Category: Current Affairs (Page 68 of 74)

I am a bit confused about this whole story. Is it claimed hospitals were exaggerating their waiting lists in order to increase funding, or that they were understating them in order to look good? Like many news stories on this subject, this one from the Herald Sun is unclear about what actually happened, or is alleged to have happened.

This story from the Australian makes things a bit clearer. It claims that in the case of the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, staff falsely reduced the number of patients on waiting lists so that the hospital appeared to be meeting government targets for waiting times for elective surgery. Meeting those targets meant that the hospital received bonus funding to which it was not entitled. This means that the hospital was cheating other health care providers by taking more than its share of the health budget.

Hospital CEO Dale Fisher says that staff involved will be disciplined. But staff who admitted to auditors that they knew what was happening also said that they believed senior staff were aware of the practice, and that it was condoned.

I doubt very much that this kind of practice is unique to health services in Victoria. I know that at least some educational institutions in Queensland and South Australia, including child care centres and state schools, routinely overstate their enrolments in order to increase their funding. Again, this cheats honest schools and providers because it means less funding is left for them.

I thought proper auditing was a requirement for any government funding. How have these major government institutions been able to get away with cheating the public for so long?

That must be one of the dodgiest headlines I’ve seen for a long time.

The house was on fire and burning dangerously. Police stopped neighbours from entering the house. The chances are that anyone else entering the house would also have been killed. Can you imagine the fuss if police had let neighbours enter and they had also died?

One of the first things we learn in ambulance training is that you can’t help anyone else if you are injured yourself. If you get yourself into a situation where you need to be rescued you are adding to, not reducing, the risk to others. The loss of life was tragic, but I think police did the responsible thing.

Mind you, if it was my neighbours, or a neighbour’s child, and I really thought I could help, even if it meant endangering myself, I’d like to think I would still go.

For a different perspective on this, see John Ray’s Political Correctness Watch.

Kiwis clash over whether there should be an ‘h’ in Wanganui or not? I don’t think so.

I was in Wanganui at the time this issue was being debated. There was very little acrimony, and most locals, both Maori and more recent arrivals, agreed that the spelling of the name Wanganui should be retained rather than add the ‘h’ to make it Whanganui.

This NineMSN story is not right when it says early settlers made a spelling mistake. The Maoris had no written language. What is now written ‘wh’ at the beginning of Maori words was a way (invented by Europeans) of indicating that the word should pronounced with an aspirated ‘w’ – like that at the beginning of the word whistle. It is now commonly pronounced as an ‘f”, but this is whrong.

In any case, the name of the place has always been written Wanganui, for as long as the name of the place has been written. To change it now would just be a silly ‘PC’ decision which even most local Maori don’t agree with. So I am pleased the Wanganui Council has decided to leave it alone.

This is sad. Some ratbag by the name of Ronald Gander and his equally disgusting girlfriend (who is not named and does not seem to have been charged) lived in an expensive inner city apartment. They decided a teenage student living with them should prostitute herself to help pay the rent. She had run away from home, and they threatened to evict her if she did not produce sufficient income. She was not allowed to keep any of the money she made, and the only bonus or payment they gave her was an occasional box of chicken treats.

The sentence – two and a half years suspended after nine months, in other words, nine months in jail – seems woefully inadequate to me, especially considering Gander already had a criminal record and was on parole at the time. And what must the girl’s home life have been like if that kind of treatment was preferable?

A crime gang (OK, two guys) which stole over $800,000 from Brisbane city parking metres has been busted, according to Queensland police.

How do people think of these things? How did they do it? Why didn’t anyone notice before? And how much does the Brisbane City Council make from parking meters?

Andrew Bolt points out that Chinese born Australian business woman Helen Liu is a leading member of organisations dedicated to promoting the Chinese military and Chinese re-unification (which means the absorption of Taiwan).

Joel Fitzgibbon has lied about the extent of his links to her, and the gifts he has received from her. He is Australia’s Minister of Defence. The Opposition should, must, keep asking questions about this.

Fitzgibbon may genuinely have forgotten how well he knows Ms Liu, his visits to China with her, the functions he attended with her, and the gifts he has received from her. In that case he is an idiot and cannot be trusted with the Australia’s defences.

Or he lied about them. In that case, he thought he had something to hide. If he thought he had something to hide, he probably did.

It is hard to see how rebel catholic priest Peter Kennedy can believe he is doing the right thing. For years he has refused to teach the catholic faith, offering instead his own version of easy to digest do-it-yourself Christianity mixed with popular psychology. He has refused to accept guidance about why what he is doing is wrong, and refused to stand aside so that the people of his parish could have what they are entitled to – a priest who will teach and live the faith.

Now after reaching a mediation with church authorities which will see him replaced at St Mary’s South Brisbane, he has announced he intends to set up a church of his own (and that’s what it will be, his church, not Christ’s church) only a few hundred metres away.

A priest is supposed to be a father to his congregation, is supposed to protect and care for them, is supposed to teach them the faith so that they may be nurtured and grow in Christ. He is entrusted, and this is a solemn trust which ought to make every clergyman tremble, with the spiritual well-being of his people.

Clergy have crises of faith all the time. Occasionally clergy go off the rails. Very occasionally a priest will lose his faith completely. Clergy are human. As I have said before, I do not object to someone believing something other than the catholic faith (though I think they are losing out if they do).

The problem here is that Peter Kennedy is instead insisting on his ‘right’ to teach the people of St Mary’s South Brisbane his own philosophy, which seems to be a bizarre collection of every currently trendy notion, while telling them that this is the catholic faith. This is simply dishonest.

His beliefs are not the issue. His integrity is – if he had any, he would have left long ago.

A man stole a ring worth a million dollars by breaking a hole in a shop window and reaching in. The shop is in the Melbourne CBD and was open at the time.

I’m guessing their insurance company will be asking some questions.