And these are the people Rudd & Co intend to trust with access to a national database containing all your sensitive personal information?

It wasn't all that many years ago that a series of royal commissions and investigations revealed that Australian police officers were not above inappropriately accessing information about ordinary citizens and that in New South Wales a corrupt trade in personal information had occurred.

If you have ever lived in rural and regional Australia you will be aware that doctors gossip about their patients, and not just amongst themselves.

That even now public hospital computer access is not always secure.

Anyone who has read national newspapers over the last decade would be aware that at least 465 Centrelink employees were found to have accessed personal information about people on pensions and other welfare benefits, sometimes in exchange for money.

Now we are told that; More than 1,000 Medicare employees have been investigated for spying on customers' personal information over the past three years and at least 150 of those investigated were found to be plain spying on other people.

These health professionals and public servants are the very people Kevin Rudd and his Health Minister Nicola Roxon are going to entrust with our very personal health information (cross matched by name, address, date of birth, gender etc.) when they introduce the Medicare smart card/e-card and national health information database.

According to The Australian this week:

Last week, the Healthcare Identifiers Bill was referred to the Senate Community Affairs committee for an inquiry and report on "the significant changes" proposed by Ms Roxon by March 15.
Under the planned regime, Medicare will issue every Australian with a unique, 16-digit identity number, while more than 600,000 healthcare providers -- including pharmacists, psychologists and podiatrists -- will be given similarly unique identifiers to access patient numbers.
While the Medicare-operated service will not store clinical information along with the patient's number, name, address and date of birth, the HI number will be used to populate records held by a range of care providers, so that eventually all related files can be brought together at the point of care. But the unexpected news of snooping by Medicare staff has set off alarm bells.

That the Rudd Government's so-called reform of health information is suspect is nothing new, indeed public figures are to be given the opportunity to have their personal information hidden behind a false name because privacy risk is admitted.

In fact North Coast Voices has posted on problems with the Rudd-Roxon grand database plan before this.

It doesn't matter how many times the Prime Minister goes in front of the camera and tells the Australian electorate that he means well and can do better - this national health information database is one of his worst ideas after mandatory internet censorship and leaving those draconian sedition laws in place.

• Medicare privacy policy
• Medicare Australia 2009 Personal Information Digest
• Healthcare Indentifers Bill 2010 - exposure draft
• National E-Health Transition Authority

Footprints for Peace: women's walk for peace events on the NSW North Coast 20 March to 15 April 2010

The Women's Walk for Peace follows a route from Brisbane in Queensland to Sydney in New South Wales. The walk will be held from February to May 2010.

Stages of this walk pass through all major NSW North Coast towns and villages between 20 March to 15 April 2010.
If you wish to join a stage in your area go to Footprints for Peace Australia for details.

EDO Free Seminar on Tweed Draft Local Environmental Plan, 23 March 2010 Murwillumbah

FREE Seminar: Tweed Draft LEP

The draft Tweed Local Environmental Plan is on public exhibition until Wednesday 31 March. In response to requests from the local community, the EDO Northern Rivers office is holding a public seminar to discuss how well the draft Plan protects the area's unique biodiversity and how the community can make effective submissions.

Where : CWA Hall, 20 Queen St MURWILLUMBAH

When : 5.45 for 6 pm sharp to 8 pm, Tuesday 23 March

Light refreshments provided. No booking necessary. Presented by the EDO NSW Northern Rivers office

For more information please call Mark Byrne on 6621 1113 or email

SES Yamba rules, O.K.

This is a big thank you to State Emergency Service personnel from Yamba (at the mouth of the Clarence River in north-east New South Wales) for their prompt, efficient and cheerful response to my sudden emergency in this last week's wet weather.

I sincerely appreciate their efforts to keep me dry under a compromised roof.

JM
Yamba

* GuestSpeak is a feature of North Coast Voices allowing Northern Rivers residents to make satirical or serious comment on issues that concern them. Posts of 250-300 words or less can be submitted to ncvguestspeak at live dot com dot au for consideration.

Rudd thinks censoring MPs access to Internet 'sensible'?

Rudd described some opposition to the government's Internet filtering schemes as "stupid debate" about "extreme civil libertarianism" that claims filtering "means the imposition of Soviet Communism a la 1980". He said most people "are sensible folk" who "know where the balance lies", according to Computer World on 1 March 2010.

Is that why the Australian Senate runs a web filter on all the internet connections it assigns and censored those of senators so that they were unable to read a reputable gay online newspaper - because it was "sensible" to reduce parliamentarian's access to information about a significant voter demographic?

Obama appointment of Medina as U.S. representative on International Whaling Commission indicates developing pro-Japan stance?

President Obama's appointment this month of former Pew Institute director of whale conservation to the post of U.S. commissioner for the International Whaling Commission does nothing to bolster support for Australia's determinedly anti-whaling position.
In fact Monica Medina's views at the end of the day would seem to run parallel with the current Japanese push for limited commercial whaling in the Antarctic.

Limiting Japan's Whale Hunting

Publication: Bangor Daily News

Author: Monica Medina

01/10/2008 - The Japanese whaling fleet set off recently amid much fanfare and celebration from its home port of Shimonoseki. Children waved flags covered with cartoon whales, politicians made speeches, and a band played "Popeye the Sailor Man." Officials told the assembled crowd that Japan must preserve its "whale-eating culture."

While it's true that Japanese communities have been whaling in their coastal waters for hundreds of years, in fact no nation, including Japan, is legally permitted to conduct a hunt like this one — where almost 1,000 whales may be killed — for the purpose of preserving its whaling tradition.

And in reality, today's high-tech whaling in no way resembles traditional Japanese coastal whaling. Japanese whalers use boats the size of battleships and employ high-powered automatic harpoon guns to kill whales. They process the whale meat at sea so that it can be sold once they return home.

Meanwhile, back home in Japan, demand for whale meat continues to decline — more than 4,200 tons remains stockpiled in freezers, according to a recent government report. It is hard to understand why the Japanese government is trying so hard to preserve its whale-eating tradition. But at least the world is beginning to understand their real motives.

In the past, Japan had been more guarded about describing these motives. For more than 20 years, international law has prohibited commercial hunting because whales had been hunted to the brink of extinction. The law, however, contains a large loophole. As long as the Japanese maintain that whale hunting is conducted for the purpose of scientific research, they can kill any species of whale, even endangered whales, and can do so anywhere in international waters, even in a whale sanctuary.

So whereas they may call it research, the Japanese officials' send-off remarks only confirm what many have suspected all along — the whaling expedition is not primarily about science......

But Japan is still actively expanding its "scientific research program." It still plans to kill hundreds more whales than it killed last year, including highly endangered fin whales. Since the prohibition on all commercial whaling was enacted, the Japanese alone have killed more than 15,000 whales under the guise of science.

Moreover, Japan is planning to build a new, state-of-the-art commercial-sized whaling vessel that would operate for many years to come. Scientists across the globe have condemned Japan's "scientific" whaling program.......

It is time for the Japanese government to face the reality of its fading whaling industry. Rather than killing whales in the name of science, exploiting a loophole in the international commercial whaling moratorium, it should attempt to determine whether some elements of the long whaling tradition could be retained without causing lasting harm to whale populations and the international rule of law.

And rather than increase the size and scale of its falsely labeled scientific research, in the face of shrinking demand for whale meat at home and a chorus of rebuke abroad, Japan should completely abandon its ambitions to kill humpbacks and other endangered whales.

For its part, the U.S. government must push for real reform of the international laws and institutions established to protect whales. And it should employ all available diplomatic channels to obtain binding assurances that the Japanese will not hunt endangered whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. It is time to bring whale conservation into the 21st century.

Monica Medina is director of whale conservation at the Pew Charitable Trusts Environment Group.

The blogosphere's talking about Tony Abbott

There are currently 43,648 mentions of Australian Liberal Party Leader Tony Abbott on Google Blog Search.
Here are a few:

If you had him in your family or as one of your friends, you'd quickly learn to ignore him. You'd laugh at him, write him off as a hysterical drop kick, or both. Oh, you'd say, there goes Tony again, with his lunatic conspiracy theories. Don't take any notice of him he's over-the top........
It doesn't take genius to see Abbott's modus operandi. He makes far-out statements in the hope that some mud will stick. He then backs off and resumes a more reasonable demeanour. In short, he is toying with us. Like a two-year-old child, he's testing out how far he can go before the adults impose limits on him. Unlike the child, he's fully cognisant of what he's doing and the consequences. His hope is that we are so thick we'll take his comments seriously, or at least factor them in as possibilities, and begin to see the Rudd government's apparently inexhaustible and dangerous potential for nothing less than absolute evil....
Jennifer Wilson at Online Opinion on 22nd February 2010

Abbott still misunderstands the role of effective, election-winning opposition, which is to keep the focus on the incumbent. I'm sure he's rubbing his hands at every headline he's getting, but all they do is keep the focus on him and his antics, and not the government.
PatrickG commenting at Larvatus Prodeo on 25th February 2010

As Abbott and Julie Bishop notch up their first 80 days as the new Opposition leadership team, the odds that they can pull off an election win are shortening. As unlikely as it seemed only two months ago, they may get there in time.
Ross Fitzgerald 23rd February 2010

For Abbott's Army it is victory after victory after victory and I know you are all high on the scent of blood and ready to do whatever your Commander in Chief (me) asks.
Tony with tongue firmly in cheek over at Abbott's Army: Forward to a safer past on 1st March 2010

We are getting a clearer picture of Opposition policies under Tony Abbott. It's full steam ahead to the past, circa 2004 to 2007:
Work Choices Light
Global Warming Slack
Hospital Boards Slight
Medibank Private Fire Sale
Refugee Reject
Kevin Rennie at Labor View from Bayside 17 February 2010

Paul Toohey has a piece in the Herald Sun: The PM, God and women – according to Tony Abbott. It's not a profile because only Abbott was interviewed. It's not Abbott's response to another politician. It's just a puff piece. But it's full of shit from Abbott:
"I do not regard myself as a Christian politician. I regard myself as a politician who just happens to think religion matters. I would be appalled, absolutely appalled, to think religion drove anyone's politics in a secular democracy like ours."
Seems Tony Abbott thinks we all have a short memory for when Parliament voted to remove his control of RU486.
And how's this quote from Abbbott about Rudd: "I also occasionally thought he was a little bit more in love with the sound of his own voice than he should have been." Pot, kettle, black.
The News With Nipples on 20th February 2010

Oz leader Tony Abbott misses sex during election campaigns!
Post tiltle at Buzz 7 on 19th February 2010

I am mesmerised by Tony Abbott. A conservative politician who actually articulates conservative values! A political leader who actually leads! Such a phenomenon is unknown in Britain, where David Cameron's Conservatives believe they have to go with the left-wing flow. And of all issues, Abbott actually won his party leadership through scorning man-made global warming theory for the scam that it is. This is surely as if Galileo had been elected to the Papacy. Abbott thus took on and bested not only Prime Minister Rudd but his own Liberal party colleagues who had supported Rudd's ruinous environmental policies. And wonder of wonders, such realism is winning votes; people queue up to say to me: 'At last, a politician who tells it as it is.' As a result, Abbott is snapping at Rudd's heels. A politician who is not afraid to tell unfashionable truths to ideological power; a conservative who is fighting on the right side of the culture wars. Can I bottle him and take him home with me?
Melanie Phillips on 24 February 2010

SYDNEY'S Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras went political last night with WorkChoices, budgie smugglers and the undead sending a message straight to Tony Abbott.

More than 70 members of union WorkersOut! a collective of working individuals who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and intergender took part in the float "Tony Abbott and WorkChoices Undead?" and marched down Oxford Street in a sparkly protest.

The majority were dressed as zombies with slogans saying "Tony Abbott loves WorkChoices" and "Tony Abbott hates your rights at work".

World Countries on 27th February 2010