The New South Wales doctors' dispute 1984–85: An interpretation

The NSW doctors’ dispute 1984–85 has had a lasting effect on the Australian health care system. Militant surgeons were effective in securing some modifications to regulations and administrative arrangements governing the role and remuneration of certain groups of doctors in NSW public hospitals and some changes to the federal government's Medicare scheme.

This paper examines the causes, actors, issues and outcome of the dispute. The key to understanding the dispute is a knowledge of both the specific issues debated by militant doctors and the federal and NSW Labor governments and the broader historical forces that have shaped the politics of national health insurance throughout the twentieth century. In contrast to media reports, the outcome of the dispute is interpreted as a compromise rather than a victory for the doctors. It is further argued that a theoretical generalisation formulated by two American political scientists, Marmor and Thomas, about disputes between doctors and governments over payment methods is only partially useful in explaining the outcome.

Two prominent and well‐documented historical themes from the politics of national health insurance in Australia — namely, the resistance of sections of the medical profession to any contraction of the private market for medicine and the fragmentation of the organised medical profession during periods of disputation with governments at the state and federal level — are discussed. These themes, and some generalisations about the capacity of the medical profession to influence public policy outcomes, are illuminated by the study.     

A lesson from Bass Strait on connectivity conservation

Isolation effects on the distributions of plant species in fragmented forests appear to be weak over tens to hundreds of years and strong over geological eras. The 250 km wide, 6.5 millennia old Bass Strait, and other millennium-scale disjunctions in the range of Eucalyptus regnans forests, were used to determine the effects of intermediate periods of isolation on plant species occurrence and composition. Three of six floristic communities were found on both sides of Bass Strait. The residuals from multiple regression models using climatic variables on the latitude vector were not explained by latitude, indicating negligible isolation effects from Bass Strait. However, there was a lesser compositional effect of disjunctions within land masses than between land masses, suggesting some effect of the larger barrier. No species that commonly occurred with E. regnans and were largely confined to wet forest exhibited absences from any region where the climate and soils were within their range. If areas isolated from each other for millennia can maintain their vascular plant biota, the expenditure of conservation funds on creating corridors to connect large areas separated by anthropogenic landscape modification might require more justification than it is currently afforded.     

世界纪录世界有多大？数字告诉你……

以色列12 以色列航空工业公司微型机器人实验室研制出一款新型机器人——“机械蝴蝶”。它属于接近纳米技术的微电子科技产品。“机械蝴蝶”长20厘米,仅重12克,内含发动机、传感器、通讯及转向系统,模拟蝴蝶煽动四片翅膀推动其前进。