In hindsight, was the public campaign against smoking a colossal mistake?
This is not to dispute the manifest benefits of the massive decline in smoking, of course. From the precipitous decline in smoking-related diseases to the blessed relief of sitting through a restaurant meal or a pub gig without coming home stinking like an ashtray, I doubt that many are mourning the abandonment of smoking.
On the other hand, the cost in the form of doctors’ overblown egos has been enormous.
Having racked up an undisputed win on smoking, too many doctors seem to have got the idea that they’re all-purpose sages on a mission from God. From cigarettes, they’ve launched auto-da-fes against fat, sugar, meat and alchohol. Like C. S. Lewis’ apocryphal schoolboy, one can be forgiven for suspecting that many doctors are always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying themselves and then trying to stop it.
Still, at least they might make the poor excuse that such things are somewhat within their area of expertise. They have no such excuse for butting in on any and every issue that comes along.
We’ve had “Doctors Against Nuclear Weapons”, “Doctors Against War”, “Doctors for the Environment”, “Doctors for Peace”, “Doctors Against Wrong Pronouns”… OK, I made that last one up, but you get the picture.
You might have noticed, by the way, a distinct pattern in doctors’ pontifications. There’s not a fashionable left-wing cause that doctors don’t fancy themselves the infallible authorities on.
Speaking of which…
Doctors have converged on Canberra for a landmark protest against fossil fuel projects that risk turning Darwin and the Beetaloo Basin into hotspots for disease.
In fact, there’s scant evidence that the mooted projects will do any such thing. Not that such footling stuff as “evidence” has ever stopped the green-left before.
Hundreds of health professionals have locked in behind paediatrician Louise Woodward who desperately wishes she was on the job in the Northern Territory, caring for sick kids.
Then why isn’t she?
Why, instead of doing her job, is she stroking her ego — and killing the planet — by flying thousands of miles to the nation’s capital? Why isn’t she in the Northern Territory, treating sick kids?
After all, Aboriginal children especially in the Northern Territory suffer endemic and shocking rates of easily treatable diseases. They also suffer grossly disproportionate rates of violence and sexual abuse, and the sexually-transmitted diseases that are a consequence.
So, why isn’t she devoting her time and energy to addressing that?
Instead she’s in the nation’s capital pleading with politicians to acknowledge what’s at stake if they don’t stop fracking in the basin and axe plans to spend $1.5 billion taxpayer dollars on a gas processing and petrochemicals plant in Darwin Harbour.
MSN
So, she’s travelled all the way to Canberra to talk, not about rampant alcoholism and violence in the Northern Territory, not about shocking rates of domestic violence and child abuse, nor about uncontrolled crime.
But then, when even Aboriginal women do travel to Canberra to try and tell politicians about this stuff, almost no one but wicked, racist Pauline Hanson even shows up to listen. Certainly not a single MP from Labor or the Greens.
But you can bet your arse that Labor and the Greens will turn out in droves to fawn on a virtue-signalling, tilty-head, white lefty.
After all, it’s a lot easier to screech at sky dragons than admit that there is something genuinely, seriously wrong with the Northern Territory’s kids, right now.
