Diatribe report for doomsayers

Bad luck, kids. You don’t live in Burundi, Chad, Somalia, the Central African Republic or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So just suck it up. Failed African states, among the most cruel, corrupt and violent in the world and torn apart by wars and poverty, have been ranked in the top 10 for “sustainability’’ in a new global report.

It was released by the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and scientific journal The Lancet, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Australia was rated 174 out of 180 nations on the “sustainability’’ index that put 10 African states at the top. Australia was just behind the US and ahead of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Developed nations, the authors said, were “ threatening the future’’ of children’’ with high carbon emissions, junk food and alcohol advertising and time online. The doomsday tome, overseen by former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, urges “immediate action on child and adolescent health … to ensure children have a future on this planet’’. It demands an urgent end to CO2 emissions, crackdowns on advertising, heavy investment in child rights and incorporating children’s voices into policy decisions. Would Greta Thunberg help us out and wag more school to set up a third chamber of parliament for minors?

Ms Clark’s hysterical assertion that “every child worldwide now faces existential threats from climate change and commercial pressures’’ reflected the report’s mangled logic. WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a former Ethiopian politician and academic, described the report as a “wake-up call’’. He’s right. The ideological drivel, set out in didactic bureaucrat-speak, should wake up politicians to ask: does Australia need to rethink the tens of millions of dollars taxpayers contribute to the UN and its affiliates each year?

On Wednesday, local academics stepped out of their ivory towers to claim, falsely, that Australia has been “disgraced’’ on the world stage. The nation has “lost its way’’, according to Liz Hanna, an Australian National University academic who chairs the Environmental Health Working Group at the World Federation of Public Health Associations. This “rigorous’’ study, Dr Hanna said, married “the voices of children with global metrics”. It also showed why “the world’s children are uprising, demanding governments protect their future’’. We can only assume that Paul Read, a senior research fellow at the Monash Sustainability Institute, was joking when he said Australia was Sir Les Patterson, “the drunken uncle at every wedding that doesn’t seem to realise what he’s doing wrong’’. Wasting money on spurious “research’’ perhaps? University of Queensland academic Peter Sly, a local author of the report, called for governments to “impose restrictions that truly protect children’’ against fast food and gambling advertisements. Another UQ academic, Jackob Najman, nailed the issue when he said including the sustainability index as a measure of child health outcomes was “fanciful’’ and a “contrivance’’.

By overlooking inconvenient truths — including the fact that Australia contributes just 1.3 per cent of global CO2 emissions — the authors shredded any credibility they might otherwise have had. So did their apparent indifference to the mortality and suffering of children in developing nations and the corruption behind so much of it. Their rants demanding the banning of junk food, alcohol and gambling advertising during children’s television viewing times were hollow. A more mature approach would suggest sugar, alcohol and gambling are part of life and that parents take responsibility for teaching children to be discerning consumers. Censorship is one of the hallmarks of authoritarian societies, the dire problems of which were largely conveniently ignored by the WHO, UNICEF and The Lancet. Given the grave issues of survival confronting children in poor nations and problems such as cancer and other diseases still unsolved, the world’s children deserve far better than this rubbish.