Brian Haill, the Founder/President of The Australian AIDS Fund writes:
Before not too much longer, the federal government will be obliged to wheel out its 2005 HIV/AIDS Strategy, one already largely condemned in advance by many in the sector who simply want more money.
The Australian AIDS Fund, a small registered AIDS charity based in Melbourne believes it's probably the only agency that's urged the return of HIV warnings to the mainline media as opposed to being largely confined to the gay glossy mags or the darkened gay saunas.
"It's as if Australia's heterosexuals are believed to have given up sex and that the only coupling that's done is in the gay sector," says the AAFI's founder/president, former ABC news chief of staff, Brian Haill.
"Essentially, all the knowledge that was out there in the general community in the (unwanted) days of the Grim Reaper has dried up and even key advisers to the federal government are pushing the line that HIV is just another manageable disease, that there's no need to fear", he added.
"Sexual ignorance, and its partner, sexual disease, are rampant across the country even to those in government keen to build the nation's population and who ought to have a keen regard to such dire signals", Haill said.
"In a way, it's unfortunate that Australia is, sexually, the odd man out in this part of the world, with the overwhelming number of Australian infections occurring among homosexual males while Australia itself floats in a sea of HIV that's gradually convulsing its geographical neighbourhood. Heterosexuals think they're immune and who's to blame them while they're left out of the information loop.
"The AIDS councils in Sydney and Melbourne have become ballooning bureaucracies. There's talk of poverty among those living with HIV/AIDS in Melbourne but the Victorian AIDS Council has an income of over 4 million dollars a year and wants even more.
"The Australian AIDS Fund thinks that's too much and that much of the money would be better directed to the infected.
"The AAFI, which has no government funding, relying on its own efforts, is involved in a variety of initiatives -including helping feed HIV patients in the Port Moresby General Hospital, having also helped establish that country's first HIV/AIDS hospice and also offers a hand to distant Malawi in Africa. Imagine the miracles we could work in the Pacific if we had 4 million dollars a year!"
The Australian AIDS Fund was first set up in the mid 1980's in response to the horrifying discrimination and abuse directed at the then NSW pre-schooler, Eve van Grafhorst, the first Australian child to be infected by HIV via a blood transfusion. A premature baby, she needed 11 transfusions to survive and ironically, the 11th which was polluted by HIV, saved her life and later stole it.
The organisation has an information resource website at www.aids.net.au and offers her story on its Schools AIDS Day page as an incentive for Australian schools to ponder what HIV and AIDS can do here at home.
For many years an agency of Melbourne's Catholic Social Services group of some 70 Catholic organisations, The Australian AIDS Fund is now ignored by that organisation and the Melbourne archdiocese which also once funded it for years and viewed it as one of its practical faces of its compassionate HIV response.
Haill says the archdiocese now pretends his organisation doesn't exist, preferring instead to support its own tightly controlled part-time chaplaincy style resource centre that operates out of a secret address in East Melbourne with an unpublicised phone number. He says Archbishop Hart has been misled by his own advisers who have their own agendas and are not supportive of Haill's insistence on condom protection.
Relations between the estranged parties chilled further just before Christmas when The Australian AIDS Fund petitioned Health Minister Abbott to drop the high profile Jesuit priest, Fr Michael Kelly (CEO of Church Resources, publishers of the eforum CathNews) from his HIV/AIDS Advisory Subcommittee.
Haill charged that as Fr Kelly wouldn't publicly support the use of condoms as an HIV preventive, especially in marriages where one of the partners was HIV positive, it was senseless for him to be a member of a committee whose support for condom usage was central to its and the government's prevention strategy. It also sent out conflicting messages.
Jesuit Publications, the publishers of several magazines like (its flagship) Eureka Street has now refused to accept AAFI advertisements, even those simply confined to advertising its information resource website.
"It's not a good sign" said Haill, " 2005 is facing an HIV tsunami of global proportions that's set to infect 5 million people this year alone, and to kill a further 3 million. And the scenario is for that to continue year after year after that."
Brian Haill can be contacted via email at bhaill@bigpond.net |
