The ANZACs are not dead

The old warrior genes are still there. It is unusual for someone of such a senior rank to lead his men from the front. Major is the highest field rank. This is probably a good moment to remember another heroic Australian of that ilk, Major Peter Badcoe, VC



A QUEENSLANDER and former Australian Digger has forged a name for himself while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan, earning the Military Cross for gallantry. Major Mike Aston was awarded the third-highest award for bravery for leading his company through three months on the front-lines under "some of the most intense close combat the British Army has experienced for some years".

Major Aston, who spent 11 years with the Australian Army at Duntroon, said he was "speechless" when he received the award. "It was unique for a company out there to do so many things," he said. "During our time we were moving around doing a lot of strike operations. "We were a very aggressive company, always on the front foot, and we took the fight to the enemy . . . and sadly did suffer a number of casualties."

Major Aston grew up in Toowoomba, 200km west of Brisbane, and entered the Australian Defence Force after completing high school at Centenary Heights State High. During his time in the Australian Defence Force he was awarded Soldier of the Year in 1990 and was nominated for the Sword of Honour.

His mother, Yvonne Aston, told The Courier-Mail she always knew her son would achieve in the army but was worried about him while he was fighting in Afghanistan. "It was very tense because several men in his battalion were killed, first his (second-in-command) and then another major was killed, which upset him," she said. "That was the only time I was worried about him."

She said he had come a long way since his early days in the Australian Army. "I can remember him sneaking off and ringing me and saying it was so hard." Major Aston is now serving as a staff officer with a UK armoured division in northwest Germany.

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'More clerks than nurses' in NSW health system

The NSW health system employs more clerks than nurses, and continues to obstruct desperately needed reform, the former director-general of the Premier's Department said yesterday. Ken Baxter, who ran the agency under Labor premier Bob Carr, yesterday released an Australian Centre for Health Research report calling for a federal takeover of public hospital funding, saying the scale of state bureaucracies, cost-shifting and woefully inadequate reporting data justified the overhaul. He cited annual report data that showed more than a third of NSW's 90,997 health staff were classified "administrative or other". "In the NSW health system, there are more clerks than there are nurses," Mr Baxter said, estimating nurse numbers at 30,000.

In Tasmania, the system was even more heavily weighted towards office workers, with 45 per cent of the 8992 full-time equivalent staff classified as administrative or other, his figures show. Administrative jobs accounted for a quarter of positions in the Northern Territory and a fifth in Queensland and the ACT, with data from Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia non-existent or incomplete. "A number of the states can't give you accurate figures and certainly none of them (are) comparable," Mr Baxter said.

Many of the jobs in health had gone to IT support, despite the fact that more than $2 billion had been spent on IT systems throughout the Australian health sector "without delivering any real improvements" in performance data or services, he said.

The ACHR report into the future of Australia's federal-state healthcare agreements argues for a slimmed-down system where area health services and local boards run public hospitals, directly funded by the commonwealth based on their success in meeting performance indicators. The states would be left as owners of the hospitals, but would relinquish their current roles as co-funders and sole administrators.

Mr Baxter said more direct lines of responsibility would help reduce cost-shifting estimated at up to $500 million a year. "If we want that same level of service and we want the same standard, then some of these changes have got to be made," he said. "And none of them are going to be comfortable. But if you ask (NSW Health Minister) Reba Meagher, life is not comfortable for Reba at the moment."

Ms Meagher has faced off several scandals over substandard services at hospitals such as the busy Royal North Shore in Sydney while leading resistance to commonwealth calls to sign up to nationally consistent performance data for state hospitals. But she defended herself against Mr Baxter's claims, saying frontline clinical staff, including doctors, dentists, ambulance workers and allied health professionals, as well as nurses, outnumbered administrative staff and made up two-thirds of the system's workforce. "NSW Health has been actively restructuring the health system to shift resources away from administration into frontline health services," she said.

She also defended NSW's record in reporting on hospital performance, citing emergency and surgery data by hospitals published quarterly. But "we won't support benchmarks that are simply reporting for reporting's sake or have the potential to act as a disincentive for medical staff to report adverse events," Ms Meagher said.

Mr Baxter called the arguments against the release of hospital scorecards "nonsense". The NSW Government had surrendered in the face of bureaucratic resistance, he said.

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Qld. teachers join nurses' protest over Torres Strait worker safety

The deepening crisis over worker safety in the remote Torres Strait islands is fuelling threats of strike action by teachers fearful that dilapidated staff housing will fail to protect them from physical abuse. A chronic lack of maintenance has left accommodation for teachers working at many of Queensland's 180 remote schools in a poor state and unable to be secured against intruders.

Education Queensland has admitted that since 2003 at least five teachers posted in the Torres Strait have sought counselling after facing physical threats, with two of them opting to be transferred immediately. There have also been at least six Workcover claims related to threats against teachers in the region.

The plight of teachers, nurses and other workers in remote communities has hit the headlines following the alleged rape of a nurse on Mabuiag Island last month. Health Minister Stephen Robertson has come under heavy political fire over his handling of the incident during which he has been regularly found wanting on the issue of worker safety in remote communities and what the Government was doing to address the issue.

Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said there was not enough accommodation for teachers and existing housing was run-down and unable to be secured. Like Queensland Health's facilities, Mr Ryan said Education Queensland's buildings commonly had missing or broken security screens - leading to break-ins and thefts from teachers' homes. The poor housing in remote communities was discouraging teachers from moving to them, he said.

The union estimates $160 million needs to be spent over the next three years to bring teacher accommodation across the state up to standard. "If strike action is the only way to get the State Government to listen, members . . . may be obliged to follow suit," Mr Ryan said. Premier Anna Bligh yesterday said: "I have absolute confidence in Stephen Robertson as the Health Minister."

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Rabbit fish key to saving Great Barrier Reef

What? We don't have to stop global warming after all?



A RAVENOUS weed-eating fish might be the key to saving large sections of the Great Barrier Reef from destruction, scientists say. Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University researcher Professor David Bellwood said new research had shown the herbivorous rabbit fish - capable of stripping an area of vegetation - could fight coral-stifling weeds. "When a coral reef is weakened or damaged through human activity such as climate change or pollution or by a natural disaster like a cyclone, the coral will usually recover provided it is not choked by fast-growing marine algae," Prof Bellwood said.

"The problem is that over the years we have fished down the populations of fish that normally feed on the young weed to such a degree that the weed is no longer kept in check - it can now smother the young corals and take over." He said the chances of coral re-establishing itself after such an event were small.

But in a video study in which different fish were observed grazing in overgrown areas of the reef, schools of rabbit fish (Siganus canaliculatus) were seen chomping away at 10 times the rate of other weed-eaters. "To our surprise and disappointment, the fish that usually mow the reef - parrot fish and surgeon fish - were of little help ... then, to our even greater surprise, a fish we had never seen in this area before was observed grazing on the weed," Prof Bellwood said. He said the brown, bland-looking fish had been overlooked in the past but could be an important protector of the reef.

But he said it was important other herbivores were protected so they could work alongside the rabbit fish. "In Australia these herbivore fish populations are still in fairly good shape, but around the world as the big predators are fished out, local fishermen are targeting the herbivores," he said. "In Hawaii, the Caribbean, Indonesia, Micronesia and French Polynesia there are reports of serious declines in herbivore numbers of up to 90 per cent. "By killing them, we may be unwittingly eliminating the very thing which enables coral reefs to bounce back from the sort of shocks which human activity exposes them to."

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