I have read two pamphlets about the Canberra Hospital expansion and been to the advertised website. Try as I did to find them, there were no plans for rehabilitation facilities, either wet or dry.
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Many people used the old hydrotherapy pool, which was the best such pool in Canberra. I am one of many waiting for a new pool to be opened. Each town centre needs a hydrotherapy pool so we who try to maintain hydro activity, usually with advice from doctors and physiotherapists to guide us, can continue our therapeutic activity.
Activity pursued in rehabilitation settings is used by wise health therapists to treat post-injury; debilitating conditions such as arthritis and addictions, among others.
It is doubtful that medical specialists wanted the hospital to have zero capacity for rehabilitation. This is a bean counter's decision.
Is anyone for an ACT Liberation Army: shooting off letters to editors; lobbing pamphlets into letter boxes; protest marching; and maybe blockading the Assembly offices?
Warwick Davis, Isaacs
Hospital system is broken
A couple of days ago it was reported that NSW had 1200 hospital admissions with COVID-19 but that about half of them were actually in hospital for other reasons - like a broken arm - and were either asymptomatic or had very mild symptoms. So, NSW actually had about 600 hospital admissions due to COVID-19.
In August of 2017, NSW had 8000 hospital admissions due to influenza, all of which would have been genuine influenza cases because people who were admitted to hospital with a broken bone or to give birth were not routinely tested for influenza. I write this not to diminish COVID-19, or to praise the effectiveness of anti-COVID-19 measures. The point is that few people would even remember the 2016 and 2017 flu seasons, when about 8000 Australians died from influenza and influenza-related pneumonia, and "health experts" warning about a tsunami of hospital admissions was not daily front page news.
So what happened to Australia's hospital system in the last three to five years? Is this a story of enormous government neglect and, if so, why aren't journalists writing about it every day?
It's entirely possible that border closures and other draconian measures were implemented at least in part by governments trying to conceal their own incompetence, egged on by a news media with an insatiable appetite for bad news.
D Zivkovic, Aranda
Vaccine criticism was justified
Amanda Vanstone wrote "Be grateful for our vaccine rollout" (January 6, p43). I dare say there are more than a few people who are not grateful for Prime Minister Morrison's "stroll-out", a reference to the painfully slow pace of the initial and most important phase of the vaccine distribution that began on February 22, 2021. Many vaccine doses were diverted to "more deserving" people in Europe.
Ms Vanstone objects to "ScoMo and (Health Minister Greg) Hunt" being "regularly pilloried", but perhaps there was good reason to do so.
Ms Vanstone should know all about criticism: in 1996, when she was Minister for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, she was strongly criticised for presiding over deep cuts to the employment programs set up by the Keating government. Ms Vanstone seems not to have learnt from that experience.
Douglas Mackenzie, Deakin
Djokovic bungle
Novak Djokovic's arrival quickly turned into a classic Australian bureaucratically incompetent and politically-driven farce at Melbourne airport, with the obligatory ping-ponging of responsibilities.
It's difficult to know how much the claimed inappropriate visa category had to do with it, and how much was an unscrupulous federal government domestic-politically sniffing votes and exploiting popular disaffection with the visa which it itself had issued.
Had Novak claimed to be an au-pair here to attend to a prominent Liberal figure's kids, no doubt his visa would have been rubber-stamped and the airport hotel imprisonment drama skipped.
