Catholic Archbishop Mark Coleridge (Letters, April 27) has a nerve writing about ''the good of all in the ACT'' concerning the publicly funded Calvary Hospital from his publicly funded Archbishop's House.
Whatever happens to the hospital, the Catholic Church is in a win-win situation. If the hospital is sold the church receives a double dipping from the public trough.
Back in 1978 the Little Sisters of Mary saw prime minister Malcolm Fraser asking to manage a hospital and Fraser wrote the millions of dollars cheque. Thirty one years later sections of the Catholic Church want to sell the hospital, the church receiving millions of dollars more.
If the hospital is not sold it simply means that the Catholic Church continues imposing its own set of ethics on the people of the ACT. No birth control, no stem-cell research, no abortions, no gay health care, no IVF, no euthanasia. All this imposition done at the public expense and tax-free.
Frank Boddy, Lyons
While the national chairman of the Little Company of Mary, Tom Brennan (Letters, April 28), concedes that the choice over the future of Calvary Public Hospital will be difficult and complex, he concludes by leaving the final choice to the ''deep learning and conscience'' of Archbishop Mark Coleridge.
With due respect to Coleridge, it appears that he is either telling half-truths in his opposition to the sale, or he is completely in the dark. He is quoted as stating (''Hurdles in the way of deal on Calvary'', Forum, April 25, p4): ''I think the roots of it all go back a very long way and I have major questions about the justice of a process of attrition reaching back years whereby Calvary Public Hospital was systematically and deliberately denied proper funding''.
What real evidence does he have to prove that proper government funding was ''deliberately'' denied? Such an accusation is completely at odds with the counter-claim made by ACT Health Minister Katy Gallagher that since 2001 the Government provided $36 million in capital expenditure and increased recurrent funding by 34 per cent. Moreover, Brennan is himself reported as backing the Government's claim in saying that he has no complaints about the level of funding to Calvary.
The question now is whether Coleridge wants to continue airing his grievances, or whether he has uppermost regard for future public health care to all the people of Canberra.
Reverend Dr Vincent Zankin, Rivett
Pack of lies
In last Saturday's review of William Cohan's book on the fall of Bear Stearns (''Capitalism savaged by a Bear'', Panorama, April 25, p17), Paul Malone writes that Cohan ''does not provide sufficient insight into why the players failed to properly assess their precipitous situation''.
It is Malone who lacks insight. Three paragraphs before using the word ''players'' himself, Malone noted a reference in Cohan's book that ''many of the key executives who contributed to Bearn Stearns's crash were fanatical bridge players and even went off to bridge tournaments at various crisis points''. Malone found this merely amusing, but it may well be the key to understanding the problem.
As anyone who has tried to learn bridge knows only too well, most of the bridge bidding system is a pack of lies. You say things which you definitely do not mean; you are expected to utter words which do not describe the sort of contract you want to make.
For anyone brought up on the direct relationship between bidding and contracts in five hundred or solo, this indirect method of communication can feel like the symbolism of an exclusive religious sect.
While all that is quite OK for playing a card game, it has a downside. The thought patterns and dedication to lying required for bridge have a bad habit of being used elsewhere bridge is notorious for helping to break up friendships and marriages. The weird nonsense of making bad loans and then building an international finance system on top of them is remarkably comparable to such thought patterns and dedication to lying.
Malone is not the only one to have missed this possibility. As usual, we've been thoroughly told recently that excessive testosterone may be the root cause of last year's financial meltdown. As usual, what goes on in the brain is much more important.
G.T.W. Agnew, Page
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