Secrecy and defensiveness to the fore

FOUR ministers down.

Hardly surprising. This government appears to be rotten to the core – ever since Peter Gutwein sprung that early election. Even without Gutwein at the helm it has become more secretive, defensive and autocratic.

An ICAC would be very handy right now to establish just what is going on. Yvonne Stark

Battery Point

CARE ABOUT US FIRST

THE majority of Tasmanians have lost all faith in the public hospital system and ambulance service.

While a child lies clinically dead in a taxi in Hobart because there was no ambulance or paramedics available to assist her, we have a Premier and most members of parliament who have betrayed us.

Their priority is a billion-dollar football stadium to house an AFL team and at least $15m in taxpayers funds each year to sponsor the team.

This utter madness is compounded by their bleating that they are being so overworked we should cough up millions a year for another 10 politicians.

The government and opposition are as bad as each other.

Who cares about the lowest-paid public hospital nurses in Australia, of which we are short hundreds.

Or a lack of paramedics and vehicles because they are ramped for hours at emergency departments with at times seriously ill patients for whom there is no room in the hospital.

Toddlers and children are forced to share a children’s ward at RHH with adolescents.

The Bass Highway from Devonport to Launceston is carrying huge amounts of traffic and in sections has become highly dangerous to drive on because of the shocking surface. The road toll this year is ahead of fatalities

for all of 2021. Where is the deterrence of the mobile speed camera lost over a decade ago and highly visible dedicated traffic police on patrol in force? Nowhere to be seen.

Forget this absurd AFL team mania and concentrate on saving lives.

No more decades of starving funding to hospitals, instead, give us more nurses paid what their interstate colleagues receive, a massively overhauled and strengthened ambulance service, and a properly funded police force with another 150 officers, all to keep us safe and alive.

The pandemic is raging and killing us in large numbers every day.

Mandate masks indoors other than private homes until at least winter is over.

Care about us and not the AFL and yourselves.

Ken Geeves Shearwater

RIGHT TO PROTEST

NO one likes their actions scrutinised and yet governments and big corporations need scrutiny more than ever.

The Orwellian-named “Workplace Protection Bill” will ban effective public protest. The effect will be to disempower the community and almost certainly lead to disengagement will the political process.

Protests can cause minor inconvenience but it is a small price to pay for effective democracy.

There are laws to prevent major disruption and we do not need harsh penalties for those who want to express their displeasure with something that a government or a major corporation is doing.

Ken Hart Glebe

POOR PRIORITIES

EVERY day when I wake up I wonder if I am living in the same Tasmania in which I have lived for the past 88 years.

Now, we have a government which seems hell bent to build a stadium costing a mere $750m so that a few overpaid and underworked can run around kicking an egg-shaped “ball” (I always thought a ball was round, not oval, but never mind), for what seem obscenely huge pay packets, considering their value to the community.

Forget the appalling housing situation. Whoever thought we would see Tasmanian families forced to sleep in tents in a cold Tasmanian winter in the 21st century?

And whoever thought we would be desperately short of nurses and police in this day and age? Certainly, no one I know.

How many nurses and police could we pay with that $750m?

It is about time this pathetic mob of a so-called government listened to its constituents, got its priorities right and provided the citizenry of this state with the basic needs it is elected to provide.

I may be just a tad hard on this body of people as I suppose it requires a degree of intelligence and perception to recognise that there are better ways to spend someone else’s dollar in a way that you can get away with ineptitude on a grand scale.

I wonder how long it will be before any AFL team from Tasmania folds and sinks, hopefully dragging this misnamed “government” with it.

Robert Clarke

Glenorchy