Kid killed in busy school playground: Nobody charged

Police should have been able to take someone into custody same day

THE father of a teenager killed in a schoolyard brawl almost six months ago says it is "atrocious" no one has been charged. Steve Drummond, father of 15-year-old Jai Morcom, who died at Mullumbimby High School in northern NSW on August 29, slammed police yesterday after they issued a media release appealing for more witnesses. "It's pretty atrocious that this hasn't been sorted out by now," Mr Drummond told the Courier-Mail newspaper. "There were that many witnesses to it and there's no doubt there were a few (specific) kids involved."

Jai died after a playground fight over a lunch table. Students later staged a mass walkout and protest amid claims of a bullying problem at the school.

Mr Drummond has raised suggestions of "standover tactics" at Mullumbimby High, and NSW education officials have ordered a major review into student welfare at the school.

Tweed/Byron police crime manager Inspector Greg Carey appealed for patience, saying "every effort" was being made to solve the case. "We have conducted interviews with literally dozens of students, teachers and community members," he said. "We have been in constant contact with Jai's parents and the school community. "Investigators have also set up an email address which has been circulated throughout the school community, in the hope that additional information could be provided by that method."

Jai died from his injuries in the Gold Coast Hospital. Insp Carey said NSW police were still waiting the full autopsy report from Queensland authorities. "As Jai died in Queensland, the (NSW police) report will be submitted initially to the Queensland Coroner," Insp Carey said.

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Corporate regulator takes 9 years to make its case -- and still bogged down

It's either gross incompetence or a witchhunt with no substance behind it. Or maybe it's both. But as long as you are churning through heaps of taxpayer money, why worry? Very unjust treatment of the accused, though, who is at this stage entitled to the presumption of innocence. Fortunately, the judge recognizes that. Are government lawyers the worst of all? If they were any good, would they be working for the government?

THE Australian Securities and Investments Commission has again come under sustained fire in the Victorian Supreme Court where a judge hearing the regulator's case against the former AWB boss, Andrew Lindberg, has accused ASIC's lawyers of ignoring his rulings.

One day after Justice Ross Robson permanently halted one of two civil penalty cases against Mr Lindberg, the judge reiterated that, in his view, ASIC's claim against Mr Lindberg was limited only to breaches of Mr Lindberg's fiduciary duties that occurred before Saddam Hussein was toppled from power in March 2003, and not after that date.

ASIC strongly disagrees with this interpretation as it believes Mr Lindberg's duties to AWB, including the duty to inform the board and to investigate allegations of corrupt behaviour by the wheat exporter, continued unbroken from early 2000, when he was appointed chief executive, to February 2006, when he quit.

ASIC's board is expected to meet next week to decide if the regulator will appeal against Justice Robson's decision of Wednesday, when he stopped ASIC from proceeding with its second civil penalty case.

Justice Robson also said that considering all the interruptions to ASIC's original case against Mr Lindberg, including the regulator launching its second case in November and now seeking appeals against his decisions, he was concerned about prejudice to Mr Lindberg. ''I think therefore that the primary consideration here must be that Mr Lindberg gets a fair trial,'' Justice Robson said. ''I think we are really reaching the outer limits of when a person gets a fair trial when it is some nine years after the events. I think we should do as much as possible to get the trial over and done with.''

ASIC's original case, filed in December 2007 and amended several times, alleges Mr Lindberg knew about $US225 million of kickbacks that the wheat exporter secretly paid to Saddam's regime in breach of United Nations sanctions, and that by failing to stop those payments he brought the company into disrepute.

In the second case, ASIC alleged Mr Lindberg misled the AWB board and took steps to prevent his fellow directors learning about either the kickbacks or other abnormal transactions.

ASIC's counsel, Norman O'Bryan, SC, told the judge yesterday that if ASIC appeals his decision to halt the second case, then the ''cut-off'' date imposed by Justice Robson will certainly be raised in the Court of Appeal.

Amid some tense exchanges, Justice Robson said he had limited ASIC's allegations of breaches to events before March 2003 because that was the way he had interpreted ASIC's amended statement of claim.

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Tony Abbott does well with a female audience

It was a chance for Tony Abbott to put to rest the perception, in the words of his host, that "you don't like women". But the Christmas lunch in Brisbane of the Women's Network Australia became so much more for Mr Abbott and 80 corporate cougars, who ganged up on him over his penchant for Speedos, laughed at his spruiking of their wares and then joined hands as newfound disciples of self-helper Amanda Gore, author of The Gospel of Joy.

It wasn't an orchestrated picture opportunity; Mr Abbott had planned for a catch-up lunch with former MP and recently exhumed candidate Teresa Gambaro, who was already booked to attend the event in a room overlooking Allan Border Oval. And like the great Australian cricket captain, Mr Abbott played defensively when needed -- promising to supply a picture for the group's website, but only in "my boardies" -- and moving on to the front foot about his problematic image among women.

Asked how he could be perceived in such a way when he lived with four women, Mr Abbott hit a proverbial six over the crowd of businesswomen. "Well, I know who the boss is and it's not me," he said, to cheers.

He then paid tribute to his supportive and independent wife and three daughters, before tackling the question of his alleged problem with women. "I think it is (a myth)," he said. "But in the end, I suppose, in politics you just got, to some extent, just roll with the punches. "Sometimes they are low blows, sometimes, they are not and you try and be yourself and you hope people will give you a fair go."

It should have been a segue to Ms Gore -- who near-eulogises on how to deal with competitors in the workplace -- but first, Mr Abbott was called to compere the product promotions of several WNA members.

Ms Gore talked of surrounding yourself with the right people and being a leader who is a "spirit igniter, and not a spirit foofer" of colleagues.

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Illegal Immigration Crisis in Australia

By John Stone

ANYONE SURVEYING the Australian immigration policy scene today must be seized with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Not only has the Student Visa racket emerged into the plain light of day, with its chains of corruption from beginning to end, but the threat to our borders from the illegals has re-erupted.

The Student Visa program, as noted earlier, stands out for its corrupt practices in an immigration program now grown notorious for corruption across its entirety (including not least its Refugee and Special Humanitarian Visa components). So long as we blindly continue to fail to acknowledge that Australian citizenship (the real goal of almost all involved, both genuine students and bogus “students” alike) is a highly valuable property right—for which people from countries such as China and India will pay whatever bribes are necessary—it will remain so.

As to the re-emergence of the people-smugglers and their human cargoes, put aside, first, the lying (regrettably, there is no longer any other word for it) assertions by the Rudd government that the recent upsurge of illegals arriving on our shores owes its origins solely to “push” factors—in particular, the conflict in Afghanistan and the defeat of the Tamil Tiger insurgents in Sri Lanka. No more people are squatting in UNHCR camps around the world today than there were when the Howard government shut down the earlier people-smugglers’ trade in boat people.

At any given time, people-smugglers and their criminal clients have a choice of destinations—continental Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States (usually via Mexico), Canada, Australia and so on. The choice they make will be a function of the relative expense (that is, the fee charged by the smuggler), the relative value to the client if successful (very high in the case of Australia), and the relative likelihood of such success. Under the Howard regime, that last factor had become so small, and subject to such relative hardship even if successful, that the choice was strongly weighted in favour of attempting to go somewhere other than Australia.

The tearing down by the Rudd government of the barriers erected by its predecessor has changed all that, and no amount of lying denials of that fact will alter it.

At the time of writing, a new element has entered the equation. Having boasted of abolishing “the Pacific solution”, the Rudd government has now been forced to go, cap (plus millions of dollars) in hand to the government of Indonesia. On bended knees, it has been begging that country to “warehouse” two boatloads of illegals—most of them, seemingly, from Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, the criminals involved have resorted—with the eager co-operation of the Australian media—to one threat after another: first, to blow up, or set fire to, one of the boats in question; second, to embark on several hunger strikes—rapidly abandoned when that tactic failed to work; third, refusal to disembark from either vessel without various “guarantees”; and so on.

Not only is this whole bizarre incident leading to Australia being seen as a laughing stock around the world—with both the illegals and the Indonesian authorities playing our government for suckers—but also, even if eventually resolved (temporarily) in our favour, there can be no lasting assurance in such arrangements. To quote again from that above-mentioned Quadrant article three years ago, “we would be wise to avoid becoming too reliant on Indonesia’s goodwill and co-operation. As the record has consistently shown, those attitudes can change overnight.”

Meanwhile, the so-called processing facilities at Christmas Island have become rapidly over-crowded. (I say “so-called” because there is no way that people who arrive there without identity papers can be properly processed as to their criminal—or even terrorist—records, or general character. Nor, as a matter of fact, can they be properly checked for various transmissible diseases, given the facilities available on the island.) The government has been frantically trying to minimise this problem, principally by “clearing” the criminals involved and granting them Permanent Residence visas. So frantic has this process been that even the illegals—one or more of whom is known to have deliberately set fire to the boat off Darwin on which, as a result, five people perished—were also recently granted permanent residence and released into the West Australian community.

If the government’s performance on all this has been abysmal, the Opposition’s has been little better. Not until a former Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, spoke to the Australian (and then gave a succession of excellent, hard-hitting interviews to both radio and television), had we heard so much as a cheep out of the Opposition. Its formal spokeswoman on immigration matters, Sharman Stone (no relation, I am glad to say) had effectively said nothing. The best that the Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, could do was call for an inquiry! Why he would need an inquiry into these matters when he has within his own party room two of the most knowledgeable people in Australia—Philip Ruddock and Kevin Andrews, both of whom he has small-mindedly relegated to his backbench—beggars imagination.

In a larger sense, of course, we do need an inquiry, and a thoroughgoing one at that, into the whole corrupt immigration scene—one leading to an immediate major reform and reshaping of the Department of Immigration. The Howard government failed to take up that suggestion, and the present government will certainly not do so.

The bottom line is this. It is the first duty of any government to protect its citizens, including their protection against invasion by undesirables and incompatibles who seek to penetrate the nation’s borders by entering into criminal conspiracies with people-smugglers. The Rudd government’s palpable failure in this respect means that we have lost control of our borders. Just as the British government under Tony Blair (whom Kevin Rudd more and more closely resembles) lost control of immigration into Britain—with results that are now producing a sharp rise in the fortunes of Britain’s only truly fascist political party, the British National Party—so we are losing control of immigration into Australia. Though the consequences may be literally incalculable, one thing is certain: Australia will be a lesser country—and progressively so—as a consequence.

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CLIMATE ROUNDUP

Three current articles below

Climategate: ordering a better scare for Australia

The exchange and comments presented below by Andrew Bolt include something that is really explosive for anyone with the most basic knowledge of statistics. The Warmist scientist has undertaken to present changes that are not statistically significant (i.e. random changes) as if they WERE statistically significant. See the update at the foot of the article. Once again we see a total lack of scientific integrity among Warmists. The UEA is just a propaganda institution. It's not a real university's anus

CSIRO alarmist Barrie Pittock tells off Climategate scientist Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia for not presenting material that’s scary enough for green groups:

I would be very concerned if the material comes out under WWF auspices in a way that can be interpreted as saying that “even a greenie group like WWF” thinks large areas of the world will have negligible climate change. But that is where your 95% confidence limit leads.
Sorry to be critical, but better now than later!…

Dr A. Barrie Pittock

Post-Retirement Fellow*, Climate Impact Group

CSIRO Atmospheric Research

Hulme agrees to help, up to a point, to hide some doubts:

My reason for introducing the idea of only showing changes in T and P that *exceed* some level of ‘natural’ variability was a pedagogic one, rather than a formal statistical one (I concede that using ‘95% confidence’ terminology in the WWF leaflet is misleading and will drop this). And the pedagogic role of this type of visual display is to bring home to people that (some, much or all of) GCM simulated changes in mean seasonal precip. for some regions do *not* amount to anything very large in relation to what may happen in the future to precip. anyway…

The point behind all this is to emphasise that precip. changes are less well-defined than temp. changes *and* that we should be thinking of adaptation to *present* levels of precip. variability, rather than getting hung up on the problems of predicting future precip. levels. This pedagogic thinking is hard to communicate in a short WWF brochure.

Your concern about my message is well taken, however, and I intend to remove any reference to 95% confidence levels, to re-word the text to indicate that we are plotting precip. changes only ‘where they are large relative to natural variability’, and to reduce my threshold to the 1 sigma level of HadCM2 control variability (e.g. this has the effect of showing precip. changes for the majority of Australia even in the B1 scenario).

But I do not intend to abandon the concept. I think it important - even for Greenie groups - to present sober assessments of magnitudes of change. Thus making it clear that future changes in T are better defined that future changes in P, and also to point out that future emissions (and therefore climate change) may be as low as the B1 scenario (is B1 climate change negligible? I almost think so), whilst also being possibly as high as A2 is I think very important.

The alternative is to think that such a more subtle presentation is too sophisticated for WWF. But I think (hope) not. Thanks again Barrie for forcing me to think through this again.

Pittock then explains why he’s so keen to “improve” this material - and also illustrates just how close green groups are to the CSIRO (whose climate change risk expert Penny Whetton is married to a Greens politician):

I should perhaps explain my delicate position in all this. As a retired CSIRO person I have somewhat more independence than before, and perhaps a reduced sense of vested interest in CSIRO, but I am still closely in touch and supportive of what CAR is doing. Also, I have a son who is now a leading staff member of WWF in Australia and who is naturally well informed on climate change issues. Moreover, Michael Rae, who is their local climate change staffer, is a member of the CSIRO sector advisory committee (along with some industry people as well) and well known to me. So I anticipated questions from WWF Australia, and from the media later when the scenarios are released...

Hulme then alerts another colleague to this exchange, under an interesting header, as an example of the massaging of their message to fit an audience:

From: Mike Hulme

To: Jennifer F Crossley

Subject: Re: masking of WWF maps

... it illustrates nicely the nuances of presenting climate scenarios in different Fora

Word sure had got around the green traps about how helpful the University of East Anglia was prepared to be to green campaigners. Here is an email from green entrepreneur Adam Markham to Hulme, asking for “beefed up” scares and directing him to Pittock’s more alarming scenarios, as and example of what WWF likes:

From: Adam Markham

Subject: WWF Australia

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 09:43:09 -0400

Hi Mike,

I’m sure you will get some comments direct from Mike Rae in WWF Australia, but I wanted to pass on the gist of what they’ve said to me so far. They are worried that this may present a slightly more conservative approach to the risks than they are hearing from CSIRO. In particular, they would like to see the section on variability and extreme events beefed up if possible. They regard an increased likelihood of even 50% of drought or extreme weather as a significant risk. Drought is also a particularly importnat issue for Australia, as are tropical storms.

I guess the bottom line is that if they are going to go with a big public splash on this they need something that will get good support from CSIRO scientists (who will certainly be asked to comment by the press). One paper they referred me to, which you probably know well is:  “The Question of Significance” by Barrie in Nature Vol 397, 25 Feb 1999, p 657

Let me know what you think. Adam

UPDATE

Reader Grant:

There is an explosive admission in this exchange that needs to be drawn out and it is to do with the following comment:

Your concern about my message is well taken, however, and I intend to remove any reference to 95% confidence levels, to re-word the text to indicate that we are plotting precip. changes only ‘where they are large relative to natural variability’, and to reduce my threshold to the 1 sigma level of HadCM2 control variability (e.g. this has the effect of showing precip. changes for the majority of Australia even in the B1 scenario

In statistics this is important because any 1st year undergrad is told that the scientific approach for testing for significance is a 2-sigma test; ie the 95% confidence interval. Results that are significant at no more than 1-sigma significant are as good as meaningless in the sense that they are no different to sheer randomness and would be laughed all the way out of a 1st year course on stats.

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Nature will decide Earth's future

By Professor Bob Carter, currently aboard a research ship near New Zealand. He is a research professor at Queensland's James Cook University - where he was Professor and Head of School of Earth Sciences between 1981 and 1999 - and the University of Adelaide

AS the core samples from deep underground pass through the logging sensor before me, the rhythmic pattern of ancient climate change is clearly displayed. Friendly, brown sands for the warm interglacial periods and hostile, sterile grey clays for the cold glaciations. And for more than 90 per cent of recent geological time the Earth has been colder than today.

We modern humans are lucky to live towards the end of the most recent of the intermittent but welcome warm interludes. It is a 10,000 year-long period called the Holocene, during which our civilisations have evolved and flourished.

The cores tell the story that this period is only a short interlude during a long-term decline in global temperature - they also warn of the imminence of the next glacial episode in a series stretching back more than 2 million years.

Together with 50 other scientists and technicians, I am aboard the drilling ship Joides Resolution. JR, as it is affectionately known, is the workhorse of the Ocean Drilling Program, an international program that is to environmental science what NASA is to space science.

JR's drilling crew can retrieve cores up to 1km or more below the seabed and we are drilling today about 80km east of South Island in New Zealand. The ancient muds and sands that make up the sediment layers we pass through are the most important record of ancient climate that scientists possess. And they tell the tale that climate always changes.

Some core alterations are ruled by changes in the Earth's orbit at periods of 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years, others by fluctuations in solar output and others display oceanographic and climate shifts caused by . . . we know not what. Climate, it seems, changes ceaselessly: sometimes cooling, sometimes warming, oft-times for reasons we do not fully understand.

Similar cores through polar ice reveal, contrary to received wisdom, that past temperature changes were followed - not preceded but followed - by changes in the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide. Yet the public has been misinformed to believe that increasing human carbon dioxide emissions will cause runaway warming; it is surely a strange cause of climate change that postdates its supposed effect?

The now numerous special interest groups who continue to lobby for unnecessary and economically harmful carbon dioxide taxation need to appreciate that nature, not the world's governments, will determine future climate. Second, that there is no scientific evidence that warmings greater than the much-talked about 2C will cause environmental catastrophe; rather, this number is one plucked out of the air for reasons of political targetry and control. And, third, that to limit atmospheric carbon dioxide to 450ppm, also a widely touted figure, makes no sense, because past carbon dioxide levels attained more than 10 times this without known adverse environmental effects, while greening the planet.

Politically popular though it may be, the belief that atmospheric carbon dioxide is the primary driver of average planetary temperature is junk science. For instance, Earth experienced an ice age about 450 million years ago at a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are estimated to have been 15 times the pre-industrial level.

It is simply science fiction to believe that 450ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide and 2C of warming are magic numbers that somehow mark a "tipping point"in Earth's climate system. Rather, they are politically contrived targets, erected for the purpose of stampeding scientifically innocent citizens into a gaping corral of carbon dioxide taxation.

The simplest explanation for the mild warming that occurred in the late 20th century is that it was part of Earth's ever-changing pattern of natural climate change and the job of scientists is to seek evidence to test that interpretation. They have and literally thousands of scientific papers to date have described climate evidence that is consistent with natural change.

Despite all the efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the expenditure of about $100 billion of research money since 1990, no scientific paper exists that demonstrates that the late 20th century warming, or the past 10 years of cooling for that matter, fall outside the rates and magnitudes of past (geological) climate change.

Melting glaciers (but, in some places, advancing), rising sea levels (but, in some places, falling), increasing numbers of storms (actually, currently at a 30-year low), increasing numbers of polar bears and changes in migratory patterns of birds may very well all have happened or be happening. But these facts say nothing about a human causality for such changes.

It is not for the independent climate scientists (the so-called "climate sceptics") to disprove that dangerous human-caused warming is happening. Rather, it is for the alarmist scientists of the IPCC and CSIRO to show that the simple idea of natural climate change can be invalidated. This they have failed to do.

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Thank heavens cap and trade is dead

By Gary Johns -- previously a minister in the Hawke Labor government

KEVIN Rudd never actually fought the 2007 election on an emissions trading scheme. After all, John Howard offered the same.

There was a consensus on an ETS; Rudd lassoed votes by offering to sign the Kyoto Protocol, just as it was coming to an end. It was a cheap gesture. Now comes the hard part, convincing the electorate that what once seemed like a good idea remains so despite the fact it will not achieve its objective, or at least will be costly and ineffectual in solving climate change, and that it will be positively harmful in distracting from other big world issues such as poverty. Remember the promises made to make world poverty history? What happened to that money?

In all this, the Prime Minister has been operating as an international bureaucrat. His involvement in multilateral matters is immense and mostly futile. The real action takes place in country to country deals, in gas, uranium, climate adaptation and technical co-operation. On these matters he has been largely absent. Labor opted out of the climate change debate years ago by following the consensus between climate change scientists and European economics. There was no political antenna telling them that this stuff really hurts. The consequence is that there is no plan B.

How did this happen? Climate change advocates have become the bullies of policy-making. They have pushed aside a score of important international issues. They are sucking up money and policy oxygen. They claim their demands supersede poverty, clean water, Third World health, international free trade, and that they will protect the poor from catastrophe.

But climate change measures to save the world will not solve world poverty, provide clean water or solve health problems. Indeed, developing a trade in a gas that is essential for life, difficult to measure and therefore easy to cheat to avoid complying with an international agreement will interfere with free trade.

Successive Australian governments fell for this bullying. Fortunately, now the faux consensus between the main parties on climate change response has collapsed, there is no chance the ETS will pass. More importantly, Rudd will not want to take a new version to an election for fear it will be treated like all referendums where there is disagreement among the main parties. They fail.

The prospects for an ETS do not improve with the likely outcomes from Copenhagen. Three things will happen at Copenhagen. There will be no agreement that the world can move to a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas mitigation. Politicians in developing countries, China and India in particular, will announce national targets for carbon intensity (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for each unit of gross domestic product) but not lower carbon output. Politicians in poor countries will have their hands out for money to help them develop or adapt, which will look pretty much like the old foreign aid game. The agreement will begin to talk about adaptation because scientists are telling the community it is already too late to stop climate change.

Sooner or later we will have to accept that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is not like a crash diet, there is no lap-band surgery. And since modern societies cannot exist without cheap, non-renewable fuel, realistic substitutes such as nuclear energy are fast coming online everywhere except in places such as Australia, where coal and gas are cheap.

The implications for Australia are that the government's ETS is dead. In policy terms it is a rebuttal of the process whereby climate scientists, international diplomats and some economists came up against reality and failed to find the path they wanted. The politicians' job now is to find a way out of the mess.

How did this come about? Bullying. Environmentalists were given too much prominence because too many advocates for other causes stood aside. Even within the climate abatement debate there was bullying. The ETS has a premium on setting limits to greenhouse gases, but in so doing causes price to fluctuate. A carbon tax can make price more certain (at least that part which is the tax) but cannot guarantee certainty in greenhouse gas output.

Cap and trade won over carbon taxes because the environmental lobby was obsessed with setting an absolute limit of carbon output. It drove the economists to deliver a cap-and-trade mechanism. But it will not work without a full international market. And that will not happen, not even in the wildest dreams of the international bureaucracy's wildest fantasies. Cap and trade was road-tested in Europe. But Europe is not the rest of the world. Europe has been working on a common market for 50 years. In a sense the carbon cap and trade suited its greater cause of bedding down its internal market and, incidentally, building barriers to other trading blocs.

The advocates of cap and trade lost their way because the process has been so drawn out. Copenhagen is the 15th UN Climate Change Conference. The game changed beneath the players. Cap and trade seemed a sensible goal when participants aspired to a global response, but without a global response cap and trade falls in a hole.

China and India signed a joint agreement on climate change in October, in which both rejected legally binding caps on their CO2 output and gave equal priority to adaptation and mitigation.

So cap and trade is dead; what to do now? The Coalition at least had a debate; at no time has Labor debated climate change or mitigation strategies or countenanced adaptation as a strategy.

Labor simply chased one mitigation non-solution. The Rudd ETS was a giant washing machine churning taxes. Labor looks vulnerable to an attack that its politicians are dreamers, willing to chase far off threats while forgetting to care about more immediate matters closer to home.

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GOVERNMENT HEALTHCARE ROUNDUP

Three current reports below

Pregnant mum and bub fall down ancient lift shaft at hospital

EIGHT weeks' pregnant and with her toddler daughter in her arms, Shavaun Nemere could do nothing but scream as she plunged down a Kingaroy Hospital elevator shaft after its doors malfunctioned. The screams continued as they lay seriously injured at the bottom of the shaft, with a young staffer coming to their rescue before the lift could descend and crush them.

Shavaun, 17, and daughter Izabella, 14 months, face more surgery for the horrific injuries sustained in the accident six weeks ago. They have made almost daily trips to hospitals in Toowoomba, Brisbane and Caboolture from their Benarkin home in the South Burnett to be treated for multiple fractures and gashes so bad they needed plastic surgery. Shavaun is still too distressed to talk about what happened.

Her mother Julie Nemere has spoken for the first time about the ordeal because she wants the hospital's 68-year-old elevator to be replaced. "The hospital has been asking for a new lift for years but their requests have fallen on deaf ears," she said.

Ms Nemere said her daughter was visiting a sick relative at the hospital and decided to go up a floor to make an antenatal appointment. With Izabella in her arms, she opened the exterior polished doors to the elevator and then pushed back the inside metal security doors and stepped forward - into space.

Desperately trying to protect Izabella, she fell 1.6m to the bottom of the lift shaft landing on her left hip, arm and cheek, while the little girl hit the concrete floor with her face. A staff member heard their screams and jumped down the shaft handing the baby up to a doctor and rescuing Shavaun.

Both were airlifted to Brisbane where Shavaun was treated for multiple fractures to her left arm, shock, concussion and amnesia. Izabella's badly gashed face needed stitches and plastic surgery. If the injuries had been a few millimetres higher, she could have lost an eye. Ms Nemere said there had also been bleeding complications with Shavaun's pregnancy and doctors were still monitoring a small haematoma behind her uterus.

The executive director of the Darling Downs-West Moreton Health Service District, Ray Chandler, said the lift had been tested by engineers and was safe and fully operational. "It undergoes a service check every month," he said. [A very cursory check, obviously]

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Blame dodged in public hospital death case

TEARS and anger have followed a coroner's finding that no one was to blame for the death of a Mareeba mother-of-five twice turned away in pain from her local hospital. Coroner Kevin Priestly yesterday said Mareeba Hospital did not have the staff or equipment to save Sharon Con Goo, who died of bacterial septicemia in January 2007. But he cleared its doctors of any negligence, finding it was unlikely they could have done anything to save her life.

Relatives reacted angrily yesterday after Mr Priestly found there was "no missed opportunity for medical intervention that would have affected the outcome" of Ms Con Goo’s case. Ms Con Goo was not admitted to the hospital on January 7 nor January 9 after presenting on both dates with serious pain caused by a septic leg. On one occasion she was sent home with Panadol to ease her suffering. [No missed ipportunity???] She returned to the hospital on January 10 and was transferred to Cairns Base Hospital, where she died on January 11.

During the inquest in August, Mareeba Hospital doctor Asif Majeed said he offered to admit Ms Con Goo during her second visit, but she refused. But her husband, Andrew Con Goo, testified that his wife was not given the option of being admitted, despite having her bags packed to stay overnight.

Ms Con Goo's mother, Faye Rigg, broke down outside court yesterday, telling reporters that her daughter was in such a poor state of health, family members had to carry her to the hospital. She said she was upset at the verdict, labelling it ""bulls---''.

Mr Priestly said he reviewed a range of expert medical opinions to conclude it was unlikely Mareeba Hospital staff could have prevented Ms Con Goo`s death. But he also found the hospital was "not properly equipped with the resources or medical professionals required''.

Former Tablelands MP Rosa Lee Long, who attended the inquest, said yesterday's findings should prove worrying for people who rely on Mareeba Hospital. "She packed her bags to be admitted, and what did they do? They turned her away,'' Ms Lee Long said. "Everyone should be frightened, everyone should be concerned.''

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Rudd fails to deliver on 35 GP super clinics

KEVIN Rudd's promise to build 35 GP super clinics across the nation appears to be in tatters, with only one completed centre in operation after two years of Labor government. The Australian can reveal that despite the Prime Minister's claims that six more centres are partially complete, at least two are offering little more than conventional GP services. And one centre claimed by Health Minister Nicola Roxon as a partially functioning GP super clinic -- in Darwin -- is in fact being fully funded by the Northern Territory government.

Mr Rudd campaigned for the 2007 election promising to spend $275 million on super clinics -- medical one-stop shops in areas struggling with inadequate medical services. The centres were to offer after-hours general practitioners, specialists, mental health services, chronic disease management, allied health practitioners and training for medical students and trainee specialists.

Yesterday, as the opposition savaged the scheme as a politicised con, Mr Rudd refused to answer questions from The Australian as to whether the scheme was on target and exactly how many clinics he expected to deliver by the end of his three-year term. Instead, the Prime Minister, who was criticised earlier this week by health sector groups for taking too long to deliver promised reform to the health system, blamed the Howard government for being negligent on health.

Last month, Ms Roxon told parliament the GP super clinic program was being well received, with the nation's first super clinic -- at Ballan, in Victoria -- already operating and another six offering "early services".

Inquiries by The Australian yesterday revealed that at least two of the partially complete super clinics -- at Palmerston in Darwin and at Woongarrah in NSW -- were offering simple GP services. The Palmerston facility was offering after-hours, bulk-billed GP consultations. Local mayor Robert Macleod said he was pleased with the extra services. But the super clinic is not due to begin operating until March next year.

Despite Ms Roxon claiming the Palmerston facility as evidence of the success of the program, Health Department officials told a Senate budget estimates committee earlier this year that it was funded by the Northern Territory government and was not a super clinic. The Woongarrah clinic also offers limited services and the super clinic is not due to open for a year.

The opening of the Ballan super clinic has resulted in the previous two GPs being increased to three and the addition of four-day-a-week dental services as well as a range of allied health services. Ballan Bush Nursing spokesman Glenn Rowbotham told The Australian the GPs did not operate out of hours but that one was on-call for emergencies.

Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton said the government had used the scheme to curry favour in marginal electorates but had failed to deliver. "Mr Rudd was tricky during the election campaign by not putting a deadline on the provision of these clinics," Mr Dutton said. "But most people would have expected they would have been delivered in the first term of government."

Australian Medical Association national president Andrew Pesce said he did not know whether the scheme was running behind schedule because the government had never consulted his organisation at any stage of the program. Dr Pesce said the AMA had always argued it was wiser and more cost-effective to offer grants to existing medical practices to broaden their services rather than building a new system "from the ground up".

Earlier this week, The Australian sent written questions to Mr Rudd asking why the six GP super clinics were operating only partially and whether he would explain the hold-up. His spokesman responded with a written statement that ignored these questions. However, the spokesman said "several more" clinics would begin operating within the next 12 months. "Some GP super clinics have begun providing services while their full infrastructure is being completed in order to allow them to provide a wider range of services," the spokesman said. "The procedures for delivering many of these clinics involves tender processes."

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POLICE ROUNDUP

Two current reports below

More Queensland police misbehaviour

Former Palm Island police officer sues state for $2.7m over bullying

A FORMER Palm Island police officer who claims he was bullied by his colleagues and called a "pretty boy cop" is suing the State Government for nearly $3 million. Giovanni Roberto Palleschi, 32, allegedly suffered a mental breakdown after he was subject to ongoing derision, bullying and harassment while working on the island from October 2005 until November 2007.

In civil documents filed to the Supreme Court, Mr Palleschi alleges Senior Sergeant Paul James verbally abused him on a daily basis, including calling him a "f - - - ing ballerina cop" and a "f - - - ing lazy bastard". Sen-Sgt James allegedly belittled Mr Palleschi's police work, saying "all that touchy feely stuff with the locals is crap Palleschi, it is all about arrests".

Mr Palleschi arrived on Palm Island after the death in custody of Mulrunji which sparked riots on the island in 2004. Due to the volatile environment, Mr Palleschi's wife and children lived in Townsville. He lived with fellow officers on the island in a police compound, which is described in the court documents as an "unhappy and unhealthy environment".

The documents allege Sen-Sgt James ridiculed Mr Palleschi, often excluding him from social events. In March 2006, the court documents claim Mr Palleschi approached Sen-Sgt James to advise him he needed help to deal with work-related stress. He alleges Sen-Sgt James reacted in a violent and aggressive manner. He then allegedly said: "You are f - - - ing full of shit. You are just lazy and I have caught you out. It's all about arrests and traffic tickets and not airy fairy community policing".

Mr Palleschi began suffering physical stress symptoms such as bleeding noses, paranoia and insomnia, the court documents claim. On November 12, 2007, he was so distraught he confronted Sen-Sgt James and another officer about the ongoing harassment and soon after had a complete mental breakdown, the court documents claim. He ceased work the next day.

Mr Palleschi now lives on the Gold Coast and was medically retired from the Queensland Police in March. He suffers ongoing mental health issues, the documents claim. He is suing the State Government for $2.78 million for failing to provide a proper and safe work environment and exposing him to the risk of sustaining psychiatric injury

Sen-Sgt James is still working on Palm Island but is currently relieving at Ayr Police Station. A Queensland Police spokeswoman said they had not received any complaints against Sen-Sgt James and that this year he had received an Australian Police Medal in the Queens Birthday honours. The State Government is yet to file a defence. Sen-Sgt James is not being sued directly.

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Corrupt Victorian police agency 'lost $120 mil'

An honest policeman's lot in Australia is not a happy one

THE amount squandered by Victoria Police's troubled IT department was more than $120 million, three times the sum detected by the Ombudsman, a former senior police manager says. Richard Kennedy, the force's former manager of strategy and business relationships, said the IT department was systematically milked by IBM for years before any action was taken. "Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost, and the Ombudsman, Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon and the auditor- general were repeatedly warned," Mr Kennedy said. "The whole thing is just an unbelievable disaster."

Mr Kennedy is an auditor who joined the police in 2001 after 15 years specialising in restructuring the outsourcing of information technology contracts. He said he was astonished by what he found. "They were paying out millions of dollars for services that were never delivered," he said.

Mr Kennedy said he complained to the auditor-general, Ms Nixon and the Ombudsman as long ago as 2002, but that his concerns were whitewashed and his identity as a whistleblower revealed by some in senior management.

The Ombudsman finally investigated the matter this year. Though only examining expenditure back to 2006, he found a "gap" in funding of $39 million. "Not only is there a problem in Victoria Police, but there are significant questions which need to be asked of the auditor-general's office and the Ombudsman's office," Mr Kennedy said.

Documents seen by the Herald Sun show senior public servants in the Police Minister's office were aware of a $22.8 million cost blowout as long ago as September 2001.

Mr Kennedy said that he wrote reports for senior police, complained to both the Opposition and the minister, and was even fobbed off by the Ombudsman in 2003. "Nobody wanted to know. The problem was really that big," Mr Kennedy said.

A spokeswoman for Victoria Police declined to say whether IBM had delivered all the services the force had paid for, and declined to respond to questions about Mr Kennedy's claims. "The matters raised are historical and Victoria Police is now focused on improving its future IT practices and contract management arrangements," the spokeswoman said.

IBM spokeswoman Gisele Boulay would not say whether all the services the company had been paid for were delivered to Victoria Police. "IBM cannot provide comment, as we have neither knowledge of - nor seen - these alleged documents," Ms Boulay said. "These are matters that are more appropriate for your informant to raise with Victoria Police, if he has not already done so during previous internal investigations," she said.

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CLIMATE ROUNDUP

Five current articles below

Climate claims fail science test

By Michael Asten, a professorial fellow in the school of geosciences at Monash University, Melbourne

THE UN Climate Change Summit started this week in Copenhagen with far more dissent than its organisers hoped for from two extremes of the climate change debate We had the "grandfather of climate change", James Hansen, describing the proceedings as counter-productive and "a farce", while the chief Saudi Arabian negotiator to the summit, Mohammed al-Sabban, doubts the current science and suggests there is no longer any point in seeking agreement to reduce emissions.

It is therefore certain that the global political debate on managing carbon emissions and climate change will continue well beyond the Copenhagen summit. It is to be hoped that the scientific debate is also permitted to continue.

Results released this year suggest that the degree of scientific certainty falls short of that desirable before we set binding targets and dollar values on carbon emissions. Indeed, Tim Flannery, chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council admitted that: "We can't pretend we have perfect knowledge: we don't."

This is a refreshingly honest comment when contrasted with some of the statements in the hacked emails of the Climatic Research Unit, UK, made by leading British and US climate scientists, who were caught with their fingers on the "delete button" when faced with climate data that failed to agree with their computer models.

Meanwhile two recent results published by top scientists cast doubt on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's theory about the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming. These are of of significance because whereas the climate models used by the IPCC rely on software to represent a large number of highly complex Earth processes, these results are equivalent to experimental observations on the Earth itself.

Paul Pearson of Cardiff University and his international team achieved a breakthrough recently, published four weeks ago in arguably the world's top scientific journal, Nature. They unravelled records of atmosphere, temperature and ice-cap formation 33.6 million years ago, when the Earth cooled from a greenhouse without ice caps, into something quite similar to our present day. These results from "Laboratory Earth" have a particular advantage: we can see what happened after the event for two million years. With today's records we see changes in atmospheric CO2 and temperature over 50 years and seek to project what will happen in the future.

Pearson's work contains a couple of remarkable results. First the greenhouse atmosphere pre-cooling contained a CO2 concentration of 900 parts per million by volume, or more than three times that of the Earth in pre-industrial days. We can't be sure what triggered the Earth to cool despite, or because of, its changing green-house atmospheric blanket, but once it did, cycles of ice cap formation and glaciation commenced, apparently governed by the same variations in the Earth's orbit that govern the ice ages of the past million years.

Second, while the cooling of the Earth took place over a time-span of around 200,000 years, the atmospheric CO2 first dropped in association with the cooling, then rose to around 1100ppmv and remained high for 200,000 years while the Earth cooled further and remained in its new ice ages cycle.

We can compare these huge swings (both up and down) in atmospheric CO2 with current computer-modelled estimates of climate sensitivity by the IPCC which suggest that a doubling of CO2 relative to pre-industrial times will produce a temperature increase of 2.5C to 4C.

If the Earth started a cycle of ice ages 33.6 million years ago while having its very carbon-rich atmosphere, and if the Earth showed cycles of ice-age activity when atmospheric CO2 was four times the level that it was in humankind's pre-industrial times, what new information must we incorporate into our present climate models?

Another key parameter in climate modelling is the warming amplification associated with increasing CO2 in our atmosphere. This amplification factor is generally believed to be greater than one, giving rise to an understanding that increases in atmospheric CO2 amplify warming (a positive feedback in the physical process), and the IPCC has quantified this to deliver the finding that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in man-made greenhouse gas concentrations.

However since the IPCC's fourth report, our Laboratory Earth has also delivered new data on this CO2-induced amplification factor. The tool for the study in this instance is recent satellite-based temperature data now extending over 30 years. Building on a methodology published 15 years ago in Nature, climatologist and NASA medallist John Christy and colleague David Douglass studied global temperature impacts of volcanic activity and ocean-atmospheric oscillations (the "El Nino" effect) and separated these from global temperature trends over the past 28 years. The result of their analysis is a CO2-induced amplification factor close to one, which has implications clearly at odds with the earlier IPCC position.

The result was published this year in the peer-reviewed journal Energy and Environment and the paper has not yet been challenged in the scientific literature.

What this means is that the IPCC model for climate sensitivity is not supported by experimental observation on ancient ice ages and recent satellite data. So are we justified in concluding that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is not the only or major driver of current climate change? And if so, how should we re-shape our ETS legislation?

I don't know the answer to these questions, but as Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman observed: "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."

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Global warming has stopped, says conservative leader

OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott has gone one step further from being a climate change sceptic and has questioned if the world is warming. The comments were seized upon by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, who will arrive in Copenhagen today for climate change talks that aim to set the foundations for cuts to global greenhouse gas emissions. It comes as the US Environmental Protection Agency plans to limit greenhouse gas emissions because they "threaten the public health and welfare of the American people".

When Mr Abbott seized the Liberal leadership from Malcolm Turnbull last week he rejected criticisms that he was a climate change denier, but said he was sceptical about what level mankind had contributed to the problem. His position yesterday raised further questions about his intentions to address climate change. "Notwithstanding the dramatic increases in man-made CO2 emissions over the last decade, the world's warming has stopped," he told Macquarie Radio.

Senator Wong, who has been accused of not giving enough funds to helping the Torres Strait cope with climate change, hit out at Mr Abbott. "He is out there publicly talking about the world cooling when we have so many world leaders ... going to Copenhagen because they are concerned about climate change," she said. ["World leaders" matter more than the facts? She is a pure apparatchik] "We see Mr Abbott talking about the globe cooling as the rest of the world is trying to work its way to tackling climate change."

A gobsmacked Greens Leader Bob Brown said Mr Abbott's comments would alienate conservatives. "In a world where both big and small business understand the science of climate change and the need for appropriate action," Senator Brown said.

It comes as Opposition climate action spokesman Greg Hunt has said tackling climate change would come at a cost. Mr Abbott has guaranteed there will not be any taxes, either "by stealth" or otherwise to mitigate the problem. "There are no cost-free options, but there are dramatically lower cost options," Mr Hunt said. "The Government picked the highest cost of all the major mechanisms (through its carbon pollution reduction scheme)."

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Plimer gets good mainstream coverage in Australia

The story below ran on several Murdoch sites

AN Australian scientist has told a Copenhagen audience that humans are not damaging the climate - and the weather seemed hotter to him as a child. Well-known geologist and author Ian Plimer travelled to the scene of the UN climate conference to question whether the world was warming. "It's been freezing in Perth and bucketing down," Professor Plimer said after his lecture.

The UN's weather body, the World Meteorological Organisation, yesterday announced the last decade was likely to be the hottest on record. Australia has had three heatwaves this year and is on track to record its third-hottest year ever. But Prof Plimer, author of the recent best-selling book, Heaven and Earth, which questioned human-induced climate change, said: "One swallow doesn't make a summer."

The University of Adelaide professor did not make it inside the official climate conference venue, instead giving his speech to a rival conference organised by a US lobby group in central Copenhagen. "Heretics are not allowed," he said of the UN conference. He told the rival conference he remembered summers when he was a child being much warmer and said at the moment it was freezing in Perth and bucketing down.

Prof Plimer said he was in Copenhagen to try to stop the world engaging in the "global collective madness" of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by clamping down on economic development. He said the climate had always changed and it was erroneous to blame emissions from people. Other factors, like the sun, the earth's orbit and extraterrestrial factors, could be responsible. Major ice ages had happened when carbon dioxide levels were high and there had been very warm periods before the industrial age began, he said.

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Academics firmly stuck in their ivory tower

A NATIONAL union has broken ranks with the ACTU to demand the Rudd government dump its proposed emissions trading scheme, declaring the plan a costly and ineffective response to climate change. The National Tertiary Education Union said federal Labor should replace the scheme with "a non-market-driven solution that will drastically reduce carbon emissions".

The union said its policy stand was driven by academics and researchers directly involved in scientific and economic work around climate change. The union's NSW secretary, Genevieve Kelly, said the union was motivated by concerns from university staff that the ETS was not an adequate response to climate change. "Rather than get bogged down with a costly emissions trading scheme that rewards big polluters and will have a limited impact on emissions, the Rudd government needs to immediately invest in renewable energy, public transport and a transition from coal-fired power generation," Ms Kelly said.

The union is calling for a 40 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2020. Ms Kelly told The Australian that the union did not believe there had been sufficient debate within the ACTU and the union movement about the direction of climate change policy. "This policy may place the NTEU at odds with the Rudd government and some elements of the union movement; however, we have an obligation to respond to the deeply held concerns of our members who overwhelmingly want action on this issue," she said.

The union is also serving claims on universities to have environmental claims included in workplace agreements. During the current round of bargaining with universities, the union has pushed employers to agree to clauses that commit universities to reducing emissions. "We are seeking a better level of debate within the ACTU," Ms Kelly said. The union's national council has endorsed a resolution calling for the abandonment of the CPRS legislation and development of a national pollution-reduction strategy that does not primarily rely on market mechanisms. The resolution says there should be a planned transition from coal-fired generators to renewable energy.

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By-election results a worry for the Labor party and its climate policies

Losing their traditional base

THE double-edged swings in the by-elections for Higgins and Bradfield will force the main parties to rethink their plans for any federal election based around the issue of climate change. Lower-income Labor booths swung to the Liberals, while higher-income Liberal booths swung to the Greens, in a criss-cross of party loyalties that presents challenges for both Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott.

Labor has more marginal seats to defend outside the capital cities, where the opposition hopes to find fertile ground for a scare campaign over the emissions trading scheme. But the Liberals have more marginal seats on the line in the cities, where the government believes voters will punish any party that does not take climate change seriously.

By picking a fight on climate change, the new Opposition Leader will force the Prime Minister to juggle two messages: compensation for lower- and middle-income earners outside the cities, and action for those within the cities. The Abbott strategy looks more viable after the weekend by-elections because Labor's lower- and middle-income base was not interested in switching to the Greens.

In Bradfield, Liberal candidate Paul Fletcher gathered double-digit swings to him in the Labor strongholds of Hornsby (up 12.6 per cent on the 2007 election) and Chatswood (up 13.5 per cent), but lost ground in the blue-blood suburbs of Wahroonga (down 7.7 per cent) and St Ives (down 8.7 per cent).

Kate Brodie, 22, voted Labor at the last federal election, but she voted Liberal in Saturday's by-election because she felt the Prime Minister had failed to make the case for an ETS. Ms Brodie, who works in public relations, said she didn't understand what the ETS meant. She described Mr Abbott as "a last-minute saviour . . . "For me, it came about really fast, so I wasn't quite sure what it involved, and how it would really impact on our future," she said. She was so concerned about the cost of an ETS, she said she would not have voted Liberal at Saturday's by-election had Malcolm Turnbull retained the leadership.

The pattern was repeated in Higgins, where the mortgage belt and Labor stronghold of Murrumbeena swung to the Liberals by 4.7 per cent but the private school hub of Kooyong Park had a 6.8 per cent swing against the Liberals.

The opposition is wary of reading too much good news into the worker swings because Labor didn't run in either seat, and many Labor voters appear to have cast informal ballots. But the numbers do provide a warning to Labor that its base, when confronted with a choice between Green and Liberal, will fracture.

The Rudd government betrayed its sensitivity last year by using its compensation package for the ETS to deliver more in handouts to lower- and middle-income families, and to pensioners, than these groups would face in energy price rises.

By switching its message on the ETS, from bipartisanship to opposition, the Liberals will force Labor to return to the retail politics of climate change by emphasising the benefits over the costs.

At the next election, Labor will have 88 seats, the Liberals 50, the Nationals nine and independents three. Nine of those Labor seats are on margins of less than 1 per cent, with five of those nine being Liberal-held seats that are now notionally Labor after the redistribution of boundaries. Labor has a further five seats on margins between 1 per cent and 1.7 per cent. The breakdown of these 14 most marginal seats -- the difference between holding government and losing it -- is where the climate change rub lies. Only three of Labor's exposed seats are inner city -- Solomon, Swan and Bennelong. The remaining 11 split between the suburbs and the bush. Four are outer metropolitan: Macquarie, Hasluck, Dickson and Deakin. A further four are in provincial centres: Robertson, Herbert, Corangamite and Bass. The final three are classified by the Australian Electoral Commission as rural: Macarthur, Gilmore and Longman.

From the Liberal perspective, some of these seats are worth targeting. But first they must shore up their base. Newspoll has shown a swing to Labor since the last election, so the opposition is at risk of going backwards if the ETS scare doesn't bite, or if it backfires.

The Liberals have nine seats on margins of less than 2 per cent, and the Nationals have a further two. The Liberal nine are split between two in the inner city -- Sturt and Stirling -- five in outer metropolitan areas -- Bowman, La Trobe, Hughes, Ryan and Cowan -- and two rural -- McEwen and Paterson. The Nationals have two rural marginals: Cowper and Hinkler.

George Meredith, a 70-year-old practising accountant from Gordon, believes Mr Abbott can win back the Howard battlers by fighting Mr Rudd on the ETS. "I was happier when Abbott came in and clarified his position on the ETS . . . I think we're rushing the whole bloody thing," he said. "I lost heart with Malcolm, he's not very different from Milky Bar Kid Kevin Rudd."

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QANTAS ROUNDUP

Three current reports below on Australia's own third-world airline

QANTAS strands blind woman -- illegally

"Australia's national airline" refused guide dog and stranded blind woman. A mainstream carrier that is as ignorant -- and as ignorant of the law -- as an El Cheapo airline

QANTAS left a blind woman distressed and stranded interstate at night because the airline would not allow her guide dog on a flight. Qantas is not alone. Tiger Airways two days earlier baulked at letting the same woman fly with her guide dog.

Donna Purcell and her husband, Ric, of Sydney, met a wall of resistance from Tiger Airways when they tried to fly return to Adelaide with her guide dog for a weekend away last month. First, she was told that Tiger did not take dogs, then she would have to buy an extra ticket for it and even then could not be guaranteed to fly. Eventually she convinced the airline to take her to Adelaide, but when Tiger cancelled the return flight, she approached Qantas.

Despite at least 20 seats being available on a plane that evening, Qantas asked her to stand aside while they processed other Tiger passengers. Qantas counter staff told her to call reservations, who told her dogs were not allowed in Adelaide airport. The airline finally booked them on a flight the next day. It left Ms Purcell and her husband stuck in Adelaide with no accommodation arranged or food for her seeing-eye dog, Hetty, a three-year-old black labrador on a special diet.

Ms Purcell has lodged complaints with both airlines and the Human Rights Commission. "I was shunned because I had a guide dog," she said.

Tiger Airways, which could find no record of the complaint, yesterday apologised to Ms Purcell, blaming an outsourced company for not understanding the airline's policy. "Tiger Airways will take immediate action to remind our staff and business partners of our policies in relation to passengers with special needs," its communications manager, Vanessa Regan, said.

Qantas head of communication Olivia Wirth said the Qantas counter staff did not have the authority to make the seat allocation but the airline took the matter seriously and had apologised to Ms Purcell, offered to pay expenses and was reviewing its processes.

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Qantas passengers in dark for eight hours

DOZENS of international travellers' plans were thrown into chaos last night when a Qantas flight to Singapore was delayed by eight hours and then finally cancelled. A faulty emergency exit door has been blamed for the delay.

Passengers on the 2pm flight from Adelaide were initially told that the flight would be delayed by am hour. But at 9.45pm last night, they were told the part needed for the door had not arrived and the flight would be rescheduled. Many passengers missed connecting flights in Singapore as a result and some passengers became irate when advised of the further day's delay.

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QANTAS has lost it

Qantas is in the process of reinventing itself, if you believe the company's own hype. It has spent millions on a customer service training centre in Sydney; at least on domestic routes to begin with, it is in the process of redefining the customer check-in experience to radically reduce the time it takes.

It sees the main brand as a premium carrier, complemented by Jetstar as a cheap alternative, with the group able to offer something for each part of the market. But, particularly for long-haul travel, I'm wondering whether the Qantas group has already lost the battle for Australian hearts and minds.

The combined Qantas group share of the market is now below 30% on international routes from Australia, where once its share was nearer 50% (admittedly in the much more regulated old days). Its market share continues to shrink in spite of the invention of Jetstar, which was designed to increase it.

On the US route, Qantas is being clobbered by new capacity from V Australia and Delta, although Qantas still has the lion's share. Between here and Europe, Qantas is being swamped, not only by traditional rivals like Singapore Airlines, which continues methodically and relentlessly to increase its Australia market share (in spite of this year's pause caused by the global slowdown), but also by the new Arabian Gulf carriers, Emirates, Etihad and Qatar.

More than a million Australians - about 20% of everyone heading overseas - are going to Europe, but only 40% of them to English-speaking Europe (that is, the UK). Yet Qantas now has only two European destinations where it flies its own planes - London and the German business capital, Frankfurt. Its key competitors have far more comprehensive European networks. Emirates, for example, now has more than 20 European cities.

In the past two decades, Qantas has axed Manchester, Paris, Rome and Athens - not because it couldn't fill its planes on those routes, but because there weren't enough business travellers to make those routes pay.

Jetstar plans to return to Rome and Athens. But I think Jetstar will not only struggle to find acceptance from Australians if it flies to Europe, but also needs to tap new markets for visitors to Australia - and most (though not all) of those are in Northern Europe. Think Spain, Germany's many big regional cities, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland -- countries from where travel to Australia is already (or potentially) the strongest.

Do you think of Qantas if you're heading to Europe? How would Jetstar go against Singapore Airlines and Emirates? Has the horse already bolted, particularly since its chief low-cost rival, AirAsiaX, already flies daily to London and has just secured rights to fly to Paris?

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Liberal Party getting tougher on illegal immigration

The Coalition's dumped immigration spokeswoman, Sharman Stone, says she has been "done over by the Right" as Tony Abbott moves to harden the Coalition's stance on immigration. The Australian understands the Opposition Leader will appoint Sydney MP Scott Morrison to the immigration porfolio in a new frontbench line-up expected to be announced today. Last night Dr Stone lashed out at her demotion, saying she had sought to steer a middle course between party moderates and hardliners.

Mr Abbott's reshuffle comes as the number of unauthorised boat arrivals this year approaches 2500, following the interception of the 51st boatload this year on Sunday.

Mr Morrison was elected to parliament in 2007 following the retirement of Bruce Baird, an outspoken critic of John Howard's hard line on immigration. His appointment to the front bench follows a widespread feeling within the party that Dr Stone had failed to "cut through" in her criticism of the government, a charge she angrily rejected.

"I've been done over by the Right," Dr Stone told The Australian yesterday. "It's about payback. Immigration was so difficult because you were sandwiched between the left and the right wing of the party. I happened to believe that I was steering the right path and I had a lot of support for that, including, of course, from the leader at the time."

Dr Stone is one of a number of moderates understood to have been dumped from the shadow cabinet. One Turnbull supporter said yesterday the reshuffle had rewarded hardline Abbott supporters and punished Turnbull backers. Dr Stone's public outburst came on the same day deposed leader Malcolm Turnbull attacked in his blog Mr Abbott's stance on climate change, suggesting the Coalition's internal bickering was far from over.

Nevertheless, Dr Stone, who has accepted a position as the Coalition's spokeswoman for women, youth and early childhood, pledged to work with her successor, as well as Mr Abbott, her ideological opposite. She said she would bring considerable experience to her new role. "I'm well known for championing the rights of women, particularly in the area of reproductive health and also indigenous, rural and migrant women," she said.

Dr Stone fired a warning shot over the new Opposition Leader's bow, saying it was essential the Coalition did not fall back on the hardline policies of the past. "It will be essential that the moderates that remain in the party continue to steer through the middle ground, ensuring that the real grassroots of the party continues to build in multicultural communities," Dr Stone said. "After all, we were the party that abolished the White Australia policy with Harold Holt in 1966."

Dr Stone's remarks came as authorities on Christmas Island prepared to process a boatload of 40 people intercepted on Sunday night -- the 51st boat to arrive this year. All told, the boats have ferried 2353 passengers and 115 crew to Australia's shores, bringing to 2468 the number of unauthorised arrivals by boat this year. More than half of those people, 1286, remain in immigration detention on Christmas Island.

Refugee Council of Australia chief executive Paul Power criticised the system of offshore processing, saying it made more sense to manage asylum-seekers on the mainland. "Years of strident political debate has lead to a situation where decisions are made to minimise political embarrassment to a government," Mr Power said. "Both major parties have done that."

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Some stupid comments on the monarchy

By Barry Everingham -- "a Melbourne writer and commenter on royalty". All he has is hostility. He doesn't even know the difference between Sandringham and Balmoral. Sandringham is in Norfolk, not Scotland

Dear oh dear – the Queen of Australia and her other realms and territories beyond the seas – is very angry. She’s sick and tired of the paparazzi lurking behind the clipped hedges at Sandringham – her multi million pounds holiday house in Scotland – taking pictures of the rollicking royals on their Christmas break. Privacy? What privacy?Privacy? What privacy?

So angry is the Australian head of state, she’s threatening to invoke laws if any of the snappers are caught in the royal grounds – there’s nothing she can do if they stay outside the castle’s fences so the guess is ladders will be the orders of the day.

What the Queen fails to understand is that she, along with the other members of her family are nothing more or nothing less than paid public servants. They get their fortnightly cheques from Whitehall – which are taxed these days – and they go about doing what they are paid to do: open; open fetes, cut ribbons, launch ships and other important day to day duties....

More HERE, if you want to read drivel.

ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is deeply unimpressed by media collusion designed to promote the Copenhagen climate conference.




Australian conservatives riling UN climate bosses

THE head of the world's top climate research body has compared Tony Abbott to former US president and climate sceptic George W. Bush and conceded the failure of Australia's cap and trade carbon bill has given momentum to climate naysayers worldwide. In an exclusive interview with The Australian just hours before he was to deliver the keynote address on the opening day of the Copenhagen global climate summit, Rajendra Pachauri denied the defeat of the legislation would provide enough impetus to derail negotiators at Copenhagen from delivering an agreement.

But Dr Pachauri, who chairs the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice-president Al Gore, said more important was the decision of US President Barack Obama to defer his Copenhagen trip to coincide with the leaders meeting on the last day of the summit. "Yes, of course, it will be a motivator (for climate sceptics), but several positives have taken place, like President Barack Obama coming on December 18th and not the 9th," he said. "The Chinese and Indian prime ministers are also coming."

Asked how he might deal with Mr Abbott -- who has previously described global warming as "crap" -- should he topple Kevin Rudd at the next federal election, Dr Pachauri cited US president George W. Bush's reversal on climate change during his second term. "You don't know what a person will do from one point in time to another. People have also been known to change their opinions," Dr Pachauri said. "I talked to George W. Bush on his sixth or seventh year as president and his beliefs had changed drastically from when he first took office."

As well as the defeat of the Australian legislation, the lead-up to the Copenhagen conference, which began last night, has been complicated by the scandal of "Climategate", the leaking of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit which appear to undermine data showing global warming.

IPCC vice-chairman Jean-Pascal van Ypersele said the theft of the emails was not the work of amateurs, but was a sophisticated attempt to destroy public confidence in the science of man-made climate change. He said the fact the emails had first been uploaded to a sceptics' website from a computer in Russia was an indication the hackers were paid. "It's very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services," he said. "If you look at that mass of emails, a lot of work was done, not only to download the data, but it's a carefully made selection of emails and documents that's not random at all. This is 13 years of data, and it's not a job of amateurs."

UN Environment Program director Achim Steiner said the theft of the emails had echoes of Watergate -- the burglary of the US Democratic Party's offices at the Watergate building in Washington in 1972. "This is not climate-gate, it's hacker-gate. Let's not forget the word `gate' refers to a place where data was stolen by people who were paid to do so. So the media should direct its investigations into that."

In Adelaide yesterday, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong conceded she would go to the Copenhagen summit with Australia's position significantly weakened because of parliament's rejection of the ETS. "We wanted to go to Copenhagen with a plan to meet our targets; it's unhelpful that we're not," Senator Wong said. "But of course Australia will still be doing all we can to contribute to getting the agreement Australia needs and the world needs."

Senator Wong said that although it was unlikely a legally binding treaty would be finalised in Copenhagen, she was determined to get an "effective political agreement". "We need to do what President Obama said: that is, an agreement that's comprehensive and that has immediate effect," she said.

Last week's Senate vote on the ETS legislation, which would have seen emissions trading in Australia begin in July 2011, had been closely scrutinised by the US and other Western nations which are considering similar domestic measures to help cut greenhouse gas emissions. A political agreement on carbon trading in Australia, the developed world's biggest per capita emitter, would have helped to garner support for action in Copenhagen from other countries. But the legislation was voted down after a mutiny within opposition party ranks led by Mr Abbott, who overthrew former leader Malcolm Turnbull over his support for the ETS legislation.

Dr Pachauri described Mr Rudd, whom he met last month during the Prime Minister's lightning trip to India, as a "remarkable leader and an experienced politician". He said he was confident the ETS bill's defeat last week was a "minor setback". During his India visit Mr Rudd pledged $70 million in funding for a host of new joint agriculture and energy research projects, several of which involved India's top environmental organisation, TERI (The Energy Resources Institute), which Dr Pachauri also heads. "It seems to me the Australian public is fully committed to taking action because Australia is probably one country that has suffered from the impacts of climate change more than any other," Dr Pachauri said from Denmark. "(Climate sceptics) will get momentum from time to time but they are certainly a minority so I don't see in a democracy how they would succeed. "I think as long as Kevin Rudd is the Prime Minister of the government in power and he wants to move in a particular direction the country will rally around the PM."

Dr Pachauri said he was "pretty optimistic" an agreement could be reached in Copenhagen and had been encouraged by commitments made in the past fortnight by China, India and the US.

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Hatred blinds Leftist academics to reality

The election prophecies of the Canberra psephologist Malcolm Mackerras are really just harmless entertainment. Last week he predicted that the Greens candidate Clive Hamilton would defeat the Liberal Kelly O'Dwyer in the byelection for the Melbourne seat of Higgins on Saturday, and prophesied that Liberal Paul Fletcher would be forced to preferences in Bradfield on the north shore.

Of greater concern are the byelection predictions of some social science academics who are employed to teach politics to fee-paying students at taxpayer-subsidised universities. Both O'Dwyer and Fletcher increased the total Liberal vote, after the distribution of preferences, over that which was obtained in the 2007 election.

Labor did not run candidates and the Greens were not able to match the combined anti-Liberal vote of two years ago. Yet some academics predicted not only a dismal showing for the new Liberal leader, Tony Abbott, in his first electoral test but also the demise of his party.

In a bizarre article in The Australian on Friday, Robert Manne, a politics professor at La Trobe University, canvassed not only a victory for his friend Hamilton but also "the destruction of the Liberal Party" this week. Manne acknowledged some of his views were "fantasy" but it was difficult to work out what part of his article was fantasy and what was academic analysis. Most teachers would fail a paper like this if it were presented as a university essay.

Manne also made his position clear on the Liberals, referring to the party's "troglodyte-denialist wing" and Abbott as the "troglodyte-in-chief". Such language seems acceptable in the La Trobe University politics department.

Judith Brett, Manne's professional colleague, did not throw the switch to fantasy or engage in labelling. Even so, her analysis was very similar to Manne's. Writing in the Herald on Saturday, she said that "the Liberals risk becoming a down-market protest party of angry old men in the outer suburbs". She also said the Liberals were "the natural party of the big end of town and of the big producer groups".

In fact, big business and the big producer groups are willing to co-operate with whichever party is in government. The core of the Coalition's support turns on medium to small business, farmers and middle-income earners.

According to O'Dwyer, the Liberals gained votes in such suburbs as Carnegie and Murrumbeena, which are not the high socio-economic parts of Higgins, where she received strong support from young married women. So much for Brett's analysis. Or perhaps fantasy is a better word.

Manne and Brett are not alone. Brian Costar, a professor of political science at Swinburne University, said he expected Higgins would go to preferences. And Paul Strangio, a member of the Monash University politics department, wrote in The Age that "Abbott's leadership will need emotional intelligence - a quality in short supply in the Liberal Party in recent times".

Manne, Brett, Costar and Strangio are all left-of-centre or leftist academics who comment on the Liberal Party as part of their professional career. A reading of their analyses this week reveals the pitfalls of projection. Manne, Brett, Costar and Strangio dislike Abbott's social conservatism and his rejection of the Rudd Government's emissions trading scheme. They made the familiar error of projecting their views on to the voters in Higgins and Bradfield.

There is also an unpleasant double standard here involving Tony Abbott's Catholicism. On Friday Manne wrote that "very many Australians will not vote for a Catholic party leader whose religious convictions fashion their politics". Manne was the chairman of The Monthly when it ran Rudd's essay on the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 2006, and enthusiastically endorsed Rudd's religious convictions at the time. The views of Rudd and Abbott on social issues are not far apart. Yet it seems, according to Manne, Rudd's religious convictions are acceptable while Abbott's are not.

Come to think of it, the fantasy surrounding last Saturday's byelections has not been confined to academics. This year, the Radio National program Breakfast has been giving publicity to Fiona Patten's new Australian Sex Party. As recently as last Friday it was suggested on Breakfast that the party could win a seat in the Senate. Not on Saturday's vote it couldn't. Patten scored 3.3 per cent of the primary vote, finishing behind the Democratic Labor Party candidate John Mulholland. This is a breakaway from the original DLP, which was formally wound up three decades ago.

Few would expect that Abbott could lead the Coalition to victory in next year's election. His task will become more difficult following the decision of Malcolm Turnbull to adopt the stance taken by such former Liberal leaders as John Gorton, Malcolm Fraser and John Hewson and become a public critic of the party he once led.

Turnbull's announcement that he would cross the floor and support Labor's emissions trading scheme is a blow to the Coalition. But it does not overturn the fact that, based on last week's Liberal Party secret ballot, 75 per cent of Coalition parliamentarians support Abbott's approach on climate change.

The Liberal vote at the weekend indicates that Abbott is capable of at least stabilising the Coalition vote at the level of the 2007 election and perhaps increasing it somewhat. Moreover, Abbott's approach may attract support among the lower socio-economic groups who elected Robert Menzies in 1949, Fraser in 1975 and John Howard in 1996. This is a fact that the left-of-centre academy has invariably been slow to appreciate.

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New conservative leader talks to the coalminers

Journalists attack Abbott over his Catholic beliefs but give Rudd a free ride over his Anglican beliefs. Bigotry, anyone?

KEVIN Rudd has a reputation for donning hard hats on construction sites, while Tony Abbott's staunch Catholicism has earned him the nickname of "Mad Monk". But yesterday, in the first open hostilities between the two, it was Mr Abbott who visited a coalmine in the NSW Hunter Valley vowing to save thousands of jobs threatened by an emissions trading scheme, while the Prime Minister returned fire from the forecourt of St John's Anglican Church in Canberra.

In a direct appeal to Labor's working-class constituency, the newly elected Opposition Leader selected the Bloomfield open-cut coalmine at East Maitland as a backdrop to warn that 16,000 jobs could be lost in the Hunter should the ETS come into effect. "You only have to listen to the coalmining unions to understand there's a lot of unhappiness among Labor people with Mr Rudd's rushed emissions tax, which is going to put tens of thousands of jobs at risk around Australia and about 16,000 jobs at risk here in the Hunter," Mr Abbott warned. "The last thing we want to do is jeopardise the competitiveness of Australia's export industries, on which all of us ultimately depend."

With Mr Rudd shelving plans to fly early to the Copenhagen summit next week after US President Barack Obama indicated he would not arrive until later in the talks, Mr Abbott challenged the Prime Minister to a series of debates on climate change. "The problem is, Mr Rudd has explained his emissions tax more to Barack Obama than he has to the Australian people," he said.

In what promises to be an increasingly bitter contest between the two men, the Liberal leader took aim at critics who seek to define him by his Catholicism, and swiped at Kevin Rudd's new prime ministerial tradition of holding "press sermons" outside church most Sundays. Describing Mr Rudd as sounding "more like a public servant in a seminar than a retail politician", Mr Abbott said his personal faith was a private matter, and asked why journalists did not grill Mr Rudd on his religious beliefs.

Responding to a pointed question from the Nine Network's Laurie Oakes about whether or not he believed in evolution, Mr Abbott said his faith was "not out there in the political marketplace". "I don't do doorsteps in front of church, Laurie," Mr Abbott said. "I mean, if there's one person who's put religion front and centre in the public square, to use his phrase, it's Kevin Rudd. "So please, next time Kevin's here, grill him on evolution and all these other subjects."

As if to prove the point, down in Canberra, Mr Rudd emerged from morning service at St John's Anglican Church in Reid to issue a rebuke to Mr Abbott on climate change policy. "Despite our differences, Mr Howard had a policy on climate change, as did Mr Turnbull. It was called an emissions trading scheme. I have a policy on climate change. It's called an emissions trading scheme," Mr Rudd said. "I'd suggest the current Leader of the Opposition calms down, puts in the hard yards and actually develops a policy on climate change."

Mr Abbott has vowed that he will take neither an ETS nor a carbon tax to the next election. And that policy, raw as it is, found plenty of support with the manager of the Bloomfield mine, John Richards. Mr Richards said the miners who would be most affected by an ETS would be those in "gassy underground mines".

"Open-cut miners will also be hurt, but to a lesser extent," he said. "If the ETS goes ahead, it will impose a direct increase of $1.40 to $2 per tonne dependent on our production costs."

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ROUNDUP OF GOVERNMENT MEDICAL CARE

Four current articles below:

Surprise! Nobody knows how to fix Australia's unfixable "free" hospital system

Rudd knows he doesn't have the moneypit needed

PEAK health groups have demanded Kevin Rudd stop talking and act on improving the nation's health system, flatly declaring he is taking too long to decide how to reform the troubled sector. And the opposition has ridiculed the Prime Minister as a health bureaucrat more interested in process than action after yesterday's Council of Australian Governments meeting in Brisbane failed to deliver substantive health reform. Mr Rudd yesterday defended his reform process, insisting that reforms of the multi-billion-dollar system must be done properly and with proper consultation.

Mr Rudd won the 2007 federal election promising to end what he called "the blame game" between states and the commonwealth. He vowed he would lift funding to states but relieve them of control of public hospitals if they failed to improve their performance. Despite delivering a 50 per cent, five-year funding boost to the states in a $64 billion funding agreement signed last year, complete with more federal strings attached, Mr Rudd has yet to finalise his plans for structural reform of the system.

Yesterday, he emerged from a two-hour discussion on health with the premiers with no news beyond a $300 million boost in funding for elective surgery and an agreement on a decision-making process for next year. "Our healthcare system is under great stress and pressure, and therefore we must get it absolutely right for the long-term," Mr Rudd said.

Earlier, he had briefed the premiers on the report of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, produced earlier this year, proposing a range of possible changes to the operation of the health system.

The lack of progress drew a sharp response, with Australian Medical Association president Andrew Pesce saying the health sector was running out of patience. "People are losing confidence because the timeframes keep changing and getting put back," Dr Pesce said. "We can only tolerate further delays if we can get some assurance that solutions are being considered that will actually fix our deteriorating system. Our governments must give a firm indication of the direction and extent of the health reform that is being developed."

Catholic Health Australia chief executive Martin Laverty labelled COAG a talkfest and demanded Mr Rudd "stop talking and start acting". "We appreciate the level of consultation on health reform but today's Council of Australian Governments talkfest has not delivered what patients in hospitals and residents in aged care services need," he said. "Unwieldy and inconsistent legislation and regulation, and overlapping responsibilities between states and the commonwealth, are delaying or even preventing timely access to aged care for many older Australians in need. "By simplifying and centralising the funding and assessment processes, the federal government could ensure quality aged care is available to all who need it, when they need it, with choice over where and how to receive care."

Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association executive director Prue Power said she was disappointed by the lack of action. "Now that these processes have been undertaken, it is time for governments to act," Ms Power said. "The community expects it and the future of our health system depends upon it. "The outcome today can only be characterised as a continued holding pattern for the Australian community. If the government is not careful, the plane may run out of fuel before it has a chance to land safely."

Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton said Mr Rudd had spent two years making promises but had done nothing. "Mr Rudd is Australia's favourite bureaucrat," Mr Dutton said. "He loves to talk in bureaucratic terms, he talks in convoluted terms and today he was the health bureaucrat."

Mr Rudd was unmoved. He said his reform process was adhering to his stated targets and that he had significantly boosted funding to states in the new funding agreement. "These are massive numbers which affect the totality of the health system and therefore they have to be got right," the Prime Minister said. "A bit of sticking plaster here and a bit of sticking plaster there frankly, when you are looking at long term reform won't work."

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Baby sent home had blood clot that could have killed him

On the one hand, the seven-month-old's life was saved with surgery to remove an 8cm x 2.8cm blood clot pushing on his brain. However, his traumatised mother Tamara says that only hours before, when she first took James to the Gold Coast Hospital's emergency department, he was not treated and allowed to go home.

Gold Coast Hospital emergency director David Green yesterday strongly disputed Mrs Owen's account. He said Mrs Owen and James left the emergency department "against clinical advice after the patient was assessed and under observation". However, Mrs Owen said: "The triage nurse said he had only a minor head injury that didn't need to be seen by a doctor. "If we hadn't taken him back to the hospital when we did, he would have died in a matter of minutes."

Mrs Owen, 28, said James landed on his head after rolling off his parents' bed at the family's Upper Coomera home about 8am on November 24. "Immediately, his head swelled up so we put him in the car and took him straight to see our GP," she said. "Our doctor gave us a referral letter and said, 'Please take him to the hospital', so we did."

Mrs Owen and her husband Steven, 31, arrived with their baby at the Gold Coast Hospital emergency department about 9.20am. She said a triage nurse led them into a treatment room for initial assessment. "However, the nurse then pushed on the part of (my son's) head that was bruised and swollen and he didn't stop screaming," Mrs Owen said. "She said, 'If you like, you can sit in the waiting room for four hours and we'll come and check his vital signs every half-hour'. "She also said that we should try to put him to sleep out there but we thought after a head injury, the last thing you should do is go to sleep."

Mrs Owen said the family retreated to the waiting room as directed, but after 90 minutes no further medical checks had been performed. "So we decided then to take (James) home as he wouldn't calm down and we were the only ones observing him anyway," she said. She said the triage nurse agreed they could leave, handing Mrs Owen a "list of signs to watch out for." "Things like vomiting . . . being non-responsive," she said.

Once back at their house, James, would not take his bottle. He appeared extremely tired, and Mrs Owen says against her better instincts, she let him sleep. "With the nurse earlier saying, 'Put him to sleep', we (now) didn't think there was anything wrong with that," she said.

Three hours later, James barely flickered when his mother tried to rouse him. "He'd kind of look at me and crash again," Mrs Owen said. "He became unconscious."

Returned to the Gold Coast Hospital emergency department via ambulance, James was given a CT scan, which showed he was clinging to life with a fractured skull and a large haematoma compressing his brain. He was rushed to theatre, where a piece of his skull was removed to gain access to the clot and extract it.

Mrs Owen says James has bounced back remarkably and she is thankful for the skill of the surgeons. However, she remains furious with what she can only surmise are procedural flaws in the way emergency departments deal with suspected head injuries. "I'm so angry that when we took him to emergency that morning we were turned away when my baby's life was at stake," she said. "I'm still not coping with how close we came to losing our son due to this negligence. "Standing there, looking at my helpless baby boy – not knowing if he would make it – was the worst thing I have ever felt."

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Pregnant women ignored as they suffered miscarriages at RBWH

A PREGNANT woman was ignored by emergency department staff for hours as she miscarried and suffered a life-threatening haemorrhage at Queensland's biggest public hospital. Just six days later, Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital emergency staff were again reported over their handling of another woman's miscarriage.

This time, a specialist was shocked to discover the patient "pale" and "dizzy" and "lying in a large amount of blood". The doctor said he filed a patient harm report "given that this is the second similar episode in a week".

In the first case, blood was gushing from the cervix of an 11-weeks pregnant woman who arrived at RBWH emergency on June 8 this year. Despite this, and the fact she had already passed "several large clots at home", emergency staff did only one set of observations in three hours.

A clinical incident report, compiled by an unidentified medical officer and granted to The Courier-Mail under Right to Information laws, criticised the doctors and nurses involved. They were accused of carrying out infrequent and inadequate checks on the patient's vital signs, "distraction and inattention" and "lack of workplace knowledge".

The woman's blood was not sent away for important pre-transfusion compatibility testing and she had a heart-rate of 120 beats a minute when finally delivered to the operating theatre where her haemorrhage was controlled and her "life saved".

In the second episode, a RBWH consultant gynaecologist reported that the emergency department's failure to run tests and perform examinations as instructed – as well as its poor communication – had compromised the care of a miscarrying patient. He explained that when emergency staff initially notified him of the patient, at 9.30am, he asked about the level of bleeding and the results of a per vaginal examination. "But (I) was told these (tests) hadn't been performed as the (emergency) registrar thought it was inappropriate/unnecessary," the doctor wrote on the incident reporting system.

The doctor said he was contacted again about 1pm, by which time an ultrasound scan had confirmed an "incomplete miscarriage". But an internal vaginal examination still had not been done. "I specifically asked the resident medical officer if she thought I needed to see (the patient) immediately and the reply was 'No'," the doctor said. "(Then) I attended the patient (about) 1.30pm. (She) had been moved to (a ward) and had had observations performed showing pulse of 110 – this had not been notified to myself. "The notes also stated the patient had fainted at home after losing 1-1.5 litres of blood prior to hospital (presentation). This also wasn't conveyed to me. On entering the patient's room . . . the patient was lying in a large amount of blood (500ml)."

The doctor said he did the vaginal examination himself, which proved difficult because of the profuse bleeding. He alerted the nurses, but "could get help from only one". "I administered fluid resuscitation while transferring her to the operating theatre," the doctor said.

Queensland Health director-general Mick Reid said the incidents were concerning but media reporting of "isolated" events caused unwarranted community alarm. "Each day nearly 50,000 people are treated in Queensland Health facilities and 92 per cent of patients (are) satisfied with all aspects of their hospital stay," Mr Reid said. [Who cares if a few of the cattle die, in other words]

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Public hospital negligence kills baby

A MAN who told staff at a mental institution about his urge to kill a baby was later released into the care of the girl's family, only to kill her three days later. Jayant Kumar Singh, 56, was transferred to Rozelle psychiatric hospital in mid-2006 after receiving treatment at Canterbury Hospital for diabetes and depression. At Rozelle he received a visit from the mother and her children, with whom he had boarded for years. The woman was unaware of his thoughts about killing her 10-month-old daughter.

During a hearing yesterday to determine whether Mr Singh was not guilty by reason of mental illness, the court heard he had had electroconvulsive therapy before returning to the woman's home on December 19, 2006. In the days after his release, the nursing staff who checked on Mr Singh found he had not taken his antipsychotic or antidepressant medication. But he was not readmitted, the court heard.

A crown prosecutor, Tony McCarthy, told the court that on the morning of December 22 the mother had gone shopping and left her three children in Mr Singh's care. She returned to find the back door locked and her two older children, aged two and four, screaming inside. "When the mother left the house the crown alleges that the accused … took a walking stick and commenced to hit the infant child a number of times about the head," Mr McCarthy said. "He also took the stick to the … older children … to stop them interfering." The court heard that Mr Singh tried to suffocate the baby with a pillow and to choke her with his hands. "He then went to the kitchen and took … one of the knives to its throat and ultimately [partially] decapitated the child," Mr McCarthy said.

The woman broke into her home and found Mr Singh. She removed the older children before carrying the dead baby towards her father-in-law, who was at a nearby pub. Police came and arrested Mr Singh.

"Will the Crown evidence establish whether or not the Rozelle Hospital bothered to inform the mother that the accused had told them that he had thoughts of killing the child?" Justice Robert Shallcross Hulme asked Mr McCarthy. "There is no evidence that they did do that," he replied.

The court heard that a psychiatrist, Stephen Allnutt, believed Mr Singh had been "urged" towards a decision to kill the baby. Dr Allnutt said he could not determine from hospital records why staff discharged Mr Singh, but suggested it may have been because they believed his condition had improved.

"Thoughts of killing a baby are so extreme that one would have thought one would need to be pretty well convinced that they [the thoughts] had gone for good, not just a case that he's not 100 per cent," Justice Hulme quipped back.

The family, originally from overseas, had befriended Mr Singh, a Fijian Indian, and he had lived with them for several years. The woman, now pregnant, and her husband, who was overseas at the time, intend to take civil proceedings against Sydney South West Area Health Service and Central Sydney Area Health Service, in charge of Canterbury and Rozelle hospitals.

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ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG has some skeptical thoughts about "Dopenhagen"