Snake-training for Australian paramedics

While many people would have freaked out at the thought of holding a snake, Simon Hale couldn't have been more excited. The paramedic is one of the Queensland Ambulance Service's new overseas recruits, and last week had to learn all about the state's creepy crawlies as part of his training to join the service. "It's been very nerve-racking but very, very exciting," Mr Hale, 36, from England, said. "When they asked if I wanted to hold it I was up straight away. It felt very cold and it was quite heavy, actually."



The carpet snake was just one of 11 snakes the 14 new UK, US and interstate recruits had to handle as part of their initiation into the QAS. The training also included getting close to spiders and crocodiles. "It's given me an insight and I know what I'm looking out for, I know what to expect and hopefully I'll be able to deal with it," Mr Hale said.

Not everyone was so keen to get up close and personal with their new country's wildlife, with some recruits cowering in the corner at the sight of redbacks, huntsmen and funnelwebs [spiders]. But English paramedic Harvey Milburm, 41, had a crocodile sit on his lap and said the experience was "fantastic": "Being given the opportunity to see these animals up close has been really great. "We've actually all been really excited about this day. We were all lining up to hold the snakes, and everyone's really enjoyed themselves."

Although Mr Milburm was pleasantly surprised by how soft the crocodile was, he said he hoped he wouldn't have to use his training soon. "Obviously I'd prefer it if the offending animal was away from the patient at the time, but at the end of the day we're here to deal with these situations so, hopefully, we'll all deal with it in a professional manner."

Helping to organise the day was head ambulance officer Darren Ferguson, who said the training was vital for officers as exposure to these critters was increasing. "Urbanisation means there's less trees around, so snakes are inhabiting towns now and the drought is bringing snakes out more. So there's a good probability these officers will see snakes," he said. "It's learning how to identify early and manage a snake bite, before the symptoms progress, more seriously."

The above article by Anooska Tucker-Evans appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on November 18, 2007




The flight to private schools is pushing fees up

The cost of a private education is rising by double the rate of inflation and taking the best schools out of many parents' reach. Although some private schools charge fees of as little as $2000 or $3000 a year, the fees at some of the best secondary schools now commonly total $18,000 a year, and the amount is predicted to go even higher.

If you are thinking about a private education for your children, bear in mind that schools usually offer discounts for siblings, so the cost may not necessarily be double the cost of one child. But fees do not cover additional expenses such as uniforms, books and excursions, the cost of which tends to rise with the more expensive schools. If you've just started a family, then investing the Government's baby bonus immediately will help. It stacks up to a healthy $4187 but you will need to top up the bonus with regular savings in order to cover the full cost of an education. To make funds stretch further, many parents opt for a state primary education and a private secondary school, which cuts costs and gives more time to get enough money together.

Say you were expecting school fees for your child to run to $18,000 a year (in today's money - not indexed) for a total of five years between the ages of 13 and 18. If you were to pay those fees from your income at the time they were needed you'd pay an average of $346 per week - a big dent in the family budget. However, using an education savings plan available from specialist fund managers, kick-started with the $4187 baby bonus from birth, you will only have to save $3400 per year, or around $66 per week from birth to the age of 18 in a balanced fund yielding about six per cent per annum, after fees and taxes, to cover the private school fees....

Matt Walsh of specialist fund manager Lifeplan says: "Depending on the person's time frame and the risk they're comfortable with, you can invest entirely in aggressive equities or entirely in safe bonds if you wish - or something in between. The idea is really to invest aggressively when you have a five-year plus outlook, then to decrease the risk as you near the time that you will need to draw on the money. Then you might shift increasing amounts into the safer funds.'' The proceeds are tax-free as long as you use the money for education purposes, and those can include HECS fees, HELP (the university funding scheme), tuition fees, uniforms, books, computers, sports equipment, school outings - really, anything related to the education. If you don't use the funds for education purposes, the earnings accrued on your contributions are taxed at 30 per cent.

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Regulators finally do something about irresponsible bureaucrats

QUEENSLAND'S former chief health officer, Gerry FitzGerald, faces disciplinary action for his role in the Dr Death scandal at Bundaberg Base Hospital after a dogged two-year pursuit by a doctor with the Royal Flying Doctor Service on the other side of the country. The Medical Board of Queensland, which had been reluctant to launch proceedings against anyone over the Bundaberg hospital disaster, with the exception of surgeon Jayant Patel, is preparing to start disciplinary action against Dr FitzGerald, one of its former members, for failing to act swiftly.

The decision of the board is sensitive because it was initially dismissive of calls for top administrators to be held accountable. It was pressed into an investigation of Dr FitzGerald by a West Australian-based doctor with the RFDS, Simon Evans. Documents obtained by The Australian yesterday show the board has now agreed that Dr FitzGerald received serious complaints about Dr Patel in early 2005 but "failed to take proper action to ensure that Dr Patel was limited to surgical work that he and the hospital could satisfactorily perform". Dr FitzGerald said yesterday he was "very disappointed" with the board's decision. He said he had tried to do his best under difficult circumstances.

Dr Evans hopes the latest decision will send a powerful message to senior bureaucrats and administrators in charge of health systems that they are not immune from disciplinary action usually reserved for clinicians. Dr Evans urged the board two years ago to start disciplinary action against Dr FitzGerald, who had resigned from Queensland Health after giving evidence at a 2005 judicial inquiry into the problems at Bundaberg Base Hospital, as well as other administrators. "They told me they had absolutely no intention of taking any disciplinary action against any administrators adversely named in the report (of the inquiry)," DrEvans said yesterday from his home in Derby, in Western Australia.

Undeterred by the rebuffs, Dr Evans researched the evidence in greater detail, cited legislation and administrative negligence cases from Britain, and wrote several letters accusing the board of failing in its responsibilities. "From my time at Queensland Health as a clinician I could see where the major problems were - they were with senior medical administrators," Dr Evans said.

The board has concluded that Dr FitzGerald "failed to recommend suspension of Dr Patel when he could and should have done, thus exposing patients to undue risk of harm". The matter is to be heard by the Health Practitioners Tribunal. Medical practitioners found guilty of unprofessional conduct face penalties ranging from fines to being struck off as doctors.

Serious concerns relating to Dr Patel's performance at the Bundaberg hospital were not properly addressed until senior nurse Toni Hoffman put her job on the line by going public in 2005 with evidence of unnecessary deaths and injuries resulting from Dr Patel's surgery.

Dr Patel, who has lived in Portland in the US state of Oregon since fleeing Australia in April 2005, will be arrested by US marshals when the paperwork is completed between Australian and US authorities, possibly as early as next month. The extradition request is understood to relate to 16 charges, including manslaughter and grievous bodily harm, arising from his time at Bundaberg Base Hospital.

Tess Bramich, the widow of a patient who died at the hospital, said she had "forgiven" Dr FitzGerald. Mrs Bramich said since Dr FitzGerald was facing disciplinary proceedings, other administrators also needed to be dealt with. A senior source said the board had always been uncomfortable with the prospect of taking action against a former member. The board permitted Dr Patel to practise in Queensland, overlooking his history of serious disciplinary action for botched surgery in the US.

Retired Supreme Court judge Geoff Davies QC, head of a public inquiry in late 2005, made strong findings against Dr FitzGerald for not acting on a clinical audit that showed Dr Patel's complication rate was at alarming levels. The inquiry ruled that Dr FitzGerald's decision to permit Dr Patel to continue to practise "was a course designed to minimise publicity and in effect conceal the truth. The interests of the patients were ignored." Mr Davies told Dr FitzGerald: "You knew he had 25 times the complication rate for a very normal piece of surgery. "What more do you want to protect the potential patients of Bundaberg Hospital?"

Dr FitzGerald, who won support from patients and Ms Hoffman because of his candour and his apologies on behalf of the health system, has denied he set out to conceal information. He now works at the Queensland University of Technology.

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Unions not the main enemy

MUCH of the criticism directed at Kevin Rudd's Labor Party in the run-up to Saturday's election has been focused on its domination by unions and ex-union leaders. With the notable exception of the regulation of the workplace, and just possibly of support for free trade, I suspect this standard line of criticism gets it wrong.

The real threat to Australia comes not from the unionists but from the other main wing of the Labor Party, what I would describe as the chardonnay-sipping, ultra-PC, anti-traditionalist wing of the Labor Party. These are the people who worry me.

Start with the legal revolutionaries among them. This Labor-voting crowd, well represented among lawyers, judges, teachers and academics, wants power taken away from elected MPs and given to unelected judges. They badly want a bill of rights. They know perfectly well that all bills of rights - be they British-style statutory ones or Canadian-style entrenched models - have precisely this increase-the-power-of-judges effect. Indeed, if they had no effect at all on the power balance, why would anyone push so hard to have one?

This crowd also knows that if voters are asked in any sort of referendum they will always be sensible enough to vote down a bill of rights or some disguised version of one. So these people set up elaborate consultation processes that attempt to give the illusion that a bill of rights is wanted. This is precisely what the state of Victoria did before enacting its statutory bill of rights only last year. Knowing that they could not win a referendum there (or anywhere) a "consultation process" was put in place chaired by a longstanding proponent of bills of rights and lacking even a single opponent of these instruments.

Yet this consultation sham of "like-minded activists talking to like-minded activists" served a useful function for the legal revolutionaries. It helped reinforce the basic selling line that's used. The trick is to just keep repeating the mantra: "We need to protect and uphold fundamental human rights." Never, ever acknowledge that people in Australia simply disagree about what exactly is required to protect and uphold these indeterminately phrased, vague moral guarantees.

So proponents gloss over the patently true fact that smart, reasonable, even nice people simply have different opinions about gay marriage, abortion, how to treat refugee claimants, how to balance security concerns about terrorism against individual liberties and so much more. Those are the sort of things a bill of rights takes away from parliament and puts into the province of the judges.

These instruments are sold to the public by always talking up in the Olympian heights of moral abstractions. They have real bite and effect, however, in terms of contentious, debatable moral issues where none of us, top judges included, have a pipeline to God. The problem is that the chardonnay-sipping wing of the Labor Party does rather tend to think that its moral antenna is more finely attuned than that of everyone who disagrees with it.

It's not the ex-unionists who are the preening, puffed-up moralisers in the Labor Party. Far from it. But the crowd that doth vaunteth itself has calculated that the unelected judges are likelier to give it the moral outcomes it wants than are what it sees as the grubby politicians. And just to make sure of this, it tries to appoint to the bench people in its own image, people who are as much anti-traditionalists, parliamentary sovereignty-loathing activists as it is. One need look no further than Victoria's recent judicial appointments to see what I mean.

Nor do you hear these same legal revolutionaries admit that in a recent poll in Britain 61 per cent of people said they wanted to scrap that country's barely seven-year-old bill of rights. In fact, as the judicially driven absurdities have mounted over there, even some of Britain's Labour ministers who introduced it (no referendum there either) have started to have second thoughts. What absurdities you ask? Well, under its aegis, British judges have said the bill of rights gives prisoners rights to drugs, foreign hijackers the right to live in Britain, Gypsies the right to squat, a native-born Italian murderer of a London headmaster the right to a family life and, from that, somehow, a right not to be deported after serving his sentence.

Needless to say, the chardonnay-sipping wing of Britain's Labour Party, including the whole expansive industry of self-styled human rights lawyers, has blamed the media, not the bill of rights. You see, it rather likes all these outcomes. And many like the judge-driven legalisation of gay marriage in Canada. And the unbelievable entitlement to an oral hearing and taxpayer-funded lawyer for all those who simply claim also to be a refugee in Canada (which costs billions of dollars, much of it going to lawyers).

In the long term it's these sort of anti-traditionalist, ultra-PC people who pose the biggest threat to Australia, not the unionists. It's not the unionists who sneer at patriotism or at Australia's constitutional arrangements. (And let me say straight out that I think our arrangements to be the best in the world.) It's not the unionists who are so politically correct that they can't laugh at anything, including themselves, or who genuflect before every passing grievance-industry complaint. It's not the unionists who implicitly demean the family as the bedrock unit of social life, and look for ways to undermine it by suggesting that all forms of social organisation are as good as each other, a claim belied by every collected statistic related to the comparative outcomes of children from single-parent homes and those from traditional two-parent homes. It's not the unionists who see any and all attempts to legislate against potential terrorists as some descent into an authoritarian, police state hell. It's not the unionists who indulge in politically correct claptrap or fall victim to postmodernist, deconstructionist fads.

One of the attractive things about Australia's left-wing party - as opposed to New Zealand's, Canada's, Britain's and, to a lesser extent, the US's - is that it has not fallen wholly under the control of the preening, smug, holier-than-thou PC brigade who like their moralising to come cheap and easy. Sure, ex-unionists may tend to focus on their members more than on the unemployed. And sure, some of them may not see, or care much about, the wealth-creating effects of free trade, especially for the poor part of the globe. But I'd take them any day of the week over the other main wing of the Labor Party.

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