My advice is to arrive at our new hospital by ambulance if you are suffering a genuine emergency, to avoid waiting in the queue while the one “triage” nurse deals with the crowd. 

Swallowing the froth from the last beer at a Christmas get-together caused a severe coughing fit, triggering a very serious problem. My wife drove me to Emergency.

I had to immediately retreat to the toilet while she explained to the triage nurse that I was bleeding and in excruciating pain.

In emergency care, the doctors and nurses were all fantastic. Our new hospital is everything we would want it to be. Likewise, the next eight days in Calvary showed the best of Wagga, with wonderful care in my time of need.

It’s at moments like this that multicultural Wagga is on show. Our medical staff would seem to come from the four corners of the Earth, and every one of them professional, and an asset to Wagga. 

Urologist Dr Sowter was there at dawn in Emergency, and late at night in Calvary to talk about scans and blood tests. His surgical skills have done the job. I can’t say enough in his favour. I’m now enjoying two weeks “without work” to recover. I’m not game to have a beer, but ham and Christmas pudding have had no ill effect!

However, why should I complain about waiting minutes, when, to quote Adelaide’s The Advertiser,

 “The Royal Adelaide Hospital, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Lyell McEwin Hospital in South Australia each registered a patient who had been waiting more than 24 hours for a bed, indicating a sad Christmas for those caught in the system.” 

But that’s South Australia, which is fast becoming the laughing stock of the nation. I’ve had plenty of time to study websites. Adelaide had its hottest Christmas Day for 75 years, once again relying on gas, or coal power from Victoria to keep the airconditioners on. 

SA’s solar farms kicked in at about 7am on Christmas Day with around 10 per cent capacity, rising to over 80 per cent until 4pm before dropping rapidly to 40 per cent by 6pm and zero by 8pm. SA’s wind generators were running at around 20 per cent capacity until about 9pm when wind power shot up to nearly 40 per cent of capacity. In other words, renewables performed very poorly on this very hot day.

There were blackouts and “load shedding”, as they call it in SA, where part of the network is shut down when there is not enough power. A lightning strike to a power line cut power to the Eyre Peninsula, with stories of shops losing frozen stock, customers losing the ability to use EFPOS. All in a day’s fun in SA. We have lightning strikes in NSW, too, but our stable network can be quickly restored.

If you’ve ever visited places like Ceduna, you’d know that not having airconditioning on a record-heat day would not be fun, especially for old people and mothers with babies. But as one local lamented, the 6000 Eyre votes can’t change the government.

In the New Year I pray for better health, but for the nation I pray that common sense may bring ideology-free realistic solutions to Australia’s problems in 2017.