Opinion Articles

The rural reality check the medical lobby needed

One Nation has floated a proposal to tackle Australia’s chronic rural GP shortage by requiring doctors to spend time in the regions before enjoying full Medicare billing privileges in the cities. From the reaction in some quarters, you would think someone had proposed cancelling anaesthetics. Apparently, asking newly minted doctors to spend a stint in the bush now qualifies as conscription, economic coercion and constitutional catastrophe. Let’s inject a little oxygen into the room. Medicine

Trevor Whittington February 25, 2026

Opinion Articles

Reflex politics crushing WA

Out on a country road, when something jumps out in front of you, the worst thing you can do is panic and yank the wheel. Anyone who has spent time behind the wheel outside the suburbs knows you don’t swerve wildly left or right every time the road throws up a surprise. That’s how you turn a problem into a wreck. Yet that, increasingly, is how the Albanese Government governs. When political pressure mounts, it

Trevor Whittington January 2, 2026

Opinion Articles

How the Housing Boom Broke the Lucky Country

Like every parent watching their adult kids edge toward the real estate market, I look at the numbers with growing alarm. In 25 years, Perth house prices have jumped from roughly $200,000 to close to $900,000 — a three-to-fivefold increase — while wages have barely doubled from $50,000 to $100,000. That’s not a generational squeeze; it’s a structural impossibility. Unless the next generation marries a doctor, a diesel mechanic, a FIFO worker, wins Lotto, or

Trevor Whittington December 11, 2025