By Michael Giles

A COUPLE of things caught my eye in the past week; one of them being the decision by Leongatha medico Dr Chris Webster to make public comment on the impact of the mushroom murders on the local community, and in particular, on the health system.

The other was a seminar I attended in Melbourne last week on a new era in the development of more cost-effective, energy-efficient community aquatic centres.

There’s no connection between the two and we won’t try to make one.

First things first, and what this community does not want to see is any repercussions against Dr Webster for going public.

Certainly, under normal circumstances, you would expect health care professionals to respect patient confidentiality and leave it to others to comment on such events. But these are not normal circumstances, and many people have been impacted, if not traumatised by the events of the past two years, not the least being the healthcare staff who took care of Don, Gail, Ian and Heather, both here and in Melbourne.

We need to give them a leave pass on this one.

They were presented with a health emergency that no one should ever have to deal with and the fact that they had to respond with one hand tied behind their backs, made it terribly difficult for them and ultimately fatal for three of the victims.

Hopefully, they got any support they needed in the aftermath but for someone to step outside what is usually a clinically-closed environment, and give us some insight into their experiences is entirely understandable. We’re with you, Dr Chris.

With regard to the ridiculous cost of aquatic centres, up and down the local government areas of Australia, it’s a crazy racket that’s simply got to stop.

And for a municipality like the Bass Coast Shire Council, with a vision for “leading the transition to our net zero emissions future” to get sucked into trying to build two of these energy-sucking Taj Mahals for aesthetic purposes alone, instead of looking to the future for a realistic, cost-effective, energy efficient solution, is hard to fathom.

Yes, we’ve wasted money on dumb designs that will never be built but look on the bright side, we haven’t saddled ourselves with infrastructure we can’t afford.

Time to chuck those two projects in the bin and talk to some experts in the field who can introduce us to the world’s best practice on the development of purpose-built shells for pool complexes, instead of trying to construct an office building that a pool might somehow fit inside.