ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG does not think very highly of the un-conservative conservatives in the New South Wales parliament.




Arrogant architects who think they know what's best for other people

Regardless of what the people themselves want, of course. NOTE: 1). This is just a regurgitation of the failed American "Smart Growth" strategy. 2). Low quality houses throughout the metropolitan areas are already often torn down and replaced by apartment blocks -- so that people who are willing to live in apartments can do so almost anywhere they choose

AUSTRALIA'S big cities are being urged to ban outer suburban housing estates to cut urban sprawl and be more like London and Rome. The nation's peak architectural body wants Australian cities to focus on boosting their inner and middle suburbs' density rather than release land in outer areas, to become more sustainable.

The Royal Australian Institute of Architects' new urban design policy also pushes for greater regional development, which in Victoria would mean more people to living and working in cities such as Geelong or Ballarat. However, Victoria's peak housing developer group says a move away from outer suburbs would cripple the economy and hurt families who were calling for more housing in affordable areas.

RAIA president Howard Tanner said increasing urban density to maximise efficiency and sustainability of infrastructure was the only way forward for Melbourne and Sydney. "You have got people encouraged to buy a block of land way out of the city and they are having to travel for three hours a day to commute. That's not sustainable," he said. Mr Tanner said a roads-based city like Los Angeles was seeing infrastructure crumble, and Australian cities would do better to aim for the city models of London and Rome. "People there live in town houses or terrace houses, the houses are never one-storey and you have got the population that lives closer to the city," he said. "We have to curtail land subdivisions at the extremities of the city. The other option is to put in some very fast trains to regional centres. Somewhere like Geelong could be an attractive destination for working and living."

Victoria's housing estate developers are represented by the Urban Development Institute of Australia, and executive director Tony De Domenico said banning estate developments on Melbourne's fringe was unrealistic and blinkered. "The population is still growing and there's a demand for these properties," Mr De Domenico said. "It's near impossible to dictate to the market what should happen. The thing that's keeping Victoria's economy very competitive compared to the mining states is we are very competitive in housing." Mr De Domenico said RAIA members should spend more time in outer suburbs and see what people wanted.

Victorian Council of Social Service policy manager David Imber said a sweeping ban on outer-suburban estates was wrong.

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Surgery freeze call over public hospital beds crisis

A ban on elective surgery is being called for as a desperate solution to the chronic shortages of public hospital beds in Queensland's health system. Frustrated emergency specialists have called for a two-week statewide ban on surgery to free up beds. The situation is so critical at hospital emergency departments some patients are forced to sit in waiting rooms for more than 24 hours before being admitted.

Australasian College for Emergency Medicine Queensland chairwoman Sylvia Andrew-Starkey said: "We try really hard not to put elderly people in chairs ... but we've had a situation recently where we've had to put elderly people with pneumonia in chairs for 12 hours or so because we didn't have a bed. "It's awful. It's the worst it's been for years. We're powerless to do anything."

In the past fortnight, some of the state's largest public hospitals - including the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, the Princess Alexandra and Logan - have been forced to go on bypass and redirect ambulances to other facilities because they could not cope with the numbers of patients needing a bed.

In the state's north, a backlog of trolleys and people filled the corridors at Townsville Hospital yesterday as 23 patients waited to be transferred from the emergency ward to beds. Australian Medical Association North Queensland president Dr Sam Baker said Townsville Hospital was overcrowded and in "meltdown" and backed calls for a suspension of elective surgery. "We've got no beds," Dr Baker said. "Staff are being pushed to the limits. It is a bottleneck. It is a shambles. And it is only going to get worse."

Queensland hospitals are so overcrowded that private facilities have also been redirecting patients. "We haven't been able to get a private patient into a private hospital for weeks - they're full too," said Dr Andrew-Starkey, who is based at the RBWH. Freezing elective surgery for a period would free up beds for other patients, taking pressure off emergency departments which are stretched during the traditional winter flu season. "The system needs resetting," Dr Andrew-Starkey said. "I'm not sure suspending elective surgery for a week would be enough. It might take two."

Specialists admit a freeze on elective surgery is a radical step, given lengthy public hospital waiting lists. Queensland Health Minister Stephen Robertson said an elective surgery freeze was unnecessary, but individual hospitals might need to suspend elective surgery from time to time to cope with emergency department demand. "What I do expect is hospital management to make decisions on a daily basis about what is in the best interests of providing safe patient care," Mr Robertson said. "If that means they've got to temporarily suspend elective surgery, then unfortunately, if that decision is made in the interests of patient safety, I support that. I would rather that not be the case, but that's the reality of the very busy times we are experiencing at the moment."

Townsville Hospital staff were yesterday forced to set up makeshift wards in X-ray waiting rooms and lounges. Ten operations were postponed, feeder hospitals at Ingham and Ayr were full, and every nursing home bed in the north Queensland city was occupied. It is the fourth "code yellow" - a complete lack of beds - activated by the hospital in the past two months. Townsville Hospital Acting Director of Medical Services Dr Isaac Seidl said they were working to reduce the likelihood of "ramping" where patients wait outside in ambulances.

Mr Robertson said the situation in Townsville had been exacerbated by 22 nurses calling in sick with "flu-like symptoms", with another 49 off on sick or family leave the day before.

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Update:

PATIENTS have fallen off trolleys in overcrowded hospital emergency wards which overworked doctors describe as the worst they have experienced. The Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital's emergency department was in "gridlock" yesterday, forcing hospital administrators to redirect ambulances to other facilities for more than two hours, The Courier-Mail reports. As the bypass was declared, 22 patients were sitting in chairs in an overcrowded corridor. Some had been waiting more than 24 hours to be admitted, with no guarantee when a bed would become available.

Australasian College for Emergency Medicine Queensland chairwoman Sylvia Andrew-Starkey said hospital emergency departments were at crisis point. "People don't get fed properly, people get sleep deprived. The staff get frustrated as well. It leads to a whole snowball effect," she said. "I can give you three instances of elderly people falling out of trolleys because they were confused. They should never have been on trolleys in the emergency department." "Increasing the amount of time that patients spend in an emergency department leads to deaths," she said. "The number of long-stay patients in Queensland emergency departments has skyrocketed in the last couple of months."

Health Minister Stephen Robertson said the State Government was moving towards "quarantining" hospital emergency departments from elective surgery to alleviate problems. Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg said the "entire health system in Queensland is in danger of collapse".

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University not always the path to good money

Young Aussies are turning their backs on a university education to take advantage of the huge salaries flowing from the resources boom and skills shortage. Heading straight into the workforce and getting on-the-job training is an attractive proposition in boom towns where newcomers can walk into huge money. "Particularly in Queensland and Western Australia we're seeing many school leavers heading straight out to the mines and putting university and tertiary education on the back burner," says Peter Carey, National President of the Career Development Association of Australia.

Recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows the average mining salary tops $100,000 a year - that's $1939 gross a week, or $800 a week more than the average worker. Trades are no different with the skills shortage meaning big bucks are available sooner rather than later. Construction workers' wages jumped almost 8 per cent last year to an average of $1140 a week. These pay rates compare to graduate earnings which range from as low as $35,000 for pharmacy graduates up to $51,887 for engineers.

Traineeships and "earn while you learn" apprenticeships is one way to get ahead. "With the way of the world today people need to work to survive and TAFE and traineeships often provide more work-ready skills than universities," Mr Carey said. "Student debt and poor workforce planning is influencing a move towards more practical learning," he said.

Eddie Dobosz from Apprenticeships Australia believes traineeships are no longer only an option for those who can't get into university. "A lot of people want to do training that gets them to the top quickly and furthering your skills later on in your career, via a degree is always an option," he said. The latest ABS data indicates enrolments in TAFE courses have increased by 4 per cent over recent years with practical learning undergoing a revival.

The average university graduate is $8500 in debt when they leave university. According to ABS data, over 1.2 million people pay for university via FEE-HELP or HECS with 6 per cent owing more than $20,000.

So where does a degree matter? If it's law, accounting or engineering you're looking into then you've got no choice but to hit the books, says Andrew Williams, general manager at LINK Recruitment. "However sales, commerce and business are professions more competitive driven than reliant upon an employee's tertiary education," he said Assessing what's important to you and where you want your career to go is the most important thing when it comes to choosing where to study, says Mr Williams. "Depending on where you want to be, a university degree may not be necessary," he said.

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Rudd following Howard on welfare

HOW very un-Laborlike, said one Labor MP in response to the Rudd Government's proposal to introduce legislation this week that would tie welfare payments to the responsibility of parents to ensure their children attend school. Not all Labor MPs are on side, it seems. The Rudd Government is about to discover that tough love is a tough policy. Nay-sayers wedded to the failed idea that compassion comes in the form of unconditional welfare will be out in force to kill off Labor's embrace of mutual responsibility.

Where, one must ask, have these Labor MPs been? Welfare reform that matches rights with responsibilities was endorsed long ago by the Centre-Left in the US under Democratic president Bill Clinton and in Britain under Labour prime minister Tony Blair. They proved that linking rights to responsibilities was not some nasty conservative agenda to punish those most in need. It is an idea that crosses the political divide for the simple reason that it works, whereas past policies of passive welfare have failed.

So credit where it's due. Kevin Rudd is right to point out that an education revolution depends on children attending school. Education Minister Julia Gillard says there could be up to 20,000 Australian children who are not at school, with Families Minister Jenny Macklin suggesting that at least 2000 children are not enrolled at school within the Northern Territory.

Though it's a case of Labor-come-lately for some in the ALP, the Rudd Government's plan to tackle the problem of truancy by setting up trials in six NT communities and in Western Australia before a national roll-out deserves unequivocal praise.

For too long, welfare has been seen as an unfettered right, without any attendant responsibilities. The rights-based culture that emerged in the 1960s and `70s failed, in particular, an entire generation of indigenous people. Many of them are lost. Uneducated and untrained, relegated to the dysfunctional fringes, they will never have a chance of entering mainstream society. Now, the children of that generation risk being lost too unless policies encourage parents to accept responsibility for their children. Accordingly, Labor's belated acknowledgment of past policy failures is to be applauded.

But let's also pay tribute to those who got us to the point where a Labor government in Australia is ready to instil responsibilities into the welfare equation. Howard haters, shut your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears. Here it is. By tackling the old orthodoxy of no-responsibility welfare, John Howard fundamentally realigned our thinking on this issue.

Sure, we watched welfare reform unfold in the US and Britain. But in Australia the Rudd Government is proposing to link welfare to parental responsibility after a decade of conservative rule that did the hard yards on welfare reform.

Encouraged by The Australian, which provided an early and continuing platform for genuine debate about these critical issues, what was once the accepted left-wing orthodoxy has been challenged and found wanting by a more questioning mindset. Not so long ago, if you raised questions about welfare you would be labelled as mean-spirited. If you raised those questions about welfare in relation to indigenous people, you were mean-spirited and racist. Back then, orthodox thinking was framed around the virtues of Aboriginal welfarism, apologies, treaties and separatism.

By tackling that PC-infected entrenched orthodoxy, the Howard government legacy is one that has paved the way for Labor's present policy. Under Howard, the first steps to address indigenous disadvantage were premised on practical reconciliation: on outcomes, not politics. Symbolism was eschewed as demonstrably counterproductive to solving disadvantage and passive welfare uncovered as poison. When critics shouted about racism, Howard did not flinch. His government challenged mindless policies such as the Community Development Employment Program, which allowed able-bodied indigenous people to work for a few hours a week in return for full welfare.

As a reminder of that fundamental shift, it's worth remembering that Noel Pearson once derided the Howard government as "racist scum" and said Howard was "totally useless to the nation". That was before Pearson's epiphany that greater individual responsibility, not indigenous victimhood, was the way to address disadvantage and dysfunction within indigenous communities.

Today, indigenous leaders such as Pearson and former ALP federal president Warren Mundine are daily pushing the frontiers for more sensible indigenous policies that promote education, training and work as the solution to Aboriginal dysfunction. They recognise that welfare reform must escape the shackles of left-right labels. After all, as The Australian said last Friday in an editorial, Ben Chifley's vision of a Labor light on the hill did not involve "putting an extra sixpence in somebody's pocket". Chifley's 1949 call was about empowering people.

Rudd is on that path. His proposal for a 13-week suspension of welfare as a last resort for parents who do not ensure their children attend school is premised on the state providing the right signals to encourage parents to do the right thing by their children. As Gillard said, a child who misses large slabs of schooling is set up for failure for the rest of their lives.

Sadly, so many on the Left remain cemented to past policies predicated on the role of the state rather than the power of individuals. Critics immediately labelled Rudd's plan as a "blunt instrument". They prefer to point the finger of blame at anyone except parents. Blame the system. Blame the schools, they say. Australian Greens senator Rachel Siewert described Labor's policy as "crazy thinking in the 21st century from a government that's supposed to be committed to social inclusion".

Yet genuine social inclusion must mean encouraging people to take responsibility for their own lives. Those who view individual responsibility with suspicion necessarily view human potential with equal suspicion. Their paternalism is based on an inherently defeatist view of human ability and aspiration. It entrenches social exclusion and human misery, and ensures the only outcome of their paternalism is the continued existence of their own handout-premised industries.

The importance of the Rudd Government finally confronting the unprogressive consequences of the so-called progressive mindset cannot be underestimated. The Howard government was always going to be attacked by so-called progressives as launching a right-wing ideological crusade in its efforts to encourage greater personal responsibility.

The Rudd Labor Government can, depending on the strength of its conviction, bring many of these critics to a quiet halt by following Howard and showing courageous leadership aimed at moving the national conversation on disadvantage in more sensible directions.

The fear is that this will be some will-o'-the-wisp Labor policy that flickers with hope but can never be realised, either because Labor is not serious about the policy or because it falls victim to old Labor types still wedded to the past.

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