Adventure Ausrama Blog

No security can be claimed for Australia's new My Health Record. Staff at hospitals can download patient records from the central database, copy them, then take the information home. Password gateways are useless. No hacking is needed. Records have been kept for years on people in hospitals anyway. Many have found that they already have an MHR record when they attempt to opt-out. After October 15 clearing your data is not possible. It cannot be deleted, only cancelled - whatever that means. Apparently, cancelled records will be kept in the cloud for 30 years. Don't be fooled. Governments can bring in new rules to access them. Politicians of all colors know the future will be Orwellian. There will be nowhere to hide and everything about you will be known by the state. The government started My Health Record without your consent six years ago. It was called the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR). A patient was pestered after release from hospital. He r...

People are throwing tantrums about being refused addictive pills from pharmacists. This comes at a time when the federal government is setting up a system of "policing" morphine based medications. If patients are frustrated by over the counter tablets what are they going to do when refused prescriptions? Codeine is the drug of choice for most. Because it is freely available and not officially restricted one can understand the frustration when a sale is refused. It is not much use for pharmacists to call police. Giving people police records is going to make them more antisocial. Telling people not to use Nurofen Plus for a headache is stupid. The public thinks, "Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot take?" - and rightly so! Pharmacists are not trained to deal with the public. They only learn chemistry, mostly irrelevant at that in today's prepacked world. Monitoring purchases is a silly idea. It is another layer of costly bureaucracy ...

Australia is going down the same road as the British by privatizing public resources. There is a major problem with this economic theory. That is, that once resource are sold and the money is used to pay off debt it cannot be sold again. When railways, electricity and water are privatized they are no longer under public control. Ordinary people are at the mercy of private enterprise who have been shown to continually increase charges beyond what citizens can bear. This is the cold reality of what the future will be like. Politicians of the right have put faith in private enterprise for a century or more. The trickle down benefits of wealth are shown to be completely wrong. The riches of nations is still being consolidated into fewer hands. The poorer are poorer still. Despite consumer goods being widespread, very few can afford a Ferrari. Millionaires have been superseded by billionaires. And the these consumers of all things monetary still want more. When services ...