Dingo bytes
The Federal Government's plan to scrap an annual $7 million subsidy for general aviation and regional airports will add $1 million a year to the cost of Victoria's Metropolitan Ambulance Air Service. Air Ambulance Victoria carries about 6000 patients a year to Melbourne hospitals, mostly from rural areas. If the subsidy goes it will be forced to pay almost 700 percent more in airport charges. Costs will have to be cut. The Service's general manager, Ian Patrick, says it isn't possible to pass the cost onto patients: "If we don't get funding for it somewhere, you'd have to look at what you can and can't provide. Maybe you would end up cutting services." In response, the office of Federal Transport Minister John Anderson flippantly said airport charges had been kept "artificially low".* * * Immediately after the death of 17-year-old Thomas Hickey in Redfern, which sparked a violent confrontation between police and the suburb's Aboriginal community, the police denied having even seen him. Then they admitted they may have seen him, then said, yes, they had seen him. The community claimed right from the start that the cops had chased him, and caused his death from a collision with a fence outside a housing commission estate. Now, at the inquiry into his death, police say they did follow Thomas, but didn't chase him. How's that for splitting hairs? If you're an Aboriginal kid in Redfern, a car-load of cops following you is a chase.* * * John Howard and his little crew of thieves and cutthroats are obviously jittery about the coming election, what with their character assassination of Mark Latham and the spending of more than $4 million in just one week last month on advertising their package of lies about Medicare and promoting the $600 child payment. In fact, Flakjacket Johnnie oversaw the spending of $29 million of taxpayers' money in the past six months according to Nielsen Media Research. Labor claims the Government's advertising blitz will total $122 million for the year.* * * CAPITALIST HOG OF THE WEEK: is the Australian Democrats. The wavering, inconsistent and unreliable nature of the Australian Democrats as far as workers are concerned is nowhere better demonstrated than their approach to the trade unions. Rightly seeing the Greens as the threat to their balance of power position in the Senate, they have attacked them for having "rejected every piece of this Government's industrial relations legislation". They say that the Greens "not only oppose the Workplace Relations Act" but (horror of horrors) "philosophically have hard left views". The Democrats, on the other hand, "are not bound by ancient ideologies, nor beholden to big business or the unions". They actually credit the Howard Government's vicious anti-union laws with creating "lower unemployment, lower interest rates, higher productivity, higher real wages" and "lower levels of industrial disputation". Proudly they proclaim their contribution to the increased exploitation of workers: "Lost working days are at a record low".