Malcolm Turnbull’s interview with Monica Attard yesterday was good for him and for the Liberal Party. It re-established Turnbull as the leader of the non-conservative wing of the Liberal Party, while also making it clear that Turnbull is a team player interested in securing a Liberal Party victory at the next election. In other words he is not going to be a spoiler.

The next issue of Debate Magazine is due out in early June. The focus is on Defence and strategic issues.

There is a long article on Defence policy which asks the question “Why is Defence treated as a second order issue by governments?” Following this there are two articles on Afghanistan which examine the strategic issues there. One of these is by Marion Le who is a frequent visitor to the country and the other is by Richard Filmer who has worked as an adviser to Hamid Karzai.

Australia used to have four university departments teaching health information management, now there are only two. This is crucial for the Prime Minister's health reform. In order to implement a national funding scheme based on case mix, every hospital in Australia will have to have a number of health information managers, who can code each of the medical procedures so that they can qualify for activity based funding. Unfortunately health information managers are in even shorter supply than doctors, nurses and other health professionals. Many of those trained in Australia now work around the world as highly paid consultants, so the cost of getting those people back to Australia will not be cheap.

There was an interesting piece in by Michael Stutchbury in yesterday's Australian. It referred to the work done by Alan Brown and his Federalism Project team at Griffith University. Brown argues that local government needs to be strengthened so that it can handle an increasing role in service delivery. Stutchbury picks up the theme of stronger regionalism pointing out that a Griffith University survey found that 42% of voters favour some new form of regional government.

On the day before April Fool's day Jack Waterford wrote an appraisal of “Ahead of the Game”, the Moran Committee's report on the reform of the public service. As Jack pointed out it was a document mired in sludge. More than that it squibbed on making any real recommendations for change in the public service.