It has only been introduced in a couple of test sites, is 5 years late and $35 million over budget.  And it has not been designed to integrate with the new national e-health system (that is meant to link all hospitals and GP clinics in the country). In other words it's a complete failure.

Suffice to say the new Liberal government has been left holding the steaming dog turd that is "HealthSmart", and they have two options, flush it down the toilet and blow the hundreds of millions already spent on it, or start flogging a dead horse, and waste even more money trying to implement a flawed, non-functional already out-dated system.  Either way they lose, and we have John Brumby and the Ex-Health Minister (now unfortunately leader of the Opposition) Daniel Andrews to thank. 

South Australia may be the most boring state in Australia, and Darwin the biggest cultural void, but at least their hospitals have computer links that make working there a breeze compared to Victoria, may be time to Get Smart and move...

Just one question, why aren't they calling for the assassination of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condaleeza Rice and the rest of the Bush administration, who actually ordered the murder of over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men women and children.  They are guilty of genocide.  No-one can actually name or cite a law that Julian Assange has broken.  If you can, with a reference, send it in.  Julia Gillard, the Australian Prime Minister, and a lawyer, can't name one.  The Swedish prosecution team who want him extradited have named some potential sex-crimes but still haven't charged him (an illegal use of an EU extradition warrant), and the US Government & their media puppets, well, all they can come up with are inflammatory statements claiming that what he's done is "unconsitiutional" - without specific reference, or (my favourite - the McCarthy-esque, witch-hunting, tar-brush label) "he's a terrorist" despite clear evidence that no-one has died as a result of the leaks... I hope he lives forever and brings down the insanely hypocritical governments and media organisations that are publicly calling for his death.  Go Julian.

Point 1: The legal farce

Suffice to say he's being held in solitary confinement, with CCTV monitoring, in a jail, in a country where he has committed no crime, based on an allegation of a crime in another country, that even if he was found guilty of it would attract nothing but a 700 Kroner fine.  His bail release has been opposed by Swedish lawyers.  The allegation of the crime stems from him not wearing a condom the 2nd time he had sex with a girl who's house he'd spent the night at.  The woman involved was only concerned about STD testing, not about pressing charges.  Does Sweden extradite, detain, or arrest and commit to solitary confinement everyone that has sex without a condom or who needs an STD test in every other country of the world? I doubt it.

Point 2: The threats

How can it be tolerated that in America (everyone's favourite country), politicians can be allowed to exercise their right to free speech by demanding that Mr Assange be executed?  EXECUTED. They are free to call for the death of a man who has not actually broken any law, who has committed no crime, who has done nothing illegal AT ALL, and this is quietly tolerated.  Let us remind everyone that Mr Assange did not break into government computers and steal these documents.  He has simply published them.  As has EVERY MAJOR MEDIA OUTLET IN THE WORLD.  Are they calling for the execution of Rupert Murdoch and every other journalist in the world who's reproduced, copied, forwarded and published these documents? Obviously not. The term "scapegoat" comes to mind.

Point 3: The "risk"

Sources at the highest levels of governments have declared that despite all the bullshit hype not a single life has been threatened or lost as a result of these documents being published. NOT ONE. Compare that to the approximately 100,000 innocent women, children and men, innocent CIVILIANS that the US has killed in Iraq since 2003. The US government, and George Bush in particular has committed the worst war crime since the Holocaust, they are on par with Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Slobodan Milosevic.  They are murderers, having committed these crimes in a war that everyone knows was illegal and unfounded.  The hypocrisy of this situation kills me.

Point 4: He's Australian

While Julia Gillard is fucking around with Oprah Winfrey, which embarrasingly highlights our pathetic parochialism and reputation as the poor little cousin of America, and she's stated that his actions were "illegal" without beng able to state which law he'd actually broken, an Australian citizen has been forcibly detained in a foreign country for doing nothing more than embarrassing an ally.  This isn't David Hicks who was found in Afghanistan in questionable circumstances relating to fighting in a foreign army (and I by no means condone the abhorrent treatment he received, it was just as bad), but this is a journalist. Who types for a living.  If our government is so subverient to America to the point that they would deny consular assistance to an Australian citizen imprisoned abroad and wash their hands of him, label him a criminal before any charges had been laid and threated to invalidate his passport, then I for one am embarrassed to be associated with this country.  I can't express this passionately enough.  Fundamental processes of justice have been denied to this man, for what?

'Nuff said.  The Ironic Fist salutes you Julian, even if you mysteriously "disappear" at the hands of the US government, you have started a revolution that they can't stop.  And if any assholes from the US government are reading this and you'd like to see what happens when you fuck with computer hackers, then I strongly suggest you go and purchase these 2 books by Daniel Suarez.  God help us all if anything like that happens.  For those that aren't CIA operatives, I still highly recommend that you immediately buy and read these books, they will blow your hippie noodle off your shoulders (and scare the crap out of you) and give you a glimpse of the power of the net and the stupidity of the human race.

Compare this to what Tony Abbott was doing yesterday:

While Kevin Rudd was delivering his new health plan, that took 2 years to develop, is aimed at reducing bureaucracy and waste of taxpayer dollars and obviously involved a shitload of hard work, Tony Abbott was lost in the outback, driving around on a quad-bike without enough petrol or water and with a phone that no-one knew how to use.  He then has the gall and the stupidity when he was finally rescued for one of his first comments to be "how can you trust a government that can't run a pink-batts scheme to run the hospital system?".  Um, der, Tony, have a look at the article in The Age today (see below).  This government actually reduced the risk from insulation installation, and has massively cut greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption thanks to the insulation scheme, and has at the same time delivered on it's education portfolio, and while doing all this has designed the biggest reform to healthcare in this country in the last 25 years (something you couldn't do while you actually held the position of Health Minister - your only achievement then was to block the introduction of RU-486 because you couldn't separate your own crazy religious beliefs from your duty as a minister...).  And what has Tony Abbott been doing all this time? Whining that Peter Garrett should be "sacked" and getting lost in the bush on a quad-bike, eating witchtety grubs and trying desperately to build a pre-election image as a "true blue Aussie hard-man" (obviously to appeal to blue collar masses), without having any new policy on the table and without any constructive criticism of the urgent health issues facing Australians at the moment.  And you know what, sadly, I reckon if they had the election today, Tony might just scrape through, because we are a nation of morons, tall-poppy choppers, who prefer football and beer to health and wellbeing, who (as Jeff Kennet once pointed out) "don't know how to vote".  We're more impressed by superficiality and image than we are by policy and actual political achievements. More likely to vote for the guy with the best advertisement rather than the best track record.  So who knows what the end of the year will bring, there are major obstacles in the way of K-Rudd's health plan so ot will probably never come to fruition thanks to petty political bickering and parochialism by the State Governments, and we'll all be a whole lot worse off than we were health-wise with crumbling hosiptal system, and Tony "God Bless Him" Abbott, who couldn't operate a mobile phone (but geez did you see him eat that witchety grub?) as our leader.  I can't wait.

Until today.  Finally a journo has actually analysed that facts, and deemed that the rate of house fires from insulation has actually DROPPED after this scheme was introduced, and that the risk assessment that was "ignored" by the governent actually didn't identify any of the risks that have since occurred as being substantial...

Here is one of the more objective pieces of journalism you'll read this year, and I'd encourage anyone thinking of voting Liberal at the next election to read it and have a good think about how stupid Tony Abbott sounds next time he opens his mouth on this issue.

This really does take the cake.  It's 2010, they can land robots on Mars that can do their own scientific experiments, we know that the earth is round, that ALL religions are simply a perpetuation of millenia old myths and fables that have no place in a modern world except to incite bigotry, racism and wars, yet there are cunts like Pat Robertson, a right wing "Christian" charlatan who happily brainwashes millions of Americans (who I'm sure are much like these fucking idiots) into believing that if they send him money God will save them.  This asshole has publicly come out and in the face of hundreds of years of scientific proof about what causes earthquakes stated that the Haitians brought their most recent natural disaster on themselves by making a "pact with the devil". I'd like to see this fucker crushed under a tonne of concrete and steel and with his last breath say "the devil did this".  Fucking prick.  I wouldn't be incensed unless I knew what influence bastards like this have over malleable minds.  How do I know?

My mother died 5 years ago from a disease called "sporadic CJD".  Creutzfeld Jacob Disease.  Otherwise known in its contagious form as "mad cow disease".  There is also a sporadic form that happens when genetic machinery in your brain cells get defective and start making a protein that destroys your other brain cells.  My mother was an intelligent, articulate widow, who lived alone in a small country town and was painfully lonely.   She "turned to Christ" and became a dedicated participant at her local "Assembly Of God" church, she went every Sunday without fail. This "AOG" crowd are the idiots that believe in "faith healing" and other "miracles".  They also con their followers into donating vast sums of money to their local churches and then to American TV Evangelists like Benny Hinn (just look how good he is a sucking money out of morons).

You could not have met a more warm hearted, compassionate caring soul than my mother. She was the embodiment of positive living, she ate well, exercised regularly, worked hard, raised my sister & I in a way that I struggle to fault, she never spoke ill of anyone and unfortunately in her loneliness and need for inner fulfillment, became brainwashed by her Church.  She ended up donating tens of thousands of TAX EXEMPT dollars to Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn and other TV evangelists in the hope that, well I don't know what the fuck she was hoping for, perhaps the "100-fold return" that they promise, salvation by Jesus...  I wish those fuckers had to sleep in her room for 6 weeks like my sister and I did while we palliated her as she died a slow painful death from a rapidly degenerative brain disease, evetually suffocating to death as she succumbed to pneumonia, gasping like a fish out of water for 3 nights in a row until our palliative care nurse  eventually ended her life with a massive dose of morphine and haloperidol... She was 52 years old.  And you know what?  Fucking Jesus wasn't there. Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland and Pat Robertson weren't there.  If "God" is willing to let a faultless, dedicated follower die in such an undignified and painful way, then I can tell you now, "he" doesn't exist.

Having formed the first religious broadcasting TV service in America, Pat Robertson is undoubtedly to blame for the proliferation of these scum, these charlatans that rob money from the poor, the ignorant, the lonely and the desperate in the name of "Jesus", only to line their own pockets and generate excessive tax free personal wealth while delivering nothing but lies, lies and more lies.  So Fuck You Pat Robertson for ever being born.  You know you could have sent a donation of some of your organisations billions of dollars to help the people of Haiti, or expressed how sad you were that anyone on earth was enduring such tragedy, loss and suffering as any truly compassionate religious person would, but oh no, instead you choose to maliciously misinform your idiotic followers that the Haitians are devil worshippers who all deserve to die.  So I guess it's no surprise you're not going to try & help these poor people, I mean neither you, nor Jesus came through for my mother, who donated her life savings to your bullshit organisations, and was left to die a pitiful demented undignified painful death.

Fuck Off And Die All American Television Evangelist Religious Christian Broadcasting Cunts.  Keep your hatred to yourselves.  The world doesn't need you. The only saving grace will be if I'm wrong (and sometimes I hope I am only for this reason) and there really is a heaven and hell, then there will be a special place in hell reserved for these assholes, who will be wonderfully tortured by Satan for all of eternity for their misdemeanours while on earth.  Now I'd pay to watch that.



''You get what you pay for, and they did: these trains are cheap and nasty overseas shit and drivers aren't happy with them". Yikes.

Do you think the government asked the drivers which trains would be best? Or do you think they formed 5 different committees and 3 levels of bureaucrats who all had to be paid annual salaries and bonuses to write reports and hire consultants at $2000 a day to decide which trains were the best? I wonder...

Go Brumby Government.  More top spending decisions.

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.

I just got Foxtel and am obsessed with the show Air Crash Investigation on the national Geographic Channel.  I must have watched 20 or 30 episodes now, and admittedly the thought of your 747 catching on fire and plummeting into the Indian Ocean, or your Airbus A320 running out of fuel because the guage was broken and the pilot thought the tanks were full when they weren't isn't everyone's idea of fun.  I mean, who wants to die in a plane crash? It sounds awful, traumatic, violent and panicked.  The reality is most of the time there's only a couple of minutes of panic then a very sudden (and i mean 700km/hr into the ground, bug on a windscreen, SPLAT! sudden).  And I could live with this if the pilot was doing everything he could to avoid or correct a potentially fatal situation, I mean when your number's up your number's up, right?

Well I recently watched an episode about the Lockerbie air disaster, during which a bomb, planted on a Pan Am 747 from Frankfurt, stopping in London and bound for the USA detonated over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21st 1988.  290 people were killed including all of the passengers, crew, and several residents on the ground.  A suspect, a Libyan national was eventually arrested and sentenced to life in prison.  He was recently released to much international scorn and condemnation as he is dying from cancer.  This story is one of the most well known airline disasters in modern history, if you say the word "Lockerbie" to almost anyone they'll know what happened there.  This crash has helped crystallise views about the middle east amongst western countries for the last decade, and helped provide a stimulus for the "war on terror".  It was an incredible catastrophe, and is enough to make you agree with one woman seen on old news footage who poignantly states, "there is no god".

What most people don't know about is another airline disaster that occurred on July 3rd, 1988, only a few months before Lockerbie.  This was the illegal shooting down of a civilian Iranian passenger jet, Iran Air flight 655, flying in Iranian arispace over the Strait of Hormuz (Iranian waters) by the American warship USS Vincennes.

On an episode of Air Crash Investigation this disaster is explained in meticulous detail.  In short the Captain of the Vincennes (William Rogers) ignored a direct order from his commanding officer (Richard McKenna of the USS Montgomery) to turn his ship around & get out of the area he was patrolling (an area he'd entered "looking for a fight" with Iranian speedboats who were in fact not acting in a hostile manner).  The passenger jet was mis-identified as an F-14 fighter plane by the radar on the Vincennes, and the person in charge of checking civilain flight schedules didn't realise that there were different time zones in the area, and even if he had, he  said he couldn't read the civilian flight schedule as it was "too dark".

While the passenger jet was ascending to its cruising altitude, in Iranian airspace, the radar operator on the Vincennes told Rogers that it was an F-14 that was rapidly descending (or diving) in an "attack" formation.  Rogers, without ever correctly identifying the plane, without checking the radar himself, illegally present in foreign waters, where he had no permission from his commanding officer to be, ordered that two surface to air missiles be fired.  The aircraft was shot out of the sky, killing all 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children.

In true American fashion, William Rogers, an aggressive "fight seeker", full of American bravado and stupidity, was not court-martialled or charged with any offences whatsoever. Instead he received the Legion of Merit medal, "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer ... from April 1987 to May 1989."  The officer who finally hit the firing button to launch the missiles (after the person who's job it was to do this hit the wrong button 23 times) was also awarded a medal for his role in the firing procedure.

Regarding this incident, President George Bush (Snr) stated "I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are".  This was a frightening prelude to subsequent acts of "war" enacted by the USA in the middle east.  Acts that performed by any other country would immediately be labelled "terrorism" and used as excuses for even more outrageous illegal acts by America.  Acts that have also required no factual basis for instigation and have resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.  Acts that label America as truly the worlds biggest terrorist.

I don't condone the Lockerbie bombing.  No-one deserves to die like that.  However I can fully understand the motivation that fuelled the desire of the bombers to seek revenge.  American Naval Officers were commended & decorated for murdering innocent men, women and children, and the US government not only failed to openly disclose the mistakes they made, but refused to apologise.  Instead they paid out tens of millions of dollars (of which only a small proportion was received by victim's families) in compensation but never accepted blame. 

Imagine that, flying along on a passenger jet, minding your own business, with a pilot flying in the correct airspace, in a fully functional modern jet airliner, on a day of blue skies and sunshine, and the next second you're falling through the sky with 3rd degree burns, possibly missing a limb or two, with shards of metal and glass piercing your skin, having just watched your son or daughter get ripped to pieces in front of your eyes, and maybe, just maybe, you'll be lucky enough to pass out or die before you hit the water at 500km/hr.  I hope that's the image that goes through William Rogers mind each night as he's trying to go to sleep. Or maybe he'll be lucky enough to get prostate cancer soon like the Lockerbie bomber and he can have a nice peaceful death surrounded by his family, drifting off with a morphine infusion blocking out the visions of the deaths he caused, before he spends eternity in Hell.  There may be a Hell, run by the devil and reserved for people like Rogers and the Lockerbie bomber, but one thing's for certain, there really is no God.

At least Obama's going to shut Guantanamo and get everyone out of Iraq eventually. And of course isn't it convenient that the GEC (Global Economic Crisis) has coincided with Bush leaving office? Is that simply a coincidence, or was it a political plan by Bush et al to leave Obama with a steaming plate of economic dog turd to start off his presidency? We'll never know, but thankfully my mortgage interest rate is tumbling and while I'm sure they won't be perfect, between Obama and Kevin Rudd there's at least a sense of hope that the world will be ruled with some semblance of sanity, for a couple of years at least.