Hospital parking time limit needs a rethink

The Editor,

I was in utter disbelief when I came across the parking signs in the Dubbo Base Hospital parking area stating a “3 hour limit”.

Did the people who decided this was a good idea think for one minute that this would solve the ongoing parking problems of the hospital. I think not.

All it will do is cause anxiety for those people who are actually fortunate enough to secure a parking place to ensure their visit to the hospital is less than three hours.

This may be achievable for many visitors, but please take into account: (a) those people who travel 100, 200, 300, 400 kilometres to attend the hospital; (b) those people attending day surgery with an escort person which may take up to six or more hours (personal experience here); (c) those people accompanying mothers to be attending the labour ward; and (d) those people trying to manage a couple of kids in A&E and worrying about parking restrictions and so forth.

I am a concerned citizen who attends the Dubbo Base Hospital frequently.

Name supplied,

Dubbo The Editor,

I would like to express my objection to schools using our children to send out junk mail. We have a “No Junk Mail” sign on our letterbox at home for this very reason.

We don’t want junk mail. We don’t read it. We don’t use it. We think it’s better for the environment not to accept it.

So to then have our school presumably IN his maiden speech to Parliament in 2008, Scott Morrison declared “growing up in a Christian home, I made a commitment to my faith at an early age, my personal faith in Jesus Christ is not a political agenda”.

“In recent times it has become fashionable to negatively stereotype those who profess their Christian faith in public life as ‘extreme’ and to suggest that such faith has no place in the political debate of this country.

“Australia is not a secular country – it is a free country. This is a nation where you have the freedom to follow any belief system you choose. Secularism is just one. It has no greater claim than any other on our society.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is an evangelical Christian.

Those of us with long memories may equate evangelicalism with the American Billy Graham and his ‘Crusades’ to Australia in the 1960s, channelling the word of God to packed stadiums. Less well known was his deep homophobia and closet anti-semitism – attributes now espoused by his son and accept payment to hand out this junk mail to our kids and then get them to bring it home in their schoolbags is just not on.

I guess the school has done this as a way of raising extra money. If this is true then I find that to be a sad indictment on governments not providing enough funding for our education system.

Surely if a school is so desperate for extra money that they have to resort to delivering unsolicited advertising material then our governments should be having a good hard look at themselves.

Also, the school needs to stop this.

P. Jones,

Dubbo The Editor,

We’ve all read the news about Chinese and Russian hackers, but if you’re like me you probably thought it was a problem faced by big businesses and government organisations.

So I thought your readers should be warned it can happen to a small Dubbo business too.

The IT expert who checks our computer system alerted me to this last week. We have a small server which keeps all our files in one place so the team can access those. It’s internet connected.

Our IT guy was running some basic checks and when he checked the server logs he found that someone had been trying to login to the server from a foreign IP address. There was a long list of unsuccessful login attempts, each only a few seconds apart which he suggested might mean a robot had been set up to try and hack us. daughter, religious entrepreneurs who have inherited the family bigotry business – but I digress.

Morrison is a devotee of the Horizon Church in the Sutherland Shire, a venue for rousing sermons, speaking in tongues, and divine healing.

Horizon Church teaches the Prosperity Gospel, a doctrine that equates devotion to the Christian faith to the rewards of material wealth and good health. Be not a person of faith (or more specially, the right type of faith) and poverty and disadvantage is your own doing.

That this goes against one of the most basic tenets of Christianity – being on the side of the suffering and underprivileged – seems obvious. Examine the Doctrinal Basis of his church more closely, and more disconnections between the faith and the material world become apparent.

The Horizon Church doctrine includes the bible being the complete revelation and very word of an infallible god, God created man in his own image but men who transgress are depraved and without spirit. Salvation from this transgression is only via atonement, divine healing is made possible by the resurrection, and purity must

Most of the attempts (thankfully none of them were successful) came from the one IP address and he was able to do a quick check and found the IP address was located in China.

He did say that IP addresses can be faked, so we can’t be sure.

We are a small retail business with no state secrets and no credit card or other confidential financial information on our server, so we don’t think we were being specifically targeted. The most logical reason is they were hoping to find credit card information stored on our server, so they would have been disappointed if they’d managed to access our network!

But as our IT expert said, they still could have wreaked havoc if they’d successfully access the server.

So I’d like to share this friendly warning to other small businesses: the hackers are out there and they’re targeting anyone and be achieved in readiness for the imminent return of the lord in material form.

And whilst Morrison says his faith is not a political agenda, the question needs to be asked how he reconciles the teachings of his church against the imperative to apply reason and free enquiry to the functions of government. If he suffers any cognitive dissonance when contemplating behaviours or situations which conflict with church doctrine (e.g. the earth was created by God 6000 years ago versus human induced climate change) does he eliminate the dissonance by siding with the church or science?

How does he reconcile the systemic cruelty to asylum seekers, reductions in social welfare, and strident opposition to the Banking & Finance Royal Commission against the ‘love, justice, care’ ethos professed by Horizon Church everyone, and so make sure your computer network and gear are secure, with strong passwords. That’s what saved us!

Name supplied,

Dubbo The Editor,

There’s been a great deal of robust discussion within the wool industry of late, but it’s the future sustainability of our industry we should be focused on in this Woolpoll year.

Woolpoll is an opportunity for woolgrowers to directly influence how much we want to invest in research, development and marketing for the Australian wool industry through Australian Wool Innovation (AWI) and voting is now open for a limited time.

We all agree that wool prices have been good, but now is not the senior pastor Brad Bonhomme?

In November 2016 the Federal Government initiated an inquiry into ‘The Status of the Human Right to Freedom of Religion or Belief’. Led by former Liberal Party minister Philip Ruddock, the report received submissions from thousands of faith groups, secular bodies and legal experts.

The National Council of Churches of Australia told the enquiry that people of faith are concerned about a growing level of intolerance in the community. A cynic like me might suggest some religious faiths may like to voice some heartfelt apologies for their intolerance and violence towards those of other faiths and the secular before declaring victim status for themselves. But again, I digress.

The final report of the enquiry was delivered to Prime Minister Turnbull on May 18 this year, and the report has still not been released to the public.

When recently asked about the delay in releasing the report, Morrison avoided committing to a date, instead announcing he wants to protect religious rights which (in an echo to his maiden speech) he declared will be under attack in the future. In a further example of cognitive dissonance, he said he time to take our eye off the ball.

Woolgrowers are asked to consider five levy rate options: 3 per cent, 2.5 per cent, 2 per cent, 1.5 per cent and 0 per cent. Voting is now open and closes on November 2. You can vote online at www. woolpoll.com.au, via post or fax.

I encourage all eligible woolgrowers to take the time to consider the information provided and make an informed decision about the future funding of the Australian wool industry.

If you haven’t received your voter information kit contact Link Marketing Services on 1800 990 365.

Don’t leave it to others to decide, or make the mistake of thinking your view doesn’t matter. Whether you produce ten bales or one thousand, we need you to have your say.

Sydney Lawrie

Woolpoll 2018 Panel Chair

won’t be a ‘culture warrior’, gave no specific examples of the threat to oppression of the religious, but intimated legislation and regulation will be needed to protect religious freedom.

Eminent former High Court Justice Michael Kirby said the delay in releasing the report is grounds for suspicion about what the government’s plans for religious freedoms are. And I agree. Will it include more public money for religious schools or chaplaincy in public schools, or laws allowing religious-based health and aged care providers (which receive government subsidies) to discriminate based on gender and sexuality?

In the modern material world, where we should be emancipating from religion, we appear to be steered in the other direction by those who believe their predilection to faith gives them equal if not more power in the public square.

Morrison is wrong when he said secularism is a belief system. It is the separation of matters of state from the disciples of revealed truth – resulting in religion being a private matter, and reason and governing a public matter.

If he can’t grasp this basic concept, Morrison convicts himself of favouring one of the two masters he claims to serve. z Greg Smart lives and works in Dubbo, and is keen observer of current affairs.