Rudd went to a PRIVATE hospital for his procedure

Another Leftist hypocrite. Leftists routinely glorify socialized medicine -- but only for "the masses". Britain's "Red Queen" in the 60s was Barbara Castle, a minister in Harold Wilson's Labour government. She was famous for saying that it was "obscene" for anybody to "carve their way to a hospital bed with a chequebook". But what did she do when her son got sick? Being very well-paid as a government minister, she got him admitted to a private hospital, of course, under a false name. Rudd could hardly hide his identity, however

KEVIN RUDD spent a restless night after his release from hospital, his wife Therese Rein said yesterday. But at least the former prime minister was able to get prompt attention.

Nearly 50,000 people in Australia had their gall bladder removed last year and - apparently unlike Mr Rudd - most of them had to wait. The average time on a public hospital waiting list was 47 days, while one in 10 waited six months. In NSW, one in 50 endured intermittent symptoms for a year.

But Michael Bickford, a Melbourne surgeon who specialises in upper gastrointestinal conditions, said about 20 per cent of cases came on suddenly with severe pain that required urgent surgery - and such people were usually operated on promptly regardless of them having private health insurance....

The average hospital stay is 1.5 days in private hospitals and two days in the public system. Mr Rudd had exceeded this in his Thursday-to-Monday stay at the Mater Private Hospital in Brisbane.

But Mr Bickford said those with more sudden onset gall bladder problems might need more recuperation time, often with an extra day or two of intravenous antibiotics to damp down any residual infection.

The operation, which Mr Rudd in common with most patients had using the laparoscopic - or keyhole - technique, is one of the commonest procedures in Australia. One in 500 people undergoes it every year, on a par with hernia repair and haemorrhoid excision.

More HERE





Doctors threaten to walk over 'bullying'

Queensland Health is a bureaucratic quagmire with more "administrators" than doctors and nurses. And far from all that "administering" doing any good, it just stultifies everything, including patient care. The system was set up in 1944 so has had over 60 years of bureaucratic metastasization. It's exactly the mess that you would expect from that

DOCTORS are threatening to abandon Queensland's public hospitals, fed up with the "bullying" tactics of Queensland Health.

More than 60 of the state's most senior doctors - Visiting Medical Officers (VMOs) - will quit the public health system unless Queensland Health urgently addresses their concerns, said the chairman of the Australian Medical Association Queensland's VMO committee, Dr Ross Cartmill.

"The resignations will throw whole departments at our major hospitals into chaos, especially orthopaedics, ear, nose and throat, urology and plastic and reconstructive surgery," he said. "I actually believe some of these will have to close.

"The majority of surgery in our public hospitals is performed by VMOs, the fact they have been treated with such disdain by Queensland Health is a scandal," Dr Cartmill said. "Many VMOs have indicated they are ready to resign and believe many more will follow them out the door."

Dr Cartmill said VMOs are ready to resign as the VMO agreement with Queensland Health expired more than 18 months ago. "Essentially we have had VMOs working without the certainty of an agreement with Queensland Health for 18 months, but enough is enough," he said.

"VMOs in South East Queensland will resign in support of their colleagues who treat patients and teach junior doctors in regional and rural locations such as Mt Isa on behalf of Queensland Health."

SOURCE






Father fined for confronting child's bully

What are you supposed to do when your kid is bullied at school? The schools and the police are useless. Kids have been killed because handwringing is all that schools do about bullying

An Ipswich dad has been fined $300 for confronting bullies who relentlessly teased his daughter at school.

Ipswich Magistrates Court was told the man's daughter had been teased at her school after she was scarred in an accident.

But the 34-year-old father, who had no previous criminal history, took matters into his own hands after he saw his daughter's tormentor at a shopping centre.

Prosecutor Senior Constable Adam McDonald said the man grabbed the bully by his shirt and said, "If you touch my daughter again I'll kill you".

The juvenile then went to Karana Downs police station to complain about the assault.

SOURCE







A Damascene conversion for the Australian Labor Party?

How come the centralizers have discovered decentralization?

PRIME Minister Julia Gillard might describe herself as an atheist. But yesterday's speech arguing that principals and parents should be given the freedom to manage their own schools represents a road-to-Damascus experience when it comes to empowering school communities.

While the Prime Minister's statement that a re-elected ALP government will work "to ensure that core decisions that make the most difference to student outcomes are devolved to schools" is commendable, Gillard's record as minister for education proves that her epiphany is more about political opportunism than conviction.

It also smacks of catch-up politics when the ALP releases a policy giving principals power over their schools just weeks after the Tony Abbott-led opposition promised to give school leaders control over school infrastructure spending - a policy condemned by federal Education Minister Simon Crean. During Gillard's time in charge of education, even though schools are a state's responsibility and the commonwealth government neither employs teachers nor manages schools, all roads led to Canberra and, as a result, classrooms have been paralysed by a command-and-control model of education.

During her nearly three years in charge of education, Gillard championed a raft of centrally inspired programs involving a national curriculum and assessment regime, national literacy and numeracy testing and a national approach to teacher registration and certification.

It's widely accepted that the Rudd-Gillard education revolution is inflexible and statist in its approach. Not surprisingly, the eminent educationalist Brian Caldwell from the University of Melbourne, gives the education revolution 2/10 for school autonomy and 1/10 for introducing models of innovative school governance. Across Australia, primary as well as secondary principal professional organisations have bemoaned the educational straitjacket being imposed by the ALP's education revolution and called for increased school autonomy.

One cannot but conclude that any Gillard-inspired school autonomy program, not starting until 2012 and only with a sample of schools, will be a Clayton's one. The promise to give school principals and parents freedom and flexibility at the local level amounts to nothing if schools are constrained and shackled by the type of government directives and demands exemplified by the ALP's education revolution.

Best illustrated by the fate of government schools under the Building the Education Revolution fiasco, the result of Gillard's approach is that state schools are denied the power to manage their affairs and tailor programs and initiatives to best suit their needs.

Whereas Catholic and independent schools, given the freedom and flexibility they have, are able to deliver school infrastructure efficiently and economically, government schools have been plagued by dodgy deals, cost over-runs and white elephants.

Yesterday's admission by Gillard that "without control over decision-making, principals are limited in their ability to respond to problems and are impeded in attempts to improve educational outcomes for their students" makes a good deal of sense.

Unfortunately, it comes too late for government schools shackled with useless infrastructure, and cannot absolve her of the failure to give state schools the power to properly implement the BER program over the past two years.

Doubts about yesterday's conversion to school autonomy in the middle of an election campaign, three weeks before judgment day, are reinforced by Gillard's inaction on the issue during her term as minister for education.

Under the Howard government a report was commissioned into school leadership and principal autonomy, undertaken by Educational Transformations and completed in December 2007. The report, based on national and international research, concluded that school autonomy was critical for raising standards, and that Australian principals are concerned about the adverse effect of the centralising of control over education.

Not only did Gillard, while she was minister for education, bury the report for nearly two years, finally releasing it in November 2009, but the Labor government has failed to adopt any of the report's recommendations.

At the 2007 election, the then Rudd opposition promised to give every senior school student a computer and to build a trade centre in every secondary school; neither promise has been fully implemented.

There must also be doubts whether the promise on school autonomy will ever be delivered. As the NSW ALP-led government learned a couple of years ago when it attempted to allow principals to hire and reward staff, the Australian Education Union is vehemently opposed to giving state schools control over their own destiny.

It's no secret that the AEU regularly campaigns in support of the ALP, injecting millions into marginal seats campaigns and funding anti-Coalition advertising. If the ALP is re-elected, it should not be a surprise if the promise to deliver school autonomy is put on the back burner and that it disappears into the byzantine bureaucracy represented by bodies such as the Council of Australian Governments.

SOURCE





"Brown Wash"

"Brown Wash" is a new hate-speech term describing climate skepticism dreamed up by Warmists attached to Australia's Green/Left public broadcaster, the ABC. They say that "Brownwashers" should be prosecuted for fraud.

Such threats seem to have faded away in most of the rest of the world but the mental world of many ABC "intellectuals" still seems to be fixed somewhere in the old East Germany so their polemical primitivism is no great surprise.

My immediate response is "Bring it on". I am sure most skeptics would LOVE to present their case before a court -- where it is evidence, not abuse, that counts.

Meanwhile, however, Jo Nova has some derisive comments on the ABC effusions. See HERE