I was interested to read in today's Courier-Mail (pg 29) that Queensland Premier Peter Beattie considers it "immoral" for a national as wealthy as Australia to rely on developing nations to provide its medical workforce.
The Premier was referring to what I am told is a growing reliance on overseas trained doctors for rural and regional Australian hospitals.
The Premier was supported by AMA Queensland president Steve Hambleton, who according to the newspaper report, said "We are now getting some of our doctors from very poorly doctored nations ... That's not fair. We should be a net exporter of medical expertise, not an importer."
This is exactly how I feel about forestry issues. How can a country with as many trees as Australia import hardwood from Indonesia and Malaysia? How can the Greens rally against the Tasmanian forestry industry and turn a blind eye to the imported teak furniture displayed in every second furniture store?
For my all my posts at this blog on forestry (beginning with this one) click here and scroll to bottom to read about the lock up of the Pillaga-Goonoo forests in north-western NSW earlier this year.
And as a descendent of the first permanent settler in Byron shire, and one who can remember what it was like to have a peaceful surf with a few friends, it must be said that nothing, absolutely nothing, will stuff a place up like cool people. For these people simply cannot be exposed to a beautiful place without telling the whole bloody world about it. Yet, if they really loved the place, rather than merely consumed the physical landscape, they would keep their mouths shut.
The Bay (only blow-ins use the implied familiarity of the term Byron) is now the high church of narcissism. A minority of permanent green voters subjugates a mainstream majority by gathering the votes of an equally sized cohort of transients who will have been replaced by identical cliche's before each election.
What all these places need is an influx of people in bermuda shorts, cardigans and protruding nasal hair. The cool dudes, fearing dagginess by association, will run all the way to Mungundi and build stately pleasure domes by artificial (salt) lakes.