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Story by Emmjay
So, Tasmania always looks like a great place to move to when the mercury hits the thirties and above on the big island. That is, unless you need a job.
And you wouldn’t want to get sick in Tasmania either.
The Hodgman government is allegedly looking for ways to address overweening demand for emergency services at the Royal Hobart Hospital. (Where have we heard that tune before ? Answer: every state and territory in the federation.)
But for my money the lowest mean act is that to save money they are defunding Palliative Care Tasmania. According to the ABC, Palliative Care Tasmania is the organisation that trains palliative care workers and offers support to terminally ill people and their families. This is without a doubt an outrageous thing to do.
Patients with terminal illnesses and their families in my opinion are the people smack dab between the rock and the hardest place one faces in life. Anyone who has sat with a loved one in God’s waiting room and shared the pain and suffering so many folk experience at the end of their life will know just how critically important is quality palliative care. And the carers in my experience do the most difficult, incredibly important and demanding jobs – for the lowest pay. SO this is a double if not a triple whammy.
But it’s lucky that the Taswegians have a sympathetic ear in Canberra. Regardless of who’s the Minister for Health and ageing this week. Gadzooks – NOT GREG Hunt ! They’re really up shit creek now.
According to the ABC, Palliative Care Tasmania has worked with 250 organisations across the state, has been going for 20 years and was granted $2.6M in 2012 to ramp up its programs. The fact that the organisation is facing closure now because government funding has dried up, gives the lie to the allegation that state and federal politicians and bureaucrats have any concept that government is for the long haul. And it’s certainly not rocket surgery to understand that with an ageing population the demand for end-of-life care is rising.
It beggars belief that the Minister Darren Mathewson recognised that this would be a significant loss. That was it. Well done Darren. Thanks for coming.
Effing outrageous.
On a lighter note, the Turnbull government has managed the unthinkable – lower approval ratings than even the Abbott government. Couldn’t possibly be because they haven’t actually done ANYTHING since they fluked re-election. Could it ? Well, I suppose standing down Susan Ley was a major achievement. And replacing her with Greg Hunt. Masterful leadership, Mal. Fucking masterful. And what a great job you’re doing looking after the refugees.
This is not a government. Cat spew would be better at running the country than these guys.
So, if Tasmania is out, and the American rich have not purchased all of New Zealand, maybe it’s time to cash in some of the goodwill Australia has gained by accepting, no questions asked, kiwi economic refugees in the past.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Emm, I was mighty shocked when I saw the withdrawal of funding from Paliative Care Tasmania. Good call writing this piece. I love the line that cat spew could do a better job of running the country, that’s Mal (ingerer) Cat Spew at the head for those of us who are not blind.
It’s bizarre an organisation of its importance will be left to regroup. Its specialists will move on into positions they can obtain income from, leave the State, retire to a small holding in the country and grow strawberries, spin wool, and/or waste away in a menial position. I imagine it was supposed a kernel may provide volunteer services especially as so many individuals have to perform voluntary service of 15 hours a week to maintain their unemployment support (titled that, in itself noxious label, Newstart).
Newstart for the Dead (Clang! Clang! The ringing of the crier’s call and bell)
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Waz, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=237u6dTr6s0
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Watch people die, then get back to me. It’s either emotional or factual. It sucks either way. Terrestrial bodies make extraterrestrial decisions about you but at the end of the day you are nothing but fertiliser. 40 years of nursing taught me that. Take me on anytime.
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PS: Sister Yvonne may affirm some of my points.
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Yes, Sister Mark, it’s often pretty fucking bad, although, when I started my training, we hadn’t heard of euthanasia, or assisted suicide, but well meaning physicians quite often prescribed large doses of narcotics and sedatives, as ‘he is in great pain, and it would be inhuman to ignore’.
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Sister Mark. wheeze has seen it, awful, families that want their relative to live on, me too, but it don’t happen. I remember giving SC Morph 5 mg hourly plus a SC pump, great family, switched on, gave me a box of chocolates for helping their dad,sad as.
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Twas horrible when as a young nurse to have to watch those so sick die in agony. After working in OHS and then Community it twas good to see the change when returning to mainstream nursing.
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Top article and top comment from Warrigal. Just remember all Liberals are bastards.
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Thanks Viv. Just starting to get the scribbling going again. Must be the heat .
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Politics per se is the problem.
The old party paradigms are continuing to de-cohere and to be replaced by populist place sitters. These are not the permanent replacements though.
Australia doesn’t really want a government led by the Chip Witch or that malevolent stick insect from SA. They don’t really think that George “Jabba” Christensen has the answers.
We want better education, better health care and jobs, in that order. In long baseline surveys Australians again and again put border control and national security well behind those things that actually make a difference in peoples lives.
The rest is confected distraction, party political infighting, ideological delusion and constant fluffing of presumed party “bases”. (Read rusted on political illiterates who wantonly tow the line with never a thought about what their vote means. There are sadly more of these types on the conservative side because conservative ideology generally requires constrained adherence to a narrow view bound in market fundamentalism, whereas progressive politics offers a much broader range of ideas and therefore requires a deeper commitment to thinking about where you stand in relation to those ideas.)
Our task is now as it has always been; to properly parse the policy decisions and positions, look to the character of the aspirant MPs and there demonstrated ability to listen and act based on the legitimate concerns of their electorates. And now more than ever, it is time for ordinary Australians of all kinds to become engaged in the process so that substantive change can be achieved.
Remember the old saw that the future is made by those that turn up.
Globally at the moment we see that those that are turning up are filled with “passionate intensity”, and sadly we also see that “the best lack all conviction.” *
I don’t know how any of this plays out but the Bulletin of Nuclear Scientists has moved the clock up to 2 minutes to midnight, the closest its been since the eighties.
* “The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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Just for the sake of clarity: progressive politics is essentially humanist whereas conservative politics is essentially fascist. It’s a clear distinction between a rational approach to the future and the blind adherence to established cant and dogma.
Trump of course is trying something completely new; no idea at all except a whole bum load of “look at me” and “I’m gonna grab all the pussy I can while the pussy grabbin’s good, then leave it to the suckers to clean up.”
I’ve sent MJ a picture of picture of Trump’s women, (and they are “his” women aren’t they?) and I hope he can put it up. It is very telling.
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Or dialectic versus didactic, eh Mou?
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Daleks. “Exterminate!”
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Australians are clamouring for housing among the basics they want and need, Warriagl and I cannot help reflect social acceptance because without a reasonable degree of it housing can be mighty uncomfortable and ‘a village’ a miserable place. How that comes, social acceptance, might be a hard road or won in a place resembling hell but however it arrives, it makes the day to dayness of our Australian lives more tolerable, allows a form of co-operation however that pans out.
If it works well, it’s the difference on a personal level. Aye, there’s the rub, culture. Scratch the surface of a village and what do you have, a world in a grain of sand?
Thinking as i write, I am circling the subject of voters and political activists who respond to their village, perhaps to the family, to a conditioned response, to whatever, that warps the potential outcome of an election. The POTUS situation was a shocking one before the prize winner was unveiled. I cannot imagine the consternation in homes, on buses, street corners, offices in respect to what to do, how to vote, where to go, where to leave off, leaving or staying, coming and going, to and fro. The mental health of the POTUS seems intact, plenty of vitamins, plenty of health care, physically robust, well clothed, specialists to see, people and places that can be accessed, pipelines to try to build by a stroke of a pen. How are the American people getting on day to day? A lot of them not well at all, I am sure.
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Hi Waz.
Front page news !
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