When the PM comes to town, but first...
I’M going to repeat myself – the current petrol price is highway robbery well before you ev-er get onto any highway, main road or back street, it’s a disgrace. We need a Royal Com-mission into these historic, ongoing, blistering pricing practices by the big oil companies that dictate the prices we pay at the pump – and we need that Royal Commission as soon as possible.
A couple of months ago and my current car had never cost me more than $80 to fill up and when fuel was down it was closer to $60 from an empty tank, now this week it’s a few drachmas off $100.
There was some commentary on the TV news that prices were going down, but when you start at a buck and a half a litre, they can fall a hell of a long way and the fuel majors will still be ripping consumers like there’s no tomorrow. I WAS writing yarns on setting up a rural clinical school in Dubbo when it was still a dream of former federal MP Tony Lawler, so it’s been great to follow its progress into reality, see the education of Dubbo’s first homegrown doctor to attend the school (Lars Newman) and to hear about its further expansion so it will be able to train doctors locally from go to whoa.
Rural health minister Bridget Mckenzie was in Dubbo this week to talk to the staff and students at the University of Sydney School of Rural Health. She said the new funding would transform the number of domestically-trained doctors who’d practice in the region.
“The evidence is clear – when medical students complete the majority of their training in the regions they are more likely to live locally and practice rurally after graduation,” Senator Mckenzie said.
It’s going to help that Dubbo is getting a redeveloped hospital as many new doctors prefer decent facilities, and the number of experienced doctors in town is already growing thanks to the new health facilities, according to Member for Parkes Mark Coulton.
“When we talk about health in Dubbo these days, it’s a much different discussion to just 10 years ago when we couldn’t even get enough GPS to the city,” Mr Coulton said.
Senator Mckenzie said while the NSW government was doing better than states like South Australia, when it came to issues like having enough doctor training places available, this state could still learn much from Queensland on how to ensure a more constant flow of country doctors. IT was an interesting press conference at Trangie this week.
As well the Prime Minister there was Deputy PM and federal Nationals’ leader Michael Mccormack, Agriculture Minister David Littleproud, Regional Development Minister Dr John Mcveigh, Rural Health Minister Senator Bridget Mckenzie, as well as Assistant Trade Min-ister and Member for Parkes Mark Coulton, so all up a pretty fair entourage.
It was annoying that a few questions were asked about the Barnaby Joyce affair; yes, he’s a fool but when we see the PM out here so infrequently I wish those intruding tabloidish journos would wait until they get back to the big smoke where they have all the time in the world to talk about Canberran political gossip, and allow us local bumpkins to discuss issues of substance.
I asked Malcolm Turnbull about a few things including saltbush, a drought resistant native perennial plant which is covered off in this edition on Page 3.
I also talked about Peter Andrews, the inventor of the Natural Sequence Farming method and a bloke the PM and wife had invited up to their Hunter Valley property a while back.
The Prime Minister responded that he was a believer in slowing water down when it is run-ning across the land, allowing it to be stored underground for zero cost and zero evapora-tion, and he’s asked me for some information on this and other issues I raised such as fod-der factories.
If instead of lurching from one drought disaster to the next, we instead had, say, 10-year interest-free loans for farmers to invest in saltbush, and to set their properties up along Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) principles, we’d see far fewer people needing assistance or being forced to sell off their stock.
Even if the federal and state governments loaned free money for farmers to buy fodder fac-tories, all of a sudden graziers would have sheds on their places which could produce up to three tonnes of fodder each day.
This would not only mean that they could keep stock off fragile groundcover so they didn’t lose soil to erosive forces, it would save them a fortune on feed and transport costs and al-low them to hold onto stock instead of being forced to panic sell.
Imagine thousands of these fodder factories scattered across the landscape, an initiative where the only cost to the taxpayer would be a bit of interest over a few years, rather than having the economy take huge unpredictable hits from drought which also put at risk our continuity of supply into all our overseas markets. SUNDAY saw about 500 people show up to the War4water concert at Armatree, pretty much double the local population.
The concert was to raise awareness about water issues and the music line-up was head-lined by Greg and Sara Storer and the Bushwhackers.
Organised by the Great Artesian Basin Protection Group (GABPG), the fundraiser was held at the Armatree Hotel.
PHIL THOMSON is a good bloke and for the past few years has been a man on a mission.
He’s been developing ways to extract essential oils from the trunks and leaves of White Cypress, Gumby, Quandong and other native plants to heal human skin naturally, as in tradi-tional Indigenous culture, and he says it’s working.
He’s already signed up QANTAS as a client and has just launched a Kickstarter campaign so stay tuned to hear much more about this enterprising business, one which Phil believes has a massive export potential which could create a large number of local jobs. MY last word on the drought and regional development.
If we removed and constantly fought to close emerging loopholes when it comes to corpo-rate tax avoidance, it would give us the spare cash as a nation to set up regional Australia so that droughts would have only a minimal effect on us, and that would greatly improve the ecological sustainability of our parched continent, as well as prevent farmers and coun-try communities from going through so many boom and bust, feast and famine type cycles.
Money would also be available to put in place infrastructure such as an international airport at Dubbo, and a very fast train and four lane highway to connect the entire western region to Sydney – and that would in turn relieve an enormous amount of pressure on our capital city.
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z Additional reporting by
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.