A wasted Christmas card
Russell Broadbent MP, your Christmas card is wasted on me, unless you start to aspire to closing down coal mines and replacing with renewable energy sources pronto; you renounce the current taxation system and replace it with a debit tax; you argue to fully fund the Gonski school funding program; and you argue for a resources rent tax and a carbon tax.
Most of all you need to start to listen to the constituents who do not agree with your party's policies, such as these are.
I know what the surf life saving volunteers stand for. What exactly do you and your party stand for Mr. Broadbent? Inge Mitchell Yarragon South
A member of the House of Representatives is elected to voice the views and opinions of an electorate not just in a party room meeting but also and more importantly in the House of Representatives.
To sit and say nothing or blindly go along with a party ideology is not really representing an electorate in the true sense of the word. A representative should consult with the broad community within an electorate and express their wishes and aspirations. However I could be wrong.
Perhaps it is the wish of the majority of the McMillan electorate to offer $1 billion dollars to a foreign owned company to develop a new coal mine, even though that flies in the face of global warming issues and further damage to the Great Barrier Reef.
Similarly people may want to house asylum seekers in squalid conditions on Manus Island and Nauru and ban them from ever coming to Australia. The majority of people may believe that negative gearing and capital gains tax should remain and that new young potential home owners should be frozen out of the market.
Electors in McMillan may believe that no tribunal or Royal Commission should be organised to investigate banks.
If on the other hand any one of these issues are not the beliefs of the majority of electors in McMillan then perhaps our representative needs to listen more and present the majority views on the floor in Parliament.
It doesn’t matter which party is in power and which party wins a seat, it seems that in Canberra we have a House of Unrepresentatives. Greg Tuck Warragul eleventh hour perhaps higher power costs (if you don’t count the cost to the environment) are necessary to retain a habitable planet. Or perhaps not, as technology progresses. Again, this is my point, if Denmark, Germany etc can reach “heroic targets’, while maintaining reliable supply of electricity why can’t Australia?
Too costly” Too difficult? Contrary to the financial interests of fossil fuel industry/government?
Hopefully most of us are capable of figuring that out. John Evans Warragul