(edit: this is all rather off-topic, but I don't really care because it's interesting LOL)
The internship 'crisis' is an interesting issue, mainly because I don't see it as the real crisis right now.
Personally, whilst I do feel sorry for those missing out, I also don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that they did, as cruel as it sounds. Medicine is now following the way of basically every other over-saturated degree. As someone who does realistically expect to one day be a patient of a hospital in the (hopefully very distant) future, it bothers me a great deal that the old joking notion of "what do we call the person who comes last in med school? a doctor" is actually not a joke at all, but is instead the truth. I'd feel reassured as a patient knowing that my doctor was got grades good enough to be one, and wasn't there just because of some guarantee. Getting into med school shouldn't be the hard part, that should be the easiest part; with guaranteed jobs that's just not the case and I don't think that's right.
To draw comparisons, the person who scrapes through with P's (passes, 50-59%) in law school won't become a lawyer (and let's ignore all those 0.00000001%'ers who pull off the miraculous and inspirational to get somewhere from nowhere), similarly the person who scrapes through with P's in a science degree won't get a job in a lab. So in this regard, I think it's perfectly ok for us to weed out the weaker graduates early. However, I'm unaware of any Australian studies correlating med school marks with performance as a practitioner, but that would certainly alter my stance on this issue.
Having said that, by all reports, Australia does need more doctors. So it's an interesting conundrum, and I think the responsibility lies with both the Govt and with the Colleges to try and solve the issues. There's no use having interns who can't get training spots, so I don't see raising intern spots as a big priority. I see the priority as fixing the more serious bottleneck later in training: during registrar years, advanced training, fellowship. Instead of fixing from the bottom-up, I'd prefer a solution starting at the top. For example, created more AT spots in rural areas, get the specialists, albeit specialists in training, to those areas of need. Give more people a chance to climb the ladder, not give more people a chance to be stranded at the bottom of the ladder.
(not touching the Fellowship thing again, but I don't think either of us are super well informed on it hahahaha
and NAPLAN was an analogy, if it was a perfect fit it wouldn't be an analogy
)
sorry for being so passive aggressive!
Not at all, always a pleasure to hear from our colleagues who are on the wrong side of the Victorian-NSW border
(/cheek)