The high standards of government schools again

No wonder around 40% of Australian teenagers go to private schools. Government education departments don't give a stuff about anything -- except their tea-breaks, of course. I worked in one once so the story below does not surprise me. "Just don't bother us", is their attitude.

It's the poor who have to put up with all this crap, of course. So we see what the "compassion" of a Leftist government really leads to: The opposite of what it claims. They don't give a stuff about the poor. All they care about is sounding good

The mother of a student at a country primary school plagued by years of inappropriate sexual behaviour between its pupils has hit out at the lack of action by authorities. As revealed by The Advertiser yesterday, a country primary school has reported to the Education Department at least 60 incidents of inappropriate sexual behaviour by its students in the past three years. Among the incidents were boys exposing themselves in class, throwing girls to the ground and simulating sex, pulling down other students' pants and underwear, writing sexually explicit stories and the use of threatening sexual language among students. In one case, a student brought a plastic penis to school and sexually harassed another student. The school's plight only became public after the 28-year-old mother complained to her local MP.

The MP used Freedom of Information laws to obtain pages of school incident reports detailing a catalogue of shocking sexual behaviour since 2006. The mother yesterday told The Advertiser her five-year-old son had only been at the school for a fortnight when he was urinated on twice by another student. "This same child later on knocked a toilet door off and asked him to touch his penis, and this same child was also asking my son and other children at the school for sex," she said.

"We reported it to the school. The school counsellor then told us she had already been into the reception classroom a couple of times to talk about inappropriate sexual behaviour. "As parents, we were never told a counsellor had been having sex education talks with our reception-aged children."

The mother said her 11-year-old daughter also had been the victim of violent sexual threats by boys at the school, who had talked of raping her. "Teachers dismissed that as children just learning a new word over the holidays," she said. The mother, who has since pulled her son out of the school, said Education Department officials only took her complaints seriously after she told them she had met with her local MP.

University of South Australia child development professor Freda Briggs told ABC radio yesterday that "this is the tip of the iceberg". "I'm getting desperate parents ringing me every other week about this sort of thing," she said. "We are dealing with teachers ignorance and also ignorance in the department."

Opposition education spokesman David Pisoni yesterday called on Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith to explain what was being done to address the problem. "The Minister repeatedly refused on ABC radio today to reveal what steps the department had taken to protect children and stop the extraordinary behaviour involving children as young as five," he said. "It is not good enough for the Minister to say these incidents happen in disadvantaged schools and blame forms of media. "This is totally inappropriate sexual behaviour and parents want to know what the Minister is doing about it."

But Dr Lomax-Smith accused the Opposition of using children to "score political points". "I have been assured that the school and district have dealt with the incidents immediately and appropriately when they occur, including advising relevant authorities where necessary," she said.

Education Department chief executive Chris Robinson said swift action had been taken, but he remained "very concerned" by groups of students who were "multiple" offenders. He said some students had been suspended, mandatory reports had been made to child protection authorities and students and parents had been counselled. Police have not been involved, he said.

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Deadbeat public hospital getting supplies from a veterinary practice!

It has been known for months that this hospital cannot pay its bills but the problem continues

A doctor has dipped into his own pocket to buy equipment for patient tests as supply shortages reach crisis point at a western New South Wales hospital. The doctor bought the equipment so a diagnostic blood test could be processed at Dubbo Base Hospital, while nursing staff say they are tired of sourcing medical supplies from the local vet.

Dubbo medical staff council chairman Dr Dean Fisher said there had been ongoing problems at the hospital, but patient care was now threatened. The hospital's pathology department had recently advised staff not to order blood tests because the associated equipment stocks were running low. "It is the first time that I'm aware that a doctor has had to buy supplies and that stems mostly from bills unpaid by GWAHS (Greater Western Area Health Service), which stopped supplies being sent up to us to use," Dr Fisher said. "In the past it's been unpaid food bills, unpaid transport bills, now it's affecting patient safety and that's of extraordinary concern."

On Monday, medical staff cast a vote of no-confidence in hospital management. Staff now want to meet with management and ask that NSW Premier Nathan Rees and Health Minister John Della Bosca visit the hospital to discuss supply shortages. "We've had enough of nursing staff having to go down the the local veterinary clinic to get bandages and urinary dip sticks to be able to continue patient care," Dr Fisher said.

"Every six to 12 months we have a crisis here. "We are short from a workforce point of view, both medically and with nursing personnel. They (GWAHS) bring in a external auditor at great expense to look at the problems. That money could be so much better spent."

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) said rural hospitals urgently needed state government funds to boost patient care. "If there are funds available to be spent, rural hospitals should be the first in line," AMA NSW president Dr Brian Morton said in statement today.

Mr Della Bosca, appointed health minister last month, has said previously he planned to visit hospitals in rural NSW. A spokeswoman for his office could not confirm when the minister would visit Dubbo. Mr Della Bosca last month could not confirm reports from Independent Dubbo MP Dawn Fardell that businesses were waiting for $150,000 worth of bills to be paid by the area health service. But he admitted there was a systemic problem and the service had "cash flow problem".

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State health boss pledges to fix "broke" public hospital

The blowhard is "investigating" it. Why not get the chequebook out first so suppliers are paid and can resume supplies?

NEW South Wales Health Minister John Della Bosca has promised to fix a "systemic failure" that forced doctors at a hospital in the state's west to buy their own medical supplies. Mr Della Bosca today said he had launched an investigation into cash-flow problems at the Greater Western Area Health Service which led to shortages of medical gear at Dubbo Base Hospital. "The direct answer is cash flow, and it is totally unacceptable for doctors and nurses to be paying for supplies out of their own pocket,'' he told Fairfax Radio Network. "It is totally unacceptable, if it is true, that doctors and nurses are having to borrow bandaging from local veterinary scientists. "I'm immediately having that investigated as of today.''

Mr Della Bosca said before medical staff went public with their concerns, he had held a meeting with the GWAHS's chief financial officer a week ago. The meeting had led to the payment of about 5000 outstanding accounts. "Those creditors are now satisfied and supplies have been restarted,'' Mr Della Bosca said. '(But) we need to fix the system, there's a systemic failure here and I'm getting to the bottom of it. "I expect to have it fixed and fixed very quickly.'' ....

The GWAHS has brought forward to Monday a meeting with the staff council originally scheduled for next month.

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Australian doctor-training catches the British disease

Britain too turns out thousands of medical school graduates who are given no chance of completing their training. That great government "planning" again, of course

Andrew Hobson isn't bad at maths, a factor contributing to his selection as a first-year medical student at the University of Queensland. So when he compares the 734 students to be awarded Queensland medical degrees in 2011 and the 667 hospital internships on offer in 2012, he worries. The numbers don't compute. Everyone sits there and says: 'Wow.' All of a sudden there's added pressure, almost competition, between the students because most of us know that as of 2012, here in Queensland, we no longer have that guaranteed intern spot."

Hobson is a product of a belated government realisation in the late 1990s that Australia was about to run out of doctors. In the years that followed, it did, to the point where it now draws 36 per cent of its general practitioners from overseas. That figure jumps to 41 per cent in the bush. Canberra was forced into a hasty rethink of its earlier policies aimed at limiting over-servicing by doctors. Its complaints about too many GPs and blow-outs in Medicare billing costs were replaced by a hefty catch-up investment in medical schools. By 2012, 19 medical schools - almost double the number operating throughout the '90s - will struggle with record throughput. Domestic graduate numbers will total almost 3000, an 86 per cent increase on last year's output. But although one problem seems solved, another has emerged.

Australia may have students in the pipeline, but a lack of training places before and after graduation - in hospitals, in general practice and the specialties - threatens to block the workforce flow just as it starts. The country's medical deans warned earlier this year the number of young doctors was starting to exceed the capacity of some clinics, hospitals and medical colleges to give them on-the-job training and access to patients. "The situation is becoming critical," they said.

The cracks first appeared in 2005, however. That year, the Australian Medical Workforce Advisory Committee concluded the country was short of 800 to 1300 GPs. It was also the year that a Medical Journal of Australia study revealed teaching hospitals in the University of Newcastle medical school catchment had started to fall behind on clinical placements for the next generation of doctors. The school's student population outnumbered patients available on any given day by two to one.

It reminds Australian Medical Students Association president Michael Bonning of the British debacle, where a dearth of National Health Service training positions left thousands of young doctors jobless. "That's exactly what we're worried about," Bonning says. "The situation here hasn't yet reached those dire projections that we've seen in the UK, but what we want to do is learn from the mistakes over there."

After years of importing doctors, Britain earlier this year announced it was shutting the door to applicants from other Commonwealth countries, including Australia. Australia, which also has counted overseas-trained doctors among its biggest imports for many years, could start engaging in its own form of exclusion as soon as next year. Queensland, for example, may have to start limiting hospital internships to Australian graduates of its medical schools from the end of next year, when applicants start surpassing demand, Bonning notes. Bar a change of policy, by the time Hobson graduates, virtually none of the 67 overseas students awarded medical degrees from his and other Queensland universities are likely to find a home at the state's hospitals....

Australian medical graduates aren't able to go into independent practice straight out of university. Instead, they are put through long years of supervised training, first as hospital interns and postgraduate trainees, then through vocational training. The country's biggest vocational training program is one designed to turn graduates into GPs, who provide most of Australia's out-of-hospital health care. The Australian General Practice Training Program for next year, however, is already vastly oversubscribed. As of June 30 this year, there were 600 training spots and 733 applications.

The lack of certainty over future placements frustrates Bonning, who wants another 100 places added annually to the program during the next three years. "I think it's very unlikely and very much out of line with the Government's current push in primary care to think that they won't look at increasing the number of people in general practice," he says....

It's where the commonwealth, eight states and territories and about 20 medical colleges overlap that things get messy. The states and territories provide initial training for medical graduates in their teaching hospitals, in the form of a one-year internship and pre-vocational training. For each young doctor, cash-strapped public hospitals have to find the time and resources to supervise training while tending to their growing patient workloads. The Victorian Department of Human Services reportedly has gone as far as charging for clinical placements for students, according to the deans of the country's medical schools. This year, they called on governments to include explicit funding streams for medical education in hospital budgets as part of the next federal-state health funding agreement, to be signed within three months.

"Public hospitals have been able to shift much-needed funds away from teaching and research to meet the increasing costs of service delivery," they told the commonwealth's health reform adviser. "This has placed an increasing burden on medical schools to ensure adequate and quality clinical training placements."

Bonning, who graduates from UQ in seven weeks, has secured a hospital internship for next year. But his later years of vocational training, which qualify doctors for independent practice, are still not assured. The process of entry to general practice or a specialty involves not just multiple governments and agencies but the medical college that young doctors aspire to join. "It's just more complicated because there are more parties involved and any one of them can cause some problems," Bonning says. The relationship between the different parties has often been a strained one....

Successive federal governments have tried to unclog the bottlenecks and expose doctors to non-traditional practice by expanding areas in which training takes place to private hospitals, community medicine and public health. But the federal Department of Health and Ageing, too, has been overwhelmed bydemand. As of July this year, it had received about 500 applications for the 180 places it had funded for its 2009 program, which aims to give specialists experience working outside of public hospitals.

Bonning says Canberra needs to continue looking for placements beyond state hospital settings if it is to make its grand experiment in medical workforce planning work. "No matter how many students you put into a system, you essentially have to train them all the way through to independent practice," he says. "If we stop or neglect their training at any stage, you won't get the full pay-off that the community demands."

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The Wrong Plan for Australia

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has just unveiled a fiscal stimulus plan worth 10.4 billion Australian dollars ($7.4 billion). At around 1% of GDP, it's bold. Will it work? Probably not as intended.

The plan consists of a set of handouts for politically appealing groups, such as old-age pensioners and families with children. There's also a big boost to infrastructure spending. It's a dramatic change for a government that as recently as May was hewing to the tightest fiscal policy since 1970-71, with a budget surplus of 2.1% of GDP. That budget was designed to put downward pressure on inflation. Taken together with the Reserve Bank of Australia's one-percentage-point easing at the beginning of the month, the new stimulus package points to a major reassessment of economic risks on the part of Australian policymakers. Growth has replaced inflation as the top concern.

Mr. Rudd's plan might look like a solution in search of a problem. Economic growth is set to slow, but Australia's real economy has yet to show significant stress from the global financial crisis. Financial institutions remain sound, and confidence has been boosted by the weekend's coordinated move by Australia and New Zealand to insure deposits. Monetary policy has already responded aggressively and a sharp fall in the Australian dollar exchange rate relative to the U.S. dollar is performing its traditional function of insulating Australia from external economic shocks.

There's certainly room for stimulus measures. But there are risks to stimulus, too. Timing fiscal stimulus measures so they take effect when they are most needed is difficult. Get the timing wrong and these measures could end-up being pro- rather than counter-cyclical.

A case in point is the government's proposal to accelerate its infrastructure spending agenda. Even with an accelerated timetable, work on these projects will not commence until well into 2009, with much of the spending not seen until even later, when Australia may already be through the feared economic downturn. Infrastructure spending decisions made in a crisis atmosphere might not be evaluated to the highest standards. Australia could be saddled with some wasteful rather than productivity-enhancing infrastructure projects.

Other aspects of Mr. Rudd's plan are at odds with what government should be doing in the current environment. The plan provides $1.5 billion in grants to first-time home buyers. It would double the grant amount to buyers of existing homes, while tripling the grant to buyers of newly built homes. The latter measure will be useful in addressing the chronic housing shortage that has driven housing affordability in Australia to record lows and seen rising rents makes a significant contribution to inflation.

The grant to buyers of existing homes, however, will serve only to bid up the prices of existing properties, the opposite of what is needed to improve housing affordability. This will benefit existing home owners rather than new home buyers, and has little value as a stimulus measure because it merely transfers wealth from buyers to current owners rather than encouraging new housing supply.

In other respects, the plan moves away from, not toward, broader structural reforms important to the long-term health of the economy. Consider the lump-sum payment to old-age and other pensioners, scheduled for December. Single pensioners will receive a one-time payment of A$1,400, while couples will receive A$2,100. The government calls this a "down payment on long-term pension reform," but it leaves the long-term future of pension reform an open issue. The focus for future reform needs to be on reducing dependence on the government pension. This means making the pension less rather than more attractive, so as to encourage people to save for their retirement.

Similarly, the government will make a one-off A$1,000 payment for each child in eligible families. While this may have some value as a short-term economic stimulus measure, it does not address some of the long-term issues clouding the family payments system, including the disincentives to labor-force participation.

The biggest problem with the stimulus plan, however, is something that's not in it -- tax relief. That too has been left to a future review by the Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry. There had been speculation the government might introduce a one-off tax rebate. Since the government says it is making "down payments" on future reform, a tax rebate would have provided a welcome signal of the government's commitment to this vital policy area. A tax rebate would diffuse more broadly than one-off welfare payments and reward labor-force participation rather than welfare dependence.

Short-term stimulus measures need not conflict with the imperatives of long-term structural reform. The government should have used the global financial crisis to gain increased traction for a long-term structural reform agenda that will provide lasting economic security, and not just a short-term boost to spending. The biggest flaw of Mr. Rudd's plan is all the opportunities it missed.

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