Band-Aid over a big black hole
WHAT a great service the Mercury has done by laying out Health Minister Ferguson’s White Paper plans, with a sensible and non-destructive commentary by Labor’s Rebecca White alongside (Talking Point, Mercury, July 10). Politics at its best, perhaps. However, the two articles together get to the heart of a huge Tasmanian problem, the unrealistic nature of the Government’s health plans and their gross unaffordability.
I get the same dizzy feeling reading the White Paper and the Minister’s article as I did when Premier Lennon came over the top of the Giddings health reforms a decade ago with his white elephant “new RHH” plan to magic away all pain. The reduction to one health board is inevitable, and should have happened five years ago, but almost everything else is in cloudcuckoo land.
Mr Ferguson is going to keep four big hospitals when we can afford and indeed need only two; one in the North and one in the South. He is going to keep four 24hour EDs open. He is going to transform LGH into a level-five hospital across the board and enhance some the RHH statewide services. A new elective surgery centre at Mersey. How do we staff all this? The only downgrade is to obstetric services at Latrobe, which was demanded by external expert review 15 years ago because of safety concerns!
The Government is going for the same old inefficient dispersed hospital model, presumably to guarantee no short-term political pain, but is actually now goldplating it. There are major new capital developments in all the major hospitals, including a new third comprehensive cancer centre in the NW, while our real problem is budgets. How on earth do we run all this, and maintain some sort of quality, when there is no real sustainability strategy at all, and financial realities are only going to get worse and worse?
Now with the site closed, the South Hobart Progress Association is describing it as the “historic Blundstone’s site” — no doubt to position themselves to oppose any residential development on the site.
About the only thing the South Hobart Progress Association isn’t is progressive and now we see it putting together some conspiracy theory that says because planning will be simpler, easier and fairer in Tasmania, this is somehow bad.
Let God guide us
PAUL Clemens (Letters, July 4) writes: “The best guide on how to live in 2015 is your common sense — not some collection of translated fragments from a couple of thousand years ago!” When I look at history, I can take no comfort in mankind’s common sense to guide us.
In 2015, look at ISIS and the atrocities taking place. Look at 1940 at Hitler. His words, written on the wall at Auschwitz, state, “I freed Germany from the stupid, degrading fallacies of conscience and morality!” That the horror of Nazism was conceived and nurtured in the mind of the most educated nation at that time in history and brought forth on the soil that had also given birth to the Enlightenment, almost defies belief. But it was atheism’s legitimate offspring.
Man was beginning to live without God. No one is safe in such a world. The Bible holds truths that are essential to us all. To dismiss the Bible with Mr Clemens’ scathing words is to turn one’s back on the one true anchor we have in this everchanging, turbulent world.
The oxymoron of same-sex marriage is another example of man using his “common sense” to make a choice. What man is really doing is following his own desires, whether they are beneficial to society or not. Who is to set the standard if there is no God? Man! When what is true for one may not be true for another, how can anyone be judged?
Brooker bad
JIM Cox comes out on TV in support of Operation Zero, which is fine and dandy. Some of his claims, however, are just plain ludicrous. He blatantly states that the roads are getting better! Oh really? Not when you look around, Mr Cox.
The Brooker Highway, for one, is breaking up and it’s not so long ago that it was resurfaced in the same areas. What have the authorities done about the road condition? Same as the Midland highway — stuck up a speed reduction sign. How about fixing the roads instead of taking the easy way out?
All or nothing
THE current smoke and mirrors being proposed by certain councils re an “alliance” coupled with extra staff to oversee such a scheme is a last-ditch stand by those who fear their little empires will come tumbling down. We the ratepayers can see through both the smoke and the mirrors. Minister Peter Gutwein needs to tell them it’s amalgamation or nothing.