Stop the point-scoring
Who built the Bendigo hospital? We did. The Australian people. Our money. Our demand for a facility available for all.
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Could the petty grandstanding politicians trying to gain points get on with what we elected them for – to carry out their responsibilities as we elected them to do in a proper and fair manner?
Your standard of governance is at an all time low in the public’s opinion. Try to get some credibility, some respect, some statesmanship. Otherwise the trend is that minor parties will get control.
If the major parties show their inability to govern for all of us in a bipartisan manner and treat us all with some respect, we will increasingly vote elsewhere.
Kevin Inglis, Kangaroo Flat
Liberals opposed hospital
Robert Smallpage (“Who takes hospital credit?”, Bendigo Advertiser, November 30) now admits the Liberals opposed master-planning for the Bendigo hospital in the 2006 election.
Indeed, it was only just before the 2010 election, and well after the 2010 budget that funded the project, that they buckled at the knees and conceded Bendigo needed new health facilities.
Mr Smallpage will know there were two main bidders for the job of building our new hospital, but the Liberals opposed Exemplar Health getting the building contact even though their design and project management was far superior.
The Liberals wanted them ruled out because they would not ban union members from working on the site.
Mr Smallpage forgets to tell your readers that it was only after the Federal Court slammed the approach of the Liberals that they again buckled at the knees and agreed that Exemplar Health would build a good hospital for our future.
I congratulate Exemplar Health and all the workers. The new hospital is well designed and built and will serve us well for many years ahead.
Our new hospital facilities have been 10 years in the making, and fortunately every time the Liberals have tried to stand in the way they have been forced to cave in.
Jacinta Allan, Member for Bendigo East
Australian voters angry
Deputy editor Ross Tyson has indicated the rise of the silent anger vote effecting Australian politics (“Political brinkmanship hurting the country”, Bendigo Advertiser, December 3), but Murray McPhie is claiming Malcolm Turnbull cannot do much about it (“Right-wing parties benefit”, December 5).
But there is a very simple reason we have this situation now, it is the inaction caused by the decision to call the recent double dissolution, which was going to clean out the Senate and put a bulldozer through the industrial labor movement, but gave one hell of a fright to all of the elites in the Liberal-National Party.
These are the same people who allegedly called the building industry a bunch of thugs, but only 11 per cent are in a union. Any government collectively calling any organisation a bunch of thugs, says more about the political intentions of them, and their efforts to stay in power at any price, without any regards to the innocent people caught up in their collective nonsense.
The latest IPSOS poll has the Liberal party on 30 per cent, Labor 30 per cent, Greens 16 per cent, Nationals 6 per cent, and others at 18 per cent. Before the last election the Greens and others totalled 23 per cent, now it is 34 per cent.
Considering the increased vote of the Greens, but more significantly, the "other” vote has nearly doubled since the last election, to suggest that we will have anything remotely like the status quo into the future is simply not going to happen.
The "ordinary" are waiting with baseball bats to deliver another Orange by-election rout, because of politicians who ride roughshod of the voting public.