While Vaile chases Queensland…

While Vaile chases Queensland even the village idiot could win Lyne!

While Port Macquarie (Lyne) health and community services steadily fade into oblivion the local federal member has more important issues to deal with.

As leader of the Nationals, Mark Vaile is spending his time trying to win Queensland back to the fold.

He feels safe of course, as the local media are careful to run protection for him in his absence. Queensland is a long way from the electorate of Lyne and a long way from the real problems his government has chosen to ignore.

Health? Community support service? “You don’t understand the big picture”, Vaile is fond of saying.

Indeed, anyone desperately seeking local services really don’t care about the need for the coalition to win back support in Queensland. They don’t even care about politics. They just want effective services.

Take hospitals, and despite the recent flood of budget money, the long-awaited upgrade to Port Macquarie’s public hospital might be more than 10 years away, according to news reports.

But then the budget of Vaile’s government allocated just 5% growth to the hospital budget while the real cost is growing by 7.5% per year.

Reports suggest that much of the budget allocation was simply remedial, to fix existing problems. Nothing has been put into growth and nothing has been put into immediate shortages of funding and staffing.

I understand Mark’s ‘big picture’. I understand how frightened he and his colleagues are of losing the honey pot of government! The little picture is that real people, real Australians are suffering because of this political arrogance.

Come home Mark and face the people!