Action from Rudd at last: Freeze on "asylum" applications

But action of the hamfisted sort one expects of Leftists

THE Federal Government has frozen processing of all applications from asylum seekers from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan to try to stop the tide of arrivals.

The suspension of processing is effectively immediately, and will be reviewed in three months for asylum seekers from Sri Lanka and in six months for asylum seekers from Afghanistan.

It says changing situations in both nations may affect visa applicants' claims for protection. The Government says it accepts its Christmas Island facilities are stretched because of the number of arrivals.

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Greenie scheme burns down houses

As stupid as most Greenie schemes but more visibly so

A YOUNG Malvern East family is the latest face of the roof insulation debacle as figures show insulation was the cause of eight fires a month in Victoria this year. The Opposition has now called for all 1.1 million homes to be inspected as the toll from the government's botched rebate scheme continues to mount.

Father-of-two Kemal Brkic, 35, is counting his blessings after awaking suddenly around 4.30am to the smell of burning electrical wires at his Waverley Rd, Malvern East home. He said he checked the roof when he noticed marks appearing on his ceiling and was confronted by flames leaping one to two feet in the air. He managed to douse the blaze with a fire extinguisher but said it could have been much worse.

Commander Ian Hunter, the head of the MFB fire investigation unit, said the fire in the Waverley Rd home had started after insulation over downlights caught fire. He said the old blow-in insulation had recently been removed from the ceiling and replaced with batts. But he said not all the old insulation had been removed properly and had gathered against downlights. The new batts were placed directly over the lights and they overheated, he said.

Mr Brkic’s new insulation was installed about six weeks ago under the Federal Government’s scheme. "Another five or ten minutes and the whole roof would have gone," Mr Brkic said. "To have woken up at that time, and had a fire extinguisher in the house... we were pretty lucky." He urged anyone who had insulation installed recently to have it checked, especially if they also have downlights. "I'm so grateful all the family was safe. I had my mum and dad in the house and my two young kids. "It was pretty scary.'

Figures show huge increase in the number of house fires caused by insulation in the past 12 months. The MFB attended 31 ceiling fires involving insulation from July to December in Victoria last year, compared to just seven in the first six months. "Coincidentally that's about the time the home owners insulation program commenced," he said.

Fire investigators also looked into a second fire overnight at Glenda Rd, Doncaster, where insulation was installed as part of the rebate scheme in November last year. But it turned out to be caused by a faulty light bulb fitting - not incorrectly installed insulation. However with all the publicity over the debacle the incident had homeowner Wilma Garland, who is in her 80s, worried that she was yet another victim.

The government said last week the number of fires linked to the scheme was 105. It axed the $2.45 billion rebate scheme after it was linked to the deaths of four installers, house fires, and safety and quality problems potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of homes.

It will start a scaled-back scheme on June 1. [They're slow learners]

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Enquiries are still ongoing but the house in an overnight fire that killed two people was also "insulated" recently and we may therefore have another result of this "know-all" Greenie scheme




Starving to slow death in a notorious government hospital - family claims grandad ignored

A WOMAN spent an agonising week watching her father waste away in one of Sydney's top hospitals because there was no one rostered on that could insert a feeding tube. Stricken grandfather Max Miller went without food for eight days after the nasal tube providing him with life-giving sustenance failed last Tuesday while he was being treated at Royal North Shore Hospital.

The retired advertising executive, 83, broke his neck in a fall on March 19 and complications with his injury last week prevented a new tube being reinserted. The only option was for a different feeding passage, known as a PEG tube, to be inserted directly into his stomach. But Mr Miller was told he would have to wait because it was Easter and there was no one around to do it.

It was only after his daughter Prue Miller contacted The Daily Telegraph in desperation yesterday that her father finally made it to the front of the queue and got the procedure. "The doctor said on Thursday they would place him on the acute list to get him a PEG line but five days later there was still nothing done," Ms Miller said. "He was just disappearing before our eyes and he was so terrified. He kept saying to me 'I don't want to die, I don't want to die'."

Ms Miller said she "begged and begged" for staff to do something. "They told me it was up to the radiology department but the radiology department said that they were too busy," she said. "The system has become so appalling that people are dying simply because there is no one around to do what is needed."

A spokeswoman for Royal North Shore Hospital said Mr Miller was still receiving fluids, electrolytes and glucose via an intravenous drip after his feeding tube failed. She said his operation to have the PEG tube inserted was rescheduled "due to more serious cases taking priority". "The hospital believes that the appropriate care and treatment has been and is being provided," she said.

Mr Miller's case emerged just three days after The Daily Telegraph reported that 87-year-old World War II veteran Kevin Park called triple-0 from his hospital bed in Lismore because he could not get help from nursing staff.

It also coincided with nurses at Bathurst Base Hospital threatening industrial action because of "horrendous and unacceptable" work pressures.

NSW Nurses Association general secretary Brett Holmes said the hospital's surgical ward was funded for 12 beds but had up to 18 patients over the weekend, while the medical ward had to care for an extra five patients beyond its capacity.

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The lying obesity propaganda never stops

There is not even epidemiological evidence behind the assertions below. The epidemiology shows that it is people of MIDDLING weight, not slim people, who live longest

OBESITY has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of premature death and illness in Australia, as experts say the federal government is woefully unprepared for a tsunami of weight-related health problems.

Fat was rapidly becoming the biggest public health challenge Australia had to face, said the president of the Public Health Association of Australia, Mike Daube, who is also the deputy chairman of the government's National Preventative Health Taskforce.

New figures from Western Australia, which are expected to be echoed across Australia, show the contribution of excessive weight to ill health has more than doubled in just six years [And how do they judge that? It's just opinion. You can bet that the death certificates concerned say things like "myocardial infarction", not "obesity"], and by 2006 accounted for 8.7 per cent of all disease. Tobacco's role has fallen by a quarter, and now causes 6.5 per cent of illness and early death.

"The obesity crisis is not on its way - it is already here," Professor Daube said. "What we have done about obesity is not working. This issue needs concentrated and determined action."

He said that while the federal government had done more than its predecessors there was an urgent need for the issue to be high on the agenda of the Council of Australian Governments meeting in Canberra on April 19.

"Our political leaders should be considering not only improvements to the hospital system but how to stop literally hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths," he said.

The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has signalled he will use the COAG meeting to push the states to accept his hospital reform plan. Critics have said it might not work well for complex diseases such as those caused by obesity, which is linked to increased rates of diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

More than 60 per cent of Australian adults and one in four children are overweight or obese. In 2008 the cost of obesity in NSW alone was $19 billion, according to NSW Health.

Ian Olver, chairman of the Australian Chronic Disease Prevention Alliance, criticised the government for its lack of action on the taskforce's recommendations last year. Professor Olver said governments had acted strongly against tobacco but had failed to tackle obesity adequately. "They have access to evidence-based policy and they need to act on it," he said.

The leader of the study, Victoria Hoad, said she expected the rest of the country to reflect the findings in Western Australia. "Smoking traditionally has been the leading preventable cause of disease but people have been getting fatter and quitting smoking," she said.

Timothy Gill, from the Boden Institute at Sydney University, said people in their 30s and 40s did not understand they faced health problems caused by obesity that in the past were more commonly seen in people in their 60s and 70s. "There has been a degree of normalisation of the problems," he said. It took 50 years to lower the rates of tobacco use in Australia but there was not that time left to deal with obesity, he said.

A spokesman for the Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, said that the government was investing $872 million in preventive health.

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The light of publicity squeezes some decency out of the West Australian government

A CANCER stricken WA pensioner robbed of $70,000 in life savings will finally get some of his money back. Attorney-General Christian Porter has finally agreed to give Mr Fletcher back some of the money he was robbed of two years ago. The back down comes after The Sunday Times highlighted the dying man’s plight on March 21.

Two years ago thieves broke into his home near Kwinana and stole a safe containing $70,000 - his life savings. No one was ever convicted of the break in, but four people were convicted of receiving money stolen in the burglary.

Police seized cars that the offenders were alleged to have bought with some of the stolen money. The cars were forfeited to the state and sold, but instead of giving the proceeds to Mr Fletcher, the government simply put the money into consolidated revenue.

Mr Porter said today the money from the sale of the cars and any money that may have been recovered from the robbery would be returned to Mr Fletcher.

Kwinana MP Roger Cook, who fought for the return of Mr Fletcher’s money, said today the government back down was a welcome development in the long running saga.

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Note that my QANTAS/Jetstar blog continues to chronicle bad and alarming news about QANTAS. Six stories already this month