Too often health systems were dependent on dedicated individuals who eventually wore out. The systems and arrangements were insufficient and unsustainable. The weight of the remote Indigenous health needs is vast, and urgent action on a major scale is desperately needed. The weight can’t be carried by the old ideals and approaches.

Good resident GPs are a crucial part of the mix needed to enable things to start to be fixed.

Overly idealistic doctors, many with only short term experience of the situation and embedded in the NT’s urban angst centres or in the remote health sector cliques, are flocking to criticise the Intervention, but fail to provide any realistic critique of the old arrangements.

Circumscribed by the orthodoxies and dogmas which have accummulated around their institutions and social and professional groups, and which have engulfed them over the last thirty five years, all they can prescribe is more of the same old pious sentiments, plus a lot more money, and less interference or observation by the outside world.

They don’t seem to be able to reflect much on the fact that they themselves may also not have all, or even many, of the answers.

Sue, on the other hand, is prepared to promote a fresh look, and one which nibbles ever so gently at the self-indulgences of some of her fellow doctors.

However, there’s a tougher alternative: a reformulation of the Medicare arrangements, requiring that new doctors could only get Medicare provider numbers to be used in geographic areas with a demonstrated shortage of residential GPs, would go a very long way to reversing the tendency (shared by Sue) to regard all the less profitable remote locations as medical and social sacrifice zones.