The Whirling Dervish

A couple of days after Tony Abbott became leader of the Opposition, I found myself in an emergency ward waiting for an operation. It was a Saturday and, given that St Vincent’s is part of New South Wales’ increasingly stressed hospital system, the staff were doing the best they could after misplacing me in a storeroom for several hours. My surgery was postponed half a dozen times due to the backlog; on the second night I was operated on. I was lucky enough to get the final bed available in the whole hospital.