Let's try to make sense out of a couple of hints thrown out by Nick Minchin and Sharman Stone.

Stone: Annual Procurement Plans make $17 billion procurement market more transparent
A new Australian Government Procurement Framework was launched in January this year. It was implemented to encourage greater competition, fairer access for SMEs and to harmonise with Australia’s free trade agreements. The Australia – United States Free Trade Agreement in particular gives Australian business access to the United States $200 billion government procurement market. The new policy makes Australia’s $17 billion Government procurement market more open, transparent and accountable. It should also deliver better value for money to the Australian taxpayer.

Minchin: Speech 24 August 2005 - NATIONAL PRESS CLUB
At a Federal level, we are under increasing pressure to take over State responsibilities. While there is much to be said for the harmonisation across Australia of rules and regulations governing things like workplace relations, we should not succumb to pressure to take on more State spending functions.
In particular, I am opposed to any suggestion that we takeover the States’ public hospitals.
Indeed in my view, the States should consider outsourcing the management and operation of their hospitals to the private sector, given they seem incapable of running them efficiently themselves.

Why would public hospitals management spring to Minchin's mind, in the context of plums ripe for outsourcing? Has one of the big US HMOs been taking him out to lunch?

Is it also coincidence that J. Stoelwinder has had an article published at New Matilda on management of public hospital waiting lists? Stoelwinder came from public hospital management to the Private Health Insurance Administration Council, appointed by Wooldridge 1998 and resigned 2002.

Is it more coincidence, that Minchin is trying to flog off Medibank Private? And someone else is promoting the credentials of PHI to expand its activities - Private cover to go beyond hospitals.

Mr Walker said the present system of "perverse incentives" contributed to health insurance premiums being driven up by 8 per cent a year for the past three years. The two biggest funds, Medibank Private and MBF, have both championed policies to reduce reliance on hospitals.

I'd like to see the Private Health Industry lined up against the public hospital management monopolies, which are rotten with their own sets of perverse incentives.

Minchin: We are an unashamedly conservative government and smaller government is a core belief.

There may be a parallel, on core beliefs, with this - Earth's Core Spins Faster Than Surface, Study Confirms

Minchin and Stone ought to be able to "threaten" public sector cartels with privatisation, but only if the mechanisms for procurement of services, and ongoing audit of performances, are out in the cleansing environment of brilliant sunshine, where we can all see what is going on.

So, where is DoFA's Private financing panel (announced by Stone months ago) in the procurement process? (I take it 'procurement' is more or less synonymous with 'outsourcing'.)

California accused GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott Laboratories & 37 other pharmaceutical companies of defrauding the state's $34-billion Medi-Cal health program for the poor by inflating prescription drug prices.

 

In a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Boston, California Attorney-General, Bill Lockyer, said the companies supplied inflated prices to industry publications used by Medi-Cal to reimburse healthcare providers for drug costs.

 

"We're dragging these drug companies into the court of law because they're gouging the public on basic life necessities," Lockyer said in a statement. "The days of prescription pricing fraud are over."

Drug Mafia Fraud

From The Lobbying-Industrial Complex

Clearly, it is time to enact credible controls. Worthy proposals have been submitted for clearer electronic tracking of spending, the curtailing of Congressional junkets arranged by lobbyists and tighter controls on the leaps to private-sector riches that Congressional and White House specialists routinely make. Some of the newest and highest-paid lobbyists in the Medicarefest were instrumental to writing and selling the law. Surely those who so easily catered to that special interest might spare a minute for the public interest.

From the right-leaning ABC

AWB vetoes CBH wheat export licence
Western Australian wheat growers are set to miss out on millions of dollars this harvest after wheat exporter AWB International vetoed a bulk export licence.

WA grain handler CBH was hoping to offer farmers a five-year contract to supply wheat to its South East Asian flour mills.

Under the agreement CBH needed two million tonnes of grain each year and was willing to pay farmers about $30 more than AWB for the first year.

AWB says it rejected the application to protect the financial entitlements of wheat growers, who are delivering to the 2006/07 National Pool.

CBH Group chief executive officer Imre Mencshelyi says the decision is an injustice for WA growers.

"We found it outrageous that growers in Western Australia will miss out on an opportunity of between $40 million and $50 million that would benefit them enormously in a year of drought."

CBH says it will resubmit its application.

------------------

Gus: Could CBH pay a little bribe somewhere in the pipeline to AWB? It worked for AWB with Saddam, Did it not? Ah, I forgot, this is free trade as long as it's a monopoly...