Having been in senior administrative and financial roles with NSW Health for over 40 years I too am very concerned about the financial viability of the hospice and consequently wrote privately to Prof Fletcher in March 2018 and, at his insistence, I met with both Dr Rosenthal and Prof Fletcher in April 2018 to discuss the matters I raised in my letter.

RELATED: Southern Highlands Hospice funding, voting and a New Zealand tragedy draw reader comment

Call to re-assess viability of Southern Highlands Community Hospice

That meeting was cordial and I was given a commitment that I would receive a written response to issues I raised. Not having received anything by mid May I contacted Prof Fletcher who again committed to provide responses when he returned from overseas at the end of May. I heard nothing.

In the ensuing months I tried at least four more times to elicit a response but not only did I not get the information, my correspondence was not acknowledged. I now put three questions to Prof Fletcher publicly.

1. Can and will you provide details of the financial and operational model that would be in place should the hospice become operational (including the full source of year by year operational funding)

2. If the hospice is opened and becomes operational but in the future becomes no longer viable, what remedies will be in place to ensure the investment that has been made by donations from residents of the Southern Highlands will be returned to them given that the proposed hospice is being constructed on private land

3. Will he now release the expensive feasibility study for public scrutiny

Interestingly there are still 20 per cent of votes to be counted in the  Wollondilly electorate according to the NSW official electorate website as at March 27. It does seem as though the Liberals will retain the seat, however the margin has been drastically reduced.

I volunteered to work at the Mittagong pre-polling booth and was there every day from early morning until it closed at 6pm. To quote from a letter published on March 20 "A scrum of candidates and supporters pushing how to vote forms onto early workers. Not pretty." My observation was that one party in particular was guilty of this unattractive behaviour. It was also interesting to see the majority of these volunteers were not local but had been recruited by the party concerned from various areas of the Sydney metropolitan area. Two senators were also co-opted to assist with  handing out how to vote forms. Generally speaking the majority of volunteers were friendly, courteous and helpful.

On the same topic, the unsolicited telephone calls, e-mails and letters from the major parties were extraordinary. We received calls from Berejiklian (2), John Howard and Pauline Hanson, e-mails from Nathaniel Smith and, of course, large amounts of mail from both major parties. This is an invasion of our privacy and something should be done to stop this, preferably before the federal election.

Judy Hannan's campaign was, in my opinion, exemplary. No aspersions were cast on other candidates and her volunteers were well behaved and courteous. The same cannot be said of the Liberal Party. As an article in the SHN on March 20 stated the misleading pamphlet delivered to houses in the electorate was "grubby politics". The incredible amount of money obviously spent by the Liberal Party, in particular, for their candidate no doubt assisted greatly in his election. It would be interesting to know just how much was spent.