Skin colour no reason for discrimination

Favouring Aborigines in hospitals is not an egalitarian society, says Paul Murray

IT is 50 years since American civil rights leader Martin Luther King was killed and it gives us pause about how far from his famous dream we have moved. He wanted a world where a person was judged by the content of the character not skin colour.

But sadly in 2018, here in Australia, not a week goes by where some apparently well meaning bureaucrat goes out of their way to emphasise race.

In NSW they decided this week to open special parts of hospital waiting rooms that were just for Aboriginal people. The theory is, if they had a safe cultural space, they would wait longer for treatment instead of leaving a hospital before they were seen by a doctor.

But that’s not how an emergency department works. The wait is directly linked to how urgent your medical needs are.

Dividing people by race in a public space is counter to everything we believe about being an open and equal country. Your need for medical help should be the sole determinate of how long and where you wait.

What signal are you sending to a kid if they are told to wait somewhere else? IT is time banks paid for their own mistakes.

Commonwealth Bank customers were left without access to their money for much of Tuesday as a “glitch” crashed their internet banking, eftpos and debit card systems.

It’s not the first time it’s happened to the CBA and has hit all major banks in the past six months. Yet, nothing happens. No fines, no fee-free weeks, nothing.

In the past decade we’ve gone from carrying cash to trusting that we can tap and go almost anywhere.

But just like when the power goes out through no fault of our own, there are real consequences when banks fail us like this. Businesses, who need eftpos machines to keep their tills turning over, should at least be compensated when the system goes down.

Banks make billions in profit, yet this keeps happening. Why? What’s the backup and what are we going to do to make them lift their game?

It’s often too hard to move your home loan, but maybe we should reward banks who take these shutdowns seriously by opening a new account somewhere else and put your pay in there. FORGET 30 Newspolls, what’s Turnbull going to do when it’s 35, 40 losing polls?

Nothing is going to save the PM from failing his own test of losing 30 Newspolls in a row to Labor.

We all know nothing will happen when he does, he will keep his job for now. But the day can’t pass without him being held accountable for his failing to inspire and fill Australians with confidence about his leadership.

Turnbull’s defenders will say he’s failed because his internal critics have not given him a crack and people like me in the media pounce on the smallest issue. But the truth is when he got the job he flew higher than most PMs in the polls, yet he squandered that goodwill to make big decisions, and when it came to things like the GST he gave up the fight before it even started.

Now, there is every chance he could find a way to win the next election. But that’s only going to happen if he finds a way to convince the more than a million former Coalition voters who bolted because the party did what Labor did, dumped PMs, and have stayed away because Turnbull seems to lack the fight on cultural issues best exemplified by the Left’s long march through the institutions.