However, there are two points not mentioned in those expensive advertisements.

First, there is a good deal of self-congratulatory puff about the offer of $3000 sign-on being “fair and reasonable”.

This proposed payment merely takes the place of pay rises for the past three years.

Paramedics are already well behind in salary levels compared to their counterparts in both NSW and, especially, SA.

Secondly, there is no mention in the government’s blurb about one of the conditions of employment (rural relieving) that the Napthine government wants to include in paramedics’ work conditions.

It plans to force ambulance officers to move anywhere in the state, for individual shifts or even for up to a month at a time.

Some shifts worked by paramedics can be 14 hours or more, and then at the end of this shift, ambulance officers would have to travel to their place of residence.

In the city this is possible, but in rural areas the idea is dangerous — economic ideology goals are seen as more important than employees’ work conditions and safety.

Clearly the government has not included this in their advertisements because it is obviously not “fair and reasonable”.

When a government goes to the expense and trouble to produce a full-page advertisement on an issue such as this it is a clear sign that all is not as it seems; the message is distorted when relevant facts are avoided.

Mr Napthine, the public is not as accepting of this sort of puffery as it once was; our state public health system is already run down; let’s not reduce the effectiveness of our ambulance system any further.

— J. SHEARER,

Wodonga