Obstetrician calls on assistant health minister Fiona Nash to reverse her decision, saying it is 'just plain dumb'

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Drug and alcohol professionals have renewed angry protests at the withdrawal of funding from Australia’s drug and alcohol advisory body just as police launch major operations against alcohol-fuelled violence.

A leading obstetrician says if Australians care about women and babies they should be “absolutely furious” with the assistant minister for health, Fiona Nash, over her decision to stop funding the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia (Adca).

Adca members were told on 25 November it would be stripped of its funding by the federal government, effective immediately. It forced the body into voluntary administration.

In a letter to Guardian Australia, the obstetrician and associate professor at ANU Steve Robson, added his voice to those from the health sector, calling for Nash to reverse her decision, which he said was “just plain dumb”.

"Any Australian who cares about women and their babies should be absolutely furious with minister Nash and the prime minister about this decision," he said.

"It's difficult to understand how anybody familiar with the work done by Adca could support funding cuts to the organisation.”

Robson is also vice-president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, but stressed that these were his personal views. He told Guardian Australia he had approached Nash’s office on several occasions but had received no response.

Adca was a contributor to the government’s report into foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, FASD: the Hidden Harm in 2012 and a 2011 inquiry into FASD, and has been involved in education and awareness campaigns to ensure mothers know about the dangers of drinking while pregnant.

"One single case of foetal alcohol syndrome would cost the government considerably more to manage than an entire year's funding to Adca," Robson said.

It’s a point echoed by politicians opposed to the cut.

“I know those opposite claim that we are in a budget emergency, but let's have some perspective,” Canberra MP Gai Brodtmann said in parliament earlier in December.

“The cost of one Australian living with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder over their lifetime is $15m. That is almost 10 times the annual budget of Adca.”

Adca board member Donna Bull, a former chief executive, queried the timing of the decision, just as police arrested about 1000 people at the weekend for alcohol-related offences.

“Amidst the tut-tutting and hand-wringing of our politicians in response, how is it that the federal government can justify its short-sighted decision to axe funding to [Adca] just two weeks ago?” she said.

“Adca is the national peak body, Adca is the organisation that provides the voice to clinicians throughout the country.”

Co-chair of the National Alliance for Action on Alcohol, Mike Daube, said the decision was “incomprehensible” and predicted that Australia would see an increase in drug and alcohol problems in the community.

“This is already an underfunded and stressed sector and we have a community that clearly are enormously worried about alcohol and drug issues ... It provides really important resources to that sector and deals with workforce development and training and so on,” Daube told Guardian Australia.

“The on the ground consequences will be that in a really complex sector we’ll have a less well informed, less well trained sector dealing with some of the most difficult health and social problems in the community.”

Daube said the cost of drug and alcohol problems in the community would exceed the huge revenue the government received from alcohol, and dwarf the savings made by withdrawing Adca’s funding.

Two former presidents of Adca, Neil Blewett and Mal Washer – both former MPs – and its chief executive last week published an open letter protesting against the decision to strip the council of its average annual funding of $1.6m.

Nash and the health minister, Peter Dutton, have repeatedly referred to “financial difficulties” the body was in, and the Coalition government’s efforts to reduce the budget deficit.

But Adca’s chief executive, David Templeman, told Guardian Australia the financial troubles Nash cited were of the government’s “own making” as it had not paid Adca any of its core funding since July.

Nash’s office did not respond to requests for comment.