Via Suki Lombard I discover that the Australian government's position on Iraqi deaths because of the war is that the Lancet estimate of roughly 100,000 excess deaths is an exaggeration and we have no idea how many have died and no plans to find out. Govt seeking no information on civilian toll in Iraq war:
PETER VARGHESE: I can't give you a number, no.
JOHN FAULKNER: You can't even hazard a guess?
PETER VARGHESE: Well I wouldn't want to hazard a guess. I mean, that's the whole point.
JOHN FAULKNER: You've got no idea? And no one's made...
PETER VARGHESE: I cannot give you a reliable number.
JOHN FAULKNER: Well, can you give me an unreliable number?
PETER VARGHESE: No, I won't give you an unreliable number.
KIM LANDERS: But he says a report published in the British medical journal, which put the number at 100,000, was probably exaggerated.
Update: Phil Gomes points me to Alan Ramsay's column in this morning's paper which has the reason why Varghese claimed that the Lancet estimate was "exaggerated":
"No tasking of ONA?" - "No. The matter would have been discussed within ONA, and more broadly, at the time that the British Medical Association publication, The Lancet, had a figure of 100,000."
"What was the outcome of that discussion?" - "Our sense was that the methodology for it was not particularly transparent. Our guess - and it would be no more than a guess - was that the number may have been exaggerated. We do not have anything to compare it against."
The methodology was, of course, explained in excruciating detail in the paper. Either the Office of National Assessment is hopelessly incompetent or Varghese is mispresenting what it found.
One small correction to Ramsey's piece: He writes that the study found a minimum of 98,000 civilian deaths. While it is more likely than not that the number of civilian deaths was more than that, it is possible that the number is somewhat less. A followup study should be conducted to check, but the coalition does not want to know about it. That fact strongly suggests that they think such a study would confirm the Lancet findings.
Update 2: Tim Blair's reaction to Ramsey's column is telling. He abuses Ramsey, calling him "crazy". It looks like Ramsey struck a nerve. Blair disputes Ramsey's contention that the huge Iraqi civilian death toll has been barely mentioned in the Australian papers. Blair manages to come up with a whole eight mentions in the Sydney Morning Herald. And he only gets that many by double counting. Out of thousands of stories on the Iraq war, that is, indeed, barely mentioning it. Also, Blair somehow forgets to comment on the main point of Ramsey's piece---the way our government is deliberately ignoring Iraqi civilian deaths because of the war. Blair only seems to care about the welfare of the Iraqi people when it is politically convenient.
Ramsey is up and running on this in the SMH today.
"We have absolutely no information on this whatsoever except that we can say with absolute certainty that it was much less than 100,000."
Well, not only don't we have any information we are also not planning on getting any. But still we are convinced that 100,000 is much too much.
To paraphrase an old National Lampoon story: "The mutated anthrax virus we don't have is much more deadly than the mutated anthrax virus the Russians don't have."
"Our sense was that the methodology for it was not particularly transparent."
I agree. I mean, there was all that statistics jingo in there. That's not transparent to me.