Three nominate for ‘safe’ Nats seat
CONGRATS to the three people who’ve thrown their hats in the ring for The Nationals’ pre-selection for the state seat of Dubbo in the lead-up to the NSW election in March next year.
The first Nat in a Hat is Dugald Saunders who’s spent a few decades talking at people about the state as a radio host; prior to that he grew up on a farm near Mendooran.
Dugald’s had to take leave from the publicly-funded national broadcaster, ABC Radio, because he obviously couldn’t continue to interview hopeful politicians now he’s officially a Nationals’ supporter.
I’ve heard the organisation is less than pleased about his candidacy.
Andrew Mckay has been a longtime community stalwart and comes with some serious academic qualifications including studying Chemical Engineering and a Masters of Commerce at the University of NSW before working in London and Sydney as a Chartered Accountant.
He’s run in the London Marathon twice, swam the English Channel in a relay for a disability charity and founded the Zoo2zoo (Taronga Sydney to Dubbo Western Plains Zoo) bike rides which have raised more than $1 million for the Black Dog Institute.
The third candidate is Jillian Kilby, a civil engineer who grew up on a farm northwest of Coonamble.
She’s represented this region in the 2006 Sydney Royal Easter Showgirl, the 2010 Engineers Australia Young Professional Engineer of the Year, the Sydney University Young Alumni of the Year and the 2018 NSW/ACT Rural Woman of the Year.
The behind the scenes goings-on at the local Nationals branch and the interplay between the locals and the state bosses is going to make for interesting watching.
The Nats are in strife in the Orange electorate after a fight between state and local party personalities resulted in a bitter preselection battle which many believe has doomed the party’s chances of taking that seat back from Shooters Fishers Farmers MP Phil Donato.
It’s a great time to be a polly-watcher. THE mighty River Repair Bus has taken on the river rubbish problems at Wellington.
I was in Wellington late on Monday arvo when Harro pulled up in the bus, a trailer loaded with just some of the shopping trolleys the crew had been pulling out of the Bell River and surrounds that afternoon.
It’s a great thing to see happen, and it’s a good thing to see this project making such a major impact outside Dubbo.
We should have River Repair buses and the like all across Australia. THE Bus crew will be hard at it on Sunday for National Tree Day and local environmental groups are hoping plenty of people will join them on a Dubbo property to get some trees into the ground at 10am.
They’ll be planting trees, shrubs, grasses and rushes along the Macquarie River and there’s a sausage sizzle after the event.
Jump onto Wambuul Bushcare River Faebook page and follow the links to find out more.
THE blokes from Dubbo Men’s Shed haven’t let the chill in their bones stop them from doing good community stuff.
I’m often critical of large corporations but Woolworths at Delroy have been great supporters of this community organisation, providing prizes for their recent raffles and all the barbecue supplies as well.
Shed VP Steve White said the group was most appreciative of the generous support shown by the residents of Dubbo and surrounding areas. IT’S difficult to get a handle on the scale of Dubbo’s recent water pipe disaster, but I’ve been told that hundreds of homes could have had pipes burst because of the cold weather, with the pipes that burst in the houses themselves causing widespread destruction.
Two families I spoke to were away on holidays when the leaks occurred so the water caused ceilings to fall in and so the damage escalated, with one house half written off and needing all internals like carpets and furniture replaced, as well as getting the structural damage sorted.
Copper pipes seem to be the main culprit, but in the picture here it was a joiner that froze and popped off a pipe on the evaporative air conditioner, so it wasn’t even in the roof.
The water shot up under the tiles instead of going the other way down the roof.
You can be very unlucky.
SO many jobs these days are being created in the transport and logistics industries but unless you know someone involved in that space it can be difficult or intimidating when it comes to getting your foot on the first rung.
So it’s great to see TAFE partnering up with business across the state to try and get people through
Freezing damage:
It’s hot one minute and cold the next so about the only consistency in the weather at the moment is how dry it’s been pretty much everywhere.
My front driveway on a block I’ve been going in and out of since 1989 is now riddled with lines of 30-40-centimetre-deep furrows, so it looks like the ob-scene lack of moisture is literally making everything crack up.
Apparently I’m not the only one who’s noticed this phenomenon.
the door when it comes to pursuing careers in this growing area of specialisation.
Locally, Fletcher International Exports will host students sponsored by the Department of Education and Transport for NSW on August 9.
The day aims to raise awareness of the role of the transport and logistics industry amongst students and promote entry pathways into this industry.
Green Light Day has been run since 2011 and continues to grow each year. I’M making inquiries with a university in the USA about a potential identity theft.
Professor Sarah Knight is a real live academic but the looney-toon parading a Faecesbook account utilising her picture and attacking all sorts of real people around Dubbo is a fake.
What drives people to this sort of behaviour?
Why does Fakebook allow obsessed and fixated people to set up never-ending fake accounts which they can then use to gutlessly hammer all and sundry.
We need as a nation to bring some accountability to these social media giants and put the brakes on this rampant culture of cowardly intimidation.
Meantime, if you see this fake account in action, call it out for the absurdity it is.
It’s not just in Dubbo, these pathetic pieces of human flotsam and jetsam are all over the place.
I saw a report this past week where an online troll had been attacking NRL executives and others while hiding behind an anonymous Twitter handle.
That coward has been outed but apparently the language had been so offensive that the Daily Telegraph wouldn’t print it, so it must have been pretty nuclear.
I’m always happy to receive information which could lead to the outing of Dubbo’s own online troll.
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News staff. Note: John Ryan is also a councillor on Dubbo Regional Council, and is also employed part-time by Landcare. He writes here in his capacity as a journalist. A joiner that froze and popped off a pipe on the evaporative air conditioner at this Dubbo home caused extensive water damage.