Piers Akerman: Societal cancers left to fester for too long

OPINION: THE death on Friday of friend and colleague Rebecca Wilson sharply illuminated one of the evils that confronts us — the scourge of cancer, writes Piers Akerman.

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THE death on Friday of friend and colleague Rebecca Wilson sharply illuminated one of the evils that confronts us — the scourge of cancer.

A number of her grieving friends who called after hearing the sad news wanted to discuss their own experiences or those of their intimates with this awfulness.

Believe me, if you are of a mature age, you would not be surprised at the ubiquity of cancer even as enormous ­strides are being taken to beat the beast in institutes around the world.

Rarely a week passes without a new breakthrough being announced somewhere, bringing hope to a person or a family that it may help break the cycle.

Gradually, incrementally, cancer’s invincibility is being challenged. Too late for Bec tragically, but others will benefit from the work being done — though we are still far, far from defeating this curse.

Unfortunately, the cancers that affect our society are not being illuminated and attacked with the same relentless ­vigour.

The efforts to defeat the scourges of drug addiction, domestic violence within Aboriginal communities, or welfare dependence have not been placed on the same war footing as the struggle against cancer despite the mealy-mouthed ­assertions from our politicians.

Some decades ago, there was some interest shown in the concept of tough love being used to deter addicts from wasting their lives and destroying those who loved them.

It seems to have gone out of fashion as the softer option of providing so-called safe injection rooms to better enable drug addiction has been seized upon by some in the West, ­despite the development of even more debilitating drugs.

When it comes to domestic violence in Aboriginal communities, there has been an even more wilful exercise of politically correct blindness.

Writing in The Australian last week, Warren Mundine, who chairs the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council, said indigenous women in Australia are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised from domestic abuse, yet most media fail to report such issues — even when a woman is killed in broad daylight by her partner in a public park.

Those indigenous leaders who do speak out “are often cut down”, he wrote.

He is, again, absolutely correct. No more so than in any discussion about the courageous Bess Price and her daughter Jacinta, who have endured abuse because of their discussion of the blight of ­violence in communities they are familiar with in Central Australia.

For their courageous truth-telling, they have been vilified. Just as Cape York leader Noel Pearson was 15 years ago when he labelled welfare as “poison” to Aboriginal people.

But what are we, as a culture, doing to attack this evil — not much.

The issue of family violence in both the broader Australian community and among Aboriginal Australians has become politicised, just as the rate of Aboriginal incarceration is doomed to become because of a kneejerk decision to hold a royal commission into the treatment of teenage criminals based on a hysterical report on recidivist offenders at the Don Dale juvenile detention centre.

We don’t turn a blind eye to cancer — why do we turn a blind eye to the obvious serial failures of policy?

There is no institute mustering its forces to examine why crime is so high among the most welfare-dependent group in our society and no one outside the law enforcement bodies has been tasked to eradicate this malaise.

We don’t turn a blind eye to cancer — why do we turn a blind eye to the obvious serial failures of policy?

Why are the luvvies getting exercised with the notion of reconciliation when there are real problems to be treated?

Why did Opposition Leader Bill Shorten unwisely suggest the possibility of a treaty — opening up yet another topic for interminable discussion — when there are real issues of ­violence, Aboriginal health and education to fight for?

There is exactly the same urgent need to deal with social ills as there is to defeat cancer but the struggles get lost in a morass of blaming and shaming, virtue signalling and vain halo-polishing exercises.

There may be some researchers in institutes who seek personal aggrandisement from their toils, but nowhere near the number of poseurs who are heralded on the ABC and within the Fairfax media as keepers of the nation’s cultural and spiritual codes.

Isn’t it astonishing — and tragic — that in our children’s lifetimes there may be cures for a number of cancers but in that same time span many children will be lost to cultural plagues such as drug and ­alcohol abuse and violence in our nation?

There is no shortage of petri dishes in the slums, regional and urban, in which to study the flourishing cultural ills.

These cancers are eating away at our country. They are sapping the lives of people who might otherwise be productive, people who might be participants within society, rather than dismal recipients of generational welfare payments.

The layers of resistance to helpful programs must be peeled away, the DNA within the dysfunctional clans must be exposed, and effective remedies administered or the nation will succumb to the increasingly debilitating effects of the cultural disease.

Scientists know which treatments don’t work and we know which policies don’t work. We have the examples of failed states around us.

Higher taxes, more welfare, domestic violence, drugs, all contribute to failure.

These are cultural epidemics we can easily identify.

They deserve to be confronted with the same clinical approach with which we tackle cancer so we can really work toward beating both ills.