It looks like Britain does not have a monopoly on filthy public hospitals



Cockroaches crawled on operating tables during procedures, the inquiry into Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital has been told. Health Minister Reba Meagher is the first witness to face the inquiry this morning, being held at NSW Parliament. The hospital's doctors and former management are giving evidence into the hopital, which has been the centre of many complaints over the past two months. One doctor, who has since resigned, complained of the filthy conditions in operating theatres.

Nationals state MP Jenny Gardiner told the inquiry the allegations were made in a submission from the doctor who worked at the hospital for 16 years. "He refers to the killing of live cockroaches on operating theatre tables during operations and `no response when I forward a written complaint and response is requested'."

Ms Meagher said that was unacceptable. "That is why the new management has responded to concerns of staff at the hospital and ordered a complete clean of the hospital," Ms Meagher said. Contract cleaners were sent to the hospital on the eve of a tour of the facility by the parliamentary committee. Ms Meagher has denied the clean-up was an attempted cover-up, saying it was done after a request by staff and had been arranged before the committee indicated it would visit.

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Two crooked cops down

But plenty more where they come from

VICTORIA police media director Stephen Linnell, who is answering corruption allegations at an independent inquiry, has resigned. Mr Linnell's lawyer, Martin Grinberg, told the Office of Police Integrity (OPI) inquiry today Mr Linnell had resigned. OPI delegate Murray Wilcox indicated Mr Linnell, believed to be at the inquiry today, would still be required to give further evidence..

His resignation follows that of Assistant Commissioner Noel Ashby who quit on Friday after three days of explosive evidence implicated him in a Victoria Police corruption scandal.

Mr Linnell was expected to return to the witness box for a second day of grilling at the inquiry today. The OPI is examining leaks over a botched secret police task force investigating police links to a 2003 murder. The task force, dubbed Operation Briars, was investigating claims a police officer gave the address of slain male prostitute Shane Chartres-Abbott to a hitman. The leaks resulted in the police suspect being tipped off about the investigation.

A police spokeswoman confirmed Mr Linnell had tendered his resignation to Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon this morning. Ms Nixon may comment later today.

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What a great idea!

Car hoons [speed hogs] will have their vehicles crushed and the video posted on the internet in a bid to deal with the growing defiance of speed obsessed drivers in Sydney. But first they will have to witness their car destroyed under crash test experiments in RTA labs. As four more cars were confiscated at the weekend in drag racing offences across Sydney, The Daily Telegraph can reveal NSW premier Morris Iemma is planning a major offensive against this increasingly reckless - and often fatal - behaviour.

On Saturday night, a P-plater [provisionally licenced driver] crashed into a tree at high speed in Londonderry, in Sydney's west. The 20-year-old driver and his 16-year-old passenger suffered multiple fractures and were last night in Nepean Hospital. It was what The Daily Telegraph warned in August would continue to happen unless NSW adopt Los Angeles' style laws that not only confiscate cars but destroys them.

Following a campaign sparked by a flood of support from Daily Telegraph readers - in the wake of the deaths of Alan and Judith Howle, allegedly killed by street racers - the Government has agreed to toughen the laws for car hoons. And if crushing their cars does not change the behaviour of young drivers, the Government will consider posting the entire spectacle on YouTube as an education tool. "These modified, loud and often illegal vehicles confiscated from car hoons will be smashed to pieces in our crash labs, the results filmed and analysed, and the wrecks shown to other young drivers as a warning," Mr Iemma said.

In four other incidents at the weekend police charged four drivers and confiscated their cars after two street racing incidents in Sydney's southwest. A 23-year-old P-plate driver and a 23-year-old man were given court attendance notices for street racing at Lansvale and had their cars confiscated. Two Holden sedans were also seen racing on Victoria St, Wetherill Park, on Saturday night.

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Huge success about to be thrown away?

If you have ever wondered which country has the healthiest, wealthiest population in the world, you don't have to look far. Providing you are not an Aborigine, the average Australian's chances of combining long life with comfortable lifestyle are the best in the world. Bar none. The statistical evidence is emphatic. Australia ranks equal third in average longevity. It ranks eighth in per capita wealth among nations with populations larger than that of greater Sydney. Average household wealth has doubled in the 11« years since the Howard Government was elected. Unemployment is the lowest in 30 years. You, personally, may, or may not, have never had it so good, but we, as a population, have never been as healthy and wealthy as now.

Australia is thus approaching a fascinating historical juncture. Amid such benign economic conditions, we may be on the brink of an unprecedented experiment in power politics - giving control of every government in the nation to a political machine with a proven record of insularity and self-serving public patronage on a large scale.

This is uncharted territory. Nine Labor governments out of nine. Nine governments able to cross-fertilise each other's power base, exercising complete control over appointments to the judiciary and the senior bureaucracy. Nine Labor governments with big debts to the unions that underpin their finances. It could change Australia's political culture for a generation.

Kevin Rudd presents impressively and has wisely targeted the Government's obvious weaknesses in education policies, labour law reform and climate change. He has managed to operate above the realities of Labor's machine politics. But then so did Premier Bob Carr, and he bequeathed to NSW a state Labor Government riddled with cronyism, addicted to gambling, coddling the public sector unions, and providing inefficient public services.

On Friday the former federal Labor leader Mark Latham, in an essay in The Australian Financial Review, portrayed the modern Labor Party as far more committed to self-preservation than idealism. In the process he also demolished a core element of Rudd's presidential campaign - the idea that Australia has a housing affordability crisis.

"It seems strange," Latham wrote, "to hear people talking about a private housing affordability crisis when, over the past decade, Australia has experienced its greatest ever boom in private housing investment . In most cases, [home buyers] are enjoying a quality of housing well beyond the expectations of their parents and grandparents before them . Bargains are still available. In south-west Sydney, for example, home buyers can purchase a three-bedroom brick house in a decent neighbourhood for less than $250,000 . There is no crisis in the private housing market, just the manufactured hysteria of the political class."

Latham is half right. Rising interest rates have been offset by income tax cuts from the Federal Government. Housing prices have been rising in most areas, which means the net wealth of home buyers has been rising. Reserve Bank statistics show no meaningful mortgage delinquency. There is no crisis. That said, the Government has stimulated the economy, and the housing market, with rolling tax cuts, a gang-busters immigration policy (120,000 immigrants a year plus a surge in short-term work visas). Per capita private debt has ballooned. While wealth creation and rising real incomes have been spread right across society, the gap between rich and poor has widened.

There is the other manufactured "crisis" that has been helped along by government missteps. The unions have financed a campaign against the Work Choices legislation built on a series of scares presented by actors masquerading as victims. In contrast, since Work Choices became law, work creation has boomed. Last Thursday's employment figures showed the economy at the highest rate of employment and job-creation in a generation.

The Prime Minister made one of the great mistakes of his career by investing so much political capital in Kevin Andrews, who oversaw sweeping labour market reforms via Work Choices, reforms that have stimulated job growth and job creation, as intended, but have also been overly ambitious, overly cumbersome and very much a work in progress. The Government needs to address this reality or die.

Labor's confection of a sense of crisis, in the midst of real-world growth and prosperity, is thus based on some real-world stress, much of it self-inflicted by a consumer-driven culture, plus a great deal of hot air and false hope. As Latham wrote on Friday: "We have reached the zenith of policy convergence in Australian public life. Everything else is just play-acting, a bit of media melodrama to keep the public entertained. Australia is having a Seinfeld election, a show about nothing."

Once again, he is only half right. There is great deal of play-acting. There is a great deal of policy convergence between Labor and the Coalition. There is, however, a real schism, a real issue that divides the Government and the Opposition - the restoration of union power. That is what the election on November 24 is really about. Under a Labor government, the deputy prime minister and minister for industrial relations would be a hard-left union ideologue and labour lawyer, Julia Gillard. The attorney-general would be Senator Joe Ludwig, who, in the great tradition of the Labor patronage machine, is the son of a Queensland Labor powerbroker, Bill Ludwig, the national president of the Australian Workers Union. Leaders of the machine would dominate the ministry.

Everything is in place. With Labor so close to the holy grail of power - every government in Australia - the machine, and the Labor left, are maintaining an iron discipline, and a patient silence.

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