Last week I was consulting a specialist registrar at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. The clinic where I had an MRI done a few weeks ago hadn't sent on the results so she spent a good 30mins phoning the MRI clinic, my referring specialist and the RMH administration getting authorisations arranged and sent off in order to have the written MRI report faxed to Outpatients and the scan sent electronically.
She used both the fixed line on the desk and her mobile for the six or seven calls (I couldn't see a pattern to why she chose one over the other) while also receiving two calls and making one call on the mobile for consultation on other cases. No calls came in on the fixed line.
If it wasn't for the mobile phone network, a dedicated network would still have to be set up so doctors can talk to each other as well as communicating with other agencies outside the hospital precinct. It only takes a minute of watching a doctor in a hospital actually at work to come to this conclusion, so my guess is this is a non-policy (of which the Greens have a lot) that is designed to appeal to certain flavours of Green voter but will never actually get put into practice, even if through some miracle the Greens ever achieve power.
What is sad is that it is this kind of non-policy on the run with little actual thought being made that puts off voters who might otherwise vote Green. While I might be sympathetic to the progressive social agenda that many Green policies put forward, and I may be disenfranchised by the mainstream duopoly of Labor/Liberals and the self-interested corporatisation of my life, it is the ass-backward luddite mentality and slavish devotion to dogma by the Greens over sensible compromise and pragmatism that stops me from voting for them.
Vote 1: Australian Sex Party at the next election!