Soldiers' alcohol binge OK, says Howard

Good to see that Australia has a level-headed PM who does not buy in to Leftist hysteria. Drinking is part of life in Australia and overdoing it from time to time is normal too

JOHN Howard and Brendan Nelson have defended the conduct of drunken soldiers in a video posted on internet site YouTube, saying the young men were just letting off steam. The 3-minute video, titled My Experience in the Australian Army, posted by an ex-soldier but now removed from YouTube, shows a group of young men getting extremely drunk during a drinking game. The soldiers, from Robertson Barracks in Darwin, are shown sculling alcohol through a long tube and then vomiting.

The brief appearance of someone in a Ku Klux Klan outfit has caused widespread comment but the Prime Minister said the soldiers were letting off "a bit of steam" and urged the public not to overreact. "I have some understanding of the disposition of people in these situations to let off a bit of steam," Mr Howard said. "I just think people can overreact with these things. People get into a lather and sweat and so on ... Let's be sensible about this."

Mr Howard said any discipline was a matter for the army. "Let the military deal with those things in their own way," he said. The Defence Minister said he would wait for the army's report into the incident. "Let's just wait until the Chief of Army and the military investigate the matter before we start jumping to conclusions and start to criticise the men who appear to have been involved," Dr Nelson said. "I suspect a lot of it is ... a bit of larrikin irreverence and I also suspect some of it has crossed the line and is quite inappropriate."

Brigadier Craig Orme, commander of Darwin's 1st Brigade, said the video was shot by a now former member of the Australian Defence Force about three years ago. He said the conduct was "abhorrent and inappropriate" and "not in the least" common, and the army would launch an inquiry to determine what action if any should be taken.

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Klan footage a 'bucks prank'



A FORMER soldier who appears in a video of Australian troops binge drinking, with one apparently dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman, says the footage was a bucks party prank, not a racial slur. Identified only as Rico, the former soldier said he could understand why people were upset about the footage but it wasn't meant to be offensive. "I can see why people find it offensive but the reason why it was done was a mate's bucks party that we were having," he told the Seven Network. "We had a surprise made up for him so we went and pretty much kidnapped him and we needed a costume so he couldn't find out who it was. "The cheapest way to do it was to put a bedsheet over our heads, it wasn't in any racial terms."

The military is conducting an inquiry into the "abhorrent" video, shot three years ago and recently posted on the YouTube internet site. Rico said alcohol was a big part of army life while he was there and a way of letting off steam. "Every weekend pretty much that kind of drinking went on, most of the footage in that video was pretty tame compared to a lot of things that used to go on," Rico said. "We did our duty to the best of our abilities, we didn't drink while we were on duty."

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That wonderful government "planning" again

Delay in autopsy reports on SIDS

DISTRAUGHT parents of children who have died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome are waiting up to a year for final autopsy reports due to a chronic shortage of forensic pathologists. The shortage is also causing increasing delays for relatives waiting for adult autopsy results through the coroner's court system.

Doctors specialising in SIDS say the situation is causing anguish for parents who desperately need emotional closure after a child's death. But they would speak only anonymously because their area of highly specialised work depends entirely on state and federal funding.

The latest figures from the Royal College of Pathologists Australasia show there is one pathologist for every 15,500 Australians. The situation for child forensic pathologists is much worse: 10-12 pathologists for the entire population. About 30 per cent of these pathologists are aged 60 and over. To train a pathologist takes five years on top of a regular medical degree and one year's hospital experience.

Professor Roger Byard of the University of Adelaide told The Sunday Mail: "There just aren't enough pathologists, full stop. It's a workforce issue that's only going to get worse." Dr Debra Graves, CEO of the Royal College of Pathologists, describes the situation as "woeful". She said a 2003 Australian Medical Workforce Advisory Committee report, signed off by both state and federal health ministers at the time, recommended an extra 500 training positions over five years. But to date only 80 positions have been created, well short of the 400 traineeships that should have been in place by the beginning of 2007. According to College data, the Commonwealth has committed to funding an extra 30 positions in the private sector.

But it is the states that are dragging the chain. To date Queensland has committed to 21 positions, the ACT two, Western Australia 11, South Australia two, Tasmania one, and Victoria and New South Wales six each. The number of SIDS deaths in Australia has fallen from 500 a year to around 100 annually since the "safe sleeping" campaign began in 1991.

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Qld. hospitals stretched to limit

A moronic government was not prepared for an upsurge of winter flu -- more of that wonderful government "planning"



With a burning forehead from a raging fever and his tiny chest heaving with every cough, Tyson Penrose slumped into his dad's lap. As exhausted Matthew Penrose, of Petrie, tried to make himself comfortable on the cold steel seat, he wrapped his arms around his sickly 11-month-old son and waited . . . and waited. "We were told there would be a two-hour wait when we got here," Mr Penrose said as he took his late-night place among the scores of other anxious parents who cradled their sick babies in the emergency room of Royal Brisbane Children's Hospital. By midnight, the wait time was nearly three hours. By then the children were drained by their illness and exhaustion, their desperate parents willing to do anything to get their kids better again.

The hospital staff are understanding of each parent's plight, those in the wait room said, but they are chronically undermanned and the flood of patients sickened by the current flu outbreak appears overwhelming. And this is a scene repeated in emergency rooms and hospital wards across the state as Queensland plunges into its worst flu crisis in six years.

Influenza A killed a four-year-old boy at Mater Children's Hospital last week and nurses yesterday flew home yesterday with 48 children stricken with the influenza A virus during a school trip to Canberra. The Year 7 students from Marymount College on the Gold Coast were required to wear face masks as they boarded a bus in Canberra which left for Sydney airport early yesterday morning. Two of their classmates remained in hospital in Canberra, but are reported to be satisfactory.

At the Gold Coast Hospital 23 children have been diagnosed with suspected Influenza A virus in the past two weeks, 10 of them requiring admission. That's five times the number of flu cases among children in the same period last year, a trend doctors say is occurring across the state. "It's strikingly unusual. I assume it has something to do with a change in the strain (of the virus)," said Professor John Gerrard, the Gold Coast Hospital's director of medicine.

Dr Steve Hambleton, a GP spokesman for the Australian Medical Association, agrees the current strain of influenza is unusually virulent. "It also spreads very easily. The virus can actually be transmitted within two hours of shaking hands with an infected person," he said.

The flu crisis is taking a staggering toll across the state. A Queensland Health source told The Sunday Mail that on Monday the state had run out of intensive care beds, coronary care beds and higher dependency beds - although a spokeswoman for Queensland Health disputed that. Queensland Nurses Union secretary Gay Hawksworth said critically ill patients were being dumped on trolleys in hospital corridors because there were no beds.

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