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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

W.Australia has a land area three time that of Texas with the bulk of the 2.9 million in population clustered about the capital city Perth.

In the rest of the state there are volunteer Ambulance services subsidised by state and federal government and a fleet of Royal Flying Doctor air ambulances.

RFD(WA) comes in at ~ $80 million AUD / annum in state support (for better or worse - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-24/rural-gp-slams-royal-... )

They assert to have a "value" to the state of $4.1 billion AUD over 30 years - https://www.flyingdoctor.org.au/wa/

  Every day, the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Western Australia retrieves 29 people.

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Australia is also going bankrupt just slightly faster than the United States. Looks like deficit spending and debt levels are only trending the wrong direction there as well.

I am all for flight for life as we call it here, but that is different than saying we should have a network of ambulances across massive swabs of mostly empty terrain.

I am willing to hazard that the Australian airlift response is slower than your average ambulance response in Sydney.

> Australia is also going bankrupt just slightly faster than the United States.

Dunno about that, there be weeds. Not to mention the US clown car demolition derby is still in office.

Still, the coronavirus pandemic and associated policy responses led to the largest deterioration in the Australian Commonwealth Government’s fiscal position since the Second World War. That was 2021.

The forecast national net debt has looked pretty shitty since then, but the arc has been one of improvement - last years 2025-26 National Fiscal Outlook has been claimed to be overly grim by the most recent KPMG assessment of the 2026–27 AU Budget and backs the estimates that the Federal Government net debt servicing will return to pre COVID levels by 2029-30.

Yeah, it's f-obvious it takes longer for a plane to cross 600km than it takes an ambulance to cross a Sydney suburb.

Any other insights?

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