The tyranny of distance means you cannot always get home at 6pm, put your feet up, be with your family or even play local sport. It means lots of hotel rooms, lots of hotel food and lots of calls home to see what your family or friends are up to.

If you are a minister on the political stage it means serving your constituents wherever they are. If you live in the country it does not mean a direct flight to your destination – there are no direct flights from Albury to Adelaide or even Albury to Canberra. It is a whole day exercise on commercial airlines. 

Sussan Ley has done a great job as a member for our area and as a minister. Before you start casting stones, often for political gain, think about the context, the distance and the work. 

I empathise with Tim Dick in the loss of his family cat and make allowances for the  irrational thoughts his bereavement causes (‘Life lesson in death of a beloved family cat’, The Border Mail, January 3).

It is precisely because humans are not animals that we treat them as special and don't put them down like Tim Dick’s cat. My moggy is clever but I will never come home to discover she has composed a sonata  equivalent to Beethoven's Moonlight. Just as no dog owner will find their pet has painted  the kennel ceiling as Michaelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel’s.

He suggests  dying patients are “pumped with morphine to dull the pain of a disease”. The judicious administration of pain relief is what doctors and nurses do. Dying doesn't have much going for it. But it is a time to tell our loved ones how much we love and will miss them, not hasten them out of the world with a lethal jab. 

Safe guards are impossible when the State sanctions killing people. Canada legalised assisted suicide last June with a data system not designed to uncover abuse of the law. There have already been 744 euthanasia deaths. That's a lot for only 6 months.

Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge states that people want integrity in the welfare system. I do but I wonder why he uses a faulty computer program to generate debt notices threatening vulnerable people. 

In The Border Mail’s sister publication The Age (January 4), Peter Martin identifies a number of issues;

1. People are assumed to be guilty until proved innocent. 

2. Some letters request information going back six years, way beyond the six months the Centrelink website asks people to keep pay slips. 

3. One of their stupidest mistakes is to calculate fortnightly income by dividing annual income by 26. If the figure is too high the program states that someone wasn't entitled to benefits during the weeks they received them, even if during those weeks the person earned nothing.

4. If the name of an employer is spelt one way by the Australian Tax Office and another way by Centrelink, the robots assume it’s a different employer and that it’s undeclared income.

5. An internal Centrelink check is said to have found that only 20 out of hundreds of cases reviewed are genuine debts. Regardless people are being told to pay it even if they dispute the debt. In order to avoid debt collection they have to start repayments.

In the meantime Liberal party Cabinet ministers bill us to attend weddings, the races, football, rugby and polo matches, New Year’s Eve parties, and even trips to the Gold Coast to make business announcements where their partner coincidentally resides.