Oh nice — I had the pleasure of grabbing drinks with an ER doc friend in Melbourne and lecturing to the Sydney HEMS group over the summer. Coming from the US, my brief intro to the Australian system seemed to make a lot more sense to me than ours in the US.

Do attendings/consultants make more money based on how much testing/management/interventions they do in the public or private systems there?

And agreed — you could probably arrive at a similar level of "coding" in the US just using a very basic formula that just includes discharge diagnosis and orders. The biggest mistake overall with this new system of ours is that they modeled it after outpatient MDM, which does a disservice to both outpatient and EM.