A new, purpose-built Border hospital has been the centrepiece of the wish list for our region's public health needs for quite some time.
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But just as prominent has been the issue of transparency, or the lack of it - it's been both startling and frustrating.
We want to know what's going on.
We want to know whether there is a serious commitment to delivering what this community truly needs.
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Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews' attitude is one of "people get your head out of the clouds" and accept that the $538 million rebuild of the Albury hospital is all that matters.
Nothing else will ever get a look-in.
But we just don't know how government arrived at such a figure, we don't know what this project will encompass in detail and we don't know the process by which we arrived at this point.
![Border Medical Association chair Barb Robertson Border Medical Association chair Barb Robertson](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/zTpV5j6X6iLmSh5SbcmSaP/dae5a379-6aca-4055-b31e-5a1165d94968.jpg/r956_1150_6108_4316_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
What we do know is there has been, in the background, this mysterious master plan for our public health system simmering away.
We will just have to see whether the wait has been worth it, or whether we're being delivered something designed around the premise of a specific political goal.
Meanwhile, transparency about the whole process cropped up again just this week.
You could almost hear the collective groan from our medical and allied health community at the incongruity and absurdity of it all.
This was best put by Border Medical Association chair Barb Robertson.
She quite rightly posed the question: "Why are we having further planning when we've already done a clinical services plan and (have already done) a master plan in the last two to three years?"
The association's concern that politics is being put before planning is one we share.
That's because everything thus far has been hidden behind a bureaucratic, politically convenient world of internal whispers, out of earshot of our Border community.
We simply don't know.
And that's not good enough.
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