Could that be because she was a Labor Party Prime Minister?

Barry apparently suffers from selective memory syndrome.

Keith Norris, Bellambi

In lieu of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull being drawn out to stoically defend all elements of Medicare against Labor scuttlebutt and scaremongering, why doesn't he simply call Shorten a liar?

D J Preece, Balgownie

This election was called because the Senate twice rejected the government’s bill to re-establish the construction watchdog, the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

It’s strange how very little has been mentioned of the ABCC since the election was called.

Similarly, acres of newspaper print was forthcoming following the final report by Commissioner Dyson Heydon regarding the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption.

I have not heard one word of the failure of TURC’s promised ‘over a thousand bad bastards in unions’ prosecuted.

So far 100 charged, 100 dismissed through lack of evidence. That’s $70 million wasted.

The media reported on the Royal Commission as though they were in a frenzy of doing the public a service.

Compared with corporate crime, theirs is often benign in comparison.

Conservatives go to great lengths to protect the banking sector who have been ripping off their customers for years.

Now the Federal Court has ordered Woolworths to pay penalties totalling $9 million for its involvement in a laundry detergent cartel. This lasts one day in the media and that’s the end of it.

On recent and historic evidence, corporate crime in Australia far outweighs that of the union movement.

Don Kelly, Kanahooka

Each year the Alaskan government distributes, as a dividend, five per cent of their sovereign funds wealth. In 2015, each resident received a dividend of US$2100.

Here it is the opposite. The Australian government’s Future Fund was set up in 2006 to help offset the growing cost of federal public servants' superannuation pensions that would become available after 2020.

The outcome Australian taxpayers are the fall guys. For 14 years taxpayers will be propping up the government financially – while the likes of Peter Costello and his cohorts play the stock exchange.

During 2012-13, it may come as no surprise that one public service executive employed at Costello’s Future Fund Management earned a total remuneration package of $1,110,355, including a salary of $548,595, a performance bonus of $536,760 and superannuation of $25,000.

That is far more than the salary packages of government department heads and even eclipses Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens' remuneration that year of $1,025,713.

And yet workers and families, need for better health, desire for affordable education and comfort in old age are denied government assistance and have to do without.

John Macleod, Berry