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Canberra Today 14°/17° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Macklin / A big, stiff dose of things medical

MEDICAL matters took centre stage this past week, not least PM Tony Abbott’s apparent recovery – albeit somewhat tenuous – from his “near death experience” in the opinion poll emergency ward.

Robert Macklin.
Robert Macklin.
News that his opponent in the other corner, Bill Shorten, was regarded as “wishy-washy” by Fairfax focus groups would have helped him breathe a little easier, even though the same groups thought him “unimpressive and blokey”. And sadly, his “Nope, nope, nope” response to the Rohingya refugees will probably do him no harm at all with his heartless supporters.

BUT the most spectacular news belonged to the nation’s pharmacists whose Guild – reportedly the biggest lobby group in Canberra – secured them a $19 billion government handout. It would be used to give them the power to manage chronic conditions such as arthritis, to tend customer/patient wounds and to manage mental health patients’ medications.

Health Minister Sussan Ley said the handout would result in “cheaper medicines for consumers” without telling us how. The GPs’ spokesman Frank R Jones had it about right when he said the government had “bowed to the pressure of the pharmacy sector”. That would be instead of his own lobby group and that of the supermarkets who want to sell more of those products reserved for the pharmacists.

Alas, that’s the name of the game in today’s lobby-infested capital.

THE specialists at Calvary are using the big law firm, Clayton Utz, to press their claims for more money from the ACT Government. And they wouldn’t be getting that “representation” for free.

The medicos can afford it; while a specialist’s base salary is capped at a mere $199,000 a year, last year special agreements gave senior doctors extra payments ranging from $70,000 to $593,000 each!

HOWEVER, the good news is that at last – and without a lobbyist in sight – the Barr Government began building a new mental health unit in Symonston. Costing $43.5 million it will provide 25 overnight in-patient beds by late 2016.  

MORE good news that leading figures in science and the humanities are showing real humanity in coming to the aid of the 5000 kangaroos scheduled to be slaughtered in the capital’s environs in the next two years. In an open letter to “CityNews” they said: “The decision to proceed with the killing disregards the extreme brutality of the killing process.” Moreover, there had been no reliable evidence to link the kangaroos “with the demise of other small, threatened species”.

THE erratic Agriculture Minister, Barnaby Joyce, could benefit from some of that pharmaceutical medication. His call to relocate his Grains Corp from Canberra to Wagga Wagga after they’d just signed a $12.5 million lease had his colleagues in uproar. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann was appalled. Even our own Zed Seselja was moved to break ranks. “I think Barnaby’s a little bit out on his own here,” he said.

FINALLY, warmest congratulations to the new Chief of Army, Gen Angus Campbell, who took up his appointment last week.

Anyone who could survive the Operation Sovereign Borders imbroglio with honour can handle just about anything. His Special Forces background fits him perfectly for the task at hand as ISIS wreaks havoc as the new international threat.

Just what the doctor ordered.

robert@robertmacklin.com

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Robert Macklin

Robert Macklin

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