The picture on the right is of $1 billion US dollars, which is about the same as $1.2 to $1.3 billion Australian (depending on the exchange rate). If you had this much money...

• You could buy the entire Royal Australian Air Force's fleet of F/A-18A Hornet Fighter Planes (approximately 54 planes)
• You could run three separate Formula 1 racing teams for a year, and probably win the world title
• You could almost buy the Space Shuttle Endeavour, or at least put a nice deposit on it (cost $1.7 billion US)
• You could vaccinate every single person in Africa against measles, TWICE
• You could build a state of the art major tertiary hospital in Melbourne (new Royal Children's Hospital estimated cost $1 billion AUD).
• OR: you could flush it down the toilet...

...which is exactly what the Brumby Labor Government is doing.  The myki "smartcard" (or "stupidcard" as it should be called) system was launched this week, two and a half years late, $850 million dollars over budget (now costing $1.35 billion instead of the original $500 million estimate), only working on trains (which only 20% of public transport users use exclusively) and not working on trams or buses because "they're mobile"... Um, der, did someone forget to tell the dickheads that designed this thing that, um, it's for a public transport ticketing system, so when you install it, it will be "mobile", that's what transport does, it mobilises people, so it will need up to date mobile technology.  My mobile phone works on the bus, hell my google maps app on my iphone works on trams and buses, my car radio works everywhere I go, (I don't have a GPS, but I hear they work in cars...) so the technology is out there, but no we can't seem to get it to work, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this project.  No doubt Transport Minister Lynne Kosky and a bunch of other bureaucrats and over-paid consultants have been on some wonderful junkets to Europe & Asia to look at the technology there, in fact there's probably a whole division of middle-bureacracy devoted to this system who are chewing up our money and not delivering results.  Hmmm, sounds remarkably similar to the health bureaucracy...

I just worked the long weekend over Christmas & Boxing day in our local Emergency Department.  We broke our annual attendance record 2 days in a row for the number of patients coming in to the ED (and remember this is in a year where we had already had record attendances during the swine flu epidemic).  I should remind readers from the Northern Hemisphere that it's summer here, and holiday time, traditionally a time of reduced hospital demand as there's less colds & flu's around and people are at the beach or away on holiday, but as has happened every year for the last several years the "post-winter" decline in attendances is not happening.  This phenomenon is well documented, the statistics are widely published, the government knows it, and is doing nothing about it.  And this is after the same Labor government introduced new "8-hour" rules for our ED's last month meaning patients need to be out in 8 hours, or penalties are imposed...  Hmm demand is going up and up, we're not giving you any more resources (in fact they're cutting the health budget next year) and we want better throughput  from you... Despite Victoria already having the most efficient hospitals in the country, and despite simple facts like the computer I use to access patient information and pathology results is running, wait for it, Windows 2000! We're trying to cope with a record workload with 10-year old computer software!! (remember, myki, completely unnecessary, doesn't even fucking work, cost: $1.35 billion). I bet Lynne Kosky's computer isn't running Windows 2000, or maybe it is, and maybe the myki machines are too... Fucking Idiots.  Did we have extra staffing on for this busy holiday period? No.  Did we have extra beds opened in the hospital to help us cope with the massive increase in admissions? No. Were there more ambulance crews on the roads? No.  Did I receive any sort of thanks from management for avoiding ambulance bypass when there were no beds in the hospital, the ED was full and I was working the last 9 hours of a 5-day long weekend overnight last night? No.  Did I get to eat or go to the toilet last night at work? No. Did I get a Christmas bonus? No.  Could the Victorian hospital system use an $1.35 billion cash injection at the moment instead of a new public transport ticket system that doesn't work when we already have a ticketing system that works just fine? YES.

6 weeks to go until I finally get my specialist qualifications and I can walk out of the Victorian public health system for good.  While I admire the doctors and nurses that stay behind to work in this hopelessly underfunded, over-stretched system while the government is flaunting it's waste of the public's money on idiotic unnecessary ideas that don't work, I have to get out.  I can no longer stand the embarrassment of having to "apologise for the wait" to every patient I see, to patients who are sick & in pain, while there is money literally being poured down the toilet by the government that could be being used to help people in real need. Fucking John Brumby, Lynne Kosky and Daniel Andrews should be there apologising to these people, not me.

If anyone who reads this & lives in Melbourne or Victoria, don't vote Labor at the next election, although you probably will after watching the political ads on TV at the moment that they're also paying for with our money that tell you what a good job they're doing... I wonder how much they cost?

By the way, wondering where you could get $1 billion dollars? Just go to Iraq and steal it.