The cancer is the most common in Australian men (apart from ordinary skin cancers) and there are about 23,000 new cases each year; the hard statistics are that more men will die each day in Australia of prostate cancer than women will die of breast cancer.

In part this is because men have been reluctant to embrace awareness of prostate cancer, even to talk about it, let alone visit their GP for two simple tests.

That is all changing, thankfully.

This week - after years of campaigning, submissions, protests and disappointment - the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and the Murrumbidgee Local Health District announced that the Wagga region will get a specialist prostate cancer nurse/co-ordinator.

This has been a huge win for the community overall and especially for Bob Bowcher and particularly the Wagga Cancer Patients Support group led by Kerry Geale.

The new specialist nurse will co-ordinate support for patients in the city and assist those in surrounding rural towns but more importantly provide better care for men and support for them and their families.

The Daily Advertiser can take a share of the credit for this week’s news as it began and led the media campaign; but, the real drive for awareness has come from PC sufferers who have a simple message - get tested often, don't leave it too late especially if there is a family history of the disease. In recent months I have heard of men in their early forties being diagnosed.

A year ago my long-time newspaper colleague, Chris McPherson, like Bowcher and Geale, a PC sufferer, gave a graphic message to men of our region in an interview with The Daily Advertiser at the first Biggest Ever Blokes Lunch held in the city for PC research.

McPherson, 61, told readers: “I always thought I was a relatively intelligent bloke until I was diagnosed with PC at the age of 54 but by the time the cancer was discovered it had moved outside the prostate. I feel pretty silly about that. Now I've got a disease that is going to kill me”.

“Don’t be complacent. It's all about having a test. If your doctor doesn't want to give you a test, get a new doctor.”

THE mayor, Rod Kendall, said this week that federal governments needed a plan to solve the continuing urban sprawl.

He is not the first to say that; many, including this column, have been suggesting for decades a solution must be found for the metropolitan sprawl that is causing infrastructure costs to burgeon.

Nothing much has been done at federal government level in the area of major regional re-development since the Sir Robert Menzies era and the introduction of regional universities by Gough Whitman, which is now under threat from the current government.

This week, PM Tony Abbott, has been stomping around the Torres Strait Islands when he might have done better touring regional cities in our eastern states. It is possible he might just have realised the potential of regional Australia.

For that matter, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, should take a week off and have a look too. Their minders (the "Noddies") should be left behind and the locals listened to.