Hang your heads in shame
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As we have known for a while, instead of delivering environmental flows to the Coorong and Murray Mouth, South Australia uses that water to keep the Lower Lakes at a suitable level for yachting and other recreational pursuits.
As Speak Up has been highlighting for several years, the Basin Plan has always been more about politics, in particular protecting South Australian political interests, than about environmental objectives. We are pouring billions of litres down the Murray River – much of it wasted – to protect Adelaide’s domestic water supply, provide luxury waterfront housing and support recreational activities.
As a consequence we are developing unprecedented mental health issues in the agricultural regions of eastern states, especially northern Victoria and southern NSW, and decimating the social fabric of once thriving rural communities. All major political parties and the bureaucrats responsible for the destruction this plan has caused should hang their collective heads in shame.
It has taken courage to expose the deception. What a shame we have not seen the same courage from politicians, or the highly paid bureaucrats leading them along, to fix the mess they have created.
Shelley Scoullar, chair Speak Up Campaign
What about the whips?
Trainer Darren Weir was suspended for four years, as he “may” have used a jigger in his possession to train a horse for an unfaír advantage, which is considered cruel. Yet every horse, in every race, every day, is flogged with a whip over the last furlong, regardless of position in this country, which is considered normal practice. In fact, a jockey can be fined for not using it!
Where is the consideration for the horses? There was supposed to be a trial of harness racing without whips, but this seems to have been forgotten.
Jeff Lewry, Bowna
A campaign of fear
In the next weeks you will hear the fear campaign the Liberal-National government will spin – border protection fears (neither major party want open borders) and economic security (and the bribe of a tax cut).
The Liberal-National government (and whoever will be PM at the time of election) will talk about the need to lower electricity prices and housing prices. What they will not discuss is the rising cost of living in the face of record corporate profits, and the flat wage growth under their leadership, or even the record job insecurity, the likes of which we have not seen for over 70 years.
Stripping public services to the brink of dysfunctionality, demonising unions whose function is to attain better outcomes for workers, and acquiescing to a narrow Royal Commission into banking is tantamount to appeasing the Liberal-National party stakeholders more than improving the highest casualised and contracted workforce in the OECD. That one in four Australian workers are in temporary employment, and that Australians now have the highest record of personal debt in the world, should be sending alarm bells to the most rusted-on Liberal voter. The rules are broken, and they must be changed.