[Des]

“From shops not to banks closing ATMs”
I take it there’s something missing there?

The failures of telecommunications are entirely at the feet of the current system design, and need not be the major outage they currently result in. It is entirely possible, where multiple networks coexist, to have phones default to another provider should the designated provider not be available. This is, in fact, how TCP/IP is intended to operate. It is a deliberate design choice to have mobile service users have no service available to them if their particular telco is not available, even if another has a full 5 bar service. With the current reliance on mobile services, and definitely for EFTPOS machine transactions, the inability of the system to automatically switch to any other available provider is no longer acceptable, and regulation should be changed to force providers to ensure usage of each others services is the default when there is an outage.

[Des]

Cruise ships don’t use cash, and it doesn’t affect their operation. An island is little different to a ship at anchor. They should simply issue their own cashless transaction cards, linked to a credit card number, and settle accounts at the end of the stay.

[Des]

A small amount of research would have answered the question, but it seems to be beyond Jan.

“JOURNALIST: Fewer than one in four GP clinics nationwide bulk bill all their patients. Backbenchers are saying publicly that medical bills are one of the key concerns for their constituents. Will you have to do something more in this area, ahead of the Budget?

BUTLER: We’re getting about the job of implementing the Budget measures right now. And these are very significant investments. It’s important to be clear how you are measuring bulk billing. The data you’re referring to measures how many general practices bulk bill every patient, for every service, that comes through their doors. That is one measure. It’s not the measure that we choose to use in the government. The measure we’ve been using after, frankly, overhauling the way in which the former government reported on bulk billing data, which we thought lacked transparency, is to ask how many GP consults are bulk billed. At the moment, it’s about 75% of GP consults across the country are bulk billed. As I said, in response to Andrew’s question, those numbers are very different depending on what market you’re looking at: Tasmania, relatively low, Western Sydney, relatively high, most of the country somewhere in between. But there’s no question that that healthcare costs, whether it’s medicines or the cost of going to a doctor, is a key cost of living pressure. And that’s why it was such a feature of our 2023 Budget.”

https://www.health.gov.au/ministers/the-hon-mark-butler-mp/media/minister-for-health-and-aged-care-press-conference-29-january-2024?language=en

[Des]

This old nonsense again? You can’t run a government on a shoe string budget. And you conveniently forget that Marles is also the Defence Minister – and the majority of that travel is as the Defence Minister, and that is why there are security considerations. The IT issue is that the system for posting expenditure has not been fit for purpose for years, but remediation of it was held back by the former government who were busily outsourcing IT roles. Government IT has been left a shambles across all departments and agencies by this piecemeal approach over the last decade.

[Des]

So you would be happy for anyone at all to be able to find your bank account by the most basic phishing – just punching in random numbers? I swear – the public is outraged when any privacy is breached. And outraged when there are privacy provisions put in place.

[Author]

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