April Fools

Contemplating whether or not medical staff at the new Gold Coast Hospital will be allowed to have a durrie on site is not news. It's mean, small minded, tawdry class war.

Page 5 of this week's 'Gold Coast Sun' (we've blocked the subject's identity)

No quotes from nurses or doctors are included in what is becoming an all too familiar example of the Murdoch press' campaign against universal health care, but the caption to the accompanying image of a person lighting up says: "Nurses want a chance to inhale without leaving the grounds."

We reject the closely aligned ideological agenda of the Murdoch press and that of the government and opposition at Federal, State and Local levels - especially when there are no alternative newspapers.

For instance, this fascist propaganda endorses Moncrieff Federal MP Steven Ciobo's proposition to use prison labour to clean the supposedly litter ridden M1.

Page 7, this week's 'Gold Coast Sun'

Evidently a handful of rubbish on the highway is more worrying to Ciobo (and last week Albert MP Margaret Keech) and the Murdoch Press, than concerns about the environmental and health impact of the recent fuel leak in Miami.

Speaking of pollution, fascism, propaganda, Murdoch and public services:

... MURRAY MCLAUGHLIN: The information super highway was foremost on everyone's mind at Yirrkala school, where every child was given a laptop computer, branded an XO.

Fifteen hundred XO laptops have been distributed in the past year to children in remote schools across Australia.

The project's being driven by a not-for-profit organisation called One Laptop Per Child, which plans to distribute 400,000 laptops to children in remote schools over the next five years. That's going to cost $200 million.

RANGAN SRIKHANTA, ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD: Now that cost is a drop in the ocean in terms of the total spend in terms of education right across Australia, but it can have a monumental impact if we really do reach each of these children.

MURRAY MCLAUGHLIN: The One Laptop Per Child organisation was formed in the United States five years ago to create an affordable educational device for use in developing countries.

JOHN HARTIGAN, CHAIRMAN, NEWS LTD: Well, the first thing that happened several years ago was that Rupert Murdoch put seed capital into the whole program of rolling it out of the Massachusetts media lab and that started a process that, one was exciting, but who would believe that we'd finish up in East Arnhem Land handing them out today. ...

Action?

Never give up.