Ambos need crash course in manners

FROM MY CORNER .. with Ann Brunswick

Far be it from me to be critical of the fine men and women who serve in the Queensland Ambulance Service. But this column has from time to time had cause to get a tad grumpy with those who wear the .., er, ... whatever that funny bluish greeny colour of their uniforms is called.

Most particularly it has fallen to me to wag a finger at QAS staff who have been spied by your very own alltime favourite columnist sipping coffee while their vehicle is parked in a clearway just a few metres away.
Well, the other day an ambulance screamed to a halt with siren wailing and lights flashing outside the Queensland Rail building in Edward Street just before 5pm.
The peak-hour traffic parted to allow it free passage, and the ambulance driver thoughtfully puled off the street and onto the footpath where he parked the vehicle and kept its lights flashing.
That is thoughtful, was my initial thought, because otherwise if he had parked on the street the ambulance would have been blocking a bus lane. Not the done thing at peak hour, or other times really.
The vehicle was at that stage actually straddling the entrance and exit lanes of the car park under the QR building.
Well, surely the driver will back the vehicle up or run it a little way forward to unblock the driveway, I thought. But, no. All at once the three-person QAS team leapt from their vehicle, leaving it straddling the driveway.
Sure enough, a few minutes after they had disappeared into the railway station to tend their patient, one car and then another emerged from behind a roller door and under a boom gate from the QR car park only to be confronted with an ambulance blocking the driveway.
The first car was a four-wheel-drive and made a daring manoeuvre by mounting the concrete island in the driveway and squeezing around the back of the ambulance by using the car park’s entry lane.
From my vantage it seemed the driver of the car just squeezed through too. The second car gave up and reversed back into the car park.
Soon a building security man emerged and solved the problem by opening the boom gate and roller door of the car park’s entry driveway, enabling vehicles to exist.
No sooner had a few done so than one of the ambos returned to the vehicle and, with assistance from the security guard, backed it up just a few metres, thereby solving the problem.
Now no doubt tho three ambos had bigger things on their mind when attending an emergency call. But surely they would have known they were blocking a driveway.
If they didn’t then maybe eyesight tests are in order.
Not much harm was done in this instance, but if the emergency had been of another, more serious kind, and the car park was needed to be evacuated, then other problems would have arisen.
As stated at the start of this item, our boys and girls in bluey green put in some hard yards. But they don’t have to make life harder for others, surely.

***

Those who controls our state and local roads are a special breed. For some time now it has been my belief that any mayor, minister or premier who is presented with a plan by their traffic engineers is likely to be on safe ground if they do exactly the opposite of what the planners recommend.
It is often very simple things that tend to annoy me and raise questions of why they were allowed to happen in the first place.

Take for instance speed limit signs. For some time now a 40kph limit has been signposted in the stretch of Gregory Terrace that runs between the two halves of the RNA Show grounds.
At the weekend extra signs were posted to take account of the temporary taxi ranks installed for the Octoberfest celebrations at the grounds and another large expo of some description.
But the odd thing was that in parts one side of the street was signed as a maximum 60kph and the other side of the very same stretch had a 40kph limit.
Our local police would surely not be too happy with that situation, given it would make it near impossible to enforce either speed limit.

***
The “dirt files” saga that engulfed the LNP in recent times has certainly spawned a lot of media coverage, not least in The Courier-Mail, the august paper of record that saw fit to publish them exclusively and in great detail.

It did seem a bit odd to me that the same newspaper which in the past has been known to thunder about the need for higher standards in our political classes, and to bemoan muckraking, chose to devote huge chunks of its print edition to retailing what had been lambasted in its own editorial column as “mud most foul”.
Surely our city’s major Murdoch media organisation would not be motivated by a desire to boost the flagging circulation of its hard-copy version by publishing the files and limiting that publication to its print edition that punters actually need to pay for? Surely not. That would be just a hypocritical and cynical approach to take, wouldn’t it?
That would be the type of tactic used by disreputable Murdoch rags such as the now defunct News of the World. Wouldn't it?
By late last week the story had swung to suggestions that the LNP had dirt files on its own MPs and ex-MPs.
When reading one of the online stories on that aspect I began to see some sense in the LNP having them.
This line on www.news.com.au reflecting a comment by state treasurer Andrew Fraser seemed to suggest a possible motive for the LNP compiling the files: He suggested the files were used to “bring to heel” rouge MPs including Michael Johnson and Aidan McLindon.
Can’t have anyone with that type of predilection in a butch outfit like the LNP, can we?