicides in just 3 weeks on shifts she worked on back in 2013, in a centre holding around 600 asylum-seekers. ‘It is a common occurrence’, she said. Other whistleblowers have detailed rapes by Nauru men of foreign women, which Nauru police failed to investigate. Children are going without education and some may have had their growth stunted. Tamils from Sri Lanka have physically clashed with Afghan Hazaras, and those employed to guard them are poorly prepared.

    Reports from another offshore detention centre in Papua New Guinea’s northern Manus Island are no better. But Australia also has onshore immigration detention centres, where it keeps people it cannot justify sending away even under its own draconian laws. Reports from those are also grim. Riots have broken out at some.

    An official inquiry has been held. Quietly, away from the cameras, sick detainees overseas have occasionally been moved to Australia for urgent medical care. However, the policies remain firmly intact, including turning back boats, refusing to allow those arriving by sea to settle in Australia, and mandatory detention of asylum-seekers. Refugee advocates argue that many of these things are at odds with Australia’s obligations under the 1951 UN convention on refugees.

    Australia’s justification for its policies? Stopping a dangerous illegal trade, which has led to hundreds of drownings and could be feeding millions of dollars into the pockets of people-smugglers and corrupt officials in other countries.

    By global standards, the numbers of asylum-seekers are small, in the thousands yearly, and many actually reach Australia by air, not by boat. Australia has also, over the years, taken in substantial numbers of refugees through official channels, particularly Sudanese refugees.

    Most of the migrants want to be recognised as refugees and want to settle in Australia. A substantial proportion of Australia’s voters do not want them, enough possibly to swing an election. So Australia’s Government is determined to keep them out and discourage others from trying. The left-wing opposition agrees. It wants to win the next election too.

    The new act allows jail terms of up to 2 years for unauthorised disclosures of information in relation to all immigration detention centres, by employees, contractors, and those who work for contractors. Australia’s Government insists that public interest disclosures, defined in the Public Interest Disclosure Act, will not result in prosecution. Others are not so sure and suspect an attempt at a cover-up.

    Lawyers say that concerned health workers have come forward for legal advice since the act was passed, often unsure how to reconcile their ethical obligations with the law. In September, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, François Cré peau, called off a planned visit to Australia, citing the new law. He said health workers would be unable to communicate freely with him. Australia’s Government, clearly irritated, said he was wrong.

    Stephen Parnis, vice-president of the Australian Medical Association, said Australian doctors and other health workers have long been concerned about the policy of detaining asylum-seekers. ‘You are an advocate for your patient. If you believe that the system is undermining the health of the patient, you have an obligation to speak out about that’, said Parnis.

    ……

    International Health and Medical Services (IHMS), which provides health services to detainees both onshore and offshore under contract to the Australian Government, said its health care was consistent with Australian standards. Transfield Services, which runs the centres in Nauru and Manus Island, declined to comment. The Nauru and Papua New Guinea Governments did not respond to requests for comment.
    ………

    _____________________________________________________________________________

    There are many conflicts of interest. When we are open and honest about them, we have a much better opportunity to reach a constructive solution.

    Secrecy and dishonesty might suit entrenched interests, but not the wider public interest. Certainly, in the long term, honesty is the best policy.

    Secrecy is the refuge of rogues and scoundrels, like familycaught$.

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Sat 14th November 2015 @ 11:19 am

  16. It is only by honestly sharing accurate and not misleading information, that progress can be made for less common diseases:

    Compare that to legal workers managing the familycaught$, for their own paramount financial interests.

    Are they gathering statistics and information, that will or might improve the safety of at risk children? NO

    Are they gathering information that might or will lead to more cost effective treatment of relationship separations? Not on you nelly…..

    Are they gathering information about the welfare of their entrapped “customers”, that might or will lead to improved welfare of families? NO (Improved welfare could be better stated as “less damaged by familycaught$”.

    Anyway, the medical profession has lead the way (and the legal workers have refused to follow good examples).

    the Lancet: Post-authorisation assessment of orphan drugs

    Carla E M Hollakemail, Marieke Biegstraaten, Marcel Levi, Rob Hagendijk
    Article has an altmetric score of 2
    DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)00827-2

    The EU regulation of orphan drugs has promoted the development of new treatments for rare disorders.1 However, the high cost of most orphan drugs threatens the sustainability of public health care. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of treatment is often unclear for part, if not all, of the patient population, especially for patients with very rare diseases, such as inherited metabolic disorders. We believe that the system of post-authorisation assessment for orphan drugs needs to be reformed to address these problems. Fast access to high quality data is essential for the improvement of treatment options and to manage costs more effectively.

    ……. We propose the launch of collaborative registries that are independent from the pharmaceutical industry and are based on the features summarised in the panel, to promote appropriate use of orphan drugs and management of costs.

    Panel
    Features of post-authorisation registries

    “¢Disease-centred registries, instead of drug-centred registries, to enable the comparison of effectiveness of different treatments for the same indication; existing registries should be integrated in or linked to systems, such as the registries proposed
    “¢Registries supervised by patients, health-care professionals, and other relevant stakeholders, independent of corporate activity
    “¢Analysis of data by independent statisticians
    “¢Obligatory data entry for all doctors treating patients across Europe

    “¢Pivotal and extended trial data and natural history data should be included in the registry
    “¢Registries should be launched early in the development process of orphan drugs (eg, to obtain natural history data)
    “¢Databases should contain key factors needed for cost-effectiveness studies (eg, health-related quality of life)
    CEMH reports grants from Genzyme and Shire, outside the submitted work. ML is on the Board of Directors at the Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands. MB and RH declare no competing interests. ie no conflicts of interests.

    _________________________________________________________________________________
    For improvements to be created, we must remove barriers of conflicts of interest and share data, to allow improved procedures to be devised.

    This approach is just as necessary in legal areas, as in medicine.

    Failure to address the endemic ethical, competence and integrity problems in the legal workers, may not cost lives directly as in medicine, but corrupts society, weakens our ability to properly provide for our most vulnerable citizens, women, men and children.

    The public need more than just theatre and expensive looking clothing from legal workers and doctors.

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Sat 14th November 2015 @ 11:35 am

  17. Another example, involving a large, ongoing loss of health, Quality of Life and lives, is exposed as occurring from an unmanaged Conflict of Interest, in USA.
    Association of Pharmaceutical Industry Marketing of Opioid Products With Mortality From Opioid-Related Overdoses
    January 18, 2019
    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2720914?guestAccessKey=f6185438-8ae1-4b4e-aeb1-566101eafa77&utm_source=silverchair&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=article_alert-jama&utm_term=mostread&utm_content=olf-widget_01242019

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Fri 25th January 2019 @ 10:50 am

  18. Trust is much the opposite attribute to unmanaged COI. Scandals among healthcare providors have led to the medical profession looking more carefully at monitoring the extent to which the public trust them and what they can or should do to improve this situation.
    These medical examples should make quite stark what is not happening within the legal worker’s industry !
    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2723078?guestAccessKey=34b63483-9517-4c75-a2cb-31bc94d1ac99&utm_source=silverchair&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=article_alert-jama&utm_content=olf&utm_term=012419
    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2723080?guestAccessKey=69e2e259-a65e-4758-9a2e-c1ced8342a12&utm_source=silverchair&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=article_alert-jama&utm_content=olf&utm_term=012419

    Comment by MurrayBacon — Fri 25th January 2019 @ 10:54 am

  19. #18,, Mr Murray Bacon, the world would sure be a nicer place if the legal industry could see their consequences through on a humane basis…. hope you dont mind this bringing forward from above thread.

    from Murray @ 6 above….A cool wee deep read.

    you can see this happens with our politicians all the time….constantly protecting our perceived image is a major impededament to trustworthyness and integrity…

    from Murray

    Comment by mama — Fri 25th January 2019 @ 12:01 pm

  20. oops!…sorry, I suck today……… from Murray above @ 6

    Comment by mama — Fri 25th January 2019 @ 12:05 pm

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