What next: a water pistol buyback?
August 5, 2010
Before we get to the rest of Hey: You’ve gotta see this great campaign ad from Bob Katter, a north Queensland MP. He’s even solid on property rights!
Today, Tony Abbott has announced his health plan – 1500 more hospital beds than Julia Gillard’s plan.
Sure. Great, I guess.
But what’s the point if all our doctors and nurses do is complete forms and wrangle with red tape?
- There are more than TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND pages of legislation saying what medical workers cannot do
- There are more than THREE HUNDRED Acts of parliament on health
- There are EIGHTY Commonwealth health regulatory agencies.
It’s what the IPA’s Julie Novak, Tim Wilson and I found in this report we did with the Australian Centre for Health Research. Maybe Gillard and Abbott should cut red tape … then we can talk about more beds.
We’ve been telling you for ages Gillard and Rudd are wrong: the stimulus didn’t save Australia. But we’re not alone! Here’s The Daily Telegraph’s John Rolfe yesterday, and in The Australian last week Tony Makin agrees. There’s a wonderful essay in the latest City Journal on what all the books on the GFC teach us about what actually happened in the crisis – it’s here.
While we’re at it, this article from the January Cato Policy Report continues to be – I reckon – one of the most insightful pieces on the GFC. Not even the regulators understood their own regulations!
The IPA’s Tim Wilson has been everywhere – he has a new TV show, Snapshot, every Wednesday at 9:15am on ABC24. He was also on The Drum yesterday. And today he’s got a new paper looking at green protectionism.
From the Nanny State files: Andrew Bolt has a fantastic column on how the Nanny State is holding back Melbourne’s bike-share program. And in Queensland – you might have to get a license to keep your kids’ toy guns!
And the National Health and Medical Research Council thinks people should go unhealthy – for the planet! The Australian had the story last month. (Speaking of which: here’s a great sketch about rude vegetarians from the show Mitchell and Webb. Is eating cat good for Gaia?)
Here’s what IPA staff have been talking about this week: In The Australian today, Tom Switzer discovered that climate action isn’t going anywhere. In The Sunday Age, I said that Abbott and Gillard’s law and order policies were off the mark, and on The Drum on Tuesday that Wikileaks might be missing the point.
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