from Wikileaks .....

The Australian Department of Health and Ageing (DHA) has set out to constrain the number of doctors graduating, despite supply shortages which have seen the country poaching medical staff from the developing world.

A FOI request executed on the DHA returned among other documents, the Howard era document C160.

A portion of that document is blacked out because the DHA claims it was contrary to public interest to reveal the information.

The DHA action serves to highlight the Deparment's political sensitivies.

Another FOI was executed on the University of Sydney and returned a copy of the same DHA document-but this time, without the blacked out text (C170).

By comparing the two, we can see what the DHA was trying to hide:

"As you know, the Commonwealth is working towards containing the overall numbers of medical students graduating, "

The part after the comma reads,

"while encouraging special initiatives (such as the Medical Rural Bonded Scholarships) to deliver more doctors to rural communities."

But another DHA document, similarly obtained from the University of Sydney, C175 states:

"As detailed at the time of allocation around 80% of total HECS funded medical places offered at each medical school continue to have no restrictions on where the doctor concerned can work."

The DHA FOI did not return C175 at all.