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.

Many interesting comments, all of which I agree with.  I too am a disillusioned senior registrar about to finish my Emergency specialty training and upon completion, abandon the public health system for good.  I can't in good conscience support a system that has abused me and my peers in such a systematic and degrading way for so many years.  The $20K CME allowance isn't enough to entice me back and is really an affront to registrars, who can buy 3 textbooks with their $1000, while watching their consultants jet off overseas (business class) to conferences that they don't even show up to, while we have to fight (and often lose) to get our 5 hours a week paid training time. My consultants spend their CME money on flash new computers for their kids, overseas holidays and new i-phones, none of which are used for work. What do I get as someone who actually has to go home each night and study? A couple of free textbooks. What a load of BS.  Maybe if everyone was treated better as a registrar they wouldn't think about leaving and they wouldn't need the $20K CME carrot to keep people in the system.

As far as hoping to change the system what everyone needs to keep in mind are the following facts:
1) Nothing mentioned on this page is "new" information to the AMA, the government or the Colleges.
2) All of these organisations have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and no amount of whining about how bad it all is, to anyone, will change it.  They know IT ALL, and could change it anytime they want, they just won't because it will simply cost too much, and could lose the government the next election.
3) This system has evolved because our predecessors (read "bosses") have allowed it to and we have them to thank for being such pushovers and creating a culture of compliance and dependence on hospitals for our bastardising training system.
4) The reason they haven't fought to change the system earlier is that as you learn more about it, you come to realise that YOU CANNOT CHANGE THE SYSTEM.  No amount of letter writing, petitions, campaigns, haggling, arguing, lobbying or meetings will ever change the system. Why? Because WE CAN'T STRIKE. WE HAVE NOTHING TO BARGAIN WITH. WE NEED THE SYSTEM MORE THAN IT NEEDS US. The only thing yo can do is LEAVE. (As seen recently when ALL the Emergency Physicians in Adelaide RESIGNED, and their demands were miraculously and instantly met). Did the AMA achieve this for them...? No.
5) When you need the hospital more than they need you (ie for training positions) they will always have the power to dictate pitiful working conditions and YOU ARE POWERLESS TO CHANGE IT.
6) When the situation is reversed (ie when they need to fill a shift) you have the power.  Next time you're called by a HMO manager to fill a shift demand $200/hour. Or just say "no". When they laugh at your outrageous request for higher pay, tell them to get stuffed and hang up.  You still have your day off, and they still have an empty roster. (I did this once and they called back a few hours later and paid me the $200/hour as they couldn't get anyone to do the shift).  Or tell them to get the locum agency to call you.  Why accept the lowest locum rates in the country (Victoria) to help a system that won't help you?  Screw the HMO manager, they're earning double what you are and the biggest challenge they'll ever face is filling an empty box on an Excel spreadsheet.  Compare that to your usual day at work. 
7) VOTE WITH YOUR FEET.  Why risk being driven to suicide (as some of our colleagues have been) or depression, or hypertension, or tears, or realtionship breakups? (Heard of any HMO managers or CEO's killing themselves recently because of their job stress?) Why not just pick up and move interstate? Wouldn't you rather have better conditions, better pay, less ill-effects on your health and realtionships, plus better weather, and then fly back to Melbourne once a month to see your friends and family? Do you really see them that often anyway?  Get Skype and you can video-chat with them every night, for free!
8) THE PATIENTS WILL BE FINE.  Don't ever let the guilt of the "but what about the patients?" lobby guilt trip you into accepting substandard conditions. While the public wants free healthcare, then they will get a crap system.  If they want to pay more, then they will get a better system.  It's no use whining about how little you're getting paid - the money has to come from somewhere, and as long as the public refuses to pay more for public healthcare, then your salary will NEVER go up. I can't stand to hear people say "patients are consumers these days" and they "have the same rights as consumers".  I'm sorry but that is bullshit.  If they are consumers then let them pay market rates for my services.  And make them pay for proper equipment and facilities for me to treat them in.  As long as we live in a society where healthcare is seen as a "right", but where people aren't willing to pay for it, then YOUR SALARY WILL NEVER GO UP, AND YOUR WORK CONDITIONS WILL NEVER IMPROVE.
9) "I can't leave as it will just increase the stress on my colleagues".  Don't let the fact that your colleagues are too apathetic to get out make you feel bad for leaving.  If they had any brains they'd be doing it as well.  YOU OWE THEM NOTHING as it's their continued acceptance of piss-poor working conditions that continues to make your work so difficult. Just look after "number 1" (ie yourself) and let the system fall down around the fools who choose to stay.  Or let your boss (who I guarantee earns a least $250-500K p.a.) come in on their day off to write discharge summaries. After all, they created this mess.
10)No private company would treat equivalently educated, trained and skillful employees as badly as public hospital doctors are treated.  Anyone else with equivalent qualifications in the private sector would start on a 6-figure salary, with a phone and a car, and as they progressed they'd get a designated car-park, a personal assistant, a laptop, their own office, free lunches & dinners, and overseas trips for professional development, as well as performance and end-of-year bonuses and if they didn't I'm sure they'd at least be able to, oh I don't know, maybe go to the toilet or eat something during their day at work.  Unfortunately we don't even get these basic food and toilet privileges as public hospital doctors.  Do you think prisoners in Victoria's (privately run) prisons would accept it if they weren't fed and weren't allowed to go to the toilet for 10-14 hours?  There'd be riots...  If patients want professional service THEN START TREATING AND PAYING US LIKE PROFESSIONALS (which as I've clearly explained, will never happen in our lifetimes...sigh). And on this point here's an anecdote: my sister is a corporate lawyer, last year her CHRISTMAS BONUS was more than my after-tax salary for the year... She writes contracts and I save lives...
11) IT IS ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE.  Demand is going up and up, doctor number are going down... hmm I wonder why.  How do they plan to fix it? By improving my conditions? Paying me what I'm worth and treating me like a valued employee so I'll stay? No.  DHS has spent millions concocting plans to massively increase intern numbers (yet is providing no infrastructure to help supervise and train them... more cannon fodder) and is enticing foreign doctors with incentive packages including free health insurance, rent assistance and spousal employment assistance, (which I assume is cheaper than my currently unpaid overtime) yet most of us would actually stay in the system if they just improve a few of the conditions. Instead they intend to send more lambs to the slaughter, put more kerosene on the fire... pick your own analogy, it's all bad.  For this DHS can go to hell, and so can the Victorian  public for not supporting us.  And they'll all get what they deserve, a crappily designed, dangerous system, run by incompetents, supervised and controlled by morons. Good luck.

My advice? VOTE WITH YOUR FEET.  LET THE VICTORIAN PUBLIC HEALTH SYSTEM COLLAPSE. Your primary responsibility is to YOURSELF, NOT THE PATIENTS, NOT THE AMA, NOT YOUR COLLEAGUES AND CERTAINLY NOT THE HOSPITAL. Anyone that tries to convince you otherwise is either an agent of the system, or a delusional do-gooder who's too blinded by their "ethical duty" or some other crap to see what's really going on.

If you really want to stay then choose a specialty like Emergency (or even Anaesthetics) that lets you walk straight out of the public system as a consultant and start charging $200-$300 per hour as a locum or private ED specialist.  You can earn $200,000-300,000 per year working 2 to 3 days a week, 8am til 6pm and never be on call. The system does not, has not and will never support you in the public system so why are you sacrificing so much of yourself for it?.  Don't hold your breath for the EBA, because at the end of the day the AMA is a useless organisation, with no leverage and nothing to bargain with.  Cancel your membership and with the money buy a few bottles of nice wine, you'll get more joy out of it, and it might make you feel better after a crap day at work (or you can use it to help with moving expenses, or to buy a new hammock in Darwin, Cairns, Perth, or wherever else you end up). GOOD LUCK!

Anyway the list of problems and implications facing Victorians is long, and I can't write them all in one go, but recently the Australian Medical Association started a blog site for doctors in Victorian hospitals to have a little rant on, and nicely made it so you can do it anonymously, it's called doctors4hospitals.  Have a look, it's a sad read really.  Doctors are committing suicide, driving home from work in tears every day, being physically and verbally abused by nursing staff, patients and families, working hours and hours of unpaid overtime and being paid a pittance for the privilege. As nice as it is for the AMA to start this up, they already know everything on this page, and it can have no real political sway.  Why? Because we have nothing to bargain with.  We can't strike.  Recently in Adelaide every Emergency Physician in town resigned as they were getting nowhere in their negotiations with the AMA and the government.  The state government even tried to take them to court to make them go back to work and were told, "um, they quit, they're not on strike, they don't work for us anymore and you can't force people to work against their will, that's called slavery". And what happened? Their demands were instantly met.  Unfortunately in Victoria, there are too many doctors to achieve a critical mass of people willing to resign, and meanwhile the AMA dawdles along having conditions dictated to it by the government.  What an appalling state of affairs when we have a federal government (who refuse to intervene in the public hospital crisis as they're run by state governments) who are willing to spend BILLIONS of dollars on failed military hardware purchases, fighting wars that we have NO business being part of in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other defense "initiatives" while slashing budgets and services in the health sector despite record demand, the most obese population on earth, and an aging population. What a disgrace.

Recently the Victorian health minister Daniel Andrews had an official survey from the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine handed to him from ED directors across Victoria, most of whom admitted to fiddling their admission statistics so they wouldn't be hit with funding penalties (as under our great system if your hospital is drowning under record numbers of patients and you can't get them out of your ED quick enough you have your funding CUT!).  So what do you think the man in charge if thie system had say about it?  "I don't believe you". He then issued an official statement through DHS that basically said "I know no-one's doing it, but in case you are, stop it".  This is what we're dealing with.  A bunch of finger pointing, committee dawdling, heads-up-our-arses politicians, bureaucrats, and middle-management who have the gall to say, openly and publicly, when presented with hard data, "I don't believe it".  It's like the mayor of Chernobyl saying "the nuclear plant is running perfectly, we have no problem and I won't be investigating claims of a meltdown".  Well that's nice Mr Andrews but there's one thing you can't ignore.  The fact that doctors are leaving the public system in droves, and like the inevitable cloud of nuclear dust that eventually enveloped Chernobyl and killed it's residents, your health system is going to start killing patients (it is already), and you can pretend for as long as you like that it's OK, and not listen to the doctors who are keeping the system afloat, but when there are none of us left, and all you can get are less well trained overseas doctors to staff your Emergency Departments, and we have all moved to Western Australia or Queensland who have doctor-friendly systems in place, we'll all look back and say "we told you so".  Asshole.  Did you know they already realise this and instead of creating incentives to keep us here, they are already advertising to overseas doctors, (scroll down to "Incentive packages for international medical graduates") with pissweak incentive packages that are no-doubt going to cost them less than it would to keep locally trained doctors here. And why is it that I can't get paid ONE CENT of overtime, yet they are offering free health insurance to new overseas doctors, so they can go to the PRIVATE hospital and not have to get treated in the crap public system??!!

Personally when I get my final specialist qualification next year I'm going to walk out on the public system for good,  I can't in good conscience continue to support a system that intentionally and systematically abuses its most valuable employees.

For some far more eloquent reasons not to vote for Sarah Palin click here.  (if the link takes you to the front page look in the top right corner and click the "enter" button).  And for those who may want to argue with me about any of the above points, please click here to register your complaint.  As mentioned in previous posts if you could start your reply with a point form justification for every single death that'd be lovely.