An open letter to Mark Butler.
Dear Health Minister,
I’ve written to your office a couple of times but have yet to receive a reply.
So let me introduce myself again. My name is Lolly Oscarovena, I’m three-and-a-half years old and I live in Murray Bridge.
My hobbies include going for long walks, eating meat balls and sniffing bums. I should mention I’m a miniature Schnauzer.
If you’ve never visited Murray Bridge, you’re not missing much. It’s the kind of place where children live on chicken nuggets, the babies have mullets and people think hepatitis C is a vitamin.
In fact, it’s so poor that my human mother says it’s beginning to feel like the last days of the Soviet Union, when the cost-of-living crisis turned the fabric of society into a giant, one-sided game of Monopoly and the people turned to the consolations of drugs and crime.
Anyway, let me get to the “meat” of my letter. My human parents both work as GPs in Murray Bridge but their patients can’t afford to pay a private gap fee so they have to bulk bill them.
Medicare rebates are too low to sustain this, despite you disingenuously trumpeting the fact that you’ve put them up.
To compound things it looks like you’ll be scrapping management plans and team care arrangements in June.
My mum and dad are worried sick about making ends meet and keeping their practice doors open for the good of the local community.
I do my bit – I take them out for regular walks and I wash their faces and behind their ears, which they seem to enjoy – but there’s only so much a small hairy dog can do when your health policies and priorities are a pile of Schnauzerscheisse. Please rethink them so that mum and dad can keep looking after the good people of Murray Bridge.
Yours wolfishly,
Lolly Oscarovena
P.S. My surname means “the daughter of Oscar” while yours means “chief manservant of the house”, and I’d like you to just pause for a moment and reflect on that.
