Pokies replacing Diggers’ history

Don Wormald writes: Re. “Raise a beer to the RSL clubs — before the pokies came” (Wednesday). A few years ago I called in to Palm Beach RSL club on Sydney’s northern peninsula to take a look at my father’s gold life membership badge, which had for 20 years or more been displayed in a special cabinet with other memorabilia.

My dad had been one of the founding members of the club and a long-serving treasurer as well of a member of the board of directors of the “War Vets” home on Collaroy Plateau. The display cabinet (and its companion cabinets) were not in the RSL bar, so I asked the manager where might I find his badge.

He took me into a store room where all the cabinets had found a home piled on top of each other — and gave me the badge back. What had replaced the memorabilia? Pokies, of course. The storeroom used to be the club’s billiards room containing two full-sized billiard tables. They were gone too — free billiards was too much competition for the pokies.

The real message in the Boston bombings

Matthew Brennan writes: Re. “Rundle: how the Boston bombings exposed the fragility of the American state” (Wednesday). I would agree with Guy Rundle’s statement that “treating the Boston bombings as nothing other than a crime … would have gone a ways to taming it”.

I would disagree with Rundle as to what the “it” is that would be tamed is. The Boston police and FBI seemed to have cornered two apparent culprits fairly quickly, which suggests a reasonable level of competence and effectiveness in that part of the US state, though one has the impression that the two suspects weren’t all that bright at covering their tracks and making of the getaway. And I don’t think that the fact that the bombings exposed that a few of the US’ elected representatives have great faces for talk-back radio equates to the fragility of the American state either.

The first paragraph of Rundle’s article describes a confected media circus that had little or nothing to do with what seem to be separate criminal acts and separate tragedies. Any fragility exposed is the fragility of the connection with reality of a whole lot of journalists. And I think that’s the problem.

Health Workforce Australia’s role

Health Workforce Australia’s Dale Webster writes: Re. “The rise and rise of health spending — but don’t blame the old people” (Tuesday). The article in Tuesday’s edition of Crikey by Bernard Keane contained a reference to Health Workforce Australia that was incorrect. Health Workforce Australia (HWA) is not part of the Department of Health and Ageing. It is a Commonwealth statutory authority that was established by the Council of Australian Governments in 2008 to provide a national, coordinated approach to health workforce planning and reform.  It has an independent board whose chairman reports to the Standing Council on Health.