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Referrals to specialists are regulated under the Health Insurance Act 1973 and Health Insurance Regulations 1975. They're not a scam concocted by the doctors. They were concocted by the Federal Government so that if you don't have a referral, you do not qualify for a Medicare rebate. To emphasise: You do not need a referral from a GP to see a specialist in Australia. You need a referral from a GP to qualify for a medicare rebate for your specialist consultation, and the rebate will more than cover what you paid the GP, every single time. The history behind referrals is that they are a kind of "triage" system. In the USA there is no requirement at all and people commonly book directly into specialists for treatment of minor ailments, clogging up the specialist's appointment books for things which are totally pointless getting a specialist to treat. Example: they'll book into a Respiratory Physician for a cold. These specialists treat things like mesothelioma, asthma, cystic fibrosis, etc. Not colds. But yes people there actually do this! The healthcare system becomes very expensive and overburdened as a result. So if you want to call it a racket (which I do not believe it is) you should at least call it a Government racket. However the Government do it this way for a reason. You'd be surprised at the amount of correspondence which flows back from specialists to your referring GP about your condition, prognosis, and the recommended treatment. I'm often in bed while my wife is still typing the transcriptions from her dictaphone from the day's consulting. Sun lesions: You could actually go to a skin cancer clinic which is run by GPs. We have quite a good one near where we are which I've been to for example. So why have plastic surgeons do this? Well, it depends a bit on what the problem is. If you had a problem which was near a vital structure (eg your eyes perhaps) or somewhere where you were particularly concerned about scarring (delicate and pretty face perhaps? Is that you? It's certainly not me! ) you might want a referral to a plastic surgeon who has many years of specialist training and additional skills in doing that type of delicate work. But if that's not so important to you, some of the cancer clinics run by GPs are just the ticket, much cheaper, no referral required, and they can very competently and safely remove lesions, etc. You just might not have your delicate lines restored quite as perfectly as they would be by a plastic surgeon. In my case, there are no delicate lines, so it didn't matter and I have to say he did a great job anyway. The last thing they actually want is to be sued or to get a bad reputation, so if your problem is too complex, they would refer you onwards for more specialised treatment. Just a thought......

Well tell them what you think! When you next walk into a specialist consulting room for treatment for a major health problem don't be afraid. Tell them straight up that you hold prostitutes in higher esteem than them!

Actually OME the exact opposite is often true. In NSW at least (I think other states are similar) most public hospital specialists are "VMOs" which means they're sole traders/private contractors who are contracted to work in the public system. There are 2 basic pay scales: "sessional rates" which is essentially getting paid by the hour no matter what you do, or the far mor lucrative "fee for service" which is getting paid per procedure, with different procedures worth different fixed payments. So if you're on a fee for service contract and do multiple procedures in a day you can make a lot more money. And guess what contract is normally offered at Oonawhoopwhoop Area Health Service as a "designated area of need" to attract specialists? Yep, fee for service. The government is trying to change that, but watch how hard it becomes to get specialists out there when they do. Why would you work out the middle of nowhere in Oonawhoopwhoop when for the same money you can live and work in the city you were born & bred in (Oonawhoopwhoop doesn't produce many specialist doctors)?

Yes the private funds are regulated to an extent. If they were not, we would have a system like the USA where a certain percentage of insurance claims are arbitrarily denied, whether you desperately need the treatment or not and you would lose any semblance of cover for pre-existing conditions, among many other things. How do you conclude that the entire medical profession is protected by the government? My observations from being married to one of them are that the government spend a lot of time trying to shaft them and no time at all trying to protect them. The medical Colleges are not run by the Government. They enforce training standards among other things. So no, you cannot become a surgeon without meeting the training standard set by the College. If you meet the training standard, you'll become a surgeon whether there's a job out there for you or not. There are actually cases these days of specialists finishing their training with no job to go to, unless of course they want to pack up and move interstate or work out at Oonawhoopwhoop, which very few want to do.

I've got friends who reckon 9/11 was an inside job, thermite traces were clearly evident in the WTC ruins, and no plane wreckage was ever found (conspiracy myths debunked many times). I don't always believe everything they say......but I still like having a beer with them.

Those who say "you think you have it tough? Think yourself lucky you didn't have to deal with what we went through when interest rates were at record highs!" don't seem to realise that in fact housing affordability is less today, with low interest rates, than it was then. Yeah rates were 17%+. But they didn't stay that way and the median house price was $75,090 in Melbourne. Over 30 years you would pay 14 cents in every dollar you earned to pay off your house taking into account historical interest rates. Today you will pay 25 cents in every dollar you earn to pay off your house and just as many, if not more, people are either defaulting on loans or more commonly just selling up and giving up as repayments kill them. Fact: Young people are pretty much screwed for home buying these days, but the boomers just can't get over their "we did it so tough, what are you complaining about?" mentality. The interest rate doesn't tell the whole story. Unfortunately they don't have one individual like Keating to focus their anger on, as successive governments have done stuff all about it.

My wife's a surgeon. It's more profitable for her to totally desert the public healthcare system and work solely in the non-Government funded private healthcare system, which is funded by your private health insurance premiums and run by private companies. Way, way more profitable. The only reason she stays in public healthcare working in public hospitals is because she feels obliged to provide a surgical service to people who can't afford private insurance. Pensioners, people on low incomes, etc. Yeah she's paid very well. But she worked under training for 8 years after finishing university before she could perform a surgical operation completely unsupervised. Her hourly rate under training as a doctor in the public hospital system for that time was around $38-$40/hour. I can't even find a plumber who will work for that. Her longest shift in a public hospital was 36 hours continuously treating patients. She had a 2 hour break. She does orthopaedics. What value would you care to put on a 3 hour operation which repaired a man's badly smashed leg so he could walk, work, and be generally mobile again rather than be badly crippled for the entire rest of his life? $40/hour, so say $120? A lot of people have no clue what many medical professionals go through to get where they are, nor the amazing changes they make to people's lives. The majority of them (there are unfortunately of course always some exceptions) deserve every cent they get.

It'll be interesting to see the results of the next Turkish election. However the situation in Turkey from a democratic perspective isn't comparable to Saddam's Iraq. In reality in Iraq you had a choice between the Baath party and the Baath party. If you worked for the Government, you had to be a member of the Baath party. If you wanted Saddam's internal security police to leave you alone, you also had to be a member of the Baath party. This is what caused the civil service to unravel after the invasion by the US. The Bush Administration banned anyone who was a Baath party member from any role in the post-war Iraq. This meant thousands of civil servants who were Baath party members - many purely for their own survival - were banned from any role in the reconstruction despite their in depth knowledge of how Iraq's infrastructure and bureaucratic systems worked. Also banned were doctors, teachers, and numerous other professions. You could't even attend university without being a member! Rather than looking at it from a practical perspective and banning the Baath party from future involvement but not banning people on account of their former membership, Bush went for pure ideology over common sense (gee if only I had a dollar for every time I've seen that I wouldn't need to work for a living)..........and paid the price. In contrast, Turkey had a hung parliament after the early 2015 election, something which never would've happened in Iraq! At the next election only a few months later, Erdogan's party won a majority and although there were suspicions over media bias and ballot rigging, nothing much has been proven that would've affected the end result of him being re-elected. Since then he seems to have gone off the rails a bit though, so the next one will be interesting.

By the way Gnu, if you knew your Iraq war history, you would also know it was the Bush administration who agreed to the troop withdrawal date, not the Obama administration. Obama simply followed the agreement Bush signed. It's called the "US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement" and it was personally signed by George W Bush. If you're interested in the long, official title, it is "Agreement Between the United States of America and the Republic of Iraq On the Withdrawal of United States Forces from Iraq and the Organization of Their Activities during Their Temporary Presence in Iraq". Obama did however complete the troop withdrawal 15 days early, on 16 December 2011 instead of 31 December 2011. I'm surmising that you honestly believe Obama's withdrawal of US forces 15 days early after an 8 year occupation in accordance with a status of forces agreement as he was obliged to do under international law regarding foreign forces occupying other countries with the agreement of the "host" country, signed by his predecessor, is the entire cause of the mess and instability in Iraq and thus solely his fault. Interesting argument, but not entirely convincing shall we say?

I don't think you understand what it means to be "victorious" in a war. If you think Bush, or potentially McCain/Palin had they beaten Obama at the presidential election, would've claimed anything even remotely resembling "victory" in Iraq or Afghanistan, you need your head read. Foreign powers have been invading Afghanistan for 2000 years. None of them have been victorious. Not once.......ever. In Iraq the Bush administration started the rot. I remember vividly (I was still serving in the military although I had left full time service and was doing reserve service) when it came out after the initial invasion that he wanted to form a "Christian democracy" in Iraq. I thought "Seriously? Christian democracy? This guy is a moron! Does he even know where Iraq is?" Then he installed the most corrupt Government Iraq has ever seen in its history. He expected the Iraqi people to love him because he liberated them from Saddam, yet couldn't even give them running water, power and sewerage for months because he'd authorised the destruction of their infrastructure and the total dismantling of their civil service, then wondered why people started hating him so quickly! I know someone who was a very senior officer in the command chain of joint force operations and special forces operations. He was tearing his hair out at the incompetence of it all from the political masters, well before Obama came to power.

.....the recession actually started when Bush was in power. In fact the GFC which trashed numerous economies around the world was largely a product of the massive financial crisis that emerged in the USA in Bush's final term. But we won't tell anyone. That way they'll think it was all Obama's fault. Bloody Kenyans can never be trusted to run the world's biggest economy anyway.

Do what the Americans would do. Use Australian grown chickpeas and call them "freedom peas". Fixes everything, and really makes the world sit up and listen.

We like chickpeas in our aussie mince and veg. Why should only the arabs enjoy them?

And how exactly is Obama "fiddling with the constitution" in the USA? Enlighten me. Republicans in the US have a lot of power and for 2 years have controlled both houses of Congress. Up until the death of Antonin Scalia they had also successfully managed to stack the SCOTUS with enough judges to pretty much run a conservative agenda there. Obama would be exposed immediately if he'd actually done anything unconstitutional or illegal. Of course that fact doesn't stop people who hate him just making sh!t up as they go.

Lol. Some of your responses to things I write could be used to teach a university philosophy course on logical fallacies. "I'm sure you would do this" (makes obviously ludicrous untrue statement about driving tanks over Pauline Hanson) "Therefore I can say you're a hypocrite" (argument careers off in random direction) "and a lefty" (asserting your opinion on whether someone is politically left or right inclined is not actually an insult, though presumably it was intended as one) I didn't actually say any of it was good. A couple of posts back on this thread I said: "......but more to do with Erdogan being seen to have become almost dictatorial in Government and his terrible failings in dealing with ISIS and the PKK." I surely don't have to explain that this is not a compliment do I?

......so you're on the side of military coups bringing down elected governments and having the coup participants' tanks roll over the unarmed civilians trying to block them in the streets, are you Gnu? I see you're a man of principles. [ATTACH]47946._xfImport[/ATTACH]

I don't quite share those doomsday views, though I agree CSG mining is a big problem. I've never seen any evidence or research that the "2 million" figure is anything other than a bit of a wild stab in the dark. It would be interesting to know what assumptions it is based on. I do however agree with you that as a species we ignore long term problems. It's not because we're stupid. It's because we're broadly selfish. Not necessarily from a day to day perspective (before anyone takes personal offence), but because we tend to put long term things in the "too hard, I'll worry about it later, I have more important things affecting me right now" basket then forget about it until it comes back to bite us. And bite us it usually does.

There's been no evidence that Turkey has provided material assistance (weapons, financing, etc) to ISIS, although it's relative inaction against ISIS because it wants ISIS to continue fighting the Kurds has been an ongoing problem. As to the oil output which is in ISIS hands, where you believe that's ending up and how it is being facilitated depends on whether you believe the Russians, Europeans, Turks, Kurds, Iraqis, Syrians, or Syrian rebels. Or one of a few hundred internet conspiracy websites out there which all seem to have a different opinion (the only common theme being that whatever is happening, Obama is probably behind it - he is the Antichrist after all).

I realise we have an awful lot of desert, but I think Flannery says a lot of careless things on many subjects. 2 million is ridiculously tiny for a country capable of intensive modern agriculture with the fertile and arable land we have along our whole east cost, the southern coast, and south-western coast, stretching a couple of hundred km inland in many areas. As far as non-arable land goes, it also depends a lot on what you do with it.

Phil, the population of Turkey has been >97% muslim for a hundred years now. What do you mean by "islamisation of a secular country"? Or are you talking more about "radicalisation" than "islamisation", given that it's already about as islamic as it can get? I get it if by "secular" you mean it has no official State religion. That is guaranteed in the Turkish Constitution. Well, actually an amendment to the constitution in 1928 as the original one specified that the official religion was Islam. However reports are that the military coup leaders want a new constitution. I'd be interested to know specifically why, as Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) has also called for a new constitution and I don't for a minute think their visions of "new constitution" could be the same thing or we wouldn't have a coup attempt. I suspect it has not so much to do directly with who is islamic or not, but more to do with Erdogan being seen to have become almost dictatorial in Government and his terrible failings in dealing with ISIS and the PKK, who see Turkey as a mortal enemy and have lead to numerous terror attacks. Of course the endemic corruption and general political instability doesn't help either.

.....and therein lies the problem when you have someone in a position of power who has what we might politely call an "unsophisticated" way of looking at things. In Pauline Hanson's world, everything is either black or it's white. In the real world there are many shades of grey. So if Asian looking people are queuing up to buy a house at auction, then by default they cannot be Australian in her eyes. Except the likelihood is that many of them - quite possibly all of them - actually are, and they would be perfectly entitled like any other aussie to bid on a house. The majority of Asian-looking people I know are born and bred here. They are not caucasian, but they are Australian. However Pauline doesn't appear to have the capacity to look at anything in a more sophisticated and realistic way, and that's a great concern when it comes to giving someone the power to pass or reject national laws.

None of my friends were ever assaulted by drunks late at night in the city before Sydney brought in recent lockout laws. Therefore I can confidently conclude that reported increases in late night city assaults fuelled by alcohol which led to those laws are false or just exaggerated.

Yeah I have to admit that I do occasionally turn to religion myself. Wife: "My mother is coming to visit for 4 weeks" Me: "Oh God, oh Lord please no, I'm begging you......"

I'm not justifying FT calling Hanson supporters "ferals". I'm sure there are some smart and articulate people who voted for her, and probably some who are not. Same deal goes for the other parties too. But to categorically state that racist or anti-Asian comments by Hanson don't exist is total BS. In her maiden parliamentary speech she stated Australia was being "swamped" by Asians, and that they form ghettos and do not assimilate. Look it up in Hansard. She has done it again recently. If that's not beating up on Asians, what is? It's crap too. The Asians I've met assimilate fine. Many are just as happy eating a meat pie and watching the Swans play at the SCG as they are eating Singapore noodles. Many of them even have Aussie accents. As for "ghettos" - if you feel unsafe walking through Chinatown districts in any Australian city, you have paranoia issues you need to talk to someone about. Chatswood is heavily populated by Asians and has some of the best and most upmarket shopping here. You'd be seriously redefining the word to call it a ghetto. In 2006 she stated that most South Africans coming to Australia were bringing diseases with them, especially HIV. That's just rubbish. She was clearly assuming most South African immigrants to Australia were black and impoverished (I suppose she figures immigrants are always black or brown) but the opposite is true. The South African immigrants were predominantly white.......and also disease free. I don't think she's racist in the sense that she wants to go back to the 1800s and shoot aborigines for fun, or that she wants to round up Asians or Africans and put them in camps. But she's one of the most xenophobic politicians we've ever had. She seems racist to me, but even if I were to be generous and not hold that opinion of her, she's certainly an extreme xenophobe when it comes to anyone who doesn't have white skin, and totally unwilling to modify those types of comments when faced with contradicting evidence.

But.....there still is one legal system. You can arbitrate as much as you like. "Arbitration" is a negotiation. You can negotiate for whatever you like in whatever forum you like and call it whatever you like, as long as it doesn't break the laws of the country you're in. If you want to have a "family court" and a "financial disputes court" which operate outside the usual court system and lawyers etc, then best of luck. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that and here in Australia we have many such things. In fact, even judges themselves often order negotiation between parties before they'll even actually hear the details of a dispute in a courtroom. "Judge Judy" is not a real US court. The parties agree to be bound by the decision when they appear on the show. That's their choice to operate outside the normal US legal system. Why is there no massive outcry over it? Far from complaining, many people seem to lap it up. Aaaah.......but of course they're not personally objecting to religious practices now, are they?