Final hurdle falls for Victorian abortion Bill

Abortion fills me with horror but I have never thought that criminalizing it was the way to go. I agree with Cardinal Pell and George W. Bush that support for the mother is the key to preventing it

Abortion will be decriminalised after a historic late-night vote of State Parliament. The Upper House last night voted 23 to 17 to overhaul abortion laws and make terminations more accessible for Victorian women. The decisive vote ended decades of wrangling and will mean terminations up to 24 weeks will be legal.

The result was embraced by pro-choice MPs but decried by anti-abortionists with two opponents of the Abortion Law Reform Bill escorted out of parliament during last night's debate. The bitter recriminations continued late into the night, with MPs backing change sent a scathing text message at 9pm by an anti-abortionist. "You have just condemned untold numbers of unborn Victorians to death," the message said. "You will have to live with that - their deaths are because of your votes." This message came 90 minutes before the Bill was passed by the Upper House.

MPs who voted against change last night included Major Projects Minister Theo Theophanous and Treasurer John Lenders. It was one of the toughest debates in parliament in decades. An earlier vote saw Legislative Council president Bob Smith explode with rage after opponents of the Bill screamed from the public gallery.

Despite opposing change, Mr Smith, who was outraged at the slow response from security staff, was forced to eject two protesters who screamed out after the vote. Prue Neiberding, from Youth 4 Life, shouted at MPs who backed change: "Shame on you. Blood (is) on your hands." Another protestor, Jack Fox, shouted: "There'll be retribution in this country."

Catholic Health Australia said if the package was passed it would not lead to a cut in hospital services. But CHA chief Martin Laverty warned that the CHA would review conscience provisions in the Bill, potentially testing the law if hospital staff who opposed abortion were required to refer pregnant patients for terminations.

Under the reforms, terminations will be legalised up to 24 weeks and Victoria will have some of the most liberal laws in the country. It allows abortions after 24 weeks but only with the consent of two doctors.

Abortion law reform campaigner Dr Jo Wainer said the expected passing of the legislation in the Upper House would help lift the "burden of shame". She said the debate had brought her to tears. "The Parliament has shown tremendous courage and some of the speeches made me weep," she said.

Premier John Brumby cautiously welcomed the 23-17 vote when the Bill was second read earlier yesterday. "It was always my view that this legislation should be put before the Parliament and it was always my view that it should be supported," he said.

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Australian government rethinks immigration boost amid global financial crisis

Australian Labor unionists have long been critical of immigration from low-wage countries so maybe the political party that ostensibly represents them is returning to its roots

Australia said on Friday it will re-think a large boost to immigration as the global financial crisis buffets the economy and places a brake against years of strong growth. With economic expansion tipped by the IMF to almost halve to just above two per cent, centre-left Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said his government would re-assess the need for a planned 19.8 per cent immigration increase, or 31,000 extra migrant places. "As with all previous governments, and mine's the same, whenever we set immigration targets we will adjust them according to the economic circumstances of the day," Rudd told local radio.

Australia is a nation of immigrants, with nearly one-in-four born overseas among the 21 million population. Only two months ago, before financial tumult spread around the world, Rudd's government agreed to a pilot scheme bringing 2,500 Pacific islanders to Australia to help fill 22,000 seasonal agriculture jobs which growers have been unable to fill with unemployment at 32-year lows. As well, the government planned to accept 190,300 new migrants before July next year, including 56,500 places for family members sponsored by people already in Australia and 133,500 places for those with highly skilled newcomers.

The booming economy, growing at more than four per cent annually during 16 years of expansion, has been facing shortages of skilled labour, pushing up wages and inflation.

But critics of migration now say economic chaos on international markets will erode the need for more workers, even in resource-rich states like Western Australia and Queensland.

Rudd said immigration was not a one-size-fits-all approach and the government would take advice on where workers were still needed. Unemployment increased by 21,700 last month, ticking up from 4.1 per cent to 4.3 per cent in seasonal terms.

Australia's peak union body, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, said there was no case yet to lift migration numbers as the threat of a US-led recession gripped world markets. "You would want to be convinced that immigration was not adding to employment growth and that it wasn't in fact necessary to fill medium- to long-term skills vacancies," ACTU president Sharan Burrow told the Australian newspaper.

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NSW: Hospital statistics are so disastrous that the government disowns its own statistics

They sure are desperate in the NSW government

The NSW Government has an explanation for why some public hospitals are failing to see most of their urgent patients on time -- it does not believe its own health figures. According to the data, in January only 36 per cent of patients with an imminently life-threatening condition were seen within the required 10 minutes of arriving at the emergency department of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, in inner Sydney.

But the NSW Health Department says this figure and those for Westmead Hospital are wrong because of problems with collecting data, even though they are included in the performance indicators it publishes to enable people to compare hospitals. Asked by The Weekend Australian why the Government had published incorrect figures, a spokesman for NSW Health Minister John Della Bosca said it was important to publish the information for the sake of transparency. "Although some of the data might reflect poorly on these hospitals, we are prepared to wear that while we try to fix the teething problems," he said.

The revelations add a bizarre twist to the string of claims about fudged figures on hospital performance in NSW and Victoria. Mostly the allegations are that data is being massaged to meet performance benchmarks. But in this case, the NSW Government claims the figures understate the true situation. State governments have responded to dissatisfaction with public hospitals by releasing data on their performances, available on health department websites.

According to former Victorian and NSW premier's department head Ken Baxter, whose consultancy prepared a report on the funding of public hospitals earlier this year, the figures, particularly in NSW, "are not worth the paper they were written on". There were serious doubts about the veracity of the data fed into them from hospitals. Nor were they necessarily the best indicators of performance. "For example, waiting times for elective surgery can be manipulated for what you want out of them," Mr Baxter said.

The report by TFG International, of which Mr Baxter is chairman, found hospital data was "inconsistent, patchy and not readily comparable on a state-by-state basis". Although the states had spent more than $2billion on information technology and data collection systems, this money had "largely been wasted".

Documents obtained by NSW Opposition health spokeswoman Jillian Skinner show that patients are not included on the waiting lists for elective surgery if they cannot be operated on within a certain period.

The problems highlight the challenge the Rudd Government faces in establishing a national system of performance benchmarks on which it will base part of its funding of hospitals under a new agreement with the states due to apply from January 1. Canberra wants to use better and more uniform data to drive improvements in hospital performance. Treasurer Wayne Swan quotes the example of New York state publishing information for hospitals on patients receiving heart bypass surgery. In the three years after the introduction of the system in 1989, mortality rates for cardiac operations fell by more than 40per cent.

The Weekend Australian asked NSW Health why only 36per cent of patients taken to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in January with an imminently life-threatening condition were seen within the required 10 minutes, compared with the average for all hospitals in NSW of 82per cent.

The figure for the RPA rose in subsequent months and reached 71per cent in June, the latest figures to be published. But it is still below the figures for most other hospitals. The pattern was the same for patients with potentially life-threatening conditions, who are supposed to be seen within 30 minutes, and potentially serious candidates, who should be seen within an hour. The department responded that the explanation involved a "technical issue, related to how data is extracted out of the patient systems into reporting systems ... It is important to notethat clinical care delivered at this hospital remains of the highest quality, although this may not be reflected in the triage benchmarks".

What then of the figures for Westmead hospital, in western Sydney, which showed that just 36per cent of patients with potentially life-threatening conditions were seen within the required 30 minutes in March, compared with the average for all NSW hospitals of 74per cent? Low figures were also reported for Westmead in most other months this year, although they had improved by June.

The department said Westmead and other hospitals were introducing a new emergency department system and that "some initial usability and process issues associated with this new system have been experienced ... This has led to some inaccurate under-reporting against performance benchmarks ... Again, standards of care were not affected". NSW Health said both hospitals had experienced higher-than-average increases in emergency attendances.

The independent and not-for-profit Australian Council on Healthcare Standards, which collects data from hospitals, said last year that only one of the indicators of treatment in emergency departments showed satisfactory results in 2006. This was for the immediately life-threatening cases, required to be seen within two minutes, where the benchmark was met in 99per cent of cases throughout the nation.

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QLD: Wire from public hospital surgery left inside EIGHT children

Not just one: EIGHT! Amazing

QUEENSLAND Health has ordered checks on about 200 child hospital patients after wire from a frequently used piece of medical equipment was found inside eight of them. The children have all been treated with what's known as a peripherally inserted central catheter, commonly called a PIC line, used to deliver drugs, including chemotherapy. A PIC line is inserted in a vein in the elbow, and then advanced through increasingly larger veins, toward the heart.

Concerns were raised this week about a particular brand of PIC line after a piece of wire was discovered inside a patient at Townsville Hospital. Australia's medical regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, has been notified of the problem. Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said today Queensland Health was in the process of notifying parents of children potentially affected. She urged parents not to panic because there was no evidence of children coming to harm as a result of the wire being left in.

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