Encourage all forms of trading Educate early

Is it true that the Baw Baw Shire Council is planning on increasing road-side trading fees as a means to drive one person out of business?

Is this the same council who encourages and actively assists the farmers market held in Civic Park each month? Isn’t this market effectively a group of “road side” traders in a pleasant publicly owned parkland environment? Aren’t they also taking some trade away from ratepaying local businesses?

Is this the same council who I have seen on more than one occasion using our community bus to transport groups of elderly citizens on shopping excursions to Morwell’s Mid Valley centre? Surely their money would be better spent in this shire.

Instead of being perceived as a council that discourages development – at times in what seems to be a very personal war – they should realise that diversity and more competition is what will keep people in Warragul, instead of them choosing to travel to Narre Warren and the Latrobe Valley.

Perhaps the council could learn from other shires and towns around Australia who encourage all forms of trading, even if it is in competition to rate paying businesses.

These traders help retain some of the rural charm and amenity that Warragul used to have. When all that is lost, and given the staggering number of new houses being built in Warragul, we will just turn into a boring extension of Pakenham.

Why not think outside the square and give permanent businesses a reduction in rates to compensate for proven loss of income to competition? Sorry chief, only kidding.

Russell Hupfield Warragul

All Australians are disgusted and discouraged to see the behaviour of out-of-control youths breaking and entering, stealing, even hi-jacking motor vehicles, smashing jewellery shops, beating up older citizens, and ignoring speed restrictions as they drive erratically and dangerously while unlicensed … and then escaping from where they are meant to be safely detained.

We applaud the government’s decisions to increase the police force at this necessary time, but note with some dismay other government decisions which have contributed to the problem.

Most of our older citizens remember that when religious instruction was mandated for all students, there was a rich opportunity to learn about right and wrong, about love and forgiveness, about kindness and generosity, about working for a future hope, about contributing to a team effort, about a spiritual dimension that is today so easily ignored or ridiculed.

And when corporal discipline was part of every home and every school, kids quickly understood what was good and right, and what was wrong and irresponsible.

Most men over 40 report that they may not have liked it at the time, but it did no long-term harm, and it sorted them out. Proper corporal discipline is wise punishment for poor behaviour, not child abuse.

We know that many parents expect teachers to do everything, as their own lives are too involved in earning incomes; this delegation of moral teaching has meant that it is more and more important, that the true basis of our morality and civilisation, the Christian faith, is taught to all children in our society.

We may have a pluralist society, but if we want to maintain, an “Australian set of values” that every earnest parent would want, the moral teaching suggested above must be understood by their children.

More moral teaching early will go some way to heal the disease; more law enforcement agents later, while currently necessary, will do little to alter the numbers of youths with no sense of contributing to or helping in a civilised society. These young men on the extreme edge of society are also a prime source of the perpetrators of domestic violence, and are those most easily persuaded into extreme terrorism.

Educating early is a preferred response to locking up late, if we are to overcome our current problems. Geoff Dethlefs, Drouin