Bent cop has "refreshed" memory!

If British officials can be "economical with the truth", why cannot an Australian official have a "refreshed" memory? Another most useful excuse for lying!

Victorian police union secretary Paul Mullett has told the Office of Police Integrity (OPI) he wants to change some answers he gave the OPI at a private hearing last month. Senior Sergeant Mullett has told a public OPI inquiry today that since the private hearing "I have refreshed my memory". He admitted today to speaking to former assistant police commissioner Noel Ashby about his appearance at the private OPI hearing after telling the hearing last month he had not. It is illegal to discuss the private hearings of the OPI with anyone.

He also admitted meeting Detective Peter Lalor at the union's headquarters after telling the private hearing he had not. He now says he asked Mr Ashby to make inquiries as to who was on a police taskforce related to a secret investigation. Det Lalor was the target of the internal investigation into the gangland murder of a male prostitute in 2003.

It is alleged Sen-Sgt Mullett was a link in a chain of senior police figures which ended with Det Lalor being tipped off that he was being investigated. It has been alleged Det Lalor gave the address of the prostitute to a hitman. Mr Ashby and director of the police media unit Stephen Linnell have quit in the last week after being found to have lied to the OPI.

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More revelations about NSW hospital

Amazing that this was ever tolerated

Cockroaches crawled over patients undergoing surgery and theatre staff were forced to catch a falling patient after an operating table collapsed in the middle of a procedure at the Royal North Shore Hospital. The incidents were part of a litany of horror stories about the hospital that were revealed as a NSW parliamentary inquiry into the RNSH began yesterday. In a written submission to the inquiry, Jeffery Sleye Hughes, who was senior orthopaedic consultant at the hospital for 12 years until this year, detailed:

* patients with infected joints and compound fractures being "left to rot" in wards for 18 hours or more because of "inappropriate theatre management";

* patients being lied to about the reason their surgery was delayed, by units in the hospital trying to cover their backs;

* live cockroaches running over operating theatre tables during surgery;

* high-pressure hoses exploding in theatre during operations and injuring staff; and

* operating tables collapsing during surgery, with surgeons forced to catch falling patients.

The inquiry, which is due to report next month, was called following the publicity surrounding the case of Sydney woman Jana Horska, who miscarried in a toilet adjacent to the hospital's emergency unit in September, after waiting hours for treatment.

In another submission, Sydney woman Maureen Cain told how her husband lost both legs after contracting a staph infection at the hospital in 1998. "The family and I were horrified at the filthy conditions but, as we were so occupied with supporting our husband and father, (we) did not do anything at the time," Mrs Cain wrote. "Wards were dirty, bed frame had congealed matter on it, there was no ventilation in the bathroom, syringe left under the bed for three days before I picked it up - I could go on and on."

NSW Health Minister Reba Meagher insisted conditions would improve under new management and stressed the need for better financial management to end budget overruns. "There will be no cuts to nurses, no cuts to doctors and no cuts to beds," Ms Meagher said. "Our investment in frontline services will continue to increase in those important areas, but it is important that the hospital's financial management is improved and there have been a number of ideas floated."

Acting nursing director Linda Davidson told the inquiry nurses at RNSH had been spat at and abused in the street following coverage of problems at the hospital. "I have had it reported to me that some nursing staff in the community are actually undergoing similar situations that their colleagues at Camden and Campbelltown experienced, which was abuse in the streets and actual spitting episodes," she said. "So when that comes back within that environment, the morale does tend to wane accordingly." Nurses at Campbelltown and Camden Hospitals were abused in the streets when the hospitals were at the centre of maltreatment allegations in 2004.

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Believe me Greenies, I tried the bus but it is a lost cause

By Andrew Gall, writing from Sydney

I drove to work the other day. Walk out the door, hop in the car, 15 minutes later I am at my desk after parking at the early-bird rate of $18. Going home is just as low fuss. Problem is I felt a bit guilty with all the talk about greenhouse emissions and carbon footprints, so I caught the bus to work today. As I live in Annandale and work near Wynyard, how hard can it be?

Walk out the door, 50 metres to the bus stop and wait. One hour and seven minutes later I am at my desk, realising I could have walked it quicker. The first thing you notice is that the timetable is just a selection of random times with no relevance to buses actually arriving. Although the timetable suggests there is a bus every four or five minutes the reality is actually no buses for 25 minutes and then four or five buses simultaneously. My neighbour tells me the record is eight buses at once. With narrow streets precluding passing, the result is one or two hugely overcrowded buses followed closely by three almost empty buses.

Once on the bus I discover another problem. The bureaucrats apparently claim that buses are designed to fit the "95th percentile adult". Unfortunately this data appears to be based on 19th-century Lancashire miners or hobbits. I am just over 180 centimetres and I have to bend over while standing in the back of the bus. Jamming my legs into the seats is almost impossible.

The next problem is the route appears to be have been designed by Soviet Central Planning. Annandale is five kilometres west of the city, and as three-quarters of the passengers go into the CBD you would expect the bus route to be generally easterly. Not so. It meanders through the back streets of Camperdown and Glebe before coming out on Broadway and going down George Street. Once the bus turns onto Broadway and joins up with all the other Parramatta Road and King Street services it becomes almost comical as we leave the realm of professional commuters with their TravelTens and weeklies and enter the world of tourists who try to pay with a $50 note.

As people trickle off through Railway Square and Haymarket the buses creep on and begin to clump together until by the Queen Victoria Building, George Street is one long bus queue. Eventually we arrive at Wynyard and I give thanks for one small mercy - that I am not the driver. Today I am driving to work.

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Conservatives back calls for a judicial enquiry into a useless Left-run child protection agency

The NSW Opposition is supporting a call for a royal commission into the state's child protection agency. The State Government has been urged by Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper to launch a royal commission into the operations of the Department of Community Services (DOCS). The newspaper has created a petition in the hope of "forcing the Iemma Government to address DOCS' incompetence". They have also called on DOCS workers to come forward to discuss the difficulties faced by the agency and its staff on the ground.

"The Daily Telegraph is now taking a stand on behalf of all children whose lives are at risk through a combination of parental neglect and the mismanagement of the Department of Community Services," the newspaper said. "We are calling for a royal commission to end the shameful events that have led to five children - all known to DOCS - killed, injured or forced to live alone in the past month." The calls come after a series of high-profile incidents involving DOCs, with the latest being a three-year-old Sydney girl named Emily who was admitted to hospital on Monday night after allegedly being bashed by her mother's partner.

Emily's case

Yesterday Emily remained in a stable condition in the Children's Hospital at Westmead suffering severe facial injuries and bruising to her body. Her mother's 23-year-old boyfriend has been charged over the assault. At the time of the attack, the girl was in the care of her mother and the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, in a housing commission townhouse at Glenfield. [welfare housing].

Neighbours said they heard shouting and arguing throughout Monday afternoon and evening. A neighbour who raised the alarm, Christine, yesterday said she was called over to the house about 5pm. Christine said she saw Emily in the back seat of the family's sedan with a towel on her head. Her face was "blue and purple", one eye was swollen shut and her mouth was covered in blood. "(She looked) just like she's been hit by a truck," Christine said yesterday.

She said she told the mother's boyfriend the child needed to be taken to hospital but he refused, saying he would take her to a "backyard" doctor. When he returned at 8pm, Christine went inside the house and the boyfriend handed her the child, who kept falling asleep and appeared concussed. She said she told the boyfriend she would take the child to hospital but he told her she was all right.

DOCS yesterday confirmed Emily was known to the department but not in relation to physical violence. Emily's mother has been questioned at length by police and released. Her boyfriend is to face Campbelltown Local Court today charged with maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm.

One in hundreds

Emily's case is the latest in a string of publicised cases in which children known to DOCS have died or suffered injuries. Last month the body of two-year-old Dean Shillingsworth was found in a suitcase dumped in a pond in western Sydney. Dean had also been known to DOCS.

"Despite a $1.2 billion, five-year program intended to improve DOCS, the state Labor Government has delivered a system where an increasing number of children, known to authorities as being at risk of harm, are dying in NSW," Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell said today. "Labor won't be able to ignore a royal commission, it will force them to act. "Over the last four years, 422 children have died who were known to DOCS."

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