You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
That’s how voters in the suburb of Kentlyn felt on Saturday when they dropped into their local primary school to exercise their democratic duty and found it closed.
A small sign at the gate directed them to Leumeah or East Campbelltown Public Schools.
Naturally, with one polling place closed, the others were busier.
The queue at East Campbelltown was 50 metres from the door of the hall where voting was taking place.
It was taking close to half an hour to get in and vote, but plenty gave up.
As we did, going about our business the rest of the day before dropping in to Ruse Public to cast our votes.
This was about 5.45pm, and it was cold and dark and there were hardly any party volunteers still standing.
In any case, we were not happy with this runaround, having been deprived of our own polling place for the first time in almost 20 years.
We all had heard about Medicare cuts but nobody mentioned polling places cuts.
Never mind, we have our revenge.
With the Prime Minister very close to losing government he may be about to start thinking about the same song we started singing on Saturday.
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
It’s not a nice feeling, is it, Malcolm?
